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Expert contacts: Tiffany Finck-Haynes, Friends of the Earth, (202) 222-0715, tfinckhaynes@foe.org
Preston Peck, Toxic Free NC, (919) 833-1123, preston@toxicfreenc.org
Emma Pullman, SumOfUs.org, (778) 887-6776. emma@sumofus.org
Communications contact: Kate Colwell, Friends of the Earth, (202) 222-0744, kcolwell@foe.org
RALEIGH - Farmers, beekeepers, environmentalists, students, and other members of the North Carolina community will swarm the North Carolina Capitol building in bee costumes on Saturday to help save the bees. Local stakeholders will speak and deliver petition signatures from more than 500,000 Americans, urging Bayer, one of the manufacturers of neonicotinoids -- a leading driver of bee declines -- to stop manufacturing and selling these harmful chemicals.
In the face of mounting evidence and growing consumer demand, more responsible retailers, towns and federal agencies have decided to champion the bee crisis. The European Union banned several neonicotinoids; Ontario, Canada pledged to reduce neonicotinoid-coated corn and soy seeds by 80 percent by 2017; cities and states across the U.S. have passed measures to address pesticide use; and more than 30 retailers across the country have taken steps to eliminate the sale of these chemicals.
What: A rally and petition delivery to call-on Bayer to stop selling bee-killing neonicotinoid pesticides.
When: Saturday, September 19 at 11 a.m. EST
Where: Outside the North Carolina State Capitol Building (south side across from Fayetteville Street), 1 East Edenton Street Raleigh, NC 27601; proximal to the Bayer CropScience North America headquarters and Bayer Bee Care Center in Research Triangle Park.
Who: Farmers, beekeepers, environmentalists, students, members of the North Carolina community and bee-lovers from Friends of the Earth, League of Conservation Voters, MoveOn, North Carolina League of Conservation Voters, Organic Consumers Association, Save our Environment, Sierra Rise, SumOfUs, and Toxic Free North Carolina.
Speakers include: Gaby Benitez, Duke student and President of Food for Thought; Preston Peck, Policy Advocate at Toxic Free NC; Charles McNair, organic farmer and president of the NC Rastafarian Union; Tony Kleese, organic farmer and owner of Earthwise Organics.
Representatives from Bayer have been invited to attend the event.
Visuals will include activists in bee costumes, drawings of bees from Raleigh elementary school students and bee hives to represent 500,000 petition signatures.
Friends of the Earth fights for a more healthy and just world. Together we speak truth to power and expose those who endanger the health of people and the planet for corporate profit. We organize to build long-term political power and campaign to change the rules of our economic and political systems that create injustice and destroy nature.
(202) 783-7400"Today's challenges of access to food will be exacerbated by production challenges tomorrow. We are not on track to meet future food needs. Not even close," according to a letter published Tuesday.
A group of some of the world's foremost thinkers is sounding the alarm on the globe's looming "hunger catastrophe" and are calling for "moonshot" efforts to stave off the crisis, according to an open letter published Tuesday that was signed by 153 winners of the Nobel Prize and World Food Prize.
The luminaries who signed the letter include the economist Joseph Stiglitz; the spiritual leader the 14th Dalai Lama; the Nigerian playwright and political activist Wole Soyinka; and Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, who discovered the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors.
The letter notes that there are 700 million people worldwide who are currently food insecure and "desperately poor"—and about 50% of them don't know where they can expect their next meal. Some 60 million children under five are cognitively and physically impaired for life from nutritional deficiencies.
As hard as those numbers are to fathom, it's about to get worse, according to the letter. Due to climate change, the world is expected to experience a decrease in the productivity of most major food staples, even though the planet is projected to add another 1.5 billion people to its population by 2050. "For maize, the major staple for much of Africa, the picture is particularly dire with decreasing yields projected for virtually its entire growing area," according to the letter.
Extreme weather and weather events linked to climate change will threaten crop productions, as will additional factors like "soil erosion and land degradation, biodiversity loss, water shortages, conflict, and policies that restrict innovation."
In sum, according to the letter, "today's challenges of access to food will be exacerbated by production challenges tomorrow. We are not on track to meet future food needs. Not even close. While much can and needs to be done to improve the flow of food to those in need, food production and accessibility must rise sharply and sustainably by mid-century, particularly where hunger and malnutrition are most severe."
The appeal was coordinated by Cary Fowler, joint 2024 World Food Prize Laureate, who is also the outgoing U.S. special envoy for global food security at the State Department. He is also known as the "father" of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
"We know that agricultural research and innovation can be a powerful lever, not only for food and nutrition security, but also improved health, livelihoods and economic development. We need to channel our best scientific efforts into reversing our current trajectory, or today's crisis will become tomorrow's catastrophe," Fowler said in a statement Tuesday.
The efforts the group is calling for include investment and prioritization in agricultural research and development, as well as other potential moonshot initiatives such as enhancing photosynthesis in crops such as wheat and rice, transforming annual to perennial crops, creating nutrient-rich food from microorganisms and fungi, and more.
