Most Recent Headlines
American agrochemical giant Monsanto paid a public-affairs consultancy up to €200,000 to set up a ‘grassroots farmers’ operation across Europe to oppose a prospective EU ban on glyphosate, Unearthed has learned. Glyphosate is a key ingredient in Monsanto’s signature Roundup weedkiller.
Consumer groups scorched nearly every fast-food burger chain in the country for continuing to buy beef raised using antibiotics in ways that make them less effective on humans. Only two small but up-and-coming chains, Shake Shack and BurgerFi, received A grades in an annual report card issued Wednesday by a coalition of five consumer and environmental groups.
Robert Howard, juror #4 in the trial of former school groundskeeper Dewayne Lee Johnson vs. Monsanto, has two questions for the judge who is threatening to undo the jury’s unanimous verdict against Monsanto:
“Do you have any reason at all to believe that myself or my fellow jurors did not follow your instructions?”
Did you assess the credibility of Monsanto witnesses, particularly Monsanto employees, at all?”
Howard is one of four jurors who wrote to Judge Suzanne Bolanos, defending the jurors’ unanimous decision and asking her to uphold it.
Howard also called our office, wanting to vent. He’s discouraged. And angry. He told us that he and others on the jury listened to the evidence, and followed the judge’s instructions to the letter.
Yet, now, that same judge appears poised to undo their work by threatening to overturn the jury’s $289-million verdict for the former school groundskeeper.
Genetic engineering isn’t everyone’s childhood dream. Even I didn’t care for it when I started studying biology at the University of Amsterdam, but my professor explained it was an acquired taste and the best option for a good job. So, I suppressed my doubts and learned to extract DNA from plants, recombine the DNA in test tubes, reinsert the fusions into plant cells, and use hormones to regenerate new plants.
People say that love is blind, but I started loving what I did blindly. Or, perhaps, what started as an acquired taste soon became a dangerous addiction. Genetic engineering became part of me.
Plastic pollution is a global problem that is growing exponentially due to both an increase in consumerism and an increase in the number of plastics used to manufacture the things we use on a daily basis. Many of these items are single-use items, which are used once and then tossed in the trash.
Learning that a judge may overturn their historic decision to hold the chemical company Monsanto-Bayer accountable for manufacturing cancer-causing weedkillers, several jurors are demanding that their verdict in a case decided in August be upheld. Gary Kitahata and Robert Howard are among the jurors who unanimously found that Monsanto was liable for $289 million in damages.
A 59-year-old employee at Allen Harim poultry plant in Harbeson, Delaware was killed last week from a serious head trauma after being struck in the head with a piece of equipment on an electric hoist when he and another employee were attempting to change the battery on a pallet jack.
The kind of thing you might whip up at home – nothing fancy, just enough to fill you up and meet a third of today’s calorie needs. A soup, maybe, or a simple stew – some beans or lentils, a handful of rice, bread, or corn?
Recent research into the health effects of artificial sweeteners deliver yet another blow to safety claims. The animal study, published in the journal Molecules, found all artificial sweeteners currently approved and deemed safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cause DNA damage in, and interfere with the normal and healthy activity of, gut bacteria.
Today is World Food Day.
It’s also a day when millions of people are cleaning up after yet another weather-related disaster, this time in Florida. And millions more around the globe are experiencing devastating droughts and crippling storms that are leaving them unable to grow food and feed their families.
We often think that we, as individuals, have little or no power to solve problems as complex and overwhelming as global warming and world hunger.
And yet, we do. The personal choices we make when it comes to our food, and the demands we make of our local, state and federal politicians to adopt climate change-reversing food, farming and and land-use policies give us the power to do something, everyday, to reverse our dangerous course.
Get Local
