The Fortune 500 comes out just once a year, but the companies on it make headlines every day. Here then are today’s highlights of news and happenings coming from the biggest names in business.
By Shelley DuBois, reporter
BP’S CORPORATE CULTURE OF SAFETY or the lack thereof has been under intense scrutiny ever since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf. But looking into BP’s behavior in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay suggest that BP (BP) still has some questionable safety practices company-wide. [Wall Street Journal]
SANDY BRIDGE DETOUR There’s a flaw in Intel’s (INTC) hot new microprocessor, codenamed Sandy Bridge, which was supposed to power electronic devices scheduled to hit the market in the coming weeks. The company has had to delay the roll-out, a measure that will ultimately cost it $1 billion. Intel says the Sandy Bridge processor is fine, but a support chip that connects it to other parts within the system is busted. [Wall Street Journal]
THE LATEST FRACKING ISSUE The Environmental Protection Agency found several oil and gas services companies involved in drilling for natural gas onshore in violation of the Clean Water Act. The companies, including Halliburton (HAL), apparently violated EPA regulations by using diesel fuel during a controversial well extraction method called fracking. It remains to be seen what the EPA is going to do about it. [New York Times]
COMPANIES PIONEER NEW WEB REAL ESTATE Google (GOOG) and AT&T (T) are leading the charge to relocate their internet presence. The web is running out of its remaining internet protocol addresses that use the current routing system. So Fortune 500 companies such as Google, AT&T and Yahoo (YHOO) are creating versions of their websites that use the new routing system, dubbed internet protocol version 6. The companies are scheduled to test out the IPv6 system in June. [Wall Street Journal]
THE FREEDOM TO TWEET enabled in Egypt as Google and Twitter team up to provide a service for people blocked from tweeting by the Egyptian government. As protesters prepare to march on Cairo, Google and Twitter created a system where people can leave voicemails on certain numbers listed on Google’s blog. Those voicemails would then instantly be turned into a tweet. [Bloomberg Businessweek]
ADD IT TO THE LIST Boeing’s (BA) 787 Dreamliner aircraft hits yet another bump in the road towards ever taking off. The latest obstacle: the World Trade Organization said that the airplane received illegal subsidies from the U.S. government that skewed the market by throwing off competition. Playing by the rules seems to be problematic for aircraft manufacturers–the WTO also accused Franco-German company Airbus of receiving illegal aid for its new aircraft back in June. [Financial Times]
