World Political Secret

GMO 'fish oil' crop trials - how to respond?

2014-01-26T07:01:00.000-08:00

Rothamsted Research has applied to field trial GM Camelina plants that make long chain omega-3 fatty acids - an important nutrient currently available only from fish. This poses a dilemma for those who have so far opposed GMO foods.

Long chain omega-3s are not readily available, especially to poor people or those in hot countries far from the sea. There is also a global crisis of over-fishing.

The application to trial the GM Camelina oilseed - a species similar to the well-known oilseed rape - is certain to receive Defra's permission and we can confidently expect the crop trial to begin shortly, in time for the 2014 growing season.

Established GM campaigners have lost no time to oppose the application. Helen Wallace, executive director of Genewatch, spoke today on the BBC's World at One to denounce it as a "desperate attempt" by the GM industry that would bring "no real benefit to health" and was "not a sustainable solution".

Rather than representing a genuine benefit to people suffering from poor diet and nutrition, she insisted, it was merely "tinkering". She went on to warn of "unintended side effects" that might result from the genetic modiciation, with possible dire consequences for health.

Her conclusion was clear and firm - the crop trials should not take place.

Omega-3 fatty acids are essential

But the facts of the matter are not quite so clear and simple. Long chain omega-3 fatty acids are not strictly essential in the diet, no. But omega-3 fatty acids are, and most people eat nowhere near enough of them.

Modern diets are over-rich in the omega-6 fatty acids abundant in nuts, seeds and vegetable oils like soy, corn, sunflower and safflower. The far more fragile omega-3 oils are relatively scarce and most of us eat much less of them that we should.

Moreover the vegetable omega-3 oils that we do get - linseed, hemp seed and green leaf vegetables are good sources - are of the short-chain variety, predominantly alpha-linolenic acid, or ALA.

And ALA is many metabolic steps away from the long chain omega-3 fatty acids, EPA and DHA for short, that are needed to maintain good health - especially in the brain, nervous tissues, heart, and immune system.
Our bodies can and do extend the ALA into EPA and DHA, but it is a long and metabolically 'expensive' process requiring the well-functioning of numerous enzymes.

Moreover not everyone can produce enough of the long chain omega-3s. Some are genetically disadvantaged. Others may suffer from mineral deficiences that cause a shortage of key enzymes essential to the elongation process.

Fish oil - a valuable nutrient

That's why millions of people take fish oil as a nutritional supplement, or make a point of eating oily fish like mackerel or herring. The EPA and DHA is especially beneficial for babies and children who need far more of it than adults to build a healthy brain and nervous system.

But it's beneficial to get additional EPA and DHA right through life, and those who do are likely to enjoy better cognitive, nervous and cardiovascular health - something to think about as ever more elderly people are afflicted by Alzheimer's disease.

There is however a serious problem. The seas are unable to provide enough fish to feed the world. Of course it's not helpful that the biggest consumer of the world's fish catch is not actually people, but ... fish.
That is, high value fish like salmon kept in fish farms and fed on low value 'trash' fish turned into fishmeal. These in fact eat an astonishing 80% of the world's fish oil production.

But fish is also expensive and in many parts of the world, either not affordable or simply not available at all. And that's not to mention the vegetarians and vegans who choose not to eat fish on principle.

Fish may also be contaminated with heavy metals like mercury from coal fired power stations, bio-concentrated in marine ecosystems. There are also growing fears about radioactive contamination to Pacific fish from Fukushima.

There are real benefits to be gained

So if crops were to provide us with the EPA and DHA that we need without needing to catch and kill fish, that surely creates a real benefit for us, and the quality of our diet.

It could also reduce the world's dependence on wild-caught fish and relieve pressure on dwindling fish stocks. The EPA/DHA rich oilseeds could make a real contribution to both health and environment.

This is in stark contrast to the direction of the GMO industry to date. Two very specific interventions characterise the current generation of GM crops: resistance to herbicides like glyphosate and glufonisate; and built-in pest resistance using Bt toxins from Bacillus thiriguensis.

GM crops so far - a disaster

Both have had serious and undesirable consequences. Herbicide resistance allows farmers to spray the growing crop with herbicides to control weeds.

And because a crop may be sprayed to control weeds several times over a growing season, it inevitably causes far higher levels of herbicide residues in the resulting food - with reported consequences on animal health.

It also means that fallen seeds in the field can contaminate the following year's crop - unless a different herbicide is used to get rid of them. Now as crops are engineered to be resistant to multiple herbicides, it will become ever harder to find herbicides that can do the job without resorting to ever more toxic ones.

The herbicide resistance genes have also spread to wild crop relatives, creating new 'super-weeds' - again requiring the use of new and often more toxic herbicides for their control. The result is detrimental to both health and environment.

Bt toxins - not so harmless?

Bt toxins can indeed be effective in controlling insect pests. But they too are not ideal - after all they are produced within the tissues of the plant itself, and are therefore present in the resulting food, not to mention pollen and possibly even nectar, so they can kill beneficial insects like bees.

Moreover insects can acquire resistance to the Bt toxins - as has happened with aggressive strains of boll-worm in India. The answer has been to increase the number of Bt toxins in the GM crops, and even to create new synthetic toxins not found in nature.

One such example is StarStax corn, widely grown in the USA, engineered to be resistant to both glyphosate and glufosinate and expressing eight different Bt toxons, one of them synthetic.

And while Bt toxin is not meant to be harmful to humans, this notion is coming increasingly under question. The truth is that the long-term food studies that would prove that is safe to eat Bt toxins in our daily food have simply not been carried out. Safety has been assumed.

The anti-GMO movement hs won all the arguments

This dire state of affairs has enabled anti-GMO campaigners to win all the arguments as far as health and environment are concerned, as well as the battle of public perception. GM food is quite rightly seen as a liability and anti-GM movements are growing across the world.

There may be benefits for farmers - some of them at least, for a time - and GMO companies like Monsanto and Dow Agrosciences have grown rich on the proceeds. But where is the benefit for consumers or environment?

The answer is clear - there is no benefit to consumers or environment, only hazards and harm.
The development of Golden rice, engineered to express Vitamin A, has been a sop in the direction of providing consumer and health benefit.

But that's all it is - because the sought-after benefit can be achieved simply by eating a few green leaves and other vegetables, which also deliver a host of other vitamins and mineral nutrients that the Golden rice could never deliver.

This time there is a difference

The EPA/DHA Camelina is different. The long chain omega-3s are not readily available, especially to poor people or those in hot countries far from the sea. There is also a global crisis of over-fishing.

Yes, there are other possible solutions to these problems. The long-chain omega-3 fatty acids could be eaten in the form of algae, for example. And there is no actual need to feed quite so much of the world's fish catch to fish, rather than people - merely a powerful economic driver.

But to judge by the price of algae-based dietary supplements in health food shops, there is nothing cheap about growing, harvesting and preparing algae for human consumption.

And to judge by the success of campaigners to date in reforming the world's fishing and fish farming industries, we should not expect any major transformation any time soon.

Should campaigners be more open?

So maybe campaigners should be more open to the GM Camelina. Of course it needs to be tested and screened very carefully for any unforeseen and undesirable consequences of the kind alluded to by Helen Wallace.

Far more complete, thorough and long lasting tests must be performed to prove their safety before they enter into the food chain, than has been standard practice with GM crops to date.

But these are not arguments against carrying out the trials. They may actually be arguments to carry out the trials, and to ensure that the trials themselves and the subsequent food safety testing are carried out to the highest standard.

A question of principle?

Of course there are those who oppose all GMO and GM technologies on a matter of ethical or philosophical principle, or from simple conviction. They are fully entitled to that view.

But many GMO campaigners still need to work out in their own minds exactly where they stand. Are they opposed to GMO technology itself?

Or are they opposed to the way in which obnoxious, aggressive and over-powerful multinational corporations have used GMO technology, allied it with restrictive and monopolistic practices, defended it with flawed patent and intellectual property regimes, and used it to attack the environment and human health in the callous and single-minded pursuit of profit at all cost?

On the second point I know exactly where I stand.

On the first, I'm still thinking about it.

Source: http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2251435/gmo_fish_oil_crop_trials_how_to_respond.html

Where Is The Best Place In The World For Healthy Eating?

2014-01-19T07:25:00.000-08:00

The U.K. has plenty of fresh produce available, such as these vegetables on display at a garden show in Southport, England. But these healthy options cost more in the U.K. than in any other country in Western Europe.

The Dutch are known for their lax drug laws, tall statures and proficient language skills.
Perhaps we should add stellar eating habits to that list, as well.

The Netherlands ranked as the easiest country in the world in which to find a balanced, nutritious diet, the advocacy group Oxfam reported Tuesday.

France and Switzerland shared the second slot. And Western Europe nearly swept the top 20 positions, with Australia just edging into a tie for 8th.

Where did the U.S. land?

We tied with Japan for 21st place, despite the fact that we have the most cheap food available. Our friendly neighbors to the north, Canada, took the 25th position out of 125 countries.

A banana seller makes his way to the market in Burundi's capital, Bujumbura. The small country in eastern Africa ranked last in terms of malnutrition in children.

A group of researchers at Oxfam, an anti-poverty nonprofit based in Oxford, England, concocted the ranking scheme to measure the best and worst places to eat around the world.

We're not talking about the density of Michelin-starred restaurants or whether you can get wild salmon versus farmed-raised fish at the grocery store.

Instead, the ranking considers whether families have sufficient access to fresh produce, nutritious proteins and clean water — and whether these options are affordable compared with less healthful options.

The Healthy Food Rankings

According to the advocacy group , here are the easiest and hardest countries in the world to find a nutritious and diverse diet.

Best:
1. Netherlands
2. France, Switzerland
4. Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Belgium
8. Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Luxembourg, Australia
Worst:
121. Yemen
122. Madagascar
123. Ethiopia, Angola
125. Chad

The team's conclusion?

"Basically, if you arrive from Mars and design a food system, you probably couldn't design a worse one than what we have today on Earth," Oxfam's Max Lawson tells The Salt. "There is enough food overall in the world to feed everyone. But 900 million people still don't have enough to eat, and 1 billion people are obese. It's a crazy situation."

To compile the rankings, Lawson and his colleagues spent a few months analyzing eight reports from the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N and the International Labor Organization.
A country's score depends on how much food is available (so richer countries have an advantage), the nutritional value of that food and how diet helps or harms the nation's health.

The team measured that last metric by looking at diabetes and obesity rates in each country. Not surprisingly, that's where the U.S. stumbles: We ranked 120th out of 125 countries in terms of how diet influences health.
The problem is linked to poverty, Lawson says.

"Food is very, very cheap in the U.S. compared to most countries," he explains. "But the fact is you end up with people malnourished in one of the richest countries because they don't have access to fresh vegetables at a cheap enough price to make a balanced diet."

At the other end of the spectrum are countries that struggle just to get enough food on each family's table each day. Chad, Ethiopia and Angola ranked at the overall bottom of Oxfam's list, in large part because of high malnutrition rates and the relatively high cost of foods in these countries.

"People think that hunger is inevitable, but that's just not true," Lawson says. "There is enough food in the world to ensure that nobody goes to bed hungry."

The problem, in large part, is getting fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grains to people who need it, he says. "Even in countries with famines, there's still often enough food. Someone is hoarding it, or it hasn't been distributed."

And that problem isn't new. "Very famously," he says, "during the Irish potato famine, the British were exporting Irish wheat to the U.K."

Source; http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/01/14/262465619/where-in-the-world-is-the-best-place-for-healthy-eating?utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=20140119&utm_source=mostemailed

Amazon forest loss risks water security across South America

2014-01-10T07:36:00.000-08:00

Water, food supplies and energy production are all in jeopardy as the Amazon forest is felled for profit. And the damage is spreading well beyond Amazonia itself.

The continued destruction of the Amazon to exploit its resources for mining, agriculture and hydro-power is threatening the future of the South American continent, according to a report by campaigning groups using the latest scientific data.

Five countries - Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru - share the Amazon, and for all of them the forest area occupies more than 40% of their territory. All face threats to their water supply, energy production, food and health.

Declining rainfall

In addition, the report says, because of the over-exploitation of the region rainfall will fall by 20% over a heavily-populated area far to the south of Amazonia known as the La Plata basin, covering parts of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay.

Last month it was reported that deforestation in Amazonia had increased by almost a third in the past year, with an area equal to 50 football pitches destroyed every minute since 2000.

The report, the Amazonia Security Agenda, authored by the Global Canopy Programme and CIAT, the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture, says the prosperity of the region is based on the abundance of water.

"Amazonia's abundant natural resources underpin water, food, energy, and health security for the economy and people of the region and far beyond", the report states.

"At the heart of this nexus of securities is water. So abundant in the region, but now under increasing threat as industrial pollution increases, and unprecedented droughts reveal a once unthinkable water vulnerability."

