Judge Orders Complete Environmental Review of Monsanto's Gene-Altered Alfalfa

San Francisco, CA - A Federal judge today made a final ruling that the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) 2005 approval of Monsanto's genetically engineered (GE) "Roundup Ready" alfalfa was illegal. The Judge called on USDA to ban any further planting of the GE seed until it conducts a complete Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the GE crop.

In the decision, Judge Charles Breyer in the Federal Northern District of California affirmed his preliminary ruling, which echoed the Center for Food Safety's arguments in their lawsuit against USDA, that the crop could harm the environment and contaminate natural alfalfa. Today's ruling also requires Forage Genetics to provide the locations of all existing Roundup Ready alfalfa plots to USDA within 30 days. The Judge ordered USDA to make the location of these plots "publicly available as soon as practicable" so that growers of organic and conventional alfalfa "can test their own crops to determine if there has been contamination."

The president just vetoed a plan that would bring our troops home from Iraq this year. There's a huge amount of pressure right now on Democrats in Congress to compromise and give the president what he wants. We need to make sure Congress stands firm on a deadline to end the war--instead of sending another blank check. Can you help out by signing the petition at the link below? It'll only take a second. petition

A powerful punch in a small package

I’ve always been a sucker for movies – they are such a vibrant art form, engaging so many of the senses. I’m a big reader, but I sheepishly admit that a movie telling the same story does have a number of advantages. One is that a viewer doesn’t have to work as hard as a reader, or spend as much time. The producer has already made those hard artistic choices, and the result is shorter and already partially digested. (You could argue that this is a downside to movies, but I am focusing here on the positive aspects.)

A movie has the ability to pull us down into the rabbit hole of the producer’s creation. I personally understand the power of film, as the documentary Invisible Ballots launched my initial leap into activism through my lending library project. Almost 3,200 copies later, I’m definitely sold on a film’s ability to make a case.

While the natural human fascination with gossip and backbiting among our rulers guarantees media coverage and best-seller status for George Tenet's new memoir, the former CIA director cannot achieve absolution in print or on television. His clumsy attempts to shift the blame to Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and their rebuttals are titillating but ultimately pointless. He is right about them, of course, but they are right about him, too.

            History will absolve none of them. With thousands of Americans and Iraqis dead and national honor permanently tarnished, there is more than enough blame to go around.

            As a group of former intelligence officers observed in a letter they sent to Tenet upon the publication of "At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA," his outrage over the misleading propaganda that led to the war is belated and utterly self-serving. During the critical months between September 2002 and March 2003, in the midst of that White House campaign, he was nothing but the useful tool of those he now criticizes.

Bobby

Bobby is an ensemble film about the disparate characters at the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel during the events leading up to Robert Kennedy's assassination there in June, 1968. Directed by actor Emilio Estevez, the film portrays various racial and class conflicts among the characters. They include a retired doorman, a soldier to be and his fiancée, an aging alcoholic singer and her miserable musician husband, two campaign workers who drop acid with a hippie, a Czech reporter who tries to get an interview with Kennedy, only to be rebuffed by a campaign official, to name a few characters.