As a historic vote with profound implications for the future of our food system nears, the question becomes whether a campaign with limitless resources and a disdain for the truth can defeat an overwhelmingly popular idea supported by a grassroots army, and over 3000 public interest organizations: the right to know what's in the food we eat and feed our families.

Poll after poll showed 90% of Americans (and Californians) favored labeling foods that have been genetically engineered (GMOs) and nearly a million signatures were gathered by California volunteers in just 10 weeks - easily qualifying Prop 37 for the ballot. And as of the first week of October, the Yes on 37 campaign enjoyed a 2 to 1 lead in the polls.

This broad statewide (and national) support - across party lines - made perfect sense. Prop 37 posits a simple question: Do we have the right to know what's in the food we eat and feed our children, or is that a decision better left to the pesticide and junk food companies bankrolling the opposition campaign?

Prop 37 isn't a referendum on genetically modified foods. It's not a ban, or a warning, it's a label. 

The debate over the efficacy of genetically engineered foods should and will continue. In the meantime, Californians have a right to know, and for good reason.

A growing body of research links GMO foods to potential health risks, increased pesticide use,biodiversity loss, the emergence of super ...

A campaign bankrolled by financially motivated pesticide and junk food companies is expected to lie - a lot. It's what they always do when confronted by inconvenient facts and consumers seeking to protect their rights - like the Right to Know what's in the food we eat and feed our families.

Prop 37 opponents have run one of the most deceptive misinformation campaigns in recent history - a $35 million deluge of one demonstrable lie after another to try and defeat a common sense measure that most Californians support.    

Today, the No on 37 campaign's already tattered credibility was dealt yet another big blow with news that its "top scientist" is nothing more than a corporate shill willing to misrepresent himself and the University for which he works.

Meet Henry Miller - a spokesperson the No on 37 campaign has been all too eager to promote as an arbiter of good science and someone we can trust with our families health. Miller has been featured in No on 37 television ads, written outrageously deceptive opinion editorials, and has presented himself as an "unbiased" scientific expert.

And now he's been caught misrepresenting Stanford University- forcing the No on 37 Campaign to pull and reshoot a statewide television ad identifying Miller as "Dr. Henry Miller, MD, Stanford University," without disclosing his affiliation with the Hoover Institute, a right-wing think tank at the University. In other words, he works ON the ...

In contrasting decisions last month, a United States Court of Appeals struck down a US Food and Drug Administration requirement that cigarettes be sold in packs with graphic health warnings, while Australia’s highest court upheld a law that goes much further. The Australian law requires not only health warnings and images of the physical damage that smoking causes, but also that the packs themselves be plain, with brand names in small generic type, no logos, and no color other than a drab olive-brown.

The US decision was based on America’s constitutional protection of free speech. The court accepted that the government may require factually accurate health warnings, but the majority, in a split decision, said that it could not go as far as requiring images. In Australia, the issue was whether the law implied uncompensated expropriation – in this case, of the tobacco companies’ intellectual property in their brands. The High Court ruled that it did not.

Follow Project Syndicate on Facebook or Twitter. For more from Peter Singer, click here.

Underlying these differences, however, is the larger issue: who decides the proper balance between public health and freedom of expression? In the US, courts make that decision, essentially by interpreting a 225-year-old text, and if that deprives the ...

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 ...

Last week, Brazil hosted over 190 heads of state and high-level ministers — including Hillary Clinton, Vladimir Putin and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao — for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, popularly referred to as Rio+20. In addition to the governmental representatives, the conference also included over 40,000 participants from civil society — which, by the U.N.’s classification, encompasses indigenous leaders, students, climate scientists and the CEOs of multinational corporations.

The formal inclusion of large numbers of civil society groups at the original 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, after all, was unprecedented and part of what made it such an historically significant event. This year, though, these same groups wound up publicly denouncing Rio+20’s failure to deliver meaningful results.

In 1992, the Cold War had just ended and democratic-capitalist “one-worldism” was being proclaimed as the “end of history.” Yet there were serious reasons for pause. We’d recently just barely closed a deal to stop using chemicals that were putting and enormous hole in the ozone (that hole is still there but at least it isn’t getting any bigger), and we’d come to realize that greenhouse gases were beginning to blanket the planet with heat and could make large segments of the earth uninhabitable if we didn’t do anything to reduce emissions. How could a global growth-oriented capitalist system and a global environmental crisis be reconciled?

The inclusion of civil society — an appeal to conceptions of global citizenship and democratic deliberation — was one part of an incomplete answer. The adoption of a set of Rio Principles for sustainable development framed in terms of ...

