Lawrence Solomon: Science getting settled | FP Comment | Financial Post

Lawrence Solomon: Science getting settled

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Lawrence Solomon  Aug 26, 2011 – 11:37 PM ET | Last Updated: Aug 27, 2011 10:08 PM ET

New, convincing evidence indicates global warming is caused by cosmic rays and the sun — not humans

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

The hypothesis that cosmic rays and the sun hold the key to the global warming debate has been Enemy No. 1 to the global warming establishment ever since it was first proposed by two scientists from the Danish Space Research Institute, at a 1996 scientific conference in the U.K. Within one day, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bert Bolin, denounced the theory, saying, “I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naive and irresponsible.” He then set about discrediting the theory, any journalist that gave the theory cre dence, and most of all the Danes presenting the theory — they soon found themselves vilified, marginalized and starved of funding, despite their impeccable scientific credentials.

The mobilization to rally the press against the Danes worked brilliantly, with one notable exception. Nigel Calder, a former editor of The New Scientist who attended that 1996 conference, would not be cowed. Himself a physicist, Mr. Calder became convinced of the merits of the argument and a year later, following a lecture he gave at a CERN conference, so too did Jasper Kirkby, a CERN scientist in attendance. Mr. Kirkby then convinced the CERN bureaucracy of the theory’s importance and developed a plan to create a cloud chamber — he called it CLOUD, for “Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets.”

But Mr. Kirkby made the same tactical error that the Danes had — not realizing how politicized the global warming issue was, he candidly shared his views with the scientific community.

“The theory will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth’s temperature that we have seen in the last century,” Mr. Kirkby told the scientific press in 1998, explaining that global warming may be part of a natural cycle in the Earth’s temperature.

The global warming establishment sprang into action, pressured the Western governments that control CERN, and almost immediately succeeded in suspending CLOUD. It took Mr. Kirkby almost a decade of negotiation with his superiors, and who knows how many compromises and unspoken commitments, to convince the CERN bureaucracy to allow the project to proceed. And years more to create the cloud chamber and convincingly validate the Danes’ groundbreaking theory.

Yet this spectacular success will be largely unrecognized by the general public for years — this column will be the first that most readers have heard of it — because CERN remains too afraid of offending its government masters to admit its success. Weeks ago, CERN formerly decided to muzzle Mr. Kirby and other members of his team to avoid “the highly political arena of the climate change debate,” telling them “to present the results clearly but not interpret them” and to downplay the results by “mak[ing] clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.” The CERN study and press release is written in bureaucratese and the version of Mr. Kirkby’s study that appears in the print edition of Nature censored the most eye-popping graph — only those who know where to look in an online supplement will see the striking potency of cosmic rays in creating the conditions for seeding clouds.

CERN, and the Danes, have in all likelihood found the path to the Holy Grail of climate science. But the religion of climate science won’t yet permit a celebration of the find.

Financial Post

LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

- Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

First of two parts. Next week: The end of the global warming debate.

To see the striking graph that the journal Nature withheld from its print edition, click here.

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Honey, What A Scandal – We Eat Smuggled Honey Banned In EU | Health Freedom Alliance

Honey, What A Scandal – We Eat Smuggled Honey Banned In EU

Submitted by Lois Rain on August 25, 2011 – 12:00 amNo Comment

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This will perhaps be the most compelling arguing point yet to buy local! The menacing food hazards continue to grow worse.

If you buy honey from the store, there’s a good chance you are consuming smuggled honey that is tainted with carcinogenic and allergenic antibiotics, dead bacteria and heavy metal toxins. Some of the honey isn’t even made from bees. The same exact honey that is banned in Europe!

Surprise, surprise it comes from China (and India?) – we are really witnessing the repercussions of that business arrangement.

Please read on to discover in this thorough report, the scandalous actions that lead to the grocer’s shelves and why it continues.

~Health Freedoms

Asian Honey, Banned in Europe, Is Flooding U.S. Grocery Shelves

FDA has the laws needed to keep adulterated honey off store shelves but does little, honey industry says.

A third or more of all the honey consumed in the U.S. is likely to have been smuggled in from China and may be tainted with illegal antibiotics and heavy metals.  A Food Safety News investigation has documented that millions of pounds of honey banned as unsafe in dozens of countries are being imported and sold here in record quantities.

And the flow of Chinese honey continues despite assurances from the Food and Drug Administration and other federal officials that the hundreds of millions of pounds reaching store shelves were authentic and safe following the widespread arrests and convictions of major smugglers over the last two years.

Experts interviewed by Food Safety News say some of the largest and most long-established U.S. honey packers are knowingly buying mislabeled, transshipped or possibly altered honey so they can sell it cheaper than those companies who demand safety, quality and rigorously inspected honey.

“It’s no secret that the honey smuggling is being driven by money, the desire to save a couple of pennies a pound,” said Richard Adee, who is the Washington Legislative Chairman of the American Honey Producers Association.

“These big packers are still using imported honey of uncertain safety that they know is illegal because they know their chances of getting caught are slim,” Adee said.

Food safety investigators from the European Union barred all shipments of honey from India because of the presence of lead and illegal animal antibiotics.  Further, they found an even larger amount of honey apparently had been concocted without the help of bees, made from artificial sweeteners and then extensively filtered to remove any proof of contaminants or adulteration or indications of precisely where the honey actually originated.

An examination of international and government shipping tallies, customs documents and interviews with some of North America’s top honey importers and brokers documented the rampant honey laundering and that a record amount of the Chinese honey was being purchased by major U.S. packers.

Food Safety News contacted Suebee Co-Op, the nation’s oldest and largest honey packer and seller, for a response to these allegations and to learn where it gets its honey. The co-op did not respond to repeated calls and emails for comment. Calls and emails to other major honey sellers also were unreturned.

EU Won’t Accept Honey from India

Much of this questionable honey was officially banned beginning June 2010 by the 27 countries of the European Union and others. But on this side of the ocean, the FDA checks few of the thousands of shipments arriving through 22 American ports each year.

