WashingtonPost.com | The luxury cars lined up on Catron Road in a suburban subdivision north of Baltimore. A baby blue Rolls-Royce, a white Maserati, a black Bentley and two Ferraris. More than a dozen jammed the street and driveway in front of Rodney R. Hailey’s five-bedroom colonial.

Hailey told people that his company, Clean Green Fuel, was in the business of making renewable fuel, but some neighbors grew suspicious. One eventually complained to law enforcement officials.

That tip led authorities to uncover what federal prosecutors in Maryland say was a multimillion-dollar scam.

Bloomberg.com | PetroChina Co. surpassed global rivals Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) and OAO Rosneft to become the biggest oil producer among publicly traded companies last year.

The CHART OF THE DAY shows crude output by PetroChina compared with production of the world’s largest listed energy companies, in million barrels a day, based on Bloomberg calculations from company statements. The lower panel tracks Beijing-based PetroChina’s quarterly net income in million yuan, including the final three months of 2011 reported on March 29.

PetroChina plans “large scale” acquisitions to secure more oil and natural gas to help fuel the world’s second-biggest economy, Chairman Jiang Jiemin told reporters after the earnings report. The Hong Kong-listed company aims to spend at least $60 billion on global assets this decade to boost the share of overseas output to half of total production.

NBC Bay Area | Solyndra, a major manufacturer of solar technology in Fremont, has shut its doors, according to employees at the campus. 

"I was told by a security guard to get my [stuff] and leave," one employee said. The company employs a little more than 1,000 employees worldwide, according to its website.

Shortly after it opened a massive $700 million facility, it canceled plans for a public stock offering earlier this year and warned it would be in significant trouble if federal loan guarantees did not go through.

Telegraph | Japan's government estimates the amount of radioactive caesium-137 released by the Fukushima nuclear disaster so far is equal to that of 168 Hiroshima bombs.

Government nuclear experts, however, said the World War II bomb blast and the accidental reactor meltdowns at Fukushima, which has seen ongoing radiation leaks but no deaths so far, were beyond comparison.

The amount of caesium-137 released since the three reactors were crippled by the March 11 quake and tsunami has been estimated at 15,000 tera becquerels, the Tokyo Shimbun reported, quoting a government calculation.

Russia has put forward "proposals" to build new nuclear power plants in Iran after the completion of the Bushehr project, local media reported Sunday quoting the Islamic republic's atomic chief.

"We have held negotiations with the Russians regarding the construction of new nuclear power plants. They have put forward some proposals," Fereydoon Abbasi Davani was quoted as saying by Resalat newspaper.

Breitbart | US conglomerate General Electric is seeking permission to build a $1 billion plant for uranium enrichment by laser, a process which has raised proliferation fears, The New York Times said Sunday.

After testing the enrichment process for two years, GE has asked the US government to approve its plans for a massive facility in North Carolina that could produce reactor fuel by the ton, the report said, citing GE officials.

"We are currently optimizing the design," Christopher Monetta, president of Global Laser Enrichment, a subsidiary operated by GE and Japan's Hitachi, said in an interview with the newspaper.