Briefly noted
Online “passports” to make Chinese foods safer… Top U.K. prosecutor warns against growing state power… France may buy Reaper UAVs
Online “passports” to make Chinese foods safer
An online listing of the provenance of Chinese foods is being created that might have contained the recent melamine-in-milk scandal. ChinaTrace, a joint venture between the Shandong Institute of Standardization in China and TraceTracker of Oslo, Norway, will create electronic “food passports” stating how ingredients of foods for export were sourced and what, if any, tests they have undergone. Technologies to track food through the supply chain will probably be welcome, but without regulation, the industry is unlikely to be cleaned up. Fang Shi Min, founder of New Threads, a Web site that exposes fraud and corruption in China, says milk adulteration has been a problem for at least ten years, first with urea and now melamine. “It’s widely practiced and an open secret,” he says.
Top U.K. prosecutor warns against growing state power
The controversy in the United Kingdom over the sweeping Data communications Bill continues. Outgoing director of public prosecutions Sir Ken Macdonald warned in a speech the other day that expansion of state snooping powers was likely to be irreversible. “They will be with us forever,” he said. “And they in turn will be built upon. So we should take very great care to imagine the world we are creating before we build it. We might end up living with something we can’t bear.”
French officials are talking with General Atomics about buying the Reaper UAV, also known as the Predator B, as part of their search for a surveillance system to back up combat troops deployed in Afghanistan, sources familiar with the talks said.
