The Nightly Quill

John Stossel’s report on the facts about Kevin Trudeau and his “Natural Cures They Don’t Want You To Know About” books

America’s rice farmers didn’t want to grow a genetically engineered crop. Their customers in Europe did not want to buy it. So how did it end up in our food? Fortune’s Marc Gunther reports.

Back in the spring of 2001, a 64-year-old Texas rice farmer named Jacko Garrett watched a fleet of 18-wheelers haul away truckloads of rice that he had grown with great care. “It just bothers me so bad,” Garrett said. “I’m sitting here trying to find food to feed people, and I’ve got to bury five million pounds of rice.” No one likes to waste food, but for Garrett, who runs a charity that collects rice for the needy, the pain was especially acute.

Garrett’s rice was genetically modified, part of an experiment that was brought to an abrupt halt by its sponsor, a North Carolina-based biotechnology company called Aventis Crop Science. The company had contracted with a handful of farmers to grow the rice, which was known as Liberty Link because its genes had been altered to resist a weed killer called Liberty, also made by Aventis.

But by 2001, Aventis Crop Science was living a biotech nightmare. Another one of its creations, a variety of genetically modified corn known as StarLink, had been discovered in taco shells made by Kraft. Because the StarLink corn had been approved as animal feed - and not for human consumption - all hell broke loose.

Hundreds of corn products were recalled. Consumers and farmers sued. Greenpeace dumped bags of corn in front of federal regulatory agencies, and an Environmental Protection Agency official accused Aventis Crop Science of breaking the law. So shell-shocked was Aventis SA (Charts), the French pharmaceutical giant that owned Aventis Crop Science, that it decided to sell the U.S. biotech unit and abandon the very emotional business of reengineering the foods we eat.

So dumping the Texas rice was a no-brainer. “We didn’t want to take any chances,” says a former Aventis executive. “We burned and buried enough rice to feed 20 million people.”

Eventually Aventis paid about $120 million to settle the StarLink lawsuits. It sold its crop science unit to Bayer (Charts), the German drug giant that makes aspirin, Aleve and Alka-Seltzer. Bayer Crop Science dropped plans to bring Liberty Link rice to market, largely because rice grown in the U.S. is exported to Europe and other places that don’t want genetically modified foods. And everyone forgot about Jacko Garrett’s rice.

Can you guess where this is going? Yep. In January 2006, small amounts of genetically engineered rice turned up in a shipment that was tested - we don’t know why - by a French customer of Riceland Foods, a big rice mill based in Stuttgart, Ark. Because no transgenic rice is grown commercially in the U.S., the people at Riceland were stunned. At first they figured that the test was a mistake or that tiny bits of genetically modified corn or soybeans had somehow gotten mixed up with rice during shipping. They said nothing.

Then came another shock. Testing revealed that the genetically modified rice contained a strain of Liberty Link that had not been approved for human consumption. What’s more, trace amounts of the Liberty Link had mysteriously made their way into the commercial rice supply in all five of the Southern states where long-grain rice is grown: Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Missouri. Bayer and Riceland then informed the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which announced the contamination last August.

By then the tainted rice was everywhere. If in the past year or so you or your family ate Uncle Ben’s, Rice Krispies, or Gerber’s, or drank a Budweiser - Anheuser-Busch (Charts, Fortune 500) is America’s biggest buyer of rice - you probably ingested a little bit of Liberty Link, with the unapproved gene. (A very little bit - perhaps ten to 15 grains of transgenic rice in a one-pound bag of rice, which contains about 29,000 grains.)

Last November, over the howls of anti-GMO (that’s genetically modified organisms) activists, the USDA retroactively approved the Liberty Link rice, known as LL601. The department said the genes that it approved are similar to those inserted for years into canola and corn, with no apparent ill effects. The experts at the USDA, the EPA and the Food and Drug Administration, all of which bear some responsibility for regulating transgenic food, say the contamination is nothing to worry about. Read the rest of this entry »

Investigative news report regarding cancer-causing additives to milk by Monsanto is shut down by Fox News executives.

 Paul Grignon’s 47-minute animated presentation of “Money as Debt” tells in very simple and effective graphic terms what money is and how it all is being created. It is an entertaining way to get the message out. The Cowichan Citizens Coalition and its “Duncan Initiative” received high praise from those who previewed it. I recommend it as a painless but hard-hitting educational tool and encourage the widest distribution and use by all groups concerned with the present unsustainable monetary system in Canada and the United States.

