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As the days tick down to next month’s presidential election, debate rages over the U.S. government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic with critics of President Donald Trump calling for his ouster due to his failure to protect the American public.

And yet as mass media runs daily tallies of COVID-related cases and deaths, a more sinister threat to public health looms as the Trump administration rolls back regulations that govern the quality of our air, land, and water. And though these actions are garnering little public outcry now, they pose grave danger to our children and their children for decades to come. It’s a simple truth — a poisoned environment means poisoned people.

A year ago Thailand was set to ban the widely used weed killing chemical glyphosate, a move applauded by public health advocates because of evidence the chemical causes cancer, along with other harms to people and the environment.

But under heavy pressure from U.S. officials, Thailand’s government reversed the planned ban on glyphosate last November and delayed imposing bans on two other agricultural pesticides despite the fact that the country’s National Hazardous Substances Committee said a ban was necessary to protect consumers.

A ban, particularly on glyphosate, would “severely impact” Thai imports of soybeans, wheat and other agricultural commodities, U.S. Department of Agriculture Undersecretary Ted McKinney warned Thailand Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-Ocha in pushing for the reversal. Imports could be impacted because those commodities, and many others, typically are laced with residues of glyphosate.

Now, newly revealed emails between government officials and Monsanto parent Bayer AG show that McKinney’s actions, and those taken by other U.S. government officials to convince Thailand not to ban glyphosate, were largely scripted and pushed by Bayer.

The school groundskeeper who won the first-ever trial over allegations that Monsanto’s Roundup causes cancer is asking the California Supreme Court to restore $250 million in punitive damages awarded by the jury who heard his case but then slashed by an appeals court to $20.5 million.

Notably, the appeal by plaintiff Dewayne “Lee” Johnson has larger implications than his own individual case. Johnson’s lawyer are urging the court to address a legal twist that can leave people such as Johnson who are facing death in the near term with lower damage awards than others expected to live many years in suffering and pain.

“It is long past time for California courts to recognize, as other courts do, that life itself has value and that those who maliciously deprive a plaintiff of years of life should be made to fully compensate that plaintiff and be punished accordingly,” Johnson’s attorneys wrote in their request for the state supreme court review. “The jury ascribed meaningful value to Mr. Johnson’s life, and for that he is grateful. He asks this Court to respect the jury’s decision and restore that value. ”

A California appeals court on Tuesday rejected Monsanto’s effort to trim $4 million from the amount of money it owes a California groundskeeper who is struggling to survive cancer that a jury found was caused by the man’s exposure to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicides.

The Court of Appeal for the First Appellate District of California also rejected the company’s request for a rehearing of the matter.  The court’s decision followed its ruling last month slamming Monsanto  for its denial of the strength of the evidence that its glyphosate-based weed killers cause cancer. In that July ruling, the court said that plaintiff Dewayne “Lee” Johnson had presented “abundant” evidence that Monsanto’s weed killer caused his cancer.  “Expert after expert provided evidence both that Roundup products are capable of causing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma…  and caused Johnson’s cancer in particular,” the appeals court stated in its July decision.

As Bayer AG seeks to discount concerns that Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides cause cancer, several new studies are raising questions about the chemical’s potential impact on reproductive health.

An assortment of animal studies released this summer indicate that glyphosate exposures impact reproductive organs and could threaten fertility, adding fresh evidence that the weed killing agent might be an endocrine disruptor. Endocrine disrupting chemicals may mimic or interfere with the body’s hormones and are linked with developmental and reproductive problems as well as brain and immune system dysfunction.

In a paper published last month in Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology, four researchers from Argentina said that studies contradict assurances by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that glyphosate is safe.

A new study published Tuesday found that after switching to an organic diet for just a few days, people could cut the levels of a pesticide linked to cancer found in their urine by more than 70 percent.

The researchers collected a total of 158 urine samples from four families –seven adults and nine children – and examined the samples for the presence of the weed killer glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in Roundup and other popular herbicides. The participants spent five days on a completely non-organic diet and five days on a completely organic diet.

“This study demonstrates that shifting to an organic diet is an effective way to reduce body burden of glyphosate… This research adds to a growing body of literature indicating that an organic diet may reduce exposure to a range of pesticides in children and adults,” states the study, which was published in the journal Environmental Research.

Ruling says EPA ignored clear evidence that the new herbicide would cause widespread damage to crops: 

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broke the law in approving agricultural weedkilling products sold by Bayer and two other chemical giants, ignoring clear evidence that the new herbicides would cause widespread damage to crops, a federal court ruled on Wednesday.

The decision by the US court of appeals for the ninth circuit invalidates the registrations for dicamba-based herbicides made by Monsanto, which is owned by Bayer AG, BASF and Corteva Agrisciences that are designed to be sprayed on genetically engineered soybeans and cotton. The court order effectively makes it illegal for farmers to continue to use the dicamba herbicides this summer as they tend to millions of acres of crops. 

In a stinging rebuke, the court said it had no choice but to cancel the EPA’s approval of the herbicides because the agency had strayed so far from its duty to properly assess the dangers presented by the “new use” of dicamba. 

With the turn of the calendar to June, farmers in the U.S. Midwest are wrapping up the planting of new soybean crops and tending to growing fields of young corn plants and vegetable plots. But many are also bracing to be hit by an invisible enemy that has wreaked havoc in farm country the last few summers – the chemical weed killer dicamba.

Jack Geiger, a certified organic farmer in Robinson, Kansas, describes the last few summer growing seasons as characterized by “chaos,” and said he partially lost certification for one field of organic crops due to contamination with dicamba sprayed from afar. Now he is pleading with neighbors who spray the weed killer on their fields to make sure the chemical stays off his property.

“There is dicamba everywhere,” Geiger said.

Geiger is only one of hundreds of farmers around the U.S. Midwest and several southern states who have reported crop damages and losses they claim were caused by drifting dicamba over the last few years.

The US Environmental Protection Agency is due in federal court on Tuesday to answer allegations that it broke the law to support a Monsanto system that has triggered “widespread” crop damage over the last few summers and continues to threaten farms across the country.

As farmers prepare to plant a new season of key American food crops, farmer and consumer groups are asking the ninth circuit court of appeals in San Francisco to review and overturn the EPA’s approval of a Monsanto herbicide made with a chemical called dicamba.

The US agriculture giant Monsanto and the German chemical giant BASF were aware for years that their plan to introduce a new agricultural seed and chemical system would probably lead to damage on many US farms, internal documents seen by the Guardian show.

Risks were downplayed even while they planned how to profit off farmers who would buy Monsanto’s new seeds just to avoid damage, according to documents unearthed during a recent successful $265m lawsuit brought against both firms by a Missouri farmer.

The documents, some of which date back more than a decade, also reveal how Monsanto opposed some third-party product testing in order to curtail the generation of data that might have worried regulators.

And in some of the internal emails, employees appear to joke about sharing “voodoo science” and hoping to stay “out of jail”.