Since GMOs were approved for commercial use, and then first planted into U.S. soil in 1996, their production has increased dramatically. More than 90% of all soybean cotton and corn acreage in the U.S. is used to grow genetically engineered crops. Other popular and approved food crops include sugar beets, alfalfa, canola, papaya and summer squash. More recently, apples that don’t brown and bruise-free potatoes were also approved by the FDA.

Chipotle Mexican Grill announced on Sunday that it had completed an initiative to remove all food containing genetically modified organisms (GMO) from its menu. The Denver-based company is the first major fast-food restaurant chain to ban genetically engineered ingredients.

More than 25 million years ago, India, once a separate island on a quickly sliding piece of the Earth’s crust, crashed into Asia. The two land masses are still colliding, pushed together at a speed of 1.5 to 2 inches a year. The forces have pushed up the highest mountains in the world, in the Himalayas, and have set off devastating earthquakes.
In 1934 — 81 years ago — more than 10,000 people died in a magnitude 8.1 earthquake in eastern Nepal, about six miles south of Mount Everest. A smaller quake in 1988 with a magnitude of 6.8 killed more than 1,000 people.

“Hawaii is a postcard from the future,” said Adam Browning, executive director of Vote Solar, a policy and advocacy group based in California.
Other states and countries, including California, Arizona, Japan and Germany, are struggling to adapt to the growing popularity of making electricity at home, which puts new pressures on old infrastructure like circuits and power lines and cuts into electric company revenue.

BEIJING — Air pollution data from the Chinese government shows that more than 90 percent of 360 Chinese cities failed to meet national air quality standards in the first three months of this year, according to areport released on Tuesday by Greenpeace East Asia.

Rolling Stone magazine retracted its article about a brutal gang rape at aUniversity of Virginia fraternity after the release of a report on Sunday that concluded the widely discredited piece was the result of failures at every stage of the process.
The report, published by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and commissioned by Rolling Stone, said the magazine failed to engage in “basic, even routine journalistic practice” to verify details of the ordeal that the magazine’s source, identified only as Jackie, described to the article’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely.
On Sunday, Ms. Erdely, in her first extensive comments since the article was cast into doubt, apologized to Rolling Stone’s readers, her colleagues and “any victims of sexual assault who may feel fearful as a result of my article.”

Media-savvy, fearless and well-connected to feminists outside China, the young activists over the last three years have taken their righteous indignation to the streets, pioneering a brand of guerrilla theater familiar in the West but largely unheard-of in this authoritarian nation.
Now five of them — core members of China’s new feminist movement — sit in jail, accused of provoking social instability.

Channapha Khamvongsa, an irrepressibly cheery Lao-American woman who for the past decade has led a single-minded effort to rid her native land of millions of bombs still buried here, the legacy of a nine-year American air campaign that made Laos one of the most heavily bombed places on earth.
From 1964 to 1973, American warplanes conducted 580,000 bombing missions overLaos, one of the most intensive air campaigns in the history of warfare. The campaign is often called the Secret War because the United States did not publicly acknowledge waging it.
Since the war’s end, more than 8,000 people have been killed and about 12,000 wounded in Laos by cluster bombs and other live, leftover ordnance.

For the second time in less than a year, the Yale School of Medicine is embroiled in charges of sexual harassment.
A nephrology professor, Dr. Rex L. Mahnensmith, who worked at the university for over 20 years, has been accused of a pattern of sexual harassment while he was medical director of the New Haven Dialysis Clinic, where university physicians treat their patients.
Last year, when the accusations boiled over but were being handled quietly by Yale, the clinic removed him, and Yale forced his resignation. But now, two federal lawsuits have been filed against him in Connecticut, detailing a history of sexual misconduct that stretches back more than a decade.

LAS VEGAS — THIS week I will be sexually harassed on the job, and like many women in the Las Vegas service industry, I will count my tips at the end of my shift and decide that it is worth it.
This is not the most progressive statement for a self-described feminist like myself to make. Neither are a majority of my responses to the suggestive comments I receive.