Rising Food Prices

http://hubpages.com/hub/Rising-Food-Prices
An article on the Internet about rising food prices and their consequences.

'I'm addicted; bigger syringe, please!'

I received this in my e-mail today, and it seemed so relevant that I had to post it:

From:

"Rabbi Arthur Waskow" <office@shalomctr.org>

To:

nathanson1947@yahoo.com

A Prophetic Voice in Jewish, Multireligious, and American Life

Prez Sez: "I'm addicted; bigger syringe, please!" Several years ago, the President of the United States acknowledged that America is addicted to oil. He did nothing to address the addiction, protected its Drug Lords (the Big Oil companies) and their enormous profits, and now has demanded a bigger syringe so as to mainline his favorite drug into the veins and arteries of the American people. And of course into the veins of all the world, where the planet's very breath and wind are being choked to death by burning oil and rising CO2. Mr. Bush's proposal to drill for oil in the Alaska nature reserve and off the American coasts has nothing to do with reducing gasoline prices at the pump. (The oil companies already have legal options on reserves that they are not trying to drill.)  Nor does his proposal to limit the legal and environmental challenges to plans for new oil refineries, since in any case new refineries would take years to build. Tying these proposals to the price of gasoline is a lie. It follows in the heels of the Big Lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the Big Lie about imminent nuclear weapons in Iran. Those lies, like this one, were also tied to increasing the power of Big Oil. (For an analysis of how the military might of the US has been perverted to the protection of Big Oil, see an article by Michael Klare at http://www.shalomctr.org/node/1401 The Bush proposals have only one purpose: to add to the power of his favorite Drug Pushers before he leaves office. If he gets away with doing that, it is future generations of Americans and every other people and most species on our planet's face who will suffer. Instead of strengthening the power of Big Oil and its willingness to sell the future of our planet to multiply its world-record profits, this is what we could do now: 1.    Mr. Bush could have strongly supported the plan of Mayor Bloomberg of New York, to charge fees for auto use of car-choked central Manhattan, putting the proceeds into mass transit. And he could have urged such arrangements for other cities, too. That would have saved oil.  (se my Op/Ed piece on this, just pub;ished in the NY Jewish week, at --   2.     He could have asked Congress to reinstate lower speed limits on the nation's highways. That would have saved oil. 3.    He could have urged Congress to extend the tax credits for installation of wind and solar energy equipment, set to expire soon. That would have saved oil, and encouraged new jobs as well. 4.    He could have told his pet EPA administrator, who recently took his orders to prevent California and 25 other states from insisting on higher standards of gasoline mileage for autos, to reverse that kowtow to Big Oil and OK the higher standards.  That would have saved oil. 5.     He could have supported a strong Congressional  bill to enact cap-and-trade limits on CO2 emissions.   That would have saved oil. Instead, he announced he would veto even the weak Lieberman-Warner bill,  thus guaranteeing its defeat by Senate Republicans  -- though even that bill would have saved some oil. But saving oil, preventing global climate crisis, and benefiting drivers or truckers is not the point. Lining the pockets and increasing the power of his pals in Big Oil is the point. What is this like? In the story of Pharaoh, over and over his actions bring disaster on the people and land of Egypt. He does not care. He has become addicted to his own power, and even the warnings of his own advisers and the wreckage of his own country do not matter.   It is true that the Drug Lords of Big Oil have turned most Americans into oiloholic addicts, just as Big Tobacco turned millions of us into nicotine addicts. But we can redeem ourselves and save our children from asthma, our food prices from disaster, our Iowa from unprecedented floods and our Georgia from unprecedented drought and our New Orleans from unprecedented hurricanes if we act. Please do two things today: 1)    Call 202/224-3121 and ask for your Senators and your member of the House of Representatives.  Ask for the energy-policy person on their staff, and then say who you are, where you're from, and why your strongest religious, spiritual, and ethical beliefs are opposed to Mr. Bush's plan. 2) Write a short letter to one of your local newspapers.   In both, make clear that for you this is an issue of justice and survival, and urge your representatives to act now to strengthen not the oil industry but the practice of energy conservation and the use of sustainable and renewable energy sources. Ask them to speak out now, denouncing the President's plan to lavish more money and power on Big Oil even before the bills formally  come before Congress. There is nothing more important to our future. Nothing. Shalom, Arthur The Shalom Center | 6711 Lincoln Drive | Philadelphia, PA  19119 www.shalomctr.org | office@shalomctr.org | 215.844.8494

Farsi, anyone?

