From Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Hilversum, December 1, 2007, here is information about World AIDS Day today. Although the epidemic does seem overwhelming, besides reading the brief article, here are a few things you can do about it:
 
(1) Look at the interactive video on World Vision about AIDS and Children; Journey Into the Pandemic, in which "you will meet children whose lives have been forever affected by AIDS, http://www.worldvisionmedia.ca/worldmap/,

(2) Have a look at the Stephen Lewis Foundation Website, whose purpose is to ease the pain of HIV/AIDS in Africa, http://www.stephenlewisfoundation.org/;

(3) Read the book Race Against Time by Stephen Lewis, http://www.anansi.ca/titles.cfm?pub_id=1124;

(4) Sponsor a Hope Child - a child who lives in a community affected by AIDS through World Vision, http://www.worldvision.ca/Sponsor-a-Child/Pages/SponsoraHopeChild.aspx,

(5) Sign the petition found through the World Vision video site, http://advocacy.worldvision.ca/eactivist/user/userC.jsp?13327&EXAMIN=1,

(6) Through the World Vision gift catalogue, buy: (a) an HIV/AIDS Care Kit or (b) the prevention of mother to child HIV Prevention, http://www2.worldvision.ca/gifts/app?service=external/Gift&sp=l1651. You can even do it in someone's name, say for an excellent holiday present.

World AIDS Day raises awareness

Jakarta (1 December) - Today is World AIDS Day: the United Nations says 33 million people are infected with the HIV virus which can cause the disease.

The figures indicate that Indonesia currently has the world's highest rate of infection. Indonesia's first ever campaign against HIV/AIDS, which will encourage the use of condoms, is being launched today.

China is also marking World AIDS Day, with even the Miss World pageant, taking place at a Chinese resort, being used to spread HIV/AIDS awareness.

Earlier this week, the Chinese government announced that it will open a centre for research into the disease. For many years, China has viewed HIV/AIDS as a foreign problem which did not greatly affect the country.

World AIDS Day raises awareness

Jakarta (1 December) - Today is World AIDS Day: the United Nations says 33 million people are infected with the HIV virus which can cause the disease.

The figures indicate that Indonesia currently has the world's highest rate of infection. Indonesia's first ever campaign against HIV/AIDS, which will encourage the use of condoms, is being launched today.

China is also marking World AIDS Day, with even the Miss World pageant, taking place at a Chinese resort, being used to spread HIV/AIDS awareness.

Earlier this week, the Chinese government announced that it will open a centre for research into the disease. For many years, China has viewed HIV/AIDS as a foreign problem which did not greatly affect the country.


WORLD AIDS DAY RAISES AWARENESS

Jakarta  (1 December) - Today is World AIDS Day: the United Nations says 33 million people are infected with the HIV virus which can cause the disease.

The figures indicate that Indonesia currently has the world's highest rate of infection. Indonesia's first ever campaign against HIV/AIDS, which will encourage the use of condoms, is being launched today.

China is also marking World AIDS Day, with even the Miss World pageant, taking place at a Chinese resort, being used to spread HIV/AIDS awareness.

Earlier this week, the Chinese government announced that it will open a centre for research into the disease. For many years, China has viewed HIV/AIDS as a foreign problem which did not greatly affect the country.

The event mentioned in the following article in the Toronto Star, Monday, December 3, 2007, Living Section, page L2, is a variation on the group meditation on peace event.  Even if there is no measurable success by the event, surely it is still a positive thing for people to be making love rather than war.  Maybe some people involved in this event will be inspired to work for peace in other innovative ways.

ORGASMS IN SYNC: A PLAN TO REALLY SHAKE YOUR WORLD

Nancy J. White
Living Reporter

Make love, not war - literally.

That's the message of the second annual Synchronized Global Orgasm for Peace, scheduled for the moment of the solstice, Saturday, Dec. 22, 1:08 a.m. in Toronto. Come on time.

"If everyone had an orgasm at the same time concentrating on one subject - peace on Earth - could it influence the energy fields of the earth in a positive way?" wonders Paul Reffell, co-founder of Global Orgasm (globalorgasm.org).

This is not a Saturday Night skit. He's serious.

Well, sort of serious. He and his partner, Donna Sheehan, founded the anti-war group Baring Witness (baringwitness,org), that posed naked women spelling out peace messages in parks and beaches on every continent. (They were clothes in Antarctica.)

This world consciousness stuff has floated by before. New agey types have tried to get the energy of 6 billion minds focused on ending war or hunger. But nothing happened.

Now some folks will try to measure these supposed good vibes of synchonized sex, hoping this time the earth moves.

The Global Consciousness Project, a volunteer collaboration of about 100 scientists and analysts, runs a network of generators around the world that spit out random numbers. Project members believe that when people all over the world fous on the same big event, such as the 9/11 attacks, these generators respond less randomly picking up the planet-wide pulse.

Last year's data, from the first annual global orgasm, were inconclusive, says Reffell. So back to the bedroom.

They got 17 million hits on their website last year and are hoping for more this itme. "If enough people join in," says Sheehan, "who knows what could happen?"

Er, maybe a baby boom on September 22, 2008?

Thisis a question and answer in the New in Homes: Expert Advice: Helpful Hints section about the Ecovent dryer vent, which appears in the Saturday, November 17, 2007, Toronto Star:

FOAM-BALL DRYER VENT WORKS WELL

Steve Maxwell
Special to the Star

Q:  What's your take on the Ecovent dryer vent? I understand the need for a vent that effectively keeps out cold air, but I'm concerned about the foam ball that acts as a valve inside this product. Won't it wear out after a few years? Carpenter ants usually love foam. Won't they tunnel into the vent? Is flammability of the foam an issue?

A: We've been using an Ecovent for about three years, and it works as good as new. Instead of relying on a plastic flap to keep cold air out (a widely used design that simply doesnt' work), a foam ball drops down whenever the dyer isn't running, blocking the hole as it does. Our unit continues to seal out air as completely as necessary in this application. We've never had any insect infestation, or any trouble with fire. The only issue had to do with the plastic shroud that encases the foam components inside. Occasionally this shroud falls off, leaving the foam exposed. Dab a few blobs of construction adhesive on the foam before replacing the shroud and it stays in place permanently.

Amnesty International and the Law Society of Canada have already complained to Canada about it not intervening in the case of the imprisonment of Omar Khadr in Guantanamo Prison.  Now the UN has expressed its concerns to the United States about his case. 

It is unfortunate that the Harper government is not concerned enough, having complaints from the United Nations, Amnesty International and Canadian lawyers, that it is headed in the wrong direction where human rights and the rights of Omar Khadr are concerned. I have made my thoughts known to the government, but along with the more august organizations and persons, have not had any luck in getting Khadr released. I do think Canada's actions have been disgraceful where Omar Khadr has been concerned, and I'm glad to see I'm not alone in feeling this way.

This article is dated November 21 (hard to make out the date), 2007, News section page A4 of the Toronto Star:

CHILDREN'S RIGHTS
UN complains to U.S. over Khadr case

Beth Borham
The Canadian Press

Washington - The United Nations has registered its unease over the military trial of Canadian terror suspect Omar Khadr.

Radkhika Coomaraswamy, the UN Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict, complained yesterday to the U.S. Secretary of State's top legal adviser, John Bellinger.

"She raised her concerns about the creation of an international precedent where an individual is being tried for war crimes with regard to alleged acts committed when he was a child," said spokesperson Laurence Gerard.

Coomaraswamy, described as an independent moral advocate for all children, spoke about the implications of trying him for war crimes.

Bellinger's response is not known. His office did not return calls.

The U.S. military is determined to proceed against Khadr, 21, who has been imprisoned for more than five years on the naval base in maintains in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Khadr is charged with throwing a grenade that killed U.S. medic Sgt. Christopher Speer in a 2002 firefight in Afghanistan.

Coomaraswamy also had discussions with Canada. Its approach has been hands-off, saying he's on trial for serious crimes of spying, conspiracy, attempted murder and material support for terrorism.

Critics say the trial contravenes the Optional Protocol of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, giving those under 18 in armed conflict special protection.

Khadr is the last remaining Westerner among some 300 detainees. Britain, among other American alllies, intervened to get its citizens out of Guantanamo.

U.S. Lt.-Cmdr. William Kuebler, Khadr's defender, is asking British MPs to press Ottawa to intervene.

From the Saturday, November 17, 2007, Travel section of the Toronto Star, pages T18-T19, an article about books about eco-tourism and greening your vacations:

Eco-Tourism
GUIDES TO GREENING UP YOUR VACATION

Book publishers putting the focus on responsible travel

Juliet Eilperin
Special to the Star

As more vacationers begin to think about the impact of their travels on the planet, mainstream travel publishers have devised a new category of books to address their concerns.

The new responsible and ethical travel guides, including Lonely Planet's recent Code Green: Experiences of a Lifetime and the upcoming Green Travel: The World's Best Eco-Lodges & Earth-Friendly Hotels from Fodor's Travel, aim to give readers a way to judge the sustainability of operations from lodges to wildlife treks.

These specialty books help travellers distinguish environmental ventures from orchestrated PR. (In fact, Code Green has a short section called "Hot to Tell If Your Holiday is Green or Just Greenwash," and Rough Guides has a similar feature in its recently released 25 Ultimate Experiences: Ethical Travel.)

Some publishers, such as the U.K.'s Rough Guides and Australi's Lonely Planet, have integrated the concept into all their books and websites. They urge readers to reduce their global warming emissions and compensate for those they generate while travelling. Both companies' websites have a feature allowing visitors to calculate the global warming impact of a trip and then donate money to Climate Care, a British group that compensates for carbon emissions by funding in initiatives that cut greenhouse gases.

Mark Ellingham, Rough Guides' co-founder, said guidebooks "should encourage our readers, and by extension airlines and governments, to treat the issue with the gravity it demands."

U.S. travel guidebook publishers, such as Fodor's and Frommer's, have traditionally confined this sort of advice to books about countries where environmental activities are most popular, such as those in Latin America.

"In general, the U.S. market is just becoming aware of eco-travel, carbon footprint and the impact of travel on the planet," said Fodor's Travel publisher Tim Jarrell.

Kelly Regan, Frommer's Travel Guides editorial director, said her company is working to educate readers about practical steps, such as reusing towels and linens to conserve energy and water. "It's a very small thing, but it can reap big benefits."

Fodor's and Frommer's are expanding their responsible travel offerings, covering not only which hotels use solar power and sustainably harvested wood, but which tourist activities improve the welfare of the local communities they touch.

Publishers also are exploring the possibility of introducing rating systems in their standard guides that would let readers know which accommodations are greener than others.

Lonely Planet plans to publish a "green listing" that will establish criteria for comparing the climate effects of different lodging options.

These changes may seem minor in light of the massive carbon emissions that global travel produces year year. A round-trip flight for two passengers from California to Europe produces about the same amount of carbon dioxide that a U.S. car emits on average during an entire year, and air travel is expected to be the single biggest contributor to human-induced climate change by 2020.
Washington Post

TIPS FOR GOING GREEN

Travel Less and stay longer, rather than taking several short trips.

Take Trains when you can, instead of flying or driving.

Take Non-Stop flights rather than connecting flights.

Reuse Towels and sheets in hotel rooms rather than getting them changed every day.

