France bans GM corn amid mass US protests against Monsanto

French activists rip open bags of MON 810, a variety of Monsanto's genetically modified corn after entering a Monsanto storehouse. (AFP Photo/Eric Cabanis)

By Rady Ananda
Global Research

Amid mass US protests against Monsanto yesterday, France imposed a temporary moratorium on the planting of Monsanto’s genetically modified corn, MON810.

“Due to the proximity of the planting season,” said Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire along with Francois Fillon, Minister for Ecology and Sustainable Development, in a press release on Friday, authorities “decided to take a precautionary measure to temporarily prohibit the cultivation of maize MON810 on the national territory to protect the environment.”

­All prior plantings of MON810, trade name YieldGard, become illegal on March 20.

Again, hundreds of Beebe birds die despite fireworks ban

 

 

UPDATES below.

By Rady Ananda

Another New Years Eve, another mass bird kill. On December 31, 2011, Beebe police chief Wayne Ballew initiated an emergency ban on fireworks around 7:15 pm after receiving reports of dead birds.

Little Rock television station KATV showed a radar image of a large mass over the Arkansas town and said that hundreds of birds had died, reports the Associated Press. Other news reports indicate only “dozens” were found.

A Theory of Chronic Pain

A social and evolutionary theory of human disease and chronic pain

By Denis G. Rancourt

We like to nurture a species self-image where we are radically different from ants and bees. The idea goes like this. Ants and bees are automatons completely governed by chemical and physical signals and each individual in the colony has its place which determines its physical body characteristics, adapted to the function of its class.

Global milk war ramps up as citizens face off with regulators

By Rady Ananda

The battle for food freedom intensifies across the planet as citizens assert their right to raw dairy products unadulterated by drugs and genetically modified ingredients – in the face of authorities seeking to restrict our food choices and to criminalize entrepreneurs who operate outside the monopolized factory food system.

The State of Maine recently sued farmer Dan Brown for selling food and milk without State licenses, despite a local law that permits it. “Blue Hill is one of five Maine towns to have passed the Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinance,” explains Family Farm Defenders.

Jailbirds add life to UK prison famous for torturing suffragists

By Rady Ananda

The British Hen Welfare Trust re-homed 20 commercial hens at HM Prison Holloway on Oct. 3, as part of the staff’s garden program offering educational and therapeutic projects to its women inmates. This is a far cry from the days when Holloway imprisoned women for agitating for the right to vote, and then tortured them.

Volunteer re-homer at the British Hen Welfare Trust (BHWT), Jean Gill, delivered the hens and spoke to prisoners about the work of the charity and advised them on hen care.

“This is a really interesting experiment and a real opportunity from the charity’s point of view,” said Gill in a press release. “It is apt and extraordinary on so many levels that some of the prisoners will be able to take care of something as vulnerable as a battery hen that has had a restricted start in life, that has been kept, literally behind bars in a small cage without access to sunlight or fresh air.”

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

By New York City General Assembly

This document was accepted by the NYC General Assembly on September 29, 2011:

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

Beyond Protest: Saving our planet with ‘Deep Green Resistance’

By Rady Ananda

From what makes an effective resister to effective resistance strategies, in Deep Green Resistance, Aric McBay, Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen lay out the reasons for and methods of bringing down industrial civilization.  The goal is saving the biosphere, and with it, Homo sapiens.

In Endgame, a two-volume tome that everyone should read, Jensen writes, “Bringing down civilization means depriving the rich of their ability to steal from the poor, and it means depriving the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet.” He backs this up with his Twenty Premises.

DGR agrees: “It means thoroughly destroying the political, social, physical, and technological infrastructure that not only permits the rich to steal and the powerful to destroy, but rewards them for doing so.”

Permaculture ends meat-vegan debate, promotes anarchy

By Rady Ananda

Review of Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlee (2010, 322 pp.); and

Sepp Holzer’s Permaculture: A Practical Guide to Small-Scale Integrative Farming and Gardening by Sepp Holzer (English version 2011, 232 pp.)

Notice: PBS is rebroadcasting Food, Inc. on Tuesday, August 9 and is kicking off its new Food site. Check local listings here.

