In a suburban oasis amid golden hills north of San Francisco, members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union are processing thousands of marijuana cigarettes a day, rolling joints in rice paper cylinders from Amsterdam.
The startup factory for a Bay Area firm called Medi-Cone is part of a commercial industry evolving to serve the hundreds of thousands of medical pot users who can legally use the drug in California, as well as marijuana dispensaries amassing an estimated $1.3 billion in annual transactions.
Growth of California's pot industry is good news for unions
$5 trillion: The cost each year of vanishing rainforest
British scientific experts have made a major breakthrough in the fight to save the natural world from destruction, leading to an international effort to safeguard a global system worth at least $5 trillion a year to mankind.
Groundbreaking new research by a former banker, Pavan Sukhdev, to place a price tag on the worldwide network of environmental assets has triggered an international race to halt the destruction of rainforests, wetlands and coral reefs.
Army embeds active-duty PSYOPS soldiers at local TV stations
The U.S. Army has used local television stations in the U.S. as training posts for some of its psychological-operations personnel, The Upshot has learned. Since at least 2001, both WRAL, a CBS affiliate in Raleigh, N.C., and WTOC, a CBS affiliate in Savannah, Ga., have regularly hosted active-duty soldiers from the Army's 4th Psychological Operations group as part of the Army's Training With Industry program.
Training With Industry is designed to offer career soldiers a chance to pick up skills through internships and fellowships with private businesses. The PSYOPS soldiers used WRAL and WTOC to learn broadcasting and communications expertise that they could apply in their mission, as the Army describes it, of "influenc[ing] the emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign audiences."
Citing Israeli settlement-building, Palestinians rule out talks
The Palestinian leadership on Saturday ruled out a resumption of peace talks without a halt to Israeli settlement building in the West Bank, backing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in a dispute that has imperiled recently renewed negotiations.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu responded by appealing to Abbas to continue the negotiations. "The way to achieve an historic peace agreement between our two nations is to sit around the negotiating table, seriously and continuously, and not to leave it, because that is the place to resolve our disagreements,'' he said in a statement.
CNN Fires Rick Sanchez for speaking the truth about media control
It all got ugly when Domick pointed out that Jews like Stewart have a sense of what its like to be an oppressed minority. Sanchez responded sarcastically "yeah Very powerless people... He's such a minority, I mean, you know ... Please, what are you kidding? ... I'm telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they -- the people in this country who are Jewish -- are an oppressed minority? Yeah......"
Are we raising a generation of nincompoops?
Second-graders who can't tie shoes or zip jackets. Four-year-olds in Pull-Ups diapers. Five-year-olds in strollers. Teens and preteens befuddled by can openers and ice-cube trays. College kids who've never done laundry, taken a bus alone or addressed an envelope.
The issue hit home for me when a visiting 12-year-old took an ice-cube tray out of my freezer, then stared at it helplessly. Raised in a world where refrigerators have push-button ice-makers, he'd never had to get cubes out of a tray -- in the same way that kids growing up with pull-tab cans don't understand can openers.
U.S. apologizes for Guatemala STD experiments
U.S. government medical researchers intentionally infected hundreds of people in Guatemala, including institutionalized mental patients, with gonorrhea and syphilis without their knowledge or permission more than 60 years ago.
Many of those infected were encouraged to pass the infection onto others as part of the study.
About one third of those who were infected never got adequate treatment.
The Big Secret Commercial Water Companies Hope You Never Discover…
Bottled water has been falling out of public favor for years now, once people began to realize just how detrimental all those plastic bottles are to the environment – and what a rip-off bottled water often is in terms of price and purity.
Now, instead of toting a plastic bottle of water everywhere, the “in” thing is to carry a refillable bottle of filtered tap water -- it’s better for you and the environment.
Novartis fined $422.5M in marketing, kickback case
Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp. will pay $422.5 million in penalties for marketing an epilepsy medicine for unapproved uses and for paying kickbacks to doctors to prescribe it and five other drugs, federal officials announced Thursday.
The company agreed to plead guilty to distribution of a misbranded drug, a misdemeanor, and pay a criminal fine and forfeiture totaling $185 million in the case involving Trileptal, U.S. Attorney Zane Memeger said at news conference in Philadelphia.
Page 708 of 1139
