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PFAS Crisis: Toxic "Forever Chemicals" Found In US Mothers' Breast Milk
New research conducted by Toxic-Free Future, a Seattle-based non-profit fighting for safer products free of deadly chemicals, found that women's breast milk, especially in the US, contains dangerous levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
Erika Schreder, a co-author and science director with Toxic-Free Future, said the findings "are cause for concern" and highlight a possible threat to newborns.
Schreder collected 50 breast milk samples and discovered that the PFAS contamination was nearly 2,000 times higher than the level of regular drinking water.
"The study shows that PFAS contamination of breast milk is likely universal in the US and that these harmful chemicals are contaminating what should be nature's perfect food," Schreder said.
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/pfas-crisis-toxic-forever-chemicals-found-us-mothers-breast-milk
UN chief âdeeply disturbedâ by civilian casualties & IDF bombing of Gaza media building, dubbed âTERROR TOWERâ by Netanyahu
UN head Antonio Guterres has voiced his dismay over growing civilians casualties in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and criticized the destruction of media offices in Gaza, as IDF claims the tower housed Hamas operatives.
âThe Secretary-General reminds all sides that any indiscriminate targeting of civilian and media structures violates international law and must be avoided at all costs,â spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in the statement on behalf of Guterres.
Guterres was particularly âdismayed by the increasing number of civilian casualties, including the death of ten members of the same family, including children, as a result of an Israeli airstrike last night in the al-Shati camp in Gaza, purportedly aimed at a Hamas leader,â he added.
While Guterres said he was âdeeply disturbed by the destruction by an Israeli airstrike today of a high-rise building in Gaza City that housed the offices of several international media organizationsâ â including the Associated Press and Al Jazeera â the IDF insisted that Hamas was also using the building for âintelligence gatheringâ and that it had thus become a âlawful military target.â
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shifted all the blame for the deadly spiral of violence on Hamas in a Saturday night address, accusing the militant group of committing a âdouble war crimeâ â all while Israel is âdoing everything possible to protect our civilians and keep Palestinian civilians out of harmâs way.â
PM Benjamin Netanyahu:"It has been 5 days since Hamas brazenly fired rockets at Jerusalem and other Israeli cities in a totally unprovoked attack. This past week, millions of Israelis were forced into bomb shelters as missiles rained down on our cities."https://t.co/ToeJPuwMCBpic.twitter.com/qCuvnfYkIB
â PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) May 15, 2021
âWe demonstrated this yet again today when we warned civilians to vacate the building used by the Hamas terror intelligence,â Netanyahu said.
They vacated the premises before the target was destroyed and thatâs why you donât hear of casualties from these collapsing terror towers because we take special care to avoid these civilian casualties, exactly the opposite of Hamas.
https://www.rt.com/news/523946-netanyahu-gaza-media-terror-tower/
Ethics Complaint Filed Over Congress Members Using Air Marshals for Extra Protection. Maxine Waters Hardest Hit.
Serial riot-instigator Maxine Waters, traveling to Minneapolis for the Derek Chauvin trial, requested two Federal Air Marshals (FAMs) on her plane and two more for added security when she landed. This is in addition to the two armed Capitol Police officers and two Secret Service agents that flew with her to the Twin Citiesâ party for the reading of the Derek Chauvin triple-guilty verdict. Not only is this a double dose of hypocrisy, but itâs also not allowed.
Since the January 6 Capitol riots, some members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have requested extra muscle, whether traveling home to their districts or on vacation. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is in charge of the FAMs and has been diverting undercover air marshals from âhigh-riskâ security flights to babysit frightened Congress non-binaries. This creates a national security gap and angers air marshals, whose mission is to protect the public.
âAir marshals can only be assigned to high-risk flights. That means flights that have been deemed through our vetted process that have a security risk,â said Sonya Hightower LoBasco, executive director of the Air Marshal National Council, which filed a complaint with the House Committee on Ethics, according to Fox News. âWhen these processes are violated and theyâre taken advantage of and they are just tossed to the side now as if they donât matter, weâre really looking into creating a major problem for ourselves in the aviation domain.â
FACT-O-RAMA! There were 33 FAMs on 9/11. Shortly thereafter, then-president George W. Bush expanded the department. Today there are an estimated 4,000.
