by Aurora Geib
Natural News

Aspartame, an artificial sweetener commercially known as Nutrasweet, Spoonful and Equal, has infiltrated the world market and has become almost as ubiquitous as the sugar it seeks to replace. From soda drinks to chewing gum, it offers a low-fat, low-calorie and no-sugar option enticing to diabetics and people who are trying to lose weight.

Strangely, diet products containing aspartame has been shown to actually cause weight gain, and the components that make up aspartame have also been found to be toxic in themselves. Why then, despite the numerous studies conducted on this substance finding it to have potentially harmful effects, is it still considered safe for human consumption?

Interview with Russell Blay lock

In an interview conducted by Betty Martini and Jon Baum over Personal Achievement Radio, Dr. Russell Blaylock, a respected neurosurgeon and author of the book “Excitotoxins: The Taste that Kills,” speaks about excitotoxins and shares his thoughts on why he believes aspartame is dangerous.

According to Dr. Blaylock, excitotoxins are substances that excite brain cells or neurons to the point of exhaustion and death. Normally, these substances act as transmitters, a substance allowing brain cells to relate with one another.

However, these compounds are so harmful that the body keeps them in low concentrations. Anything that alters or increases these substances can cause neurodegeneration, degeneration of the spinal cord and the brain. Excitotoxins are normally found in plant substances, and, where most people are concerned, in food additives.

One of the components of NutraSweet or aspartame is aspartic acid, a powerful excitotoxin similar to glutamate. Moreover, phenylalanine, one of its components, an amino acid and a neurotoxin at high levels in the rain, has been known to cause seizures.

Dr. Blaylock goes on to add that what makes aspartame so dangerous is that it contains three neurotoxins: methanol, phenylalanine and aspartic acid. Methanol is a powerful neurotoxin whose exposure is carefully allowed by the EPA in minute levels in food and environmental exposure. Nutrasweet, however, provides levels that are seven times the amount the EPA will allow anyone to use. It’s been known to produce blindness and cellular destruction in the brain and spinal cord, particularly the optic nerves.

Aspartic acid, on the other hand, produces cellular excitation. It is an excitotoxin that causes cell death in the brain and significantly affects neural developments in infants, resulting in behavioral changes and even hyperactivity in children. Phenylalanine, like aspartic acid, can also alter brain development during fetal formation and create a lowering of the seizure threshold. Phenylalanine and aspartic acid are both wellrecognized neurotoxins and according to Dr. Blaylock, three neurotoxins in one mix are just unbelievable. Neurological side effects

Today, aspartame is found in over 6,000 product and consumed by 250 million people world wide. There has been more report for aspartame reactions to the FDA than all other food additives put together. In 1988, 80 percent of complaints to the FDA about food additives were aspartame related. After more than 8,000 complaints on the side effect of NutraSweet, the FDA released a list of 92 side effects associated with aspartame consumption.

This is without taking into account other findings that show what aspartame can cause: Destruction of kidney function – In a study conducted by scientists from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, it was discovered that subjects who drank more than two artificially sweetened beverages daily increased their risk of rapid kidney decline.

Headaches/migraines – In a study published in Headache: The Journal of Head and Face Pain, it was discovered that ingestion of aspartame by those who suffer migraines caused a significant increase in headache frequency for some subjects. Increase of hunger and body weight – In an article published in the UT Health Science Center, it was revealed that diet soft drink consumption seemed much more related to the chances of becoming more overweight or obese.

Increase of the risk of preterm delivery – In a study funded by the Center for Fetal Programming, Division of Epidemiology, a connection ­was discovered between the intake of artificially carbonated drinks and increased risk of preterm delivery.

Seizures and Convulsions – As early as 1987, a study was already conducted by Timothy Maher and Richard J. Wurtman who, through their work, discovered that aspartame potentially induces seizures. Cancer – In a remarkably recent study conducted by the Ramazzini Institute, it was discovered that in rodents, aspartame was a carcinogenic agent in multiple sites with autopsies that showed a significant risk to lung and liver cancer. Why is it still legal? Laws were meant to protect people from harm. Despite this, the FDA has continued to ignore years of research pointing to aspartame’s negative effects and continue to declare that aspartame is safe for use.

This artificial sweetener openly sold in the market has caused many recorded health issues and was never tested in humans prior to its approval. We are now the unwitting subjects in a grand experiment whose results have long been foretold by the questionable way this additive came to be approved. It’s about time we stop relying on the government and do our own thinking. Perhaps, if we are not complacent, we can choose not to be victims.

­by the El Reportero’s news services

ex Presidente Manuel Zelaya

The Honduran Electoral Supreme Court (TSE) allowed the registration of new party Partido Libertad y Refundacion (Freedom and Refoundation, LIBRE), led by former president Manuel Zelaya, to become the seventh political institution in the country.

LIBRE fulfilled all the established requisites in the Honduran electoral law, gathering more than 42,000 required signatures, presenting structures in the 18 departments of the nation and in more than 50 percent of the municipalities, so now, it can start the formal registration to participate in the future electoral processes.

