Society's Child
[A] new report just out has revealed some very disturbing findings. ... A blood study that was conducted on four males ages 3 to 43 and one female age 38 in December of last year. Subra says the results of those tests have revealed elevated levels of six toxic and potentially life threatening chemicals associated with crude oil, most notably Ethylbenzene which has been linked to kidney damage and cancer. ... UL Lafayette Professor Paul Klerks is an expert in the environmental toxicology and he says the high levels of ethyl benzene found in human patients is alarming but he doesn't believe its reason to panic just yet. "This is potentially cause for concern, but it's a very small sample size of five so it's really hard to tell with just a small sample size what it means as whole." ... [Their] problems included everything from trouble breathing, and bleeding from the ears, to swelling of the limbs and blood in the stool. Some of the more unusual cases include a commercial diver who is plagued by mysterious rash and the three year son of a fisherman who is suffering from kidney stones.
Part 1:
Last month, 138,000 farmed salmon escaped from feedlots on the New Brunswick side of the Bay of Fundy, a fact that scarcely caused a ripple in the Maritime consciousness. Elsewhere - in Norway, Scotland, Chile, British Columbia - salmon farming is a highly controversial industry. Here it seems to skate along smoothly under the radar.
Salmon farming is controversial for two main reasons. First, it is a highly inefficient way to produce food. Producing feed for farmed salmon intensifies the pressure on other fisheries around the world. In effect, the process turns four kilograms of wild fish into one kilogram of industrial fish. How clever is that?
Second, salmon farms have horrible effects on the marine environment and on wild salmon. A salmon cage consists of an outer layer of netting to keep predators out, and an inner layer to keep salmon in. But parasites, bacteria, viruses and chemicals can move freely in and out of the cages - and, like all intensive industrial food production facilities, the salmon cage holds the maximum number of animals packed in together.
Afterward, the woman told detectives she killed the teens for being "mouthy."
Julie Powers Schenecker admitted the slayings after officers found her covered in blood on the back porch of her home Friday morning, police spokeswoman Laura McElroy said. Schenecker's mother had called police from Texas because she was unable to reach the 50-year-old woman, whom she said was depressed and had been complaining about her children.
Schenecker's husband, Parker Schenecker, is an Army colonel stationed at the headquarters of U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. The father had been away for several days when the killings happened, said CentCom spokesman Lt. Col. Michael Lawhorn, describing him as a career Army intelligence officer.
Carter's remarks came at Maranatha Baptist Church, where he regularly teaches a Sunday School class to visitors from across the country and globe.
"This is the most profound situation in the Middle East since I left office," Carter said Sunday to the nearly 300 people packed into the small sanctuary about a half mile from downtown Plains.
Carter spent the first 15 minutes of his 50-minute class talking about Egypt.
Carter was president from 1977-81 and brokered the historic peace agreement between Israel and Egypt in 1978. He brought Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin together for an agreement that still stands today.
Zahra Bahrami's execution Saturday brings the total number of people hanged in Iran so far this year to 66 -- on average more than two a day -- according to an AFP tally based on media reports.
"A drug trafficker named Zahra Bahrami, daughter of Ali, was hanged early on Saturday morning after she was convicted of selling and possessing drugs," the Tehran prosecutor's office said.
Dutch Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal "was profoundly shocked by the news, he called it an act committed by a barbarous regime," foreign ministry spokesman Bengt van Loosdrecht told AFP.
"The Netherlands has decided to freeze all contacts with Iran" after obtaining confirmation of Bahrami's execution from Iran's ambassador to the Netherlands Kazem Gharib Abadi, the ministry spokesman said.
"This concerns all official contacts between diplomats and civil servants," he added.
Bahrami, a 46-year-old Iranian-born naturalised Dutch citizen, was reportedly arrested in December 2009 after joining a protest against the government while visiting relatives in the Islamic republic.
Armed riot police broke up groups of young Sudanese demonstrating in central Khartoum and surrounded the entrances of four universities in the capital, firing teargas and beating students at three of them.
Some 500 young people also protested in the city of el-Obeid in North Kordofan in the west of the country.
Police beat students with batons as they chanted anti-government slogans such as "we are ready to die for Sudan" and "revolution, revolution until victory."
Groups have emerged on social networking sites calling themselves "Youth for Change" and "The Spark," since the uprisings in nearby Tunisia and close ally Egypt this month.
"Youth for Change" has attracted more than 15,000 members.
Patricia Young, 54, greedily ate the hot food - including celery soup, mashed potatoes and Brussels sprouts - in front of helpless Ivy McCluskey, 70.
The hungry pensioner went without meals and was put to bed at night with her stomach rumbling.
Mr. Issa, a California Republican and the new chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, says he wants to make sure agencies respond in a timely fashion to Freedom of Information Act requests and do not delay them out of political considerations.
But his extraordinary request worries some civil libertarians. It "just seems sort of creepy that one person in the government could track who is looking into what and what kinds of questions they are asking," said David Cuillier, a University of Arizona journalism professor and chairman of the Freedom of Information Committee at the Society of Professional Journalists. "It is an easy way to target people who he might think are up to no good."

Socialist academic Frances Fox Piven has been relentlessly targeted by Glenn Beck as a threat to the American way of life.
Frances Fox Piven is not going into hiding. Not yet.
The 78-year-old leftwing academic is the latest hate figure for Fox News host Glenn Beck and his legion of fans. While she has decided to shrug off the inevitable death threats that have followed, she is well aware of the problem. "I don't know if I am scared, but I am worried," she told the Observer as she sat in a bar on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
"At the start I thought it was funny, but now I know that is dangerous... their paranoia works better when they can imagine a devil. Now that devil is me."
For the past three weeks Beck has relentlessly targeted Piven via his television and radio shows as a threat to the American way of life, seizing on an essay that she and her late husband wrote in 1966 as a sort of blueprint for bringing down the American economy.
Called The Weight of the Poor, it advocated signing up so many poor people for welfare payments that the cost would force the government to bring in a policy of a guaranteed income. For Piven, a committed voice of the left, known in academic circles but little recognised outside them, it was just one publication in a lifetime dedicated to political activism and theorising.
The shadowy world of Britain's arms dealers has been thrust into the spotlight after the directors of two companies based in York and Kent were charged with conspiring to illegally export to the US hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition for AK-47 assault rifles in breach of an American embargo.
Court documents filed in the US claim that British businessman Gary Hyde and his associate Karl Kleber fraudulently imported more than 5,000 Chinese-produced AK-47 drum magazines into the US from the UK via Germany.
The alleged deal backfired, however, after US agents received a tip-off that the drums, each of which holds 75 rounds, had come from China, the subject of a US import ban on weapons.
The complex nature of the alleged deal, made via a multitude of companies based in several countries, provides a rare insight into the byzantine world of international arms brokers, which critics maintain is insufficiently monitored by western governments. "It's a deeply alarming case that demonstrates yet again why arms brokering, small arms and ammunition trafficking must be at the heart of efforts to secure a new global arms trade treaty," said Oliver Sprague, UK arms programme director at Amnesty International.