US Business

As a changing climate intensifies extreme weather, agricultural multinationals are hyping the ability of genetically modified crops to boost yields when facing drought, heat or even heavy rainfall.

But skeptics of engineered foods, or genetically modified organisms (GMOs), still aren’t buying it.

“I don’t see why we should evolve our views when they’re still doing the same things,” said Bill Freese, science director at the non-profit Center for Food Safety, criticizing the “dramatically increased toxic herbicide use” following the proliferation of GMOs.

Seeds designed to thrive in specific local conditions have been developed for centuries through conventional breeding, by crossing together plants with relevant characteristics and selecting the desired offspring.

But as more severe weather creates hostile growing conditions for conventional seeds, companies such as Bayer/Monsanto, Corteva and Syngenta are promoting GMOs as more efficient.

And newer technologies can reduce development times for these heartier varieties “by many years” compared with traditional crop modification techniques, according to a spokesperson for Germany’s Bayer.

“Drought tolerance is a complex trait involving many genes,” the spokesperson said. “Therefore, the ability to develop drought-tolerant traits through classic breeding methods such as crossbreeding is limited.”

Longtime GMO critics say they are open to new approaches but are not sold on the latest industry pitch, viewing conventional seed products as safer and with fewer environmental drawbacks.

“How many times have we read that we won’t be able to feed the world by 2050 unless we have GMOs?” said Freese, referring to the argument of GMO proponents that genetically modified crops will be necessary to produce enough food for a growing population on a warming planet. 

But for Freese, that  claim is “just a really effective smoke screen put on by the pesticide and seeds conglomerates to put a good face on this new technology.”

US company Corteva said it, too, is focused on “new breeding technologies such as gene editing” to “take advantage of the genetic diversity that already exists within the plant’s DNA” when it comes to creating new seed types. 

Such GMO products can help normalize a crop’s performance, even if extreme moisture from rain or flooding promotes the spread of fungus or pests, companies say.

In July, the World Economic Forum highlighted the potential for GMOs to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by creating breeds that remove more carbon dioxide than conventionally grown crops.

– Safety, environmental concerns –

Many American growers favor GMO options because, while more costly, they require less human labor, Freese said.

More than 90 percent of the corn, cotton and soybeans grown in the United States is currently genetically modified to withstand herbicides and/or insects, according to US government figures.

Farmers have been growing corn meant to tolerate drought since 2011. Whether or not this trait is acheived with traditional breeding or with GMO seeds, the resulting plants are then usually combined with GMOs that can withstand herbicides.

“They told us in the ’70s and ’80s that GMOs were going to be more nutritious, fix the nitrogen level, withstand everything,” said Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumer Reports. “What did we see? Mainly herbicide-tolerant crops.” 

Dana Perls, senior food and agricultural program manager at environmental network Friends of the Earth, said GMOs “go hand in hand with harsh chemicals that perpetuate pesticide pollution,” harming insect populations, soil health and water quality.

Perls acknowledged “incredible advances” in mapping and manipulating genetic material, but said scientists “are still quite limited in our understanding of the functioning of the incredible complexity of life, both within a single organism and within ecosystems.” 

For now, she advocates for regulatory oversight of new GMO technology “rooted in a precautionary approach.”

Andrew Smith of Rodale Institute said using GMOs to help crops withstand droughts and other extreme conditions is “nearsighted” unless the health of the soil is ensured.

Smith favors agricultural practices such as rotating crops, limiting chemical inputs and reducing soil tillage. Such techniques, known as regenerative agriculture, leads to healthier soil able to retain more water. 

“It’s a strategy to mitigate climate change,” said Smith.

Ukrainians on Saturday hailed Russia’s retreat from Kherson, as Kyiv said it was working to de-mine the strategic southern city, record Russian crimes and restore power across the region.

Kherson was one of four regions in Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed to have annexed in September. 

But weeks later, the Russian retreat from the city of Kherson has boosted Ukrainian resistance after nearly nine months of fighting and hardship.

In the formerly occupied village of Pravdyne, outside Kherson, returning locals embraced their neighbours, with some unable to hold back tears.

“Victory, finally!” said Svitlana Galak, who lost her eldest daughter in the war. 

“Thank god we’ve been liberated and everything will now fall into place,” the 43-year-old told AFP.

“We are Ukraine,” added her husband, Viktor, 44.

Several disabled anti-tank mines as well as grenades could be seen in the settlement that is home to a Polish Roman Catholic church and a number of damaged buildings.

Speaking from Kherson city center, Yaroslav Yanushevych, head of the regional state administration, said everything was being done to “return normal life” to the area. 

While de-mining is carried out, a curfew has been put in place and movement in and out of the city has been limited, Yanushevych explained in a video posted to social media, in which people could be seen celebrating in the background.

