Category Archives: Profiteering

Every Year 700 Million People Fall Ill from Contaminated Food | Inter Press Service – So who do you trust for food?

 

contaminated food that every year causes illness to 1 in 10 people around the world – or around 700 million – killing 420,000 people as a result.The leading United Nations body in the field of food agriculture has something to say on this. And it does: food availability and food hygiene are compromised every day by diseases and pests that plague plants and animals as well as various types of contaminants.“This happens on farms, in factories, at home, in fresh or sea water, in the open air and in the midst of dense forests,” warns the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).Whether in the form of pathogen, insect or contaminant, threats are now travelling faster and further, making effective and timely responses more difficult and putting people’s food supplies, their health and livelihoods, and often their lives at greater risk, it adds.Over 70 per cent of new diseases of humans have animal origin, with the potential of becoming major public health threats, FAO adds.

Source: Every Year 700 Million People Fall Ill from Contaminated Food | Inter Press Service

Trump and Netanyahu are allies in a losing battle | +972 Magazine

The most important clue to solve this puzzle is Trump and Netanyahu’s obsession with attacking, controlling and manipulating the news media (indeed, this is one of the major sources of Netanyahu’s recent legal troubles). Admittedly, even within their own camps, they are extreme outliers in terms of crudity and relentlessness on this issue — something that surely has to do with their individual psychological makeup. But they are also emblematic of a broader approach on the right, which has fueled the rise of rigorously partisan and uncurious media organs such as Israel Hayom in Israel and Fox News in the U.S.Journalists are a major problem for the Israeli and American extreme right because, despite all their flaws, they occasionally do provide information and cover actual events. In other words, they reflect reality — however partially and inadequately.Reality is the greatest foe of the extreme right wingers currently in power. In the real world, Palestinians, Mexicans, Muslims, and many other groups that they do not like continue to exist, despite travel bans and land grabs. In the real world, international relations are crucial for the prosperity of both countries and cannot be flippantly dismissed. “Alternative facts” are easily malleable. Actual facts cannot be so flexibly managed. The extreme right is not creating “facts on the ground,” it is being undone by them, bit by bit.Netanyahu, Trump, and their allies are fighting a losing battle. Deep inside, they know this. If they truly believed otherwise, their disposition would be sunny and confident, not dark and fretful.This is not cause for complacency. Part of the reason these agendas will be defeated is precisely because people are not complacent — they are mobilized and agitated (at least in the U.S.; this kind of mass opposition seems to be further down the road in Israel and Palestine). Until they are stopped, Trump and Netanyahu can do great harm, some of which will be irreparable. Nonetheless, the struggle against them must begin with the insight that we are not fighting an ascendant and secure power, we are opposing a desperate and fearful faction.

Source: Trump and Netanyahu are allies in a losing battle | +972 Magazine

Donald Trump: The Role of the Media in Addressing the Threat – SPIEGEL ONLINE

So there we have it: Donald Trump, a misogynist and a racist businessman who verifiably made 87 false statements in the course of only five days of the election campaign, is no longer a candidate. He’s sitting in the White House. Here are three insights about this American president who has been in office since Jan. 20.First, in the two-and-a-half weeks since his awful inauguration speech, he has demonstrated that he will do what he said he would: He is ordering the construction of a wall on the border to Mexico, he is issuing xenophobic decrees and he is rattling America’s allies and international institutions and, by doing so, every aspect of global politics. He has already threatened Iran and North Korea. None of this comes as a surprise either, because even Trump’s voters knew that adviser Stephen Bannon is a man who considers wars to be useful.Second, Trump is also showing that he will do much that he did not announce in the campaign. He has ordered scientists not to conduct or publish research on topics of which he does not approve. He says climate change doesn’t exist and means it seriously. He stood by as one of his closest confidants invented the term “alternative facts” to create a parallel reality. Trump brings his children with him to high-level meetings, he hired his son-in-law as a White House adviser, he has spared countries in which he does business from his travel ban on citizens of predominately Muslim states, he has not divested himself of his company holdings, he has not released his tax filings (despite pledging to do so) and even had his adviser Kellyanne Conway claim that voters didn’t care. He now wants to undo banking regulations so that “friends of mine” can get easier access to money. Is he paving the way to cash in and further enrich himself while in office?Third, Trump has already proven some of the things we already knew about him. The perception people have of him is more important to Trump than anything else. Nothing was more important to him in his first two and a half weeks in office than the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Trump is a chronic liar and he proves this in one tweet after the other. Trump despises the media (he calls it the “opposition party” and says “As you know, I have a running war with the media”) as well as the judicial branch in the form of “this so-called judge” who didn’t rule the way that his ruler desired. Meanwhile, Trump claims the people protesting against him are “paid.”

