|
NEWS July 19th 2001
|
||
| Around the Web... EU Commissioners plan weakening of safety standards for GM food. The European Commission is proposing to allow for increased contamination of our food from genetically modified organisms (GMOs). In particular, current proposals will allow for the presence in foods of GMOs that have not even been approved as safe in Europe. Friends of the Earth Bayer in exclusive talks for Aventis CropScience Bayer AG, the German chemicals group, is in exclusive negotiations with Aventis of France and minority shareholder Schering AG of Germany over the acquisition of CropScience, the Aventis pesticides subsidiary. From the Financial Times Exxon restarts drilling in Aceh ExxonMobil has started pumping gas from the giant Arun gas fields in Indonesia's Aceh province for the first time since March. BBC News See also: Exxon Mobil on torture charges (Corporate Watch, 23/6/01) EU wants to loosen drug controls The European Union wants to speed up the approval of new medicines and relax the tight restrictions on the marketing of drugs, the enterprise commissioner announced on Wednesday. Erkki Liikanen said the system had to change if Europe was not to lose out to US competition. BBC News This is the orthodox BBC view – for an eye on what loosening drug marketing laws could lead to, read about the current US situation here. For comparison, Erkki Liikanen is also behind attempts to water down car safety regulations, see Corporate Watch News 6/7/01 Plutonium stolen fron German nuclear plant Germany's Environment Minister, Juergen Trittin, has demanded clear answers to how a worker apparently managed to steal plutonium from a nuclear reprocessing plant. From the BBC How Should Media Handle Conflict? Danny Schechter from mediachannel.org looks at how the corporate media deals with violence, and what this leads to. Read more Shorter version of this article in Indymedia: |