9/11 false flag info

John McCain is NOT presidential, he is an ass who owns the USA's biggest friendly fire incident.

who are these people who keep insisting Israel is our friend? the truth is quite the opposite.

"Attack one American and you attack all Americans" was once proclaimed by President Clinton. More recently, an Assistant Secretary for State proclaimed that the U. S. government always protects its citizens. These are damned lies and meaningless words. These words were not true in 1967 (when Israel deliberately attacked the USS LIBERTY,) and unfortunately, and in spite of these beautiful words, they are not even true today. Moreover, there is no such thing as justice.

Cellphones could be a reason behind a dramatic decline in New Zealand's honey bee population.

The only honey bees alive in Taranaki are in hives kept by beekeepers, according to industry locals and while insecticides and disease are cited as main reasons, one enthusiast cited cellphones as a threat.

However, this theory is disputed by Minister of Biosecurity Jim Anderton.

Okato's Nicki McAnelly says her partner keeps bees and has just lost one hive.

"People we know are losing hive after hive. They are blaming the cellphones. They think the cellphones are interfering with the bees' sonar. The bees are flying away and not coming back, they are disappearing."

She has noticed there are no honey bees around the Pukeiti gardens where she works, only bumble bees.

The cellphone theory has been developed by researchers at Germany's Landau University, who found bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby.

However, Mr Anderton puts that theory down to the silly season.

"I had 40,000 bees, now I have 150,000 and I have a cellphone tower nearby. You have to be careful with this, just because one researcher says so.

"It is one of the mad New Year stories. I have never heard of it and I am the minister of biosecurity."

Bumble bees appear to have replaced the honey bees in Taranaki.

Taranaki Beekeepers Club secretary Stephen Black says except for the odd hive of feral bees, the only honey bees still alive in Taranaki are those kept by beekeepers.

"The varroa mite has got rid of most of the feral bees and reduced the number of hobby beekeepers.

"This leads to less competition from feral bees and is a reason many people are reporting more bumble bees in their gardens.

"You hear tales that a lot of people are seeing reduced apple crops and have tomatoes that are not pollinating because of a lack of bees. I have been hearing that for a couple of years."

Mr Black says if beekeepers don't look after their bees, they die.

He says another possible reason for the lack of bees is the use of insecticides.

"There is a lot of inappropriate use of sprays.

"People should not be spraying flowers with insecticide. The bees take that back to the hive."

He says some insecticides applied to the seeds can rise through the plant and on to the pollen, and there is speculation this could be killing the bees.

Mr Black says many farmers are reporting a lack of clover and are requesting hives to help the situation.

He has 650 hives and will be building up that number to 1000 this year to help cater for the demand.

Fiona Black sells honey at the New Plymouth Farmers' Market.

"I have little old ladies coming up and asking why there are no bees in the garden and people are phoning up and asking the same question. We are thinking about providing a pollination service, putting beehives in the garden," she said. She had not heard of the cellphone theory.

In the latest development, scientists at HortResearch have successfully bred honey bees which fight back against varroa - by suppressing mite reproduction. This sustainable and cost-effective tool may soon be available to New Zealand beekeepers.

Nationally, the number of beekeepers has almost halved since the advent of varroa in 2000. They are down to 2602 beekeepers with 313,399 hives as of June 20 last year from 4956 beekeepers and 320,113 hives in May 2000.

