For more than 30 years, I’ve been reading, writing and teaching about the ethical issue posed by the juxtaposition, on our planet, of great abundance and life-threatening poverty. Yet it was not until, in preparing this article, I calculated how much America’s Top 10 percent of income earners actually make that I fully understood how easy it would be for the world’s rich to eliminate, or virtually eliminate, global poverty.

Winnipig, Manipooba?
Businesses, activists and politicians band together to fend off a mega hog slaughter plant in a Winnipeg industrial park. Visit the nowinnipig.net website. Visit nomanipooba.net. 

Feeding grain to factory-farmed pigs is no way to feed a hungry world. Manitoba's pork industry takes far more than it gives to the hungry, the environment, the economy and the moral fabric of our society - unless you count the billions of gallons of untreated liquid hog waste.

According to Lester Brown, veteran commentator and activist on food politics, the corn required to fill an SUV tank with bioethanol just once could feed one person for a year. He describes the boom in bioethanol as a competition between the 800 million people in the world who own automobiles and the 3 billion people who live on less than $2 a day, many of whom are already spending over half their income on food.

Where does this particularly virulent strain come from? It’s not found in the intestinal tracts of cattle raised on their natural diet of grass, hay and other fibrous forage. No, O157 thrives in a new — that is, recent in the history of animal diets — biological niche: the unnaturally acidic stomachs of beef and dairy cattle fed on grain, the typical ration on most industrial farms.

None of the companies scored perfectly. Even first-place Nokia, for example, doesn't release figures on the number of units it recycles, according to Greenpeace.

That truth is, if we're truly going to be effective environmentalists, if we're really going to attenuate climate change ... we're going to have to give up eating meat. In the modern world, it is impossible to reconcile a carnivorous diet with environmental responsibility. 

One of the things I like about this book is that, whatever the subject – farm animal welfare, overfishing, GMOs, big corporate retail vs small independent – Singer and Mason ask you to learn and reason along with them. Their process ... is scrupulously transparent, a model of how we might think our way through these dilemmas ourselves. 

We want to live here in 100 years, in 500 years. Our most basic national interests demand that we extend our hands to the Arab nations that accept us, and act together with them for the rehabilitation of this region. That was true 59 years ago, and that will be true 59 years hence.

The French government expects its "air ticket levy" to raise over 200 million euros a year for lifesaving drugs in the developing world....If every country participated, the levy could bring in a whopping $10 billion a year, according to French President Jacques Chirac. 

The new emergency force could cost $2 billion to establish, much less than the costly wars that have flared across Africa and Asia in recent years. It would complement the UN's recently endorsed "responsibility to protect," a Canadian-backed doctrine that makes the world body's members responsible for intervening when a conflict threatens the lives of civilians.

 "At the end of the Cold War, Canada was the only nation to have contributed to every UN peacekeeping operation. Regrettably, we have fallen to 50th in the list of nations contributing to UN missions," says Warren Allmand, former federal cabinet minister and current President of the World Federalist Movement—Canada.

Mid-afternoon brought a screening of An Inconvenient Truth; more than a few audience members could be seen dabbing teary eyes as the documentary drew to a close....
Last October, Scott pledged to transform his sprawling company, which employs 1.8 million people worldwide and ranks No. 2 on the Fortune 500 list, into a lean green machine powered exclusively by renewable energy, producing zero waste, and selling sustainable products.

The fact is, following an energy-efficient diet is one of the most important things you can do to avert global warming. And it doesn't have to be "inconvenient."

It looks like news-at-six video of a puppy mill bust. Except the filthy, neglected animals are hens, and the setting is a modern industrial-strength egg barn near Guelph, Ontario. 

"This was not just a case of animal cruelty, it had become a case of consumer fraud," Shapiro says. So they decided to go back to some of the egg farms where they had done their open rescues a year or so before. "We knew what the conditions were like back then and now here they are 'Animal Care Certified', so we thought, 'OK let's see if there's been any change'. We found the conditions were exactly the same. 

