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The U.S. government stated that the salmonella outbreak which had sickened at least 1,440 people appears to be over, but its ultimate source may never be known, partly because of shortcomings in the nation's food safety system. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration said they found strong evidence to implicate jalapeno and serrano peppers, which were imported from Mexico. It was the largest outbreak of food borne illness in decades. Investigators were unable to clear domestic and imported tomatoes, from the ban. Here in Canada, we have our own problems with contaminated food products. Given the recent outbreak of tainted meats infected with listeriosis bacteria in Canada, it is giving Canadians great concern how safe our food products really are in Canada. I recall that aside from meats, other foods like fruits and vegetables, like tomatoes and spinach were found to be contaminated. This gives little comfort to Canadians. While the president of Maple Leaf Foods, Michael McCain, had taken full responsibility for the tainted ready-to-eat meat products which were infected with listeria monocytogenes bacteria, which had come out from his processing plant, somewhere along the line, the systems has failed the Canadian public which has caused the death of 15 people. 12 people in Ontario, one person in Saskatchewan, one person in B.C. and one person in Quebec. According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, there are 29 confirmed cases of the outbreak strain in the country. The tainted meats were found in a variety of ready-to-eat meat products. Now, Health Canada thinks that hospitality and party trays, submarine sandwiches, cooked ham and salami sandwiches which are sold in Sobeys, Foodland and IGA stores in Ontario may also contain the listeria monocytogene bacteria. The best advice is to stay away from ready-to-eat meat products of any kind which come from food processing plants until a full inspection of those plants have been made. Now there is a salmonellosis outbreak in Quebec which has killed one person and made 87 people sick. This time the salmonellosis outbreak has been traced back to a cheese factory located about 300 km south-east of Montreal. The province's Food and Agriculture Department has issued recalls for cheese brands La Chaudiere and Polo, which are the suspected sources of the new outbreak. This year we have see a huge increase in tainted foods, compared to other years. Giving prompt alerts will no doubt lessen the amount of people who will be effected by eating tainted foods. I recall times when I had bought meats from supermarkets or had chicken wings and burgers at take-outs which turned out to have been tainted with salmonella. Given the amount of tainted food which is affecting Canadians, we need to find better ways to combat this problem.
The sea floor off the B-C coast has been rocked by a series of earthquakes this week. The recent quake of 5.8. magnitude struck about 157 kilometres west of Port Hardy on northern Vancouver Island about 5:30 a.m. Pacific Time, but there are no reports it was felt on land. The tremor follows two other quakes, which occurred yesterday in the same area, both with magnitudes of around five, and several other quakes earlier in the week. Garry Rogers of the Geological Survey of Canada say the shaking is happening in an active geological region that often produces swarms of quakes, although he calls this recent one, more "vigorous" than in the past few years. He says there may be more earthquakes and they could be slightly bigger, but they're nothing to be alarmed about, they're too small to trigger a tsunami. Hope he is right, for the people on the west coast. That is an area where the fault plates are moving apart from each other. With good weather coming, I will be off camping again. Lately, we had been having a lot of rain. Mostly the on and off type, throughout the week. I am told that we can expect a good fall season. With the cooler weather coming on, there will not be any more mosquitoes to pester our camping trips. What a blessing that will be.
For a guy who has been threatening to force an election so many times, I find it curious that Liberal Leader Stephane Dion is now complaining that Harper had decided to call for an election. In Dion's Liberal campaign, he is offering hundreds of millions for farmers, fishermen and truckers as an additional part of his contentious 'Green Shift' plan. He claims that the plan will "reconcile the economy with the environment." Dion said that a Liberal government would set aside $400 million over four years in emission-reduction credits for the primary industries under his environmental plan. He hopes to get the money from emission taxes. While people in the southern U.S.A. are heading back to Florida, after fleeing hurricane Gustav. Now tropical storm Hanna is heading for their coast. That shows how stupid some people can be. Tropical storm Hanna had drenched flood-plagued Haiti on Wednesday, adding to the miseries of a country that has lost more than 100 lives to mudslides and flooding since mid-August. The storm is still expected to change course, sweeping across the Bahamas on Thursday and then start climbing along the U.S. coastline by the weekend, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami. Forecasters say there is a chance it could bring tropical storm force winds to New York City. Eight deaths in the U.S. have already been attributed to Gustav. Tropical storm Hanna, still poses a hurricane threat to the U.S. Southeast Coast. In the meantime, tropical storm Ike, which has strengthened into a hurricane in the open Atlantic Ocean into a category four storm, moving west at 28kmph with wind speeds of up to 215kmph. It is heading westward and is expected to hit Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virgina as it travels up the coastline.
