from Mother Jones
Last August, Shell got a long-awaited go-ahead from US regulators to begin exploratory oil drilling in the Arctic. It's a potential gold mine for the company — up to a fifth of the world's untapped oil resources are in the Arctic. But instead of rolling in cash, Shell ended up getting rolled by one disaster after another, culminating in the crash in January of drilling rig and a subsequent investigation by the feds…
from Mother Jones
Despite persisting concerns over genetically modified crops, a new industry report (PDF) shows that GMO farming is taking off around the world. In 2012, GMO crops grew on about 420 million acres of land in 28 countries worldwide, a record high according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications, an industry trade group…
from Al Jazeera
from The Nation
In Chicago, Black History Month is a time when some of us reflect on one of our poorest-kept secrets, an ongoing injustice born of brutal, systemic racism, which has spread over a generation and whose stain is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city..
from The Independent
Controversial nerve-agent pesticides widely linked to decline in bees around the world should be banned, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) says today…
by Steven Staples, from The Ottawa Citizen
The Canadian public is leery of the role being played by our military in the troubled West African country of Mali, and rightly so. Having emerged from the sacrifices made in Afghanistan with seemingly little to show for them, Canadians cannot be faulted for fearing “mission creep” and involvement in another unwinnable conflict…
from Democracy Now
Thursday’s confirmation hearing for CIA nominee John Brennan was briefly postponed to clear the room of activists from CODEPINK after they repeatedly disrupted Brennan’s testimony. One woman held a list of Pakistani children killed in US drone strikes. Former US diplomat Col Ann Wright interrupted Brennan while wearing a sign around her neck with the name of Tariq Aziz, a 16-year-old Pakistani boy who was killed in a US drone strike in 2011. Wright and seven others were arrested. We speak to CODEPINK founder Medea Benjamin, who also disrupted the meeting and recently visited Pakistan to speak with victims of drone strikes. "It’s not only the killing, it’s the terrorizing of entire populations, where they hear the drones buzzing overhead 24 hours a day, where they’re afraid to go to school, afraid to go to the markets, to funerals, to weddings, where it disrupts entire communities," Benjamin says. "And we are trying to get this information to our elected officials, to say, 'You are making us unsafe here at home,' to say nothing of how illegal, immoral and inhumane these policies are." …
from The Ottawa Citizen
OTTAWA — Nuclear officials are preparing to secretly transport a toxic stew of liquid bomb-grade uranium by armed convoy from Chalk River to a South Carolina reprocessing site…
from Mother Jones
Last year's drought took a big bite out of the two most prodigious US crops, corn and soy. But it apparently didn't slow down the spread of weeds that have developed resistance to Monsanto's herbicide Roundup (glyphosate), used on crops engineered by Monsanto to resist it. More than 70 percent of all the the corn, soy, and cotton grown in the US is now genetically modified to withstand glyphosate…
