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Although Europe and Africa are minimizing it in public, a wide gulf separates the two continents on the slavery issue at the World Conference against Racism (WACR), according to several inside sources.

In Kearny, New Jersey, a 20-minute drive from Manhattan, a Wal-Mart-branded automated teller machine is reigniting fears among small banks that the world's largest retailer wants to drive them out of business.

Asda Group Ltd., the British division of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, has reached a deal with one of Britain's largest unions that marks the most significant concessions the global retailer has made to organized labor.

One of Wal-Mart's most vocal union-funded critics took out a full-page ad in The New York Times on Tuesday calling on the company to live up to the ''moral responsibilities'' of being the world's largest private employer by improving wages and health insurance.

Wal-Mart, having helped start an advocacy group that trumpets its contributions to America, is now helping that organization recruit Wal-Mart's suppliers to join the public relations offensive - a move that some vendors say puts improper pressure on them.

The campaign to encourage suppliers to join the advocacy group, called Working Families for Wal-Mart, challenges Wal-Mart's longstanding policy of keeping suppliers at arm's length and shows how eager the company is to fend off a well-organized union-backed campaign critical of its wages and benefits.

With companies eager to tout their "green" credentials to consumers, advertising watchdogs in a number of countries are stepping up efforts to rein in marketers that make false or exaggerated claims.

Shopping in a Target store, you know you're not in Wal-Mart. But, critics say that in terms of working conditions, sweatshop-style foreign suppliers, and effects on local retail communities, big box Target stores are very much like Wal-Mart, just in a prettier package.

I was reading this article about Wal-Mart tricking its customers into signing up for a stealth PR campaign to burnish the retailer's image, when this stopped me cold:

Last December, Wal-Mart, based in Bentonville, Ark., created its own grassroots group, Working Families for Wal-Mart. It hired Edelman, a global public relations firm, to organize the group out of its Washington office and launch a nationwide campaign.

Wal-Mart said it will build the stores in neighborhoods with high crime or unemployment rates, on sites that are environmentally contaminated, or in vacant buildings or malls in need of revitalization.

Like almost anything involving Wal-Mart these days, the dispute has less to do with specific legal or regulatory questions than it does with the deep rift the company has opened across the American landscape.