Guardian – Thousands of workers in Britain’s lucrative food industry are being subjected to widespread mistreatment and exploitation, including physical and verbal abuse and degrading working conditions, according to an inquiry published today. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said it has uncovered significant evidence of abuse among producers supplying Britain’s big supermarkets. The inquiry includes reports from meat factory workers who say they have had frozen burgers thrown at them by line managers, and accounts of pregnant women being forced to stand for long periods or perform heavy lifting under threat of the sack. Read Article
ABC – A former Scientologist who says she was a “child slave” and alleges she saw a six-year-old boy chained up in a ship’s hold is disappointed the Senate has blocked a full inquiry into the religious organisation. Independent Senator Nick Xenophon has been calling for a full inquiry into the church since revealing claims of forced abortions and other abuses in Parliament last year. Read Article
Guardian UK – Companies across Europe are hoarding permits to produce greenhouse gas emissions worth hundreds of millions of pounds, the Guardian can reveal. The surplus credits have been amassed from over-allocation of permits to pollute from the European emissions trading scheme, and by buying cheap credits from carbon-cutting projects in developing countries and holding on to their more expensive official EU allowances. The saved permits can be used to meet future targets to cut the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming and climate change without actually reducing pollution, or sold for a profit in the future. Read Article
Times Online – The Italian Parliament has approved a law that will shield Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister, from criminal trials for the next year and a half. The decision led to vociferous protests from magistrates, judges and the centre-Left opposition. The law, passed last night, in effect undermines two trials in which Mr Berlusconi, 73, is accused of corruption. In one he is charged with giving David Mills, his former British tax lawyer and estranged husband of Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister, a bribe to lie for him in court in corruption cases in the 1990s. In the second his television company Mediaset is accused of tax fraud over the purchase of Hollywood film rights. Read article
Telegraph – Google, the internet giant, is believed to be testing a new technology which will allow consumers to search programme listings on their own television sets. The new product, which utilises parts of Google’s Android mobile operating system, also lets users find and watch YouTube video clips on their televisions. The system, details of which were first reported by the Wall Street Journal, is currently on trial in a small number of homes belonging to Google employees and their families. The exact trial size not currently known. Read Article
Bloomberg – The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is trying to encourage public retirement funds that control more than $2 trillion to buy all or part of failed lenders, taking a more direct role in propping up the banking system, said people briefed on the matter. Direct investments may allow funds such as those in Oregon, New Jersey and California to cut fees for private-equity managers, and the agency to get better prices for distressed assets, the people said. They declined to be identified because talks with regulators are confidential. Read Article
Times – Northern Rock, the state-owned bank bailed out with £26 billion in taxpayers’ funds, will share a £14.9 million bonus among its staff despite running up a loss over 2009. The lender’s 4,500 staff will receive rewards, including its 32 top managers, who will benefit from a £3 million bonus specifically for senior staff, to be paid in three instalments and subject to the Government’s 50 per cent tax on awards in excess of £25,000. Read Article
Zero Day – The United States Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT) has warned that the software included in the Energizer DUO USB battery charger contains a backdoor that allows unauthorized remote system access. In an advisory, the US-CERT warned that he installer for the Energizer DUO software places the file UsbCharger.dll in the application’s directory and Arucer.dll in the Windows system32 directory. Read Article
Associated Press – The Pentagon said Thursday the cost to build its next-generation fighter jet has doubled to as much as $113 million per plane since 2001. The bad news about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Progam, delivered Thursday to Congress, was swiftly denounced by lawmakers who said runaway spending on major weapons systems has become all too common. Read article
