Even as it waits for President Trump to nominate a new secretary of Labor, the Department of Labor is rolling back policies meant to prevent worker safety violations, says The New York Times. “In a sharp break with the past, the department has stopped publicizing fines against companies. As of Monday, seven weeks after the inauguration of President Trump, the department had yet to post a single news release about an enforcement fine,” says the Times.

After decades of gaming and monopolizing the system governing commercial fishing rights in New England, a crime lord known as The Codfather has been kicked from his throne in New Bedford, Massachusetts, writes Ben Goldfarb in FERN’s latest story, co-produced with Mother Jones. Rafael will plead guilty for fraud before a federal judge in Boston on Thursday, facing 25 years in prison and $500,000 in fines.

Two senior farm-state senators filed legislation to make USDA a permanent member of the high-powered federal panel that decides whether foreign investment in the United States would impair national security interests. The legislation sponsored by Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, the senior Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, would require the panel to consider the impact of a proposed foreign investment on U.S. food and agricultural systems.

President Trump's nominee for U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, said at his confirmation hearing that he will follow Trump's "America first" policy. Reminded by farm-state senators of the importance of exports to the agricultural economy, Lighthizer responded, "I assure you we will prioritize agriculture," reported DTN.

It will take more than a year to write, but President Trump ordered a top-to-bottom reorganization of the federal government, to streamline its operation and discard unneeded programs. The project, under the control of the White House budget office, could provide an opening for calls to create a single food-safety agency, to centralize federal oversight of genetically engineered plants and animals, or to combine public nutrition programs that sprawl across several agencies.

As part of a pollinator plan announced last fall, the Minnesota Agriculture Department sought regulatory authority over seeds coated with neonicotinoids, blamed by some environmentalists for the decline in bee populations. Committees in the state House and Senate rejected the proposal, says Minnesota Public Radio.

Aflatoxin, created by a fungus, "is one of the most potent toxins on the planet," says Monica Schmidt of the University of Arizona, leader of a study on how to avoid crop loss to the toxin. Researchers developed a GMO corn variety with small RNA molecules that prevent the aspergillus fungus from creating the fungus in kernels of corn.

President Trump will ask the Senate to confirm J. Christopher Giancarlo as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the White House announced. Giancarlo was named acting chairman on the day Trump took office and is expected to rein in Dodd-Frank financial reforms. Giancarlo, a commissioner since June 2014, would succeed Timothy Massad, a Democrat, who resigned with the change in administration. Sharon Brown is the only other commissioner at present.

Natural swings in earth's climate patterns "may be responsible for about 30–50 percent of the overall decline” in summer sea ice in the Arctic, says a study out in the journal Nature Climate Change. The study suggests that if these natural patterns reversed themselves, it could slow the pace of Arctic ice melt and maybe even produce a recovery of some of the ice that’s already been lost.

Hawaiian lawmakers killed a bill that would have required agribusiness companies like Monsanto and Syngenta to notify nearby residents before spraying pesticides, says Civil Beat. “Reporting provisions requiring notifications for each application would be very onerous and difficult to carry out,” testified Warren Mayberry, DuPont Pioneer’s senior manager of government affairs.

The first Hispanic from the Rio Grande Valley elected to Congress, Kika de la Garza, who was House Agriculture chairman for 14 of his 32 years in Congress, died on Monday at age of 89. He was chairman during the farm recession of the mid-1980s, one of the hardest times for agriculture since the Depression.

President Trump selected a physician and political conservative, Scott Gottlieb, to become commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, the White House announced. If confirmed, he will succeed Robert Califf, who held the job for the final 11 months of the Obama administration. Gottlieb was deputy FDA commissioner for medical and scientific affairs during the second term of President George W. Bush.

President Trump has often doubted the validity of climate change, but his public comments on the topic also haven’t been straightforward, says The New York Times. In 2009, Trump was one of 50 business leaders who took out a full-page ad in the Times urging “meaningful and effective measures to combat climate change.” But just a few years later, in his 2015 book, “Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again,” he writes: “To begin with, the whole push for renewable energy is being driven by the wrong motivation, the mistaken belief that global climate change is being caused by carbon emissions.”

The world’s oceans are heating up 13 percent faster than previously thought, says a study published in the journal Science Advances. Ocean temperatures are considered a reliable indicator of the earth’s overall rate of climate change, since 90 percent of any extra heat is absorbed by the ocean, writes John Abraham, a thermal sciences professor at University of St. Thomas and one of the study's authors, in The Guardian.

Schools across Britain will see an additional 1 billion pounds ($1.2 billion) for sports from a tax on sugary beverages that will be imposed beginning in April 2018, said Phillip Hammond, chancellor of exchequer, in laying out the proposed government budget. The tax was announced last March as step toward better public health through lower rates of obesity, diabetes and tooth decay, said the Independent.

The most widely used herbicide in the world, glyphosate, faces hundreds of legal challenges from cancer victims, primarlly agricultural and landscape workers, who blame the chemical for their illnesses, says the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Attorney Tim Litzenburg says the total could run into the thousands in the next two months because the statute of limitations is running out in many states.

People will eat more healthy food if prices are lowered and consume less unhealthy food and fewer sugary beverages if they cost more, say researchers who performed a meta-analysis of 30 studies on the issue. Co-author Ashkan Afshin said the meta-analysis demonstrated causality: "Our results show how 10 to 50 percent changes in price of foods and beverages at checkout could influence consumers’ purchasing behaviors over a relatively short period of time.”

The Forest Service is wading through public comments on its proposal to continue to allow ranchers to graze up to 5,600 sheep in the largest wilderness area in Colorado, which is three-quarters of the size of Rhode Island, says The Associated Press. Despite hopes that a decision on the year-old proposal would be announced this winter, it could be months before that happens, according to a Forest Service spokeswoman.