The forest maintains its own rainfall

Key to the problem is the role of the forest in recycling water deep into the interior of the South American continent, as rainfall onto the forest is transpired by trees back into the atmosphere, regenerating atmospheric humidity and clouds, and creating powerful thermal updraughts:

"The loss of ecosystem services through deforestation undermines the securities and particularly water security that is so pivotal. The forest recycles 20-25% of the rainfall it receives, and air travelling over
extensive forest cover may generate twice as much rainfall as air over deforested land."

As forest is cut down this process is disrupted - leaving both people and ecosystems at increasing risk.

Pollution - a growing problem

Another problem that comes with Amazonia's increasing industrialisation is pollution of both air and water, with toxic contaminants including mercury from gold-mining.

"Large-scale deforestation is predicted to reduce rainfall by up to 21% by 2050, although the science is still uncertain. Furthermore, deforestation is likely to affect water quality through increasing soil erosion and leaching of nutrients and heavy metals including mercury."

And most people depend on the rainforest and the rain it brings to keep their water clean:

"Water purification ecosystem services are important for the provision of clean drinking water. However, limited access to a proper water supply, treatment and basic sanitation infrastructure across Amazonia, particularly in rural areas, makes water security of Amazonian populations extremely vulnerable to pollution.

"This has knock on effects on food security (fisheries) and health security. In Ecuador 30,000 Amazonian citizens are seeking compensation through the courts at the billion US dollar scale over claims of toxic pollution by oil companies in the region."

Profits siphoned off

The huge wealth being generated from the forests comes with large-scale environmental and social costs. Local people do not benefit, and the profits from minerals, mining and agriculture are siphoned out of the region.

The large-scale economic development of the region causes deforestation. That in turn is threatening not only the wellbeing of the local people but the economic stability of the industries themselves.

Climate change is adding to both the uncertainty and the instability. Increasing temperatures, as much as 3.5°C in the near future, changing rainfall patterns and more intense and frequent extreme weather events will have further impacts on the health and well-being of the population.

Hydroelectricity at risk

Energy supply from hydro-electric dams will also decline, according to the report:

"Hydropower generation, especially for run of river dams, will be more vulnerable in the dry season, challenging future energy security across the region, especially given plans to invest heavily in new Amazonian hydropower."

The biggest such example is the highly controversial Belo Monte dam in the Brazilian Amazon, which is projected to supply 40% of Brazil's additional electricity needs by 2019.

Belo Monte

"will have a significantly lower power output than expected due to regional deforestation - up to 13% lower than under a fully-forested scenario, and up to 36% lower by 2050 if current deforestation rates continue."

Big bill coming

Among those welcoming the report is Manuel Pulgar, Peru's environment minister. He will play a leading part when the country's capital, Lima, hosts the 20th summit of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in December 2014.

He said:

"Climate change is a global problem, but one that will multiply local and regional problems in unforeseeable ways. In Latin America, we have taken Amazonia and its seemingly limitless water and forests as a given. But recent unprecedented droughts have shown us just what happens when that water security falters ..."

According to the report, the impacts of environmental degradation that have so far been felt in other parts of the world are now likely to be felt in Amazonia, threatening economic development and security.

Governments in the region, it says, need to recognize that development cannot continue without recognising the damage caused to the water supply and the climate both globally and locally. Policy makers need scientists to monitor changes to conditions and the economic risks they pose.

Trillions of tons of water

These findings must be shared between academic institutions and governments so that they can decide how to remedy the problem. Annual reviews of dangerous hotspots are also needed, and cross-border groups of experts who could help both national and regional development plans to be worked out.

Carlos Klink, Brazil's national secretary for climate change and environmental quality, endorsed these findings.

"We are understanding more and more how interdependent water, food, energy and health security are across our continent.

"There is also interdependence between the countries that share the Amazon, which recycles trillions of tons of water that all our people and economies rely on.

"The challenge that we are just beginning to recognise and act upon is one of transitioning to a more sustainable economy - one that values the role of a healthy Amazonia in underpinning long-term security and prosperity."

The History of Christmas and Its Pagan Origins

2013-12-22T08:11:00.002-08:00

Many people suffer from the misconception that Christmas is a Christian holiday. The earliest history of Christmas is composed of "pagan" (non-Christian) fertility rites and practices which predate Jesus by centuries. The truth is, in short, the real history of Christmas has nothing to do with Christianity. Many of the traditions which we hold dear, such as decorating Christmas trees, singing Christmas carols, and giving Christmas gifts, are rooted in the traditions of non-Christian religions.

We do not observe Christmas on December 25th because it was the date in history when Jesus was born. Nobody knows exactly what that date was, but references in the Bible show it most likely did not take place in winter. Rather it is because this was the date that the Romans historically celebrated the winter solstice.

This celebration was about dies natalis solis invicti: the day of the birth of the unconquerable sun, which took place on December 22nd. The winter solstice held the promise of the return of springtime and earthly renewal. In Roman history, this was the time of Saturnalia, honoring the God of Agriculture, for the week before the solstice, and Juvenalia, a feast in honor of the children of Rome, around the same time. On the 25th of the month they celebrated the birth of the sun-god Mithra. Masters and servants traded places temporarily, and everybody had a rollicking good time. It was during Saturnalia that the tradition of exchanging gifts was established. They gave one another Stenae or fruits which were intended to bring good luck. The Romans placed an enormous amount of pressure on the early Christians to rejoice along with them, and around the time of the fourth century, they began to celebrate Christmas around the same time. It was inevitable that Christians should make a connection between the rebirth of the sun and the birth of the Son.

In the Middle Ages, Christmas was a raucous, drunken celebration which resembled a carnival. Poor people would go on a Christmas "trick or treat" around the richer neighborhoods, causing them misery if they didn't get what they wanted.

Many other pagan traditions have been incorporated into Christmas. Yule was celebrated by the Norse in Scandanavia around the time of the winter solstice by bringing in large logs for the fire, in recognition of the eventual return of the sun. It could take as much as twelve days for the log to burn down. Meanwhile, the Norse would feast. The holiday usually lasted through January.

The Germans did not so much celebrate as honor the winter solstice. They believed that their god, Oden, flew through the sky at night passing judgment on his people. Generally, they would stay indoors during this season. When the Germanic people were converted to Christianity, their winter festival was naturally adopted as a celebration of the birth of Christ.

To the pagans, evergreens served as a symbol of winter's inability to stop the cycle of renewal. They were important fertility symbols which were highly revered by many cultures, including the Germans and the Celts. They helped to soothe the pagans' fears that the sun would never return, and that winter would reign eternal.

Contrary to popular belief, the tradition of cutting down a Christmas tree, bringing it into the home and decorating it is not pagan in origin, and did not appear until centuries after Christ's broth. The Romans decorated their homes and temples with evergreen clippings, but allowed the trees to remain intact, often decorating live trees with religious icons. The Druids tied fruit to the branches of live trees, and baked cakes in the shape of fish, birds and other animals, to offer to their god, Woden. We also inherited the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe from the Druids. The Christmas tree tradition we currently practice had its origins in 16th century Western Germany. "Paradise trees" were cut down to commemorate the Feast of Adam and Eve, which took place on Christmas eve every year.

Many Christians were opposed to the merrymaking and pagan origins of the Christmas festivities, especially the more solemn Christians such as the Puritans. In England in 1645, Christmas was actually canceled. In Boston between 1659 and 1681 Christmas was outlawed, and merrymakers incurred fines for their mirth.

Early carols were sung in a circle dance by European Celts in medieval times, as a part of their fertility rituals, and were later adopted as a way to celebrate Christmas. As a result they became unpopular among Christian authority. Over the ages multiple attempts have been made to ban Christmas carols. Christmas carols enjoyed a revival when St. Francis of Assisi began to favor a more joyous celebration of the Christmas season. Another pagan custom called wassailing, or singing from door to door, also became very popular among Christmas celebrants.

Many people mistakenly state that "Jesus is the reason for the season." They do so, because they believe people have lost sight of the true meaning of Christmas. It simply isn't true. Christmas can be celebrated as completely secular because ultimately it is not a Christian holiday. Christmas goes beyond religious and cultural differences, and addresses something universal in all of us. For this reason it has become popular in non-Christian countries such as Japan. The truth is that Christian and pagan traditions have a great deal in common. The real need behind all of these traditions was to find a source of joy, happiness, hope, goodwill and generosity. There was a need to find ways to cope with our fears about the darkness and cold of wintertime, and to celebrate the return of the sun and the longer days of spring.

In fact, Christianity and pre-Christian pagan religion have a great deal in common. Various pagan religions shared the Christian practice of worshiping a god-man who could offer salvation in the form of heaven or condemnation in the form of hell. The concept that a son of God could be born of a mortal woman is seen in many different religions spanning the globe. These concepts are universal, except to those who are extremely divisive and have a tendency to pick nits.

The pagans were smart people who had quite a few good ideas. They respected the earth, and we have benefited greatly from their practices. There is no reason for Christians to fear "pagan" universal and earth-centered traditions. At Christmas, rather than fretting that non-Christians have forgotten about Jesus we should focus on the deeper purpose of the holiday. The main problem is that Christmas has become far too commercial and this has gotten us away from the pagan tradition of connecting with the earth. Instead, we spend the whole holiday trashing the planet with excessive buying, and cutting down millions of Christmas trees which must then be discarded less than a month later. Environmental destruction and consumerism has passed for merrymaking for many years now, but it's an empty tradition. Celebrating the fertility of the earth is better by far. There is a strong need for a return to the family- and society-centered traditions which were established in Roman times and reestablished in the 19th century. Washington Irving's writings helped Americans to establish Christmas as a time of giving to those who are most in need, and bridging the gap between the rich and the poor. These traditions had their roots in the practices of the real St. Nicholas, who lived in Myra in the fourth century A.D. He was born rich and inherited a great deal of money on the death of his parents, all of which he gave away. St. Nicholas is said to have thrown bags of gold into the windows of dowerless girls to save them from lives of prostitution or slavery. He was also well know for his love and protection of children. St. Nicholas is the figure behind our modern day Santa Claus myth of a generous man who delivered hand-made toys to children all over the world.

So rather than viewing Christmas as a time to break the bank, we can take advantage of it as a time to help the less fortunate. Many people ask that their friends and loved ones give to charity rather than buy them a gift. This sort of gift giving is popular among yogis who see Christmas as a way to extend their practice.

Fortunately there are many ways to reconnect with the original purpose and meaning of Christmas. Small traditions, such as placing apples or cookies on the tree, or decorating a live tree instead of a cut one, are a good way to get in touch with the way that our ancestors celebrated Christmas. Respecting the planet and understanding its powers and its limitations are important. The pagans were aware of the changing seasons and found earth-centered and social ways to cope with them. They were aware and appreciative of the sun. They exchanged gifts, but their gift exchange was not commercialized. Instead the focus was on bringing good fortune. Giving gifts of fruit has been a common practice throughout history, and is still popular today.

The Christmas holiday season is about unity, not divisiveness. At the holiday season we should forget about our religious differences, abandon commercialism and think about what is best for the planet and for humanity.

Source: http://voices.yahoo.com/the-history-christmas-its-pagan-origins-646539.html?cat=74

FAO warns of coming food shortage

2013-12-13T10:25:00.000-08:00

The government has announced a one week food security assessment exercise in the country amid reports that the country could face an acute food shortage come next year.

Targeting high and medium potential areas of the country, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has donated Sh24m towards the exercise.

The exercise comes amidst warning from the organization that Kenyans should brace for hard times and high food prices due to failed rains coupled with uncertified seeds, high cost of production and the lethal maize in parts of the country the exercise will cover high and medium potential areas of the countries.

According to FAO national food security officer Simon Muhindi, food production in the country would drop by between 30-40 percent covering 24 counties.

FAO Geographical Information Systems officer Joseph Matere also says the project will cover crops, fisheries and livestock sector and the smart phone technology would be used to collect and relay data from the field.

The officers were speaking during the launch of the assessment exercise which is also supported by The Millennium water alliance and the German Agro-action.

Source:
http://www.kbc.co.ke/fao-warns-of-acute-food-shortage-in-2014/

http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/?articleID=2000098372&story_title=fao-warns-of-looming-food-shortage/

Ghanaians must resist becoming GMO “guinea pigs” – CPP

2013-12-04T08:10:00.000-08:00

Ghana’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) says the country must resist attempts to use Ghanaians as guinea pigs for genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

According to Ernesto Yeboah, “…we are waiting someway somehow to become guinea pigs in the hands of some scientific experimentation by people elsewhere before we think, before we come together”.

The party’s anti-GMO lobbying campaign comes on the heels of Parliament’s consideration of a plant breeders’ bill, which when passed into law, aims to regulate and protect genetically modified and improved crop varieties.

