World News
Yellow Vest Protests: The Birth Of A Global Uprising?
Activist Post – The Yellow Vest protesters have been partially successful in having the government bend to their will. Now that they’ve shown the world how to make political waves, will these protests mark the point where individuals worldwide finally say no to big government and globalist policy?
>>Related: Egypt restricts sale of yellow vests amid fear of protests
In central Cairo, traders said they had been stopped from selling the vests to walk-in customers.
“They made us sign statements that we won’t sell yellow vests,” said one trader who did not want to give his name.
“Anyone who sells a single vest will put himself in big trouble.”
He refused to sell any of the yellow vests in his shop window, which were priced at around $1. “Now they are for display only,” he said.
I will stand down before the next general election, May tells Tory MPs ahead of no-confidence vote
RT – UK Prime Minister Theresa May has told Tory MPs that she will stand down before the next general election, in a bid to win their support ahead of a no-confidence vote later this evening.
Entering a meeting with Conservative MPs in a Westminster committee room ahead of the crucial vote, May was met with applause and the traditional banging of desks from some sections of her party.
Pope plans edit on Lord’s Prayer
Washington Times – Pope Francis, showing once again his willingness to turn over liturgical tables, is expected to approve a change in the translation of the Lord’s Prayer, the famous biblical petition recited by Christians billions of times a day.
The Italian Episcopal Conference [CEI] has submitted the proposed change to the Vatican for approval, changing the line “lead us not into temptation” to “abandon us not when in temptation,” reported the Italian newswire service Ansa and the [U.K.] Express.
A year ago, the pope brought the issue to the forefront when he described the petition widely used for centuries in many languages, including English and Italian, as “not a good translation.”
“A father doesn’t do that, a father helps you to get up immediately,” Francis said in an interview on Italian television. “It’s Satan who leads us into temptation, that’s his department.”
Will the proposed version catch on? It may depend on which language you speak: The French bishops adopted such a change last year, and the Spanish translation, the one most familiar to the Argentina-born Francis, already reflects the concerns about who’s leading whom into temptation.
Khashoggi murder: Trump says he stands by Saudi crown prince
Al Jazeera – US President Donald Trump has reiterated his support for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, despite CIA assessment that the Saudi royal ordered the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul.
Trump refused to comment on whether the crown prince was complicit in the murder, despite pleas from Senators to condemn the gruesome murder of the Washington Post columnist more than two months ago.
“He’s the leader of Saudi Arabia. They’ve been a very good ally,” Trump said in an interview in the Oval Office.
Strasbourg shooting: Gunman shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he attacked
BBC – French police have issued a call for help to find the man suspected of opening fire near a Christmas market in Strasbourg.
Hundreds of police, soldiers and border agents on both sides of the Franco-German border are trying to find Chérif Chekatt, 29.
Two people died and 13 were injured in the gun attack in the eastern French city on Tuesday evening.
The gunman shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“God is greatest”) as he opened fire.
Chérif Chekatt was already known to the French authorities as someone who had been radicalised into following an extreme form of Islam while in prison for crimes including robbery.
Some Caravan Migrants Demand Entry to U.S. Or $50K Each to Leave
Breitbart – Members of the “Honduran Migrant Caravan” marched to the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana on Tuesday and delivered a letter directed to President Donald Trump, demanding entry into the United States or $50,000 each to return home. They also requested the removal of military installations in Honduras.
U.S. News, Politics & Government
Ex-Trump lawyer Cohen gets 3 years in prison for crimes incl hush-money payments
RT – Michael Cohen, former attorney to President Trump, has been sentenced to three years in jail for crimes including lying to Congress and facilitating hush-money payments to two women who had affairs with Trump.
Cohen told a federal judge in Manhattan on Wednesday that he had been “living in a personal and mental incarceration” since he agreed to work for Trump. He said that Trump had directed him to make the payments to the women, one of whom was porn actress Stormy Daniels.
Philadelphia’s Perverse Civil Asset Forfeiture Machine Has Finally Come to An End
Activist Post – Philadelphia may be the birthplace of our Constitution, but its civil asset forfeiture program is anything but constitutional. The program has become so corrupt and far-reaching it is often referred to as a “perverse machine.” Luckily, after a four-year legal battle brought by the nonprofit law firm the Institute for Justice (IJ), the city has agreed to a settlement that will give its abusive forfeiture program a major overhaul and protect the rights of Philadelphia property owners.
In Philadelphia alone, 25,000 people have been victimized by the practice of asset forfeiture. Property confiscated by law enforcement includes 1,200 homes, 3,500 vehicles, and $50 million from residents. And the majority of these property owners were never actually convicted of a crime. But now, due to the diligent efforts of IJ, many of these individuals will finally see justice served.