Images distributed by the Ukrainian military showed Kherson residents dancing around a bonfire singing “Chervona Kalyna”, a patriotic song.

“All of us are elated,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday after declaring the day before that the Black Sea city was back in Kyiv’s hands.

Kherson city was the first major urban hub to fall after Russia invaded in February.

“Before fleeing Kherson, the occupiers destroyed all critical infrastructure — communication, water supply, heat, electricity,” Zelensky said, adding that nearly 2,000 explosives had been removed. 

He said Ukraine’s forces had established control over more than 60 settlements in the Kherson region.

After an eight-month Russian occupation, Ukrainian television resumed broadcasting in the city and the region’s energy provider said it was working to restore power supplies.

Ukraine’s police chief Igor Klymenko said around 200 officers were erecting roadblocks and recording “crimes of the Russian occupiers”.

He urged Kherson residents to watch out for possible landmines laid by the Russian troops, saying one policeman had been wounded while de-mining an administrative building.

A woman and two children were taken to hospital with injuries after an explosive device went off near their car in Mylove, a regional village, police said.

In Berislav district of the Kherson region, Ukrainian police said Russian shelling left “dead and wounded”, without providing further details.

– Nuclear hint –

On Saturday, an increasingly isolated Putin spoke by phone with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, pledging to intensify political and trade cooperation, the Kremlin said.

Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev hinted again that Moscow could use nuclear weapons.

“For reasons that are obvious to all reasonable people, Russia has not yet used its entire arsenal of possible means of destruction,” Medvedev said on messaging app Telegram.

“There is a time for everything.”

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Kyiv and the West were on their way to “joint victory”.

“This is coming, and our victory will be our joint victory,” Kuleba said, as he met US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the sidelines of a Southeast Asian summit in Cambodia.

Kherson’s full recapture would open a gateway for Ukraine to the entire Kherson region, with access to both the Black Sea in the west and Sea of Azov in the east.

– ‘Remarkable courage’ –

Blinken hailed the “remarkable courage” of Ukraine’s military and people and vowed US support “will continue for as long as it takes” to defeat Russia.

In London, British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said Russia’s “strategic failure” in Kherson could prompt ordinary Russians to question the war. 

“Ordinary people of Russia must surely ask themselves: ‘What was it all for?'”

Kuleba warned, however, that Russia is still “mobilising more conscripts and bringing more weapons to Ukraine” and called for the Western world’s continued support. 

The Kremlin has insisted that Kherson remains part of Russia.

“This is a subject of the Russian Federation. There are no changes in this and there cannot be changes,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

A Ukrainian recapture of the whole Kherson region would disrupt a land bridge for Russia between its mainland and the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014.

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American actor Alec Baldwin has filed a lawsuit against four people involved in the Western film “Rust,” saying they were negligent in providing him with a gun that discharged, killing the movie’s cinematographer.

The death on October 21, 2021 of Halyna Hutchins sent shock waves through Hollywood and gave rise to a series of civil suits. 

The 64-year-old Baldwin is suing the film’s armorer and props assistant, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed; assistant director David Halls; props master Sarah Zachry; and Seth Kenney, who supplied guns and ammunition to the film set, according to a filing Friday in a Los Angeles court.

Baldwin’s complaint follows a suit filed against him and others on the set last year by script supervisor Mamie Mitchell over their alleged role in the shooting that caused her great emotional distress. 

In his suit, Baldwin accuses Gutierrez-Reed of failing to verify that a Colt revolver he was using in rehearsal was safe. The suit also states that Halls failed to check the weapon before he declared it safe and handed it to Baldwin, and that Zachry failed to ensure that weapons used on the New Mexico set were safe.

All those named in the suit have denied any culpability.

The gun Baldwin was holding during rehearsal — meant to be loaded only with blanks — instead discharged a live round, killing the 42-year-old Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza.

Baldwin last month reached a civil settlement with Hutchins’ family, details of which have not been disclosed. A judge has not yet approved the settlement.

Baldwin, who was a producer as well as the star of “Rust,” has previously said he did not pull the trigger, though an FBI report determined the gun could not have gone off otherwise.

Production on the movie will resume in January, filmmakers have said, with Hutchins’ husband Matthew Hutchins taking on the role of executive producer.

“I have no interest in engaging in recriminations or attribution of blame,” Hutchins said in an earlier statement. “All of us believe Halyna’s death was a terrible accident.”

Investigators in New Mexico have filed no criminal charges, but have not ruled them out.

In August, Baldwin said he did not believe he would be charged.

While there has never been any doubt that the gun was in Baldwin’s hands when it went off, it remains unclear how it came to be loaded with a live round.

