Going Green

General Motors in Detroit, Michigan, has signed onto a group of other businesses calling for a 60–80% reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050. The firm is the first carmaker to join the US Climate Action Partnership, which already includes companies such as DuPont and Duke Energy and has called for legislation to regulate emissions in the United States. PepsiCo and Shell Oil were among the 14 new members who joined the group last week. Environmentalists praised the move but said that only formal legislation could enforce such caps.

Finding its way

Europe's beleaguered Galileo satellite navigation system sustained another blow on 10 May, when the eight-company consortium charged with building the system had the project taken away from it. Instead, the European Union plans to take over the €3.6-billion (US$4.9 billion) project. The satellites, a competitor to the US Global Positioning System, are meant to be operational by 2012 — a deadline that the European Union says it intends to honour even if it means taking on additional costs.

Drug doings

The US Senate voted last week 93–1 in favour of a bill that significantly boosts the power of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to police the safety of drugs once they are on the market. The bill was modified from an earlier, more stringent version (see Nature 446, 844–845; 2007) — for instance, the FDA will not have the option of enacting a two-year moratorium on direct-to-consumer advertising of new drugs. The legislation now moves to the House of Representatives, where a vote is expected this summer. Senators Edward Kennedy (Democrat, Massachusetts) and Mike Enzi (Republican, Wyoming) led the charge for the bill.