Posted: June 22, 2012
Read this ridiculous interviewwith a Coke executive for a good laugh -- Coke products being hydrating? Might as well hydrate your body by drinking kerosine.
Until now, beverage giant Coca-Cola hasn't put a face to its staunch opposition to last week's proposal by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to limit to 16 ounces the size of sugary drinks sold at New York restaurants, movie theaters and street carts. But in an exclusive interview, Katie Bayne, Coca-Cola's 45-year-old president of sparkling beverages in North America, explains to USA TODAY marketing reporter Bruce Horovitz where she differs with Bloomberg and discusses which beverages she permits her young sons to drink.
Q: Is there any merit to limits being placed on the size of sugary drinks folks can buy?
A: Sugary drinks can be a part of any diet as long as your calories in balance with the calories out. Our responsibility is to provide drink in all the sizes that consumers might need.
Read the full interview here: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/story/2012-06-07/coke-q-and-a-coca-cola-mayor-bloomberg/55453016/1
Posted: June 21, 2012
Beginning August 4, 2012, New Hampshire will require notification that 6-month-olds should not be routinely fed infant formula mixed with fluoridated water to avoid discoloring babies' unerupted teeth (fluorosis), reports the Fluoride Action Network (FAN).
Passed by the House, 253-23, unanimously by the Senate, and signed by the Governor, HB-1416 reads: "If a public water supply is fluoridated, the following notice shall be posted in the water system's consumer confidence report: 'Your public water supply is fluoridated. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, if your child under the age of 6 months is exclusively consuming infant formula reconstituted with fluoridated water, there may be an increased chance of dental fluorosis. Consult your child's health care provider for more information.'" The bill was introduced by Rep. Anne Cartwright (R-Alstead), and had four co-sponsors.
"Neither a nutrient nor required for healthy teeth, fluoride chemicals are added to public water supplies in a failed attempt to reduce tooth decay," says Paul Connett, Ph.D., FAN's Executive Director. "Current science shows that fluoride hardens teeth topically. Swallowing fluoride delivers risks without benefits," says Connett.
Fluoridated water contains 100-200 times more fluoride than breast milk. And all infant formula already contains some fluoride.
The Centers for Disease Control reports that 41% of 12-15 year-olds are affected with fluoride overdose symptoms - dental fluorosis, white spotted, yellow, brown and/or pitted teeth - from over-ingesting fluoride while their teeth were forming.
Connett says, "We are proud of New Hampshire legislators for taking this bold step. Fluoridation is a political issue and most legislators shy away from notifying constituents of any scientifically-verified negative effects from fluoride for fear of offending the dental lobby."
The scientific literature has been reporting for over a decade that mixing infant formula with fluoridated water is linked to dental fluorosis. And many government, health and dental agencies now advise against mixing fluoridated water and infant formula. But New Hampshire is the first state to require warnings on annual water reports.
Connett says, "We hope this gives legislators the courage to stop fluoridation entirely because several studies from China show even modest exposure to fluoride is associated with lower IQ. Fluoride promoters can provide no evidence that efforts are being made to either refute or repeat these studies in the U.S."
SOURCE Fluoride Action Network
http://www.marketwatch.com
Posted: June 21, 2012
Such gender discrimination, isn't it? Why not just let EVERYONE swim topless if they want? They do in Australia and it's no big deal...
http://www.washingtonpost.com
Posted: June 21, 2012
(Reuters) - Merck & Co Inc. recalled a batch of vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella after it accidentally shipped doses to its U.S. customers before internal company approval for market release, U.S. health regulators said.
An investigation by Merck concluded that there were no product safety, quality, or efficacy concerns associated with the batch, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on its website.
There would be no impact to the supply of the vaccine, and Merck had contacted customers directly to provide instructions on how to return the product, the statement said.
Read the full article here: http://www.reuters.com
Posted: June 21, 2012
CHICAGO -- When it comes to genetically modified foods, the American Medical Association (AMA) has adopted a "trust but verify" policy: the foods SEEM safe, but they still "need to be checked out."
The policy adopted Tuesday at the AMA's House of Delegates meeting states that "although there is no proven risk" to foods coming from plants or animals whose DNA has been tweaked, the association would still like to see such foods go through a mandatory pre-market safety approval process.
This both-sides-of-the-fence position on the issue stemmed from a contentious Sunday debate during a reference committee meeting, at which some AMA members called for mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods, while others maintained there isn't enough science to show such foods pose any risks to human health.
Read the full article here: [email protected]&mu_id=5352281" target = "_blank">http://www.medpagetoday.com
Posted: June 21, 2012
WHEATLAND TOWNSHIP - Jerry Garrabrant sold half of her video games, and gave up a lot of time in the air-conditioned indoors, to make her family's backyard chicken coop possible.