Use Local  transportation in stead of renting a car.

Travel domestically rather than internationally.

From The Economist, www.economist.com, September 22nd-28th, 2007, issue, Leaders section, pages 17-18, an article about the importance and necessity of preserving human rights and freedom at home during the "war on terror":

Civil Liberties Under Threat
THE REAL PRICE OF GREEDOM

It is not only on the battlefield where preserving liberty may have to cost many lives

"They hate our freedoms." So said George Bush in a speech to the American Congress shortly after the attacks on America in September 2001. But how well, at home, have America and the other Western democracies defended those precious freedoms during the "war on terror"?

As we intend to show in a series of articles starting this week (see page 71), the past six years have seen a steady erosion of civil liberties even in countries that regard themselves as liberty's champions. Arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention without trial, "rendition", suspension of habeas corpus, even torture - who would have thought such things possible?

Governments argue that desperate times demand such remedies. They face a murderous new enemy who lurks in the shadows, will stop at nothing and seeks chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. This renders the old rules and freedoms out of date. Besides, does not international humanitarian law provide for the suspension of certain liberties "in times of a public emergency that threatens the life of the nation"?

There is great force in this argument. There is, alas, always force in such arguments. This is how governments through the ages have justified grabbing repressive new powers. During the second world war the democracies spied on their own citizens, imposed censorship and used torture to extract information. America interned its entire Japanese - American population - a decision now seen to have been a cruel mistake.

There are those who see the fight against al-Qaeda as a war like the second world war or the cold war. But the first analogy is wrong and the moral of the second is not the one intended.

A hot, total war like the second world war could not last for decades, so the curtailment of domestic liberties was short-lived. But because nobody knew whether the cold war would ever end (it lasted some 40 years), the democracies chose by and large not to let it change the sort of societies they wanted to be. This was a wise choice not only because of the freedom it bestowed on people in the West during those decades, but also because the West's freedoms became one of the most potent weapons in its struggle against its totalitarian foes.

If the war against terrorism is a war at all, it is like the cold war - one that will last for decades. Although a real threat exists, to let security trump liberty in every case would corrode the civilised world's sense of what it is and wants to be.

When liberals put the case for civil liberties, they sometimes claim that obnoxious measures do not help the fight against terrorism anyway. The Economist is liberal but disagrees. We accept that letting secret policemen spy on citizens, detain them without trial and use torture to extract information makes it easier to foil terrorist plots. To eschew such tools is to fight terrorism with one hand tied behind your back. But that - with one hand tied behind their back - is precisely how democracies ought to fight terrorism.

Take torture, arguably the hardest case (and the subject of the first article in our series). A famous thought experiment asks what you would do with a terrorist who knew the location of a ticking nuclear bomb. Logic says you would torture one man to save hundreds of thousands of lives, and so you would. But this is a fictional dilemma. In the real world, policemen are seldom sure whether the many (no one) suspects they want to torture know of any plot, or how many lives might be at stake. All that is certain is that the logic of the ticking bomb leads down a slippery slope where the state is licensed in the name of the greater good to trample on the hard-won rights of any one and therefore all of its citizens.

Human rights are part of what is means to be civilised. Locking up suspected terrorists - and why not potential murderers, rapists and paedophiles, too? - before they commit crimes would probably make society safer. Dozens of plots may have been foiled and thousands of lives saved as a result of some of the unsavoury practices now being employed in the name of fighting terrorism. Dropping such practices in order to preserve freedom may cost many lives. So be it.

From AlterNet: The Mix Is the Message, Headlines Newsletter, dated December 7, 2007, an article about the biggest media fraudsters in 2007, http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/70039/, from the Centre for for Media and Democracy, http://www.prwatch.org/:

Announcing the 2007 Falsie Awards for the Biggest Fraudsters in the Media

By Diane Farsetta, Center for Media and Democracy. Posted December 7, 2007.

Draw up your chair and prepare to be both amused and dismayed. The winners of the Center for Media and Democracy's 2007 Falsies Awards are ...

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the year that the Falsies Awards have truly arrived!

Here at the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), we've dearly treasured our Falsies since we gave the first awards out in 2004. After 12 months of reporting on the cynical, manipulative and just plain anti-democratic pollution of our information environment, we love adding an extra dash of humor to our work. But this year's Falsies Awards are extra super special.

Why, you ask? Well, more people responded to our Falsies Awards survey than ever before. Thanks to the more than 1,400 people who took part! Our Falsies are your Falsies, too.

In addition, this year marks the first time there was an organized campaign in favor of one of our Falsies Awards nominees. To find out who was stuffing our Falsies survey, read on.

As always, Falsies Awards winners must stop by CMD's office in Madison, Wisconsin, to collect their prizes. This year's winners will receive a pair of Groucho Marx glasses, to obscure your real identity; the Online Deception Kit, comprised of a sock, buttons and thread, to make your own puppet; and a five-gallon bucket of Mr. Flack's Special Greenwash Paint (warning: may not look green upon closer examination)!

With so many stellar nominees and few clear trends in the survey results, deciding on this year's winners was no easy task. Our panel of judges awarded the coveted Gold Falsie to two belligerent groups. The Silver and Bronze Falsies recognize spinners of environmental and health issues, respectively. Dishonorable mentions go to drug pushers, troop users and reporter wanna-be's. And thanks to the survey participants for nominating many worthy recipients for our Readers' Choice and Win Against Spin Awards!

Draw up your chair and prepare to be both amused and dismayed. The winners of the 2007 Falsies Awards are ...

Golden Falsie: "War More Years" and "For More Wars"

The only thing worse than failing to end a long, bloody and increasingly unpopular war might be trying to start a new one. All we are saying is that the joint winners of this year's Gold Falsie should give peace a chance.

Half of this year's Gold Falsie goes to the leadership of the U.S. Democratic Party. By all accounts, growing opposition to the Iraq war was a major factor in the Democrats' November 2006 election victories, which gave them control of both houses of Congress. What have they done with that mandate? Not much. The tension between the public's anti-war sentiment and the Democrats' political wrangling came to a head in early 2007, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promoted a "compromise" war funding bill with no specific timetables, no binding measures and no chance of becoming law. As CMD's John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton wrote at the time, a stronger Iraq amendment by members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus was deep-sixed by the Democratic leadership and ignored by the Democrat-aligned online advocacy group MoveOn.

The Iraq war funding triangulation continues today. In early December, the Wall Street Journal reported that Democratic leaders, in order to avoid being seen either as capitulating to Bush on Iraq or as under-funding the military, "are looking at the option of advancing more money for U.S. military operations in Afghanistan." Meanwhile, "responsible" war critics are being encouraged to wait for General David Petraeus's spring 2008 report, much as they were previously for Petraeus's September 2007 report. It reminds us of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's infamous, never-ending six month timeframe for evaluating progress in Iraq.

No wonder that Congress's approval ratings have sunk even lower than President Bush's, or that Speaker Pelosi felt compelled to launch a PR campaign this autumn, touting the Democratic Congress's accomplishments. At least now they can say they've won an award!

The other cup of the Gold Falsie goes to Freedom's Watch, an influential Republican-associated lobbying group that advocates "peace through strength," as described by its spokesman, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. In August 2007, the group launched a multi-million dollar advertising campaign encouraging continued support for the "troop surge" in Iraq. The Freedom's Watch print and television ads alleged a connection between Iraq and 9/11, without directly claiming that Iraq was responsible for the terrorist attacks -- the same approach used by the Bush administration in the lead up to the March 2003 invasion.

More recently, Freedom's Watch has been pushing for war with Iran. In September 2007, the group's president Bradley Blakeman (a former assistant to President Bush) ominously stated, "If Hitler's warnings were heeded when he wrote Mein Kampf he could have been stopped." Just before Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's U.S. visit, Freedom's Watch ran a full-page New York Times ad that called him a "terrorist." In October, the group organized a forum with several American Enterprise Institute fellows, designed to prove that Iran poses a significant security threat to the United States. The following month, news of a focus group apparently funded by Freedom's Watch surfaced. "The basis of the whole thing was, 'we're going to go into Iran and what do we have to do to get you guys to go along with it,'" according to one participant.

In early December, when U.S. intelligence agencies reported that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program more than four years ago, Freedom's Watch ignored the news for several days. Finally, one of their blog posts approvingly pointed to an editorial which, in their words, argued that the intelligence report showed "we must continue to pressure Iran on their weapons program." That's right -- the weapons program that doesn't exist. Why let reality get in the way of well-funded war mongering? With that chutzpah, FreedomWatch truly deserves the most false of Falsies!

Silver Falsie: "Deleting Heating"

Speaking of alternate realities, this year's Silver Falsie goes to determined global warming skeptics who, when faced with evidence of climate change, simply remove it. Exhibit A is Philip A. Cooney, who headed the White House Council on Environmental Quality in between lobbying gigs for the American Petroleum Institute and Exxon Mobil. In March 2007, the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released documents detailing "hundreds of instances" where Cooney had edited government reports to downplay the human contribution to and impacts of global warming. Cooney has no scientific credentials.

Exhibit B is the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), whose "heavy-handed" editing "eviscerated" the October 2007 Congressional testimony of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's director on the likely health impacts of global warming. Her original testimony described "how many people might be adversely affected because of increased warming and the scientific basis for some of the CDC's analysis on what kinds of diseases might be spread in a warmer climate and rising sea levels." The OMB edits removed these details, cutting her testimony to less than half of its original length.

Exhibit C is the U.S. negotiators for the global warming statement released by the Group of Eight (G-8) industrial countries at their June 2007 summit. Draft documents revealed that the U.S. pressured other G-8 countries to remove commitments to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, as well as an assessment that "tackling climate change is an imperative, not a choice."

These climate change cancelers have helped stymie attempts to address global warming for so long that hundreds of the world's most prestigious climate scientists recently issued an impassioned cry for action. Of course, the skeptics would not be so effective were it not for a larger network that funds, develops and promotes their brand of Flat Earth-ism: companies like Exxon Mobil; think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, American Enterprise Institute and Cato Institute (whose Jerry Taylor claims that "scientists are in no position to intelligently guide public policy on climate change"); and celebrities like Bjorn Lomborg and Czech president Vaclav Klaus. Take a bow, everyone!

Awarding a Falsie to groups spinning breastfeeding issues seems ... well, especially appropriate. Apparently the folks at Ban the Bags, a campaign against formula company marketing in maternity hospitals, agree. They posted a call for their members to participate in our Falsies Awards survey, and votes for the formula industry came pouring in. Is this spinning a survey on spin? Our judges were divided on that question, but ultimately decided to discount survey responses where people only voted on the formula industry nominee.

There's no question that the formula industry, represented by the International Formula Council (IFC), deserves the Bronze Falsie. The September / October issue of Mothering Magazine reported on "stealth" websites that "appear to be grassroots advocacy sites, but are actually mouthpieces for the formula industry." They include MomsFeedingFreedom.com, an IFC website that opposes restrictions on formula marketing in hospitals as attacks on "women's access to information to make a legitimate choice."

