-The UK's Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is abandoning its duty to protect workers, in a drive to become 'business-friendly.' That's the upshot of Total Suck Up, a new report by safety coalition The Hazards Campaign. Based on Freedom of Information requests, they alledge that the HSE is moving away from enforcing safety, to asking corporations to become 'self-policing'. Read their full report on www.hazards.org/totalsuckup/

-Nestle are alledged to have mislead students at the University of East Anglia, in an attempt to influence their student union, and overturn its boycott of the infamous baby milk pusher's products. Read the full report by Baby Milk Action, at www.babymilkaction.org/press/press16feb06.html

-2005 has been a bad year for US newspapers' advertising sales, according to analysts Merrill Lynch . Money from car adverts fell by a startling 10%. This has implications for the survival of papers, which often get over half their income from advertising.

-Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz now estimates that the cost to the US of the Iraq war and ongoing occupation could be as much as $2 trillion. This sum takes into account factors such as costs of caring for the tens of thousands of woulded veterans, plus the knock-on effects of rising oil prices. In 2002 the Bush administration predicted that the war would cost between $100 and $200 million. Read more at http://corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13057

-And Adidas showed their deep understanding of sport recently, when the kind sponsors issued the Winter Olympics German skiing team with caps in the national colours of Belguim.

References
1 http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s;=39852&Nid;=18451&p;=117792
2 http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID;=2006-02-15T130343Z_01_L15256738_RTRIDST_0_OUKOE-UK-OLYMPICS-ADIDAS-ODD.XML