366. Ancient Male Humanoid Stayed Home While Females Roamed, Study Finds

"Mrs. Ples" is the most famous example
of Australopithecus africanus from Sterkfontein
cave, South Africa.

By Nicholas Wade, The New York Times, June 1, 2011

Researchers studying the diet of human ancestors who lived two million years ago in southern Africa have unexpectedly come across a crucial clue to their social structure. The males never strayed far from home, and the females dispersed after puberty to neighboring groups.

The pattern of female dispersal is not unexpected, since it is practiced by chimpanzees, the closest living species to humans, and by some hunter-gatherers. But social behavior does not fossilize, and any data on the subject is invaluable in reconstructing how human social structure evolved.

“This is the first direct evidence that we have about the residence pattern of hominins,” said Bernard Chapais, a primatologist and expert on human social evolution at the University of Montreal.

The evidence emerged from study of the fossil teeth of 19 australopithecines, the still apelike ancestors of the human lineage. The makeup of teeth can reflect local geography because some chemicals like strontium are drawn from rocks into plants, and then into tooth enamel when the plants are eaten. In australopithecines, the absorption of strontium continued until the teeth were completed around age 8.

The researchers were measuring different versions, or isotopes, of strontium to see if the australopithecines traveled far from home in search of food. As the data rolled out of the measuring device, “we were at first disappointed,” said Julia Lee-Thorp of Oxford University, a member of the research team, “but we soon realized that we had found another prize.”

This was that half the females had been born far away, whereas all the males had grown up locally, the team reported Wednesday in the journal Nature. The team was led by Sandi R. Copeland of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

In most mammals, the females stay in the home community and the males disperse after adolescence to avoid inbreeding. But chimpanzees and many human hunter-gatherer groups are unusual in following the opposite pattern. The reason may have to do with the aggressive territoriality of both species: A group of males who have grown up with one another is more cohesive and better at defending a territory against competitors. This obliges the females to be the gender that disperses.

“It’s really nice to see there is biological continuity from chimpanzees to australopithecines,” said Joan B. Silk, an expert on primate social behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The joint ancestor of chimps and humans lived about five million years ago and is often assumed to have had a chimplike social structure, with a male hierarchy, promiscuous mating by the females and all-out war between neighboring bands. The central puzzle of human social evolution, in Dr. Chapais’s view, is to explain how promiscuity was replaced by the pair bond and aggressive relations were pushed up from the band level to that of the tribe, a group of bands tied together by the exchange of women.

The australopithecines studied by Dr. Copeland’s team still had a somewhat chimplike social structure, Dr. Chapais said, because the pair bond did not evolve until the appearance of Homo erectus around 1.8 million years ago. The australopithecine fossils came from the Sterkfontein valley, and one of them has been dated to 2.2 million years ago.

The pair bond, in his view, arose when human ancestors started to develop more dispersed sources of food and males increasingly guarded a group of females to protect both them and their own paternity. With the male around anyway, he could also help rear the children, which allowed for a longer period of juvenile dependence and hence for brain size to grow. The relatively small size of the australopithecine brain suggests that this process had not yet started, Dr. Chapais said.

Another far-reaching consequence of the developing pair bond was that individuals could at last start to recognize their relatives, which chimpanzees mostly cannot do. So when females dispersed to neighboring groups, males from their home community could recognize their daughters or sisters, together with their in-laws, who had an equal interest in their children’s welfare. This transformed the neighboring group from an adversary to an ally, and the human social structure expanded to being that of a tribe. Friendly relations, in Dr. Chapais’s view, then allowed males as well as females to transfer, the pattern typical of hunter-gatherers today.

“It is great to think that we might be in a position to begin dating such major events in our evolution,” he said of the new finding.

The australopithecine fossils are few and precious, and researchers are reluctant to damage them in any way. In a new technique, a barely visible pit is blasted out of a tooth with a laser and the vaporized enamel is passed into a mass spectrometer, which measures the amount of strontium or any other element of interest. The researchers started out looking at carbon isotopes, which showed them that australopithecines had a highly variable diet. To determine whether that was because they ranged far and wide, the researchers then looked at strontium isotopes, the ratio of which varies according to the local geology. And this led to the discovery of the female dispersal pattern.

