All posts by alternativefreepress

Banksters, Geopolitics/War

Ukraine Using IMF Loan To Buy Gold

And The First Thing Ukraine Will Buy With IMF Money Is…

by Zero Hedge: May 6, 2014

A month ago, it was alleged, that Ukraine – under cover of night – loaded its gold reserves onto a plane and shipped them off (for safekeeping) in the US, as the potential price of ‘liberation’. So how ironic that, given the massive gas debts that Ukraine owes to Russia (and prepayments pending), and sizable bond maturities pending, the first thing that Ukraine’s National Bank governor will be buying with his freshly minted loan from the IMF is… buy a billion dollars of gold.

We presume Gazprom still gets its payment and bondholders get paid off – because that seriously impair ‘investor confidence’ which is, as they note below, is what is crucial to stabilize the nation’s economy… but it seems the Central bank has other priorities…

 

As ITAR-TASS reports,

Kiev will use the first portion of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan for augmenting its gold and currency reserves in order to stabilize the financial situation in the country, National Bank Chairman Stepan Kubiv said on Monday, May 5.

 

“Over $1 billion from the first portion of the loan will go into the gold and currency reserves of Ukraine, which will strengthen the financial system of the country. The remainder will go to the budget to stabilize the macroeconomic and financial situation in Ukraine,” he said.

 

Kubiv believes that the IMF loan “will send a positive signal to foreign investors and domestic entrepreneurs, improve the investment climate in the country and stabilize the hryvnia”.

 

On April 30, the IMF Board of Governors approved a two-year standby credit facility of $17 billion for Ukraine. The first portion will amount to around $3.2 billion.

 

What is odd is that Ukraine’s gold reserves have been soaring in recent years – so it’s hardly been a confidence-inspiring move for Ukrainian entrepreneurs and foreign investors so far?

So the big question we are left wondering is – whether all the IMF is doing is “giving” Ukraine money so it can buy gold as proxy for the NY Fed…
with that next batch of gold also set to be confiscated by the Fed and shipped off to Germany (and maybe even Switzerland) to cover their growing repatriation demands.

(read the full article at Zero Hedge)

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Drugs

A futile war on drugs that wastes money and wrecks lives

George Soros
FT: May 5, 2014

The war on drugs has been a $1tn failure. For more than four decades, governments around the world have pumped huge sums of money into ineffective and repressive anti-drug efforts. These have come at the expense of programmes that actually work such as needle exchanges and substitution therapy. This is not just a waste of money, it is counterproductive.

The London School of Economics has just completed perhaps the most thorough account of the war on drugs done to date. The conclusion, backed by five Nobel Prize-winning economists: it has done more harm than good.

Drug prohibition has created an immense black market, valued by some at $300bn. It shifts the burden of “drug control” on to producer and transit countries such as Afghanistan and Mexico. This approach also fails to grapple with a basic truth: drug markets are highly adaptive. Repress the business in one country and it springs up elsewhere.

Consider Colombia. When its law enforcement agencies made progress cracking down on the country’s cocaine trade, much of the criminal business and the violence that goes with it moved to Mexico. The LSE report estimates that after 2007, Colombia’s interdiction policies accounted for more than 20 per cent of the rise in Mexico’s murder rate.

Bogotá had a lot of mayhem to export. The explosion of the illegal drug market between 1994 and 2008 “explains roughly 25 per cent of the current homicide rate in Colombia. That translate into about 3,800 more homicides per year on average that are associated with illegal drug markets and the war on drugs”, according to the report. This type of violence takes a massive economic toll; corporations relocate, foreign investment dries up, industries decline and citizens flee in search of a better life.

The costs are not limited to producer countries; consumer nations suffer as well.

This is especially so in the US, which has less than 5 per cent of the world’s people but almost 25 per cent of the planet’s incarcerated population. Most are drug and other non-violent offenders for whom drug treatment and other alternatives to incarceration would probably prove cheaper and more effective in reducing recidivism and protecting society. Worldwide, 40 per cent of the 9m people who are incarcerated are behind bars for drug-related offences – and that figure is only likely to rise, as arrests of drug offenders in Asia, Latin America and west Africa are increasing steadily.

Despite the epic scale of human wreckage, services that could save lives and cut down on the costs to society go underfunded, or not funded at all.

