The British Court of Appeal has cut libel damages awarded to McDonald’s, the world’s largest fast—food chain, against two penniless environment campaigners.
In 1997, the High Court in London found that environmental campaigners Helen Steel, aged 34, and Dave Morris, 44, were guilty of distributing a pamphlet containing allegations against McDonald’s and their fast food and its preparation. The trial lasted three years and brought to light much evidence about the way McDonald’s hamburger chain workers prepared, handled and served food, and the treatment of these workers by the American-owned company. The High Court in London awarded McDonald’s damages of 60,000 pounds (RMB 780,000) against the two penniless campaigners.
But in 1999, three Appeal Court Judges in London decided that the two defendants found guilty of libel against McDonald’s in 1997 would have the damages they have to pay to McDonald’s reduced to 40,000 pounds (RMB 520,000).
While upholding the libel ruling, the judges backed the defendants' claim the food carries health risks and said allegations McDonald’s workers suffer poor pay and conditions are "fair comment". The judges also backed a claim by the defendants that eating the company’s hamburgers can cause heart disease.
The claim that "if one eats enough McDonald’s food, one’s diet may well become high in fat..., with the very real risk of heart disease, is justified," said Lord Justice Pill, who was sitting in the Court of Appeal with Lord Justice May and Justice Keene.
The appeal decision is likely to be a further embarrassment to McDonald’s, whose three-year action against environmental campaigners Helen Steel and Dave Morris generated extensive negative publicity.
Peter Backman, chief executive of Food Service Intelligence, a research group, said: " McDonald’s is very conscious of what people say about them. They have got where they have by listening to consumers. I think their strategy will be to downplay the ruling, refute the comments, and thirdly, to do something about it." McDonald’s said it welcomed the Court of Appeal decision to uphold the 1997 libel ruling.
The company faces another $200,000 legal bill for the 23-day appeal hearing. Steel and Morris were to take the case to the House of Lords and the European Court of Human Rights to appeal against the damages awarded against them. They present much of their cases themselves and any lawyer’s fees are largely paid for by donations. The pair have yet to win court backing for claims that McDonald’s damages the environment, or that there are links between its hamburgers, cancer and food poisoning.
The fast-food chain has not yet recovered a penny of its original libel award from the defendants, who are refusing to hand over any money.
One benefit of the long trial was that
A.McDonald’s become more famous after that.
B.people knew a lot about the food processing in McDonald’s.
C.the way McDonald’s treated its workers has been improved.
D.the government got a sum of money from it.
If it were simply a matter of passing strong laws to protect it, the Amazon rainforest—the world's largest tropical forest, around the size of western Europe—would be safe. Brazil, whose territory includes about two-thirds of the forests has impressively tough laws that, on paper, set most of it aside as a nature reserve and impose stiff penalties for illegal logging. But the latest annual figures for deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, published by the government on Wednesday May 18th, have confirmed a disturbing recent trend: the destruction is accelerating despite all efforts to control it. In 2004 August, more than 26,000 square kilometres(10,000 square miles) of forest were chopped down, an area larger than the American state of New Jersey.
The area deforested in the past year was up 6% in 2003, far worse than the Brazilian government's predictions that it would rise by no more than about 2%. It was the second worst year for the destruction of the rainforest since satellite surveys began. It is reckoned that almost a fifth of the Brazilian part of the forest has now been wiped outs if it were to continue at this rate, it would all be flattened within the next two centuries. Things are hardly any better in those portions of Amazonia that lie in neighboring countries: Ecuador has lost about half of its forest, mainly due to illegal logging, in the past 30 years. Worse still, tropical forests have been disappearing at an even faster rate elsewhere in the world, such as in Africa. The world's greatest stores of biodiversity—and some of its main suppliers of the oxygen we breathe—are still being chewed up at an alarming rate, despite decades of talk among world leaders and environmentalists about the need to preserve them.
As has been seen before in Brazil, the surge in the rate of deforestation is a sign that the country's economy is booming—recently it bas been growing at an annual rate of around 5%. Most of the timber felled illegally in Amazonia is sold to domestic buyers, in particular to the construction industry in Brazil's richer southern states. But the forest is also threatened by the rapid expansion of farming and ranching. In the past year, almost half of the total deforestation was in the state of Mato Grosso on the forest's southern part, where huge areas have been flattened to grow soybeans. Last year Brazil earned about $10 billion from exporting soy products, exceeding its income from coffee' and sugar, the country's traditional export crops. Mato Grosso's governor, Blairo Maggi, is also its soybean king—his family's farms are' the world's largest single producer of the crop.
The rate at which the forest is being flattened could easily rise further. To boost the region's economic development and make attack on poverty, the government plans to asphalt(铺设沥青) and widen the BR-163 highway that slices the forest roughly in half, running from north to south. Though the government has been working with environmental groups and others to try to limit the scheme's impact, past experience has shown that improved road access invariably means more intrusion of the forest by loggers, ranchers, farmers, mineral prospectors and others.
For much of Brazil's recent history, in particular during the country's 1964-85 military dictatorship, successive governments were obsessed(困扰) with populating and "developing" Amazonia, convinced that otherwise a foreign power might seize it. Large sums were spent building highways to open up the forest and a lot of subsidies were offered to get people to resettle there. However, the huge area of abandoned former forest land alongside previous road schemes show that, in fact, much of the region lacks suitable soil and climate for agriculture.
More recent governments have taken the axe to the worse schemes that encouraged people to destroy the rainforest. Besides Brazil's tough conservation laws, there are now countl
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