Harvest Dream - A Chronicle

With no warning one weekday morning, investigators entered an organic grocery with a search warrant and ordered the hemp-clad workers to put down their buckets of mashed coconut cream and to step away from the nuts.

Then, guns drawn, four officers fanned out across Rawesome Foods in Venice. Skirting past the arugula and peering under crates of zucchini, they found the raid's target inside a walk-in refrigerator: unmarked jugs of raw milk.

"I still can't believe they took our yogurt," said Rawesome volunteer Sea J. Jones, a few days after the raid. "There's a medical marijuana shop a couple miles away, and they're raiding us because we're selling raw dairy products?"

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Cartons of raw goat and cow milk and blocks of unpasteurized goat cheese were among the groceries seized in the June 30 raid by federal, state and local authorities — the latest salvo in the heated food fight over what people can put in their mouths.

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"This is about control and profit, not our health," said Aajonus Vonderplanitz, co-founder of Rawesome Foods. "How can we not have the freedom to choose what we eat?"

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Squeezed between a coffee shop and a vintage guitar store, Rawesome looks from the outside like a forgotten storage unit. A tiny club sign hangs on the 10-foot-tall corrugated fence that hides the windowless storefront.

But inside, the shop is bright and airy, a bohemian farmers market surrounded by burnt-orange walls and a white tarp roof to keep out the rain. Boxes of coconuts and ginger from Hawaii sit nestled next to crates of California squash. Labels identify where each bite of produce was grown: onions from the Viva Tierra farm in Harlingen, Texas, and King's Crown Organic farm in King Hill, Idaho.

The members — a mix of tattooed young people and middle-aged executives in Italian shoes — chat as they head to the walk-in cooler in the back. It is jam-packed with meat and dairy. Ziploc bags are filled with chicken, beef and pork. Many don't have an expiration date. The other side is stocked with Amish buttermilk ($7.95 a quart), Amish cream cheese ($12.75 a pound) and whole milk ($8.59 per half-gallon).

Agencies that participated in the raid on Rawesome included the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, the California Department of Food and Agriculture, the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Investigators confiscated the club's computer and 17 coolers packed with, among other things, 24 bottles of organic honey, 10 gallons of raw whole milk and two bottles of raw cane syrup. Stewart said the health department slapped a closure notice on the club's front door that said it was "operating a food facility without a valid public health permit."

The health department, district attorney's office and the FDA declined to comment, citing the pending investigation. The state Department of Food and Agriculture, which was the agency of record on the search warrant, said it continues to work with the district attorney's office.

Co-op members are undeterred. Four days after the raid, Rawesome reopened its doors. The shelves were restocked. They have remained so ever since.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, the line stretched halfway down the block. A stern young man in baggy cargo pants and sunglasses guarded the entrance, checking drivers' licenses. Lela Buttery, a Rawesome volunteer and professional biologist, handed out legal waivers to sign.

One woman, digging into her green grocery bag for a pen, asked, "You guys got shut down last week?"

"Yes," Buttery said.

"That's nuts," the woman replied. "You're not going to stop, right?"

Buttery grinned. "Can I see your membership card?"

Russia on Tuesday blasted unilateral European Union sanctions imposed against Iran's energy sector as "unacceptable", saying the move showed a disregard for the UN Security Council.

"We have already said many times that we consider unacceptable the practice of unilateral or collective sanctions measures against Iran, that go beyond the Security Council sanctions regime in operation in the country," the foreign ministry said.

The statement came after EU foreign ministers on Monday formally adopted new sanctions on Iran's key energy sector in a bid to force it to return to talks on its controversial nuclear programme.

Iran is under four sets of UN sanctions over its refusal to heed repeated Security Council ultimatums to suspend uranium enrichment, the most controversial part of its nuclear programme.

Iran says that it is enriching uranium purely for peaceful use, but Western powers are concerned that it intends to develop a nuclear weapon.

Russia said Tuesday that the EU sanctions showed "disregard for the carefully regulated and coordinated provisions of the UN Security Council."

Both the EU and US sanctions "do not promote finding a speedy political and diplomatic resolution of the problem. For us this is obvious," the ministry said.