(read the full article at FT)

Health/Environment

Fracking Causes Rare Earthquake Warning in Oklahoma

Deep injection wells used for the disposal of fracking waste is suspected to be the cause of unprecedented earthquake activity

Rare Earthquake Warning Issued for Oklahoma

By Becky Oskin
Live Science: May 5, 2014

Mile for mile, there are almost as many earthquakes rattling Oklahoma as California this year. This major increase in seismic shaking led to a rare earthquake warning today (May 5) from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Oklahoma Geological Survey.

In a joint statement, the agencies said the risk of a damaging earthquake — one larger than magnitude 5.0 — has significantly increased in central Oklahoma.

Geologists don’t know when or where the state’s next big earthquake will strike, nor will they put a number on the increased risk. “We haven’t seen this before in Oklahoma, so we had some concerns about putting a specific number on the chances of it,” Robert Williams, a research geophysicist with the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program in Golden, Colorado, told Live Science. “But we know from other cases around the world that if you have an increasing number of small earthquakes, the chances of a larger one will go up.” [Watch 2500+ Oklahoma Earthquakes Since 2012 (Video)]

That’s why earthquakes of magnitude 5 and larger are more frequent in states such as California and Alaska, where thousands of smaller temblors hit every year.

This is the first time the USGS has issued an earthquake warning for a state east of the Rockies, Williams said. Such seismic hazard assessments are more typically issued for Western states following large quakes, to warn residents of the risk of damaging aftershocks, he said.

The geological agencies took action after the rate of earthquakes in Oklahoma outpaced that of even California for the first few months of 2014. (California regained the lead in April.) [The 10 Biggest Earthquakes in History]

“The rate of earthquakes increased dramatically in March and April,” Williams said. “That alerted us to examine this further and put out this advisory statement.”

While Oklahoma’s buildings can withstand light earthquakes, the damage from a magnitude-5 temblor could be widespread. Oklahoma’s last major earthquake was in November 2011, when a magnitude-5.6 earthquake centered near Prague, Oklahoma, destroyed 14 homes and injured at least two people.

“Building owners and government officials should have a special concern for older, unreinforced brick structures, which are vulnerable to serious damage during sufficient shaking,” Bill Leith, a USGS senior science adviser for earthquakes and geologic hazards, said in the joint statement.

While scientists haven’t ruled out natural causes for the increase, many researchers suspect the deep injection wells used for the disposal of fracking wastewater could be causing the earthquake activity. Fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, is a method of extracting oil and gas by cracking open underground rock.

Ongoing studies have found a link between Oklahoma’s high-volume wastewater injection wells and regions with an uptick in earthquakes.

According to the USGS, the number of quakes magnitude-3 and stronger jumped by 50 percent in the past eight months in Oklahoma. Some 183 earthquakes of magnitude 3 or greater struck between October 2013 and April 14, 2014. The state’s long-term average from 1978 to 2008 was only two earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or larger per year.

(read the full article at Live Science)

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Banksters, Corporate Welfare

Too Big To Audit? Large Partnerships Escape IRS Scrutiny, GAO Reports

By Barbara Hollingsworth
CNS News: May 2, 2014

In 2011, while the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was busy scrutinizing the tax-exempt status of 100 percent of Tea Party groups and other conservative non-profits, the tax agency did not audit a single high-value electing large partnership (ELP) with more than $100 million in assets.

That’s according to a preliminary report released to Congress by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) April 17th. (See GAO.pdf)

An ELP is a business entity with more than 100 partners and more than $100 million in assets that is required to file a 1065-B tax return every year. They include large private equity firms, hedge funds and oil and gas partnerships.

“No partnerships that filed a Form 1065-B from tax years 2002 to 2011 had their tax return audited and closed by IRS from fiscal years 2007 to 2013,” a footnote on page 14 of the GAO report stated.

Jim White, a spokesman for GAO, confirmed that no ELPs were audited by the IRS between 2007 and 2013, the last year statistics are available. However, he pointed out that there were only 15 ELPs out of 105 filing 1065-B returns nationwide in 2011 that met the $100 million asset threshold.

Another 2,211 partnerships filed under IRS Form 1065 in 2011, “but only 20 audits (or less than one percent) were closed that year,” White told CNSNews.com, acknowledging that “this is a very low audit rate.”

