EPA to raise limits for radiation exposure while Canada turns off fallout detectors

(naturalnews.com) The mass radioactive contamination of our planet is now under way thanks to the astonishing actions taking place at the Fukushima nuclear facility in Japan. As of last night, TEPCO announced it is releasing 10,000 tons of radioactive water directly into the Pacific Ocean. That 2.4 million gallons of planetary poison being dumped directly into the ocean.

This water is being released because they have run out of places to keep it on land. It’s too deadly to transport anywhere else, and all the storage pools around Fukushima are already overflowing. So they’re dumping it into the ocean, then calling it “safe” because they claim the ocean will “disperse” all the radiation and make it harmless.

But because there’s more radioactive water being produced every day at Fukushima, this process of releasing radioactive water into the ocean could theoretically continue for years, easily making Fukushima the worst nuclear disaster in the history of our world.

Quick, fudge the numbers before anybody notices!

Fukushima, you see, is doing to the Pacific Ocean what BP and the Deepwater Horizon did to the Gulf of Mexico last summer. Except that in the case of Fukushima, that radiation doesn’t just disappear with the help of millions of gallons of toxic chemicals. Nope, that radiation sticks around for decades.

So what to do? If you’re the United States Environment Protection Agency, there’s only one option: Declare radiation to be safe!

Yes indeed, friends, we have reached a moment of comedic insanity at the EPA, where those in charge of protecting the environment are hastily rewriting the definition of “radioactive contamination” in order to make sure that whatever fallout reaches the United States falls under the new limits of “safe” radiation.

The EPA maintains a set of so-called “Protective Action Guides” (PAGs). These PAGs are being quickly revised to radically increase the allowable levels of iodine-131 (a radioactive isotope) to anywhere from 3,000 to 100,000 times the currently allowable levels.

Eleni Gabre-Madhin: Building a commodities market in Ethiopia

Groundbreaking Study Shows Roundup Link to Birth Defects

Organicconsumers.org

• International scientists confirm dangers of Roundup at GMO-Free Regions Conference in Brussels
  GMO Free Regions, Sept 16, 2010
  Straight to the Source

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in the world’s best-selling weedkiller Roundup, causes malformations in frog and chicken embryos at doses far lower than those used in agricultural spraying and well below maximum residue levels in products presently approved in the European Union. This is reported in research (1) published by a group around Professor Andrés Carrasco, director of the Laboratory of Molecular Embryology at the University of Buenos Aires Medical School and member of Argentina’s National Council of Scientific and Technical Research.

Carrasco was led to research the embryonic effects of glyphosate by reports of high rates of birth defects in rural areas of Argentina where Monsanto’s genetically modified “Roundup Ready” (RR) soybeans are grown in large monocultures sprayed from airplanes regularly. RR soy is engineered to tolerate Roundup, allowing farmers to spray the herbicide liberally to kill weeds while the crop is growing.

At a press conference during the 6th European Conference of GMO Free Regions in the European Parliament in Brussels Carrasco said, “The findings in the lab are compatible with malformations observed in humans exposed to glyphosate during pregnancy.” Reporting of such problems started in 2002, two years after large scale introduction of RR soybeans in Argentina. The experimental animals share similar developmental mechanisms with humans. The authors concluded that the results raise “concerns about the clinical findings from human offspring in populations exposed to Roundup in agricultural fields.” Carrasco added, “I suspect the toxicity classification of glyphosate is too low. In some cases this can be a powerful poison.”

Read more

The Future of Food

Unnatural Selection: Genetically Modified Canola growing wild in North Dakota

Bayer (IG Farben) and Monsanto (/Searle), two of the most evil companies in history, join forces to pollute our gene pool with their profit-motivated genetic tinkering.

Our society desperately needs to move to a techno-agrarian model using local food production and clean energy (solar and wind), domestic manufacturing, responsible mining, and renewable materials, with severely limited imports.  This is getting ridiculous.  It’s death to our environment by a thousand cuts.

For billions of years on this planet, there has not been the means to program genes manually and deliberately.   All mutations to genes have been due to random forces such as radiation or chemical damage.  Now we bring into the equation the psychology of profit combined with the ability to construct new organisms with specific purposes.  This is a quantum leap forward in terms of evolution.  In a sense it bypasses evolution since natural selection is not imposed on these new organisms.

It’s artifical,  unnatural selection, imposed by some sick, sick people.  We’re talking about the same companies that created Agent Orange defoliant (Monsanto) that caused horriffic birth defects, and Zyklon B Gas (IG Farben) used to kill concentration camp inmates in Germany during WW2.  Do we really trust them to be engaging in this sort of reckless activity that will surely have unforeseen consequences?  The biggest class action law suit you can imagine wouldn’t begin to recoup the cost of permanently removing GM plants and animals that have escaped into the wild.   There is no amount of money that can fix these problems.