Russia "categorically rejects" any attempts to use sanctions against companies and individuals from third countries who are "conscientiously carrying out the demands of UN Security Council resolutions," it said.

To require all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or in civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, to authorize the induction of persons in the uniformed services during wartime to meet end-strength requirements of the uniformed services, and for other purposes.

Brazilian native Indians on Sunday took 100 workers hostage at the construction site of a hydroelectric plant in the southern Amazon region, local media reported.

As many as 400 Indians from several different tribes occupied a power plant they say was built on an ancient burial site.

"They didn't take into account the situation of the Indians," Antonio Carlos Ferreira de Aquino, a local administrator with the government's agency of indigenous affairs, Funai, told Folha.com.

Armed with bows and arrows, the Indians occupied the site at dawn on Sunday and confined the construction company's employees to their barracks.

There were no reports of injuries.

The Indians are demanding that government officials help negotiate a settlement with the construction company.

"We want to be compensated for the construction of the plant. The site is 30 kilometers (19 miles) from our reserve and has caused great cultural and social impact in our community, not to mention environmental damage," Aldeci Arara, a tribal leader, told the G1 news portal.

The Dardanelos dam on the Aripuana river, some 400 kilometers (250 miles) north of the Mato Grosso state capital Cuiaba, was due to come online in January 2011, the media reports said.

The construction company told G1.com that it has been in touch with Funai to define a community development program for the local native Indians.

The company was not immediately available for comment.

It is one of nearly a dozen hydroelectric power plants the administration of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been promoting in the Amazon region.

Earlier this year the government took bids for the construction of the $17 billion Belo Monte dam on the Xingu river. The project triggered an international outcry over potential environmental damage and impact on native Indian tribes.

Scientists celebrated Sunday after finding more than 700 suspected new planets -- including up to 140 similar in size to Earth -- in just six weeks of using a powerful new space observatory.

Early results from NASA’s Kepler Mission, a small satellite observing deep space, suggested planets like Earth were far more common than previously thought.

Past discoveries suggested most planets outside our solar system were gas giants
such as Jupiter and Saturn -- but the new evidence tipped the balance in favor of solid worlds.

Astronomers said the discovery meant the chances of eventually finding truly Earth-like planets capable of sustaining life rose sharply.

NASA so far formally announced only five new exoplanets -- those outside our solar system -- from the mission because its scientists were still analyzing Kepler’s finds to confirm they are actually planets.

“The figures suggest our galaxy, the Milky Way [which has more than 100 billion stars] will contain 100 million habitable planets, and soon we will be identifying the first of them,” said Dimitar Sasselov, professor of astronomy at Harvard University and a scientist on the Kepler Mission. "There is a lot more work we need to do with this, but the statistical result is loud and clear, and it is that planets like our own Earth are out there."

U.S. local governments may cut almost 500,000 jobs through next year to cope with sliding property taxes, a decline in state and federal aid and added need for social services, according to a report released today.

The report, a result of a survey by the National League of Cities, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the National Association of Counties, showed local governments are moving to cut the equivalent of 8.6 percent of their workforces from 2009 to 2011. That suggests 481,000 employees will lose their jobs, according to the report, which said the tally may yet rise.

“Local governments across the country are now facing the combined impact of decreased tax revenues, a falloff in state and federal aid and increased demand for social services,” said the study, which was released in Washington today.

Property Taxes

The local groups said their budgets are likely to be hit by a drop in property taxes, which trail changes in home values because of the way assessments are calculated. Although prices peaked in 2006, property taxes paid to state and local governments kept rising until the first three months of this year, according to annual totals compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau.

“Over the next two years, local tax bases will likely suffer from depressed property values, hard-hit household incomes and declining consumer spending,” the report said.

Distressed Cities

The fiscal strains have pushed some local governments into distress. In 2008, Vallejo, California, filed for bankruptcy protection. Reading, Pennsylvania, last year sought refuge under the state’s program for distressed municipalities. This month, a state appointed receiver took over in Central Falls, Rhode Island, a cash-strapped town of 19,000.

Ron Loveridge, the mayor of Riverside, California, one of the areas worst affected by home foreclosures, said cities are struggling to meet the basic needs of their communities, such as running parks, libraries and fire departments.