by: Ethan Huff

(NaturalNews) Pennsylvania House Bill 492, the Emergency Health Powers Act, was introduced by Rep. Ken Smith (D) on February 18, 2009, as an amendment to The Administrative Code of 1929 which outlines provisions for dealing with public health emergencies. HB 492 contains provisions that, during a health emergency, allow for the public takeover of private property and infrastructure, restriction of free trade, quarantines, mandatory medical treatments, and forced vaccinations.

Similar to the Massachusetts pandemic bills that were passed by both the House and Senate back in October, HB 492 follows suit with a laundry list of unconstitutional mandates not lawfully afforded to the State, even during a pandemic. A final, combined version of the two Massachusetts bills is currently awaiting passage.

Though the Pennsylvania bill has been sitting with the Veterans Affairs and Emergency Preparedness Committee since February, there is a possibility it could move out of committee and be rushed for a vote in the very near future. Because many other states have begun trying to replicate the Massachusetts template for government tyranny during a crisis, it is crucial for the public to stop this bill and others like it before it ever makes it to the Congressional floor.

Contents of HB 492
Section 2523-D furnishes the Governor with the power to mobilize the National Guard for active duty to achieve and enforce the bill's objectives.

Section 2532-D allows for the control of facilities, property, trade, food rationing, commodities distribution and the movement of people during a crises.

Section 2542-D authorizes the coercion of persons to submit to medical examinations, testing, and any other medical treatments deemed necessary by the public health authority. The public health authority is not subject to any judicial restraints or accountability and persons refusing to comply with its mandates will face third-degree misdemeanor penalties.

Section 2544-D sanctions forced vaccinations if deemed necessary which furnish power to detain, quarantine, and impose third-degree misdemeanor charges for those who refuse to comply.

Section 2574-D grants immunity from liability to the state for death or injury to persons and for damage caused to property as a result of enforcing said provisions. It grants the same immunity to private persons, firms, or corporations who cause death, injury, or destruction while acting under the direction of the state in helping to enforce the provisions.

Essentially the bill will allow for the complete takeover of the state during a public health emergency by the Governor, the National Guard, and those from the private sector called upon to assist in the takeover. Aside from the decimation of liberty and free trade, mandatory medical treatments, and forced vaccinations, the state will not be held liable for the death and destruction caused by enforcing its requirements.

Additionally, private persons, parties, groups, corporations, or whoever is accessible and willing can be called upon to enforce these heinous provisions on their fellow citizens with the same protection from liability for the death and destruction caused by enforcement.

Since the White House recently declared a national health emergency on October 24, contingency plans like HB 492 on the state level are becoming chillingly more possible and likely. The idea of martial law being declared during an emergency, whether it is a manufactured pandemic or something else, is no longer baseless fear-mongering but a sordid reality.

It is paramount that concerned citizens actively and forcefully oppose draconian laws such as HB 492 and demand that their elected officials oppose unconstitutional power grabs, especially during crises when those seeking such power prey on the fears of the public.

by: Aaron Turpen

(NaturalNews) France`s highest court has ruled that Monsanto lied about the safety of its weed killing herbicide Roundup. The decision came just days ago and confirms an earlier court judgment in France finding that Monsanto had falsely advertised Roundup as being "biodegradable" and that it "left the soil clean."

The original case was brought to court in 2001 by several French environmental groups alleging that Roundup's main ingredient, glyphosate, has a classification as "dangerous to the environment" by the European Union. That case drug on for years and finally ended in a ruling against Monsanto in 2007. ¹

The GMO giant quickly appealed and that appeal was heard in 2008 in the Lyon court. Monsanto lost that case as well. They appealed again. This time it went to France's Supreme Court; it lost that hearing and now faces fines and nowhere else to go for further appeals.

The court levied a 13,800 Euro fine against the company (about $22,400USD). Monsanto is also looking at continued losses with fourth quarter losses of $233 million (US), mostly due to plummeting sales of the Roundup brand.² So far, Monsanto has made no public statement about the court`s ruling, but it is also possible that the ruling could mean civil cases from farmers and communities harmed by the false advertising. That could mean millions of dollars more in losses.

