by Matthew Silverstone

(NaturalNews) We have all been sold a lie, yet again. We are constantly being told that the only solution to solving the world’s food shortages is to use enormous amounts of fertilisers or genetically modified seeds that produce “super” crops. What we are not being told is that we do not need either of these two options to solve the worldwide crisis in food production, all we need to do is give seeds a little magnetic tickle.

That is right, that is all we need to do. No nitrates, no genetics, no toxic chemicals, no damage to our health or to the natural balance of nature. Just a simple tickle of tiny amounts of magnetism.

One of the authors of a study into crop growth through magnetic stimulation, Angel De Souza, wrote to me after reading the research in my book, Blinded by Science (www.blindedbyscience.co.uk)  which proved that magnetism was the long term solution. He wanted to share his disbelief as to why seed companies showed no interest in his research.

“ We d e v e l o p e d a technology of magnetic treatment to improve the vigour of tomato, lettuce and onion seeds, rate and germination uniformity, growth, emergency and seedling vigour under field conditions as well as crop yields and quality of harvest… Also, this technology increases protection against the stress of heat and pathogens.

In further correspondence he went on to say that he published a paper in an offi cial seed journal to promote his research in 2010, proving it was possible to increase seed germination and growth of yield of tomatoes. This piece of research fell on deaf ears. No seed company was interested.

This is almost an act of crime against humanity! So start asking yourself this question, what is the motive behind all of this.

It can only be one thing, profits. What can we do about it? Start a media campaign and spread the word, let everyone know what is being done and put pressure on supermarkets, retail outlets and specifically seed companies to let them know that we don’t want to eat food grown with chemicals of plants that are genetically modified in any way. We want natural.

If this means that they don’t make enormous profi ts then so be it as humanity will be the big benefactor, not only for you, but for your ­children and your children’s children.

De Souza A, Garcia D, Sueiro L, Gilart F, Porras E, Licea L (2006) Pre-sowing magnetic treatments of tomato seeds increase the growth and yield of plants. Bioelectromagnetics, 27, pp. 247-257. De Souza A, Sueiro L, Gonzalez L, Licea L, Porras E, Gilart F (2008) Improvement of the growth and yield of lettuce plants by the non-uniform magnetic fields. Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine, 27, pp. 173-184.

“Extremely low frequency non-uniform magnetic fi elds improve tomato seed germination and early seedling growth” Seed Science and Technology 2010.

About the author: Matthew Silverstone is the author of Blinded by science, www.blindedbyscience.co.uk a book that will completely change your attitude to your health. Blinded by Science offers a theory which when applied to factors like water, plants, the Sun and the Moon all seems to make perfect sense. As simple as it sounds, it is the theory that everything vibrates.

The book explains that everything vibrates from the nucleus of an atom to the molecules of our blood, our brain, sound, plants, animals, all the way into outer space. Once this basic principle is understood, everything suddenly becomes clear. Once you apply this theory to the world around you, you will be astounded by what you learn.

Find out more at www.blindedbyscience.co.uk

­por Isaac Bigio

Ollanta Humala

Before officially taking office, Peru’s elected president was in La Paz, where he claimed that he would like to revive the Peru-Bolivian Confederation of 1836-39.

This statement, just as others related to foreign policy, was absent in the debate during the presidential campaign. Nevertheless, if it is successful in going beyond being just a wish and starts to seek implementation, it will entail the emergence of a unionist tendency, opposed to that of the current world.

To date, the dynamics of Hispanic-America have not been related to the reunification of diverse republics, but towards an increasing fragmentation. Since the 1821 post-colonial Mexico, the Central-American federation broke away, and afterwards it was divided into 5 new republics. Later, Texas demanded its independence, in order to be annexed to the US, and so was later the north of Mexico. In 1830 the Great Colombia was divided into Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia (from this latter  Panama split in 1903).

The attempts of keeping integrated the old Vice-royalty of la Plata have failed, just as any possibility to unify the old Spanish colonies of the Caribbean. The Spanish island is currently divided between the Dominican and Haitian republics. The Spanish Antilles were captured by the US in the 1898 war, allowing Cuba to obtain independence, although one of its zones (Guantanamo) and Puerto Rico remain under Washington’s administration.

The tendency towards division has been enhanced in the rest of the Antilles. The Federation of the Western Indies of 1958-62 gave rise to 14 countries (most of them under the rule of Elizabeth II, although only 4 were semi-autonomous dependencies). The Dutch West Indies have ­advanced towards fragmentation as most of the 6 islands that comprise them have voted for its separation.

