Monsanto sues California, says its ‘undemocratic’ for listing glyphosate as a carcinogen (Re-Post from NewsTarget)

Monsanto sues California, says its ‘undemocratic’ for listing glyphosate as a carcinogen

By: Julie Wilson

Date: January 25, 2016

in: Corporations

One of the world’s most hated companies, Monsanto, is like a bull in a china shop, angrily destroying everything in its path, including people and the resources we need so desperately to survive. Monsanto’s Roundup, for which the primary ingredient is glyphosate, is one of the most widely used herbicides. Over the last two decades, 2.6 billion pounds of glyphosate was sprayed on U.S. crops.
However, last year was a major milestone for public health when the World Health Organization boldly announced that glyphosate was “probably” carcinogenic. Since then, government regulatory agencies all over the world have taken steps to limit and/or properly label the ingredient’s toxic effects on people.
Under Calif. law, the state is required to maintain a list of cancer-causing chemicals to serve as a safety guideline for residents. Proposition 65 – the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act – requires listed chemicals not be dumped into sources of drinking water. Proper warnings must also be labeled on products containing cancer-causing chemicals.⁽¹⁾

Monsanto may be prevented from dumping toxic herbicide into Californians’ water supply

Following the WHO’s declaration, the Golden State naturally moved to add Monsanto’s glyphosate to its list of cancer-causing toxins.
But Monsanto is having none of it.
The seed giant filed a lawsuit against the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) and the agency’s acting director Lauren Zeise on Thursday, seeking to prevent Calif. from listing Roundup’s main ingredient as a carcinogen.
Refusing to back down from their product, Monsanto insists glyphosate is safe, pointing to decades of studies. However, the biotech giant’s so-called “studies” are no longer credible after it was exposed for faking safety tests glyphosate nearly four decades ago.
The revelations emerged after two independent scientists gained access to Monsanto’s secret toxicology studies on glyphosate, after which they discovered the company purposely withheld evidence of tumors caused by the chemical.

Monsanto faked safety tests on glyphosate 40 years ago

They concealed the health impacts of glyphosate by diluting their data with irrelevant information from unrelated studies.
“Monsanto included irrelevant historical control data from other experiments ‘to create doubt and obscure the statistical significance of inconvenient findings, which may have prevented product registration,’” reports GMO.news.⁽²⁾
The independent scientists concluded that had Monsanto not faked their safety trials, glyphosate may never have been approved for use in the first place.
Despite evidence of fraud and the WHO’s conclusion, Monsanto’s Vice President Phil Miller insists that glyphosate is safe and that there is “not a sound basis for any regulatory action.”
According to Reuters, Monsanto’s lawsuit alleges that listing glyphosate under Prop 65 “cedes regulatory authority to an ‘unelected, undemocratic, unaccountable, and foreign body’ that is not subject to oversight by any state or federal entity.”⁽³⁾
Monsanto says the Prop 65 mandate to provide consumers with a “clear and reasonable warning” about cancer-causing chemicals is a violation of its First Amendment rights and subsequently damages its reputation.
Monsanto’s “reputation” however, has been damaged for quite some time. It earned the ominous title of being the world’s “most evil corporation” in 2013 and since then has remained high on the list. Last year, it was voted the fourth most hated corporation, beat by Goldman Sachs, AIG and Dish Network.^(4,5)

International Tribunal to hold Monsanto accountable for its crimes against humanity

Using a set of guidelines implemented by the UN to protect individuals from human rights abuses committed by states and corporations, a group of individuals will hold an international tribunal that “is set to hold the world’s most evil corporation, Monsanto, accountable for its crimes against nature and humanity,” Natural News reported.⁽⁶⁾
Scheduled for Oct. 12–16 in the Hague, Netherlands, the Monsanto Tribunal will evaluate the health and environmental damage caused by a list of products made by the seed giant.⁽⁷⁾
Roundup is included on the list, along with PCBs, Lasso (a weed killer now banned in Europe) and 2,4,5,T, “a dioxin-containing component of the defoliant, Agent Orange, which was used by the US Army during the Vietnam War and continues to cause birth defects and cancer.”
Click here to learn more about the Monsanto Tribunal.
Sources:
(1) Scorecard.GoodGuide.com
(2) GMO.news
(3) Reuters.com
(4) IBTimes.com
(5) Bloomberg.com
(6) NaturalNews.com
(7) Monsanto-Tribunal.org
(8) DailyFinance.com
(9) Independent.co.uk
(10) EcoWatch.com
_____________________


I did some bolding of text to enhance a number of points in the article.


Isn't it against the First Amendment to engage in stifling of information intended to inform the public of a compelling and/or impending danger? Is Monsanto kidding us?


They don't even ingest their own FrankenFoods!


What's Served In Monsanto's Cafeterias?


It's time to put these asshats out of their misery.

