News bites: Keystone XL foes go local

Ex-FBI Director Louis Freeh was appointed by a federal judge to investigate whether a claims administrator committed ethics violations in determining payouts for those affected by the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Houston Chronicle reports.

A group of U.S. oil-pipeline makers filed a U.S. trade case against firms in nine nations, saying they sold their wares below cost in the U.S. and that some received government subsidies, Bloomberg reports.

An effort by wealthy countries to give poorer ones $100 billion in climate change adaptation aid through contributions to multinational corporations rather than governments was shot down, The Guardian writes.

From The Guardian:

The UN’s fledgling Green Climate Fund (GCF) is designed to transfer money in the future from the developed to developing world, to tackle the impacts of climate change, such as floods and droughts.

Papers seen by the Guardian following a tense GCF board meeting in South Korea show that rich countries led by the US, Britain and Australia pushed for the World Bank-run fund to be able to bypass the governments of poor countries by giving money intended to help them directly to rich countries’ companies. Under this scenario, large contracts for climate change adaptation works in developing countries might have been awarded by the fund to international companies rather than to host governments.