The US 7th Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay last Friday to Philomena Nwaokolo, a Nigerian immigrant living in Dallas who argued that she and her 3-year-old daughter would face the tortures of female genital mutilation (FGM) if they were deported.

Nwaokolo came to the US two decades ago as a legal immigrant. However, upon taking a position as a nurse's aide, she violated her visa restrictions two years later. The court's ruling, which recognizes FGM as a form of torture, marks a milestone in Nwaokolo's six-year legal effort, which included four denied motions to reopen her case.

Still, the broader impact remains to be seen, especially regarding the deportation of African immigrants by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Officials of that agency have yet to comment on the case.

A 2001 World Health Organization report estimates that 100 to 140 million women and girls have experienced FGM. The practice, which affects a least two million girls every year, is performed as a girl's rights of passage and is prevalent in over 28 African countries, as well as Syria and Saudi Arabia.

There is growing evidence that FGM is also occurring among emigrant populations living in Europe and the United States.

FGM is practiced in various forms—all severe and harmful to women’s health—including: clitoridectomy, the removal of prepuce (skin covering the clitoris) and/or the removal of the clitoris; excision, the removal of the prepuce and clitoris and/or the partial or complete removal of the labia; to infibulation, the partial or complete removal of external genitalia and stitching or narrowing of the vaginal opening.

Health risks include death from excessive bleeding, extreme pain during urination or menstruation, and infection or complications during childbirth as scar tissue may block the birth canal.

Ethiopia will host an International Conference on Female Genital Mutilation in early February. The conference—whose attendees will include UN agency representatives, the Economic Commission for Africa, the African Union, African and European dignitaries, as well as various ministries of the Ethiopian government—aims to develop an action plan.

The conference will declare its final day, February 6, the International Day for “Zero Tolerance to FGM,” reports Xinhua General News Service.

10/3/2002: Somali refugee families may be barred from immigrating to the US for performing female genital mutilation on their daughters.

A spokesman from the American embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, condemned the ritual as a crime stating “the rules of cultural sensitivity do not apply here,” and announced that any family who has mutilated their daughters in the last few months would be barred from resettling in the US, according to BBC News.

With the US government declaring female genital mutilation illegal in the US, Somali refugees have started carrying out the female circumcision rite, which typically happens when a girl reaches puberty, on girls as young as 2, according to BBC News.

Currently there are approximately 12,000 Somali families being held in camps in Kenya on their way to the US. The Somalis are members of an ethnic minority, former slaves who are refugees in Kenya because they are now victimized in their own war-ravaged country.

The US has approved the emigration en masse of the entire ethnic Bantu group, who are being held in two isolated refugee camps in the northern part of Kenya.

Aid workers at the camps there have reported incidents of mass genital mutilation. These incidents typically take place at night without any anesthetic, with the girls held down to the floor by members of their families. One aid official stated that “an aggressive public information campaign” has changed the minds of many Somalian parents.

In 2000, the World Health Organization reported that two million women and girls face genital mutilation annually. Research findings indicate between 85 and 115 million women and girls worldwide have undergone the practice.

All of these victims face possible health risks in the form of death from excessive bleeding, infection or complications during childbirth as scar tissue may block the birth canal.

Female genital mutilation continues in many countries of the world and is especially common among African tribes, who claim that it is a practice encouraged in Islam.

Some are said to view it as a mark of chastity, a rite of passage into womanhood, and a link to increased fertility. In March 2002, delegates at an international conference on women and Islam strongly condemned female genital mutilation, and stated that the practice was not mentioned in the Koran.

Two Gambian Islamic religious leaders, including the leader of the Muslim Council in Oslo and a Somalian are facing prosecution for aiding and abetting female genital mutilation (FGM) in Norway.

The religious leaders allegedly told a 20-year old Somalian girl to consent to mutilation, providing her with inaccurate information in an attempt to convince her that "the practice was neither harmful or dangerous." If convicted, the three face three to eight years imprisonment.

10/13/2000: The Norwegian governments' prosecution of these men is seen as a major step toward fighting FGM among African immigrants in Europe. Female genital mutilation is a brutal and debilitating ritual that some cultures, the majority of which are in Africa, practice.

As citizens from these nations immigrate, the practice is forced underground in their new countries or families send their daughters abroad for mutilation.

Female genital mutilation involves the painful sewing of the vagina and/or removal of the clitoris. Research findings indicate that between 85 and 115 million women and girls worldwide have undergone the practice, victims of FGM face possible health risks including death from excessive bleeding, infection or complications during childbirth, blockage of the birth canal with scar tissue and sexual dysfunction.

Mark Tuttle, President
c/o Solar Works in Michigan
P.O. Box 414
Tustin, MI 49688-0414

Phone: (616) 636-4995

http://www.glrea.org

Solar industry launches push to pass energy bill
More than 70 companies sign letter urging passage of strong renewable energy package in final bill.

The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) today began its push to get an energy bill that promotes clean solar energy signed into law before Congress adjourns next month.

The campaign, which will include CEO visits to Congress, an email and fax campaign from solar enthusiasts and workers employed by solar companies, and an informational campaign to educate energy bill Conferees about the key solar provisions, began today with delivery of a letter to bill Conferees urging aggressive efforts to expand clean energy technologies.

Top executives at more than 70 companies nationwide signed the letter.

As the nation inches toward a broader war in the Middle East, we are reminded once again that energy diversity and domestic production are essential to our national security, said Glenn Hamer, SEIA's Executive Director.

An energy bill with strong solar provisions will make us less dependent upon foreign energy sources while cleaning our air and building a 21st century high-tech industry here in the United States.

That's not a bad way for Congress to complete its session before election day, particularly since solar energy regularly polls in the stratosphere nationwide.

Key SEIA recommendations include:

* Retain the 15% residential solar energy tax credit, passed by both the House and Senate and included in the President’s budget;

* Double the business investment tax credit for solar to 20%, at least temporarily;

* Pass a Renewable Portfolio Standard that retains Senate language of double credits for distributed solar, and explicitly include solar hot water heating in any RPS;

The Renewables Portfolio Standard (RPS) is a requirement that a small but growing minimum percentage of the nation's power supply portfolio come from renewable sources like wind, solar, biomass and geothermal energy. UCS is calling for the minimum level or "standard" to be 2.5% of all electric generation by 2000, 5% by 2005, and 10% by 2010.

The RPS is flexible and uses market forces.

The RPS works by requiring all electricity providers to include a minimum percent of renewable electricity in the electric power supply portfolio they offer to their customers. Electricity providers have great flexibility in meeting this requirement. They can generate the necessary amount of renewable electricity themselves; they can purchase it from someone else; or they can buy credits from other providers who have exceeded the standard. They choose the option that is cheapest for them. Through credit trading, the RPS relies on the initiative of businesses to ensure that the standard is met at the lowest possible cost.

The RPS is necessary to help level the playing field for renewables.

The coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power industries are mature, yet continue to receive considerable government subsidies. Moreover, the market price of fossil and nuclear energy does not include the cost of the damage that they cause to the environment and human health. Conversely, the market does not give a value to the environmental and social benefits of renewables. Without the RPS or a similar mechanism, many renewables will be not be able to compete in an increasingly competitive electricity market focused on producing power at the lowest direct cost. The RPS is designed to deliver renewables that are most ready for the market. Additional policies are needed to support emerging renewable technologies, like photovoltaics, that have enormous potential to become commercially competitive through targeted investment.

The RPS is good for the environment.

Fossil fuels cause enormous damage to the environment, including smog, acid rain, and mercury poisoning in lakes. Scientists also agree overwhelmingly that carbon emissions from fossil fuels are causing the climate to change and believe that serious damage to the earth's environment will result, with large consequences for humanity. Renewable energy is clean energy.

The RPS is good for consumers and the economy.

Smart investors typically acquire a portfolio of stocks and bonds to reduce risk. Including renewables in America's power supply portfolio would do the same by protecting consumers from fossil fuel price shocks and supply shortages. A properly designed RPS will also establish a viable market for the long-term development of America's renewable energy industries, creating jobs at home and export opportunities abroad.

The RPS is under consideration around the country.

In the last session of Congress, the RPS concept was included in six bills on electricity restructuring, while the current session has RPS proposals from Sen. Jeffords, Rep. Kucinich, Rep. Pallone and the Clinton Administration. The RPS has been signed into law in Texas, Connecticut, Maine, Arizona, Massachusetts, Nevada, and New Jersey. Bills with the RPS are pending in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, New Mexico, Vermont, and Wisconsin.

The plight of animals raised for food is gaining more and more attention in the United States, and with good reason. More than 99 percent of the animals killed in the United States are those we eat, yet they have traditionally been the most ignored.