365. Brazil Approves Construction of the World's Third Largest Dam on the Amazon

By Alexei Barrionuevo, The New York Times, June 1, 2011

Area impacted by Belo Monte mega dam

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Brazil’s environmental agency gave final approval on Wednesday for a giant hydroelectric power plant in the Amazon rain forest that has been at the center of a protracted battle between the government and environmentalists over the fate of indigenous people.

After three decades of planning, the environmental agency, Ibama, granted a license to the North Energy consortium for the dam, which will be the world’s third largest, capable of producing 11,200 megawatts of electricity.

Opponents said they would not give up the fight against the Belo Monte dam, which they said would flood a large part of the Xingu River basin, affecting local fishing and forcing tens of thousands of indigenous people from their native lands.

“We will not cede an inch,” said Antônia Melo, the coordinator of Xingu Vivo Para Sempre, a group based in Altamira, a city that will be partly flooded. “Our indignation and our strength to fight only increases with every mistake and every lie of this government.”

Belo Monte became a priority for the previous government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who contended that the plant was critical to Brazil’s future energy needs. His successor, President Dilma Rousseff, has remained committed to the project.

The license was granted by the environmental agency after “robust technical analysis,” the government said in a news release. The North Energy consortium will pay $1.9 billion for “social-environmental measures,” to help people affected by the dam’s construction and to offset environmental effects, an agency spokeswoman said. The government itself has committed $314 million, she said.

Conservationists have become increasingly critical of Brazil’s efforts to protect the Amazon rain forest. Brazil’s deforestation numbers increased sharply over the past nine months, and the lower house of Congress last week approved a revision of the Forest Code that would open up protected areas to deforestation while granting amnesty to agribusiness developers for previous forest-clearing. The Senate has yet to vote on the measure.

“The government has an important choice — to go back to a future of wasteful publicly funded mega-projects and frontier chaos, or ahead, to the future of a sustainable and equitable green economy leader, with rule of law, good governance and a secure natural and investment environment,” said Stephan Schwartzman of the Environmental Defense Fund.

The $17 billion dam, which is expected to start producing electricity in 2015, would divert the Xingu River along a 62-mile stretch in Pará State. Environmental groups say it will flood more than 120,000 acres of rain forest and settlements, displacing 20,000 to 40,000 people and releasing large quantities of methane. The Ibama spokeswoman put the number of displaced people at 20,000 but insisted that no indigenous people would be removed from their lands.

“This is a tragic day for the Amazon,” said Atossa Soltani, executive director of Amazon Watch. “Despite all the promises the dam builders are making around mitigation and compensation, this dam is going to spell disaster for the local people.”

364. Michelle Obama Promotes a Healthier Diet; Healthier Power Plate Will Save Many Lives

By Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, April 2010

America faces an epidemic of diet-related diseases. So it’s time for the federal government to step up to the plate and help spread the word about healthful nutrition. As the U.S. Department of Agriculture revises the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, PCRM is filing a petition asking the agency to throw out its confusing food guide, MyPyramid, and adopt a simple, plant-based alternative called the Power Plate.

Since the first Food Pyramid was introduced nearly two decades ago, obesity and diabetes have become commonplace. About 27 percent of young adults are now too overweight to qualify for military service, and an estimated one in three children born in 2000 will develop diabetes.

“Millions of Americans are digging their own graves with a knife and a fork,” says Susan Levin, M.S., R.D., PCRM’s nutrition director. “We’ve never had such a desperate need for clear, accurate nutrition advice. But MyPyramid is confusing, and it recommends meat and dairy products despite overwhelming evidence that these foods are unnecessary and unhealthful. We’ve got to do better.”

The Power Plate and the petition, filed with U.S. Department of Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack and Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius, have already received media coverage in various outlets, including The Des Moines Register and the St. Louis Globe Democrat.

The colorful, user-friendly Power Plate graphic is based on current nutrition research showing that plant-based foods are the most nutrient-dense and help prevent chronic diseases, such as cancer and diabetes. The graphic depicts a plate divided into four new food groups: fruits, grains, legumes, and vegetables. There are no confusing portion sizes and food hierarchies to follow; the Power Plate simply asks people to eat a variety of all four food groups each day. ThePowerPlate.org offers more information on plant-based diets, as well an interactive Power Plate diagram and quiz.