The Columbus Dispatch – WASHINGTON – Dozens of former federal officials are playing leading roles in helping carmakers handle federal investigations of auto defects, including those for Toyota’s runaway acceleration problems. A Washington Post analysis shows that as many as 33 former National Highway Traffic Safety Administration employees and Transportation Department appointees left those jobs and now work for automakers as lawyers, consultants, lobbyists and in other jobs that deal with government safety probes, recalls and regulations. The reach of these former agency employees is broad. Their names appear on rosters for every major automaker, every automotive trade group and as expert witnesses and legal counsel for the industry in class-action lawsuits. Read Article
New York Times – Some of the nation’s large banks, according to economists and other finance experts, are like dead men walking. A sober assessment of the growing mountain of losses from bad bets, measured in today’s marketplace, would overwhelm the value of the banks’ assets, they say. The banks, in their view, are insolvent. None of the experts’ research focuses on individual banks, and there are certainly exceptions among the 50 largest banks in the country. Nor do consumers and businesses need to fret about their deposits, which are federally insured. And even banks that might technically be insolvent can continue operating for a long time, and could recover their financial health when the economy improves. Read Article
Telegraph – But doctors have accused the Government of rushing the project through, meaning that patients have had their details uploaded to the database before they have had a chance to object. The scheme, one of the largest of its kind in the world, will eventually hold the private records of more than 50 million patients. But it has been dogged by accusations that the private information held on it will not be safe from hackers. Read Article
Reuters – The Dutch government wants to sell 21 million unused H1N1 flu vaccine doses back to their manufacturers after they proved unnecessary and no other country wanted to buy them, the Health Ministry said on Saturday. Read article
The Australian – WHEN Les Alcorn decided he wanted to take the world’s largest mining company to court, he knew it wouldn’t be easy. He also knew he and his wife, Margaret, would need the full support of the local community to protect their farm of 37 years from BHP Billiton’s exploration plans. Yesterday, Mr Alcorn’s worries turned to celebration as the 75-year-old cattle farmer from Quirindi, on the Liverpool Plains in NSW’s mid-north, savoured a landmark decision handed down in the Supreme Court on Friday. Read Article
The Age – SCORES of starving and pain-ridden kangaroos have been culled after developing tooth and bone deformities from breathing and ingesting fluoride emissions. Many more are believed to be suffering from growths that will kill them. The affected kangaroos are living near the Alcoa aluminium smelter in Portland, in the state’s south-west, and the Austral Bricks factory at Craigieburn. Read Article
Ed. – The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) currently sees itself as a regulatory agency, so they hide behind already established levels for poisons in emissions (not the environment). It makes for a peaceful relationship with the manufacturing corporations poisoning the environment, which suits most governments. This makes the EPA pretty toothless instead of being the powerful and innovative agency that they purport themselves to be. The EPA, or the manufacturer, could have chosen to be pro-active; they might have prevented a lot of unnecessary animal-suffering, now and in the future. When environmental poisoning like this is allowed to happen government agencies have very much ‘lost the plot’ – certainly their ‘vision’. EPA ‘plans’vs. P.2 – stated objectives
AFP _ It is blamed for everything from deforestation to threatening the extinction of the orangutan, but palm oil is a vital source of income for many developing countries, the crop’s producers say. In Indonesia, the world’s largest palm oil producer, where the plant provides work for three million people, the government is keen to promote the benefits of the crop. Read Article
Ed – The fact of the matter is however that most palm oil production is owned by big corporations (not the peasant farmers), that it leads to massive deforestation, and that despite this it still counts towards ‘carbon off-setting’ for corporations
The Australian – PHARMACEUTICAL giant Merck is being urged to settle with hundreds of Australian heart attack victims after a Federal Court judge found the company’s blockbuster drug Vioxx doubled the risk of cardiac arrest. In a landmark decision with international ramifications, judge Christopher Jessup ruled the anti-inflammatory drug was not “reasonably fit” to be on the market and the selling of it by Merck’s Australian subsidiary breached the Trade Practices Act. Read Article
ABC – SHANE MCLEOD: Some believe the structure of the modern pharmaceutical industry means cases like Vioxx are inevitable. Dr Peter Mansfield is a GP (general practitioner) who founded the group Healthy Skepticism that campaigns for changes to the way drugs are marketed. He’s also a visiting research fellow at the University of Adelaide. He joins me on the line now. Read transcript/listen to audio.
