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Cancer patients in India have reason to be relieved at a high court ruling this week which dismissed a petition by Swiss pharmaceuticals multinational corporation (MNC) Novartis challenging an Indian law which denies patents for minor or trivial improvements to known drugs.

U.S.-funded aerial spraying of coca plantations in Colombia near the Ecuador border has severely damaged the DNA of local residents, a new study has found.

Destined for American kitchens, planks of birch and poplar plywood are stacked to the ceiling of a cavernous port warehouse. The wood, which arrived in California via a cargo ship, carries two labels: One proclaims "Made in China," while the other warns that it contains formaldehyde, a cancer-causing chemical.

When claims were first published on the front pages of Indian newspapers this month that Coca-Cola and PepsiCo beverages were contaminated with pesticides, executives at the two companies were breezily confident that they could handle the issue.

Three weeks later, though, they are still struggling to win back Indian consumers. One-quarter of India's component states have imposed partial bans on their products, and a complex legal battle to overturn those bans is only just beginning.

Here is a list of more endorsers of correspondence to Kofi Annan blasting the Global Compact corporations.

Early in March, Bausch & Lomb received a troubling phone call from a New Jersey eye doctor. Dr. David S. Chu, a specialist in cornea diseases, alerted the company that three of his recent patients had been afflicted with a microbe that caused a potentially blinding eye infection.

Disney is not renewing its cross-promotional pact with the fast-food giant, ending the arrangement with this summer's release of "Cars" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest." One reason, say multiple high-ranking sources within Disney, is that the company - which prides itself on being family friendly - wants to distance itself from fast food and its links to the epidemic of childhood obesity.

Hong Kong supermarkets have halted some vegetable sales amid a new food scare after pressure group Greenpeace accused grocery chains of selling produce tainted with dangerous levels of pesticides.

As of last week, 30,000 children had been dropped from the Childrens Health Insurance Program since Accenture, LLP began running the call center in December.

The sale of the Body Shop to the French cosmetics giant L'Oréal last month has dented the reputation of the British high street retailer once vaunted as the champion of ethical beauty products.

International drugs companies should seek to reduce prices for medicines sold to the poorest countries and avoid filing for patent protection there, a report prepared for the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Monday.

The company that bought AIDS patient M. Smith's life insurance policy in the 1990s was betting she wouldn't live more than two years. Now it's trying to weasel out of its contract because her being alive is starting to cut into their profit margin.

In the months following the discovery and expose of Unilever's polluting practices in Kodaikanal, many of the responses and statements by the company have been contrary to facts. The time line below outlines a few. (Emphasis is the author's.)

Many of the world's top food companies are not doing enough to help cut the salt, fat and sugar which are contributing to a global, diet-related health crisis, according to a report on Tuesday.

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