Carey Gillam, - Reader Supported News/The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: This lawsuit has the potential to either bring Monsanto to heel, or legitimate its practices. I'm sure you have noticed this is a replay of the suppression of research showing the correlation of smoking with lung cancer. I will follow this because, in my view, these products should not be sold.
Monsanto has been accused of hiding the dangers of its popular Roundup products for decades, a claim the company denies.
Credit: Benoit Tessier/Reuters)
At the age of 46, DeWayne Johnson is not ready to die. But with cancer spread through most of his body, doctors say he probably has just months to live. Now Johnson, a husband and father of three in California, hopes to survive long enough to make Monsanto take the blame for his fate.
On 18 June, Johnson will become the first person to take the global seed and chemical company to trial on allegations that it has spent decades hiding the cancer-causing dangers of its popular Roundup herbicide products – and his case has just received a major boost.
Last week Judge Curtis Karnow issued an order clearing the way for jurors to consider not just scientific evidence related to what caused Johnson’s cancer, but allegations that Monsanto suppressed evidence of the risks of its weed killing products. Karnow ruled that the trial will proceed and a […]
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Robin Lustig, Presenter, The Future of English, BBC World Service - BBC News
Stephan: Here is a very thoughtful essay on the English language.
Credit: Getty
English is spoken by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, but do the development of translation technology and “hybrid” languages threaten its status?
Which country boasts the most English speakers, or people learning to speak English?
The answer is China.
According to a study published by Cambridge University Press, up to 350 million people there have at least some knowledge of English – and at least another 100 million in India.
There are probably more people in China who speak English as a second language than there are Americans who speak it as their first. (A fifth of Americans speak a language other than English in their own homes.)
But for how much longer will English qualify as the “world’s favourite language”? The World Economic Forum estimates about 1.5 billion people around the world speak it – but fewer than 400 million have it as their first language.
Damian Carrington, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: When you think about the Matrix of Life, think about this.
A cattle farm in Mato Grosso, Brazil. 60% of all mammals on Earth are livestock.
Credit: Daniel Beltra
Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life on Earth by a groundbreaking new assessment of all life on the planet.
The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study. Yet since the dawn of civilisation, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants, while livestock kept by humans abounds.
Another surprise is that the teeming life revealed in the oceans by the recent BBC television series Blue Planet II turns out to represent just 1% of all biomass. The vast majority of life is land-based and a large chunk – an eighth – is bacteria buried deep below the surface.
“I was shocked to find there wasn’t already a comprehensive, holistic estimate of all the different components of biomass,” said Prof Ron Milo, at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, who led […]
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Sarah Boseley, Health Editor - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Our obsession over germs and bacteria, as this report lays out, has taken us into realms where it has become self-defeating, indeed self-sabotaging. There have been a number of research studies showing that children who grow up in homes where there are pets have stronger immune systems than children who do not.
More recently, and I have run all this in SR so check the archives, research has shown that the Amish live healthier and longer lives in part because of their interactions with farm animals and the earth itself.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that children show play outdoors, that they should be exposed in the normal course of their lives with bacteria and germs, and that attempts to shield them from the earth's ecosystem is a mistake.
Part of the solution to childhood acute leukaemia could be to ensure children under the age of one have social contact with others, possibly at daycare centres.
Credit: Alamy
Clean modern homes, antiseptic wipes and the understandable desire to protect small babies against any infection are all part of the cause of the most common form of childhood cancer, a leading expert has concluded after more than 30 years of research.
Childhood acute leukaemia, says the highly respected Prof Mel Greaves, is nothing to do with power lines or nuclear fuel reprocessing stations. Nor is it to do with hot dogs and hamburgers or the Vatican radio mast, as have also been suggested. After the best part of a century of speculation, some of it with little basis in science, Greaves – who recently won the Royal Society’s prestigious Royal Medal – says the cancer is caused by a combination of genetic mutations and a lack of childhood infection.
The best […]
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Jon Lee Anderson, Staff Writer - The New Yorker
Stephan: The Republican congress is as pusillanimous a group of creeps as one could conjure up in a novel, providing a study in failure. Every day they place party, and personal power over the wellbeing of country. Happily, there are still men and women of honor in government service. Here is the story of one of them.
Ambassador John Feeley
“My values are not his values,” John Feeley said, of Trump. He quit this March.
Illustration by Lincoln Agnew. Photographs by (from top to bottom): Arnulfo Franco / AP (head); DAJ / Getty (body); Mark Reinstein / Corbis / Getty (building); Helovi / Getty (beach)
John Feeley, the Ambassador to Panama and a former Marine helicopter pilot, is not averse to strong language, but he was nevertheless startled by his first encounter with President Donald Trump. Summoned to deliver a briefing in June, 2017, he was outside the Oval Office when he overheard Trump concluding a heated conversation, “Fuck him! Tell him to sue the government.” Feeley was escorted in, and saw that Mike Pence, John Kelly, and several other officials were in the room. As he took a seat, Trump asked, “So tell me—what do we get from Panama? What’s in it for us?” Feeley presented a litany of benefits: help with counter-narcotics work and migration control, commercial efforts linked to the Panama Canal, […]
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