I see that Sarah Palin is now being accused of having been a member of the Alaskan Independence Party. Members of the Alaskan Independence Party claims that Sarah Palin was a party member. Though the McCain Camp and the Alaska division of elections deny the charge. Lynette Clark, the chairman of the Alaskan Independence Party told ABC News on Monday that Palin and her husband Todd, were members in 1994, even attending the 1994 statewide convention in Wasilla. Clark was AIP secretary at the time. A day after ABC News requested a response from Palin as to whether she was ever a member of the AIP, McCain campain spokesperson Brian Rogers told ABC News that Clark's allegations are false. The McCain campaign asserted that Palin was never a member of the AIP. Gail Fenumiai, director of the Alaska Division of Elections, tells ABC News that regardless of the impression given to members of the Alaskan Independence Party, "Gov. Sarah Palin first registered to vote in the state in May 1982 as a Republican, and she has not changed her party affiliate with the Division of Elections since that time. Lynette Clark, the chairman of the Alaskan Independence Party told ABC News that she had been mistaken about Sarah Palin being a member of the Alaskan Independence Party.
Students from around the world, including Canadians, are going to the North Pole to see the effects of Global warming. They are going when the Ice Pack has receeded at its lowest level, before it starts to expand during its normal cycle of shrinking and expanding.
I had downloaded this photo from the NASA satellite to show the amount of ice is at the North Pole during September 1st, 2008, which is now at its lowest level before it begins to expand once again. This is the type of deceptive manner which the U.N. and the European Union use in order to promote their "Global Warming" stance, which by the way, had co-sponsored these students study, in order for the students to strongly support the Kyoto Protocol. There is a 144-page report, which is due to be officially released soon, which is claiming the accelerated warming of the globe, which it blames mostly on the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases produced by the industrial age. They claim that the Arctic "is now experiencing the most rapid and severe climate change on Earth," according to the report. The European Union (EU), some of whose member states who strongly supports the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse emissions, while President George W. Bush has rejected the accord. His Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, has called for the U.S. to rejoin negotiations on the treaty's terms. But recent dramatic changes in climate change, the melting of sea ice, warmer ocean, green fields in place of icy wilderness, etc - might not all be directly related to man-made greenhouse emissions that is causing global warming. The change in the climate could be triggered by circulation changes in the oceans and atmosphere.
Researchers say 55 Million years ago, the North Pole had a climate like Miami. According to a team of NASA scientists, decade-long variations in ocean circulation, known as the Arctic Oscillation, have an effect on the oceans' salinity. A very salty sea is heavier and circulates differently than a less salty one, the team says. This can affect the temperature of the water in the region and thus the local climate. North Pole's ancient past holds lessons for future global warming. Detailed information on greenhouse gasses and a subtropical heat wave at the North Pole 55 million years ago is providing information about the Earth's past as well as a portent for its future, according to reports in the June 1 issue of Nature. An expedition to the Artic Ocean in 2004 by a team of scientists aboard a fleet of icebreakers collected samples by drilling into the floor of the ocean. The project was part of an international research effort, the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, which explores the Earth's history and structure as recorded in seafloor sediments and rocks. "Remains of ancient plant and animal life found in cylindrical core samples from the ocean floor have given us critical new information about the history of the Arctic Ocean and surrounding region," said Mark Pagani, assistant professor of geology and geophysics at Yale and a co-author on the study. During the warmest time interval, the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), sea surface temperatures at the North Pole reached as high as 23 ºC, or around 73 ºF. Then I have heard from other scientists and people who claim that we are heading towards a cooling cycle. It seems that either nobody has a handle as to what is really going on with this whole cycle the planet Earth is going through, or that people can't agree on what is happening. So this climate change debate continues.