Animal-rights advocates ask what morally relevant differences there are between humans and the many thousands of other animals with whom we comprise the animal kingdom that make it all right for us to harm them in ways that we would never tolerate against one of our own kind, no matter how diseased or vicious.

Life in the circus is a brutal grind that can last into the fifth or sixth decade of their lives. Many of the travelling circuses that perform every year in Canada and the United States and the companies that train and lease elephants to them have a long record of animal welfare violations, cruelty charges and convictions.

The main problem isn’t inefficiency – it’s lack of democracy. Here’s a suggestion for UN reform: global decisions made by elected representatives of global citizens rather than by appointees of nations. 

OlyWest will create over a thousand of the country's most mentally, physically, socially and spiritually hazardous low-end jobs. 

Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.

McCartney condemns Chinese fur industry
After viewing graphic footage of China's unregulated cat and dog fur export industry, Sir Paul McCartney vows never to perform in China "until something is done." 

 "I wouldn't even dream of going over there to play, in the same way I wouldn't go to a country that supported apartheid. This is just disgusting. It's just against every rule of humanity. I couldn't go there." 

Over the last few decades, meat and egg consumption has exploded in the developing world, leading to industrial-scale commercial chicken farming and mass animal transport, creating the "perfect storm" environment for the emergence of new superstrains of influenza.

Inside Canada's egg industry
A biology student sneaks a camera inside a big Ontario egg barn; a coalition of animal protection groups asks Loblaw to change the way its 1000+ stores label and sell eggs.

The images are haunting. Birds crammed into small cages. Feathers chafed off. Open sores. Birds in lower tiers covered in feces. Birds who have fallen out of their cages left to languish on the manure pile or die in the alley between the rows of other birds. This is standard practice across Canada. No laws are being broken ... 

Red Cross shelters that do not have animal-friendly areas, or do not coordinate with humane groups to make sure that there are animal shelters nearby, are out of touch with the needs of a society in which 60 percent of families have pets and many view them as intrinsic members of the family.

... about 330% higher than the dosage of the echinacea preparations given in the NEJM trial. This supports ABC’s contention that the preparations may have been under-dosed and that the trial might have shown a potentially positive trend if a higher dosage and/or increased frequency of administration had been followed.

The powerful zoom lens on the video camera brought me right up to her eyes. There was an emptiness there that reminded me of films I have seen of psychiatric patients in hospitals, huddled on the floor in the corner, their knees bent and their arms pulling their legs close to their body as they rock back and forth. It is the body language of a life without hope.

The G8 governments claim they want to help poor countries develop and compete successfully. But they have a powerful commercial incentive to ensure that they compete unsuccessfully, and that our companies can grab their public services and obtain their commodities at rock-bottom prices. The conditionalities we impose on the poor nations keep them on a short leash.

 “All we want is an open, public investigation into what happened to us,” says Chopra. “Then the truth will come out. Our job was to protect the health of Canadians, and that’s just what we were doing. We believe that the public has a right to know the full story.”

Let's face it, the people who are screaming the loudest at Bolton have never been a boss and have no idea what it’s like to deal with nitwits as dumb as themselves all day long. 

A contribution of £1 or £2 on every plane ticket in the world would produce almost enough revenue to finance the worldwide fight against AIDS. Who could refuse such an effort? Who could refuse to stem the "silent tsunamis" which happen every day in Africa?

You would find that what is rising in Canada is not so much anti-Americanism, as claimed by your and our right-wing commentators, but fundamental disagreements with certain policies of your government. You would see that rather than just reacting to events by drawing on old conventional wisdoms, many Canadians are trying to think our way through to some ideas that can be helpful in building a more secure world.

"Climate change is for real. We have just a small window of opportunity and it is closing rather rapidly. There is not a moment to lose....We are risking the ability of the human race to survive." 

And every month, for example, 150,000 African children die of malaria because they don't have bed nets to keep out mosquitos, a tragedy Sachs called the "silent tsunami."..."The required doubling of annual official development assistance to $135 billion in 2006, rising to $195 billion by 2015, pales beside the wealth of high income countries — and the world's military budget of $900 billion a year," the report said. 