From GM crop escapes into the American wild (Nature)

“The extent of the escape is unprecedented,” says Cynthia Sagers, an ecologist at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, who led the research team that found the canola (Brassica napus, also known as rapeseed).

Sagers and her team found two varieties of transgenic canola in the wild — one modified to be resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide (glyphosate), and one resistant to Bayer Crop Science’s Liberty herbicide (gluphosinate). They also found some plants that were resistant to both herbicides, showing that the different GM plants had bred to produce a plant with a new trait that did not exist anywhere else.

McDonalds, public school lunch beef treated with ammonia

New York Times

Eight years ago, federal officials were struggling to remove potentially deadly E. coli from hamburgers when an entrepreneurial company from South Dakota came up with a novel idea: injecting beef with ammonia.

The company, Beef Products Inc., had been looking to expand into the hamburger business with a product made from beef that included fatty trimmings the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil. The trimmings were particularly susceptible to contamination, but a study commissioned by the company showed that the ammonia process would kill E. coli as well as salmonella.

Officials at the United States Department of Agriculture endorsed the company’s ammonia treatment, and have said it destroys E. coli “to an undetectable level.” They decided it was so effective that in 2007, when the department began routine testing of meat used in hamburger sold to the general public, they exempted Beef Products.

With the U.S.D.A.’s stamp of approval, the company’s processed beef has become a mainstay in America’s hamburgers. McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone.

But government and industry records obtained by The New York Times show that in testing for the school lunch program, E. coli and salmonella pathogens have been found dozens of times in Beef Products meat, challenging claims by the company and the U.S.D.A. about the effectiveness of the treatment. Since 2005, E. coli has been found 3 times and salmonella 48 times, including back-to-back incidents in August in which two 27,000-pound batches were found to be contaminated. The meat was caught before reaching lunch-rooms trays.

…

Carol Guzy/Washington Post

Carl S. Custer, a former U.S.D.A. microbiologist, said he and other scientists were concerned that the department had approved the treated beef for sale without obtaining independent validation of the potential safety risk. Another department microbiologist, Gerald Zirnstein, called the processed beef “pink slime” in a 2002 e-mail message to colleagues and said, “I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling.”

One of the toughest hurdles for Beef Products was the Agricultural Marketing Service, the U.S.D.A. division that buys food for school lunches. Officials cited complaints about the odor, and wrote in a 2002 memorandum that they had “to determine if the addition of ammonia to the product is in the best interest to A.M.S. from a quality standpoint.”

“It is our contention,” the memo added, “that product should be labeled accordingly.”

Represented by Dennis R. Johnson, a top lawyer and lobbyist for the meat industry, Beef Products prevailed on the question of whether ammonia should be listed as an ingredient, arguing that the government had just decided against requiring another company to list a chemical used in treating poultry.

School lunch officials said they ultimately agreed to use the treated meat because it shaved about 3 cents off the cost of making a pound of ground beef.

Cherry farmer dumps his frustration

Leonard Ligon stands in mounds of tart cherries that he had to dump because of government regulations. Douglas Tesner/Record-Eagle

Millions of pounds of fruit left on the ground to rot

BY BRIAN McGILLIVARY
bmcgillivary@record-eagle.com
Traverse City Record-EagleOLD MISSION — Life on the farm is no bowl of cherries for farmer Leonard Ligon — nor profitable in the cherry business.

Ligon, and many other tart cherry growers in northwest Michigan who produced a bumper crop this summer, will leave millions of pounds of cherries on the ground to rot. A federal marketing order will divert 42 percent the estimated 300 million-plus pound tart cherry harvest from going to the primary domestic market this year. Area growers estimate 20 percent to 25 percent of their crop will be abandoned.

Instead of shaking his cherries off trees and leaving them to rot in the field, Ligon dumped his 72,000 pounds of “diverted” cherries along Old Mission Road with a sign that read “Traverse City, cherry capital of the world.”

“All I’m saying to the tourists and joggers and others in this town is that life on the farm is not always profitable,” Ligon said, “and we’re losing our (cherry) producers.”

Ligon said he’s leaving the tart cherry business as fast as he can. Instead of replanting orchards with cherries he’s putting in wine grapes. He doubts many growers will replant orchards on Old Mission Peninsula.

“The farther I get away from the tart cherry business the better as far as I’m concerned,” said cherry grower and Peninsula Township Supervisor Rob Manigold. “My whole focus right now is to convert to wine grapes.”

Manigold said the cherry business is like no other. Growers take their fruit to processors for whatever they will give them, then have to wait a year until the processors sell the cherries before they get paid.

Wine grapes generate cash within 30 days, he said.

Conversion to grapes is expensive, however, so Manigold isn’t going to tear out productive orchards that can last 25 or 30 years. Manigold’s processor took 100 percent of his cherries this year, so he’ll either break even or make a small profit.