White noted that GAO is doing a follow-up and “will be asking the IRS a number of questions to try to better understand” the tax agency’s audit decisions.

“These are the big guys,” said Amy Elliott, legal editor at the non-profit Tax Analysts, who pointed out that some ELPs have up to $20 billion in assets. “The IRS should be looking at them more.”

(Read the full article at CNS News)

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Privacy

How federal bill C-13 could give CSIS agents — or even Rob Ford — access to your personal online data

Justin Ling
National Post: May 4, 2014

A wide-ranging new federal bill that will allow Internet and cellphone providers to hand over your personal data without a warrant has privacy advocates concerned about just how many officials will have access to that information, a list that could range from CSIS agents to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford.

When passed, Tory bill C-13 will mean that any “public officer” or “peace officer” can request, obtain and use data that has been voluntarily provided to them by telecommunication companies, and it spells out legal immunity for any company that co-operates.

The officers obtaining that data can be anything from tax agents to sheriffs, reeves, justices of the peace, CSIS agents, and even, yes, mayors.

That aspect of the bill was enough of a concern for then-Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, to raise the alarm. She released a statement in November noting “the potentially large number of ‘public officers’ who would be able to use these significant new powers.”

While the much-lauded bill is supposedly targeting cyberbullying by going after those who share intimate images without consent, so-called ‘revenge porn,’ a bevy of changes sewed onto the back — touching on everything from stealing cable to catching terrorists and regulating hate propaganda — have led it to being decried as omnibus legislation by some.

Ottawa is arguing that the changes will have no substantive effect, yet privacy advocates like David Christopher, a spokesperson with Open Media, says the legislation “opens up our information to a wide range of government authorities.

“It effectively encourages telecommunications companies to hand over information to the government without a warrant and without any judicial oversight,” he says.

(read the full article at National Post)

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Drugs

Marc Emery Asks Public To Help Imprisoned Drug War POWs

By Marc Emery
Cannabis Culture: May 5, 2014

Dear Friends in the United States,

The US Sentencing Commission has just made a drug sentence amendment referred to as “Drugs Minus 2” that lowers the sentencing guidelines by 2 points, which, for newly sentenced drug offenders, will reduce their sentence by, on average, eleven months, effective on November 1, 2014.

What this amendment doesn’t do is apply retroactively to all currently incarcerated non-violent US drug war prisoners. I need your help in trying to change that.

As you may be aware, US federal penalties for drug offenses are among the most severe and unforgiving in the world. What I need my American friends to do is send a letter to the US SENTENCING COMMISSION and urge them to make this new AMENDMENT retroactive so all currently incarcerated federal non-violent drug prisoners, including those sentenced for marijuana offenses, have some time shaved off their sentences.

As my sentence ends in 2 months, on July 9, I do not benefit by this proposed amendment.

It would be tremendously appreciated by the over 100,000 non-violent drug war prisoners in US federal prisons if compassionate US citizens would write a brief letter to:

The Office of Public Affairs
U.S. Sentencing Commission
One Columbus Circle, N.E.,
Suite 2-500,
Washington, DC, 20002-8002

Please send a letter similar to or exactly as follows:

Re: Retroactive Application of Drug Amendment 3: Drugs Minus-2

Dear Member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission;

I am writing you as a US citizen in favor of the retroactive application of the recent amendment 3; commonly known as Drugs Minus-2 to the federal drug guidelines. I believe the benefit of this amendment should apply to all of the 100,000+ non-violent drug offenders currently incarcerated in US federal prisons, as well as those newly sentenced after November 1, 2014, when the new guidelines will take effect.

The Commission’s data reflects that public safety was not endangered by the retroactive application of the crack cocaine sentencing amendments. I urge you to make a similar decision in regards this amendment’s application also. Moreover, the federal courts have the institutional capacity and experience following the retroactive crack cocaine amendments to handle an influx of sentence reduction motions from incarcerated defendants.

Please make this Amendment retroactive, without limitation, to all who may currently be incarcerated in US federal prisons who would qualify.

