Monsanto Shifts All Liability For Damages Caused By Its GM Crops to Farmers, Now & For Perpetuity

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Monsanto is a perfect example of the worst excesses of opaque corporate shenanigans that, alongside outright political dictatorship and oppression, are direct threats to true democracy.

The Monsanto Technology Stewardship Agreement (the name itself is Orwellian in it’s use of language to obscure and not illuminate) indemnifies Monsanto against “any and all losses, injury or damages resulting from the use or handling of seed (including claims based in contract, negligence, product liability, strict liability, tort, or otherwise)…in no event shall Monsanto or any seller be liable for any incidental, consequential, special, or punitive damages.”

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Beer to be Classified as Alcohol for First Time in Russia

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Beer is now alcohol in Russia

Beer is to be legally classified as an alcoholic drink in Russia for the first time as the Kremlin forges ahead with the toughest anti-alcohol campaign since the fall of the Soviet Union. The beverage is technically classified as a foodstuff for now, an anomaly that has allowed producers to avoid a sweeping new crackdown on alcohol advertising and night-time sales.

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Alaska State Rep Refuses TSA Grope of Her Mastectomy Scars, Drives Herself Home from Seattle

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Sharon Cissna

Alaska State Rep Sharon Cissna, a breast cancer survivor who has had a mastectomy, was barred from flying home to Juneau from Seattle by the TSA when she refused to allow a screener to touch the scars from her operation. She drove home instead. Apparently she is always selected for an invasive “hand screening” because the “irregularities” presented by her prosthesis when viewed through the pornoscanner raise the TSA’s suspicions. As others have observed, the War on Terror is really a War on the Unusual — it’s the systematic erosion of rights for people with nonstandard appearance, health, itineraries, and beliefs, without regard to whether those “irregularities” are correlated with terrorist activity. It’s as though the TSAhas said, “All terrorists are engaged in something unusual, therefore all unusual occurrences should be viewed as potential terrorism.”

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The Man With 39 Wives, 94 Children And 33 Grandchildren

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He’s a families man.

He is head of the world’s biggest family – and says he is ‘blessed’ to have his 39 wives. Ziona Chana also has 94 children, 14-daughters-in-law and 33 grandchildren. They live in a 100-room, four storey house set amidst the hills of Baktwang village in the Indian state of Mizoram, where the wives sleep in giant communal dormitories…

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TSA Screeners Stole Over $200K From Fliers’ Baggage

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And to think the TSA is ‘protecting’ us.

Two TSA screeners from New York’s Kennedy airport were busted for stealing over $200,000 in cash from fliers. They targetted people they thought were drug dealers, since they didn’t think their victims would complain…

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Why Chocolate Is Bad For Dogs

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Chocolate and dogs do not mix.

To most of us, chocolate is a delicious substance. To dogs, chocolate is also delicious, but potentially lethal. Chocolate contains theobromine, a naturally occurring stimulant found in the cocoa bean. It affects the central nervous system as well as heart muscle.

It’s the theobromine that is poisonous to dogs in sufficient quantities. But it takes, on average, a fairly large amount of theobromine to cause a toxic reaction…

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Coal Costs US Public Up to $500 Billion Annually: Harvard Study

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A new look at coal in the US.

It’s well-known that the coal-fired power plants that provide the US with 50% of its electricity also inflict significant damage on the environment and citizens’ health. Coal plants spew particulate emissions that cause asthma and other respiratory woes — and they’re responsible for tens of thousands of deaths every year. And then there’s the environmental damage inflicted during the process of extracting, transporting, and processing the stuff. And then, there’s coal’s contribution to climate change. All told, it costs the nation up to $500 billion a year. That’s the finding of a new Harvard study that, for the first time, examines the true cost of coal throughout its entire life cycle …

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Mosquito-Eating Spider Likes Smelly Socks

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Spiders are better than malaria-carrying mosquitos.

A spider that preys on the malaria-carrying mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted to the odor of sweaty socks, according to a study.

Scientists in the UK and Kenya used previously worn socks in an experiment to find out if the spider, like its prey, was attracted to human odours.

The jumping spider appears to have evolved an affinity for smelly human feet in order to help find its prey.

The team reports its findings in the journal Biology Letters…

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After Almost 20 Years of Legal Battles, Chevron Fined $8 Billion for Amazon Pollution

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A slap on the hand or a slap in the face?

It’s been a long battle: people of the Ecuadorean Amazon against Chevron, which is accused of dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste sludge into the Amazon, leaving people sick with cancer and suffering miscarriages and birth defects. But the BBC reports that, after a lawsuit lasting nearly 20 years, a court in Ecuador has fined Chevron $8 billion for the pollution…

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Zapping Microbes With Electricity Could Cut Chemical Use in Wastewater by 50%

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Changing the face of mining?

The mining industry requires significant amounts of water, and the water used becomes polluted with toxins including arsenic, mercury and sulfates. Typically, the water is cleaned with microbes which do their job by adding or removing electrons from the soup, but they need to be supplemented with chemical additives. But a new process could change that, feeding microbes with electric charges instead, and cutting the need for chemicals by half, or possibly even more…

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Chinese Develop Gait-Biometrics Surveillance

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Another way to be under surveillance.

A confidential United States embassy dispatch released by Wikileaks provides details about a new technology developed by the Chinese Academy of Science to identify people by their gait.

The technology is designed to be deployed beneath existent flooring. From there it measures pedestrian pace and walking pressure to create a unique biometrics profile which can be used to identify and track the movements of individuals without their knowledge…

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EPA’s Budget To Be Slashed

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77% of Americans support the EPA

Okay, okay, we get it. House Republicans don’t like the idea of trying to reign in pollution. I mean really don’t like it. Many of them already claimed that climate change wasn’t real on the campaign trail, and said they’d fight climate legislation. Then, the powerful chairman of the House Energy Committee, Fred Upton (R-MI), has already sponsored a bill designed to prevent the EPA from enforcing the Clean Air Act, claiming it would kill jobs and whatnot. Now, House Republicans have released their vaunted plan for massive federal spending cuts. At the top of the list? The EPA.

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