Wikileaks: Canada and U.S. Work to Suppress and Spy on Indigenous Communities

Brazil 2008, Survival International, AP photo by Gleison Miranda, Funai

By Indigenous Review

First, from Brenda Norrell’s exceptional effort to keep us all abreast of a wealth of daily news concerning indigenous struggles–CENSORED NEWS: Indigenous Peoples and Human Rights–some extracts (please see the complete articles at the links below), with the most recent articles listed first:

Wikileaks: Top six ways the US and Canada violated Indigenous rights–Wikileaks reveals how the US and Canada worked globally to systematically violate Indigenous rights:

Uncle Sam Food History Exhibit Promotes Food Control

By Rady Ananda

Oh, gag me with a bowl of propaganda. The National Archives is hosting an historical exhibit on government say in what we eat and grow and how to cook it: “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam: The Government’s Effect on the American Diet.” From the opening lines of the website, you know our control freak “Uncle” has launched another major psyops campaign to convince us that Government Knows Best when it comes to food:

How to Get the 400 to 800 Chemicals in Your Body Out

Intro by David Wolfe and Alex Ortner

Shocking statistics reveal that in North America alone there are over 77,000 chemicals being produced. 3,000 of them have been added to our food supply and 20,000 of them cannot be metabolized properly by our bodies.

What happens to them? They get stored in our fat cells where they continue to accumulate. And research shows that most people have between 400-800 chemical residues stored in their bodies which include: PCBs, dioxins, xylene and dichlorobenzene.

Getting Used to Life Without Food, Part 1

Wall Street, BP, Bio-Ethanol and the Death of Millions

Our planet has everything we need to produce nutritious natural food to feed the entire world population many times over. Yet, we face a decade or more of famine on a global scale because key forces and interest groups have decided to artificially create a scarcity of nutritious food, writes F. William Engdahl.
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By F. William Engdahl
Financial Sense

My late grandfather, a man of sturdy Norwegian-American farm stock, who later became a newspaper editor and political activist during the First World War, used to say, ‘A man can get used to pretty much anything with time, except dying…and even that with some practice.’ Well, as fate has it, it seems we, the vast majority of the human race, are about to test that adage in regard to the availability of our daily bread itself.

EPA approves bee killer Dinotefuran to deal with Asian stink bug

By Leesburg Today

The Environmental Protection Agency has granted an exemption to the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to permit the sale of the insecticide Dinotefuran for limited agricultural use on apples and peaches, according to a statement released from Rep. Frank Wolf’s (R-VA-10) office today.

Asian stinkbug (Pentatomidae: Halyomorpha halys)

The congressman is part of a coalition of House of Representatives members that has been pressing the EPA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to find a means of combating the brown marmorated stink bug. After having talked with a number of local farmers and growers, Wolf became convinced a permanent solution was needed to avert potentially devastating economic injury to crop producers.

In recent years, the invasive Asian pest has increased its range across the country, now present in more than 30 states, with ensuing damage to commercial crops, notably to apples and peaches. The stink bug has no natural predator in this country, although a wasp, which is used to control it in China and other Asian countries, is currently being studied at the University of Delaware.

GM crop saboteurs go free in France

July 13 UPDATE: Prosecutors have decided to appeal the decision. More info will be provided upon receipt.

By Rady Ananda

On June 28, 2011, the court of Poitiers in central France acquitted eight defendant Volunteer Reapers (les Faucheurs Volontaires) of destroying a genetically modified field trial in 2008.

Among those acquitted were anti-globalist Jose Bove and Francois Dufour, recognized as “repeat offenders.” (Image: Jose Bove)

The court also dismissed Monsanto’s financial claims. Apart from their own legal expenses, the Reapers owe nothing for the 2008 mowing of a GM field trial of Monsanto’s GM corn, Mon810 x Nk603.

No No to NanoFoods: FDA Releases Draft Guidance on Nanotechnology

By Alliance for Natural Health

When is organic not organic? When nanoparticles are involved. 

The FDA has just released its draft guidance for regulated industries describing what to consider when determining whether a product uses nanotechnology or nanomaterials. The comment period is open for 60 days.

Last year we reported on nanotechnology, the process of manipulating matter at the atomic and molecular level.  As we said then, it has no place in organic food. Like genetic modification, it is the antithesis of the organic concept. Canada has already amended its national organic rules to ban nanotechnology in food production as a “Prohibited Substance or Method.”

