Global

US is Incapable of Removing Aspartame from Market, Consumer Protection shifts to International Focus

A horrifying conclusion, but these are the facts: without a massive overhaul at the FDA resulting from a very large hue and cry from the American public, nothing will ever get done in terms of the FDA removing this neurotoxic carcinogen from the market. There is considerable hope, however, in efforts going on right now in Sacramento, California to require a carcinogen label on aspartame containing products, as well as international efforts to fight back against the misleading corporate propaganda that assures hundreds of millions that "aspartame" is somehow safe to consume.

Talk about Fake News! These Ajinomoto guys in Japan win the Gold Prize for getting away with audaciously lying to consumers in every nation.

Demesia Padilla’s sudden resignation as Taxation and Revenue Department secretary last week sent a jolt through state government. It was also a blow to Republican Gov. Susana Martinez, who had stood by Padilla, one of her longest-serving Cabinet members, as the Attorney General’s Office carried out a monthslong investigation into Padilla’s personal finances and allegations that she tried to thwart a state audit into one of her former tax clients.

That changed last week as the contours of the investigation came into focus with the release of a stunning search warrant affidavit. The document, released a day after agents raided Padilla’s state offices, revealed that investigators were looking into a host of possible criminal activities, including tax evasion and embezzlement.

Martinez, who had once challenged the investigation as a politically motivated attack, accepted Padilla’s resignation and said she had ordered the tax department to fully cooperate with investigators.

World Beyond War, with your help, is expanding our staff, our organizing, and our activism. As we start the new year, I'll be staying on as director and we'll be adding a fulltime organizer and a part-time education coordinator (both already hired), as well as many volunteers -- including our growing global coordinating committee, chaired by Leah Bolger.

We've also just launched a campaign to divest public pension funds from weapons dealers. This will be a major undertaking. We've begun a campaign in support of international justice including moving remaining nations to join the International Criminal Court, and moving that court to apply the law equally. We're also working with allies around the world on closing military bases and restoring land to its people.

n December 13, US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power offered up yet another stark exercise in imperial deceit, shedding crocodile tears for those suffering in the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo, while continuing her strategically amoral silence about much greater suffering in the country of Yemen. The basis for this unconscionable choice is simple. Russia, Syria, and Iran are attacking Aleppo. The carnage in Yemen is led by Saudi Arabia, allied with eight other Sunni Muslim states (supported by another seven countries including Canada, UK, France, and Turkey) – but this 16-state war of aggression would be impossible without the exceptional 17th enemy of Yemen, the US: there would be no genocidal war of attrition on the poorest country in the region without US approval, US weapons, US intelligence gathering, US attack planning, and constant US tactical military participation.

I pledge allegiance to . . . what?

The Electoral College, to no one’s serious surprise, voted Donald Trump in as the nation’s 45th president, and the pot of outrage in the American spectator democracy begins to boil.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no — no to all his right-wing and idiotic cabinet and Team Trump appointments, no to his conflicts of interest and serial tweets, no to his sexism, his reckless arrogance, his ego, his finger on the nuclear button.

When George W. Bush made the case for attacking and destroying the nation of Iraq, he made claims that, if true, would have justified nothing. And he proposed as evidence for those claims fraudulent, implausible, and even ridiculous pieces of information. But he was expected to produce evidence. There was no assumption that he should simply be taken on faith.

Those standards are gone.

The common wisdom that Vladimir Putin hacked into Democratic and Republican emails and fed the Democratic ones to WikiLeaks which delegitimized an otherwise legitimate election, is not based on any public evidence, and none is asked for by most believers.

Harvey Wasserman interviews investigative reporting partner Bob Fitrakis about the rigged 2016 selection and the inside story of the attempted recount for his weekly radio program, the Solartopia Green Power and Wellness Hour. EON photo

The Woodward and Bernstein of Election Integrity
Every presidential election since 2004, we have traveled to Columbus, in key swing state of Ohio, to video document election protection efforts by Harvey Wasserman, Bob Fitrakis and the Columbus Free Press team (FreePress.org).   We made the trip again this year and have just returned from filming post-recount interviews with both of them in Columbus last week.

Harvey Wasserman – an author, historian, celebrated journalist and lifelong activist, and Bob Fitrakis – a practicing attorney who holds doctorates in both political science and law – are also both popular professors in Columbus colleges.

With its theme of inconsolable grief and how to cope with it, director David Frankel’s (Marley & Me, The Devil Wears Prada) Collateral Beauty has the kind of story one usually experiences in low budget indies by filmmakers such as Jim Jarmusch. But this is a New Line Cinema, Village Roadshow Pictures, et al, feature being distributed by Warner Bros. with an A-list cast, written by Allan Loeb (the similarly-themed Things We Lost in the Fire, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps), a screenwriter who “doggedly pursues and creates unique, character-driven films… grounded in authentic emotion, poignant honesty, and a deep sense of humanity,” according to press notes.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Thailand's military government is consolidating
its control and skillfully handling the country's traumatic mourning
in the aftermath of King Bhumibol Adulyadej's death on October 13 at
age 88, while a flow of hundreds of thousands of grieving people offer
Buddhist prayers in front of the golden royal coffin.
   Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, a staunch royalist who seized
power in a bloodless 2014 coup, is overseeing the elaborate funeral
arrangements and extensive public security amid the nation's
grief-stricken changes.
   The widely revered, late constitutional monarch headed an
influential institution which supported the military.
   In turn, the armed forces proudly protected Bhumibol during his
70-year reign.
   Prayuth's post-coup policies are also defending Thailand's "old
money" elite against social climbing "nouveau riche" rivals.
   Those quashed rivals are led by former Prime Minister Thaksin
Shinawatra, who Prayuth helped topple in a 2006 coup, and by Thaksin's