The body of Muslim woman, killed in a German courtroom by a man convicted of insulting her religion, has been taken back to her native Egypt for burial.

Read more here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8136500.stm

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A New Zealand company is seeking EU approval to market honeybee venom to help people with arthritis ease their pain.

Nelson Honey & Marketing says two teaspoons a day of its honey with added venom milked from honeybees has anti-inflammatory power to soothe joints.

The venom concept is not new - some clinics even offer up bee stings.

The UK's Food Standards Agency said it would be considering the application in the coming months.
The Manuka honey with added bee venom has been available in New Zealand for 13 years and its makers say although it does contain a venom, it has proved extremely safe.

It contains a blend of honey derived from the native New Zealand Manuka tree and dried venom harvested from the Apis mellifera honeybee using electrical milking machines that send impulses to stimulate worker bees to sting through a latex film onto a glass collector plate.

Anecdotal benefit

The Nectar Ease label advises consumers to start with a quarter of a teaspoon a day and increase this to one or two as required.

It also warns that people with allergies to honey or bee venom should seek medical advice prior to use, and that it should not be given to infants under 12 months of age.

Honey has long been hailed for its healing properties, but the Arthritis Research Campaign said it was sceptical about the beneficial properties of honeybee venom in the treatment of arthritis.

The charity's medical director Professor Alan Silman said: "We recently compiled a report on the effectiveness of complementary medicines in treating the common types of arthritis based on available scientific evidence and honeybee venom didn't feature, as no research has been done into this product.

"As a result, it's difficult to postulate the action of honeybee venom or how it purports to work, because any available evidence is entirely anecdotal."

This article by Antonio G.M. La Viña, JSD, Professorial Lecturer, U.P. College of Law and Dean, Ateneo School of Government, was originally published in The U.P Forum, July 2009
————————————————
“The enemy of the good is the perfect.” This is the adage I will bear in mind when I enter the voting booth on the 10th of [...]

I love a practical solution, especially when it’s good all around — for personal health, the environment, and for living consciously. So when I received an email from Chris Elam, the director of the Meatless Monday campaign — a project of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Columbia University School of Public Health, in association with twenty-seven other public health schools — I was thrilled.

The campaign is focused on convincing the world not to eat chickens, pigs, and other animals — just one day per week (on Mondays, as you may have guessed).

Since it’s sponsored by a slew of public health schools, the campaign was set up to promote health, and since I’ve already written extensively about the fact that eating meat leads to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, and lethargy (for example here), I’ll skip extended analysis of these facts, other than to say: When Johns Hopkins, Columbia, the American Dietetic Association, and dozens of other health organizations argue that the less meat you eat, the better off you’ll be, it’s worth listening to them.

Chris wrote to share the fact that Michael Pollan had just argued in favor of the campaign on Oprah, saying, “[w]e don’t realize it when we sit down to eat, but that is our most profound engagement in the rest of nature… To the extent that we push meat a little bit to the side and move vegetables to the center of our diet, we’re also going to be a lot healthier…” I wasn’t surprised, since Pollan’s most recent book calls on all of us to eat “mostly plants,” and his new movie (Food, Inc.) offers a stomach-turning look at factory farming and slaughterhouses (I highly recommend it).

As an aside on Food, Inc.: The scene that I found most interesting is the one where Joel Salatin, proprietor of Polyface Farm, was slaughtering chickens and talking a mile-a-minute through the process. He was talking about treating the animals with respect, but in the theater where I saw the film, this scene elicited perhaps the most audible shock of the entire movie because you can actually see the animals being slaughtered (contrast this with the secrecy of factory farms and slaughterhouses — no one is allowed because, as Paul McCartney likes to say, the process would turn everyone vegetarian). Anyway, this scene seemed to shock a lot of people, even though this is poultry slaughter at its most humane. Actually, the scene reminded me of that Sarah Palin interview that she conducted in front of the turkey slaughter; it’s worth remembering that most chickens and turkeys have a far more horrific experience in the factory farms that process more than 98% of the birds we eat.

Chris also wanted to share their new video, in which their scientists tell us that if all Americans switched from eating chickens and pigs to eating beans and grains for just one day per week, that would stop as much global warming as if everyone in the U.S. shifted to ultra-efficient Toyota hybrids (which is the weekly equivalent of using 12 billion fewer gallons of gasoline). Of course I have to point out the obvious: If we all stopped eating animals completely and shifted to vegetarian foods, that would save 84 billion gallons of gas per week (and all the troubles that go with that kind of consumption).

I know that some readers will argue that the issue is not the meat industry, but factory farmed meat. But in fact, environmentally, all meat requires exponentially more resources to produce than eating grains and beans, as eloquently discussed in the Audubon Society’s magazine a few months back. And all meat contributes to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and so on. Some meat may be “less bad,” but according to the science, no meat is good.