Whatever the risks involved in acknowledging our common humanity, they are outweighed by the need to understand that it is human beings, not instantly recognisable as moral monsters, who commit the great atrocities.

Beware the ideological-theological complex
America's moral compass has been supplanted by a delusional ideological-theological complex, warns Bill Moyers.

One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the oval office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.

The holiday from history that we have enjoyed since the early '90s may be drawing to an end, and another great-power war, fought next time with nuclear weapons, may be lurking in our future.

By spending $150 billion dollars worldwide each year, the UN could actually meet its Millennium Goals over the next decade. (UNICEF puts the figure somewhere between $40 and $70 billion--either way, it's a paltry sum in contrast to the $956 billion spent annually worldwide on military items.) 

Impunity -- the perception of being outside the law -- has long been the hallmark of the Bush regime. What is alarming is that it appears to have deepened since the election, ushering in what can best be described as an orgy of impunity. In Iraq, US forces and their Iraqi surrogates are assaulting civilian targets and openly attacking doctors, clerics and journalists who have dared to count the bodies. At home, impunity has been made official policy with Bush's nomination of Alberto Gonzales--the man who personally advised the President in his infamous "torture memo" that the Geneva Conventions are "obsolete"--as Attorney General.

In another Baghdad case, a U.S. soldier was accused of trying to force an Iraqi civilian to hold a gun as a justification for killing him. The soldier punched the civilian in the face, held an M-16 rifle to his head and flicked the safety off to threaten him, according to the accounts of 19 witnesses. Another soldier eventually stepped in to protect the civilian, who had been hired by the U.S. Army to guard the Museum of Iraqi Military History, the records show.

If the Earth is to have a future of any kind, we, the people, must finally civilize ourselves on the global level. 

Thousands of children are currently being used as slave labour on cocoa farms in an attempt to keep down production costs. Fair trade and certified fair trade chocolate offer an alternative to this system.

Angles on angels Angels, spirit guides — what's the deal? We asked a few Winnipeggers with an angle on angels. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, a modern Kabbalist, speaks about angels in terms of feelings. He urges us to always take our feelings seriously, because feelings are messengers — MALACHIM — from the heavens that we carry within.

"Four more years"
From north of the 49th parallel, American ex-pat Dave Steele says Bush's damage could be self-limiting. Aquarian Editor Syd Baumel says squeeze more lemonade. 

Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming).

In the run-up to Bush's Nov. 30 visit, Martin expressed his desire to engage the U.S. president in a discussion of "Canada's vision of the new multilateralism." Rather than zeroing in on the usual bilateral issues ... the Prime Minister has set himself the task of nudging a unilateralist president back toward global engagement.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry. 

According to Cornell University’s David Pimentel, we North Americans use an average of ten calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food energy. Feeding just one of us takes about 1600 litres of fossil fuel each year. For me, at least, that’s more than I use driving my car.

Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?...Respect for evidence seems not to pertain any more, when a poll taken just before the elections showed that 75 percent of Mr. Bush's supporters believe Iraq either worked closely with Al Qaeda or was directly involved in the attacks of 9/11.

... the World Votes has no intent to influence the democratic process in the U.S. “We just want to urge U.S. voters to keep the rest of the world in mind when casting their vote”, says Wiebe de Jager, one of the initiators.

Dr Les Roberts, who led the study, said: "Making conservative assumptions we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 

"Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most of the violent deaths." 

It would be permanent, based at a designated UN site, with two mobile field headquarters. It thus could move to quell an emergency within 48 hours after authorization from the UN Security Council. With individuals recruited from the best volunteers worldwide, it would not suffer the reluctance of UN members to deploy their own national units. With 14,000 personnel, carefully selected, expertly trained and well-equipped, it would not fail in its mission due to a lack of preparation, skills or enthusiasm to engage in robust operations.

