New FDA regulations to destroy small organic farms

(NaturalNews) A proposed law to bring farms more directly under FDA supervision could be the death of small organic farms, natural food advocates have warned.



"How do we trust that the FDA is going to know about things that the San Francisco Bay Area has been very progressive on -- the field to fork, fresh, grow local, buy local -- all of that?" said Rep. Sam Farr. "The organic people are feeling that the regulations the FDA may promulgate will be so safety oriented, it'll put them out of business."







Spurred by recent outbreaks of foodborne illness across the country, Congress has moved to give the FDA direct control over the production, storage, transport, inspection and recall of food products. A bill to that effect has already passed the House of Representatives, while another version is currently before the Senate.



Yet small farmers object that even the more lenient Senate version would be an undue burden on their operations. They are backed up by a recent study from the University of California-Davis, which concluded that new food safety rules consistently impose higher per-acre costs on small farmers.



The farmers also argue that food contamination has not come from diverse, small-scale farms, but from big monoculture fields, from animal agriculture and from newer products such as pre-bagged vegetables, in which crops from a variety of farms are mixed, bagged and shipped over long distances.



"[The legislation] does not take on the industrial animal industry and the abuses going on," said California organic farmer Tom Willey. "The really dangerous organisms we're dealing with out here, and trying to protect our produce and other foodstuffs from, are coming out the rear end of domestic animals."



The first food poisoning outbreak in what would originally become a nationwide problem has been attributed to a strain of E. coli that first appeared in hamburger meat in the 1980s, and had spread to spinach by 2006.



Sources for this story include: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.....

Source

WTC Collapse Under Fresh Scrutiny After Explosive Dust Samples Found

Evidence indicating that the collapse of the World Trade Center was a controlled demolition has been propelled back under the national spotlight following the University of Copenhagen’s announcement that dust obtained from the rubble of the twin towers contains evidence of highly explosive material.



The energetic material that was found in the WTC dust by an international team of scientists led by Niels Harrit of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, consists of “nano-engineered iron oxide and aluminum particles” that “exhibit the same characteristics as advanced energetic materials developed in US national laboratories in the years leading up to 9/11.”







The red chips have “no reason to be in this dust” points out an Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth story concerning the samples and could not have been naturally formed from either the impact of the jetliners nor the collapse of the towers, unless a highly pyrotechnic explosive was used to implode the buildings.



“This follows the discovery, by the United States Geological Survey and others, of high concentrations of unusual previously molten iron-rich microspheres in the WTC dust. These microspheres can only have been formed during the destruction of the World Trade Center at temperatures far higher than can be explained by the jet fuel and office fires. Those fires, we are told by engineers employed by NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, were allegedly the cause of the World Trade Center’s destruction. The discovery of this advanced energetic material, in the form of red/gray chips distributed throughout the dust, both explains the iron-rich microspheres and confirms the inadequacy of the official account of what happened that tragic day.”



The implosion of the towers as well as WTC 7 has also received fresh attention as a result of NIST being forced to release hundreds of hours of video footage from its investigation into the collapse of the buildings.



Every single piece of footage we have studied thus far since the Journal of 9/11 Studies was forced to file a lawsuit against NIST to obtain the material has contained eyewitness testimony of controlled demolition, from firefighters who were in the lobby of the World Trade Center, to news reporters on the ground, to people filming ground zero from nearby high rise buildings.



The Google search term “WTC Collapse” has shot to the top of Google Trends charts after radio host Alex Jones encouraged listeners to bring attention to this shocking new evidence.

The controlled demolition of the World Trade Center has also been a hotly debated topic of conversation after numerous appearances on CNN and Fox News by Conspiracy Theory host and former Governor Jesse Ventura.

Ventura angrily reminded Fox Business host Eric Bolling that, just like 9/11, the Gulf of Tonkin was a staged event designed the lead the United States to war, during a confrontation following Ventura’s interview on the Follow The Money show.



Source

McDonald’s Happy Meal resists decomposition for six months

Vladimir Lenin, King Tut and the McDonald's Happy Meal: What do they all have in common? A shocking resistance to Mother Nature's cycle of decomposition and biodegradability, apparently.



That's the disturbing point brought home by the latest project of New York City-based artist and photographer Sally Davies, who bought a McDonald's Happy Meal back in April and left it out in her kitchen to see how well it would hold up over time.





The results? "The only change that I can see is that it has become hard as a rock," Davies told the U.K. Daily Mail.



She proceeded to photograph the Happy Meal each week and posted the pictures to Flickr to record the results of her experiment. Now, just over six months later, the Happy Meal has yet to even grow mold. She told the Daily Mail that "the food is plastic to the touch and has an acrylic sheen to it."



