Category Archives: Viva!

EU bans neonics; U.S. bees not so lucky

Bee buzzing



After years of strong scientific evidence and even stronger advocacy, this week European officials decided to make a temporary ban on three bee-harming pesticides permanent. This is very, very good news for bees in Europe.

The decision reflects years of hard work by our PAN partners and many others. It also spotlights just how far behind we are in the U.S. — not only with our pollinator protection efforts, but in how we regulate pesticides overall.

U.S. pollinators not so lucky

A few years ago, national momentum to protect honeybees and other pollinators from pesticides seemed to be building here in the U.S. A high-profile White House Pollinator Health Task Force officially recognized the importance and urgency of problem, and promised a comprehensive action plan.

Not surprisingly, the effort attracted the attention of pesticide industry lobbyists, and the Task Force ended up punting any meaningful action to the states.

The science on the harms neonicotinoid pesticides (aka “neonics”) cause to honey bees and other pollinators continued to mount, as did evidence that neonics provided little actual benefit to farmers. Yet states have by and large failed to step up to the plate. Pressure from pesticide manufacturers appears to have played a role here as well. Seeing a pattern here anyone?

State action stymied too

Minnesota provides a telling example. In the face of mounting scientific evidence and strong public concern about bee-harming pesticides, the state Department of Agriculture conducted a Neonic Review — and in 2016 released a strong set of recommended actions to protect pollinators in the state.

Governor Dayton then signed an executive order setting the changes in motion, and establishing a “Committee on Pollinator Protection” to track implementation and recommend what else could be done. PAN and our partners in the state celebrated these groundbreaking commitments, and held up Minnesota as an example for others to follow.

Then came the pushback.

In last year’s legislative session, lawmakers did all they could to undermine pollinator protection measures and state pesticide rules. While PAN and our partners were able to hold the line against the most egregious rollbacks, legislators were clearly keen to weaken pollinator protections in the state — just as industry lobbyings were pressing them to do. 

What do they have that we don’t?

So how is it that the entire European Union can agree to take the top three bee-harming pesticides off the market, but it’s so difficult to get even minimal protections in place here in the U.S.? While there’s certainly no simple answer to this question, I’d point to a few key facts.

First, European regulators seem to actually be aware that the pesticide industry has a vested interest in keeping their products on the market. Somehow officials here in the U.S. seem to have missed this — or don’t think it matters — and give the interests of industry “stakeholders” the same (or more) weight than those advocating for the public good.

Second, scientific evidence has more influence on policy making in the EU. While it still takes advocacy to make this happen (as our PAN UK and PAN EU partners know well), the value placed on independent science stands in stark contrast to the increasingly post-truth, politicized rulemaking process here across the pond.

EPA process rewards delay

And finally, Europe takes less of an “innocent until proven guilty” approach to pesticides. When evidence shows a product may be causing harm, it’s quickly taken off the market until manufacturers can prove otherwise, in the interest of public and/or environmental health.

Hence the moratorium on neonic use that was put in place three years ago, and made permanent this week.

In the U.S., a pesticide can be flagged as a “chemical of concern” and stay on the market for years — even decades — while manufactures pay their scientists to (slowly) make the case that their products are safe. Every additional season on the market means one more year of profit; incentives are strong to drag out the process as far as possible.

Avoiding the treadmill

Whether here or in Europe, one of our top objectives at PAN is dismantling the pesticide treadmill, or as our colleagues in the UK call it, the

pesticide merry-go-round, whereby chemicals banned because of their environmental and health impacts are simply replaced by similarly toxic alternatives

We strongly support the efforts of our colleagues in the UK and Europe to ensure the neonics that were recently banned are not replaced by “similarly toxic alternatives.” Let’s support practices that benefit farmers, rural communities and the environment instead.

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thefingerfuckingfemalefury: cheskamouse: thedevilspanties: spar…

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thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

cheskamouse:

thedevilspanties:

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viridieanfey:

romanimp:

beatnikdaddio:

admiring the stockings. 1940’s.