People’s Tribunal against the Criminalization of Protest in Ecuador

By Sofía Jarrín
Upside Down World

The current government of Ecuador, under President Correa, is driving an aggressive development program that is fueling social conflicts all around the country, mostly around mining and oil industries and the control of water sources. Protesters are charged with terrorism, writes Sofia Jarrin.

Operation Orlando: ‘Anonymous’ targets city for arrest of Food Not Bombs members

Anonymous Communique
June 27, 2011

The City of Orlando has ignored our warnings, and our generous offer of a cease fire. On Wednesday last you not only arrested two more people for feeding but you arrested the worldwide President of Food Not Bombs Keith McHenry. This is a declaration of war.

Henceforth there will be no more cease fires, no more attempts to get you to resolve this issue with human decency. We will now treat you like the human rights abusers that you are.

Anonymous will now begin a massive campaign against you and your city web assets. Everyday we will launch a new DDoS attack on a different Target. We will continue to E-Mail millions of people in 50 countries with the Boycott Orlando campiagn message.

Panera Bread CEO Says Pay What You Can

By Emily Drew
Matter Network

One in six Americans live in “food insecure” homes. This means one in six Americans is seriously hungry, likely under-nourished or malnourished and doesn’t know when he/she will have their next meal.

When Panera Bread Founder and CEO Ronald Shaich learned this, he thought about how Panera Bread opens two restaurants every week, employs 60,000 people, and he knew Panera’s resources could have impact on America’s hunger problem. He personally set out to help, pitched his board (with a lot of respect and credibility under his belt), created a foundation and the result is a new kind of chain restaurant: pay-what-you-can Paneras.

1000s Haitians march for food sovereignty; Bolivia enacts law for seed bank

Two key news items show that food sovereignty is gaining traction around the world: On June 21, thousands of Haitians again marched for a saner policy strengthening food sovereignty, the saving of natural seeds, and fair land prices. They staunchly oppose GM seeds. In Bolivia, on June 26, President Evo Morales signed a new law to spur small scale agriculture and create a national seed bank, while developing laws for biotech seeds.  Both Venezuela and Bolivia governments support genetically modified foods. ~Ed.

Venezuela food distribution program to reach half of poor

By Press TV

In order to widen the scope of distribution, the Venezuelan government intends to increase food supply up to reach 50% of the Venezuelan population. At the moment, it only reaches 44%. Through state distribution networks in the form of small and big markets, Venezuelan people are able to get a range of basic products at affordable costs.

Vermont’s new raw milk law allows consumers to legally use it in kitchens

By Olga Peters
The Commons

Thanks to recent changes in state law, farmers selling unpasteurized milk can now know whether consumers plan to use the raw milk for purposes other than “fluid consumption.”

To celebrate the revision, farmer-advocacy organization Rural Vermont and farmer Lisa Kaiman hosted a raw-milk dairy class and ice-cream social on June 8.

“We can party until the cows come home, and that isn’t until 5:00 in the morning,” said Kaiman to the dairy class participants.

Neighborhood Cows and Pigs: Real Food Sovereignty

By Laura Weldon
Your Olive Branch

“You don’t actually drink the milk do you?” When acquaintances learn we have dairy cows on our small farm, many ask us that very question with incredulous expressions.

We’ve also been asked, too many times to count, if we really eat the eggs from our hens. “Don’t they, like, come out of a chicken’s butt?” a colleague asked my husband. She was accustomed to eggs laid at distant factory farms, comfortably far from her awareness.

Government Litigation Savings Act protects Feds who break the law

It turns out that the “litigation savings” in H.R.1996 and S.1061 are realized through amendments to the Equal Access to Justice Act (“EAJA”) that will make it much more difficult for advocacy groups to sue the federal government for failures to follow the law, writes Milt Toby.

Legislative Obfuscation

By Milt Toby
The Horse.com

Sometimes it’s easy to figure out whether proposed legislation in Congress will affect the horse world, sometimes not so much.

The purpose of S.1176, the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act of 2011, introduced in the Senate on June 9, is clear. The unofficial summary at www.GovTrack.us says it all—”A bill to amend the Horse Protection Act to prohibit the shipping, transporting, moving, delivering, receiving, possessing, purchasing, selling, or donation of horses and other equines to be slaughtered for human consumption, and for other purposes.” If you oppose horse slaughter, this sounds like a bill you can get behind and support.

