Source: Truthout

After nearly five years of legal and regulatory battles, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has fully deregulated Monsanto’s Roundup Ready alfalfa that is genetically modified (GM) to be resistant to Roundup herbicide.

The decision squashed a proposed compromise between the biotech industry and its opponents that would have placed geographic restrictions on Roundup Ready alfalfa to prevent organic and traditional alfalfa from being contaminated by herbicide sprays and transgenes spread by cross-pollination and other factors. read more

Source: In These Times

Senor,

Lord of the heavens and the beaches, the highways and the trailers:

1. I have never met you and I truly hope I never do. I am one of the hundreds of thousands of post-national Mexicans whose umbilical cord to my homeland has been severed by you. I don’t look forward to my decreasing visits to Mexico. I have lost my country of origin to violence and fear — to the violence you helped create and the fear you continue to perpetrate.

2. I haven’t had the opportunity to cry for Mexico. I haven’t had the time to cry for the 30,000 “documented cases” of people killed by organized crime in the past three years — Mexicans killed by other Mexicans like you, not to mention the thousands more who have simply vanished in the Arizona desert, lost in the bi-national sex trade or buried in some mass grave. read more