Daniel Bates writes for The Daily Mail:
A record one in six American families went hungry last year because they did not have enough food, a shock survey has revealed.
Some 17.4million U.S. households - 50 million people - were classified as 'food insecure' which meant they regularly skipped meals even if they wanted to eat.
Others went for entire days without eating and handed round smaller portion sizes to make their meagre offerings suffice.
The news comes as it is revealed that top U.S. executives saw their pay and bonuses shoot up last year in the face of the worst recession for 80 years.
The highest paid bosses received an average of $1.6million (£1million) as a bonus on top of their basic remuneration, an increase of 11 per cent.
Salaries rose by just 3 per cent but that still meant the typical executive took home $7.2million (£4.4million).
The dietary figures are the highest since 1995 when the first national food security survey was conducted and will be acutely embarrassing for the United States, the world's richest nation and the last remaining superpower.
They also shine a light on the vast numbers of hard working Americans who have lost their jobs in the recession and for the first time are having to rely on the state to make ends meet.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture study shows that in 2009, almost 50 million people, including 17 million children, were 'food insecure'.
This marked a slight increase from the previous year when 17.1 million families had difficulty putting meals on the table.
Those in this category usually went hungry, could not afford a balanced meal and cut their portion sizes on the occasions they did have food.
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Monday, November 22, 2010
America starves as executive pay rockets: 50MILLION people go hungry while Wall Street fatcats take home millions
The poison lurking in your plastic water bottle
A potentially deadly toxin is being absorbed into bottled mineral water from their plastic containers. And the longer the water is stored, the levels of poison increase, research reveals. As the sell-by date on many bottled waters is up to two years, scientists have now called for extensive further studies.
The research by world expert Dr William Shotyk - who has vowed never to drink bottled water again - will be published in the Royal Society of Chemistry's journal next month. It is sure to revive concerns about the safety of bottled water, the world's fastest-growing drinks industry, worth £1.2billion a year.
The tests found traces of antimony, a chemical used in the making of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, used by most mineral-water sellers.
Small doses of antimony can make you feel ill and depressed. Larger quantities can cause violent vomiting and even death. The study stressed that amounts of antimony were well below official recommended levels. But it also discovered that the levels almost doubled when the bottles were stored for three months.
Professor Shotyk, of Heidelberg University in Germany, said: "I don't want to shock people but here's what I know: Antimony is being continuously released into bottled drinking water. The water in PET bottles is contaminated."
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Think tank: 92% of Afghans never heard of 9/11
By Daniel Tencer, Raw Story
Fewer than one in 10 Afghans are aware of the 9/11 attacks and their precipitation of the war in Afghanistan, says a study from an international think tank.
A report (PDF) from the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) shows that 92 percent of those surveyed had never heard of the coordinated multiple attacks on US soil on September 11, 2001. It also shows that four in 10 Afghans believe the US is on their soil in order to "destroy Islam or occupy Afghanistan."
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Earth will take 100,000 years to recover from global warming say geologists
Louise Gray reports for The Telegraph:
A conference organised by the Geological Society in London this week will bring together scientists from around the world to look at how the world coped with climate change in the past.
By studying rock sediments from millions of years ago geologists have been able to model how increases in greenhouse gases led to temperature change and extinction of species.
Professor Jim Zachos, of the University of California, said that 55 million years ago volcanic activity caused around 4,500 gigatons of greenhouse gases to be released into the atmosphere over thousands of years.
Prof Zachos said that if the world continues to pump out greenhouse gases at the current rate, around 5,000 gigatons of greenhouse gases will be released into the atmosphere over a few hundred years.
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Did the Bushes help to kill JFK?
If nothing else, these pages will show the reader the following:
- Although he does not recall when asked, George (Herbert Walker) Bush was in Dallas the day JFK was assassinated.
- Bush lies about the fact that he was a high-ranking CIA official at the time of JFK's death.
- Bush allowed the escape of a convicted terrorist from prison to go to work for him as an undercover CIA asset in Iran-Contra.
- Bush has released another convicted terrorist.
- Both these terrorists were present on Dealey Plaza on 11/22/1963.
- Both these terrorists were convicted for killing 73 people by blowing up an airliner.