On November 5, 2002, Florida voters made history by passing the first-ever law protecting animals on U.S. factory farms. Prior to this landmark ballot initiative, which outlaws the cruel confinement of pregnant pigs in gestation crates so narrow they can't even turn around, not a single U.S law existed which offered farmed animals any degree of protection from standard yet abusive industry practices.

Indeed, there are still no laws regulating the treatment of hens who lay eggs, despite the fact that the conditions in which they must live are arguably more intensive than any other in animal agribusiness.
The overwhelming majority of eggs eaten in the United States come from hens who never see sunlight, never flap their wings, and never touch the earth.

An average of eight and sometimes more hens are kept in battery cages, wire cages the size of filing drawers, stacked in tiers and running down aisles the length of one or two football fields.

Compassion Over Killing’s latest investigation, like other recent egg farm investigations, is intended to expose the cruelty inherent in commercial egg production and to ask consumers to take a stand against such abuse by refusing to buy eggs.

solar hot water heating systems (that reward will cover 50% of a project but must cost less than $4,000)

solar electric systems (10 to 30% of project cost - depending on anticipated kWh production and system cost)

wind turbines (20 to 50% of projects costs - depending on kW production and system cost)
mini hydro electric systems (10 to 50% of project cost - again depending on kWh production and system cost)

See the cash back applications attached or on the webpage. The cash back reward is not a loan!

Homes typically use electricity and an heating fuel (natural gas, propane, fuel oil and sometime (huge amounts of) electricity). Heating fuel is used not only in the furnace but also hot water heater and often stove and dryer.

It is much easier to meet your electric load with renewables than your heating load. Unless you are willing to use wood.

A part of any home renewable energy strategy begins with maximizing energy efficiency (of the home's appliances and the home's thermal shell) and minimizing the home's size. For new homes a renewable strategy can include passive solar heating and cool (basically using natural means to move air through a home and shading a home).

Many people would argue that geothermal heat pumps are not renewable (as the vast majority run off of coal and nuclear fired power plants). In fact for a home they generate more pollutants than an natural gas heated home. Thus the program's the renewable energy program does not support geothermal. For the report see: http://www.ecw.org/ecw/projectdetail.jsp?projectId=81

Without natural gas there is no easy way to heat homes, nor is there a good renewable option. The same goes for air conditioning. Unless you are willing to put enough solar or wind energy on your home to meet the needs of your geothermal heat pump. Which would get very costly.

I see the heating of home in the northern tier states as a major problem in the next few decades. What we can do now is reduce size, improve the home's thermal efficiency and include passive solar and cooling attributes.

One more comment. Although we offer them, I personally do not like large incentives. First they create an artificial market. Second when they go away (which in our political climate is common) the market disappears - and no one is left to service or maintain the existing systems. As a result renewable energy gets a bad reputation.

be well,

Niels Wolter

From: "Virginia Rose"
To:
Subject: Emailing: page.htm
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 12:17:50 -0600
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1106

Student Lawyer, December 1994 In their crusade against cruelty, students at Rutgers Animal Rights Law Clinic break ground in a new field ---by Holly Metz

Maureen Hall, a 1994-graduate of Rutgers Law School in Newark, New Jersey, says she really "didn't have a clear sense of all the issues involved with animal rights" when she signed up for the Rutgers Animal Rights Law Clinic.

The four-year-old clinic is the first of its kind at an American law school and part of a larger Animal Rights Law Center that includes education of the general public in its mission.

The clinic provides hands-on litigation experience to about a dozen second- and third-year law students each semester, through cases involving animals and their advocates.

Though she'd always liked animals, Hall says the clinic's strongest draw had been the prospect of working with its founder and co-director, law professor Gary Francione.

Francione, she remarks, "is pretty well known at Rutgers as one of the top lawyers, with respect to litigating and writing."

Most Rutgers students know that the 40-year-old professor's resume includes a clerkship for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and a stint practicing law at New York's Cravath, Swaine & Moore.

Some know, too, that Francione left the firm in 1984 to become an academic--first at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and now at Rutgers--and to devote himself fully to pro bono animal rights cases.

"I couldn't do animal rights stuff there," he says of his decision to leave Cravath. "They represented just about every drug company incompany in New Jersey." The threat of a conflict was always present, he says, considering the industry's involvement in animal experimentation.

According to Francione, he'd always wanted to get some law firm experience and then leave to do public interest work--he jokes that "like many highly competitive white males I had my life sketched out for me by the time I was four"--but the area of public interest law he would engage in was decided by a chance occurrence in 1979: A friend, a fellow University of Virginia law student, took him to a veal slaughterhouse.

The visit, he recalls, was precipitated by an argument they'd had over the effectiveness of federal legislation mandating humane animal slaughter.

Francione admits with some embarrassment that he'd insisted that he "had no reason to believe anything was wrong."

But when his friend arranged for them to go to a nearby Richmond abattoir, he saw procedures, he says, that "totally freaked me out." Lame veal calves were dragged across the slaughterhouse floor and stunned with probes to temporarily "keep them quiet while they were shackled and hoisted," he recalls.

And when the time came to butcher them, "about 50 percent" of the animals he watched were still conscious "when they were ripping into them with the knives." Francione immediately "went home and threw out every piece of meat in the house," he says, and he hasn't eaten meat since.

"From the time I visited the slaughterhouse to the time I finished my clerkship with Justice O'Connor," he says, he realized "that the abuse of animals is just a symptom of a larger problem: the acceptance of violence as a way of solving disputes.

That convinced me that the animal rights movement was the place to be, because it was the lowest common denominator." After all, he argues, "How could you be a vegetarian and be in favor of animal rights and be a sexist, and a racist, and a homophobe, or be in favor of wars or capital punishment?"

In the years since he left Wall Street, Francione has gained a reputation as a vigorous and resourceful litigator of animal rights cases, including as general counsel to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), a well-publicized legal challenge to federally-funded head-injury experiments on monkeys.

Since founding the center, however, Francione has become a free agent, creating a hub for national animal rights litigation, advocacy, and education independent of animal rights organizations and their politics.

"I wanted to bring cases irrespective of whether there was someone to pay the fees, and irrespective of how upset it was going to make people to bring those cases--in terms of the institutional restraints," he says.

The clinic does not charge for professional services, and only a few thousand dollars of its $125,000 annual budget comes from animal rights groups such as PETA or the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, says Francione. Private donations make up the balance.

Despite its modest budget, the clinic has routinely faced down opponents with far greater resources and personnel, including high-powered firms for colleges involved in vivisection and government lawyers of all stripes.

This past year, clinic cases included an effort to stop the Bureau of Land Management's removal of federally-protected wild horses from public land; the defense of animal activists' right to criticize perceived animal cruelty; and the filing of an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the City of Hialeah's ordinances prohibiting animal sacrifice within its borders.

Though the Court ultimately struck down the Hialeah ordinances this past June, citing an unconstitutional targeting of religion, the animal advocates in Newark have rebounded. Writing in the clinic's annual report, Francione notes that the ruling did not prohibit state regulation of ritual sacrifice, "as long as that regulation was pursuant to a neutral, generally-applicable statute, such as the state anticruelty statutes [municipalities] had the power to enforce."

Clinic students are now drafting an educational pamphlet for distribution to interested parties, advising on statutes that will pass constitutional muster.

Francione is the first to admit that the students face a tough, though invigorating, battle to bring animal issues before the bench. The rights of animals cannot be vindicated in court, he says bluntly, because "animals have no rights."

Under the law, "animals are no different from light bulbs," he says. "They're property." Understanding this, he works with students to "try to find loopholes in the system. A lot of what we do is try to figure out legal theories to use.

We have to figure out: How do we deal with particular issues? Is there a cause of action?" To Francione, "one of the tests of whether you really understand the law is whether you can get into an area like animal rights, which is sort of an amalgam of constitutional law, administrative law, tort law, criminal law, and everything else, and make some sense out of it all."

Co-directing the center with Francione and serving as assistant clinical director is English-born attorney Anna Charlton. Before joining the center, she clerked for federal circuit judge Leonard Garth and practiced law at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett in New York. Now she administers the day-to-day operation of the clinic, helping students' projects take shape, and conducting a weekly seminar with Francione on philosophical underpinnings of the animal rights movement and on the development of innovative legal approaches to the plight of animals.

Clinic students' involvement in a project is "limited only by the bar association rules of the state in which we're doing it," says Francione. Students do it all--from client intake to interviewing; from answering phones to assessing cases for winnability; from research to drafting complaints, memoranda, and interrogatory outlines; from attending depositions with their supervisor to negotiation on behalf of a client.

Clinic enrollees earn six academic credits per semester, with a maximum potential of 28 credits.

In her first semester at the clinic, Maureen Hall worked on four different projects. One case she helped to prepare was a First Amendment challenge to New Jersey's 1993 hunter harassment statute prohibiting "interference" with hunting.

