The state of global stocks of marine fish

*52% of stocks are fully exploited, meaning they are at or near their maximum sustainable production levels;
*20% are moderately exploited
*17% are overexploited
*7% are depleted
*3% are underexploited
*1% is recovering from depletion

Fish catches in the wild have reached a record high of 95million tonnes a year, with 84,8 million tonnes coming from marine fisheries and 9.2 million tonnes from inlands fisheries.
Overall, global fisheries production (marine and inland capture fisheries plus fish farming) totals 141,6 million tonnes annually.

From: www.fao.org

(Posted on April 14, 2007)

New slavery systems

There are “more slaves alive today than all the people stolen from Africa in the time of the transatlantic slave trade,” writes Kevin Bales (‘Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy’). He estimates there are more than 27 million people “enslaved by violence and held against their wills for purposes of exploitation” and the number is increasing. A feature of the new slavery is that slaves become disposable once the slaveholder has used them.

Although officially illegal in every country, a new form of slavery is arising because of globalisation, Bales explains. Transnational companies switch their production to subsidiaries and subcontractors in the developing world and “take advantage of slave labour to improve their bottom line and increase dividends to their shareholders.”

A ‘Wild West syndrome’ exists in which corruption and state forces protect slaveholders. Bales points out that today’s slaveholders get “all the benefit of ownership without the legalities.” Indeed, for the slaveholders, not having legal ownership is an improvement because they get total control without any responsibility for what they own.”

In de last century in the American South a slave owner might pay the equivalent of up to $100.000 for a slave. This was an incentive to keep a slave alive. Today a slaveholder can enslave a worker for as little as a $20 debt. It is not profitable to keep them if they are not immediately useful or become ill.

(Posted on March 19, 2007)

Climate change: World leaders should take immediate steps

Driven by increased concerns and mounting evidence of the threats posed by global warming, some of the world's most eminent scientists are telling policymakers to get their act together before it is too late to avoid a doomsday scenario.

Releasing a new study entitled ‘Confronting Climate Change: Avoiding the Unmanageable and Managing the Unavoidable,’ researchers said here Tuesday that world leaders should take immediate steps to start reversing the upward trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions, otherwise the current path would lead to "serious" climate change impacts.

Prepared in response to a request by the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) two years ago, the 144-page study outlines a roadmap for measures to reduce dangerous emissions, alleviate poverty, and spur sustainable development.

"It is still possible to avoid an unmanageable degree of climate change, but the time for action is now," John Holdren, a professor of environmental policy at Harvard University and one of the lead authors of the study, told reporters at U.N. headquarters.

According to the study's findings, the average global surface temperature has already risen about 0.8 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels and that may rise by another two to four degrees by the end of this century.

Prof. Holdren and other authors of the study said the risk of climate change could entail "intolerable impacts" if the average temperature level reached more than two degrees C. above the 1750 pre-industrial level. They observed that the world is already experiencing climate disruptions, and the increases in droughts, floods, and sea level rise that will occur in the coming decades could lead to enormous human suffering and economic losses.

“We imperil our children's and grandchildren's future if we fail to improve society's capacity to adapt to a changing climate,” said Rosina Bierbaum, former acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Such an eventuality can be avoided, she went on to say, "if we manage water better, bolster disaster preparedness, increase surveillance for emerging diseases, make cities more resilient, prepare for environmental refugees, and use natural resources more sustainably."

(Posted on March 5, 2007)

Food sovereignty threatened by biofuels
Save the rainforest

An open letter was sent om January 6th, 2007, to the European Parliament, The European Commission, The Governments and Citizens of The European Union, in which several
networks from Latin American countries expressed their “deep concern over the policies that are probably to be adopted to favour the use and import of biofuel as an alternative to fossil fuels, whose disproportionate use is one of the main causes of global warming”.
They point out :

• Increasing use of individual automobiles and their associated oil consumption as one of the main causes of global warming, and biofuels might appear to be a positive alternative. However, serious negative impacts are being experienced by the people and natural
resources of the South.

• Europe will never achieve self-sufficiency in the production of biofuel from national production of energy crops. The EU Biofuels directive being announced by the EU Commissioners next week, will drive a massive market expansion in biofuels in Europe that will come at the expense of lands on which the food sovereignty of Southern countries depend.

• While Europeans maintain their lifestyle based on automobile culture, the population of Southern countries will have less and less land for food crops and will loose its food sovereignty. We will have to base our diet on imported food, possibly from Europe.

www.regenwald.org

(Posted on Feb. 26, 2007)

Be careful with where you get your information from!

We have to be increasingly more careful with where we get our information from these days. It seems that it becomes more and more difficult to be able to rely on the media, even the mainstream sources. A lot of people still believe that if something is reported in the media, it has to be true, and if it’s not reported, it’s probably not true. They fail to realize that the media is being used more and more to form public opinion instead of objectively informing the public. It’s being used to manipulate people into doing and thinking what those in control want them to do and think. This is largely being done by selectively reporting the news, reporting half truths, lies or just opinions that are not based on facts. Selectively reporting the news also means that there’s a lot of information that never reaches the public. It’s a form of censorship.

You should see two important documentaries that you should see on this subject: “Orwell Rolls in his Grave” and “Outfoxed.” The traditional media such as TV, radio and print are slowly being taken over by a small number of corporations with just a few people at the top deciding what to report.

Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp alone reaches 80% of the world population, and he’s now also taking over large websites on the Internet. Other corporations such as General Electric Capital and organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are also busy buying what remains of independent media. And then you also have corporations on the Internet such as Google who have been caught censoring information many times already. Even Microsoft and Yahoo are actively and willingly helping the Chinese government with censorship and limiting freedom of speech. And it’s still not enough, because the Chinese president wants even more control of the Internet: Chinese President Hu Jintao said that his glorious socialist government should be using the Internet to “guide public opinion”. He wanted to see a “healthy online culture” which was dedicated to protected the government’s stability. According to the Xinhua News Agency Hu told officials at a meeting of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo that whether China could cope with the Internet affects the development of socialist culture, the security of information, and the stability of the state.

