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A Texas based oil conglomerate and four of its employees were indicted last week on 97 counts of violating federal clean air and hazardous waste laws. The charges come less than one year after the company was slapped with the largest civil penalty ever levied under federal environmental statutes.

The logging firm Botrosa, one of whose partners is Ecuador's Trade Minister Roberto Pea Durini, has been charged in court for harassing peasant farmers and environmentalists in the northwestern province of Esmeraldas, near the Colombian border.

By joining the international boycott of World Bank-issued bonds, the City of San Francisco is continuing its legacy of supporting social and environmental justice including its support for selective purchase campaigns against Apartheid South Africa and the military junta in Burma.

EuropaBio, the European biotech lobby group, has recently suffered a major blow when it had to cancel its annual congress. The Fourth Annual European Biotechnology Congress was scheduled to take place in Edinburgh, Scotland on October 9-13. According to the Dutch daily newspaper, De Volkskrant, EuropaBio, ''cannot deny that the conference was cancelled due to the fierce critique of genetic engineering in the UK and the resulting lack of sponsors.''

The African Growth and Opportunity Act has now been signed into American law as Title 1 of the US Trade and Development Act which received presidential assent in May 2000. The Act purports to grant certain benefits to Sub-Saharan African economies if African governments enact certain domestic laws, and pursue certain measures.

The Preface and Executive Summary of a report by the American Federation of Teachers which looks at student achievment in 13 schools run by the Edison Project.

This year's cause celebre was the campaign to end the use of sweatshop labor by the $2.5-billion collegiate apparel industry. Undergraduates nationwide demanded their colleges quit the Fair Labor Association (FLA) -- an industry-backed watchdog that opponents liken to a fox guarding the hen house -- and join the Worker Rights Consortium. Founded by students, academics, and labor unions last October, the WRC promises strict workplace oversight, free from industry influence.

One of the leading partners in a controversial hydroelectric dam project in southeastern Turkey pulled out of the scheme this week.

PRAGUE -- Yehoshua Tzarfati has a chilling story to tell. He came to Prague to help as a medic during this week's World Bank/IMF demonstrations.

In a rare inside look at the auditing firms that inspect overseas factories to see whether they are sweatshops, an M.I.T. professor contends that the world's largest factory-monitoring firm does a shoddy job and overlooks many safety and wage violations.