According to FDA data, between January and June, just 24 honey shipments were stopped from entering the country. The agency declined to say how many loads are inspected and by whom.

However, during that same period, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that almost 43 million pounds of honey entered the U.S. Of that, the Department of Commerce said 37.7 million pounds came from India, the same honey that is banned in the EU because it contained animal medicine and lead and lacked the proper paperwork to prove it didn’t come from China.

“There are still millions of pounds of transshipped Chinese honey coming in the U.S. and it’s all coming now from India and Vietnam and everybody in the industry knows that,” said Elise Gagnon, president of Odem International, a worldwide trading house that specializes in bulk raw honey.

The FDA says it has regulations prohibiting foods banned in other countries from entering the U.S. However, the agency said last month that it “would not know about honey that has been banned from other countries …”

Adee called the FDA’s response “absurd.” He said the European ban against Indian honey is far from a secret.

“Why are we the dumping ground of the world for something that’s banned in all these other countries?” asked Adee, who, with 80,000 bee colonies in five states, is the country’s largest honey producer.

“We’re supposed to have the world’s safest food supply but we’re letting in boatloads of this adulterated honey that all these other countries know is contaminated and FDA does nothing.”

The food safety agency said it’s doing the best it can with existing resources and will do more when the newly passed Food Safety Modernization Act is up and running.

Where Is Our Honey Coming From?

The U.S. consumes about 400 million pounds of honey a year – about 1.3 pounds a person. About 35 percent is consumed in homes, restaurants and institutions. The remaining 65 percent is bought by industry for use in cereals, baked goods, sauces, beverages and hundreds of different processed foods.

However, the USDA says U.S. beekeepers can only supply about a 48 percent of what’s needed here.  The remaining 52 percent comes from 41 other countries.

Import Genius, a private shipping intelligence service, searched its databases of all U.S. Customs import data for Food Safety News and provided a telling breakdown:

- The U.S. imported 208 million pounds of honey over the past 18 months.

- About 48 million pounds came from trusted and usually reliable suppliers in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Uruguay and Mexico.

- Almost 60 percent of what was imported – 123 million pounds – came from Asian countries – traditional laundering points for Chinese honey. This included 45 million pounds from India alone.

“This should be a red flag to FDA and the federal investigators. India doesn’t have anywhere near the capacity – enough bees – to produce 45 million pounds of honey. It has to come from China,” said Adee, who also is a past president of the American Honey Producers Association.

Why Is Chinese Honey Considered Dangerous?

Chinese honeymakers began using various illegal methods to conceal the origin of their honey beginning in about 2001. That’s when the U.S. Commerce Department imposed a stiff tariff – as much as $1.20 a pound — on Chinese honey to dissuade that country from dumping its dirt-cheap product on the American market and forcing hundreds of U.S. beekeepers out of the business.

About the same time, Chinese beekeepers saw a bacterial epidemic of foulbrood disease race through their hives at wildfire speed, killing tens of millions of bees. They fought the disease with several Indian-made animal antibiotics, including chloramphenicol. Medical researchers found that children given chloramphenicol as an antibiotic are susceptible to DNA damage and carcinogenicity. Soon after, the FDA banned its presence in food.

“We need imported honey in this country.  But, what we don’t need is circumvented honey, honey that is mislabeled as to country of origin, honey that is contaminated with antibiotics or heavy metal,” said Ronald Phipps, co-chairman of the International Committee for Promotion of Honey and Health and head of the major honey brokerage firm CPNA International.

Heavy Metal Contamination

The Chinese have many state-of-the-art processing plants but their beekeepers don’t have the sophistication to match. There are tens of thousands of tiny operators spread from the Yangtze River and coastal Guangdong and Changbai to deep inland Qinghai province.  The lead contamination in some honey has been attributed to these mom-and-pop vendors who use small, unlined, lead-soldered drums to collect and store the honey before it is collected by the brokers for processing.

The amount of chloramphenicol found in honey is miniscule. Nevertheless, public health experts say it can cause a severe, even fatal reaction — aplastic anemia — in about one out of 30,000 people.

European health authorities found lead in honey bought from India in early 2010. A year later, the Indian Export Inspection Council tested 362 samples of honey being exported and reported finding lead and at least two antibiotics in almost 23 percent of the test samples.

The discovery of lead in the honey presents a more serious health threat.

“The presence of heavy metals is a totally different story, because heavy metals are accumulative, they are absorbed by organs and are retained. This is especially hazardous for children,” Phipps said.

All the bans, health concerns and criticism of Indian honey hasn’t slowed the country’s shipping of honey to the U.S. and elsewhere. In February, India’s beekeepers and its government agricultural experts said that because of weather and disease in some colonies, India’s honey crop would be late and reduced by up to 40 percent.

Yet two months later, on April 15 in Ludhiana, officials of Kashmir Apiaries Exports and Little Bee Group, India’s largest honey exporters, posed for newspaper photographers in front of “two full honey trains” carrying 180 20-foot cargo carriers with a record 8.8 million pounds of honey headed for the export ports.

“They’re clearly transshipping honey from China and I can’t believe that they are so brazen about it to put it right on the front page of a newspaper,” honey producer Adee said.

Data received by FSN from an international broker in India on Friday showed that within the last month 16 shipments – more than 688,000 pounds – of honey went from the Chinese port of Nansha in Guangzhou China to Little Bee Honey in India.  The U.S. gurus of international shipping documents – Import Genius – scanned its database and found that just last week six shipments of the honey went from Little Bee to the port of Los Angeles. The honey had the same identification numbers of the honey shipped from China.

Government investigators in the U.S. and Europe and customs brokers in India told FSN that previous successful criminal investigations had proven that the Chinese honey suppliers and their brokers are masterful at falsifying shipping documents.

Each of the shipments – whether from China or India – bore an identical FDA inspection number. However, FDA’s Division of Import Operations did not respond to requests for information on how and where it issued that FDA number.

