Nutraingredients.com: Quality of nano toxicity data is ‘not great’, says expert

Nutraingredients.com, 22-Jun-2011

The limited nature of many toxicity studies into engineered nanoparticles used in the food and dietary supplements industry makes it very difficult to draw firm conclusions about their safety, according to one expert in the field.

Speaking at the IFT show last week, Dr Bernadene Magnuson, senior scientific and regulatory consultant at Cantox Health Sciences International, said an analysis of 30 studies toxicity studies into engineered nanoparticles highlighted gaps in the research and methodological problems.

For example, most in vivo tests were high, single-dose, acute studies, which were of “limited relevance to food exposure”, which should examine the impact of repeated low doses over a long period of time, she argued.

“There are a few short-term repeated dose studies, but no long-term, chronic studies. In general, the reliability of the data from nanomaterial toxicology studies is not great.

"We need to improve characterization and the quality of the studies," added Magnuson, a toxicologist best known for her work on assessing the safety of aspartame.

Testing methodologies must be validated

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"Dahr Jamail and Max Blumenthal" - Assault on Gaza Flotilla Ship: 'Sabotaged by Divers' in Port, Attacked by Legal Group Funded by Christian Right 'Mad Pastor' John Hagee

By Dahr Jamail and Max Blumenthal, Al Jazeera English and MaxBlumenthal.com
Posted on June 28, 2011, Printed on June 29, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151461/assault_on_gaza_flotilla_ship%3A_%27sabotaged_by_divers%27_in_port%2C_attacked_by_legal_group_funded_by_christian_right_%27mad_pastor%27_john_hagee

The following are two news stories revealing an orchestrated attempt to prevent the launch of the 2nd flotilla ship aimed at breaking Israel's naval blockade of Gaza.

Gaza flotilla ship 'sabotaged by divers'                 

by Dahr Jamail, Al Jazeera English

A Swedish ship due to join an upcoming Gaza-bound aid flotilla has been sabotaged in the Greek port of Piraeus, organisers say.

In a statement, they said "hostile divers had destroyed the propeller house and cut the propeller shaft" of the vessel Juliano on Monday.

The ship is part of the 10-vessel Freedom Flotilla II that is expected to set sail from Greece and elsewhere for the Gaza Strip in the coming days in a bid to break Israel's blockade of the Palestinian territory.

About 350 pro-Palestinian activists from 22 countries are likely to participate.

Israel insists the latest flotilla is a "dangerous provocation" and has vowed to intercept it.

Determined organisers

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Marty Kaplan: Don't Look on the Bright Side -- Pessimism, Not Magical Thinking, Is What Will Save Us

By Marty Kaplan, Smirking Chimp
Posted on June 28, 2011, Printed on June 29, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151454/don%27t_look_on_the_bright_side%3A_pessimism%2C_not_magical_thinking%2C_is_what_will_save_us

It gets worse. If you pay attention to the news, the prospects for the future look grim. The new normal of high unemployment and stagnant wages will likely not turn out to be just a phase. The next generations may indeed do worse than the ones before them. Thanks to the Supreme Court, big money will keep tightening its stranglehold on elections and lawmaking. Financial reform and consumer protection will never survive the onslaught of lobbyists. Reckless bankers will go on making out like bandits, and the public will always be forced to rescue them. The Internet, along with cable and wireless, will be controlled by fewer and more-powerful companies. The world will keep staggering from one economic crisis to another. We will not have the leadership and citizenship we need to kick our dependence on oil. We will not even keep up with the Kardashians.

Add your own items to the list. Whatever global threats scare you -- climate change, the Middle East, loose nukes, pandemics -- and whatever domestic issues haunt you -- failing schools, crumbling infrastructure, rising poverty, obesity -- the odds are that the honesty, discipline, resources and burden-sharing required for a happy ending will not, like Elijah, show up at our door.

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Paul Craig Roberts: Can The Fed Stop Quantitative Easing?

By Paul Craig Roberts

Global Research, June 27, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25412

If the Fed stops QE, confidence in the US dollar would rise. Money would flow into US investments, both supporting the US stock market and helping to finance the large US budget deficit. Gold and silver prices would decline.  Negative dollar expectations would be squeezed out of oil and grain prices, although drought, flood, and supply factors would continue to impact grain prices and the administration’s wars can impact oil prices. 

