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Oregon Woman Freezes To Death After Being Evicted For $338 In Late Rent Payments

by Whitney Webb, True Activist

Karen Lee Batts, 52, met an unfortunate fate last Saturday when she succumbed to the freezing outdoor weather in Portland, Oregon.

Though Portland is often known for its quirkiness and microbreweries, the scourge of urban homelessness is quickly marring the reputation of Oregon’s largest city. Last Saturday, 52 year old Karen Lee Batts became the second person to die on Portland streets within the first week of 2017 due to hypothermia. Batts had been found in the Smart Park parking garage Saturday night when Portland Police arrived on the scene, responding to a report that a woman was taking off her clothes and struggling in the freezing weather. Though Batts’ actions may seem strange, it is actually common for sufferers of late stage hypothermia to frantically undress themselves as they begin to feel extremely hot due to nerve damage. Police responding to the scene arrived too late for Batts, who had already died from exposure to the cold.

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Ugly, Scarred Apples Taste Better Than Perfect Ones, So What’s With All The Food Waste?

by Brianna Acuesta, True Activist

They're healthier and taste better, what's not to love?

Pretty much everyone who buys fruit at a market, be it a farmer’s market or the local supermarket, is privy to searching for the perfect-looking produce and leaving behind the fruits and vegetables with marks or holes in them. But what if it turns out that the uglier the fruit, the better it tastes?

Eliza Greenman, an orchardist and consultant for growing fruits, runs an apple farm and describes herself as “obsessed” with growing fruit trees for the past decade. After she started studying the ways that fruits are produced to be perfect, she started to question the status quo and started a blog to publish her findings.

“I’m absolutely infatuated with the idea of stress in an orchard,” Greenman told NPR. “I believe stress can help create a super fruit.”

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Popular ‘God’ Facebook Page Banned For Post About US Spending Too Much On War

In an act of astonishing irony, Facebook has suspended the satirical account 'God' — because he dared criticize US military spending.

By: Claire Bernish / The Free Thought Project   Facebook’s notorious censorship — which has included takedowns of iconic images like the Vietnam War’s ‘Napalm Girl’ to the arrest of Rosa Parks to a photograph of a classical statue of Venus — reached a whole other level of absurd recently, when the platform suspended God’s account.

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One Of The World’s Largest Supervolcanoes Is Stirring; 500,000 Lives At Risk

by Brianna Acuesta, True Activist

When Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried the Italian city of Pompeii in ash, killing 2,000 people, it was regarded as one of the most catastrophic natural disasters and is still studied heavily today. By comparison, a nearby supervolcano called Campi Flegrei, which means “burning fields,” would put the lives of 500,000 Italians at risk and cause damage that would extend to the surrounding nations.

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Seven Arrested For Feeding Homeless In Public Park

by Whitney Webb, True Activist

Activists with the group Food Not Bombs were arrested in Tampa, Florida on Saturday for feeding the needy without the necessary permits.

Since 2008 economic crisis, homelessness in the United States has been on the rise, particularly in cities and urban areas. Though most local and city governments are well-aware of the issue, many have decided to criminalize the homeless instead of working to alleviate their hardships or resolve the underlying problems which contribute to the phenomenon. Not only that, but many have also sought to criminalize those activists and good samaritans who offer food and services to the homeless when over-burdened homeless shelters and food pantries cannot.

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First Of Its Kind Study Shows that Change In Diet Alone — Not Drugs — Is Curing Diseases

Big Pharma isn't going to like this. Diet alone was able to bring patients with active disease into clinical remission, avoiding the need for harmful meds.

By: Justin Gardner / The Free Thought Project   Let medicine be thy food and let food be thy medicine.” – Hippocrates

In the fourth century BCE, the most famous Greek physician made the bold claim that disease was caused naturally, not by the gods. Environment, diet and living habits all played a part in the health of a person.

The tools and techniques of modern science have allowed us to uncover many secrets of nutrition. But we’re still just scratching the surface of the complex ways in which food compounds interact with the body.

 As Mat Edelson wrote for Hopkins Medicine, the rise of corporatism had a big influence on medicine.

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New App Aims To Be The "Shazam" For Plants By Identifying Species With Just A Photo

by Brianna Acuesta, True Activist

This app is quickly becoming the go-to for identifying plants in the wild.

While it may not theoretically be a new app, PlantNet has just recently garnered attention as a result of successful updates that have exponentially increased its downloads. It was released last summer and has continuously improved its database to be more inclusive and accurate to help users.

PlantNet is an app that can identify the plant you’re looking at based on a photo you take of it, making it the “Shazam” for plants. While image-matching is extremely difficult, considerably more than audio-matching like Shazam does, it’s made easier when it’s at least just limited to one, albeit immense, category: plants.

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First Solar Road In The World Officially Opens In France [Watch]

by Amanda Froelich, True Activist

Roughly 30,000 square feet of solar panels have been installed on a road in a small Normandy town.

There’s a lot to appreciate about France, specifically its law prohibiting supermarkets from purposefully wasting food, the ban it passed on plastic cutlery, cups, and plates, and the 24-hour car-free day which is held annually in Paris. In the small village of Tourouvre-au-Perche, however, one will also find a route which is the first solar road in the world.

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Japan Recognizes First Thyroid Cancer Case As Fukushima-Related, Offers Compensation

by Whitney Webb, True Activist

The case of a former employee of TEPCO, whose cancer was “officially” linked to the 2011 nuclear disaster, has prompted the Japanese government to finally agree to offer post-disaster compensation to affected workers.

Even though Fukushima was the worst environmental disaster to have taken place in the last 30 years, you probably haven’t heard much about it. After the Tohoku earthquake in eastern Japan and subsequent tsunami, one of the cooling systems at Fukushima’s Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) nuclear power plant failed. The result was a devastating triple reactor meltdown that led to the evacuation of over half a million people and the creation of a 20-kilometer exclusion zone. Ever since the disaster, TEPCO as well as the Japanese government have consistently tried to downplay the disaster’s impacts nationally and globally. The collusion was so blatant that even TEPCO’s company president, Naomi Hirose, admitted that a “cover-up” had taken place.

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