The USDA’s Food Pyramid, introduced in 1991, was a major step forward compared with past dietary recommendations because it asked people to eat more fruits and vegetables. But the Pyramid, and its later versions, recommend two to three servings each of meat and dairy products daily despite studies showing that these foods increase body weight, raise blood pressure, and drive up diabetes risk. The average American now consumes more than 215 pounds of meat a year—up from 144 pounds in 1950.

Learn more about this healthful alternative to the federal Food Pyramid at ThePowerPlate.org.

*     *     *

Today, June 2, 2011, the USDA unveiled its new MyPlate icon that recommends Americans fill half their plates with fruits and vegetables. But it’s at odds with agriculture subsidies that promote high-fat, high-calorie food products.

By William Neuman, The New York Times, June 2, 2011

The first lady, Michelle Obama, on Thursday relegated the government’s well-known food pyramid to the sands of history, unveiling a new, simpler image of a plate divided into basic food groups.

The new design, called MyPlate, was conceived as a crucial part of Mrs. Obama’s campaign against obesity, designed to remind consumers about the basics of a healthful diet.

The plate is split into four sections, for fruit, vegetables, grains and protein. A smaller circle sits beside it for dairy products.

Mrs. Obama, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Dr. Regina M. Benjamin, the surgeon general, unveiled the new healthful eating icon at a news conference in Washington.

“This is a quick, simple reminder for all of us to be more mindful of the foods that we’re eating,” Mrs. Obama said. “We’re all bombarded with so many dietary messages that it’s hard to find time to sort through all this information, but we do have time to take a look at our kids’ plates.”

If the filled plate looks like the symbol, with lots of fruits and vegetables, she said, “then we’re good, it’s as simple as that.”

The Agriculture Department has created a Web site, ChooseMyPlate.com, that elaborates on the guidance reflected in the plate’s design. It includes tip sheets with recommendations like eating fish twice a week and avoiding high-fat, salty foods like salami and bologna.

Officials said they planned to use the plate in a campaign to communicate essential dietary guidelines to consumers, emphasizing one message at a time for the best effect.

The first part of the campaign will encourage people to make half their plate fruit and vegetables. Later phases will urge consumers to avoid oversize portions, enjoy their food but eat less of it and drink water instead of sugary drinks.

Nutritionists often criticized the food pyramid, which was first advanced in 1992, for being misleading or hard to understand. Some gave the plate cautious praise on Thursday.

“It’s better than the pyramid, but that’s not saying a lot,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University.

Dr. Nestle praised the plate for being generally easy to understand, but she said that labeling a large section of the plate “protein” was confusing and unnecessary, because grains and dairy products also are important sources of protein and most Americans get far more protein than they need.

But she said the emphasis on fruits and vegetables was a significant step.

“Americans aren’t used to eating this way, so this is a big change,” Dr. Nestle said.

The plate was created by the Agriculture Department with advice from the first lady’s anti-obesity team and federal health officials. The Agriculture Department said that it had conducted focus groups with about 4,500 people, including children, as it developed the plate.

The project, with the Web site and related educational materials, cost about $2 million. That money will also help pay for an educational campaign about the plate over the next year, officials said.

363. Cuba Has 14 Percent Fewer Healthcare Employees

Reductions include pharmaceutical,
X-ray and dental assistants 

BY Associated Press, The Washington Post, June 1, 2011

HAVANA — Tens of thousands of Cubans are no longer employed in the island’s widely praised health care system, authorities said Wednesday, after warning last year of a need to slash redundant jobs among less-skilled medical workers.

Overall employment in the sector fell 14 percent in 2010 to about 282,000, compared with 330,000 the previous year, according to a report released by the National Statistics Office.

The biggest change was a 34 percent drop in technicians and auxiliary workers, from 134,000 to 88,000, it said. The report did not explain the drop, but said the category included employees such as pharmaceutical, X-ray and dental assistants.

There were only slight changes in numbers for high-skill medical workers such as doctors, nurses and pharmacists, the report said.

Cuba prides itself on providing free, universal health care despite its economic problems.

