Green Deen

Well that’s the perfect position to take when Venus, Jupiter and a crescent moon line up in the southwestern sky just after sunset on Nov. 30th and Dec. 1st.

No need for a telescope. The Moon and the two planets will be visible to the unaided eye and easily distinguishable from the stars in the distance.

“They will be the brightest things in the sky,” said Anthony Cook, astronomical observer at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.

The three celestial objects pass each other once a year but rarely do they appear this clearly, he said.

“It’s striking,” Cook added.

Here’s the scoop: Look to the southwest, about 17 degrees above the horizon, between 6 and 7:30 p.m. on either night.

On Nov. 30, the crescent moon will be just below the two planets. Venus will be the brightest of the two and Jupiter will have a slight yellow tinge. On Dec. 1, the moon will be just above the two planets.

To see photos of similar alignments from the past, check out the NASA Images website.

Cook doesn’t recommend looking through a telescope because you won’t be able to get all three objects in one field. Instead, he suggests using less-powerful binoculars to see some detail without isolating any of the orbs.

Although the moon and the planes will look close in the sky, they are actually millions of miles apart. The moon is 240,000 miles away; Venus is 93 million miles away and Jupiter is a scant 539 million miles from earth.

You can read more about the alignment and other astronomical sights on the Griffith Observatory’s weekly Sky Report.

-Hugo Martín, Times Staff Writer

[Photo: Venus, Jupiter and the Moon align over Phoenix. Credit T. Polakis, courtesy of NASA]

Source: LA Times

Labels: community, economy, green building, housing, poverty

In early 2008, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that they considered meat and milk from cloned animals to be safe to eat¹ despite years of controversy and a long list of unresolved ethical, health, and animal welfare concerns. The agency asked the livestock industry to continue a voluntary moratorium on putting meat and milk from cloned animals into the food supply, but did not ask for the same moratorium on products from the offspring of cloned animals. And, to add insult to injury, the agency will not require any of these foods to be labeled.

Currently, the appeal of cloned animals to the livestock industry largely lies in their role as breeders or milk producers. Already, cloned bulls’ sperm is shipped all over the country to sire offspring with particularly desirable traits, such as high milk production. These “half-clones” (offspring of cloned animals) are possibly reaching the marketplace, with no consumer awareness as to their ancestry. One semen broker who has sold the sperm of cloned bulls, said that these offspring are “going to be slaughtered [for food], and the FDA can’t do anything about it.” In 2001, the FDA asked farmers to voluntarily refrain from selling meat or milk from cloned animals or their offspring, but no one at the agency is tracking whether farmers are complying.²

In 1998, cows were successfully cloned for the first time in Japan. Approximately 300 beef cows, 150 dairy cows, and 200 pigs have been cloned in the United States.³ A Texas-based company began cloning champion horses in March 2006, which can sell for as much as $150,000 per horse.⁴ And pet cats can be cloned by a private company for $32,000.⁵

Pushing ahead with cloning animals for food, researchers have cloned pigs whose meat contains higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids by blending a gene from earthworms with pig’s genetic material. No one has tasted the transgenic piglets’ meat, yet. Nevertheless, scientists hope to clone chickens and cows with high levels of omeegs-3s in the future.⁶ Even as the FDA is poised to approve cloned animals for human consumption, there are concerns about the process’ impact on animal health and the insufficient research on eating meat or drinking milk from cloned animals.

Fact Sheet: Cloned Animals on the Dinner Plate?

Read on.

Take Action!

• Tell Congress you don’t want to eat cloned animals and that need to step in to keep these controversial foods off of your plate. You can contact your Representative and Senators by calling (202) 224-3121.
• Buy sustainable meat from a producer who you can ask or read about their practices. Visit the Eat Well Guide to find sustainable meat and dairy products near you.

Labels: action, Cloning, dairy, FDA, food, genetic engineering, GMO, health, meat, nutrition, sustainable

• Don't try to be a hero, if you are told to evacuate, please do so.
  
• If you have Asthma or any other respiratory illness, keep your inhaler handy and try to stay indoors.
• If you must be outdoors and the air quality is bad, cover your mouth and nose with a cloth or mask to help keep the particles of ash out of your respiratory tract as much as possible.
  