This new party wants to take Xiomara Castro, wife of Zelaya, as the only candidate to the presidency, and gathers all the groups opposed to the coup in June 28, 2009 in Honduras.

The Morazanic Information Net published that for the first time in Honduras, electoral participation of a movement coming from the people, has been assured.

“With the union of political strength and social struggle, LIBRE and the National Popular Resistance Front (Fnrp) will be towards the power,” said the Morazanic Information Net.

In October 2011, LIBRE presented more than 80,000 signatures requesting its inscription as a legal political party before the TSE authorities, together with documents showing its municipal, department and national structures, statutes, programs and constitution act.

When the TSE official resolution official TSE was known, by means of which the inscription and recognition is legalized and its authorities at national level, they will just wait for the publication of that resolution in the Official Gazette, with which it would be come to request the legal personality.

It assures that with the inscription of that new political force it is qualified for its participation in the general elections and this way to dispute the power to the traditional parties of the oligarchy.

Last week, TSE approved the request of registry of Partido Anticorrupción (PAC) that postulates television announcer Salvador Nasralla for the Presidency of the Republic.

Until then, the Liberal, National, Innovation and Unidad (PINU), Christian Democracy (DC) and Democratic Unification were enrolled legally (UD).

Guatemala: Former soldier involved in massacre sentenced

Guatemalan ex soldier Pedro Pimentel was sentenced on Tuesday to 6,060 years in prison in a trial in which he was prosecuted for a massacre in an indigenous community in 1982.

The three judges dismissed the plea of innocence of the defendant and his lawyers by confirming the veracity of the evidence presented by the prosecutors and the witnesses’ testimonies about his involvement in the events.

Pimentel was sentenced to 30 years in prison for each of the 201 peasants massacred from Dec. 6 to 8, 1982, in the village of Dos Erres, 8in the northern department of Peten, and 30 others for crimes against humanity.

­However, technically, the penalty for the former member of the Kaibiles, the elite force of the Guatemalan Army, is 50 years, because it is the maximum sentence allowed in the Criminal Code.

The Dos Erres massacre is considered one of the most famous killings committed by the military, among dozens of them that took place during the domestic armed conflict (1960-1996).

by Anna M. Tinsley
Star-Telegram Staff Writer

FORT WORTH — Gun sales are booming. Enthusiasts are stocking up on guns and ammunition, and some in the industry are wondering whether sales are spiking as they did after Democrat Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008.

That rush created a nationwide shortage.

“We’re at the top of the roller coaster and we’re about to plummet down the side,” said DeWayne Irwin, owner of the Cheaper Than Dirt gun store in north Fort Worth, which set a sales record for the month of February. “It’s fixing to happen again. I don’t know if it will be to the same extent it was before, but I see it coming.

“Look who the Republicans are trying to put against Obama,” he said. “It’s the Keystone Kops and people are getting scared. People are terrified he’s going to get re-elected and then he won’t care about getting votes next time. He’ll just pass whatever legislation he wants.”

Some say the uptick in sales at gun stores could also be linked to anything from the arrival of tax refunds to a spending spree by fans of the National Geographic Channel’s Doomsday Preppers show, which chronicles people preparing for the end of the world.

Nationwide, more people than ever are buying firearms.

Last year, the FBI received more than 16.3 million inquiries from people running criminal background checks on potential gun buyers. That’s up from 12.7 million in 2008 and 11.4 million in 2007, FBI records show.

Texas had around 1 million such requests in each of the past four years, the second most, behind Kentucky, which had nearly double that. Officials say Kentucky’s numbers are high because fresh background checks are run every month there on gun owners with concealed-weapons permits.

“I’m constantly getting questions from people in the gun community about this [issue],” said Alan Korwin, author of nine gun law books, including Gun Laws of America, and operator of gunlaws.com. “People are concerned that if Obama wins, as a lame duck, he will go after firearms in a way we have never seen before.

“We saw a fire sale when he was elected last time,” he said. “But the speculation is that now … with his need to get re-elected gone, the sky is the limit on attacking the Second Amendment.”

Assault weapons ban?

Before taking office, Obama said he respected the constitutional right to bear arms. In 2007, after more than three dozen Chicago children had been killed, he also said he wanted to restore the ban on assault weapons.

In the days and weeks after the 2008 election, people began stocking up on firearms and ammunition, eventually creating a shortage. It took nearly a year for supplies to become more plentiful and for prices, which spiked because of the demand, to come down.

President Bill Clinton signed the last so-called assault weapons ban on Sept. 13, 1994, and it expired 10 years later. Just months after he signed the ban, voters went to the polls and the House and Senate flipped from Democratic to Republican control.

When the assault weapons ban came up in Congress for reauthorization in 2004, the measure failed.

“It’s bad politics to be on the wrong side of the Second Amendment at election time,” Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, has said.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has said the Obama administration “has consistently favored the reinstitution of the assault weapons ban. It is something that we think was useful in the past with regard to the reduction that we’ve seen in crime and certainly would have a positive impact on our relationship and the crime situation in Mexico.”

Fort Worth’s Mark Greene, a hunter and former member of Gun Owners for Obama, said he’s tired of people using this argument to influence Obama’s re-election bid.