- Bush is personal friends with a close associate of these convicted terrorists, who was also a participant in Iran Contra.
- Bush has taken a leading role as CIA official in structuring/organizing these terrorists in effective organizations.
Shall we say: "Only in America, the land of unlimited opportunities"?
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The Kennedy Assassination And The Current Political Moment
From Joan Mellen's talk at the 92nd St. Y:
I'm sure many in this audience are aware of the third recent moment at which the Kennedy assassination has surfaced. There are a few scant degrees of separation between
1. the two Bush presidents
2. the role of the CIA in the Kennedy assassination
3. Lee Harvey Oswald, the CIA asset.
This surprising invocation of the Kennedy assassination occurred on January 2 nd at the funeral of President Gerald Ford, the last surviving member of the Warren Commission. I'll read this extraordinary revealing paragraph from George H. W. Bush's eulogy for those who missed it:
“After a deluded gunman assassinated President Kennedy, our nation turned to Gerald Ford and a select handful of others to make sense of that madness – and a conspiracy theorist can say what they will – but the Warren Commission report will always have the final definitive say on this matter. Why? Because Gerry Ford put his name on it and Gerry Ford's word was always good.”
Allow me to add that when amendments were offered to the Freedom of Information Act, enlarging public access to affairs of state, Gerald Ford vetoed the bill, only for Congress to override his veto. Ford was no more a supporter of the truth than Mr. Bush's son. George H. W. Bush's own word was not always so good either. There are powerful reasons why George H. W. Bush was motivated to invoke the Warren Report, even, amazingly, to refer to a “conspiracy theorist,” as if that designation would at once banish some truths he does not want available. Only two degrees of separation separate George H. W. Bush from Oswald himself.
At his 1976 confirmation hearings for the post of Director of Central Intelligence, a post into which he was elevated by Gerald Ford, Bush denied that he had any prior connection to the CIA. This was a falsehood. At the National Archives, and on the Internet, is a CIA document directed to its clandestine service (Record Number 104-10310-10271) that reveals that when, in the 1950s, Bush founded Zapata Oil, his partner was one Thomas J. Devine, who was not only an oil wildcatter, but a long-time CIA staff employee. Thomas Devine's name does not appear in the original papers of Zapata, but it does in the company Bush created shortly thereafter as “Zapata Offshore.”
This CIA document reveals that Thomas Devine had informed George Bush of a CIA project with the cryptonym WUBRINY/LPDICTUM. It involved CIA proprietary commercial operations in foreign countries. By 1963, Devine had become not a former CIA employee, but ‘a cleared and witting contact” in the investment banking firm which managed the proprietary corporation WUSALINE. WUBRINY involved Haitian operations, in which, the documents reveal, a participant was George de Mohrenschildt, the Dallas CIA hander of – Lee Oswald.
In late April 1963, in Haiti, de Mohrenschildt appeared to discuss investment possibilities. The CIA officer, the author of the document, named only as WUBRINY/1, had no idea of de Mohrenschildt's already long-standing CIA connections, and in particular his role in shepherding Oswald in Dallas. De Mohrenschildt could safely pursue CIA interests in Haiti because it was that month, April 1963, that Lee Oswald, his charge, moved from Texas to New Orleans, on the orders of the CIA, with Oswald reporting to – Hunter Leake.
A May 22, 1963 CIA document has de Mohrenschildt admitting he had “obtained some Texas financial backing” and had visited interested people In Washington regarding the candidacy of one M. Clemard Joseph Charles for President of Haiti, “as soon as Duvalier can be gotten out.” So we are reminded of CIA's efforts to influence the political configurations of other countries – an obvious example is CIA's obliging British Petroleum – for a price – and overthrowing Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, replacing him with the Shah.
To summarize: George Bush is linked in April 1963, seven months before the Kennedy assassination, to a CIA project involving Lee Oswald's handler, Count Sergei Georges de Mohrenschildt through his own CIA partner, Thomas Devine. Bush and Devine later traveled to Vietnam together, a trip for which the Department of Defense issued Devine an interim “Top Secret” clearance. No surprise there: Devine obviously had never left the Agency.
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