(Posted on Feb. 19, 2007)

Millions to Go Hungry by 2080

Rising temperatures will leave millions more people hungry by 2080 and cause critical water shortages in China and Australia, as well as parts of Europe and the United States, according to a new global climate report.

By the end of the century, climate change will bring water scarcity to between 1.1 and 3.2 billion people as temperatures rise by 2 to 3 Celsius (3.6 to 4.8 Fahrenheit), a leaked draft of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report said.

The report, due for release in April but detailed in The Age newspaper, said an additional 200 million to 600 million people across the world would face food shortages in another 70 years, while coastal flooding would hit another 7 million homes.

“The message is that every region of the earth will have exposure," Dr Graeme Pearman said.

In Europe, glaciers would disappear from the central Alps, while some Pacific island nations would be hit hard by rising sea levels and more frequent tropical storms.

"It's really a story of trying to assess in your own region what your exposure will be, and making sure you have ways to deal with it," said Pearman.

On the positive side, Pearman said there was an enormous amount the international community could do to avert climate change if swift action was taken.

From: Rob Taylor, Reuters, Tuesday 30 January 2007

(Posted on Feb. 5, 2007)

Memorization is not education

Teaching answers to standardized tests should not be called ‘education,’ especially when problem-solving will be the most important tool for a generation of students destined to inherit the incredible problems we will leave as our legacy. To repeat the answers we feed, is at best, preparing future ‘patriots’ for greater acceptance of official policy. The consequences of this blind trust have become painfully apparent. The US government spent millions of dollars on propaganda to sell a peace-loving populace on an illegal invasion of a sovereign country.

In the name of the people of the US, and with their unwitting approval, the United States has aggressively squandered a peace that was earned by the blood of generations before them. ‘We the People’ unknowingly ‘agreed to’ torture of prisoners, non-compliance with international treaties, destruction of the environment, and proliferation of a nuclear arsenal that was already excessive for its insane, outdated, imaginary purpose. We've widened the gap between the wealthy and the less-fortunate; denied affordable access to health care, and - to avoid any sacrifice - we've left our children with the tab.
We acquiesced, because to dissent would have been unpatriotic, non-supportive of the troops, and part of a far-left agenda. Standardized tests have just as little room for dissent, and might be the perfect preparation for naive acceptance of creeping fascism. After all, many neo-conservative leaders believe THE problem in our country is a lack of patriotic indoctrination at the elementary levels of public education.
Better we teach our children no answers - only questions and suspicions, courage and insight to detect official ideology. They will need wisdom beyond ours to rebuild our trusted position of leadership in a peaceful world - to restore environmental health to a wounded planet - and to redefine concepts like patriotism, democracy, and morality. They will need an extraordinary education, not short answers.

From: Jack Blatherwick, PhD

(Posted on Jan. 8, 2007)

The Fallible Patriarch

With his poor choice of examples (‘violent conversion’ ‘irrationality of the Islam faith’) Pope Benedict XVI in a lecture given in September 2006 at the German University of Regensburg, has engaged in the rhetorical equivalent of playing with dynamite.
A gracious letter in response from 38 Muslim scholars sought to educate the pope on Islamic theology, pointing to the words of Mohammed that "there is no compulsion in religion." The scholars pointed to Islam's history of tolerance for other faiths, saying: "Had Muslims desired to convert all others by force, there would not be a single church or synagogue left anywhere in the Islamic world." They also condemned in the strongest terms the violent reactions of a few Muslims to the pope's speech calling them "acts of wanton individual violence" and "completely un-Islamic."
Theologian Karen Armstrong said the pope's remarks were "extremely dangerous," and that they "will convince more Muslims that the West is incurably Islamophobic and engaged in a new crusade." She said that the myth of Islam as a violent faith is just that - a myth left over from the Crusades. Extremism in the Muslim world today, she said, is a response to "intractable political problems - oil, Palestine, the occupation of Muslim lands ..."
Clearly, Pope Benedict, known as an intellectual, failed to do his homework on Islamic theology. Charged with promoting peace, he blundered and insulted Muslims for no good reason. Benedict is revealed as only a man, a fallible person with his own agenda that he pursues imperfectly.

By: Kelpie Wilson

(Posted on Dec. 25, 2006)

Strength out of Weakness

In ‘Cradles of Eminence’ by Victor and Mildred Goertzel studied the family backgrounds of 300 highly successful people. Many of the names of those in the study are well-known to most of us, ¬including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Helen Keller, Winston Churchill, Albert Schweitzer, Gandhi, and Einstein, all of whom were brilliant in their field of expertise.

The results of this study are both surprising and encouraging for many of us who came from a less than desirable home life. For example: "Three-quarters of the children were troubled either by poverty, by a broken home, or by rejecting, over-possessive or dominating parents.

"Seventy-four of 85 writers of fiction or drama and 16 of the 20 poets came from homes where, as children, they saw tense psychological drama played out by their parents.

"Physical handicaps such as blindness, deafness, or crippled limbs characterized over one-quarter of the sample."

These people who had confidence in their abilities and put them to creative use had more weaknesses and handicaps than many who have all of their faculties intact and who had a reasonably good home life background. So, what made the difference? Probably by compensating for their weaknesses they excelled in other areas.

One man reported, "What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature."

The speaker who stammered until his death was W. Somerset Maugham, as he looked back on his life at age 86. "By then he had become a world-renowned author of more than 20 books, 30 plays, and scores of essays and short stories." It's not what we have or don't have that matters in life but what we do with what we have.

(Posted on Dec. 4, 2006)

No Commitments on ‘Anti-vehicle Mines’

The U.N. conference on conventional weapons that cause indiscriminate or excessive injuries, Geneve, 7-17 November 2006, did not came up with an agreement on a legally binding instrument on Mines Other Than Antipersonnel Mines.

”Mines other than antipersonnel mines -- often termed anti-vehicle mine[s] -- laid outside fenced and marked areas, present a substantial risk to peacekeeping operations, humanitarian operations and normal civilian activities,” noted Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, representing the Holy See.

”The failure to achieve such an agreement has left a real disappointment in the expectations of many people who see that it could have provided a good and adequate response to the humanitarian concerns posed by these weapons.”

