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I remember our daily food always coming from a long, long line at the end of which was a loaf of bread, a liter of milk, a stick of butter, a bottle of murky cooking oil, or a kilo of bones with traces of meat and fat on them. [...] If we wanted to eat, we learned at a very young age that we had to stand in long lines every day, often in bitter cold at 4 a.m. in hopes that the store would not run out of bread or milk by the time we made it to the...

<p>SALINAS, Calif. –  Three starving children -- including one who was chained to the floor to prevent her from getting food -- were found last month in the squalid home of a Northern California couple, authorities said.</p> <p>All three -- two boys and a girl -- were taken into protective custody, and one was hospitalized, Monterey County Sheriff Scott Miller said Friday.</p>

I just got back from a business trip to Mexico. While there, I met with some Mexicans who had recently traveled to Cuba. What they told me was shocking. The Cuban people are being held on the edge of starvation. According to my Mexican friends, ordinary Cubans are not allowed to eat beef. Instead, what beef there is in Cuba is reserved for the nation’s rulers and for tourists who can pay for it with foreign exchange while staying at the all-inclusive resort hotels. It is in fact illegal to sell beef to a Cuban — not that any...

In 1944, 26-year-old Marshall Sutton was a young idealist who wanted to change the world for the better. As a conscientious objector and Quaker, he refused to fight in the war but he still craved the chance to help his country. "I wanted to identify with the suffering in the world at that time," he says. "I wanted to do something for society. I wanted to put myself in a little danger." That danger came, unexpectedly, in the shape of a small brochure with a picture of children on the front. "Will you starve that they be better fed?" it...

If you’ve read any news in the past day, you’ve seen reports regarding cannibalism in colonial Jamestown. It was known prior that the colonists had undergone a number of starvation years where they were forced to eat foods that they wouldn’t normally. The trash pits from the sites hold the remains of animals who aren’t normally butchered, including horses, cats, dogs, rats and snakes. Burials from this period are not given the complete funerary treatment likely due to the high number of deaths, and the skeletons show evidence of nutritional hardship and early death. The colony was founded in 1607...

A day after winning the three-week battle to take their brain-dead daughter from Children's Hospital Oakland, the family of Jahi McMath conceded Monday they are losing the ghastly war against nature. Her body, checked in at an undisclosed care facility Monday morning, has deteriorated so badly, that "Right now, we don't know if she's going to make it," said attorney Christopher Dolan. "She's in very bad shape," he said. "What I can tell you is that those examinations show that her medical condition, separate from the brain issue, is not good." Dolan's frank and sober assessment echoes a Friday legal...

The Real Thanksgiving Story In the middle of December 1620 the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, leaving behind the sinfulness of the “old world” to make a “new Jerusalem” in America. Three years later, in November 1623, they had a great feast thanking God for getting them through an earlier famine, and now for a bountiful crop. What had created the earlier famine and then the bountiful crops? The story is told in the diary of Governor Bradford, who was one of the elders of that early Puritan colony. At first, they decided to turn their back on all the...

STALIN - UKRAINE'S GENOCIDE BY FAMINE Eighty years later, there’s no denying the Soviet atrocity. By Alec Torres NRO 11/9/2013 ‘We went to a field. We had nothing to eat. Everything was taken from us. So my mother decided we would go to the field, find some half-frozen potatoes, some kind of vegetables, to make a soup. At that time the Soviet Union was teaching people to report on each other, to spy on each other. Somebody saw that we came with some vegetables, half-frozen, and they arrested my mother. That was the last time I saw her.” So Eugenia...

Swedish Muslims north of the Arctic circle have long waited for and feared this summer. When the sun never sets, they have pondered how to observe Ramadan, when devout Muslims fast from sun up to sun down for a month. "Kiruna is as high up as you get in Sweden, the sun never sets during this month," Ali Melhem, 45, who has lived in Kiruna for 24 years told The Local. As the fasting month is set by the moon, Ramadan usually moves about 10 days forward in the calender each year, which means this is the first summer it...

China's long term goal, dating back to the rule of Mao Zedong, of becoming self sufficient in food is running into some inconvenient reality, much no doubt caused by that country's command economy. The problem started with China's breakneck drive to become an industrial power. This, coupled with a somewhat lax approach to environmental regulation, created large amounts of farmland contaminated with heavy metals. Since China is also driving to grow much of its own food, much of this farmland is being used, resulting in contaminated crops that are not fit for human consumption. Chinese farmers are also overusing pesticides,...

