Oklahoma Initiative Would Make Pot a Legal, Exportable Cash Crop

Source: US News

Marijuana reform advocates hope Oklahoma will live up to its nickname – the Sooner State – by becoming the first U.S. jurisdiction to both legalize cannabis for personal use and allow it to be exported as a cash crop.

In the best-case scenario for pro-pot campaigners, there will be two initiatives on the November ballot: One that would allow medical marijuana and another more far-reaching initiative that would comprehensively dismantle status quo pot policies.

The medical marijuana initiative is further along. On May 18 supporters will begin collecting the required 155,216 signatures for ballot access – if opponents do not file a challenge with the state’s supreme court.

The outright legalization initiative is currently being finalized and its backers – led by state Sen. Connie Johnson, a Democrat – hope to file it with the Oklahoma Secretary of State’s office as early as Friday.

Read more: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/05/08/oklahoma-pot-legalization-cannabis-cash-crop

Who wins the minimum wage wars? The robots...

This isn’t the first time kiosks were used in place of real people. Airlines have been doing it for years, and now Panera has joined the club!

The soup and sandwich giant will be cutting down the number of cashiers in its new store design in attempt to fix its speed problems. The chain has faced criticism in the past over its slightly slower service in comparison to other fast food companies, so it was proposed to put the power of the order in the customer’s hands. Panera Chief Executive Ron Shaich said in an interview:

“The dirty little secret in the food industry is one in seven orders is wrong. We’re one in ten, a little better than average. Half of those inaccuracies happen during order input.”

This Guy May Get Sued Over an Amazon Review

The next time you write an online review, be careful. You might get sued.

That's what could happen to a Florida man who left a negative review about an Internet router he purchased. According to his Tuesday post on Reddit, where he's asking for legal advice, he received a letter from a law firm in Philadelphia threatening to sue him for an "illegal campaign to damage, discredit, defame, and libel" the company that makes the router.

"Your statements are false, defamatory, libelous, and slanderous, constitute trade libel and place Mediabridge and its products in a false light," the verbose letter from the law firm reads in part.

In his review, which has since been edited, the man made several allegations, including that many of the positive reviews about the product on Amazon might be fake and that the router itself was "identical" to a router from a different company.

If the man doesn't take down his review within three days, cease all Internet conversation about the product, and agrees to never buy the company's products again, the law firm will sue him, according to the letter. But by going to Reddit and not keeping quiet, the man might have already sealed his fate.

Companies, it turns out, have every right to sue people who write reviews on websites that they may feel are libelous or defamatory.

Read More: http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/this-guy-may-get-sued-over-an-amazon-review-20140507

Positive Pregnancy Tests Up For Sale Online

Used positive pregnancy tests can be found for sale all over the Internet.

And as CBS 2’s Alice Gainer reported, those involved said people are snapping them up – with less-than-ethical motivations.
One mother from Dallas did not want her identity revealed, but she does want people to buy her positive pregnancy tests. She talked about one woman who took her up on the offer.

“She wanted to trick him into thinking she was pregnant, so he would drop everything so I gave her two tests,” the woman said.

Buying and selling others’ pregnancy tests is the latest trend on the Internet. Those involved in the trade said the buyers’ motive is often to trap a man – and that is not all.

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/05/07/seen-at-11-positive-pregnancy-tests-up-for-sale-online/

Nestle CEO: Water Is Not A Human Right, Should Be Privatized

Is water a free and basic human right, or should all the water on the planet belong to major corporations and be treated as a product? Should the poor who cannot afford to pay these said corporations suffer from starvation due to their lack of financial wealth? According to the former CEO and now Chairman of the largest food product manufacturer in the world, corporations should own every drop of water on the planet — and you’re not getting any unless you pay up.

The company notorious for sending out hordes of ‘internet warriors’ to defend the company and its actions online in comments and message boards (perhaps we’ll find some below) even takes a firm stance behind Monsanto’s GMOs and their ‘proven safety’. In fact, the former Nestle CEO actually says that his idea of water privatization is very similar to Monsanto’s GMOs. In a video interview, Nestle Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe states that there has never been ‘one illness’ ever caused from the consumption of GMOs.

Watch the video below for yourself:

Read More: http://www.minds.com/blog/view/60213/nestle-ceo-water-is-not-a-human-right-should-be-privatized

Nigerian girl describes kidnap, 276 still missing

The girls in the school dorm heard the sound of gunshots from a nearby town. So when armed men in uniforms burst in and promised to rescue them, at first they were relieved.