But state-run media said last year that the government needed to cut “inflated payrolls” in health care. Among the examples cited then were ambulance bases with many drivers for a single vehicle, clinics with more workers than patients on a given shift, and X-ray technicians who performed only a few scans each month.

The Health Ministry’s labor director, Dr. Armando Guerra, told the Communist Party newspaper Granma last June that the sector was undergoing a reorganization.

President Raul Castro also said last year that a half-million state employees would be let go to improve efficiency and productivity amid Cuba’s economic crisis, though those plans have been put on hold. Cuba is legalizing limited private-sector employment in its effort to boost the economy and absorb laid-off government workers.

362. Climate Change: The Sky Is Really Falling

By Chris Hedges, Truthout, May 30, 2011

Joplin, Missouri, before and after photos
of the May 23, 2011 tornado

The rapid and terrifying acceleration of global warming, which is disfiguring the ecosystem at a swifter pace than even the gloomiest scientific studies predicted a few years ago, has been confronted by the power elite with two kinds of self-delusion. There are those, many of whom hold elected office, who dismiss the science and empirical evidence as false. There are others who accept the science surrounding global warming but insist that the human species can adapt. Our only salvation—the rapid dismantling of the fossil fuel industry—is ignored by both groups. And we will be led, unless we build popular resistance movements and carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience, toward collective self-annihilation by dimwitted pied pipers and fools.

Those who concede that the planet is warming but insist we can learn to live with it are perhaps more dangerous than the buffoons who decide to shut their eyes. It is horrifying enough that the House of Representatives voted 240-184 this spring to defeat a resolution that said that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” But it is not much of an alternative to trust those who insist we can cope with the effects while continuing to burn fossil fuels.

Horticulturalists are busy planting swamp oaks and sweet gum trees all over Chicago to prepare for weather that will soon resemble that of Baton Rouge. That would be fine if there was a limit to global warming in sight. But without plans to rapidly dismantle the fossil fuel industry, something no one in our corporate state is contemplating, the heat waves of Baton Rouge will be a starting point for a descent that will ultimately make cities like Chicago unlivable. The false promise of human adaptability to global warming is peddled by the polluters’ major front group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which informed the Environmental Protection Agency that “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.” This bizarre theory of adaptability has been embraced by the Obama administration as it prepares to exploit the natural resources in the Arctic. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced recently that melting of sea ice “will result in more shipping, fishing and tourism, and the possibility to develop newly accessible oil and gas reserves.” Now that’s something to look forward to.

“It is good that at least those guys are taking it seriously, far more seriously than the federal government is taking it,” said the author and environmental activist Bill McKibben of the efforts in cities such as Chicago to begin to adapt to warmer temperatures. “At least they understand that they have some kind of problem coming at them. But they are working off the science of five or six years ago, which is still kind of the official science that the International Climate Change negotiations are working off of. They haven’t begun to internalize the idea that the science has shifted sharply. We are no longer talking about a long, slow, gradual, linear warming, but something that is coming much more quickly and violently. Seven or eight years ago it made sense to talk about putting permeable concrete on the streets. Now what we are coming to realize is that the most important adaptation we can do is to stop putting carbon in the atmosphere. If we don’t, we are going to produce temperature rises so high that there is no adapting to them.”

The Earth has already begun to react to our hubris. Freak weather unleashed deadly tornados in Joplin, Mo., and Tuscaloosa, Ala. It has triggered wildfires that have engulfed large tracts in California, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas. It has brought severe droughts to the Southwest, parts of China and the Amazon. It has caused massive flooding along the Mississippi as well as in Australia, New Zealand, China and Pakistan. It is killing off the fish stocks in the oceans and obliterating the polar ice caps. Steadily rising sea levels will eventually submerge coastal cities, islands and some countries. These disturbing weather patterns presage a world where it will be harder and harder to sustain human life. Massive human migrations, which have already begun, will create chaos and violence. India is building a 4,000-kilometer fence along its border with Bangladesh to, in part, hold back the refugees who will flee if Bangladesh is submerged. There are mounting food shortages and sharp price increases in basic staples such as wheat as weather patterns disrupt crop production. The failed grain harvests in Russia, China and Australia, along with the death of the winter wheat crop in Texas, have, as McKibben points out, been exacerbated by the inability of Midwestern farmers to plant corn in water-logged fields. These portents of an angry Gaia are nothing compared to what will follow if we do not swiftly act.