Roundup is the world`s best-selling herbicide and is marketed as a weed-killer to both commercial farmers and home owners. Monsanto is also the world`s largest purveyor of genetically modified seeds (GMO seeds). Often, the seeds are sold in conjunction with Roundup, the seeds being modified to be "herbicide tolerant" (HT-ready).

Some have argued that these GM crops and seeds are worse for the environment and could be a real problem. Crop failures of GMO seeds in Africa have highlighted the lack of a crop diversity issue while other studies have found that GM versus non-GM seeds have little or no bearing on higher yields, as seed companies like Monsanto have claimed.

Currently, in the United States, nearly all of our soybean plants and most of our corn crops are now GMO, and most of the seed crops for those plants are Monsanto-owned. In fact, at least 68% of corn and 90% of soy is a GMO (HT-ready) crop in the U.S. now and Monsanto is working hard to make that a fact worldwide.³

Recent decisions, such as this one in France and a court finding in the U.S. earlier this month, as well as a common blockade in many European countries, are pushing back against the Monsanto takeover of our food crops. Other initiatives, such as Shelly Roche`s "Replace Roundup Challenge," are using consumer boycotts to further take it to Monsanto`s pocketbook.

by: Frank Mangano

(NaturalNews) For muscle heads, diets high in protein may be just what the doctor ordered, but a growing bicep may come with a cost: a shrinking brain.

According to a recent study published in the journal Molecular Neurodegeneration, when compared to three other diets, high protein diets were the ones that caused the most significant drop-off in brain weight.

Alzheimer's disease researchers are well aware of the wealth of studies linking diet to brain health. The Mediterranean diet, for example, is touted as one of the best diets to follow not only for great physical health, but for great mental health as well, according to findings published in a December 2006 issue of the Archives of Neurology.

With this in mind, researchers put four specific diets to the test to see how, or if, they contributed to the formation of amyloid proteins in the brain. Amyloid protein formation is one of the precursors to Alzheimer's disease.

Using rats as their specimens, the researchers provided each rat with one of four regimented diets: a high fat, low carbohydrate diet; a low fat, high carbohydrate diet; a diet high in protein but low in carbohydrates; or a diet where carbohydrates, fats and protein were well-balanced (i.e., 40 percent carbohydrate, 30 percent fat, 30 percent protein).

After 14 weeks of observing and feeding the genetically-modified rats, the researchers performed several post-mortem procedures, including an analysis on their brains to see if some developed better than others.

There wasn't much of a difference in the brain development of most of the brains, with the noted exception of the rats fed the high protein diet. For them, not only was the hippocampus region less developed – the portion of the brain most adversely affected by Alzheimer's – but their brains weighed less, five percent less.

Researchers believe their findings could affect what people eat and at what age, as the likelihood of developing Alzheimer's dramatically increases after the age of 65. But until more human studies are done, the researchers are loath to recommend any specific diet.

That said, this study adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting how someone eats plays a crucial role in assessing risk for Alzheimer's disease. At present, though, researchers consider age (i.e., Alzheimer's risk doubles every five years after age 65), genetics (i.e., the gene apolipoprotein E-e4 is the only known gene associated with Alzheimer's disease risk) and family history as the biggest factors.

It is estimated that 5.3 million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer's, overwhelmingly among those 65 years of age and older (200,000 are believed to be younger than 65). Alzheimer's has recently jumped from seventh to the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. While no one is immune to it, Alzheimer's diagnoses are higher among women than men (approximately 17 percent of women age 71 and older have Alzheimer's disease compared to 12 percent of men 71 and older).

by: Mike Adams

(NaturalNews) The US government has issued a new report that recommends blocking access to popular websites during a pandemic outbreak in order to preserve internet bandwidth for investors, day traders and securities clearing house operations. The concern is that a pandemic would cause too many people to stay at home and download YouTube videos and porn, hogging all the internet bandwidth and blocking throughput for investment activities, thereby causing a stock market meltdown.

