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Irma Angelica Rosales, a 13-year-old girl, was raped and murdered on February 16 in the town of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, just a cross the border from El Paso, Texas. Her very brief life and violent death symbolize everything that is wrong with the social system which U.S. multinational corporations and the U.S. and Mexican government have created on our common border.

The murder of 13-year-old Irma Angelica Rosales should lead to a time of reflection about the nature of the north American economy. To a degree we seldom stop to consider, women and children increasingly provide the labor base of the North American economy, including what supposedly represents its most "advanced" sectors.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado filed suit today against the country's largest private extradition company on behalf of a female prisoner who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of a sexual assault by a company guard during a drive from Texas to Colorado.

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.

Here is a list of corporations participating in the GSDF project as of February 1999.

Of the $18 billion budgeted for the Iraq Reconstruction Program, $7 billion is spent on securing the workers and the construction sites that are contracted and overseen by the Corps of Engineers Gulf Region District and the Project and Contracting Office.

• 174 War & Disaster Profiteers Campaign

Bernard J. Ebbers, the founder and former chief executive of World Com who was found guilty of fraud by a New York jury in March, agreed yesterday to surrender nearly all of his personal fortune - about $40 million - to investors who lost billions when the company spiraled into bankruptcy almost three years ago.

In closing arguments, the attorney for two whistleblowers asks for more than $10 million in damages against the Rhode Island-based company accused of war profiteering in Iraq.