Bronze Falsie: "Impeding Breastfeeding"

In August 2007, the Washington Post reported on an IFC lobbying campaign that succeeded in getting the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to pull ads that dramatically illustrated the increased health risks faced by babies who do not breastfeed. The IFC portrayed the ads as "scaring expectant mothers into breast-feeding," and hired a former Republican National Committee chair and former Food and Drug Administration official to lobby HHS. It probably didn't hurt that most formula companies are "divisions of large pharmaceutical companies that are among the most generous campaign donors in the nation."

For portraying accurate health information as alarmism and intrusive marketing campaigns as "freedom" -- not to mention helping to keep U.S. breastfeeding rates well below those of European countries -- this Falsie's for you, IFC!

The level of deception throughout 2007 simply can't be adequately conveyed by our top Falsies Awards recipients. So we hope that you have some indignation left for the following winners of Dishonorable Mentions:

• The Vaccine for Cancer: The pharmaceutical company Merck got more than it bargained for when it embarked on a high-pressure lobbying and PR campaign to get U.S. states to mandate the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine for schoolgirls. Coincidentally, the only approved HPV vaccine at the time was Merck's Gardasil. Working with the PR giant Edelman, and with help from Women in Government and other non-profit organizations that it funds, Merck succeeded in getting dozens of states to consider mandating the brand-new vaccine. After widespread criticism, Merck agreed to stop "lobbying" state governments, though it continues to "educate" them.
• Support Our Dupes: What's wrong with supporting U.S. troops? Nothing, per se, though a Pentagon program with multi-million dollar PR contracts, events seemingly geared to increase public support for the Iraq war, with questionable spending and fundraising practices, and ties to Christian evangelical groups trying to convert soldiers and Iraqis is another thing altogether. That's America Supports You (ASY), which is currently under investigation by the Pentagon's inspector general. In October 2007, the investigation widened to include hundreds of thousands of dollars in ASY contacts run through the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. The paper's editors have called on the acting publisher to resign, after he refused to release information on the paper's involvement with ASY.
• To Thine Own Self Be Falsie: For many, the incident summed up the various "fake news" practices of the Bush administration, from video news releases to press conference plants to payola pundits. In late October, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) held a press conference on the California wildfires, giving reporters only 15 minutes' notice and offering a phone line that reporters could use to listen but not ask questions. Instead, the questions came from FEMA staffers playing reporter. Two of the staffers involved lost their jobs, but two later received promotions. The Homeland Security Department's investigation of FEMA's fakery (which will not be made public) turned up a similar incident, where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official asked questions during a February 2006 agency press conference.

Readers' Choice Awards

As usual, our readers had their own list of Falsie-worth people, groups and institutions, ranging from Fox News to PBS, from Rudy Giuliani to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Survey participants made an especially good case for the following Readers' Choice Award winners:

• Alexis Debat, a former ABC News consultant / reporter and "terrorism analyst" exposed in September 2007 for having padded his resume and published fake interviews with Barack Obama, Alan Greenspan and others. Debat also sought work with the Lincoln Group, the PR firm that planted stories in Iraqi newspapers, and had affiliations with think tanks and lobbying firms. "Seems Debat was good enough at saying the 'right' words in that paranoid climate [five years ago] to get a high-paying job" at ABC, wrote his nominator, who also criticized the lack of media coverage of Debat's fall from grace.
• TV4US, an astroturf group funded by the telecom company AT&T. In May 2007, the Wisconsin branch of TV4US (which is headed by a Milwaukee PR and political consultant) delivered to all 132 state legislators binders listing what it said were supporters of a controversial cable franchise bill. Several people who opposed the bill, including two lawmakers, were stunned to find out that they were erroneously listed in the TV4US binders. Still, the franchise bill passed both houses of the Wisconsin legislature, helped along by AT&T's many lobbyists and copious political donations.
• Edelman, the public relations firm for such clients as the American Petroleum Institute, Diebold, Microsoft and the pharmaceutical industry lobby group PhRMA. Edelman "deserves a special 'life time achievement' award for repeated boneheaded duplicity," wrote its nominator, listing such deviousness as its "fake blogging campaign" for Wal-Mart and its "Ecomagination" campaign, "claiming General Electric is 'green.'" Not surprisingly, a recent analysis of the Ecomagination campaign concluded that GE's environmental initiatives leave something to be desired.

We couldn't help but note the absence of a formerly perennial nominee -- us, the Center for Media and Democracy! Should we take that as a compliment, or as a sign that we may have been a bit too agreeable over the past year? We're not sure, but we firmly promise to do better in 2008.

Read more at the Center for Media and Democracy.

Diane Farsetta is senior researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy.

When I am in doctor's offices these days (pediatrician, psychiatrist, counsellor, family doctor...), I just have to have the magazines that contain articles about environmental or social issues for my blogging. As my youngest son says, "My bad."

The stupid thing is that after the last time I was in a doctor's office and I couldn't take the magazine with me (the receptionist never left her seat), my son reminded me that I could probably get the information online instead. Turns out he was right. I'll have to check whether that is true for the ones I "borrowed" recently, as I can return the magazines at my next appointments and stop being a green klepto. It has been one of those, the ends justify the means actions, which of course, is never the ethical or the right thing to do. It isn't exactly a good role model thing to do, either.

On my last trip to the counsellor, I made off with my biggest klepto heist: two The Economist, one Harper's, and one New Yorker. I don't even feel guilty about it, although I will bring them back when I go again in two weeks, as I'll be done with them then.

I've also gotten a bit carried away with blogs, as I'm now on: zaadz, vox, blog.ca, blogger.com, blog.com, wordpress, blogetery, shoutpost, etribes, clearposts, squarespace, livejournal, weebly, zanga, facebook. I can't say I won't join others either, as it is just fun to pick the designs and see what features are available.

My favourites? Zaadz, of course, for the community and pods; then Vox for the links, books, etc., that appear on your blog page; and then because it is Canadian and I get a lot of traffic on it:  blog.ca. Some of the others, I like because of the colours and designs or that I can have several different blogs on the same blogsite.  

I get quite obsessive in my hobbies - though usually one at a time. (What is life without passion?) I think anything green and socially related is "it" this year, which includes reading about green and social justice/human rights things, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, David Suzuki Foundation.

Up until this year, I can say 90 per cent of my reading has all been fiction (not science fiction and not mysteries and not fantasy). This year, I think it has been 95% non-fiction.

The following essay from David Olive, columnist at the Toronto Star, starts with a quotation from John F. Kennedy, in a University of Washington address, November 1961, seven months after the U.S.-led Bay of Pigs fiasco:

" We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient ... that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity; and that therefore, there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."

Tell that to George Bush and whoever succeeds him.

From the Sunday, November 25, 2007, Ideas section of the Toronto Star, pages ID-ID4:

POLITICS:  ESSAY
Why Pax Americana - U.S. attempts to govern the world - is today failing everybody, including America

David Olive
Columnist

The epic failure of American foreign policy in recent years should have yielded a new world vision among candidates seeking to replace U.S. President George W. Bush. But it hasn't, and perhaps won't.

There remains a consensus among both leading Democrats and Republicans that their homeland is in danger; that America is well served by its financial and military support of unreliable and repugnant regimes; and that continued projection of U.S. values and military force is imperative in the protection of America's commercial and security interests worldwide.

Yet is is plainly evident that over the past decade, well before Bush took office, U.S. intentions have not been realized in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Cuba, Haiti, Darfur, Somalia, Myanmar, Russia, France, Canada, China or practically anywhere America has tried to exert influence.

The two notable exceptions are North Korea, which suspended its nuclear-weapons program when the Bush administration finally abandoned sabre rattling for the bilateral talks Pyongyang had sought all along. And Norther nIreland where, in another triumph of old-fashioned diplomacy then-U.S. president Bill Clinton played a peripheral but useful role in helping broker the Good Friday accords that finally brought an end to the decades-old Troubles.

Thus the familiar U.S. foreign policy of seeking to protect America's interests by controlling world events - with military force, covert insurrections, coercive trade practices, or threat of sanctions - is bankrupt. It was bankrupt before Bush debilitated the U.S. Armed Forces in Iraq, and found no takers for his so-called "freedom agenda," articulated in Bush's second inaugural, by which he dedicated America to bringing not stability but democracy to the four corners of the Earth.

That Bush is not alone in the U.S. foreign-policy establishment in failing to grasp that stability - domestic tranqility - is a precondition to freedom, democracy, the rule of law and a market economy indicates that the deep thinkers in Washington have missed Iraq's most important lesson.

A new, self-interested American foreign policy for the 21st-century would embrace a strategy that might be called "constructive isolation." That would mean:

*  being far more selective about U.S. entanglements abroad, and even then only after a mighty overhaul of America's intelligence agencies, with their unfathomable lack of basic foreign-language skills and understanding of world religions and cultures;

*  acting alone at times but usually with others in boosting goodwill, responding to natural disasters and humanitarian crises abroad - being "the first with the most," as America was in rushing essential supplies to victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunamis;

*  ending the genocide in Darfur by joining others to hamstring the regime in Khartoum;

*  resisting a superpower's temptation to meddle, and embracing the humility of learning from and working with others. The enhanced legitimacy of collective action is a "force multiplier" in confronting the world's bad actors and the challenges threatening the planet, including nuclear proliferation and climate change;

*  and forsaking the soft bigotry of low expectations by which the U.S., with its massive financial and military aid to favoured nations, traps America's wards in a cycle of dependency.

Without the crutch of unqualified American support, Israel, for instance, would have to think harder about the consequences of its settlement policy. The European Union's emerging military prowess, which the U.S. has long discouraged, will relieve America of the burden of coping with emergencies in Europe's backyard, such as civil war in the Balkans. And Japan could be empowered to assume responsibility as a guarantor of stability in the Pacific Rim.

WITH APOLOGIES to Wordsworth, America is too much with us, laying waste its powers.

Its global ubiquity has spread regional resentment toward the U.S. It too often has yielded unsatisfactory outcomes. And it is an increasingly perilous burden on the American people. The U.S. tab for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan is officially placed between $2.4 trillion (U.S.) and $3.5 trillioin (U.S.), depending on the duration of those obligations. To put that in perspective, as recently as 2000 the national debt accumulated during the entire history of the republic was about $5 trillion (U.S.).

In a well-reasoned essay titled "The Case for Restraint" in the November-December edition of The American Interest, U.S. political scientist Barry Posen grades America's persistent attempts to impose its vision on the world.

"Since the end of the Cold War 16 years ago, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have been running an experiment with U.S. grand strategy," writes Posen, the Ford International Professor of Political Scienceand director of the security studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"The theory to be tested has been this: Very good intentions, plus very great power, plus action can transform both international politics and the domestic politics of other states in ways that are advantageous to the United States, and at costs it can afford. The evidence is in: The experiment has failed. Transformation is unachievable, and costs are high."

Posen's treatise (available at the-American-interest.com) is an obvious counterpoint to the cri de coeur of the Project for the New American Century. That 1997 neo-con manifesto - signed by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, I. Lewis "Scotter" Libby, Norman Podhoretz, and 20 kindred spirits - urged the creation of what William Kristol, then-chair of the Project for the New American Century, would later describe in a piece co-authored with Robert Kagan in Foreign Affairs magazine as a "benevolent global hegemony."

That meant maintaining America's unrivalled influence against emerging rival superpowers, China in particular.

