Guest's Blog
The much-anticipated Roundup cancer trial set to get underway in two weeks in Monsanto’s former hometown of St. Louis is being rescheduled, according to the a spokeswoman for the St. Louis County Court where the trial was set to begin Aug 19.
Court spokeswoman Christine Bertelson said Judge Brian May, who is overseeing the case of Gordon v. Monsanto, communicated late Monday that the trial was being continued, but no official order has yet been entered into the court file. Jury questionnaires were due next week and the voir dire selection of the jury was set for Aug. 18 with opening statements Aug. 19.
Judge May is rescheduling the trial for January and will issue an order within the next few days, according to Bertelson.
Dear Prole,
I hope this missive finds you well. If not, I’ll blame it on yet another act of technofascism.
Your rights to be healthy without drugs and speak freely are being thwarted. Alas, a large swath of the general populace will never know their health choices are being eliminated.
This is an uphill battle of Sisyphean proportions. A virtual witch hunt. A deletionreminiscent of the Library of Alexandria burning. A multi-tentacled greedy schema.
Those of us who stand for health freedom and, criticize Big Anything, are losing posting privileges, getting banned, being buried, finding ourselves deranked, and proverbially becoming imprisoned.
It sounds conspiratorial because it is. We are blowing the whistle. But it’s become a silent one.
Our right to know if it’s GMO is officially under attack—again.
On June 6, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) proposed to overhaul longstanding regulations governing genetically modified organisms (GMO). The proposed new rule would revise the agency's current method for regulating genetically modified plants, and would exclude newer so-called “gene-edited” GMOs.
In a statement, the USDA said the new rule came "in response to advances in genetic engineering."
A week later, in the political equivalent of a one-two-punch, President Trump bolstered the USDA’s proposal by signing an executive order directing the USDA, as well as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA, to "streamline" GMO regulations in the U.S. for agricultural biotechnology, including for genetically modified livestock and seeds.
As the USDA organic seal becomes ever murkier in its meaning, what choices are left to us?
We want real organic food. We want vegetables and berries grown in the soil. We want cows and chickens raised on pasture. It sounds so simple And it is what the law guarantees us. And it is what most organic farmers in the U.S. provide.
And yet . . . if we look closer, that’s often not what we’re being offered as organic in the grocery stores. If we pull on the thread, the cloth starts to unravel. We see soil farmers and pasture farmers going out of business for lack of demand, even while we’re desperate to buy the food they grow.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) calls antibiotic resistance “one of the biggest public health challenges of our time.” In the U.S., at least 2 million people get an antibiotic-resistant infection every year, and at least 23,000 of those people die, the CDC says.
Antibiotic resistance is a global, and worsening, problem. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “some types of bacteria that cause serious infections in humans have already developed resistance to most or all of the available treatments, and there are very few promising options in the research pipeline.”
Unfortunately, the tide isn’t turning back. In the U.S., that’s largely because lobbyists for some of the world’s biggest agribusiness corporations have successfully thwarted efforts by Congress to restrict the rampant and reckless use of antibiotics on factory farms.
If the biotech industry has its way, the meat, eggs and milk on your plate could soon come from genetically engineered farm animals—and without laws requiring these products to be labeled, you’ll never know.
Just a few years ago the idea of genetically engineered farm animals seemed like science fiction to most consumers. But it’s a sign of how powerful the industry has become, and how quickly the science is advancing, that we’ve reached the stage where regulators are having to draft new regulations to deal with the influx new applications.
Behind the scenes there have been squabbles over not just what the regulations will say, but which government department should take the lead.
May 2019 was a turning point for climate change. The world reached a record of 415.3 parts per million of carbon dioxide (ppm CO2) in the atmosphere—the most in over 3 million years. The UK Parliament declared an environmental and climate emergency on May 1. Pope Francis has followed this by declaring a climate emergency on June 14.
A study published in May shows that if we don’t succeed in radically reducing emissions, civilization could collapse by 2050. The authors of the report showed that we are on track to "… a world of 'outright chaos' on a path to the end of human civilization and modern society as we have known it…"
The good news is that we can turn this around by scaling up Regenerative Agriculture.
Glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, was once hailed as a kind of miracle solution to the problem of weeds.
Today, glyphosate-based weedkillers like Monsanto’s Roundup are a disgraced product, associated with a shocking and increasing number of health and environmental problems.
Glyphosate has long been promoted as a fast-acting weedkiller, as effective in small gardens and lawns as it was in industrial corn and soy fields. Its use on farms dramatically increased with the introduction of herbicide-tolerant GMO crops. But glyphosate is also regularly sprayed on non-GMO crops—‘healthy’ foods such wheat, oats, maize and barley but also soya, rapeseed, sunflower seeds and chick peas—as a desiccant, used to dry out the crops in a uniform fashion, so they can be harvested all at once.
Glyphosate-based herbicides are also used to control weeds in parks, on city streets, roadsides, sidewalks and in playgrounds.
After three stunning courtroom losses in California, the legal battle over the safety of Monsanto's top-selling Roundup herbicide is headed for the company's hometown, where corporate officials can be forced to appear on the witness stand, and legal precedence shows a history of anti-corporate judgments.
Sharlean Gordon, a cancer-stricken woman in her 50s, is the next plaintiff currently set for trial. Gordon v. Monsanto starts Aug. 19 in St. Louis County Circuit Court, located just a few miles from the St. Louis, Missouri-area campus that was the company's longtime world headquarters until Bayer bought Monsanto last June. The case was filed in July 2017 on behalf of more than 75 plaintiffs and Gordon is the first of that group to go to trial.
Throughout the U.S., major food brands are trying to get rid of GMO ingredients—not necessarily for the right reasons, but because nearly half of consumers say they avoid them in their food, primarily for health reasons.
But the CEO of Impossible Foods, purveyor of the Impossible Burger, is bucking that trend.
The manufacturers of the controversial veggie burger just announced that in the future, due to “high demand” for the product, its plant-based patties will be made using GMO soy.
The formula change was made to ensure the smooth rollout of the Impossible Burger in Burger King restaurants. The soy formulation is apparently better able to withstand Burger King’s trademark flame grilling. As a result, in early in 2019, Impossible Foods dumped the textured wheat protein it had been using and replaced it with soy protein concentrate instead.
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