At the conference, the Holy See supported negotiations “for a legally binding instrument on cluster munitions and opted for a moratorium in the meantime, prompted by the overwhelming evidence of the humanitarian disasters caused by such weapons, especially on the civilian population.”

Humanitarian aid agencies explained during the meeting that it is not enough to call for the withdrawal of cluster munitions. Rather, they must be prohibited, the agencies insisted.
According to these organizations, there are millions of cluster bombs stocked in the world.

(Posted on Nov. 27, 2006)

World flat and unflat

“You have to come to the rural villages and see whether India is shining. India is shining okay for the glossy magazines, but if you go outside Bangalore you will see that everything about India shining is refuted….(In the villages) alcoholism is rife and female infanticide and crime are rising. You have to bribe to get electricity, water; you have to bribe the tax assessor to assess your home correctly. Yes, the middle and the upper classes are taking off, but the 700 million who are left behind , all they see is gloom and darkness and despair.

From: The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman, pg 377

(Posted on Nov. 20, 2006)

Global Warming Nears ‘Dangerous’ Level

In a study that analysed temperatures around the globe, researchers found that Earth has been warming rapidly, nearly 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit (0.2 degrees Celsius) in the last 30 years.

“The average surface temperature is 15, maybe 16 degrees Celsius (60 degrees Fahrenheit),” said Alan Robock, a meteorologist and climate researcher from Rutgers University who was not involved with the study.

If global temperatures go up another 1.8 degrees F (1 degree C), it would be equal to the maximum temperature of the past million years.

“This evidence implies that we are getting close to dangerous levels of human-made (anthropogenic) pollution,” said study leader James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

“During the warmest interglacial periods the Earth was reasonably similar to today. But if further global warming reaches 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know,” he said. “The last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about 3 million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 meters [80 feet] higher than today.”

In a 2003 study, scientists showed that 1,700 plant and animal species migrated toward the poles at about 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) per decade in the last 50 years.
That migration rate is not fast enough to keep up with the current rate of movement of a given temperature zone, which has reached about 25 miles (40 kilometers) per decade in the period 1975 to 2005, Hanson and co-authors write in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Rapid movement of climatic zones is going to be another stress on wildlife,” Hansen said. “It adds to the stress of habitat loss due to human developments. If we do not slow down the rate of global warming, many species are likely to become extinct. In effect we are pushing them off the planet.”

(Posted on Nov. 13, 2006)

Economic Hit Men

Economic Hit Men (EHM) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign ‘aid’ organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families, who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalisation.

John Perkins

(Posted on Oct. 30, 2006)

Basic characteristics of empire
Roman empire –American empire

1. the sense that the empire is divinely authorized
2. the development and employment of overwhelming military power to spread and maintain the empire
3. the use of terror, or simply the threat of terror, to intimidate
4. rule through puppets backed up by the empire’s pervasive military presence, and
5. the collection of taxes in order to enrich the empire’s center and finance its imperial rule

From: Christian faith and the truth behind 9/11,108, David Ray Griffin

(Posted on Oct. 23, 2006)

Our narrowed-down consciousness

Although we live in a violent world, luckily most people don't act out in violent ways -- they tend to act out more against themselves, drowning themselves in alcohol or drugs or personal despair.
Others turn toward fundamentalist religions or ultra-nationalist extremism. Still others find themselves acting out against people that they love, acting angry or hurtful toward children or relationship partners.
Most Americans will feel puzzled by any reference to this "larger picture." It seems baffling to imagine that somehow we are part of a world system which is slowly destroying the life support system of the planet, and quickly transferring the wealth of the world into our own pockets. We don't feel personally responsible when an American corporation runs a sweat shop in the Philippines or crushes efforts of workers to organize in Singapore.
We don't see ourselves implicated when the U.S. refuses to consider the plight of Palestinian refugees or uses the excuse of fighting drugs to support repression in Colombia or other parts of Central America. We don't even see the symbolism when terrorists attack America's military center and our trade center--we talk of them as buildings, though others see them as centers of the forces that are causing the world so much pain.
We have narrowed our own attention to "getting through" or "doing well" in our own personal lives, and who has time to focus on all the rest of this? Most of us are leading perfectly reasonable lives within the options that we have available to us -- so why should others be angry at us, much less strike out against us? And the truth is, our anger is also understandable: the striking out by others in acts of terror against us is just as irrational as the world-system that it seeks to confront. Yet our acts of counter-terror will also be
counterproductive.

Rabbi Michael Lerner

(Posted on Oct. 16, 2006)

Animal Farm’s reality:
Some animals are more equal than others

‘Animal Farm’, by George Orwell, 1945, was written as a satire on the Sovjet Union. It was re-enacted recently in the discussions in the UN where the ambassador of Israel seems to follow the thinking of the American jurist Alan "Torture is OK" Dershowitz who was annoyed that the Israelis have been accused of killing innocent civilians. He is now arguing that there are degrees of "civilianity." He wonders how many innocent civilians killed by Israel in Lebanon would still be innocent if we could make finer distinctions.

He should read the Lebanese newspapers and he would get the answer. One third of those killed by the Israelis are children. I'd guess they are all civilian all the time. And then there are the families, like the Canadian women, children and men blown up at Aitaroun. I suppose they are really civilians. Etc.

People, like Dershowitz ( there are many, as in war and in conflicts enemies are easily depicted as animals or evil beings) make distinctions of degrees of humanness. The enemy isn’t mostly considered a full human being. Israeli officials have already showed us how Arabs can be reclassified away from a full "human" category that they clearly, in the view of the Kadima government, do not deserve.

For instance, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dan Gillerman angrily denounced Kofi Annan for neglecting this key fact. The Guardian reported, ' Mr Gillerman said "something very important was missing" from Mr Annan's speech: any mention of terrorism. Hizbullah were "ruthless indiscriminate animals", he told reporters.'

So you see, one reason that you can just bomb the hell out of the Lebanese in general is that they aren't human beings at all. They are "animals."

There is a problem with stopping here, however. It is not enough to reclassify some human beings as animals. After all, you have to treat animals humanely. You can even be fined for mistreating an animal, though probably you would not go to jail.