And I know that some vegetarians pooh pooh Meatless Monday as not enough. I’m sympathetic to that view, but I think it’s unnecessarily strident. For people who think that going totally vegetarian is too challenging, the Meatless Monday campaign offers a gentle entrée into the idea of eating without eating animals. My hope is that people will use the campaign as a stepping stone — first one meatless day per week, then three, then five, then seven. As we lean into meatless eating — switching out more and more meat meals for meatless meals — we end up feeling better, both physically and ethically.

And another point for those who might think that Meatless Monday is not enough: The first family of vegetarianism — Sir Paul McCartney and his daughters — recently launched the campaign in the UK. Stella and Mary have been vegetarian since birth, and Paul has been a vegetarian for more than two decades.

For recipes and cooking information, check out the Meatless Monday site. And for tips on making the transition to vegetarian eating, please click here.

Happy eating!

alternet

Bahamas Caribbean Blog International

The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
Because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
--Jelaluddin Rumi,
translation by Coleman Barks

The Pulse Of God
The limbs of a tree reached
down and lifted me, thinking
I was it's child,
and
in the meadows
my spirit becomes so quiet
that if I put my cheek
against the earth's body
I feel the pulse of God,
"tell me the way you
do that birds....
enter the private chambers
of my Lord?"
and they all sang,
they just SANG.
I gathered it was time
to become a musician,
and I did.
Years passed, and the
sky reached down
one day and lifted
me
and the birds noticed and spoke,
"how do you enter
the sun like
that and
know
the
pulse
of
God?"
From Saint Thomas Aquinas

I am against neutering of animals. Who are we to decide about another animal's reproduction. But there are so many stray dogs on the streets. They thrive because of unchecked mating (ofcourse!) and on the waste on the streets. There have been many cases of children being attacked and killed by packs of dogs. Dogs can't hunt alone, but are highly effective when hunting in packs.
I was thinking that maybe we should capture all stray dogs and leave them in the jungle. Not all at once, but periodically. Because loss of forest cover and habitat loss and expansion of farmlands has seen a rise in cases of leopards starying into human territory (which was the animals' to being with). Most times, the leopards have fallen into open wells or killed by fearful villagers , beaten to death with sticks. Leopards are in search of fod , so are man-eaters (tigers). So before we kill all our beautiful cats, maybe we should provide them food in their own space, limited as it is, by letting loose a few stray dogs which can be hunted, because both of these cats hunt dogs.
I understand there could be some problems with ecological balance, but dogs aren't good hunters anyway. Unless ofcourse they evolve vertime and adapt to their new surrounding. But, I think saving our national animal, the Tiger is more important than anything.
And meanwhile we can check forest cover loss.
By making punishment to offenders who grab forest and more stringent. According to what I read, laws to deal wth such offences aren't very strong. Rs. 25,000 as a fine is just such a joke.
We should deal such offenders on par with murderers.

Vegetarians are generally less likely than meat eaters to develop cancer but this does not apply to all forms of the disease, a major study has found.

The study involving 60,000 people found those who followed a vegetarian diet developed notably fewer cancers of the blood, bladder and stomach.

But the apparently protective effect of vegetarian did not seem to stretch to bowel cancer, a major killer.

The study is published in the British Journal of Cancer.

Researchers from universities in the UK and New Zealand followed 61,566 British men and women. They included meat-eaters, those who ate fish but not meat, and those who ate neither meat nor fish.

Overall, their results suggested that while in the general population about 33 people in 100 will develop cancer during their lifetime, for those who do not eat meat that risk is reduced to about 29 in 100.

Special protection?

The researchers said they found marked differences between meat-eaters and vegetarians in the propensity to cancers of the lymph and the blood, with vegetarians just over half as likely to develop these forms of the disease.

In the case of multiple myeloma, a relatively rare cancer of the bone marrow, vegetarians were 75% less likely to develop the disease than meat-eaters.

The reduction was less notable for fish-eaters with these cancers. The reasons, researchers said, were unclear, but potential mechanisms could include viruses and mutation-causing compounds in meat - or alternatively that vegetables confer special protection.

There were also striking differences in rates of stomach cancer. Although the numbers of cases were small, fish-eaters and vegetarians were about a third as likely to develop the disease as meat-eaters.

Previous research has already implicated processed meats in stomach cancer, so these findings were not entirely surprising. It is thought N-nitroso compounds found in these meats may damage DNA, while the high temperatures they are cooked at may also produce carcinogens.

But the same reduction for vegetarians was not found with cancers of the bowel, one of the most common forms of the disease. The vegetarians in the group in fact had a slightly higher rate of cancers of the colon and the rectum, although not significantly so.

But the relative risk for fish-eaters and vegetarians of cervical cancer was twice that of meat-eaters. The number of cases was small, and could be down to chance but the researchers said it was possible that dietary factors influenced the virus behind cervical cancer.