The CPP’s deputy communications director told XYZ Breakfast Show Host Moro Awudu Tuesday that passing the bill will amount to pandering to colonialist tendencies.

He argues that tonnes of research findings in the US, the European Union, France, Australia, India and other scientifically advanced countries, have linked GMOs to sterility in men, tumours, cancers as well as numerous birth defects, and so have all put a moratorium on GMOs.

Yeboah claims GMOs have wreaked havoc in so many countries including India where 125,000 died from GMO related diseases in 2008.

Source:
http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=294064

How to turn soda cans into solar heating panels

2013-11-30T05:37:00.001-08:00

Soda pop cans are converted into a powerful solar heating panel by Newfoundland inventor Jim Meaney.

Study Finds Cancer-Causing Chemical in Nearly 100 Shampoos and Soaps

2013-11-24T09:04:00.002-08:00

The Center for Environmental Health (CEH) revealed independent testing on Tuesday finding a cancer-causing chemical in 98 shampoos, soaps and other personal care products sold by major national retailers.

The chemical, cocamide diethanolamine (cocamide DEA), a chemically-modified form of coconut oil used as a thickener or foaming agent in many products, was listed by California as a known carcinogen last year.
Products tested with high levels of cocamide DEA include shampoos made by Colgate Palmolive, Colomer, Paul Mitchell and many others. In addition, products marketed for children and a product falsely labeled as organic were found with the chemical, in violation of California law.

CEH filed a California lawsuit Tuesday against four companies that sell products containing cocamide DEA, and the nonprofit has sent legal notices to more than 100 other companies that produce and/or sell cocamide DEA-tainted products that their products violate state law.

“Most people believe that products sold in major stores are tested for safety, but consumers need to know that they could be doused with a cancer-causing chemical every time they shower or shampoo,” said Michael Green, executive director of CEH. “We expect companies to take swift action to end this unnecessary risk to our children’s and families’ health.”

In addition to many brand name shampoos and personal care products (see the full list, below), the CEH testing found cocamide DEA in store-brand products purchased at Walmart, Trader Joe’s, Pharmaca and Kohl’s. A store brand children’s bubble bath from Kmart and a children’s shampoo/conditioner from Babies R Us were also found with cocamide DEA. Falsely labeled organic products from Organic by Africa’s Best also tested for high levels of the cancer-causing chemical (CEH previously won a legal settlement with this company requiring it to end its use of phony organic labels).

CEH has purchased the shampoos and other products containing cocamide DEA at Bay Area, CA, locations of major retailers and from online retailers since June, and commissioned an independent lab to determine the total content of the chemical in the products. In many cases, products contain more than 10,000 ppm cocamide DEA, and one shampoo tested at more than 200,000 ppm (20 percent) cocamide DEA. California listed cocamide DEA in June 2012 as a chemical known to cause cancer based on the assessment by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which evaluated skin exposure tests on animals.

Source: http://www.undergroundhealth.com/study-finds-cancer-causing-chemical-in-nearly-100-shampoos-and-soaps/

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How could this young woman lie dead and undiscovered for almost three years? - Joyce Carol Vincent:

2013-11-19T05:59:00.001-08:00

When the film-maker Carol Morley read that the skeleton of a young woman had been found in a London bedsit, she knew she had to find out more…

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On 25 January 2006, officials from a north London housing association repossessing a bedsit in Wood Green owing to rent arrears made a grim discovery. Lying on the sofa was the skeleton of a 38-year-old woman who had been dead for almost three years. In a corner of the room the television set was still on, tuned to BBC1, and a small pile of unopened Christmas presents lay on the floor. Washing up was heaped in the kitchen sink and a mountain of post lay behind the front door. Food in the refrigerator was marked with 2003 expiry dates. The dead woman's body was so badly decomposed it could only be identified by comparing dental records with an old holiday photograph of her smiling. Her name was revealed to be Joyce Carol Vincent.

I first heard about Joyce when I picked up a discarded copy of the Sun on a London underground train. The paper reported the gothic circumstances of her death – "Woman dead in flat for three years: skeleton of Joyce found on sofa with telly still on" – but revealed almost nothing about her life. There was not even a photograph of her.

The image of the television flickering over her decomposing body haunted me as I got off the train on to the crowded platform. In a city such as London, home to 8 million people, how could someone's absence go unnoticed for so long? Who was Joyce Vincent? What was she like? How could she have been forgotten?
News of Joyce's death quickly made it into the global media, which registered shock at the lack of community spirit in the UK. The story ran on in the British press, but still no photograph of Joyce appeared and little personal information.

Soon Joyce dropped out of the news. I watched as people discussed her in internet chatrooms, wondering if she was an urban myth, or talking about her as though she never mattered, calling her a couch potato, and posting comments such as: "What's really sad is no one noticed she was missing – must have been one miserable bitch." And then even that kind of commentary vanished.

But I couldn't let go. I didn't want her to be forgotten. I decided I must make a film about her.

At this point all that had been revealed in the press was that Joyce Vincent was 38 when she died, had been born in west London to parents who were from the Caribbean, and that some of her family had attended her inquest. Some reports suggested Joyce was, or had been, engaged to be married, and that before living in the bedsit she had been in a refuge for victims of domestic violence. But she didn't fit the typical profile of someone who might die and be forgotten: she wasn't old without family; she wasn't a loner, or an overdosed drug addict; nor was she an isolated heavy drinker. Who she was and the circumstances of her death were a mystery.

I placed adverts with various publications and internet sites. On a poster on the side of a black cab I asked: Did you know Joyce Vincent? Meanwhile, as I waited for any response, I contacted people who were involved with bringing Joyce's story to light.

I met Alison Campsie, news editor for the Tottenham & Wood Green Journal, whose journalist David Gibbs had reported on Joyce Vincent's inquest. She told me that while the paper would have liked to have pursued the background to the story, they didn't have the time or money, and that even the BBC with all its resources had tried and failed to run an item on Joyce.

In the Three Compasses pub below her office, I talked to Lynne Featherstone, MP for Hornsey and Wood Green, Joyce's constituency. Lynne had urged the police to reopen their investigation into Joyce's death but they decided there was nothing to answer to in terms of foul play. The coroner recorded an open verdict, with the cause of Joyce's death "unascertained". "We don't know how big a part Joyce played in her own isolation or whether it was more down to society neglecting her," Lynne told me.

Lynne wrote to the local council, the utility companies, and the housing association about Joyce's unpaid bills, questioning why alarm bells didn't ring earlier – but she either received no reply or little insight. "The point is, Joyce Vincent is dead, no one murdered her, and no one seems to care that much. I gather she was very beautiful, which for reasons totally spurious makes it more poignant because we always think beautiful people have everything go their way."

On the way to her next appointment Lynne drove me to Wood Green, to the back of Shopping City, where lorries rumbled in and out of a delivery depot. She pointed to the housing estate above the mall known locally as Sky City, where Joyce had lived and died. I looked at the red brick walkways and tiers of water-stained grey concrete, interspersed with metal grilles, indistinguishable from the car park or the shopping centre below. "I suppose, in a way, we all walked by," Lynne said. As I stepped out of her car she wished me luck.

Dominating the skyline was a round blue sign for Shopping City – a beacon to commercialism. In one of the flats I saw an open window with a billowing net curtain and I thought of the window in Joyce's bedsit that had been open for the two years she lay dead, insects crawling along the windowsill, the escaping smell of her decomposing body attributed to the rubbish bins below. I walked around to the other side of the complex – to the high street, hectic with shopping activity and traffic. The main door Joyce used to access her part of the estate is here, sandwiched between the usual chain of shops.

Inside the entrance I avoided the lift and climbed the empty grey concrete stairs. I walked along a walkway, meeting nobody. In contrast to the hordes of people below, it was desolate. I found Joyce's bedsit, with its glossy green door, at the end of the walkway. With only one neighbouring flat, and no flat above or below, it felt architecturally cut off. I knocked on the doors of other flats in the block, but no one answered. I wondered if I would ever meet anyone who actually knew Joyce.

The first response to my adverts was from Karen, but it turned out she never knew Joyce. "I was a neighbour. I lived on her doorstep. I got my old diaries out. Had I seen her? Had I written about her? All the neighbours – where were we? Why didn't we talk to her?" Karen said she had always liked living in Sky City but that as she lives alone, and is the same age as Joyce was when she died, she now worries whether anyone would notice if anything happened to her.

Months passed. I spent time in libraries and public records offices, piecing together some of Joyce's history through official records, locating previous addresses and relatives. I managed to track down people who knew Joyce, but they wouldn't talk to me. Then I received an email from Martin Lister, who had seen my advertisement. He wrote to me in the hope that the Joyce in question was not the same Joyce he went out with in his twenties. We quickly established that it was. On the phone he said it just didn't add up – "she never drank much, she never took drugs" – but the thing that most surprised him, he said, was that she ended up in social housing.

I arranged to meet Martin outside Shepherd's Bush underground station. In his late 40s, he wore a green Brazil baseball cap, and was all friendly smiles. In his local pub I thanked him for seeing me. "Well I want to thank you," he said, his pale complexion flushing pink. "Therapy, is how I feel about it."

While he had confided the news of the circumstances of Joyce's death to friends, he was glad to have the opportunity to discuss her at length. They had met in 1985, when he worked negotiating client renewals for a shipping company in the City. Joyce was 20 years old and secretary to his boss. "She was always asking me to go for a drink, but it never occurred to me that she was asking me out. I thought, what a shame she doesn't have any friends. I didn't read anything into it."

Eventually Martin went for a drink with Joyce and they subsequently dated for about three years. Afterwards they kept in touch, on and off, until 2002. Looking back, Martin was unsure if he ever knew exactly what was going on in Joyce's life. "You look back and think, I wish I'd asked more, wish I'd understood more."
They had good times together. "We were always doing something," Martin reminisced, "racing at Goodwood, tennis at Wimbledon, classical music, opera. We liked restaurants too." Martin shook his head, baffled at Joyce's outcome. "She always wanted to improve her mind. Actually, she told me she'd had elocution lessons and she sounded – I wouldn't say posh, but you wouldn't know she was from London, she just sounded very well-spoken, almost BBC really. In reality she grew up off the Fulham Palace Road in west London and she used to say, 'I don't know why people say it's so lovely round there because it certainly wasn't when I was growing up.'"

Pulling some photographs from a carrier bag, Martin looked at one wistfully before handing it to me. It was the first photograph of Joyce I had seen. I held it carefully, trying to take in every detail. "People used to say she looked like Whitney Houston," Martin said proudly. He sipped his wine and looked at another photo. "Her hair came from her mother's side. Her mother was Indian, she died when Joyce was young, 11, I think. She had a real bond with her mum, especially as she was the youngest. She had four sisters, but I think she was the only one to be born over here – the sisters brought her up really. Her dad was a carpenter. I never met her family, which I thought was a bit odd.

"I don't understand. She worked her way up, had really good jobs. She earned excellent money." His voice was tinged with sadness as he said: "Apparently she wanted to marry me, but being a typical bloke I was like – no, no, don't be ridiculous. I didn't want to settle down."

Martin opened a sizeable old Filofax to find Joyce's name. Her contact details had been TippExed over a number of times. "It was alarming really, how often she moved – at least once a year."

I asked Martin to appear in my film. I stressed how Joyce's story was a very modern one. She was born in 1965, the year the Post Office Tower opened, which Tony Benn later referred to as a symbol of our age – an age in which we worship the internet, television, mobile phones. I told him how ironic I thought it that Joyce should be forgotten and unreachable in this so-called period of communication.

Martin listened politely, thought for a while, and then said, "We'll see". It was not until a few years later, sitting in the same pub, that he finally agreed. "I can't say no, I've got to do it for her," he said then.

A few weeks after meeting Martin, I went to the Horn Pub in St Albans with John Ioannou, who was once friendly with both Martin and Joyce. Known as John the Greek, he was exuberant and talkative. He recalled reading the story about Joyce in a newspaper, but didn't connect it to the Joyce with whom he had once shared a house for a while. He told me he felt an enormous amount of guilt because he spoke to her on the phone in 2002, but never found the time to meet her.

He described his gang of home-counties friends whom Joyce had hung out with in the 80s. "We were a bunch of blaggers. We did things way above our class. A few of us came from money, but most of us didn't. We used to mix with proper posh people and go sailing, go to glitzy nightclubs. Right poseurs we were. We used to make up names. Joyce called herself Rachel Prejudice."

I showed him the photographs I'd gathered of Joyce. "The trouble with Joyce was she was very fanciable," he said. "Wherever she went and whatever she did, there were people trying to get her into bed. It was a burden that she was so beautiful and she was very clever, a lot more intelligent than she let on. I think she had several lives."