Get The Picture? Round Two

Got some more...but first:

CALL TO ACTION: Contact Congress TODAY and tell them to reject Fast Track of the TPP: http://www.stopfasttrack.com/

Bernie Sanders Calls Out Media For Not Covering Obama's TPP Trade Deal: “The major television networks are not covering the TPP. Incredible as it may sound, this trade agreement - the largest trade agreement in the history of the United States of America - has received virtually no coverage, no coverage, on the major networks.” - U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. Why hasn't the TPP gotten any media coverage? Because the TPP would immensely benefit multinational corporations like Monsanto at the expense of people and the environment. And we all know how mainstream media loves to carry water for the agrichemical industry and their other advertisers.

Fast Track (formally known as Trade Promotion Authority) is a power given to the President by Congress that would allow the President to push the TPP deal through without any Congressional debate or public review. STOP FAST TRACK.

CONTACT Congress and tell them to reject Fast Track: http://www.stopfasttrack.com/

READ: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/01/bernie-sanders-media-tpp_n_6777248.html

READ: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kill-the-dispute-settlement-language-in-the-trans-pacific-partnership/2015/02/25/ec7705a2-bd1e-11e4-b274-e5209a3bc9a9_story.html

READ: http://billmoyers.com/2015/04/28/battle-trans-pacific-partnership-fast-track-gets-hot/

LEARN the basics in these short videos:
http://youtu.be/3O_Sbbeqfdw
http://youtu.be/DnC1mqyAXmw

WATCH Segment 1: http://www.democracynow.org/2015/4/16/a_corporate_trojan_horse_critics_decry

WATCH Segment 2: http://www.democracynow.org/2015/4/16/grayson_on_money_politics_if_we

Artificial sweeteners linked to obesity epidemic, scientists say - CBCNews

 If any of you were readers of my Room Eight blog, you will know that I regularly took former NYC Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to task for claiming to want to deal with obesity; yet, not going after the main cause of said obesity - high fructose corn syrup, or HFCS.


He didn't have a problem with artificial sweeteners, and yet, here we are, finding out that it is yet but another cause of obesity:

Artificial sweeteners may exacerbate, rather than prevent, metabolic disorders such as Type 2 diabetes, a study suggests.
Calorie-free artificial sweeteners are often chosen by dieters in part because they are thought not to raise blood sugar levels.
In Wednesday’s issue of the journal Nature, researchers report that artificial sweeteners increase the blood sugar levels in both mice and humans by interfering with microbes in the gut. Increased blood sugar levels are an early indicator of Type 2 diabetes and metabolic disease.
The increase in consumption of artificial sweeteners coincides with the obesity and diabetes epidemics, Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and his co-authors said.
"Our findings suggest that non-caloric artificial sweeteners may have directly contributed to enhancing the exact epidemic that they themselves were intended to fight."

Link to gut bacteria

The study included a series of experiments.
Mice whose drinking water was supplemented with glucose and a sweetener developed glucose intolerance compared with mice drinking water alone, or water with just sugar in it. The effect occurred both in mice fed normal chow and those on a high-fat diet.
When antibiotics were used to kill off gut bacteria, the artificial sweetener effect on glucose intolerance in mice fed either diet was restored to normal.
Taken together, the data indicate that artificial sweeteners "may contribute to, rather than alleviate, obesity-related metabolic conditions, by altering the composition and function of bacterial populations in the gut," Cathryn Nagler and Taylor Feehley of the pathology department at the University of Chicago said in a journal commentary.
In the human part of the research, gut bacteria were analyzed from 381 non-diabetics averaging age 43 who were participating in an ongoing nutrition study.  They found differences in the gut bacteria among those who consumed artificial sweeteners compared with those who did not.
Artificial sweetener consumers showed "markers" for diabetes, such as raised blood sugar levels and glucose intolerance.

More research needed

In the final portion of the study, seven human volunteers who didn’t normally consume artificial sweeteners added it to their diets for seven days. After four days, blood glucose levels rose and the makeup of their gut bacteria changed in half of the participants, just as in the mice experiment.
To confirm the findings, the researchers also transferred feces from people who consume artificial sweeteners into mice that were bred to have sterile intestines and never consumed it before. The mice who had saccharin became glucose intolerant, which suggests that the artificial sweetener caused the unhealthy effect.
It could be that artificial sweeteners lead to an expansion of bacterial species that extract energy from food that often gets stored as fat, contributing to obesity, Nagler said. It's also possible the sweeteners could suppress the growth of other bacteria that seem to stave off insulin resistance, she said.
The commentators suggested studies to identify specific bacterial populations that promote resistance to weight gain or improve glucose tolerance could be useful as treatments.
Other experts who were not involved in the research called the findings intriguing, but noted that the human findings in particular were very preliminary in terms of considering changes to nutrition recommendations.
"This research raises caution that [non-caloric artificial sweeteners] may not represent the 'innocent magic bullet' they were intended to be to help with the obesity and diabetes epidemics, but it does not yet provide sufficient evidence to alter public health and clinical practice," said Nita Forouhi, program leader at the Medical Research Council's epidemiology unit at Cambridge University.