While the number of the world’s billionaires grew from 793 in 2006 to 946 this year, major mass uprisings became commonplace occurrences in China and India.

In India, which has the highest number of billionaires (36) in Asia with total wealth of $191 billion USD, Prime Minister Singh declared that the greatest single threat to ‘India’s security’ were the Maoist led guerrilla armies and mass movements in the poorest parts of the country. In China, with 20 billionaires with $29.4 billion USD net worth, the new rulers, confronting nearly a hundred thousand reported riots and protests, have increased the number of armed special anti-riot militia a hundred fold, and increased spending for the rural poor by $10 billion USD in the hopes of lessening the monstrous class inequalities and heading off a mass upheaval.

The total wealth of this global ruling class grew 35% year to year topping $3.5 trillion USD, while income levels for the lower 55% of the world’s 6-billion-strong population declined or stagnated. Put another way, one hundred millionth of the world’s population (1/100,000,000) owns more than over 3 billion people. Over half of the current billionaires (523) came from just 3 countries: the US (415), Germany (55) and Russia (53). The 35% increase in wealth mostly came from speculation on equity markets, real estate and commodity trading, rather than from technical innovations, investments in job-creating industries or social services.

Among the newest, youngest and fastest-growing group of billionaires, the Russian oligarchy stands out for its most rapacious beginnings. Over two-thirds (67%) of the current Russian billionaire oligarchs began their concentration of wealth in their mid to early twenties. During the infamous decade of the 1990’s under the quasi-dictatorial rule of Boris Yeltsin and his US-directed economic advisers, Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar the entire Russian economy was put up for sale for a ‘political price’, which was far below its real value. Without exception, the transfers of property were achieved through gangster tactics – assassinations, massive theft, and seizure of state resources, illicit stock manipulation and buyouts. The future billionaires stripped the Russian state of over a trillion dollars worth of factories, transport, oil, gas, iron, coal and other formerly state-owned resources.

Contrary to European and US publicists, on the Right and Left, very few of the top former Communist leaders are found among the current Russian billionaire oligarchy. Secondly, contrary to the spin-masters’ claims of ‘communist inefficiencies’, the former Soviet Union developed mines, factories, energy enterprises were profitable and competitive, before they were taken over by the new oligarchs. This is evident in the massive private wealth that was accumulated in less than a decade by these gangster-businessmen.

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Jeff Han is a research scientist for New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Here, he demonstrates—for the first time publicly—his intuitive, “interface-free,” touch-driven computer screen, which can be manipulated intuitively with the fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure.

More examples:

Video demo of Touch Me Tender early prototype interface that allow to draw by your finger on the screen. Made by KsanLab (www.ksanlab.com).

Steel and coal from the Titanic have been transformed into a new line of luxury wristwatches that claim to capture the essence of the legendary oceanliner which sank in 1912. Geneva watchmaker Romain Jerome SA billed its “Titanic-DNA” collection as among the most exclusive pieces showcased this week at Baselworld, the watch and jewellery industry’s largest annual trade fair. “It is very luxurious and very inaccessible,” said Yvan Arpa, chief executive of the three-year-old company that hopes the limited edition watches will attract both collectors and garrulous luxury goods buyers. “So many rich people buy incredibly complicated watches without understanding how they work, because they want a story to tell,” he said. “To them we offer a story.”

The North Atlantic wrecksite of the Titanic, which hit an iceberg and sank on its first voyage from the English port of Southampton to New York, have been protected for more than a decade but many relics were taken in early diving expeditions.

Romain Jerome said it purchased a piece of the hull weighing about 1.5 kg (3 pounds) that was retrieved in 1991, but declined to identify the seller. The metal has been certified as authentic by the Titanic’s builders Harland and Wolff. To make the watches, which were offered for sale for the first time in Basel for between $7,800 and $173,100, the Swiss company created an alloy using the slab from the Titanic with steel being used in a Harland and Wolff replica of the vessel. The gold, platinum and steel time pieces have black dial faces made of lacquer paint that includes coal recovered from the debris field of the Titanic wrecksite, offered for sale by the U.S. company RMS Titanic Inc. Arpa said the combination of new and old materials infused the watches with a sense of renewal, instead of representing a reminder of the 1,500 passengers who drowned when the oceanliner met her tragic end off the coast of Newfoundland. “It is a message of hope, of life stronger than death, of rebirth,” he said in an interview in Romain Jerome’s exposition booth in Basel, where more than 2,100 exhibitors are flaunting their latest wares amid a boom for the luxury goods sector.

