In October 2015, we celebrated with farmworker unions and advocates when a much-improved Worker Protection Standard (WPS) was approved. The WPS is the only federal rule that protects farmworkers from exposure to hazardous pesticides on the job, and hadn't been updated in more than 20 years

Not surprisingly, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently announced that it is planning to put the new rules on hold.

Rolling back commonsense safeguards:

The minimum age requirement which prohibits children under 18 years old from mixing, loading and applying pesticides

The right of a farmworker to designate a representative who can request pesticide application and hazard information on their behalf.

The “application exclusion zone” (AEZ) which requires a 25-100 foot buffer zone between the application site and any worker or bystander (depending on the application method.)

PANAMA CITY – One of President Trump’s family businesses is battling an effort to physically evict its team of executives from a luxury hotel in Panama where they manage operations, and police have been called to keep the peace, The Associated Press has learned. Witnesses told the AP they saw Trump’s executives carrying files to a room for shredding.

Representatives of the hotel owners’ association formally sought to fire Trump’s management team Thursday by hand-delivering termination notices to them at the Trump International Hotel and Tower, according to a Panamanian legal complaint filed by Orestes Fintiklis, who controls 202 of the property’s 369 hotel units.

Trump’s managers retreated behind the glass walls of an office where they were seen carrying files to an area where the sounds of a shredding machine could be heard, according to two witnesses aligned with the owners. The legal complaint also accused Trump’s team of improperly destroying documents.

The witnesses spoke on condition of anonymity over concerns they would be drawn into an expensive and protracted legal fight.

specifically targeted its brand of dicamba. BASF and DuPont also make dicamba weed killers.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/arkansas-judge-dismisses-monsanto-lawsuit-dicamba-ban-53153871

Monsanto (mon, +1.12%) invited dozens of weed scientists to a summit this week to win backing for a controversial herbicide but many have declined, threatening the company’s efforts to convince regulators the product is safe to use.

Monsanto faces a barrage of lawsuits over its dicamba herbicide and risks of tighter restrictions on its use, after the chemical drifted away from where it was sprayed this summer and damaged nearby crops unable to tolerate it.

Arkansas and Missouri suffered the most complaints of U.S. states with damage linked to dicamba. Weed scientists from the two states declined to attend the summit on concerns about Monsanto’s response to the incident.

The company plans to present data at the summit that it says show user error was behind the damage, contrary to academics’ findings that dicamba products can vaporize and move off target under certain conditions in a process known as volatilization.

http://fortune.com/2017/09/26/monsanto-summit-weed-killer-dicamba/from

In a lengthy interview, Holdnerness, who married Porter in 2003, told CNN on Wednesday that the physical abuse began almost immediately after their wedding. The couple went to the Canary Islands for their honeymoon in the summer of 2003, when Holderness said Porter kicked her thigh during a fight.

"I didn't quite know how to take it," Holderness said. "I had just tied the knot with him."
She said that Porter's repeated physically abusive behavior also included throwing her on the bed and forcefully pushing one of his limbs into her body in anger and choking her.

"The thing he would do most frequently is he would throw me down on a bed and he would just put his body weight on me and he'd be yelling at me but as he was yelling he'd me grinding an elbow or knee into my body to emphasize his anger," she said. The choking, she said, "was just very scary and dehumanizing," and she said she didn't realize the severity of the situation until she spoke with a counselor.

In the summer of 2005, the couple was in Florence, Italy, when Holderness said he punched her in the face -- the only time, Holdnerness says, when she remembers her ex-husband leaving a physical mark on her body.

Several former employees said Mr. Wynn often walked around some areas of the complex in extremely short shorts without underwear, and he would sit in the salon to get pedicures in such a way that his genitals were exposed.