TV3's toxin avenger vows she will never give up http://www.stuff.co.nz/sundaystartimes/4558422a6619.html WHAT IS it like to be Melanie Reid, TV3's best and brightest investigative journalist, on the trail of the biggest story of your career? "You're up against everybody and everything. You're up against the Ministry of Health, you're up against the ESR, you're up against the university scientists. You're up against Dow, one of the biggest chemical companies in the world. It's like being an ant looking up a mountain." Reid is in a cafe not far from TV3's offices in central Auckland. She is leafing through a thick sheaf of her files bound into a tabulated tome, looking for a newspaper cutting, or maybe a letter, but she keeps losing her place each time she looks up to drive a point home. Maybe she's a soldier ant: "It's like being in a war. You've got this line in front of you who say `you got it wrong', `you're a maniac'. Then you get all this rubbish" she taps the huge file "thrown in too. And you go, bring it on. I won't stop until those people get what they deserve. They deserve a health study and an apology, and I won't stop until they've got both of those things." "Those people" are the residents and former residents of the New Plymouth suburb of Paritutu, who believe their health and in some cases the health of their children and grandchildren has been destroyed by the toxic dioxin released from the American-owned Ivon Watkins Dow (IWD) agri-chemicals factory in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. In October 2006, TV3 screened Reid's long, compelling and seemingly authoritative documentary Let Us Spray, in which interviewees recounted their ghastly family histories of rare cancers and neurological disorders, miscarriages and deformed babies. While carefully falling short of stating that these illnesses were directly caused by dioxin released from the factory, the documentary strongly alleged that successive governments had failed to respond adequately to the Paritutu residents' concerns. "This rubbish" is what followed in early 2007: a pair of submissions to the Broadcasting Standards Authority by the Ministry of Health and the Institute of Environmental Science and Research (ESR) accusing the documentary of a multitude of sins, from lack of balance to bad science, from misleading editing to mischievous choice of theme music. The ministry complaint alone, says Reid, was weighty "enough to hold a very, very heavy door open". The complaint, says TV3's head of news and current affairs Mark Jennings, was probably the heftiest he has seen in his television career. Worse still, says Jennings, in order to test the truth of some of the complaints, the BSA has asked TV3 to hand over Reid's original tapes of her interview with Ministry of Health official Mark Jacobs, "which opens up a whole new area in terms of freedom of the press". TV3 is refusing, and the complaint process has turned into a standoff as lawyers for the BSA and TV3 tussle over those tapes. Reid says responding to the two complaints has already taken her four or five months of fulltime work. Jennings says the complaints have little merit and are an "abuse" of the complaints system. "Just doing the story alone cost about $200,000; now we're spending a lot of money fighting this government department in a forum where the judges the BSA are government-appointed. You can understand how queasy this makes us feel." If Reid and Jennings sound a little paranoid, consider this: late last year the ESR chief executive John Hay wrote to the judges of the Qantas Television Awards, strongly urging them not to honour Let Us Spray, given that it was in "blatant breach" of broadcasting standards and the subject of a BSA complaint. TV3 fired off a trenchant letter to ESR expressing surprise at such interference by a taxpayer-funded organisation, and pointing out that until the BSA ruled, any such breach was arguable at best. Naturally, the Qantas judges took no notice of the letter, and the only action Jennings took in response was to "applaud extra loudly" when the documentary was awarded "Investigation of the Year". MELANIE REID, 43, was fighting for causes even before she was journalist. "When I was 18 I took on the Queenstown council and stopped a multimillion-dollar development. The pegs were in for an industrial site at the entrance to Queenstown. I did a campaign, engaged the entire community, wrote a book called Towards Sustainable Development and presented it to all the councillors and the mayor. I held public meetings." The experience taught her that "if you can motivate people to care, change can happen" and she decided to become a journalist. The travails of the little guy up against big bureaucracy has been a recurring theme, from a Christchurch family fighting for compensation because they believed the garden fungicide Benlate was the cause of their child's birth deformity, to a piece in defence of Christchurch daycare worker Peter Ellis. There have been fluffy pieces, too, such as the 20/20 report on "psychic" Jeanette Wilson which won Reid a "Bent Spoon" award for gullibility in the field of the paranormal from the Skeptics Society. She has been back in David v Goliath mode since she began investigating the Paritutu saga four years ago. It has become a bewilderingly complicated saga, but the core facts are simple. From 1962 to 1987 IWD manufactured the gorse herbicide 2,4,5-T at its New Zealand factory in the New Plymouth suburb of Paritutu. A highly toxic compound called 2,3,7,8-TCDD, one of a class of chemicals known as dioxins, was created in small quantities in the manufacturing process, and remained as a contaminant in the herbicide. Before 1972, the level of contamination was relatively high, but that year New Zealand passed regulations limiting the level of dioxin to 0.1 parts per million (ppm). The level of contamination permitted was reduced tenfold in 1982 and tenfold again in 1987, a level which made manufacture uneconomic, and production of 2,4,5-T ceased. The Paritutu factory was the last in the world to stop production. From the 1960s on, residents were complaining to authorities about the smell of fumes from the plant; more recent media reports contain