Source: Donald Trump: The Role of the Media in Addressing the Threat – SPIEGEL ONLINE

The age of Trump spells the end of the Zionist dream | +972 Magazine

When Israel backs an American regime that threatens our liberty as humans and our safety as Jews, the claim that Zionism protects Jews no longer holds.By Ben Lorber

Source: The age of Trump spells the end of the Zionist dream | +972 Magazine

How Long Can the Resistance Continue to Resist? | Dame Magazine

Align with Time-Tested Organizations

Alongside protest, however, Hunt says folks should align with existing groups rather than trying to recreate the wheel on your own. “It’s really important to work underneath people who have been doing the work, and that you can learn from,” she says. For most folks it makes the most sense to start locally within your own community, where most great acts of resistance begin. In doing this you can build what Hunt calls “alternative political apparatuses” which can empower people even when the government imposes oppressive laws. Connecting with existing organizations links small groups to more powerful activist engines, increasing the power to make change.Action: Find one to three organizations in your community, or online, that works around your three target issues and sign up to volunteer with or learn more about them. Check out The Resistance Manual and these politically-minded apps.Focus, but Keep Intersectionality in MindUndoubtedly you feel strongly about multiple issues, from women’s rights to civil rights, to the right for all to have affordable healthcare. In practical terms, you may only be able to focus on strategies to deal with one or two at a time. “The more that you can narrow down and be clear about what you can and cannot do, and are willing to do and are interested and curious about, that can help you identify where you want to connect,” Luz Guerra, a long time feminist and activist who has trained hundreds of organizers around the country and internationally, tells Dame.However, Davis points out that in her own realm of environmental work, “Long before white environmentalists began to focus on sustainability, environmental justice activists understand that…it is all connected.” So while you may focus your own activist lens in one direction, be open to “the broader realization of intersectionality,” she says. All of our rights are connected and we can effect more change when no one is excluded from the fight.

Source: How Long Can the Resistance Continue to Resist? | Dame Magazine

Not ‘Lone Wolves’ After All: How ISIS Guides World’s Terror Plots From Afar – The New York Times – how true? don’t know but some rings true…

While a reliance on local amateurs has allowed the Islamic State to announce that it can stage terrorism around the world, it has also led to many failed attacks.Instead of opening fire on a church, Mr. Ghlam shot himself in the leg. Instead of laying waste to a music festival this past summer, the Islamic State recruit in Germany detonated his bomb prematurely, killing only himself.The same thing happened the day before the end of Ramadan on July 2 inside a police compound in Indonesia, where another remotely guided attacker hit the switch on his crudely assembled suicide vest.“He didn’t even knock over the flowerpot on the ledge next to where he blew himself up,” said Sidney Jones, director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict.Indonesian officials say that the suicide bomber had been incited to attack by Bahrun Naim, a 33-year-old Indonesian man who is now one of the Islamic State’s most prolific cyberplanners, operating from the group’s capital in Raqqa, Syria.Initially, Mr. Naim wired money to families in Indonesia to pay for travel to Syria, officials said. Later, the bank transfers he sent were to be used to buy the chemicals needed to build explosives, according to the interrogation records of his recruits.In just over a year, the young men he was in contact with attempted at least six attacks, targeting a police post, a Buddhist temple and a church, as well as foreigners visiting the country. In November, a college dropout who the police said had at least been initially in contact with Mr. Naim was arrested as he prepared to attack the embassy of Myanmar. In his home, the police recovered a quantity of explosives that could have resulted in a blast twice as powerful as the 2002 Bali bombing, which killed 202 people, the police spokesman told local news media.Yet nearly all of the plots attributed to Mr. Naim have failed. And it was human error that finally led to the arrest of Amriki’s followers in Hyderabad.The plot began to unravel in June after the men were instructed to collect a 10-kilogram bag of ammonium nitrate left beside a canal next to mile marker No. 9 on the Vijayawada Highway.They returned to Mr. Mohammed’s home to begin preparing a bomb, but could not figure out how to replicate the steps in the instructional YouTube video sent to them by the handler. “We could not succeed in making powder, as it became jellylike paste,” Mr. Yazdani lamented, according to the transcript of his interrogation.They tried using a tea strainer. They tried heating it longer. They began talking on their cellphones about their efforts to “cook the rice.”By then, the police were wiretapping their calls and suspected that all the food talk was a crude attempt at misdirection. Early on June 29, the police banged on the door of Mr. Mohammed’s home.In his bedroom, they found the half-cooked explosive in his refrigerator.

