Are we all becoming like Americans?
The American dream spells DOOM for planet earth. AND WE STILL CRAVE IT. If everyone in the world lived as Americans do, we would need 5 Earths to support humanity.
Read More Year: 2020
Could the foreign worker have been spared from being buried alive?
It was reported on 21 July that a foreign worker was buried alive at a construction site in Kota Damansara and passed away as he was being rushed to the hospital. Preliminary investigation showed that the walls caved in as he was assembling an underground waste disposal pipe. The Consumers’ Association of Penang (CAP) is outraged by this news as this is certainly not the first time an accident...
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Is there talcum powder in your supplements?
According to an industry source, to avoid alarming consumers about the use of toxic tableting or encapsulating agents, most manufacturers simply avoid the problem by not listing them on their label. “Flowing agents such as talcum powder, a suspected carcinogen (cancer-causing agent), are used routinely by most … manufacturers as well as polyvinylpyrrolidone, magnesium stearate (a proven...
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Government should increase penalty on dirty food factories and eateries
The Consumers’ Association of Penang (CAP) urges the authorities to check on all food factories to ensure that they comply to a high standard of hygienic food manufacturing practices. We have been making this call to monitor food manufacturers for decades, but it appeared that raids had only been carried out irregularly thus emboldening some factories to violate the law. In recent media...
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MARKETING TO CHILDREN – SELLING THEM OUT
"Just like paedophiles, marketers have become child experts” — Michael Brody, who chaired the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s television and media committee. Strong words, perhaps. But it is time to return parents, teachers… to their rightful roles as the real experts on children
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Moral Neutralisation
One cultural element after another has been absorbed into the ever-widening economy, subjected to the test of economic rationality, rationalised and turned into a commodity or factor of production. So pervasive has the process been that it now seems that anything can be thought of as a commodity and its value measured by a price... time, land, capital, labour; also personality itself and even...
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On sustainable transport 20 years ago
We said this about TRANSPORT 20 years ago (2001 Seminar on Sustainable Transport in Malaysia). The problems PERSIST and have WORSENED. For us to enjoy our constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of movement, we need a sustainable, efficient and affordable transport system. It must enable all of us — regardless of wealth, status, gender and disabilities — to meet our need to travel to...
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What is a Food Additive?
ACCORDING to the Codex Alimentarius (an international food code of the WHO and FAO), a food additive is: “Any substance NOT normally consumed as a food by itself and NOT normally used as a typical ingredient of food, whether or not it has nutritive value, the intentional addition of which to food for a technological (including organoleptic) purpose in the manufacture, processing, preparation,...
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