The statute, versions of which have been passed in 45 other states, is not content-neutral, says Hall. It basically "makes it illegal for animal activists to express their disdain for hunting [anywhere] near a hunter."

She also wrote memos to enjoin pigeon shoots in Pennsylvania, one of several states that permits gun clubs to shoot live pigeons, often leaving wounded birds to die.

That's when Hall discovered how the clinic was helping her to develop lawyering skills. "You have to cull your arguments from very little law," she notes, adding that local humane society cruelty officers have the power to enforce the state's anticruelty statute, but have been unwilling to exercise that authority.

Because of the dearth of precedent, she says, students are compelled to work harder on developing arguments and advocacy.

He is not doing this because he has been bought and paid for by big business and the insurance companies.

No, no, no! He is doing this because, wounded people such as the woman who had both her breasts removed due to a mistaken diagnosis, should be prevented from receiving money damages over $250,000.00. (40% of which goes to the lawyer; after legal costs and fees are paid off the top of the award; always a significant amount due to the tremendous costs associated with our Injustice system - attorneys pay malpractice insurance also you know - and without counting the take home pay of the attorney, the cost of operating a small firm is well over six thousand a month)

Then everyone will be able to afford insurance. Because if we tell victims to buck up and get over it rather than award them enough money to have a good life with what is left of it, the insurance companies will lower their rates for medical malpractice insurance and all the other insurances.

The doctors will pay so much less they will be able to stay in high risk fields.

And those parents of crippled and deformed babies can just shut up and get over it.No one can insure a good outcome every time. You must take your chances despite all those premiums you paid. They totaled about $250,000.00 over your lifetime? Well, then it all worked out didn't it.

We have places to put those kids and the parents can work two jobs to pay for it. Especially those mothers who are divorced because the kid is too much of a burden. Their child support is cut off when the child is 18, even if the child is mentally defective or crippled but hey, the kid gets $500 a month SSI. It is not the mother who has to pay, the social security paying taxpayers are responsible for his room and board in "one of those places".

Better the taxpayers, than Fidelity Mutual, or Fidelity Trust or Maryland Casualty, or Prudential, or Dewy, Cheetum and Howe, who, once off the hook for all those large settlements, will immediately lower their premiums so everyone will be able to afford medical insurance.

Will the first person who receives lower insurance rates please comment below?

Maybe I should offer an award.

We are frequently consulted by animal advocates who wish to protest a hunt or seek to dissuade hunters. We have advised many organizations and individuals on these matters.

The clear need for materials on this subject prompted us to produce the monograph, Demonstrating and Civil Disobedience: A Legal Guide for Activists that is available on this Web site.

We have also filed a challenge to a "hunter harassment" statute. Forty-eight states now have statutes that prohibit a person from seeking to interfere with hunting, even if such interference merely consists of approaching someone who is hunting or preparing to hunt and speaking with the hunter in order to persuade the hunter to cease killing animals.

Binkowski v. State of New Jersey
Complaint
Table of Contents Brief
Brief

We became involved in this area because we consider such statutes to be a clear violation of the rights of free speech and assembly guaranteed by the United States Constitution.

For those who oppose hunting on spiritual grounds, the statutes also represent an impermissible burden on their free exercise of religion. Similar provisions of state constitutions are also violated by these statutes.

The Complaint attached challenging the hunter harassment statute concerns federal law and New Jersey law.

The laws of other jurisdictions may be substituted in challenges to the hunter harassment statutes of other states.

14th Annual Upper Midwest Organic Farming Conference February 27th- March 1st 2003
MOSES will host the fourteenth annual Upper Midwest Organic Farming Conference at the LaCrosse Center in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, February 27th through March 1st, 2003. The UMOFC will celebrate and reinvigorate the spirit of agriculture in the Midwest.

The UMOFC is a resource and education extravaganza. Over 45 workshops from farmers and other experts will provide the knowledge you need to succeed in organic agriculture.

The largest Organic Agriculture Trade Show in the Midwest- with more than 1230 businesses and organizations- will help you develop your organic vision and make it into a reality.

The delicious organic food and great company will inspire and enrich your farm, business and dreams.

Help us celebrate this year's theme, "Keeping the Circle Unbroken," which reflects the connection between all things in life and agriculture. From the soil nutrient cycle to the cycle of the seasons, from the fields to the city streets, we are all connected in this "circle of life."

All of the food and drink at the conference is organic, and locally produced whenever possible.

Registration is $149 for Thursday evening, all day Friday and Saturday, including breakfast, lunches and breaks.

(09/14/2002) Bowing to pressure from local activists, Tom Presny, manager of the Janesville City Leisure Services Division, officially called off Janesville's first Canada goose hunt in city parks.

The hunt was scheduled to run until Sunday night September 15, but was called off two days early when activists confronted parks employees, police and state Department of Natural Resources staff at an attempted kill at dawn on Saturday.

Immediately prior to the hunt being suspended, two activists were charged with trespass for entering a closed city golf course to scare geese away from hunters.

Other police interactions during the short campaign included charges of illegal possession of fireworks and two arrests, one of the thirteen year-old daughter of an activist who was handcuffed and has since been threatened with disciplinary action at her high school.

Local grass roots activists had been spending up to 14 hours a day in the city parks attempting all legal means to keep geese and hunters a safe distance from each other.

The Janesville goose activists were not your typical protesters marching with signs at city hall. Instead these activists took the parks armed with pots and pans to protect their resident wildlife from an ill-intentioned, poorly managed, unsafe shooting gallery within city limits.

The city's own expert review from Leisure ServicesServices advised the city:

"Because of safety concerns and public relations issues, the City Administration does not recommend a goose hunt at this time. In addition, we believe the hunt will not significantly reduce our goose population."

Despite their own strong recommendations to the contrary, misguided city councilors voted to allow the hunt to proceed. Within days, Janesville City Hall was inundated by hundreds of emails, letters and telephone calls from Wisconsin and around the world demanding an end to the city park goose slaughter.

During the ill-advised hunt, City of Janesville officials intentionally violated several State and federal statutes, including allowing hunting over a baited area.

As well, there is considerable concern about the selection process for the hunters which was conducted in total secrecy. Accusations have been made that the process may have arbitrarily excluded racial minorities or those that the city believed opposed the hunt.

Local activist Mary Ann Svoem, spokesperson for activists, was pleased that Janesville called off the hunt, but disappointed that it went on as long as it did. "I still feel badly about the 14 or 15 geese who were killed," said Sveom, "There is no justification for this wanton act of cruelty."

National reactions to this goose hunt were swift and far reaching. Groups such as The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the Fund for Animals and People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) were quick to alert their Wisconsin memberships about this travesty to wildlife.

As well, some of the national groups have pledged continued support should Janesville decide to try another city-sponsored goose slaughter.

The National Coalition to Protect Canada Geese has requested copies of the council's records, including hunter identities and information about the hunter selection process. The city has already determined that the hunters' applications are public record.

Coalition Coordinator Ann Frisch said, "Park hunting is a last ditch attempt to bolster game agencies' sagging revenues. As hunting popularity declines, game agencies are desperate to find new hunters and maintain their revenue. Parks are intended as a refuge for both people and wildlife. To hold a municipal-sponsored Canada goose hunt in city parks is a travesty."

Janesville City Council refused an offer of a donated goose poop sweeping machine, valued at approximately $15,000, in exchange for calling off the hunt. The offer, tendered by west-coast activist Bob Chorush, was a collaborative effort of several individuals and organizations opposed to the goose kill.

"The donation of the poop sweeper for the City of Janesville was contingent on an immediate halt to the hunt." Said Chorush. "At this point, we have decided to use the $15,000 pledged for the poop sweeper to mount a campaign against any further goose kills in Janesville."

Chorush conceded that the donors might still consider presenting the city with the machine but that such a gift would involve a public long-term moratorium on urban goose killing in the city.

Janesville activists intend to plead not guilty to any charges should the Janesville Police decide to pursue them.

Police refused to file charges early on in the hunt when a city-authorized hunter illegally disposed of eight geese in a garbage can by a protester's place of business in order to intimidate her, despite the fact that the hunter admitted his intent to the police.

(10/18/2002) In a program believed unique to Wisconsin, bear hunters receive financial compensation from the Endangered Resources Bureau of the Department of Natural Resources for the loss of hound dogs due to wolf predation while the dogs are hunting bears.

Last year, such cases outnumbered livestock depredation incidents.

Over 40,000 Wisconsin citizens purchase the Endangered Resources license plate featuring the timber wolf and many give annually to the state income tax checkoff designated to help protect endangered species.

BAGUIO CITY (Philippines)

More than a hundred people will go hungry this Christmas, and it serves them right. The Philippine Star reports that their intended Christmas meals were live dogs.

