QBits

JOVANA GEC   09/30/11 12:43 PM ET  

BELGRADE, Serbia — Serbian authorities have banned a gay pride march and an anti-gay protest planned in the nation’s capital this weekend to avoid violence.

When two similar events occurred side by side in Serbia’s capital last year, about 100 people were injured, cars were burned and shops were looted in clashes between police and the anti-gay, far-right extremists.

So the gay pride march and the anti-gay protest planned in Belgrade on Sunday have been banned “to avoid bloodshed,” Interior Minister Ivica Dacic said Friday.

Anti-gay prejudice is widespread in Serbia, a predominantly conservative Balkan country. The head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Irinej, has called gay pride marches a “parade of shame” that are “foreign to our history, tradition and culture.”

But Serbia has been urged by the West to protect the human rights of gays and other minorities, if it wants to one day join the European Union.

On Friday, Serbia’s President Boris Tadic backed the ban of Sunday’s events, saying it was imposed to “prevent violence and the possible loss of lives.”

Gay pride organizers said the ban represents a defeat for the state and shows that authorities have not cracked down on the far-right extremists since the clashes a year ago.

“It is totally unbelievable that police have not clamped down against the extremists,” said Goran Miletic of the organizing committee. “We have spent four months preparing the gay pride march, and the authorities have done nothing.”

But the ultranationalist Obraz, or Honor, group said that the ban presented a “victory for the Serb patriots.”

Police said anti-gay extremists had planned to set buildings on fire in the suburbs of Belgrade on Sunday and to clash with police in the center of the capital.

Foreign diplomats had planned to attend the gay pride march in a show of support for human rights in Serbia.

Minister Dacic said the ban would prevent a possible repeat of the burning of U.S. and other Western embassies in the capital that occurred in 2008 during protests against Kosovo’s declaration of independence.

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Dusan Stojanovic contributed to this report.

PTI Sep 24, 2011, 09.23pm IST

VADODARA: An old age home for gay men, perhaps the first such centre in Asia, has come up in neighbouring Narmada district of Gujarat.

The old age home at Hanmenteshwar village, located on the banks of Narmada river, was inaugurated yesterday and named after late American writer Janet who generously donated funds for the project.

Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil, main architect behind the project, said, “I decided to name it after Janet as she had contributed a lot in its set up. She was like any other ordinary person… and that added more beauty to the project, which was initiated in 2009.”

The centre was inaugurated by Janet’s sister Carlafine, who accompanied by her husband, flew down from US for this purpose.

Gohil belongs to the royal family of former princely state of Rajpipla. He is the only known person of royal lineage in modern India to have publicly revealed that he is a gay.

“The home can accommodate 50 elderly homosexuals,” said Gohil, scion of the 650-year-old Rajpipla dynasty.

The project has been developed under the auspices of Lakshya Trust, a community-based organisation founded by Gohil, known as India’s gay prince, to provide support and promote HIV/AIDS prevention among gay men.

Gohil hoped his project would remove misgivings about homosexuals and help in promoting a society where people from different sexual orientation can co-exist peacefully.

He said he was happy that a priest of a temple located near the home attended the inauguration ceremony along with his family which is a “good sign” and indicated towards changing mindsets.

ROD McGUIRK   09/14/11 09:55 PM ET  

CANBERRA, Australia — Australian passports will now have three gender options – male, female and indeterminate – under new guidelines to remove discrimination against transgender people, the government said Thursday.

Transgender people and those of ambiguous sex will now be able to list their gender on passports with an ‘X’ if their choice is supported by a doctor’s statement.

Previously, gender was a choice of only male or female, and people were not allowed to change their gender on their passport without having had a sex-change operation.

Senator Louise Pratt, whose partner was born female and is now identified as a man, said the reform was a major improvement for travelers who face questioning and detention at airports because their appearance does not match their gender status.

“‘X’ is really quite important because there are people who are indeed genetically ambiguous and were probably arbitrarily assigned as one sex or the other at birth,” Pratt said. “It’s a really important recognition of people’s human rights that if they choose to have their sex as ‘indeterminate,’ that they can.”

Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said the new guidelines removed discrimination on the grounds of gender identity and sexual orientation.

“This amendment makes life easier and significantly reduces the administrative burden for sex and gender diverse people who want a passport that reflects their gender and physical appearance,” Rudd said in a statement.

Attorney-General Robert McClelland said while the change would affect few Australians, it was important because it would allow them to travel free of discrimination.

—By Tom Philpott

As the summer growing season draws to a close, 2011 is emerging as the year of the superinsect—the year pests officially developed resistance to Monsanto’s genetically engineered (ostensibly) bug-killing corn.

While the revelation has given rise to alarming headlines, neither Monsanto nor the EPA, which regulates pesticides and pesticide-infused crops, can credibly claim surprise. Scientists have been warning that the EPA’s rules for planting the crop were too lax to prevent resistance since before the agency approved the crop in 2003. And in 2008, research funded by Monsanto itself showed that resistance was an obvious danger.