John asked what had attracted me to Joyce. I replied that I couldn't leave her to be forgotten – and that I had discovered there were a lot of things that connected us: we were exactly the same age, we shared a name – Carol, her middle name – and at one point we even lived on the same street. Joyce lost her mother when she was 11 and I was 11 when my father died, so I felt I understood something of the loss she had suffered. I told John that the title of the film, Dreams of a Life, captured what I was trying to do – dream up Joyce's life and ambitions through the information I gathered and the people who knew her.

John said: "I want to know Joyce's story myself, and that sounds ridiculous coming from someone who knew her. There must have been signs she would end this way, but if there were she covered them up with this happy-go-lucky, having-a-great-time act." John shook his head and sighed. "She died of neglect. We all loved her, but not enough to stop her dying."

On the train back to London, I reflected on how nobody she knew really worried about Joyce when she fell out of touch with them, as she often did – they just thought she was off somewhere having a better life than they were. Her aspirations and desires, her immaculate way of presenting herself, masked any deeper troubles she may have had.

As I continued my research I tracked down some of Joyce's former colleagues who were willing to appear in the film. Kim Bacon and Dan Roberts worked with Joyce at Ernst & Young, one of the biggest accountancy firms in the world. They told me Joyce worked for the company for four years and had a very responsible job in the treasury department, "moving the company's money around". It was during this period that Joyce was engaged for two years to someone I tracked down but who wishes to remain anonymous.

Her colleagues were surprised when she decided to quit in 2001. Kim said: "There do seem to be conflicting stories about what she did when she left." Joyce told some people she was going travelling with 20 people, and others that she had been headhunted. All that is known for sure about what happened to her in the time between her departure from the firm and her death is that she spent some time in a refuge for victims of domestic violence in Haringey.

Dan said: "I know it sounds odd, but it seems like we're talking about two different people. I just can't connect the Joyce who died to the Joyce that we knew." Kim nodded in agreement: "I mean she gave this impression of being a happy, bubbly person but it does make you wonder what was really going on."

I showed them the Sun article that started my quest. Kim studied the accompanying photograph of the bedsit. "The place she ended up living in doesn't tie up with her persona. I always imagined she lived in a really nice Victorian house, lovely furniture, nice things around her, everything immaculate and perfect. Not somewhere like that."

They looked at the photos of Joyce I'd gathered. "This is the sort of thing you'd imagine being on Facebook," Kim said. Dan agreed – "but we didn't have Facebook then. It's different now, you can keep in touch with people very easily." Dan looked around the pub we were in, where they used to socialise with Joyce. "It's shocking to think that two years after she left work she was dead," he said. Kim put the photos down. "I really don't understand," she said. "She was a very popular girl and I don't know why we didn't keep in touch. I feel a bit guilty about that."

As time went on I received a lot of messages via Friends Reunited from Joyce's old schoolfriends. All concurred that she was beautiful, well turned out, funny, down to earth, and all mentioned that she loved to sing – one message even urged me to tell the world about Joyce's fantastic singing voice.

It was two more years before I found Kirk Thorne, a musician, and a friend and landlord of Joyce's in the late 80s. Kirk had once recorded Joyce in his studio.

I sat with him in the garden of the same modern house in Wapping that Joyce had once occupied. He told me that since he received my message about Joyce he had spent hours speculating on how she ended up as she did. "I can't understand. She had a lot of friends and a good social life. She was not a girl that came in and sat in front of the telly. If she was white she could have been a debutante – she was upwardly mobile, a high flyer."

Kirk was especially surprised that by the age of 38, Joyce was living without a man. "Joyce was the kind of person that would worry most women. She was a threat. Good-looking, intelligent, successful and on a mission for the type of man all women are after."

He showed me around the studio he had built at the bottom of his garden. It was here that Joyce once dressed up as a maid and served tea to Captain Sensible, the punk legend. It was also here that she first fulfilled her dream of being a recording artist. Kirk had lost the tape, though at my insistence he promised me he would have another hunt for it. He wondered if Joyce might have been happier if she had pursued her singing and taken a different path in life. "She had a clique with all these City bankers – they didn't suit her, but she liked it," Kirk said. "I think she was on a search for something she wasn't going to find. I used to think that what she needed was a good black man. She was my flatmate, not my family, so I didn't tell her."
Catherine Clarke became good friends with Joyce while renting a room in Kirk's house. I tracked her down in Florida, where she recalled that Joyce only had one other close female friend. "Mostly it was men. Men who had crushes on her, men who followed her – there was always a story about a guy that had the hots for her. It was just unbelievable how intense guys would get with her."

Catherine said she was not surprised that Joyce ended up in a refuge for victims of domestic violence. "Guys would come on so heavy and not let go. I can only think she became isolated from her family because of a guy that she chose. Maybe she was ashamed of the situation she got herself into. To go into a women's refuge, for Joyce, would have been a big thing."

I tracked down another of Joyce's friend's – the American disco singer Judy Cheeks, who once took Joyce out to dinner with Stevie Wonder. On the phone from the States, Judy said she last spoke to Joyce in the late 90s and found her still looking for Mr Right. "I had no idea where she was heading. It appears no one did. I often thought of her and always assumed she had finally found her ideal husband, had a few kids and was happy."

Over time I received a number of phone calls from Joyce's former boyfriends. Mostly they were calling me for information, so disturbed were they that the Joyce they went out with could have ended up being so overlooked. Most of them didn't want to appear in the film, but were willing to give me snippets of information. Jason, for example, told me that when he met Joyce he was a working-class boy from a sink estate, and Joyce was five years older than him and wanted to be a pop star. "I used to resent her for that. I used to resent her for having dreams… what a fall from grace." Jason told me that before he went out with her, Joyce went out with a baronet and an MP, but he couldn't recall their names. He also thought that Joyce once knew the American soul singer Betty Wright.

So I wrote to Betty in Miami. A couple of months later I received a phone call from Alistair Abrahams, Betty's one-time tour manager and Joyce's former boyfriend. Betty had told him about my letter. Stunned by the news, he invited me over to see him in London the following day.

In his early 50s, with long dreadlocks swept back behind his shoulders, Alistair showed me into his living room. Originally from Zimbabwe, he delivered his accented words slowly and cautiously as he described Joyce and the two years they lived together in the early 90s. "There were a lot of exciting things happening to me and her arrival coincided with a lot of that change, so I used to call her my lucky charm. She was always immaculately attired down to the bows on her underwear. But she wasn't just physically beautiful, she had an aura about her."

Alistair explained that Joyce never really talked about her life before she met him. "Have you ever seen the movie The Man with No Name? That's how she was – she came with no past."

While Joyce lived with Alistair she came into contact with many of the musicians he knew and worked with. "We had great times. We had Jimmy Cliff to stay at the house, Gil Scott-Heron and Isaac Hayes came for dinner. For her it was exciting, vibrant, thrilling. It was a good time."

He asked me if I had found out how Joyce had died but I told him that not even the pathologist came to a conclusion. "Perhaps she suffered a fatal asthma attack, or do you think it was something more sinister?" he asked. I replied that Joyce's death would always be shrouded in mystery and open to speculation, but what was more important then dwelling on how she died was to remember her life.

"I was so committed to Joyce almost in a paternal way. I think that's what she wanted out of a relationship, someone she could rely and depend on. She was a chameleon in many ways – she adapted to the environment she was in. I introduced her to Ben E King and the next day she bought his album. After I'd introduced her to Gil Scott-Heron, when she met him again, she had this wonderful knowledge of him, she was asking him questions about the civil-rights movement and The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."

Alistair recalled the time he surprised Joyce by taking her to Wembley in 1990 to see a Nelson Mandela tribute concert. "Something very momentous happened – she met Nelson Mandela, she shook his hand. In fact I spoke to my brother yesterday and he thinks he may have seen her at the concert, when it was on the TV."

I ordered up the film of the concert, Nelson Mandela, International Tribute for a Free South Africa, from the BFI National Archive. I trawled through it, ever hopeful, constantly pausing when I spotted anyone remotely resembling Joyce. After a few fruitless hours I began to prepare myself for disappointment when the programme cut from the stadium crowds to Nelson Mandela backstage, addressing the musicians who had taken part in the show. As he ended his passionate speech they cheered in appreciation, and there was a cut to a wide shot from the rear of the room – featuring an array of backs of heads.

And then I saw her. It was Joyce, unarguably. She turned and smiled at someone behind her. Catching the light, her earrings gleamed. She turned back and I panicked, I had lost her.

But she turned around once more. It was Joyce – moving and alive. I had found her. The power of the moving image hit me, the power to resurrect.

I rewound the tape and timed Joyce's appearance. Four seconds. I slowed the footage down and watched. One hundred frames, hundreds of dancing pixels.

Joyce, who died alone in her bedsit, anonymous and seemingly forgotten, had once had her image transmitted live to millions of living rooms in the 61 countries where the show was broadcast.

The video cut away from Joyce to the Wembley crowd and I thought of her, backstage, in her element, on a high, talking to Anita Baker and Denzel Washington, shaking hands with Nelson Mandela, in a room with verifiable stars. She was 26 years old, ambitious, beautiful, full of hope for the future. She had her whole life ahead of her but in 13 years she would die and nobody would know and nobody would notice.

I resumed the tape and carried on watching the show, eager to experience what Joyce once had. Nelson Mandela arrived on stage to rapturous applause and the crowd sang, louder and louder, "You'll never walk alone".

Dreams of a Life, written and directed by Carol Morley, will be shown at the 2011 BFI London Film Festival. The film has been shortlisted for the Grierson award for best documentary at the LFF. It will go on general release in March 2012. www.dreamsofalife.com

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/oct/09/joyce-vincent-death-mystery-documentary

New advanced system to guard Russia from hi-tech surveillance, drone attacks

2013-11-18T09:06:00.003-08:00

Russia’s Defense Ministry has received the top-notch anti-radar system Krasukha-4. The system is designed to guard against aircraft-based electronic surveillance - including that carried out by drones.
Bryansk electromechanical plant has delivered 1RL257 Krasukha-4 broadband multifunctional jamming stations to the defense ministry, RIA Novosti reported on Sunday, citing a spokesman from the Radioelectronic Technologies group.

The stations, which will complement Krasukha-2 units already in use by the Russian army, will provide the military with powerful radar jamming capability.

While technical details of the units have remained top-secret, sources cited by Russian media have described the system as “unique.”

Krasukha-4 is able to effectively shield objects on the ground against radio-locating surveillance satellites, ground-based radars, or aircraft-installed Airborne Warning and Control Systems (AWACS), a source with knowledge of the system told Izvestiya.

The protective jamming shield may span up to a 300-kilometer radius, he said.

Moreover, interference caused by Krasukha-4 will render radio-controlled missile attacks ineffective. The system has been designed to counter attacks from enemies possessing advanced technologies, the source added.

More specifically, the new Russian system has been described as a tool against “flying radars,” such as the USAF E-8 Joint STARS aircraft, or reconnaissance satellites - like the United States’ Lacrosse satellite - and a means of protection against surveillance and combat unmanned aerial vehicles, otherwise known as drones.

Media sources named the Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk and the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator as drones which Krasukha-4 could guard ground objects and troops against.

Source: http://rt.com/news/russia-radar-jammer-drones-864/http://rt.com/news/russia-radar-jammer-drones-864/

Motorola wants to tattoo a mic on your throat

2013-11-10T10:40:00.000-08:00


Tattooed electronics? Commence conspiracy theory germination sequence now... (Credit: US Patent and Trademark Office/Motorola Mobility)

A patent application filed in 2012 by the Google-owned company and published Thursday details a wireless microphone that can be tattooed on the neck and connect to a smartphone.

For Motorola, the "touchless control" used on the Moto X could be just the beginning.

If a just-published patent application from Google-owned Motorola Mobility is any indication, the company is actually more interested in devices that you're always touching, like permanently. The patent, filed in 2012, details a wireless microphone that can be tattooed onto the throat.

According to the application:

The electronic skin tattoo can include an embedded microphone; a transceiver for enabling wireless communication with the MCD (mobile communication device); and a power supply configured to receive energizing signals from a personal area network associated with the MCD. A controller is communicatively coupled to the power supply. The controller can be configured to receive a signal from the MCD to initiate reception of an audio stream picked up from the throat region of the body for subsequent audio detection by the MCD under an improved signal-to-noise ratio than without the employment of the electronic skin tattoo.

So if I sit through a long inking procedure to turn my neck into a wirelessly powered and tethered microphone, the only major benefit I'll see in return is improved signal-to-noise ratio? I didn't even think a fancy bone-conducting Bluetooth headset was worth the extra expense. Would I at least get to choose my own tribal design for the tat?

What do you think? If this guy is willing to install his own Bluetooth health monitor sans anesthesia, does it make sense that we'll all soon be having our new smartphones installed by the local tattoo parlor?

