The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced its intent to relax restrictions on food manufacturers for making claims about the health benefits of products. FDA will allow companies to petition the agency for review of claims about the healthfulness of their products based on preliminary scientific information—a departure from its current practice of approving only those claims supported by conclusive scientific evidence.

The U.S. Forest Service and the Department of the Interior (DOI) recently issued joint interim guidelines to implement stewardship contracts that allow timber companies to harvest trees in exchange for broadly defined “land management services” -- opening the door to increased logging in forests.

More than 75,000 people have written to the Department of Labor (DOL) in response to its proposed changes to overtime standards -- the most mail the agency has received on any similar issue in at least a decade, according to the Washington Post. DOL’s proposed changes, issued March 31, 2003, would significantly alter current overtime rules -- stripping eight million workers of their right to time-and-a-half pay for hours worked beyond 40 in a single week, according to a recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) altered standards on June 30 for recording workplace injuries and illnesses, eliminating a provision that required employers to document workers’ ergonomic injuries.