Updates
News: MORE ON McAULIFFE
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Mother Jones was the first to report that a 1993 real estate deal involving Terry McAuliffe, Clinton's former chief fundraiser, and the Prudential Insurance Co. was under investigation by the Justice Department ("McAuliffe Inc.," May/June 1997). In November, Prudential agreed to pay $317,500 to settle a Justice Department complaint over the same deal. According to the Washington Post, the DOJ found that Prudential had secretly—and illegally—paid McAuliffe, then a Democratic National Committee fundraiser, $375,000 to help arrange for the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., a government agency, to sign a $187 million, 15-year lease on a Washington, D.C., office building that the insurance company owned. Around the same time, Prudential paid a total of $85,000 to the DNC.
A Prudential spokesperson told the Post that although the company agreed to settle the complaint, it admits no wrongdoing. McAuliffe maintained that the fee went to his real estate firm and that he didn't know anything about the deal. But when we talked to McAuliffe last year, he said he'd heard the DOJ had "looked at [the Prudential deal] and found nothing, absolutely nothing." The DOJ isn't finished with McAuliffe yet: It's reportedly investigating charges that during the '96 campaign he lined up donors for disgraced former Teamsters leader Ron Carey's campaign in exchange for $1 million in donations to the DNC.
NOT ROUNDUP READY
In "A Growing Concern" (January/February 1997), we looked into the failure of Monsanto Co.'s Bt cotton—which is genetically engineered to produce a toxin that the company claimed would kill bollworms—in Texas' Brazos River Valley. Farmers there lost much of their crop when the cotton didn't perform as advertised, and 13 of them filed a lawsuit against Monsanto. Now it seems that Monsanto's second major genetically engineered product to hit the market, Roundup Ready cotton, is faring no better. The New York Times reported in November that farmers using Roundup Ready cotton in Mississippi lost up to 40 percent of their crop when the plants failed to survive applications of the company's Roundup herbicide. Forty-six farmers have asked the Mississippi Seed Arbitration Council to force Monsanto to cover their losses.
TOBACCO TROUBLES 
In "Heavy Breathing" (July/August 1993), L.J. Davis predicted that Lorillard, the nation's fourth-largest tobacco manufacturer, was in for some sticky legal problems: From 1952 to 1957, the "micronite filter" on Lorillard's Kent brand cigarettes contained crocidolite, the deadliest form of asbestos. (Lorillard actually claimed the filter made Kents healthier than other cigarettes.) In December, Lorillard was forced to pay $1.5 million in compensatory damages to the family of a California man who smoked Kents and died from a rare cancer caused primarily by crocidolite. The tobacco company is still appealing the $700,000 in punitive damages the jury awarded to the victim's family, but the floodgates have opened: There are now a half-dozen similar cases pending against Lorillard.