This isn't an April Fool's joke. It's all based on a public report issued by the Government Accounting Office (GAO), available from their website at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d108.pdf

In this article, I'm going to explain how a pandemic outbreak could theoretically bring down Wall Street. But to get to that, you'll first need to find out what the GAO said in its curious report (see below). Parts of this article are presented as satire, but the underlying facts quoted here are all true and verifiable (links are provided to all sources).

This report in question is entitled, "GAO Report to Congressional Requesters, INFLUENZA PANDEMIC" and includes this subtitle: Key Securities Market Participants Are Making Progress, but Agencies Could Do More to Address Potential Internet Congestion and Encourage Readiness.

As the report explains:

In a severe pandemic, governments may close schools, shut down public transportation systems, and ban public gatherings such as concerts or sporting events. In such scenarios, many more people than usual may be at home during the day, and Internet use in residential neighborhoods could increase significantly as a result of people seeking news, entertainment, or social contact from home computers. Concerns have been raised that this additional traffic could lead to congestion on the Internet that would significantly affect businesses in local neighborhoods, such as small doctors' offices or business employees attempting to telework by connecting to their employers' enterprise networks.

To translate this concern of the GAO, what they're saying is that if too many people stay home and use the internet, Wall Street might not be able to function smoothly. Therefore, in order to protect Wall Street (because as you know, our government does everything possible to bail out Wall Street), the feds might need to shut down some popular websites.

But where, exactly, is all the bandwidth usage really coming from? Twitter uses virtually no bandwidth, given that it's a short, text-based messaging service. Text articles also don't use up much bandwidth. In terms of clogging the internet's "series of tubes" (to use a hilarious term coined by a U.S. Senator), the real culprits are videos. While a Twitter text message might be less than 1k in size, a typical video is 350MB, or roughly 350,000 times larger than a Twitter message.

So where, exactly, are people getting video downloads? The most popular non-porn video destinations today are MySpaceTV.com, YouTube.com, LiveLeak.com, Yahoo Video and Hulu.com. But as it turns out, even these highly popular websites may not account for most internet traffic.

According to this TechRepublic post (http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/t…), the majority of internet traffic is actually P2P traffic. Anywhere from 49 to 89 percent of all internet traffic reportedly falls into this category.

P2P traffic means "peer to peer." It's file-sharing traffic happening between two "peered" computers rather than from one central server to many individual computers. YouTube, for example, is a centralized video site that serves videos directly to millions of computers. The Pirate Bay, on the other hand (www.ThePirateBay.org) is a site that lists links to peer-to-peer sharing files so that individual computer users can share files amongst each other, bypassing centralized websites or file servers.

Peer-to-peer traffic carries the latest movies, music albums, television shows, ebooks, podcasts, graphic novels and even… yes… porn. A search on The Pirate Bay today shows downloads for Heroes Season 4 Episode 7 (350MB), the new Bruce Willis movie Surrogates (700MB) and even a bootleg version of the new Windows 7 operating system (3.5GB). These files are obviously not small. When peered computers share these files, it requires a tremendous amount of bandwidth.

Porn represents a sizable percentage of all P2P traffic. Although "official" statistics were difficult to find, according to TopTenReviews.com (http://internet-filter-review.topte…), internet pornography revenues in the U.S. were $2.8 billion (2006). There are 4.2 million porn websites on the 'net, and 25% of all search engine requests are porn-related. Importantly, this page claims that 35% of all P2P traffic is porn-related.

Where am I going with all this? Well, if you consider that roughly 50% of all internet traffic is P2P, and that roughly one-third of all P2P traffic is porn, then it quickly becomes obvious that if the GAO's pandemic clogging of the internet becomes a reality, porn might bring down Wall Street!