Economy & Business
Infowars – The rapidly exploding U.S. national debt is about to cross another critical threshold.
According to the U.S. Treasury, the debt of the federal government is currently sitting at $21,854,296,172,540.94, and at our current pace we will likely hit the $22 trillion mark next month. This is a horrifying national crisis, and yet nothing is being done about it. When Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2008, the U.S. was $10.6 trillion in debt, and so that means that we have added 11.2 trillion dollars of new debt to that total in less than 11 years. Needless to say, it doesn’t take a math genius to figure out that we have been adding an average of more than a trillion dollars a year to the national debt for more than a decade. But instead of getting our insatiable appetite for debt under control, Congress is actually accelerating our spending. At this point, there is no possible scenario in which this story ends well.
Meanwhile, the global financial elite are really starting to talk up the possibility of a new financial crisis.
Multipolar World Order in the Making: Qatar Dumps OPEC
Activist Post – The decision by Qatar to abandon OPEC threatens to redefine the global energy market, especially in light of Saudi Arabia’s growing difficulties and the growing influence of the Russian Federation in the OPEC+ mechanism.
In a surprising statement, Qatari energy minister Saad al-Kaabi warned OPEC on Monday December 3 that his country had sent all the necessary documentation to start the country’s withdrawal from the oil organization in January 2019. Al-Kaabi stressed that the decision had nothing to do with recent conflicts with Riyadh but was rather a strategic choice by Doha to focus on the production of LNG, which Qatar, together with the Russian Federation, is one of the largest global exporters of. Despite an annual oil extraction rate of only 1.8% of the total of OPEC countries (about 600,000 barrels a day), Qatar is one of the founding members of the organization and has always had a strong political influence on the governance of the organization. In a global context where international relations are entering a multipolar phase, things like cooperation and development become fundamental; so it should not surprise that Doha has decide to abandon OPEC. OPEC is one of the few unipolar organizations that no longer has a meaningful purpose in 2018, given the new realities governing international relations and the importance of the Russian Federation in the oil market.
Besides that, Saudi Arabia requires the organization to maintain a high level of oil production due to pressure coming from Washington to achieve a very low cost per barrel of oil. The US energy strategy targets Iranian and Russian revenue from oil exports, but it also aims to give the US a speedy economic boost. Trump often talks about the price of oil falling as his personal victory. The US imports about 10 million barrels of oil a day, which is why Trump wrongly believes that a decrease in the cost per barrel could favor a boost to the US economy. The economic reality shows a strong correlation between the price of oil and the financial growth of a country, with low prices of crude oil often synonymous of a slowing down in the economy.
Employees at Amazon’s New NYC Warehouse Launch Unionization Push
Newsmax – A committee of employees at Amazon’s recently opened Staten Island fulfillment center is going public with a unionization campaign, a fresh challenge to the e-commerce giant in a city where it plans to build a major new campus.
Labor unrest is the latest complication in Amazon’s plan to invest $2.5 billion and hire 25,000 people in the city over the next 15 years. Several New York City politicians who were shut out of negotiations handled by the governor and mayor have raised objections to a new office park in Queens that threatens to overload mass transit and drive up rents in an already expensive housing market.
Now workers in a another borough are saying the company treats them like robots and should be focused on improving conditions there rather than raking in tax breaks to build a new headquarters.
The union they’re working with sees the up to $3 billion in incentives offered to bring an Amazon office campus to Long Island City as leverage to prevent the company from retaliating against them for organizing.
Employees backing the union effort said issues at the warehouse include safety concerns, inadequate pay, and 12-hour shifts with insufficient breaks and unreasonable hourly quotas, after which they lose more of their day waiting unpaid in long lines for security checks.
Energy & Environment
BREAKING: Early morning earthquake jolts Atlanta awake – Atlanta Journal Constitution
AJC – Residents from across the metro area jolted awake may have wondered if they were imagining things, but the magnitude 4.4 event was real. The U.S. Geological Survey reported that it emanated from east Tennessee, where it was the second-strongest on record, at about 4:15 a.m.
Science & Technology
Congress asks Google CEO tough questions on user privacy, bias
CS Monitor – On Dec. 11, Congress grilled Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Google’s practices regarding user privacy, election interference, and possible bias. The hearing underscores a growing uneasiness over the increasing influence of tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
The 3.5-hour hearing Dec. 11 hit upon familiar themes – online privacy, data protection, and the danger of digital monopolies – that are poised to come into even sharper focus next year.
Rep. Ted Poe (R) of Texas tried to pin down Mr. Pichai on privacy during the Dec. 11 hearing. “I’ve got an iPhone,” Mr. Poe said, waving his device. “Can Google track me when I move?” If he moved to the left toward his Democratic colleagues on the panel, would Google know?
