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Cocoa Prices At Highest For Two Decades Cocoa prices have been quietly but steadily rising in London, this week reaching their highest point in the last two decades. Published: 7:40PM BST 11 Oct 2009[snip]

COCOA, Fla. -- A law enforcement officer who is still recovering from being shot six times last week spoke at a news conference Thursday morning.

Cocoa prices on Tuesday surged to a 23-year high as speculative investors poured into the market amid concerns about dwindling supplies from Ivory Coast, by far the worldÂ’s largest producer. Prices for cocoa have risen 70 per cent in the past year, bucking the weakness in overall commodities prices. The drop in sterling has helped push London-based, sterling-denominated cocoa futures higher, but analysts said the main factor was low supplies. The International Cocoa Organisation said in its latest monthly report that cocoa bean arrivals until the end of November at ports in Ivory Coast, which provides almost 40 per cent...

Cocoa But Not Tea Linked To Blood Pressure Reduction A German study suggests there is evidence that cocoa but not tea is linked to blood pressure reduction. The study is published in the American Medical Association journal Archives of Internal Medicine. Dr Dirk Taubert and colleagues from the Department of Pharmacology at the University Hospital of Cologne, Germany, reviewed the medical literature for dietary effects of cocoa and black and green tea on blood pressure over the last 40 years. They specifically searched for trials involving 10 or more adults that examined the before and after effects of consuming cocoa,...

Two recent studies suggest compounds in natural cocoa have significant health-giving properties. One study by Prof Norman K. Hollenberg from Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, US was published in the International Journal of Medical Sciences. Hollenberg spent years studying the effects of cocoa-drinking on the Kuna people in Panama. He suggests that epicatechin, a flavanol found in high levels in natural cocoa, should be classed as a vitamin and is as important as penicillin and anaesthesia in terms of its potential to impact public health. Although only an observational study, Hollenberg's results from his work...

The health benefits of epicatechin, a compound found in cocoa, are so striking that it may rival penicillin and anaesthesia in terms of importance to public health, reports Marina Murphy in Chemistry & Industry, the magazine of the SCI. Norman Hollenberg, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, told C&I that epicatechin is so important that it should be considered a vitamin. Hollenberg has spent years studying the benefits of cocoa drinking on the Kuna people in Panama. He found that the risk of 4 of the 5 most common killer diseases: stroke, heart failure, cancer and diabetes, is reduced...

SAN FRANCISCO - A nice cup of the right kind of cocoa could hold the promise of promoting brain function as people age. In an increasingly aging world, medical researchers are seeing more cases of dementia and are looking for ways to make brains work better. One potential source of help may be flavanols, an antioxidant found in cocoa beans that can increase blood flow to the brain, researchers said Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Ian MacDonald of England's University of Nottingham reported on tests given to young women who were...

AMSTERDAM, Feb 9 (Reuters Life!) - A Dutch journalist asked an Amsterdam court on Friday to convict him for eating chocolate, saying by doing so he was benefiting from child slavery on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast. Teun van de Keuken, 35, is seeking a jail sentence to raise consumer awareness and force the cocoa and chocolate industry to take tougher measures to stamp out child labor. "If I am found guilty of this crime, any chocolate consumer can be prosecuted after that. I hope that people would stop buying chocolate and thus hurt the sales of big corporations and...

Bolivia's incoming President Evo Morales could easily become the nightmare for the United States that he boasted about becoming on the campaign trail. He supports the growing of coca, the raw material for cocaine, is an ally of a prominent anti-U.S. firebrand, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and wants to nationalize Bolivia's oil sector. He will undoubtedly do everything in his power to counter U.S. economic and geopolitical interests in Latin America. Interestingly enough, the electoral landslide that will be bringing Mr. Morales to power was unwittingly aided by the architects of U.S. drug policy in Latin America. While it is...

Mars, Incorporated, the privately held U.S. company company that produces M&Ms, Twix, Snickers and other confectionaries is in talks with several large pharmaceutical companies to develop medications based on flavanols -- plant chemicals with health benefits found in cocoa, according to a report from Reuters. Flavonoids are naturally-occurring compounds found in plant-based foods that have been shown to have a number of health-benefiting properties including anti-inflammatory, anti-allergic, and anti-cancer activity. Cocoa, especially dark chocolate, has high amounts of the flavonoid Epicatechin and has been found to have nearly twice the antioxidants of red wine and up to three times those...

In 2001, two American congressmen set up legislation pushing for a cocoa certification program designed to protect the thousands of children working in the sector. Four-years later, little has changed for the working children of Ivory Coast. Joe Bavier visited a plantation near Agboville in southeast Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa exporter and has this report for VOA. At the end of a trail head leading through dense forest to a 30-hectare cocoa plantation, a half-dozen shirtless young men and adolescents take a break from work. During the July lull in the cocoa-growing season, they had been 'cleaning', hacking...

MARGATE, N.J. - He's a diehard surfer, an eccentric millionaire, a sun-seeking recluse. Given all that, Ron DiMenna's choice of retirement home makes perfect sense.Who else would spend $500,000 to buy an RV, equip it with a slew of high-tech electronic features, paint it to look like a 21st-century woodie and then hit the road, destinations unknown?But DiMenna, the 66-year-old founder of Cocoa Beach, Fla.-based Ron Jon Surf Shops, is not the retiring type. He has three shops in Florida - Cocoa Beach, Orlando and Sunrise.More than 40 years after he started selling boards on nearby Long Beach Island, the...