residents' recollections of curtains that melted, of factory workers' footprints leaving dead patches on lawns; of children playing with the orange foam from the effluent stream between the factory to the sea. In two incidents an explosion in 1972 and an equipment failure in 1986 the factory released chemicals across the town. From the 1970s on, there was growing international concern that dioxin could lead to an array of diseases, especially cancers. In the same decade, a number of "clusters" of birth defects observed in New Zealand were alleged to have been caused by maternal exposure to 2,4,5-T. In 2004, after years of local discontent (and despite numerous health studies that have failed to unequivocally link the IWD to specific instances of ill-health), the Ministry of Health commissioned ESR to conduct a "serum study" on the levels of dioxin in the blood of people who lived near the factory during those years of production. The resulting report, released in 2005, concluded there were indeed elevated levels of dioxin, and that this was likely to lead to slightly increased rates of cancer compared to the general population. The report underpins the modest package of free annual health checks and advisory services for Paritutu residents that was announced last month. That much is uncontroversial. But Reid's resulting documentary painted a far more sinister picture. It contained moving interviews with sick people, horrifying images of deformed babies, and Reid's own trenchant attacks on the competence, candour and motives of the Ministry of Health (and before that the Department of Health) over three decades. She criticised the rigour of various health studies, but singled out the ESR's recent serum study, attacking its methodology and claiming that the results had been misinterpreted, giving dioxin levels four to five times too low. This was backed by the opinion of an Auckland forensic accountant, John Leonard, who scrutinised the ESR report on behalf of TV3. Although not a medical scientist, Leonard was used by TV3 after scientific advisers recommended they run the study past a "numbers man". The Ministry of Health and the ESR responded on two fronts. They commissioned more peer reviews of the serum study, but meanwhile got to work on a complaint to the BSA, accusing TV3's documentary of breaching standards relating to balance, fairness and accuracy. Issues of balance and fairness are always tricky in a documentary that espouses a particular cause (especially where the cause is little people beset by powerful forces such as big business or government). There is no question that Reid went in to bat on behalf of those who believe they were poisoned by IWD; the Ministry of Health was given just a fraction of the screen time of the sick people and the anti-dioxin campaigners. The ESR wasn't represented at all. But a documentary that scrupulously balanced every claim with a matching counterclaim would soon disappear into a morass of contradictory detail. And though the ESR is incensed it was not given a chance to defend its research, TV3 argues, with some merit, that the ministry commissioned that research and has long been fronting the dioxin issue. Some details of the ministry's complaint seem trivial or even daft, especially the claim that the choice of the Fourmyula "Nature Enter Me" was intended to persuade viewers that chemicals had entered the bodies of the interviewees. Reid thinks this is hilarious, and says the song was chosen mainly because it was a hit in the 1960s, then again in the new millennium, thus echoing the timeframe of the long-running Paritutu saga. For members of the public who couldn't care less about such niceties of journalistic practice, though, what really matter are the complaints about accuracy. They want to know if the documentary was right in saying that the government has for 30 years failed to take proper steps to look into health problems caused by dioxin from IWD, whether it has consistently misinformed the public, and whether it has botched again with the serum study. On the first point government inaction and misinformation TV3 isn't backing down, pointing out that it has extensive documentation, much of it not used in the documentary, proving precisely this point. The second point the vexed 2005 ESR serum study (see box, right) has spawned a saga in its own right. Three peer reviewers who re-examined the ESR report in light of Reid's documentary all gave it a clean bill of health (while acknowledging some glitches), a fact trumpeted in a ministry press release in early 2007. But TV3 has hit back: it asked toxicology expert Dr Mike Fitzpatrick to look again at the serum study, and he said it was "based on poor science", "imbalanced" and contained "too many errors to count". So on the science, on the history, on the basic facts, TV3 and the government flatly contradict each other, and the BSA is caught in the middle, required not only to make calls on subjective matters such as balance and fairness, but also to judge whether scientific expert X knows more than expert Y. Meanwhile, the piles of documents grow ever taller, and lawyers on each side clock up the billable hours. This, says TV3 lawyer Clare Bradley, is not what the BSA was set up to do. She believes the BSA should simply be judging whether Reid did everything she could to bring a story to light and gave the other side a reasonable opportunity to put its perspective. Instead, says Bradley, "the BSA has a tendency to become the investigator of fact, which I think is a wrong use of their mandate. They don't cross-examine to determine credibility in the way a judge does". In any case, says Bradley, the broadcasting complaints process should be for people who don't have the ability and resource to get their own message out there. Government departments have a publicity machine to do just that. Government departments, says Bradley, "should suck it up". AS THE squabble over the value of the ESR report drags on, it is worth noting the rather depressing fact that even if flawless, the report would be far from the final word on whether or not the people of Paritutu were poisoned by the IWD plant. Much about the science of dioxin is messy. For example, there