And now those unheeded warnings are proving prescient. In late July, as I reported recently, scientists in Iowa documented the existence of corn rootworms (a ravenous pest that attacks the roots of corn plants) that can happily devour corn plants that were genetically tweaked specifically to kill them. Monsanto’s corn, engineered to express a toxic gene from a bacterial insecticide called Bt, now accounts for 65 percent of the corn planted in the US.

The superinsect scourge has also arisen in Illinois and Minnesota. “Monsanto Co. (MON)’s insect-killing corn is toppling over in northwestern Illinois fields, a sign that rootworms outside of Iowa may have developed resistance to the genetically modified crop,” reports Bloomberg. In southern Minnesota, adds Minnesota Public Radio, an entomologist has found corn rootworms thriving, Bt corn plants drooping, in fields.

Monsanto, for its part, is reacting to the news with a hearty “move along—nothing to see here!” “Our [Bt corn] is effective,” Monsanto scientist Dusty Post insisted in an interview with The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “We don’t have any demonstrated field resistance,” he added, pretending away the Iowa study, to speak nothing those corn fields that are “toppling over” in Illinois and and Minnesota.

But the company’s denials ring hollow for another reason, too. Bill Freese, science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety, alerted me to this 2008 study, conducted by University of Missouri researchers and published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on this precise question of Bt corn and rootworms.

The first thing to notice about the study is that Monsanto is listed in the acknowledgements as one of the “supporters.” So this is Monsanto-funded research, meaning that he company would be hard-pressed to deny knowledge of it.

The researchers found that within three generations, rootworms munching Monsanto’s Bt corn survived at the same rate as rootworms munching pesticide-free corn—meaning that complete resistance had been achieved. Takeaway message: rootworms are capable of evolving resistance to Monsanto’s corn in “rapid” fashion.

But such concerns were nothing new by 2008. From the early days of Bt-based GMOs in the ’90s, everyone—Monsanto, the EPA, independent scientists—agreed that farmers would have to plant a portion of their fields in non-Bt corn to control resistance. The idea was that, as bugs in the Bt portion of the field began to develop resistance, they would mate with non-resistant bugs from the so-called “refuge” patch, and the resistant trait would be kept recessive within the larger bug population and thus under control.

The contentious point involved how large these refuge patches would have to be. Monsanto insisted that 20 percent was adequate—that farmers could plant 80 percent of their corn crop with Bt seeds, and 20 percent in non-Bt seeds, and in so doing, avoid resistance.

But the majority of a panel of scientists convened by the EPA countered that the refuge requirement should be 50 percent—which would have, of course, eaten into Monsanto’s profits by limiting its market. The reason for the scientists’ concern, Freese explained, was that the corn plants express the Bt protein toxic to root worms at a low dose, meaning that a large portion of the rootworms survive contact with the plants, leaving them to pass on resistance to the next generation. With just 20 percent of fields planted in non-Bt crops, the scientists warned, resistant rootworms would eventually swamp non-resistant ones, and we’d have corn fields toppling over in the Midwest.

The minutes (PDF) of the committee’s Nov. 6, 2002, meeting on the topic documents their concerns. The majority of the committee’s members, the minutes state, “concluded that there was no practical or scientific justification for establishing a precedent for a 20 percent refuge at this time.”

I asked Freese why Monsanto didn’t simply engineer a high-dose version of its rootworm-targeted corn, since that would have lowered resistance pressure and thus addressed the panel’s concerns. “Well, from the start, the EPA pushed for a higher dose for the toxin,” he said. “My sense is that Monsanto came up with the best they could in terms of dose.” Freese stressed that industry rhetoric to the side, the genetic modification of crops turns out to be a rather crude process: The companies can’t always make the genes behave exactly as they want them to.

Nevertheless, the EPA registered the rootworm-targeted corn in 2003—and defied the scientific panel it had convened by putting the refuge requirement right where Monsanto wanted it: at 20 percent.

Jilted panel members, along with other prominent entomologists who hadn’t been consulted by the EPA, greeted the decision with anger and disbelief, as this May 2003 Nature article (behind a pay wall but available here) shows.”The EPA is calling for science-based regulation, but here that does not appear to be the case,” one scientist who served on the panel told Nature. Another added: “This is like the FDA approving a drug with flimsy science and saying to then do the safety testing… I don’t think that’s how you do science.”

Eight years later, Monsanto and the EPA have been proven wrong, and their scientific critics have been vindicated. Monsanto, meanwhile, booked robust profits selling its corn seeds without the burden of a 50 percent refuge requirement—and continues to do so today even as the tehnology fails.

So what happens now? Go here for my thoughts.

Tom Philpott is the food and ag blogger for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. To follow him on Twitter, click here. Get Tom Philpott’s RSS feed.