VIDEO: Canada’s Trudeau Announces Plan to Block Federal Land from Being Sold to the People
On his Monday show Alex Jones broke down how The Canada is blocking private sale of land, land in one of the largest ‘countries’ in the world.
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The Crown’s True Dominion: Shadow Power
FDA Lets Chemical Companies Decide if Recycled Plastics Are Safe for Food Containers
Recycled content in food packaging is increasing as sustainability advocates press manufacturers to cut their use of virgin plastic.
Since 1990, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency responsible for ensuring food contact materials are safe, has approved at least 347 voluntary manufacturer applications for food contact materials made with recycled plastic, according to a database on its website.
Approvals have tripled in recent years, from an average of 7 to 8 per year through 2019, to 23 per year since then, and they continue to climb. The FDA has already approved 27 proposals through June this year.
Other than Coca-Cola, most manufacturers seeking approval are petrochemical giants such as Eastman Chemicals, Dupont and Indorama; and lesser-known plastic packaging manufacturers, including many from China, India and other countries.
The end buyers of the recycled materials aren’t included in the FDA database, but many popular brands are using recycled content. Cadbury chocolate bars come in a wrapper marketed as 30% recycled “soft plastic packaging.”
The Coca-Cola Co. in North America reports it sells soft drinks in 100% recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles, while General Mills says its Annie’s cereal boxes use a liner made from 35% recycled plastic film.
Increasing recycled content in packaging may be good news for the planet, but researchers say the FDA has a lax approval process for plastic food packaging that hasn’t kept pace with the science on chemical hazards in plastics.
The agency’s approval process for recycled plastics is voluntary and ignores the potential risk of chemical mixtures, researchers told Environmental Health News (EHN). Companies can seek guidance on their recycling process, but they are not required to.
In addition, the FDA relies on manufacturers’ test data when it approves materials, leaving companies essentially in charge of policing themselves. Meanwhile, some studies show that recycled plastic can harbor even more toxic chemicals — such as bisphenol-A (BPA), phthalates, benzene and others — than virgin plastic.
FDA spokesperson Enrico Dinges defended the process, telling EHN the agency “reviews [industry] data against stringent scientific guidelines” and can “use its resources to spot test materials” if it sees an issue.
But researchers say the agency fails to protect the public from the toxic chemical soup found in recycled plastics.
“[The] FDA is most concerned about pathogen contamination coming with the recycled material, rather than chemicals,” Maricel Maffini told EHN.
The approval process “is very lax,” she said.
Recycled plastic is more toxic
Globally, just 9% of plastic is recycled. Most are recycled mechanically, by sorting, washing, grinding and re-compounding the material into pellets.
Most recycling centers collect a mix of materials, allowing milk jugs, say, to intermingle with detergent bottles or pesticide containers and potentially absorb the hazardous chemicals from those non-food containers.
Recycling facilities that are set up to collect one plastic type, such as PET bottles, can better control potential contamination, although chemicals could still be introduced from bottle caps or the adhesives in labels.
Hazardous chemicals can also be introduced when plastics are decontaminated and stabilized during recycling. Plastics degrade with recycling, “so you may need to add more stabilizers to make the material as robust as the virgin material,” Birgit Geueke, senior scientific officer at the non-profit Food Packaging Forum, told EHN.
“Recycling can therefore increase the material complexity and the presence of different additives and degradation products.”
Geueke, who led a review of more than 700 studies on chemicals in plastic food contact items, said that research on recycled plastics is limited. Despite that caveat, “there are a few studies really showing that contamination can be introduced more easily if you use recycled content.”
One study found 524 volatile organic chemicals in recycled PET versus 461 in virgin PET. Chemicals detected in the recycled PET included styrene, benzene, BPA, antimony, formaldehyde and phthalates — chemicals linked to an array of health issues, including cancer, and the ability to hack hormones and cause development delays in children, obesity and reproductive problems.
Most studies have focused on recycled PET, which is “not as prone to picking chemicals up,” in comparison to other plastics such as recycled high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene, or PP, Geueke said.
“HDPE milk bottles really take up chemicals during all stages of their life cycle, much more than PET bottles, and [those chemicals] are harder to remove, because they stick harder to the material,” she said.
Indeed, a study on recycled HDPE pellets obtained from various countries in the Global South identified pesticides, pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals in the pellets.