World energy system is high on content of carbon and radioactivity according to Mario Arrastía, a Cuban specialist in Science, Technology and the Environment, who is also a member of the Group of Renewable Energy of the Center for Information Management and Energy Development. Arrastía maintains that the energy system in the world today, is characterized by being carriers that are concentrated, exhaustible and with a high content of carbon and radioactivity. Experts in the field noted that the high level of environmental contamination, is produced mainly from the use of fossil fuels. This information has been greatly silenced by countries who are involved in the production of fossil fules in oil, natral gas and low grade coal.
I find it interesting that Posada Carriles, who was a former CIA agent, lives in Miami and some of his crimes include masterminding the mid-air bombing of a Cubana airliner in 1976 that killed all 73 people onboard, a series of bomb attacks against Cuban hotels and restaurants in the late 1990s and an assassination attempt against Cuban leader Fidel Castro in Panama in 2000. According to Granma news daily, Zelaya said that eight days after he was sworn-in as Honduran President in January 2006, the then US ambassador in Tegucigalpa, Charles Ford, asked his government to grant political asylum to Posada Carriles. In this regard and according to an interview published by the Honduran radio station HRN, Zelaya revealed: “I told him that it was impossible to grant a visa and political asylum to Posada Carriles because he was accused of terrorist crimes and they (the United States) defend this kind of terrorism; they defend it and I am sure of that.”
Hurricane Ike has slammed into the Turks and Caicos Islands last night. Ikeis as an "extremely dangerous" Category 4 storm, the U.S. National Hurricane Center reported. Ike is packing winds of 215 km/h as the large eye of the hurricane moved over the low-lying islands. Hurricane force winds extend outward up to 75 kilometres from the centre. The storm has affected the southeastern Bahamas early this morning. The Bahamas has expanded its hurricane warning to its central islands, including Cat Island, the Exumas, Long Island, Rum Cay and San Salvador. Cuba has issued a hurricane warning for the provinces of Guantanamo, Santiago de Cuba, Holguin, Las Tunnas and Granma. South Florida and the Florida Keys were advised to closely monitor the storm's progress. Forecasters said Ike has taken a turn to the southwest that could send it over the Florida Keys by Tuesday and then into the Gulf of Mexico. Ike is expected to produce storm surge flooding up to six metres above normal tide levels, with large and dangerous waves battering coasts, the centre said. Large swells generated by the hurricane will affect parts of the southeast U.S. coast and the oil rigs over the next couple of days, with the danger of life-threatening rip currents, it said. You can expect oil prices to surge upwards again.
According to the news media, a roadside bomb attack in Afghanistan has killed a Canadian soldier nearing the end of his second rotation. Seven Canadian soldiers were also wounded in that attack in Kandahar province's Panjwaii district. Sgt. Scott Shipway, an infantryman with the 2nd battalion of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, died less than a week before he was set to go home. Two suicide bombers had detonated their explosives inside the main police station in Kandahar city early this morning, killing at least two police officers and wounding 37 people. Among the wounded is police commander Gen. Abdul Raziq. Those hurt include 29 officers and eight civilians. A spokesman for the governor, Najib Pervaiz, said several of the wounded were in critical condition. Canadian and Afghan soldiers surrounded the station shortly after the explosions. So far,97 of our Canadian soldiers have lost their lives in Afghanistan, which is a Muslim country. A religion which wants to defeat all other religions. The bombing comes three months after a Taliban attack on the city's prison, which allowed almost 900 prisoners to escape. Remember that?
Julienne Stroeve, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado are warning that the Arctic ice sheet which has melted this summer, is not coming back. With several weeks left in the melt season, 2008 could still surpass September 2007 for the lowest amount of sea ice since satellite measurements were first taken in 1979. At last measure on Aug. 26, Arctic sea ice coverage was at 5.26 million square kilometers, a decline of 2.06 million square kilometres from the beginning of August. In September of last year, a record low was recorded, with 5.69 million square kilometres of sea ice recorded. It's not a benchmark that Stroeve is proud of, but she's also not surprised by the chilling picture the numbers provide. "I guess the main thing people should understand is this is just a continuation of that long term downward trend. I think whether or not we break the record it's just the continuation of what we've been seeing since 2002, where every year we're losing ice and we're not recovering at all," she said. Much of the ice coverage in the Arctic normally melts each summer and reforms in winter. However, Stroeve said more and more of that ice is being lost to the sea, and failing to reform in winter.