Sincerely,
Name:
Address
City/State/Zip

Marc Emery is a Canadian marijuana activist currently imprisoned in the United States for selling marijuana seeds and using the money to fund political activism. Find out more about him at FreeMarc.ca

Source: Cannabis Culture

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Geopolitics/War

New York Times Finds No Russians Among Slavyansk Self-Defense Forces

RT: May 4, 2012

Self-defense forces in the anti-Kiev stronghold of Slavyansk are Ukrainians, not Russians, who distrust the new regime and the Western powers that support it, New York Times reporters have discovered. The forces also said they are not being paid to fight.

Two New York Times reporters have spent a week in the city of Slavyansk in eastern Ukraine, talking to members of the self-defense forces. The journalists visited self-defense checkpoints and observed the forces as they battled Ukrainian troops amid a military assault on the city on Friday.

The resistance fighters of the 12th Company, part of the People’s Self-Defense of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, deny claims made by Kiev and its Western sponsors that Russia or private tycoons are paying them to fight.

“This is not a job,” one of the activists, Dmitry told the NYT reporters. “It is a service.”

Armed with dated weapons, the self-defense activists said they would have bought new weapons if they had financial support. The NYT journalists reported seeing weapons from the 1980s and 1990s in checkpoints and warehouses.

The activists explained that they purchased some of their weaponry from corrupt Ukrainian soldiers, while taking others from seized police buildings or confiscating them from captured Ukrainian armored vehicles.

“Much of their stock was identical to the weapons seen in the hands of Ukrainian soldiers and Interior Ministry Special Forces troops at government positions outside the city,” the NYT reporters said in an article published on Saturday.

“These included 9-millimeter Makarov pistols, Kalashnikov assault rifles, and a few Dragunov sniper rifles, RPK light machine guns and portable antitank rockets, including some with production stamps from the 1980s and early 1990s.”

The head of Slavyansk self-defense, Yury, also chuckled at claims made by Kiev authorities and the West that Russians are fighting side by side with them.

“We have no Muscovites here,” Yury told the journalists. “I have experience enough.”

Many of the Company’s 119 members, who range in age from their 20s to their 50s, have served in the Soviet or Ukrainian infantry, airborne, special forces, or air-defense units, the reporters said. Yury, in his mid 50s, noted that his experience includes four years as a Soviet small-unit commander in Kandahar, Afghanistan in the 1980s.

“There was no clear Russian link in the 12th Company’s arsenal,” the reporters said.

While visiting checkpoints for more than a week, the NYT reporters said they saw much support for the self-defense forces from local residents, who primary provided the activists with food.

“To the guys in Kiev, we are separatists and terrorists,” Yury said. “But to the people here, we are defenders and protectors.”
[…]

“All spoke of disgust with the interim authorities in Kiev,” the NYT reporters noted in their article.

The eastern Ukrainians have made up their minds, Yury told the journalists, adding that they are demanding a referendum and will go to war in the case of a refusal. He added that people in the region are puzzled by the West’s support of the coup in Kiev and blatant disregard for eastern Ukrainians’ opinions and rights.

“Why did America support those acts, but is in opposition to ours?” Maksim, a young former paratrooper asked. “These are the contradictions of the West.”

(read the full article at RT)

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Drugs

Injecting some evidence

Charlie Bell
The Tab Cambridge: May 3, 2014

Drugs are not something that many of us feel terribly comfortable talking about – but after hearing CUCA’s debate on the subject this week, it got me thinking. Because the main thing that simply wasn’t on the agenda is evidence – and to me, that’s where any debate on the use, abuse, or whatever, of these drugs should begin, continue and end with. Call me a boring medic, with slavish obedience to scientific method and evidence-based policy, but to tackle something like legalisation of drugs and its ramifications without it, you are an idiot.

We can all scream our political ideology and score cheap points – God knows I enjoy doing that – but drugs are too important to mess about with, and it’s time our generation started to demand the subject was properly covered. At the moment we live in a somewhat bonkers world where we all know of a lot of people who have taken, or are currently taking, illegal drugs (or their equivalent legal highs), but daren’t admit it just in case it wrecks our careers. Whilst arrests and criminalisation are very unlikely, any vicious ladder-climber who wanted to bring anyone in a profession down could do so pretty easily by alleging they took drugs.

