First it was UK Channel 4. Now even the NYT admits that man-made global warming is more hype than fact. Glenn Beck explores the issue.
Hippies will have to create a new ‘end of the world’ scenario. This one’s busted (much like every other envirowhacko doomsday scenario since envirowhackoism was created)
It’s very true. NEVER re-enter your vehicle while gas is pumping. You will create static electricity that will ignite the gas in your car. This is a real incident caught on tape by a surveilance camera
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 »
BOSTON - Police are looking for a man who robbed the Citizen’s Bank on Elm Street in Manchester, New Hampshire on Saturday disguised as a tree!
The man walked into the bank with tree branches duct taped on his arms and demanded money from the teller. The teller filled the bag with cash and the suspect took off. A dye pack inside the bag exploded.
Manchester Police describe the man as a white male, between 45 and 50 years old, wearing glasses and a blue shirt.
A BBC story from March 16, 2007 said the raid netted $205-million along with guns, drugs, and smaller amounts of cash in Euros and Mexican pesos.
Seven persons were arrested and accused of illegally importing chemicals to make methamphetamines.
Police say the raid took place in a mansion in an affluent part of Mexico City.
These are ACTUAL photos!!!!!!!!!!!! Incredible !!!!!!!!!!
SEE MORE HERE>>> Read the rest of this entry »
Investigative news report regarding cancer-causing additives to milk by Monsanto is shut down by Fox News executives.
Former Saturday Night Live star Tony Rosato has languished behind bars for two years with no trial.
He started out as a gifted improv comic at Toronto’s Second City. From there, Tony Rosato took his zany writing and performing style to the small screen, winning fame on SCTV and later on Saturday Night Live.
His off-the-wall characters ranged from fictional TV chef Marcello Sebastiano to Lou Costello, Captain Kangaroo and Yasser Arafat. Industry buzz pegged him as the next John Belushi.
Rosato went on to perform in a variety of TV shows and movies. In 1989 he was nominated for the best-supporting-actor Gemini for his role as police informant Whitey in Night Heat.
Then suddenly, two years ago, Rosato disappeared.
Since then, the actor has been behind bars, with no trial, at the maximum-security Quinte Detention Centre in Napanee, 30 kilometres west of Kingston, on charges of criminally harassing his wife during their marriage. It’s alleged that his “reckless” behaviour led his spouse, Leah, with whom he has a now-2-year-old daughter, to be afraid for her own safety or others’.
According to his Toronto lawyer, Daniel Brodsky, Rosato was arrested after repeatedly complaining to police that, in a scenario reminiscent of the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the actor’s wife and their infant daughter had gone missing, having been replaced by imposters.
The Italian-born, Toronto-based actor, now 53, has had a bail hearing and a preliminary inquiry. Both of them are subject to publication bans.
Arraignment documents show Rosato was denied bail almost three months after his arrest, after undergoing a mental fitness assessment.
He has never had a bail review, and his trial (by judge alone) isn’t scheduled until Nov. 13.
Rosato steadfastly maintains that he is sane, and innocent. “I’m not pleading guilty – I’m fighting injustice” has been his mantra in phone calls with show business friends. MORE>>> Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
Three weeks of quickfire hiccups already, but they stop when she talks! …weird.
Renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who authored the best-selling book, A Brief History of Time, soon will experience a brief history with weightlessness.
Hawking, who uses a wheelchair and is almost completely paralyzed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, plans to go on a weightless flight on April 26, officials at the flight operator said Thursday. The flight, operated by Zero Gravity Corporation, a Fort Lauderdale-based space tourism and entertainment company, will take off and return to a landing strip at the Kennedy Space Center.
“As someone who has studied gravity and black holes all of my life, I am excited to experience first hand weightlessness and a zero-gravity environment,” Hawking said in a statement.
The modified Boeing 727 generally soars to 32,000 feet at a sharp angle and then plunges 8,000 feet so passengers can experience 25-second snippets of zero gravity during the descent. As the plane climbs, passengers experience 25 seconds of being pushed down hard, as they feel 1.8 times the normal pull of the Earth.
Zero Gravity CEO Peter Diamandis said assistants will be onboard to help Hawking. “The key thing here is that weightless and personal spaceflight is something available to everyone, even someone like Prof. Hawking,” Diamandis told The Associated Press. “This something that almost everyone can now experience.” Zero Gravity will pick up the bill, which normally is $3,750. The company also plans to have two seats on the flight auctioned off by two charities. The company began offering the flights in 2004.
Last year, Hawking publicly spoke of his desire to go into space and made an appeal to Sir Richard Branson, whose company, Virgin Galactic, is building a suborbital spaceship that could be flying passengers as early as 2009. Branson has decided he will personally finance Hawking’s ticket into space — a flight that would normally cost $200,000. “He’s one of the greatest physicists of all time,” Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn told AP earlier this year. Link - www.usatoday.com
Weather reporter FREAKS out over cockroach…
Julie Amero, a substitute teacher at a middle school in Norwich, Conn., said she had simply wanted to e-mail her husband. The authorities contend that she was — purposely or, perhaps, carelessly — exposing 11- and 12-year-old students to pornography rather than teaching them English.
Last month, Ms. Amero was convicted in Norwich Superior Court of four counts of risking injury to a child and faces up to 40 years in prison at a sentencing hearing scheduled for March 2. She has insisted on her innocence, refusing to accept a plea bargain that would have allowed her to walk free. She portrays herself as a hapless technophobe too clueless to unplug a wayward computer.
Ms. Amero, 40, a longtime substitute, contends that when she arrived that day in October 2004, she asked the regular seventh-grade language arts teacher at Kelly Middle School if she could use his computer to e-mail her husband. But first, she says, she went to the bathroom, and when she returned, the teacher was gone and students were gathered around the screen, watching a hairstyle Web site.
When she tried to close the site, what she got was an endless barrage of pop-up ads for pornography sites. The images continued all day, since “I absolutely have no clue about computers,” she said in an interview.
Ms. Amero plans to appeal, and she says lawyers have offered to handle the appeal free. Read the rest of this entry »