Mashal Hussain, the incoming president of the World Food Prize Foundation, said in a statement: "If we can put a man on the moon, we can surely rally the funding, resources, and collaboration needed to put enough food on plates here on Earth. With the right support, the scientific community can deliver the breakthroughs to prevent catastrophic food insecurity in the next 25 years."
The letter will be discussed during a Senate Committee event in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday.
"Trump has lost any benefit of the doubt with his nominations of people with serious conflicts of interest and ethical problems," said the executive director of Accountable.US.
With the Republican-controlled Senate set to hold confirmation hearings for more than a dozen of President-elect Donald Trump's nominees this week, a watchdog group on Tuesday urged Democrats to oppose any effort to ram the picks through without sufficiently aggressive questioning and vetting.
"There's far too much at stake for our national security and economy for senators to rubber stamp any of President-elect Trump's nominees without doing their due diligence," Tony Carrk, executive director of Accountable.US, said in a statement. "Trump has lost any benefit of the doubt with his nominations of people with serious conflicts of interest and ethical problems. These nominees should be subject to more than a skin-deep examination of their records and senators who would fast-track nominations in the interest of going home early for the weekend would not be acting in the public interest."
Accountable demanded that all Trump picks be "fully and properly vetted—including all the required disclosures and clearances for each nominee." The group pointed to reports that Trump's transition team has been "bypassing traditional FBI background checks for at least some of his Cabinet picks while using private companies to conduct vetting of potential candidates for administration jobs."
The New York Timesreported Tuesday that an FBI background check on Pete Hegseth, Trump's choice to lead the Pentagon, "omitted key details on major allegations against him, in part because it did not include interviews with critical witnesses."
"One missed opportunity came when the bureau did not interview one of Mr. Hegseth's ex-wives before its findings were presented to senators last week," the Times noted.
The newspaper's reporting came shortly before Hegseth, a defender of war criminals who has been accused of sexual assault, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday for his confirmation hearing, during which he pledged to "bring the warrior culture back to the Pentagon" and be "laser-focused on lethality."
Laura Grego, senior scientist and research director for the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said ahead of Hegseth's hearing that he is unqualified and "downright dangerous."
Hegseth is one of 13 Trump nominees who will appear before nearly a dozen Senate panels this week as Democrats face progressive backlash for not doing enough to resist the president-elect's picks.
Punchbowlreported Tuesday that "Senate Republicans want Trump's national security nominees to be confirmed on day one—or close to it—but Democrats are determined to expose what they see as an unfit nominee in Hegseth."
"It's virtually guaranteed that Democrats won't agree to fast-track Hegseth's nomination on the floor, even if it's clear he'd have the requisite votes to be confirmed," the outlet added. "All it takes is one Democrat to refuse to consent to fast-tracking any of these nominees, meaning Senate Majority Leader John Thune would have to burn a few days of floor time to confirm each one."
"But for Mr. Trump's election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial," the report states.
The special counsel who investigated and charged Donald Trump over his attempts to subvert the 2020 election said in a final report released by the U.S. Justice Department early Tuesday that the former president would have been convicted for "a series of criminal efforts to retain power" had he not won another White House term in November.
"But for Mr. Trump's election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial," wrote Jack Smith, who resigned from the Justice Department late last week ahead of Inauguration Day.
Smith pointed to the Justice Department's view that "the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a president," a position he said is "categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government's proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the office stands fully behind."
The report, which Trump's legal team sought to bury, is the first of two volumes that Smith's team produced following the completion of its investigations into the former president's unlawful election interference and hoarding of classified documents. Smith dropped the two cases shortly after Trump's victory in the 2024 election.
According to the Justice Department, Smith has urged that the volume on the classified documents probe not be released to the public while the case against Trump's former co-defendants is still pending.
"Trump worked with other people to achieve a common plan: to overturn the election results and perpetuate himself in office."
In the newly released report, Smith detailed how Trump and his allies tried to "induce state officials to ignore true vote counts," manufactured "fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost," directed "an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election," and leveraged "rioters' violence to further delay it."
"In service of these efforts, Mr. Trump worked with other people to achieve a common plan: to overturn the election results and perpetuate himself in office," the report added.
Trump responded furiously to the report's release, ranting on social media that "Deranged Jack Smith was unable to successfully prosecute the Political Opponent of his 'boss,' Crooked Joe Biden, so he ends up writing yet another 'Report' based on information that the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs ILLEGALLY DESTROYED AND DELETED, because it showed how totally innocent I was, and how completely guilty Nancy Pelosi, and others, were."
In his introduction to the report, Smith rejected as "laughable" Trump's claim that the investigations were politically motivated or influenced in any way by the Biden administration.
"While we were not able to bring the cases we charged to trial, I believe the fact that our team stood up for the rule of law matters. I believe the example our team set for others to fight for justice without regard for the personal costs matters," Smith wrote. "The facts, as we uncovered them in our investigation and as set forth in my report, matter. Experienced prosecutors know that you cannot control outcomes, you can only do your job the right way for the right reasons. I conclude our work confident that we have done so, and that we have met fully our obligations to the department and to our country."