Jerry, 12, has helped raise five chickens in the coop since the early spring, when the birds were only one day old. It was something she wanted to do. Now, county officials are telling her and her family, the chickens are, well, pollos non gratae
Read the full story here: http://heraldnews.suntimes.com/news/13308111-418/will-county-familys-chickens-need-to-fly-the-coop.html?intcmp=emailheadlines
Also, Ferguson, Missouri's Code Enforcement is attempting to enforce opinions rather than law on a front yard heirloom garden. Learn more here : http://vegetableyarden.wordpress.com/about-2/
Posted: June 21, 2012
(CNN) -- When Manuel Reyna developed a deadly kidney disease, his sister, Florinda Gotcher, didn't hesitate to give him one of her kidneys. When she found out they were a match, she cried.
"She was so happy," remembers Gotcher's daughter, Melinda Williams. "She was overwhelmed that she was able to save her brother's life."
Williams said her mother didn't worry about the risks of surgery. Statistically, kidney donor surgery is considered to be very safe: in 2010, the year before Gotcher's surgery, 6,276 people donated a kidney, and none of them died within 30 days of the surgery.
Her laparoscopic surgery went well, but about 30 minutes afterwards in the recovery room, she took a mysterious turn for the worse.
"She just took a deep breath and her eyes got real huge and then she fell back down and started breathing really, really bad," Williams says.
Surgeons at University Medical Center in Lubbock, Texas, rushed Gotcher back into the operating room. Once they opened her up again, they saw something horrible had happened: there was a pool of blood in her abdomen. Gotcher, 41 and the mother of four, had died from a massive and sudden bleed.
Read the full story here: http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/20/health/kidney-clips/index.html?hpt=hp_c1
Posted: June 21, 2012
(Reuters) - Want a serving of antibiotics with your meat? If not, you may want to change your shopping habits, according to a Consumer Reports study released Wednesday.
Four store brands - Food Lion, Sam's Club, Food-4-Less and Save-A-Lot - only sell chicken, beef, turkey and pork products raised with antibiotics, according to the study.
Stores with high amounts of antibiotic-free meat include Trader Joe's, Publix, Giant, Shaw's and Stop & Shop, it said.
Read the full story here: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/20/us-usa-health-meat-idUSBRE85J11820120620
Posted: June 20, 2012
The U.S. has never before had a President who thinks so little of the American people that he imagines he can win re-election running on the opposite of reality. But that is the reality of President Obama today.
There is, now, a house-of-cards feel about this administration. It became apparent some weeks ago when the President talked on the stump - where else? - about an essay by a fellow who said spending growth [under Obama] is actually lower than that of previous Presidents. This was startling to a lot of people, who looked into it and found the man had left out most spending from 2009, the first year of Mr. Obama's Presidency. People sneered: The President was deliberately using a misleading argument to paint a false picture! But you know, why would he go out there waiving an article that could immediately be debunked? Maybe because he thought it was true. That's more alarming, isn't it, the idea that he knows so little about the effects of his own economic program that he thinks he really is a low spender.
http://www.forbes.com
Posted: June 20, 2012
Here are 20 Reasons why America's next bank holiday will be a nightmare:
1) A bank holiday will create a virtual blackout of information on not just checking and saving accounts, but also automated mortgage payments, CDs, and more. Our presently quite transparent banking system will suddenly become opaque. Your bank balance will become invisible. Your handy-dandy online banking web page will be replaced by a "Service Temporarily Unavailable" notice. The willingness to accept checks will evaporate in less than a day. The FUD factor (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) will be overwhelming.
2) Most businesses will no longer honor personal checks, corporate checks, or bank money orders. Showing a merchant your most recent bank statement isn't likely to sway him. Again, the FUD factor will rule.
3) All checks in the U.S. are cleared through the automated clearinghouse (ACH) network. Most of this network is inside of banking system firewalls. Many Federal, State, and local tax payments are also handled through ACH. (A similar network exists for European banks--the Pan-European Automated Clearing House (PE-ACH), under the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) system).
4) Credit cards might not be accepted. The FUD factor will dictate that anything even peripherally related to the banking system will be suspect. (Even though the credit card companies have their own credit clearing mechanisms that are only attached to the banking milieu.)
Keep reading at:
http://www.survivalblog.com
Posted: June 20, 2012
With her 1962 book, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson got DDT and other synthetic pesticides banned and saved bird life. Today it is humans who are directly threatened by technologies designed to extract the maximum profit at the lowest private cost and the maximum social cost from natural resources.
Once abundant clean water has become a scarce resource. Yet, in the US ground water and surface water are being polluted and made unusable by mountain top removal mining, fracking and other such "new technologies." Ranchers in eastern Montana, for example, are being forced out of ranching by polluted water.
Offshore oil drilling and chemical farming run-off have destroyed fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico. In other parts of the world, explosives used to maximize short-run fish catches have destroyed coral reefs that sustained fish life (http://aquatek-california.com). Deforestation for short-run agricultural production results in replacing bio-diverse rain forests with barren land. The "now generation" is leaving a resource-scarce planet to future generations.
