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By Micah Hanks | MysteriousUniverse.org 

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The Daily Green

2010-03-02

Prices were up 50 cents a pound for consumers … but only 2 cents a pound for beekeepers.

It’s official. 2009 was a terrible year to be in the honey business. Recently we polled our Honey Market Reporters and came up with an estimate for the U. S. honey crop for 2009. Our guesstimate was 119 million pounds, produced by 2,223,000 colonies. The USDA today released their figures (pdf). Though higher than ours at 144,108,000 million pounds of honey, it is still the worst honey crop on record. Ever. USDA figures showed a colony count of 2,462,000 … a couple hundred thousand higher than our guesstimate.

There’s a couple more numbers that are important here that need to be in the mix. For instance, some beekeepers always have some unsold honey at the end of the year. This honey, left over from last year (2008) has to be added to the honey produced this year (2009). Plus, you also have to add in the honey that was imported into the U.S. during 2009, and subtract the honey that beekeepers exported. This final figure gives a nice picture of how much honey was used in the U.S. overall during 2009. That total figure is 363,754,996 pounds. If you divide that total figure by average the U.S. population for 2009, you get a handy figure to have … per capita consumption, which is, for 2009 – .903 pounds, or right about 14.5 ounces. Did you eat your pound of honey last year?

Historically, this per capita figure is down a bit. Last year it was .960 pounds, or 15.4 ounces per person. The figure most honey experts use is a pound a person every year, so though a tad off, these figures are still in the ball park.

Survey figures, by our magazine and others, however, show that obviously not every person in the U.S. eats their pound of honey. Rather, only about 1 in 4.5 or 1 in 5 people eat any honey at all, so those that do, are eating 4 or 5 pounds each. Thank you.

The imported figure is a bit scary, not unlike a lot of other foods we consume. The U.S. imported 211,418,300 pounds … or almost 60% of the honey we ate last year. That percentage has been creeping up slowly for several years and no end is in sight. Less U.S. production coupled with the fact that U.S. honey costs more than almost all imported honey makes that easy to understand.

The average price of honey increased a couple cents per pound – 2 percent over last year’s prices, from $1.421 to $1.445 per pound. Retail prices, however, were even higher, rising from $2.247 to $2.784 per pound, or just over 50 cents a pound. That’s a hike by any standard.

The last caveat for this report is that the USDA does not contact, nor count, beekeeping operations that have 5 or fewer colonies. There are a lot of these in this country and their production does add up, but for the most part, the honey produced by these beekeepers does not enter the stream of commerce, but rather is consumed at home, shared with neighbors and family, or sold to friends or coworkers. It would be interesting to be able to measure that amount, and count those beekeepers … hidden away in the backyards and rooftops of America, wouldn’t it?

Reuters

2010-03-02

Atrazine, one of the most commonly used and controversial weedkillers, can turn male frogs into females, researchers reported on Monday.

The experiment is the first to show such complete effects of atrazine, which had been known to disrupt hormones and which is one of the chief suspects in the decline of amphibians such as frogs around the world.

“Atrazine-exposed males were both demasculinized (chemically castrated) and completely feminized as adults,” Tyrone Hayes of the University of California Berkeley and colleagues wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The chemical had been shown to disrupt development and make frogs develop both male and female features — termed hermaphroditism. This study of 40 male frogs shows the process can go even further, Hayes said.

“Before, we knew we got fewer males than we should have, and we got hermaphrodites. Now, we have clearly shown that many of these animals are sex-reversed males,” Hayes said in a statement.

“Atrazine has caused a hormonal imbalance that has made them develop into the wrong sex, in terms of their genetic constitution.”

Syngenta AG (SYNN.VX), one of several companies that makes atrazine, questioned the design of the study and said Hayes has a history of offering flawed studies for publication.

“For 50 years, atrazine has been used safely in agriculture with no effect to amphibians, fish, birds and other wildlife at concentrations found in the environment — a fact that is supported by numerous scientific studies,” the company said in a statement.

The Proceedings is a peer-reviewed journal, meaning that papers it publishes have been screened for obvious flaws.

EFFECTS ON HUMANS?

Whether the effects translate to humans is far from clear. Frogs have thin skin that can absorb chemicals easily and they literally bathe in the polluted water.

The European Union banned atrazine in 2004. The finding may add pressure to the United States to more closely regulate the chemical, used widely in agriculture.

“Approximately 80 million pounds (36,000 tonnes) are applied annually in the United States alone, and atrazine is the most common pesticide contaminant of ground and surface water,” the researchers wrote.

“In fact, more than a half million pounds (220 tonnes) of atrazine are precipitated in rainfall each year in the United States.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in October it was reviewing the health impacts of atrazine.

Hayes and colleagues studied 40 African clawed frogs, keeping them in water contaminated with 2.5 ppb (parts per billion) of atrazine. The EPA’s current drinking water standard is 3 ppb.

“Ten percent of the exposed genetic males developed into functional females that copulated with unexposed males and produced viable eggs,” the researchers wrote.

“Regardless of the mechanism, the impacts of atrazine on amphibians and on wildlife in general are potentially devastating,” they wrote.

