General Motors, DaimlerChrysler and Isuzu Motors have agreed to drop the lawsuit that has delayed California’s clean-air program
HBOS, one of the largest UK banks is to introduce random lie detector analysis of insurance claims according to this article from the Edinburgh Evening News. The three month trial will see calls from its 1.5 million policy holders randomly subjected to voice stress analysis. Those flagged up will then receive a set of questions designed to expose potential fraudsters
The Indian units of rival soft drink giants Coca-Cola and Pepsi jointly denied yesterday an environmental group’s report that their beverages contained high levels of pesticides. The private Centre for Science and Environment said soft drinks sold by the firms in India contained high levels of pesticides such as DDT and malathion
Waste product from a Coca-Cola plant in India which the company provides as fertiliser for local farmers contains toxic chemicals. Dangerous levels of the known carcinogen cadmium have been found in the sludge produced from the plant in the southern state of Kerala. Coca-Cola denies the reports and say they will continue to supply the sludge to farmers
MIT student, James Patten, has created a Corporate Fallout Detector. It acts and looks like a Geiger counter, but it’s a barcode scanner with an internal, updateable database of corporate misdeeds, with both Pollution and Corporate Ethics modes
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission plans to have an automated robot trawl the web for suspicious sites and discussion board postings could be operational by October
AOL has laid off 50 employees involved in Web browser development at its Netscape subsidiary amid a reorganisation of its Mozilla open-source browser team. Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organisation, will continue mozilla.org’s work of co-ordinating the development of the Mozilla codebase
The last production line for the original Volkswagen Beetle is to close in Puebla, Mexico
If big business hopes to regain the dwindling trust of consumers, demanding a right to lie is hardly the way to do it. So perhaps the US Supreme Court helped save corporate America from itself — at least temporarily — by declining to rule on the Nike Corporation’s claim of a constitutional right to lie
Allegations that Telstra sells email addresses of BigPond customers have been denied by the telco
The dispute over genetically modified crops will intensify with news of the evolution of superweeds, which are resistant to the powerful weedkillers that GM crops were engineered to tolerate. While French small farmers’ leader and anti-globalisation campaigner, José Bové, was starting a 10-month jail sentence last night for destroying genetically modified crops, his third spell in prison in four years, after his highly melodramatic arrest
Esso could face legal action from hundreds of companies after the Victorian Supreme Court ordered it to pay more than $1 million in damages over the Longford gas explosion
Less than two years after berating its rivals for over-charging customers, mobile phone company Vodafone has added a 25c connection charge — known as a flagfall — to its so-called No Plans service
Online reseller City Software has bought the remains of failed competitor E-Store, broadening its own customer lists and product range in the SMB space. E-Store is the second online retail brand to be acquired by City Software, which acquired International Software Warehouse in March 2001
The Orica Report
, suppressed for over a year, has finally been released due to an FOI application from the Greens, and pressure from the EPA. The report reveals a problem of lead pollution in Homebush Bay, and a reluctance on the part of the developer to admit the fact and responsibility for a cleanup
New Zealand porn king, Steve Crow, is threatening to sue the country’s stock exchange for stealing the name of his sex magazine. He launched his adult magazine NZX in November 2001, and he wanted compensation from the New Zealand Stock Exchange, which has only just rebranded itself with the same name
Telstra may pay a rebate to ADSL customers affected by a major outage on Wednesday evening, and will soon introduce a service level guarantee for cable customers following unstable network performance this year
Palm plans to buy Handspring to strengthen its grip on the market for handheld devices. It also has finalised plans to spin off its PalmSource software unit
Microsoft is paying $750 million to AOL Time Warner as part of a wide-ranging settlement of disputes between the two companies. As part of the deal, the two companies will drop pending litigation, including an antitrust complaint filed by AOL Time Warner’s Netscape Communications unit in January 2002 against Microsoft. AOL also agreed to a seven-year royalty-free license of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. So much for Netscape 8.0, according to industry analysts who predict that the Netscape browser — currently at version 7.02 — will now move from a neglected orphan of AOL Time Warner to a candidate for euthanasia
A wrist computer that tracks and calculates safe diving times and limits for SCUBA divers had a dangerous software bug that may have been covered up by company executives for years
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