“I still own guns and I still support Obama,” he said.

“And I still have very little in common with the fear mongers and bunker-mentality gun nuts who will tell any lie they think they can get away with to try and bring down this president they hate so vehemently and irrationally.”

Some in the industry ­cite a variety of reasons for the rise in gun and ammo sales, including that manufacturers are better marketing guns — primarily pink ones — to women.

B u t a b i g r e a – son may be politics. A prominent businessman recently shopped at Cheaper Than Dirt, saying that “Republicans  don’t have a prayer against Obama” this year. That man, Irwin said, spent $25,000 on ammunition, magazines and other gun paraphernalia.

“The folks  paying attention to the political climate think this might be an opportunity to stock up,” Irwin said. ‘War on gun owners’ John Woods, who has lobbied for legislation to keep guns off college campuses, said many fears surfacing are unwarranted. “The gun lobby has long known that fear is a remarkable marketing and fundraising tool,” said Woods, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin who attended Virginia Tech and lost his girlfriend in the 2007 shooting there that claimed 33 lives. “But the Supreme Court ruled recently that the Second Amendment is an individual right, so that fear is completely misplaced.”

Not everyone is stocking up .

Robert Chafin, who lives in Denton County, says he was among those who stocked up during Clinton’s presidency.

“I stockpiled a variety of firearms that I feared might not be available in the future,” he said. “As it turned out, in the wake of the disaster that befell the Democratic Party in the ‘94 elections, attacks on firearms ownership evaporated as Democrats learned a painful lesson. And it appears they have remembered that lesson.” That’s why he isn’t stockpiling right now, he said, even though Obama’s “administration has waged an oblique war on gun owners.”

por David Bacon Truthout

­http://www.truthout.org/immigrant-steel-workers-march-against-unjust-firings/1329922142.

Pacific Steel workers march through Berkeley.  (PHOTO BY DAVID BACON)

BERKELEY, CA (2/18/12) — Two hundred immigrant workers, their wives, husbands, children, and hundreds of supporters marched through downtown Berkeley February 17, protesting their firing from Pacific Steel Castings. The company is one of the city’s biggest employers, and the largest steel foundry west of the Mississippi River. Starting at City Hall, they walked for an hour past stores and homes, as bystanders often applauded. Teachers and students at a Montessori school along the route even came out to the sidewalk to urge them on. At a rally before the march started, fired worker Jesus Prado told the assembled crowd, “I worked for Pacific Steel for seven years. We’ve organized this March for Dignity because we want to stop the way they’re stepping on us, and treating us like criminals. We came here to work, not to break any laws.”

“Many of us are buying homes, or have lived in our homes for years,” added another fired worker, Ana Castaño. “We have children in the schools. We pay taxes and contribute to our community. What is happening to us is not just, and hurts our families. All we did was work. That shouldn’t be treated like it’s a crime.”

Berkeley City Councilmember Jesse Arreguin agreed. “We’re here today to send a message to the Obama administration that the I-9 raids have to stop,” he told the crowd.

Two hundred fourteen workers were fired in December and January, as a result of a so-called silent raid, in which the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arm of the Department of Homeland Security inspected the company’s records to find workers who don’t have legal immigration status. ICE then demanded that the company fire them.

For the past year these workers have held meetings in union halls and churches, distributed food to families hungry because they can no longer work, and spoken to elected officials. The march was the culmination of months of debate in which to us is not just, and hurts our families. All we did was work. That shouldn’t be treated like it’s a crime.” Berkeley City Councilmember Jesse Arreguin agreed. “We’re here today to send a message to the Obama administration that the I-9 raids have to stop,” he told the crowd.

Two hundred fourteen workers were fired in December and January, as a result of a so-called silent raid, in which the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arm of the Department of Homeland Security inspected the company’s records to find workers who don’t have legal immigration status. ICE then demanded that the company fire them.

For the past year these workers have held meetings in union halls and churches, distributed food to families hungry because they can no longer work, and spoken to elected officials. The march was the culmination of months of debate in which rights organizations, ­and local elected officials.

Bill Ong Hing, law professor at the University of San Francisco, says the lack of jobs in Mexico is a consequence of free trade and structural adjustment policies designed to benefit large corporations. He calls the administration’s justification divorced from reality. “Employer sanctions [the section of immigration law that prohibits undocumented people from working] have not reduced undocumented migration at all. They’ve failed because NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] and globalization create great migration pressure. Trying to discourage workers from coming by arresting them for working without authorization, or trying to prevent them from finding work, is doomed to fail in the face of such economic pressure. To reduce it, we need to change our trade and economic policies so that they don’t produce poverty in countries like Mexico.”

Reverend Deborah Lee of the Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights called this kind of enforcement a violation of the workers’ basic human rights, “These families have done nothing wrong,” she said. “They’re being punished for working, which is what people in our community are supposed to do. We will not let this happen in silence, nor allow these workers to be treated as though they are invisible.”

As hundreds of people filled Second Street, a block away from the foundry where they’d put in their years of labor, the fired workers were certainly not invisible any longer.