Getting To The End -- Nomi Prins

Goldman Sachs has been manipulating the economies of the world, on behalf of and for the Rockefeller's and the "USA" for a long time. It didn't start or end with Mexico in the mid-80s but just prior to the collapse of Mexico, Robert Rubin worked his magic on the Mexican President for Clinton. About six months later, the president of Mexico, who had "disappeared" at the end of his term in office, showed up in Boston, working for Goldman Sachs. Robert Rubin went from COB of Goldman Sachs to being made Secretary of the US Treasury by Bill Clinton within a month of Rubin's engineered collapse of the Mexican economy

and the sudden vanishment of the Mexican President. So let's not assume or pretend that anything going on economically is fair or above board or that truth is available to thee or me.

Splenda linked to Cancers

Artificial sweetener sucralose – marketed under the brand name Splenda – may not be harmless at all, according to a new study in Italy.

Researchers from the Ramazzini Institute have found that Splenda substantially raised the risk of leukemia and other cancers.

Splenda hit the market in the 1990s as an alternative to white sugar and other artificial sweeteners that have been linked to health issues. In 2013, it was downgraded from a "safe" to "caution" standing because of earlier research also from the Ramazzini Institute.

The new study, discussed in theInternational Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, gave 457 male mice, along with 396 female mice, different levels of sucralose, as added to their food from 12 days of gestation until they died.

The team saw an overall increased rate of malignant cancer in male mice as Splenda amounts increased in the diets. The researchers also detected a substantially higher incidence of leukemia in the male rodents whose dose levels of sucralose reached 2,000 to 16,000 ppm.

According to the authors, the results do not back up previous findings that sucralose remains "biologically inert."

"More studies are necessary to show the safety of sucralose, including new and more adequate carcinogenic bioassay on rats," they wrote, emphasizing the need for follow-up studies given the sucralose intake of millions worldwide.

Even less intake poses a problem, added scientist Lisa Lefferts of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. A substance that leads to cancer at high doses can also do so at lower doses, only with a smaller risk, she said.

In a statement, Heartland Food Products, the makers of Splenda refuted the study claims, calling the institute's body of research unreliable and with an unconventional design that does not adhere to internationally recognized standards.

The company asserted that sucralose has been studied extensively, with over 100 studies performed over a two-decade period.

"Extensive research strongly supports that sucralose is safe for everyone and does not cause cancer," the statement read.

CSPI said that the only long-term feeding studies on the artificial sweetener in animals, prior to the Italian study, were conducted by Splenda's previous makers, Johnson & Johnson. At present, CSPI has given other artificial sweeteners saccharin, aspartame, and acesulfame potassium an "avoid" grading.

Sucralose is around 600 times sweeter than sucrose or table sugar, and about three times as sweet as aspartame. It is commonly added to certain foods and beverages, such as diet soft drinks, to replace sugar.

By Katrina Pascual,

Fukushima's Ground Zero: No Place for Man or Robot

By Aaron Sheldrick and Minami Funakoshi

(Reuters) - The robots sent in to find the thousands of tons of highly radioactive fuel at Fukushima's nuclear reactors have “died”; literally melted due to the still intense heat being generated by those still molten and intensely radioactive, thousands of tons of what is now called "corium" for the literally thousands of tons of molten metallic substances that now resembling lava but said to be "missing" but is actually moving beneath the ground under the crippled plants and melting through anything in its path; as yet, a planned for subterranean "ice wall" around the crippled plant which was meant to stop groundwater from becoming contaminated has yet to be finished. And authorities still don’t know how to dispose of highly radioactive water stored in an ever mounting thousands of flimsy "temporary" holding tanks around the site.

Five years ago, one of the worst earthquakes in history, triggered a 10-metre high tsunami that almost reached the heights of markers indicating the heights of previous tsunamis in the area, crashed into the Fukushima Daiichinuclear power station causing a loss of the electrical power needed to run the pumps circulating the needed cooling water for the multiple nuclear reactors and thus allowing multiple nuclear reactor meltdowns wherein their thousands of tons of nuclear fuel in each reactor, burned through all of their containment vessels and went somewhere into the ground.. Nearly 19,000 people were killed or left missing and 160,000 lost their homes and livelihoods.

Today, the radiation at the Fukushima plant is still so powerful it has proven impossible to get into its bowels to find and perhaps recover and remove the thousands of tons each per nuclear reactor, of extremely radioactive and huge dangerous blobs of melted fuel rods, now at temperatures approaching those of the surface of the sun. While each of these scenarios had been predicted as the plants and reactors were being constructed, to save money, they were all built to lower standards.

The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) <9501.t>, has made some progress, such as removing hundreds of spent fuel roads in one damaged building. But the technology needed to establish the location of the melted fuel rods in the other three reactors at the plant has not been developed.

“It is extremely difficult to access the inside of the nuclear plant," NaoheroMasuda, Tepco's head of decommissioning said in an interview. "The biggest obstacle is the radiation.”

The fuel rods melted through their containment vessels in the reactors, and no one knows exactly where they are now. This part of the plant is so dangerous to humans, Tepco has been developing robots, which can swim under water and negotiate obstacles in damaged tunnels and piping to search for the melted fuel rods.

But as soon as they get close to the reactors, the radiation destroys their wiring and renders them useless, causing long delays, Masuda said.

Each robot has to be custom-built for each building.“It takes two years to develop a single-function robot,” Masuda said.

IRRADIATED WATER

Tepco, which was fiercely criticized for its handling of the disaster, says conditions at the Fukushima power station, site of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in Ukraine 30 years ago, have improved dramatically. Radiation levels in many places at the site are now as low as those in Tokyo.

More than 8,000 workers are at the plant at any one time, according to officials on a recent tour. Traffic is constant as they spread across the site, removing debris, building storage tanks, laying piping and preparing to dismantle parts of the plant.

Much of the work involves pumping a steady torrent of water into the wrecked and highly radiated reactors to cool them down. Afterward, the radiated water is then pumped out of the plant and stored in tanks that are proliferating around the site.

What to do with the nearly million tonnes of radioactive water is one of the biggest challenges, said Akiro Ono, the site manager. Ono said he is “deeply worried” the storage tanks will leak radioactive water in the sea - as they have done several times before - prompting strong criticism for the government.

The utility has so far failed to get the backing of local fishermen to release water it has treated into the ocean.

Ono estimates that Tepco has completed around 10 percent of the work to clear the site up - the decommissioning process could take 30 to 40 years. But until the company locates the fuel, it won’t be able to assess progress and final costs, experts say.

The much touted use of X-ray like muon rays has yielded little information about the location of the melted fuel and the last robot inserted into one of the reactors sent only grainy images before breaking down.

ICE WALL

Tepco is building the world’s biggest ice wall to keep groundwater from flowing into the basements of the damaged reactors and getting contaminated.

First suggested in 2013 and strongly backed by the government, the wall was completed in February, after months of delays and questions surrounding its effectiveness. Later this year, Tepco plans to pump water into the wall - which looks a bit like the piping behind a refrigerator - to start the freezing process.

Stopping yet more ground water intrusion into the plant is critical to Japan's survival, said Arnold Gunderson, a nuclear physicist and former nuclear engineer.