Food Safety News left several messages for the Little Bee Group to discuss the source of their honey and how they were breaking records when the rest of India’s honey producers were months behind schedule. None of the phone messages or emails were returned.

Other major Indian honey exporters insist that India gets no honey from China. However, Liu Peng-fei and Li Hai-yan of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences disagree. In a scientific study of the impact the global financial crisis is having on China’s honey industry, the apiculture scientists wrote that to avoid the “punitive import tariffs” Chinese enterprises “had to export to the United States via India or Malaysia in order to avoid high tariffs…”

Why Hasn’t Smuggling Stopped?

The massive honey laundering scams that plagued the U.S. for more than a decade – the transshipment of Chinese honey to a second country before being reshipped to the U.S. — were presumably given a deathblow over the past two years.

During that period, Justice Department lawyers and Department of Homeland Security and FDA investigators launched a series of indictments and arrests of 23 German, Chinese, Taiwanese and American corporate officials and their nine international companies.

They were charged with conspiracy to smuggle more than $70 million worth of Chinese honey into the U.S. by falsely declaring that the honey originated from countries other than China. That allowed them to avoid paying stiff anti-dumping charges imposed on China.

It was an impressive series of complex busts spanning three continents, and instant fodder for a great whodunit novel. But, according to some of North America’s largest producers and importers of honey, the arrests bombed as a deterrent.

“There are still millions of pounds of transshipped Chinese honey coming into the U.S.A. and it’s all coming now from India and Vietnam. Everybody in the industry knows that,” said Odem International’s Gagnon.

How Do They Get Away With It?

When it comes to honey laundering, the crooks are always trying to stay one step ahead of the criminal investigators.

For example, when customs agents discovered that China usually shipped its honey in blue steel drums, the exporters quickly painted the drums green.

It took investigators a while to learn that often — while the drums were in port or en route at sea — the Chinese shuffled drum labels and phony paperwork showing country of origin as places that didn’t have an onerous anti-dumping tariff. The Russian Honey Federation blew the whistle on the Chinese relabeling millions of pounds as coming from Russia.

After that scam became known, the felons then shipped Chinese honey to countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and even Australia. There the honey was repacked, authentic local documents were issued and the honey was shipped on to the U.S. or elsewhere.

Another favorite con among Chinese brokers was to mix sugar water, malt sweeteners, corn or rice syrup, jaggery, barley malt sweetener or other additives with a bit of actual honey. In recent years, many shippers have eliminated the honey completely and just use thickened, colored, natural or chemical sweeteners labeled as honey.

However, sophisticated analysis that will match the pollen in honey to flowers from a specific geographic region is available at just two or three laboratories around the world.  There are also simpler, less expensive tests to detect the telltale presence of commercial sweeteners and other adulterants that are more readily available.

A laboratory in Bremen, Germany, founded a half century ago by German beekeepers, can accurately scan honey samples for flower pollen.   There is only one expert in the U.S. known to analyze pollen in honey to determine where it was actually grown and that would be at the Palygnology Laboratory at Texas A&M.  The lab was created and is run by Vaughn Bryant, a forensic palynologist and Professor of Anthropology.

Melissopalynology, or pollen analysis, has been used for years by geologists seeking evidence of ancient coastal areas – often sites of major oil deposits. Scientists tracing the origins of the Shroud of Turin have identified 61 different pollens on the cloth that could only have come from around Jerusalem.

Forensic scientists have used pollen identification to help solve murder, rapes, kidnapping and at least one espionage case. Now, at least in the labs in Texas and Germany, melissopalynologists use pollen to determine – with great accuracy – the geographic area where the bees foraged for the nectar.

“If they find, for example, pollen from flowers that grow in northern latitudes – like China – but it’s found in honey ostensibly produced in tropical countries – like India, Vietnam, Malaysia and the like – you know something’s rotten or illegal,” said CPNA International’s Phipps, who also produces a quarterly, international intelligence report that monitors the country-by-country supply of honey and everyone’s exports.

To avoid detection by concerned purchasers or criminal investigators, some Chinese producers in state-of-the-art processing plants pump the alleged honey, heated and under high pressure, through elaborate ceramic filters. This ultra-filtration removes or conceals all floral fingerprints and indicators of added sweeteners or contaminants.

“The Chinese have refined methods of masking their contaminated product by ultra-filtration so their honey seems perfect. But it’s not honey anymore. There’s no color.  There’s no flavor. There’s nothing.  So you take this perfect product, which could be confused with honey, and you blend it with real Indian honey,” Gagnon said.

“Everyone avoids tariffs because government agents cannot test to prove it’s from China.”

The FDA says it has sent a letter to industry stating that the agency does not consider ultra-filtered honey to be honey.

“We have not halted any importation of honey because we have yet to detect ultra-filtered honey.  If we do detect ultra-filtered honey we will refuse entry,” said FDA press officer Tamara Ward.

“FDA is just not looking” was the answer that most honey brokers offered.  They added that the FDA doesn’t want to find it because then the agency would have to test for it, something it is incapable of doing in its existing laboratories.

Honey experts worry that new technologies will make detection of adulterants even more difficult.

At June’s conference of the Institute of Food Technologists in New Orleans, there were hundreds of Chinese vendors working in small clusters beneath bright red banners. They offered for sale almost any spice, food-processing substance or additives a food processor might want and promises of concocting anything else they could dream of. “All FDA approved,” they emphasized to potential clients.

One salesman quickly jerked back his business card when a reporter pulled out a tape recorder to capture the man’s promises offering a “nanoparticle sweetener for honey that cannot be detected.”

Does the FDA Care?

The U.S. Departments of Customs and Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have dollar and cents issues to worry about because hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid taxes and anti-dumping tariffs on Chinese imports are circumvented by the honey laundering.

“These honey crimes are not a Republican or Democratic, Liberal or Conservative issue.  The country is being ripped off of millions and millions,” Phipps said.