(Posted on Oct. 4, 2006)

Widening gap between rich and poor

American CEOs were paid in 2000 an average of 458 times more than production workers, up from 104 times in 1991.
The degree of wealth concentration of the world's 475 billionaires is now worth the combined income of the bottom half of humanity. Meanwhile, the United Nations Development Program's 1999 Human Development Report revealed that the gap between the wealthy and the poor both within and between countries is growing steadily larger.
In its Global Trends 2015 report, issued in 2000, the CIA maintained that globalisation will create "an even wider gap between regional winners and losers than exists today. [Globalisation's] evolution will be rocky, marked by chronic volatility and a widening economic divide…deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation. [It] will foster political, ethnic, ideological, and religious extremism, along with the violence that often accompanies it."

From: Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)

(Posted on Sept. 25, 2006)

The pathology that shapes the minds of terrorists

Raise children in circumstances where no one is there to take care of them, or where they must live by begging or selling their bodies in prostitution, put them in refugee camps and tell them that that they have "no right of return" to their homes, treat them as though they are less valuable and deserving of respect because they are part of some despised national or ethnic group, surround them with a media that extols the rich and makes everyone who is not economically successful, physically trim and conventionally "beautiful" feel bad about themselves, offer them jobs whose sole goal is to enrich the "bottom line" of someone else, and teach them that "looking out for number one" is the only thing and that anyone who believes in love and social justice are merely naive idealists who are destined to always remain powerless, and you will produce a world-wide population of people feeling depressed, angry, unable to care about others, and in various ways disfunctional.

Luckily most people don't act out in violent ways -- they tend to act out more against themselves, drowning themselves in alcohol or drugs or personal despair.

Others turn toward fundamentalist religions or ultra-nationalist extremism. Still others find themselves acting out against people that they love, acting angry or hurtful toward children or relationship partners.

But we live in one world, increasingly interconnected with everyone, and the forces that lead people to feel outrage, anger and desperation eventually impact on our own daily lives. The same inability to feel the pain of others is the pathology that shapes the minds of these terrorists.

Rabbi Michael Lerner

(Posted on Sept. 18, 2006)

Divisive trends in the USA

The USA now has more millionaires than ever -- 7.4 million! And over the past decade, the number of billionaires has more than tripled, 341 of them!
Mr. Median is earning, after inflation, a little less than he earned when Richard Nixon reigned. Median household income -- and most of the Americans are "median" -- is down. Way down. Since 2000, median income has fallen 5.9%.

The richest fifth of America owns 83% of all shares in the stock market. But that's a bit misleading because most of that, 53% of all the stock, is owned by just one percent of American households.

And what does the Wealthy One Percent want? Answer: more wealth. Where will they get it? As with a tube of toothpaste, they're squeezing it from the bottom. Median paychecks have gone down by 5.9% during the current regime, but Americans in the bottom fifth have seen their incomes sliced by 20%.
At the other end, CEO pay at the Fortune 500 has regime to an average of $8.1 million per annum.

Is America getting poorer? No, just its people, the Median. In fact, they are producing an astonishing amount of new wealth in the USA. It is a lean, mean production machine. Output per worker in presentday America zoomed by 15% over four years through 2004. Problem is, although worker productivity keeps rising, the producers are getting less and less of it.

From: Tikkun 060905

(Posted on Sept. 11, 2006)

Economic Hit Men (EHM) build a global empire

Photo: John and his daughter Jessica decided to change the world in ways that will benefit Jessica’s

An elite group of men and women who utilize international financial organisations to foment conditions that make other nations subservient to the corporatocracy running the biggest corporations, the government and the banks of the USA. They provide favours such as loans —loans that were much larger than needed—to develop infrastructure- electric generating plants, highways, ports, airports or industrial parks. Mostly under the condition that engineering and construction are being done by American companies, like Halliburton and Bechtell. Most of the money never leaves the United States; it is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington to engineering offices in New York, Houston or San Francisco.
Despite the fact that the money is returned immediately to corporations that are members of the corporatocracy (the creditor), the recipient country is required to pay all back, principal and interest. The EHM is completely successful if the loans are so large that the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years. Then the USA demands its ‘pound of flesh’, such as control over the United Nations votes, the installation of military bases or access to precious resources such as oil or the Panama Canal. Of course, the debtor still owes the USA the money – and another country is added to the global empire of the USA.
All the countries that were in this way brought under the global empire‘s umbrella have suffered. Third world debt has grown to more than $2,5 trillion and the cost of servicing it – over $375 billion a year as of 204 – is more that all third world countries spend on health and education, and twenty times what developing countries receive annually in foreign aid.

From: John Perkins – Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, prologue

(Posted on Sept. 4, 2006)

The average age of civilizations

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years.
These nations have progressed through this sequence:
- From bondage to spiritual faith;
- from spiritual faith to great courage;
- from courage to liberty;
- from liberty to abundance;
- from abundance to selfishness;
- from selfishness to complacency;
- from complacency to apathy;
- from apathy to dependence;
- from dependency back again into bondage.

(Posted on Aug. 14, 2006)

We share the same inability

“We may tell ourselves that the current violence has "nothing to do" with the way that we've learned to close our ears, when told that one out of every three people on this planet does not have enough food, and that one billion are literally starving. We may reassure ourselves that the hoarding of the world's resources by the richest society in world history, and our frantic attempts to accelerate globalisation with its attendant inequalities of wealth, has nothing to do with the resentment that others feel toward us. We may tell ourselves that the suffering of refugees and the oppressed have nothing to do with us -- that that's a different story that is going on somewhere else.
But we live in one world, increasingly interconnected with everyone, and the forces that lead people to feel outrage, anger and desperation eventually impact on our own daily lives. The same inability to feel the pain of others is the pathology that shapes the minds of these terrorists”.

Rabbi Michael Lerner

(Posted on July 31, 2006)

The threat of nuclear weapons

When the bipolar balance of nuclear terror passed into history, the concern with nuclear weapons also seemed to drift from public consciousness. But some 35,000 nuclear weapons remain in the arsenals of the nuclear powers, with thousands still deployed on hair-trigger alert. Whatever rationale these weapons may once have had has long since dwindled. Political, moral and legal constraints on actually using them further undermine their strategic utility without, however, reducing the risks of inadvertent war or proliferation.

