“My office has received some pretty ugly voicemails, threats, terrible things said to my staff,” Collins said in an interview with WVOM on Wednesday.

We've had some very abusive callers. ... We've had some very vulgar calls and sort of harassing the staff," Steve Abbot, Collins's chief of staff, told a Maine TV station at the time

Bayer said the number of U.S. lawsuits brought against newly acquired Monsanto has risen to about 8,000 from 5,200 previously, after Monsanto was ordered to pay damages for not warning of alleged cancer risks of glyphosate-based weedkillers.

“The number of plaintiffs in both state and federal litigation is approximately 8,000 as of end-July. These numbers may rise or fall over time but our view is that the number is not indicative of the merits of the plaintiffs’ cases,” Chief Executive Werner Baumann told analysts in a conference call on Thursday.

Bayer shares have lost more than 10 percent since Monsanto was ordered on Aug. 10 to pay $289 million in damages in the first of possibly thousands of U.S. lawsuits over glyphosate-based weedkillers such as Roundup and Ranger Pro.

https://www.ewg.org/childrenshealth/glyphosateincereal/#.W3S0KX4nYQ9
Popular oat cereals, oatmeal, granola and snack bars come with a hefty dose of the weed-killing poison in Roundup, according to independent laboratory tests commissioned by EWG.

Glyphosate, an herbicide linked to cancer by California state scientists and the World Health Organization, was found in all but two of 45 samples of products made with conventionally grown oats. Almost three-fourths of those samples had glyphosate levels higher than what EWG scientists consider protective of children’s health with an adequate margin of safety. About one-third of 16 samples made with organically grown oats also had glyphosate, all at levels well below EWG’s health benchmark.

Each year, more than 250 million pounds of glyphosate are sprayed on American crops, primarily on “Roundup-ready” corn and soybeans genetically engineered to withstand the herbicide. But when it comes to the food we eat, the highest glyphosate levels are not found in products made with GMO corn.

Increasingly, glyphosate is also sprayed just before harvest on wheat, barley, oats and beans that are not genetically engineered. Glyphosate kills the crop, drying it out so that it can be harvested sooner than if the plant were allowed to die naturally.

Monsanto suffered a major blow with a jury ruling that the company was liable for a terminally ill man’s cancer, awarding him $289m in damages.

Dewayne Johnson, a 46-year-old former groundskeeper, won a huge victory in the landmark case on Friday, with the jury determining that Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller caused his cancer and that the corporation failed to warn him of the health hazards from exposure. The jury further found that Monsanto “acted with malice or oppression”.

Johnson’s lawyers argued over the course of a month-long trial in San Francisco that Monsanto had “fought science” for years and targeted academics who spoke up about possible health risks of the herbicide product. Johnson was the first person to take the agrochemical corporation to trial over allegations that the chemical sold under the brand Roundup causes cancer.

In the extraordinary verdict, which Monsanto said it intends to appeal, the jury ruled that the company was responsible for “negligent failure” and knew or should have known that its product was “dangerous”.

Dr. Harry Lever, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, said he was concerned about quality control of generic medicines, like valsartan, made in China and India. He believes that manufacturers should be more transparent about where their active ingredients are made.

“It’s not just valsartan,” Dr. Lever said. “It’s becoming very difficult for me to write prescriptions at all. There are so many drugs that are coming in from India and China and companies are buying and selling each other and you don’t know what’s what.”

Mother: Remember that God exists. Kneel and cry to God. Ask him to help you get out of there.

Child: Everytime I go to sleep, I pray for you.

Mom: "We didn't kow that things were like this. If we had known, I would not have let you go with your dad."

Ocasio-Cortez outlined plans to transition the United States to a 100 percent renewable energy system by 2035. It’s a goal hailed by environmentalists as the last best hope of staving off the most catastrophic effects of human-caused planetary warming, and it’s one already adopted by a coalition of mayors representing 42 percent of U.S. electricity use and representing major cities such as Atlanta and St. Louis.

What sets Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal apart is her plan to meet the target by implementing what she called a “Green New Deal,” a federal plan to spur “the investment of trillions of dollars and the creation of millions of high-wage jobs.” Though the slogan harks back to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal program of infrastructure spending and labor reforms, she compared the program she envisions to the tens of billions of dollars spent on armaments manufacturing and the rebuilding of Europe after World War II.

“The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan,” she told HuffPost by email last week. “We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy, but this time green energy.”

A federal judge in San Diego on Tuesday barred the separation of migrant children from their parents and ordered immigration officials to reunify within 30 days families that have been divided as a result of a zero-tolerance policy enforced by the Trump administration until last week.

Judge Dana Sabraw of the United States District Court for the Southern District of California granted a preliminary injunction sought by the American Civil Liberties Union.

An executive order issued by Trump last week ended the policy of forced separation, replacing it with family detention, but about 2,000 children remain split from their parents. The government had urged Sabraw not to grant the injunction, saying the president’s order, which followed days of bipartisan outcry, had resolved the concerns of the suit.