| US: Amazon.com Fights Union Activity by Steven Greenhouse, New York Times November 29th, 2000 Amazon.com has come out swinging in its fight to stop a new unionization drive, telling employees that unions are a greedy, for-profit business and advising managers on ways to detect when a group of workers is trying to back a union. |
| FRANCE: Yahoo! Ordered To Block Users by Pierre-Antoine Souchard, Associated Press November 20th, 2000 In a landmark ruling, a French court on Monday ordered Yahoo! to block French Web users from its auction sites selling Nazi memorabilia. |
| US: Computers Bad for Kids by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, Focus on the Corporation October 5th, 2000 Last month, the www.allianceforchildhood.net Alliance for Childhood a group of more than 75 educators, child-development and health authorities called for a time-out from the overwhelming pressure on educators and parents to computerize childhood. |
| WORLD: NGOs Tell World Bank "Don't Hijack the Internet" by Gumisai Mutume, Inter Press Service September 21st, 2000 Non-governmental organisations and academics are alarmed over the Global Gateway, a portal website project which the Bank says will be the ''the premier web entry point for information about poverty and sustainable development'' but which the NGOs say is flawed and non-participatory. |
| US: Sony Corporation Tracks Environmental Organizations by Danielle Knight, Inter Press Service September 15th, 2000 A leaked document written by Sony Corporation, obtained by IPS, outlines a presentation made in July to fellow electronics companies at a conference in Brussels illustrating the various activities of environmental groups. It names specific US activists who seek to regulate waste caused by the electronics industry. |
| INDIA: 325,000 Telecom Workers Strike over Corporatization Plan Agence France Presse September 6th, 2000 Some 325,000 Indian state telecom workers began an indefinite strike Wednesday, to push for guarantees against layoffs and pension losses when their department becomes a corporation next month. |
| INDONESIA: International Union Steps into Sony Dispute Jakarta Post July 25th, 2000 An international union has stepped into the dispute surrounding the dismissal of 928 workers from PT Sony Electronics Indonesia. |
| SOUTH ASIA: Digital Divide Sharpens Rich-Poor Gap by Ranjit Devraj, Inter Press Service July 21st, 2000 South Asia has emerged as the most promising region for sourcing information technology (IT) expertise, but this is an achievement that is of use only to the rich nations, say critics. |
| US: Info-Cleansing on the Web by Marcia Stepanek, Business Week Online July 7th, 2000 Beware the public relations person with a modem. Now corporate spinmeisters, too, can go online to track customers -- especially the disgruntled ones who vent their spleen in cyberspace. |
| USA: Spying for Free Trade by Duncan Campbell and Paul Lashmar, The Independent (UK) July 2nd, 2000 It is the new Cold War. The United States intelligence agencies, facing downsizing after the fall of the Berlin wall, have found themselves a new role spying on foreign firms to help American business in global markets. |
| USA: The Dot-com Obsession Warping the Economy by David Friedman, Los Angeles Times February 6th, 2000 Spurred by unprecedented stock-market wealth, land-use, tax and development policies are skewing economic incentives almost exclusively toward a postindustrial, dot-com society. Alternatives that might better distribute technology and capital among the population and diversify the economy are being sacrificed. |
| USA: One Big Company by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, Focus on the Corporation January 12th, 2000 AOL has been a leading proponent of open access -- meaning those who control high-speed internet access through cable systems or other means not have the power to discriminate against internet service providers that they do not control or favor. In buying Time Warner, AOL suddenly acquires one of the largest cable systems in the country, and gains a material interest in opposing open access. |
| MEXICO: Consumers Accuse Phone Company of Human Rights Violations by Kent Paterson, Borderlines August 11th, 1999 For more than four years, Graciela Ramos and Women for Mexico have been a thorn in Telmex's side. The group has waged a campaign to force Mexico's privately-owned, local phone service giant to cancel measured service, provide devices that track the number of phone calls made from a home, and ensure that economically disadvantaged groups have access to both public and private telephones. |
| MEXICO: NGO Battles Telmex Planning Move into US Market by Kent Paterson, Borderlines September 1st, 1998 U.S. consumers may soon have yet another long-distance phone company competing for their monthly accounts. After years of wrangling, Telefonos de Mexico (Telmex) was recently granted approval by the Federal Communications Commission to test-market telephone services aimed at Spanish-speakers in Tucson, AZ. |
| India: New Computer Operating System Takes Country by Storm by B. Harsh, India Abroad News Service February 9th, 1998 MUMBAI -- Linux, a computer operating system that has thrown up the biggest ever challenge to Microsoft's monopoly and which got a boost with the Hollywood blockbuster ''Titanic'', is taking the Indian software industry by storm. |
| Canada: Business-Education Partnerships a Troubling Trend by Bernie Froese-Germain and Marita Moll, Education Monitor June 1st, 1997 Berne Froese-Germain and Martia Moll, two researchers with the Canadian Teachers Federation, outline the scope of the problem. |
| USA: RSI Suit May Finally Catch Up with Apple by Reynolds Holding, San Francisco Chronicle January 19th, 1997 For the first time ever, a keyboard maker has lost a lawsuit involving repetitive stress injury. And, with dozens of suits pending against it, this could be bad news for Apple. |
| USA: Intel Computer Chip Plant Tests New Environmental Rules by Pratap Chatterjee, Inter Press Service October 14th, 1996 SAN FRANCISCO -- The 1.3-billion-dollar expansion of a computer chip plant near Phoenix, Arizona, heralds a new era in environmental regulation, according to company and U.S. government officials. |
| US: AT&T to pay $25 million to settle Calif. lawsuit
AT&T Inc. will pay $25 million to end a lawsuit by California officials alleging the company failed to test properly and repair its underground storage tanks, the state attorney general said on Tuesday. |
| CHINA: Google Moves In BBC news Google has secured a licence to operate in China, enabling it to compete more effectively with rivals in the world's second-largest internet market. |