the "Headline That Caught My Attention or the WTF" thread

OK, who cut the cheese???

Major Cheese Heist Puts Dutch Dairy Farmers on Alert​

Thieves made off with thousands of pounds of cheese, worth about $23,000, from a Dutch dairy farm last week.

Thieves have long found cheese as lucrative as many people find it delicious, and a sophisticated heist in the Netherlands has dairy farmers there on high alert.

Gerda van Dorp, a Dutch cheese farmer in the town of Fijnaart, in the south of the country, woke up on March 29 to a mostly empty cheese storage room. Overnight, unknown thieves had taken from her shelves 161 wheels of cheese, weighing 3,500 pounds, that had taken months to make and mature.
The value: about $23,000.

“It was like waking up in a movie,” said Ms. van Dorp, who runs her business and farm together with her husband, Joost.

Cheese from similar robberies in 2016 was later located in Eastern Europe, said Theo Dekker, the chairman of an interest group for Dutch dairy farmers. The incident has left some farmers on edge, and Ms. van Dorp said that several other farmers had reached out to her for support.

The thieves also stole her trailer and two wheelbarrows from the farm, the police said, presumably to transport the cheese to a bus or a truck. (A wheel of cheese is roughly 10 kilos, or 22 pounds.) The police said they recovered the trailer and the wheelbarrows nearby.

Ms. van Dorp guessed that whoever stole the cheese must have been watching her farm, where she lives with her husband and two children, for a while. The incident happened while the gate to the property was left open for an overnight milk delivery.

Nobody has been arrested in the case, the police said, and an investigation is ongoing.

Selling the cheese inside the Netherlands might be difficult. Every wheel of cheese has its own serial number, and farms add their logos to it as well to indicate where it was made — and to make the products easily traced.

“Thankfully this doesn’t happen often, but we’re worried about how professional this has become,” Mr. Dekker, who is a dairy farmer himself, said. “These people come at night and take everything with brute force. It’s almost like organized crime.”

“They know what they’re doing,” he said. “That scares us.”

Prices of consumer goods in the Netherlands have risen, as they have elsewhere in the world. They were up 9.7 percent in March compared with a year before, reaching their highest levels since 1976, according to Statistics Netherlands, a Dutch governmental institution that tracks data.

The Netherlands, home to 1.6 million cows (and over 17 million people), is a major producer of dairy, of which about two-thirds is exported, according to the Dutch Dairy Association. In 2020, the Netherlands exported 7.5 billion euros (about $8.1 billion) worth of dairy products.

Mr. Dekker said he had warned the 290 members of the interest group he leads to be extra vigilant, to install cameras and to double check their locks before going to bed. In total, the Netherlands, a major producer of cheese and other dairy products, counts 500 farms that make cheese and other products from the animals that they own, he said.

When the Netherlands saw similar robberies some years ago, Mr. Dekker said that he had seen security footage of the thefts and that he had been shocked by the speed and the force used by the thieves. At the time, the Dutch newspaper NRC estimated that in 2015, close to 19,000 pounds of cheese had been stolen.

Still, this is a special case, Mireille Aalders, a police spokeswoman, said. “I know that a while ago, batches of cheese were stolen around the country, but this isn’t the kind of incident that happens weekly or monthly,” she said. “It’s pretty unique.”

The problem isn’t limited to the Netherlands. Italy’s precious Parmesan cheese is a frequent target, including a daring nighttime heist of 25,000 pounds in 2018.

Wisconsin has its own issues with what one cheese seller dubbed “cheese pirates.” In 2016, someone made off with more than 20,000 pounds of cheese, valued at more than $46,000, when an unmarked trailer was stolen from a parking lot in Oak Creek.

A big robbery like the one at Ms. van Dorp’s farm isn’t just unfortunate from a monetary standpoint, Mr. Dekker said. For many of the farmers, who make cheese from milk from their own farm animals and often live on the same property, it feels personal.