The objective of nuclear non-proliferation is not helped by the fact that the nuclear weapon states continue to insist that those weapons in their hands enhance security, while in the hands of others they are a threat to world peace.

If we were making steady progress towards disarmament, this situation would be less alarming. Unfortunately the reverse is true. Not only are the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks stalled, but there are no negotiations at all covering the many thousands of so-called tactical nuclear weapons in existence, or the weapons of any nuclear power other than those of the Russian Federation and the United States of America.

Above all else, we need a reaffirmation of political commitment at the highest levels to reducing the dangers that arise both from existing nuclear weapons and from further proliferation

Alice Slater

(Posted on July 24, 2006)

Before long no non-GMO
foods anymore anywhere

As a result of genetically contamination of non-GMO (genetically manipulated organs) crops in Europe, the U.S., Mexico, Australia and South America, the biotech food industry had an upbeat year in 2005 and things are definitely looking good for the future. As genetically modified pollen from their crops blows around, contaminating nearby fields, objections to genetically modified crops diminish because non-GMO alternatives become harder and
harder to find. A few more years of this and there may not be many (if any) truly non-GMO crops left anywhere. At that point there won't be any debate about whether to allow GMO-crops to be grown here or there -- no one will have any choice. All the crops in the world will be genetically modified (except perhaps for a few grown in greenhouses on a tiny scale). At that point, GMO will have contaminated essentially the entire planet, and the companies that own the patents on the GMO seeds will be sitting in the catbird seat.

By: Peter Montague

(Posted on July 17, 2006)

War or peace

America’s behemoth, the military-industrial complex (MIC), has raked-in from taxpayers since WWII a cool $21 trillion. If we divide the $21 trillion of U.S. spending alone by the 60 years since WWII, the result is $350 billion per year.

Now let’s compare the cost of war per year just for the US against the estimated cost per year of providing adequate food, water, education, health and housing for everyone in the world. The Campaign Against Arms Trade based in London puts this number at $17 billion. Now we can figure out how many times more expensive war is than peace. By dividing $350 billion by $17 billion, we get 20.5. So war costs twenty times more than caring for the world’s population, just using US military spending. Moreover, we cannot imagine the accumulative dollar value of life lost, the collective mental degradation of humanity and the co America’s behemoth, the military-industrial complex (MIC), has raked-in from taxpayers since WWII a cool $21 trillion. If we divide the $21 trillion of U.S. spending alone by the 60 years since WWII, the result is $350 billion per year.

Now let’s compare the cost of war per year just for the US against the estimated cost per year of providing adequate food, water, education, health and housing for everyone in the world. The Campaign Against Arms Trade based in London puts this number at $17 billion. Now we can figure out how many times more expensive war is than peace. By dividing $350 billion by $17 billion, we get 20.5. So war costs twenty times more than caring for the world’s population, just using US military spending. Moreover, we cannot imagine the accumulative dollar value of life lost, the collective mental degradation of humanity and the cost to the earth’s eco-system caused by war.

Bo Filter

(Posted on July 10, 2006)

The alternative to security funding

The overall defence spending of the United States includes eight times as much on military security programs as it does on non-military security programs. The Pentagon budget totals $439 billion and has increased almost 30 percent since 9/11. In addition, the U.S. spends $21.8 billion on nuclear weapons activities within the Energy Department.
Keep in mind the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not covered by the Pentagon's budget, but come from emergency supplementals. When these costs are taken into account, military spending for the coming year will exceed $600 billion.
The U.S. should align its spending with approaches that have real promise for achieving security. The task force suggests a $10 billion increase in spending for overseas economic development; a $1 billion increase in U.S. contributions to international organizations, $1.8 billion in additional funds for diplomatic operations; tripling what is allocated for proven nonproliferation programs like those designed to lock down or destroy excess nuclear weapons and bomb-making materials around the world; $8.8 billion more for alternative energy sources; and a $10 billion increase in spending on the nation's basic public health
infrastructure.

Frida Berrigan

(Posted on July 3, 2006)

We are maturing

We are beginning to realize what we are doing to our environment – that we are gradually killing off the planet as a living, breathing, evolving body of expression of a Great Cosmic Being which, of curse, the planet is. We are beginning to see that we cannot go on despoiling the planet, polluting the air , rivers and oceans. More and more, concerned groups have brought this to the attention of governments. At long last, many governments meet on a more or less regular basis to discuss the problems and see what can be done about them. That is a new maturing, a growing sense by humanity that it is One, brothers and sisters of one humanity, n this planet to carry out some plan, some role, which is as yet dimly felt by most people. That we are, at last, taking seriously what individual groups have for long brought to the notice of governments is a sign that we are recognizing our vulnerability and also our oneness

(After: Benjamin Creme, The Art of Co-operation)

(Posted on June 26, 2006)

Creating a society of automatons

What are our public schools but an instrument of the state? Our students are not taught the skills of critical thinking that would serve them well as citizens in a free society for the entirety of their lives. Mass education focuses upon memorization and scoring well on exams. Our schools do not promote independent thought or independent actions--they teach conformity and control of the masses. Every student is taught virtually the same thing in essentially the same way--much of it untrue; especially history and economics. Our students are not educated to become useful and creative members of society; they are programmed to be unquestioning conformists and mindless consumers of goods and propaganda. Thus we are creating a society of automatons who will never challenge authority, who will behave predictably and will be staunch defenders of the status quo. In other words, they will become the passive core of modern Society.

The continued programming of malleable young minds for the purpose of promoting capitalism paves the way for a poorly informed, passive society capable of believing any lie, accepting any atrocity and calling it liberation, democracy or justice--calling it anything but what it really is. If we are ever to have a peaceful and just society that values the contributions of its citizens equally, we have to begin by first educating ourselves and then our youth. Self deceit does not work in the public interest. It never has.

