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After becoming somewhat used to food scares from China, now we have sleazy operators in Europe too.
From the ABC News article:
Authorities have arrested at least 66 people in a European food scam which sold horse meat unfit for human consumption.
European Union police coordinating organization Europol announced Sunday that eight nations cooperated in the operation. In Spain, 65 people face a series of charges relating to public health, money laundering and animal abuse.
The operation took several months and the chief suspect, a Dutch businessman, was arrested in Belgium in April.
Spain's Civil Guard said that the criminal ring acquired horses in Spain and Portugal that were "in poor shape, old, or had been designated 'not apt for consumption.'" After falsifying paperwork and substituting microchips used to identify the horses, the animals were slaughtered and the meat shipped to Belgium.
The Civil Guard said that the profits from the illegal meat could reach 20 million euros ($23 million) a year.
The case was linked to a 2013 scandal when Irish authorities detected beef burgers containing horse meat.
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Additional details at CNN.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @11:03AM (2 children)
We can look at one unregulated market operating in our society and see if it's better: drugs. How's that working out with out?
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Tuesday July 18 2017, @04:04PM
Drugs are extremely regulated; only a handful of companies can legally manufacture or distribute them, and only licensed doctors can prescribe them to patients who must go to licensed pharmacies or hospitals to obtain them. Out doesn't get much more regulated than that. The problem with "street drugs" containing potentially dangerous filler and cut is a direct result of this intense regulation. If a company could legally sell drugs to consumers, they could also legally provide quality guarantees and proper dosage instructions, tools, and facilities, which would make the process much safer, not to mention generate jobs, money, and help keep addicts from dropping out of society into a poverty/addiction/crime feedback loop.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:39PM
Have to agree with the other replier. You couldn't have picked a worse example except for government itself. For example, the US still has the death penalty on the books as a punishment for large scale illegal drug dealing. And on the legal side, it is not unusual for drug companies to spend hundreds of millions of dollars merely testing drugs to meet regulatory hurdles.