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Worst. Putin Puppet. Ever.

AUTHOR: CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

Knee jerks or just jerks? Is the empire looking for war?
Knee jerks or just jerks? Is the empire looking for war?

In what the BBC is unironically referring to as “a remarkable show of solidarity,” the US and more than 20 other countries have participated in the largest collective expulsion of Russian diplomats ever in history. The US topped them all with no less than 60 diplomats expelled, far exceeding the 23 diplomats expelled by the UK, the location of the alleged “Novichok” poisoning which the expulsions are intended as a response to.

This is just the latest gratuitous cold war escalation against the Russian Federation by the Trump administration, which will still remain plagued by accusations of Kremlin collusion despite this latest act and all the others preceding it. Those previous escalations include Trump’s capitulation to the longstanding neoconservative agenda to arm Ukraine against Russia, killing Russians in Syria as part of its regime change occupation of that country, adopting a Nuclear Posture Review with greatly increased aggression toward Russia and blurred lines between when nuclear strikes are and are not appropriate, sending war ships into the Black Sea “to counter Russia’s increased presence there,” forcing RT and Sputnik to register as foreign agents, expanding NATO with the addition of Montenegro, assigning Russia hawk Kurt Volker as special representative to Ukraine, shutting down a Russian consulate in San Francisco and throwing out more Russian diplomats in August of last year.

Isn’t it weird how when you ignore the narratives being promoted by both sides and just look at the raw behavior, being a “Putin puppet” looks exactly the same as being a dangerously aggressive Russia hawk? Continue reading “Worst. Putin Puppet. Ever.”

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Pesticide safety: Flawed risk assessment tests were driven by too much industry influence

Pesticides are deadly

(Natural News) “If pesticides are so dangerous, why are they allowed to be sold and used?” If you’ve ever tried to convince someone how important it is to buy organic produce, you might have heard this line. Answering honestly can get you labeled a conspiracy theorist pretty quickly, but according to one NGO, nine out of ten EU tests determining pesticide safety come from the industry itself.

That answers the question nicely, but there’s more to the story than that. The EU is known for having some of the strictest pesticide laws on the planet. In many other systems, regulators have to prove that they are harmful to get a ban or restriction; in the EU, on the other hand, the burden is on pesticide makers to prove they are safe before they can be sold.

You would think this would give Europeans an unparalleled level of protection, but the reality is far different. A report from the Pesticide Action Network has found that 90 percent of the tests for authorizing pesticides carried out by the EU have been designed by the pesticide industry or are tests that the pesticide industry advocated for – and we can all imagine why they would favor certain tests over others.

In addition, more than two thirds of these tests use methods that come from the U.S., where pesticide regulations are notoriously lax.

Who regulates EU pesticides?

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has the job of regulating pesticides in Europe. They use 12 methods for assessing pesticide risk to determine if each substance should be allowed to be used within the European Union, but 11 of these were promoted by the pesticide industry or developed by them directly. That leaves just one test that can really be trusted.

According to the Pesticide Action Network’s Hans Muilerman, this allows the dangerous effects seen in animal safety studies to essentially be “swept under the carpet.” The methods deem the tumors seen in test animals irrelevant in humans, for example, and consider pesticide residues in groundwater to be acceptable.

Muilerman said: “The methods are designed to prevent a ban of harmful pesticides and result in lowering of the protection of the public and the environment.”

Read more at naturalnews.com