FDA’s lax approach
The FDA must authorize all materials that contact food before they reach the market. To be authorized, a material cannot contain intentionally added cancer-causing chemicals nor any other chemicals that leach from the material at a level of more than 0.5 parts per billion.
But as Maffini pointed out, the FDA recommends, but does not require, the type of testing that manufacturers should do to ensure their products are safe, and it doesn’t always require them to submit any safety data, she said.
“If you tell the FDA the substance or substances used to make the plastic are not mutagenic or genotoxicant, and the exposure in the diet would be less than 0.5 parts per billion, FDA does not expect you to send any safety data [to back up these claims].”
In defense, the agency’s Dinges said, “the FDA has robust guidelines for the underlying scientific data that should be provided” by industry.
But he also said, “It is the responsibility of the manufacturer to ensure that their material meets all applicable specifications.”
For recycled plastics, companies may also voluntarily submit a requested review of their recycling process. In this case, the FDA asks companies to provide a description of the process, test results showing that the process removes possible incidental contamination and a description of how the material will be used.
The FDA further advises manufacturers to conduct “surrogate testing,” which involves challenging recycled materials with or submerging them into, different classes of hazardous chemicals that could theoretically contaminate the plastic, to determine whether the company’s recycling processes can eliminate those toxic chemicals.
Surrogate testing is the “best available practice” for evaluating chemical migration from recycled plastics, Gueke said, although research shows it works better for PET than for other plastics like PP or HDPE.
Though the FDA doesn’t require surrogate testing, Tom Neltner, executive director at Unleaded Kids, said, “I don’t think you’re going to find a market in the industry without having gone through FDA review.”
Neltner, who formerly worked with Environmental Defense Fund’s Safer Chemical Initiative, said that in his experience, big food companies are skittish about using mechanically recycled plastic on packaging that touches food.
According to the FDA database of recycled plastic applications, two-thirds of the approvals are for recycled PET, for a broad range of products from drink bottles to clamshell containers for fruits and vegetables to tea bags.
Most of the remaining approvals are for recycled PP for products including clam shells, disposable tableware, cutlery, caps and lids; recycled HDPE for grocery bags, milk and juice bottles, meat trays and disposable tableware and recycled polystyrene for meat and poultry trays and clam shells.
Most requests are for mechanical recycling processes, though a couple dozen were submitted for chemical recycling, which uses an energy-intensive, largely unproven, process to convert plastics back to their original monomer chemicals. (The FDA no longer evaluates chemical recycling proposals for PET because it says the process produces material of suitable purity for food-contact use.)
“The FDA has been very reluctant to adopt a modern perspective,” Tom Zoeller, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told EHN, referring to testing for the effects of endocrine disruptors or for the mixtures of chemicals found in plastics.
FDA’s requirement that a chemical not exceed a threshold of 0.5 parts per billion is based on cancer risk, Zoeller said, and while that number is protective for evaluating exposure to a single chemical, “I’m not sure that means a lot, when you consider the 16,000 chemicals that are put in plastic.”
In other words, the FDA’s approach doesn’t account for multiple chemical exposures, even as research shows that chemical mixtures can have significant health impacts.
A European study, for instance, found that a mixture of nine different chemicals had a greater impact on children’s IQ than what was expected based on individual risk assessments.
“It’s the combination of chemicals that are impacting IQ and basically stealing human potential,” Zoeller said. “We are way behind the curve,” in assessing chemical risks, he added.
Dinges responded that “while it is unlikely that appropriately sourced and controlled feedstock will experience incidental contamination to any appreciable amount, potential incidental contamination is addressed by the FDA’s surrogate testing recommendations.”
Yet the ability to control feedstock is what worries experts. Researchers who found BPA and heavy metals migrating at higher levels from recycled PET compared to virgin PET stressed that the plastic’s safety depends on transparency and cooperation across the value chain. Moreover, surrogate testing is not required.
Neither does the FDA’s approach account for endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which can act at levels in the parts per trillion by disrupting metabolism, Maffini and Zoeller commented.
“This concept that there’s a threshold below which there are no effects or no adverse effects is fundamentally incorrect,” said Zoeller.
Dinges countered that the “effects on the endocrine system are just one of many areas of toxicology that the FDA evaluates,” while also repeating industry talking points.
“Endocrine activation … does not necessarily translate into toxicity,” he wrote.
“Consumption of any food (for example, sugar) can activate the endocrine system.”
