Environment

Honduran owned Generadora del Istmo S.A. (GENISA) is almost done with building Barro Blanco- a 28.84 megawatt hydroelectric project - on the Tabasará river in Chiriqui province in western Panama. The indigenous Ngäbe-Buglé community says that the impact of this project on their livelihoods will be devastating. Read More

The idyllic village of Balcombe, just south of London, is a stronghold of the Conservative party. Just the sort of place that one might imagine cheering on industry plans to drill for natural gas and applaud the tax breaks that the government has offered to industry. Read More

Halliburton has admitted that it destroyed evidence after the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. The company has agreed to pay a $200,000 fine, make a donation of $55 million to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and accept three years of probation. Read More

Cargill, the world's largest food company, has been secretly amassing land from small farmers in eastern Colombia, despite a law prohibiting the practice. When the two countries signed a free trade agreement last year, Cargill emerged as the owner of 52,574 hectares where it grows corn and soybeans. Read More

Monsanto has refused to testify at a major government hearing about the development and sale of seeds in Puerto Rico. At stake is the research that the company conducts into genetic engineering on the island that critics say threaten the environment and can cause serious human health problems. Read More

TransCanada and the provincial government of Alberta are paying former advisors to the Obama administration - as well as former staff of the Hillary Clinton and John Kerry presidential campaigns - to help them lobby for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline to transport tar sands fuel to the U.S. Read More

A subsidiary of Arch Coal of St. Louis, Missouri, was denied permission to dump nearly three billion cubic feet of dirt into local headwater streams after blowing up a mountain in West Virginia. The object was to extract coal from a project known as the Spruce No. 1 Surface Mine. Read More

Alstom, a French engineering company, has been accused of bribing Indonesian officials to win a lucrative contract to build coal power plans in Sumatra. Frederic Pierucci, a French employee of the company, was arrested and David Rothschild, a U.S. employee, has pled guilty. Read More

A lawsuit against HudBay Minerals in Canada for human rights abuses in Guatemala is the next case to watch for corporate accountability activists after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a case against Shell for aiding and abetting human rights abuses in Nigeria. Read More

In a unanimous ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit against Shell in Nigeria for human rights abuses in the Ogoni region. The ruling effectively blocks other lawsuits against foreign multinationals for human rights abuse that have occurred overseas from being brought in U.S. courts. Read More