Human Rights

Two U.S. companies can be prosecuted for the alleged role of their employees in torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a U.S. federal court ruled last week. The companies are CACI of Arlington, Virginia, which provided the interrogators at the prison, and L-3/Titan of New York city, which provided translators at the same location. Read More

War has been declared on Enbridge, a Canadian oil company, by a chief from the Nadleh Whut'en in British Columbia. Chief Martin Louie was attending the company annual general meeting in Toronto where he spoke out Wednesday against the environmental impact of the company's tar sands operations. Read More

Protestors targeted annual general meetings of Enbridge and Bank of America this week for the devastating environmental consequences of extracting energy from two new and unconventional sources: tar sands and mountain top coal. Read More

G4S and Serco - two private security contractors - have just been awarded multi-million pound contracts by the UK Borders Authority to provide housing to asylum seekers, edging out charities for the work. Activists are protesting, saying that G4S has a history of abusing immigrants and providing poor quality housing. Read More

KLM, the Dutch airline, has been forced to backtrack from a plan to use oil from jatropha seeds grown in Indonesia for commercial flights, after Friends of the Earth Netherlands put out a report criticizing the potential impact on local food supplies. Read More

Why don't drug companies invest enough money in treating malaria and tuberculosis? A recent study published in the Lancet magazine estimates that 1,238,000 people died from malaria in 2010. Surely a wonder drug that stops these diseases would be wildly profitable? Read More

Carnival Cruise staff on UK ships are paid $1.20 an hour or $400 a month in basic wages, according to the Guardian newspaper. These workers lose their tips, ie roughly 15 percent of wages, unless they get at least a 92 percent favorable rating from customers. Read More

Protestors have rallied this week outside annual meetings of Barclays bank in London, Citibank in Dallas, Credit Suisse in Zurich and Wells Fargo in San Francisco. A surprising number of shareholders have rallied to their side to vote down excessive executive compensation, in an unexpected victory for the Occupy movement. Read More

Facebook, the social network behemoth that is about to become a multi-billion dollar company, has been lobbying for a proposed new U.S. law called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) that would allow companies to share information with government agencies. Read More

Children as young as ten in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, dig for cobalt and copper which they then sell to Switzerland-based Glencore, the world's largest commodities company, according to a new BBC investigation. Read More