“We are going to have to adapt a good deal,” said McKibben, with whom I spoke by phone from his home in Vermont. “It is going to be a century that calls for being resilient and durable. Most of that adaptation is going to take the form of economies getting smaller and lower to the ground, local food, local energy, things like that. But that alone won’t do it, because the scale of change we are now talking about is so great that no one can adapt to it. Temperatures have gone up one degree so far and that has been enough to melt the Arctic. If we let it go up three or four degrees, the rule of thumb the agronomists go by is every degree Celsius of temperature rise represents about a 10 percent reduction in grain yields. If we let it go up three or four degrees we are really not talking about a planet that can support a civilization anything like the one we’ve got.

“I have sympathy for those who are trying hard to figure out how to adapt, but they are behind the curve of the science by a good deal,” he said. “I have less sympathy for the companies that are brainwashing everyone along the line ‘We’re taking small steps here and there to improve.’ The problem, at this point, is not going to be dealt with by small steps. It is going to be dealt with by getting off fossil fuel in the next 10 or 20 years or not at all.

“The most appropriate thing going on in Chicago right now is that Greenpeace occupied [on Thursday] the coal-fired power plant in Chicago,” he said. “That’s been helpful. It reminded people what the real answers are. We’re going to see more civil disobedience. I hope we are. I am planning hard for some stuff this summer.

“The task that we are about is essentially political and symbolic,” McKibben admitted. “There is no actual way to shut down the fossil fuel system with our bodies. It is simply too big. It’s far too integrated in everything we do. The actions have to be symbolic, and the most important part of that symbolism is to make it clear to the onlookers that those of us doing this kind of thing are not radical in any way. We are conservatives. The real radicals in this scenario are people who are willing to fundamentally alter the composition of the atmosphere. I can’t think of a more radical thing that any human has ever thought of doing. If it wasn’t happening it would be like the plot from a Bond movie.

“The only way around this is to defeat the system, and the name of that system is the fossil fuel industry, which is the most profitable industry in the world by a large margin,” McKibben said. “Fighting it is extraordinarily difficult. Maybe you can’t do it. The only way to do it is to build a movement big enough to make a difference. And that is what we are trying desperately to do with 350.org. It is something we should have done 20 years ago, instead of figuring that we were going to fight climate change by convincing political elites that they should do something about this problem. It is a tactic that has not worked.

 




































“One of our big targets this year is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is the biggest front group for fossil fuel there is,” he said. “We are figuring out how to take them on. I don’t think they are worried about us yet. And maybe they are right not to be, because they’ve got so much money they’re invulnerable. 

“There are huge decisive battles coming,” he said. “This year the Obama administration has to decide whether it will grant a permit or not for this giant pipeline to run from the tar sands of Alberta down to the refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. That is like a 1,500-mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet. We have to figure out how to keep that from happening. The Obama administration, very sadly, a couple of months ago opened 750 million tons of western coal under federal land for mining. That was a disgrace. But they still have to figure out how to get it to port so they can ship it to China, which is where the market for it is. We are trying hard to keep that from happening. I’m on my way to Bellingham, Wash., next week because there is a plan for a deep-water port in Bellingham that would allow these giant freighters to show up and collect that coal.

“In moral terms, it’s all our personal responsibility and we should be doing those things,” McKibben said when I asked him about changing our own lifestyles to conserve energy. “But don’t confuse that with having much of an impact on the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere. You can’t make the math work one house or one campus at a time. We should do those things. I’ve got a little plaque for having built the most energy-efficient house in Vermont the year we built it. I’ve got solar panels everywhere. But I don’t confuse myself into thinking that that’s actually doing very much. This argument is a political argument. I spend much of my life on airplanes spewing carbon behind me as we try to build a global movement. Either we are going to break the power of the fossil fuel industry and put a price on carbon or the planet is going to heat past the point where we can deal with it.

“It goes far beyond party affiliation or ideology,” he said. “Fossil fuel undergirds every ideology we have. Breaking with it is going to be a traumatic and difficult task. The natural world is going to continue to provide us, unfortunately, with many reminders about why we have to do that. Sooner or later, we will wise up. The question is all about that sooner or later.

