• Experiments at one of the remaining UK GM crops sites have been threatened not by protesters but by a tippling fox. The animal took a liking to the alcohol-containing pitfall traps arranged around the site to catch insects. Its numerous drunken nighttime raids left researchers with fewer and fewer data points.

• But the most laid-back anti-GM protest yet has to be virtual crop destruction. A news release circulating late in July claimed that members of two action groups— the "LodiLoppers" and the "Cropatistas"— had destroyed about two acres of commercial plantings of GM corn somewhere near Lodi, a farming community in the fertile Central Valley of California. This vandalism was intended "to show the biotech industry. . .that these genetically engineered crops are not wanted in the US and that Californians will use any means necessary to eradicate this menace," the release stated. Well, any means, that is, bar actually doing something. According to one Lodi resident, there "is not one scintilla of truth" to the claim that any crops were damaged. He points out that the wanton destruction of several acres of corn is not something that would go unnoticed. Critics of biotechnology are wondering what's up, some puzzling over the secrecy and anonymity of this gesture, and others bewildered over what now seems to be a phantom incident.

• Commenting entirely rationally and soberly on a proposal to establish a single tightly controlled area within which UK trials on GM crops could take place, the director of an organic farming organization has compared GM crops with anthrax bacilli. Patrick Holden of the Soil Association said that the proposed area could become another "anthrax island" because "GM could cause contamination for a very long time." He did fail to mention that the seeds and DNA of organic crops are not equally long-lived, or that crops in general do not tend to cause fatal and infectious diseases in humans or animals. Other than that, the comparision is absolutely appropriate.