Is Hemp a Miracle Plant That Can Save the World?

Hemp is perhaps the answer to most problems in the world. Ambitious, yes.  An exaggeration, no.

If grown extensively, its diverse uses can be of significant value to the environment, the economy, world hunger, personal health, and so much more.

For the environment, hemp can reduce deforestation, pesticide use, provide a sustainable biofuel, and replace GMO cotton among other benefits. It grows like a weed without the need for pesticides or heavy fertilizers.

Hemp does just about anything wood can do and it only takes 6 months to renew, not 20 years. It can be used to make paper, to build homes with, and as fuel for fire.

Hemp clothing is far more durable than cotton, which is an industry still operating a form of slavery from cultivation to production. GMO cotton has led to indentured servitude for Indian farmers where failed crops and debt result in shockingly high suicide rates. Hemp is simply a better material for clothing.

The oil in the hemp seed can be made into biodiesel just like any vegetable oil. Most arguments against biofuels are that their crops take up too much valuable farm land that should be used for food, and it takes more energy than it gives back when all things are considered (fertilizer, pesticides, planting and harvesting machinery, refining).

With hemp, biofuel is merely a bi-product of this crop, not it's main use. The fiber of the plant is still an extremely valuable commodity. Whereas corn ethanol needs a lot of land with tons of intensive chemicals, and the process of turning corn into ethanol is then a net energy loss.

As today's economy falters due to a variety of systematic problems, the world is in desperate need of a new industry. Worldwide hemp legalization and promotion would lead to a revolution in nearly all major industries. Entrepreneurs would have a field day with textiles, plastics, body care, construction, etc.

Industrial hemp's female counterpart, marijuana, provides effective natural medicine for a number of ailments. Cannabis is one of mankind's oldest recorded healing plants. As its prohibition lessens, modern man is only just beginning to discover the exciting medical uses of marijuana, which are provably vast already.

Cannabis can ease pain, depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, PTSD, arthritis, and has even been proven to have anti-cancerous properties. When eaten or vaporized, cannabis is entirely beneficial as a natural alternative because any unwanted tars are not inhaled. Furthermore, juicing raw cannabis has many benefits and zero psychoactive effects.

Hemp alone is powerful enough to be a game changer for the environment and for human society as a whole. It's time to unleash the hemp seed.

Please watch the very entertaining video about how hemp can save the world and share this information with everyone you know.

Source: Activist Post

Venus Syndrome: The Life Ending Effects of Geoengineering

A very good interview, informative.

BP to Ask Judge Today to Halt Spill Settlement Payments

BP Plc (BP/) is seeking to block the administrator handling its $8.5 billion settlement over the 2010 oil spill from paying certain claims, contending his decisions may cost the company billions more than expected.

The company is scheduled to ask U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans for an injunction halting certain payments at a hearing today. Settlement administrator Patrick Juneau’s decisions have already exposed BP “to hundreds of millions of dollars in fictitious ‘losses’ that were never contemplated by the agreement,” the London-based oil company said in court papers last month.

“Although the ultimate exposure is at this time inestimable, it grows daily and could cost BP billions,” BP said in the filing.

The blowout of BP’s deep-water Macondo well off the coast of Louisiana sent more than 4 million barrels of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico and killed 11 people. The accident sparked hundreds of lawsuits against London-based BP, Transocean (RIG) Ltd., owner of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, and Halliburton Co. (HAL), which provided cement services.

BP reached a settlement last year resolving most economic and medical-injury claims by private parties. The company estimated at the time that the settlement would cost $7.8 billion. BP raised the estimate to $8.5 billion in February, citing the dispute with Juneau.

Similar Request

Today’s hearing comes exactly one month after Barbier rejected a similar request from BP to halt payments by the administrator. The judge ruled March 5 that the settlement agreement required the interpretation of claims that Juneau has been using.

“BP’s interpretation injects a subjective notion of alternative causation and a degree of complexity that are contrary to the settlement’s terms,” Barbier said in his ruling last month.

BP was aware that the terms of the settlement agreement could produce “false positives,” Barbier said, citing a letter from a company executive to Juneau in September.

Such results are an “inevitable concomitant of an objective, quantitative, data-based test,” BP lawyer Mark Holstein said in the letter, according to Barbier.

BP has appealed that decision and filed a separate lawsuit against Juneau and the Deepwater Horizon Court Supervised Settlement Program over payments. Today’s hearing considers both the injunction request and the new lawsuit.

BP last night asked Barbier to put a hold on payments until its appeal of his order is heard.

‘Not Harmed’

“Granting a stay pending appeal will inflict little or no harm on claimants as they are not harmed by forgoing undeserved payments,” company lawyers said in a filing.

A nonjury trial over liability for the spill and explosion began before Barbier Feb. 25 in federal court in New Orleans. Barbier will determine responsibility for the disaster and whether any of the companies acted with willful or wanton misconduct or reckless indifference -- the legal requirement for establishing gross negligence.

