Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) require more pesticide use on crops, say the authors of a 16-year study published in Environmental Sciences Europe. According to the researchers, 527 million pounds of a toxic herbicide have inundated farmlands since 1996. What’s more, this abhorrent amount is much greater than that promised by Monsanto, which claims that GM crops require smaller doses of herbicides like the company’s best-selling Roundup Ready.

This study found, however, that although farmers did reduce Roundup Ready use by 2 percent between 1996 and 1999, herbicide use resurged with a vengeance thereafter. This was a result of the emergence of “superweeds” that resist herbicides, requiring farmers to use more of it with each application.

Herbicide and Pesticide Use Damage Humans, Environment

These “superweeds” have become resistant to glyphosate, a chemical found in Roundup Ready. Rootworms, too, may be becoming resistant according to ongoing research by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Additionally, a recent French study by the University of Caen found glyphosate and herbicides like Roundup to be actively toxic to human cells—findings which led to Russia’s suspension of Monsanto crop imports. Earth Open Source, a nonprofit organization with volunteers as well as several international scientists and researchers, has linked glyphosate with birth defects. Worse (but predictable) is that in 1993 Monsanto ...

Russian researchers will stream a live experiment to show the effects of GMO feed on rats. This comes after a French study found GMOs to have negative effects on rats, which lead to a provisional Russian suspension on imported Monsanto genetically modified corn.

Russian Scientists Condemn GMOs, Plan a Unique Experiment

French scientists at the University of Caen sounded the alarm on September 19 after publishing images from their study of tumors on rats fed American GM maize. The National Association for Genetic Safety (NAGS) researchers in Russia have publicly condemned genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and have declared plans to conduct an experiment which members of the public can see, allowing the latter to formulate well-informed opinions about GMOs themselves.

These researchers will install web cameras in the cages of four groups of rats.

• Group 1 will be fed a diet high in GM soybeans and corn.
• Group 2 will be fed a diet low in GM soybeans and corn.
• Group 3 will be fed a diet with no GMOs.
• Group 4 will be fed a diet with standard rat feed.

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An alarming report published by the Department of Homeland Security in March 2010 called attention to the theft of dozens of pounds of dangerous explosives from an airport storage bunker in Washington state.

Like many such warnings, it drew on information gathered by one of the department’s “fusion centers” created to exchange data among state, local and federal officials, all at a cost to the federal government of hundreds of millions of dollars.

There was just one problem with that report, and many others like it: the theft had occurred seven months earlier, and it had been highlighted within five days in a press release by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which was seeking citizen assistance in tracking down the culprits.

The DHS report’s tardiness and its duplication of work by others has been a commonplace failing of work performed by fusion centers nationwide, according to a new investigation of the DHS-funded centers by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

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Following the groundbreaking French study that graphically linked the lifetime consumption of Monsanto’s GMO corn in rats to massive tumors and direct organ failure, Russia’s premiere consumers rights organization has suspended both the importation and use of Monsanto’s GMO corn within the nation’s borders.

The move may soon be echoed by other nations, who may soon be urged by France to ban Monsanto’s GMOs due to serious health concerns. France, who also recently upheld a key ban on growing GMOs, has been instrumental in alerting the world to the dangers of GMOs and Monsanto’s overall corruption. In the nation’s latest announcement, it was revealed that France’s Agriculture Minister was launching an investigation into the GMO study, ultimately calling for European authorities to ban Monsanto’s GMOs in order to protect citizens in the event that the study was found to be sound.

It seems that France has become somewhat of a consumer health watchdog in more than just one area, simultaneously tackling ...

Food prices are rising, and consumers are feeling it. Rising food prices aren’t only hitting America, they are happening around the world. Costs have gone up 10 percent between June and July alone, with corn, soybeans, and wheat reaching record prices. This outpaces the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s estimate of a 6 percent increase.

Rising Food Prices and Vulnerable Populations

While we may all see small changes in the grocery store and in grocery bills, World Bank president Jim Yong Kim says countries reliant on imported grains, especially “Africa and the Middle East are particularly vulnerable.”

The World Bank attributes the price jump mainly to the American heatwave and drought in Eastern Europe, which has hurt corn and soy in the US and wheat in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Use of corn in the production of ethanol in the U.S.—accounting for up to 40 percent of corn crop—has also been blamed for the price jump.