Well, as I look out my window, I see people wearing their winter coats as they are walking by. This is only the beginning of September, and people are already wearing winter coats. What do that tell any sensible person? We will see if the Ice Sheet will not rebound back to its near normal level later on in Febuary. I will compare the Ice Sheet level during the month of Sept. (which is now at its lowest point) and see what it is like in Febuary. I will post the NASA photo's of the Ice Sheet and see if the scientists are correct in what they are claiming. Personally, I suspect that those scientist are full of hot air, but we will see.
During this election, I would remind people who use tobacco products that it was every one of these political parties who are running in this election who had a hand in raising the taxes on tobacco products which amount to gouging the smoking public. Every one of these political parties had a hand in imposing unfair regulations against people and business owners who use tobacco products. Might I remind people who enjoy smoking a cigarette, a cigar or smoke their pipe, that they make up over one-fifth (about 5.3 million people) of the population in Canada. That is a very conservative figure, which I suspect far exceeds that number. That is nothing to sneeze at or to ignore. Now is the time that we need to stand up and make ourselves heard during this election campaign. Let these politicians know that we are fed-up of being unduly harassed by them and those Anti-smoking moron groups. As I have pointed out, their unfounded, outlandish, exaggerated claims have been proven for the most part, to be false. Their claims have little legitimacy . Let these politicians know that as a tobacco user, you want those taxes rolled back to a reasonable level and that you want those unfair regulations which had been imposed against people and business owners who use tobacco products to be struck down from mandatory imposition. We have as much rights to smoke our cigarettes, cigar or pipe, as those who choose not to smoke. Don't forget, the vast majority of the people who fought in the two world wars to protect our rights and freedoms where people who smoked cigarettes, cigars or a pipe. Least we forget!
Here is a breakdown on who uses health care services the most, in Canada for
the year 2007. Here is the percentage of people who have:
Chronic Emphysema
\ Asthma, ( which the vast majority of these people are non-Smokers)
Diabetes, Cancer, Stroke Arthritis/Rheumatism
Back problems
(non-arthritic)
High blood pressure
Cataracts
Smoking\Tocacco Users
As the pie chart shows, the greatest users of our Health care system and who takes a big chunk of the medical expesses and hospitalization, are used mostly by non-smokers who suffer from Asthma, Diabetes or Cancer. Only a small percentage of these diseases were the direct cause of smoking tobacco products. Doctors and specialist in science now realize that toxic fumes which cause smog is the major factor for Chronic Emphysema \ Asthma, some Cancer and maby even Diabetes. Yet smokers have been blamed for all of those health issues listed above by those Anti-smoking groups, which was instigated and pushed mainly by those Fundamentalist Protestant lying wonders! Lets put the blame where it really belongs for a change. Politicians should give serious consideration during this election campaign on the unfair tobacco taxes and regulations that were imposed upon tobacco users. There are at least 5.3 million people who smoke in Canada, and every one of them are voters. Politicians would do well to keep that in mind.
Medical researchers are also advising heart-disease patients that they should limit their time outdoors if they live in a highly polluted city, new research suggests, as microscopic air pollution particles may lead to decreased heart function. Researchers in Boston, Mass., found that pollution particles impair the heart's signalling pathways, which may lead to inadequate blood flow to the heart and inflammation of the heart muscle. The findings are published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association. Researchers studied 48 people who had been hospitalized for heart-disease symptoms or heart attack and monitored their hearts' electrical impulses with a 24-hour monitoring device. They then compared the results to air pollution measures taken at a Harvard School of Public Health monitoring site. The pollution measures were taken an average of 18 kilometres from the patients' homes. The findings showed that an increase in fine particles of air pollution was associated with the decreased ability of the heart to send electrical signals. Get the full story on these issues at CTV News. Now we are getting some honest medical research that is not catering to those Anti-Smoking Morons.