The following message is from Yahoo Messenger for the Web. The person who left the message immediately signed out afterwards. As you can tell, it is written in Farsi, a language which I do not speak. If you click on the message, you will see it enlarged.

I was just wondering whether anyone out there has a working knowledge of Farsi and could tell me what the message is all about.

The Banality of Evil

This is a video of an interview with serial killer Paul Bernardo which took place about a year ago. The man in the centre wearing the white sweatshirt is probably the most notorious serial killer in Canadian history, but he comes across simply as a common garden-variety sleazebag. A similar observation was made after Adolf Eichmann had been captured by the Israelis. Despite all of the eye-witness testimony of all the monstrous deeds that Eichmann had done, in prison he looked more like a clerk than a mass murderer.

Wrong Number?

I sometimes get e-mails which I can't read.This is one. As far as I can figure out, this appears to be a screensaver packaged in a zip file.

 Although Yahooo mail says that the attachment is virus-free, AVG says that there may be some sort of infection there.

Natural Health Product law brings Stalin to mind

Federal legislation aimed at herbs and vitamins serious overkill

Geoff Olson, Vancouver Courier

Published: Friday, June 06, 2008

The trenches are dug, and the bugles are sounding. On one side are Canadians convinced the government is about to snipe their vitamins and herbs. On the other side are federal Health Minister Tony Clement and Health Canada bureaucrats, sharpening their talking points and unfurling a Conservative blue banner labelled "Consumer Health Safety."

But it's not a war of attrition, it's a war of nutrition, and the flashpoint is Bill C-51. This is the legislation intended to amend the Natural Health Act, which covers natural health products.

"Natural health product" (NHP) is the blanket term for organic supplements said to have medicinal benefits. This includes herbs, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, extracts, fungus, algae, essential fatty acids, and animal materials. It's a huge industry, and a big deal in places like health-conscious Vancouver.

It's not just the NHP manufacturers and retailers who have a stake in this, but the millions of Canadian consumers who swear by the products' health benefits.

Bill C-51 will purportedly protect Canadians from untested NHPs. But with no recorded deaths in Canada from NHPs, the question many Canadians are asking is, why the great urgency to fix something that isn't broken?

One of these critics is lawyer Shawn Buckley, president of the Kamloops-based Natural Health Products Protection Association, who spoke this week at St. Andrew's-Wesley United Church in Vancouver. He says he started "on the other side," representing the Canadian government against a natural health product supplier, but had a "road to Damascus" conversion after the same client asked Buckley to represent him in court.

After years of legislative muscle-flexing against NHPs under both Liberal and Conservative governments, Buckley believes the NHP industry now faces a complete "takedown" from Health Canada.

The Canadian government assumes every natural health product in Canada is dangerous, until it completes the licensing process. Almost all the products you see on health food store shelves are without licences. But Health Canada has allowed them to remain on the shelves for now, because their manufacturers have applications pending. The odds are not favourable. According to the Natural Health Products Protection Association, an estimated 60 per cent of licence applications fail.

Small players in the NHP industry don't have the finances to conduct double blind scientific studies of their own. If Health Canada says they have to remove their products from the shelves, they have to comply, and the government is under no obligation to show them documentation why. Under Bill C-51, NHP manufacturers face up to $5 million for an indictable offence and two years in prison.

The bill has other amendments that would make Joe Stalin nod in approval, Buckley insists. It eliminates the law of trespass, one of the foundations of civil law. Through its enforcement, police are allowed to venture onto property--and seize property--without a warrant.

"I was taught to hate the Communist state because where they were on property rights," says the lawyer of his Cold War youth. Now he believes Canada is picking up some nasty totalitarian habits, under the pretext of protecting Grandma from a bottle of rogue ginseng.

Health Canada critics say that the real purpose of Bill C-51 is to bring Canada into compliance with Codex Alimentarius, a United Nations initiative to globally "harmonize" food and supplement standards.

There's little doubt that there are some NHPs out there with exaggerated health claims. But you could say the same about many pharmaceutical drugs. The major difference is that legal drugs are far more likely to kill you than NHPs. According to New Zealand risk analysis researcher Ron Law, "of the more than two million visits to U.S.A. emergency departments due to poisoning, less than 10 (.000005) were related to fatalities associated with natural health products, whilst 78 per cent of the fatal poisoning cases were associated with pharmaceutical products."

NHPs aren't just safer than physician-prescribed pharmaceutical drugs, they're safer than ordinary store-bought food, says Law. Let that thought roll around in your head for a bit. You are at a greater risk of dying from a ham sandwich on a hot summer afternoon than a natural health product.