Professor Tim Key, the lead author, said it was impossible to draw strong conclusions from this one single study.

"At the moment these findings are not strong enough to ask for particularly large changes in the diets of people following an average balanced diet."

Vegetarian diets tend be lower in fat and higher in fibre, but they can require careful planning to ensure necessary protein and vitamins - notably B12, which is mainly derived from animal products - are taken in sufficient amounts.

'Complex process'

A spokesperson for Cancer Research UK, which funded the research, said: "These interesting results add to the evidence that what we eat affects our chances of developing cancer. We know that eating a lot of red and processed meat increases the risk of stomach cancer.

"But the links between diet and cancer risk are complex and more research is needed to see how big a part diet plays and which specific dietary factors are most important.

Myeloma UK said this was the first data of its kind for the bone marrow cancer "and for that reason we are treating it with caution.

"Dietary advice to myeloma patients remains aligned with national guidance - that they should eat a healthy, balanced diet high in fibre, fruit and vegetables and low in saturated fat, salt and red and processed meat."

Dr Panagiota Mitrou, Science and Research Programme Manager for the World Cancer Research Fund, said: "The suggestion that vegetarians might be at reduced risk of blood cancers is particularly interesting.

"However, this finding should be treated with caution since not much is known about the link between diet and these types of cancer. Further studies of vegetarians are needed before we can be confident this is actually the case."

GEORGETOWN, Guyana — David Thompson, Prime Minister of Barbados, said this week that the Caribbean was faced with global economic convulsions of unprecedented proportions, which had reinforced convictions that regional integration “is the last best hope” for the Caribbean Community (CARICOM).

“Going it alone or fragmenting into unworkable reconfigurations of the regional project cannot be an enduring solution”, Thompson stated. He was at the time speaking at a press briefing in Georgetown, Guyana, on the eve of the 30th Meeting of The Conference of CARICOM Heads of Government.

Barbados Prime Minister David Thompson

Thompson who is also Lead Head of Government with responsibility for the Single Market and Economy in the CARICOM Quasi Cabinet stated that in the current economic crisis, it was easy for stakeholders to become impatient due to what they saw as the slow pace of the integration project and to declare it “dead on arrival”. Alternatively, he posited, what was needed was the strengthening of the core ideals of the integration movement rather than “proliferating the periphery.”

“In the midst of global crisis and regional upheavals, now is not the time for CARICOM to retreat from its strategic purpose,” the Barbadian Prime Minster emphasised. He added that the crisis had highlighted the need for the refocusing of many of our national institutions from purely domestic visions to the wider regional horizon.

“The successful implementation of the interlocking elements of the CARICOM Single Market and eventually the Single Economy demand this of us,” he stressed.

“It requires of us to put in place number of regional institutions dealing with accreditations, standards, and the exchange of information amongst other infrastructure to facilitate the CSME. If we do not do this carefully, we would endanger the fabric of the very societies regional integration aimed at sustaining” Thompson added.

Outlining the progress of the CSME, he stated that all of the provisions for the rights of establishment and the free movement of the goods, services, and skilled persons had been implemented.

Included in the successful implementation of the Single Market, Thompson said, was the establishment of the CARICOM Development Fund, which has been established to assist disadvantaged countries, regions and sectors.

He said while the time table for the Single Economy may have been delayed, recent developments in the Region have shown the true extent of the financial interdependence that already existed, and this has given new urgency to the policy coordination efforts of the Region’s regulators and Ministers of Finance.

Reflecting on the historical Grand Anse Declaration and Work Programme for the Advancement of the Integration Movement, crafted at the 10th Meeting of The Conference, 1989, in Grand Anse, Grenada, Thompson said that it was now time for the Community to “regroup and refocus to find strategies irrecusable of survival”.

Prime Minister of Barbados is expected to lead a discussion on the developments within the CSME at the July 2-5 Meeting of The Conference of CARICOM Heads of Government.

July 4, 2009

caribbeannetnews

Bahamas Caribbean Blog International

Prince Michael Angel

an original Poem by Clarlita Zarate

In Memory of Michael Jackson


In a kingdom of all colors
dwells our beloved brother.
He has made his home in heaven
above where moments are made of
dreams come true.

It is where the greatest power is love.
Michael is dancing with angels now.
They sing his songs
because, my lord,
it pleases you.

The virgin calls out to him,
"Young Michael."
Her eyes are soft and kind.
Then she asks him as she takes his hands,
"Are you lonely for something you left behind?"

Michael answers, "I miss my fans."

By Clarita Zarate
written for Michael Jackson, forever.

RT @netzwirken: SpOn: Social Entrepreneurs – Rettung der Welt mit Eistee. http://is.gd/1n9kG

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