The complaint mentions police defunder Rep. Maxine Waters specifically,
âCongresswoman Maxine Waters utilized numerous government resources inappropriately. Federal Air Marshals were removed from a âHigh Riskâ flight to cover Ms. Waters [sic] flight to Minnesota,â the complaint reads. âThe High Risk flight took off with no armed law enforcement on board leaving a gap in National Security.â
Hightower LoBasco had more to say:
Air marshals for Miss Watersâ trip were assigned high risk missions, they were removed from those missions and assigned to Miss Watersâ mission on top of her already armed security detail from the Capitol Police. That was not an official business trip. We still donât have any justification as to why government resources were utilized to fly Miss Waters out to Minnesota.
âPlacing FAMs on aircraft simply because a member of Congress requests it is an egregious misuse of government resources,â said David Londo, president of the Air Marshal National Council (who represents roughly 2,000 Air Marshals) in a strongly worded complaint to the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General on April 20. âThe FAMs are now taking agents off of regularly scheduled âhigh riskâ flights to put them on flights with members of Congress, that in most cases have their own armed federal security details onboard already. It has become akin to a type of extremely expensive concierge service for Congressional members.â
Thirty-two percent of the TSAâs annual budget of $2.4 billion comes from the September 11 Security Fee, which charges passengers $11.20 for a round trip. The rest comes from Congress, which may be why the TSA isnât in a hurry to say no to congressional requests for extra firepower when traveling.
Mad Maxine did not respond to several Fox News inquiries.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2021/05/14/ethics-complaint-filed-regarding-congress-using-air-marshals-for-extra-protection-maxine-waters-hardest-hit-n1447155
Schools are giving biological girls as young as 13 boys' names and using them on official documents without telling their parents
Schools are sanctioning the use of male names for girls without parental consent
'New' names were used in classroom, on registers and official communications
Campaigners say some in education are misinterpreting the equality regulations
Three mothers said their daughters, all under 16, had been given boys' names
One claimed her daughter's school said that she had 'no say' when she objected
Schools are increasingly sanctioning the use of male names for girls as young as 13 without the consent of their parents.
An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has found three mothers discovered schools had allowed their daughters to be called by boys' names without first being consulted.
Campaigners say some in the education sector are misinterpreting â or even misusing â equality regulations.
The mothers, who each spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their children, say that their daughters, who are all under the age of 16, were given boys' names by teachers after saying that they identified as male.
The 'new' names were used in the classroom, and on pupil registers and official communications from school authorities.
One claims to have been told by her daughter's secondary school when she objected that she had 'no say' in the 13-year-old's decision because it was the 'child's right' to decide their gender.
Describing the experience two years ago, the woman, who is in her 50s and from Scotland, said: 'The school only phoned us to tell us it was happening and we had no say. They just said it's the child's right and you have to follow that.'
She said the school changed her daughter's name and pronouns on the school's internal IT records as well as using her new gender identity in letters sent home.
She says that her requests to reinstate the original name on school documents were initially 'ignored', adding: 'It took me a year and three months to get the school to change her records back to her legal name, although they were still calling her by her preferred name.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9582641/Schools-giving-transgender-girls-young-13-boys-names-without-telling-parents.html
UK Police Cut Money Laundering Scheme
U.K. law enforcement agencies arrested eight people suspected of acting as cash couriers responsible for laundering more than 50 million British pounds (US$70,29 million) in criminal profits, the National Crime Agency (NCA) reported Tuesday.
The agency said that police carried out raids in London, Surrey, West Yorkshire, and Greater Manchester and arrested three men and five women who allegedly hid in their luggage large amounts of cash as they took commercial flights to Dubai from Heathrow or Manchester airports.
âOn each occasion the alleged couriers flew out with large amounts of checked in baggage. Days later they would return with fewer cases,â read the statement.