Recent news releases by the border patrol and the FDA say they have developed an anti-smuggling strategy to identify and prevent smuggled foods from entering the United States and posing a threat to national security and consumer safety.

But at the field level, investigators with the two agencies and an agent with ICE’s Commercial Fraud Unit said the cooperation is more on paper then in practice and that the FDA continues to be the weak link. They say the FDA either doesn’t have the resources to properly do the job or is unwilling to commit them.

ICE and the border patrol can and do go after the honey launderers by enforcing the anti-dumping and tariff violation laws. But protecting consumers from dangerous honey, identifying it as adulterated and therefore illegal for importation, falls to the FDA. And many of its enforcement colleagues say the food safety agency doesn’t see this as a priority.

A Justice Department lawyer told Food Safety News that the FDA has all the legal authority and obligation it needs to halt the importation of tainted honey. He cited two sections of the agency’s regulations defining when food products are considered “adulterated.”

The regulations say: “Food is adulterated if it bears or contains a poisonous or deleterious substance which may render it injurious to health” and “damage or inferiority has been concealed.”

Those two factors pretty much sum up the health concerns that many have with the smuggled honey. But the honey industry and Congress can’t get the FDA to even come up with a legal definition of what honey is.

Eight years ago, America’s beekeepers and some honey packers petitioned FDA to issue an official definition of honey. Their concern was how to determine whether honey is bogus if there is no official standard to measure it against. The FDA did nothing.

Last Nov. 15, senators asked the food safety agency for the same thing. Again, nothing.

On Aug. 10, two members of the Senate Committee on Appropriations tried once more.

Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and John Hoeven (R-ND) urged the FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg to issue the official definition.

Calling the lack of regulations “a food safety concern,” Gillibrand said a national standard of identity for honey is needed “to prevent unscrupulous importers from flooding the market with misbranded honey products…”

An investigator in FDA’s import section explained the agency’s refusal to develop an official definition to FSN. “If we had an official description of honey then FDA would have to inspect everything we’re importing to ensure it’s legal. That’s the last thing we want to do,” he said, but would not allow his name to be used because he wasn’t authorized to make public statements.

How Do You Stop The Illegal Flow?

Gagnon and four other major players in the honey industry have formed a voluntary group called True Source Honey.  They hope it will eventually expand into an international, industry-wide program to certify the origin and quality of honey.

“We need an origin traceability program, a professional audit of both the exporters and the packers so those buying and selling honey can ensure its authenticity and quality,” said Gagnon, who is the group’s vice chairman.

Meanwhile, it’s rumored that the feds are increasing their surveillance of the large U.S. importers and not too soon, Adee and others say.

Adee likens the honey laundering to a huge auto chop shop, where the police occasionally arrest the low-level car thieves but others pop up to continue supplying the criminal operation, which authorities never go after.

“That’s what’s happening here,” Adee explained. “ICE and the other investigators have arrested a handful of the middle men, the brokers who supply the honey packers, but haven’t gone after the big operators buying the phony foreign honey.”

Adee and others interviewed by Food Safety News say there are 12 major honey packers in the U.S. and four or five that are involved with the bulk of illegal trade.

“We know who they are,” he said. “Everyone in the industry knows. If these packers are allowed to continue buying this possibly tainted but clearly illegal smuggled honey, the importers will always find a way to get it to them.”

———-

Editor’s Note:  Andrew Schneider, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, writes for Food Safety News and The Food Watchdog.com

Source:

http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/08/honey-laundering/

via healthfreedoms.org

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Coriander oil could be used to cure food poisoning and MRSA, say scientists | Mail Online

The natural remedy for superbugs? Coriander oil could be used to cure food poisoning and MRSA, say scientists

By Tamara Cohen

Last updated at 7:46 AM on 24th August 2011

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Coriander: The herb extract is resistant to a range of toxic bacteria

Coriander oil could be used to cure a host of infections including food poisoning and the superbug MRSA, say researchers.

The herb extract is resistant to a range of toxic bacteria which cause infections that are resistant to drugs, a study has found.

Portuguese scientists tested samples of the oil – taken from the seeds of a coriander plant – against 12 lethal bacteria.

All showed reduced growth and most were killed by a solution containing less than 1.6 per cent of the oil.

The team from the University of Beira Interior found the oil attacks and kills the outer membrane of bacteria cells, including salmonella, E.coli and MRSA.

Dr Fernanda Domingues, who co-authored the study, said coriander oil could help the millions who suffer from food-borne illnesses every year.

‘It could become a natural alternative to common antibiotics,’ she said.

‘We envisage the use of coriander in lotions, mouth rinses and even pills, to fight multidrug-resistant bacterial infections that otherwise could not be treated.

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‘This would significantly improve people’s quality of life.’

In the UK every year, around one million people suffer a food poisoning, leading to 20,000 needing hospital care and around 500 deaths, according to the Food Standards Agency.

There were 1,900 cases of MRSA in this country in 2009-2010 and nearly 500 deaths.

Dr Domingues explained how the oil works by saying: ‘It disrupts the barrier between the [membrane of bacteria] cell and its environment and inhibits essential processes including respiration, which ultimately leads to the death of the bacterial cell.’

But the authors say more research is needed into how it would be developed into a drug.

Coriander is widely used in Mediterranean and Asian cuisine.

It has been known as a medicinal plant since ancient times but the mechanism by which it works was not previously understood, says the study, published today in the Journal of Medical Microbiology.

Hugh Pennington, former emeritus professor of bacteriology at Aberdeen University said: ‘We have known about the antibacterial properties for a long, long time, but the difficulty in medicine is getting them to the right place to treat salmonella, or MRSA in your hip or whatever.

'Unless it can do that, the discovery is not fantastically important.’

via dailymail.co.uk

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S&P AND THE BILDERBERGERS: ALL PART OF THE PLAN?

Ellen Brown
August 18, 2011
www.webofdebt.com/articles/s_p.php

What just happened in the stock market? Last week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose or fell by at least 400 points for four straight days, a stock market first.

