Wal-Mart recalls donkey meat tainted with fox meat from stores in China
by Rebecca Winters
Natural News
Jan 10, 2014
(NaturalNews) As if anyone even needs yet another reason to be wary of the food coming out of China, Reuters is reporting that Wal-Mart customers there are outraged to learn that their donkey meat was recently found to contain “the DNA of other animals,” including fox.
Wal-Mart issued an apology and has announced that customers who purchased “Five Spice” donkey meat will be reimbursed. Confoundedly, Reuters went on to note, “The scandal could dent Wal-Mart’s reputation for quality in China’s $1 trillion food and grocery market….” Really?
China and Wal-Mart: an inimitable combination to say the least
Wal-Mart has been involved in everything from child labor scandals and mislabeling organic products to being fined over $80 million earlier this year for violating EPA regulations on improperly disposing hazardous waste. Currently, the company is under a Department of Justice investigation over possible Foreign Corrupt Policies Act violations regarding some $24 million in bribes to build 19 stores in Mexico and other alleged misconduct in Brazil, India and, again, China. Closer to home, the media was splashed around the holidays by reports that Wal-Mart stores across the U.S. were setting up donation boxes for employees to give Thanksgiving food… to other Wal-Mart employees who couldn’t afford a decent Thanksgiving dinner, because apparently they don’t earn enough.
China’s food and drug scandals read like a House of Horrors checklist. Babies dying from industrial chemical-tainted infant formula? Check. Rat meat sold as lamb meat? Check. Some 600 dogs dropping dead after eating pet jerky treats made in China? Check. Glow-in-the-dark blue “Avatar” pork? Check. “Gutter oil” scavenged from drains beneath Chinese restaurants being using to cook one of every ten meals in Chinese restaurants? Check. Farmed, powdered cockroaches being sold to pharmaceutical companies as medicine? Check. The list goes on and on.
But China has perhaps become most well-known lately for its vast amounts of air, soil and water pollution. Shanghai recently suffered what the media dubbed an “airpocalypse” – choking, toxic smog so heavy and thick that it closed down major airports, roadways and public schools for over a week. A deputy minister of China’s Ministry of Land and Resources has also just announced that 3.3 million hectares of Chinese farmland is so polluted, it is literally unsafe to grow crops on it. Estimates are that a whopping 90 percent of groundwater supplying China’s cities is severely contaminated, to the point that Chinese people reportedly do not even trust the bottled water sold there. NGOs, Chinese media and academics have estimated that China is home to over 450 “cancer villages” – residential areas built up around power, chemical or pharmaceutical plants where people are riddled with above-average levels of illness and disease. The Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection even mentioned these villages in one of its latest reports.
There are no limits on how close crops can be grown to chemical plants or how much pollution the water spayed on crops can contain in China. All of that toxic runoff and pollution finds its way into rivers and soil used to grow Chinese crops and feed livestock. The food and water is ingested by the Chinese people, and that food is exported to the rest of the world as well.
Chinese food failures coming to a grocery store near you?
As Natural News has reported before, you may be eating more food imported from China than you think. Back in 2007, CNN declared that avoiding Chinese food ingredients is nearly impossible. The U.S. imports billions in food from China every year.
Just a few months ago, the USDA announced its intention to allow processed, cooked chicken from China to be exported to the U.S., as the agency determined that China’s poultry inspection process is “equivalent to that of the United States”.
The “certified organic” label has also come under scrutiny (and rightfully so) after it was revealed that the USDA was licensing organic certifiers to operate in China as well. These certifiers may have rules about whether or not added petroleum-based fertilizers, pesticides or synthetic hormones in the case of animal feed are allowed; they are not required to test for limits on toxic heavy metals like arsenic, mercury, lead or cadmium – heavy metals found contaminating the food grown in China all the time. The FDA wouldn’t know anyway, considering that the agency inspects less than 2 percent of the food imported from China.
Stories like fox-tainted donkey meat just continue to highlight the fact that, if its marked “Made in China,” it’s a safe bet you don’t know what’s in it.
Sources for this article include:
http://science.naturalnews.com
[h/t: DavidIcke]
Cannabis Decriminalization Bill Introduced In Alabama
The Joint Blog
Jan 11, 2014
A proposal to decriminalize the possession of up to an ounce of cannabis has been formally introduced in the Alabama House of Representatives.
The proposal, House Bill 76, was introduced by Representative Patricia Todd, and has been assigned to the House Judiciary Committee.
Under the proposed law, anyone 21 and older caught in possession of up to announce of cannabis will no longer be committing an arrestable offense, but instead can be given a ticket of roughly $100.
Under current Alabama law, the possession of any amount of cannabis can result in up to a year in prison, and a fine of $6,000.