If a halt to QE coincided with more European sovereign debt problems, the dollar might regain a lot of the ground that it has lost.  

Looked at from this perspective, the Fed should halt its bond purchases, and people should bail out of their bullion investments and commodity speculations.

But there are other factors in play--the economy and continuing solvency worries about financial institutions. At a June 22 news conference, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said: “Some of the headwinds that have been concerning us, like the weakness in the financial sector, problems in the housing sector, balance sheet and deleveraging issues, may be stronger and more persistent than we thought.”

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Nomi Prins: Guess How Much More Wall St. Spends on Bonuses Than on Penalties for Torpedoing the Economy?

By Nomi Prins, AlterNet
Posted on June 27, 2011, Printed on June 29, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151434/guess_how_much_more_wall_st._spends_on_bonuses_than_on_penalties_for_torpedoing_the_economy

Are you enraged about JPM Chase’s puny $156.3 million fine? The fine was part of an SEC settlement in which the firm "neither admits nor denies" any wrong-doing. Translation: Stuffing assets with carefully selected crap is not wrong. Creating the crap loans to begin with: Also, not wrong. 

Of course you’re pissed off. I know I am.

There aren’t enough synonyms for the word "tiny" to adequately describe the size and impact of this settlement. It's a fleabite on the hand of the nation's second largest bank in punitive pain terms, and meaningless in stopping the creation of toxic assets, or reducing the criminal complexity of our banking system.

This JPM Chase settlement isn’t the first wrist slap for a financial firm’s role in killing our economy and making off with the money and the bailouts, while our political leaders scratch their heads and wonder where all the debt came from. This hush money is part of the SEC’s two-year program to address, in its own words, the "misconduct that led to or arose from the financial crisis."

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"John Carey" - Storm Warnings: Extreme Weather Is a Product of Climate Change

Published on Tuesday, June 28, 2011 by Scientific American

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/28-13

More violent and frequent storms, once merely a prediction of climate models, are now a matter of observation.

by John Carey

In North Dakota the waters kept rising. Swollen by more than a month of record rains in Saskatchewan, the Souris River topped its all time record high, set back in 1881. The floodwaters poured into Minot, North Dakota's fourth-largest city, and spread across thousands of acres of farms and forests. More than 12,000 people were forced to evacuate. Many lost their homes to the floodwaters.

Scientists used to say, cautiously, that extreme weather events were "consistent" with the predictions of climate change. No more. "Now we can make the statement that particular events would not have happened the same way without global warming," says Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. (ALLEN FREDRICKSON/Reuters files Yet the disaster unfolding in North Dakota might be bringing even bigger headlines if such extreme events hadn't suddenly seemed more common. In this year alone massive blizzards have struck the U.S. Northeast, tornadoes have ripped through the nation, mighty rivers like the Mississippi and Missouri have flowed over their banks, and floodwaters have covered huge swaths of Australia as well as displaced more than five million people in China  and devastated Colombia. And this year's natural disasters follow on the heels of a staggering litany of extreme weather in 2010, from record floods in Nashville, Tenn., and Pakistan, to Russia's crippling heat wave.

These patterns have caught the attention of scientists at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). They've been following the recent deluges' stunning radar pictures and growing rainfall totals with concern and intense interest. Normally, floods of the magnitude now being seen in North Dakota and elsewhere around the world are expected to happen only once in 100 years.

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"Ethan A. Huff" - Bill Gates, Monsanto hijack 'humanitarian aid' efforts to push GMO agenda

by Ethan A. Huff, staff writer

http://www.naturalnews.com/032834_humanitarian_aid_GMOs.html

(NaturalNews) Those still in denial about the connection between the so-called "humanitarian" efforts of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the bigger agenda to thrust genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) on the populations of the world (among other things), need look no further than the Golden Rice Project (GRP) for proof that things are not as they seem. Hailed as the solution to "micronutrient deficiencies in developing countries," GRP is actually nothing more than an attempted Trojan horse to usher GMOs into countries that have thus far rejected them.

