Glyphosate, perhaps surprisingly for a chemical so ubiquitously associated with our food, was not first used as an agricultural chemical.

Instead it was first patented as a metal chelator in 1964 by Stauffer Chemical company (US 3160632 A) and used as an industrial pipe cleaner.

Glyphosate is teratogenic - according to Monsanto's own data

Monsanto's own toxicology tests submitted to the EU commission showed evidence of teratogenicity (see EU Regulators and Monsanto Exposed for Hiding Glyphosate Toxicity, SiS51). The submitted test reports describe rats and rabbits with skeletal abnormalities including the development of a 13th rib in offspring, as well as cardiac abnormalities.

Scientific studies such as that of the late Professor Andrés Carrasco reporting neural tube birth defects in frog and chick embryos exposed to agricultural concentrations of glyphosate have validated both Monsanto's findings and clinical observations (see also Lab Study Establishes Glyphosate Link to Birth Defects, SiS48).

Probing into the mechanisms underlying the defects, Carrasco discovered that glyphosate disrupted retinoic acid activity, a well-known regulator of developmental processes.

A giant Anglo-Australian mining company is getting the rights to a huge copper reserve - and we don't know what US taxpayers are getting in return.

In December, two Republican senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, pushed Congress and the president into giving away what could amount to over $130 billion in public property.

That's enough to provide every single unemployed American a minimum-wage job for an entire year. That's enough to pay for a year of tuition at a public institution for every college student in the US.

And yet the GOP big-shots call themselves "fiscal conservatives"! "Fiscal conservatives," my you-know-what.

I'm talking about the huge giveaway to the mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton in the Defense Authorization Act. It was splayed across ten pages of the bill, pages 441 to 450 (out of 697).