UC Berkeley’s new Stanley Hall not your father’s ivory tower (San Francisco Chronicle) UC Berkeley, the university that made history by building a machine to smash atoms in the last century, has now constructed a building to smash academic boundaries in the 21st century. Costing $162 million, the new Stanley Hall science center is perhaps the... [News Source]

Premise registration continues on plan (Iowa Farmer) Editor’s note: On Nov.. 22, the Bush administration pledged not to make a planned National Animal Identification System mandatory. However, that has not derailed movement toward a voluntary tracking system. [News Source]

Johanns Could Be Leaving USDA Just in Time (AG Weekly) WASHINGTON — The Department of Agriculture is rarely in the headlines these days, but when Secretary Mike Johanns stepped down last week, he listed a range of projects that span the agency’s broad reach, from preparing for an outbreak of a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza to developing an online facility for providing U.S. citizens with nutrition advice. [News Source]

R-CALF: New FTAs detrimental to U.S. food safety (Prairie Star) WASHINGTON, D.C. n Recently negotiated free trade agreements (FTAs) with Peru, Panama and Colombia would limit inspections and safety requirements for food imported into the U.S. from these countries. [News Source]

Johanns Could Be Leaving USDA Just in Time (Prairie Star) WASHINGTON — The Department of Agriculture is rarely in the headlines these days, but when Secretary Mike Johanns stepped down last week, he listed a range of projects that span the agency’s broad reach, from preparing for an outbreak of a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza to developing an online facility for providing U.S. citizens with nutrition advice. [News Source]

Chronic wasting disease continues to spread. Neurological disease has hit as far south as West Virginia. [News Source]

Epidemic of vCJD in UK highly unlikely (The Herald) There will be no epidemic of the human form of mad cow disease in Britain, despite fears that the worst is yet to come, an expert said yesterday. [News Source]

Theater Review: Mad Cow chronicles Heidi — and a generation (Orlando Sentinel) [News Source]

Japan to resist U.S. pressure on beef: Farm Min (Reuters via Yahoo! News) Japan will resist pressure to relax import rules on beef from the United States, one of the nation's top suppliers of the meat before a ban several years ago, the new farm minister said on Wednesday. [News Source]

Some Say Johanns Abandoned Farm Legislation (Washington Post) The Department of Agriculture is rarely in the headlines these days, but when Secretary Mike Johanns stepped down last week, he listed a range of projects that span the agency's broad reach, from preparing for an outbreak of a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza to developing an online fa... [News Source]