In Iowa, corn is king. In summer, one can drive hundreds of miles in all directions - east, west, north, and south - and see vast green fields of corn, along with soybeans, planted fence row to fence row.
To some Iowa natives, corn is more than king. It's sacred. The Meskwaki Native Americans, based in Tama, have grown corn for centuries, making today's massive industrial corn production a small dot in the timeline by comparison.
The Meskwaki's traditional corn is called Tama Flint, which is known for its hardness and red color.
But today the corn is threatened by cross-pollination from genetically modified corn, which now dominates U.S. agriculture. Meskwaki tribe member Jerry Young Bear is trying to preserve the genetic purity of his tribe's corn. "Corn has significant value to the Meskwaki people in our culture, tradition, religious ceremonies, and as a major food source," he says. "We want to take care of our corn to make sure it is viable for future generations."
The world's best-selling weedkiller, and a genetically modified maize resistant to it, can cause tumours, multiple organ damage and lead to premature death, a new study has revealed. Its results are published in The Food & Chemical Toxicology Journal in New York. Here, experts discuss the significance of the findings.
MINNEAPOLIS - A Minnesota man accused of violating the state's raw milk laws was just the middle man in a voluntary arrangement of people sharing food, his attorney argued Wednesday.
Alvin Schlangen, an organic egg producer from Freeport, is charged with three misdemeanor counts including distributing unpasteurized milk, operating without a food handler's license and handling adulterated food. Minnesota law prohibits raw milk sales except directly to consumers on the farm when it's produced.
A Hennepin County jury began deliberating the case Wednesday. After almost an hour and a half, jurors recessed for the day and were scheduled to resume deliberations in the morning.
The case highlights a deep national divide between raw milk and free choice advocates - who contend it provides important health benefits to their families, such as relief from allergies and prevention of various illnesses - and officials who say unpasteurized milk can carry dangerous pathogens that cause serious and sometimes fatal diseases, such as E. coli, salmonella and listeria.
An engineer with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) says the agency has withheld documents showing reactor sites downstream of dams are vulnerable to flooding, and an elevated risk to the public's safety.
Richard Perkins, an NRC reliability and risk engineer, was the lead author on a July 2011 NRC report detailing flood preparedness. He said the NRC blocked information from the public regarding the potential for upstream dam failures to damage nuclear sites.
Perkins, in a letter submitted Friday with the NRC Office of Inspector General, said that the NRC "intentionally mischaracterized relevant and noteworthy safety information as sensitive, security information in an effort to conceal the information from the public." The Huffington Post first obtained the letter.
(Reuters) - U.S. budget experts raised their forecast on Wednesday of how many Americans will probably have to pay a penalty in 2016 for not buying health insurance to 6 million from 4 million.
The 50 percent increase was likely to draw fire from Republicans on the campaign trail who want to repeal President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law and who reject the penalty as a government intrusion into the lives of individuals.
But the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said some of the increase reflects state opposition to an expansion under the healthcare law of the Medicaid program for the poor, which is most unpopular in states with Republican governors or Republican-majority legislatures.
CHICAGO (CBS) - City officials have decided to shut down a temporary clinic that had been set up in a garbage truck garage to provide wellness screenings for Streets and Sanitation Department workers.
WBBM Newsradio's Steve Miller first reported that workers were complaining about unsanitary conditions at the clinic that had been set up inside the garage at Ferdinand Street and Tripp Avenue.
Streets and Sanitation employee Marty Zamora had said, when he and his co-workers arrived at the garage this week to find a temporary clinic had been set up, they "thought it was something unreal. I mean, are we seeing this?"
Whatever the arguments around the health risks of consuming genetically-modified (GM) food, the conditions under which many GM crop farmers have to toil means this an issue for anyone who cares about the impact of their purchasing choices.
An estimated 270,000 small-hold farmers in the Philippines are being forced to grow GM corn and ending up in debt as a result.
These are the findings of a recent study by CI member IBON and MASIPAG, a farmer-led network of people's organisations, non-government organisations and scientists.
The farmers are at the mercy of seed suppliers and lenders who are one-in-the-same in the country.
EXCLUSIVE. Yes, GMOs are poisonous! William Malaurie Le Nouvel Observateur, September 19 2012
*French researchers studied privately for two years, 200 rats fed GM corn. Tumors, serious diseases ... a massacre. And a bomb [for the] GMO industry.
This is a real bomb that launches this September 19 to 15 hours, the very serious American journal "Food and Chemical Toxicology" - a benchmark for food toxicology - publishing the results of the experiment conducted by [the] team [of] French Gilles-Eric Seralini, professor of molecular biology at the University of Caen. A cluster bomb [for] scientific, medical, and industrial policy. It sprays indeed an official truth: the safety of genetically modified maize.
Heavily toxic and often fatal:
Even at low doses, the GM study proves heavily toxic and often lethal to rats. So much so that, if it were a drug, it should be suspended forthwith pending further investigations. Because it is the same GMO found on our plates through the meat, eggs or milk.
Research shows that within the next ten years large parts of Asia can expect increased risk of more severe droughts, which will impact regional and possibly even global food security; on average, across Asia, droughts lasting longer than three months will be more than twice as severe in terms of their soil moisture deficit compared to the 1990-2005 period; China, Pakistan, and Turkey as the most seriously affected major producers of wheat and maize.
Research shows that within the next ten years large parts of Asia can expect increased risk of more severe droughts, which will impact regional and possibly even global food security
The report, led by the University of Leeds and published by the U.K.-basedCenter for Low Carbon Futures, highlights China, Pakistan, and Turkey as the most seriously affected major producers of wheat and maize and urges policymakers to focus attention on climate change adaptation to avert an imminent food crisis.