(Via Engadget)

Source; http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57611545-1/motorola-wants-to-tattoo-a-mic-on-your-throat/

Larry Burrows' Vietnam Photos Still Haunt Us 47 Years Later

2013-11-03T08:45:00.001-08:00

In October of 1966, the Vietnam War had already been raging for nearly 11 years. Thousands of troops were still fighting, and in their midst a courageous photographer risked and ultimately lost his life documenting the horrors of one of the longest wars in U.S. history. As LIFE magazine wrote of Larry Burrows in a 1971 issue:

He had been through so much, always coming out magically unscathed, that a myth of invulnerability grew up about him. Friends came to believe he was protected by some invisible armor. But I don’t think he believed that himself. Whenever he went in harm’s way he knew, precisely, what the dangers were and how vulnerable he was.

Burrows had died that same year when his helicopter was shot down over Laos, together with three other photographers. Their tragic deaths are a harrowing reminder of the acute danger war correspondents face in doing their jobs, and of the endless dangers that armed forces and civilians face in the midst of violence.
For those left at home, there is little that conveys the horrors of war as thoroughly as photographs such as Burrows'.

Wounded Marine Gunnery Sgt. Jeremiah Purdie (center, with bandaged head) reaches toward a stricken comrade after a fierce firefight south of the DMZ, Vietnam, October 1966. (Larry Burrows—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

U.S. Marine in Vietnam, October 1966. (Larry Burrows—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

"Four Marines recover the body of a fifth as their company comes under fire near Hill 484." Vietnam, October 1966. NOTE: At right is the French-born photojournalist Catherine Leroy (1945 – 2006); she was cropped out of the version of this photo that originally ran in LIFE. (Larry Burrows—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

American Marines receive the sacrament of Communion during a lull in the fighting near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966. (Larry Burrows—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

You can find more of Burrows' incredible photos on the Life.com website.

New $5 device easily unlocks car doors for thieves in Winnipeg

2013-10-31T08:47:00.000-07:00

A new tool is allowing criminals across the world to break into cars without leaving a trace, and now that device has made its way to Winnipeg.

The new device can be purchased online for about $5 and sends an electromagnetic pulse through a car’s key area to unlock the vehicle.

Winnipegger Rick Henzel had no idea the technology existed, until his car was broken into early Sunday morning.

“We did find the glove box open, insurance papers stolen,” said Henzel.

At first, he thought his wife had left the doors unlocked, but a neighbour told him he had phoned the police early that morning when he heard noise outside.

Luckily, the whole thing was caught on tape. Henzel had installed security cameras on his property about a year ago when his car was broken into previously.

“They come running up into the screen. It’s a free for all,” he said. “They’re in that car as well and away they go. Just like that.”

Thieves can be seen applying a device to a car and then opening the door as if it is unlocked.

“It makes you feel a bit vulnerable to be honest with you because you feel like a victim,” said Henzel.
Michael Legary is a security expert with Seccuris. He said thieves are using the $5 devices to hack into vehicles’ computer systems.

"So just like we have to worry about our computers being hacked, our cars can be hacked as well,” said Legary. “That's something we didn't have to worry about a decade ago."
The device sends an electromagnetic pulse into the vehicle, tricking it into unlocking the door, much like a keyless entry key fob.

He said according to the device’s manufacturer, at least 19 of the devices have been shipped to Winnipeg in the past three months.

Legary said while you can’t prevent thieves from getting into your vehicle, you can keep them from getting your belongings, and he recommends not leaving anything, even your insurance papers, in your car unattended.

The device can be thwarted if the car’s keyless entry system is disabled, but you’ll have to visit a mechanic to have that done.

Henzel has reported the theft to police but said police officers appeared baffled by the device.

Source; http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/new-5-device-easily-unlocks-car-doors-for-thieves-in-winnipeg-1.2288826?cmp=rss

GMO Wheat can Silence Human Genes, Causes Early Death

2013-10-28T15:32:00.001-07:00

One Thing Everyone's Missing About GMO Foods

2013-10-27T03:36:00.002-07:00

The greatest intellectual crisis in politicized scientific issues is when inventors fail to anticipate the negative side effects of their creations. For example, the biochemists who manufactured early pesticides were not entirely aware of the ecological impacts of their work. The scientists who created the technology to produce electricity from fossil fuels could not have predicted the rise of acid rain, global warming, and the public health impact of pollutants. Genetically modified foods are the most recent example of this frightening trend.

Last week there was a massive protest against Monsanto, one of the chief developers of genetically modified crops. While Monsanto is a probelmatic company, and there are serious dangers associated with genetically modified crops, there are situations when the technology is appropriate. The question should not be whether or not to create genetically modified crops, but when it is appropriate to do so.

A genetically modified crop is a food that contains human-inserted genes. Scientists select genes with a specific purpose in mind, such as increasing a crop's resistance to heat. The food industry often takes genes that would not otherwise be found in a species and inserts them into the organism’s genetic makeup. It is a common misconception that such gene insertion does not occur in nature, when in fact viruses are capable of inserting genes into their hosts. What this all means is that organisms can be designed to fulfill a variety of purposes.

The biggest problem with genetically modified crops is the threat they pose to genetic diversity. When managing a species it is important to consider the genetic diversity of the population. The genetic diversity of a species can be thought of as the species' tool box for dealing with threats. Evolution works by selecting genes that increase the ability for a species to survive and reproduce. If a disease wipes out a chunk of a population, the survivors will pass on their disease-resistant genes to their offspring. However, if all the members of a species possess similar genes, their ability to survive threats becomes greatly diminished.

The scary thing about genetically modified organisms is that they have the potential to reduce the already limited amount of genetic diversity in individual crops to a miscroscopic level. If a small number of strains of a GMO (genetically modified organism) became dominant in agriculture, it would seriously imperil our food supply — a single disease could wipe out an entire food group. Humans cannot possibly anticipate every threat, so it's important to limit the spread of genetically modified foods. Given the importance of genetic diversity, genetically modified crops should only be used on a limited basis to address specific problem.

The question then becomes what modifications, if any, are worth considering. Genes that would increase the yield of crops would save lives in countries with starving populations, and crops that could grow in polluted or poor soils should be considered as well.

The merits of GMO technology must be considered on a case-by-case basis. On one hand, GMOs pose a serious threat to crops' genetic diversity. On the other, GMOs could allow us to feed the world's hungry and grow crops in inhospitable soil. We must recognize the threat of GMOs while also embracing the solutions they offer.

Source; http://www.policymic.com/articles/68515/one-thing-everyone-s-missing-about-gmo-foods

Scientists hail health benefits of black rice

2013-10-25T09:55:00.001-07:00

Black rice – revered in ancient China but overlooked in the West – could be one of the greatest "superfoods", scientists believe.

The cereal is low in sugar but packed with healthy fibre and plant compounds that combat heart disease and cancer. It was known as "forbidden rice" in ancient China because only nobles were allowed to eat it. Today black rice is mainly used in Asia for food decoration, noodles, sushi and desserts.
"Just a spoonful of black rice bran contains more health-promoting anthocyanin antioxidants than are found in a spoonful of blueberries, but with less sugar, and more fibre and vitamin E antioxidants," said Dr Zhimin Xu the food scientist who led the research.
"If berries are used to boost health, why not black rice and black rice bran? Especially, black rice bran would be a unique and economical material to increase consumption of health-promoting antioxidants."
Bran is the hard outer coating of a cereal grain. When rice is processed, millers remove the outer layers of the grains to produce brown rice or more refined white rice.
Research suggests that plant antioxidants, which mop up harmful molecules, can help protect arteries and prevent the DNA damage that leads to cancer.
Food manufacturers could potentially use black rice bran or bran extracts to make breakfast cereals, beverages, cakes, biscuits and other foods healthier, said Dr Xu, from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, US.
The scientists presented their findings yesterday at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston.

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/scientists-hail-health-benefits-of-black-rice-2063064.html

Your “Healthy” Diet Could Be Quietly Killing Your Brain

2013-10-18T14:52:00.001-07:00

I recently stumbled onto a book that opened my eyes in many ways to the misinformation plaguing Americans regarding healthy eating, particularly where it concerns brain health. The book, Grain Brain, by Dr. David Perlmutter, is mind-blowing—no pun intended—and disruptive to some long-standing beliefs about what our bodies require for optimal health.

"The brain thrives on a fat-rich, low-carbohydrate diet, which unfortunately is relatively uncommon in human populations today," he says. Carbohydrates typically thought of as healthy, even brown rice, 100% whole grain bread, or quinoa—mainstays of many of the most health-conscious kitchens—cause disorders like dementia, ADHD, chronic headaches, and Alzheimer’s, over a lifetime of consumption. By removing these carbohydrates from the diet—harbingers of inflammation, the true source of problems that plague our brains and hearts—and increasing the amount of fat and cholesterol we consume, we can not only protect our most valuable organ, but also potentially, undo years of damage. Cholesterol, for example, long vilified by the media and medical community, actually promotes neurogenesis (the birth of new brain cells) and communication between neurons, to the degree that studies have shown that higher levels of serum cholesterol correlates to more robust cognitive prowess.

The book is also not without serious consideration for cardiovascular system, citing study after study to reaffirm that it’s not fat and cholesterol, but carbohydrates and certain fats—and not the fats that you would think—that are the true enemies of heart and vascular health. Guidelines to eating for above-average health and longevity are not without nuance, but Grain Brain lays out an easy-to-understand roadmap packed with the latest science in a colloquial writing style, never once doubting the ability of its audience to keep up.
As the only doctor in the country who is both a board-certified neurologist and Fellow of The American Board of Nutrition, he deftly covers a topic rarely discussed: How what we eat affects the health of our brain. And considering that deaths from Alzheimer's increased 68 percent between 2000 and 2010, the timing of Grain Brain couldn’t be better.

After reading it, I couldn't wait to sit down with him for a Q&A. (My questions are in bold.)
You’ve stated that carbs of any kind, from natural sugars in fruit to the complex carbs in quinoa and a whole wheat bagel, are detrimental to the brain, to the point that the most serious degenerative brain disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease, are now being referred to as “Type 3 diabetes”. What’s the science behind this?

Carbohydrate consumption leads to blood sugar elevation obviously in the short term, but also, in the long term as well. Persistently challenging the pancreas to secrete insulin to deal with dietary carbohydrate ultimately leads to insulin resistance, a condition directly associated with increased risk for dementia. What’s worse, insulin resistance is the forerunner of type 2 diabetes, a condition associated with a doubling of Alzheimer’s risk. In a recent report in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease., Mayo Clinic researchers showed that individuals favoring carbohydrates in their diets had a remarkable 89% increased risk for developing dementia as contrasted to those whose diets contained the most fat. Having the highest levels of fat consumption was actually found to be associated with an incredible 44% reduction in risk for developing dementia.

So-called “complex carbs” may actually represent a more significant threat to health than simple sugar in that they may not only raise blood sugar, but keep it elevated for a more prolonged period of time. Foods can be evaluated by their glycemic index which measures not only how high blood sugar will be elevated by the consumption of a particular food, but also takes into account how long it will have this effect. So the higher the glycemic index, the more damaging are the effects of elevated blood sugar. Whole grain bread for example has a dramatically higher glycemic index when compared to pure table sugar.

Ultimately, continued challenges of our bodies with high glycemic index foods leads to elevation of fasting blood sugars. This is of paramount importance as recently published in New England Journal of Medicine. In this report, researchers found that a fasting blood sugar even in the range that most doctors would consider to be normal, levels far below what would qualify for the diagnosis, are powerfully associated with developing dementia.

In your book you challenge some of the most commonly accepted dogmas regarding nutrition, namely that both saturated fat and cholesterol are not only benign, but imperative to brain health. If someone is suffering from brain dysfunction, would you actually recommend that they consume more red meat, whole eggs, coconut oil as treatment?

Two forms of fat that are vitally important for brain health are cholesterol and saturated fat. In the Mayo Clinic study mentioned above, it was found that those individuals consuming the most saturated fat experienced a 36% reduction in risk for developing dementia. And this comes on the heels of data now indicating that saturated fat consumption has absolutely no relevance in the area of cardiovascular risk as recently described by Dr. Glen Lawrence in the journal, Advances in Nutrition.

Saturated fat is a fundamental building block for brain cells. It’s certainly interesting to consider that one of the richest sources of saturated fat in nature is human breast milk.