<p>The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of Monsanto Monday over an Indiana farmer accused of having pirated the genetically-modified crops developed by the agribusiness giant.</p> <p>The high court was unanimous in its decision, ruling that laws limiting patents do "not permit a farmer to reproduce patented seeds through planting and harvesting without the patent holder's permission."</p>

Staple foods will more than double in price by 2050 from extreme temperatures, floods and droughts that will transform the way the world farms. As food experts gather to discuss how to feed the nine billion people expected in 2050, leading scientists state that food insecurity risks turning parts of Africa into permanent disaster areas. Rising temperatures will drastically affect access to basic foodstuffs: "Food production will have to rise 60% by 2050 just to keep pace with expected global population increase and changing demand. The annual production gains we have come to expect … will be taken away by...

REMEMBRANCE of EASTER 2005 Crowd my eyes, you bevies of daffodils, And you forsythias in throngs of cheer, Dandelion galaxies and fountains of trees. Fill my mouth with the breath of hyacinths, you purple air And you roistering breeze. And you quince-buds so eager, you swelling seeds, You squirrels running stitches across the loom Of woven grasses, inflorescent weeds; Jasmine-bush, loop me with your lariats of perfume. Fill me, small birds, with your versicles, And chuckled replies. She is bleeding from the mouth and eyes. Sate me then, Sun, all dapple and spangle Crowd out all else Lade me and...

A tearful Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Fla) blamed “heartless Republicans” for the “severe hardships” the sequester is imposing on members of her staff. “Nearly half of my office staff has been forced to forgo lunch on a daily basis because of the cruel budget cuts that have been forced down our throats by the GOP,” the Congresswoman claimed. The “toll of suffering” has been less than half because “some have been able to make do with sack lunches of leftovers or peanut butter sandwiches they bring from home,” she explained. “This is not a solution that can be applied across-the-board, though....

Whittaker Chambers and Totalitarian Islam Playwright David Mamet recently acknowledged that he had been profoundly influenced by Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 anti-Communist memoir, Witness. Mamet described how reading Chambers’s opus inspired “the wrenching experience” of forcibly reevaluating the way he thought, particularly his confessed leftist-herd co-dependence. Also, echoing the delusive herd mentality of the Left’s ad hominem attacks in the 1950s on Chambers — whose allegations of Communist conspiracies have been entirely vindicated with irrefragable documentation from the captured Soviet Venona cables — Congressman Peter King’s staid initial hearings of March 10, 2011, on American Muslim radicalization engendered similarly...

The latest rallying cry emanating from the DPRK's newDear Leader Kim Jong Un (they call this one 'Supreme Leader') -who apparently seeks to develop computer skills amongst the zombified populace he inherited- is the super-catchy (their translation) 'Rapider, More, and Exacter!' Confusion grows as you hear the plan is based on the BIG rollout what they say is a 'North Korean-built' notebook... one that looks an awful lot like the $70 Chinese-made Sylvania 7-inch 'netbook' sold at CVS (a surprise perhaps only to those who thought the Norks made their own Lincoln Continentals). The DPRK has also introduced their own operating system/search engine- dubbed 'Red Star/My Country', both designed...

Why does it seem like wherever there is human suffering, some giant bank is making money off of it? According to a new report from the World Development Movement, Goldman Sachs made about 400 million dollars betting on food prices last year. Overall, 2012 was quite a banner year for Goldman Sachs. As I reported in a previous article, revenues for Goldman increased by about 30 percent in 2012 and the price of Goldman stock has risen by more than 40 percent over the past 12 months. It is estimated that the average banker at Goldman brought in a...

Sick children are being discharged from NHS hospitals to die at home or in hospices on controversial ‘death pathways’. Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved only elderly and terminally-ill adults. But the Mail can reveal the practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube is being used on young patients as well as severely disabled newborn babies.

Trapping Feral Pigs and Other Parables of Modern Life by Matt Bracken Professional trappers don't catch fast-breeding and destructive feral pigs using hunting dogs and guns, or in little traps one or two at a time. The wily pigs quickly learn to evade humans after such fleeting contacts. So how do the pros trap entire feral pig herds, eliminating them all, from granddads to piglets, in one go? They feed them, most generously. They kill them with kindness. First, in a clearing in the woods, the trappers build an enclosure about twenty feet on a side and four feet high,...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqFBa9ePWpo