20/April/20

 

The Washington State Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association intentionally violated Washington’s campaign finance laws by hiding the identities of food companies who funded opposition to the state's 2013 GMO labelling ballot initiative, and reinstated the historic $18 million penalty in Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s campaign finance lawsuit against the trade organization. “Today’s Supreme Court ruling constitutes a tremendous victory for fair and transparent elections,” Ferguson said. “The court ruled that the Grocery Manufacturers Association, an association of large corporations, including PepsiCo, Inc, Nestle USA, Inc, and The Coca Cola Company, intentionally violated our voter-approved campaign finance transparency law. GMA’s unlawful conduct was intentional — and unprecedented." Sustainable Pulse (this is a full account of a story we put out in brief recently)

 

 

If the world’s experience of COVID-19 has a silver lining, it could be that it galvanizes us to take seriously our role in manufacturing our own diseases. Spatial epidemiologist Marius Gilbert of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium and colleagues have clearly demonstrated a link between intensive poultry production and the emergence of highly pathogenic forms of avian flu, for example. And a 2015 study published by Martha Nelson of the US National Institutes of Health, and colleagues, demonstrated that Europe and the US – the world’s biggest exporters of swine – are also its biggest exporters of swine flu. A swine flu that spilled over into humans is what caused the most recent flu pandemic, in 2009, the first cases of which were recorded in California. TIME