According to a recent story published by Food Consumer, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has donated $20 million to develop "golden rice," a type of GM rice that allegedly contains higher than normal levels of vitamin A. Monsanto, creator of this "Frankenrice," claims the crop will help end the epidemic of vitamin A deficiency (VAD) that afflicts many living in poor Asian countries. Sounds great, right? Except for the fact that introducing the rice threatens to actually worsen the VAD crisis, and promote economic and ecological debacles of epic proportions.

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ScienceDaily: It's Not an Apple a Day After All -- It's Strawberries: Flavonoids Could Represent Two-Fisted Assault On Diabetes and Nervous System Disorders

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110627183932.htm

ScienceDaily (June 27, 2011) — A recent study from scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies suggests that a strawberry a day (or more accurately, 37 of them) could keep not just one doctor away, but an entire fleet of them, including the neurologist, the endocrinologist, and maybe even the oncologist.

Investigations conducted in the Salk Institute's Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory (CNL) will appear in the June 27, 2011, issue of PLoS ONE. The report explains that fisetin, a naturally-occurring flavonoid found most abundantly in strawberries and to a lesser extent in other fruits and vegetables, lessens complications of diabetes. Previously, the lab showed that fisetin promoted survival of neurons grown in culture and enhanced memory in healthy mice. That fisetin can target multiple organs strongly suggests that a single drug could be used to mitigate numerous medical complications.

"This manuscript describes for the first time a drug that prevents both kidney and brain complications in a type 1 diabetes mouse model," says David Schubert, Ph.D., professor and head of the Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory and one of the manuscript's co-authors. "Moreover, it demonstrates the probable molecular basis of how the therapeutic is working."

Pam Maher, Ph.D., a senior staff scientist in the CNL, is the study's corresponding author. Maher initially identified fisetin as a neuroprotective flavonoid ten years ago. "In plants, flavonoids act as sunscreens and protect leaves and fruit from insects," she explains. "As foods they are implicated in the protective effect of the 'Mediterranean Diet.'"

Other celebrity flavonoids include polyphenolic compounds in blueberries and red wine.

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"Alex Thomas" - Los Alamos Fire And 30,000 Barrels of Plutonium: Perfect Cover For A Nuclear False-Flag Operation?

The Intel Hub
Avalon & Shepard Ambellas
June 27, 2011

http://theintelhub.com/2011/06/27/los-alamos-fire-and-30000-barrels-of-plutonium-perfect-cover-for-nuclear-false-flag-operation/

Update By Alex Thomas  – 30,000 Barrels of Plutonium Stored At Los Alamos nuclear laboratory?

Concerned Citizens For Nuclear Safety, an anti nuclear watchdog group, has reported that over 30,000 barrels of  plutonium contaminated waste is being stored in tents ABOVE ground near the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

These barrels may be in danger due to a massive fire that has been quoted as, “entirely uncontained and highly unpredictable.”

“The weather forecast for Los Alamos predicts the wind through Tuesday afternoon will be from the southeast, then switching from the southwest at 11-18 mph with minimum humidities in the lower teens. This could encourage the fire to move closer to Los Alamos,” reported Wildfiretoday.com.

This is absolutely critical information that was given a paragraph in the corporate controlled media.

Government officials have been quick to claim that the situation does not pose a risk to public health and while we all hope they are right, it is the job of the press to MAKE SURE.

NBC Nightly news was one of the few newscasts to cover the fact that THREE nuclear power plants are currently in danger in the United States!

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Business Insider: Economist Charles Gave: The Euro Will Not Exist In One Year!

Business Insider| Jun. 25, 2011, 5:46 PM | 11,471 | 27

Charles Gave is the French economist whose research firm GaveKal is fairly well known, and read in some hedge fund circles.

In his latest note, John Mauldin reports on a dinner he attended with several investors and experts, of which Gave was one. At the dinner, he predicted the Euro's imminent demise.

Will the Euro Survive?

We had dinner on Monday night at the home of Hervig von Hove of Notz-Stucki Bank, where I was speaking the next morning. There were 16 of us at the table, and these people represented a great deal of money as managers and investors. All very well-informed. We sat outside in perfect weather in the Swiss countryside. Charles Gave sat across from me at the middle of the table, and we talked and debated as the rest asked questions and offered opinions for 3-4 hours. The wine was flowing, and it was a most interesting evening. Now, with that set-up…

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