At an international level there is, on one hand, a tendency to form regional blocs, but on the other hand, there is a tendency towards the fragmentation of the states. Until half a century ago, most of the 54 countries of Africa were united under the administration of France or Great Britain.

I n w e s t A s i a , a t least 8 new countries emerged from decolonization. The old British India is today divided into 5 republics and the French Indochina, into 3. Since 2 decades ago, the 3 “socialist” federations from Eastern Europe have split, giving rise to 23 new members of the United Nations, while others are also demanding to become members.

Countries that could claim a national common past (such as Austria and Germany or several in Arabia) are still separated. Libya’s, Egypt’s or Syria’s attempts of integrating among them or with other neighbors have failed. Countries such as Gambia, Swaziland, Monaco, San Marino or the Vatican, despite being entrenched within a bigger nation, have insisted in maintaining their independence.

Three exceptions to that rule are the reunifications of Vietnam, Germany and Yemen, even though these 3 cases include historical nations that were temporarily divided due to the fact that parts of their territories chose different socio-economic models during the Cold War.

Violencia en México

by Michael Smith

Just before sunset onApril 10, 2006, a DC-9 jet landed at the international airport in the port city of Ciudad del Carmen, 500 miles east of Mexico City.

As soldiers on the ground approached the plane, the crew tried to shoo them away, saying there was a dangerous oil leak. So the troops grew suspicious and searched the jet.

They found 128 black suitcases, packed with 5.7 tons of cocaine, valued at $100 million. The stash was supposed to have been delivered from Caracas to drug traffickers in Toluca, near Mexico City, Mexican prosecutors later found. Law enforcement officials also discovered something else.

The smugglers had bought the DC-9 with laundered funds they transferred through two of the biggest banks in the U.S.: Wachovia Corp. and Bank of America Corp., Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its August 2010 issue. This was no isolated incident. Wachovia, it turns out, had made a habit of helping move money for Mexican drug smugglers.

Wells Fargo & Co., which bought Wachovia in 2008, has admitted in court that its unit failed to monitor and report suspected money laundering by narcotics traffickers — including the cash used to buy four planes that shipped a total of 22 tons of cocaine. The admission came in an agreement that Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia struck with federal prosecutors in March, and it sheds light on the largely undocumented role of U.S. banks in contributing to the violent drug trade that has convulsed Mexico for the past four years.

‘Blatant Disregard’ Wachovia admitted it didn’t do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion for Mexicancurrency-exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That’s the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an antimoney-laundering law, in U.S. history — a sum equal to one-third of Mexico’s current gross domestic product.

“Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations,” says Jeffrey Sloman, the federal prosecutor who handled the case.

Since 2006, more than 22,000 people have been killed in drug-related battles that have raged mostly along the 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) border that Mexico shares with the U.S. In the Mexican city of CiudadJuarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, 700 people had been murdered this year as of mid- June. Six Juarez police officers were slaughtered by automatic weapons fire in a midday ambush in April.

Rondolfo Torre, the leading candidate for governor in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas, was gunned down yesterday, less than a week before elections in which violence related to drug trafficking was a central issue.

45,000 Troops

Mexican President Felipe Calderon vowed to crush the drug cartels when he took office in December 2006, and he’s since deployed 45,000 troops to fight the cartels. They’ve had little success.

Among the dead are police, soldiers, journalists and ordinary citizens. The U.S. has pledged Mexico $1.1 billion in the past two years to aid in the fight against narcotics cartels. In May, President Barack Obama said he’d send 1,200National Guard troops, adding to the 17,400 agents on the U.S. side of the border to help stem drug traffic and illegal immigration.

Behind the carnage in Mexico is an industry that supplies hundreds of tons of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines to Americans. The cartels have built a network of dealers in 231 U.S. cities from coast to coast, taking in about $39 billion in sales annually, according to the Justice Department.

‘You’re Missing the Point’

Twenty million people in the U.S. regularly use illegal drugs, spurring street crime and wrecking families. Narcotics cost the U.S. economy $215 billion a year — enough to cover health care for 30.9 million Americans — in overburdened courts, prisons and hospitals and lost productivity, the department says.

“It’s the banks laundering money for the cartels that finances the tragedy,” says Martin Woods, director of Wachovia’s anti-moneylaundering unit in London from 2006 to 2009. Woods says he quit the bank in disgust after executives ignored his documentation that drug dealers were funneling money through Wachovia’s branch network.

“If you don’t see the correlation between the money laundering by banks and the 22,000 people killed in Mexico, you’re missing the point,” Woods says.

