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JOHANNESBURG -- International conventions have not stopped multi-national corporations from trying to secure valuable contracts by bribing government officials in the world's emerging economies -- especially in the arms and defense, and public works and construction industries.

Violations of the Clean Water Act have risen steadily across the nation, an extensive review of water pollution records by The New York Times found. Polluters include small companies, like gas stations, dry cleaners, and shopping malls. They also include large operations, like chemical factories, power plants, sewage treatment centers and one of the biggest zinc smelters, the Horsehead Corporation of Pennsylvania.

Environmental groups hailed a decision this week by four of the world's largest meat producers to ban the purchase of cattle from newly deforested areas of Brazil's Amazon rain forest. Brazil has the world's largest cattle herd and is the world's largest beef exporter. It is also the fourth largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions.

In Eastern India's Jharkand State, tensions are mounting between Indigenous tribal communities and the Uranium Corporation of India Limited, or UCIL. Heavy security at a May public hearing in Jadugoda prevented many local activists and villagers from entering. But outside the hearing, activists from the Jharkhandi Organization Against Radiation (JOAR) argued their case for protecting their health and the environment from horrific impacts of radioactive contaminated waste resulting from uranium mining.

In Eastern India's Jharkand State, tensions are mounting between indigenous tribal communities and the Uranium Corporation of India Limited, or UCIL. Heavy security at a May public hearing on UCIL's planned expansion in the Jagoda region prevented many local activists and villagers from entering. But outside the hearing, activists from the Jharkhandi Organization Against Radiation (JOAR) argued their case for protecting their health and the environment from the horrific impacts of radioactive contaminated waste resulting from uranium mining.

As Angolan leader Jose Eduardo Dos Santos wooed President Jacob Zuma this week, some South African companies are furious at having been fleeced out of cash by doing business with the oil-rich country

Obama sips it. Paris Hilton loves it. Mary J. Blige won't sing without it. How did a plastic water bottle, imported from a military dictatorship thousands of miles away, become the epitome of cool?

Alcoa and Cargill have bypassed laws designed to prevent destruction of the world's largest rain forest, Brazilian prosecutors say. The damage wrought by scores of companies is robbing the earth of its best shield against global warming.

For many Americans, ''May Day'' brings to mind images of phalanxes of Soviet soldiers, goose-stepping through Red Square behind massive tanks, while millions of onlookers obediently cheer. (It's a process not too different from the obedient cheering that goes on here every July 4 -- but never mind.) For other people, ''May Day'' is a pagan holiday, Beltane, more known (and often loved) for maypoles or other fertility rituals than for political struggles.

Originally posted on August 13, 2009 at http://dirtdiggersdigest.org/archives/746

These days just about every large corporation would have us believe
that it is in the vanguard of the fight to reverse global warming.
Companies mount expensive ad campaigns to brag about raising their
energy efficiency and shrinking their carbon footprint.

Last February, the town of Shapleigh, Maine, population 2,326, passed an unusual ordinance. Like nearby towns, Shapleigh sought to protect its aquifers from the Nestle Corporation, which draws heavily on the region for its Poland Spring bottled water. Shapleigh tried something new. At a town meeting, residents voted to endow all of the town's natural assets with legal rights.

Villagers living near a gold mine owned and run by Canada's Barrick Gold Corp. in Tarime District, Mara Region are demanding the immediate closure of the project, saying they are paying a deadly price for the mining activities in the area.

Officials are meeting to review the Kimberley Process, amid criticism that the scheme, set up to certify the origin of diamonds to assure consumers that by purchasing diamonds they are not financing war and human rights abuses, is failing. The Kimberley Process emerged from global outrage over conflicts in countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone, largely funded by the plundering of diamond resources.

The De Jure Ruler of Baluchistan, Khan of Kalat Suleman Daud, and
national hero Hairbyair Marri have expressed their deep resentments
over the remarks of a Pakistani army colonel working for Barrick Gold
Corporation against the Baluch struggle for their national rights.

Set on India's west coast, Goa is renowned as a beach paradise popular with Indian and foreign tourists alike. Just a few miles inland from the quaint restaurants and the pristine waves lapping the silver shores of India's smallest state, iron-ore mining is destroying the environment, say activists and locals.

A landmark legal case now before the US Supreme Court holds huge implications for lakes across the continent. Nearly four decades the Clean Water Act was passed to protect waterways from industrial pollution, a proposal by Coeur d'Alene Mines Corp. to dispose of tons of effluent in Alaska's Lower Slate Lake has sparked an international debate.