“There’s a bit of emotion involved,” Mr. Dekker said. “These people put passion and love into their work.”
 
that dumbbell is better than Chevys guess to my Brazilian Coconut Spear… C22…
.
8A3E9921-C07B-4550-AA4D-5B968B960F46.webp
 
what the hell is going on in India??

www.yahoo.com

Four men arrested for ‘raping’ Bengal monitor lizard in western India

Four men have been arrested after one of the accused’s phones was discovered to contain a video of them gang-raping a Bengal monitor lizard at the Sahydari Tiger Reserve in Maharashthra, India. CCTV footage from the Maharashtra Forest Department showed the four men lurking around the forest and...
www.yahoo.com www.yahoo.com

:oops:

Uhe case was taken to the Indian Penal Court to discuss proper legal action and charges against the four men. According to the Indian Penal Code, Section 377 states that anyone who voluntarily commits intercourse with an animal “shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.”
 
wader said:
what the hell is going on in India??

www.yahoo.com

Four men arrested for ‘raping’ Bengal monitor lizard in western India

Four men have been arrested after one of the accused’s phones was discovered to contain a video of them gang-raping a Bengal monitor lizard at the Sahydari Tiger Reserve in Maharashthra, India. CCTV footage from the Maharashtra Forest Department showed the four men lurking around the forest and...
www.yahoo.com www.yahoo.com

:oops:

Uhe case was taken to the Indian Penal Court to discuss proper legal action and charges against the four men. According to the Indian Penal Code, Section 377 states that anyone who voluntarily commits intercourse with an animal “shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.”
Click to expand...
Or they can just move to US and marry the lizard.
 
jpd said:
MSM is mobilizing to claim it was corn feed :rolleyes:

www.politifact.com

No, a bird didn’t poop on the president

All presidents face some bad luck while in office as events they often can’t control affect their agendas. But one would
www.politifact.com www.politifact.com
Click to expand...
They’re funny. So the grain was flying around and shit on him they say. I don’t think these fruits have ever been outside an office let alone on a farm or a mill. Birds are everywhere inside mills. Trying not to get shit on is a bigger challenge.
 
Rut-roh, Rooskies admit ship has sunk!!

Russia says flagship missile cruiser has sunk after explosion off coast of Ukraine​


The flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet sunk after an attack from Ukrainian forces triggered a “significant explosion” as the vessel floated off the coast of Ukraine, U.S. officials said Thursday, with Moscow offering a competing claim about the cause of the destruction.

The explosion occurred Wednesday, when the ship was roughly 75 miles from Odessa, a seaside hub in Ukraine’s south, a senior U.S. defense official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Pentagon. Odessa’s governor said the Moskva was hit by a Ukrainian anti-ship missile, an assertion backed by another American official familiar with the matter, who confirmed the strike but could not verify the specific weapons system used.
 
Congrats to CMS being the "adult in the room" when it comes to Aduhelm. It's FDA approval over the recommendations of the advisory panel gave me fits. I guess that the people having seizures now are Biogen stock holders...

Commentary: Medicare is cleaning up FDA’s mess on Biogen’s Alzheimer’s drug​

pressherald.com/2022/04/16/commentary-medicare-is-cleaning-up-fdas-mess-on-biogens-alzheimers-drug/

By Lisa Jarvis April 16, 2022

Medicare has decided once and for all not to pay for Biogen’s new Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm unless patients are enrolled in a clinical study.

The agency’s final call was unsurprising, but blessedly rational. It corrects the Food and Drug Administration’s mistake in letting Aduhelm onto the market. At the same time, it leaves room for future Alzheimer’s drugs to be covered – as long as studies show they are safe and effective.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR​

Lisa Jarvis, former executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News, writes about biotech, drug discovery and the pharmaceutical industry for Bloomberg Opinion.

This will encourage beneficial innovation in Alzheimer’s drug development, and ensure that patients get medicines that can truly help them.

The decision by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services marks a turning point in Aduhelm’s long and contentious journey. In 2014, the drug raised hopes among Alzheimer’s doctors and patients when, in a small phase 2 trial, it appeared to clear amyloid plaques in patients’ brains and – in a first for the field – ease their cognitive decline. Biogen promptly began a large, expensive phase 3 study to confirm those results and, to prepare for the drug’s eventual approval, invested $2.5 billion in manufacturing capacity.