Last year’s settlement didn’t include damage claims by financial institutions, casinos and companies claiming harm from the Obama administration’s deep-water drilling moratorium, which was imposed after the spill. It also didn’t include claims by the U.S. government and the states of Louisiana and Alabama.

Lawyers suing the company claim BP underestimated the cost of the settlement.

‘Uncapped Nature’

“The uncapped nature of the potential payments was a seminal feature of the settlement agreement,” victims’ lawyers said in an April 1 filing. “Simply because the value of the overall payments in certain industries exceeds what BP estimated does not make the individual claims ‘fictitious,’” they said.

Juneau ruled that he would measure revenue when it was received rather than when it was earned, BP complained last month. This meant that a contractor filing a claim could show a “fictitious” decline in revenue, “even though it earned the same amount for the same job performed one year earlier,” the company said.

BP said Juneau’s “rewriting” stretched the settlement accord to include claims the oil company never contemplated paying. The company said the “non-existent losses are most prevalent” in the agriculture, construction, professional services, real estate, manufacturing, wholesale trade and retail industries.

BP said two-thirds of all business economic-loss payments larger than $75,000 have been based on “flawed data.” The company also contends that more than 1,200 payments have been made to claimants in the agriculture, construction and professional services industries that are too remote from the area impacted by the spill to qualify for compensation.

Economic Loss

BP is protesting a structure for payments of economic loss that it knew about and accepted, victims’ lawyers said in court papers. Claimants are using comparable months to determine losses, as per the settlement, and counting revenue when they receive it, the lawyers contend.

“The injunction BP seeks would itself violate the express terms of the settlement and trust agreements that BP negotiated, agreed to, and supported,” the victims’ lawyers said in the April 1 filing. “BP is effectively asking the court to enjoin itself.”

The case is In re Oil Spill by the Oil Rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010, 10-md-02179, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana (New Orleans).

Source: Bloomberg

Scientists find treatment to kill every kind of cancer tumor

Researchers might have found the Holy Grail in the war against cancer, a miracle drug that has killed every kind of cancer tumor it has come in contact with, the New York Post reported.

The drug works by blocking a protein called CD47 that is essentially a "do not eat" signal to the body's immune system, according to Science Magazine.

This protein is produced in healthy blood cells, but researchers at Stanford University found that cancer cells produced an inordinate amount of the protein thus tricking the immune system into not destroying the harmful cells.

With this observation in mind, the researchers built an antibody that blocked cancer's CD47 so that the body's immune system attacked the dangerous cells.

So far, researchers have used the antibody in mice with human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver and prostate tumors transplanted into them. In each of the cases the antibody forced the mice's immune system to kill the cancer cells.

Click for more from the New York Post. 

Geoengineering, Runaway Climate Change, And The Poisoning Of Life On Earth

More major publications are trying to “condition” the population to the idea of “geoengineering” as a cure for the increasingly extreme climate. It is ever more shocking that publications like Foreign Affairs can still pretend they don’t know SRM (stratospheric aerosol geoengineering) has been a lethal reality for decades. They say “SRM could cool the planet in a few months”, really? A mountain of data to date says otherwise.

The ongoing atmospheric spraying (and jet stream manipulation with HAARP facilities ) can and does cool large regions of the planet for limited periods, but at what cost? The ongoing global geoengineering programs are making climate change far worse and quite literally are tearing the planet's life support systems apart.

As Go The Bees, So Goes Man

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying “if the bees disappear from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live…no bees..no pollination…no man”.

Bee populations are collapsing everywhere at an extremely alarming rate (as are countless species). Nearly all media and science sources are trying to blame the very rapid die-off on farm/crop chemicals, but how does one then explain the fact that the die-off is also occurring in extremely remote regions hundreds of miles from any farms?

There is only one spray program that encompasses the entire planet, aerosol geoengineering. The highly toxic bio-available heavy metal nano particles used in the ongoing geoengineering programs are being inhaled and absorbed by all life on our planet. Now add the constant bombardment of HAARP radio frequency signals and the bees have little chance. How long will the rest of us last when the bees are gone? Will not all of us eventually succumb to the geoengineering assault if it continues, just like the bees?

Runaway Climate Change is Now

Still don’t believe it?

Many still refuse to accept that our climate has been completely decimated. True, Al Gore is a hypocrite and disaster capitalist, but that fact does not change the reality unfolding around us all. Even mainstream media is no longer able to ignore the imploding climate which is now in a runaway state thanks to “feedback loops” like mass methane release.

Human activity has done great damage to the planet, but there is one factor that stands out far above all others as the single greatest causal factor for extreme climate disruption and the die-off of global species now occurring at mass extinction rates:  geoengineering.

The planet we all have known is changing by the day and will soon be very different from the one we have known; this is now inevitable. If geoengineering is not stopped, our biosphere may eventually not support life at all.