Charles Sullivan
cesullivan@stargate.net

(Posted on June 19, 2006)

More ‘real-world’ learning

We spend four years in high school. That's about 720 days, or 17,280 hours, of being stuck in the same boring schedule over and over. According to a new study, it's boredom that causes more students to drop out of high school. The survey used by the Gates Foundation gathered from the 470 dropouts said that 47 percent left because classes weren't interesting, 88 percent of the dropouts had passing grades and would have met graduation requirements. When asked the question, what would have kept them in school, 81 percent wanted more "real-world" learning opportunities.

From: The Columbian Opinion, 060605

(Posted on June 12, 2006)

Grim unemployment figures

The ILO annual jobs report, released in January, makes grim reading: more people out of work, looking for work or living in poverty than ever before, especially if they are young.
"Our greatest concern is that if the recovery falters and our hopes for more and better jobs are further delayed, many countries will fail to cut poverty by half as targeted by the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for 2015. But we can reverse this trend and reduce poverty if policymakers stop treating employment as an afterthought and place decent work at the heart of macroeconomic and social policies."

Juan Somavia, Director-General of the ILO

(Posted on June 5, 2006)

The ending of war

When the time comes to count the cost, men will be amazed at, and ashamed of the waste of war. More than any other activity of men, war eats greedily into resources and lives. Nothing is spared in the efforts to overcome the ’enemy’; everything is sacrificed to the attainment of victory. Thus has man waged relentless strife against his neighbor, and not always in self-defense. As often as not, war has been used for the expansion of territory, the accumulation of plunder or, most abhorrently, the capture of slaves. The ‘spoils of was’ is a phrase used lightly to describe the underlying purpose of most wars.
Today, we have reached a time when men must take seriously the task of ending war. Men must understand that there is no problem or situation which needs war to solve or cure. This being so the nations must together act and end for ever that destructive aptitude of men.

Benjamin Creme
Share 0603-3

(Posted on May 29, 2006)

The insufficient global food production system

The world is now eating more food than farmers grow, pushing global grain stocks to their lowest level in 30 years. Rising population, water shortages, climate change, and the growing costs of fossil fuel-based fertilisers point to a calamitous shortfall in the world's grain supplies in the near future, according to Canada's National Farmers Union (NFU).

In five of the last six years, global population ate significantly more grains than farmers produced. And with the world's farmers unable to increase food production, policymakers must address the massive challenges to the ability of humanity to continue to feed its growing numbers. There's not nearly enough discussion about how people will be fed 20 years from now.

Hunger is already a stark and painful reality for more than 850 million people, including 300 million children. How can the number of hungry not explode when one, two and possibly three billion more people are added to the global population.

Shifting from a global food production system to local food for local people would go a long way towards addressing inequity. The 100-mile diet, where people obtain their food from within a 100-mile radius of their homes, makes good sense for most of the world.
The whole fabric of the food production system needs to change, or hunger and malnutrition will only get much worse.

From: Population: Global Food Supply Near the Breaking Point, Stephen Leahy, IPS, 060517

(Posted on May 22, 2006)

Poisoned lives

American citizens in at least 35 states are carrying a toxic chemical in their bodies at levels very close to the federal safety advisory guidelines. This is a shocking fact, but perhaps even more appalling is the report that alleges that the White House is trying to delay publication of the data.

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) is demanding that the study be made public immediately so that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and various state level agencies can start a program to protect the public.

What is poisoning Americans, their water sources and their soil in more than 35 states (some reports say as many as 45 states are implicated in the contamination) is a chemical known as perchlorate. It is the explosive ingredient found in solid rocket fuel, and is found predominantly on military bases, their surroundings and anywhere where military machinery and armaments are produced or stored. Perchlorate has been discovered in milk, various food sources as well in animal feed crops right across the USA.

‘Perchlorate is a thyroid toxin, and animal tests show that even small amounts can disrupt normal growth and development in fetuses, infants and children,’ says EWG. Drinking water for more than 20 million Americans is contaminated with perchlorate, which is also carcinogenic and has an ‘indefinite’ duration in the environment.

From: Share International, 2006.4-24

(Posted on May 15, 2006)

Unclean Fuels Kill 1.5 Million People Per Year - UN

Half the world's population burns wood, coal, dung and other solid fuels to cook food and heat their homes, exposing them to dangerous smoke that kills 1.5 million people a year, the UN health agency said on Thursday.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said women and children in Africa and Asia were especially vulnerable to indoor air pollution from open fires and poorly ventilated stoves. Children make up 800,000 of the 1.5 million people who die each year from polluting household fuels, women account for 500,000 deaths and the remaining 200,000 are men.

"Day in day out, and for hours at a time, women and their small children breathe in amounts of smoke equivalent to consuming two packs of cigarettes per day," the WHO said. Yet in a report entitled "Fuel For Life: Household Energy and Health," the Geneva-based agency said it could cost as little as US$6 per family to install better-insulated and fuel efficient stoves in developing countries. "Making cleaner fuels and improved stoves available to millions of poor people in developing countries will reduce child mortality and improve women's health," WHO Director General Lee Jong-wook said.

(Posted on May 8, 2006)

"If financial markets bring prosperity, why are they so underdeveloped around the world, and why were they repressed, until recently, even in the United States? Throughout its history, the free market system has been held back, not so much by its economic deficiencies, as Marxists would have it, but because of its reliance on political goodwill for its infrastructure.
The threat primarily comes from two groups of opponents. The first are incumbents, those who already have an established position in the marketplace and would prefer to see it remain exclusive. The identity of the most dangerous incumbents depends on the country and the time period, but the part has been played at various times by landed aristocracy, the owners and managers of large corporations, their financiers and organized labor.

The second group of opponents, the distressed, tends to surface in times of economic downturn. Those who have lost in the process of creative destruction unleashed by markets- unemployed workers, penniless investors, and bankrupt forms—see no legitimacy in a system in which they have proved losers. They want relief, and since the markets offer them none, they will try the route of politics.”

