Majority of EU nations seek opt-out from growing GM crops

Source: Reuters

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Nineteen EU member states have requested opt-outs for all or part of their territory from cultivation of a Monsanto genetically-modified crop, which is authorized to be grown in the European Union, the European Commission said on Sunday.

Under a law signed in March, individual countries can seek exclusion from any approval request for genetically modified cultivation across the 28-nation EU.

Snip

Although widely grown in the Americas and Asia, public opposition is strong in Europe and environmentalists have raised concerns about the impact on biodiversity.

Commission spokesman Enrico Brivio on Sunday confirmed in an emailed statement the Commission had received 19 opt-out requests following the expiry of a deadline on Saturday.

Read more: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/majority-eu-nations-seek-opt-growing-gm-crops-150657955--sector.html

The Decline of ‘Big Soda’

Over the last 20 years, sales of full-calorie soda in the United States have plummeted by more than 25 percent. Soda consumption, which rocketed from the 1960s through 1990s, is now experiencing a serious and sustained decline.

Sales are stagnating as a growing number of Americans say they are actively trying to avoid the drinks that have been a mainstay of American culture. Sales of bottled water have shot up, and bottled water is now on track to overtake soda as the largest beverage category in two years, according to at least one industry projection.

The drop in soda consumption represents the single largest change in the American diet in the last decade and is responsible for a substantial reduction in the number of daily calories consumed by the average American child. From 2004 to 2012, children consumed 79 fewer sugar-sweetened beverage calories a day, according to a large government survey, representing a 4 percent cut in calories over all. As total calorie intake has declined, obesity rates among school-age children appear to have leveled off.

The change is happening faster in Philadelphia than in the country as a whole. Daily soda consumption among teenagers, a group closely tracked by federal researchers, dropped sharply — by 24 percent — from 2007 to 2013, compared with about 20 percent for the country. Last month, the city Department of Public Health reported a sustained decline in childhood obesity over the last seven years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/upshot/soda-industry-struggles-as-consumer-tastes-change.html

The battle against HFCS is working.

Flaws in Polling Data Exposed as U.S. Campaign Season Heats Up

Polls for the 2016 U.S. presidential race have been defying all expectations: Donald Trump as the persistent Republican frontrunner even as he insults large swaths of the country and brushes off policy questions; Hillary Clinton haunted by an email controversy Democrats shrug off while a Vermont socialist keeps gaining on her.

Are the polls correct? While that is hardly a new question, doubts are intensifying after a series of high-profile misfires around the world in the past year, notably in Greece, Israel and the UK. As politics and business lean increasingly on surveys and data, technological and social shifts are combining to challenge polls’ reliability in an entirely new way. Polling professionals have no solution; investors are wary.

"There isn’t a pollster out there who thinks about this seriously who isn’t a little bit uneasy," said Kirby Goidel, editor of the book "Political Polling in the Digital Age." Interviews with more than a dozen pollsters in the U.S. and around the world revealed similar anxiety.

Brad Schruder, a director of foreign exchange at Bank of Montreal, said what many in the investment world have been thinking: "It makes you wonder, how much weight should we attach to these polls?"

Telephone Avoidance

Global Failures

A single voter

Robocalls

Rising Anger

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-09-29/flaws-in-polling-data-exposed-as-u-s-campaign-season-heats-up

Terrorist kills two, wounds toddler and mother in capital's Old City

Source: J Post

A Palestinian terrorist murdered two Jewish men and wounded a mother and son in the Old City of Jerusalem in a Saturday stabbing and shooting spree, before he was shot dead by police.

The victims were Rabbi Nehemia Lavie, 41, an Old City resident who worked at the Ateret Cohanim Yeshiva, near the place he was killed, and Aharon Benita from Beitar Illit.

The toddler’s mother, 22, was in critical condition.

The incident began around 7:30 p.m., when the knife-wielding Arab attacked the couple and their toddler son, as well as Lavie, as they walked past Lion’s Gate, en route to the Western Wall, police said.

A fifth male victim, in his 20s, was lightly wounded.

Read more: http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Palestinian-goes-on-stabbing-spree-in-Jerusalems-Old-City-wounds-4-419847

Sanders tells massive Boston crowd to look around room, "we have something they dont have...

The Hypocrisy of ‘Helping’ the Poor

EVERY so often, you hear grotesquely wealthy American chief executives announce in sanctimonious tones the intention to use their accumulated hundreds of millions, or billions, “to lift people out of poverty.” Sometimes they are referring to Africans, but sometimes they are referring to Americans. And here’s the funny thing about that: In most cases, they have made their fortunes by impoverishing whole American communities, having outsourced their manufacturing to China or India, Vietnam or Mexico.

Buried in a long story about corruption in China in The New York Times a couple of months ago was the astonishing fact that the era of “supercharged growth” over the past several decades had the effect of “lifting more than 600 million people out of poverty.” From handouts? From Habitat for Humanity? From the Clinton Global Initiative?

No, oddly enough, China has been enriched by American-supplied jobs, making most of the destined-for-the-dump merchandise you find on store shelves all over America, every piece of plastic you can name, as well as Apple products, Barbie dolls or Nike LeBron basketball shoes retailed in the United States for up to $320 a pair. “The uplifting of impoverished people” was one of the reasons Phil Knight, Nike’s co-founder, gave in 1998 for moving his factories out of the United States.

The Chinese success, helped by American investment, is perhaps not astonishing after all; it has coincided with a large number of Americans’ being put out of work and plunged into poverty.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/the-hypocrisy-of-helping-the-poor.html?src=me

Free Trade is anything but FREE, there is a huge cost to the American worker.

Egypt says Russia's intervention in Syria will counter terrorism

Source: Reuters

Russia's intervention in Syria will curtail the spread of terrorism and help deal a fatal blow to Islamic State in the war-torn country, Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said on Saturday.

Russia launched air strikes in Syria on Wednesday in its biggest Middle East intervention in decades, marking a dramatic escalation in a more than four-year-old civil war in which every major country in the region has a stake.

"Russia's entrance, given its potential and capabilities, is something we see is going to have an effect on limiting terrorism in Syria and eradicating it," Shoukry said in a televised interview on Saturday.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/egypt-says-russias-intervention-syria-counter-terrorism-222034415.html

World Cup Rugby

Go Japan! Watching Japan vs. Samoa

8-0 Japan 24 minutes in.

U.S. Senators Hem and Haw on Saudi Arabia’s Human Rights Abuses

Leading American politicians of both major parties appear to share an extreme reluctance to openly criticize the human rights abuses of Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally that has ramped up executions of its own citizens, led a coalition bombing effort in Yemen that has killed thousands of civilians, and supported Sunni extremist groups throughout war-torn Syria.

Given the news this week that Saudi-led forces bombed a wedding party in Yemen, killing scores of civilians, as well as the decision by the Saudi government to behead and then crucify Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, the son of a government critic arrested as a teenager, I attempted to talk about the Saudi Arabian human rights record to a number of politicians at the Washington Ideas Forum, an event hosted by The Atlantic and the Aspen Institute to discuss “this year’s most pressing issues and ideas of consequence.”

Most were uninterested in commenting.


https://theintercept.com/2015/10/03/one-day-after-warning-russia-of-civilian-casualties-the-u-s-bombs-a-hospital-in-the-war-obama-ended/

The House of Saud is one of the real evils in the middle east. They are the main backers of sunni terrorists in the region and beyond.

One Day After Warning Russia of Civilian Casualties, the U.S. Bombs a Hospital in Afghanistan