Police in Baguio intercepted three vans en route to the illegal slaughterhouse on Saturday, Dec. 21. Inside the vans they found 175 caged and muzzled dogs, almost half of which had died in transit. But miraculously, 91 survived and were rescued by the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG).

The regional chief of the CIDG, Superintendent Generoso Bonifacio, reported that the suspects, six men and one woman, were trying to supply dog meat to illegal Baguio slaughterhouses in time for the Christmas holidays.

Supt. Bonifacio expressed his personal outrage.....more plus pictures

MELBOURNE, Victoria (Australia) — If you think all the people in your corner of the globe are too civilized to eat dogs, you might get a shock out of this one.

Victoria, home of the world-famous Melbourne City Opera (see "Opera-Singing Dog") and some of the finest wines in the South Pacific (see "Booze Hounds - New Zealand"), is scrambling this month to come up with legislation that will ban the human consumption of dogs.

"We, like most Victorians, view the practice as abhorrent," says Agriculture Minister Keith Hamilton, adding that the Victorian government wants to stop people from engaging in the practice of eating dogs and cats.

The issue surfaced last week after the nearly-tragic story of "Occy" was published in the Moonee Valley Community News. Occy, a 10-week-old Staffordshire mix, was seen being held in a plastic bag by a man at a Niddrie shopping strip. The unidentified man, said to be of foreign appearance, pointed to the puppy and suggestively brought his hand to his mouth several times.

Bystander Rebecca Silva came to the rescue and snatched Occy away. Several other shoppers also confronted the man who allegedly demanded money for the dog.

Occy was returned to the home of Erin Marquis and Shannon Richter (pictured above). It is not known whether the pup had escaped his backyard or whether somebody had stolen him.

Ms. Marquis told reporters she could not believe someone was planning to eat her dog. "People in Australia go and get a pie, not a dog," she said.

At the moment, it is not illegal for people to eat dogs, cats or horses in Australia. However, there are existing laws that prevent the slaughter and sale or inhumane treatment of companion animals (dogs, cats and horses).

RSPCA president Hugh Wirth says it's about time the government took the subject seriously. Although the RSPCA has struggled for years to get a total ban imposed, Dr. Wirth says he has been repeatedly told by ministers and government advisers that they could not act for fear of offending minority groups, who might enjoy the occasional dog or cat.4

But Mr. Wirth insists: "The dog was the first animal domesticated by humans and has a very special relationship with us because of that, a place unequalled by any other animal."

Hi, Thank you for alerting me to this information. I have been monitoring The Sportsmen's Alliance and other hunting groups on the internet and we believe they are intensifying a last-ditch effort to promote their detrimental agenda by grouping terrorists and animal rights activists in the same category, which many legitimate hunters know that animal rights activists are helping animals not terrorizing people. It seems only when problems start occurring with hunting such as Chronic Wasting Disease affecting Deer and Elk, people being mistaken for wildlife and being shot and/or killed by hunters, and the encroachment of hunting clubs, these pro-hunting organizations jump on the bandwagon and start targeting the people who are known for establishing No-kill domestic animal shelters, domestic and wildlife animal rescues, spay and neuter programs, legislation to promote humane slaughter, etc,.

And by labeling animal rights activists as,"terrorists", this is a very weak manipulation of the facts concerning animal welfare, of which many hunters do not support. One lady that lives in Monroe, La. I will do a story on in the next Messenger told me, "she came home one evening last year to find Deer strewn all across her property shot and killed, completely intact, just used for target practice, she feels." This was during hunting "season", why do hunters commit these acts? These three males, hunters, were later apprehended and charged. Thomas Dillon, the hunter that got drunk, went into the wilderness areas and killed five men now serving a life sentence, "used to target practice up to 1000 rounds of ammunition". Also, a statement by another hunter that hunted with Thomas Dillon on occasion,"he seemed to enjoy killing." www.crimelibrary.com - Thomas Dillon - SEARCH.

In Louisiana crime from hunting club members has risen, hunters actually shoot each other arguing over a Deer stand. Who are the terrorists now? Animal Rights Activists do not shoot each other, at least the ones I have come to know. Animal Rights Activists do not accept violence towards any living creature. A quote from Laura A. Moretti, "We have lost our bond with nature, with the animals who once captivated and inspired us. Today, they are Whoppers, and suede, garment trim and gelatin." September/October 1998 The Animals' Agenda, page 14, article: "No Apology". www.animalsagenda.org

Are hunters committed to animal and human rights? Definitely not the ones we have witnessed shooting over our heads and property intentionally, from hunting clubs I would like to add!

We know as well as other Non-Hunting citizens have experienced, that being victimized by hunters stray bullets, hunting club members malevolence, and overall hunters denying our Right to Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness"is not supposed to be denied to the American people.

I know a former Vietnam veteran that is an Animal Rights Activist, he would never think of taking an animals life and definitely not a humans life, he has seen how war and guns destroyed animals overseas, it is a memory he lives with everyday. However, hunters have no conscience or they would not promote their war on wildlife and now hunters have targeted innocent people that support life instead of death towards all animals. Sure, there are Animal Rights Organizations that destroy buildings, it's property, not something that's alive. Buildings can and will always be replaced, no animals are harmed or killed, the animals are rescued to live on.

The ALF and ELF have their reasons to expose the atrocities of animal cruelty, maybe some of these ALF and ELF members have seen the worst that has happened to animals and know nothing is being accomplished from the governments' standpoint to stop the cruelty to the fur bearing animals, the wildlife that is shot with arrows being left to die slowly and in excruciating pain in the woods of gangrene poisoning, the shock of hearing a high powered rifle at close range forces you to stop breathing, your heart races, you break out into a cold sweat,(even though the temperature is 55 degrees), and the birds stop singing for what seems like hours is only minutes.

The war is in this country, and it is directed towards wildlife and "anyone" who attempts to stand in the way of hunters monetary rewards from the hunting industry. The reason for all of the recent hunting promotions? Money, it seems everything that is connected with hunting of wildlife, either kills someone or something else. Alcohol for example, Budweiser, owned by Busch, promotes,"Big Buck Contests"(promotes killing the Deer with the largest antler); alcohol also kills many people on our highways. Simmons sporting goods in Bastrop, Louisiana promotes,"Big Buck Contests" within their stores. It seems alcohol and guns go together along with the KKK.

The hunters are the real hate mongers that display the rebel flag on one side of their rear window of their 4wd jacked up pickups with oversize tires. While on the other side of the same rear window , a sticker of a Deers' head, outline and usually other hunting promotional stickers and I promise you will never see these vehicles without the NRA sticker. So now combining all of these stickers, rebel flag(Klan associated), NRA, the Deers' head, and Budweiser stickers. It just looks like the FBI would target these individuals for promoting hate and domestic terrorism. When the members of the hunting club shot our vehicle and we reported the incident, this area was like a hornets nest, they followed us, shot the road sign that directed people to the public park with 32 bullet holes, oh they were angry, not to mention the removal of ALL of their rebel flag bumper tag plates on the front of their pickup trucks. Underground maybe? The Klan and hunting, what a combination.

Human beings, family members, and animal companion friends, that are "accidentally" shot and/or killed by overzealous trigger-happy hunters cannot be replaced.

If the hunters had never shot at my family, threatened, and harassed us for the past ten+ years, maybe we wouldn't be against hunting and it's lack of respect for living creatures. However, the hunters committed their crimes against us, their acts forced us to the other side of the humanitarian fence.

The Non-Hunters' Rights Coalition would love to debate these hunting organizations along with their incomplete and sheltered agendas', when and where? The U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance is made up of Theodore Nugent wanna be's, of which are usually outcasts of society that have been brought up in a world that justifies killing. The world watched Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson after these two just recently and horribly massacred four students and their teacher in Jonesboro, Arkansas, this memory, unfortunately will live with many of caring human beings. Learning later that Andrew had been taught to hunt wildlife at a very young age, by his Arkansas Wildlife & Fisheries Warden Grandfather, hunters dismiss this incident as,"bad upbringing." What are we to really being forced to believe by the hunting organizations, that killing of wildlife and sometimes "accidentally" people is justified? Again, thank you Sally, thank you for allowing me to express my beliefs on this issue. We are thinking of posting a petition to expose the truth about hunting and to counteract their agenda. Bye for now.

Sincerely,
Rex Stuart
President
The Non-Hunters' Rights Coalition

January 10, 2003 -- THE U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance is preparing to launch two nationwide legislative campaigns that may prove to be the largest steps yet taken to bring about the ultimate defeat of the animal rights movement.

The Alliance will work on two fronts to defeat the anti's. First, it will work with key legislators to introduce model bills to help states prosecute animal rights terrorists and organizations. The Alliance will also campaign for model legislation that will outlaw unproven birth control methods for wildlife.