is no dispute that dioxin causes some cancers, but there is vigorous disagreement on whether or not it can cause multi-generational mutations. TV3 quotes the studies which support the idea that dioxin is "mutagenic"; the Ministry of Health quotes those which suggest it isn't. Similarly, it is difficult to accurately state precisely how elevated blood dioxin levels might affect the health of a given individual. "Safe" levels of dioxin exposure have been repeatedly revised downwards over the decades as new evidence of its dangers have come to hand. Reid has not a flicker of doubt that the ESR study is badly flawed. But the bigger scandal, she says, is that the right studies are still not being done. "There are some very easy stock answers on dioxin," says Reid. "`This has been peer reviewed'; `this has been studied'; `this has been looked at by four experts'. "My answer to that is why don't you look at the exposed group and do the health study on those people those people who walk down the road with me and say `in this house they lost this many children; in that house they lost this many children and she's now got a baby with hydrocephaly'." The BSA process is dragging on and on, largely because of TV3's refusal to hand over Reid's unedited tapes, a matter of principle with which many journalists would sympathise. In the meantime, Reid says she will stick with this story until the people of Paritutu have got justice. "I'm convinced those people are sick because of that plant. I make no bones about it. Until they get help I will fight for them. How can I not do it? What sort of journalist what kind of person are you to just walk away?" She is working on a follow-up to Let Us Spray. Journalism, though, may turn out to be not enough. Next stop: court. "The government has had four or five years to set this straight. Mark my words, there will be a class action suit bigger than anything they've ever seen. "It will be really easy, because there are certain things you can prove. You can prove when the government knew and when they acted. You can prove when Dow knew and didn't tell the government. You can prove the production figures." Almost 13 years ago, Reid reported on the Ison family of Christchurch, who believed that their son had been born without eyes as a result of the mother coming into contact with the garden fungicide Benlate while pregnant.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dailynews/4460132a6002.html One of the world's biggest worker health studies will be released in Taranaki later this month. Chemical manufacturer Dow contracted Otago University's Dr David McBride to head the investigation into dioxin in the blood of workers at New Plymouth's Dow AgroSciences site in Paritutu. Between 1962 and 1987 the Ivon Watkins-Dow site produced 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D. Both produce toxic dioxins. During that time IWD employed 1500 workers. In an exclusive interview with the Taranaki Daily News, Dr McBride said the latest study of 376 workers was one of the biggest of its kind in the world. It was probable the study would find that the workers' blood dioxin levels are higher than those of 52 Paritutu residents tested by the Ministry of Health in 2003, he said. On average, the blood-serum dioxin levels in residents was found to be three times higher than the New Zealand population. "We do expect the workers to be slightly higher," Dr McBride said. However, he rubbished some claims that his study lacked credibility because it had been paid for by Dow. The blood tests alone have cost $500,000. "Some would say that you are in the pocket of the company, but it's not like that at all because the university has academic independence," he said. "I'm a doctor, so it wouldn't be very good if I tried to hush things up. "Dow has an interest in its workforce and it is it that should be spending the money and it is not something public money should be spent on, investigating worker health," Dr McBride said. "We had to make sure everything was right with this study because it is going to be under intense scrutiny. "When you have got the co-operation of the company you know you are going to get good data from them, including employment data and inside information, and everybody is involved in the project, which is a really good thing." Dr McBride was pleased workers had willingly come forward to be tested. "They are worried about these things. It's been going on for a long time and we'd like to give them some resolution and be able to tell them something. "We had a marvellous response from the Taranaki community, from people who previously worked at the plant. We were very pleased with that. The scientists back-calculated the exposure to dioxin. "It was a very technical and time-consuming procedure. It was a huge effort." The workers will hear what their levels are before the report is publicly released this month. Dr McBride said the study would be used to ensure safe exposure levels for future workers. "The horse has bolted on this one (IWD exposure)." The two McBride studies will be used to work out whether there is any direct association between dioxin exposure and a number of health conditions. "Along with other studies, you can get a coherent body of data that leads you down certain tracks where you can make informed decisions." The latest study is linked to Dr McBride's study of 1700 workers, released in 2006, which looked into cancer deaths of people who worked at the New Plymouth site from 1969 to 2001. It found the death rates were not dissimilar to those among the general population but suggested a slightly increased risk from multiple myeloma. In 2003 the Ministry of Health serum study into the dioxin levels of 52 long-term Paritutu residents found on average they had dioxin levels three times the national level. Experts believe toxins could mean a slightly elevated chance of suffering from cancers, especially soft tissue sarcoma or non-Hodgkins lymphoma. About four IWD workers' dioxin exposure health claims have been accepted by ACC. NZ "IWD workers" do not show a higher level of 2378-TCDD because the whole population got highly contaminated through the food chain, ,,,for 50 years. the Dow "study" is a wash.