Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Rebranded as Corn Sugar.
The good news: Consumption of high-fructose corn syrup is at a 20-year low. The bad news: The folks who make this insidious sweetener aim to rebrand it to boost sales. High-fructose corn syrup is cheaper than cane sugar and acts as a food preservative, too, so the food industry loves the stuff. But it's been added to so many foods — yogurt, cereal, bread, drinks and even condiments — that researchers have fingered it as a culprit in the obesity epidemic.Link
Monday, September 13, 2010
The Frankenfish.
When the FDA announced it found the genetically engineered AquAdvantage salmon safe just before Labor Day, news headlines and even Alaska Senator Mark Begich called it a "frankenfish.".Link
Advanced military aircraft to Saudi Arabia.
US President Barack Obama's administration will soon notify Congress of plans to offer advanced military aircraft to Saudi Arabia in a deal worth up to 60 billion dollars, congressional sources said Monday. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the transaction has not yet been formally announced, confirmed a Wall Street Journal report about the deal but warned that key US lawmakers would block the move. "You can fully expect that a hold will be placed on this deal," thought to be the largest ever arms sale of its kind, said a senior congressional source. "There is serious concern about some sensitive material which is expected to be included in the deal," said another source, who told AFP that Obama aides would brief congressional staff on the deal on Monday.Link
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Few See Terrorism as Top U.S. Problem.
PRINCETON, NJ -- Nine years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, 1% of Americans mention terrorism as the most important problem facing the country, down from 46% just after the attacks. Just before the attacks, in a Gallup poll conducted Sept. 7-10, 2001, less than one-half of 1% of Americans mentioned terrorism as the nation's most important problem. One month later, in October 2001, 46% named terrorism, the highest in Gallup's history. From that point on, terrorism slowly faded as a response to this question. At the one-year anniversary of the attacks, in September 2002, 19% of Americans mentioned terrorism as the country's top problem, already eclipsed by the economy at the top of the list. By the five-year anniversary of the attacks in September 2006, 11% of Americans mentioned terrorism. Terrorism continued to drop from that point, albeit with an uptick to 8% mentions in January of this year, reflecting the widespread news coverage of the "Christmas Day bomber" who allegedly attempted to detonate explosives on a Northwest Airlines plane headed for Detroit.Link
Doomsday warnings.
Economists peddling dire warnings that the world's number one economy is on the brink of collapse, amid high rates of unemployment and a spiraling public deficit, are flourishing here. The guru of this doomsday line of thinking may be economist Nouriel Roubini, thrust into the forefront after predicting the chaos wrought by the subprime mortgage crisis and the collapse of the housing bubble. "The US has run out of bullets," Roubini told an economic forum in Italy earlier this month. "Any shock at this point can tip you back into recession.".Link
‘Biggest leak of military intelligence ever’
Whistleblower website WikiLeaks is teaming up with news outlets to release a "massive cache" of classified US military field reports on the conflict in Iraq, Newsweek magazine reported recently. Newsweek quoted Iain Overton, editor of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a London-based journalism nonprofit, as saying the material constitutes the "biggest leak of military intelligence" ever. Newsweek said the stash of Iraq documents held by WikiLeaks is believed to be about three times as large as the number of US military field reports on Afghanistan released earlier this year by WikiLeaks.Link
FDA Has Gone Nuts.
Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food. Hippocrates. Since food is medicine, and medicine is food, the Food and Drug Administration, an agency of Health and Human Services, is requiring that claims of food health benefits by sellers, must have federal licensing and scientific proof of such claims. This is to harmonize with Codex Alimentarius, global food and drug control standards.Link
White House aides owe the IRS $831,000.
Over the years a lot of suspicion has built up across the country about Washington and its population of opportunistic transients coming to see themselves as a special kind of person, somehow above average working Americans who don't labor down in that monument-strewn former swamp.Link
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