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Around the world and almost up to date.

Department of Lenient Sentencing
An English creationist on vacation stabbed a Scotsman who believed in evolution rather than the bible after getting drunk. For some inexplicable reason he was only convicted of manslaughter, and then judge gave him a light sentence.

It's being billed as 'Creationist stabs Evolutionist'. As if being a rational human being, dealing with the world using facts and logic, makes you a special sub-class.

Geez.

Source: The Australian


No More Farm Tilapia From the Grocery For Me
It turns out China produces 70% of the world's aquaculture, and they apply the same, ahem, lofty standards to their fish safety as they do their toys.

In other words, loaded with poison and heavy metal.

Oh well. It's better to pay a little more than end up with a toxin-fried brain.

Source: The New York Times

Which leads us nicely into..

Department of Monstrous Evil
It seems that twenty years ago in England, a tanker truck poured a water treatment chemical into the wrong tank at a small town's treatment plant. Instead of going into a reservoir to purify water, the highly caustic aluminum substance went right into the tap water. 30,000 people were exposed. Immediate symptoms included, and I swear I am not making this up, skin peeling off, hair bleaching, ulceration of the mouth and lips sealing shut. Residents were told the water, filled with caustic crap, was safe, and that the bad taste could be diluted with a little orange juice.

The result, concludes the hitherto unpublished police account, was "a massive and instant contamination of the water supply."

Worse was to follow. For days, the water authority insisted the water was safe.

Officials took nearly a week to identify the cause of the poisoned water and ten more to reveal it in a tiny advertisement in the local paper.

It wasn't just aluminum, however, and the incompetence of the government compounded itself with further stupidity.

The water was, indeed, deadly. It contained not only aluminium sulphate but other noxious substances, too. As the acidic liquid travelled from the plant into people's homes, it corroded the copper pipes and their soldered joints, made of zinc and lead.

"We were drinking a cocktail of metals and god knows what else," adds Mr Cross angrily.

"We were also advised to boil the water.

"This was even more dangerous advice because it concentrates the contaminants.

"They kept flushing the pipes out for months after the incident.

"This will have stirred up debris in the bends and only have lengthened the amount of time the water was coming through the taps with all sorts of metals in it."

Flash forward to today. Cancer rates are now terribly high, neurological problems abound, and the facts are just coming to light.

Why the coverup? Why the deception when it would only cause further harm?

Because the government, then run by the Conservatives (the Brit equivalent of our own Republican party) was looking to sell off the city water company. Privatization strikes again.

We have also been handed an explosive letter which reveals how officialdom set out to downplay the Camelford disaster and any wrong-doing by the water authority, which was about to be privatised by the Conservative government of the day.

The letter from a water official to Michael Howard, then Minister of State for Water and Planning, states that a police investigation into the poisoning incident was viewed as "very distracting".

It goes on to say that any subsequent prosecution of South West Water would also "be totally unhelpful to privatisation . . . and render the whole of the water industry unattractive to the City".

Stories like these can make a person long to believe in hell. There's no punishment on earth to fit a crime like that.

Source: The Daily Mail