In larger trials, however, the stunning early results couldn’t be replicated. And that seemed to end all hope for the drug – until Biogen said it found buried in the data a signal that the drug could still be effective. Then, according to an investigation by Stat News reporters, the company secretly lobbied the FDA for Aduhelm’s approval.

In 2020, the FDA’s scientific advisory committee harshly criticized the company’s data mining and overwhelmingly recommended against approving Aduhelm. Then the agency stunned everyone by approving the drug anyway, based on its ability to clear amyloid plaques, with the proviso that Biogen would run another trial to prove that the plaque-clearing would slow cognitive decline.

Biogen audaciously priced the drug at $56,000 per year. And Medicare, faced with the possibility of paying for treatment for millions of qualified Americans, had to schedule a big rise in monthly premiums for Part B coverage. (After an outcry, Biogen eventually halved the price.)

Now that CMS has settled on a way to limit spending on the drug until its benefit is proved, Medicare will be able to dial back that premium increase. The decision also likely spells the end of Aduhelm, which doctors were already shunning. In 2021, it brought in only $3 million in sales.

Biogen, patient advocacy groups and even some members of Congress have suggested that CMS’ refusal to cover Aduhelm could have a chilling effect on innovation in Alzheimer’s. They have argued that drug companies will have no incentive to develop new medicines if insurers won’t cover them.

But in a clear and sober explanation of its thinking on Aduhelm, CMS pointed out that the opposite is true: “The CMS final decision provides clarity on the criteria to receive coverage for any drug in this class (and thus what evidence is necessary to meet the standard for ‘reasonable and necessary’ for this particular treatment).”

A drug can be considered innovative only if it actually improves patients’ lives. In a disease as devastating as Alzheimer’s, even marginal improvements matter. But evidence from several large clinical studies indicates that Aduhelm fails to offer that.

Medicare has laid a path for other companies to understand where the bar for coverage is set: A drug must be safe and offer a meaningful benefit to patients, and it must do so over time. This is good news for Eli Lilly & Co. and Roche, both of which have Alzheimer’s therapies that will soon be up for approval.

CMS, which is expected to foot the bill for Medicare patients’ drugs, perhaps had greater incentive than the FDA to make sure the drug works. But the FDA is the agency that should have set the bar. FDA’s mandate is to follow the science. As it weighs other loaded decisions, particularly for neurodegenerative diseases, it should make sure that Medicare never again has to correct its mistakes.
 
Now I'm not surprised again. Looks like the Russians sell their fish to China for processing, and then the rest of the world buys it because it's Chinese!!! Bottom line, no more McD Fish Fillets and no more buying frozen seafood, only fresh, never frozen with country of origin clearly other than China...

U.S. seafood imports fuel Russian war machine​

pressherald.com/2022/04/15/u-s-seafood-imports-fuel-russian-war-machine/

By JOSHUA GOODMAN and HELEN WIEFFERING April 15, 2022
MIAMI — A U.S. ban on seafood imports from Russia over its invasion of Ukraine was supposed to sap billions of dollars from Vladimir Putin’s war machine.

But shortcomings in import regulations mean that Russian-caught pollock, salmon and crab are likely to enter the U.S. anyway, by way of the country vital to seafood supply chains across the world: China.

Like the U.S. seafood industry, Russian companies rely heavily on China to process their catch. Once there, the seafood can be re-exported to the U.S. as a “product of China” because country of origin labelling isn’t required.

The result is that nearly a third of the wild-caught fish imported from China is estimated to have been caught in Russian waters, according to an International Trade Commission study of 2019 data. For pollock and sockeye salmon, the rate is even higher – 50 percent to 75 percent.

“China doesn’t catch cod. They don’t catch pollock. But yet, they’re one of the largest exporters of these whitefish in the world,” said Sally Yozell, a former policy director at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who now is a senior fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington. “Having it labeled as a Chinese product is really not fair to the consumers and to restaurants.”

Fishing is big business in Russia, one closely linked to the Kremlin and Putin’s projection of power at sea. The country is the one of the world’s top seafood producers and was the eighth-largest exporter to the U.S. last year, with more than $1.2 billion worth of sales, the bulk of it king crab.