Gutierrez-Reed has sued the film’s ammunition supplier, accusing him of leaving real bullets among the dummy cartridges.

The incident led to calls in Hollywood for guns to be permanently banned from sets. 

Ukrainian authorities said Saturday they were working to de-mine Kherson, record Russian crimes and restore power across the region one day after declaring the southern city had been liberated following months of Russian occupation.

Ukraine’s president on Friday declared that the Black Sea city was back in Kyiv’s hands after Moscow said it pulled back more than 30,000 troops from what was the first major urban hub to fall to Russia after the February invasion.

Kherson was one of four regions in Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed to have annexed in September. But weeks later, the Russian retreat came as a huge boost to Ukrainians suffering from nearly nine months of fighting.

Ukrainians in Kherson danced around a bonfire and sang “Chervona Kalyna”, a patriotic song, in the dark, in images distributed by the Ukrainian military.

After an eight-month Russian occupation, Ukrainian television resumed broadcasting in the city and the region’s energy provider said it was working to restore power supplies.

Ukraine’s police chief Igor Klymenko said around 200 officers were erecting roadblocks and recording “crimes of the Russian occupiers”.

He urged Kherson residents to watch out for possible landmines laid by the Russian troops, saying one policeman had been wounded while de-mining an administrative building.

A woman and two children were taken to hospital with injuries after an explosive device went off near their car in the region’s village of Mylove, police said.

In Berislav district of the Kherson region, Ukrainian police said Russian shelling left “dead and wounded,” without providing further details.

– Nuclear hint –

On Saturday, Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev hinted again that Moscow could use nuclear weapons.

“For reasons that are obvious to all reasonable people Russia has not yet used its entire arsenal of possible means of destruction,” Medvedev said on messaging app Telegram.

“There is a time for everything.”

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Kyiv and the West were on their way to “joint victory” over Moscow after Russia’s February 24 invasion.

“This is coming, and our victory will be our joint victory,” Kuleba said as he met US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the sidelines of a Southeast Asian summit in Cambodia.

“A victory of all peace-loving nations across the world.”

Kherson’s full recapture would open a gateway for Ukraine to the entire Kherson region, with access to both the Black Sea in the west and Sea of Azov in the east.

In Ukraine’s capital, the news was met with joy late Friday.

Wrapped in flags, popping champagne corks and belting out the national anthem, residents of Kherson living in Kyiv celebrated in the central Maidan square.

– ‘Best surprise’ –

“I didn’t believe it at first, I thought it was going to take weeks and months, a few hundred metres at a time, and now we see them arrive in Kherson in one day, it’s the best surprise,” said Artem Lukiv, 41, originally from Kherson.

Blinken hailed the “remarkable courage” of Ukraine’s military and people and vowed US support “will continue for as long as it takes” to defeat Russia.

“It’s a big moment and it’s due to the incredible tenacity and skill of the Ukrainians, backed by the relentless and united support of the United States and our allies,” added US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

In London, British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said Russia’s “strategic failure” in Kherson could prompt ordinary Russians to question the war. 

“Ordinary people of Russia must surely ask themselves: ‘What was it all for?'”

Kuleba warned, however, that Russia is still “mobilising more conscripts and bringing more weapons to Ukraine” and called for the Western world’s continued support. 

The Kremlin has insisted that Kherson remains part of Russia.

“This is a subject of the Russian Federation. There are no changes in this and there cannot be changes,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

A full Ukrainian recapture of the Kherson region would disrupt a land bridge for Russia between its mainland and the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014.

US federal prosecutors are seeking a 15-year jail term for Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and want her to pay more than $800 million to investors defrauded by her blood-testing startup, according to a court filing.

“The government recommends the Court sentence the defendant to 180 months in custody and order her to pay $803,840,309 in restitution,” said a court filing submitted Friday by US attorney Stephanie Hinds.

The toughly worded filing said Holmes had been “blinded by… ambition,” and that “her reality-distortion field put, and will continue to put, people in harm’s way.”

Holmes had vowed to revolutionize health diagnostics with self-service machines that could run an array of tests on just a few drops of blood, but the company collapsed following Wall Street Journal reporting in 2015 that revealed the machines did not work as promised.

Key investors in the startup included the Safeway grocery chain and the Walgreens chain of pharmacies, as well as former US Secretary of State George Shultz.

Holmes’ attorneys, in their own filing, insisted that no purpose would be served by her incarceration — saying she posed no danger, readily acknowledged her mistakes and had not materially benefited from the fraud — but that if the court decided on jail time it should not exceed 18 months.

The rival filings came just days after a federal judge rejected Holmes’s request for a new trial following her conviction in January for defrauding investors.