Similarly, cholesterol is vital for a well functioning brain. Cholesterol functions as a brain protective antioxidant. It is the raw material from which our bodies make vitamin D, a fundamental player in preserving brain function. In addition, cholesterol is the precursor for the sex hormones estrogen, progesterone and testosterone – all of which contribute to healthy brain function. While the brain constitutes about 2-3% of our total body weight, an impressive 25% of the body’s cholesterol is found in the brain. So when the FDA last year began requiring consumer warnings on certain cholesterol lowering medications related to memory decline and other cognitive issues, it wasn’t surprising. Indeed, it has now been shown that in the elderly, those folks whose cholesterol levels are the highest may have as much as a 70% risk reduction for dementia.
So yes, I am absolutely an advocate for grass-fed beef, pasture raised eggs, and coconut oil is on the top of my list. Getting these life sustaining, brain nurturing fats back on the plate while substantially reducing carbohydrates paves the way to brain preservation, enhancement of function and reducing the risk for Alzheimer’s disease – a disease for which there is no treatment whatsoever.

I’ve read many reports about statins, drugs commonly prescribed to lower cholesterol, like Lipitor—netting pharmaceutical companies $35 billion in sales in 2010—producing dementia-like effects in patients, which seems like an awful side effect. Why has the public not made a bigger deal of this?

In general, the public knowledge base and thus decision-making behaviors are far more influenced by advertisement than with current science. The widespread demonization of cholesterol has been incredibly monetized as you well point out. My mission is to offer up the other side of this debate to the public forum so caveat emptor can more appropriately apply.

You reference many studies that challenge conventional wisdom about heart health, most interestingly that people with high cholesterol and low cholesterol tend to have just as many heart attacks and die just as frequently. Should a diagnosis of “high cholesterol” from ones internist be alarming? Are there any cases in which it should be controlled by medicine or diet?

Over the past decade we have witnessed a changing landscape in terms of refinement of the cholesterol markers as they relate to cardiovascular risk. Whereas cholesterol itself was first targeted, emphasis soon moved to LDL as it was given the name “bad cholesterol,” despite the fact that LDL’s role is to deliver life sustaining cholesterol to every one of our body’s cells. I’ll say parenthetically that whatever marketing team attached the “bad “ surname to LDL must have been well rewarded! We then saw emphasis move to the importance of so-called “particle size” as being an important marker of cardiovascular risk – and rightfully so, size really does matter.

Now the focus of attention has gone back to LDL in recognizing that it truly represents a potent risk factor when it has become oxidized. Oxidation represents the damage that can occur to proteins by the action of chemicals called free radicals. So, measurement of oxidized LDL is now showing up on comprehensive heart disease blood panels, and with good reason. The empowering science here is that LDL gets oxidized when it is bound to sugar, a process called glycation. And this process is directly related to fasting blood sugar and therefore relates to a person’s choice to consume carbohydrates – or not. In evaluating cholesterol in and of itself, I do not define any upper limit in terms of cardiac liability.

A recent report correlated higher intake of omega 3 fish oils—which we know from Grain Brain to be very healthy and protective to the brain—with a greater incidence of acquiring prostate cancer. I was always under the assumption that the more omega 3's you could consume, the better (while minimizing omega 6's, their pro-inflammatory cousin). What's your take on the study?

The study had actually nothing to do with taking fish oils or any supplement for that matter. And yet spinmeisters would have you believe that this report dealt with people taking supplements compared to those who did not. What the study showed was that those men whose one time measurement of the omega-3 DHA was higher than others were found to have a miniscule increased risk for developing prostate cancer. The explanation that the public did not get was that because most men get their DHA from fish consumption as opposed to supplementation, and that the vast majority of fish consumed is farm raised, eating farm raised fish poses a risk for developing prostate cancer. And that is certainly no surprise.

My grandmother is 96 years old and has never even heard of gluten. Because of the seemingly overnight hysteria surrounding this grain protein, some have written it off as a fad. How do you refute this?

In writing Grain Brain, I reviewed more than 250 peer-reviewed references, many of which specifically address this issue and are discussed in great detail. Gluten free isn’t new or a fad. It’s the diet that humans have consumed for more than 99.9% of our existence on this planet. I would direct your readers to recent publication by my friend and colleague Dr. Alessio Fasano from Harvard. I welcome the hysteria as it is directing attention to an absolutely fundamental issue in our modern nutrition.

If someone is not suffering from celiac disease, and generally feels okay after consuming bread—even 100% whole grain bread—how do you convince them that wheat is as detrimental as you claim in the book?

I must and should defer to the most well respected peer-reviewed literature that now indicates that gluten consumption leads to the amplification of a specific protein called zonulin which increases permeability of both the gut and blood brain barrier as described by Dr. Fasano in the above reference. Gut permeability activates inflammation and inflammation is a cornerstone of some of the most pernicious brain disorders including Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson’s disease. What is so compelling in a very positive light is that this occurs in all humans and may be the key to a vast number of human maladies including a vast number of other inflammatory disorders as well as autoimmune diseases, and even cancer.
In addition, the gluten issue aside, whole grain bread has an incredibly high glycemic index and this poses an equally powerful threat to brain health.

What’s your daily diet like? What's currently in your fridge?

I really love to eat and maintain the diet described in Grain Brain. I generally start my day with a three egg omelet made with kale or spinach and covered with olive oil. I drink a cup of coffee with breakfast along with water. At lunch I might have steamed vegetables, salmon, a green salad and an iced tea. And at dinner I again load up with above ground vegetables by themselves or along with wild fish or grass fed beef. I drink one or two glasses of wine each week, but statistically I should drink more. That’s a work in progress.
As to your second question, there’s not much in my fridge at home as we try to keep food as fresh as possible and as of this writing, my wife and I are traveling.

Source; http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-optimalist/201310/your-healthy-diet-could-be-quietly-killing-your-brain

Think You Can Live Offline Without Being Tracked? Here's What It Takes

2013-10-17T09:10:00.000-07:00

We asked the most privacy-aware people we could find what it would take to go off the radar. Hint: You're going to need to do more than throw away your laptop.

Nico Sell, the cofounder of a secure communication app called Wickr, has appeared on television twice. Both times, she wore sunglasses to prevent viewers from getting a full picture of what she looks like.

Sell, also an organizer of the hacker conference Def Con, places herself in the top 1% of the “super paranoid.” She doesn’t have a Facebook account. She keeps the device that pays her tolls in a transmission-proof envelope when it’s not in use. And she assumes that every phone call she makes and every email she sends will be searchable by the general public at some point in the future.

Many of her friends once considered her habits to be of the tin-foil-hat-wearing variety. But with this summer's revelations of the NSA's broad surveillance program, they’re starting to look a little more logical. “For the last couple of months,” Sell says, “My friends that are not in the security industry come up to me, and I hear this all the time, ‘You were right.’ ”

But even as more people become aware they are being tracked throughout their daily lives, few understand to what extent. In a recent Pew Internet study, 37% of respondents said they thought it was possible to be completely anonymous online. From experts like Sell, you'll get a different range of answers about whether it's possible to live without any data trail: "100% no," she says.

The people who have actually attempted to live without being tracked--most often due to a safety threat--will tell you that security cameras are just about everywhere, RFID tags seem to be in everything, and almost any movement results in becoming part of a database. “It’s basically impossible for you and I to decide, as of tomorrow, I’m going to remain off the radar and to survive for a month or 12 months,” says Gunter Ollmann, the CTO of security firm IOActive, who in his former work with law enforcement had several coworkers who dedicated themselves to remaining anonymous for the safety of their families. "The amount of prep work you have to do in order to stay off the radar involves years of investment leading up to that."

Fast Company interviewed the most tracking-conscious people we could find about their strategies for staying anonymous to different degrees. Here are just a handful of daily, offline tasks that get more complicated if you're avoiding surveillance.

1. Getting Places
A few years ago, a man who goes by the Internet handle “Puking Monkey” noticed devices reading his toll pass in places where there weren’t any tolls. He assumed that they were being used to track drivers’ movements. “People would say, 'Well you don’t know that, because it doesn’t tell you when it tracks you,'” he tells Fast Company. “I said, 'Okay, I’ll go prove it.' ”

He rigged his pass to make a mooing cow noise every time a device read his toll payment tag. And sure enough, it went off in front of Macy’s, near Time Square, and in several other places where there was no tollbooth in sight.

It turns out the city tracks toll passes in order to obtain real-time traffic information, a benign enough intention. But what worries people like Puking Monkey about being tracked is rarely a database’s intended purpose. It's that someone with access to the database will misuse it, like when NSA employees have spied on love interests, A U.K. immigration officer once put his wife on a list of terrorist suspects in order to prevent her from flying into the country. Or that it will be used for a purpose other than one it was built for, like when social security numbers were issued for retirement savings and then expanded to become universal identifiers. Or, most likely, that it will be stolen, like the many times a hacker group called Anonymous gains access to someone's personal data and posts it online for public viewing. By one security company's count, in 2012 there were 2,644 reported data breeches involving 267 million records.

In order to stop his toll pass from being tracked, Puking Monkey keeps it sealed in the foil bag it came in when he's not driving through a toll. That only stops that data trail (minus toll points). Automatic license plate readers, often mounted to a police car or street sign, are also logging data about where cars appear. They typically take photos of every license plate that passes them and often these photos remain stored in a database for years. Sometimes they are linked with other databases to help solve crimes.

Puking Monkey avoids license-plate readers by keeping his old, non-reflective license plate, which is more difficult to read than newer, reflective models. Others who share his concerns salt their license plates, add bumper guards or otherwise obscure the writing--say by driving with the hatch down or driving with a trailer hatch attached—in order to avoid being tracked.

But that still doesn’t account for the tracking devices attached to the car itself. To identify tires, which can come in handy if they’re recalled, tire manufacturers insert an RFID tag with a unique code that can be read from about 20 feet away by an RFID reader. "I have no way to know if it’s actually being tracked, but there are unique numbers in those tires that could be used that way," Puking Monkey says.

He uses a camera flash to zap his tires with enough energy to destroy the chips.

2. Buying things
Depending on your level of concern, there are several ways to produce less data exhaust when making purchases. None of the privacy experts who I spoke with sign up for loyalty cards, for instance. “It’s the link between your home address, what you’re purchasing, age, your movements around the country, when you’re shopping in different locations, that is tied to purchases you’re making in-store,” Ollmann says. In a recently publicized example, Target used data collected from loyalty cards to deduce when its customers were pregnant--in some cases, before they had shared the news with their families.

Tom Ritter, a principal security consultant at iSEC Partners, has come up with a creative way to subvert loyalty tracking without giving up discounts. When he sees someone has a card on their key chain, he asks if he can take a photo of the bar code to use with his own purchases. They get extra points, and he gets discounts without giving up any of his privacy.

What you buy can paint a pretty good picture of what you’re doing, and many people aren’t willing to leave that information in a credit card company's database either. Adam Havey, an artist who makes anti-surveillance gear, puts all of his purchases on a credit card registered under a fake name. Then he uses the credit card in his actual name to pay the bill (Update: Harvey clarified that this is a technique he heard about from Julia Angwin, who is writing a book about surveillance). Ollmann buys prepaid gift cards with no attribution back to him to do his online shopping.

The most intense privacy seekers have a strict cash-only policy--which can mean they need to get paid in cash. At Ollmann’s old law enforcement job, one employee didn’t get paid, but vaguely “traded his services for other services.”

“A barter system starts to appear if you want to live without being tracked,” Ollmann says.

3. Having Friends
Friends can be an impediment to a life off the radar. For one, they probably think they’re doing you a favor when they invite you to a party using Evite, add you to LinkedIn or Facebook, or keep your information in a contact book that they sync with their computer.

But from your perspective, as someone trying to remain as untraceable as possible, they are selling you out. “Basically what they’ve done is uploaded all of my contact information and connected it to them,” Sell says.
Same goes for photos, and their geolocation metadata, when they're added to social networking sites. Sell, with her sunglasses, is not alone in being concerned about putting her appearance online. At some security events, where there are often speakers and attendees with reasons to keep off the radar, organizers distribute name tags with different color stickers. The stickers indicate whether each attendee is okay with having his or her photo taken.

Sure, it seems paranoid today. But Facebook and Twitter already run photos posted on their sites through a Microsoft-developed system called PhotoDNA in order to flag those who match known child pornography images. Most would not argue with the intention to find and prosecute child pornographers, though it's not difficult for privacy activists to imagine how the same technology could be expanded to other crimes. "Every time you upload a photograph to Facebook or put one on Twitter for that matter you are now ratting out anybody in that frame to any police agency in the world that’s looking for them," digital privacy advocate Eben Moglen told BetaBeat last year during a rant against one of its reporters. "Some police agencies in the world are evil. That’s a pretty serious thing you’ve just done."

Ritter says he (not his company) personally thinks someone will build a facial recognition algorithm to scan the Internet within the next 10 years. “I can just imagine them opening it up where you would submit a Facebook photo of your friend, and it would show all the images that match it,” he says. “We have the algorithms, we know how to crawl the Internet. It’s just a matter of putting the two together and getting a budget.”

4. Just About Everything Else
It’s almost impossible to think of all the data you create on a daily basis. Even something as simple as using electricity is creating data about your habits. It’s more than whether or not you turned the lights on--it’s how many people are in your house and when you’re usually around.