The worst drop was on Monday, 8-8-11, when the Dow plunged 624 points. Monday was the first day of trading after US Treasury bonds were downgraded from AAA to AA+ by Standard and Poor’s.

But the roller coaster actually began on Tuesday, 8-2-11, the day after the last-minute deal to raise the U.S. debt ceiling -- a deal that was supposed to avoid the downgrade that happened anyway five days later. The Dow changed directions for eight consecutive trading sessions after that, another first.

The volatility was unprecedented, leaving analysts at a loss to explain it. High frequency program trading no doubt added to the wild swings, but why the daily reversals? Why didn’t the market head down and just keep going, as it did in September 2008?

The plunge on 8-8-11 was the worst since 2008 and the sixth largest stock market crash ever. According to Der Spiegel, one of the most widely read periodicals in Europe:

Many economists have been pointing out that last week's panic resembled the fear that swept financial markets after the collapse of US investment bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008.

Then as now, banks stopped lending each other money. Then as now, banks' cash deposits at the central bank doubled within days.

On Tuesday, August 9, however, the market gained more points from its low than it lost on Monday. Why? A tug of war seemed to be going on between two titanic forces, one bent on crashing the market, the other on propping it up.

The Dubious S&P Downgrade

Many commentators questioned the validity of the downgrade that threatened to collapse the market. Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said in a statement:

"The Treasury Department revealed that S&P’s decision was initially based on a $2 trillion error in accounting. However, even after this enormous error was corrected, S&P went ahead with the downgrade. This suggests that S&P had made the decision to downgrade independent of the evidence. [Emphasis added.]

Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, was also skeptical, stating:

[E]verything I’ve heard about S&P’s demands suggests that it’s talking nonsense about the US fiscal situation. The agency has suggested that the downgrade depended on the size of agreed deficit reduction over the next decade, with $4 trillion apparently the magic number. Yet US solvency depends hardly at all on what happens in the near or even medium term: an extra trillion in debt adds only a fraction of a percent of GDP to future interest costs . . . .

In short, S&P is just making stuff up — and after the mortgage debacle, they really don’t have that right.

In an illuminating expose posted on Firedoglake on August 5, Jane Hamsher concluded:

It’s becoming more and more obvious that Standard and Poor’s has a political agenda riding on the notion that the US is at risk of default on its debt based on some arbitrary limit to the debt-to-GDP ratio. There is no sound basis for that limit, or for S&P’s insistence on at least a $4 trillion down payment on debt reduction, any more than there is for the crackpot notion that a non-crazy US can be forced to default on its debt. . . .

It’s time the media and Congress started asking Standard and Poors what their political agenda is and whom it serves.

Who Drove the S&P Agenda?

Jason Schwarz shed light on this question in an article on Seeking Alpha titled “The Rise of Financial Terrorism”. He wrote:

[A]fter the market close on Friday August 5th, we received word that S&P CEO Deven Sharma had taken control of the ratings agency and personally led the push for a U.S. downgrade. There is a lot of evidence that he has deliberately tried to trash the U.S. economy. Even after discovering that the S&P debt calculations were off by $2 trillion, Sharma made the decision to go ahead with the unethical downgrade. This is a guy who was a key contributor at the 2009 Bilderberg Summit that organized 120 of the world's richest men and women to push for an end to the dollar as the global reserve currency.

[T]hrough his writings on “competitive strategy” S&P CEO Sharma considers the United States the PROBLEM in today’s world, operating with what he implies is an unfair and reckless advantage. The brutal reality is that for "globalization" to succeed the United States must be torn asunder . . .

Also named by Schwarz as a suspect in the market manipulations was Michel Barnier, head of European Regulation. Barnier triggered an alarming 513-point drop in the Dow on August 4, when he blocked the plan of Hans Hoogervorst, newly appointed Chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board, to save Europe by adopting a new rule called IFRS 9. The rule would have eliminated mark-to-market accounting of sovereign debt from European bank balance sheets. Schwarz writes:

We all should be experts on the dangers of mark-to-market accounting after observing the U.S. banking crisis of 2008/2009 and the Great Depression in the 1930s. Mark-to-market was repealed at 8:45 a.m on April 2, 2009, which finally put a stop to the short term liquidity crisis and at the same time ushered in a stock market recovery. Banks no longer had to raise capital as long term stability was brought back to the system. The exact same scenario would have happened in 2011 Europe under Hoogervorst's plan. Without the threat of failure by those banks who hold high amounts of euro sovereign debt, investors would be free to move on from the European crisis and the stock market could resume its fundamental course.

Schwarz notes that Barnier, like Sharma, was a confirmed attendee at past Bilderberger conferences. What, then, is the agenda of the Bilderbergers?

The One World Company

Daniel Estulin, noted expert on the Bilderbergers, describes that secretive globalist group as “a medium of bringing together financial institutions which are the world’s most powerful and most predatory financial interests.” Writing in June 2011, he said:

Bilderberg isn’t a secret society. . . . It’s a meeting of people who represent a certain ideology. . . . Not OWG [One World Government] or NWO [New World Order] as too many people mistakenly believe. Rather, the ideology is of a ONE WORLD COMPANY LIMITED.

It seems the Bilderbergers are less interested in governing the world than in owning the world. The “world company” was a term first used at a Bilderberger meeting in Canada in 1968 by George Ball, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs and a managing director of banking giants Lehman Brothers and Kuhn Loeb. The world company was to be a new form of colonialism, in which global assets would be acquired by economic rather than military coercion. The company would extend across national boundaries, aggressively engaging in mergers and acquisitions until the assets of the world were subsumed under one privately-owned corporation, with nation-states subservient to a private international central banking system.

 Estulin continues:

The idea behind each and every Bilderberg meeting is to create what they themselves call THE ARISTOCRACY OF PURPOSE between European and North American elites on the best way to manage the planet. In other words, the creation of a global network of giant cartels, more powerful than any nation on Earth, destined to control the necessities of life of the rest of humanity.

