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Something Smells Funny? Gorgonzola Popularity Spawns Bogus-zola

As Gorgonzola exports begin to boom, formaggio fraudsters try to get a cut of the action with fake versions of the cheese. One trick is to give the imitation variety a name that has a familiar ring.

Wheel in the real stuff (Rachel Black)
Wheel in the real stuff (Rachel Black)

*NEWSBITES

TURIN - All over Europe, the whiff of Gorgonzola is getting stronger and stronger. Thanks to aggressive advertisement campaigns featuring top chefs, sales of the zesty, blue and green-marbled cheese are rising fast. For instance, sales in Poland have increased 82% over the past year.

But with success comes the risk of stinky knock-offs, with "imitation" Gorgonzola increasingly showing up on the shelves. The Gorgonzola Consortium, a business organization in the northern Italian regions of Piedmont and Lombardy where the cheese is traditionally made, has warned that the imitation products are often sold under names ending with "zola" (but not starting with "Gorgon"), in order to confuse careless supermarket shoppers.

Most of the ersatz cheeses are sold in northern Europe, where several lawsuits have been filed. Courts are studying the cases. Authentic Gorgonzola producers, who benefit from the D.O.C label (denominazione di origine controllata) are also working with the cross-national Interpol and Europol policing agencies to help verifiy bona fide Gorgonzola exports.

Read the original Italian article in full by Gianfranco Quaglia

Photo - Rachel Black

*Newsbites are digest items, not direct translations

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Green

How Climate Change May Be Triggering More Earthquakes — And Vice Versa

Researchers have identified a possible link between climate change and the frequency of earthquakes — and the quakes may also start a vicious circle of accelerating climate change.

Image of a man trying to measure the offset of a crevasse on a glacier

Crevasse on the Canwell glacier created by the earthquake that struck near Denali National Park in Alaska in November 2002

Paul Molga

PARIS — Between 1900 and 1950, the Earth recorded an average of 3.4 earthquakes per year with a magnitude greater than 6.5. That figured doubled to 6.7 a year until the early 1970s, and was almost five times that in the 2000s.

Their intensity would also have increased with more than 25 major earthquakes per year, double the previous periods. This is according to the EM-DAT emergency events database, which compiled the occurrence and effects of 22,000 mass disasters worldwide in the 20th century.

Can we conclude that there is a causal relationship with the rise of human activities, as some experts suggest? The idea was first suggested in 2011 by an Australian research team led by geology professor Giampiero Iaffaldano. At the time, it reported that it had found that the intensification of the monsoon in India had accelerated the movement of the Indian tectonic plate by 20% over the past 10 million years.

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