But it’s unknown exactly how much manages to land in the U.S. by way of China, which sent another $1.7 billion in fish to the U.S. last year. Nor does the Biden administration’s ban require companies importing from China to find out.

Among Russia’s biggest seafood exports is Alaska pollock. A cousin of cod, Alaska pollock is the most harvested fish in the U.S., showing up in everything from imitation crabmeat to McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish. Every year, giant, floating factories in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska catch 1.5 million metric tons of the fish, the equivalent of more than four times the weight of the Empire State Building.

But the same species is also harvested in Russia in similar amounts, and once processed and imported from China, fills an important gap in the U.S. market. In lieu of tracing the country of origin, U.S. producers rely on the name recognition of Alaska pollock to signal where the fish was caught.

“Consumers can have confidence that if the name Alaska is on the box it unequivocally comes from Alaskan waters,” insisted Craig Morris, chief executive of Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers.

Even before the invasion of Ukraine, pressure had been building to prevent what Sen. Dan Sullivan, a Republican of Alaska, called “authoritarian” pollock from entering the U.S. Putin banned U.S. seafood in 2014 following American sanctions to punish him for the invasion of Crimea that year. Since then Russian exports entering the U.S. duty free have nearly quadrupled in value.

U.S. trade data analyzed by The Associated Press show that the biggest importer of Russian-caught pollock from China last year was High Liner Foods. The company did not respond to the AP’s request for comment.

While overshadowed by Russia’s role as an energy powerhouse, Russia’s seafood industry has increasingly been flexing its own muscle with strong support from the Kremlin.

Two of the country’s largest seafood exporters – Vladivostok-based Russian Fishery Co. and Russian Crab – are owned by Gleb Frank, the son of Putin’s former transportation minister and head of state-owned shipbuilder Sovcomflot. Frank, dubbed Russia’s “Crab King,” is also the son-in law of one of Russia’s richest men, Gennady Timchenko, who was among the first oligarchs sanctioned following the 2014 invasion of Crimea.

With generous state loans, Frank’s companies have been at the forefront of an effort to renew Russia’s aging fleet. Last year, during a Navy Day ceremony at a St. Petersburg shipyard with Putin and 50 warships looking on, he launched an advanced supertrawler capable of hauling 60,000 tons of pollock per year.

After Frank himself was hit with U.S. sanctions last month, he sold part of his ownership stakes in both seafood companies and resigned as chairman. Russian Fishery Co. did not respond to a detailed list of questions about the U.S. embargo, but Russian Crab said Frank has never played a role in management of the company.

It’s not just the industry’s ties to the Kremlin that are driving concern.

For years, activists have complained about Russia’s poor record caring for the oceans. The country was ranked No. 2 out of 152 nations in a recent study of global efforts to combat illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing. Only China scored worse.

Allegations of illegal fishing have even followed Russia to the South Pole, where a Russian ship in 2020 was accused of faking its location data to fish illegally off season. A Russian observer was also found to be behind anomalous catch data from several Antarctic fishing vessels. In both cases, Russia denied any wrongdoing.

At a congressional hearing this month on the Russian seafood ban, Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat, led calls for the expansion of NOAA’s Seafood Import Monitoring Program, which aims to prevent illegal seafood from entering U.S. supply chains by tracking shipments from the point of catch. Currently the program covers just 13 species, only two of which – red king crab and Atlantic cod – are fished by Russia.

“Until that happens, Russian seafood will continue to line grocery store shelves and American consumers will continue to unwittingly support Putin’s war machine,” Huffman said.

Peter Quinter, a former U.S. Customs Service attorney, said that the Biden administration can easily close the China loophole by requiring importers to inspect their supply chains to make sure none of their fish comes from Russia.

“They can and should fix this,” said Quinter, who now advises seafood companies on compliance with American trade law. “The old days of being sure your fish is caught in a single place or country is no longer the case.”

Roccus7 said:
I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by this. It's not like I never heard of the Russian Trawlers off LI before the EEZ was introduced...