The U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance prepared The Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act, draft legislation to combat animal rights terrorism, and is promoting the bill to legislators in all 50 states.

The model bill officially recognizes animal and eco-terrorism as a form of domestic terrorism; increases penalties for persons participating in politically motivated acts of animal or eco-terrorism and creates specific penalties for those who encourage, assist or finance these acts of terrorism.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a bipartisan membership association for conservative state lawmakers, has agreed to review the bill for endorsement. The draft legislation was recently presented before ALEC's Criminal Justice Task Force and the Homeland Security Working Group.

The Alliance is working with key legislators in Mississippi, New York, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin to have the bill introduced in 2003. The Alliance will initiate a campaign to rally the support of sportsmen and other groups that are affected by animal rights terrorism to back the legislation.

Anti-hunters continue to pressure local lawmakers to permit birth control as a wildlife management tool. The U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance is leading the fight against the anti-hunting threat.

None of the drugs used in birth control projects on wildlife is approved for human consumption by the FDA or the USDA, despite the fact that venison is the most popular game food.

Whether the drugs are safe for the deer or other wildlife is another concern. Research by Rutgers University and other institutions shows that birth control methods are not effective on free-ranging animals and could be detrimental to wildlife.

Over the next year, Alliance will work with state wildlife agencies, key legislators and professional lobbyists to introduce model legislation that requires these health concerns be addressed before permits for future projects can be issued.

-----Original Message-----
From: Virginia Rose [mailto:raylaw@greenconsciousness.org]
Sent: Friday, November 01, 2002 9:09 AM
To: assignment@wisctv.com
Subject: CWD Expenditures

Does anyone know exactly how much state and federal money including sharp
shooters, conferences, travel and extra personnel has been spent on the
DNR's CWD "solution" of eradication?

I cannot understand why the state wild animal/canned hunt farms have not
been outlawed.

I believe you should get the total amount of funds spent, both state and
federal, and show how the funds are spent in detail, for instance:

Of state funds, we have spent about 10 million so far-where did it go? In
the category sharp shooter---you should find out who the sharp shooters are/
where they were trained or certified/ what they are paid. The DNR say it is
their own personnel - so what jobs are NOT getting done while their
personnel are out sharp shooting. Are there more "hidden" costs like this?

Do this in every budget category for state and federal money. Have a series
on it.

What are the taxpayers buying into with the hysteria whipped up for CWD by
the DNR? How many meetings over the state are we paying for? Now they are
considering paying bounties. Shooting from airplanes. Oh what fun for the
boys.

Is the hunting lobby so powerful in Wisconsin that the amount of money they
can get is more than the old, the sick. the poor, the children and the
environment? Is it limitless?

The Journal Sentinel reported on the 31st that the blood and body fluids at
the DNR collection sites is so thick that even the hunters are disgusted and
fear our ground water is being contaminated by the run off. Another hidden
cost that we will have to pay for later.

It seems to me, that the boys at the DNR are having an exciting good time
away from their boring regular routine but their actions are ridiculous in
terms of actually eradicating the disease. They turned this state into a
huge butcher shop and taxpayers are the chumps.

When I was a young boy, one of my great joys was playing in the creek and woods behind our house. It was an area full of wonders - with the salamanders and polywogs hiding in the leaves and rocks in the creek, terrapins and garter snakes in the pine woods. I still like to go to the creek in the woods, but I no longer find these creatures who were there in my youth.

What has happened to them? Mostly, they have disappered due to pesticide runoff from the yards in our neighborhood.

Amphibians are easily killed by the chemicals used to kill grubs in grass, by the herbicides used to prevent anything but grass from growing in the lawns.

to anyone reading...if you are not part of the solution, YOU are the problem as well!

In the wake of Nigeria's execution of nine environmental activists, including Nobel Prize winner and leader of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), Ken Saro-Wiwa, evidence has indicated that Shell has fomented civil unrest in Nigeria, contributed to unfair trials and failed to use its leverage to prevent the unjustified executions. The executed activists were involved in massive protests against Royal Dutch/Shell Group because of the environmental devastation it has caused--particularly in Southern Nigeria's Ogoniland.

Since the executions, Shell has also managed to keep the United States media from informing the public of its actions.

Nigeria's government, under the dictatorship of General Sani Abacha, derives 90 percent of its foreign revenue from oil exports. The United States, home of Royal Dutch's subsidiary Shell Oil Company, located in Houston, Texas, imports almost 50 percent of Nigeria's annual oil production.

In October 1990, Nigerian villagers occupied part of a Shell facility demanding compensation for the farm lands which had been destroyed by Shell. A division manager at Shell Petroleum Development Company called the Nigerian military for help. The military forces then fired on the villagers killing some 80 people and destroying or badly damaging 495 homes. A Nigerian judicial inquiry later concluded that the protest had been peaceful. The MOSOP was formed after the massacre to continue protests against Shell. And while Shell has denied having anything to do with the recent executions, Dr. Owens Wiwa, Ken Saro-Wiwa's brother, reported that on three occasions Brian Anderson, the managing director of Shell Petroleum Development Co. in Nigeria, offered to make a deal with Wiwa: Shell would try to prevent the executions if the activists would call off their protests. Wiwa refused, and Shell did not intervene.

After international pleas for Shell's intervention, Shell claimed that it was not--and would not--become involved in Nigeria's political affairs. Internal documents uncovered by journalists and human rights groups contradict this claim. According to a report by Andy Rowell in the Village Voice (11/21/95), there is evidence that Shell has been bankrolling Nigerian military action against protesters and that two key prosecution witnesses admitted in sworn affidavits that they were offered bribes by Shell to unjustly incriminate Saro-Wiwa in his trial.

In response to these allegations, Shell has mounted an international media campaign to combat negative publicity. Amnesty International USA said the Houston Chronicle refused to run an ad which questioned Shell's stance on human rights violations in Nigeria and that three billboard companies, including Gannett Outdoor Co. Inc., also declined to sell space to the human rights organization.

at Huntingdon Life Science. 16 Sep 2002 19:19


As I understand it Shell DOES directly fund experiments at Huntingdon.
Should Shell publicly announce that they are no longer willing to involve themselves with the extremely dangerous laboratory practices that Vivisection represents they would become as Pioneers.
Vivisection is a crippled and dying science and Shell need to make a choice as to whether it will stand apart from it or be condemned alongside

Feminism and the Animal Rights Movement

...............The need for alliances, and the great difficulty in achieving them, is evident in the attempts to build bridges between the feminist and animal rights communities.

As spelled out by Carol Adams and other ecofeminists, the patriarchal ideologies of Western society reduce women to a subhuman status. Men have depicted women as closer to animals than to humans, as humans have rational capacities that allegedly lacking in women and animals.

Throughout our social landscape, one finds advertising images that link women's bodies to animal bodies, equating both as meat to be consumed by men. Women and animals are among the most defenseless members of society and both are targets of male violence.

Meat eating and hunting are bound up with ancient patriarchal values and institutions, and Adams argues that feminists who wish to be consistently anti-patriarchal should adopt a vegetarian lifestyle. Ecofeminists advance an ethics of care that promotes holism, connectedness, and respect for animals and the earth.

Thus, there appears to be a natural affinity between core concerns of feminism and animal rights, as both have a common enemy in patriarchy. But the reality of forging alliances has often proved difficult.

Feminists have complained, rightly, that while a disproportionate number of people in the animal rights community are women, the leaders overwhelmingly are men.

For many feminists, the existence of sexist norms within the animal rights community is most obvious in the case of PETA, the world's largest animal rights organization that is infamous for featuring naked or scantily clad women in their demonstrations and advertisements, thereby reproducing society's dominant images of women as sex objects rather than human subjects.

PETA unapologetically defends this tactic as necessary to gain media attention for their education campaigns that otherwise would be ignored, but many feminists feel that PETA is sending out a mixed message that denounces one form of exploitation while endorsing another.

Beyond Identity Politics

Some of these feminists respond by leaving the animal rights movement altogether and many animal rights activists wish them fond farewell for what they view to be divisive concerns. This truly is unfortunate.

For the last few decades, social movements have taken the form of identity politics that are highly Balkanized, with each group pursuing its own agenda relating to its specific form of identity (black, brown, female, environmental, gay, and so on).

This development perhaps was necessary for various cultures and groups to find their own histories and voices, but the fragmentary politics of identity now needs to be replaced with a politics of alliance where each group not only recognizes its own particular mode of oppression and champions its distinct identities and interests, but also grasps its theoretical and political relations to other groups and works in a strategic unity against common forces of oppression such as capitalism.

There are signs that such a movement is emerging. Many commentators characterize the 1999 Battle of Seattle as a turning point in that a rich diversity of groups came together to challenge a common enemy -- global capitalism and the World Trade Organization.

