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OSGATA and company finally got their day in court on Jan. 31. Approximately 200 farmers and supporters showed up in front of the Federal District Court in Manhattan for opening arguments. Occupy Wall Street’s food justice working group helped organize the rally, though they are not plaintiffs in the suit. “We’re part of OWS, which is all about corporate consolidation, and you can’t discuss that without addressing agriculture,” says Corbin Laedlein, a member of the working group.

idea of a suit to the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT), a group that wants to change how patent law works in the U.S., and PUBPAT took on the case pro bono

if Hantz comes in, it will be like the Walmart of urban farming, and will annihilate the small producers who are dependent on restaurants to buy the high-end produce so they can run these socially beneficial programs.

I will summarize how the process will work and why citizen involvement over the next few weeks is critical.

On January 23rd, the United States Senate will reconvene to begin legislative business for 2012.  After the first order of business is taken care of, Majority Leader Harry Reid w

It is also possible that PIPA never makes it to the January 24th vote, but that depends on the public weighing in with their U.S. Senators before they come back to Washington D.C.  To begin countering the $94 million spent in lobbying in support of PIPA and SOPA, more than a million Americans have contacted Congress in opposition and citizen boycotts have forced corporations to withdraw their support of passage.  Now Senators are home and away from the D.C. lobby, which is the perfect time for citizens to ask their Senators to voice their opposition to PIPA before they return to Washington D.C.  If enough Senators publicly object to PIPA, then it is likely that consideration would be delayed in order to begin negotiating a compromise.  So it is important that the public try to meet with their two Senators and their home state staff and inform them on where they stand and ask their Senators to represent the public interest by standing with them.

the majority of the processed oil was already scheduled for export to foreign countries. That's' right, this Keystone XL pipeline's Canadian tar sands oil would have no positive impact whatsoever on America's national security.

Canada wanted to send the dirtiest oil on the planet through the heart of America so that they could access export routes. And they proposed getting there by bringing the pipeline right over the Ogallala Aquifer, one of America's most important repositories of fresh water. Along the route, Democrats and Republicans alike opposed it.Nocera never mentioned that a first pipeline just like the proposed Keystone XL, built by the same foreign company, TransCanada, had over 12 spills in the U.S. (30 if you count Canada) in just its first year of operation. Some of those spills have yet to be cleaned up.

In fact, when it comes to jobs and the Keystone XL pipeline, the State Department estimated it would create only 20 permanent jobs and about 5-6,000 temporary construction jobs... not the hundred thousand jobs proponents of the tar sands pipeline have been citing.The Keystone XL pipeline doesn't deliver on jobs or national security, it jeopardizes public health and safety and the president was right to reject it. And tar sands are not just "a little dirtier" than traditional crude as Nocera notes. Producing synthetic crude oil from tar sands generates three times the global warming pollution and the extraction process uses vast amounts of energy and water.

Mav6, whose key executives include a respected retired Air Force general and a former Northrop Grumman program manager, once envisioned building a fleet of Blue Devil 2 airships to fill an important gap in U.S. surveillance capabilities

“The Blue Devil airship initiative [is] urgently needed to eliminate combat capability deficiencies that have resulted in combat fatalities,” then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote. His opinion was seconded by the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO, which explores new technology for finding and disabling improvised bombs in Afghanistan. JIEDDO hoped a long-endurance airship would help spot more Taliban bombers.

The Blue Devil 2 effort quickly ran into problems. In November 2010, as the airship began to take shape in the Elizabeth City hangar, the Air Force shook up the program structure. JIEDDO bowed out. The flying branch transferred the Blue Devil 2′s management responsibilities to a secretive Air Force office called Big Safari, which traditionally oversees specialized reconnaissance planes — planes, not airships