"I think that today the challenge always is for activists you've got to get really clever at delivering the message. The public is inundated with more and more messages....If you don't find a way to deliver a different kind of message in an effective way, people won't pick it up. They don't have time. They look at their TV and they say, 'Oh, there's a WTO demonstration.'"
"The smart activists don't do street protests," Dobson says bluntly, in his Kitsilano kitchen. "They just don't."

Kerry was strongly preferred among all of America’s traditional allies. These included Norway (74% for Kerry to 7% for Bush), Germany (74% to 10%), France (64% to 5%), the Netherlands (63% to 6%), Italy (58% to 14%), and Spain (45% to 7%). Even in the UK, Kerry was preferred by more than 30 percentage points (47% to 16%). Among Canadians, Kerry was preferred by 61% to 16% and among the Japanese by 43% to 23%. 

George Bush's record should make him an easy target, yet John Kerry is failing to connect.

Kerry has failed to make an electoral breakthrough. This is so because he has shied away from the great moral issues raised by Bush's post-9/11 policies - issues that Americans are, arguably, ready and even eager to confront.

As a Jew, the swastika is an image that should repel me. But as a decades-long lover of Eastern religions, I understand the history and true intent of this ancient symbol. In the East, the swastika is actually supposed to bring good luck. 

 "Insist on your rights and demand your freedom peacefully ... Let the voice of reason and compassion stand up again," said Gandhi, president and founder of the US-based MK Gandhi Institute for Non-Violence. 

There have been 150 years of legal decisions favoring big business, granting corporations legal rights that our founders intended solely for individual human beings. And while human liberty is on the defensive against authoritarianism, corporations are seizing power as aggressively as ever. For example, courts recently have ruled that municipalities attempting to control the placement of cell phone towers are violating corporate “civil rights.”

In interviews with a number of White House staffers who were willing to talk off the record, a picture of an administration under siege has emerged, led by a man who declares his decisions to be “God’s will” and then tells aides to “fuck over” anyone they consider to be an opponent of the administration.

The Price of Pork Manitoba has joined the gold rush to mass produce cheap pork with hundreds of mega hog barns and a meatpacking monopoly. The Aquarian examines the real cost of our billion dollar export industry for farmers, rural communities, animals and the environment.

Hog Wild: Manitoba's Reckless Agriventure

If you’re interested in getting into big-time corporate hog production, don’t go to North Carolina. Don’t go to Quebec either, or Taiwan or Iowa or the Netherlands. But should you come to friendly Manitoba, you’re in luck. 

There is No Cheap Pork

Based on this bottom line alone, there is little doubt that the most efficient way to produce pork chops, ham and bacon is in a factory-style mega hog barn. But things are not so clear-cut when you factor in all the costs, including the long-term social and environmental costs.

Why Manitoba Must "Quit Stalling"

I believe that the root of all these problems, and specifically the hog industry’s, is the close confinement of hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of animals in completely unnatural settings in a very small space under one roof.

We learn about Molly, a stray pit bull mix who develops "kennel stress" from being in the shelter so long she has to be euthanized; Mocha, a lost cat who is lucky enough to have caring guardians who come searching for her, and so is happily reunited with her family. . . .

Canadians are culturally predisposed to recognize niceness. . . .The niceness of the Dalai Lama is so powerful that it automatically evokes a visceral reaction in those who experience it. 

Growing up as a 4-H farm boy, Brown had been taught to shun any emotional attachments to farm animals. Privately he wept for those he had to give away. Yet as an adult, he became a hardened animal farmer himself.

Veal - fughedaboudit! The makers of "The Meatrix" strike again with another conscientiousness-raising flash animation. It's goodfellas meet factory farm.

The ambiguous lexicon of Iraq
Ex-Monty Python pundit Terry Jones sees a lack of moral clarity in the lack of verbal clarity surrounding the occupation of Iraq. 

It also sounds a bit lame to call ambulance drivers "fighters" - when 
they've been shot through the windscreen in the act of driving the 
wounded to hospital - and yet what other word can you use without 
making them sound like illegitimate targets?