Help Us Bring Geoengineering To Light While It Still Matters

It's up to all of us to get up off our backsides, get into the trenches, and start helping. We don’t have tomorrow. Get educated on the dire issue of geoengineering, put together credible data to share with others in the form of flyers and DVDs like Why In The World Are They Spraying, make copies, and pass it out. Use the Internet to locate contacts for groups, organizations, journalists, and individuals that would care if they knew and send them links to articles. In this way countless “spot fires” of awareness can be created which will soon enough merge into a giant blaze of consciousness that cannot be extinguished. Once enough of those carrying out these programs realize they are killing themselves along with the rest of us, the spraying can realistically be stopped.

Source: Activist Post

Scientists find antibody ‘roadmap’ to AIDS vaccine in African patient

Scientists on a quest for an antibody-based AIDS vaccine said Wednesday they found promising clues in the uncommonly “robust” natural immune response of a patient in Africa.

Studying blood samples over a three-year period after the person was infected, researchers were witness to a microscopic battle between the virus and antibodies — both evolving as they sought to gain the upper hand.

For the first time, scientists were able to follow the full chain of events leading to the patient naturally producing broadly neutralising antibodies (BnAbs)– so called because they attack different strains of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS.

“The current research… fills gaps in knowledge that have impeded development of an effective vaccine for a virus that has killed more than 30 million people worldwide,” said a statement from Duke Medicine, which participated in the study by a team of researchers in the United States and Malawi.

“We learned from this individual how the antibodies get induced with the hope that this information can be a map for how to induce these antibodies as a preventive vaccine,” added team leader Barton Haynes, director of Duke University’s Human Vaccine Institute.

Antibodies are the foot soldiers of the immune system, latching onto viruses or microbial intruders and tagging them for destruction by specialised “killer” cells.

Most antiviral vaccines are made by priming antibodies to recognise germs, but the method has not yet been successful in AIDS control.

One of vaccine developers’ fiercest foes, the HIV virus typically evolves too fast to ever be left open to antibody attack.

The individual in the study, from an African country that is not specified, is one of about 20 percent of HIV-infected people whose immune systems naturally produce BnAbs.

Unfortunately, this generally only happens two to four years after infection and is of no help to the host who will still develop AIDS if not treated with anti-retroviral drugs.

“When broad neutralising antibodies are made they are no help to the person already infected. The notion is however; if they are present before infection, then they can prevent infection and prevent insertion of the virus genetic material into the host genetic material,” Haynes told AFP of the research published in the journal Nature.

In monkeys, BnAbs have shown to prevent infection.

A BnAbs-based vaccine is being keenly pursued in the battle against AIDS, an immune system-wrecking disease first recognised in 1981.

Almost one percent of the world’s population today is infected with HIV, according to the United Nations.

In this study, researchers isolated an antibody named CH103, and found that it was triggered by a specific protein envelope found on an early, little-mutated form of the HIV virus.

This meant the antibodies may only be stimulated to respond in the presence of this protein or other similar ones on the virus.

While most antibodies require about 10 to 15 mutations to be able to attack their target, potent BnAbs show 40 to 100, said a comment on the study also published by Nature, which described the findings as a possible “roadmap” to an HIV vaccine.

The CH103 antibody had a much lower number of mutations, which may explain how it developed so quickly in this patient.

The scientists said they had gained a “critical insight” for developing a potential vaccine.

“We are now making recombinant forms of the (protein) envelopes from this patient as a vaccine to immunise animals to recreate the induction of a similar type of antibody,” said Haynes.

A Nature statement said it remained to be seen whether or not the finding could be used to develop an effective vaccine.

“But it presents a strong and testable rationale that can be used to address the major challenges of creating an antibody-based HIV-1 vaccine,” it said.

Source: Raw Story

Google faces EU state fines over privacy policy merger

Summary: Google faces a string of fines in EU member states after the U.K., France, Italy and Germany prepare to launch investigations into the search giant's privacy policy.

Google's 'new' privacy policy, launched a little over a year ago, is still causing headaches in Europe. But a new pan-European investigation into the policy may cause greater troubles for the search giant.

The French data protection authority, the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertes (CNIL), said today that the search giant has failed to respond to its requests to make changes to its controversial privacy policy and has handed the case to European member states to deal with the matter locally.

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Google must review privacy policy, EU data regulators rule

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The U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands were first involved in the examination of the new privacy policy — which merged around 60 different policies for Google's various products and services into one single policy.

In doing so, it could open Google to multiple fines at a local level in the coming months and quarters, once each authority has concluded its own investigation into its privacy practices.

Speaking to ZDNet, the U.K.'s Information Commissioner's Office said that an investigation had been launched and was in its early days. An ICO spokesperson said the organization would determine whether or not Google's year-old policy breaches the U.K. Data Protection Act.

Due to the ongoing investigation, the ICO declined to comment further.

The ICO can serve a maximum £500,000 ($758,000) fine against a company that breaches U.K. data and privacy laws. Each data protection authority would have to enact their own fines separately and maximum fines vary by region.