“Not by default,” Pichai answered. Poe demanded a yes or no answer, but Pichai indicated it was complicated.
Other lawmakers questioned whether regular people know how much data Google can collect about them and how to stop being tracked. Privacy, of course, is also a huge issue for Facebook, which has spent nearly a year trying to recover from the Cambridge Analytica data mining scandal.
Lawmakers from both parties seem determined to re-examine whether Google rigs its search results to promote its own services and its own political agenda, too. President Trump also has complained about the issue (without evidence).
European regulators already have concluded Google manipulated its search engine to gain an unfair advantage over other online shopping sites in the lucrative e-commerce market, and fined the company $2.8 billion. Google disputes those findings and is still appealing the decision reached in 2017.
Lawmakers on both sides peppered Pichai with questions about the possibility that Google is considering offering a censored search engine in China after pulling out of that country in 2010 in a high-profile dispute with its communist government’s policies.
It’s not clear what Congress might be able to do to prevent Google from returning to China, but it would certainly trigger more political fireworks.
While Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee grilled Pichai on what they perceive as bias against conservatives, top committee Democrat Jerrold Nadler said lawmakers should instead examine issues such as the spread of misinformation online and Russian efforts to influence US elections online.
Governments around the world are becoming increasingly unnerved by the power being amassed by major technology companies – with the dominance of Facebook in social networking, Google in search, and Amazon in e-commerce raising the most concerns.
Health
Do You Know About These Hidden Chemicals in Common Foods?
Health Impact News – We often see “artificial” or “natural” flavors listed among the ingredients on foods we buy, but do consumers know what these terms mean? Action Alert!
Recently, the FDA announced that a group of six artificial flavors would no longer be permitted to be used as food additives. They are: synthetically-derived benzophenone, ethyl acrylate, methyl eugenol, myrcene, pulegone, and pyridine.
If you’ve never heard of these, you’re not alone. Most Americans are completely unaware of the additives put into their food because the food industry does not need to list the chemicals they use in the ingredients.
Instead, the federal government allows these chemicals to be obscured by being listed as “artificial flavors” or “natural flavors.”
It’s time to stop letting Big Food and their crony capitalist friends get away with hiding the contents of their products and require them to list the chemicals they use in our food.
Artificial flavors are flavors that have been derived from sources other than plants or animals; they are synthetic compounds made in a lab from any of thousands of different chemicals used to make flavors.
Companies often favor artificial flavors because they are cheaper to produce than “natural” flavors. It’s impossible to know, then, just how many chemicals are in a food that lists “artificial flavors” in its ingredients—it could be two, or it could be twenty.
Despite the vast number of chemicals used in food and labeled as artificial flavors, the government has done very little to ensure that they are safe. That’s because food companies can deem their own products to be “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) without a formal review by the FDA. The GRAS process has essentially turned into a loophole for food companies to declare all kinds of chemicals safe to add to our food with little oversight. The FDA seems fine with taking Big Food’s word for it. The above-mentioned chemicals that are now banned were found to cause cancer in animal studies, and the FDA needed to be sued by grassroots environmental advocacy groups to remove them from the food supply. Of the thousands of other chemicals being added to our food, how many more pose a risk to human health?
Allowing Big Food to only mention “artificial flavors” rather than list the chemical names of the additives they use only benefits food manufacturers because they know that consumers would be turned off if they knew their favorite iced tea had seven chemicals they couldn’t pronounce in the ingredients. The term “artificial flavors” is similar to the new GMO label in development that depicts a sun with a smiley face and says “BE” for “bioengineered” rather than GMO, a term more people are aware of. In both cases, the government is helping the food industry sanitize its products to make them more attractive to consumers. Once again, our crony capitalist government takes the side of industry rather than ordinary consumers.
Natural flavors should also be listed on food packaging. According to the FDA, natural flavors are flavors isolated from plant or animal sources.
Like artificial flavors, natural flavors are ubiquitous in our food supply; one report found that only water, salt, and sugar appear on food labels more often than “natural flavors.”
You may think that natural flavors are better, since they are derived from natural sources, but experts say that the source of a flavor has no bearing on how healthy or safe it is.
For example, traces of cyanide can be found in natural almond flavor; raw soybeans used to make soy sauce can also be toxic. Some natural vanilla flavor is synthesized from the anal glands of beavers.
The point is that consumers have a right to know what chemicals are in the foods they buy so informed decisions can be made about what is OK and what should be avoided.
The solution is simple. Food companies should be required to list out all of the chemicals used to flavor a food. Because it can be difficult to distinguish the chemical names of natural and artificial flavors, food labels can simply list out natural flavors under that heading, and artificial flavors under their own heading.
Consumers could then make their own informed decisions about what they are comfortable eating.