Sometimes people get away with it – even politicians seem to be able to admit to breaking the law with drugs as kids and not getting sacked. You only have to open a copy of Closer or similar (those delicious shit buckets of gutter journalistic tripe) to read the most outlandish drug confessions or celebrity bustings. Whilst most of them are too stupid to realise the potential consequences, there seems also to be a consensus amongst the police and indeed politicians that drug abusers won’t, on the whole, be prosecuted, particularly if they use ‘soft’ drugs. Which, of course, is an entirely misleading word.

Illegal, and indeed legal, drugs often have the propensity to be very addictive – hence those who use them often become addicts. It’s not rocket science; and given the huge number of drugs that are illegal, these people immediately become criminals. Also criminals are the providers and traffickers – and you don’t have to look outside the traditional gap-yah destinations to find a nice death penalty waiting for you if you rock up with a suitcase full of heroin.

[…]

The argument as to whether people should be treated on the NHS is an old one – should patients be treated for heart disease even if they are the size of a cross-channel ferry? More pertinently, should drunken slobs be given free treatment to vacuum out their stomach on a Friday night, after they’ve quite deliberately overindulged? To many, the points are similar – if you do something stupid, you should pay, or conversely, if we live in a society where everyone pays in, you should be able to do what you like. These arguments will go on and on – but for drugs, it’s slightly different, because many of them are illegal in the first place.

But to me, all of this seems to illustrate my point – where is the evidence for what drugs actually do, for how addictive they are, and for the risks they bring? Just as importantly, where are the comparisons with alcohol, or smoking, or all the other legal substances we use to escape from the mundanity of exam term? Is history really a good enough reason for alcohol to be legal but other drugs not? What even is a ‘drug’? And how about tobacco? We know it kills, in a grim, grim way – it’s almost guaranteed – yet that’s still legal?

It’s time for us to have a proper debate about this stuff, and to re-evaluate exactly why these kinds of substances are legal or illegal. We’re not in a strong position at the moment – not that long ago, the government sacked Prof David Nutt from the drugs advisory board because his evidence didn’t support policy. Sure, it might turn out that alcohol is more damaging than other drugs – but that would already be the case if that were to be found out, and it’s better to know than to continue in dangerous ignorance. Not until we know the effects of these things can we start to decide how to properly police them – certainly not without the entirely justified allegations of arbitrary decision-making and legal laziness.

(Read the full article at The Tab Cambridge)

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Geopolitics/War

Australians were killed by a US drone strike, and we deserve to know why

Antony Loewenstein
The Guardian : April 29, 2014

The news that the US had killed two Australian “militants” in a drone strike was announced in mid-April. Christopher Havard and “Muslim bin John”, who also held New Zealand citizenship, were allegedly killed by a CIA-led airstrike in eastern Yemen in November last year.

Readers were given little concrete information, apart from a “counter-terrorism source” who claimed that both men were foot soldiers for Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, though they may also have been collateral damage (the real target being other terror heads).

The Australian government claimed ignorance of the entire operation. “There was no Australian involvement in, or prior awareness of, the operation”, a spokesman said. New Zealand prime minister John Key released some more details, saying that the country’s GCSB spies had been authorised to spy on him. “I knew that he had gone there [to Yemen] and gone to a terrorist training camp”, he stated.

Since publication of these bare facts, little new information has emerged from the government or other sources – except for some reporting in The Australian about Havard’s apparent transformation after he converted to Islam in his early 20s and went to Yemen to teach English. The paper editorialised in support of the strike: “to be killed in this way is regrettable”, it wrote, but obliterating civilians without a trial was acceptable because “such attacks have done much to stop the terrorists committing even more atrocities.” There was no condemnation of the scores of civilians killed by drones since 9/11.

It’s of course morally convenient to believe that the death of these men will make the world a safer place by removing “threats” without the need to place western soldiers in harm’s way – this is, after all, the apparently compelling logic of drone warfare. But it’s a myth challenged by the former drone pilots featured in the recently released documentary Drone, in which ex-Air Force pilot Michael Haas explains that:

You never know who you’re killing, because you never actually see a face. You just have a silhouette. They don’t have to take a shot. They don’t have to bear that burden. I’m the one that has to bear that burden.

Yet, uncertainty be damned, the Australian government seems to keep on supporting the CIA killings with most of the media following without question.

