Labor

The UK's Lord Ashcroft, the Conservative party deputy chairman and major donor, has agreed to sell his loss-making US janitorial business in a deal that will bring him a £132m windfall. Read More

Old perils resurface as trapped S African miners emerge alive. Read More

Wal-Mart workers in Pennsylvania who previously won a $78.5 million class-action award for working off the clock will share an additional $62.3 million in damages, a judge ruled Wednesday. Read More

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has charged four more former Nortel Networks Corp. executives with accounting fraud, alleging they manipulated reserves to change Nortel's earnings statements on the orders of more senior officers of the Canadian networking equipment maker. Read More

In the annals of perks enjoyed by American corporate executives, the founders of Google may have set a new standard: an un-crowded, federally-managed runway for their private jet that is as close as can be to being in the company's own backyard. Read More

Anger at the wide spread pain and suffering of mining communities flares with each new disaster and the recent collapse of a mine on the Chaiwen River is no exception. Read More

Wal-Mart, in a struggle to expand its global reach, is trying to enter India through the back door, but many consumers here have taken notice. Read More

President Gloria Arroyo has ordered an investigation into reports that Filipino workers were forced to go to Iraq to work on the U.S. embassy there despite a ban on them traveling there. A report from the watchdog organization CorpWatch said that "other South Asians" were indeed working for First Kuwait Trading and Contracting in Iraq. Read More

In the wake of the multiple scandals over tainted Chinese food and drug exports in recent months, Chinese goods now have an indelible image of being not just cheap, but life-threatening as well. But the fact that wrongly labelled foods, liquor and pharmaceuticals have routinely sickened and even killed people en masse in China has been largely overlooked. Read More

Gordon Brown yesterday unveiled a "moral" alliance of leaders of governments and multinationals to tackle global poverty, telling the United Nations that globalisation could be a force for justice. Read More