A friend who specializes in foreign policy and hobnobs with subcabinet officials in the Defense and State departments told me that the only thing that's stopped the Bushies from storming into Iran and North Korea is the upcoming election. "If Bush is re-elected, Cheney and Rumsfeld are out of the box," he said. "They'll take Bush's re-election as a mandate to wage the 'war on terror' everywhere and anywhere."

 Viruses found in wild birds generally aren't very dangerous, he said, but they become so when they mutate in a poultry operation. 

"If you get a virus into a high-density poultry operation and give it a period of time, generally a year or so, then you turn that virus into a highly virulent virus. That's what always happens." 

The largest study. . . . followed more than 12,000 babies born in 1966 until 1997. It found those who were given the recommended amounts of vitamin D supplement had an 80 per cent reduced risk of developing diabetes.

The video documents one shipment of cows being transported from Alberta to Quebec in a cramped truck — a trip that took three days during which they were only fed and watered once, subtitles read. 

In one scene recorded inside a Quebec slaughterhouse, a cow appears conscious as it struggles to rise to its feet as it is hoisted into the air by a chain on one leg. 

Stuart Pimm, an ecologist at Duke University, said in Science that the British study results "show that we have likely underestimated the magnitude of the pending extinctions."

Even after five years, Christy Pugh has no trouble sticking to her vegetarian regimen. 

The secret to her success? Eating meat.

An entire album can be sampled in a minute or two, but it is a terrible way to listen to the music. It is the same with our lives.

The fact is that every day, in labs around the world, scientists are constructing artificial viruses that can infect humans. Many are designed to do precisely that. Some are made for pure research purposes, others to be used, potentially, for "gene therapy" — a hoped for means to cure genetic diseases in living humans. Should one of these viruses go hopelessly wrong like the Australian mouse virus did, watch out!

Scientists have calculated that in adult women, each extra gram of sodium could produce an additional rate of bone loss of I percent per year if all of the calcium loss comes from the skeleton. Research on postmenopausal women supports these estimates. 

He refused to privatize the public’s wealth as The IMF and World Bank -- and US loan agencies demanded. Aristide had seen what these policies had done to the desperately poor in the third world. His refusal to obey the dictates of the imperial financiers led to his punishment and to his inability to accomplish even minimal reforms.

The 27 fortunate souls who have ventured outward to lunar orbit have all gazed upon a single, borderless, breathtaking planet suspended among the blazing stars. They were perhaps the first humans to have the opportunity to grasp that the whole Earth was more than the sum of its parts, that it was something singularly deserving of our loyalty, our allegiance, our planetary patriotism. 

 "We cannot avoid setting up a system of international taxation," Chirac told journalists afterwards.

An estimated 840 million people live in hunger and 1.1 billion people struggle to survive on less than one dollar a day, according to the United Nations.

What we need to discuss urgently is strategies of resistance. . . .Gandhi's salt march was not just political theater. When, in a simple act of defiance, thousands of Indians marched to the sea and made their own salt, they broke the salt tax laws. It was a direct strike at the economic underpinning of the British Empire. It was real. While our movement has won some important victories, we must not allow nonviolent resistance to atrophy into ineffectual, feel-good, political theater. 

In 1989, Laura Manuelidis and colleagues at Yale University performed autopsies on the brains of Alzheimer's patients and found that 13 per cent of the patients actually suffered from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease -- the human form of mad cow. 

A University of Pittsburg study made similar findings. . . .That is not to say that a higher incidence of CJD is necessarily connected to BSE; there could be more sporadic CJD than previously thought, or an infectious prion could be responsible. What we do know is that we have mad cows; we have enigmatic brain-wasting diseases in people; and we don't have much science in between.

Certainly law is the first road leading to peace, and people need to be taught to respect that law. Yet one does not arrive at the end of this road unless justice is complemented by love. Justice and love sometimes appear to be opposing forces. In fact they are but two faces of a single reality, two dimensions of human life needing to be mutually integrated. Historical experience shows this to be true. It shows how justice is frequently unable to free itself from rancour, hatred and even cruelty. By itself, justice is not enough. Indeed, it can even betray itself, unless it is open to that deeper power which is love.