It was the neo-cons' misfortune to put aside misgivings about Bush (Kristol's The Weekly Standard endorsed John McCain in 2000) and see their designs on regime change in Baghdad and Tehran taken up by one of the least competent administrations in memory.

YET DEMOCRATS are more complicit in the notion of American exceptionalism than Republicans. The early neo-cons were inspired by Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democratic U.S. senator and Vietnam-War hawk, and contemporary neo-cons modelled their fantastical vision for Americanizing the Middle East on another interventionist Democrat: The World War I-era president Woodrow Wilon.

It was John F. Kenndy who committed the U.S. to paying any price and bearing any burden to assure the global embrace of American values, and  his vice-president who transformed Vietnam into a quagmire. And it was Clinton, in his 1997 State of the union Address, who declared America to be the "indispensable nation."

Alistair Cooke - the 20th century successor to Alexis de Tocqueville in examining the American character for the benefit of a foreign audience - said in a 1968 Letter from America radio broadcast that JFK's invocation of Pax Americana on the day of his inaugural in 1961 was "magnificent as rhetoric, appalling as policy." By then a permanent U.S. resident, Cooke sadly concluded, "Vietnam, I fear, is the price of the Kennedy inaugural." So is Iraq.

All of the Democratic frontrunners for the presidency pledge a continuing U.S. militlary role in the Middle East, where America's very presence is arguable the greatest obstacle to resolving the multitude of animosities in the region. Hillary Clinton - who joined a majority of fellow Democratic U.S. senators in 2002 in authorizing Bush to wage war in Iraq - recently voted for a Senate resolution that gained overwhelming passage and brands Iran's Revoluntary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. The poorly understood RGC, an adjunct to Iran's regular army, is a hybrid of armed forces and business managers who run many of Iran's major industries and essential services.

That Senate vote was akin to Britain declaring the U.S. Armed Forces and the Fortune 500 to be terrorist enterprises. (The U.S. House of Representatives declined to take up the absurd motion. America stopped short of demonizing even the Wehrmacht in that manner.)

The appeal of Barack Obama's presidential bid arises mainly from his having opposed the Iraq war before it began. But as recently as 2004, Obama said, "There's not much of a difference between my position on Iraq and George Bush's at this stage," explaining his votes to extend funding for the war.

More recently, Obama tried to inflate his hawkish credentials by vowing to invade a sovereign Pakistan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden, with or without Islamabad's assent.

SINCE ITS INCEPTION, America has regarded itself as exceptional, a curse that has fed the American sense of omniscience that Kennedy came to rue. An exaggerated belief in its prowess has promoted America to deploy troops or sponsor insurrections abroad on close to 300 occasions since the country was founded. Just as Thomas Jefferson was certain of victory in the War of 1812 ("We shall strip her (Britain) of all her possessions on this continent"), Cheney was over-confident in 2002 in selling an Iraq invasion to skeptical Dick Armey, then Republican House majority leader.

"We have great information (about Iraq)," said Cheney in that exchange. "They're going to welcome us. It's be like the American Army going through the streets of Paris. They're sitting there ready to form a new government. The people will be so happy with their freedoms that we'll probably back ourselves out of there with a month or two."

America might profitably take Gandhi's counsel to be the change you wish to see in the world after betraying its stated values by torturing detainees and illegally wiretapping its own citizens. Maybe it's too soon after September 11, 2001, to ask Americans why they allow their politics to be held hostage by fear. America is far safer from external threat than its scare-mongering leaders and mass media suggest, and terrorists are far weater - as Europeans learned form the traumatizing but ineffectual activities of the Red Brigades, the Irish Republic Army, and the Baader-Meinhof group.

America has suffered greatly by over-reacting to forces whose only weapon is fear - "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror," as Franklin Roosevelt said in another context.

A U.S. foreign-policy renaissance is inevitable. The U.S. is a nuclear superpower, but the same can't be said of its conventional military forces. With the bulk of them tied down for years by a mere insurgency in a fourth-rate power, their global ambit has been shown to be surprising limited.

BY MID-CENTURY, five power blocs - the U.S., China, India, Russian and the E.U. - will vie for global influence. Unilateral sanction on major issues by any one of them will be impossible, and cooperation among them of mutual necessity.

Because of its role in helping save the world from fascism and staring down the Soviet Union in the 20th century, America retains enough residual goodwill to be greeted warmly as a housebroken member of the community of nations.

The alternative, a status quo that George W. Bush has shown to be obsolete, was described by Alistair Cooke in a 1946 broadcast that accurately predicted the next half-century of American foreign policy.

"If it should happen that America, in its new period of world power, comes to do what every other world power has done, if Americans should have to govern large numbers of foreigners, you must expect that Americans will be well hated  before they are admired for themselves."

David Olive is a Star columnist who writes frequently about business and world affairs.

GLOBAL WARMING CLAIMS ITS FIRST MAJOR POLITICAL VICTIM

Posted by Dr. Joseph Romm, HuffingtonPost.com at 3:35 PM on November 26, 2007.

Dr. Joseph Romm: Why Australia's conservative prime minister bit the dust.

This post, written by Dr. Joseph Romm, originally appeared on The Huffington Post

Global warming takes down its first major political victim:

"Conservative Prime Minister John Howard suffered a humiliating defeat Saturday at the hands of the left-leaning opposition, whose leader has promised to immediately sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming."

Why the stunning loss? A key reason was Howard's "head in the sand dust" response to the country's brutal once-in-a-thousand year drought. As the UK's Independent reported in April:

... few scientists dispute the part played by climate change, which is making Australia hotter and drier..... Until a few months ago, Mr Howard and his ministers pooh-poohed the climate-change doomsayers.

You can read about Howard's lame attempt to change his rhetoric on global warming here.

Now we are the last industrialized nation with a leader who refuses to take any serious action -- hopefully that dubious distinction will be corrected in next year's presidential election.

For Australians, the drought, called "the first climate change-driven disaster to strike a developed nation" was enough to change their views on global warming dramatically. Of course, Katrina could have been the first -- but we have no way of knowing for certain if climate changed caused that hurricane to become so deadly. Let's hope we don't need to suffer anything as brutal as what Australia is going through before we commit to serious action.

Originally posted here.

Dr. Joseph Romm is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he oversees the blog ClimateProgress.org.

From the Sunday, December 9, 2007, Toronto Star, Ideas section, page ID9, an article about great philanthropic organizations:

PHILANTHROPY
The six secrets of social entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship - the application of business principles and practices to solve social problems - is all the rage. the new sort of philanthropist who sees giving as a social investment wants to support social entrepreneurs in the same way that for-profit investors want to back ordinary (anti-social?) entrepreneurs.

Judging by the number of courses in social entrepreneurship now taught at leading business schools, many an MBA student would rather work for a non-governmental organization (NGO) than a traditional company.

Yet even as its popularity soars, sober observers of social entrepreneurship are starting to ask if it lives up to the hype. Where is the social entrepreneurial equivalent of a for-profit start-up like Google or Microsoft or any other large global business? Where is the evidence of massive social change?

Jim Collins, who wrote the best-selling business book Good to Great, has long argued that there are great organizations in the non-profit sector, just as there are in the for-profit world - although in both sectors, the vast majority of organizations fail, by some margin, to achieve greatness.

"Inspired and inspiring" is how Collins describes Forces for Good, a new book about exceptional NGOs. The authors, Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant, identify six common practices of what they call "high impact non-profits."

The phrase is telling: many of today's newly wealthy are becoming philanthropists and are desperate to give their money to organizations they believe will have a significant impact - yet many of them soon become disappointed by the quality of the NGOs they find.

The authors surveyed thousands of non-profit chief executives to find out which NGOs peers consider most successful. The survey was limited to newish NGOs (started between 1965 and 1994).

A dozen organizations emerged as having had the greatest impact, among them Habitat for Humanity, which builds low-income housing and whose profile was raised considerably by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter; The Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy think tank; and Share Our Strength, which provides hunger relief.

This is a reassuringly diverse group. The inclusion of an unashamedly right-wing organization such as the Heritage Foundation is refreshing, and all the evidence you need that this is a serious piece of research, not the usual sentimental tosh that gets written about left-leaning NGOs.

What are the six keys to success?

*  Advocate and serve. High impact NGOs soon realize that simply delivering a good service is not enough; they need to campaign for political action if they really want to drive massive social change.

*  Make markets work. The great non-profits do not rely on traditional giving; they work with market forces, generating income where possible, working with for-profit businesses to help them "do well by doing good."

*  Inspire evangelists. Volunteers are not just a source of money and effort; they can be turned into highly effective advocates for the non-profit's cause.

*  Nurture non-profit networks. The best non-profits, Crutchfield and Grant explain, "freely share wealth, expertise, talent, and power with their peers, not because they are saints but because it is in their self-interest to do so."

*  Master the art of adaptation. The best non-profits are serial innovators, constantly adapting what they do to changing circumstances.

*  Share leadership. Differentiating the social entrepreneur from the organization he creates is often difficult. In such cases, the organization tends to collapse when the entrepreneur leaves.

These are important findings, and not just for NGOs: Traditional for-profit companies could probably learn a thing or two from the success of these non-profits, too.
The Economist

From the Winter 2007 Sway magazine, Community section, pages 40-21, an article about an inspirational minister and what she has accomplished in her community and for the world:

MINISTRY OF HOPE
The gospel according to Rev. Pat Francis

By: Saada Branker

As the procession of well-groomed people file through the parking lot at 1224 Dundas Street East in Mississauga, an occasional "good morning" is murmured. There's hardly any boisterous conversation breaking the Sunday serenity and nobody lingers outside the building. Everyone enters the Kingdom covenant Centre with quiet purpose. Inside several signs with bold lettering carry the same message: "Rise and Build." Though succinct, it's a directive for the church's 3,000 congregants, many of whom have been inspired to follow the examples set by their pastor, Dr. Pat Francis.

"My idea wasn't to start a church. I didn't want a typical church in a box," says Francis, the matriarch of a non-denominational movement built on compassion. She explains that what began in Mississauga as a homegrown gathering of believers has evolved during the last 13 years. "At the time it was called, 'Thank God it's Friday.' It became such a need, such a transforming power that united people. When I wanted to shut it down, I could not and that's when I realized a ministry was born."

The extensive collection of ministries bearing the Kingdom Covenant name were all established through Francis' direction, earning her a reputation as one of Canada's most influential female evangelists. Through Pat Francis Ministries Inc., her media and charity reach is international. Broadcasts of her sermon "Washed by the Word," which airs on CTS and Vision TV in Canada, are also picked up by millions of viewers in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

Last winter, Francis led a group of doctors, nurses and other professionals from her congregation to two towns in South Africa. There, the volunteer team helped set up a medical service, tending to people's healthcare needs.

DRIVEN BY VOLUNTEERS
"The success of our ministry is rooted in the strong wealth of our volunteers, skilled people who realize that it's their duty and dignity to give back to society," says Francis, who was born in Jamaica. "And so we have created over 100 programs and all of these programs evolved as a solution."

One of the first problems Francis tackled was the disengagement black youth experienced in the school system. "So we started a Saturday morning program with about 70 children," says Francis. "We got members of the congregation to volunteer and teach them. University graduates stepped up and helped students with chemistry, physics, math, and even taught French," she says. That spirit was the foundation of the youth ministry that continues to thrive at KCC - a result that triggers a litany of anecdotes from Francis about the academic rise of each youth pastor over the years and the students they've helpd.