Margaret Flowers MD, is a pediatrician whose exasperation with the American health care system turned her into a single-payer activist. In 2009 she was arrested at the Senate Round Table on Health Insurance for attempting to speak on behalf of a single-payer plan when single payer had been cut out of the conversation.     “When Obama was elected I was optimistic like many people because he knew what single-payer was,” she told me recently when we talked. “He’d been on record saying that single-payer was the best solution. It was quickly very clear that that this was a predetermined course that it was more like a marketing campaign.” As the nation awaited the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA,) Flowers sounded more upbeat than aghast at the prospect of the Supreme Court ruling striking down part or more of the Obama law. For Flowers, a single-payer plan, like Medicare for all (which would fund medical care from a single insurance pool run by the state), was always the ideal way to provide universal, affordable, quality care, and contain soaring costs and waste in the process. As for the individual mandate – forcing the public to buy from a for-profit company – she’s called it “crony capitalism on steroids.”     It would be no small thing to move health reform through the legislature again, she agrees. Three years ago, Democratic leaders in Washington foreclosed on single payer, and went on to betray their commitments to single-payer-lite  -- the so-called public option. There’s no evidence there’s been a sea change in Washington. Around the country, though, Flowers ...

Everything, women around the world would say,  because they know how closely linked reproductive health is to issues ranging from poverty and food security to climate change and beyond. This message was precisely what female leaders brought to the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development, but not many were listening, least of all the Vatican.

“The only way to respond to increasing human numbers and dwindling resources is through the empowerment of women,” said Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, former prime minister of Norway and former director-general of the World Health Organization.

“It is through giving women access to education, knowledge, to paid income, independence and of course access to reproductive health services, reproductive rights, access to family planning,” she elaborated, adding that no other way existed to change the current “pattern of human consumption”.

Female leaders have long been trying to tell the world that sustainable development is not just about deforestation, climate change and carbon emissions. Equally as important to sustainable development are gender equality and human rights, which include sexual and reproductive rights.

But the reality is that globally, 215 million women who want to avoid pregnancy are not using effective methods of contraception. More than two and five pregnancies are unplanned, and approximately 287,000 girls and women die each year from pregnancy-related causes. The world has a ways to go to ensure that women have access to full reproductive rights and health.

Yet twenty years ago, the Rio earth summit saw unanimous agreement that sustainable development cannot be realized without gender equality.

So the current state of negotiations – to be fighting over something that was recognized 20 years ago – are frustrating for people like Rebecca Lefton, a policy analyst focusing on international climate ...

The World Health Organisation (WHO) highlighted this situation when it chose "industry interference" as the centrepiece of its anti-tobacco campaign this year for World No Tobacco Day, observed annually on May 31. 

The WHO has taken a "bold stance" in a bid to stop the tobacco industry's attempts to undercut steps to improve public health, John Stewart, senior international organiser of Corporate Accountability International (CAI), told IPS. 

"Tobacco and poverty create a vicious circle, since it is the poor who smoke most and bear the brunt of the economic and disease burden of tobacco use," said United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon in his address on World Tobacco Day. 

Tobacco kills nearly 6 million people each year. It will kill up to 8 million people per year by 2030, of which more than 80 percent will live in low- and middle-income countries, according to the WHO. 

Many countries have taken steps towards kicking a lethal global habit, and the Global Tobacco Treaty (formally known as the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, or FCTC) is a crucial tool in the struggle. If fully implemented, it could save more than 200 million lives, Stewart told IPS. 

Ahead of global tobacco treaty meetings to be held in Seoul in November, groundbreaking policies in Australia and Uruguay have been lauded as positive steps towards reducing tobacco consumption. 

Health warnings must now cover 80 percent of cigarette packages in Uruguay and each brand is permitted only one design per package. Australia has gone further still, implementing a policy of plain packaging in an attempt to de-glamorise the appeal of smoking. 

In response, the tobacco firm Philip Morris ...

When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”

The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome ...

The children fetch water from nearby makeshift tanks, which isn’t drinkable, he says. Rahim and his family are not the lone sufferers in sprawling Jallozai camp, home to thousands just like him who were uprooted by a military campaign against the Taliban in the violence-wracked Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). 

One of seven agencies that make up FATA, Khyber Agency has been riddled with militancy for the past two years, prompting the government to impose daily curfews in an effort to crush the Taliban in a military operation. 

The majority of FATA’s population of 10 million people has been caught in the incessant crossfire between the warring sides. 

In early March, the Pakistan army intensified action and asked the residents of Bara tehsil, one of three administrative clusters in Khyber Agency that lies on the border with Afghanistan, to shift to the camp. 

"But the camp doesn’t have facilities. People are becoming sick from the bad food provided to us. The weather is becoming too hot and the children are at the receiving end (of the misery)," said Abdul Ghafoor, an elderly resident of the camp who arrived with a family of 12. 

Ghafoor, a shopkeeper by profession, is sick of the camp’s management. "There’s nobody to listen to our requests for water and electricity. Even the United Nations agencies have shut their eyes to our needs," he told IPS. 

Concerned for the future of the younger generation, he lamented the fact that children who grow up in an environment of perpetual violence will become "monsters" if immediate action is not taken. 