Such responses have led Zoeller to conclude that the FDA has “become a foil for industry,” and that their “precautionary principle is applied to industry, not public health.”
Unless government agencies can do a better job at ensuring manufacturers are keeping chemical hazards out of recycled plastic, experts think it shouldn’t be used for food contact materials.
“I’m not a big fan of recycled plastic and food contact, because it’s really hard to know [if it’s safe], and I think producers have to be more careful than when they produce virgin materials,” Geueke said, adding that she thinks that only recycled PET should be considered because the other types so readily absorb chemical contaminants.
“If you have a very good process and can prove that it gets rid of most of the contaminants … but nobody knows whether that really happens or not,” she said.
BREAKING: WEF Says The World Must Brace For A Series Of Massive Unknown Crises
Around 300,000 Immigrant Children are Missing Under Kamala Harris, Could be Trafficked: DHS
WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report issued last week reveals that nearly 300,000 illegal immigrant children are unaccounted for under the Biden administration’s immigration enforcement, which has been headed by now-presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
The DHS report explains that as of May 2024, U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) has not served a Notice to Appear (NTA) in immigration court to more than 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children (UCs). Nor has ICE “developed a formal policy or process to follow up on UCs who did not appear in court,” the report notes, adding that ICE has “resource limitations” and “limited” oversight capabilities.
“Without an ability to monitor the location and status of UCs, ICE has no assurance UCs are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor,” the report admits.
READ: Biden DOJ removed child sex trafficking information from website’s areas of concern
??A new DHS OIG report reveals nearly 300,000 illegal immigrant children are unaccounted for.
— Congressman Jim Baird (@RepJimBaird) August 20, 2024
The Biden-Harris Administration clearly has ZERO control over our border security.
Joe Biden & Kamala Harris bear responsibility for these missing children.https://t.co/db2fDC7wKx
The report has raised concerns about Harris’ role in the effort to “ste[m]” migration to the U.S. southern border, a goal she was officially tasked with by President Joe Biden on March 24, 2021. Under Harris, Customs and Border Protection has recorded about 10 million encounters with illegal immigrants across the country and more than 8 million encounters at the southwestern border alone.
In addition, “Encounters at official ports of entry have exploded, from just under 20,000 in January 2021 to more than 117,000 in June 2024” under Harris, the New York Post reported. The news outlet considered the numbers to be unsurprising considering that in 2015, Harris declared, “[a]n undocumented immigrant is not a criminal.”
READ: El Salvador’s president screens ‘Sound of Freedom,’ pledges to fight child trafficking
ICE has not made progress in tracking unaccompanied children despite new guidance issued in December 2023 aimed at confirming the location of children who did not show up to their court hearings. This month’s DHS report found that “ICE often neither followed this guidance nor issued corresponding guidance for its officers in the field.”
The immigration enforcement arm is reportedly still short-staffed and suffers from resource constraints that “can limit officers’ time and ability to check the location or immigration case status of migrants.”
“ICE must take immediate action to ensure the safety of UCs residing in the United States,” the DHS report concludes, noting that “UCs who do not appear for court are considered at higher risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.”
The 2009 HORROR Story – SWAT Raid on No-Vax Christian School
Elon Musk is Now the No. 1 Target of the Anti-Free Speech Globalist Cult
On the Monday show Alex Jones broke down how Elon Musk has made himself the primary target of the New World Order.
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BREAKING: WEF Says The World Must Brace For A Series Of Massive Unknown Crises
National Guard Officer who Shared Christian Beliefs Removed from Command in Idaho
The Idaho Army National Guard is under fire after removing an infantry officer from command and pressuring him to resign following complaints from another soldier about his Christian beliefs.
The officer reportedly expressed his religious beliefson his private social media accounts, where he shared opinions about the sexualization of minors as well as gender ideology. Some of the comments that drove the soldier to complain about him included his opposition to “the medical mutilation of gender-confused children,” drag events at schools and libraries, and the availability of obscene children’s books and libraries. He also said that he thinks “no child is born in the wrong body” and that males should not be allowed to compete in female sports.
A sensitive subordinate took issue with his stances, even though they were shared outside of the military environment, saying that they indicate he “truly hates the LGBTQ community.” He was apparently so offended by his Christian beliefs that he filed a complaint that claimed: “I feel like I have been discriminated against because of my sexual orientation and that is [sic] has caused a hostile work environment.”
