Regulatory oversight

B.C. slaughterhouses not testing for pathogens

Topics: 
Food safety, Regulatory oversight
Rating: 
0

Wendy Stueck – October 2, 2012

Provincially licensed slaughterhouses in B.C. should consider adding tests for pathogens such as E. coli or listeria to their inspection regimes, says a food safety specialist at the University of British Columbia.

“This is a significant issue,” Kevin Allen, an assistant professor of food microbiology at UBC, said in an interview Tuesday. “We now have 10 or more cases of food-borne disease linked to [an outbreak at Alberta’s XL Foods,]” he said. The outbreak has made several people ill and resulted in a massive recall of beef products.

82-year-old nun exposed security lapses at nuclear facilities

Topics: 
Nuclear industry, National security, Regulatory oversight
Rating: 
2

R. Jeffrey Smithemail – September 12, 2012

The hammering on the wall of America’s premier storage vault for nuclear-weapons grade uranium in pitch-darkness six weeks ago was loud enough to be heard by security guards. But they assumed incorrectly that workmen were making an after-hours repair, and blithely ignored it.

Minutes earlier, a perimeter camera had caught an image of intruders — not workmen — breaching an eight-foot high security fence around the sensitive facility outside Knoxville, Tenn. But the guard operating the camera had missed it. A different camera stationed over another fence — also breached by the intruders — was out of service, a defect the protective force had ignored for 6 months.

Vast FDA effort tracked emails of whistleblowing scientists

Topics: 
USA, Reprisals, Regulatory oversight, Health care, Privacy
Rating: 
2

Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane – July 14, 2012

A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration against a group of its own scientists used an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama, previously undisclosed records show.

What began as a narrow investigation into the possible leaking of confidential agency information by five scientists quickly grew in mid-2010 into a much broader campaign to counter outside critics of the agency’s medical review process, according to the cache of more than 80,000 pages of computer documents generated by the surveillance effort.

Transport watchdog flags air, train and marine safety issues

Topics: 
Aviation safety, Transport Canada, TSB, Regulatory oversight, Watchdogs
Rating: 
4

Sarah Schmidt – June 14, 2012

The federal transport safety watchdog said Thursday she has seen "little or no change" in critical air-safety issues, including runway overruns and aircraft-landing accidents.

Wendy Tadros, chairwoman of the Transportation Safety Board, first flagged these issues in 2010 when the board released its inaugural safety watchlist. They remain on this year's watchlist alongside a new issue highlighting Transport Canada's weak oversight of smaller aviation companies while they transition to safety-management systems (SMS), with "some companies not even required to have one," the report says.

FDA urged to rethink on antibiotics in animal feed

Topics: 
Food safety, Pharmaceutical industry, Regulatory oversight, Food industry, Public health & safety
Rating: 
0

Reuters – June 5, 2012

A federal judge asked the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to reexamine its decision to reject citizen calls to restrict the use of antibiotics in animal feed, court filings showed.

The latest ruling is the second such setback for the FDA over concerns that overuse of antibiotics in animal feed is endangering human health by creating antibiotic-resistant "superbugs".

The dark side of Canada’s financial system

Topics: 
White-collar crime, Regulatory oversight, Financial industry
Rating: 
4

Chris Plecash – June 4, 2012

The feds tout Canada’s banking system to the international community, the World Economic Forum says that Canada has one of the soundest banking systems in the world, and Forbes Magazine ranks Canada the best country in the world to do business. Canada has emerged from the 2008 financial crisis relatively unscathed, and the prevailing wisdom is that Canada’s economy is performing well thanks to our banks. 

Investigative journalist Bruce Livesey says otherwise in his new book, Thieves of Bay Street: How Banks, Brokerages and the Wealthy Steal Billions from Canadians ($32, Random House). He details how Canada’s capital markets operate as a Wild West for the trading of exotic financial products whose risks are hidden from investors by the brokers who peddle them.

SEC Kowtows to Fortune 500, Whistleblower Says

Topics: 
USA, White-collar crime, SEC, Regulatory oversight, Financial industry, Watchdogs
Rating: 
2

Matt Reynolds – April 27, 2012

The SEC allows the nation's richest firms and financial institutions - and only the biggest and richest firms - to handpick the lawyers investigating them for corruption, a whistleblower claims in Federal Court.

Rodolfo Michelon claims that the SEC runs an exclusive "outsourcing program" for Wall Street, neutering incentives and protections for whistleblowers under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

Fukushima Reactor 4 poses massive global risk

Topics: 
USA, Nuclear industry, Regulatory oversight, Public health & safety, Japan
Rating: 
0

Andy Johnson – May 19, 2012

More than a year after a devastating earthquake and tsunami triggered a massive nuclear disaster, experts are warning that Japan isn't out of the woods yet and the worst nuclear storm the world has ever seen could be just one earthquake away from reality.

The troubled Reactor 4 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is at the centre of this potential catastrophe. Reactor 4 -- and to a lesser extent Reactor 3 -- still hold large quantities of cooling waters surrounding spent nuclear fuel, all bound by a fragile concrete pool located 30 metres above the ground, and exposed to the elements.

Fukushima a Ticking Time-Bomb: experts

Topics: 
USA, Nuclear industry, Regulatory oversight, Public health & safety, Japan
Rating: 
2

Experts say acknowledging the threat would call into question the safety of dozens of identically designed nuclear power plants in the U.S.

Brad Jacobson – May 4, 2012

More than a year after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the Japanese government, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) present similar assurances of the site's current state: challenges remain but everything is under control. The worst is over.

But nuclear waste experts say the Japanese are literally playing with fire in the way nuclear spent fuel continues to be stored onsite, especially in reactor 4, which contains the most irradiated fuel -- 10 times the deadly cesium-137 released during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. These experts also charge that the NRC is letting this threat fester because acknowledging it would call into question safety at dozens of identically designed nuclear power plants around the U.S., which contain exceedingly higher volumes of spent fuel in similar elevated pools outside of reinforced containment.

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