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China Cannot Buy Oklahoma Farmland, So Why Is Chinese-Controlled Smithfield Still Raising Hogs Here?

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A Miami News-Digest Business and Consumer Report Oklahoma says foreign adversaries, including China-linked entities, should not own Oklahoma farmland. Yet Chinese-controlled Smithfield Foods still operates hog-production farms in the state. That contradiction is the heart of the story. Smithfield’s presence in Oklahoma is not the result of a simple land purchase by a Chinese buyer. It is the result of decades of American food-industry consolidation, federal approval of a foreign takeover, corporate restructuring, and state-law exceptions that appear to protect one of the largest pork companies in the United States. The controversy is not only about who owns the land. It is about who controls the meat supply, the brands, the contracts, the processing chain, and the political exceptions that ordinary citizens rarely hear about. The Short Version Smithfield Foods was once an American pork company based in Virginia. Over time, it expanded through acquisitions, including a major...
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No Sugar Added? The Hidden Food Additive Sweeping the Nation

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Sucralose, “Zero Sugar” Marketing, and the Business Behind America’s New Sweetener Habit Walk down almost any grocery aisle today and the labels sound reassuring: “no sugar added,” “zero sugar,” “low carb,” “keto friendly,” “diabetic friendly,” “light,” “reduced calorie,” and “guilt free.” But a closer look at the ingredient list often reveals what the front label leaves out: sucralose. Sucralose is the artificial sweetener best known by the brand name Splenda. It is not sugar. It is a synthetic, high-intensity sweetener that the FDA says is about 600 times sweeter than table sugar. The FDA approved sucralose for 15 food categories in 1998, then approved it as a general-purpose sweetener in 1999. Today, the FDA identifies sucralose as a general-purpose sweetener found in baked goods, beverages, chewing gum, gelatins, and frozen dairy desserts. That means sucralose is not legally “experimental.” But consumers are right to ask whether the country is living through a kind of p...
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The Hidden Costs Behind 'Cheap' Power

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Batteries: Name Brand or Brand X? The Hidden Costs Behind Cheap Power By Miami News-Digest Consumer & U.S. Report A battery looks like one of the simplest purchases in the store. It is small, sealed, standardized, and usually sold by size: AA, AAA, C, D, 9-volt, CR2032, CR2025, or CR2016. That simplicity is exactly why consumers are easy to mislead. The package may promise “long lasting,” “heavy duty,” “super power,” “high capacity,” or “bulk value,” but the real question is not just whether the battery works on day one. The real questions are how long it works, whether it leaks, whether it damages the device, whether the packaging is legal, whether the battery is counterfeit, and whether it creates a fire, burn, or child-ingestion hazard. The answer is not the same for every battery category. For ordinary AA and AAA alkaline batteries, name brands and store brands can be closer than consumers expect. For coin lithium batteries, the difference can be life or death. For ...
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Where's the Beef? Oh...

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Why #Beef Costs So Much: The Real Players Behind America’s Outrageous Meat Prices Consumer & U.S. Report By Miami News-Digest The price of beef did not become outrageous by accident. It is not enough to blame “the economy,” “inflation,” “COVID,” “the weather,” or any other broad label that lets the real players disappear into the fog. Beef is expensive because actual people, companies, agencies, ranchers, feedlots, packers, retailers, and financial interests made decisions inside a highly concentrated food system. Those decisions collided with drought, high feed costs, limited slaughter competition, global ownership, and a shrinking U.S. cattle herd. The short version is this: America has fewer cattle, fewer independent processing options, more concentrated control over slaughter, stronger consumer demand than supply can comfortably serve, and a grocery-store system that passes the pain directly to the family dinner table. As of January 1, 2026, the United States had 86...
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Mshkatiwi Kiishthwa: The Shawnee Raspberry Moon of 2026

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Mshkatiwi Kiishthwa: The Shawnee Raspberry Moon of 2026 By Miami News-Digest Long before calendars were printed on paper, the Shawnee people measured the passage of time through the living world around them. The ripening of berries, the flowering of plants, the migration of animals, and the changing character of the seasons all served as markers in a sophisticated ecological calendar passed from generation to generation. Among these traditional lunar designations is Mshkatiwi Kiishthwa , the Raspberry Moon , a season associated with the ripening of wild raspberries and the arrival of early summer abundance. Rather than viewing time as a sequence of numbered months, the Shawnee recognized the year as a cycle of relationships between people, land, plants, animals, and the Creator. Each moon carried practical, cultural, and spiritual significance. The Raspberry Moon in 2026 Traditional Shawnee moon names follow th...
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Beyond The Lens

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Beyond the Lens: Reconciling Multiple Ways of Knowing Introduction One of the greatest obstacles to human understanding is the assumption that only one framework can be true at a time. Modern society often encourages individuals to choose between science and religion, reason and intuition, materialism and spirituality, objective observation and subjective experience. Yet this assumption may itself be the source of confusion. What if reality is not exhausted by any single description? What if apparently competing perspectives are not enemies, but complementary windows into a larger whole? This realization represents a profound shift in thinking. Rather than viewing knowledge as a battlefield where only one system survives, it invites us to view reality as a landscape too vast to be captured by a single map. The scientist, theologian, philosopher, artist, and mystic may each be observing genuine aspects of the same reality from different vantage points. The chall...
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