Link: http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/23958-colombia-passes-first-draft-of-drug-crop-legalization-bill-.html

The Colombian House of Representatives Wednesday passed the first draft of a bill that seeks to legalize illicit crops. The initiative calls for the decriminalization of growing plants such as coca, marijuana and opium poppies in the country. Representative Hugo Velasquez Jaramillo, who proposed the bill, explained that although the cultivation of plants would be legal under the new legislation, the processing and trafficking of drugs would remain subject to criminal sentencing.

Link: http://www.alternet.org/health/155340/big_agriculture%27s_big_secrets%3A_9_things_you_need_to_know_about_the_food_you_eat/

Food scandals are so costly to Big Food that it has repeatedly tried to kill the messenger rather than clean up its act. Thanks to factory farming's massive economies of scale, a lot of food today is disgusting or cruel or disgusting and cruel. Just when people stopped talking about cantaloupes with deadly listeria, "pink slime" hit the news. And just when people stopped talking about pink slime, ground beef treated with ammonia to kill germs, mad cow hit the news. Does anyone even remember the arsenic in the fruit juice?

Link: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/05/09-2

"Alarming amount" of plastic having ecosystem-wide effects. Plastic garbage in the ocean has increased 100-fold in the past 40 years and could have ecosystem-wide impacts, according to a study released Tuesday. Seaplex researchers Matt Durham and Miriam Goldstein encounter netting and plastic in the Pacific. (Photograph: Scripps Institution of Oceanography) Scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography looked at the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (NPSG), known as the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch,’ and found an "alarming amount" of plastic trash, much in small bits.

Link: http://www.alternet.org/environment/155359/conservative_thinktanks_launch_campaign_to_turn_americans_against_wind_energy/

Documents show for the first time that local anti-wind groups are co-ordinating and working with national fossil-fuel funded advocacy groups to wreck the wind industry. A network of ultra-conservative groups is ramping up an offensive on multiple fronts to turn the American public against wind farms and Barack Obama's energy agenda.

Link: http://socialistworker.org/2012/05/09/our-health-insurance-nightmare

Donna Smith is an organizer for the California Nurses Association. In 2007, her story was featured in Michael Moore's documentary Sicko, which highlighted the disaster of the profit-driven health care system in the U.S. At a recent screening of the documentary The Healthcare Movie--which details the history of the struggle for single-payer health care in Canada--sponsored by the California Nurses Association, Smith spoke to Cindy Beringer.

Link: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57431087/monster-sunspot-could-bring-solar-flares/?tag=strip

A group of sunspots 11 times wider than the Earth turned to face our planet, raising the possibility of solar flares and auroras tonight, reports CNET. More than 60,000 miles wide, Sunspot Region 1476 became visible over the weekend and two coronal mass ejections (CMEs), where a portion of the sun's atmosphere breaks off, erupted on Tuesday.

Link: http://geraldcelentechannel.blogspot.com/2012/05/nigel-farage-mass-civil-unrest.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TrendsForecastsAndPropheciesBlog+%28Trends+Forecasts+and+Prophecies+Blog%29#.T6qgKTsYLMg.pingfm

Nigel Farage : The EU Titanic has now hit the iceberg , it is a European union of economic failure of mass unemployment of low growth but most of all it is an EU of the economic prism of a Euro , We face the prospect of mass civil unrest,possibly even a revolution in some countries that have been driven in total utter desperation says British MEP Nigel Farage . Nigel Farage MEP, UKIP, Co-President of the EFD Group in the European Parliament (Europe of Freedom and Democracy)