As Buckley pointed out in his talk, peanut butter is riskier than any NHP, yet the Canadian government has no "Peanut Butter Directorate" investigating candy bar makers. In terms of tilting at windmills, Tony Clement and his foot soldiers couldn't have mounted a more Quixotic campaign.

mwiseguise@yahoo.com

© Vancouver Courier 2008

Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War

(from the New York Times)

 Maria Shuluba, 53, was raped by armed men near Bukavu, Congo, in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of a rape epidemic.

by JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

Published: October 7, 2007

BUKAVU, Congo — Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, cannot bear to listen to the stories his patients tell him anymore.

The New York Times

Soldiers and militiamen have raped women around Bukavu.

Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair.

“We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo’s rape epidemic. “They are done to destroy women.”

Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of violence, and this time it seems that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen here. According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country.

“The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,” said John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. “The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling.”

The days of chaos in Congo were supposed to be over. Last year, this country of 66 million people held a historic election that cost $500 million and was intended to end Congo’s various wars and rebellions and its tradition of epically bad government.

But the elections have not unified the country or significantly strengthened the Congolese government’s hand to deal with renegade forces, many of them from outside the country. The justice system and the military still barely function, and United Nations officials say Congolese government troops are among the worst offenders when it comes to rape. Large swaths of the country, especially in the east, remain authority-free zones where civilians are at the mercy of heavily armed groups who have made warfare a livelihood and survive by raiding villages and abducting women for ransom.

According to victims, one of the newest groups to emerge is called the Rastas, a mysterious gang of dreadlocked fugitives who live deep in the forest, wear shiny tracksuits and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys and are notorious for burning babies, kidnapping women and literally chopping up anybody who gets in their way.

United Nations officials said the so-called Rastas were once part of the Hutu militias who fled Rwanda after committing genocide there in 1994, but now it seems they have split off on their own and specialize in freelance cruelty.

Honorata Barinjibanwa, an 18-year-old woman with high cheekbones and downcast eyes, said she was kidnapped from a village that the Rastas raided in April and kept as a sex slave until August. Most of that time she was tied to a tree, and she still has rope marks ringing her delicate neck. The men would untie her for a few hours each day to gang-rape her, she said.

“I’m weak, I’m angry, and I don’t know how to restart my life,” she said from Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, where she was taken after her captors freed her.

She is also pregnant.

While rape has always been a weapon of war, researchers say they fear that Congo’s problem has metastasized into a wider social phenomenon.

“It’s gone beyond the conflict,” said Alexandra Bilak, who has studied various armed groups around Bukavu, on the shores of Lake Kivu. She said that the number of women abused and even killed by their husbands seemed to be going up and that brutality toward women had become “almost normal.”

Malteser International, a European aid organization that runs health clinics in eastern Congo, estimates that it will treat 8,000 sexual violence cases this year, compared with 6,338 last year. The organization said that in one town, Shabunda, 70 percent of the women reported being sexually brutalized.

At Panzi Hospital, where Dr. Mukwege performs as many as six rape-related surgeries a day, bed after bed is filled with women lying on their backs, staring at the ceiling, with colostomy bags hanging next to them because of all the internal damage.

“I still have pain and feel chills,” said Kasindi Wabulasa, a patient who was raped in February by five men. The men held an AK-47 rifle to her husband’s chest and made him watch, telling him that if he closed his eyes, they would shoot him. When they were finished, Ms. Wabulasa said, they shot him anyway.

In almost all the reported cases, the culprits are described as young men with guns, and in the deceptively beautiful hills here, there is no shortage of them: poorly paid and often mutinous government soldiers; homegrown militias called the Mai-Mai who slick themselves with oil before marching into battle; members of paramilitary groups originally from Uganda and Rwanda who have destabilized this area over the past 10 years in a quest for gold and all the other riches that can be extracted from Congo’s exploited soil.

The attacks go on despite the presence of the largest United Nations peacekeeping force in the world, with more than 17,000 troops.

Few seem to be spared. Dr. Mukwege said his oldest patient was 75, his youngest 3.

“Some of these girls whose insides have been destroyed are so young that they don’t understand what happened to them,” Dr. Mukwege said. “They ask me if they will ever be able to have children, and it’s hard to look into their eyes.”

No one — doctors, aid workers, Congolese and Western researchers — can explain exactly why this is happening.