A settler living in an illegal outpost issues orders to demolish Palestinian homes – PNN

The racism in Israel is mostly reflected in every aspect of their life, the last of which came within the context of disclosing that Head of the Regional Unit to enforce the laws of planning and building at the Israeli Ministry of Finance, Adv. Avi Cohen, who is in charge of implementing the law of demolishing Palestinian homes, is living in an unlicensed building in the illegal Bilgi Mime outpost, built in 1984, on lands belonging to Qaryout, Saweiya and Al-Luban in Nablus Governorate, under a government resolution. Cohen was appointed 2 years ago as a Head of the Regional Unit to enforce the laws of planning and building, also called Regional Unit for Monitoring the Building.  Moreover, the Unit has the powers and authority to follow-up everything related to construction in cooperation with all planning institutions.

Source: A settler living in an illegal outpost issues orders to demolish Palestinian homes – PNN

Study finds reduced antibiotic use could cut C diff | CIDRAP – Nuther fact for Trump to pretend does not exist because it might hurt his investments.

Crook also acknowledged that reducing fluoroquinolone use by 50%—as has been done in England—will be very difficult to do in the United States, since fluoroquinolones are used widely in the US healthcare system.Brad Spellberg, MD, an infectious disease specialist at University of Southern California, agrees.”We massively overuse quinolones in the US, and, unfortunately, national guidelines have helped propagate the overuse by promoting these drugs as first line for diseases where other drugs can also be used,” Spellberg said.Spellberg said fluoroquinolones should be reserved for broad-spectrum gram-negative infections, which tend to be more resistant and harmful to humans, and should be used for less harmful gram-positive infections only when other options can’t be used.”This should become a focus of change in national guidelines, in [Food and Drug Administration] approving and labeling, and in payer, regulator, and professional expected practice,” Spellberg added.

Source: Study finds reduced antibiotic use could cut C diff | CIDRAP

I Kept Feeling the Women’s March on Washington Lacked Passion, But Then I Figured the Real Problem – The Ladies Finger The Ladies Finger

As I chanted “No Trump. No KKK. No Fascist USA,” I looked into the faces of the marchers around me, and I got my answer: Americans are not accustomed to this. Most of these hundreds of thousands of people had probably never been to a protest before, and never marched with their children and their parents and screamed at the top of their lungs in the middle of a metropolitan road. This was their first time, their introduction to taking the streets. What I assumed was a lack of passion turned out to be something equally important: a first step. The million people: women, men, children, and allies who marched on Washington, did not have the experience of fighting against overt oppression, but they knew they needed to show up; they knew they must be united in the face of a new era that will have them fight for the rights they have long taken for granted. On this day, the American Woman showed up, she rose to the occasion, and though she was hesitant, she was determined.We arrived at the White House, filling the National Mall with pink pussy hats and chants of “my body, my rights”, and made our presence known. Soon after people started to scatter, but for the rest of the day, one could not go anywhere without running into someone with a sign or a pussy hat. This may not be the desperate protest that started a revolution against a Middle Eastern dictatorship, but it is the American woman beginning her fight. The movement has begun.

Source: I Kept Feeling the Women’s March on Washington Lacked Passion, But Then I Figured the Real Problem – The Ladies FingerThe Ladies Finger

The Anti-Fascist Scouting Report: What The Left Can Learn From the Right | Race Files

The cutting edge of Trump’s offensive against civil and human rights has been attacks against immigrants, Muslims, and Black radicals, leading many to believe that Trump will go directly after those groups first. While that may be true, in many ways LGBTQ people are the low hanging fruit where targeting groups to make good on campaign promises is concerned. Producing wins like “hate the sin, love the sinner” religious exemptions that equate discrimination with religious freedom, as well as attacks on same sex unions, insurance claims for sex reassignment surgery, and queer-friendly bathrooms is a lot easier than, say, building a border wall or executing millions of deportations. But, success in attacking LGBTQ rights could set the stage for much deeper cuts into civil rights and civil liberties that may, in the end, clear the way for Trump to consolidate the kind of anti-democratic authority necessary to dig even deeper into his xenophobic and discriminatory agenda.If Trump comes good on the anti-LGBTQ front (and abortion), conservative evangelicals may well look the other way if he reaches for policies that victimize those more likely to be viewed by the broader Christian community as innocents. After all, no one, no mainline or evangelical Christian denomination, stood in the way when Japanese Americans and Alaska Natives were interned during WWII (supposedly for our own safety, which is an argument the Trump regime may be laying the basis for by inciting anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant hatred and inviting and even condoning violence).It’s a frightening prospect

Source: The Anti-Fascist Scouting Report: What The Left Can Learn From the Right | Race Files