Human Rights

Vietnam War veterans from the United States, South Korea, Australia and Vietnam gathered on Tuesday to call for more help for the victims of the Agent Orange defoliant used by the U.S. military. Read More

Police and rock throwing demonstrators clashed during a protest against the American mining company, Freeport-McMoRan, today leaving three policemen and one Air Force officer dead in the remote province of Papua, witnesses and officials said. Read More

Voice for Humanity recently sold tens of thousands of pink and silver audio players to the United States government to teach Afghan villagers about democracy. Critics say that the project was a waste of taxpayer dollars. Others say it is a perfect example of the covert "information war" conducted in the "war on terrorism." Read More

A pipeline crossing the Peruvian Amazon has spilled natural gas liquids four times since it opened 15 months ago because it was shoddily built by unqualified welders using corroded pipes left from other jobs, according to a new technical report by the nonprofit environmental consultancy E-Tech International based in San Diego. Read More

The main public investor in a controversial gas pipeline in Peru's Amazon rainforest that has ruptured four times already appears adamant not to bow to pressure from green groups demanding a full investigation after a study asserted that the pipeline is shoddily built and likely to break again. Read More

The UK has failed to act on promises to plug loopholes that allow the sale of arms to countries with poor human rights records, aid agency Oxfam says. It says that military vehicles were sold to Uganda by a South African subsidiary of the UK firm BAE Systems. Read More

Newmont Mining agreed Thursday to pay $30 million to Indonesia in a settlement of a civil lawsuit in which the government argued that the company had polluted a bay with arsenic and mercury. Read More

A controversial Kuwait-based construction firm accused of exploiting employees and coercing low-paid laborers to work in war-torn Iraq against their will is now building the new $592-million U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Listen to an interview with David Phinney about this article on CorpWatch Radio. Read More

High-ranking officials from the United States as well as Iraq accuse the Danish shipping company Maersk of having taken advantage of the chaos of war in order to grab control of Iraq's oil port. Read More

Groups fighting for the rights of peasant communities are stepping up pressure on governments to ban the use of genetically modified ''suicide seeds'' at UN-sponsored talks on biodiversity in Spain this week. Read More