Most Recent Posts

The Greek lawmaker who leads the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party is behind bars, awaiting trial for running a criminal organization. Nikolaos Michaloliakos' views are racist and anti-Semitic, and he's been blamed for inciting violence, especially against immigrants.

He says he's not a criminal and is being persecuted for his beliefs.

But will shutting down the party shut down its support?

When Michaloliakos arrived in court late Wednesday night, escorted by police in balaclavas, hundreds of his supporters were waiting for him, chanting: "Blood! Honor! Golden Dawn!"

Enlarge image i

An international team overseeing the dismantling of Syria's chemical weapons program reports that it's making "encouraging initial progress," according to the United Nations.

"Documents handed over [Wednesday] by the Syrian Government look promising, according to team members," the United Nations said in a statement on Thursday.

The joint team of experts from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the United Nations says "further analysis, particularly of technical diagrams, will be necessary and some more questions remain to be answered."

The Associated Press reports:

"The inspectors said in a statement Thursday that the team 'hopes to begin onsite inspections and the initial disabling of equipment within the next week,' but doing so depends on the work of technical groups established with Syrian experts."

High-flying billionaire Elon Musk's Tesla Motors has seen its shares skid the past couple days because they've been downgraded by analysts and because of a YouTube clip showing one of the all-electric luxury cars engulfed in flames earlier this week.

Just before noon ET, a share of Tesla was trading around $169.50 — down about 6.5 percent for the day and $25 (13 percent) below its 52-week high of $194.50.

The downgrade by analysts from Baird Research, who shifted Tesla shares from a rating of likely to "outperform" to one of "neutral," was basically because Baird believes there's already been "significant price appreciation" in the stock.

The news about Baird's new rating came out Tuesday.

On Wednesday, Jalopnik.com gave wide exposure to the YouTube clip, which shows a Tesla Model S that burned the day before near Seattle. Seeing that video of a vehicle from the company that boasts about making "the safest car in America," seemed to worry investors, AutoWeek writes.

Tesla spokeswoman Liz Jarvis-Shean "said the fire Tuesday was caused by a large metallic object that directly hit one of the battery pack's modules in the pricey Model S," The Seattle Times says. "The fire was contained to a small section at the front of the vehicle, she said, and no one was injured."

Jalopnik adds that firefighters "released more details [Wednesday night] on the fire, saying a battery pack at the front of the car was burning and adding water made the flames worse."

(Note: There are some expletives in the video, so we're pointing to it rather than embedding it. We are a "family" blog, after all.)

With the current bloom of artisanal small-batch producers across the country, you'd think that all you need to start up a new food business is a good idea and a lot of gumption. And for the most part, that's true. But when it comes to artisanal producers working with meat, you also need something else: a Hazards Analysis and Critical Control Points plan. Or, if you will, a HACCP.

A HACCP (pronounced, by those in the industry, as HASSup) aims to accomplish the admirable goal of keeping our food supply safe by planning out critical control points and monitoring and hazard analysis and all that fun stuff, making sure that you don't get a dose of Listeria along with your saucisson sec.

For dry-cured meats, which never get a turn in the bacteria-killing heat of the oven, and rely instead on critical control of pH and moisture levels, this is especially important. It may seem surprising that there isn't one universally required procedure. But that's both the bane and beauty of the HACCP.

"The USDA Food Safety Inspection Service wants you to demonstrate that the food you make is safe," explains Arion Thiboumery, founder of the Niche Meat Processor Assistance Network. "They put out performance standards, but they don't tell you how. People have tried a lot of different ways." This focus on results, rather than process, means that as long as you meet the safety requirements at the critical control points, you have some leeway in how you get there.

"The brilliance behind a HACCP plan is that it's so flexible," extols Elias Cairo, the co-founder of Portland's Olympic Provisions, the first USDA-certified charcuterie in Oregon. "The lack of guidelines lets you produce anything you want, in exactly the way that you want, as long as you can prove that it's safe."

Cairo is clearly a big fan of the HACCP (and the USDA in general), whose adaptability has allowed him to produce cured meats that are winning fans across the country. But this flexibility comes at a cost.

Because of the sausage world's variation in process and recipe, each HACCP is uniquely tailored to each small-batch producer's process. Sausage-makers have to spend months and months familiarizing themselves with the scientific literature, taking classes and exams and providing the USDA documentation for the path they're taking — or pay significant money to consultants to come up with a plan for them, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

And once they've paid (in money or sweat) for these plans, they don't necessarily want to share their trade secrets. But one sausage maker — Underground Meats, of Madison, Wis. — is looking to establish a new model, by developing (via Kickstarter) an open source HACCP plan template for all to use.

"I think this is a large barrier to people entering the market, and if we remove it, we'll see really good products coming out," hopes Underground Meat's Jonny Hunter.

If the project's funding goal is reached, he aims to work with a third party company (possibly the University of Wisconsin) to lay out the process, and then publish the results under a Creative Commons license. "The craft is something that takes time, but the knowledge of the safety side is something that should just be open and free."

Hunter's mission seems to have struck a nerve in the artisanal meat community — as of this writing, the campaign is nearly three-fourths of the way to its $40,000 goal.

Arion Thiboumery, of the Niche Meat Processor Assistance Network, notes that with the age of the average butcher, like the age of the average farmer, continuing to go up every year, removing barriers to entry for new, young producers could revitalize the industry.

"I think it would be consistent with the mission of a land grant institution — let's use public money to solve a problem that we all agree should be solved."

But some, like Olympic Provisions' Elias Cairo, are a bit skeptical as to how it'll play out. The HACCP must be so specific that it'd be hard to universalize a sort of "bible" — beyond providing already-available general information on critical control points.

But Underground Meat's Jonny Hunter thinks that while it won't be a one-size-fits-all fix, the control points, steps, and scientific justifications will be a valuable jumping-off point. "People would have to tailor it individually — nobody would be able to just download it from the Internet, it needs to be specific. But if I would have had this five years ago, it would have saved me so much time."