Chemicals & Manufacturing

Adidas, the German sportswear company, is making Olympics uniforms for the UK team at sweatshops in Tangerang city, near the main international airport of Jakarta, Indonesia. Young female workers are paid 5,000 rupiah (54 cents) an hour for a 65 hour work week, according to revelations made in the Independent newspaper. Read More

U.S. imports of sodium thiopental have been banned by a federal judge because of the poor quality of imports. The ruling has struck a serious blow against the death penalty because of the key role the drug plays in lethal injections. Not surprisingly, the state of Texas is furious. Read More

The World Trade Organization ruled that U.S. planemaker Boeing received $5.3 billion in illegal government subsidies over a quarter-century. Airbus and Boeing have both complained to the WTO that the other is receiving state aid. They are locked in a long-running trade dispute over a market believed to be worth more than $3 trillion over the next decade. Read More

Farmers in Odisha are challenging POSCO, a South Korean steel giant. The confrontation is yet another David versus Goliath battle pitting "progress" against traditional agriculturists in a struggle to define development in India. Read More

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the destruction of plantings of genetically modified sugar beets developed by Monsanto Co after ruling previously the U.S. Agriculture Department illegally approved the biotech crop. Read More

BYD Co., the Chinese carmaker part- owned by billionaire Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc., was fined and ordered to surrender seven factories in central China after the government said it used land illegally. Read More

Greenpeace has warned of "surprisingly high" levels of arsenic and mercury in the red sludge that burst out of a metals plant reservoir in Hungary, killing six people and devastating the surrounding area. Read More

If you ever buy an item of clothing from Tesco, the UK supermarket chain, you can be sure it will not contain any cotton from Uzbekistan. The company decided to boycott Uzbek cotton in 2006, following reports of forced and state-sanctioned child labour. That was the easy part. Eliminating the unwanted material from Tesco's supply chain and proving that it was no longer used would take until the end of 2007. Read More

Asbestos, a known carcinogen, causes 100,000 occupational deaths per year. Although banned in much of the world, asbestos is a common and dangerous building block in much of Asia's development boom, and its export remains both legal and profitable -- to the health detriment of the region. Read More

Some of the greenest technologies of the age, from electric cars to efficient light bulbs to very large wind turbines, are made possible by an unusual group of elements called rare earths. Most of these come from China. "In many places, the mining is abused," said Wang Caifeng, the top rare-earths industry regulator at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in China. Read More