Large palm oil companies are disregarding the ethical commitments they made, and destroying forests in Africa and Asia.

UK secrecy about communications between B'liar and Dubya is blocking the report about why they decided to invade Iraq.

A high level of polonium 210 was found in Yasser Arafat's corpse, suggesting he was killed with that poison.

Israel has a nuclear reactor (and nuclear weapons), and could easily make polonium 210. Arabs would find it difficult to obtain.

A scientific-sounding article brushes quietly over reasons to reject genetically modified foods. It looks thoughtful but its reasoning is invalid.

It is clear that today's widely used GMOs are safe for most people to eat. If they caused harm to a substantial fraction of people, it would have shown up in medical statistics by now.

This does not imply that they don't cause allergies in some people. (I linked to a different report of such allergies.) Labeling GMOs is just what's needed to enable people with those allergies to avoid the problem — even if most of us can safely ignore it.

Meanwhile, today's GMOs cause big environmental problems. "Roundup-ready" plants have led to an increase in pesticide use, while Bt-toxin plants kill other insects besides the pests they are meant to kill.

If we wish to reject these crops to protect the environment, we should have that option. Why should agribusiness be allowed to conceal use of these crops from the public?

The veil comes down when the article makes a patently absurd claim that the probable defeat in Washington should affect our goals. That defeat shows the effect of agribusiness' millions, but has nothing to do with the question of what is good policy.

The lies that defeated GMO labeling

A French court ordered Google to delete certain foreign web pages from search results.

This seems like dangerous censorship to me.