Action Alert! Tell Congress and the FDA to mandate that artificial and natural flavors be listed on food labels. Please send your message immediately.
Eleuthero (Siberian Ginseng) Benefits to Boost Body & Brain Health
Dr. Axe – Inflammation is now being linked to just about every health condition. What are some examples of inflammatory diseases? According to a Harvard Medical School report, “Chronic inflammation plays a central role in some of the most challenging diseases of our time, including rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and even Alzheimer’s.”
It’s “an emerging field,” says UCLA’s Dr. David Heber. “It’s a new concept for medicine.” This is a quote from 2009! Thankfully, inflammation has gotten a lot more attention in the past 10 years, but the problem still remains: Modern medicine focuses on treating symptoms, not addressing the root cause of a health issue, which in many cases is inflammation.
According to a scientific article published in 2012, “An increasing body of evidence shows that chronic inflammation causes and advances many common diseases.” Arthritis is inflammation of the joints. Heart disease is inflammation of the arteries. The list goes on and on.
Instead of taking a medication to reduce an inflamed area of the body, we would be better served by reducing inflammation in the first place. The good news is that there are a lot of ways to avoid or reduce chronic disease-causing inflammation, including an anti-inflammatory diet plus other scientifically-proven inflammation-reducing tactics you can start doing today!
Natural Remedies for Inflammation
Anti-Inflammatory Foods
As part of an anti-inflammatory diet, you’ll want to avoid the problematic foods that cause inflammation mentioned above while also making sure your diet is loaded with anti-inflammatory foods. These anti-inflammatory foods are also high in antioxidants, which help to reduce damage caused by inflammation.
The Mediterranean diet is a great example of an eating plan that contains many anti-inflammatory foods and has been shown to decreases levels of LDL “bad” cholesterol while also lowering the risk for heart disease, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and cancer.
My Healing Foods diet is also anti-inflammatory in nature. By reducing inflammation, you can help to place your body in a state that is conducive to healing from diseases and other health conditions.
Let’s take a look at specific foods and beverages that are wise choices while following an anti-inflammatory diet:
- Vegetables
- Fruits
- Water
- Beans and Legumes
- Healthy Fats
- Herbs and Spices
- Protein
- Tea
- Fresh Veggie & Fruit Juices
Red Wine/Quercetin-Rich Foods
Anti-Inflammatory Supplements
The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) recommends the following supplements, which have a long history of use for treating inflammation and the pain associated with inflammation:
- Omega-3 fatty acids
- Turmeric
- Willow Bark
- Bromelain
Microplastics Detected in Human Feces (Plus, 5 Microplastic Dangers)
Dr. Axe – A recent study conducted by the Environment Agency Austria estimates that more than half of the world population may harbor microplastics in their stools. Now, that is some seriously concerning information. Why are microplastics bad? Researchers say that once microplastics get into the human body and begin circulating, they can endanger health. Specifically, microplastics may negatively impact the human immune system, digestive system and more.
There are five main types of microplastics, including:
- Fiber
- Microbeads
- Fragments
- Nurdles
- Foam
According to a 2018 scientific review titled “Microplastics in Seafood and the Implications for Human Health,” “Since the 1960s, plastic production has increased by approximately 8.7 percent annually, evolving into a $600 billion global industry. Approximately eight million metric tons of plastics enter the oceans annually, and conservative estimates suggest 5.25 trillion plastic particles currently circulate in ocean surface waters. While some plastics enter oceans from maritime operations, 80 percent is suspected to originate from land-based sources.”
Unfortunately, it’s now well-known and well-documented that animals, including fish, mussels, plankton, corals, seabirds and sea turtles, are ingesting microplastics. When organisms like plankton and mussels consume these plastics, this can likely affect an entire ecosystem since they are found at the base of the food web.
Top 5 Dangers of Microplastics
1. Toxicity in Human Gut, Lung, Liver and Brain Cells
2. Major Potential Negative Effects On Gut, Heart, Lung and Reproductive Health
3. Damage to Marine Wildlife Health and Biodiversity
4. Negative Impact on Terrestrial Ecosystems
5. Drinking Water Contamination
Pet News
The Highly Toxic Pet Threat You Most Likely Ignore
Mercola Pet – U.S. cat parents are allowing their pets to grow increasingly overweight, seemingly oblivious to the short- and long-term damage they’re doing. Excess fat cells create high levels of inflammation in the bodies of animals, and that inflammation increases the risk for many serious diseases. One of the root causes of obesity in kitties is processed food; no cat, much less an overweight one, should be fed a dry diet loaded with grains or carbohydrates. To lose weight in a healthy way, overweight kitties need a nutritionally balanced, species-appropriate diet fed in two or more portion-controlled meals, and at least 20 minutes of aerobic exercise each day, which requires creativity and persistence on the owner’s part
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