In WTF News Roundup: August 4, 2010

AUTHORITIES RAID A RAW FOOD GROCER AT GUNPOINT OVER MILK AND HONEY

With no warning one weekday morning, investigators entered an organic grocery with a search warrant and ordered the hemp-clad workers to put down their buckets of mashed coconut cream and to step away from the nuts. Then, guns drawn, four officers fanned out across Rawesome Foods in Venice. Skirting past the arugula and peering under crates of zucchini, they found the raid’s target inside a walk-in refrigerator: unmarked jugs of raw milk.

“I still can’t believe they took our yogurt,” said Rawesome volunteer Sea J. Jones, a few days after the raid. “There’s a medical marijuana shop a couple miles away, and they’re raiding us because we’re selling raw dairy products?”

Cartons of raw goat and cow milk and blocks of unpasteurized goat cheese were among the groceries seized in the June 30 raid by federal, state and local authorities — the latest salvo in the heated food fight over what people can put in their mouths.

On one side are government regulators, who say they are enforcing rules designed to protect consumers from unsafe foods and to provide a level playing field for producers. On the other side are ” healthy food” consumers — a faction of foodies who challenge government science and seek food in its most pure form.

They want almonds cracked fresh from the shell, not those run through a federally mandated pasteurization process that uses either heat or a chemical to kill off salmonella  and other possible contaminants. They hunger for meat slaughtered on the farm. And they’re willing to pay a premium — $6, $8 or more — for a gallon of milk straight from the cow.

So despite research outlining the dangers of consuming raw milk and other unprocessed foods, they’re finding ways to circumnavigate federal, state and local laws that seek to control what they can serve at the dinner table. Such defiance, they said, comes from growing distrust of a food sector that has become more industrialized and consolidated — and whose products have been at the root of some of the country’s deadliest food contamination cases…

Read the entire article via LA Times (published July 25, 2010)

In related news: Feds raid Amish dairy and threaten action over raw milk sales (via Natural News)

Our two cents: People should be able to eat whatever they like without the fear of a guns-drawn raid and it’s as simple as that. And don’t give me any of that “it’s to keep people from getting sick” b.s. because cigarettes, alcohol and fast food are still readily available despite the obvious health risks.

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WHITE HOUSE PROPOSAL WOULD EASE FBI ACCESS TO INTERNET HISTORY

The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.

The administration wants to add just four words — “electronic communication transactional records” — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the “content” of e-mail or other Internet communication.

But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters. These missives, which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret. They are the mechanism the government would use to obtain the electronic records…

Read the full article via The Washington Post (published July 29, 2010)

Our two cents: Hey FBI, you can see mine if I can see yours.

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AFTER STROKE SCANS, PATIENTS FACE SERIOUS HEALTH RISKS FROM EXCESSIVE RADIATION DOSES

When Alain Reyes’s hair suddenly fell out in a freakish band circling his head, he was not the only one worried about his health. His co-workers at a shipping company avoided him, and his boss sent him home, fearing he had a contagious disease.

Only later would Mr. Reyes learn what had caused him so much physical and emotional grief: he had received a radiation overdose during a test for a stroke at a hospital in Glendale, Calif.

Other patients getting the procedure, called a CT brain perfusion scan, were being overdosed, too — 37 of them just up the freeway at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, 269 more at the renowned Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and dozens more at a hospital in Huntsville, Ala.

The overdoses, which began to emerge late last summer, set off an investigation by the Food and Drug Administration into why patients tested with this complex yet lightly regulated technology were bombarded with excessive radiation. After 10 months, the agency has yet to provide a final report on what it found.

But an examination by The New York Times has found that radiation overdoses were larger and more widespread than previously known, that patients have reported symptoms considerably more serious than losing their hair, and that experts say they may face long-term risks of cancer and brain damage.

Read the full article via NY Times (published July 31, 2010)

Our two cents: Going into a hospital with a stroke and coming out with cancer, accident or upselling?

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WYCLEF JEAN TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT OF HAITI

Hip-hop, more than most pop genres, is something of a pulpit, urban fire and brimstone garbed in baggy pants and backward caps. So it’s little wonder that one of the form’s icons, Haitian-American superstar Wyclef Jean, is the son of a Nazarene preacher — or that he likens himself, as a child of the Haitian diaspora, to a modern-day Moses, destined to return and lead his people out of bondage. Haiti’s Jan. 12 earthquake, which ravaged the western hemisphere’s poorest country and killed more than 200,000 people, was the biblical event that sealed his calling. After days of helping ferry mangled Haitian corpses to morgues, Jean felt as if he’d “finished the journey from my basket in the bulrushes to standing in front of the burning bush,” he told me this week. “I knew I’d have to take the next step.”

That would be running for President of Haiti. Jean told TIME he is going to announce his candidacy for the Nov. 28 election just days before the Aug. 7 deadline. One plan that was discussed, loaded with as much Mosaic symbolism as a news cycle can hold, called for him to declare his presidential bid on Aug. 5 upon arriving in Port-au-Prince from New York, where he grew up after leaving Haiti with his family at age 9. “If not for the earthquake, I probably would have waited another 10 years before doing this,” says Jean, who is only 37. “The quake drove home to me that Haiti can’t wait another 10 years for us to bring it into the 21st century.” Jean sees no contradiction between his life as an artist and his ambitions as a politician. “If I can’t take five years out to serve my country as President,” he argues, “then everything I’ve been singing about, like equal rights, doesn’t mean anything.”

Read the full article via TIME (published August 4, 2010)

Our two cents: Let’s see… Jean doesn’t speak either French or Creole (the primary languages of Haiti), has not lived in Haiti since he was 9, never ran for any political office before, has zero experience in dealing with the IMF, World Bank, United Nations or any other geo-political organization, knows little of the turbulent political climate of Haiti, has mismanaged his own charity organization in the past and the only group (The Fugees) he has ever been in broke up after one album so to say this isn’t a good idea for Haiti is a definite understatement. Have a listen to Jean’s “political platform” below.

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UK X-FILES REVEALS SECRET UFO ENCOUNTERS FROM WWII

The government released hundreds of previously secret “UFO files” on Thursday including a letter saying that Winston Churchill had ordered a 50 year cover-up of a wartime encounter between a UFO and military pilot.

The files, published by the National Archives, span decades and contain scores of witness accounts, sketches and classified briefing notes documenting mysterious sightings across the country.

One Ministry of Defence note refers to a 1999 letter stating that a Royal Air Force plane returning from a mission in Europe during World War Two was “approached by a metallic UFO.”

Read the full article via Reuters on Yahoo! News (published August 4, 2010)

In other Winston Churchill news: Churchill’s dentures fetch nearly $24,000 at auction

Our two cents: If there are aliens I feel like they are only here to watch us for entertainment purposes. Maybe we’re nothing more than actors and extras in the most elaborate reality show in the universe.