Holmes’ start-up drew high-profile backers and made her a billionaire on paper by the age of 30.

In 2015, Forbes magazine named Holmes the country’s richest self-made female billionaire, but a year later the magazine revised her estimated net worth to zero.

A California jury found Holmes guilty of four counts of tricking investors.

Sentencing is scheduled for November 18.

An Iranian who got stuck for 18 years in a Paris airport, inspiring a Steven Spielberg movie starring Tom Hanks died on Saturday at the terminal, an airport official said.

Mehran Karimi Nasseri died of natural causes just before midday on Saturday in terminal 2F at Charles de Gaulle airport outside the French capital, the official told AFP.

Caught originally in an immigration trap — unable to enter France and with nowhere to go — he became dependent on his unusual place of abode and increasingly a national and international cause celebre. 

He called himself “Sir Alfred”, and a small section of airport parquet and plastic bench became his domain.

Karimi Nasseri’s peculiar story came to the attention of Hollywood director Spielberg, inspiring 2004 film “The Terminal,” which starred Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Hanks played a man who becomes trapped at New York’s JFK airport when his home country collapses into revolution.

After spending most of the money he received for the film, Karimi Nasseri returned to the airport a few weeks ago, the official said.

Several thousand euros (dollars) were found on him.

Born in 1945 in Masjed Soleiman, in the Iranian province of Khuzestan, Karimi Nasseri, took up residence in the airport in November 1988 after flying from Iran to London, Berlin and Amsterdam in an effort to locate his mother.

He had been expelled from every other country he landed in because he was unable to produce the correct paperwork.

At Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport an informal support network grew up around him, providing food and medical help along with books and a radio.

In 1999 he was granted refugee status and the right to remain in France.

“I’m not quite sure what I want to do, stay at Roissy or leave,” he said after being handed the right to live in France. “I have papers, I can stay here, I think I should carefully study all the options before making a decision.”

He didn’t leave then.

“He no longer wants to leave the airport,” his lawyer Christian Bourguet said at the time. “He’s scared of going.”

Joe Biden’s Democrats were just one seat away Saturday from securing a remarkable midterm election result by retaining control of the US Senate.

Midterms traditionally deliver a rejection of the party in power and with inflation surging and Biden’s popularity in the doldrums, Republicans had been expecting to ride a mighty “red wave” and capture both houses of Congress.

But the wave never got much beyond a ripple and on Friday Democrat Mark Kelly was projected to win a tight Senate race in Arizona, putting the two parties neck-and-neck at 49 seats each.

With two races, in Nevada and Georgia, left to decide, Democrats only need to win one, as Vice President Kamala Harris can cast the tie-breaking vote if the upper chamber is evenly split 50-50.

The result in the House of Representatives is also hanging in the balance and while Republicans are slightly favored to take control, it would be with a far smaller majority than they had envisaged going into Tuesday’s election.

In Arizona, Kelly beat out a challenger backed by Donald Trump. The former president was omnipresent on the campaign trail and the Republicans’ poor national performance was a damaging political blow.

Trump’s response to the Arizona result was to double down on unfounded claims of ballot rigging, posting on his Truth Social platform that the Democrat victory was a “scam” and the result of “voter fraud.”

Trump is set to declare his 2024 White House bid on Tuesday — an announcement he had planned as a triumphant follow-on to a crushing election victory by the party he still dominates.

The underwhelming outcome has prompted a bout of internal finger-pointing with targets including Trump, the party leaders, and the campaign messaging.

US media on Saturday cited a letter circulated by three Republican senators calling for the postponement of party leadership elections currently scheduled for the middle of next week.

“We are all disappointed that a Red Wave failed to materialize, and there are multiple reasons it did not,” the letter said.

“We need to have serious discussions within our conference as to why and what we can do to improve our chances in 2024,” it added.

Trump’s candidacy would be his third shot at the presidency, including his loss to Biden in 2020.

Some suggest his early entry into the race is designed to fend off possible criminal charges arising from multiple investigations into the final weeks of his presidency as well as his business affairs.

On Friday, Trump’s lawyers challenged a subpoena from the Congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by his supporters.

The subpoena sought to have Trump questioned under oath next week but the lawyers filed a lawsuit arguing he enjoyed  “absolute immunity” as a former president from being compelled to testify before Congress.

The subpoena is “invalid, unlawful, and unenforceable,” the lawsuit said.

After the Arizona result, the fate of the Senate depends on the two remaining undecided races in Nevada and Georgia.

Counting of mail-in ballots for the extremely tight Nevada contest is expected to take several more days.

If the Democrat candidate prevails, the party will retain its majority. Otherwise, everything will depend on the outcome in Georgia, where a run-off ballot will take place on December 6.