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POPSTobacco Underground
At a time when nations are increasingly trying to crack down on smoking, smugglers put cheap cigarettes into the hands of those most vulnerable — young people and the poor. In addition, the trade is pushing the supply steadily into the black market, selling cut-rate cigarettes of often dubious quality. Of special concern is the advent of a massive counterfeiting industry. Once a minor problem, today underground factories in China, Paraguay, and Eastern Europe manufacture literally billions of fake cigarettes — Marlboros, Camels, 555s, Mild Sevens — an uncontrolled industry that law enforcement is only beginning to grapple with. Many of the smokes are made from the lowest quality tobacco, full of stem and sawdust, and spiked with unusually high levels of nicotine. Other packs contain far worse. Tests reveal that counterfeit cigarettes carry a bevy of products that could further shorten even a heavy smoker’s life: metals such as cadmium, pesticides, arsenic, rat poison, and human feces.
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POPSCleaning Up Our Rear Ends - The Green Way. No need to clog our seas with loo paper or sacrifice forests to keep our rear ends (semi) clean. Install a bidet and give the French one less reason to call everyone else uncultured clots ;-)
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POPSUnited Nations; Trade Union & Social Club For Tin Pot Tyrants by Mark Steyn
which of them is more unreal. To be sure, Colonel Qaddafi peddled his thoughts on the laboratory origins of “swine flu” and the Zionist plot behind the Kennedy assassination. But, on the other hand, President Obama said: “No nation can or should try to dominate another nation.” Pardon me? Did a professional speechwriter write that? Or did you outsource it to a starry-eyed runner-up in the Miss America pageant? Whether or not any nation “should try” to dominate another, they certainly “can,” and do so with effortless ease, all over the planet and throughout human history. And how about this passage? “I have been in office for just nine months " though some days it seems a lot longer. I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world. These expectations are not about me. Rather, they are rooted, I believe, in a discontent with a status quo that has allowed us to be increasingly defined by our differences . . . ”
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POPSIf you Care This is a petition site which allows you (if you truly Care about an issue) to sign a petition or even create your own. I think its a great idea!
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POPSWho In The Hades Thinks Up These Twisted Ideas? People will say this is "inhumane", but only a human could come up with something this foul and warped. This is the sort of thing that seriously puts a crimp in my faith in fellow humans. BTW, if this bothers you, there's a petition to sign @ the website.
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POPSCretins on the March I'll never forget the first time I saw a Ray Comfort video. He was using a banana to debunk evolution! This tool for the religious right goes far beyond parody and falls more into the area of pity. Along with his cohort, Kirk Cameron, they are pulling out all the stops on the stupid express. If you're a Creationist I'd suggest you try to wrangle a free copy. Just ignore the BS that Comfort added and read the rest. Maybe you'll learn something? Such basic ignorance of simple science is wide spread in the US. I don't recall the actual statistics but a much too large portion of the US believes this Creationist/ID drivel. Very sad indeed.
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POPSPangolins - On the Red List of Endangered Species "According to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, all eight pangolin species are experiencing decreasing populations. Due to an unfortunate superstition throughout China that pangolin meat, scales, fetus, and body parts have medicinal properties, the Chinese Pangolin and the Sunda Pangolin are now classified as endangered."
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POPSCanadian City Uses Feces to Repel Homeless
It's tough to believe that anyone -- especially a city official -- actually thought this was a good idea. But it's downright bizarre that a plan so ridiculous, so "bird-brained" was actually implemented; city officials located the dung, transported it, spread it, so on and so forth. It was only after the negative press that the city manager had it cleared (and deodorized the area, apparently). To many, this bird dung story will be kind of funny, really nasty, or completely outraging. But to me, it's just really sad. Sad for the people who usually sat outside of those city buildings, most likely because they had nowhere else to sit. Now the whole world knows what city officials really think of them, perhaps even what they equate them to. Sad that it takes an extreme story of such hate and ignorance to bring the issue of homelessness to the front of people's minds. And sad because this story really isn't about homelessness at all. Because homelessness should be about not ha
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POPS15 Things You Probably Do Not Know Well, I knew a few, but they are still fascinating. If you go to the source article, make sure you take the "blind eye test" and watch the YouTube about how rats can laugh. Really neat.
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POPSChimps do get "AIDS," study finds at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. At Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania researchers collected observational data and, from chimps that had died, tissue samples. Feces and urine tests pinpointed which living chimps were SIV positive. SIV is spread via bodily fluids, during sexual contact and probably during birth, Lonsdorf said. The virus may also spread through biting and fight wounds, she added—"which will be the topic of further study over the next several years." At the outset of the study, there was little sense that anything was wrong with the SIV-positive chimps, said Lonsdorf. Then the researchers began noticing the much higher death rate among the SIV-positive chimpanzees. And infected females, it turned out, were much less likely to give birth. When they did, their babies had a very low chance of survival. Hope for Fighting AIDS in Humans? "We can learn a lot about disease mechanisms by studying the same disease in different species''.
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POPSAnimal, human statues found in Burnt City more: Over 400 prehistoric sites have been excavated in Burnt City and archeologists expect the number to reach 1000. The 5000-year-old Burnt City is located near the city of Zabol and covers an area of over 300,000 hectares. Four civilizations have lived in the city which was burnt down three times; it was not rebuilt after the last fire. The world's oldest animated picture-book, dice and backgammon set, the earliest known caraway seed and artificial eyeball all been found in the Burnt City.
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POPSTop 6 Ways to convert Poop into Electricity
Turd Cell Smashers Destroying the cell walls in sludge—by heating it under pressure, zapping it with ultrasonic waves, or pulsing it with electric fields—boosts its methane production by 50 percent or more in anaerobic digesters Geological Toilets Last summer, Los Angeles began injecting sludge into a mile-deep well, where pressure and heat are expected to release enough methane to power 1,000 homes. The well also dissolves and sequesters carbon dioxide that the sludge would normally release, removing the equivalent exhaust of about 1,000 cars per year. Feces Ponds As a cheaper green option, some 50 waste plants in 20 countries have installed versions of UC Berkeley professor William J. Oswald's Advanced Integrated Wastewater Pond Systems Technology--large open-air ponds that primarily rely on anaerobic digestion and photosynthesis to break down sludge and convert it into a fertilizer or animal feed of nitrogen-rich algae. The algae in turn can be used as a feedstock for biofu
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POPS6 Daily Habits That May Make You Sick continued: When the weather turns nice, many of us throw open our windows to breath in the fresh spring air. But that may be an unhealthy move, considering the combination of seasonal allergies and poor air quality of many cities throughout the U.S. According to a recent report by the American Lung Association, 60% of Americans are breathing unhealthy air. 6. Sitting in Front of the TV Sitting in front of the television has become a national pastime and one of our least healthy behaviors, particularly because we often do it while snacking on food that is high in calories. More info at site.
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