“The negative impacts on wild amphibians is especially concerning given that the dose examined here (2.5 ppb) is in the range that animals experience year-round in areas where atrazine is used as well within levels found in rainfall, in which levels can exceed 100 ppb in the Midwestern United States,” they added.

Government Swine Flu Ad Portrays Vaccine Skeptics As Raving Lunatics (Video)

By Paul Joseph Watson | PrisonPlanet.com 

Wired

2010-03-03

The Obama administration declassified part of the government’s cybersecurity plan Tuesday, publishing parts of it that discuss intrusion detection systems for federal computer networks and the government’s role in securing critical infrastructure.

The declassification announcement was made by Howard A. Schmidt, a former Microsoft security executive who in December was appointed cybersecurity coordinator by President Barack Obama. Schmidt was speaking at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco, an annual industry conference for computer security professionals.

The government’s Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative was launched in 2008 by President George W. Bush under a shroud of secrecy. The plan has 12 directives that cover the government’s strategy to protect U.S. networks — including military, civilian, government networks and critical infrastructure systems — as well as the government’s offensive strategy to combat cyber warfare.

Civil libertarians criticized the Bush administration for failing to disclose the contents of the plan or allowing independent oversight of its implementation. Schmidt said that Obama recognized the need for some transparency.

“There are a lot of legal issues about what we’re doing,” he told the 2,000-member audience, adding that the government was currently working on a list of about 40 legal questions related to the cybersecurity initiative.

Obama said last May that he planned to appoint a separate official to ensure that the implementation of the cybersecurity plan doesn’t violate privacy and civil liberties and insisted that the government’s plan would not include spying on the public.

“Our pursuit of cybersecurity will not include — I repeat, will not include — monitoring private sector networks or internet traffic,”he said. “We will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans.”

A White House spokesman said Tuesday that the administration had appointed Tim Edgar to oversee the privacy aspects of the cybersecurity initiative. Edgar, a former attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, has been working as the deputy for civil liberties for the Civil Liberties and Privacy Office of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The declassified portion of the plan published Tuesday includes information on only part of the initiative and does not discuss cyberwarfare. The plan instead discusses the deployment of Einstein 2 and Einstein 3, intrusion detection systems on federal networks designed to inspect internet traffic entering government networks to detect potential threats.

–DHS (Department of Homeland Security) is deploying, as part of its EINSTEIN 2 activities, signature-based sensors capable of inspecting Internet traffic entering Federal systems for unauthorized accesses and malicious content. The EINSTEIN 2 capability enables analysis of network flow information to identify potential malicious activity while conducting automatic full packet inspection of traffic entering or exiting U.S. Government networks for malicious activity using signature-based intrusion detection technology.. . . EINSTEIN 2 is capable of alerting US-CERT in real time to the presence of malicious or potentially harmful activity in federal network traffic and provides correlation and visualization of the derived data. . . .

The EINSTEIN 3 system will also support enhanced information sharing by US-CERT with Federal Departments and Agencies by giving DHS the ability to automate alerting of detected network intrusion attempts and, when deemed necessary by DHS, to send alerts that do not contain the content of communications to the National Security Agency (NSA) so that DHS efforts may be supported by NSA exercising its lawfully authorized missions.–

The Einstein programs have raised concerns among privacy and civil liberties groups, such as the Center for Democracy and Technology, because they involve scanning the content of communications to intercept malicious code before it reaches government networks.

In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security’s Privacy Office published a Privacy Impact Assessment on early versions of Einstein 2 (.pdf) but has not published one on Einstein 3. The assessment left many questions unanswered, such as how much of a role the National Security Agency will play in the programs and whether information obtained in scans be shared with law enforcement or intelligence agencies.

What may be the most controversial part of the declassified plan is a discussion of a need for the government to define its role in protecting private critical infrastructure networks. Critical infrastructure includes the electrical grid, telecommunication networks, internet service providers, the banking and financial industry, and others.

The document indicates that DHS and private-sector businesses have already “developed a plan of shared action with an aggressive series of milestones and activities” but doesn’t discuss the nature of those shared actions other than to say that the two sectors are focused on developing a “public-private sharing of information regarding cyberthreats and incidents.”

–The U.S. Government depends on a variety of privately owned and operated critical infrastructures to carry out the public’s business. In turn, these critical infrastructures rely on the efficient operation of information systems and networks that are vulnerable to malicious cyberthreats. This Initiative builds on the existing and ongoing partnership between the Federal Government and the public and private sector owners and operators of Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources (CIKR). . . . It addresses security and information assurance efforts across the cyber infrastructure to increase resiliency and operational capabilities throughout the CIKR sectors.–

Additionally, the plan calls for a strategy to increase the security of classified networks and to develop and implement a government-wide cybercounterintelligence (CI) plan, but provides little detail about what that would involve.

“A government-wide cybercounterintelligence plan is necessary to coordinate activities across all Federal Agencies to detect, deter, and mitigate the foreign-sponsored cyberintelligence threat to U.S. and private sector information systems,” the plan says. “To accomplish these goals, the plan establishes and expands cyber CI education and awareness programs and workforce development to integrate CI into all cyber operations and analysis, increase employee awareness of the cyber CI threat, and increase counterintelligence collaboration across the government.”

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