Being a faith-based organization made generating funds a challenge. "With the needs we had helping the youth, there was no money," she says. "The government wouldn't help because we believe in Jesus Christ and our programs are God-centered. But the only way kids are going to heal is if they have God. So what I did was I started to create my own wealth, create my own business and that is how we can help fund the charity.
"Wealth is a package of money that has purpose. It's the ability to have money and affect change. The church has traditionally idolized poverty as a manifestation of humility, so because of that we have not influened the world."

Francis' two companies, located just steps away from the church's entrance, specialize in real estate and communications. "The business and the charity are seamless," she says.

EMPOWERING WOMEN
While her successful enterprise has motivated a range of people, Francis' accomplishments are particularly poignant for the women and coung girls in her congregation. Last May, the Canadian chapter of the Women Presidents' Organization, a group of women entrepreneurs at the million and multi-million dollar level, turned to Francis, an original member. They needed young girls who could participate in an event promoting financial literacy. Francis brought 16 of them, ages six to 12, from Kingdom Covenant Academy. Each one took part in the program "Cash Flow For Girls."

Lorraine Fisher, a KCC member, says mroe than 10 years ago she was invited to a Friday night meeting. The Toronto accountant felt so at home, she started attending Sunday service and eventually got baptized.

The single mom says there was a time when she didn't like the idea of traveling far; setting her sights on Jamaica was sufficient. Fisher decided to further extend herself in helping others - encouragement, she says, that came from Francis. In 2002, she accompanied doctors and nurses on a mission to the Philippines. "That trip took two days," says Fisher. "When we came back, we then went to Saskatoon where they were dismantling some hospitals. It was an opportunity forus to get equipment to donate to developing countries." Since then, she has embarked on a mission abroad every year. Last February, she paid her own way to assist the sick in South Africa.

"I love her, but most importantly, I love the influence she has in my life and in the direction it's going," says Fisher about Francis. "I think she's showing younger girls that there's no limit to what you can do .... If you want to help the world, you need money."

She recalls a trip to Madras, India after the 2004 tsunami where Francis made an impressive impact in one particular church: "It was full of women, but women had to sit in a separate area. But the speaker that night was Dr. Pat. And when she spoke, it was something to see everyone's reaction."

Francis admis people often wonder how she fares being a black female pastor in a field dominated by men. "You will always have things to grapple with," she says. "But you have to know who you are. So I didn't bother fighting those issues."

In the New Year, Francis says the congregation's work will continue, but on a grander scale. A new television show will be launched and her mission continues in South Africa, this time to help build an orphanage. As for KCC, it's planning a move to a soon-to-be constructed $45-million complex that will house a playground, gym and theatre where church services will be held.

"It's at the gate of the city," she says, "right at the border of Mississauga and Toronto. We broke ground on August 7, 2007, so we'll continue building. It will be our family centre."

From the Nation section of The Epoch Times, which calls itself 'A Fresh Look At Our Changing Times', http://www.theepochtimes.com/, December 6-12, 2007, page A3, here is an article about a registered nurse who volunteered in Uganda and set up a non-profit charity called Buy-A-Net in order to fight malaria. 

As an aside, Buy-a-Net's contact information is: http://www.buyanet.ca/. There are other organizations  where you can make a donation for bed nets to fight malaria, such as World Vision, http://www2.worldvision.ca/gifts/app,  and the Spread the Net campaign through either UNICEF,  http://www.unicef.ca/portal/SmartDefault.aspx?at=1901, or Spread the Net directly, http://spreadthenet.org/default_en.aspx, or the Red Cross, http://www.redcross.ca/article.asp?id=013017&tid=001.  

Although some of the sites I added above are Canadian, most are international organizations, so if you google them, you can find the website for either your country or the international organization.

Some of the sites offer bed net donations for as little as $7-$10, which I think will make great stocking stuffer donations, and others offer larger numbers of nets for approximately $30.




CANADIANS MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN FIGHT AGAINST MALARIA

By Sharda Vaidyanath
Epoch Times Parliament Hill Reporter

In the summer of 2004, with a stick in hand to fend off venomous snakes, Debra Lefebvre made her way to a remote, primitive village in Uganda. But instead of a snake, the rustle in the tall grass turned out to be the unconscious, convulsing body of a boy in the advanced stages of malaria.

This incident introduced Lefebvre to malaria and changed her life forever.

Today, the registered nurse and mother of four passionately champions the cause of the millions of helpless and voiceless African children dying of the mosquito-borne disease.

"I had no idea that malaria is as it is over there ... it's an undeniable tragedy that this one hundred per cent treatable disease is the leading cause of deaths in African children," she says.

Upon her return to Canada in 2004, Lefebvre founded Buy-A-Net, a registered charity whose mission is to prevent and treat malaria in Africa "one village at a tie" through the distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets and anti-malaria medicines.

At a "Parlia-Net" reception on Parliament Hill in October, Speaker of the House Peter Milliken said Buy-a-Net "is the first Canadian grassroots citizen-driven initiative aimed at malaria prevention."

The reception, at which Lefebvre spoke, raised $4,250 toward the purchase of bed nets. One net costs $6. Buy-a-Net partners with well-established local community organizations in Uganda, which distribute and monitor the use of the bed nets.

"This ensures accountability and integrity to our donors in Canada," says Lefebvre, who visits Uganda twice a year.

According to the World Health Organization, an estimated forty per cent of the world's population is at risk for malaria. While the Sub-Saharan Africa is the hot-bed for most malaria cases and deaths, Asia, Latin America, the middle-east and parts of Europe are also afflicted.

The statistics for Africa are staggering. WHO says 90 per cent of the estimated one million malaria deaths worldwide occur in Africa at a rate of 3,000 a day, killing mostly young children. That's one child every thirty seconds.

Malaria, which causes flu-like symptoms such as fever, headaches and vomiting, is a parasitic disease transmitted by a single bite of an infected Anopheles mosquito. While there are four types of malaria, WHO describes P. falciparum as the most deadly.

"This is the type found in Uganda," says Lefebvre.

People of all ages may contract malaria and build immunity. However, children under five and pregnant women with weak imune systems are the most vulnerable. In children, death can occur within 24 to 48 hours if untreated.

"One of the big problems in Africa is that people don't have access to health services, and until recently the drugs were less and less effective," says Madeleine Thompson, senior scientist for the International research Institute for Climate and Society and advisor to the PAHO-WHO Collaborating Centre for Climate Sensitive Diseases in New York.

Thomopson, who has been involved in bed net trials in Africa, is convinced that the nets are the single most effective way to prevent and reduce malaria cases and deaths. She says the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria, as well as other foundations, have helped raise funding for malaria control imiplementationl.

"Ten years ago it was a struggle to find anyone interested in malaria control. However, there has recently been a tidal change in the approach the world has to this disease.

Ugandan-born Senator Mobina Jaffer, who accompanied Prime Minister Stephen Harper during his recent visit to the Commonwealth summit in Uganda, survived several malaria attacks in her childhood - but only because her parents could afford treatment.

Yet, she confesses that the magnitude of the problem "never hit me until Debra spoke" at the Milliken reception. Jaffer got involved, and distributed nets at the Mulago hospital, the largest hospital in Kampala, Uganda, purchased with a portion of the money donated at the reception.

"There was a substantial difference between the one ward that did have the insecticide treated malaria nets and the other ward that didn't, that really hit me hard," she says.

Jaffer says population growth, along with a lack of proper drainage, no running water, and open sewage all compound the problem of containing malaria. It is also exacerbated by - and is a cause of - the grinding poverty evidenced in many parts of Africa.

However, education programs, the use of DDT, and indoor spraying of long-lasting insecticide as well as the use of the bed nets are making a difference.

Several African countries including Tanzania, Eritrea, Namibia and Zanzibar are showing positive results in controlling the disease.

A UNICEF report stated that between 2000 and 2005 in Ethiopia - where 18 million insecticide treated nets were distributed - there was a twenty per cent reduction in children's deaths.

Jaffer is waiting for a specific response from the Harper government regarding malaria prevention in Africa. she wants to know how much the $105 million government pledge over the next five years to save 500 African lives is for malaria, or is this additional funding?

The Conservative government has pledged $105 million over the next five years to save $500 lives in Africa." Jaffer is waiting to hear how much of this will go directly toward malaria prevention.

Africa needs 352 million nets and Uganda alone needs seven milllion. The Roll Back Malaria (RBM) advocacy group, representing the global malaria community, met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, last month to hammer out a global business plan to contain malaria.

RBM has determined that malaria costs Africa $12 billion every year in lost productivity.

Kingston, where Lefebvre lives, became the first Canadian city to declare world malaria day on April 25, 2008. The Kingston Whig-Standard recently recognized Lefebvre as one of the city's "Local heroes."

I guess that Avaaz petition I signed (along with 100,000 Canadians) and the stern emails I sent John Baird, the Environment Minister, and Stephen Harper, Prime Minister, must have worked (ha, ha, ha), as Canadian (and U.S. and Russia) stopped blocking the progress of a UN agreement after pressure from other countries (oh, and me, of course).

From the David Suzuki website, the blog entry for today from one of the people at the conference from the David Suzuki Foundation, http://www.davidsuzuki.org/Bali_Blog/ :

BALI BLOG

A place for all things related to the UN climate change conference in Bali, Dec. 3-14.

December 15, 2007

Breakthrough in Bali

After long delays and all-night negotiations, political leaders at the UN climate conference in Bali finally hammered out a deal that will launch negotiations to put the world on a path towards deeper emission cuts after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

It was a long, exhausting process that went 24 hours into overtime. But in the end, Canada and the U.S. bowed to pressure and agreed to stop blocking progress.

The two-week conference produced a "Bali road map," which could put the world on a path to deeper emissions cuts after 2012. The road map includes a range of emission reductions for developed countries of 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.

The final hours of the negotiations were extremely dramatic and often emotional. During one stalemate, a clearly frustrated and disappointed Yvo de Boer, the UN's climate chief, broke down in tears and left the stage.

Talks were on the brink of falling apart after the U.S. stood firm in its position that a Bali road map must include a special exemption for weaker U.S. targets.

But a few hours later, after intense international pressure, the U.S. caved and agreed to move forward with the rest of the world.

Later in the afternoon, Canada stood alone with Russia in supporting an option for the Bali road map that ignored strong science. Country after country spoke out in favour of including the strong scientific language in the deal. Canada eventually backed down and changed its position so as not to block the overwhelming consensus.

Canadian environmental groups gave the deal a qualified welcome (read our news release here).

It's great that political leaders in Bali were able to come to an agreement on the need for deeper targets beyond 2012. Now it's time to start turning talk into action.

Posted by Sarah Marchildon at December 15, 2007

The only thing I would add to the text of these go green (or greener) resolutions is that after you've decided what you don't need, that you need to recycle it where possible by donating clothes and household goods to the Salvation Army or whatever other community or charity organizations need or want such goods. Some organizations will also take computers or other electronic stuff and furniture and whatever else you're not wanting. These should not end up in landfills. If you can't find organization who wants stuff, try an ad in a free newspaper or online site, and advertise the stuff that can be picked up free from you.

