Last month, Burger King found horse meat at European supplier

Originally published January 31, 2013
Burger King announced Thursday that it had terminated its relationship with European supplier Silvercrest Foods after finding traces of horse meat in beef patties at a Silvercrest facility.

Silvercrest provided beef for Burger King restaurants in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark. Burger King said that while samples of beef from restaurants in these countries showed no evidence of contamination, four samples from a Silvercrest plant in Ireland showed "very small trace levels of equine DNA."

Burger King said the tainted product was never sold in restaurants, and appeared to have originated from a sub-contracted supplier in Poland.

"[W]e are deeply troubled by the findings of our investigation and apologize to our guests, who trust us to source only the highest quality 100% beef burgers," Burger King's vice president for global quality, Diego Beamonte, said in a statement. Read more >>

Google Says U.S. Govt Requests to Remove Content Increased Over 100 Percent

Computer World
Western democracies, which are not typically associated with censorship, have demanded that Google take down certain political videos, blog posts, and other content, the company said Sunday.

The company as on previous occasions has been asked to take down political speech in many countries, Google said. "It's alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect--Western democracies not typically associated with censorship," said Dorothy Chou, Google's senior policy analyst in a blog post.

European nations begin seizing private pensions

Hungary, Poland, and three other nations take over citizens' pension money to make up government budget shortfalls.

People’s retirement savings are a convenient source of revenue for governments that don’t want to reduce spending or make privatizations. As most pension schemes in Europe are organised by the state, European ministers of finance have a facilitated access to the savings accumulated there, and it is only logical that they try to get a hold of this money for their own ends. In recent weeks I have noted five such attempts: Three situations concern private personal savings; two others refer to national funds.

The most striking example is Hungary, where last month the government made the citizens an offer they could not refuse. They could either remit their individual retirement savings to the state, or lose the right to the basic state pension (but still have an obligation to pay contributions for it). In this extortionate way, the government wants to gain control over $14bn of individual retirement savings. More...

Twenty-one homeless people die after bird flu vaccine trial

Three Polish doctors and six nurses are facing criminal prosecution after 21 homeless people died following medical trials for a vaccine to the H5N1 bird-flu virus, according to The Telegraph's Matthew Day in Warsaw.

The medical staff, from the northern town of Grudziadz, are being investigated over medical trials on as many as 350 homeless and poor people last year, which prosecutors say involved an untried vaccine to the highly-contagious virus, says Day. The victims received £1-2 to be tested with what they thought was a conventional flu vaccine but was actually an anti bird-flu drug.

Day claims Polish authorities have not established a direct link between the deaths and the medical staff, but Poland's health minister, Ewa Kopacz, said the doctors and nurses involved should not return to their profession. "It is in the interests of all doctors that those who are responsible for this are punished," he said.

In a chilling-to-the-bone revelation regarding Poland's national health service, Day claims that in 2002, "a number of ambulance medics were found guilty of killing their patients for commissions from funeral companies."

Natural News reports that "Aside from the dangerous ingredients many people already know about (like squalene or thimerosal), one of the key ingredients used in flu vaccines (including the vaccines being prepared for the swine flu pandemic) is the diseased flesh of African Green Monkeys. This is revealed in U.S. patent No. 5911998 - Method of producing a virus vaccine from an African green monkey kidney cell line. (http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5...)

"As this patent readily explains, ingredients used in the vaccine are derived from the kidneys of African Green Monkeys who are first infected with the virus, then allowed to fester the disease, and then are killed so that their diseased organs can be used make vaccine ingredients. This is done in a cruel, inhumane 'flesh factory' environment where the monkeys are subjected to a process that includes 'incubating said inoculated cell line to permit proliferation of said virus.' Then: 'harvesting the virus resulting from step (c); and... (ii) preparing a vaccine from the harvested virus.'"