For this reason I have often reminded Christians and all persons of good will that forgiveness is needed for solving the problems of individuals and peoples. There is no peace without forgiveness!
 

It initially received a luke-warm reception -- one of his superiors wrote it was "vague but exciting" -- but Sir Tim went on to write the first Web browser and Web server, both of which he gave away on the Internet in 1991, and the Web was born. 

While other Internet pioneers went on to become multi-millionaires, he insisted that his creation should be free and globally available, and has fought to ensure the Web was never privately owned. 

Lockheed Martin, the world's highest-ranking arms maker, still produces components for CBU-89 "Gator" landmines, says COAT Co-ordinator Richard Sanders. 

By investing in these companies, Canada is breaking the spirit, if not the letter, of the highly acclaimed global Mine Ban Treaty, which is now part of Canadian law, Sanders told IPS. "It's incredibly hypocritical," he added. 

Prion scientist warns of widespread BSE
 

. . . if you try to empty your mind of distractions, you’ll just get more distracted by them. And the crazier they get, the more they'll obsess you. Which is how mental reruns of the Discovery Channel resulted in my cowering in a heap that evening, desperately trying not to think about a large orangutan named Geoffrey. 

Can I be a part of Buy Nothing Christmas even if I buy a few things? Definitely. We are all going to have to buy some things. When  you do buy things, we encourage you to remember principles like buying locally, fairly-traded, environmentally friendly packaging, recycling or re-using, buying things that last, and so on. The main aim of this campaign is not to save money (although that can be a side benefit), it’s not to slow down the pace of Christmas (although that can be a side benefit), it is to challenge our over-consumptive lifestyle and how it affects global disparities and the earth. So, even though you might buy a few things at Christmas, it’s important to think in these global economic terms.  (From the Buy Nothing Christmas information kit)

Veterans of the animal-rights movement say Butler has done more for their cause than celebrity endorsements from actress Pamela Anderson and former Beatle Paul McCartney. Lucy Kelley, a 60-year-old cook in Mount Juliet, Tenn., said she had one response to the blog: "I don't eat chicken any more."

The inheritors of the world's greatest democracy are today the pivot point of the global body politic. With a single flip, America could become the bridge, rather than the barrier to a new world order of the people, by the people, for the people.

The White House has masked its attacks with euphemisms that would have embarrassed George Orwell. George W. Bush's "Healthy Forests" initiative promotes destructive logging of old-growth forests. His "Clear Skies" program, which repealed key provisions of the Clean Air Act, allows more emissions. The administration uses misleading code words such as streamlining or reforming instead of weakening, and thinning instead of logging. 

If every last soldier pulled out of the Gulf tomorrow and a sovereign government came to power, Iraq would still be occupied: by laws written in the interest of another country, by foreign corporations controlling its essential services, by 70 percent unemployment sparked by public sector layoffs.

But even after the war got under way, the Iraqi intelligence chief appears to have sought new compromises. 

This time the conduit was Robert Baer, another former CIA official. There was talk of a meeting between Mr Baer and Gen Habbush in Ramadi, outside Baghdad, in early April. "It was a promise to hold free elections supervised by France and the US," Mr Baer said. But the proposed meeting never happened. Two days earlier, on April 9, the house it was supposed to take place in was bombed by US planes with six precision-guided bombs. 

What's going wrong
American magnate-activist George Soros rejects the selfish, supremacist globalism of the Bush administration and calls upon the U.S. to use its unique power to broker a global open society based on democracy and cooperation. 

The objective of disarming Saddam Hussein was a valid one, but the way the U.S. government has gone about it is not. That is why there was so much opposition to the war throughout the world and at home. That is why I shall remain opposed to the Bush administration's conduct of foreign policy. 

There is an alternative vision of the role that the United States ought to play in the world, and it is based on the concept of open society. The current world order is a distorted form of a global open society. It is distorted because we have global markets but we do not have global political institutions. As a consequence, we are much better at producing private goods than taking care of public goods such as preserving peace, protecting the environment and ensuring economic stability, progress and social justice. 