Old Mission cherry grower Joshua Wunsch had similar success with his fruit processor, and has no plans to convert to grapes.

“I looked pretty hard at the economics of wine grape growing, but it seems that most of the return there is at the press and bottling,” Wunsch said.

Wunsch estimates about 20 percent of one of the largest tart cherry crops in years will be abandoned in the fields this year. Abandonment is just one type of diversion. Cherries exported overseas, dried, turned into juice concentrate, sold in new markets or stored for future use are also considered diverted.

Perry Hedin, executive director of the Cherry Industry Administrative Board in Dewitt that sets the market restrictions, said a 300-million pound bumper crop in 1995 that lacked market restrictions dropped the price of cherries to 5 cents a pound or less.

This year, growers expect about 20 cents a pound, down from almost 40 cents a pound last year.

“You have to match supply with demand in the domestic industry … or the market price drops to about zero,” Hedin said.

Hedin said he still sees a lot of young orchards around Traverse City, and the market continues to expand with new uses every year.

In the past Old Mission farmers, because of their ability to produce consistent crops, hit the jackpot when the national crop failed, Wunsch said. But the result was they lost market to other fruits.

The ability to stabilize prices and store fruit for poor crop years has allowed the industry to maintain its traditional market while expanding other areas, such as juice concentrate.

“About 20 percent of the crop is going into cherry juice concentrate and it’s growing rapidly,” Wunsch said. “It’s a market segment that a dozen years ago wasn’t a blip on the radar.”

Still, leaving fruit to rot doesn’t set well with most growers and the public in the current economy, Manigold said.

“The food pantry shelves are bare, people going hungry, and here we are dumping millions of pounds of cherries on the ground,” Manigold said.

St. John’s Wort Again Proven Better than Antidepressant Drugs

(NaturalNews) The popular herbal extract St. John’s wort is more effective at treating the symptoms of depression than any antidepressant drug, and has fewer side effects, researchers from the Centre for Complementary Medicine in Munich have concluded.

“Overall, the St John’s Wort extracts tested in the trials were superior to placebo, similarly effective as standard anti-depressants, and had fewer side effects than standard anti-depressants,” lead researcher Klaus Linde said.

In a study published by the Cochrane Library, the researchers compiled the results of 29 prior trials, involving a total of 5,489 participants who were randomly assigned either St. John’s wort, a placebo, tricylclic antidepressants or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to treat mild to moderately severe depression. All studies were double-blind, meaning that neither patients nor researchers knew what kind of treatment each participant was receiving.

St. John’s wort was found to be more effective than a placebo and at least as effective as both tricylics and SSRIs, but with fewer side effects. Patients receiving the herbal treatment were significantly less likely to drop out of studies due to negative side effects than those assigned to take tricyclic antidepressants.

The researchers called their study the most thorough to date, and possibly the first to show that St. John’s wort is effective at treating not only mild, but also severe depression (also known as major depression).

St. John’s wort, known officially as Hypericum perforatum, is a native European perennial herb with distinctive yellow flowers and now grows wild in many parts of the Americas as well. It derives its common name from the tradition of harvesting its flowers on St. John’s day (June 24). Also known as Klamath weed or Tipton’s weed, the plant has been used for centuries as an herbal remedy for depression and sleeping problems.

In recent years, the popularity of the herbal antidepressant has soared as new concerns continue to emerge over pharmaceutical antidepressants, especially SSRIs. In Germany, doctors regularly prescribe it to children and teenagers. In the United Kingdom, it is currently used by two million people.

SSRIs have been shown to significantly increase the risk of suicide in those under the age of 18, and evidence suggests that they may have a similar effect on adults, as well. Recent evidence has also linked use of the drugs by pregnant women with an elevated risk of oral and heart-related birth defects.

With Western health care systems emphasizing drugs for the treatment of mental illness, however, many doctors feel they have no alternatives but to prescribe tricyclics or SSRIs, in spite of the risk. The new study may lead more doctors to prescribe St. John’s wort instead.

Another recent study, conducted by St. James’ University Hospital in Leeds, England, found that St. John’s wort was the only herbal supplement effective at treating depression, in contrast to cat’s claw, ginseng, gingko biloba, liquid tonic and royal jelly.

Researchers remain unsure precisely how St. John’s wort works, in part because the plant contains chemicals from at least seven different families. The most favored explanation is that the herb acts much like an SSRI, slowing the rate at which the neurotransmitter serotonin is removed from the brain. The chemical hyperforin is posited by some as the most active chemical agent in the herb, and has been linked to slowed uptake of not only serotonin but also the neurotransmitters dopamine, noradrenaline, GABA and glutamate. St. John’s wort extracts from which hyperforin has been removed, however, have still been shown to function as effective antidepressants.