For the first time, the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) will be integrated onto an unmanned aerial vehicle, BAE Systems announced today. The company, which designed and manufactures the guidance section of the laser-guided rocket, was recently awarded a U.S. Navy contract to add the APKWS onto the MQ-8B Fire Scout UAV.
"APKWS' precision firepower will soon be available on a UAV platform," said Roy Rumbaugh, APKWS program manager at BAE Systems. "With BAE Systems' innovative technologies, the Fire Scout will engage targets on land or at sea with laser-guided accuracy while keeping our warfighters out of harm's way."
The system is being integrated onto the Fire Scout in response to an urgent operational need and is being prepared for rapid deployment. BAE Systems will support this rapid APKWS integration by performing system analyses and modeling based on its high fidelity, integrated flight simulator.
(Reuters) - A federal judge has granted class-action status to former Wyeth Inc shareholders who accused the company, now part of Pfizer Inc, of misleading them about risks associated with the antidepressant Pristiq.
The decision issued Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan in Manhattan is a victory for shareholders led by the Pipefitters Union Local 537 Pension Fund in Boston.
It lets shareholders sue the largest U.S. drugmaker by revenue as a group rather than individually, which could lead to larger recoveries while lowering costs.
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) - Family members of an Arizona U.S. Border Patrol agent killed in connection with a botched gun-smuggling operation said they won't have closure until someone is held accountable for his death.
Brian Terry's mother, sisters and cousin from the Detroit area are in Tucson this week for a dinner to raise money for a foundation set up in his honor. They also plan to be on hand Tuesday at Naco on the Mexico border when the Border Patrol station there is renamed after him.
Operation Fast and Furious, the gun-smuggling effort, was launched in 2009 to catch trafficking kingpins, but federal agents lost track of about 1,400 of the more than 2,000 weapons - including AK-47s and other high-powered assault rifles.
A new study, issued by scientists at the Freeman Spogli institute at Stanford university in California, that suggests that organic food has no medical or health values is deeply flawed, say outraged activists.
Media coverage of the scientific paper that was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine last week was mostly supportive, as is customary for studies from famous universities. "Organic Food 'Not Any Healthier," wrote a BBC journalist, while the New York Times published an article titled "Stanford Scientists Cast Doubt on Advantages of Organic Meat and Produce."
NGOs immediately questioned the conclusions of the study. "There was just no way that truly independent scientists with the expertise required to adequately answer such an important question would ignore the vast and growing body of scientific literature pointing to serious health risks from eating foods produced with synthetic chemicals," says Charlotte Vallaeys, food and farm policy director at the Cornucopia Institute Institute, an organic farm policy organization in Wisconsin.
Two congressional bills could have big implications for electronic inboxes and mobile devices when it comes to privacy.
On Thursday , Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) was set to propose an amendment to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 that would extend privacy rights regarding email.
Leahy's move comes just one day after U.S. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced the Mobile Device Privacy Act, which would force service providers and app developers to gain permission before monitoring any activity or accessing any data on any mobile device.
Law enforcement's easy access to remotely stored emails has long been a thorn in the side of privacy advocates, but that might be about to change. If passed, a Senate bill introduced by Leahy will protect all email equally, regardless of whether it's stored on a remote server or your own hard drive.
(Reuters) - Yosemite National Park expanded a warning about the deadly hantavirus to 230,000 more recent visitors and confirmed on Thursday that a ninth person had contracted the virus, which has already killed three people.
The Californian, the latest person confirmed to have been infected with hantavirus, had stayed in Yosemite in July and has already recovered, National Park Service spokesman John Quinley said.
Yosemite said it had previously alerted 30,000 visitors, who slept in two locations where officials believe the nine visitors were infected, but expanded the warning by sending emails to 230,000 more who stayed elsewhere out of an abundance of caution, Quinley said.
Post-menopausal women who have Type 2 diabetes appear to have a 27% greater risk of developing breast cancer, experts say.
An international team, writing in the British Journal of Cancer, examined 40 separate studies looking at the potential link between breast cancer and diabetes.
Being obese or overweight is linked to both conditions.
But cancer experts say there may be a direct connection between the two.
(Reuters Health) - Middle-aged and older men who get enough antioxidants in their diets may have better-quality sperm than men who are lacking in the nutrients, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that among men age 45 or older, those who got the most vitamins C and E, folate and zinc tended to have fewer DNA-strand breaks in their sperm.
That's a measure of the genetic quality of sperm, which is known to decline as a man ages.
The findings, reported in the journal Fertility and Sterility, do not prove that antioxidants directly improve sperm quality - or boost the chances of a healthy pregnancy.
Having a highly demanding job, but little control over it, could be a deadly combination, UK researchers say.
They analysed 13 existing European studies covering nearly 200,000 people and found "job strain" was linked to a 23% increased risk of heart attacks and deaths from coronary heart disease.
The risk to the heart was much smaller than for smoking or not exercising, the Lancet medical journal report said.
The same corporations that brought us DDT and Agent Orange are now funding the No on Prop 37 campaign to deny our right to know what's in our food.
Help us fight back with the truth by watching the video and donating below so we can keep airing our hard-hitting ad.
The ad says it all - we've heard the false corporate health claims before. They said cigarettes were safe, DDT was safe, even that Agent Orange was safe. The two major donors against our right to know in California are Monsanto and DuPont - the two corporations most responsible for Agent Orange and DDT. We've heard from them - now let's hear the truth!