I think people want to do more. They want to be as involved on our side of the ledger as the terrorist cells are on their side of the ledger. As I have said so often, the civil are not organized, and the organized are not civil.

Consumers are going to start getting more details on the levels of trans fat in the foods we love, with new nutritional labelling that goes into effect in just over two years. But many nutrition experts are angry that foods made for children under the age of two will not have to comply with the new labelling rules. 

When it was announced (with amazingly little fanfare) that the pugnaciously anti-Iraq war Democrat Kennedy had been awarded the 2003 George Bush Award for Excellence in Public Service, so many jaws dropped all over Washington that usually voluble politicians were only heard swallowing their real thoughts.

Clearly, what is needed is a framework of international law that permits the operation of free trade and a competitive world economy, but only within parameters strictly drawn to safeguard our planet. . . .What is really needed is a world environment court that would enforce a global environmental charter. . . .[W]e also need a strengthened United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) to promote a more sustainable world economy . . . and, most important, it must be put on a par with the World Trade Organisation.

Six soldiers . . . said they agreed with the letter's thrust. But none of the soldiers said he wrote it, and one said he didn't even sign it. . . .A seventh soldier didn't know about the letter until his father congratulated him for getting it published in the local newspaper in Beckley, W.Va. . . .He spoke to his son, Pfc. Nick Deaconson, at a hospital where he was recovering from a grenade explosion that left shrapnel in both his legs. 

Common sense & compassion
The Miami police department is 20,000+ dogs' and cats' best new friend. Sounds like a plan.

 “There’s no reason to kill a healthy animal,” says Jeter, “and I’m committed to finding ways not to do it. Last year, the shelter took in 22,786 animals and euthanized 17,123 of them. That’s terrible.”

The crescent Moon nearest Autumn Equinox signals the beginning of a new cycle of creation according to many ancient traditions. . . .The more we get to core during these ten the more we are empowered to recreate our world. 

Liekens went looking for an alternative way of reaching the subconscious, and hit upon the idea of using fairytales and metaphors in stories. He initiated a test project using stories with 20 children. The results were so amazing – 18 of the 20 children overcame their problem – that his subjects’ parents have allowed their telephone numbers to be published in his recent book ‘Healing Stories’ so that sceptics could call them up.

The Canadians are so quiet that you may have forgotten they're up there, but they've been busy doing some surprising things. It's like discovering that the mice you are dimly aware of in your attic have been building an espresso machine.

 

Sneezing, a runny or congested nose, and swollen, itchy eyes are the well-known symptoms of ragweed allergy. And to those should be added malaise and depression, at least for some ragweed sufferers.

"The 'Bless You!' Blues" - from Psychology Today

Through the complex web of taxes, tariffs and quotas that governs trade we take far more from the poor than we give them. For every $1 we give in aid, we take $2 through unfair trade. Unfair trade costs the world's poor $100bn a year.

The attack on the Buddhas was motivated by the very same religious fanaticism, yet the response was not war. There are lots of Buddhists in the world, nearly 400,000,000 in fact, and there some heavily militarized Buddhist countries run by severe dictatorships. Yet there have been no violent reactions to speak of, nor any talk of armed reprisals. Why is this so?

You're probably not a vegetarian. . . .But I bet you're concerned about issues related to your dietary choices – issues like protecting the environment, supporting farmers and other people in the food production chain, being kind to animals, and eliminating world hunger. . . .

Ethical eating, like ethical living, is not about absolutes. It's about doing the best you're willing and able to do – and nurturing a will to keep doing better.

I think about all of those animals that I was part of sending to death and I think that my gift to them today in retribution is the fact that never is another one going to have to die for my lifestyle. 

Spiritual practice is simply a set of mental disciplines . . . analogous to the physical disciplines practiced by athletes. These exercises strengthen and focus the mind so that it can bear unbearable compassion the way that physical exercise strengthens the body to endure the rigors of running a marathon.

The notion that the super-rich might vo