What this also means, however, is that cutting off access to specific websites (like YouTube) will likely do very little to free up internet bandwidth. To have any real impact on reducing bandwidth usage, the U.S. government would need to run public service ads begging internet users to stop downloading porn. The problem with that approach is that people who pirate porn are probably not the kind of people who obediently follow the advice of the feds.

When it comes to saving Wall Street during a pandemic, the feds will stop at nothing. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) pulls out all the stops to make sure America's legalized financial gambling centers (Wall Street) keep on churning out the scams. This requires protecting the critical infrastructure of Wall Street.

As the GAO report explains:

"DHS is the lead federal agency for two critical infrastructure sectors… that are important for the Internet. Specifically, the entities within DHS responsible for coordinating national efforts to promote critical infrastructure protection activities for those sectors are the National Cyber Security Division and the Office of the Manager of the National Communications System (NCS), respectively. Although the vast majority of Internet infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector, federal policy recognizes the need to be prepared for the possibility of debilitating disruptions in cyberspace. …DHS is the central coordinator for cyberspace security efforts and has responsibility for developing an integrated public-private plan for Internet recovery."

The internet will be critical during a pandemic, the report goes on to say, because it will be an important vehicle for the government to distribute messages to the public (such as "Go get your vaccines…" or "Report to the nearest quarantine center"). It will also be important because millions of people might need to continue their work at home rather than showing up at the office and sneezing all over their coworkers.

"Increased use of the Internet by students, teleworkers, and others during a severe pandemic is expected to create congestion in Internet access networks that serve metropolitan and other residential neighborhoods. For example, localities may choose to close schools and these students, confined at home, will likely look to the Internet for entertainment, including downloading or "streaming" videos, playing online games, and engaging in potential activities that may consume large amounts of network capacity (bandwidth)."

The solutions, says the GAO, is to tell companies to send workers home and hope they get something done there: "Furthermore, the government has recommended teleworking as an option for businesses to keep operations running during a pandemic."

This part of the GAO report is particularly hilarious because, as every employer knows, when you give employees the ability to work from home, many of them spend the day at home goofing off and downloading porn! It's true: Most internet porn surfing activity occurs during work hours (9 to 5), and all those corporate porn filters that people have at work don't exist on their home computers. By sending employees home, companies will only be adding to the congestion of the internet, creating an even larger problem for Wall Streeters who are trying to extort yet more taxpayer dollars from the federal government to cover their failed investment gambles.

Now here's the kicker in all this: "According to a DHS study and Internet providers, this additional pandemic-related traffic is likely to exceed the capacity of Internet providers' network infrastructure in metropolitan residential Internet access networks. …During a pandemic, congestion is most likely to occur in the traffic to or from the aggregation devices that serve residential neighborhoods, interfering with teleworkers' and others' ability to use the Internet."

In other words, all that pandemic porn downloading will bring the internet to its knees. The internet really begins to get jammed up at the "40% absenteeism" level, according to a 2007 DHS study mentioned in this GAO report: "The study's model predicted that at the 40 percent absenteeism level — the level that health organizations have indicated is likely under a relatively serious pandemic — the highest point of congestion across the entire Internet infrastructure could occur within residential Internet access networks."

Unfortunately for Wall Street, there is no way for anyone to tell the difference between the traffic of a porn downloader vs. the traffic of a Wall Street day trader. On the internet, all packets are (nearly) the same priority. So there's no simple way to prioritize traffic from some users ("important" Wall Street people) over other users. That means "porn packets" can't simply be rejected in favor of "Wall Street packets."