Deep history of coconuts decoded

A chef wearing avocado sunscreen holds a sweet nui vai coconut. The photo was taken in the Masoala Peninsula of Madagascar by plant biologist Bee Gunn while she was collecting coconut leaf tissue for DNA analysis.The DNA of the Madagascar coconuts turned out to be particularly interesting, preserving, as it did, news of the arrival of ancient Austronesians at the island off Africa. Image courtesy Bee Gunn/National Geographic Society.

By Diana Lutz
Seed Daily

The coconut (the fruit of the palm Cocos nucifera) is the Swiss Army knife of the plant kingdom; in one neat package it provides a high-calorie food, potable water, fiber that can be spun into rope, and a hard shell that can be turned into charcoal. What’s more, until it is needed for some other purpose it serves as a handy flotation device.

No wonder people from ancient Austronesians to Captain Bligh pitched a few coconuts aboard before setting sail. (The mutiny of the Bounty is supposed to have been triggered by Bligh’s harsh punishment of the theft of coconuts from the ship’s store.)

So extensively is the history of the coconut interwoven with the history of people traveling that Kenneth Olsen, a plant evolutionary biologist, didn’t expect to find much geographical structure to coconut genetics when he and his colleagues set out to examine the DNA of more than 1300 coconuts from all over the world.

Big Dairy milk sickens 18 kids in Wisconsin

Don’t drink milk from a Big Dairy cow. Those teets are filled with pus,
drugs and GMOs.

Two kinds of raw milk and hypocrites who pretend they don’t know the difference

By Rady Ananda

When 18 people, mostly kids, were “poisoned” by raw milk served at a school in Wisconsin earlier this month, GMO-milk fans became outraged.  At least, until they learned it was unpasteurized milk from a pus-producing commercial dairy plant.

Raw milk antagonist Bill Marler goofed by confusing unpasteurized commercial milk with raw milk produced directly for human consumption, much to the enjoyment of David Gumpert.

Protective flood berm collapses at Ft Calhoun nuclear plant; KSU has radioactive leak

Highlighted in yellow above, the protective berm is a water filled “AquaDam” that collapsed early Sunday morning.  (Extra large size image here.)

June 29 UPDATE: 10-mile evacuation radius ordered.

June 28 UPDATE: Water has leaked into the building housing the cooling pool where spent fuel rods are stored (not to be confused with the dry cask storage building circled below). They consider the floodwaters in that building radioactive.

By Rady Ananda

Overwhelmed by the rising Missouri River, a 2000-foot stretch of a protective water balloon, surrounding the Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant in Nebraska, collapsed at 1:25 AM on Sunday, June 26.

Two days earlier, Kansas State University reported an emergency when radiation leaked at 149 times the Derived Air Concentration (DAC) limit for Iodine during a trial run of its reactor.

Feds buying up farmland they flooded; Soros in on it

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blows an 11,000-foot hole in the Birds Point levee in Mississippi County, Missouri on Monday, May 2, 2011. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, David Carson/AP Photo

Remember when the Army Engineers blew the Birds Point levee in early May?  Now we know the real reason. ~Ed.

By Ann Barnhardt
Cattle commodities broker
June 24, 2011 (See her June 26 Update below)

Two HUGE intel leads in my email box this morning from way-back contacts that I’ve had for years, that are actually somewhat connected concepts.

1. File this one under “Now It All Makes Sense.”  A Missouri farming and ranching contact just got off a conference call wherein he was informed that the federal government is sending out letters to all of the flooded out farmers in the Missouri River flood plain and bottoms notifying them that the Army Corps of Engineers will offer to BUY THEIR LAND.

Per USDA, Herbicide Use Increases with GE Crops

By Beyond Pesticides

According to the 2010 Agricultural Chemical Use Report released last week by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), use of the herbicide glyphosate, associated with genetically engineered (GE) crops, has dramatically increased over the last several years, while the use of other even more toxic chemicals such as atrazine has not declined.

Contrary to common claims from chemical manufacturers and proponents of GE technology that the proliferation of herbicide tolerant GE crops would result in lower pesticide use rates, the data show that overall use of pesticides has remained relatively steady, while glyphosate use has skyrocketed to more than double the amount used just five years ago.