“I’d like people to go to climatedirectaction.org and sign up,” McKibben said. “We are going to be issuing calls for people to be involved in civil disobedience. I’d like people to join in this campaign against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It’s very easy to sign up. If you don’t own a little business yourself, you probably shop at 10 or 20 of them a week. It’s very easy to sign those guys up to say the U.S. Chamber doesn’t speak for me. We can’t take away their [the Chamber’s] money, but we can take away some of their respectability. I would like people to demonstrate their solidarity with people all around the world in this fight. The next big chance to do that will be Sept. 24, a huge global day of action that we’re calling ‘Moving Planet.’ It will be largely bicycle based, because the bicycle is one of the few tools that both rich and poor use and because it is part of the solution we need. On that day we will be delivering demands via bicycle to every capital and statehouse around the world.

“I wish there was some easy ‘end around,’ some backdoor through which we could go to get done what needs to be done,” he said. “But that’s not going to happen. That became clear at Copenhagen and last summer when the U.S. Senate refused to take a vote on the most mild, tepid climate legislation there could have been. We are going to have to build a movement that pushes the fossil fuel industry aside. I don’t know whether that’s possible. If you were to bet, you might well bet we will lose. We have been losing for two decades. But you are not allowed to make that bet. The only moral action, when the worst thing that ever happened in the world is happening, is to try and figure out how to change those odds.

“At least they knew they were going to win,” McKibben said of the civil rights movement. “They didn’t know when, but they knew they were going to win, that the tide of history was on their side. But the arch of the physical universe appears to be short and appears to bend towards heat. We’ve got to win quickly if we’re going to win. We’ve already passed the point where we’re going to stop global warming. It has already warmed a degree and there is another degree in the pipeline from carbon already emitted. The heat gets held in the ocean for a while, but it’s already there. We’ve already guaranteed ourselves a miserable century. The question is whether it’s going to be an impossible one.”

Chris Hedges is a weekly Truthdig columnist and a fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is “The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.”

361. A Memorial Day Massacre

(Photo: chicago.indymedia.org)

By Dick Meister, Truthout, May 30, 2011

It's a dramatic, shocking and violent film. Some 200 uniformed policemen armed with billy clubs, revolvers and tear gas angrily charge an unarmed crowd of several hundred striking steelworkers and their wives and children, who are desperately running away. The police club those they can reach, shoving them to the ground and ignoring their pleas as they batter them with further blows. They stand above the fallen to fire at the backs of those who've outraced them.

Police drag the injured along the ground and into patrol wagons, where they are jammed in with dozens of others who were also arrested. Four are already dead from police bullets, six others are to die shortly. Eighty are wounded, two dozen others so badly beaten that they, too, must be hospitalized.

The close-ups are particularly brutal. As one newspaper reviewer noted, "In several instances from two to four policemen are seen beating one man. One strikes him horizontally across the face, using his club as he would a baseball bat. Another crashes it down on top of his head and still another is whipping him across the back."

The film ends with a sweaty, fatigued policeman looking into the camera, grinning and motioning as if dusting off his hands.

The film was made in 1937. It was not, however, one of those popular cops and robbers features of the thirties. It was not fictional. It was an on-the-scene report of what historians call "The Memorial Day Massacre," a newsreel segment filmed by Paramount Pictures as it was happening on the south side of Chicago on May 30, 1937.

We're accustomed these days to the use of videotaped evidence to show wrongdoing by abusive law enforcement officers. Video technology was unknown in 1937, of course, and though film was available, it had rarely - if ever - been used for that purpose. The 1937 film, in fact, was initially kept from the general public by Paramount's executives. Fearful of "inciting riots," they refused to include it in any of their newsreels that were shown regularly in movie theaters nationwide.

But the film was shown to a closed session of a Senate investigating committee chaired by Robert LaFollette Jr. of Wisconsin. The committee, concerned primarily with civil liberties, was outraged - particularly since the Chicago police had acted in violation of the two-year-old federal law that guaranteed workers the right to strike and engage in other peaceful union activities.

The committee found that strikers and their families, while noisily demanding collective bargaining rights as they massed in front of the South Chicago plant operated by Republic Steel, had indeed been generally peaceful.