Even the GAO concedes that shutting down specific websites is a strategy fraught with problems, including potential lawsuits, technology limitations and the fact that blocking a few websites probably wouldn't result in much of an overall reduction in traffic anyway:

"Overall Internet congestion could be reduced if Web sites that accounted for significant amounts of traffic — such as those with video streaming — were shut down during a pandemic. According to one recently issued study, the number of adults who watch videos on video-sharing sites has nearly doubled since 2006, far outpacing the growth of many other Internet activities. However, most providers' staff told us that blocking users from accessing such sites, while technically possible, would be very difficult and, in their view, would not address the congestion problem and would require a directive from the government. One provider indicated that such blocking would be difficult because determining which sites should be blocked would be a very subjective process. Additionally, this provider noted that technologically savvy site operators could change their Internet protocol addresses, allowing users to access the site regardless. Another provider told us that some of these large bandwidth sites stream critical news information. Furthermore, some state, local, and federal government offices and agencies, including DHS, currently use or have plans to increase their use of social media Web sites and to use video streaming as a means to communicate with the public. Shutting down such sites without affecting pertinent information would be a challenge for providers and could create more Internet congestion as users would repeatedly try to access these sites. According to one provider, two added complications are the potential liability resulting from lawsuits filed by businesses that lose revenue when their sites are shutdown or restricted and potential claims of anticompetitive practices, denial of free speech, or both. Some providers said that the operators of specific Internet sites could shut down their respective sites with less disruption and more effectively than Internet providers, and suggested that a better course of action would be for the government to work directly with the site operators."

A better solution, it seems, would be to just urge people to stop using so much bandwidth. As this GAO report suggests, "…entities in these sectors consider advising employees to limit household use of streaming video or other bandwidth-intensive Internet activities."

And that, of course, takes us back to those public service announcements: Please stop downloading porn, you people! You're sucking up all the bandwidth and interfering with the important business of Wall Street ripping off America!

This brings me to the bizarre conclusion of this story: If a pandemic actually does result in a 40% absenteeism rate, and companies send people to work from home, and all public sporting events get cancelled, and people are sitting around on their home computers with nothing to do, porn downloads could cause a massive stock market crash by interfering with securities trades.

More importantly, such an activity could theoretically be organized and planned as a type of cyber assault on Wall Street. "Porn terrorists" could leap on this pandemic-inspired internet vulnerability to cripple Wall Street by flooding the internet with pornographic digital bits that squeeze out all other traffic, causing financial trades to grind to a halt. And this, in turn, could conceivably wreck the entire U.S. economy because, as we already know, the whole thing is being held together by the most fragile accounting illusions. One big blip in the system, and the whole corrupt, dishonest Wall Street scam comes train-wrecking down.

And that, my friends, is the bizarre truth of how pornography combined with a pandemic might bring down Wall Street.

by: David Gutierrez

(NaturalNews) Taking sedatives or sleeping pills increases the suicide risk of senior citizens by 300 percent, according to a study conducted by researchers from Gothenburg University in Sweden and published in the journal BMC Geriatrics.

"Clinicians need to be aware of this, as these drugs are widely prescribed to the elderly," the researchers wrote.

Researchers compared the medical records of 85 Gothenburg residents above the age of 65 who had committed suicide with a group of the same age who had not committed suicide. After adjusting for suicide risk factors relating to each individual's history of mental illness, the researchers found that neither antidepressant nor antipsychotic use led to an increase in suicide risk. In contrast, the rate of suicides was four times higher among those who took sedatives or hypnotics (sleeping pills) as among those who did not.

Sedative and hypnotics are widely prescribed to seniors suffering from anxiety, depression or insomnia. Previous research has indicated that having any of these conditions already increases a person's suicide risk.

"Persons with these problems might be more likely to seek health care and perhaps more likely to receive prescriptions for psychotropic drugs," the researchers wrote.

Sedatives and hypnotics are typically indicated only for short-term use, and doctors are already urged to prescribe them to older adults with caution, as they can increase the risk of falls. The current study only adds to the risks associated with the drugs.

"A careful evaluation of the suicide risk should be carried out when an elderly person presents with symptoms of anxiety and sleep disturbance," the researchers wrote.

The researchers could not determine from this study whether the drugs actually caused an increase in suicidal behavior — such as by increasing impulsiveness or aggression, including the tendency to self-harm — or simply provided an easy means for people to commit suicide, by overdosing.

The World Health Organization estimates that for every person that commits suicide, 10 to 40 attempts are made. An estimated 877,000 people kill themselves every year.