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A new TV documentary claims that starving North Koreans are reverting to cannibalism in order to survive, and states that farmers been ordered to grow opium instead of food.

Carla Garapedian, producer of “Children of the Secret State,” a BBC production, said that film smuggled out of North Korea, as well as interviews with escapees from the Communist state, revealed “acts of unspeakable barbarism not seen since Pol Pot’s Cambodia.” She has spoken to farmers who claim to have been ordered not to grow food and told to growopium instead. “The opium would then be processed by the state into heroin and then sold abroad. The proceeds would go to arm the military,” she said.
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After two years of review, the FDA has decided that there is no need for American companies to label genfoods, and that testing for allergic response and toxicity is unnecessary.

This means that genetically engineered food products are free to enter the American food chain without restraint or restriction. Stringent European rules are exactly the opposite, requiring both testing and labeling. As a result, consumers can tell which foods are genetically altered in Europe, and avoid them. As a result, genfoods are all but impossible to sell there.
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Tiny frogs have invaded Hawaii’s Big Island. The problem is that when they croak in chorus at night, they make a noise as loud as a helicopter, so resident humans aren’t getting much sleep.

The frogs are about the size of a nickel, and arrived in Hawaii from the Caribbean in the mid-80’s, probably in an agricultural shipment. Since they have no natural predators in Hawaii, they have swelled in numbers and now pose such a hindrance to a good night’s sleep that a hotline has been set up for frustrated insomniacs.
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While the world is debating regulations to try to cut down on their emissions of the greenhouse gas Carbon Dioxide, in order to slow down the increase in global warming, scientists have discovered that the activity of a single enzyme, phenol oxidase, in peat bogs is the only thing preventing a massive release of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Inside these wet, oxygen-poor bogs, which stretch from Scotland to Siberia, the enzyme’s activity is low and thus it can’t set off the decomposition that would send huge volumes of CO2 into the air.
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