All imports of United States corn have been stopped at British ports following the discovery that the US has been illegally exporting a banned GM maize to Europe for the past four years.

The unprecedented move, which has angered the Bush administration, follows efforts to hush up and play down the scandal on both sides of the Atlantic. For weeks the official food watchdog failed to look for imports of the maize, which is banned on health grounds. It has been forced to take action by the European Commission.

The two main opposition parties yesterday blamed the delay on a pro-GM and pro-US bias in the Food Standards Agency, and pledged to correct it if they came to power.
(Source: The Independent)

Another example of the contempt the US government has for any other nation’s laws or sovereignty.

And what did the Food Standards Agency do about it? Nothing. It refused to even identify any existing imports in Britain. Apparently, it’s totally unconcerned that a banned food may have been smuggled into this country. Perhaps it was even complicit in the import?

Four years. Four years of breaking EU food laws. Four years the agency which is supposed to protect us did nothing. Nice, cushy job that is, innit? Perhaps made cushier with kickbacks from GM firms? How else can you explain four years of failure to alert the British public to this illegal trade?

If a kebab shop serves food deemed legally unfit for human consumption, it’s prosecuted and the lawbreakers punished. If multinational corporations in league with the US government do the same thing but on a vastly greater scale, what happens?

Nothing.

One law for the poor, another for the rich.

Left, the original, right top Tory Photoshopping

The Conservative leader, Michael Howard, today refused to sack a Tory candidate in a key marginal seat who doctored an election campaign photograph.

Mr Howard was forced to publicly condemn the Dorset South Tory candidate, Ed Matts, after it was revealed he had altered a photograph in order to fall in line with the Tory’s hardline stance on immigration.
(Source: The Guardian)

Another example of the high standards of the Tory party and their fearless adherence to the traditional British values of lying, distortion, manipulation and twattery.

THESE ARE THE VALUES BEING LOST UNDER THE SWAMPING TIDE OF IMMIGRANTS!

ARE YOU THINKING WHAT I’M THINKING?

The drive of Ms Dworkin’s writing and activism was to break the silence around violence against women, but her wider career saw her become a figure of adulation and loathing in equal measure. To opponents she was an archetypal man-hater, killjoy and proponent of censorship, but supporters rallied to her impassioned lectures and books. Gloria Steinem, a fellow feminist, said she was one of a handful of writers each century “who help the human race to evolve”.

Ms Dworkin’s life as a political activist began early. In 1965, when she was 18, she was arrested at the US mission to the United Nations, protesting against the Vietnam war. She was sent to the New York City Women’s House of Detention, where she was given a brutal internal examination.

Her testimony about the experience was reported worldwide and helped to bring public pressure to bear to close the prison. An unmarked community garden now grows where it once stood.
(Source: The Guardian)

Andrea Dworkin died at the weekend. She was 59.

She’s on my heroes page and has been a hero of mine for around fifteen years.

Like most men, I approached her work with trepidation. The yellow media has always painted her as a loony, man-hating feminist and so I was nervous. Once I read her, I realised how mis-reported she was. The mass media never gave Dworkin her due as a scholar, writer, revolutionary or human being.

The first book I read by her was ‘Intercourse.’ Like everyone reading this, I’ve been brought up in a society with a narrow framework for gender, with an off-the-rail notion of freedom of choice. Dworkin’s writing opened my eyes to the underlying mechanisms of society just as Reich, Trotsky and Sartre had done before her. A lot of the ranting I did in the sleeve notes to my first album was my reaction to Dworkin, trying to step back and take a look at how much I was complicit in the war of men against women.

If you haven’t read anything by Dworkin, I urge you to at least read ‘Intercourse.’ Whether you’re male of female, it will be a revelation. She constructs an argument that takes in Tolstoy and Bram Stoker, penetration and legalised misogyny. It’s a dazzling analysis and condemnation of patriarchal society and how it consigns both sexes to an impoverished, hobbled existence.

I don’t believe for a second that Dworkin was a man-hater. She simply hated a lot of what men do to women.

But what rational human being would disagree with her?