Politics & Globalization
International trade agreements force the U.S. and other participting countries to "harmonize" food and envrironmental safety standards to the lowest common denominator. Often these agreements are negotiated behind closed doors, shutting out Congress and the public, while granting corporations and trade associations a seat at the table. It's no surprise that these agreements give transnational corporations "special rights", allowing companies to challenge individual countries' environmental, worker and food safety laws and regulations.
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Rose and Ronnie· Joe volunteer© 2008
An article written by two associates of Pope Francis in the Catholic journal La Civiltà Cattolica illustrates vast disagreements between the Pope and conservative American Catholics—a rift which has been growing since Pope Francis was elected in 2013.
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A new Harvard study reveals how Big Pharma and federal government have colluded to allow the current opioid epidemic in the United States.
The study, entitled The Opioid Epidemic: Fixing a Broken Pharmaceutical Market, describes how the American public have been duped by the elites for more than 20 years.
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Sam Clovis, President Donald Trump's nominee to be the Department of Agriculture's chief scientist, maintained a now-defunct blog for years in which he accused progressives of "enslaving" minorities, called black leaders "race traders," and labeled former President Barack Obama a "Maoist" with "communist" roots.
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After numerous reports that hackers attending last weekend’s DEF CON 25 conference breached a variety of voting machines, defenders of the systems heaped scorn on the news, saying the one machine that was breached had been taken out of use more than a year ago. They also said the machines had to be taken apart to access key components, suggesting that was an unlikely scenario.
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Forget tomatoes and microgreens. Cannabis is about to enter the Massachusetts marketplace, and according to some estimates it’s poised to become a $1.1 billion industry within just a few years. That would mean cannabis alone would exceed the entire total market value of all Massachusetts agricultural products (which comes in at just shy of $500 million).
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Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, wants you to know that he was responsible for persuading President Trump to pull out of the Paris climate agreement. But Pruitt did everything he could to telegraph to the world that he thought Paris was a bad deal for America, and urged Big Coal executives to make their views known to the president as well.
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The nature of Britain's trade deals with the United States after Brexit raises serious concerns about the quality of food on supermarket shelves - and the influence of vested interests in the meat industry,
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During the early 1990s Britain’s self-sufficiency in food reached its highest in modern times. We were producing just over 70% of all the food we were eating. Since then the story has been one only of decline. We now produce 60%, but because of exports only about 50% of the food we eat is actually produced here.
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One of the world's largest and best-known hacker conventions, DEF CON, debuted an interactive "Voting Machine Hacker Village" this year at its annual gathering in Las Vegas. In some cases within minutes, and in other cases within a few hours, of the village doors' opening, hackers in attendance said they had successfully breached some systems.
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