Butz, Former Agriculture Secretary, Dies From The Associated Press Butz, an outspoken U.S. agriculture secretary forced from office in 1976 for making a racist joke and once a dean at Purdue University, died Saturday. Butz died at his son's home in Washington, D.C., said Randy Woodson, dean of Purdue's College of Agriculture. Two years earlier, Butz apologized to the Vatican after criticizing the Roman Catholic Church's stand on birth control by using a mock Italian accent while referring to the pope. When world food prices soared in the 1970s, Butz gained...

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Earl Butz, Ex-US Agriculture Secretary, Dies at 98 (Update2) From Bloomberg Feb. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Earl Butz, the U.S. secretary of agriculture who was forced to resign after telling an obscenity- laced racist joke in 1976, died yesterday in Washington. Butz, who died in his sleep, had been in failing health for the past couple of weeks, said Randy Woodson, dean of Purdue University's College of Agriculture. Butz was named to head the Department of Agriculture in 1971 by President Richard Nixon. Butz was flying from the 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City,...

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All eyes are on the new agriculture secretary, thanks to stalled ... From Baltimore Sun After Schafer's unanimous confirmation last Monday, members of the Senate Agriculture Committee expressed their hope that he would be able to break the deadlock between the Bush administration and Congress on the reauthorization of the $286 billion farm bill. The administration is opposed to a continuation of farm policy that pays crop subsidies to the wealthiest farmers. State farmers have long argued that they do not get their fair share of the federal farm spending plan. Bruce Gardner, a...

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Don’t push for premature deal, India tells WTO From Economic Times NEW DELHI: India has cautioned the World Trade Organisation (WTO) that any attempt to push for a deal in the ongoing Doha round of trade talks by holding a ministerial meeting without groundwork could prove to be counter-productive. Speaking to reporters, they said the developed countries and the WTO secretariat seemed to have lost interest in services and wanted to conclude the agriculture and NAMA deals first, which was unacceptable to India and many other developing countries like...

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New bird flu case detected in chickens in Turkish village From International Herald Tribune ANKARA, Turkey : Several dead chickens have tested positive for the bird flu virus in a small village in northern Turkey, the Agriculture Ministry said Sunday. Last month, authorities confirmed an H5N1 outbreak had killed dozens of chickens at a village near the northern Black Sea city of Zonguldak.

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