I read in the news that scientists have successfully completed their first major tests on that "big bang machine", which isthe world's largest particle collider. They send beams of protons in both directions around a 27-kilometre tunnel. When the protons collide, scientists are hoping to re-create the Big Bang and find out what happens immediately after. When the scientists sent beams of protons in both directions around a 27-kilometre tunnel, it showed up as two white dots on a computer screen which gave scientists confirmation that protons (subatomic particles) had travelled the full length of the US$3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) after a series of trial runs on Wednesday. "There it is," project leader Lyn Evans said Wednesday after the first of two tests was completed along the Swiss-French border. Scientists are hoping experiments from the European-based project will eventually help them re-create what happened immediately after the Big Bang. "When the universe started, everything was a lot closer together, everything was lot a hotter, and that's when those sorts of (particle) collisions were taking place. So we're recreating that era of time and the fundamental properties of matter, the laws of nature are most easily observed in that way," said Ivan Semeniuk, the U.S. Bureau Chief of the New Scientist magazine, told CTV's Canada AM from Boston. Three of the 30 Israeli professors, students and technicians who have taken part in preparations for the historic launch of the gargantuan particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project, are already at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) site spanning the Swiss and French borders. The three Israeli professors are Prof. Giora Mikenberg of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Prof. Erez Etzion of Tel Aviv University and Prof. Shlomit Tarem of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. They are participating in one of the greatest collaborative efforts ever attempted in the physical sciences - the result of more than a decade of work and $14 billion - which includes over 6,500 scientists from over 80 countries, and half of the world's particle physics researchers. This is only the beginning, said Sofer. "We all want as many collisions as possible. It certainly won't destroy all of Geneva," as some laymen mistakenly believe , having even gone, unsuccessfully, to an international court to prevent it. "The experiment is just like turning on a new light so there will be more light. The project won't do anything that doesn't occur in nature every day, as there is natural cosmic energy. It is safe. The theory is that the universe has other dimensions, and this - among other things - will show whether it is so." Once they start to collide the protons to re-create the Big Bang, it probably won't turn out to be like making a black hole that will start a chain reaction and cause the swallowing up of planet earth. This is the world's largest ever experiment, which will likely take human knowledge towards a giant leap forward.
As for that fellow, Jim Davis, who made that statement that all the soldiers who had died fighting in Afghanistan, would have died in vain if our Canadian troops pull out from Afghanistan by 201. Davis had said that when Conservative Leader Stephen Harper stated that he will pull out our Canadian troops from Afghanistan by 2011. Jim Davis, is the father of Cpl. Paul Davis who had died in Afghanistan when his light armoured vehicle had rolled over during a patrol in Kandahar in March 2006. This was not some new revelation that Conservative Leader Stephen Harper had made, because that plan to pull out our Canadian troops from Afghanistan by 2011 was made some time ago. Jim Davis must have forgotten that the commitment to pull out our Canadian troops from Afghanistan by 2011 had been scheduled years ago. As for our troops having died in vain, well guess what Mr. Jim Davis, our troops had died in vain in this whole Afghanistan offensive which was instigated by US president George W. Bush after Muslims had struck the Twin Towers buildings in New York city and the Pentagon with hijacked airliners. Yes, on October 7, 2001 America retaliated for the September 11 attacks upon American soil, and upon his orders, the United States military had begun strikes against al-Qa'eda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Bush also vowed that he would capture Osama bin Laden. These carefully targeted actions were designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime. After George Bush had his military bomb the hell out of the Teleban camps, and had let Osama bin Laden slip away and escape, they should had left Afghanistan and be done with that Muslim country. We all know how phony George W. Bush's " War on Terrorism", is by now. After all, the Bushes are great friends with the Muslim Saudi Arabia family with their mutual oil businesses. As far as I am concerned, we had no need to have been involved with this whole Afghan war in the first place. I have no doubt that Jim Davis was playing politics and used his son's death as a cheap shot to attack Stephen Harper and the Conservative party. How is it that Jim Davis did not speak out on this issue when Liberal Leader Stephane Dion had stated that he was in favor of pulling out our Canadian troops from Afghanistan by 2011? Our Canadian troops have been involved in Afghanistan for at least seven years now, and it is high time that the Muslim Afghans start taking full responsibility for their own security.
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