The couriers carried multiple suitcases, with up to half a million pounds in each case, and were likely paid several thousand pounds themselves, the NCA senior investigating officer, Ian Truby, said.
Cash âis the lifeblood of organized crime, as organized crime groups need to launder it so they invest it in further criminality,â he said, adding that the NCA inquiry has discovered millions of pounds of alleged illegal proceeds being flown out of the U.K. to be laundered.
The agency launched the probe into the case after the seizure of some 1.9 million pounds ($2,67 million) from an outbound passenger, a U.K. national, in October last year at Heathrow.
A Czech national was apprehended less than a month later when he tried to board a flight from Heathrow to Dubai carrying 1.3 million pounds ($1,82 million) in his bags, according to the NCA.
Both suspects were charged with money laundering.
https://www.occrp.org/en/daily/14400-uk-police-cut-money-laundering-scheme
Sexual Abuse Scandal Rocks World Health Organization
Donors to the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) and diplomats from member nations are voicing âserious concernsâ about sexual abuse allegations emanating from W.H.O.âs mission to fight the 2018-2019 Ebola epidemic in the Congo, the Associated Press reported Friday.
The AP reported Wednesday that senior W.H.O. officials were lying when they denied knowledge of the Congo allegations, which included local aides complaining they were pressured into sex by at least two W.H.O. doctors.
According to the complaints, one of the doctors made employment with the W.H.O. mission conditional on sexual favors â a difficult demand for impoverished residents of the Congo region to refuse â while another got a local girl pregnant and paid her to keep quiet. The AP obtained a notarized contract that revealed a W.H.O. staffer and manager signed as witnesses to the hush deal to âprotect the integrity and reputationâ of their organization.
The W.H.O. doctors in question, Boubacar Diallo and Jean-Paul Ngandu, denied any wrongdoing, but the AP conducted an extensive investigation including dozens of interviews, emails, legal documents, and recorded meetings that showed W.H.O. senior management disregarded the complaints about both men. The woman who accused Diallo of demanding sex in exchange for employment said he âoften bragged about his connections to W.H.O. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.â
âEight top officials privately acknowledged that WHO had failed to effectively tackle sexual exploitation during the Ebola outbreak and that the problem was systemic, recordings of internal meetings show,â the investigative report stated.
âOver 2018 and 2019, three Ebola experts, including two who worked for W.H.O. at the time, told the AP they raised concerns about sex abuse in general, and Diallo in particular, with senior managers. But they said they were told that controlling the Ebola outbreak was more important, and two said Diallo was considered âuntouchableâ because of his relationship with Tedros,â the report added.
The AP faulted W.H.O. for running a perfunctory investigation of the abuse claims, failing to observe its own protocols for handling abuse charges, instructing whistleblowers to keep quiet, and failing to interview any of the accusers. Some of the W.H.O. officials who talked with AP reporters seemed well aware the organization has pervasive problems with sexual abuse, and were unsurprised the Congo allegations went nowhere:
âAll of us may have been suspecting for as long as the Ebola response was taking (place) that something like this would be possible,â said Andreas Mlitzke, director of WHOâs office of compliance, risk management and ethics, during an internal meeting in November. Mlitzke likened WHO officials in Congo to âan invading forceâ and said, âThings like this have historically happened in wartime.â
Mlitzke said during the meeting that WHO typically âtakes the passive approachâ in its investigations, and that it couldnât be expected to uncover wrongdoing among staffers.
âWhat prevents us from doing something proactive is our own psychology,â he said.
The APâs follow-up report on Friday found diplomats and W.H.O. donors in the United States, U.K., and Europe expressing grave concerns about the Congo allegations, notably including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the third-largest funder for the World Health Organization.
âOur role as a funder is to holdâŻorganizations that receive grants from the foundation to the highest standards of transparency and accountability, and to insist that they take steps to prevent misconduct in the future,â the Foundation stated.
https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2021/05/14/sexual-abuse-scandal-rocks-world-health-organization/