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You probably visit the meat counter every time you go to the grocery store, but have you ever wondered about what goes on behind it? To learn the tricks of the butchery trade, we spoke with butchers from grocery-store chains, gourmet supermarkets and specialty shops. Read on to get the inside scoop on freezing, preparing, shopping and saving money on meats so you can carve out some savings next time you hit the counter.

There is nothing subtle about a 200-pound, fat-flanked steer hindquarter slung on a man's back. The sight brings out the red-blooded Neanderthal in even the Mason-jar-wine and skinny-jeans crowd at Oakland's Eat Real Festival in September. Despite the event's civilized sponsorship partners, like Whole Foods and Prius, the spectators roar and whistle as if a gladiator had entered the Colosseum. The charge is visceral, vaguely sexual. "Kill somebody!" one man yells. Staffers hang up the leg by its heel on a hook. "Bring on the ketchup!" "Give us some scraps!" The crowd sees a naked animal carcass, arguably as provocative...

Four women and a 14-year-old girl have been found with their throats slashed in an exotic Mexico beach resort. The semi-naked and bound bodies of two women and the teenager were discovered in the salon in the early hours of Saturday morning. The other two victims were found dumped in an abandoned car and on a street behind a church in other parts of the town. All of the women were 30 years old or younger. The teenage girl had begun working at the salon five days prior to her death Police said they were not ruling out drug or...

It was hardly noticed at the time, but its consequences could be catastrophic. Late last September, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which assigns internet domain names, approved a huge change in the way it operates. Europe and North America will now have five seats on its Board of Directors, instead of ten, and a new "Arab States" region will have five seats as well. How big a deal is this? ICANN at the same time took a reference to "terrorism" out of its Draft Applicant Guidebook. Why? Because Arab groups complained. And so now jihad terror...

A Taliban firing squad killed a young couple in southwestern Afghanistan for trying to elope, shooting them with AK-47s in front of a crowd in a lawless, militant-controlled region, officials said Tuesday. The woman, 19-year-old Gul Pecha, and the man, 21-year-old Abdul Aziz, were accused by the militants of immoral acts, and a council of conservative clerics decided that the two should be killed, officials said. The two had hoped to travel to Iran, which borders their home province of Nimroz, but their parents sent villagers to bring them home, said Sadiq Chakhansori, the chief of the provincial council. Once...

by Steven ErteltLifeNews.com EditorAugust 31, 2007New York, NY (LifeNews.com) -- The International Planned Parenthood Federation, one of the largest abortion businesses in the world, has released its annul report about abortions in the Western Hemisphere. The report claims that millions of illegal abortions are done annually in these Latin American and Caribbean nations that prohibit abortion.The report begins with a very telling revealing of the strategy IPPF seeks to employ in the region in over to overturn the pro-life cultural values reflected in the abortion laws there."Since political conditions will not change dramatically in the region in the short-term, we...

by Steven ErteltLifeNews.com EditorAugust 31, 2007McMinnville, OR (LifeNews.com) -- Planned Parenthood has caused a national stir with a new abortion center in Aurora, Illinois that it built under the table without the public knowing until the last minute. The abortion business is preparing a new center in Oregon that is already drawing significant opposition because it will target college students.Planned Parenthood has already upset pro-life advocates and African Americans in Portland by choosing to build an abortion center in a predominantly black community.Now the abortion business is headed for McMinnville, a city southwest of Portland that is the home to...

For 62 years, Akira Makino spoke not a word of what he’d done, but to those who knew him well it must have been obvious that he was a man with a tortured conscience. Why else would he have returned so often to the obscure, mosquito-blown town in the southern Philippines where he had experience such misery during the Second World War? He set up war memorials, gave clothes to poor children, and bought an entire set of uniforms for a local baseball team. Last year, at the age of 83, he embarked on a gruelling pilgrimage to 88 Buddhist...

The Truth About Muhammad By Brigitte Gabriel FrontPageMagazine.com | October 30, 2006 “Freedom of inquiry and speech, the quest for truth, should not be cowed into silence by violent intimidation or the acceptance of half-truths and propaganda meant to appease freedom’s enemies. One thing is certain: if no one is willing to take such risks, freedom of speech will swiftly become a relic of history.” These are the words of author Robert Spencer, who is risking his life to educate Westerners about the life of the founder of Islam. He has just come out with a new book, The Truth...

‘Quake money’ used to finance UK plane bombing plot * Funds given to two British citizens of Kashmiri origin and an Islamabad-based Kashmiri builder * ‘Earthquake relief’ money remitted to individuals alarmed British agencies By Sarfaraz Ahmed and Maqbool Ahmed KARACHI: A UK-based Islamic charity organisation remitted a huge amount of money to three individuals in three different bank accounts in Mirpur, Azad Kashmir, in December last year with the sole purpose of helping its recipients and their organisations carry out the aircraft bombing plan in the UK, insider sources told Daily Times yesterday. An investigation carried out by Daily...

WASHINGTON, July 11, 2006 – U.S. officials are condemning a terrorist video reported to show the mutilated corpses of American soldiers. The terrorists say the video is of two American soldiers captured near Yusifiyah, Iraq, June 16 and killed sometime later. The soldiers were members of the 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, part of Multinational Division Baghdad. "Multinational Division Baghdad condemns the release of the video in the strongest of terms," the command said in a news release. "It demonstrates the barbaric and brutal nature of the terrorists and their complete disregard for human life." The video, uploaded on a...

Early signs of elephant butchers Excavations took place in 2004 Bones and tusks dating back 400,000 years are the earliest signs in Britain of ancient humans butchering elephants for meat, say archaeologists. Remains of a single adult elephant surrounded by stone tools were found in northwest Kent during work on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. Scientists believe hunters used the tools to cut off the meat, after killing the animal with wooden spears. The find is described in the Journal of Quaternary Science. The first signs of the Stone Age site were uncovered by constructors at Southfleet Road in Ebbsfleet,...

A Contentious and Unforgettable Night at the Old GOP BallparkMonthly Republican district meetings are usually more staid than argumentative and more sedentary than physical. Tonight's GOP District 22 meeting was definitely one of the exceptions. I have heard that the Phoenix police have been called in to other GOP district meetings in the recent past. Normally, there are more laughs than raised voices in D22 meetings. District 22 basically encompasses the City of Gilbert, where we are only a month away from a Town Council run-off election between a classic conservative Republican -- incumbent Dave Peterson -- and a WISH...

The events and details of the massacre at Beslan have all but unfolded for the world. Unfortunately, the sins of a cursed political season have yielded little to coverage of the savagery from the mainstream America media outlets, who have addressed the event superficially and reluctantly, if at all. More images of the carnage and sorrow have circulated on Free Republic, it seems than all newspapers and television news combined. Together with in-depth analyses from Bloggers like wretchard at Belmont Club and The Command Post, the horrors of the event have been mostly realized for those concerned, yet detached observers…....

I've been listening all day to a report on KLBJ-AM in Austin, TX that builders for a new Planned Parenthood site in South Austin walked off the job after threats were made by pro-life groups to boycott the builders when considering plans to build new churches. Often as a building is going up, a sign is raised on the property explaining who is doing the building of the site and a phone number on how to reach them. Apparently, a pro-life group contacted the builders and told them they would be blacklisted from building future churches in the area if...

<p>The number of "partial-birth" abortions has tripled in the past four years, according to a report on abortion trends released this week.</p> <p>An estimated 2,200 dilation and extraction, or D&X, abortions were conducted in 2000, said researchers with the Alan Guttmacher Institute, who surveyed all known U.S. abortion providers during the past two years.</p>