But of course this isn’t the beginning of rising food prices. Costs have been going up for some time now; you can see a food price index we covered around just last Thanksgiving. The food index count, which is an overall score reflecting the total price of the top 6 food commodities, rose to 215 in December of 2010 — up from 90 in the year 2000. Sugar spearheaded the spike, hitting only 2 points away from the 400 mark in December of 2010.

Rice is the only staple that has actually decreased in price (by 4 percent).

G20 Unsympathetic to Those in Need

“We cannot allow ...

Arctic sea ice has already melted to a record low this year, in thickness and extent. And summer’s not over yet. According to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, record melt has occurred for the past six years. Both the NSIDC and the European Space Agency say ice is thinning at a rate 50 percent faster than scientists predicted, mainly because of global warming and that summer Arctic ice could soon disappear altogether.

The implications for global climate and weather, and for animals and people in the North, are enormous. One would think the urgency of this development would draw a swift and collaborative response from government, industry, media and the public. Instead, news media have downplayed the issue, the only mention made of climate change at the recent Republican National Convention was to mock the science, and many government and industry leaders are rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of oil and gas extraction opportunities and shipping routes that will open up as the ice disappears.

We just don’t get it. As ice melts, more of the sun’s energy, which would normally be reflected back by the ice, is absorbed by the dark water, speeding up global climate change and warming the oceans. The Arctic is now heating at almost twice the rate as the rest of Earth. There’s also the danger that methane could be released as ice and permafrost melt. It’s a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide, so this would accelerate global warming even further. ...

Despite pledges from governments across Eastern Europe and Central Asia to fight HIV/AIDS – one of the eight Millennium Development Goals – the region has the world’s fastest-growing HIV epidemic.

Punitive drug policies, discrimination and problems with access to medicines and important therapy are all driving an epidemic which is unlikely to be contained, world experts say, until governments in countries with the worst problems change key policies and approaches to the disease.

Daniel Wolfe, director of the International Harm Reduction Development Program at the Open Society Foundations, told IPS: “In most post-Soviet countries, where HIV remains concentrated among injecting drug users, harsh policies and discrimination in healthcare settings continue to cripple the AIDS response.”

Figures showing the extent of the region’s problems with the disease make grim reading. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), while HIV infection rates are actually falling globally, Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) is seeing the reverse.

The WHO says that there were 170,000 new HIV infections in the region in 2011. New infections have risen 22 percent in the EECA since 2005, and there is no sign of a slowdown.

Injection drug use has been identified as fuelling the epidemic – accounting for up to 70 percent of new infections, according to the WHO.

Activists say the key to tackling the epidemic lies first and foremost in combating the injecting drug use problem, but that official and unofficial stances towards drugs and their users are stopping the problem being effectively tackled, or are even making it worse.

Dasha Ocheret of the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network, told IPS: “Punitive drug policies have to be stopped. People are afraid to get treatment for fear of criminal ...

Three members of the feminist punk group Pussy Riot have been sentenced to two years in prison for staging an anti-Putin protest inside a Russian church. On February 21, members of Pussy Riot rushed before the altar of Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior where they danced, genuflected and issued a "punk prayer," exhorting the Virgin Mary to "get Putin out." Their imprisonment for the peaceful protest has sparked a massive outcry around the world, with protests planned today in some three dozen cities. Speaking to Democracy Now, a representative for Pussy Riot's legal defense team called the case a "political put-up job." "It is impossible to understand for people living in democracy how it is possible to live in a system of disregard of the law," said Alisa Obraztsova, an assistant to the lawyers representing Pussy Riot. "[The] only way is to believe the society, not the government, because there is no common sense in such legal trials and only the society's reaction may describe the real situation in Russia." Obraztsova said they planned to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. As protesters were arrested outside the courthouse in Moscow, we spoke with JD Samson, a punk rock musician with the bands Le Tigre and MEN who has been organizing Pussy Riot solidarity actions in New York City. "As a feminist musician, we're all interested in freedom of expression. And as artists, we can all stand behind them," Samson says. "Russia clearly has no separation of church and state and this is something that has been definitely important for us to think about."

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When Gunvor, one of the world's largest energy traders, invested $400 million in a troubled Montana coal mine, it looked like a promising deal. The plan was to sell much of the coal to the booming Asian market, where it was fetching far more than the prevailing price in the U.S.

