Commentary: Recent Headlines Claiming Sucralose ‘Damages DNA’ Are Scary, But What Does the Study Really Say?

When I went back to the U.S. for the first time in several years last year, I made an incredible discovery. It’s called Sparkling Ice and is sold separately or in 12-packs of 17 ounces (curious size) and has a ton of flavors that mostly taste alike but taste very good. Sparkling ice contains the artificial sweetener sucralose and is also lightly carbonated (low carbon footprint!) so that I didn’t drink it like water; I essentially drank it instead of water.

But lo! Newsweek headline: “America’s Most Popular Artificial Sweetener Damages Our DNA, Scientists Say.” You know, like atomic bomb victims. The alleged result is a leaky gut, and you don’t have to know exactly what that means to know it’s probably not good. Except it may not even be real; but we’ll get to that.

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Wisconsin Congressman Glenn Grothman Leading Investigation Into Biden Administration Decision to Cease DNA Testing At Southern Border

U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI-06) and his subcommittee have opened an investigation into the Biden administration’s decision to end familial DNA testing at the U.S. Mexico border.

DNA testing is a key tool used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to prevent fraudulent entry of migrants posing as family members — critical in targeting child trafficking, according to security officials.

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Kohberger Murder Affidavit: Left-Behind Knife Sheath, DNA Led to Capture, Arrest

The man accused of stabbing four University of Idaho college students to death was identified through DNA evidence left on a knife sheath at the crime scene and cellular data showed his phone was in the area of the Moscow, Idaho, crime scene at least a dozen times before the murders, officials said in an affidavit released Thursday.

The Idaho State Lab discovered DNA on a knife sheath left on the bed next to victim Madison Mogen, Moscow Police Department Cpl. Brett Payne said in the affidavit. 

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Commentary: The Left Will Not Let Go of COVID

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden

COVID’s grip on America is relaxing, not so the Left’s. The Left seized COVID as an unprecedented statist opportunity to advance their agenda. Unsurprisingly, they now resist relinquishing it. Since the Left refuse to let go of America, America must let go of the Left.

Last week the CDC relaxed its guidelines for outdoor mask-wearing by those fully vaccinated against COVID. It was more a rearguard action than a vanguard one, but at least it was a start. Several states are well ahead in their return to normalcy.

America’s virus statistics demonstrate the remission of the virus and validate accelerating relaxation of the lockdowns. On a seven-day moving average, active cases, daily new cases, and daily deaths have been plummeting since the beginning of the year.
On the ledger’s other side, vaccinations began in the U.S. in December, averaging over two million a day since February; as a result, around 31 percent of the population is now fully vaccinated at this writing.

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Famed Chemist Tells the World: Scientists Are Totally ‘Clueless’ About the Origin of Life

Students across America are taught an origin of life story that goes a little something like this: billions of years ago, energy from the sun, lightning, and Earth’s heat combined with the planet’s early atmosphere of hydrogen, methane and other gases, creating chemical reactions that formed molecules in a primordial soup that eventually produced a cell, in other words, life.

But one prominent professor argues that that simplistic explanation is not only unproven, it’s highly improbable.

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CBP Program to Collect DNA from Illegal Immigrant Detainees in ‘Full Force’ by the End of the Year

A pilot program to collect DNA samples from individuals in Customs and Border Protection custody will be fully implemented on Dec. 31, officials announced Thursday.

The pilot program began in January of this year and was given three years to meet the legal requirements to implement national collection, according to CBP. The program was expanded in monthly phases and is on track to reach nationwide operation capacity by the end of this year.

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Golden State Killer Joseph James DeAngelo Apologizes at Sentencing for Victimizing 87 People

Just before receiving multiple consecutive life sentences, Joseph James DeAngelo, the former California police officer who lived a double life as the murderous sociopath dubbed the Golden State Killer, broke his silence to tell a hushed courtroom filled with victims and their family members that he was “truly sorry” for the crimes.

It was such an unexpected moment that it brought gasps from those in the gallery, many of whom sat through an extraordinary four-day sentencing hearing filled with graphic and heart-wrenching testimony from dozens of victims. It also reinforced that nobody ever seemed to know what DeAngelo would do and who he was, which helps explain how he eluded detection for four decades while committing at least 13 killings and dozens of rapes.

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California’s Alleged Golden State Killer Set to Plead Guilty

Forty years after a sadistic suburban rapist terrorized California in what investigators later realized were a series of linked assaults and slayings, a 74-year-old former police officer is expected to plead guilty Monday to being the elusive Golden State Killer.

The deal will spare Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. any chance of the death penalty for 13 murders and 13 kidnapping-related charges spanning six counties. In partial return, survivors of the assaults that spanned the 1970s and 1980s expect him to admit to up to 62 rapes that he could not be criminally charged with because too much time has passed.

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ICE Program Collects DNA Samples of Illegal Aliens

A division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has begun collecting DNA samples of illegal aliens in its custody and storing the information in a national database.

ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations launched a pilot program earlier in May in Dallas, Texas, that collects the DNA samples of individuals arrested and placed into its custody, the agency confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation on Friday. The launch of the pilot program followed backlash from critics who chastised the agency for not implementing it sooner.

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China Orders Probe After Scientist Claims First Gene-Edited Babies

  Chinese health and medical ethics authorities started an investigation on Monday into claims by a scientist who released videos on YouTube saying he had altered the genes of twins born earlier this month, creating the first gene edited babies. The Southern University of Science and Technology in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, where the scientist, He Jiankui, holds an associate professorship, said it had been unaware of the research project and that He had been on leave without pay since February. He Jiankui defended what he claimed to have achieved, saying he had performed the gene editing to help protect the babies from future infection with the AIDS virus. But his university said it was a “serious violation of academic ethics and standards” and scientists around the world condemned it as monstrous and dangerous. The university issued a statement after He said in five videos posted on Monday that he used a gene-editing technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 to edit the genes of twin girls. China’s National Health Commission said it was “highly concerned” and had ordered provincial health officials “to immediately investigate and clarify the matter”. “We have to be responsible for the people’s health and will act…

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New Research Pushes Back the Discovery of Cacao – the Basis of Chocolate – By More Than a Millennium

New research strengthens the case that people used the chocolate ingredient cacao in South America 5,400 years ago, underscoring the seed’s radical transformation into today’s Twix bars and M&M candies. Tests indicate traces of cacao on artifacts from an archaeological site in Ecuador, according to a study published Monday. That’s about 1,500 years older than cacao’s known domestication in Central America. “It’s the earliest site now with domesticated cacao,” said Cameron McNeil of Lehman College in New York, who was not involved in the research. The ancient South American civilization likely didn’t use cacao to make chocolate since there’s no established history of indigenous populations in the region using it that way, researchers led by the University of British Columbia in Canada said. But the tests indicate the civilization used the cacao seed, not just the fruity pulp. The seeds are the part of the cacao pod used to make chocolate. Indigenous populations in the upper Amazon region today use cacao for fermented drinks and juices, and it’s probably how it was used thousands of years ago as well, researchers said. Scientists mostly agree that cacao was first domesticated in South America instead of Central America as previously believed. The…

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