Seed company, EPA settle on pesticide violations
LIHUE, Kauai — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency settled with Syngenta Seeds LLC to resolve federal pesticide violations at the company’s farm on Kauai.
Under the agreement reached Monday, Syngenta will pay a civil penalty of $150,000. The company also will spend $400,000 on 11 worker protection training sessions for agricultural workers in Hawaii, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.
The EPA said Syngenta failed to notify workers in January 2016 and January 2017 to avoid fields in Kekaha that were sprayed with an insecticide containing chlorpyrifos.
The agency also claimed the company failed to “provide both adequate decontamination supplies on-site and prompt transportation to a medical facility for exposed workers.”
The EPA says chlorpyrifos can overstimulate the nervous system causing nausea, dizziness, confusion, and at very high exposures, respiratory paralysis and death.
In January 2016, 19 workers entered a cornfield about 20 hours after the field was sprayed with chlorpyrifos. The wait period to re-enter is 24 hours. Syngenta said a supervisor had workers immediately leave the field after he realized the error. Ten workers were taken to Kauai Veterans Memorial Hospital to be examined.
High court dismisses charge against publisher
WAILUKU, Maui — The state Supreme Court dismissed a misdemeanor charge against a weekly tabloid publisher who was detained when he used his cellphone to videotape a police traffic enforcement operation six years ago.
The court decided records don’t prove Thomas Russo failed to comply with a police officer’s order.
Russo, publisher of Maui Time, was arrested in November 2012 while officers were looking for oversized vehicles and ones with illegally tinted windows. Two police officers reported telling Russo multiple times to step back, saying he was in their area of operations and in danger of being struck by a vehicle.
But the court said Russo’s cellphone video “plainly demonstrates” that he obeyed officers’ orders.
In July 2014, Wailuku District Judge Kelsey Kawano dismissed Russo’s charges of failure to comply and disorderly conduct. But the prosecution appealed the ruling, leading to the state Intermediate Court of Appeals vacating the dismissals. That sent the case back to the District Court.
Russo then asked the state Supreme Court to review the case. The court heard oral arguments in November 2017 at the University of Hawaii at Hilo.
Kansas man fighting deportation back in Missouri
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A Kansas father fighting efforts by the U.S. to deport him to Bangladesh was returned Wednesday to Missouri from Honolulu.
Syed Ahmed Jamal, 55, was being detained Wednesday afternoon in the Platte County, Mo., jail, said his attorney, Rekha Sharma-Crawford, on Facebook. The post did not give any other details.
U.S. immigration officials put Jamal on a plane bound for Bangladesh on Monday before an immigration panel granted a temporary stay in the case. He was taken off the flight when it stopped to refuel in Honolulu and his attorneys announced earlier Wednesday that he was returning to the Kansas City area.
Family spokesman Alan Anderson said the hope is that Jamal will be allowed to stay with his wife, 44-year-old Angela Jamal, and three children in Lawrence, Kan., under an “order of supervision” while the family fights the matter in the courts, which could take months.