Word: gracefully
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...student-loan program is another potential weak spot for Republicans. As part of their controversial plan for $10.1 billion in education cuts over seven years, they want parents to pay higher interest rates and to eliminate the six-month grace period students have before they must start repaying loans. Those proposals have become a constant theme in speeches by Clinton and town meetings conducted by Democratic Congressmen. Last week, just days after proposing to make colleges pay an administrative fee on government-backed student loans, Republicans were forced to scale back because of the furor that erupted...
...overwhelmed--there are so many things I'm interested in, and I can't possibly do them all," said Grace K. Katabaruki 94'. "But it's nice to have people like this at such a close proximity...
...hear its critics talk, W.R. Grace & Co., based in Boca Raton, Florida, is nothing less than a den of international pirates. Its crime: patenting a pesticide made from seeds of the Indian neem tree. "Genetic colonialism," thunders the self-proclaimed scientific watchdog Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, who is leading a coalition of 200 scientific, academic and farm organizations from 37 countries that filed a petition last week to have the patent revoked. Not only is Grace's pesticide based on an ancient and widely known extraction process, the coalition claims, but it will force Indian...
Well, yes and no. The truth is that Grace's U.S. patent has no effect in India, whose laws prohibit the patenting of agricultural products; Indian farmers are free to use neem seeds as they always have. Beyond that, Grace's patent may be upheld. The company found a way to treat traditional neem-seed extract to increase shelf life from weeks to years--just the sort of innovation patent laws cover. Even an environmentalist like Walt Reid of the World Resources Institute, based in Washington, admits, "I won't be surprised if the challenge doesn...
...Labeling Grace's actions a rip-off, though, requires something of a stretch. The company didn't steal away with the seeds and market them; it built a plant in Tumkur, near Bangalore, to process them, providing jobs for 60 Indians and contributing to the local economy. Some critics charge that demand from Grace's plant is the cause of a recent jump in neem-seed prices that has driven some small farmers out of business, but that is difficult to prove. And while India will eventually have to change its patent laws as a member of the World Trade...