Global Trade

British oil trader Trafigura has offered to settle a court case brought by 31,000 Africans who say that they were injured in the largest personal injuries class action mounted in an English court. The action resulted from the dumping of 400 tonnes of waste in the Ivory Coast by an oil tanker, the Probo Koala, in 2006 - one of the worst pollution disasters in recent history. Read More

E.ON, the German energy group, has effectively thrown in the towel on its plans to build a new coal-power station at Kingsnorth, UK, blaming the recession. Kingsnorth has been shrouded in controversy ever since inception, with protests over several years including a high-profile Climate Camp protest. Read More

Environmental groups hailed a decision this week by four of the world's largest meat producers to ban the purchase of cattle from newly deforested areas of Brazil's Amazon rain forest. Brazil has the world's largest cattle herd and is the world's largest beef exporter. It is also the fourth largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions. Read More

Tracing the chain of production of an E. Coli-contaminated hamburger made by Cargill, through interviews and government and corporate records obtained by The New York Times, shows why eating ground beef is still a gamble. Neither the system meant to make the meat safe, nor the meat itself, is what consumers have been led to believe. Read More

Originally posted at http://markfloegel.org/ The best time to announce the worst news is late on Friday. The federal government and public relations firms have known this for years. So it was that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) scheduled its press conference last Friday for 3 p.m., Pacific Daylight Time or (even better!) 6 p.m. in the east. Read More

El hecho contrasta con la postura adoptada por Al Gore, quien rehusó participar en un seminario sobre Cambio Climático en Chile el 2007 si la minera impulsora del polémico proyecto Pascua Lama actuaba como sponsor. Organizaciones norteamericanas cuestionan la asistencia de la Presidencia y aseguran que esta va en dirección contraria a la línea de protección social impulsada por la mandataria. Read More

The question at the heart of one of the biggest Supreme Court cases this year is simple: What constitutional rights should corporations have? The legal doctrine underlying this debate is known as "corporate personhood." Read More

On Monday Chevron said it gave Ecuadorean authorities evidence of a bribery scheme linked to a $27 billion environmental damages lawsuit against the oil company. Last week, the judge hearing the case, Juan Núñez, recused himself. The Amazon Defense Coalition said the recusal did not "change the overwhelming evidence against Chevron." Read More

During the heyday of the credit bubble, they were the financiers who earned huge bonuses for creating, trading and investing other people's money in those complex securities that resulted in trillions of dollars in losses and brought global financial markets to their knees. Now they're out there again hustling for investors and hoping to make another score buying and trading the same securities. Read More

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