Davies -- whose art has been featured in numerous films and television shows and is collected by several celebrities -- told The Upshot that she initiated the project to prove a friend wrong. He believed that any burger would mold or rot within two or three days of being left on a counter. Thus began what's become known as "The Happy Meal Art Project."



"I told my friend about a schoolteacher who's kept a McDonald's burger for 12 years that hasn't changed at all, and he didn't believe me when I told him about it," Davies told us. "He thought I was crazy and said I shouldn't believe everything that I read, so I decided to try it myself."



Some observers of the photo series have noted that the burger's bun appears at different angles, and therefore aired suspicions that the Happy Meal may not in fact be as "untouched" as the project's groundrules stipulate. Davies says there's a simple explanation for the mobile-bun effect. "The meal is on a plate in my apartment on a shelf," she says, "and when I take it down to shoot it, the food slides around. It's hard as rock on a glass plate, so sure, the food is moving."



Davies' friend was the person who should have done the additional research. Wellness and nutrition educator Karen Hanrahan has indeed kept a McDonald's hamburger since 1996 to show clients and students how resistant fast food can be to decomposition.



As for Davies, she said that she might just keep her burger and fries hanging around for a while as well.



"It's sitting on a bookshelf right now, so it's not really taking up any space, so why not?" she said. It ceased giving off any sort of odor after 24 hours, she said, adding: "You have to see this thing."



In response to Davies' project, McDonald's spokeswoman Theresa Riley emailed The Upshot a statement defending the quality of the chain's food. Riley's email also blasted Davies' "completely unsubstantiated" work as something out of "the realm of urban legends."



"McDonald's hamburger patties in the United States are made with 100% USDA-inspected ground beef," Riley wrote. "Our hamburgers are cooked and prepared with salt, pepper and nothing else -- no preservatives, no fillers. Our hamburger buns are baked locally, are made from North American-grown wheat flour and include common government-approved ingredients designed to assure food quality and safety. ... According to Dr. Michael Doyle, Director, Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, 'From a scientific perspective, I can safely say that the way McDonald's hamburgers are freshly processed, no hamburger would look like this after one year unless it was tampered with or held frozen.'"

Source

Plane Exhaust Kills More People Than Plane Crashes

Toxic pollutants kill at least ten thousand annually, study says.



There's a new fear of flying: You're more likely to die from exposure to toxic pollutants in plane exhaust than in a plane crash, a new study suggests.



In recent years, airplane crashes have killed about a thousand people annually, whereas plane emissions kill about ten thousand people each year, researchers say.







Earlier studies had assumed that people were harmed only by the emissions from planes while taking off and landing. The new research is the first to give a comprehensive estimate of the number of premature deaths from all airline emissions.



"We found that unregulated emissions from [planes flying] above 3,000 feet [914 meters] were responsible for most of the deaths," said study leader Steven Barrett, an aeronautical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.



Airplane exhaust, like car exhaust, contains a variety of air pollutants, including sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides.



Many of these particles of pollution are tiny, about a hundred millionths of an inch wide, or smaller than the width of a human hair.



So-called particulate matter that's especially small is the main culprit in human health effects, especially since the particulates can become wedged deep in the lung and possibly enter the bloodstream, scientists say.



Tracking Toxic Plane Pollution



Barrett and colleagues used a computer model that brought together records of flight paths, the average amount of fuel burned during flights, and their estimated emissions.



The computer model, based on experimental data, has been shown to accurately capture pollution's movement in the atmosphere as well as intercontinental transport of pollution, especially from Asia to North America, Barrett said.



By comparing this data with another atmospheric model, the team was able to track how plane pollutants are likely to move and where the pollutants are most likely to fall to the surface, where people breathe them in.



The study also looked at how human populations are spread around the planet to estimate how the patterns of airplane pollution might up the risk of death.



Globally, the team estimated that about 8,000 deaths a year result from pollution from planes at cruising altitude—about 35,000 feet (10,668 meters)—whereas about 2,000 deaths result from pollution emitted during takeoffs and landings.



The most common causes of death due to air pollution are cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, including lung cancer, according to the UN's World Health Organization.



Not in Your Backyard



The locations with the most active airports aren't always the ones that suffer the biggest health impacts, the study suggests.



When a plane flies at cruising altitude above the clouds, wind currents can whisk the pollution far away so that prevailing winds cause the pollution to fall from the sky about 6,000 miles (10,000 kilometers) to the east of the plane's route.



The United States incurs about 450 deaths each year from airplane emissions—only about one-seventh the number of deaths that would be expected if the pollution fell straight to the ground from planes, the study said.