The deal in October 2011 delivered impressive profits to the mine's previous owners, a rare financial success in America's depressed coal industry. It also set the mine on course to more than double production this year compared with last, at a time when total U.S. coal production is falling.

But shipping coal to the Asia Pacific region was not as straightforward as it seemed. Gunvor expanded from its core of trading oil into other energy sectors just as the price of coal in the U.S., Asia and elsewhere tumbled in part because U.S. power plants are burning cheaper natural gas. Now, the Geneva-based company is battling unexpected economic, political, and legal headwinds in the U.S.

Gunvor and the two other owners of the Montana mine, called Signal Peak, are embroiled in a legal dispute over royalty payments. The mine has also bid on federal and state coal tracts, thrusting Gunvor into a debate raging in America over whether governments are getting a fair price for U.S. coal reserves.

Industry experts say Gunvor bought the mine at the height of the market. "The timing of the deal was terrible," said a senior coal trader with a rival trading house. "They overpaid."

In a statement last month, Gunvor defended "Signal Peak's long-term value," noting both the quality of the coal and the quantity — enough for the mine to keep producing for roughly 30 years.

One of the trading house's two principal owners is Gennady Timchenko, a billionaire who has known Russian President Vladimir Putin since both men were based in St. Petersburg in the 1980s. Gunvor grew rapidly from a niche player in the ...

While Iran, Russia, and China are all pretty scary, the ominous word “sequestration” is what is keeping right-wing hawks and their friends in the defense industry up at night.

While they have been rallying their forces for most of the past year, their campaign to avoid the “specter of sequestration”, as they often refer to it, shifted into high gear on Capitol Hill this week, as top industry executives were summoned to testify to the urgency of the threat.

At stake is could be as much as 600 billion dollars in Pentagon funding – much of which would presumably be spent on lucrative procurement contracts for new weapons systems – over the next 10 years, as well as what the hawks see as the further erosion of U.S. global military dominance.

“It is clear that if the process of sequestration is fully implemented,” warned three of the right’s most hawkish think tanks – the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Heritage Foundation, and the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) – in a joint statement entitled “Defending Defense” last week, “the U.S. military will lack adequate resources to defend the United States and its global interests.”

“The specter of sequestration threatens the U.S. defense industrial base at a time when China, Russia, and other military competitors are ramping up their defense industries,” according to the statement, which helped raise the curtain on this week’s mantra from the military-industrial complex: hundreds of thousands of workers could lose their jobs as early as October – one month before the election – unless the sequestration nightmare goes away.

The sequestration specter arises from ...

Nuclear scientists and engineers embrace nuclear power like a religion. The term “nuclear priesthood” was coined by Dr. Alvin Weinberg, long director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the laboratory’s website proudly notes this.  It’s not unusual for scientists at Oak Ridge and other U.S. national nuclear laboratories to refer to themselves as “nukies.” The Oak Ridge website describes Weinberg as a “prophet” of “nuclear energy.”

This religious, cultish element is integral to a report done for the U.S. Department of Energy in 1984 by Battelle Memorial Institute about how the location of nuclear waste sites can be communicated over the ages. An “atomic priesthood,” it recommends, could impart the locations in a “legend-and-ritual…retold year-by-year.” Titled “Communications Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia,” the taxpayer-funded report says: “Membership in this ‘priesthood’ would be self-selective over time.”  

Currently, Allison Macfarlane, nominated to be the new head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, says she is an “agnostic” on nuclear power—as if support or opposition to atomic energy falls on a religious spectrum. Meanwhile, Gregory Jaczko, the outgoing NRC chairman, with a Ph.D. in physics, was politically crucified because he repeatedly raised safety concerns, thus not revering nuclear power enough.   

Years ago, while I was working on a book about toxic chemicals, the ...

Moscow’s second March of Millions took place on Tuesday despite two severe storms that struck the capital — one was of meteorological origin, while the other came directly from the Kremlin, in the form of a new and unconstitutional law promising huge fines and penalties for participation in street protests.

Tensions were extremely high, due in large part to the previous day’s police raids on the homes of several prominent activists. Alexey Navalny, Ilya Yashin and Sergey Udaltsov were subpoenaed to the public prosecution office, where all but the left-wing leader Udaltsov — who ignored the order and joined his supporters in the streets — were detained for the entire day of the march.