Dozens of coalitions worked harmoniously in a united front of justice for all, as diverse groups such as teamsters (labor) and turtles (environmental and animal groups) stood together. On numerous occasions since then, activists have gathered around the world in similar coalitions contesting the injustices of global capitalism.

As capitalism globalizes and unites various countries in new trade treaties such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) which subsumes 34 countries of North and South America into a "free-trade" zone, activists are uniting into alliances not only within their own countries, but also creating new global blocs of resistance across national boundaries.

Other hopeful recent signs of alliance include the Harvard Living Wage Campaign -- created by students in solidarity with janitors, dining service, and other underpaid workers at the university -- and the student anti-sweatshop movement.

One of the most moving demonstrations of solidarity I have witnessed occurred at the 1996 national animal rights conference in Washington, D.C., where gay activists from ACT-UP denounced animal experimentation, rejected any medical advance for AIDS that was dependent upon causing pain to other beings, and embraced interspecies solidarity.

The challenge will be not only to come together on occasion for dramatic protests against global capitalism, but to sustain alliances in a multifaceted attack on injustice. For this to work, progressive social movements will have to include animal rights and veganism within their agendas and, indeed, their lives -- just as animal rights activists need to extirpate elitism, sexism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of prejudice from their community.

Activists will need to forge a shared vision and set of values beyond protest and critique, knowing both what they want "freedom from" and "freedom to," the kind of society they can no longer tolerate and the nature of community they want to build.

To change the conditions for animals, we have to change the social institutions, and that demands alliances with other progressive groups. The animal welfare/rights movement is showing increasing strength and sophistication in its ability to pass city, state, and national legislation for animal protection, but it remains a single issue movement devoid of roots in communities of workers, women, people of color, and church groups (who for better or worse are a key part of the grass roots).

But as they hopefully mature as a social movement, animal advocates are a powerful reminder that "social justice" is a limited political concept and that no species is free until all species are free. The slogan of the future must not be "We are all one race, the human race," but rather, "We are one community, the community of living subjects."

Is it my imagination, or is all hell breaking loose? Vegan and animal rights activists seem finally to have caught the attention of animal exploitation industries, and the war between them has escalated to intense battles in the streets, courtrooms, boardrooms, and media.

Hardly a day goes by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and Earth Liberation Front (ELF) have not freed animals from their cages in fur farms and laboratories or destroyed the property of industries killing animals or damaging nature.

From burning biotech research labs and destruction of ski lodges to firebombing meat companies, these underground liberation groups have resorted to militant tactics that have earned them the FBI label of terrorists as the government now works toward criminalizing animal rights activities through legislation such as the Patriot Act that allows the state full powers of surveillance, search and seizure, and suppression of dissent.

The militancy of these liberation groups inspired the most powerful animal rights campaign yet, that waged against Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) by Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC). HLS is a large and particularly heinous drug and chemical testing company with offices in England and New Jersey. They profit from pouring industrial chemicals into the eyes of rabbits and pesticides and herbicides down the throats of beagle puppies.

A series of five undercover videos exposed for the world to see how vicious this company is, sadistically beating and killing 500 cats, dogs, rabbits, and chimpanzees a day, 180,000. In one HLS lab report, some of the animals were recorded as “rotting, but still alive.” HLS performed necropsy (dissection) on living monkeys and numerous employees were convicted of violating animal welfare laws by the USDA and almost shut down by the UK government. In the late 1990s, outraged activists in England and the U.S. formed SHAC as a militant and ultra-confrontational group. Hardly satisfied with letter writing and petitions, SHAC activists have made their case through property destruction, hassling of executives and employees of HLS and their investors at their workplaces and homes, and raucous demonstrations.

While one can question some of their tactics, one cannot argue with their results: over a dozen major investors pulled out of HLS. With some just cause, the SHAC website boasts: “The campaign to shut down Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) is fast becoming one of the most significant in the animal rights movement's history. The speed, methodology, and determination with which one of the world's largest animal testing laboratories is being brought to it's knees, almost entirely by the efforts of volunteer grassroots activists, denotes the endless possibilities of what a small community of passionate campaigners can do. The closure of HLS by an animal rights campaign will not only mean saving the 180,000 animals that die annually in HLS laboratories, but will also signify another nail in the coffin of the vivisection industry.”

HLS was on the brink of collapse but was saved at the 11th hour on January 29th, 2001, by Stevens Inc. with a $33 million bailout. That earned Warren Stevens and his company something he was not ready to contend with, the wrath of SHAC activists. SHAC was hit with Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) suits used by the government to target “terrorist” organizations, but they have persistently dogged Stevens, Bank of America, Morgan Dean Stanley Witter, and other unconscionable HLS investors.

Click above to finish the article.......................

Basic Seed Cheese (Raw)
Cheese Spread
Cheese, Bread And Tomato Souffle
Herb and Tomato Cheese Spread
Mushroom Fondue
Nutritional Yeast Cheese
Port Wine Cheese
Pumpkin Seed Cheese (Raw)
Spinach Ricotta Balls
Sundried Tomato Mock Cream Cheese
Swiss Fondue
Tofu Cottage Cheese
Tofu Cream Cheese (Version 1)
Tofu Cream Cheese (Version 2)
Vegan Cream Cheese

The Uncheese Cookbook: Creating Amazing Dairy-Free Cheese Substitutes and Classic "Uncheese" Dishes by Joanne Stepaniak

Vegan Vittles: Recipes Inspired by the Critters of Farm Sanctuary by Joanne Stepaniak, Suzanne Havala

World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability
by Amy Chua

Drawing on examples from around the world--from Africa and Asia to Russia and Latin America--Chua examines how free markets do not spread wealth evenly throughout the whole of these societies.

Instead they produce a new class of extremely wealthy plutocrats--individuals as rich as nations. Almost always members of a minority group--Chinese in the Philippines, Croatians in the former Yugoslavia, whites in Latin America, Indians in East Africa, Jews in post-communist Russia--these "market-dominant minorities" have become targets of violent hatred.

Adding democracy to this volatile mix unleashes supressed ethnic hatreds and brings to power ethnonationalist governments that pursue aggressive policies of confiscation and revenge.

Chua further shows how individual countries are often viewed as dominant minorities, explaining the phenomena of ethnic resentment in the Arab-Israeli conflict and the rising tide of anti-American sentiment around the world.

This more than anything accounts for the visceral hatred of Americans that has been expressed in recent acts of terrorism.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Saddam: King of Terror
Con Coughlin
Description: Author Con Coughlin was a guest on The Jim Bohannon Show to talk about his new book, "Saddam: King of Terror." In it, the author talks about Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's rise to power from his beginnings as an orphan. Mr. Coughlin says that Hussein's emergence as Iraqi leader in 1980 came from an adoption of a pan-Arab ideology that appealed to the Iraqi people. The author chronicles how Saddam's ruthlessness and penchance for violence kept his opponents living in fear, and kept him in power. During the program, Mr. Coughlin answered questions from listeners calling in.

Author Bio: Con Coughlin is the author of "Hostage" and "A Golden Basin Full of Scorpions: The Quest for Modern Jerusalem," which were published in Great Britain. Mr. Coughlin is currently the executive editor for London's Sunday Telegraph. "Saddam: King of Terror" is his first book published in the United States.

Publisher: HarperCollins 10 east 53rd Street New York, NY 10022

Below is Frist's record on reproductive rights by Planned Parenthood. Boy does this guy believe in the sanctity of the medical profession. Every time he makes one of his confused and nonsensical pronouncements, he prefaces it with the statement "As a doctor, I........

Here is an unconfused look at his record by Planned Parenthood.

BILL FRIST: SOLIDLY ANTI-CHOICE

Sen. Bill Frist's (R-TN) voting record on women's fundamental human and civil rights is as onerous and extreme as that of his predecessor, Trent Lott. The Bush administration's hand picked majority leader of the U.S. Senate is unquestionably committed to enacting an aggressive anti-choice agenda.
Since the summer of 1995, Sen. Frist has consistently voted against women's reproductive freedom in votes on key federal legislation tracked by Planned Parenthood.

FRIST VOTES TO BAN ABORTION PROCEDURES

Time and time again, Bill Frist has voted for the so-called Partial Birth Abortion bill, which is written so vaguely that it would ban many abortion procedures throughout pregnancy, and makes no exception for a woman's health. (See roll call votes 340 on 10/21/99 and 277 on 09/18/98, and Senate votes on HR 1122 on 05/20/97 and two amendments to, and the final vote on, HR 1833 on 12/07/95.)

