Where’s the Beef? (Hartford Advocate) Heaven, a Brown Swiss cow with expressive eyes and a patch of curly hair, has three ID cards. The inside of her left ear is tattooed with one number; yellow plastic name tags with another number dangle from both ears; and a silver clip with a third number clings to the top of her right ear. The Obama... [News Source]

BookExpo America 2009: ‘Catching Fire’ Tops the Kids’ Books Buzz List (School Library Journal) We all know that Suzanne Collins’s Catching Fire (Scholastic) was the most talked about YA title at Book Expo America in New York last week, but there were plenty of other fall releases that librarians were nuts about. [News Source]

R-CALF Urges USDA To Accomplish Two Priority Goals (CattleNetwork.com) Washington, D.C. – In a meeting held last week in the office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), R-CALF USA CEO Bill Bullard informed USDA officials that urgent action is needed to restore the viability of the U.S. cattle industry. [News Source]

Paula Crossfield: Sustainable Agriculture is Pro-Technology Within a Cyclical Model (The Huffington Post) Often the sustainable food movement gets a lot of flack for insisting "we go back to 19th century" agricultural methods. (this time the speaker was... [News Source]

Brian Rudman: Old goats need a swift kick (The New Zealand Herald) The God's gift to women delusion is hardly a rare phenomenon in parliamentary or legal circles. They're both trades that attract those with the messianic gene. [News Source]

Put off plan to track U.S. meat. We ask Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to wait for better economic times to create a federally mandated system of tracking the nation's meat supply, and ask growers to improve their voluntary system enough to negate the need of another regulation. [News Source]

Mice cast new light on dementia (Guardian Unlimited) Scientists have found that harmful tangles of proteins that cause diseases such as Alzheimer's can be transmitted from one brain to another, spreading and causing damage after being injected into the brains of mice. The researchers stressed, however, that Alzheimer's was not contagious and said it could not be caught, for example, through blood transfusions. Alzheimer's and similar ... [News Source]

MP urges easier imports (Guelph Mercury) GUELPH (Jun 9, 2009) -- Guelph MP Frank Valeriote said his first trip to Washington made him feel like a lobbyist as he urged U.S. agricultural officials to relax regulations currently costing Canadian farmers money. [News Source]