While the Bush reign may be described as a war on privacy, Obama’s is clearly a war on food freedom.* As his Monsanto administration arrests organic farmers and distributors, seizing and destroying healthy foods privately contracted and sustainably grown, this tyranny is not unique to the United States.  All over the world, organic, sustainable farmers are under attack by large agribiz actors  who, through government and trade agreements, are regulating them out of business and destroying the environment in the process.

Two farmers arguing against ecocidal hyper-regulation and “conventional” and “orthodox organic” farming are Simon Fairlee of England and Sepp Holzer of Austria. Both have written seminal books that should grace the bookshelves of everyone who gardens, farms or cares about the impact of agriculture on the biosphere.

How Safe Is Your Food? GMOs, Foodborne Illness and Trade Agreements

Graph: Data compiled by GRAIN from government and UN sources, 2008-2010 (except Australia=2005)

By Rady Ananda

A research group that supports community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems, GRAIN, has released a global report, Food Safety for Whom? Corporate Wealth vs. Peoples’ Health, showing how governments and corporations use “food safety” to manipulate market access and control. Rather than making food safer, domestic and trade rules “force open markets, or backdoor ways to limit market access.”

The Sacred and the Dead

I will be reading from my book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound, at the Lake Forest Friends Meeting House at 6:30 p.m. Friday, May 6. A potluck supper will precede the reading. Please come if you can! The meeting house is located at 101 West Old Elm Road, a block west of Route 41, in Lake Forest, Ill.

By Robert C. Koehler

How do values enter politics?

The Bolivian national legislature, pressured by a movement of indigenous people and small farmers, may be about to birth a stunning global precedent in the creation of an environmentally sane future: establishing legal rights for Mother Earth.

On the one hand, huh? How can we reduce nature itself — the entirety of the universe beyond humanity’s small outpost of self-importance — to an entity that requires bureaucratic recognition? On the other hand, Mother Earth — Pachamama, in indigenous Andean parlance — is humanity’s vulnerable context, without which, though the universe will go on, we will not. As Bron Taylor, author of Dark Green Religion: Nature, Spirituality and the Planetary Future, put it: “Ecologically maladaptive cultural systems . . . eventually kill their hosts.”

Millions of dead sardines with neurotoxin to be used as food fertilizer

More than 85 tons of sardines that died late Monday in King Harbor, California, have been scooped up and hauled away to a composting center where they will be turned into fertilizer. High levels of a powerful neurotoxin were found in their bodies. Domoic acid has been linked to neurological disorders, illnesses and deaths of seabirds, sea lions, sea otters and whales. When it accumulates in edible fish and shellfish, it can sicken humans. University of Southern California biologist David Caron warned that animals feasting on the sardines will probably die.  So why are they putting the sardines in human food fertilizer? ~ Ed.

Ecoterrorism: USDA admits mass poisoning of millions of animals

By Mike Adams
Natural News

It’s absolutely shocking news: The U.S. Department of Agriculture has publicly admitted it is responsible for the mass poisoning of tens of millions of birds over the last several years. It’s all part of the USDA’s program called “Bye Bye Blackbird,” and we even have the USDA’s spreadsheet where they document how many millions of birds (and other animals) they’ve poisoned to death.

BP’s Corexit moves up Atlantic Seaboard, 100s of pelicans die

By various sources

Florida Times Union reports that over the past two months, hundreds of Eastern brown pelicans have washed ashore along Florida’s northeast coast. The North Carolina University (Wilmington) Seahawk newspaper reports that an “unprecedented” number has washed ashore in North Carolina.

Massive fish kill and 1000s of birds fall from the sky in Arkansas

Jan 6. UPDATE: Fracking the life out of Arkansas and beyond

Jan. 3 UPDATE: New numbers: 100,000 drum fish die along 20 mile corridor of Arkansas River.  At least 5,000 re-winged blackbirds have died in Beebe, per NY Daily News.