Here is the list of green resolutions from The Daily Green, http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/new-years-resolutions-47121520.

12.14.2007 3:55 PM

7 New Year's Eco-Resolutions for 2008

Ideas Even a Toe-Dipper in the Green Pool Can Deal With

Annie Bell Muzaurieta /
For The Daily Green

1. I will relinquish my title of Most Likely to Acquire Useless Crap I Don't Wear or Need.
Admit it - your closet is full of had-to-have items that have been punished to a life of hanging unworn. Your have enough notepads, pens, books, magnets, and collectible tchotchkes to fill a ministorage unit. Yes, our purchases keep the economy going, but most of us buy far more than we need. (There are whole TV shows dedicated to demonstrating ways to unclutter!) Remember that packaging, waste, and pollution are created to make these items available to you. If you trash those once-new goodies when you're no longer interested in them, they will live in a landfill for years and years. It's time to clean out, and stop the crap collecting.

2. I will avenge my phantom load.
Phantom load has nothing to do with the pounds that mysteriously appeared on your midsection over the holidays. The term refers to the energy wasted by electronics and power chargers when they are plugged in but not in use. That's right - your computer cord, cell phone charger, and time-telling DVD player are all sucking energy from the outlet even when there isn't anything attached or being watched (hence the spooky phantom-ness). Actually cut the power to your electronics by plugging them in to a power strip and flipping the switch to off when you're not watching or listening.

3. I will be smarter than bottled water companies and drink for free what they are trying to sell me.
Kicking the plastic water bottle habit might sound like an impossible feat if you're as addicted as the average thirsty American; last year we consumed about 50 billion plastic water bottles. If the fact that plastic is bad for the environment doesn't get you to quit, just think: Several bottled water brands use the same H20 that's available from your faucet. So buy an eco-chic reusable stainless steel bottle, and refill it throughout the day - for free. If you're parched at the mere thought of quitting cold turkey, ease into a plastic-bottle-free life by bringing one less bottle a week to the gym, or by giving them up at the office.

4. If I can remember to TiVo "Dancing with the Stars," I can remember to bring my own bags to the grocery store.
It's as if plastic shopping bags are required to exit a store-the disposable sacks are forced on customers even when the purchase is just a can of soda. But plastic bags are made from petroleum and only about 1 percent of the estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion Annie Bell plastic bags consumed worldwide are recycled each year. Most end up in landfills (where they take perhaps 1000 years to decompose) or in the sea. If you start bringing your own bags now, you'll be ahead of the curve if plastic ones become outlawed in your community.

5. I will switch to recycled paper products at home (but not if they make me chafe).
We know there are some folks out there who must have two-ply, but even you can commit to changing just one thing. If you have a Larry David-like aversion to recycled toilet paper, try the paper towels. If brown won't match your kitchen colors, look for recycled paper towels that are whitened without chlorine or stick with washable dishcloths. By purchasing recycled paper products you're preventing trees from being chopped down, and paper waste from ending up in landfills. In addition, less energy and water is required to produce a recycled paper product.

6. I will consider whether my meal came from the farm or the factory.
Big agriculture isn't all bad. Everyone has a guilty culinary pleasure that comes from a big factory (see: Oreos, and Cap'n Crunch). But while you're worrying about your own carbon footprint, remember that your food has one too. Think of how many miles your food has traveled (do you really need berries from Chili?), how many chemicals are used, and how much pollution and waste have been generated in the production of your foodstuffs. Support local agriculture by shopping for food at a farmers market. The goods will be fresh, and you might enjoy meeting some of the people who grew your dinner.

7. I will take a day off from road rage and take mass transit or car-pool one day a week.
If you have public transportation options available to you, try switching to the train or bus one day a week. According to the American Public Transportation Association, public transportation use saves 1.4 billion gallons of gasoline each year, and can reduce household expenses by $6,200. Plus you'll get a day off from road rage. If you don't live near public transportation, try organizing a once-a-week carpool with your neighbors or coworkers. You'll save on fuel, tolls, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by removing cars from the road. As a bonus, you'll gain access to that exclusive carpool lane.

From the Arts section of Eye Weekly, December 6, 2007, eyeweekly.com, page 51, an article about a play by the Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble that deals with racist stereotypes about aboriginal peoples:

SNAPPING TURTLES
The Turtle Gals explode ideas of Indianness: Chari Maracle, Jani Lauzon, Falen Johnson and Michelle St. John

The title of Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble's new play, The Only Good Indian ..., refers to a racist platitude so reprehensible and ridiculous it could only have come from the mouth of an American president. Sure, Teddy Roosevelt did not coin the saying, but his endorsement of it during an 1886 speech in New York (during which he also claimed that "the most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian") qualifies him, along with Buffalo Bill, as one of the figures in the play who, in Turtle Gals co-founder Michelle St. John's words, "becomes a clown."

It's a deliberate cultural and social volte-face that, St. John assures me, is not half as brow-beating as it sounds. The intent of The Only Good Indian...is, in fact, not to point fingers much, but to explore the very notion of clowning, and burlesque, in presentations and interpretations of racial and artistic identity. And that includes the sticky, ironic truth that, during and after the Indian Wars of the mid to late 19th-century - when Aboriginal life was being radically changed and stamped out as it had, arguably, never been before - performing in a show like Buffalo Bill's was one of the only outlets for the expression of what St. John terms "Indianness."

"What was still acceptable was being Indian in front of a white audience for the sake of showing the vanishing Red Man," says St. John, noting the contemporaneous emergence of residential schools, which, conversely, aimed to indoctrinate and assimilate. "The seeds of contemporary performance culture, of what is considered performance by a non-Native gaze, are planted there," she says. "The idea of seeing Indian people on display became quite normal. The idea of seeing Indian people re-enact wars which they lost was expected." Two restrictive modes of being as an artist were thus born: the gawked-at, caricatured other of the side show, and the nobly tamed savage, a patented product of the residential schools.

The Only Good Indian... presents audiences with largely unsung Aboriginals who, while not entirely rejecting these modes, manipulated them in their own, defiant ways. Four women are the main focus: Tsianina Redfeather, an opera singer who eventually performed at the Hollywood Bowl; Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, an essayist, storyteller, and music prodigy (she played piano and violin and, like Redfeather, sung opera) who was a guest at the White House during the McKinley presidency; Molly Spotted Elk, "the Indian Josephine Baker" as St. John calls her; and poet Pauline Johnson, the most well-known of the bunch.

"It's not really a play about them," qualifies St. John, "but more about the contemporary artist and what they've inherited and how they navigate that inheritance. Everybody is in a different place in their social and political evolution." St. John herself has done work that is both conventional (a spot on Northern Exposure, for example) and, like her plays with Turtle Gals, confrontational and rewarding. "These are some Aboriginals who refuse to do those kinds of roles," she says, referring to the former, which, as The Only Good Indian... asserts, go way, way back. "And some who will always do them. Who's to say whether it's really right or wrong? We all gotta eat." David Balzer
www.turtlegals.com

From the Wednesday, November 21, 2007, Toronto Star, Greater Toronto section, page A6, an article about a bedbug epidemic in social housing in Toronto:

PUBLIC HEALTH MUST DECLARE BEDBUG WAR

Joe Fiorito

There are bedbugs in a Toronto Community Housing Corp. apartment building near the Eglinton West subway station. Mary O'Neil, a tenant, was telling me that she was recently bitten and had an allergic reaction; her arm swelled up and she had to go to the emergency room of a nearby hospital. The stress, she thinks, triggered an epileptic seizure shortly afterwards.

Tell me you think bedbugs are not a health hazard.

Diane Belfiore lives in the same building. She said, "There is a gentleman here who was sleeping on his balcony all summer because of the cockroaches and the bedbugs."The balcony is not an option for him now that the weather has turned.

Tell me you think bedbugs are not a health hazard.

The two women discovered, by knocking on doors, that bedbugs have spread. There was one infested apartment on one floor in June, and now there are several apartments on 10 or 11 floors of the 17-storey building. They also told me of a man in the building who washed himself with gasoline to rid his body of the bugs.

Tell me you think that bedbugs are not a health hazard.

I have heard about these vicious little bloodsuckers from people who live, not just in social housing, but in apartment buildings and houses, in neighbourhoods good and bad, all over town and across the GTA.

I have also written about the plans of Toronto Community Housing Corp. to deal with the problem. TCHC hopes to be able to respond to any complaint within 48 hours; they hope to spray any infested unit within a week or two of the complaint; they are spending a million dollars a year on pest management, including not only bedbugs but mice, rats and roaches. That all sounds so reasonable.

I am sick of reasonable people.

You cannot be reasonable while pests are sucking your blood. The problem is spreading like flames all over town. Where athe people who will deal with this problem as if they were firefighters in front of a burning building?

You think it's too expensive to declare all-out war on bugs? What is the cost of doing nothing?

Mary O'Neil shook her head. She said, "We're talking to some lawyers. I don't know if they're going to take it to the housing tribunal," I hope they do.

Tenants in the U.S. are beginning to launch lawsuits against landlords. No reason why we shouldn't catch up.

Diane said, "I shouldn't have to be scared. The social club we started here has stopped. People don't want to go out. They are staying behind their doors." In other words, they are afraid of catching or spreading bugs. Let me tell you that social isolation is a serious health problem.

Diane said, "A lot of people don't have families. The social club was an outing for them. You really want to know what the problem is? Come, walk the building, knock on a few doors, ask people what's going on."

There, right there: If Public Health now intends to learn about the bedbug problem, let them start with Mary and Diane. Let them also get a list of community housing addresses from the reasonable people at TCHC. Let Public Health start, right now, by walking around, knocking on doors, talking to tenants.

While they're at it, let them also investigate the work of care providers in social housing: I know of one instance in which a caregiver did not get help for an elderly woman, helpless and in the early stages of dementia, who was being eaten alive because her apartment was infested.

Joe Fiorito usually appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Email: jfioriot@thestar.ca

From the Saturday, November 24, 2007, Toronto Star, New in Homes section, pages H, and H16, an article about green housing construction:

ECO-CONSTRUCTION
Lowrise bar hits new heights

Environmentalists argue there's still a long way to go, but a pair of subdivisions are on new turf for green building

Tracy Hanes
Toronto Star

The green building bar for lowrise subdivisions has just been raised.

Rodeo Fine Homes, a small custom builder, and Monarch, a division of the world's largest building company, have thrown down the green gauntlet with two projects in the GTA that they claim will represent firsts in Canada.

Rodeo's is the 34-house EcoLogic enclave in Newmarket and it aims to be the first all-LEED Platinum lowrise development. Monarch's is called Evergreen, a 196-unit LEED-H project on a former Scarborough brownfield.

Rodeo calls EcoLogic the "greenest housing development in Canada," while Monarch calls Evergreen "Canada's largest lowrise green residential community."

Both projects have also been developed in partnership - Rodeo with the Town of Newmarket and Monarch with the Toronto Economic Development Corporation (TEDCO) - as leading edge examples of green building for other builders and municipalities to follow.

And while such claims are often derided as more image than substance, at least one leader of a prominent eco-conscious group has some nice things to say about these "green" housing projects - even if it's somewhat qualified.

"On the whole, (developments like these) are good, but we get into quibbles," says Chris Winter, executive director of the Conservation Council of Ontario - a province-wide association of groups and individuals dedicated to a healthy environment.