FRIST FIGHTS TO LIMIT WOMEN'S ACCESS TO ABORTION SERVICES

Bill Frist has voted to limit or deny access to the constitutional right to abortion services of women in the military, women federal employees, low income women, women in prison and young women. He never missed an opportunity to vote to make abortion a right that more and more women cannot exercise. (See roll call votes 160 on 06/21/02, 134 on 06/20/00, 197 on 07/01/99, 148 on 05/26/99, 282 on 09/22/98, 176 on 06/25/98, 190 on 07/22/97, 167 on 07/10/97, and Senate votes on S 947 on 06/25/97, HR 3756 on 09/11/96, S 1745 on 06/19/96, FY96 Omnibus Appropriations on 03/15/96, Commerce, Justice, State Appropriations on 09/29/95 and Treasury/Postal Appropriations on 08/05/95.)

FRIST REFUSES TO AFFIRM WOMEN'S FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS

Frist's opposition to women's fundamental human and civil right to reproductive freedom is well documented by his vote against an amendment that would have affirmed that the Roe v. Wade decision was constitutional and should not be overturned or weakened. He also voted against women's privacy rights when he supported an amendment that would have required reproductive health care professionals to report private patient information. (See roll call votes 337 on 10/21/99 and 338 on 10/21/99, and Senate vote on Feinsetin amendment to HR 1833.)

FRIST GUTS FAMILY PLANNING PROGRAMS

Bucking more than 30-years of U.S. support of international family planning services, Bill Frist consistently threatens women's health and lives with his votes to cut funds to these important programs, which serve women in some of the poorest countries in the world. He also supported the global gag rule, which cuts family planning funds to foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that provide abortion services or support legal abortion - even if those NGOs use separate funds to do so. Frist's attacks on family planning hit home when he voted against an amendment that would have restored Title XX funding, which is a major source of family planning funding in many states. (See roll call votes 304 on 09/30/99 and 35 on 04/28/98, and Senate votes on SJ 14 on 02/25/97, Foreign Operations Appropriations Conference Report on 11/15/95, Population Section of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Report on 11/15/95 and Helms amendment to the Foreign Operations appropriations Report on 09/21/95.)

FRIST WASTES MONEY ON ABSTINENCE-ONLY SEX EDUCATION

Instead of supporting medically accurate sex education programs that have been proven to help teens make responsible choices, Frist voted to waste 75 million taxpayer dollars on irresponsible abstinence-only programs. (See Senate vote on S 1956, roll call vote 231 on 07/23/96.)

FRIST BLOCKS ACCESS TO EMERGENCY CONTRACEPTION

Frist blocked access to emergency contraception when he voted to prohibit federal funding (through the Department of Health and Human Services) of programs to distribute emergency contraception (also known as the "morning after pill") on school property. (See roll call vote 169 on 06/30/00.)

FRIST OPPOSES LIFESAVING RESEARCH

In an effort to appease anti-choice extremists, he has opposed potentially lifesaving fetal tissue and cloning research. (See roll call vote 215 on 09/04/97 and Senate vote on S 1610.)

FRIST SUPPORTS ANTI-CHOICE APPOINTMENTS

Sen. Frist voted for anti-choice nominees John Ashcroft for attorney general and D. Brooks Smith for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Given his record and his allegiance to the Bush administration, Sen. Frist likely will support anti-choice nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court.

I wish I could credit the author but I found this piece on a discussion board by someone named Seeking Justice.

The 'racism' attack on Margaret Sanger (corrected)

Margaret Sanger gained worldwide renown, respect, and admiration for founding the American birth control movement and, later, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, as well as for developing and encouraging family planning efforts throughout the international community.

Among her many visionary accomplishments as a social reformer, Sanger

- established the principles that a woman's right to control her body is the foundation of her human rights; that every person should be able to decide when or whether to have a child; that every child should be wanted and loved; and that women are entitled to sexual pleasure and fulfillment just as men are

- brought about the reversal of federal and state "Comstock laws" that prohibited publication and distribution of information about sex, sexuality, contraception, and human reproduction

- helped establish the contemporary American model for the protection of civil rights through nonviolent civil disobedience — a model that later propelled the civil rights, anti-war, women's rights, and AIDS-action movements

- created access to birth control for low-income, minority, and immigrant women

- expanded the American concept of volunteerism and grassroots organizing by setting up a network of volunteer-driven family planning centers across the U.S.

Sanger also entertained some popular ideas of her own time that are out of keeping with our thinking today. Finding it easier to undermine her character than to confront the message she conveyed, the anti-family planning movement has seized upon some of these ideas, taken them out of context, and exaggerated and distorted them in order to discredit Sanger and the organization she founded.

Not content with exaggeration and distortion, anti-choice activists have also fabricated and attributed to Sanger points of view that she, in fact, found abhorrent. This fact sheet is designed to separate fact from fiction and to further explain Sanger's views and the background against which they must be judged.

Sanger and Eugenics

Eugenics is the science of improving hereditary qualities by socially controlling human reproduction. Unable to foment popular opposition to Margaret Sanger's accomplishments and the organization she founded, Sanger's critics attempt to discredit them by intentionally confusing her views on "fitness" with eugenics, racism, and anti-Semitism. Margaret Sanger was not a racist, an anti-Semite, or a eugenicist. Eugenicists, like the Nazis, were opposed to the use of abortion and contraception by healthy and "fit" women (Grossmann, 1995). In fact, Sanger's books were among the very first burned by the Nazis in their campaign against family planning ("Sanger on Exhibit," 1999/2000).

Sanger actually helped several Jewish women and men and others escape the Nazi regime in Germany ("Margaret Sanger and the 'Refugee Department'," 1993). Sanger's disagreement with the eugenicists of her day is clear from her remarks in The Birth Control Review of February 1919:

Eugenists imply or insist that a woman's first duty is to the state; we contend that her duty to herself is her first duty to the state. We maintain that a woman possessing an adequate knowledge of her reproductive functions is the best judge of the time and conditions under which her child should be brought into the world.

We further maintain that it is her right, regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether she shall bear children or not, and how many children she shall bear if she chooses to become a mother (1919a).

Margaret Sanger clearly identified with the issues of health and fitness that concerned the early 20th-century eugenics movement, which was enormously popular and well-respected during the 1920s and '30s, when treatments for many hereditary and disabling conditions were unknown. However,

Sanger always believed that reproductive decisions should be made on an individual and not a social or cultural basis, and she consistently repudiated any racial application of eugenics principles. For example, Sanger vocally opposed the racial stereotyping that effected passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, on the grounds that intelligence and other inherited traits vary by individual and not by group.

In 1927, the eugenics movement reached the height of its popularity when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Buck v. Bell, held that it was constitutional to involuntarily sterilize the developmentally disabled, the insane, or the uncontrollably epileptic. Oliver Wendell Holmes, supported by Louis Brandeis and six other justices, wrote the opinion.

Although Sanger uniformly repudiated the racist exploitation of eugenics principles, she agreed with the "progressives" of her day who favored

- incentives for the voluntary hospitalization and/or sterilization of people with untreatable, disabling, hereditary conditions

- the adoption and enforcement of stringent regulations to prevent the immigration of the diseased and "feebleminded" into the U.S.

- placing so-called illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, and dope-fiends on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct

Planned Parenthood Federation of America finds these views objectionable and outmoded. Nevertheless, anti-family planning activists continue to attack Sanger, who has been dead for over 30 years, because she is an easier target than the unassailable reputation of PPFA and the contemporary family planning movement.

However, attempts to discredit the family planning movement because its early 20th-century founder was not a perfect model of early 21st-century values is like disavowing the Declaration of Independence because its author, Thomas Jefferson, bought and sold slaves.

Sanger's Outreach to the African-American Community

In 1930, Sanger opened a family planning clinic in Harlem that sought to enlist support for contraceptive use and to bring the benefits of family planning to women who were denied access to their city's health and social services. Staffed by a black physician and black social worker, the clinic was endorsed by The Amsterdam News (the powerful local newspaper), the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the Urban League, and the black community's elder statesman, W.E.B. DuBois.

Beginning in 1939, DuBois also served on the advisory council for Sanger's "Negro Project," which was a "unique experiment in race-building and humanitarian service to a race subjected to discrimination, hardship, and segregation" (Chesler, 1992).

The Negro Project served African-Americans in the rural South. Other leaders of the African-American community who were involved in the project included Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the National Council of Negro Women, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.

The Negro Project was also endorsed by prominent white Americans who were involved in social justice efforts at this time, including Eleanor Roosevelt, the most visible and compassionate supporter of racial equality in her era; and the medical philanthropists, Albert and Mary Lasker, whose financial support made the project possible.

A passionate opponent of racism, Sanger predicted in 1942 that the "Negro question" would be foremost on the country's domestic agenda after World War II. Her accomplishments on behalf of the African-American community were unchallengeable during her lifetime and remain so today. In 1966, the year Sanger died, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said:

There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. . . . Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her.