(Read the full article at The Guardian)

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Health/Environment

Monsanto GMO Soy Is Scarier Than You Think

By Tom Philpott
Mother Jones: April 23, 2014

Soybeans are the second-largest US crop after corn, covering about a quarter of American farmland. We grow more soybeans than any other country except Brazil. According to the US Department of Agriculture, more than 90 percent of the soybeans churned out on US farms each year are genetically engineered to withstand herbicides, nearly all of them involving one called Roundup.
[…]

After harvest, the great bulk of soybeans are crushed and divided into two parts: meal, which mainly goes into feed for animals that become our meat, and fat, most of which ends up being used as cooking oil or in food products. According to the US Soy Board, soy accounts for 61 percent of American’s vegetable oil consumption.

Given soy’s centrality to our food and agriculture systems, the findings of a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Food Chemistry are worth pondering. The authors found that Monsanto’s ubiquitous Roundup Ready soybeans, engineered to withstand its own blockbuster herbicide, contain more herbicide residues than their non-GMO counterparts. The team also found that the GM beans are nutritionally inferior.

In the study, the researchers looked at samples of three kinds of soybeans grown in Iowa: (1) those grown from GM herbicide-tolerant seeds; (2) those grown from non-GM seeds but in a conventional, agrichemical-based farming regime; and (3) organic soybeans, i.e., non-GM and grown without agrichemicals.

They found residues of glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) and aminomethylphosphonic acid, or AMPA, the compound glyphosate breaks down into as it decays, on all 10 of the GM samples—and in none of the non-GM and organic ones.

The GMO soy had total residues averaging 11.9 parts per million, with a maximum reading of 20.1 ppm; the average is well below the Environmental Protection Agency’s limit of 20 ppm, a limit shared by the European Union. Yet as the authors note, back in 1999, Monsanto itself reported that the maximum recorded reading of glyphosate residue found on Roundup Ready soy was 5.6 ppm—a level it called “extreme” and “far higher than those typically found.”

So, the researchers found residue levels well below the EPA’s limit, but hovering above a level Monsanto itself has characterized as “extreme.” What to make of it?

As the authors note, the science around the effects of glyphosate at relatively low levels is controversial. By setting the residue limit at 20 parts per million, US and European regulators are endorsing a no-harm view. But some independent research, including a 2012 study (my account here) by University of Pittsburgh scientist Rick Relyea, found that Roundup in water at 3 ppm induced morphological changes in frogs. And in a 2012 paper, German researchers subjected various bacterial strains typically found in the guts of poultry to glyphosate at levels of 5 ppm and lower and found that it tended to harm beneficial bacteria like Lactobacillus, while pathogens like Salmonella entritidi tended to be “highly resistant” to it. The results suggest that glyphosate can shift the balance of the gut microbiota—hardly comforting, given the surge in research finding that subtle changes to the bacteria in our bodies have a huge impact on our health.

The study also found small but statistically significant differences in the nutritional quality of the soybean types: The organic soybeans had slightly higher protein levels than the other two, and lower levels of omega-6 fatty acids. Omega-3 fatty acids showed no significant difference. Both fats are essential in human diets, but research suggests that US eaters tend to consume a higher ratio of omega-6 acids to omega-3 acids than is healthy.

It’s worth noting that food isn’t glyphosate’s only pathway to our bodies. In a 2011 study, researchers for the US Geological Survey “frequently detected” glyphosate in surface waters, rain, and air in the Mississippi River basin. “The consistent occurrence of glyphosate in streams and air indicates its transport from its point of use into the broader environment,” USGS stated in a press release, adding that “we know very little about its long term effects to the environment.”

Charles Benbrook, a Washington State University researcher who documented the rise in glyphosate use that has accompanied Roundup Ready crops, told me that “human dietary exposure to glyphosate is now probably the highest ever for any pesticide used in the US.” When you consider the additional doses we get through water and air, the chemical stands “in a class by itself” in terms of human exposure. “I sure hope EPA is right in its evaluation of the toxicity of glyphosate,” he said.

Thus a plague of herbicide-resistant weeds and a corresponding spike in herbicide use may not be the only black marks against Monsanto’s blockbuster Roundup Ready crops.

(read the full article at Mother Jones)

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