Study: Americans Waste 160 Billion Tons Of Food Over Expiration Dates

A recent study done by Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic and the Natural Resource’s Defense Council exposes the truth behind expiration dates and offers suggestions to food manufacturers on how to better set these dates.

“The dates are undefined in law and have nothing to do with safety,” said Emily Broad Leib, lead author of the study, titled The Dating Game, and director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic. “They are just a manufacturer suggestion of peak quality.”

Leib researched how manufacturers set the dates on their food products, discovering that some manufacturers conduct taste tests that will factor into the expiration date.

“[Manufacturers are] picking dates that are really protective over their brand, which is fine,” Leib said. “It’s just important for consumers to know that.”

The study looked at rates of waste, finding that 90% of consumers throw they food away on the sell by date. Leib said consumers are unaware that these dates are not necessarily linked with food safety. As a result, about 160 billion tons of food are wasted every year. Read more >>

U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers. Read more >>

Ban 'killer robots,' rights group urges

Hollywood-style robots able to shoot people without permission from their human handlers are a real possibility and must be banned before governments start deploying them, Human Rights Watch warned Monday.

The report "Losing Humanity" -- co-produced by Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic -- also raises the alarm over the ethics of the looming technology.

Calling them "killer robots," it urges "an international treaty that would absolutely prohibit the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons."

The US military already leads the way in military robots, notably the unmanned aircraft or drones used for surveillance or attacks over Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere. But these are controlled by human operators in ground bases and are not able to kill without authorization.

Fully autonomous robots that decide for themselves when to fire could be developed within 20 to 30 years, or "even sooner," the 50-page report said, adding that weapon systems that require little human intervention already exist. Read more >>