600,000 salmon loaded with antibiotics escape into the wild

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Chilean fishermen are working…to recover hundreds of thousands of salmon that escaped from a fish farm as environmentalists warned of possible risks if they are eaten by humans…

A storm on July 6 damaged nine enclosures at Marine Harvest’s Punta Redonda Center near the southern city of Calbuco, freeing at least 600,000 salmon into the wild, the company said.

Local fishermen are working with Marine Harvest, one of the world’s largest salmon producers, to recover the salmon and had captured about 30,000 by Thursday, the firm said. Under Chilean law, the company has 30 days to recover the fish.

Some of the salmon had been injected with a course of antibiotics that was incomplete at the time of their escape, making them unfit for human consumption and prompting concern by environmental groups that the fish will make it into the food chain too early.

Don’t worry. Be happy! So says Marine Harvest LLC. They probably plug the location into a stock disclaimer of disaster press release. They are – after all – a global giant operating facilities in 25 countries. Think they’re concerned more about the effects of antibiotic-dosed fish loose in the wild or missing profits from the eventual sale of those salmon for a family meal?

Court orders Johnson & Johnson to pay $4.69 Billion to cancer victims

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Scott Eells/Bloomberg

❝ Johnson & Johnson was ordered by a jury to pay $4.69 billion to women who claimed asbestos in the company’s talc products caused them to develop ovarian cancer, marking the sixth-largest product-defect verdict in U.S. history.

The award of $4.14 billion in punitive damages on top of the $550 million meant to compensate each of 22 women and their families for their losses sent the company’s shares down by as much as 1.4 percent in after-hours trading.

❝ The verdict Thursday by jurors in St. Louis city court came in the first test of plaintiffs’ claims of an asbestos-ovarian cancer link in use of J&J’s iconic baby powder. The asbestos cases are part of more than 9,000 claims alleging that J&J’s talc products cause cancer…

❝ J&J “will appeal till the cows come home, or until all the plaintiffs die,” plaintiffs’ lawyer Mark Lanier said in an interview Thursday. J&J should pull its talc-based products from the market or “mark it with a serious warning,” he said.

The era that has produced a wide and expanding gap between those who profit and those whose work creates value continues the work of thugs like Trump. Fear taking responsibility for your greed, the crimes committed in the name of profit? Don’t worry. You own a president who will try his hardest to stack the courts on the side of corporate wealth. Soon enough, with the cooperation of Congressional Republicans and so-called “centrist” Dems, all that is needed to continue the rape of this Earth will be sufficient buck$ to carry a case to the Supreme Court.

From corn to cornflake: Healthy compounds lost during food processing

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The healthy bits are removed

For many Americans, highly processed foods are on the menu for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Even when the raw materials – grains, for example – are high in vitamins and health-promoting phenolic compounds, processing can rob the final product of these nutrients. In a set of recent studies, University of Illinois scientists reveal what happens to cancer-fighting phenolic acids in corn when it is processed into cornflakes…

“What we found was not particularly good news, but it was interesting. Regardless of the concentration in the grain at the beginning, the dry-milling process removes the majority of phenolics,” says Carrie Butts-Wilmsmeyer, lead author of the two studies and research assistant professor in the Department of Crop Sciences at U of I…

“…we now have the process miniaturized and can control everything in the lab, we can also start figuring out how we can change the process to recover more of these compounds in the end product,” says Martin Bohn, co-author of the studies and associate professor in the Department of Crop Sciences at U of I.

That qualifies as a step towards legitimate improvement in the product. Not just the blather from the advertising mavens.

Road map through the Trump/Putin collusion swamp

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Click to enlarge

Can’t tell the players without a scorecard – and in this case a map to all their connections. As much as the Fake President blathered to the gullible about draining the political swamp in DC – he’s spent years developing a parallel universe focussed on greed, acquisition, a Mussolini poseur. New York Magazine did us all a favor and mapped it out.