#[40S COMMERCIAL ANNOUNCER VOICE] WHAT’S BETTER THAN THIS? GALS BEING PALS

Fun fact: Though being gay in the 40s sucked, being gay in the military was easier, and pretty common. There were apparently, at one point in time time so many lesbians in the military that when they tried to crack down on it, the girls wrote back and said “Look I can give you the names, but you’ll lose some of your best officers, and half your nurses and secretaries.” And they pretty much shut up about it unless you were especially bad at subtlety. (Source: Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. A good source for gay history from 1900s onwards.)

Sergeant Phelps worked for General Eisenhower. Four decades after Eisenhower had defeated the Axis powers, Phelps recalled an extraordinary event. One day the general told her, “I’m giving you an order to ferret those lesbians out.’ We’re going to get rid of them.”

“I looked at him and then I looked at his secretary. who was standing next to me, and I said, ‘Well, sir, if the general pleases, sir, I’ll be happy to do this investigation for you. But you have to know that the first name on the list will be mine.’

“And he kind of was taken aback a bit. And then this woman standing next to me said, ‘Sir, if the general pleases, you must be aware that Sergeant Phelps’s name may be second, but mine will be first.’

“Then I looked at him, and I said, ‘Sir, you’re right. They’re lesbians in the WAC battalion. And if the general is prepared to replace all the file clerks, all the section commanders, all of the drivers—every woman in the WAC detachment—and there were about nine hundred and eighty something of us—then I’ll be happy to make the list. But I think the general should be aware that among those women are the most highly decorated women in the war. There have been no cases of illegal pregnancies. There have been no cases of AWOL. There have been no cases of misconduct. And as a matter of fact, every six months since we’ve been here, sir, the general has awarded us a commendation for meritorious service.’

“And he said, ‘Forget the order.’

– The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America

I’ve reblogged this before but it didn’t have these comments and HOLY HOT DAMN DID IT NEED THEM.

So, when someone sits down to write a fiction about Women commandos, and a Dudebro steps in to say “Huh, that is so unrealistic huh.” 

Harold… oh, Harold…sit down, shut up, and stay out of our way.

History is infinitely gayer than a lot of people want to admit

Cambridge Analytica is out of business, but its heavy hitters have reopened under a new name

Cambridge Analytica may be out of business thanks to bad publicity, but “Emerdata” is a new company, whose board includes the daughters of Robert Mercer, who bankrolled Cambridge Analytica; disgraced former Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix is on its board of directors, and much of Cambridge Analytica’s C-suite has packed up their desks and moved into the Emerdata offices.

The company was formed in August 2017 and has been largely dormant until March 2018, when a flurry of activity that moved key personnel over from Cambridge Analytica began.

It isn’t clear what Emerdata does, though the company is listed under “data processing, hosting, and related activities.” It shares an address in Canary Wharf with Cambridge Analytica’s parent, SCL Group.

Another notable company director is Johnson Chun Shun Ko, the deputy chairman of Frontier Services Group.

Frontier is a private security firm which mostly operates in Africa and is currently chaired by US businessman and prominent Trump supporter Erik Prince. Prince is best known for founding private military group Blackwater US and is the brother of US education secretary Betsy DeVos.

The power players behind Cambridge Analytica have set up a mysterious new data company [Shona Ghosh/Business Insider]

Giuliani: Trump repaid Cohen for Stormy Daniels settlement

In a television interview that appeared to contradict President Donald Trump’s prior statements, Trump’s new lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said Wednesday night that Trump had repaid Michael Cohen for the $130,000 he facilitated to Stormy Daniels in 2016.

“It’s not campaign money. No campaign finance violation,” Giuliani told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “[They] funneled through a law firm, and then the president repaid it.”

Later, Hannity returned to the topic, asking Giuliani to “clarify” what he was talking about.

“I was talking about the $130,000 payment, the settlement payment” Giuliani said bluntly, explaining, “That was money that was paid by his lawyer — the way I would do, out of his law firm funds, or whatever funds, it doesn’t matter — and the president reimbursed that over the period of several months.”

