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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.

In a statement issued on 24 April, the Haitian workers' organisation, Batay Ouvriye, denounces a month-long wave of violent repression endured by workers and peasants at the Guacimal orange plantation at St. Raphael in northern Haiti. The violence perpetrated by police, acting in collusion with the local landowners and agents of the Guacimal company, has forced workers in the area to go into hiding.

The World Bank president's June meeting could do worse than to consider Uganda's Bujagali Dam project and Tanzania's Bulyanhulu Gold Mine. The two large-scale projects are being supported by the World Bank's International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (Miga), as part of a broad strategy to increase economic growth and alleviate poverty.

Banana workers, including children as young as eight years old, suffer from a range of abuses on plantations in Ecuador whose government fails to enforce international labor standards or even its own national labor code, according to a report released in Washington Thursday by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

LAGOS, Nigeria -- Youths who seized an oil rig off southern Nigeria released their last 43 hostages and left the rig peacefully Thursday, after the oil company agreed to discuss their demands, officials said.

Is fabric made from corn an eco-friendly wonder product or just more greenwash?

Last Friday, April 12, The Municipal Government of Talamanca (one of the counties where the Costa Rican government granted concessions to U.S. companies for oil development) declared Talamanca an ''Oil-Free'' County. As far as we know, this is the first government entity anywhere that has declared its territory ''free of oil and gas exploration and exploitation'' by initiating a ''moratorium on all activities related to petroleum exploration and exploitation within the Talamancan territory.''

Following a vote in the United States Senate last week to block changes to a bill which would have allowed oil exploration and development of a fragile wildlife habitat in the Arctic, activists are now planning their next steps to ensure that the area remains protected from future environmental threats.

NEW YORK -- Domini Social Investments, manager of the Domini Social Equity Fund, announced today that it has filed nine shareholder resolutions for the 2002 proxy season and is engaged in ten separate dialogues with companies on a range of social and environmental issues.