Raguram G.Rajan and Luigi Zingales: Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists, page 1, 2

(Posted on May 1, 2006)

The scale of the catastrophe in Iraq is so extreme that it can barely be reported. Journalists are largely confined to the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, or else travel under heavy guard. There have been a few regular exceptions in the mainstream press, such as Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn [of the British newspaper The Independent], who face extreme hazards, and there are occasional indications of Iraqi opinion. One was a report on a nostalgic gathering of educated westernized Baghdad elites, where discussion turned to the sacking of Baghdad by Hulagu Khan and his vicious atrocities. A philosophy professor commented that "Hulagu was humane compared with the Americans," drawing some laughter, but "most of the guests seemed eager to avoid the subject of politics and violence, which dominate everyday life here." Instead they turned to past efforts to create an Iraqi national culture that would overcome the old ethnic-religious divisions to which Iraq is now "regressing" under the occupation, and discussed the destruction of the treasures of Iraqi and world civilization, a tragedy not experienced since the Mongol invasions

Noam Chomsky

(Posted on April 17, 2006)

There is a big difference between GDP and wealth. GDP includes such factors as purchases and services that does not record the depreciation of capital assets (such as degradation of ecosystems). So GDP per capita can increase even while wealth per capita declines. GDP can be a hopelessly misleading index of human well-being.

From: Scientific American, 2005-9:84

(Posted on April 10, 2006)

Leading causes of DALYs

Rank 1990                           2020

1     Pneumonia and other     Heart diseases
respiratory infections

2     Diarrheal disease           Depression

3     Disorders of Childbirth    Vehicular accidents
       and newborns

4     Depression                    Stroke

5     Heart disease                Emphysema and Bronchitis

From: Scientific American, 2005-9:73

(Posted on April 3, 2006)

Climate Change

Climate Change is not just an environmental issue; it is pre-eminently an issue of social and economic justice. Around the world, wealthy individuals are throwing up seaside mansions and multinationals are building high-rise hotels and condos, secure in the knowledge that if they must some day abandon them they have already purchased their great escapes. The poor, no the other hand, without help from their government, must sit tight and u\endure what comes.
The South Asian tsunami, inundation of Southern Louisiana, and accelerated melting of the Arctic ice cap are stoking well-founded fears of marine apocalypse, a new Noah’s flood. In this case, climate science converges with biblical prophecy to press the message that we must mend our ways or face a civilization swamped by the seas like the fabled lost city of Atlantis.

Share International, 2006-4

(Posted on March 27, 2006)

Forest rich countries better keep their forests

Seven million km2 of humid tropical forest have been cleared, about half its original extent, but only two million km2 have become productive cropland.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, alterations in land use, of which forest clearing is the most important, produce a quarter of global carbon dioxide emissions. An international market in carbon could create incentives for forest-rich countries to keep their forests, rather than converting them to cattle pastures.

From: Scientific American, 05.09:51

(Posted on March 20, 2006)

The failing, expensive health care

The US is now spending 16% of all its money on health care. The total annual money-flow within the U.S. (measured as GDP) is about $12 trillion -- and health care is eating up at least $1.9 trillion of that. By the year 2015 (10 years from now), it 'll be
spending 20% of all its money on health care.
Only one percent of this money is spent on prevention -- 99% is spent on treating disease after it occurs.
Despite these enormous expenditures, the system is said to be failing.

Rachel's Democracy & Health News #845

(Posted on March 13, 2006)

Higher sea levels

Two new satellite surveys show that warming air and water are causing Antarctica to lose ice faster than it can be replenished by interior snowfall, and thus are contributing to rising global sea levels. The studies differed significantly in estimates of how much water was being added to the oceans this way, but their authors both said that the work added credence to recent conclusions that global warming caused by humans was likely to lead to higher sea levels than previous studies had predicted. The earlier projections presumed that snowfall over Antarctica, as well as Greenland, would increase as warming added moisture to the air, compensating for the losses of ice from crumbling or melting along coasts.

Andrew C. Revkin, The NY Times, 060303

(Posted on March 6, 2006)

Number of U.S. Military Personnel Slaughtered (Officially acknowledged) In Bush's War: 2288

The War in Iraq Costs: $243,402,318,292

See the cost in your community here.

(Posted on Feb. 27, 2006)

(Posted on Feb. 20, 2006)

(Posted on Feb. 13, 2006)

(Posted on Feb. 6, 2006)

Measuring well-being

To judge from how gross domestic product (GDP) is discussed in the media, one should think that everything good flows from it. Yet GDP is not a measure of well-being or even of income. Rather it is a measure of overall economic activity. It is defined as the annual market value of final goods and services purchased in a nation, plus all exports net of imports. ‘Final’ means that intermediate goods and services, those that are inputs to further production, are excluded.
GDP does not subtract either depreciation of man-made capital (such as roads and factories) or depletion of natural capital (such as fish and fossil fuels). GDP also counts so-called defensive expenditures in the plus column. These expenditures are made to protect ourselves from the unwanted consequences of the production and consumption of goods by others – for example, the expense of cleaning the pollution. Defensive expenditures are like intermediate costs of production, and therefore they should not be included as a part of GDP. Some economists argue for their inclusion because they improve both the economy and the environment. We can all get rich cleaning up one another’s pollution!

(From: Scientific American, 2005-09)

(Posted on Jan. 30, 2006)

New infectious disorders

New infectious disorders against which humans have little immunity, are the wild cats of public health. Except for HIV/AIDS, none of the last 20 years has wrought global devastation, but that good fortune may not hold. Epidemiologists fear avian fly in particular, saying it is only a matter of time before a deadly strain moves readily from person to person, unleashing a global pandemic.
Emerging diseases:

1973 Rotavirus
1977 Ebola virus
1977 Legionnaire‘s disease
1981 Toxic shock syndrome
1983 HIV/AIDS
1991 Multidrug resistant tbc
1993 Cholera, by strain 0139
1994 Cryptosporidium infection
1998 Avian flu
1999 West Nile virus
2003 SARS
2004 Marburg virus

From: Scientific American, 2005.09-75

(Posted on Jan. 16, 2006)

From: Scientific American, 2005.09-72

(Posted on Jan. 9, 2006)

More profit with less carbon

If climate protection is properly done, it will actually reduce costs, not raise them. Using energy more efficiently offers an economic bonanza—not because of the benefits of stopping global warming, but because saving fossil fuel is a lot cheaper than buying it. Over the past decade, chemical manufacturer DuPont has boosted production nearly 30 percent but cut energy use 7 percent and greenhouse gas emissions 72 percent, saving more than $2 billion so far. Five other major firms –IBM, British Telecom, Alcan, NorskeCanada and Bayer -- have collectively saved at least another $2 since the early 1990s by reducing their carbon emissions more than 60 percent.