By early morning, Moscow seemed to be on the brink of war, with its streets occupied by police vans crammed full of anti-riot squads. The Russian government gathered about 12,000 police to follow the march. The officers, ironically, were required to wear ceremonial white uniforms — the same color as the protest movement — because June 12 was also a national holiday, Russia Day, celebrating the nation’s independence from the Soviet Union.

The situation looked ominous until hundreds of people with flags, banners and placards began flowing through the center of the city, from Pushkin Square to Akademika Sakharova Avenue — named after the famed Russian Nobel laureate and Cold War dissident Andrei Sakharov. Within 50 minutes, 10,000 to 20,000 participants were reportedly on the streets. “We are here because irresponsibility is unlikely to help our children,” stated an elderly woman whose discontent with the government had spurred her to take action.

Even without key leaders like Yashin and Navalny, the level of organization and consolidation among the more than 100,000 ...

We can best honor those who have given their lives for this nation in combat by making sure our military might is proportional to what America needs.

The United States spends more on our military than do China, Russia, Britain, France, Japan, and Germany put together. 

With the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, the cost of fighting wars is projected to drop – but the “base” defense budget (the annual cost of paying troops and buying planes, ships, and tanks – not including the costs of actually fighting wars) is scheduled to rise. The base budget is already about 25 percent higher than it was a decade ago, adjusted for inflation. 

One big reason: It’s almost impossible to terminate large defense contracts. Defense contractors have cultivated sponsors on Capitol Hill and located their plants and facilities in politically important congressional districts. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and others have made spending on national defense into America’s biggest jobs program. 

So we keep spending billions on Cold War weapons systems like nuclear attack submarines, aircraft carriers, and manned combat fighters that pump up the bottom lines of defense contractors but have nothing to do with 21st-century combat. 

For example, the Pentagon says it wants to buy fewer F-35 joint strike fighter planes than had been planned – the single-engine fighter has been plagued by cost overruns and technical glitches – but the contractors and their friends on Capitol Hill promise a fight. 

The absence of a budget deal on Capitol Hill is supposed to trigger an automatic across-the-board ten-year cut in the defense budget of nearly $500 billion, starting January.

But Republicans have vowed to restore the cuts. The House Republican budget cuts everything else — yet brings defense spending back up. Mitt ...

As at least two days of talks on the future of Iran's nuclear program got underway in Baghdad Wednesday, neo-conservatives and other hawks escalated their campaign against any compromise agreement, particularly one that would permit Tehran to continue enriching uranium on its territory.

Fearful that the U.S. and the other members of the so-called P5+1 (Britain, France, Russia, China, plus Germany) will strike an interim accord with Tehran under which it would agree to limit its uranium enrichment to five percent, they argued that Iran should instead be forced to comply with a 2006 U.N. Security resolution calling for it to stop enriching altogether – a position that most Iran experts here believe is certain to kill any prospect for progress. 

"Given the Iranian regime's long-standing pattern of deceptive and illicit conduct, we believe that it cannot be trusted to maintain enrichment or reprocessing activities on its territory for the foreseeable future – at least until the international community has been fully convinced that Iran has decided to abandon any nuclear- weapons ambitions," wrote three prominent pro-Israel senators in the Wall Street Journal Thursday. 

"We are very far from that point," according to Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham and independent Democrat Joseph Lieberman, the so-called "Three Amigos", who often travel overseas together and have long argued that U.S. military action will likely be the only way to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. 

At the same time, two fellows at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) published an op-ed in the Washington Post warning against any agreement by the P5+1 that would permit Iran to enrich uranium up to five percent on its own territory rather than suspend all enrichment indefinitely. 

Such a deal, according to FDD's executive director Mark Dubowitz and former ...

For those frustrated with the sorry state of the U.S. mainstream news media, Russia Today’s RT America is a nice diversion from the norm.

With punchy coverage on political and social topics of great importance, be it the ongoing collapse of American news networks, domestic drone use, the U.S. covert war in Somalia, poverty and economic inequality, Occupy Wall Street, among many other topics, some would even go so far to claim that it is better than the American mainstream news press.

Recently, RT launched a show hosted by Wikileaks’ Founder Julian Assange, adding credibility, in the judgment of