– TheJointBlog
Book by B.C. researcher says media, police not talking straight on pot
By James Keller, The Canadian Press
OttawaCitizen.com
Dec 25, 2013
A demonstrator smokes a marijuana joint on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on April 20, 2010. Police would have the option of ticketing people for a range of minor offences, instead of laying criminal charges, under a plan that could yield significant savings for the cash-strapped justice system. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Pawel Dwulit
VANCOUVER – As it turns out, Nov. 6, 2012, was a big day for marijuana laws.
Voters in Colorado and Washington state approved initiatives to legalize pot, setting the stage for the regulated production and sale of the drug. Several other jurisdictions in the U.S. have since followed suit.
In Canada, the same day two American states were effectively abandoning part of the war on drugs, provisions of a new federal law came into effect that imposed strict mandatory minimums for drug-related crimes, including marijuana production.
The contrast, says University of Victoria professor Susan Boyd, could not have been greater.
“This new law and our revived war on drugs in Canada is so contrary to what’s going on around the world,” says Boyd, who specializes in drug law and drug policy.
“It seemed like Canada was veering towards a very punitive model while the rest of the world was taking a closer look at mandatory minimums and abandoning them.”
But the revisions to Canada’s drug laws — contained in the Safe Streets and Communities Act, or Bill C-10, as it was previously known — did not happen in a vacuum, says Boyd.
Instead, Boyd argues in a forthcoming book that Canada’s recent tough-on-crime approach to drugs is, in part, the product of decades of skewed media coverage and police messaging that has routinely exaggerated the dangers of the marijuana industry and its connection to organized crime.
For the book, titled “Killer Weed: Marijuana Grow Ops, Media, and Justice,” Boyd examined 2,500 articles from four major daily newspapers in British Columbia from 1995 to 2009.
She found news coverage about cannabis enforcement in B.C. frequently contained inaccurate information or exaggerated claims about the size and scope of the underground marijuana industry, the sorts of people associated with grow-ops, and the industry’s connection to gangs.
Assertions by police – particularly the RCMP, which is responsible for policing in much of B.C. — were left unchallenged, she says, and politicians, in turn, relied on such misinformation to push for stricter drug laws.
For example, the news articles she examined repeatedly asserted marijuana grow-ops are inextricable linked to gangs and other criminal organizations. Police spokespeople were frequently quoted explaining that modern-day grow-ops are not “mom and pop” operations.
But Boyd says the federal government’s own research does not support that claim.
She cited a Justice Department study that was completed in 2011, obtained by a reporter through an access to information request, that examined a random sample of 500 marijuana grow operations. Of those, just five per cent had apparent links to gangs or organized crime.
“This study wasn’t released by our federal government, and you could see why,” says Boyd.
[h/t: Easton Ellis]
VIDEO — The Truthseeker: ‘Unequivocal’ cell phones cause cancer (E32)
RT
Jan 11, 2014
Mobiles ‘cooking the brain’; brain tumors become children’s number one killer illness; and leaked industry memo admits ‘wargaming’ the science. Seek truth from facts with former senior White House adviser Devra Davis, Storyleak editor Anthony Gucciardi, ‘cell phone survivor’ Bret Bocook, Microwave News editor Louis Slesin, top radiation biologist Dariusz Leszczynski, and Ellie Marks, whose husband Alan’s suing the industry for his brain tumor.
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CDC Not Required to Tell the Truth About Anything, Including Vaccines
by Christina Sarich
Natural Society
Jan 9, 2014
Since the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) aren’t legally required to tell the truth about anything, why should they? Maybe this is just one of many reasons the public is unaware of the many problems revolving around America’s health system.
The CDC is perhaps the most malicious in their information-twisting. Consider this recent upheaval about flu vaccinations. According to Dr. Peter Doshi in a British Medical Journal article review (BMJ 2013; 346:f3037):
“. . .perhaps the cleverest aspect of the influenza marketing strategy surrounds the claim that ‘flu’ and ‘influenza’ are the same. The distinction seems subtle, and purely semantic. But general lack of awareness of the difference might be the primary reason few people realize that even the ideal influenza vaccine, matched perfectly to circulating strains of wild influenza and capable of stopping all influenza viruses, can only deal with a small part of the ‘flu’ problem because most ‘flu’ appears to have nothing to do with influenza. Every year, hundreds of thousands of respiratory specimens are tested across the US. Of those tested, on average 16% are found to be influenza positive.”
VIDEO — Fluoride “Don’t Think Too Quickly”
Canadian Awareness Network
Jan 7, 2014
In this clip from Canadian Awareness Live (our new weekly livestream show) Terry, Frank, And Lucas discuss fluoride and comments made by Simon Kiss at Hamilton City Hall. (apologies for camera and audio quality, we experienced some tech difficulties)
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VIDEO — Jeff Rense & Yoichi Shimatsu – Food Chain Devastation
Rense
Jan 10, 2014
Clip from January 6, 2014 – guest Yoichi Shimatsu on the Jeff Rense Program. Full program available in Archives at http://www.renseradio.com/signup.htm
PN 