In July 2016 the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin signed a law to ban the cultivation and breeding of genetically modified plants and animals (GMO), except in cases where they will be used in testing and scientific research. In fact, this law makes Russia the world's largest GMO-free territory and offers a great platform for the development of organic agriculture.

This decision made by the Russian government was also influenced by environmental organizations, farmers and other representatives of Russian society, concerned by the absence of reliable scientific studies on the long-term ('long-term' comes here with an emphasis) risks of GMO food to human health and the environment. The Kremlin has also apparently taken into consideration the interests of national food security, as the world market of genetically modified (GM) seeds is monopolized by transnational, mostly American, German and Swiss based companies.

Many European Union countries, unlike the U.S., have already applied restrictions on GMOs, similar to the ones implemented now in the Russian Federation. Only five EU countries (Spain, Portugal, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania) have been cultivating GM crops, but even they have begun to decrease the area of GM crop cultivation gradually.

A man has died after Pasadena, California police officers tased him twice and used physical force during an early Friday morning callout that he requested himself.

Reginald Thomas, 36, dialed 911 for help, according to Shainie Lindsay, the mother of four of Thomas' children who has another on the way.

Thomas was "dysfunctional," suffered from bipolar disorder and had multiple interactions with the police before, according to Lindsay, but in this instance: "He called the police on himself. He wanted help," said Lindsay to KTLA.

As Thursday's protest in California ended with police firing pepper balls at demonstrators, RT talked to a witness who says it was a beanbag used by law enforcers which caused the large bruise on her face. Next time, she will not be just a bystander, Richelle Washabaugh said.

Protests have been ongoing in El Cajon, San Diego County, since Wednesday, after it emerged that a police officer fatally shot 38-year-old Alfred Olango, an unarmed black man with an apparent history of mental health problems. On Thursday night, police used pepper balls on another small rally and detained two men, after the crowd started throwing glass bottles at the officers.

RT spoke with Richelle Washabaugh, a woman who was in the area on Thursday night. Richelle says she and her friends had no part in the protests, but nevertheless were set upon by police officers. Richelle was hit by a so-called 'bean bag', a police baton round considered less harmful than rubber bullets but that can still cause damage.

Nearly all state lawmakers not only limit women's reproductive rights to abortion but deny their residents paid family and medical leave, and paid sick days, according to new analysis. Those policies drive 13 percent of US families with a new born into poverty, which disproportionately affects women of color.

"When a woman who was denied abortion coverage cannot keep her job because her employer refuses to make reasonable accommodation for her pregnancy - no paid sick day for prenatal appointments or well-baby care - no paid family and medical leave to use after giving birth - the deck is truly stacked against her," said Debra L. Ness, President, National Partnership for Women & Families in a released statement.

The state-by-state report is issued to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Hyde Amendment, a federal law which prevents taxpayer funding of abortions in federal health programs. The law is renewed every year by both Republican and Democratic presidents.

Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before they are used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.

Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions in the international community over any possible safety concerns, said Secretary Michael Wynne.

"If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," said Wynne. "(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press."

At least four students have been tased by police officers just over a month into the school year, adding their cases to some worrisome statistics: Since 2011, nearly 100 US children have been tased by school-based officers.

An electroshock weapon was last used on a 15-year old student at Middleton High School in Wisconsin on September 22. The teenager reportedly spotted people he knew trying to enter the school during lunch time. He became agitated and got into a fight with the group, with whom he'd previously had problems. Police tried to break up the fight and at one point, one of the officers shocked the 15-year-old with a Taser.

Weeks before that case, a school-based police officer tased two female students when deputies at a Florida high school tried to break up a fight.

In the wake of the recent police killing of Alfred Olango, for allegedly holding a vaping device in a threatening manner, violent protests broke out in El Cajon last night as police continued to refuse to release video of the shooting.

On Friday, after a night of violence, the El Cajon police department relented and decided to release the footage of the killing to the public.

Prior to the shooting, Alfred Okwera Olango "was not acting like himself", according to his sister, allegedly walking into traffic on Broadway in the San Diego suburb. She repeatedly called for assistance early Tuesday afternoon, with two El Cajon Police officers responding to the call, and finding Olango behind a restaurant, said Chief Jeff Davis, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Reality Check: 70% of protesters arrested in Charlotte were from out of state? Ben Swann brings forward the facts behind those numbers and why these protests are not "astro-turf":

Police say a villager in southwest China killed his parents and then 17 neighbors in an attempt to cover up his crime, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Friday.

An investigation found that Yang Qingpei argued with his parents over money on Wednesday evening and killed them, Xinhua said. Fearing he would be identified as the killer, he then murdered 17 neighbors in the village of Yema, it said, citing police in southwestern Yunnan province where the village is located.

Xinhua didn't say how Yang, who is 26 or 27, allegedly killed the villagers.

What happens to a society when thinking is eviscerated and is disdained in favor of raw emotion? [1] What happens when political discourse functions as a bunker rather than a bridge? What happens when the spheres of morality and spirituality give way to the naked instrumentalism of a savage market rationality? What happens when time becomes a burden for most people and surviving becomes more crucial than trying to lead a life with dignity? What happens when domestic terrorism, disposability, and social death become the new signposts and defining features of a society? What happens to a social order ruled by an "economics of contempt" that blames the poor for their condition and wallows in a culture of shaming?[2] What happens when loneliness and isolation become the preferred modes of sociality? What happens to a polity when it retreats into private silos and is no longer able to connect personal suffering with larger social issues? What happens to thinking when a society is addicted to speed and over-stimulation? What happens to a country when the presiding principles of a society are violence and ignorance? What happens is that democracy withers not just as an ideal but also as a reality, and individual and social agency become weaponized as part of the larger spectacle and matrix of violence?[3]


The forces normalizing and contributing to such violence are too expansive to cite, but surely they would include: the absurdity of celebrity culture; the blight of rampant consumerism; state-legitimated pedagogies of repression that kill the imagination of students; a culture of immediacy in which accelerated time leaves no room for reflection; the reduction of education to training; the transformation of mainstream media into a mix of advertisements, propaganda, and entertainment; the emergence of an economic system which argues that only the market can provide remedies for the endless problems it produces, extending from massive poverty and unemployment to decaying schools and a war on poor minority youth; the expanding use of state secrecy and the fear-producing surveillance state; and a Hollywood fluff machine that rarely relies on anything but an endless spectacle of mind-numbing violence. Historical memory has been reduced to the likes of a Disney theme park and a culture of instant gratification has a lock on producing new levels of social amnesia.