Scientific American, 2005.09-52

(Posted on Jan. 2, 2006)

Biodiversity

Extinction rates of animals and plants are much higher than we would expect from fossil and molecular evidence, approaching 1,000 times higher that the benchmark.
Earth is poised to become irreversibly poorer because of these disappearances.

Scientific American, 2005.09-46

(Posted on Dec. 26, 2005)

Scientific American, 2005.09-28

(Posted on Dec. 19, 2005)

The year 2005 is the midpoint  of a decade that spans three unique, important transitions in the history of humankind.

1. Before 2000, young people outnumbered old people. From 2000 forward, old people will outnumber young people.

2. Until approximately 2007, rural population will have always outnumbered urban people. From approximately 2007 forward, urban people will outnumber rural people.

3. From 2003 on, the median woman worldwide had, and will continue to have, too few or just enough children during her lifetime to replace herself and the father in the following generation.

Scientific American, September 2005-26

(Posted on Dec. 12, 2005)

Millennium Development Goals

MDG (Millennium Development Goal)-goal 1:
Halve the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day and the proportion of those who suffer chronic hunger.
Between 1990 and 2001 the fraction of the populations in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean living in extreme poverty remained stagnant and, ominously, increased in Central Asia. Food intake is rising, but hunger is still widespread in several regions.

(Scientific American, September 2005, 39)

(Posted on Nov. 28, 2005)

(From: As the FUTURE catches you, 32)

Posted on Nov. 14, 2005
 

(Scientific American, 05-09-28)

Posted on Nov. 14, 2005
 

www.interaction.org

Posted on Nov. 7, 2005
 

Code of Hammurabi

In the Code of Hammurabi (1780 BC) it is stipulated that when a person, because of external circumstances (disease, natural disasters, etc.), is not able to pay his debt), that debt is rewritten or pardoned. The Jewish people had the tradition of the Jubilee: every fiftieth year all debts were pardoned, people could start life anew. When poor countries nowadays can’t pay their debts, that were created by their own leaders, people die or lead a miserable life because the highest priority is given to repayment of debts instead of protection of the basic livelihood of the people.

Posted on Oct. 31, 2005
 

The happiest countries in the world

Definition: This statistic is compiled from responses to the survey question: "Taking all things together, would you say you are: very happy, quite happy, not very happy, or not at all happy?". The "Happiness (net)" statistic was obtained via the following formula: the percentage of people who rated themselves as either "quite happy" or "very happy" minus the percentage of people who rated themselves as either "not very happy" or "not at all happy.”

Iceland:        94%
Netherlands: 91%
Sweden:       91%
Denmark:     91%
Australia:     90%
Switzerland: 89%
Ireland:        89%
Norway:       88%
Venezuela:   87%
England UK: 87%

Posted on Oct. 24, 2005
 

Official Development Assistance target

The UN ODA (Official Development Assistance) target of realising 0,7% of the GNP is only been reached by the following countries:
Norway       0,92
Denmark     0,84
Luxemburg  0,81
Netherlands 0,80
Sweden      0,79

Posted on Oct. 17, 2005
 

Five leading causes of death,
all WHO member states, 2000

(1) Ischemic Heart Disease - 12.4%
(2) Cerebrovascular Disease - 9.2%
(3) Lower Respiratory Infections - 6.9%
(4) HIV/AIDS - 5.3%
(5) Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease - 4.5%

Posted on Oct. 10, 2005
 

Population distribution

* 100% urban
Anguilla
Bermuda
Gibraltar
Guadaloupe
Hong Kong
Manaco
Nauru
Singapore

* highly rural
Tokelau - 100%
Timor -East - 92%
Bhutan - 91%
Burundi - 90%
Uganda - 88%
Papua New G - 87%
Nepal - 85%

Posted on Oct. 3, 2005
 

Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

The Millennium Development Goals call for reducing the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day to half the 1990 level by 2015 - from 27.9 percent of all people in low and middle income economies to 14.0 percent. The Goals also call for halving the proportion of people who suffer from hunger between 1990 and 2015.
If projected growth remains on track, global poverty rates will fall to 12.7 percent - less than half the 1990 level - and 363 million more people will avert extreme poverty. And while poverty would not be eradicated, that would bring us much closer to the day when we can say that all the world’s people have at least the bare minimum to eat and clothe themselves. Progress in eradicating hunger, on the other hand, has been slow and the situation has been worsening in some regions.

Posted on Sept. 26, 2005
 

Biggest forest areas
-thousands of square kilometres-

Russian Federation 8514
Brazil                     5439
Canada                  2446
USA                      2260
China                    1635
Australia                1545
Congo                   1352
Indonesia               1050

Posted on Sept. 19, 2005
 

World population 2003

• Total 6,3 billion

Most populated countries:

• China 1,3 billion

• India 1,1 billion

• United States 291 million

• Indonesia 215 million

• Brazil 177 million

• Pakistan 148 million

• Russian Fed 143 million

• Nigeria 137 million

• Japan 127 million

• Mexico 102 million

Posted on Sept. 12, 2005
 

Child mortality rate

In developing countries, one child in 10 dies before its fifth birthday, compared with 1 in 143 in high-income countries. Child deaths have dropped rapidly in the past 25 years, but progress everywhere slowed in the 1990s, and a few countries have experienced increases in the same period. At current rates of progress, only a few countries are likely to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of reducing child mortality to one-third of their 1990 levels.

Posted on Sept. 5, 2005
 

Average life expectancy at birth

Highest 82 years - Japan
Lowest 37 years - Lesotho/Sierra Leone

Posted on Aug. 30, 2005
 

Did you know...

The United States produces 23.1 percent of the world’s total carbon dioxide emissions, while Japan produces 4.9 percent.

Posted on Aug. 23, 2005