"One major issue is if you're talking about climate change an energy efficiency as priorities, the housing industry is still building sprawl, putting houses where you have to drive to get a bag of milk. They haven't got the full concept yet."

Residents of Rodeo and Monarch's new subdivisions are unlikely to go on foot for much of their shopping, but both projects score better than most new lowrise sub-divisions in terms of transportation. A bus route passes the entrance of the EcoLogic development and major recreation facilities and green space are close by. Evergreen will be a fairly easy walk from the Scarborough GO station, a bus to the subway and within an existing neighbourhood.

So while some will argue that the green bar must be raised further still, there can be some agreement that these projects are part of a new era, a change in direction.

"The whole green industry is new and everyone is trying to stake out their turf," says Vincent Santamaura of RN Design, lead architect the EcoLogic project. "What is green anyway? What brand is the market going to recognize? For us, it's a whole new journey."

"There is too much information, too many programs and it is creating a tremendous amount of confusion," says Brad Carr, Monarch Corp's senior vice-president, low-rise. "But that doesn't discount the need to push the envelope," he says.

Santamaura adds that one of the key challenges will be convincing homebuyers that by spending a little more upfront for a LEED house, they are buying a portion of all the energy they are going to use over 20 years at current prices.

"You're pre-buying energy at today's dollar . . . that's a fundamental concept that's hard to get through everyone's head," Santamaura says.

He says over the 70-year life cycle of a building, the capital cost - the purchase price - typically represents only 5 per cent of what it will cost to operate the building.

"But people don't spend 70 years in a home - they are going to have to see that in 10 years they will have added value to their home," Santamaura says.

Lenard Hart, a consultant on EcoLogic and co-creator of the Energy Starfor Houses in Ontario program during his former job as business development manager for the EnerQuality Corp., says LEED offers better choices for consumers.

"For me, this LEED platinum project is so far beyond anything I have ever been involved with, R2000 or Energy Star, but it feels like we are truly beginning to transform the way homes are built," he says.

"LEED looks at more than just insulation levels and furnace efficiency. It changes the way you build, promotes recycling on site, soil erosion controls, recycled materials, advanced framing and many other environmental advances that other programs do not cover."

He says while public education is important, the EcoLogic site "is such a leadership project that we are really appealing to an elite segment of very green consumers who are already quite well informed."

One hurdle is distribution of the materials needed for LEED homes.

"The products are out there, but it's the channels and pricing that are the challenge," Hart says. "We had to develope new channels. Builders have a fairly small circle of suppliers and we went to them first and made them part of the process, but asked them to bring in what we needed. That's part ofthe social transformation."

EdoLogic project hopes to achieve LEED platinum status by reducing household water draw by 25 per cent and reducing water discharge (effluent and storm water runoff), solid waste, greenhouse gas production and energy consumption by 60 per cent over conventionally built homes.

The site was part of the 36-hectare Stickwood-Walker farm, purchased by the Town of Newmarket in January 2003. The town developed a land-use plan that included the Magna Centre recreation complex, green space and heritage reserves and 160 residential lots, says Jason Unger, assistant director of planning.

Of the 160 lots, Menkes bought 124 for $16.1 million in August 2005: the town set two lots aside for Habitat for Humanity homes and slated another 34 lots for an environmentally progressive subdivision, based on public consultantion. Menkes offered to buy the 34 lots for $3.7 million if a suitable environmental developer did not come forward.

But Rodeo responded to the town's request for proposals and in January 2006, bought the 34 lots for $3.2 million with the condition that the developer had to achieve the stringent water use, waste reduction and energy-saving goals set by the town.

Two model homes, which should be completed next spring, will be learning vehicles for trades and building inspectors about LEED. Prices have not yet been determined for the detached homes.

Santamaura says a company like Rodeo is perfectly suited to tackle such a project. For one, it is a small, custom home builder that has had experience "tinkering" with new products that custom homeowners want. As well, a small builder can easily educate staff and quickly make changes.

Santamaura says that in three decades of green building, "it has taken 15 years for us to understand the building envelope, then 15 years working on mechanical systems and HRVs (heat recovery ventilators) and knowing how to design them for the right type of space. The final step is LED lighting, which we are just understanding now.

"For all us diehard advocates (of green building) we've been quietly trying to apply them for years and it's really great to be able to put all the stuff we've learned into a development," says Santamaura, who started his green building career in the 1970s, designing a super-insulated custom home for a Newmarket client.

The $100-million Evergreen development in the Midland and St. Clair Aves. area, to consist of 196 brick old Ontario-style singles, semis and townshouses, will be built to LEED-H, or basic, certification. All homes will meet Energy Star standards, construction waste will be reduced significantly and rainwater collectors will recycle runoff. The homes are to be ready for first occupancy in late 2008.

The goal is to demonstrate a green residential community can be economically viable and marketable, Carr says.

Monarch had owned five hectares of the site since the late 1990s and the City of Toronto oowned much of the land surrounding it. Carr says it was virtually impossible to get approvals as a result, but then the land reverted to TEDCO, the city's principal redevelopment corporation.

TEDCO operates at arm's length from the city, its sole shareholder, and has a mandate to pursue opportunities with a variety of public- and private-sector partners to restore derelict and vacant lands. It agreed to sell five hectares to Monarch, with the condition it build an innovative green community, makring the first time TEDCO has worked with a residential builder.

TEDCO CEO Jeffrey Steiner says fair market value was received for the land and TEDCO did its due diligence by obtaining two value appraisals and testing the market by tendering other lands nearby by confirming prices.

He says as the two properties were intermingled, it made sense to sell to Monarch and to share services such as roads, storm water management ponds and more. These economy-of-scale savings will be reinvested in the green aspects of the development.

Carr says Monarch is striving for basic LEED certification, not silver, gold or platinum, because the builder feels it is more effective to "reduce energy use by 15 per cent on thousands of homes," rather than achieving more dramatic reducctions on a small number.

He says it's important that Evergreen not be a "one-off" but something that's economically viable and repeatable" that could be built without government subsidies.

"LEED is very paper-driven and is a prove-to-me auditable process," Steiner says. "It's not just about how you build, but what you put in and about leaving the smallest possible footprint."

Steiner says the Evergreen site will triple the number of LEED lowrise homes in North America and the projet's results and know-how will be shared with the housing industry, including the GTA's BILD (Building Industry and Land Development Association).

Carr says part of the mandate was to keep the homes affordable. He says that's why, for example, the homes will use conventional natural gas heating, cutting energy consumption with efficient two-stage furnaces and extra insulation.

Priced from the mid $300,000s to $500,000s, Carr admitsthat "clearly not everyone can afford that, but in the City of Toronto, unfortunately that's where affordability is."

The Conservation Council of Ontario's Winter says there will be a market for the EcoLogic and Evergreen homes, as a recent poll shows homeowners are investing their own money in conservation practices. Some of them will want turn-key energy-efficient houses and "LEED is a very reputable standard and it's doing a tremendous job putting forth standards the building industry can work with."

He says one of the difficulties in bringing LEED standards to entire develpments is that it will require changes to planning standards that have been around for 50 years.

Grey, like the sky outside and the pale muted sun through the stripped limbs of the trees.

From. the Ideas section of the Toronto Star, Sunday, November 11, 2007, page ID3, an article about browsing for God:

RELIGION
In a consumer society, browsing for belief

'You don't have the church as gated community,' an author says of Canada. 'Yet'

Leslie Scrivener
Feature Writer

Like so much in America that is branded, packaged, bought and consumed, religion - and the "sensation" of religion - is another commodity to be marketed, James Twitchell, a professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida, writes in his new book, Shopping for God: How Christianity Went From In Your Heart to in Your Face. He spoke to the Star from his home in Gainsville, Fl.

You argue that the increase in religiosity in the U.S. - the most religious country in the world - is spurred not by fears of war or terrorism, but by marketing. How did that happen?

We thought it important to separate church and state, which we did in our Constitution, which means from a marketing point of view, anyone with a program can get into the market and be protected by the state ... the wackiest, the noisiest, the most turbulent, will be rewarded.

Other cultures have a state supported monopoly supplier - the Roman Catholic Church in France, the Anglican Church in England or best yet, the Lutheran Church in Scandinavia. These are all suppliers, which have run out of steam. Inevitably, religion loses its pizzazz, because the state always screws up, and antagonisms toward the state get directed to the religion.

The most successful churches, you tell us, give believers an intimate and powerful experience with startling efficiency. Can you describe such a church?

Let's face it, all religions tell a story. The minute you hear a story, you should be thinking "feeling." Stories make us feel ... and religious stories can deliver an epiphany. I got interested in this when I wrote a book on luxury. Why would you buy a $500 handbag or a $300 scarf. Clearly, it's not the thing you're after, it's the sensation, which is also at the heart of all religion: "I found it. I know it. I'm special."

Does this help explain why people sometimes get emotional or weepy in church?

I'd see people coming from the parking lot to the church; they were very close to the audience in a rock concert. They wanted to be stimulated and to feel these feelings - that's why music is so crucial in any successful church. Music is the most demanding of emotional connections. That's why mega churches foreground the music - 80 per cent of the experience in mega churches is listening to music, often picked up from popular tunes, essentially singing and dancing along.

You observe that often these successful churches don't look like churches. They have auditoriums, not sanctuaries, and there is no religious iconography, not even a cross.

They look like stuff you see on the outskirts of Toronto - small business or junior colleges, nothing soaring or reaching up to the skies. they've been able to pick up the exaggeration of sensation from entertainment culture, especially the rock show - the event where you go to be blasted with drop-down screens and incredibly sophisticated sound systems.

The growing churches are trying to make a claim: We're not like the church that you remember. Don't look for those doleful images of the crucified Christ, don't think you're going to hear organ music, and especially don't think that when you pick up a hymnal, you'll hear those dreary, hard-to-sing 18th century songs.

We have big churches in Canada, but nothing like the full-service mega churches you describe. What are we missing?

You don't have the church-as-gated community - yet. These churches are rehydrating, reformatting the highly nostalgic and powerful images of community - especially in Colorado, California and Texas, where there is a large transient population. They do more than two-hour, five-times-a-weekend services: They'll educate your child, and have athletic events and special groups for men.

Some even have car-repair groups, don't they?

The mega church got successful when they realized that women always want community and will bring their children. But men are the absolute lodestone to get one of these bursts of affiliation. It's in these small men's groups - like car repair, motorcycle riders, men have trouble with their jobs - these sub groups that address male concerns for male community. It seems the genius of these mega churches is they are able to get men's space protected - there are men's groups before your divorce is finalized, how to date in middle age. "You'll see a a startling number of young men there. Invariably, you'll see a music room, filled with electronic equipment for junior, the drums he can't play at home, and the electric guitar he can't afford.

The Pope has scolded his flock forbeing "cafeteria Catholics," picking bits of doctrine that suit them. So, whither Catholicism?

He's one of the few to come out against this - this seasoned-to-taste religion. (The Catholic Church) can move into English, we can wear different outfits, and we can have guitars, but one thing we can't have is a lot of variation inside the service. It's a monopoly supplier rather than a "scramble market" (derived from the Darwinian model. "When it's applied to religion you have a market that rewards the loudest voice ...")

