In return, they make somewhere between $1.45 and $3.90 per day, according to the CDCR. They also have two days knocked off of their sentences for every day they work. Speaking with KQED, inmate Cory Sills said that, despite sometimes having to work 24-hour shifts, he generally feels like the camps are a good thing, especially since prisoners are treated better than they are behind bars.

“There’s an assembly where we have a formation in the mornings and it was like my second or third day and the lieutenant comes out and he goes, ‘Look, we’ll treat you like men first, firefighters second, and prisoners if we have to,’” he said last July. “That right there, that stuck in my head for two years now because now I have a chance to be treated like a man.”

Another inmate, Michael Dignan, is now close to being released after four years of working as a firefighter. He said there are upsides to the job besides not having to sleep in prisons, which no inmate has to do after being accepted into the program. Prisoners, instead, sleep in barracks-style lodges that are guarded by correctional officials and even get better food.

For California taxpayers, the cheap labor amounts to more than $80 million in savings per year. Still, not everyone thinks the program is ideal, especially since the work can potentially be very dangerous. When wildfires are fought by inmates, the prisoners are putting themselves at risk against huge flames. “When the inmates volunteer, we don’t try to hide that fact [that it’s dangerous],” CDCR spokesman Bill Cessa told ThinkProgress. “When you’re actually in a fire — this is not a small grass fire, these are fires with flames 100 feet tall.”

But its wrecking-ball approach doesn't stop there. This week, a new study has outlined yet another potentially detrimental effect of the cured meat – and this time, bacon's hitting below the belt. The new report suggests that consumption of meat products such as bacon, sausages and canned favourites such as Spam could be leading to infertility among men.

Devised by the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, the paper, published in the Journal for Fertility & Sterility, followed the eating habits of 141 men who were attempting to conceive with their partners using in vitro fertilisation (IVF). These men were required to complete dietary questionnaires, noting down the processed and unprocessed foods they ate. The data showed that the men who ate less than 1.5 servings of processed meat every week had a 28 per cent better chance of conceiving using IVF than men who ate upwards of four servings each week.

However, the excessive consumption of some meats – such as poultry – could be seen to have beneficial effects on fertility. "There was a positive association between poultry intake and fertilisation rate," the study authors wrote, "with a 13 percent higher fertilisation rate among men in the highest quartile of poultry intake compared with those in the lowest quartile."

According to RT.com on August 15, these campsites book up months in advance so the people holding reservations for next week at the 304-site Tuolumne Meadows Campground will be out of luck. The Yosemite officials said that those folks with reservations on the days the campsite will be closed are being contacted and their reservations canceled, according to MSN News.

This is the second Yosemite National Park campground to shut down for five days. The first campsite shut-down last week and it reopened on Friday. The Crane Flat Campground was closed after a child was found to have contracted the plague while camping at that site.

According to MSN, "The case marked the first time a human was known to be infected with the centuries-old scourge, which is carried by rodents and the fleas that live on them, in California since 2006." The child is still in the hospital recovering.

What they discovered was “key receptors that mediate taste in humans," Vinnedge explained in an interview for this article. “Senomyx doesn’t mention that they used human embryonic kidney cells (HEK 293) from an aborted baby in product testing.” The name HEK 293 means it came from the 293rd experiment, after 292 other experiments. Vinnedge said that she discovered the situation after a pro-life consumer reported it to her. “I thought, it couldn’t be true,” she said, “so I researched it and found out it was true.” Vinnedge noted that Senomyx uses baby parts in research and development but not in the products themselves.

When Vinnedge began investigating Senomyx, she found they had 77 patents using aborted fetal cells. “They named all the other cell lines they could be using but they chose to use fetal cells instead.” Vinnedge wrote and asked them to stop using cells lines from aborted fetuses. They refused, so she contacted their customers. “Cocoa-Cola, Campbell Soup, Kraft, Cadbury Adams — all from the original boycott, ended their contract with no product from Senomyx,” Vinnedge said.

When it comes to non-food products, the Food and Drug Administration does not require full disclosure so unless a company openly admits using aborted baby tissue, there’s no way of knowing. Unbelievably, Neocutis Cosmetics proudly announces they used it in the development of their anti-aging cream.

The company’s key trademarked ingredient, “Processed Skin Proteins,” was developed from a 14-week-old boy. Neocutis states on their website: “A dedicated cell bank was established for developing new skin treatments using a single biopsy of fetal skin.” Since they claim “no additional fetal biopsies will ever be required,” Neocutis President Mark J Lemko told Vinnedge in an email, “We feel we are in complete compliance with the laws of God and the laws of man.” The cream was initially developed to treat dermatology problems but led to a cosmetic line. Vinnedge said it’s pricey because it’s expensive to keep cell lines refrigerated and in working order. A 1-ounce bottle of Journee Bio-Restorative Day Cream goes for $120 an ounce.

