The author introduces the next three articles on the invasion of Fall Army Worm into Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia describing how the pest spreads, the damage it causes and approaches to its control.

Jurors in California have awarded $289 million to a man who claimed that his cancer was due to Monsanto's herbicide glyphosate, even though that is biologically impossible. Even the judge acknowledged that there was no evidence of harm. Yet, trial lawyers manipulated a jury's emotions and the public's misunderstanding of science to score another jackpot verdict. The plaintiff, Dewayne Johnson, claims that glyphosate gave him non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer that occurs when the immune system goes awry. There are three major problems with this claim. First, as stated above, glyphosate does not cause cancer because it does not harm humans. It is an herbicide, so it is only toxic to plants. There is no known biological mechanism by which glyphosate could cause cancer, therefore its carcinogenicity is not even theoretically possible. That is why there is not a single reputable public health agency that believes glyphosate causes cancer. The US Environmental Protection Agency, the World Health Organization, and the European Food Safety Authority all reject claims of any link. The only organization of note that rejects this scientific consensus is a group within the World Health Organization called the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). Contrary to all evidence, the group insists that glyphosate causes cancer – along with bacon and hot water. The truth is that IARC is a fringe outlier, staunchly ideological rather than scientific, and rife with financial conflicts of interest. Christopher Portier, a special adviser to the IARC working group that examined glyphosate, was also working for the activist organization the Environmental Defense Fund and received $160,000 from trial lawyers who stood to profit handsomely if IARC declared glyphosate a carcinogen because they could file suits in lawsuit-happy California. IARC's credibility has been so thoroughly shattered that Congress recently pulled its funding. Secondly, although the root cause of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is unknown, that does not mean its etiology is completely open to speculation. Lymphomas originate from white blood cells, so scientists believe that autoimmune disease or chronic infections play a role. Just because the plaintiff's attorneys can fool a jury into believing that glyphosate causes non-Hodgkin's lymphoma does not mean there is any scientific evidence – and there is not. Thirdly, glyphosate has been off-patent for 18 years, and about 40% of the world's glyphosate is made in China. So, why pick on Monsanto when several different companies could have supplied the glyphosate the plaintiff used?

Claims have been made that glyphosate application to glyphosate-resistant (GR) crops can result in deficiencies in certain mineral elements in those crops and that this is a cause of increased plant diseases. Strong evidence from multiyear and multisite studies has not verified these claims. Furthermore, these studies and others have found that glyphosate has no effect or a slight stimulation of yield of GR crops. Crops made resistant to the herbicide glyphosate represent about 80% of the acreage of transgenic (GM) crops grown worldwide. Their continued phenomenal success over the past 23 years has resulted from the ability to use perhaps the best herbicide yet devised with high-yielding varieties of soybean, maize, canola, sugarbeet, alfalfa, and cotton. Yet, there has been controversy over whether glyphosate adversely affects mineral nutrition of glyphosate-resistant (GR) crops. These claims have been linked to claims that GR crops are more susceptible to some plant diseases due to manganese deficiencies and other causes and to yield decreases. Two proposed mechanisms of purported glyphosate effects on plant mineral nutrition have been proposed: 1) direct effects by chelation of mineral cations, especially divalent cations such as Mn++ and 2) toxic effects on rhizoshere microbes involved in plant mineral assimilation. Although, an analysis of all the literature on this topic concluded that most of the literature did not support the view that glyphosate use in GR crops caused these problems, these claims of adverse effects have received considerable attention from farmers and the general public, and they persist in reviews and on websites. More recently, even stronger evidence refuting claims of altered mineral nutrition in glyphosate-treated GR crops has been published, while virtually no findings to the contrary have been reported. This short review discusses these new papers and the strong case for a lack of an effect.