I'm surprised when I read statistics, which you present, that four out of five Americans say they have "experienced God's presence or a spiritual force."

It's part of this strain of American righteousness but also American consumerism. If you've got the Louis Vuitton handbag, then I'll get one- there's very little you can have, that I can't have. Consumerism is applied to the experience of salvation. It's ludicrous that 80 per cent of Americans have had this - a transforming Joan of Arc experience - but it's part and parcel of, "If you've had an epiphany I'll have one."

So all I have to do is think I've had a religious experience?

It may not be the real thing, but who knows what the real thing is. It's part of that self-indulgence, that American righteousness. It's our president, the idiocy of our foreign policy, our ideas that saying "You're right" makes you right.

Not only did Australia do everyone left of the conservatives in the world proud, by electing a Prime Minister who will do something about climate change, he has appointed the former rocker Peter Garrett to help him make these changes. 

From the World section of the Toronto Star, Friday, November 30, 2007, page AA4:


EX-ROCK STAR APPOINTED ENVIRONMENT MINISTER
PM-elect names former Midnight Oil frontman, Asian-born woman to push pro-Kyoto agenda

Sydney, Australia - A former rock star and an Asian-born woman have been named to spearhead the new Australian government's environmental policies, which include ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

Former Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett was appointed environment minister by prime minister-elect Kevin Rudd, whose centre-left Australian Labour Party ousted John Howard's conservative government in elections last weekend.

Malaysian-born Penny Wong will be minister for climate change and water, with responsibility for international negotiations on the Kyoto treaty, which aims to curb the emission of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

Rudd has pledged to reverse Howard's policy and ratify the UN treaty. He told a news conference that both new ministers would accompny him to a key UN conference in Bali next month that aims to produce plans for action on climate change beyond 2012, when currrent Kyoto commitments expire.

The PM-elect said Garrett would be responsible for delivering key climate-change schemes within Australia, including "solar programs, water-efficiency programs and general energy efficiency programs."

Climate change became a major issue in the Australian election campaign against the backdrop of the worst drought in living memory, and Rudd pledged to make the environment one of this government's top priorities.

Shaven-headed Garrett, 54, was for 26 years the vocalist for Midnight Oil, named by Rolling Stone magazine as "one of the most signficant bands ever to emerge from Australia."

The band was known for its active support of a range of contemporary concerns including the plight of homeless youth, indigenous people's rights and protection of the environment.

Garrett was elected to parliament in 2004 and became shadow minister for climate change, environment, heritage and the arts, but lost climate change to Wong after making a few gaffes during the election campaign.

Wong moved from Koto Kinabalu in Malaysia to Australia at age 8 in1977. A lawyer, she was elected a  Labour senator in 2001, the first Asian-born woman to enter federal Parliament.

Meanwhile, Howard's Liberal Party elected a new leader yesterday, who immediately reversed the former leader's position on Kyoto.

The move by incoming leader Brendan Nelson - who rides a Harley-Davidson, used to wear an ear-ring and was once a member of the centre-left Labour Party - drew a stark line under the conservative Howard era.
Agence France-Presse

From the December 20, 2007, News & Views section of XTRA, page 9, an article about mental health for gay and lesbian youth:

AID FOR THE SUICIDAL
Helping queers survive the holidays

Mental Health

Krishna Rau

The recent suicide of 13-year-old Shaquille Wisdom, a gay boy in Ajax who was being bullied, has emphasized how important it is for queer youth to be aware of the resources available to them.

With the holiday season upon us it's also important for adults who may be feeling depressed to know who they can contact for support and help.

The Lesbian Gay Bi Trans Youth Line receives about 300 to 500 calls a month from kids in Ontario and December tends to be a particularly busy month.

"We definitely get a lot of calls around the holiday," says Jennifer Fodden, the Youth Line's executive director. "Many youths who are not connected to their families can find it a hard time to get through. Suicidal ideation is a very common theme."

Sara Shwadchuck, a counsellor with Kids Help Phone - a national counselling service that received 1.5 million calls last year from 3,000 communities across Canada - says queer kids are often emotionally battered into depression.

"With LGBT youth the difficulty is self-acceptance or they're dealing with so much homophobia," she says. "We ask them questions that make them think about what the good is that's happening in their lives."

Fodden says that the farther away from downtown Toronto - which boasts such well-established organizations as Supporting Our Youth and Central Toronto Youth Services - the fewer the resources available to queer youth.

"Sometimes the Youth Line's toll-free number and the internet are the only resources available." she says.

But Fodden says that even remote communities usually have some queer-specific resources available.

Where to Find Help

LGBT Youth Line: 1-800-268-9688 or (416) 962-9688; Youthline.ca

Kids Help: 1-800-668-6868; Kidshelpphone.ca

AIDS Committee of Durham Region: (905) 576-1445; Aidsdurham.com

Ajax Youth Centre: (905) 428-1212; Theyouthcentre.ca

Prism: (416) 281-7301 ext 4497

Supporting Our Youth: (416) 324-5077; Soytoronto.org

Central Toronto Youth Serices: (416) 924-2100 ext. 245; Ctys.org/programs/prideprejudice.htm

Distress Line: (416) 408-HELP (4357); Torontodistresscentre.com

"One way to find the pulse of what's happening in a community is through PFLAG [Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays]," she says. "They may know about the queer-positive youth group that's happening at a drop-in centre. Sometimes a local AIDS service organization also funds youth groups or outreach programs."

Fodden says the Youth Line is often able to refer queer youth to groups on university or college campuses.

In the case of Durham region, which includes Ajax, the AIDS committee of Durham Region (ACDR) does some youth outreach.

"There aren't a lot of supports, a lot of programs in Durham," says Tiff Idems, the ACDR's health promotions coordinator. "We do find ourselves doing a lot of support, whether it be youth calling directly or parents calling for children."

The ACDR also has a pamphlet aimed at queer youth in Durham which is available on their website. The pamphlet includes sections on coming out and dealing with homophobia.

Idems also points to youth workers at the Ajax Youth Centre as a source of help.

Amy Nagel, a health promoter at the Youth Centre, says a queer youth drop-in group will be starting on Tue. Jan 22 for those aged 13 to 19. She says queer youth searching for help can contact the centre for confidential medical care and counselling.

Scarborough's Shoniker Clinic, a mental health clinic for adolescents, also offers a queer youth group called Prism for those in Durham and Pickering, Denyse Brushette, who runs the group, says queer youth in those areas who are desperate should contact the clinic.

"If they're really struggling or anxious, this would be appropriate," she says."They would need a doctor's referral but if a youth were to call them I would help them through that process."

Queer youth services also sometimes find themselves dealing with desperate adults who have nowhere else to turn. Fodden recommends they contact the Distress Line.

Karen Letofsky, the executive director of the Distress Centres of Toronto, which operates the local Distress Line, says they get a lot of queers among the 120,000 callers they hear from annually.

"We're very gay-positive," she says. "A number of our counsellors are gay themselves."

Letofsky says the line deals with suicidal callers but many queers just want a supportive voice.

"The support comes with the phone call," she says. "They can call as often as they want. Sometimes they just want emotional release in the moment, they feel the need for human connection."

Hope. I am being taken off my last half anti-depressant this week as my dose of manic-depression medication is being slowly, slowly increased.

I was having a hard time this week and starting to think about suicide. My doctor and psychiatrist had already closed their offices for the holidays but I went to see a counsellor through my company's employee assistance provider. He was very helpful - got me to call the psychiatrist while in his office to let him know what was happening (as a result of the anti-depressant tapering off, no doubt). That is when I found out he wasn't in the office again until the 27th, but I will be two hours north of the city with my husband and sons at the cottage we bought in the fall.

He got me to sign a release so that the information from the psychiatrist would be available to a helpline should I need to call them over the holidays either at home or at the cottage. He also got me thinking about packaging up all the anti-depressant  medication I have left over which I won't be taking any more and getting rid of it (since I mentioned my thoughts about suicide had involved pills). So this morning when I drive my son to his friend's to pick up his drum set, either on the way there or back, I'm stopping in a pharmacy to see if they'll take the medication (I also went through some pain reliever and other medications and found quite a number were expired). Medications shouldn't be flushed down sinks or toilets as they get into the water system, where they are not all removed before getting back into the drinking water system or into the earth or other bodies of water.

I told him I was not keen to talk to some call centre help line partially because they wouldn't know anything about me (they will have access now because of the form I signed to my records at the psychiatrist). I also wasn't sure what they would do. Apparently, they would actually send someone out to the house to see how I am - I wasn't aware they would do something like that.

Bad luck for me that the psychiatrist has me now going to only half one anti-depressant pill, while the two lamotrigine are not working sufficiently to cover the loss of the anti-depressant (I completely go off the other half on Wednesday).

The counsellor asked if I would be telling my husband or asked if I thought it was a good idea (or something like that). I said it would be a good idea but I haven't. Bad enough having thoughts of that before Christmas and then spoiling the day for your family by dumping that information on them. I have warned my husband I may not be in any shape to participate in Christmas Eve dinner (when we celebrate) or presents. (My birthday in September was similarly completely ruined.) After Christmas if I have suicidal thoughts again, I will have to tell him in case I need to ask that he or one of my teenage sons stay in the house with me (instead of all three going out together).

The counsellor's visit, though I spent 3/4's of it crying and feeling anxious and tired of everything, did eventually make me feel better for the time being. I'm sure I will continue to feel great mood swings and even worse when off the last half pill as my other medication won't be increased for a week after that when I see my doctor on Jan 3.

I have to say it was a complete shock to me that my mind was in such a state that I could basically shoving my family and life to one side to consider suicide. I always thought I could keep the worst despair away by thinking what an impact my death would have on my children's lives and future lives. I think that is what scared me the most.

I am grateful that the counsellor gave me some practical solutions to what to do if I have suicidal thoughts again, as I don't feel overwhelmed by anxiety over having had such thoughts and not knowing what a help line or  even going to the emergency could do for me.

There should be a more humane way of treating depression or manic depression than what is available currently - especially the long waiting period for anti-depressants to kick in or the weaning off medication and the slow increase in other medication. It really is barbaric. I think they call it medication trial and error. Sounds like experimentation to me.

Hope. I know I will get through this - just sad it gets much worse before it will get better.

From The End of Poverty by Jeffrey D. Sachs, page 367, Jeffrey Sachs, as part of his chapter, "Our Generation's Challenge", includes a section on 'Our Next Steps', such as:

(1) Commit to Ending Poverty; (2) Adopt a Plan of Action; (3) Raise the Voice of the Poor; (4)
Redeem the Role of the United States in the World; (5) Rescue the IMF and the World Bank; (6) Strengthen the United Nations; (7) Harness Global Science; (8) Promote Sustainable Development; (9) Make a Personal Commitment.

Here's is the section on making a personal commitment:

Make a Personal Commitment  In the end, however, it comes back to us, an individuals. Individuals, working in unison, form and shape societies. Social commitments are commitments of individuals. Great social forces, Robert Kennedy powerfully reminded us, are the mere accumulation of individual actions. His words are more powerful today than ever:

"Let no one be discouraged by the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills - against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence ... Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation ...

It is from the numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

Let the future say of our generation that we sent forth mighty currents of hope, and that we worked together to heal the world.