. . . This explains what George Ball . . . said back in 1968, at a Bilderberg meeting in Canada: “Where does one find a legitimate base for the power of corporate management to make decisions that can profoundly affect the economic life of nations to whose governments they have only limited responsibility?”

That base of power was found in the private global banking system. Estulin goes on:

The problem with today’s system is that the world is run by monetary systems, not by national credit systems. . . . [Y]ou don’t want a monetary system to run the world. You want sovereign nation-states to have their own credit systems, which is the system of their currency. . . . [T]he possibility of productive, non-inflationary credit creation by the state, which is firmly stated in the US Constitution, was excluded by Maastricht [the Treaty of the European Union] as a method of determining economic and financial policy.

The world company acquires assets by preventing governments from issuing their own currencies and credit. Money is created instead by banks as loans at interest. The debts inexorably grow, since more money is always owed back than was created in the original loans. (For more on this, see here.) If currencies are not allowed to expand to meet increased costs and growth, the inevitable result is a wave of bankruptcies, foreclosures, and sales of assets at firesale prices. Sales to whom? To the “world company.”

Battle of the Titans

If that was the plan behind the market assaults on August 4 and August 8, however, it evidently failed. What turned the market around, according to Der Spiegel, was the European Central Bank, which saved the day by embarking on a program of buying Spanish and Italian bonds. Sidestepping the Maastricht Treaty, the ECB said it would engage in the equivalent of “quantitative easing,” purchasing bonds with money created with accounting entries on its books. It had done this earlier with Greek and Irish sovereign debt but had resisted doing it with Spanish and Italian bonds, which were much larger obligations. On Tuesday, August 16, the ECB announced that it was engaging in a record $32 billion bond-buying spree in an attempt to appease the markets and save the Eurozone from collapse.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was also expected to come through with another round of quantitative easing, but his speech on August 9 made no mention of QE3. As blogger Jesse Livermore summarized the market’s response:

. . . [T]he markets sold off rather rapidly as no announcement was made about QE3. . . . It wasn’t until . . . the last 75 min of market activity [that] the DJIA gained 639 pts to close at a day high of 11,242. That begs the question, where did that injection of capital come from? The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets? Or did the “policy tools” to promote price stability by any chance include the next round of Quantitative Easing unannounced?

Was that QE3 Incognito, Ben?

Titanic Battle or Insider Trading?

There could be another explanation for the suspicious downgrade that was announced despite the fact that the government had just made major concessions to avoid default, and despite the embarrassing revelation that S&P’s figures were off by $2 trillion. On August 12, MSN.Money reported that the downgrade “wasn't much of a surprise”:

Wall Street had heard a rumor early on that the downgrade was coming. News sites reported the rumor all day.

Unless it was all a huge coincidence, it's likely that someone in the know leaked the information. The questions are who and whether the leak led to early insider trading.

The Daily Mail had the story of someone placing an $850 million bet in the futures market on the prospects of a US debt downgrade:

The latest bet was made on July 21 on trades of 5,370 ten-year Treasury futures and 3,100 Treasury bond futures, reported ETF Daily News.

Now the investor’s gamble seems to have paid off after Standard and Poor’s issued a credit rating downgrade from AAA to AA+ last Friday.

Whoever it is stands to earn a 1,000 per cent return on their money, with the expectation that interest rates will be going up after the downgrade.

The Securities Exchange Commission announced on August 8 that it is investigating the downgrade. According to the Financial Times, the move is part of a preliminary examination into potential insider trading.

Whatever was going on in the market in the first two weeks of August, it was unprecedented, unnatural, and bears close observation.

Ellen Brown is president of the Public Banking Institute and the author of eleven books. She developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust.” Her websites are http://WebofDebt.com and http://PublicBankingInstitute.org.

via webofdebt.com

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10 Reasons Why Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann Suck « The PPJ Gazette

10 Reasons Why Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann Suck

August 18, 2011 by ppjg

Frank Veracity/PPJ Contributor

                                Who do these people work for??

(Author’s note: I am aware that this is an incomplete list, but I had to narrow it down to 10 points-please add to the list in the comments section)

Rick Perry:

• Perry mandated compulsory Gardasil vaccines for 6th grade girls, which was overturned by the state legislature (2007).

• As the Agriculture Commissioner of Texas, Perry ushered genetically engineered (GE) crops into the state. He used dirty tricks to defeat the former Commissioner, Jim Hightower, who instituted the organic farmers certification program and would have required GE food labeling.

• He is a supporter of the Texas Trans Corridor, the Agenda 21 NAFTA superhighway from Mexico to Canada designed to erase borders and sovereignty.

• Public buildings, schools, nursing homes, ports, mass transit, etc can be auctioned off for sweetheart private corporate leases under Perry’s regime. Reminds me of the successful austerity program in Greece.

• Perry supports illegal immigration and entitlements for illegal aliens.

____________________________________________________________________

Michelle Bachmann:

• Bachmann incorrectly believes that Iran is a leader of terrorism with nuclear bombs and said that she would “do everything to make sure that Iran does not become a nuclear power”; this implies a willingness to start ANOTHER war.

(For more on Iran’s nuclear program click here and here)

• Bachmann masquerades as a Constitutionalist, but believes suspected foreign terrorist suspects have no rights under the Constitution. The Constitution grants that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process. And the 6th Amendment stipulates that the accused has a right to a trial. The Constitution allows this for all people, not just citizens. How long do you think it will be before these types UNCONSTITUTIONAL ideas will be applied to Americans, too?

• She voted in favor of the Patriot Act that is now being used agains Americans.

• Michelle Bachmann was a prosecutor for the IRS from 1988- 1993. She advocates tax reform, but she received $30 a day for 23 foster children from her state. A conservative estimate of her tax free profits is $ 1,259,250!