Cleansing Dirty Cash

Wachovia is just oneof the U.S. and European banks that have been used for drug money laundering. For the past two decades, Latin American drug traffickers have gone to U.S. banks to cleanse their dirty cash, says Paul Campo, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s financial crimes unit.

Miami-based American Express Bank International paid fines in both 1994 and 2007 after admitting it had failed to spot and report drug dealers laundering money through its accounts. Drug traffickers used accounts at Bank of America in Oklahoma City to buy three planes that carried 10 tons of cocaine, according to Mexican court filings.

Federal agents caught people who work for Mexican cartels depositing illicit funds in Bank of America accounts in Atlanta, Chicago and Brownsville, Texas, from 2002 to 2009. Mexican drug dealers used shell companies to open accounts at London-based HSBC Holdings Plc, Europe’s biggest bank by assets, an investigation by the Mexican Finance Ministry found.

F o l l o w i n g R u l e s

Those two banks weren’t accused of wrongdoing. Bank of America spokeswoman Shirley Norton and HSBC spokesman Roy Caple say laws bar them from discussing specific clients.

They say their banks strictly follow the government rules. “Bank of America takes its anti-money-laundering responsibilities very seriously,” Norton says.

A Mexican judge on Jan. 22 accused the owners of six centros cambiarios,  or money changers, in Culiacan and Tijuana of laundering drug funds through their accounts at the Mexican units of Banco Santander SA, Citigroup Inc. and HSBC, according to court documents filed in the case.

The money changers are in jail while being tried. Citigroup, HSBC and Santander, which is the largest Spanish bank by assets, weren’t accused of any wrongdoing. The three banks say Mexican law bars them from commenting on the case, adding that they each carefully enforce anti-money- laundering programs.

­HSBC has stopped accepting dollar deposits in Mexico, and Citigroup no longer allows noncustomers to change dollars there. Citigroup detected suspicious activity in the Tijuana accounts, reported it toregulators and closed the accounts, Citigroup spokesman Paulo Carreno says.

Criminal Empires

On June 15, the Mexican Finance Ministry announced it would set limits for banks on cash deposits in dollars.

Mexico’s drug cartels have become multinational criminal enterprises.

­

por Adam Clark Estes

The offices of NSA studies to how read the people’s emails. (PHOTO BY LINDA PANETA)

With a new major hacking incident seemingly daily, the Department of Defense is scrambling to find the right shield against future for attacks. But why hide behind a shield when you can charge onto the battlefield underneath the invisible but ironclad cloak of the National Security Agency?

That’s exactly how the DoD is mounting it’s first strike back at the hackers–a preemptive strike that will increase online surveillance at defense contractors by partnering with internet service providers for privileged access to the rivers of data flowing through their cables. AT&T, Verizon and CenturyLink are all on board. Giving the NSA more access to the same internet tubes that power your Gmail account sounds a little invasive.

At least that’s what James X. Dempsey, vice president for public policy at the civil liberties watchdog group the Center for Democracy and Technology. “We wouldn’t want this to become a backdoor form of surveillance,” Dempsey told The Washington Post, referring to the pilot program that DoD insists will remain limited to the contractors working closely with the government.

“The U.S. government will not be monitoring, intercepting or storing any private-sector communications,” Deputy Secretary William J. Lynn III said Thursday at a global security conference in Paris. However, he added, “We hope the … cyber pilot can be the beginning of something bigger. It could serve as a model that can be transported to other critical infrastructure sectors, under the leadership of the Department of Homeland Security.”

Citing recent attacks on government contractors like Lockheed Martin, Lynn is taking a defensive stance on the privacy issue–pun intended. In other words, the NSA program will test out what some would call surveillance techniques on outside parties, and when the program is ready, it’s not out of the question that the government would move it to the private sector. It makes sense that the DoD is being aggressive. As Reuters reports, the government is getting pretty desperate: Terabytes of data are flying out the door, and billions of dollars are lost in remediation costs and reputational harm, government and private security experts said in interviews. The head of the U.S. military’s Cyber Command, General Keith Alexander, has estimated that Pentagon computer systems are probed by would-be assailants 250,000 times each hour. Cyber intrusions are now a fact of life, and a widely accepted cost of doing business.

“We don’t treat it as if it’s here today, gone tomorrow,” said Jay Opperman, Comcast Corp.’s senior director of security and privacy. “It’s like an insect infestation. Once you’ve got it, you never get rid of it.” We all saw Men in Black. And Hackers. And The Matrix. Sometimes, in the face of an invasion, the government ought to protect itself and its citizens from danger. That’s basically why an institution like the Department of Defense exists–nobody will argue with that.

