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CUT THE LIFELINE! is an ongoing campaign aiming to cut the economic lifeline keeping the Burmese military dictatorship in power. The latest target in this campaign is Amerada Hess, an American oil company which owns 25 percent of Premier Oil. Premier Oil are the largest UK investor in Burma. Our campaign to persuade them to pull out has been backed by Aung San Suu Kyi and the UK government.

Chocolate manufacturers, human rights groups and the Ivory Coast Government have signed pact aimed at ending the abuse of child labour in the chocolate industry.

Calgary (April 30, 2002) -- Rights and Democracy advised oil corporation Talisman today that future complicity in Sudanese human rights abuses could be liable for prosecution by the impending International Criminal Court.

Scientists and planners for the U.S. Army are designing the one-size-fits-all base-in-a-box in an effort to make military operations more efficient. Another advantage of this off-the-shelf package is that it comes with instructions that can be assembled by anybody, anywhere, eliminating the need for quartermaster battalions and paving the way for private contractors to set the bases up. The Army has been contracting support services out to Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Vice-president Dick Cheney has brought new meaning to the term ''revolving door'' says Bill Hartung, senior research fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York. His easy transition from the army to private industry and then to the White House has earned him millions, Dallas-based Halliburton billions.

Texas-based multinational Halliburton (parent company of Brown amd Root) have made millions out of the U.S. wars in the last decade by providing support services to the military. Here is a timeline of the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program.

The U.S. military has always relied on private contractors for basic services, but today nearly 10 percent of the emergency U.S. army operations overseas are contracted out to unaccountable private corporations.

Over the last two years, thousands of people have gathered to counter the annual conventions of the biotechnology industry in Boston and San Diego. This year, people will be converging on Toronto to broaden the biojustice movement and challenge the biotechnology industry and their vision for our future. It will be a gathering to learn, strategize and network about genetic engineering in agriculture and pharmaceuticals, biowarfare, genetic and non-genetic discrimination, trade regimes and corporate control, patenting of life and more. This event is timed to challenge the industry's annual convention BIO2002, Toronto, June 9-12.

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.

In less than 24 hours this past Wednesday, big advances for three major pieces of legislation indicated that Mexico -- for 20 years the ''model student'' of so-called free market policy reforms, and long noted for high levels of government secrecy and corruption -- may be charting a new, more independent course. At a moment when the Bush administration is chilling domestic dissent, restricting the free flow of information and promoting corporate deregulation, Mexico appears poised to do virtually the opposite.