Bloomberg — BP Plc and Exxon Mobil Corp. took the best deal they could get in Iraq last year when they won the largest oil contracts since addam Hussein was toppled in 2003. Oil companies may wait a long time to get a better one. Parliamentary elections may produce a weak or unstable government incapable of tendering new oil contracts, said Samuel Ciszuk, a London-based analyst at IHS Global Insight. He said he does expect the 10 technical-services contracts won by Exxon, BP and 20 other companies to be honored. Read Article
Daily Mail – Vaccines given to dogs are making them ill, a pet charity claimed yesterday. Profit-hungry drug companies and vets are ‘frightening’ dog owners into inoculating their pets more often than necessary, according to Canine Health Concern. Some puppies have developed conditions including autism and epilepsy after a raft of injections, it warns. Read Article
Ed. – Lyme Disease in dogs can be a very nasty, very debilitating condition. Canine Lyme Disease occurs in the US, Australia, parts of Europe, China and Japan. More in Source; Coronavirus Infection–Dogs: Causes vomiting and diarrhea; puppies are susceptible to fatalities. More in Source; bordetella = kennel cough
Wall Street Journal – Canada’s First Nations peoples chastised Royal Bank of Canada (RY) for not doing enough to prevent “an environmental holocaust,” at the bank’s annual meeting in Toronto Wednesday. Four aboriginal groups appealed to Canada’s biggest bank to use its corporate heft and political influence to stop Enbridge Inc. (ENB) from building a 725-mile pipeline to carry oil from Alberta’s tar sands through northern British Columbia to Kitimat, where it would be loaded on tankers for shipment to the U.S. west coast or Asia. Read Article
BBC – US Defence Secretary Robert Gates is to review allegations of misconduct in Afghanistan by the security company formerly known as Blackwater. The review comes a day after a leading Democrat said the Pentagon should consider barring it from applying for a contract to train Afghan police. The Pentagon said it could not bar the company from applying for the billion-dollar police training contract. A spokesman for company, now called Xe, said it welcomed the review. Read article
The Hill – A top Microsoft executive on Tuesday suggested a broad Internet tax to help defray the costs associated with computer security breaches and vast Internet attacks, according to reports. Speaking at a security conference in San Francisco, Microsoft Vice President for Trustworthy Computing Scott Charney pitched the Web usage fee as one way to subsidize efforts to combat emerging cyber threats — a costly venture, he said, but one that had vast community benefits. Read Article
The Independent – The introduction of a genetically modified potato in Europe risks the development of human diseases that fail to respond to antibiotics, it was claimed last night. German chemical giant BASF this week won approval from the European Commission for commercial growing of a starchy potato with a gene that could resist antibiotics – useful in the fight against illnesses such as tuberculosis. Farms in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic may plant the potato for industrial use, with part of the tuber fed to cattle, according to BASF, which fought a 13-year battle to win approval for Amflora. But other EU member states, including Italy and Austria and anti-GM campaigners angrily attacked the move, claiming it could result in a health disaster. Read Article
Ed – Slowly but surely the global food supply falls under corporate patent. Irrespective of the possible health affects of GM crops, there are considerable civil liberties and moral implications of mankind’s most basic need being controlled by corporate psychology.
Politico – Senate Democrats are furious that the vast majority of grants from the clean-energy program from last year’s stimulus have been awarded to foreign companies. Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana announced Wednesday a new initiative to require the “Buy America” provision of the stimulus to all programs, not just the government ones. A study done by the Investigative Reporting Workshop found that 79 percent of the $2 billion in clean-energy grants allocated since Sept. 1, 2009, has gone to foreign wind companies. Read article