The company will make 2,012 watches to coincide with the centenary anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking in 2012. Arpa said the young watchmaker would unveil a new series next year commemorating another famous legend, but declined to offer clues of what is to come. “For a new brand, you have to find something different to be interesting,” he said. Asked if the next collection would be based on Scotland’s legendary Loch Ness monster, he smiled and said: “Ooh. Have you found it?”

W. L. Carter knew there was something fishy going on when he went to his lawyers’ office a few years ago to pick up his settlement check for the heart damage he had sustained from taking the diet drug combination fen-phen. W. L. Carter, a fen-phen plaintiff, said he was angry about how he had been treated. “The greed got the best of them,” he said of his lawyers.
The check was, for starters, much smaller than he had expected. And his own lawyers threatened to retaliate against him if he ever told anyone, including his family, how much he had been paid. “You will be fined $100,000, you will go to jail and you will be sued,” Mr. Carter recalled them saying.

Mr. Carter was right to have been suspicious. The lawyers defrauded their clients, a state judge has ruled in a civil case, when they settled fen-phen lawsuits on behalf of 440 of them for $200 million but kept the bulk of the money for themselves. Legal experts said the fraud might be one of the biggest and most brazen in legal history.

This week, several clients testified before a federal grand jury that has begun to investigate potential criminal wrongdoing arising from the settlement. “It enrages me,” said Sonja Pickett, a retail manager, who testified Thursday before the grand jury. “They robbed us.” The settlement, paid by American Home Products Corporation in 2001, was meant to compensate the plaintiffs for claims of heart damage caused by the drug combination, which had been withdrawn from the market at the request of the Food and Drug Administration.

Lawyers for William J. Gallion and Shirley A. Cunningham Jr., two of the lawyers who handled the fen-phen settlement, said this week in court papers that their clients had been told by federal prosecutors that they were targets of the grand jury’s investigation. James A. Shuffett, who represents the third lawyer, Melbourne Mills Jr., said “you can assume” that his client had also received a target letter and that he would not be surprised if his client were indicted. “Mills denies any criminal wrongdoing,” Mr. Shuffett said. “He may be liable for a little money if he was overpaid.” Lawyers for Mr. Gallion and Mr. Cunningham did not respond to requests for comment. Read the rest of this entry »

Hilarious satire on telephone companies and us.

Rats perform for their adoring public in a KFC/Taco Bell showroom floor. The New York restaurant had been cited for Health Code violations in December but this Associated Press video catches the rodents in action months later.

The Tomahawk is a Viper V-10 based motorcycle, a 500 horsepower engine with four wheels beneath it. The engine breathes through twin throttle bodies mounted right up front. (That’s what the two round things above the front tires are).

Chrysler sold nine replicas through Neiman Marcus, for up to $555,000 each. The motorcycles cannot be legally driven on public roads. A Chrysler spokesman told Reuters they were meant as rolling sculptures - but they can probably still be driven on private roads (the rolling-sculpture comment may be designed to avoid legal liability).

The Tomahawk concept is an awesome-sounding machine; we have not driven it, as you may expect, but did see it started up and revved. Clouds of blue smoke vied for attention with the throaty rumble of the mighty V-10, and hitting the gas visibly opened the twin throttle body blades up front where the headlight would normally be. Though deeper and more rumbling than most motorcycles, it did not seem to be louder overall - just deeper and less shrill.

Rumors had the Tomahawk selling for under $200,000, most likely at a loss or breakeven price, for publicity purposes - but still fully drivable. Wolfgang Bernhard, Chrysler’s first mate at introduction time, was said to be enthusiastic about that project, so much so that hundreds were projected to be built at under $200,000 each. They reportedly cost Chrysler over $100,000 to build (the work is outsourced).

The Dodge Tomahawk can reach 60 miles an hour in about 2.5 seconds, and has a theoretical top speed of nearly 400 mph. Each pair of wheels is separated by a few inches and each wheel has an independent suspension. Bernhard said four wheels were necessary to handle the power from the engine.

The Tomahawk remains on display at auto shows - though well out of reach of the general public, elevated on a special display.
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