RFID tags aren’t just in tires, they’re in your clothing, your tap-to-pay credit cards, and your dry cleaning. Ollmann zaps his T-shirts in the microwave. Others carry an RFID-blocking wallet to avoid having their RFID-enabled cards read when they're not making a purchase.

Maybe you've thought about the cameras that stores use to track customer movements. But cameras are also in your television, in your computer, and on the front of your phone. Earlier this year, security experts discovered a way to hack into Samsung Smart TVs and surreptitiously turn on the built-in camera, allowing anyone who exploited the security hole to watch you as you watched TV. Though the vulnerability has since been fixed, it demonstrated that the security of connected objects isn't guaranteed. Sell responded by covering all of the cameras in her household electronics with masking tape.

What makes totally avoiding surveillance really difficult is that even if you've thought of everything--to the point where you're covering your tablet's front-facing camera with masking tape--you can always think of more ways your data could be misused. Because you're constantly trying to prevent something that hasn't necessarily happened yet, the precautions you can take are just as endless.

Sometimes, as in the case of the NSA scandal, you find out that they were warranted. Most of the time, you never really know.

Ritter, for instance, recently met an insurance executive who always pays for meals with cash because he believes some day that data will be linked to his coverage. “I’m not saying this is a definite thing that happens,” Ritter says. “but I don’t see any definite reason why it couldn’t."

"And that kind of concerns me, ya know?”

Source; http://www.fastcompany.com/3019847/think-you-can-live-offline-without-being-tracked-heres-what-it-takes

4+ Reasons Why Onions may be the Next Big Superfood

2013-10-16T10:52:00.001-07:00

The term superfood is thrown around loosely, but it always points to the same thing: an incredibly healthful, natural food that can boost your health in numerous ways. Green tea, berries, and turmeric are just a few that could be considered superfoods, but rarely do we think of onions when we are talking about these dietary golden-children. Still, the health benefits of onions are what make this savory delight a potent health-booster.
Most of the benefits of onions come from something called quercetin. Quercetin is a powerful flavonoid, or type of antioxidant, that provides numerous benefits throughout the body by protecting cells from free radical damage. Onions are one of the top dietary sources of this powerful compound.
Onions are also rich in sulfur, vitamin C, manganese, fiber, vitamin B6, folate, and potassium. All of these together add up to a wealth of benefits. Over the past several years, scientists have begun to unlock all of the health secrets of these layered veggies. Some of the benefits they’ve found include:

1. Reduced Cancer Risk - Several studies have connected quercetin with reduced cancer risk. One study in particular found that onions combined with turmeric create a synergistic effect that reduced both the size and number of precancerous legions in the intestine, reducing colon cancer risk. Another study, this one from France, found that women who ate more garlic and onions had a lesser chance of developing breast cancer.

2. Improved Oral Health - Contrary to common sense, which tells us onions make your breath stink so can’t be all that great for your teeth, chewing raw onion is known to improve the strength of teeth and kill problem-causing bacteria that can lead to tooth decay.

3. Cardiovascular Benefits - There are many cardiovascular benefits to eating onions. Researchers with the University of Utah found that quercetin is able to significantly reduce high blood pressure in hypertensive adults. The sulfur in onions may also be able to improve cholesterol levels and red blood cell health.

4. Anti-Inflammatory Powers - Quercetin, the star of onions, is known to have powerful anti-inflammatory benefits. According to Arthritis Today, this is why it can aid in the treatment of arthritis. But anti-inflammatory benefits may also help fight off inflammatory diseases like diabetes and more.

Onions are also good for relieving clogged sinuses, soothing an earache, relieving the pain of a bee sting, and detoxifying the body. As an added bonus, they are very versatile in the kitchen and can be cooked with just about any dish or eaten raw on a salad.

Source: http://naturalsociety.com/4-reasons-onions-called-superfood/#ixzz2huOXecNZ

5 Actions To Take During Non-GMO Month

2013-10-15T06:02:00.000-07:00

Did you know that October is Non-GMO Month? The GMO Project created this event to raise awareness about the issue, and to use it as an opportunity to coordinate and speak up about “our right to know what’s in our food and to choose non-GMO.” That is the purpose of the organization’s web site: to spread the word and to create and help us participate in events in our communities.

As I wrote last year at this time, this is a great time to get involved and to take a stand and support products, businesses, and organizations that take the Non- GMO pledge.

Here are some specific ways that you can take action.

1. Make your own personal pledge to support products that do not use GMO‘s, buy organic products, choose only Non-GMO Verified foods, and boycott companies that use GMOs in any of their products. You can make sure products are Non-GMO Verified by using the Non-GMO Project’s product search page. It lists over 3000 products.

2. Use your “real“ voice and share your opinion with your local, state and federal legislators, and companies that support GMOs, like Monsanto. Let them know that you want further scientific research on the health effects of GMOs and that you want labeling of GMOs so that we as consumers can make informed decisions. Support current campaigns in support of GMO labeling, like the one in Washington State set for the November 5 ballot. And, find out if there’s a ballot initiative in your local community or state, and spread the word, volunteer with the campaign, or donate to the cause.

3. Get educated and educate your friends, family, and local community. The Institute for Responsible Technology offers all you need to know about GMO’s with simple explanations so that you can educate others.

4. Attend an organized Non-GMO event in your area or volunteer at an event. While there were global marches held on October 12, there are still plenty of other events throughout the month.

5. Support only non-GMO seeds by saving seeds, joining a seed library, having a seed swap, or simply by purchasing non-GMO seed.

Related
4 Potential Risks of Eating GMO Foods
17 Essential Reasons to Eat Organic Food
5 Non-GMO Halloween Treats to Share

Source: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/5-actions-to-take-during-non-gmo-month.html#ixzz2hnMzZCo2

8 Food Risks Going Unmonitored During the Shutdown

2013-10-12T15:01:00.001-07:00

Furloughed FDA inspectors can't look out for bacteria, metals and other contaminants.

Among the ostensibly “non-essential” services on hold during the government shutdown is the Food and Drug Administration’s food inspection program.

Within the country, as the Huffington Post points out, that means as many as 80 food production facilities each day may be going uninspected (although an FDA spokesman clarified that an unclear portion of those will be carried out by state agriculture and public health departments).

Food coming from outside the U.S. is also going unmonitored. As Food Safety News first reported, meat inspectors at the USDA are still on duty, but food-safety workers at the FDA are not allowed to use their cellphones, check their emails or, most important, inspect imported food. Normally, according to Quartz, the FDA blocks imports from tens of thousands of facilities with records of violations.

Although the agency says it will continue to act on “ high-risk recalls,” Caroline Smith DeWaal, the food safety director for the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest, doubts that will be enough. “They’re underfunded in that area generally, but no imports are being inspected for safety right now,” DeWaal told the Christian Science Monitor. “People could certainly target the US for products that night [sic] not be accepted elsewhere.”

Quartz calls out shrimp as a particularly dangerous import, but estimates that 90 percent of the foreign seafood, half of the fruit and one-fifth of the vegetables consumed by Americans is currently entering the country unchecked. Below, some foods on “red alert” that, were the government operating as intended, the furloughed inspectors would be watching out for:

1. Lead in candy: The FDA has had imported candy on red alert since 1994, when a contaminated treat entered the country via Mexico. While lead in packaging hasn't occurred recently, they still see cases of lead coming from unwashed chili peppers used as an ingredient.

2. Unapproved drugs in seafood: A number of international aquaculture operations on are alert for using unapproved drugs in that could make seafoodunsafe for consumers.

3. Mad cow disease risk in supplements: The USDA's prohibition on imports of meat from countries with a history of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease, doesn't apply to dietary supplements, prompting the FDA to closely monitor shipments for the disease which, as it notes, is "extremely resistant to activation by normal disinfection or sterilization procedure."

4. Cocaine in tea: The FDA's been on alert ever since 1986, when the DEA cracked down on herbal tea made from "decocainized coca leaves" sent to Hawaii, Georgia, Chicago and various East Coast locations.

5. Melamine in milk: Milk products from China have been flagged since the 2008 infant formula scandal, in which thousands of babies were sickened, and several died, after consuming contaminated formula. The problem of melamine, according to the FDA, is a recurring one -- inspection officials are also on the lookout for anything containing milk as an ingredient, including yogurt, frozen desserts, biscuits, cakes and cookies, taffy-like soft candy products, chocolates and beverages.

6. Metals in fruit juice: Heavy lead and arsenic contamination has been found in fruit juice concentrates from Argentina and China. A single 8 ounce serving of grape juice found in a shipment from 2002 contained three times the amount of lead judged to be tolerable for children.

7. Bacteria in cheese: A laundry list of contaminants, from salmonella to E. coli, have been found in imported cheese from around the world. The FDA also looks out for the use of nitrates in cheese and other dairy products.

8. Pathogens in produce: Because fresh produce is likely to be consumed raw and follows complex distribution patterns, disease outbreaks from contaminated imports is likely to be widespread and difficult to contain. As such, fruits and vegetables from a number of countries are on red alert.

Source; http://www.alternet.org/8-food-risks-going-unmonitored-during-shutdown

How Far Are We From a Super-Pandemic?

2013-10-10T12:45:00.001-07:00


All it takes is a few biological tricks for a virus to cause widespread infection.

Fall is flu season and this year, as usual, federal health officials are asking the public to get their annual flu vaccine shot.

But scientists say there are much more deadly bugs lurking out there that could someday make the jump from local outbreak to a worldwide super pandemic that could wipe out people across the globe. All it takes is a few biological tricks for a microscopic virus to turn into a raging killer like the 1918 Spanish flu virus that killed 50 to 100 million people, or the SARS virus that started in China in 2003 and spread to 37 countries in just a few weeks. It eventually killed fewer than 800 people.

This year, two contagions that are scaring epidemiologists the most are another Asian virus called H7N9, and MERS, or Middle East respiratory syndrome. Both appeared in 2012.

Going Viral: Pandemics in Fiction and Fact

What does it take to make the jump? Medical researchers say nightmare bugs are quick to evolve, resistant to treatment, have lethal power and the ability to spread from person to person, usually through the air.

To fight these viruses, scientists are deploying new tools of genetic screening to identify the evil-doers, as well as old-fashioned public health measures to quickly isolate patients and stop an epidemic’s spread."The two most critical things are virulence and transmissibility," said Scott Dowell, director of global disease detection and emergency response for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

Dowell was part of the CDC team in Bankok, Thailand, that responded to early reports of the SARS outbreak in 2003. Even though that epidemic eventually did not kill as many people as expected, he said the outbreak scared medical experts because of its incredibly fast spread.

New Sars-Like Bug: Pandemic Potential?

"In the thick of it, it wasn't clear what direction things were going to go," Dowell told Discovery News. "It was an impressive and frightening time."

SARS -- severe acute respiratory syndrome -- is a member of the corona-virus family of microbes (same as the common cold). It originated in the farms of China's southern Guangdong Province where it made the leap from farm animals to humans in November 2002. It did that by reassembling its genetic material to take over host cells and replicate.

By April 2003, it had spread throughout Asia and was killing one out of every 10 infected patients. Dowell said the only things that stopped its spread were international cooperation and the ability to quarantine people who got infected.

By summer of 2003, the outbreak was contained after infecting more than 9,000 people.

Today, fears are rising about a new virus, H7N9, that started in poultry in China and infected 130 people in April 2013, killing 44. Luckily, there hasn't been any evidence of human-to-human spread, but researchers at the National Institutes of Health have just begun the first vaccine clinical trial for H7N9 at nine hospitals across the United States.

The CDC plans to "build" the latest version of the bird flu virus to use it in its vaccine.

In Saudi Arabia, doctors are watching the spread of MERS, another corona-virus that has been linked to four Middle Eastern nations but also has spread to Europe. So far, nearly half of the 114 people who contracted the virus have died.

Dowell says that researchers are slowly making progress in developing drugs to treat some of these respiratory viruses, which are normally immune to anti-biotics. That's due to advancements in treating another virus, HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS.

While the CDC and NIH are engaging in basic research and epidemiology to understand these killer diseases, some experts say there's a big gap when it comes to drug development.

Diseases That Just Won't Quit

"There isn't a lot of incentive on the part of industry to make the major investment, $700 million to $1 billion for each drug," said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases.

"There's a big market for Lipitor, or for a Viagra-like drug because the pharmaceutical companies know when they will make the drug there will be hundreds of millions of people taking it."

Fauci says he's been working to develop partnerships between NIH and drugmakers to get ready for the next outbreak or drug-resistant superbug.