"Don't worry, we're soldiers," one 16-year-old girl recalls them saying. "Nothing is going to happen to you."

The gunmen commanded the hundreds of students at the Chibok Government Girls Secondary School to gather outside. The men went into a storeroom and removed all the food. Then they set fire to the room.

"They ... started shouting, 'Allahu Akhbar,' (God is great)," the 16-year-old student said. "And we knew."

What they knew was chilling: The men were not government soldiers at all. They were members of the ruthless Islamic extremist group called Boko Haram. They kidnapped the entire group of girls and drove them away in pickup trucks into the dense forest.

Read More: http://www.sfgate.com/news/crime/article/Nigerian-girl-describes-kidnap-276-still-missing-5456120.php

Is your shampoo safe?

Here’s another environmental concern to be aware of: Your shampoo or body wash may contain a cancer-causing chemical called cocamide DEA.

Oakland’s Center for Environmental Health has reached legal agreements with Colgate-Palmolive, Saks Inc., Walgreens and 23 other companies to stop using the chemical in their shampoos and other personal care products.

Read More: http://blog.sfgate.com/chronrx/2014/05/06/is-your-shampoo-safe/

List of products: http://www.ceh.org/cocamide-dea-companies/

Lynne Cheney Suggests Hillary Approved Monica Piece to ‘Get It Out of the Way’

With Hillary Clinton almost assuredly running for president in 2016, Monica Lewinsky‘s Vanity Fair piece today set off a lot of people’s conspiratorial alarm bells, with some suspicion anti-Clinton forces might have been behind it. But on The O’Reilly Factor tonight, Lynne Cheney suggested it might have actually been pushed by Clinton’s team themselves.

Guest host Laura Ingraham talked with Cheney about liberal attacks on the Bush administration, and Cheney briefly addressed it before pivoting to Lewinsky’s piece and making an observation. She said, “I really wonder if this isn’t an effort on the Clintons’ part to get that story out of the way. Would Vanity Fair publish anything of Monica Lewinsky that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t want in Vanity Fair?”

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/lynne-cheney-suggests-hillary-approved-monica-piece-to-get-it-out-of-the-way/

US officials: Extent of Israeli spying ‘shocking’

Source: Times of Israel

Israel’s aggressive and widespread espionage activity in the US is increasingly angering American government officials and has “crossed red lines,” Newsweek reported Tuesday.

The report anonymously quotes senior intelligence officials and congressional staffers who have been privy to information on Israeli spying activities. Staffers called the extent of Israeli espionage “sobering” and “shocking,” far exceeding similar activities by any other close US allies.

Some of the spying was allegedly industrial in nature, conducted by Israeli companies or individuals. But a significant amount appeared to be state-sanctioned reconnaissance gathering, according to the report.

“There are no other countries taking advantage of our security relationship the way the Israelis are for espionage purposes,” one former aide who attended a classified briefing on the issue told Newsweek. “It is quite shocking. I mean, it shouldn’t be lost on anyone that after all the hand-wringing over [Jonathan] Pollard, it’s still going on.”


Read more: http://www.timesofisrael.com/us-officials-extent-of-israeli-spying-shocking/

World’s largest legal pot facility to open

Source: NY Post

Finding that sketchy guy for a bag of weed in Washington Square Park could soon be as outdated as milking your own cow. Pot production is about to go industrial. Of course, you’ll have to head to Canada to take advantage of it.

CEN Biotech — a nutrition company best known for an amino acid supplement — is working on opening the “largest and most advanced” legal marijuana production facility in the world. The Ontario site will be able to grow 1.3 million pounds of pot from 50,000 plants — an operation that could produce $5 billion in sales per year when it starts producing in a few weeks after it passes government inspections. No more hiding grow lamps in closets: This $20 million facility will churn out pot like other factories churn out aspirin. And it has plans to expand to the US.

“The facility is done, it’s ready,” CEO Bill Chaaban says. “It’s laid out [like] a manufacturing facility for prescription drugs.”

The factory, which will house 50 different strains of cannabis, is legal thanks to recently changed medical marijuana laws in Canada that ended home growth of pot plants and required users to buy from large-scale commercial facilities being set up around the country. The demand for medical pot in Canada created a backlog that led to the creation of these new “super-grow” sites.

Read more: http://nypost.com/2014/05/06/worlds-largest-legal-pot-facility-to-open-in-ontario/