In India, on the other hand, there are an estimated 1,640 deaths per year from airplane emissions—about seven times more deaths than would be expected based on the number of flights that start or finish in the country.



Most of these deaths are caused not by flights over India but from emissions in Europe and North America at high altitude, which then blow across Asia, according to the study, published in the October issue of Environmental Science & Technology.



Airplane Pollution Stoppable



Airplane pollution deaths still represent a small share of the toll from all kinds of air pollution.



Emissions from ships, for instance, kill an estimated 60,000 people a year, according to a 2007 study also published in Environmental Science & Technology.



And the annual total death toll from air pollution is about a million, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.



However, Barrett said, "aviation is growing fast, so we need to start now" on curbing the death rate.



"Regulators need to explicitly consider the impact of cruise emissions on human health," he added.



Sulfur in jet fuel is a major killer, but for a small additional cost "on the order of [U.S.] five cents a gallon, you can remove the vast majority of the sulfur," he said.



Junfeng Liu, an atmospheric chemist at Princeton University, said the "excellent" study delves into "an important global environmental policy issue."



Airplane-pollution deaths account for about a tenth of all air-pollution deaths with cross-border causes, Liu said. So airplane pollution could be an important focus for environmental regulations in the future.



Indeed the findings may someday influence U.S. policy, according to Lourdes Maurice, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration's chief scientific and technical adviser for environment.



If the findings hold up during future studies, then the aviation agency will consider how to regulate airplane emissions to cut their health impact, Maurice said.



Source

China to embark on Yeti expedition

A group of Chinese scientists and explorers is to embark on a £1m-expedition in search of the country's equivalent of the Yeti, or Bigfoot, which is said to stalk the high mountains and forests of the central province of Hubei.

The fresh search for the 'yeren', or 'Wild man', comes nearly 30 years afterChina's Academy of Science launched three expeditions in the late 1970s and early 1980s following a series of sightings of the creatures which are said to be 6ft 7in tall and covered in reddish-brown hair.



In the most lurid accounts, reported by The Daily Telegraph in 1983, female members of the wild man species were supposed to have swept into villages in search of sexual partners, ravishing them as they lay paralysed in fear.



One peasant was asleep in his mountain forest hut when, according to an account in a 1983 edition of the Zhejiang Provincial Daily, a 'wild woman' with deep blue eyes burst through the door and proceeded to ravish him.



"He was too frightened to call out, and was powerless to resist," the paper reported, "the wild woman slept with him for several minutes and then left."



Despite the tall-sounding tales, the organisers of the latest hunt, the Hubei Wild Man Research Association, say they are serious about their expedition for which they are seeking international volunteers and £1m in funding from private organisations.



"We will organise five teams to focus on five key areas where the 'yeren' are known to have been located," said Wang Shancai, vice president of the Hubei Wild Man Research Association told The Telegraph, "we will use the latest and most modern methods, including camera traps."



The expedition, which was reported by the state news agency Xinhua, will be following in the footsteps missions by China's Academy of Science in 1977, 1980 and 1981 that yielded 'evidence' including footprints, hair-samples and nesting sites, all of which ultimately proved inconclusive.



This time, however, Mr Wang, is confident that with sufficient funding and the aid of modern research techniques and the latest field gadgets, the research will bear fruit.



"Previous searches did not focus on the correct areas, they were two scattered and did not deploy the latest devices," he said, "With these at our disposal, I believe we have at least an 80 per cent chance of finding the 'wild man'."



There are more than 400 documented "sightings" of the Chinese wild man which is said to live in the Shennongjia Nature Reserve, a cluster of thickly forested mountains and hills ranging up to 9,800ft in western Hubei.



The Shennongjia forests have long been rich with superstition, partly driven by the highly unusual numbers of albino animals, including bears, muntiac deer, monkeys and snakes in the area which have been the object of more conventional scientific study.



However some have suggested that the 'wild man' - which was last 'sighted' in 2007 according to Xinhua – might not be entirely imaginary, and could be an undiscovered species of orangutan.



Source

Ventura Questions 9/11 and was Censored by Huffington Post

Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad creates panel to prove U.S. was behind 9/11 attacks

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday said he has created a panel to prove the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks.



"I announce that the formation of an independent and neutral team to examine the facts and discover the truth of the Sept. 11 events is the demand of all the peoples of the region and the world," the Iranian president said during a visit to Lebanon, the London Telegraph newspaper reported.



Later, he appeared at a Hezbollah rally in a Beirut suburb, where he was welcomed by thousands of supporters chanting "Death to America" and "Death to Israel.



Source