Organic farmers take on Monsanto over patent lawsuits
By Dean Kuipers, February 17, 2012, Los Angeles Times
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After years of taking farmers to court to assert their patent rights, agri-giantMonsanto Co.is being sued by farmers. Lots of farmers.
Judge Naomi Buchwald heard oral arguments Jan. 31 in federal district court in Manhattan on OSGATA et al. vs. Monsanto, the latest courtroom action on a suit filed almost a year ago. Responding to what they say is a climate of fear created by Monsanto’s long series of patent infringement lawsuits, a group representing as many as 25% of the nation’s organic farmers (as well as other non-organic farmers) have sued the global biotech company to allow them to grow in peace.
Monsanto’s attorneys have asked to have the suit dismissed. Buchwald will respond by the end of March.
The innovative suit is brought under the Declaratory Judgment Act, which allows for a preemptive judgment that would clear farmers of infringement suits before they even grow their plants. The farmers are not seeking any money or injunction. Monsanto, represented by Seth Waxman, former U.S. solicitor general under Bill Clinton, has moved to have the case thrown out, saying it is “hypothetical” and “abstract.” READ…..
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Woman leads pulse polio drive in India
by Abdul Latheef Naha, Malappuram, February 19, 2012, The Hindu
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An orthodox Muslim woman from a remote village of Oorakam in Malappuram district has become a torchbearer of the district’s campaign for pulse polio immunisation. In spite of stiff resistance from various pockets to immunisation programmes of the health department, this woman has been leading the pulse polio drive in her village ever since the country launched the project in 1995.
Endearingly called Mariyatha by the local people as well as the health authorities, Mariyumma M.K. is known as the ambassador of pulse polio. Despite her lack of formal education, the ability of this 59-year-old woman in convincing the people of the importance of giving pulse polio has been well appreciated.
Widowed at a young age, Mariyatha has been living alone and finds joy in helping at an anganwadi functioning next to her tiny house. She says it was her association with anganwadi that awakened the social consciousness within her. READ….
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Serial killer spills secrets for cash
By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times, February 11, 2012
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One by one, the young women vanished from the dusty farm towns of the Central Valley.
They were often addicts or prostitutes, and their disappearances over a 15-year period in the 1980s and ’90s didn’t seem to draw much official concern.
Two childhood friends and locally renowned troublemakers, Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog, were eventually arrested in 1999 for a series of murders known as the “Speed Freak” killings, and many of the missing were presumed to have fallen victim to the methamphetamine-addled duo.
Shermantine and Herzog never disclosed where they dumped the mutilated corpses of their victims, leaving bereaved families with only grim speculation. READ….
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The Russians are leaving … Russia
by Vladimir Radyuhin, February 11, 2012, The Hindu
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Andrei and Nadezhda are, by any measure, successful professionals and a happy family. They are the kind of people who are supposed to be the mainstay of new Russia and the driving force of its resurgence. Except that they are planning to leave this country for good.
They live in the ancient Russian city of Vladimir, about 200 km east of Moscow. Andrei, 40, and Nadezhda, 36, have decent jobs, a two-bedroom flat and a car, and are raising two daughters, aged 10 and 4. Four years ago they took a firm decision to emigrate. Why?
“We don’t see a future for us here,” says Nadezhda. “Once a military and industrial giant, our country today is reduced to a raw material appendage to other economic powerhouses. Look at our shops: You won’t find any goods made in Russia. Our well-being depends on the price of oil and on decisions taken by politicians and economists in other countries. We don’t feel we are needed here.” READ….
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Experts say Gingrich moon base dreams not lunacy
By SETH BORENSTEIN, January 31,2012
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WASHINGTON — Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich wants to create a lunar colony that he says could become a U.S. state. There’s his grand research plan to figure out what makes the human brain tick. And he’s warned about electromagnetic pulse attacks leaving America without electricity
To some people, these ideas sound like science fiction. But mostly they are not.
Several science policy experts say the former House speaker’s ideas are based in mainstream science. But somehow, Gingrich manages to make them sound way out there, taking them first a small step and then a giant leap further than where other politicians have gone.
Gingrich’s promise that “by the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon” got amped up in a recent debate in Florida, which lost thousands of jobs with the end of the space shuttle program. By then, the lunar base had become a colony and even a potential state, and his moon ideas were ridiculed by rival Mitt Romney. READ….
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