Unemployment is ticking up; the stock market is down by almost 8 per cent since April; China’s previously unassailable economy is faltering, forcing Beijing to devalue its currency twice in two days; the price of oil is subdued and fear and loathing is on the rise across the financial markets. Add to all of that the prospect of higher interest rates in the US and the UK – even if monetary tightening is now delayed slightly because of all this bad news – and it is clear that the economic seatbelt signs should be flashing bright red.

It’s not time to panic; but this is the first major global bump since the recovery began and therefore an important moment for all of us. Companies, investors and workers will all need to readjust, and the Bank of England and the Government will need to keep their cool.

Part of the challenge is that China is nursing huge amounts of bad debt and mis-allocated capital, all of which will require liquidation; it has the capacity and the international reserves to pull this off, but it will take time. Its decision to devalue its currency makes sense, but could yet trigger a devastating currency war if other economies decide to join in, launching tit-for-tat devaluations.

The UK, as well as much of the rest of the developed and emerging world, will find the going much tougher over the next few months. The most important lesson from the present burst of turbulence is that we should never forget that economies move in cycles, and plan accordingly.

Although the technical details of a third bailout were agreed between Greece and its lenders earlier this week, national parliaments in the euro zone, including Germany, need to approve the 85 billion euro deal before it can be implemented and the money released.

On Wednesday, there were signs of tension in Germany over developments in the Greek bailout plan, saying it was "insufficient." Germany's finance ministry outlined its concerns in a paper circulated to its euro zone counterparts just hours before the Greek parliament was due to debate the deal, according to a Financial Times report.

These include delays in planned reforms, debt sustainability and the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the latest bailout, which has participated in the past two Greece aid packages. The minsters from the 19 countries that use the euro are due to discuss whether to approve the deal - or potentially grant Greece more bridge financing to give negotiations more time – an option looking increasingly likely given German misgivings over the deal.

“The incident gave the media a chance to reinforce their place among the morally elect and gave the Obama administration a useful wedge issue to stir up the Florida base for the 2012 election. Ferguson served much the same purpose, truth be damned.”

Cashill, a WND columnist, believes demographic and electoral realities will force Democrats to continue to promote racial divisions. “The Democratic Party is unsustainable without 80 percent or more of the black vote. This plague of dishonestly stoked Ferguson-style rage is the Democrats’ problem. They cannot begin to solve it without alienating their base. So they won’t even try.”

China's fixed investment reached $5 trillion last year, matching the whole of Europe and North America combined. This is the root cause of chronic overcapacity worldwide, from shipping, to steel, chemicals and solar panels.

A Chinese devaluation would export yet more of this excess supply to the rest of us. It is one thing to do this when global trade is expanding: it amounts to beggar-thy-neighbour currency warfare to do so in a zero-sum world with no growth at all in shipping volumes this year. One dreads to think what would happen if we tip into a global downturn in these circumstances, with interest rates still at zero, quantitative easing played out, and aggregate debt levels 30 percentage points of GDP higher than in 2008.

"The world economy is sailing across the ocean without any lifeboats to use in case of emergency," said Stephen King from HSBC in a haunting report in May.

He dismissed arguments that enduring pain at the end of life is a “noble thing” and insisted that proper legal safeguards could be devised to ensure vulnerable people are not pressurised into ending their lives by greedy relatives. His remarks, ahead of a Commons vote on assisted dying, underline a growing rift with the official position of the Church he once led.

It came as one senior Church of England official condemned the attempts to change Britain’s euthanasia laws as “criminally naive”. The Rev Dr Brendan McCarthy, the Church’s national adviser on medical ethics, claimed that dying people would “most certainly” be put at risk by a change in the law. The row erupted ahead of a debate next month which amounts to the first ever serious attempt in the House of Commons to overturn the ban on assisted suicide.

The Office for National Statistics said that there was an 84,000 increase in the number of Britons in work in this country since 2014, compared with a rise of 250,000 other EU nationals. The figures also show that the number of EU-born migrants working in Britain has topped 2 million for the first time, with half of them hailing from Eastern European countries.

The influx means that there are now 4.9 million foreigners working in the UK, equivalent to one in six workers. In 1997 there were just 1.9 million foreign-born workers, equivalent to one in 13.

Rights activists who monitor the treatment of refugees say while they are seeing an increase in hate crimes across Europe, particularly targeting Roma or asylum-seekers from Europe’s poorest countries, nowhere have they seen mass demonstrations or attacks on housing for refugees like those in Germany.

“We’ve seen many bad news stories from Germany, but not that many from other countries — not in the sense of calling it a growing trend,” said Thorfinnur Omarsson, a spokesman for the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, based in Brussels. In the first half of this year alone, more than 179,000 people applied for asylum in Germany, a country of about 80 million. That is an increase of 132 percent over the same period in 2014, with Syrians the largest group, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees said.