“That is the question,” said André Bourque, a Canadian consultant who works with aid groups in eastern Congo. “Sexual violence in Congo reaches a level never reached anywhere else. It is even worse than in Rwanda during the genocide.”

Impunity may be a contributing factor, Mr. Bourque added, saying that very few of the culprits are punished.

Many Congolese aid workers denied that the problem was cultural and insisted that the widespread rapes were not the product of something ingrained in the way men treated women in Congolese society. “If that were the case, this would have showed up long ago,” said Wilhelmine Ntakebuka, who coordinates a sexual violence program in Bukavu.

Instead, she said, the epidemic of rapes seems to have started in the mid-1990s. That coincides with the waves of Hutu militiamen who escaped into Congo’s forests after exterminating 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus during Rwanda’s genocide 13 years ago.

Mr. Holmes said that while government troops might have raped thousands of women, the most vicious attacks had been carried out by Hutu militias.

“These are people who were involved with the genocide and have been psychologically destroyed by it,” he said.

Mr. Bourque called this phenomenon “reversed values” and said it could develop in heavily traumatized areas that had been steeped in conflict for many years, like eastern Congo.

This place, one of the greenest, hilliest and most scenic slices of central Africa, continues to reverberate from the aftershocks of the genocide next door. Take the recent fighting near Bukavu between the Congolese Army and Laurent Nkunda, a dissident general who commands a formidable rebel force. Mr. Nkunda is a Congolese Tutsi who has accused the Congolese Army of supporting Hutu militias, which the army denies. Mr. Nkunda says his rebel force is simply protecting Tutsi civilians from being victimized again.

But his men may be no better.

Willermine Mulihano said she was raped twice — first by Hutu militiamen two years ago and then by Nkunda soldiers in July. Two soldiers held her legs apart, while three others took turns violating her.

“When I think about what happened,” she said, “I feel anxious and brokenhearted.”

She is also lonely. Her husband divorced her after the first rape, saying she was diseased.

In some cases, the attacks are on civilians already caught in the cross-fire between warring groups. In one village near Bukavu where 27 women were raped and 18 civilians killed in May, the attackers left behind a note in broken Swahili telling the villagers that the violence would go on as long as government troops were in the area.

The United Nations peacekeepers here seem to be stepping up efforts to protect women.

Recently, they initiated what they call “night flashes,” in which three truckloads of peacekeepers drive into the bush and keep their headlights on all night as a signal to both civilians and armed groups that the peacekeepers are there. Sometimes, when morning comes, 3,000 villagers are curled up on the ground around them.

But the problem seems bigger than the resources currently devoted to it.

Panzi Hospital has 350 beds, and though a new ward is being built specifically for rape victims, the hospital sends women back to their villages before they have fully recovered because it needs space for the never-ending stream of new arrivals.

Dr. Mukwege, 52, said he remembered the days when Bukavu was known for its stunning lake views and nearby national parks, like Kahuzi-Biega.

“There used to be a lot of gorillas in there,” he said. “But now they’ve been replaced by much more savage beasts.”

[Channel 4 News] Horror of Congo's forgotten war 2008.03.27

By Jonathan Miller:

"The war formally ended five years ago - but the fighting didn't. It just carried on, ignored by much of the world.

One shocking statistic: every single month 45,000 people are killed. The Democratic Republic of Congo remains one of the most dangerous and isolated places on earth.

The accompanying video contains photographs and film which offer a rare insight into Africa's forgotten war. They show the suffering of civilians and the use of rape as a weapon of war - against children as young as two.

Congo's recent history had offered hope: a fresh peace deal agreed in January between the Congolese government and the majority of the rebel groups operating in the eastern Kivu region, next door to Rwanda.

The aim was to end months of violence that has displaced tens of thousands of people. But many of the rebel groups who signed the deal have been blamed for the continuing atrocities.

One of the most notorious of them - the FDLR, or Interahamwe - did not participate in the act of engagement deal. The FDLR is made up of Hutus who crossed the border after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

Photographer Susan Schulman has just returned from north Kivu with still and filmed footage, along with other material from Medecins Sans Frontieres."

PayPal Fraud

I received this suspicious-looking e-mail earlier today. Why is it so suspicious, you may ask? Firstly, I don't have a PayPal account. Secondly, I don't have any credit cards. Thirdly, it is addressed to "undisclosed recipients". And finally, it was sent from a hotmail account. Teenagers have hotmail accounts. Large businesses such as PayPal don't.

So if you receive a similar-looking message, don't click on any of the links in it. You may be giving away some personal information.