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Bouncers are being employed by schools to hand out work and watch pupils while teachers are away, delegates at the National Union of Teachers (NUT) conference were told. Schools are advertising for “cover supervisors” with military or police experience but no teacher training, paid half the salary of supply teachers. A drop of blood or a speck of tissue could soon be all that is needed to diagnose cancers and assess their response to treatment. New technology, developed at Stanford University in California, that allows cancer proteins to be analysed in tiny samples, could end the need for surgical biopsies.

Tuesday

The NUT demanded a 10 per cent pay rise saying that it refused to take “lessons in morality from the Government”. Its annual conference voted to press for a rise of £3,000 or 10 per cent, whichever is greater. Other unions have accepted pay rises of 2.3 per cent this year and next.

To find extreme sentiments in Lafayette Park, it wasn’t necessary to look for the people with the most eccentric tea-bag-themed costumes. You could just pick a protester at random. “I think Obama’s plan is to create a catastrophic failure in our economic system, because then people will get desperate, and then you have the ability for a totalitarian government to move in,” said J’Neane Theus, 54, who retired from the Navy and now manages investments. She drove about an hour from Clarksville, Md., battling Washington’s horrific rush hour traffic to be an official marshal of the tea party (she had a white hat with “marshal” hand-scrawled in red ink to prove it). Her son, a 19-year-old Marine named Galen, stood next to her in a red, white and blue tie-dyed shirt, holding a sign accusing Barney Frank and other Democrats of treason. “I think that sounds very wacko; Americans don’t want to believe that. But we’ve seen this movie before,” the elder Theus said. I asked her where. “How about, well, fascist Italy, under Mussolini—and look at what happened to him, I would remind Obama of that,” she said. “Hitler. Stalin. Socialism has been proven not to work.”

Another seemingly sedate protester, Brian Smith, a marketer from Greenville, S.C., who was in Washington on business and came by the rally, wandered equally off message. “I love my country and I don’t like what’s going on,” Smith said. “Government—to be honest with you, and this will probably be misquoted, but on 9/11, I think they hit the wrong building. They should have gone into the Capitol building, hit out, knocked out both sides of the aisle, we’d start from scratch, we’d be better off today.” I pointed out that “they” did try to hit the Capitol. “Yeah, I know, they missed,” he said. “The wrong sequence. If someone had to go, it should have been the Capitol building. On that day I felt differently, but today that’s the way I feel.”

To be fair, conservatives have been doing this to liberals for years now.  Get a few pictures of the zaniest people at an anti-war rally then smear everyone there with that extremism.  I’ve been guilty of that, and I’m going to go ahead and admit that I was wrong.

It’s been a tough two weeks for the California pistachio industry. A voluntary recall of pistachio products from one plant in Tulare County – Setton Pistachio of Terra Bella – due to suspected salmonella contamination led to an FDA advisement to consumers not to eat any pistachios at all.

Erring on the side of caution, the FDA warning shut down sales of the California-grown nut in supermarkets and health food stores across the US – no doubt not wanting to be charged later with lax enforcement of food safety.

Having been faced with eight recalls of nut products in recent years, including the deadly salmonella variety found recently in plants owned by Peanut Corporation of America, the FDA’s quick action may be understandable.

But for the pistachio industry as a whole – represented by the Western Pistachio Association – “The lessons learned are still evolving,” says the association that represents 400 growers’ Executive Director Richard Matoian of Fresno.

“FDA sent an industry guidance that directed growers and processors to keep raw and roasted products separate at all times.” FDA repeated the advice in conference calls in recent days, he says.

FDA said it found salmonella “in critical areas” of the Terra Bella plant with news reports suggesting that “Setton employees often used the same transport bins, conveyors and packing machines for both raw and roasted pistachios, potentially contaminating the roasted nuts,” said an April 7 New York Times article.

“That’s what we understand to have been the problem but we don’t know for sure. We asked the FDA and they still haven’t told us,” says Matoian.

Major Changes?

Setton said in a news release few days ago that it is “making major changes in its processing facility” to ensure the highest standards based on FDA and California Department of Health recommendations. A Setton spokesperson would not comment further.

But the advice – don’t mix up these nuts – would match what the FDA advisory said to keep both product and processing machinery separate along with carrying out constant sampling and testing.

Matoian says the co-use of equipment to handle raw and roasted nuts varies by plant although this practice will be coming to a screaming halt now.

“This is the first time we have experienced any salmonella problem in pistachios,” says Matoian, adding that the industry practices the placement of raw nuts in a chlorine bath along with soaking them in hot water that ranges from 160 to 200 F.

In addition, raw pistachios never hit the ground when harvested, said Matoian. They are gathered from the tree shaking by a mechanical catcher and trucked to the plant. “Any nut that hits the ground is left there.”

Matoian says unlike the virulent strain of salmonella found in peanuts recently, this is a common variety of salmonella – the kind you can find in your refrigerator.”

Some Relief for Industry

In a sign of progress, by April 7 FDA allowed consumers to link to a new industry website that listed all the pistachio brands that were not being recalled – the first time the FDA has allowed this. The web site is under Cal-Pure Co-op. This lifts the blanket warning not to eat any pistachios, although this has got little press.

Setton is the number two processor in the U.S. behind Paramount (which also packs for Sunkist), but Matoian says there are some two dozen processors nationwide. “We’ve all felt this.”

The industry is a big one in the state with a farm-gate value of $540 million annually. Acreage has been growing fast in California with an estimated 40 percent of the trees young enough to have not begun production yet.

The western U.S. pistachio industry was buffeted this past year from falling prices seen with other nuts, including walnuts and almonds last September. That’s because Iran is a far bigger producer than the U.S. and a major freeze cut that nation’s production by 30 percent.

For the Setton company, the recall now of its entire 2008 crop is devastating and for its employees the shutdown means no paycheck. The company is said to have some sort of product liability insurance but the details are not known. “That’s what everybody is talking about,” says Matoian. Growers who sold that crop to the company have a major stake in that question.

Enforcement of the new regulations for the industry will be carried out by a different industry supported group that oversees the marketing order – the Administrative Committee for Pistachios.