Oil prices settled higher, rebounding from earlier losses on reports that Nigerian oil workers are about to strike, and investors focused on a surprise decline in gasoline inventories last week.
Retail gas prices slipped slightly for a second day, a sign that falling demand may be affecting prices and that prices at the pump may have [...]

Nigerian oil workers ended a strike that cut the country’s oil output over the last several days. The head of the union at an Exxon Mobil Corp. unit said members would return to work after negotiators reached an agreement with management about pensions.
Exxon Mobil said in a statement that it was restarting production.
Nigeria produces about [...]

Seven Chinese oil workers abducted by Ethiopian rebels after a deadly attack on an oil venture arrived here Monday, a day after being freed.
The hostages arrived in Addis Ababa aboard a military helicopter from the country’s eastern Ogaden region, where they had been held since last Tuesday, when the rebel Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) [...]

Oil prices rebounded Friday amid cold weather in the United States, a major consumer of heating oil, and as traders watched for signs that OPEC members were cutting output.
Concerns were also stoked by a threat from the two main Nigerian oil workers’ unions to strike next week in protest of rising violence in the country’s [...]

Several Chinese workers were taken hostage in the southern Nigerian oil state of Bayelsa, police and industry sources said.
“I can confirm to you that some Chinese have been abducted at Sagbama. I don’t know how many because the details of the incident are still unknown,” Basyelsa state police commissioner Hafiz Ringim told AFP Thursday.
Industry sources [...]

Gunmen demanding ransom kidnapped two engineers — one American and the other British — as they traveled to work on Tuesday in Nigeria’s southern oil city Port Harcourt, authorities said.
The abduction brings to 29 the number of foreign workers being held by armed groups in the remote swamps of the Niger Delta, Africa’s oil heartland, [...]

Nigerian officials have said they were intensifying efforts to secure the release of six Filipino oil workers and a local staffer taken hostage this weekend in the oil-rich Niger Delta.
“Governor James Ibori has swung into action to secure the release of the men,” Sheddy Ozoene, the spokesman for the governor in southern Delta State where [...]

Militants have kidnapped nine South Korean oil workers and one local worker in the Niger Delta region of southern Nigeria, bringing the total number of foreigners currently held hostage there to 18.
The latest attack came barely five days after the abduction of five Chinese telecoms workers and a month after the kidnapping of three Italians [...]

Armed men have seized control of an oil complex in southern Nigeria owned by a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell PLC, authorities said Friday.
No deaths were reported but one man was shot in the overnight attack on the facility, an operating base that houses staff and stores equipment, said Joshua Benemesia, a local chief who [...]

Oil workers in Nigeria threatened to resume a strike they called off after two days in September, accusing the government of reneging on the promises it made to them two months ago.
Officials of the country’s two oil workers’ unions Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) and National Union of Petroleum and [...]