September 22, 2013 – OREGON – Sitting on a major fault line, Oregon is “like an eight-and-a-half-month pregnancy, due any time now” for a major earthquake, a geologist with the Oregon Office of Emergency Management told an overflow crowd Friday in Medford. “We’re in the zone, and we’d darn well better get ourselves ready for it,” said Althea Rizzo, geology hazard coordinator for OEM. “A lot of you may have moved here from California to escape them, but the fact is, Oregon is earthquake country.” About half the hands went up when Rizzo asked how many had been through a California earthquake. Rizzo said there’s a 37 percent chance the Big One will happen in the next 50 years. A major earthquake would cripple transportation on Interstate 5 as bridges and overpasses collapse from two to four minutes of ground shaking, possible very severe, with stressful aftershocks for weeks.
Today, the Oregon Senate passed a bill to ban commercial production of canola (rapeseed) until 2019 inside the 3 million acre Willamette Valley Protected District, one of the world’s pre-eminent vegetable seed producing regions.
HB 2427, which passed the Senate 18-12 after passing the Oregon House last week 37-22, rolls back a controversial new policy adopted by the Oregon Department of Agriculture (ODA) in February 2013 that would have allowed 25,000 acres of canola to be planted over the next decade in a region where the production of the plant for its seed has been banned since 2005.
Occupy.com, By: Solidarity Against Austerity, 06/28/2013
On June 20, Oregon's Portland City Council unanimously voted to approve a budget that had been one of the most grassroots-contested examples of austerity in recent memory. Weeks earlier, in a vote to approve the framework of this budget on May 29, the City Council's long-maintained show of consensus was broken when Commissioner Amanda Fritz voted "No.” (More on her vote later). However, by the final budget vote last Thursday she had been compelled to change her mind. How has the 2013 budget developed? When the Portland Budget process began several months ago, newly elected Mayor Charlie Hales announced a $25 million deficit in the city's General Fund. Each bureau was told to submit budgets with 10 percent cuts, signaling Hales's determination to oversee mass lay-offs and the slashing or elimination of essential programs that many Portlanders have come to rely on. This latest round of cuts promised to be the worst of several successive years of austerity measures. Each time city officials have told the public that "temporary" sacrifices need to be made now to enable the economy to turn around tomorrow. Each time there was no turn-around and more cuts were, predictably, peddled the next year despite this economic "tonic's" miserable record.
In a breaking development, the FBI confirms that 1,500 GM Sugar Beet plants were destroyed this month in Oregon, in what they are calling an act of "Economic Sabotage." When GM pollen blows into a non-GM farmer's fields and irreversibly contaminates his crop with 'biopollution,' who does the law side with? Historically, Monsanto. Also, it's not called 'economic sabotage' but rather 'copyright infringement,' and the victim not the aggressor is threatened with economic ruin.
When Monsanto's unapproved and therefore illegal GM wheat is found years after open field trials growing freely in an Oregon wheat field, the entire state crop's export fate is held in limbo, jeopardizing the present and future living of thousands of farmers and their dependents, with Monsanto receiving little more than a reprimand, followed by rapid USDA assurance that despite a lack of approval their GM wheat is "safe."
We at the Galactic Free Press do no advocate anyone calling attention to themselves in this manner. Stay safe everyone.
The Oregonian, By: Kimberly A.C. Wilson, 06/20/2013
Federal investigators are asking the public to help solve middle-of-the-night crimes that left ruined fields of genetically engineered sugar beets in rural Jackson County. The crop destruction took place over the course of two separate nights in early June, when an unknown individual or group destroyed about 6,500 sugar beet plants genetically engineered to stand up to the herbicide Roundup on a pair of privately-owned plots of land leased and managed by Syngenta.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) announced Wednesday that test results of plant samples from an Oregon farm indicate the presence of genetically engineered (GE) glyphosate-resistant wheat plants. Further testing by USDA laboratories indicates the presence of the same GE glyphosate-resistant wheat variety that Monsanto was authorized to field test in 16 states from 1998 to 2005.
APHIS launched a formal investigation after being notified by an Oregon State University scientist that initial tests of wheat samples from an Oregon farm indicated the possible presence of GE glyphosate-resistant wheat plants.
A 50-year-old business traveler claims he felt harassed by TSA workers at Portland's International Airport, so he took off all his clothes at the screening line in protest.