Nuclear power plants are thoughtlessly built in earthquake and tsunami zones. Spent fuel rods are stored within the plants, a practice that adds their destructive potential to a catastrophic accident or act of nature.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org
Posted: June 20, 2012
FDA reverses itself- for now.
We have pointed out for months that the FDA's NDI (new supplement) guidance threatens our access to supplements and indeed could destroy the industry, leaving drugs with a total monopoly.
After adamantly digging in its heals and refusing to reconsider, FDA has now at last agreed that the draft NDI guidance requires substantial revision. This follows a meeting between FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg and Mike Taylor, Deputy Commissioner of Foods, with Senators Harkin and Hatch, longtime champions of natural health.
According to our sources, the FDA stated in the meeting that the guidance would be revised to account for the numerous comments and concerns, and released in draft form once again, which will then be open for public comment. This is exactly what we asked for!
http://www.anh-usa.org
Posted: June 19, 2012
He is hoping to avoid being raked over the coals by all the western nations whose secrets he helped expose. Will Ecuador offer him protection?
http://www.guardian.co.uk
Posted: June 19, 2012
New DNA testing in hundreds of old Virginia homicide and sexual assault cases supports the exoneration of at least 38 suspects, according to a study released Monday by a national policy group that examined the test results.
The institute's researchers found that in 5 percent of homicide and sexual assault cases, DNA testing ruled out the convicted person. If the scope is narrowed to just the sexual assault convictions, DNA testing eliminated between 8 percent and 15 percent of convicted offenders. The wrongful conviction rate previously had been estimated at 3 percent or less.
http://hamptonroads.com
Posted: June 19, 2012
Some people who undergo weight-loss surgery end up trading their struggle with food for one with alcohol - but perhaps not for the reason you think.
The largest prospective study to examine the connection found that 10.7% of patients who underwent a bariatric operation called roux-en-Y gastric bypass got in trouble with drinking by the second year after the surgery. That compared with about 7% of patients who drank too much before they had the same operation, reflecting a 50% increase in relative risk.
http://blogs.wsj.com
Posted: June 19, 2012
Despite the fact that thousands of TSA agents across the country engage in similar behavior on a daily basis, a woman was arrested after she turned the tables on the federal agency and groped a TSA supervisor in protest at her treatment.
After Price became infuriated at receiving a pat down, which included touching her breasts and genitals, a violation of the protocols she herself had been trained to carry out, the Lee County woman voiced her complaint to a TSA supervisor by physically demonstrating how she was groped.
http://www.prisonplanet.com
Posted: June 18, 2012
I'm not sure who's getting the worse end of the bargain here:
A Taliban commander in northwest Pakistan has announced a ban on polio vaccines for children as long as the United States continues its campaign of drone strikes in the region, according to a statement by the Taliban.
"Polio drops will be banned in North Waziristan until the drones strikes are stopped," said the statement, released Saturday.
"Almost every resident of North Waziristan has become a mental patient because of the drone strikes, which are worse than polio," the statement continued. "On one hand, the U.S. spends millions of dollars to eliminate polio, while on the other hand it kills hundreds with the help of its slave, Pakistan."
http://www.cnn.com
Posted: June 18, 2012
Despite the narrow victory of a centrist party in Sunday's vote, almost every day extremist violence breaks out in Athens and beyond. Neo-nazis against immigrants, anarchists and leftists. Anarchists, ultra-leftists and other fringe groups of the nationalist-populist camp against riot police, mainstream politicians, journalists, liberal intellectuals, even artists. Add to this a surge in crime and rising tolerance of violence and you have a clearer picture of today's Athens. Does it remind you of anything?
http://www.ft.com
Posted: June 18, 2012
Eric Holder is the ultimate government criminal:
The National Border Patrol Council, which represents all 17,000 of the agency's nonsupervisory agents, called Monday for the resignation of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. for his role in the botched "Fast and Furious" gunrunning operation that resulted in the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
Council President George E. McCubbin III, a 25-year Border Patrol veteran, described Mr. Holder's actions in the case as "a slap in the face to all Border Patrol agents who serve this country," adding that the attorney general showed "an utter failure of leadership at the highest levels of government."
Two semi-automatic AK-47 assault weapons found at the scene of the Dec. 15, 2010, killing of Border Patrol Agent Brian A. Terry were traced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to "straw buyers" who bought the weapons as part of the Fast and Furious investigation.
http://www.washingtontimes.com
Posted: June 18, 2012
It's time for you to DIE, didn't you know? The British Medical Journal wants doctors to stop opposing "assisted dying," meaning that medical professionals would be engaged in helping people DIE, just like TIME Magazine recently promoted in its "How to DIE" magazine cover.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-18428265
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