A Los Angeles jury on Monday awarded $3.2 million to six Nicaraguan farmworkers who had sued Dole Food Co. Inc., arguing they had been rendered sterile some three decades ago by the international corporate giant's application of a banned pesticide on the plantations where they worked.

Jurors return today to consider whether Dole, and codefendant Dow Chemical Co., should be punished with more monetary damages. They will decide whether Dole acted maliciously in failing to warn its workers of the danger, and whether Dow engaged in gross negligence in manufacturing the chemical...

The headline "Indian 'slave' children found making low-cost clothes destined for Gap," in last week's Observer online must have caused massive indigestion for the PR pixies who burnish the Gap's image as a good corporate egg.

By David J. Lynch

BOGOTA, Colombia — At first, the allegations in a federal courtroom sounded like the sort of thing conspiracy-minded college freshmen dream up during late-night bull sessions. A major U.S. corporation stood accused of routinely funneling large sums of money to a vicious right-wing Latin American militia that the United States government officially had branded a terrorist organization.

GUANGZHOU, China -- The patients arrive every day in Chinese hospitals with disabling and fatal diseases, acquired while making products for America.

On the sixth floor of the Guangzhou Occupational Disease and Prevention Hospital, Wei Chaihua, 44, sits on his iron-rail bed, tethered to an oxygen tank. He is dying of the lung disease silicosis, a result of making Char-Broil gas stoves sold in Utah and throughout the U.S...

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