Human Rights

Human Rights Watch has issued a report that harshly criticizes a single industry in the United States, concluding that the nation's meat packing industry has such bad working conditions that it violates basic human and worker rights. Read More

Activists in India have held nationwide protests against multinational soft drink companies Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Read More

The Kazipally industrial area - once good farm country - now accounts for more than one-third of India's pharmaceutical industry, meaning skyrocketing rates of cancer, heart disease and birth defects for its residents. Read More

Workers at Aura-Misr, a Spanish-Egyptian asbestos company in Cairo, have been laid off since Christmas, after a ban on asbestos took effect in the country. Many of the fired workers have been diagnosed with cancer and they worry that other workers may soon fall ill and die also. Read More

Military contractors like Boeing, Halliburton and Lockheed, have become increasingly embedded with the Pentagon bureaucrats who give them lucrative work as the jailing of Darleen Druyun, a former U.S. Air Force weapons buyer, demonstrates. Read More

Soy rules the central Brazilian state of Mato Grosso and it's not the soy that much of the world associates with the ostensibly eco-friendly, vegetarian diet, either. With help from the World Bank, André Maggi (the Soy King) is bankrolling the destruction of one of the world's most biodiverse ecosystems: the savanna. Read More

New evidence suggests that the Abu Ghraib prisoners were subjected not only to torture and psychological abuse, they were underfed, malnourished and made to eat food so bad it inspired riots. A little-known private contractor, run by an American civilian, is said to be to blame. Read More

In 1984 the world's largest industrial disaster killed 8,000 people over night in Bhopal, India. Two decades later, some sort of closure might seem called for. But today survivors groups continue to struggle for justice, while the chemical industry promotes volunteer initiatives. Read More

Vietnamese Association of Victims of Agent Orange (VAVA) filed a class action law suit in a New York court, against Monsanto and 36 other manufacturers of Agent Orange. Read More

Exam privatization threatens public schools "They make kids in my class feel dumb," says Vanessa Verdín about the corporate-designed standardized tests that millions of U.S. students are required to take under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Vanessa, an energetic eleven year old whose hobbies include soccer, knitting and research, feels that the tests "ask the wrong questions" and "waste time when we could be learning." Read More