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That’s the word from authors of two new studies, presented Sunday at a meeting of the American Diabetes Association in San Diego.

“Data from this and other prospective studies suggest that the promotion of diet sodas as healthy alternatives may be ill-advised” Dr. Helen Hazuda, professor of medicine at University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, said in a written statement. “They may be free of calories, but not of consequences.”

Consequences like weight gain.

For one study, researchers at the center followed 474 diet soda drinkers, 65 to 74 years of age, for almost 10 years. They found that diet soda drinkers’ waists grew 70 percent more than non-drinkers. Specifically, drinking two or more diet sodas a day busted belt sizes five times more than people who avoided the stuff entirely.

It was honestly music to my ears. After a year of researching the Patriot Act’s breadth and ability to access data held within protected EU boundaries, Microsoft finally and openly admitted it.

The question put forward:

“Can Microsoft guarantee that EU-stored data, held in EU based datacenters, will not leave the European Economic Area under any circumstances — even under a request by the Patriot Act?”

Frazer explained that, as Microsoft is a U.S.-headquartered company, it has to comply with local laws (the United States, as well as any other location where one of its subsidiary companies is based).

Though he said that “customers would be informed wherever possible”, he could not provide a guarantee that they would be informed — if a gagging order, injunction or U.S. National Security Letter permits it.

He said: “Microsoft cannot provide those guarantees. Neither can any other company“.

While it has been suspected for some time, this is the first time Microsoft, or any other company, has given this answer.

The pipeline burst about 10 miles east of Billings, coating parts of the Yellowstone River that run past Laurel — a town of about 6,500 people downstream from the rupture — with shiny patches of oil. Precisely how much oil leaked into the river was still unclear. But throughout the day Saturday, cleanup crews in Laurel worked to lessen the impact of the spill, laying down absorbent sheets along the banks of the river to mop up some of the escaped oil, and measuring fumes to determine the health threat.

Fearing a possible explosion, officials in Laurel evacuated about 140 people just after midnight Saturday, then allowed them to return at 4 a.m. after tests showed fumes from the leaked oil had died down, the Associated Press reported. While the cause of the rupture was not immediately known, Brent Peters, the fire chief for Laurel, told the AP that it may have been caused by high waters eroding parts of the river bed and exposing the pipeline to debris.

The pipeline is 12 inches wide and runs from Silver Tip, Mont., to Billings, an area where three different refineries are located, ExxonMobil said. All three were shut down after the spill. ExxonMobil said it had summoned its North American Regional Response Team to help clean up the spill, and a fire spokesman in Laurel said over 100 people were expected to arrive at the scene by Sunday morning, including officials with the Environmental Protection Agency.

Throughout the months of lies and misinformation, one story has stuck: “The earthquake knocked out the plant’s electric power, halting cooling to its reactors,” as the government spokesman Yukio Edano said at a March 15 press conference in Tokyo. The story, which has been repeated again and again, boils down to this: “after the earthquake, the tsunami – a unique, unforeseeable [the Japanese word is soteigai] event – then washed out the plant’s back-up generators, shutting down all cooling and starting the chain of events that would cause the world’s first triple meltdown to occur.”

A media relations manager until she joined the millions of unemployed Americans two years ago, Romanaux spent the spring building contact lists and fetching lunches as she tried to keep alive her chances of resuming full employment.

“You have to suck it up sometimes and do what a 17-year-old would happily do and be happy about it,” she said of her recent stint with a public relations firm in New Jersey.

In his first media interview since resigning his post in protest in April, Toshiso Kosako, one of the country’s leading experts on radiation safety, said Mr. Kan’s government has been slow to test for dangers in the sea and to fish, and has understated certain radiation threats to minimize clean-up costs. In his post, Mr. Kosako’s role was to advise the prime minister on radiation safety.

And while there have been scattered reports of food contamination—of tea leaves and spinach, for example—Mr. Kosako predicted there will be broader discoveries later this year, especially as rice, Japan’s staple, is harvested.

“Come the harvest season in the fall, there will be a chaos,” Mr. Kosako said. “Among the rice harvested, there will certainly be some radiation contamination—though I don’t know at what levels—setting off a scandal. If people stop buying rice from Tohoku … we’ll have a tricky problem.”

Mr. Kosako also said that the way the government has handled the Fukushima Daiichi situation since the March 11 tsunami crippled the reactors has exposed basic flaws in Japanese policy making.

“The government’s decision-making mechanism is opaque,” he said. “It’s never clear what reasons are driving what decisions. This doesn’t look like a democratic society. Japan is increasingly looking like a developing nation in East Asia.”

Specifically, Mr. Kosako said the government set a relatively high ceiling for acceptable radiation in school yards, so that only 17 schools exceeded that limit. If the government had set the lower ceiling he had advocated, thousands of schools would have required a full cleanup. With Mr. Kan’s ruling party struggling to gain parliamentary approval for a special budget, the costlier option didn’t get traction, he said.

Stone said in a statement late Thursday that Riverside, Imperial, San Diego, Orange, San Bernardino, Kings, Kern, Fresno, Tulare, Inyo, Madera, Mariposa and Mono counties should form the new state of South California.

The creation of the new state would allow officials to focus on securing borders, balancing budgets, improving schools and creating a vibrant economy, he said.

They are encouraging men and women to volunteer for sterilisation, and in return are offering a car and other prizes for those who come forward.

Outside I noticed a silver van with nobody in it illegally parked across the street from my building. Sunny had been surveilled by a silver van in the days before his murder, so to be cautious I photographed the plates.

The NY plates are number DMC 9287. Then I noticed that there was Police parking plate in the window, showing that the cop was from the 81rst precinct, which is in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

As I was taking the pictures a guy in a Yankees cap approached me and asked “you got a problem?”. I said,”The van is parked illegally” ,and he replied “well, talk to the cop over there” I looked in the direction he was pointing and asked “who’s the cop?”. To my surprise he said “your fucking mother!” I said “what?” and he repeated “your fucking mother”.

I realized this was the cop from the van. I asked “who are you?” and raised my phone to take a picture. The guy lunged at me and grabbed me by the neck, throwing me against the building. “You take a fucking picture of me and I’ll fucking crush your face” he said. A woman and some kids were walking by and I yelled “call the police” The guy yelled mockingly “yeah call the police”, to let me know that they would not interfere with their own.