Seafood industry braces for losses of jobs, fish due to sanctions on Russia​

pressherald.com/2022/03/31/seafood-industry-braces-for-losses-of-jobs-fish-due-to-sanctions-on-russia/

By PATRICK WHITTLE March 31, 2022
Russia-Ukraine-War-Seafood_31368-1648745881.jpg

A cod to be auctioned sits on ice at the Portland Fish Exchange in Portland in 2015. Russia is not one of the biggest exporters of seafood to the U.S., but it’s a world leader in exports of cod. Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press

The worldwide seafood industry is steeling itself for price hikes, supply disruptions and potential job losses as new rounds of economic sanctions on Russia make key species such as cod and crab harder to come by.

The latest round of U.S. attempts to punish Russia for the invasion of Ukraine includes bans on imports of seafood, alcohol and diamonds. The U.S. is also stripping “most favored nation status” from Russia. Nations around the world are taking similar steps.

Russia is one of the largest producers of seafood in the world, and was the fifth-largest producer of wild-caught fish, according to a 2020 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Russia is not one of the biggest exporters of seafood to the U.S., but it’s a world leader in exports of cod (the preference for fish and chips in the U.S.). It’s also a major supplier of crabs and Alaska pollock, widely used in fast-food sandwiches and processed products like fish sticks.

The impact is likely to be felt globally, as well as in places with working waterfronts. One of those is Maine, where more than $50 million in seafood products from Russia passed through Portland in 2021, according to federal statistics.

“If you’re getting cod from Russia, it’s going to be a problem,” said Glen Libby, an owner of Port Clyde Fresh Catch, a seafood market in Tenants Harbor. “That’s quite a mess. We’ll see how it turns out.”

Russia exported more than 28 million pounds of cod to the U.S. from Jan. 1, 2020, to Jan. 31, 2022, according to census data.

The European Union and United Kingdom are both deeply dependent on Russian seafood. And prices of seafood are already spiking in Japan, a major seafood consumer that is limiting its trade with Russia.

In the U.K., where fish and chips are a cultural marker, shop owners and consumers alike are bracing for price surges. British fish and chip shops were already facing a squeeze because of soaring energy costs and rising food prices.

Andrew Crook, head of the National Federation of Fish Friers, said earlier this month that – even before the war – he expected a third of Britain’s fish and chip shops to go out of business. If fish prices shoot up even higher, “we are in real dire straits,” he said.

In mid-March, the U.K. slapped a 35 percent tariff hike on Russian whitefish, including chip-shop staples cod and haddock.

“We’re a massive part of U.K. culture and it would be a shame to see that go,” he told broadcaster ITV.
U.S. consumers are most likely to notice the impact of sanctions via price and availability of fish, said Kanae Tokunaga, who runs the Coastal and Marine Economics Lab at Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland.

“Because seafood is a global commodity, even if they are not harvested in Russia, you will notice the price hike,” Tokunaga said.

In the U.S., the dependence on foreign cod stems from the loss of its own once-robust Atlantic cod fishery that cratered in the face of overfishing and environmental changes. U.S. fishermen, based mostly in New England, brought more than 100 million pounds of cod to the docks per year in the early 1980s, but the 2020 catch was less than 2 million pounds.

Regulators have tried to save the fishery with management measures such as very low fishing quotas, and many fishermen targeting other East Coast groundfish species such as haddock and flounder now avoid cod altogether.

Seafood processors in Massachusetts are concerned about job losses due to loss of Russian products, Democratic U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, who does support sanctions on Russia, said.

“I have heard from seafood processors in my home state with concerns about potential sudden effects of a new, immediate ban on imports on their workforce, including hundreds of union workers in the seafood processing industry,” he said on the Senate floor in February.

For U.S. producers of seafood staples such as fish and chips, the lack of Russian cod could mean pivoting to other foreign sources, said Walt Golet, a research assistant professor at the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences.

“We might be able to bring in more from Norway, a little more from Canadian fisheries,” Golet said. “It really is driven by the price of those imports.”

As an alternative, producers and consumers could try underutilized fish species caught domestically, such as Atlantic pollock and redfish, said Ben Martens, executive director of Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association.

“Maybe this is a time to use haddock or hake or maybe monkfish, something different,” Martens said. “If it’s going to disrupt supply chains, it does present an opportunity for other species to fill that void.”

Associated Press writer Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.
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