• Bachmann loves receiving government welfare from Medicaid and agricultural subsidies, but she rails against government spending. Can you say h-y-p-o-c-r-i-t-e?

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Perry is a globalist puppet while Bachmann is a dangerous neocon.

If only there were another choice for president…someone who has a stellar voting record for over 20 years…someone who understands and follows the Constitution…someone who wants to end trillion dollar wars…someone who understands the fraudulent Federal Reserve and its monetary policy…someone who wants sound, asset-backed money…someone who has always voted to cut taxes…someone who wants to limit government…someone who could turn the economy around and get us out of the ‘economic recovery’ that is destroying our nation in a year……..

If only there were someone who wasn’t a power hungry hypocrite. I can’t think of anyone that I have heard about in the mainstream news or media that fits these qualifications.

_________________________

http://www.examiner.com/transportation-policy-in-san-antonio/rick-perry-tied-to-agenda-21-globalist-policies

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=213148

http://www.herald.co.zw/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=17121:who-is-killing-irans-nuke-scientists-and-why&catid=39:opinion&Itemid=132

http://mobile.nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/gop-presidential-candidates-pledge-to-prevent-nuclear-armed-iran-20110812

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/foreign-policy/8572-ames-iowa-gop-debate-paul-schools-santorum-bachmann-on-iran-war

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/8573-gop-debate-michele-bachmann-says-foreigners-have-no-rights

http://blog.acton.org/archives/25080-the-patriot-act-and-the-threat-to-the-rule-of-law.html

http://www.votesmart.org/voting_category.php?can_id=54675

http://wonkette.com/211978/michele-bachmanns-baby-farm

http://news.yahoo.com/romney-health-care-hypocrisy-230700170.html

http://michellemalkin.com/2011/08/16/rick-perrys-bad-obama-style-medicine/

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14 Reasons Why Rick Perry Would Be A Really, Really Bad President

Supporters of Texas Governor Rick Perry are not going to like this article at all.  Right now, Republicans all over the United States are touting Rick Perry as the "Republican messiah" that is going to come charging in to save America from the presidency of Barack Obama.  Many believe that if Rick Perry enters the race, he will instantly become the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.  Perry certainly looks the part and he knows how to give a good speech, but when ordinary Americans all over the country take a hard look at his record, they may not like what they see.  The truth is that Rick Perry is a big-time globalist, he has raised taxes and fees in Texas numerous times, he has massively increased the size of government spending and government debt in Texas, he has been trying to ram the Trans-Texas Corridor down the throats of the Texas people and he tried to force young women all over Texas to be injected with the Gardasil vaccine.  No, Rick Perry is not going to save America.  In fact, he would likely be very, very similar to both Bush and Obama in a lot of ways.

Right now, Rick Perry is trying to portray himself as a "good conservative" so that if he enters the race he will be accepted by Christian conservatives.  If Rick Perry did win the Republican nomination, he would have a great chance of winning the general election because he would very much be an "establishment" candidate.

But before Republicans get too excited about Rick Perry, there are a whole lot of things that they should know about him.

The following are 14 reasons why Rick Perry would be a really, really bad president....

#1 Rick Perry is a "big government" politician.  When Rick Perry became the governor of Texas in 2000, the total spending by the Texas state government was approximately $49 billion.  Ten years later it was approximately $90 billion.  That is not exactly reducing the size of government.

#2 The debt of the state of Texas is out of control.  According to usdebtclock.org, the debt to GDP ratio in Texas is 22.9% and the debt per citizen is $10,645.  In California (a total financial basket case), the debt to GDP ratio is just 18.7% and the debt per citizen is only $9932.  If Rick Perry runs for president these are numbers he will want to keep well hidden.

#3 The total debt of the Texas government has more than doubled since Rick Perry became governor.  So what would the U.S. national debt look like after four (or eight) years of Rick Perry?

#4 Rick Perry has spearheaded the effort to lease roads in Texas to foreign companies, to turn roads that are already free to drive on into toll roads, and to develop the Trans-Texas Corridor which would be part of the planned NAFTA superhighway system.  If you really do deep research on this whole Trans-Texas Corridor nonsense you will see why no American should ever cast a single vote for Rick Perry.

#5 Rick Perry claims that he has a "track record" of not raising taxes.  That is a false claim.  Rick Perry has repeatedly raised taxes and fees while he has been governor.  Today, Texans are faced with significantly higher taxes and fees than they were before Rick Perry was elected.

#6 Even with the oil boom in Texas, 23 states have a lower unemployment rate than Texas does.

#7 Back in 1988, Rick Perry supported Al Gore for president.  In fact, Rick Perry actually served as Al Gore's campaign chairman in the state of Texas that year.

#8 Between December 2007 and April 2011, weekly wages in the U.S. increased by about 5 percent.  In the state of Texas they increased by just 0.6% over that same time period.

#9 Texas now has one of the worst education systems in the nation.  The following is from an opinion piece that was actually authored by Barbara Bush earlier this year....

•  We rank 36th in the nation in high school graduation rates. An estimated 3.8 million Texans do not have a high school diploma.

•  We rank 49th in verbal SAT scores, 47th in literacy and 46th in average math SAT scores.

•  We rank 33rd in the nation on teacher salaries.

#10 Rick Perry attended the Bilderberg Group meetings in 2007.  Associating himself with that organization should be a red flag for all American voters.

#11 Texas has the highest percentage of workers making minimum wage out of all 50 states.

#12 Rick Perry often gives speeches about illegal immigration, but when you look at the facts, he has been incredibly soft on the issue.  If Rick Perry does not plan to secure the border, then he should not be president because illegal immigration is absolutely devastating many areas of the southwest United States.

#13 In 2007, 221,000 residents of Texas were making minimum wage or less.  By 2010, that number had risen to 550,000.

