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BOGOTA -- The US said on Wednesday that Colombia's armed forces were meeting human rights criteria and that as a result it would release more than $60m in military aid.

Banana workers, including children as young as eight years old, suffer from a range of abuses on plantations in Ecuador whose government fails to enforce international labor standards or even its own national labor code, according to a report released in Washington Thursday by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

In a statement issued on 24 April, the Haitian workers' organisation, Batay Ouvriye, denounces a month-long wave of violent repression endured by workers and peasants at the Guacimal orange plantation at St. Raphael in northern Haiti. The violence perpetrated by police, acting in collusion with the local landowners and agents of the Guacimal company, has forced workers in the area to go into hiding.

A class-action lawsuit filed by some 35 million descendants of black slaves against three companies with ties to the slave trade is aimed as much at shaking up U.S. society as at winning financial returns, say lawyers and observers.

The second annual skills training for corporate campaigners, a project of the Corporate Campaign Working Group* -- environmental, human rights and labor organizations working together to challenge corporate power and demand accountability.

Environmentalism in Mexico has a dim future unless young people are taught to be more aware of their world, according to Rodolfo Montiel, an environmentalist from the country who was released from prison late last year.

The American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG) and the Free Burma Coalition (FBC) today announced a campaign of protest over the fact that parts of the 2002 Winter Olympic Torchbearer uniforms were made in Burma.

A powerhouse team of African-American legal and academic stars is getting ready to sue companies it says profited from slavery before 1865. Initially, the group's aim is to use lawsuits and the threat of litigation to squeeze apologies and financial settlements from dozens of corporations. Ultimately, it hopes to gain momentum for a national apology and a massive reparations payout by Congress to African-Americans.

An Expeditionary Task Force patrol dispersed a group of coca growers attempting to block the Cochabamba-Santa Cruz highway in Shinahota. According to eyewitness testimony, members of the forces shot directly at a group of farmers on a market road perpendicular to the highway.

The parents of a U.S. peace activist who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer built by the global machinery giant Caterpillar confronted the company Wednesday for the first time and urged shareholders at its annual meeting to end sales of "weaponised bulldozers to Israel".

On June 19th, the U.S. Supreme Court announced a decision that amounts to a slap in the face of the democracy movement in Burma and its supporters in the U.S. The decision stings for a moment, but it does not gravely injure the movement, nor will it stop its progress.

On the eve of the annual meeting of the G-8 leaders, to be held in Okinawa, July 21-23, 2000, ninety-one members of the East Asia-US Women's Network Against Militarism, coming from the Philippines, Puerto Rico, South Korea, Japan, U.S., mainland Japan, and Okinawa, convened the International Women's Summit to Redefine Security (Naha, Okinawa, Japan, June 22-25, 2000).

It has only been in recent years that transnational corporations' complicity with human rights abuse has come under more systematic scrutiny. The international press, citizens' movements and traditional human rights organizations have sounded the alarm on a series of cases. Among those we cover in this Issue are labor abuses in global sweatshops, oil and gas companies' complicity with brutal military regimes in countries such as Burma, Nigeria and Indonesia and the growing prison industry in the United States.

Seventeen years after the Bhopal disaster, survivors still seek justice and environmental health regulations go unenforced.

The Texas Prison Labor Union (TPLU) was established in 1995 by Texas prisoners and outside supporters. The state had just completed a $1.5 billion prison expansion program, and it now incarcerates close to 150,000 prisoners in a vast network of more than 100 prisons.