By various sources

On Thursday, Dec. 30, the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission reported a massive fish kill in Roseville, along the Arkansas River. But only a single species is involved: drum fish. The next day, AGFC received reports that about two thousand black birds fell from the sky 125 miles east in Beebe. Again, only a single species is involved and only in a one-square mile area.

How Reindeer Fly

Big Meat vs. Michael Pollan

A beef industry group crusades to stop the Pollan-ation of America’s college students. MotherJones.com

Nov/Dec 2010         — By Wes Enzinna

Carrin Flores is a cattle rancher’s fantasy come true: An attractive 26-year-old with stylish eyeglasses and glossy lipstick, she’s unabashed about her love of cows. “They are so cute. Their cute little tongues. Oh, and their eyelashes,” she says. “But I also friggin’ love to eat them.” She cooks beef four nights a week and can list dozens of ways she likes it: T-bone, tri-tip, boneless rump roast…Flores, a graduate student in veterinary medicine at Washington State University-Pullman, plans to work in the beef industry when she finishes. But she’s already a graduate of the Masters of Beef Advocacy (MBA), an industry-funded program that trains college students to fight back against critics of big agribusiness, like Michael Pollan.

Nazi angel of death Josef Mengele ‘created twin town in Brazil’

The Nazi doctor Josef Mengele is responsible for the astonishing number of twins in a small Brazilian town, an Argentine historian has claimed.

By Nick Evans
Telegraph UK

The steely hearted “Angel of Death”, whose mission was to create a master race fit for the Third Reich, was the resident medic at Auschwitz from May 1943 until his flight in the face of the Red Army advance in January 1945. His task was to carry out experiments to discover by what method of genetic quirk twins were produced – and then to artificially increase the Aryan birthrate for his master, Adolf Hitler.

Now, a historian claims, Mengele’s notorious experiments may have borne fruit.

Whale sharks doomed: Unable to avoid oil spill

A whale shark feeds at the surface six miles off Orange Beach. Three whale sharks have been spotted swimming in heavy oil four miles from the gushing Deepwater Horizon wellhead, concerning scientists. (Press-Register/Ben Raines)

By Ben Raines
Press-Register
(See undersea video at original article)

Last week, scientists cheered the discovery of one of the largest groups of whale sharks ever sighted in the northern Gulf of Mexico — about 100 animals feeding on the surface over a deepwater feature off Louisiana called the Ewing Bank.

This week’s report: Three whale sharks swimming in heavy oil four miles from the gushing Deepwater Horizon wellhead.

“Our worst fears are realized. They are not avoiding the spill area,” said Eric Hoffmayer, the University of Southern Mississippi scientist who found the large aggregation last week. “Those animals are going to succumb. Taking mouthfuls of oil is not good. It is not the toxicity that will kill them. It’s that oil is going to be sticking to their gills and everything else.”

Restraining the Profit Itch

By Robert C. Koehler

The gap between the diffuse human yearning for a decent world and the organized agenda of the corporatocracy has never, in my lifetime, been wider.

I continue to be unable to turn away from the Gulf and what seems to be the unceremonious ushering in of a new age, a new awareness — or maybe just the beginning of the end of our amped-up, gated, reckless civilization . . . and all that has a chance to come after it.

What the spill has yet to reach are the headquarters of corporate power and the consciences ensconced therein. The arrogance of the great capitalists remains undamaged, as they busy themselves with post-disaster job one: fending off what they fear will be a tide of market-fettering regulations and restrictions curbing their freedom to plunder the planet.

Mother Earth to Billions, We Have a Problem

By Betsy L. Angert

copyright © 2010 Betsy L. Angert. BeThink.org

Americans acknowledge there is a problem. Petroleum pours out from a broken pipe. Thousands of barrels of fuel flow freely through the Gulf of Mexico, just as they have for more than a month. Plants, animals, and people are affected. People express distress. Millions are dismayed. What can BP do? Indeed what can any company or citizens do? Most call upon the President. Mister Obama, the electorate pleads, please, protect us. These same citizens ignore that the protection we need is from ourselves. Our present circumstances are a reflection of our past. Many Americans have forgotten an earlier time, when another of this country’s Chief Executives attempted to avoid the nightmare we experience today.