Food & Energy
School lunches may begin to look different next year.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Wednesday announced updated nutrition standards for school meals that will be gradually updated to include “less sugar and greater flexibility with menu planning” between Fall 2025 and Fall 2027.
“The new standards build on the great progress that school meals have made already and address remaining challenges – including reducing sugar in school breakfasts,” said USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service Administrator Cindy Long in the news release.
“These updates also make it easier for schools to access locally sourced products, benefiting both schools and the local economy,” Long concluded.
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Read MoreDecision puts human health, nature, and farmers’ rights at risk
In its final plenary session, the EU Parliament endorsed the EU Commission’s proposal to widely deregulate the new generation of GMOs – products of so-called “new genomic techniques”, or NGT.
Friends of the Earth Europe commented: “This decision positions the EU for even greater deregulation than in the United States of America. The approved legislative proposal grants corporations the right to market new GMOs without any type of safety, monitoring and liability obligations, putting human health, nature, and farmers’ rights at risk.”
Mute Schimpf, food and farming campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe said: “Today’s decision is a blow to food and environmental safety. It endorses a path that leaves nature, the food sector, and farmers vulnerable while bolstering profits and unchecked power for big corporations.”
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Read MorePrices for all of us have gone way up since COVID-19, and $100 now buys about $65 worth of groceries compared to five years ago. This puts a huge bite on working families because we spend most of our income every month — as much as 90% — on food and other necessities. So when prices rise, we hurt the most.
Big corporations tell us that policies and supply chains are to blame for rising costs, but there’s a big part of the story they don’t want you to know: These giant corporations are themselves largely responsible for higher prices.
According to a new report by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the largest grocery retailers — including Walmart, Kroger and Amazon, which owns Whole Foods — used the pandemic as an excuse to raise prices across the board.
These giant companies wrote themselves a blank check during COVID-19, which they now expect us to pay for.
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Read MoreFederal airport screeners predict millions more Canadians will fly over the next year but are making no promises on reducing wait times. The forecast follows a 33 percent increase in mandatory fees paid by travelers to cover security costs.
“Even before the pandemic presented unique and unprecedented wait time challenges Canadian civil aviation industry stakeholders expressed a clear and resounding desire for the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority to strive for a more ambitious wait time service level,” managers wrote in a report tabled in Parliament.
The Authority claimed on average 89 percent of passengers wait less than 15 minutes in security lineups. “Longer wait times will occur during peak periods,” wrote the Authority. It did not disclose worst-case wait times at individual airports.
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Read MoreA cabal of globalists has descended upon Ottawa to draft an international legally binding Plastics Treaty to force countries to track all plastics on the globe at all times throughout their lifecycle.
Set to be the biggest international agreement since the Paris Agreement of 2015, over 3,500 lobbyists, business tycoons, politicians, scientists, and environmental NGOs arrived at the Shaw Centre in Ottawa this morning for the biggest discussion on the Plastics Treaty since it was
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Read MoreAfter the federal Liberals said that Saskatchewanians would not be entitled to the carbon tax rebate, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has reversed course, saying that they will indeed get the full pop — just as much as other provinces — despite paying less in carbon taxes.
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Read MoreThe recent closures of Gateway Medical Clinic on Calgary Trail and 38th Avenue in south Edmonton, affecting over 7000 patients, are two such locations, as doctors claim they “can’t afford the rent on the building.”
“There’s not enough family doctors in order to meet the demand of Albertans, and then on top of that, costs have been rising much faster than reimbursement has,” said Wayne Samuels, the general manager of Medicentres Canada.
Family clinics function like small businesses, where the pr
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Read MoreCanadian families and individuals with incomes between $30,000 and $60,000 are often shouldering the heaviest tax burden, finds a new study by the Fraser Institute.
These low- to middle-income earners face marginal effective tax rates (METRs) that approach or exceed 50%, reducing the incentive to earn additional income and complicating their financial stability.
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Read MoreFor the second year in a row, Canadians’ interest in electric vehicles has declined, with fewer than half of Canadians now saying they plan to make their next car purchase an electric vehicle.
According to a recent survey conducted by AutoTrader, respondents who did express interest in buying an EV for their next vehicle, primarily cited the high cost of fuel as their main motivator.
Other motivators include environmental friendline
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Read MoreCompanies like Amazon are tacking on new fees and surcharges on top of the regular subscription fees they already charge.
Why it matters: Subscription fatigue is real and growing, testing the limits of consumer appetites for convenience.
Driving the news: Amazon announced the launch of a $9.99 a month unlimited grocery delivery subscription benefit Tuesday that is available in more than 3,500 cities and towns across the U.S.
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