Charges of racism against Sanger are most often made by anti-choice activists who are unfamiliar with the history of the African-American community or with Margaret Sanger's collegial relationship with that community's leaders. The tangled fabric of lies and manipulation woven by anti-choice activists around the issues of class, race, and family planning continues to be embroidered today, more than three-quarters of a century after the family planning movement began.

Published Statements That Distort or Misquote Margaret Sanger

Through the years, a number of alleged Sanger quotations, or allegations about her, have surfaced with regularity in anti-family planning publications. The following are samples of especially pernicious distortions, misattributions, or outright lies that Margaret Sanger's enemies continue to circulate.

"More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue in birth control."

A quotation falsely attributed to Margaret Sanger, this statement was made by the editors of American Medicine in a review of an article by Sanger. The editorial from which this appeared, as well as Sanger's article, "Why Not Birth Control Clinics in America?" (1919b), were reprinted side-by-side in the May 1919 Birth Control Review.

"The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly."

Another quotation falsely attributed to Margaret Sanger, this was actually written for the June 1932 issue of The Birth Control Review by W.E.B. DuBois, founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Taken out of the context of his discussion about the effects of birth control on the balance between quality-of-life considerations and race-survival issues for African-Americans, Dubois' language seems insensitive by today's standards.

"Blacks, soldiers, and Jews are a menace to the race."

This fabricated quotation, falsely attributed to Sanger, was concocted in the late 1980s. The alleged source is the April 1933 Birth Control Review (Sanger ceased editing the Review in 1929). That issue contains no article or letter by Sanger.

"To create a race of thoroughbreds. . ."

This remark, again attributed originally to Sanger, was made by Dr. Edward A. Kempf and has been cited out of context and with distorted meaning. Dr. Kempf, a progressive physician, was actually arguing for state endowment of maternal and infant care clinics. In her book The Pivot of Civilization, Sanger quoted Dr. Kempf's argument about how environment may improve human excellence:

Society must make life worth the living and the refining for the individual by conditioning him to love and to seek the love-object in a manner that reflects a constructive effect upon his fellow-men and by giving him suitable opportunities.

The virility of the automatic apparatus is destroyed by excessive gormandizing or hunger, by excessive wealth or poverty, by excessive work or idleness, by sexual abuse or intolerant prudishness. The noblest and most difficult art of all is the raising of human thoroughbreds (1969).

It was in this spirit that Sanger used the phrase, "Birth Control: To Create a Race of Thoroughbreds," as a banner on the November 1921 issue of the Birth Control Review. (Differing slogans on the theme of voluntary family planning sometimes appeared under the title of The Review, e.g., "Dedicated to the Cause of Voluntary Motherhood," January 1928.)

"The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."

This statement is taken out of context from Margaret Sanger's Woman and the New Race (1920). Sanger was making an ironic comment — not a prescriptive one — about the horrifying rate of infant mortality among large families of early 20th-century urban America.

The statement, as grim as the conditions that prompted Sanger to make it, accompanied this chart, illustrating the infant death rate in 1920:

Deaths During First Year

1st born children 23%
2nd born children 20%
3rd born children 21%
4th born children 23%
5th born children 26%
6th born children 29%
7th born children 31%
8th born children 33%
9th born children 35%
10th born children 41%
11th born children 51%
12th born children 60%

"We do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population."

Sanger was aware of African-American concerns, passionately argued by Marcus Garvey in the 1920s, that birth control was a threat to the survival of the black race. This statement, which acknowledges those fears, is taken from a letter to Clarence J. Gamble, M.D., a champion of the birth control movement. In that letter, Sanger describes her strategy to allay such apprehensions. A larger portion of the letter makes Sanger's meaning clear:

It seems to me from my experience . . . in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas, that while the colored Negroes have great respect for white doctors, they can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table. . . . They do not do this with the white people, and if we can train the Negro doctor at the clinic, he can go among them with enthusiasm and with knowledge, which, I believe, will have far-reaching results. . . .

His work, in my opinion, should be entirely with the Negro profession and the nurses, hospital, social workers, as well as the County's white doctors. His success will depend upon his personality and his training by us. The minister's work is also important, and also he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation, as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs (1939).

"As early as 1914 Margaret Sanger was promoting abortion, not for white middle-class women, but against 'inferior races' — black people, poor people, Slavs, Latins, and Hebrews were 'human weeds'."

This allegation about Margaret Sanger appears in an anonymous flyer, "Facts About Planned Parenthood," that is circulated by anti-family planning activists. Margaret Sanger, who passionately believed in a woman's right to control her body, never "promoted" abortion because it was illegal and dangerous throughout her lifetime.

She urged women to use contraceptives so that they would not be at risk for the dangers of illegal, back-alley abortion. Sanger never described any ethnic community as an 'inferior race' or as 'human weeds.' In her lifetime, Sanger won the respect of international figures of all races, including the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.; Mahatma Gandhi; Shidzue Kato, the foremost family planning advocate in Japan; and Lady Dhanvanthi Rama Rau of India — all of whom were sensitive to issues of race.

"The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy"

This is the title of a book falsely attributed to Sanger. It was written by Lothrop Stoddard and reviewed by Havelock Ellis in the October 1920 issue of The Birth Control Review. Its general topic, the international politics of race relations in the first decades of the century, is one in which Sanger was not involved.

Her interest, insofar as she allowed a review of Stoddard's book to be published in The Birth Control Review, was in the overall health and quality of life of all races and not in tensions between them. Ellis's review was critical of the Stoddard book and of distinctions based on race or ethnicity alone.

For Further Reading

Chesler, Ellen. (1992). Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America. New York: Simon & Schuster

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project (http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/index.html)
Valenza, Charles. (1985) "Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?" Family Planning Perspectives, 17(1) (January/February), 44-46.

References

Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927).

Chesler, Ellen. (1992). Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America New York: Simon & Schuster.

DuBois, W.E.B. (1932). "Black Folk and Birth Control." The Birth Control Review, 16(6), p. 166. Reprint: The Birth Control Review Vol. VIII, Vols. 16-17, 1932-July 1933. (1970). New York: Da Capo Press.

Ellis, Havelock. (1920). "The World's Racial Problem." The Birth Control Review, 4(10), 14-16. Reprint: The Birth Control Review Vol II, Vols. 4-5, 1920-1921. (1970). New York: Da Capo Press.

Grossmann, Atina. (1995). Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control & Abortion Reform 1920-1950. New York: Oxford University Press.

"Intelligent or Unintelligent Birth Control?: An Editorial from American Medicine." (10.919). The Birth Control Review, 3(5), 12-13. Reprint: The Birth Control Review Vol. I, Vols. 1-3, 1917-1919. (1970). New York: Da Capo Press.

King, Martin Luther Jr. (1966, May 5). "Family Planning — A Special and Urgent Concern." Acceptance speech upon receiving the Planned Parenthood Federation of America Margaret Sanger Award.
"Margaret Sanger and the 'Refugee Department'." (1993). Margaret Sanger Papers Project Newsletter, 5 (Spring), 1-2.

"Sanger on Exhibit." (1999/2000). Margaret Sanger Papers Project Newsletter, 23 (Winter), p. 5.

Sanger, Margaret. (1919a). "Birth Control and Racial Betterment." The Birth Control Review, 3(2), 11-12. Reprint: The Birth Control Review Vol. I, Vols. 1-3, 1917-1919. (1970). New York: Da Capo Press.

___(1919b). "Why Not Birth Control Clinics in America?" The Birth Control Review, 3(5), 10-11. Reprint: The Birth Control Review Vol. I, Vols. 1-3, 1917-1919 (1970). New York: Da Capo Press.

___(1920). Woman and the New Race. New York: Brentano's, 62-63.

___(1939, Dec. 10). Personal communication to Clarence J. Gamble, M.D.

___(1942, July 9). Personal communication to A.D. Lasker.

___(1969). The Pivot of Civilization. Elmsford, NY: Maxwell Reprint Company, 144-145.

Read this at Armed Liberals Log:
Armed Liberal

From CNN:

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This below comes from the above linked blog but there is so much more there including an article on depleted uranium in Afghanistan poisoning the people and the troops. Go there or be square.

I always knew the below but people who can kill and torture cows are never going to understand this. They are just going to boil them alive until they are all gone.

Fish, crabs can make human-like decisions

Sydney (ANI): Australian researchers have found that simple creatures such as fish and crabs, which have tiny brains and low-resolution eyes, can make sophisticated decisions and even have communication powers like humans.

Australian National University biological scientist Jan Hemmi found that crabs can even measure the distance between objects in the same way a footballer judges the distance between another player and the ball, says a report in The Age.

"These are animals with very small brains and low-resolution eyes, yet they can make decisions which are as sophisticated as those made by primates, including humans," Dr Hemmi said.

The Save the Dugong Campaign Center (SDCC) began a campaign in April, 2002 to obtain signatures fr