On December 19, 2007, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 4040, the "Consumer Product Safety Modernization Act," a bill to establish consumer product safety standards and other safety requirements for children's products and to reauthorize and modernize the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
On December 14, 2007, the Senate passed its version of H.R. 2419, the Farm Bill Extension Act. The House passed its version of H.R. 2419 on July 27, 2007. According to the Library of Congress' Thomas Web site, the Senate has requested a conference with the House to resolve differences between the two versions. (See ITT's Online Archives or 07/31/07 news, 07073199 2, for BP summary on the House passage of H.R. 2419.) (Congressional Record, dated 12/14/07, available at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/B?r110:@FIELD(FLD003d)@FIELD(DDATE20071214).)
On December 5, 2007, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation reported with an amendment in the nature of a substitute, S. 2045, the CPSC Reform Act of 2007, to reform the Consumer Product Safety Commission to provide greater protection to children's products, and for other purposes.
Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) has issued a press release announcing that in November it met with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) for the first Japan-U.S. Conference on Product Safety, with discussions on an accident information reporting system, among other things. (METI press release, dated 11/20/07, available at http://www.meti.go.jp/english/newtopics/data/nBackIssue20071120_01.html)
The Food and Drug Administration has released its "Food Protection Plan: an Integrated Strategy for Protecting the Nation's Food Supply," which addresses both food safety and food defense for domestic and imported products, and encompasses three core elements.
On November 6, 2007, the Interagency Working Group on Import Safety presented to President Bush its "Action Plan for Import Safety: A roadmap for continual improvement." The Action Plan includes short and long-term recommendations based on risk-based approaches across the entire import life cycle and a verification model that allocates resources based on risk.
On November 6, 2007, the Interagency Working Group on Import Safety presented to President Bush its "Action Plan for Import Safety: A roadmap for continual improvement." The Action Plan includes short and long-term recommendations based on risk-based approaches across the entire import life cycle and a verification model that allocates resources based on risk.
On September 20, 2007, Representative Dingell introduced H.R. 3610, the Food and Drug Import Safety Act of 2007, which would amend the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act with respect to the safety of food and drugs imported into the U.S.
The Journal of Commerce reports that a federal appeals court denied a request for an emergency injunction to stop the Department of Transportation's U.S.-Mexico cross-border trucking pilot program, paving the way for the start of the program, which the DOT hopes to begin as early as September 6, 2007. The program did not begin on September 1 as some had said it would because the DOT's inspector general had not completed the assessment of the program, which a DOT spokesperson stated was expected to be delivered September 5, 2007. (JoC, dated 09/05/07, www.joc.com)
BERLIN - “I'm still puzzled at the reason why they did it and the way they did it,” Philips Consumer Electronics CEO Rudy Provoost, in an IFA interview Friday with Consumer Electronics Daily, said of Paramount’s decision to support HD DVD only (CED Aug 21 p1). “Every scenario has a degree of probability,” and Paramount’s dropping its Blu-ray support “didn’t rank very high on my scale of probability,” Provoost told us.