The U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) has registered 46,331 displaced families or 201,070 homeless individuals since Mar. 17. 

"Some 12,646 families, ...

People in many developing countries often lack access to clean water, but the approach to remedy this problem has shifted in recent years to rely more on the private sector. Yet, as this new report and several other watchdog groups have shown, the change has been more harmful than helpful.

Corporate Accountability International, the U.S.-based non-governmental organization that published the report, has called on the World Bank to stop funding the private water sector and start redirecting its money to public and democratically accountable institutions.

The release of the report, entitled "Shutting the Spigot on Private Water: Case for the World Bank to Divest", coincides with the start of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund's 2012 Spring Meetings.

The World Bank's private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), has spent 1.4 billion dollars on private water corporations since 1993, according to the report.

As of January 2013, that investment will increase to 1 billion dollars per year. The report also says that the IFC is attracting 14 to 18 dollars of follow-up private investment for every 1 dollar it directly invests.

This money helps explain why the World Bank and the IFC continue to fund private water corporations, even though roughly one third of all private water contracts signed between 2000 and 2010 have failed or are in distress – four times the failure rate of comparable infrastructure projects in the electric and transportation sectors, according to CAI.

"A tremendous failure"

"Rather than focusing on guaranteeing access to clean and affordable water, the World Bank has promoted ...

US President Barack Obama’s nomination of Jim Yong Kim for the presidency of the World Bank has been well received – and rightly so, especially given some of the other names that were bandied about. In Kim, a public-health professor who is now President of Dartmouth University and previously led the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department, the United States has put forward a good candidate. But the candidate’s nationality, and the nominating country – whether small and poor or large and rich – should play no role in determining who gets the job.

The World Bank’s 11 executive directors from emerging and developing countries have put forward two excellent candidates, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala of Nigeria and Jose Antonio Ocampo of Colombia. I have worked closely with both of them. Both are first-rate, have served as ministers with multiple portfolios, have performed admirably in top positions in multilateral organizations, and have the diplomatic skills and professional competence to do an outstanding job. They understand finance and economics, the bread and butter of the World Bank, and have a network of connections to leverage the Bank’s effectiveness.

Okonjo-Iweala brings an insider’s knowledge of the institution. Ocampo, like Kim, brings the advantages and disadvantages of being an outsider; but Ocampo, a distinguished professor at Columbia University, is thoroughly acquainted with the World Bank. He previously served not only as minister of economics and finance, but also of agriculture – a critically important qualification, given that the vast majority of the developing countries’ poor depend on farming. He also brings impressive environmental credentials, addressing another of the Bank's central concerns.

"Follow ...

The World Water Council, the convener of the World Water Forum, sure knows its market. At their recent global gathering held in Marseille, France, they tapped into the thirst of governments, development agencies, banks, NGOs and private water operators for a conversation about water services and managing the growing water crisis — as well as a shot at lucrative contracts. Exhibition booths included desalinization companies and private firms like Suez and Veolia, the biggest in the industry. The event had the feel of a trade show and the price tag of the Superbowl, dissuasive to thousands of water justice activists who set up a parallel, alternative peoples’ water forum in a dockside warehouse.

Where is UN leadership on water? A Crisis of Water Governance

The first World Water Forum was held in 1997; the Sixth concluded last month. The World Water Council is a private, not-for-profit body with a board weighted towards private water industry representatives and government officials friendly to private water management. The United Nations might appear a more sensible host for a global conversation about world water policy—water troubles are felt locally but the hydrological cycle is turned topsy-turvy globally. Human rights and environmental activists who steered clear of the Forum advocate moving it to the UN. The same opinion was whispered to me by a Forum session facilitator, “but if we say it out loud, this party is over.”

One obstacle to this shift is the approximately 27 UN agencies that deal with water. This bureaucratic dispersion mirrors the way most national governments split administration of water matters. There tends to be one agency administering potable water, another issuing water permits to mine operators, a third overseeing sanitation ...

Despite powerful mainstream evidence showing that 78% of polio cases in Pakistan are among those vaccinated with the polio vaccine, and even the fact that the polio vaccine is now the leading cause of polio paralysis, Pakistan is now moving to slam parents of non-vaccinated children with fees and school bans. The country has been battling the disease, which has been running rampant among those vaccinated against the condition for quite some time, even prompting potential travel restrictions until the epidemic is dealt with.

While attributing the spread and outbreak to unvaccinated children, and demonizing their parents for making such an ‘irresponsible’ choice, mainstream public statistics have shown that even those who have been administered polio drops on several occasions were still developing the disease. According to the National Institute of Health, whose polio action group compiled the data in the report, 107 polio-affected children out of the 136 total patients had been given the polio drops under a prescribed schedule — doctor approved.

What’s more, World Health Organization states that Pakistan — despite the large percentage of prescribed vaccination — had the highest number of polio cases in a decade. But perhaps most shocking of them all is a report by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that shows it is possible that these children are developing polio from the vaccine itself. The