But that was beside the point to the police in Chicago and other cities with plants operated by Republic and two other members of the "Little Steel" alliance that also were struck. For, as the committee concluded, the police had been "loosed to shoot down citizens on the streets and highways" at the companies' behest. The companies even supplied them with weapons and ammunition from their own stockpiles.

The committee said the companies had spent more than $40,000 on machine guns, rifles, shotguns, revolvers, tear gas canisters and launchers and 10,000 rounds of ammunition to use against strikers. Republic alone had more supplies than any law enforcement agency in the entire country.

The companies were prepared to go to any extreme to remain nonunion. Two closed their plants temporarily, anticipating that most of the 85,000 strikers would soon be forced to return to work because they had little - if any - savings. But though Republic Steel closed most of its plants, it continued to operate the Chicago plant and a few others.

Republic fired union members at the plants that remained open and, with police help, cleared out union sympathizers and brought in strikebreakers to replace them. The strikebreakers, guarded by police day and night, ate and slept in the plants to avoid confronting the pickets outside.

Municipal police, company police and National Guardsmen harassed and often arrested pickets for doing little more than lawfully picketing. Six strikers were killed outside Republic's Ohio plants in Cleveland, Youngstown, Canton and Massillon.

The killings and other violence, the steadily increasing financial pressures on strikers, unceasing anti-union propaganda - all that and more combined to end the strike in mid-July, two months after it had begun.

But the steelworkers didn't give up. Determined to not have made such great sacrifices in vain, they turned to the labor-friendly administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt for help. They got it in 1941, when heavy pressures from the administration finally forced the steel companies to recognize their employees' legal right to unionization and the many benefits, financial and otherwise, that it brought them and the many other industrial union members who followed their lead.

360. Medicines from Plants

Dr. Jürgen Drossard, Dr. Thomas Rademacher
and Dr. Stefan Schillberg (from left to right) produce
active substances in transgenic plants and plant
suspension cells. (Credit: Copyright Dirk Mahler)

ScienceDaily, May 27, 2011 

"Medicines from plants" -- one thinks of herbal teas or valerian drops. However, that has nothing in common with what the researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME in Aachen, Germany, are doing. They use plants to produce biopharmaceuticals. These are proteins that, unlike many other medications, cannot be chemically produced.

Biologically produced medications, such as recombinant insulin or therapeutic antibodies to fight cancer, have become indispensable. Plants are particularly suitable for producing complex active substances. The reason is that these substances can be produced inexpensively and on a large scale in plants. Compared to producing them in animal cells, plants have the advantage that they grow quickly, are easy to look after and can be protected well against damaging influences.

Precisely controlled raising of plants

Tobacco was the plant of choice. Dr. Jürgen Drossard explains the reason: "Tobacco has long been a very interesting plant for molecular biologists. It is easy to modify, meaning a foreign gene coding for the pharmaceutical protein can be introduced. In addition, a lot of biomass grows quickly and therefore a greater quantity of the desired proteins is also produced." The active substances must be absolutely safe. It is for this reason that the requirements both for growing the plants and for the processes and equipment for the preparations are particularly high. The researchers from Aachen passed the stringent tests of the supervisory and approval authorities for both. "The tobacco plants are protected from all external influences and grown under precisely controlled conditions. We practically grow them on sterile substrates. And fertilization with manure is absolutely out of the question, of course," says Dr. Thomas Rademacher.

But growing the plants only solved a part of the problem. Because, how does one get as much protein as possible from the leaves that are harvested? The team developed the equipment that is suitable for that itself, because current processes, coming from food technology, for example, work on an entirely different scale. The complete pulping process now takes place in a closed loop.

Biopharmaceuticals for clinical studies

"We wanted to show that it can be done, that biopharmaceuticals can be produced that are suitable for clinical studies," says Dr. Stefan Schillberg of the IME. And this is exactly where the team is at with its development. The proteins that are produced in this manner are currently being tested with the objective that they be used in clinical studies. For example, the antibodies could be used to manufacture a vaginal gel with which women could protect themselves from an HIV infection. In a new project, the researchers are currently working on producing a malaria vaccine in plants.

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The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.