The soldier, who claims he is homosexual, added: “I am deeply concerned about the hostile and prejudiced behavior I have experienced, which has adversely affected my well-being, work performance, and overall sense of belonging within the workplace/organization.”
He said that he felt “unsafe” and accused his superior of “hate” toward himself as well as his husband and child.
This prompted the National Guard to remove him from command, and officials then pressured him to quit. They went on to conduct a formal investigation that took a year and ended with the recommendation that he be barred permanently from command.
The officer who investigated him indicated that enlisted personnel who express traditional values and morals are “extremists” who should not be promoted or serve. He also recommended that the National Guard adopt a policy of looking for political and religious statements that enlisted candidates for high-profile roles have made in public forums.
Legal group is supporting officer’s right to free speech and seeking his reinstatement
The National Guard officer who was the subject of the complaints is being represented by Liberty Counsel, who are fighting on behalf of his right to free speech and pressing the National Guard to restore his career. They have already notified Idaho Governor Brad Little about the violations and are calling for the National Guard to dismiss the frivolous complaint. They asked the governor to respond to them by the end of the month or face further legal action.
“In this instance, the Idaho Army National Guard has violated the First Amendment, Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the Idaho Constitution, and the Free Exercise of Religious Protection Act. In addition, it has become evident that this military branch seeks to implement a policy of discrimination against the religious beliefs of enlisted personnel,” they noted.
They also stated that the officer believes that everyone is created in God’s image and deserves respect. They explained that he is perfectly capable of carrying out his duties regardless of his religious beliefs and any conflicts they may have with the beliefs of others under his command, stating: “He is committed to serving those under his command, regardless of political or religious disagreements, and would give his life in defense of his state and nation.”
The 2009 HORROR Story – SWAT Raid on No-Vax Christian School
Canadian Pastor Convicted of ‘Criminal Harassment’ for Protesting Drag Queen Events Targeting Children
CALGARY, Alberta (LifeSiteNews) — A judge has found a Canadian pastor guilty of “criminal harassment” for protesting “drag queen story hours” targeting children at a public library earlier this year and for breaching his bail conditions, which ban him from protesting at any LGBT-themed event.
“A judge found me guilty today of criminal harassment for expressing my opposition towards drag queen story hour to a library manager set on hosting the event. For posting the video of our interaction on Facebook, and saying we’ll be back (to protest) if the event continues,” said Calgary Christian pastor Derek Reimer in a message sent to LifeSiteNews.
Reimer is the leader of MISSION7, a Christian organization that focuses on outreach to the homeless of Calgary. He told LifeSiteNews that his charges, handed to him from the Alberta Court of Justice by Justice Karen Molle on August 22, stem from incidents from March 25 to April 2.
“This charge is punishable up to two years, and I will be posting the sentencing date soon,” he noted.
While finding Reimer guilty of “criminal harassment,” Molle also acquitted him on charges of causing a disturbance, dismissing two charges alleging that he caused a public disturbance after he used a loudspeaker outside two separate drag story events. Molle ruled that these were not criminal offenses.
Additionally, Reimer was found guilty of four counts of breaching his bail conditions, which ban him from protesting outside “drag queen story time” events in Calgary.
The pastor’s lawyer, Andrew MacKenzie, noted that an appeal of the August 22 ruling is possible. As it stands now, he is out free on bail.
Reimer is still facing a court decision on charges from an incident that occurred on February 25, 2023, in which he was charged with causing a disturbance and mischief for protesting outside another drag event targeting children. He was forcibly removedfrom a public library after protesting at the event, at which he said, “homosexuality is a sin.”
For this charge, he was also banned from being within 300 meters from any LGBT event.
As reported by LifeSiteNews earlier this year, trespassing charges against Reimer for praying in a municipal building were dismissed.
He has been arrested many times for protesting “drag queen story time” and other LGBT events in his city.
Last April, his van was vandalized with an anti-Christian message as well as a satanic symbol while he was in jail for yet another arrest related to his pro-family activism.
Last year, Calgary passed a new “Safe and Inclusive Access Bylaw” that disallows “specified protests” both inside and outside all city-owned and affiliated public buildings.
The bylaw means pastors or concerned parents protesting pro-LGBT events at public buildings will be barred from getting within 100 meters of any such location.
Those who are found guilty of breaking the bylaw, such as Reimer, can face fines of up to $10,000 and one year in jail.
BREAKING: WEF Says The World Must Brace For A Series Of Massive Unknown Crises