Rudy Giuliani says Trump knew about “the general arrangement” that Michael Cohen “would take care of things like” porn star payments and Trump repaid the $130,000 that Cohen paid to Stormy Daniels. pic.twitter.com/8TuSfwe5qM

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) May 3, 2018

Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, had facilitated the payment in connection with a 2016 settlement agreement signed by Stormy Daniels, the adult film star whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford.

Asked aboard Air Force One on April 5 about whether he even knew about the payment, Trump simply said, “No.” Asked why Cohen made the payment, Trump said, “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen. Michael is my attorney. You’ll have to ask Michael.”

EXCLUSIVE: @MichaelAvenatti responds to Rudy Giuliani claiming Trump repaid Stormy Daniels hush money. pic.twitter.com/d56nAQVKoS

— The Last Word (@TheLastWord) May 3, 2018

Asked whether Trump knew about the payment at the time, Giuliani said, “He didn’t know about the specifics of it, as far as I know. But he did know about the general arrangement, that Michael would take care of things like this — like I take care of things like this for my clients. I don’t burden them with every single thing that comes along. These are busy people.”

Michael Avenatti, Daniels’ lawyer in two pending lawsuits against Trump, responded on Twitter, saying, “Mr. Trump stood on AF1 and blatantly lied. … This should never be acceptable in our America.”

EDITORIAL: California Exoneration Shows Why Death Penalty Needs to End

In an April 27 editorial, the Los Angeles Times said the death penalty should come to an end and the recent exoneration of California death-row prisoner Vicente Benavides Figueroa illustrates why. Benavides — an intellectually disabled Mexican national who was working as a seasonal farm worker — spent more than 25 years on death row after being wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death on charges of raping, sodomizing, and murdering his girlfriend’s 21-month-old daughter. His conviction rested on extensive false forensic testimony provided by prosecution medical witnesses who had been given incomplete hospital records and who erroneously testified that the child had been sexually assaulted. One California Supreme Court justice described that testimony as “among the most hair-raising false evidence that I’ve encountered in all the time that I’ve been looking at criminal cases.” The Times called Benavides’s conviction “an egregious miscarriage of justice” and said “[h]is exoneration serves as a reminder of what ought to be abundantly clear by now: that despite jury trials, appellate reconsideration and years of motions and counter-motions, the justice system is not infallible, and it is possible (or perhaps inevitable) that innocent people will end up facing execution at the hands of the state.” Benavides’s case was prosecuted in Kern County during the administration of long-time District Attorney Ed Jagels. Elected multiple times to head the California District Attorneys Association, Jagels successfully pushed to remove three justices from the California Supreme Court whom he claimed were anti-death-penalty. His official Web page as district attorney touted that Kern had the highest per-capita imprisonment rate of any county in state, and as of January 1, 2013, the county had more people on its death row than were sentenced to death in more than 99% of U.S. counties. The county also has the highest per capita exoneration rate in the state. Benavides is reportedly the 26th innocent person wrongly convicted by Kern County prosecutors, most of whom were wrongly convicted as a result of official misconduct. As of March 2015, 22 of the 24 Kern County exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations had involved official misconduct by police, prosecutors, or other government officials. Benavides’s exoneration, the Times said, is also a reminder “of the dangers inherent in California’s efforts to speed up the calendar for death penalty appeals under Proposition 66 …. Moving more quickly to execute convicted death row inmates increases the likelihood that due process will be given short shrift and the innocent will be put to death.” The records that showed 21-month-old Consuelo Verdugo had not been sexually assaulted — and that cast doubt on whether she had been murdered at all — were not discovered until 7 years after trial. The one year that Proposition 66 gives appellate lawyers to investigate cases and file appeals makes it less likely that they will discover such evidence “and thus more likely that innocent people will be put to death.” Washington Post columnist Radley Balko put it more starkly: “if Prop 66 had been in place when Mr. Benavides was convicted, he’d almost certainly be dead. He’d never have lived to see his exoneration.” Balko notes that “[t]his problem isn’t just limited to California. Even as we learn more about the extent of wrongful convictions, prosecutor misconduct and misuse of forensic evidence, states such as Texas, Alabama and Florida have also moved toward limiting appeals and speeding up executions.” He says “[i]t’s almost as if some lawmakers and law enforcement officials think that the problem with wrongful convictions isn’t that there are too many of them, but that they’re bad PR for the law-and-order cause. And that the best way to make them go away isn’t to fix the problems that allowed them to happen, but to execute people before we ever get the chance to learn that they’re innocent.” But the problems, the Times editors said, may be beyond repair. “The unfixable problem with the death penalty is that mistakes get made, witnesses lie, confessions get coerced — all factors that can lead to false convictions. It is abjectly immoral to speed things up by limiting due process. The better solution,” the editors conclude, “is to get rid of the death penalty altogether.”