But another sort of danger is the fact that, in the context of cybercrime, the public understands so very little about the terms of the government’s efforts. Poll Middle America about what “DDoS attack” or “Stuxnetlike weapons” are. Even the term “fingerprints of malicious code” from The Washington Post coverage of the NSA surveillance program leaves lots of leeway for better informed officials to define the rules of engagement. By its very nature a virtual attack is much harder to visualize than a missile heading to Washington DC. Apologies for the Cold Warstyle reference, but the Pentagon seems as confused now as they did then about how to ­balance the actual defense Stanagainst cyber attackers and the propaganda campaign to win the public’s support. Which brings us to the mixed messages problem.

The other line of narrative around the internet and government protecting the people is a presumably more docile one: the struggle for privacy in the age of Facebook. As enterprising Senators go head to head with the social network and the Google and everyone, lambasting them for deceitfully monitoring American citizens with their confusing privacy policies and location tracking programs, news of a clandestine agreement between internet service providers and the NSA, the most secret of the secret agencies, feels kind of icky. Like a hypocritical bed bug invasion or something.

by Jasmine Jafferali

Chicago Family Health Examiner Spring is in the air and the ants are marching right into your house. You may want to hold off on buying those ugly little ant traps, the little yellow packets just may do the trick. I’ll never forget when I first read about Splenda. I jumped on the bandwagon as everyone else did. Then about four years ago, I read that you could use Splenda to kill household ants. So I dumped my bag of splenda in the dirt.

Fascinated by my recent discovery, I began my research and here is what I found: Splenda was “discovered” accidentally in a lab back in 1975 while trying to create a new insecticide (Ewww…who decided it was safe for human consumption? Oh yeah the FDA did back in 1998). Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s will not sell Splenda or any product that contains “sucralose” because it does not fit within their code of ethics of selling “real food”.

(Thank you Whole Foods Market and Trader Joe’s) Sucralose, the made-up name by the manufacturer of Splenda, contains chlorinated compounds. (Ohhh… Splenda made up the name sucralose…because anything that ends on “ose” makes it sound like yummy sugar) Chlorine is toxic and is not found in any food or table salt even though the manufacturer of Splenda will tell you it is fi ne. However there is chloride present in food and table salt, which is non-toxic. (Very sneaky Splenda makers) Chlorine, (which we now know is in Splenda), has caused so much damage to human health that Greenpeace has launched a Chlorine-Free Campaign, calling for a worldwide ban on chlorine. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also maintains a strong anti-chlorine stance.

(Did you know that cancer patients have high levels of chlorine in their bodies?) If you really want some motivation for staying away from Splenda and anything that contains it (example: Weight Watchers, Atkins and South Beach, fl avored waters, Crystal Light, diet drinks anything “diet” or labeled as “sugar-free”, “low in sugar” or no sugar” typically contains it. Yes, this includes your kids’ favorite “no-sugar” Hawaiian Punch) and if you are a future mother, read all about baby boys being born with shortened male anatomy due to chlorine passed to them in the womb. (and we want to do this to our unborn children, why?) Studies show that people that consumed diet drinks were 41 percent more likely to be overweight than those who did not. (so diet drinks and foods are sabotaging our weight loss efforts? Seems like an oxymoron to me).

­But honestly, any artifi cial sweetener will work. How do I know this? I have had both friends and family members try it with great success, even my sister-in-law who lives in a very rural part of Ohio. The nice thing about using up your little yellow (or blue or pink) packets is there are no harsh chemicals used. Your family does not breathe in all the chemicals, your baby doesn’t fi nd an ant trap and put it in their mouths and if your pets lick it, you can save the call to poison control. Now is the time to try some other safer alternative sweeteners like stevia and agave nectar syrup. And don’t forget the old tried and trued, honey and real maple syrup (not Aunt Jemima).

Don’t get mad at me if your favorite drink contains sucralose. There are ways to give our families safer options if using a sweetener is a must. Here are some fun family cocktails that you can try (and it is cheaper than buying bottled juice): Homemade Lemonade: 1 1/2c of real lemon juice (about 6 lemons squeezed), 6 cups of cold water, 1/3 cup of raw honey (more or less to your liking).

Mix and enjoy! Chocolate milk: 1 TB of cocoa powder, 1TB of agave nectar syrup and 1 cup of your favorite milk Homemade Flavored Water: 1 cup of carbonated water, 1TB of agave nectar syrup and half of your favorite fruit squeezed such as an orange. Or puree your favorite berry such as frozen strawberries and a kiwi. Homemade Orange Pop: 2 liter bottle of carbonated water, 1/2 can of orange juice concentrate, 3 lemons squeezed.