Source; http://news.discovery.com/human/health/virual-super-pandemic-how-far-1309181.htm

Russian, German Warships to Train Jointly in Baltic Sea

2013-10-09T11:10:00.002-07:00

MOSCOW, October 7 (RIA Novosti) – Russian-German naval exercises, codenamed PASSEX, will be held on Monday in the Gulf of Finland, the press service of Russia’s Western Military District said.
The exercises will involve Russia’s newest Baltic Fleet warship, the Project 20380 Boiky corvette and Germany’s Karlsruhe frigate.

«During the joint exercise in the Gulf of Finland the ships will test communication and train joint maneuvers,” the press service said in a statement.

The naval maneuvers will be the final part of the German frigate’s visit to St. Petersburg, which began on October 2.

Source; http://en.ria.ru/military_news/20131007/183979456/Russian-German-Warships-to-Train-Jointly-in-Baltic-Sea.html

Russia urges UN climate report to include geoengineering

2013-10-07T08:57:00.005-07:00

The Russian government is asking for 'planet hacking' to be included in the climate science report, leaked documents show

Russia is pushing for next week's landmark UN climate science report to include support for controversial technologies to geoengineer the planet's climate, according to documents obtained by the Guardian.

As climate scientists prepare to gather for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Stockholm to present the most authoritative state of climate science to date, it has emerged the Russian government is asking for "planet hacking" to be included in the report. The IPCC has not included geoengineering in its major assessments before.

The documents seen by the Guardian show Russia is asking for a conclusion of the report to say that a "possible solution of this [climate change] problem can be found in using of [sic] geoengineering methods to stabilise current climate." Russia also highlighted that its scientists are developing geoengineering technologies.

Geoengineering aims to cool the Earth by methods including spraying sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight, or fertilising the oceans with iron to create carbon-capturing algal blooms.

Such ideas are increasingly being discussed by western scientists and governments as a plan B for addressing climate change, with the new astronomer royal, Professor Sir Martin Rees, calling last week for such methods to buy time to develop sources of clean energy. But the techniques have been criticised as a way for powerful, industrialised nations to dodge their commitments to reduce carbon emissions.

Some modelling has shown geoengineering could be effective at reducing the Earth's temperature, but manipulation of sensitive planetary systems in one area of the world could also result in drastic unintended consequences globally, such as radically disrupted rainfall.

Responding to efforts to discredit the climate science with a spoiler campaign in advance of the report, the chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra K Pachauri, said he was confident the high standards of the science in the report would make the case for climate action. He said: "There will be enough information provided so that rational people across the globe will see that action is needed on climate change."

The Russian scientist Yuri Izrael, who has participated in IPCC geoengineering expert groups and was an adviser to the former Russian president Vladimir Putin, conducted an experiment in 2009 that sprayed particles from a helicopter to assess how much sunlight was blocked by the aerosol plume. A planned test in Britain that would have used a balloon attached to a 1km hose to develop equipment for spraying was prevented after a public outcry.

Observers have suggested that Russia's admission that it is developing geoengineering may put it in violation of the UN moratorium on geoengineering projects established at the Biodiversity Convention in 2010 and should be discussed on an emergency basis when the convention's scientific subcommittee meets in Montreal in October.

Civil society organisations have previously raised concerns that expert groups writing geoengineering sections of the IPCC report were dominated by US, UK and Canadian geoengineering advocates who have called for public funding of large-scale experiments or who have taken out commercial patents on geoenginering technologies. One scientist who served as a group co-chair, David Keith of Harvard University, runs a private geoengineering company, has planned tests in New Mexico, and is publicising a new book called The Case for Climate Engineering.

Nearly 160 civil society, indigenous and environmental organisations signed a letter in 2011 urging caution and calling on the IPCC not to legitimise geoengineering.

Silvia Ribeiro, Latin America director of the technology watchdog ETC Group, said: "We have been warning that a few geoengineering advocates have been trying to hijack the IPCC for their agenda. We are now seeing a deliberate attempt to exploit the high profile and credibility of this body in order to create more mainstream support for extreme climate engineering. The public and policymakers need to be on guard against being steamrollered into accepting dangerous and immoral interventions with our planet, which are a false solution to climate change. Geoengineering should be banned by the UN general assembly."

Matthew Watson, a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol's Earth sciences department and one of the team behind the cancelled balloon project, said: "In general ought the IPCC to be thinking about geoengineering? Yes. But do I want to see unilateralism or regionalism affect the debate? Certainly not. The people who don't like geoengineering will suggest the IPCC is a method for normalising it."

He added: "The IPCC has to be very careful about how it handles this [geoengineering] because it is clearly a very significant output that people are very mindful of."

While the IPCC is intended to be a scientific advisory panel, government delegates have been reviewing the summary report and make final decisions about it in Stockholm at the end of the month.
Sweden, Norway and Germany expressed more scepticism about geoengineering and asked that the report underline its potential dangers.

"The information on geoengineering options is too optimistic as it does not appropriately reflect the current lack of knowledge or the high risks associated with such methods," noted the German government.
Geoengineering is expected to play a much larger role in the next IPCC reports coming out in 2014. Observers were surprised that it had turned up in this first major report – meant to assess physical science rather than mitigation strategies.

Source; http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/sep/19/russia-un-climate-report-geoengineering

CIA ramping up covert training program for moderate Syrian rebels

2013-10-04T04:47:00.000-07:00

The CIA is expanding a clandestine effort to train opposition fighters in Syria amid concern that moderate, U.S.-backed militias are rapidly losing ground in the country’s civil war, U.S. officials said.
But the CIA program is so minuscule that it is expected to produce only a few hundred trained fighters each month even after it is enlarged, a level that officials said will do little to bolster rebel forces that are being eclipsed by radical Islamists in the fight against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The CIA’s mission, officials said, has been defined by the White House’s desire to seek a political settlement, a scenario that relies on an eventual stalemate among the warring factions rather than a clear victor. As a result, officials said, limits on the agency’s authorities enable it to provide enough support to help ensure that politically moderate, U.S.-supported militias don’t lose but not enough for them to win.
The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said the agency has sent additional paramilitary teams to secret bases in Jordan in recent weeks in a push to double the number of rebel fighters getting CIA instruction and weapons before being sent back to Syria.

The agency has trained fewer than 1,000 rebel fighters this year, current and former U.S. officials said. By contrast, U.S. intelligence analysts estimate that more than 20,000 have been trained to fight for government-backed militias by Assad’s ally Iran and the Hezbollah militant network it sponsors.
The CIA effort was described as an urgent bid to bolster moderate Syrian militias, which have been unable to mount a serious challenge to Assad or match the growing strength of rival rebel factions that have hard-line Islamist agendas and, in some cases, ties to the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

The CIA is “ramping up and expanding its effort,” said a U.S. official familiar with operations in Syria, because “it was clear that the opposition was losing, and not only losing tactically but on a more strategic level.”
The CIA declined to comment.
The latest setback came last month, when 11 of the largest armed factions in Syria, including some backed by the United States, announced the formation of an alliance with a goal of creating an Islamic state. The alliance is led by Jabhat al-Nusra, a group that has sworn allegiance to the al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan.

Operating under constraints
The descriptions of the CIA training program provide the most detailed account to date of the limited dimensions and daunting objectives of a CIA operation that President Obama secretly authorized in a covert action finding he signed this year.
U.S. officials said the classified program has been constrained by limits on CIA resources, the reluctance of rebel fighters to leave Syria for U.S. instruction and Jordan’s restrictions on the CIA’s paramilitary presence there.
But the limited scope also reflects a deeper tension in the Obama administration’s strategy on Syria, one that has sought to advance U.S. interests but avoid being drawn more deeply into a conflict that the United Nations estimates has killed more than 100,000 people since it began in 2011.

The constraints have become a source of frustration within the CIA and drawn criticism from senior lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee meets regularly with senior officials from the CIA and other agencies, said there is a “high degree of frustration in the executive branch” with the Syria strategy.

“The situation in Syria is changing faster than the administration can keep up,” Rogers said. He declined to discuss CIA operations, which are classified, but said that U.S. support for moderate opposition groups is “less than robust” and has been hobbled by “inconsistent resource allocation with stated goals.”
CIA veterans expressed skepticism that the training and weapons deliveries will have any meaningful effect. In Jordan, operatives involved in training and arming rebels lament that “we’re being asked to do something with nothing,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official said. The former official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of agency operations overseas.
Some have also questioned the wisdom of expanding the CIA’s mission at a time when many think the agency has become too paramilitary in focus and should return to its traditional intelligence-gathering role.
‘Basic infantry training’
The agency’s training effort is centered in Jordan, where the CIA has long-standing connections to the domestic intelligence service and access to bases guarded by the Jordanian military.
The program is aimed at shoring up the fighting power of units aligned with the Supreme Military Council, an umbrella organization led by a former Syrian general that is the main recipient of U.S. support.

The training is led by small teams of operatives from the CIA’s Special Activities Division, a paramilitary branch that relies heavily on contractors and former members of U.S. Special Operations forces. Officials said the instruction is rudimentary and typically spans four to six weeks.
“It’s basic infantry training,” the former U.S. intelligence official said. “How to have some discipline hitting a target, how to reload a magazine, how to clear a room. They’re not marching. They’re learning basic infantry procedures.”

Officials said the main CIA training effort does not involve instruction on using high-
powered weapons such as rockets and antitank munitions, which are being supplied by countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, although the agency is involved in tracking those arms flows and vetting recipients.

Islamists ‘good at fighting’
The pace of the CIA program amounts to a trickle into the ranks of opposition fighters, who total about 100,000. U.S. intelligence officials said that as many as 20,000 of those are considered “extremists” with militant Islamist agendas.

Those hard-line factions have drained momentum and support from moderate rebel groups. The most prominent Islamist groups, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Jabhat al-Nusra, include fighters who have extensive experience from the war in Iraq, have ties to al-Qaeda and have carried out high-profile strikes against Assad’s government.

Former deputy CIA director Michael J. Morell said in a recent CBS interview that the most effective organizations on the battlefield in Syria are the Islamist factions. “And because they’re so good at fighting the Syrians, some of the moderate members of the opposition joined forces with them,” he said.

Those defections have been compounded by mounting skepticism of U.S. commitment and intentions, officials said. Rebels’ requests for weapons were rebuffed until earlier this year, when Obama allowed the CIA to begin providing arms. But even then, officials said, the deliveries were delayed for months and restricted to light arms, which are already abundant in the conflict.

Rebels were also angered by the U.S. decision not to launch missile strikes against Assad after he was accused of using chemical weapons to kill more than 1,000 people in August in an attack on the outskirts of Damascus. After initially threatening strikes, the Obama administration set those plans aside last month to pursue a potential deal with Russia in which Assad would surrender control of his chemical weapons stockpiles — and probably extend his hold on power.

Islamist factions have taken advantage, luring fighters away with offers of better pay, equipment and results. A spokesman for the ISIS said the group had added 2,000 Syrian recruits and 1,500 foreign fighters over the past two months.

“More and more Muslims in Syria and outside are realizing that we are the only true force able and willing to defend the Syrian people against this monstrous regime without any Western agenda,” said the spokesman, Mohammed al-Libi.

Pessimism among refugees
Recruiting efforts by militias working with the CIA have sagged, officials said.
At the largest refugee camp in Jordan, where more than 100,000 Syrians take shelter, aid officials said dozens of military-age males leave every day by bus to return to Syria, presumably to fight. But the flows have diminished, and the mood among refugees has grown more pessimistic.

“Support to the rebellion is reducing,” said an official who has worked at the Zaatari camp. “We’re seeing fewer people leaving and less [recruiting] activity.” Among those who depart, officials said they have seen no evidence that any go elsewhere in Jordan for training before returning to Syria.

The Obama administration has explored the idea of using the U.S. military to expand the training program to what some officials have described as “industrial strength.” But Defense Department officials said there has been no decision to do so and cited significant obstacles.

It is unclear whether Jordan would welcome such a large U.S. military footprint, which would mean converting a covert program into one officially acknowledged by the United States. There are also legal impediments, including a measure known as the Leahy Law that would require a determination that no recipients of U.S. military assistance had committed human rights abuses.

For the CIA, the constraints in Syria mark a significant departure from the wide latitude the agency was accustomed to over the past decade in the conflict zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in other countries patrolled by armed drones, including Pakistan and Yemen.

Mindful of the criticism and investigations that accompanied many of those operations, senior CIA officials have raised the concern that the limits imposed in Syria will do little to shield the agency from criticism if something goes wrong.

“What happens when some of the people we trained torture a prisoner?” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with agency operations in the Middle East. Even if the CIA can produce records to defend its training program, “we’re going to face congressional hearings,” the former official said. “There is no win here.”

Ernesto Londoño in Washington and Taylor Luck in Irbid and Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.

Source; http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-ramping-up-covert-training-program-for-moderate-syrian-rebels/2013/10/02/a0bba084-2af6-11e3-8ade-a1f23cda135e_story.html