(Editorial, The latest California death row exoneration shows why we need to end the death penalty, Los Angeles Times, April 27, 2018; Radley Balko, The Watch: As California moves to speed up executions, a man is exonerated after 25 years on death row, The Washington Post, April 30, 2018; CA: Prosecutor’s Fabrication is Tip of the Iceberg When It Comes to Government Misconduct in Kern County, The Open File, March 9, 2015.) See Editorials and Innocence.

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Trump’s doctor is a warning to all the footsoldiers and loyal colluders | Zoe Williams

“Dr Harold Bornstein has admitted that the president dictated his own health report. But he’s just one case of collateral damage in Trump’s war on truth”

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Dr Harold Bornstein has admitted that the president dictated his own health report. But he’s just one case of collateral damage in Trump’s war on truth

Two years ago, give or take, the US election seemed to hang on the health of the candidates. A video surfaced of Hillary Clinton, seeming to wobble and almost faint as she got into a car. Your head said: this is trivial thing, if it were serious she would have bowed out, it’s probably one of those diseases like labyrinthitis or flu that you don’t believe exists until you get it yourself. Your gut said: this is very bad, voting is primal; no one lines up behind anyone who looks as though they’re about to fall over.

Trump, meanwhile, was in rude health, which was plain from his overall rudeness, and also, a letter from his physician, Dr Harold Bornstein. It was like a note you forge from your mum, in reverse: Donald Trump can go swimming, because he is in the best health ever, his level of wellbeing is unlike any you may have encountered in a swim-eligible child. It turns out there was a reason. “He dictated the whole thing,” Borstein told CNN on Tuesday. “I just made it up as I went along,” he unclarified, but I think we can call this an idiomatic US/UK difference: over there, the phrase clearly means: “I wrote down what that other person was saying.”

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‘I miss the old Kanye’: what has happened to rap’s most complex star?

Self-delusion is inexhaustible, it seems

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His suggestion that black people have been complicit in their own slavery has prompted widespread outrage. What lies behind Kanye West’s recent provocations?

Photograph: Smallz & Raskind/Contour by Getty Image

In a video viewed more than 6m times on Twitter, 21-year-old Chika Oranika summed up the current feelings of many black Americans about Kanye West. She delivered her own lyrics over the beat of the rap star’s Jesus Walks. “How you say you Yeezus but do nothing to restore us? You support the people up in power that abort us,” she raps into the camera. “It don’t matter how much money you got or you lack, when that cheque clear don’t forget that your children are still black.”

Why the opprobrium, which has come from activists, Hollywood stars and fellow musicians, as well as withering online freestyles? West, one of the most significant, complex and celebrated rappers in the US, has used a 350-tweet stream of consciousness over the past fornight to throw his support firmly behind Donald Trump. But yesterday, he went way beyond party politics in an interview with TMZ, saying, in a sloppy bit of rhetoric: “You hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years? That sounds like a choice.”

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Plants ‘talk to’ each other through their roots

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Scientists studying corn seedlings believe that they send signals under the soil, advising each other of the proximity of other plants

Plants use their roots to “listen in” on their neighbours, according to research that adds to evidence that plants have their own unique forms of communication.

The study found that plants in a crowded environment secrete chemicals into the soil that prompt their neighbours to grow more aggressively, presumably to avoid being left in the shade.

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