The commercial director of its French unit, Michel Coulomb, was called in by Herve Novelli, the Consumer Affairs Minister. Novelli wanted to hear why at least 10 French iPhone owners reported that their devices had self-destructed. Battery over-heating is suspected. The state fraud and consumer affairs agency opened an investigation on Tuesday.

However, Apple issued a statement: "As of today, there has been no confirmed incident linked to battery overheating in the iPhone 3GS, and the number of cases we are investigating amounts to less than a dozen. The iPhones with broken screens that we have been able to analyse so far show, in all cases, that the cracks were caused by an external pressure upon the iPhone."

The owner of the first shattered iPhone had refused to hand over his device for examination, Apple told Novelli. The minister said that it was too early to draw a conclusion but that it was important to hear from Apple that two of the damaged French phones had been examined by an independent laboratory in California. They were found to have suffered an external impact. 

 
You can see Apple's logic. They have sold 26 million iPhones and 200 million iPods around the world. There have been a handful of reports of over-heating iPods in Europe, but the serious claims of iPhone melt-down have come only from France. That doesn't make much sense since they are the standard model.

Dare we say that industrial sabotage and a cleverly disguised trade war is at work here?  If it is, it would not be the first time that such tactics are employed against a product that is sweeping the market due to its popularity with importers and consumers.

Palm oil is used to such underhanded tactics being used against the commodity by anti-palm oil lobbies that had run out of ideas how to stop the inexorable growth of a commodity that is making quick inroads into other traditional edible oil markets and even as feedstock for biofuel.

First the euphemistically named Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) launched a spurious campaign against palm oil alleging that the oil was harmful for heart health.  When the full weight of scientific evidence was brought to bear on CSPI that palm oil was, in fact, one of the most heart friendly of all edible oils due to its inherent richness in heart healthy nutrients such as Co Q10, beta-carotenes and tocotrienols (a rare and extremely healthy source of Vitamin E), CSPI quickly change tack and alleged that palm oil cultivation in Indonesia and Malaysia was causing massive deforestation and threatening the extinction of the orang utan.

This latter campaign found some traction and resonated with other environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, the Palm oil Action group (POA), the Friends of the Earth (FOE) and the Rainforest Action Network (RAN).  Falling over each other to champion the anti-palm oil cause, news-media bought into the palm oil deforestation hype and without any fact-checking helped the environmental NGO’s to publicize the issue.

Plumbing the depth of sensational and scare-mongering journalism, western media especially the print media in the UK such as the Independent published dubious accounts of widespread deforestation in Indonesia and Malaysia and the impending extinction of the orang utan.

In the view of Deforestation Watch, a cursory examination of the facts quickly destroys every shred of credibility that these stories may have!

For one, it is indisputable that palm oil is fast becoming the most popular edible oil in the world for a few simple reasons:

1. It is the most productive of all edible oils with a typical yield of 4-5 metric tons per hectare which is close to 10 times higher than its competitors like soya, sunflower and rapeseed (Canola)
2. The oil is inherently healthful as it is naturally rich in anti-oxidants like tocotrienols, Co Q10 and beta-carotenes (which is why the oil is naturally red in colour)
3. Due to its extraordinary yield, palm oil is the cheapest cooking oil in the world and because of its price advantage is now increasingly popular as a feedstock for biodiesel.

It is obvious why the anti-palm oil lobbies are concerned ...and why they have to recruit  the environmental agitators to attack palm oil?

For another, it is clear that Malaysia is a small country, with a land mass about the size of New Mexico. Yet the country was for a whole century, the world's largest producer of palm oil. What does that tell us? Palm oil doesn't require quite as much land (in fact, 10 times less land than the western oilseeds) as these anti-palm oil lobbies would want us to believe!

Deforestation? It almost facetious as after 100 years of planting palm oil, Malaysia still has more than 55% forest cover, which is certainly much better than the 20% or so from the countries of the industrialized west from which these paragons of environmental virtue hail!