#14 Rick Perry actually issued an executive order in 2007 that would have forced almost every single girl in the state of Texas to receive the Gardasil vaccine before entering the sixth grade.  Perry would have put parents in a position where they would have had to fill out an application and beg the government not to inject their child with a highly controversial vaccine. Since then, very serious safety issues regarding this vaccine have come to light.  Fortunately, lawmakers in Texas blocked what Perry was trying to do.  According to Wikipedia, many were troubled when "apparent financial connections between Merck and Perry were reported by news outlets, such as a $6,000 campaign contribution and Merck's hiring of former Perry Chief of Staff Mike Toomey to handle its Texas lobbying work."

Rick Perry has a record that should make all Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians and Independents cringe.

He is not the "conservative Republican" that he is trying to claim that he is.  He is simply another in a long line of "RINOs" (Republicans in name only).

If Rick Perry becomes president, he will probably be very similar to George W. Bush.  He will explode the size of the U.S. government and U.S. government debt, he will find sneaky ways to raise taxes, he will do nothing about the Federal Reserve or corruption in our financial system and he will push the agenda of the globalists at every turn.

Look, the truth is that another four years of Barack Obama would be a complete and total nightmare.

But so would four years of Rick Perry.

America deserves better than the "lesser of two evils".

Unfortunately, the American people have been dead asleep and have been sending incompetents, con men and charlatans to Washington D.C. for decades.

Hopefully things will be different in 2012.

via endoftheamericandream.com

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Gold hits $1,800; but what about farmland? - The Tell - MarketWatch

Gold hits $1,800; but what about farmland?

August 10, 2011, 12:40 PM

Nothing can seem to get in front of this gold freight train. The December contract gc1u, the most active, just hit an intraday record of $1,801 an ounce and recently traded up $44.40, or 2.6%, to $1,787.60 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. But Jon Nadler, an often bearish gold analyst for Kitco Metals Inc. North America, points out in his morning commentary that some of the so-called “smart money” has moved out of gold.. and into farmland? Read Nadler’s past commentary.

“Amid the chaos and the noise, someone (George Soros) is quietly buying ‘stuff’ you can actually use and which has value way beyond currencies or metals; yep, farmland.” He points to a Bloomberg News story out Wednesday about  investors, including a former bond fund manager, jumping into farm ownership, where returns have averaged 16% annually from Jan. 2008. A fund operated by Soros, whose funds shed gold holdings earlier this year, has also gone into farms. Read more on Soros’s move out of gold.

via blogs.marketwatch.com

George Soros is buying up farmland...

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Elite Finishing of Tampa Bay Inc.

Check out this website I found at facebook.com

This guy is a genius at wood finishing...seriously!

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Just How Bad is Aspartame?

Proven Unsafe But FDA-Approved: Are YOU Still Consuming This Man-Made Poison?

Posted By Dr. Mercola | August 03 2011 | 25,127 views

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Americans drink more soda than anyone else on the planet -- well over 700 eight-ounce servings each year, on average, and an increasing amount of it is diet soda.

They might be more reluctant to do so if they knew about the safety questions still surrounding aspartame. A number of scientists responding expressed major concerns about aspartame's safety at the time of its approval, and even more indicated areas where they believed more research is needed on aspartame to resolve their concerns -- research on areas such as neurological functions, brain tumors, seizures, headaches, and adverse effects on children and pregnant women.

Grist reports:

"In a 1996 survey, Ralph G. Walton ... looked at 166 peer-reviewed studies on aspartame undertaken between 1980 and 1985. He found that all 74 of the studies funded by the industry found no adverse effects from aspartame, while 84 of the 92 independently funded articles did find bad effects."

Aspartame is the ingredient found in NutraSweet, It is also found in Equal, Spoonful, Equal Measure, AminoSweet, Benevia, NutraTaste, Canderel, and many popular "diet" sodas. This chemical is currently on the ingredient list of nearly 6,000 products worldwide. But since it was approved for use as a food additive in 1981, it has been dogged by complaints about its safety.

Was aspartame ever proven safe for human consumption before it gained FDA approval as a food additive?

Not according to Dr. John Olney, a researcher at Washington University in Saint Louis who first began studying aspartame in 1970. Dr. Olhney believes aspartame should not be on the market today "because it hasn't been demonstrated to be safe." Also in agreement with Dr. Olney are the FDA's own investigations into the chemical from 1975 to 1980.

When the FDA was presented with Dr. Olney's research, they assigned an outside public board of inquiry the task of deciding if aspartame should be allowed for human consumption. In 1980, the doctors on that board unanimously ruled that aspartame should not go on the market. An internal FDA panel concluded the same thing in 1980.

According to the FDA Chairman at that time, Dr. Gere Goyan, his next recommendation was to set up another FDA committee to study aspartame, composed people who played no previous part in the former studies of aspartame. Dr. Gere Goyan never saw the results of that 1980 FDA internal study, because he was forced to step down as FDA Chairman the day Ronald Reagan took office on January 21, 1981.

His replacement? Dr. Arthur Hill Hayes.

Dr. Hayes is notable for two reasons. First, he had no previous history of dealing with the science of food additives. Second, he was apparently hand picked to head the FDA by a prominent member of Ronald Reagan's political transition team, Donald Rumsfeld. Yes, the same Donald Rumsfeld who led the United States into the multi trillion dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as Secretary of Defense during the Bush presidency. But in 1981, Rumsfeld had a different title: CEO of the G.D Searle company, the company that owned the patent on aspartame.

One of Dr. Arthur Hill Hayes first acts as FDA Chairman was granting aspartame approval for use in dry goods. Incidentally, one of Hayes' last acts in office as FDA Chairman was to approve aspartame for use in beverages.

So was aspartame approved because studies ever showed it was safe for human consumption? Or was it approved thanks to the political influence of Donald Rumsfeld?

According to former Sentator Howard Metzenbaum, who reviewed the FDA's approval process of aspartame in the Senate in 1987, "I think there were a lot of politics involved in its being approved." Research scientist Dr. Olney is even more blunt, "the issue (aspartame) is really not an issue of science, it's an issue of politics."

via articles.mercola.com

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