• If you're driving, keep the windows up and have the internal air circulation button on, so that ashes and other particles are not circulating in your car as you drive.
  
• If you are having difficulty breathing and you already have a pre-existing condition its important that you seek medical attention.
• Stay well-hydrated.
  
• And, of course, make dua for the rain.

Labels: fire, los angeles, orange county, safe

The 2008 election made history in more ways than one. California
voters passed Proposition 2, the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty
Act.

Proposition 2 will amend the lives of millions of farm animals, (like the chickens on the right)
confined in small crates and cages where they can hardly move for
essentially their entire lives.

The purpose of this act is to outlaw the cruel and inhumane
confinement of animals which applies to breeding pigs, egg laying hens
and veal calves.

By January of 2015, California farms are obligated to provide enough
space for animals to stand up, turn around and extend their limbs. For
animals, this means they no longer have to live and suffer in
miserable conditions.

For Californians, this means improved health and food safety. Filthy,
unkempt, unsafe and crammed cages are breeding grounds for diseases
such as Salmonella, which can be passed on to consumers.

Proposition 2 also supports Californian family farmers and, protects
air and water and safeguards the environment.

Fisher student Ashley Grinnell is an animal lover of all kinds.

"I hope New York follows in California's footsteps. It's so sad to
think these animals treated as objects," Grinnell said.

The Rochester area is also taking strides to protect animals. Last
month, Monroe County Legislators sent a memorializing referral to
local grocers and food markets to stop selling eggs from hens in
battery cages.

Rochester animal rights activist, Adam Durand, is the campaign
director for Animal Rights International. (ARI). ARI seeks to reduce
animal suffering of all kinds; refining agricultural methods is one
effort.

Durand, supporter of Proposition 2, says this referral is a big step
to abolish the use of battery cages.

"Whole foods, college campuses and universities, including the
University of Rochester, have ended or greatly reduced their use of
caged hens," Durand said.

In 2004, Adam Durand and two other investigators documented the
appalling animal cruelty taking place at New York State's largest egg
farm, Wegmans Egg Farm, which supplies the Wegmans grocery store
chain.

They found hens living in disgusting conditions. Many were covered in
feces and many were dead due to not having access to food or water.

Up to nine hens were stuffed in cages the size of file drawers and
many had painful infections due to their skin and feathers rubbing
against the rough wire.

In December of 2005, St. John Fisher held a screening of the
documentary "Wegmans Cruelty." This documentary raised a lot of
attention locally and nationally. Durand was arrested for trespassing
and spent a month in jail. In 2007, Wegmans sold its egg farm.

"Most likely, Wegmans continues to sell battery caged eggs," Durand
said.

St. John Fisher student Melissa Dempsey followed Proposition 2.

"I am really happy it passed. I saw Oprah's show about Prop 2. I had
heard about farm cruelty but to witness it on this show was eye-
opening," Dempsey said. "Seeing cage-free hens on an organic farm and
then the farm with hens stuffed in cages where they could barely move,
was enough for me. I now only purchase eggs that are cage-free."

There are people who care where their meat and dairy products come
from, those who don't know, or those who just don't care.
Fisher student Jake Andrews was not aware of Proposition 2 and thinks
other issues are more important.

"Animals like pigs and chickens were put on this earth to be consumed.
I don't think it matters how they are raised, they are going to die or
be killed anyway," Andrews said.

Reference: Cardinal Courier Online
Image: http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2007/07/24/egg3.jpg

Researchers found the odds of such an event are higher in Southern California than Northern California, 97 percent versus 93 percent chance.

The study focuses on specific fault lines and urbanized areas, as well as making predictions about whole regions. On balance, we as southern Californians should be a little more nervous than those in the north; the probabilities for quakes of magnitude at least 7.5 before 2037 are 37% in the south versus 15% in the north.

The last time a magnitude 6.7 quake hit California was the 1994 Northridge disaster, which killed 72 people, injured more than 9,000 and caused $25 billion in damage.

“We look at the very largest earthquakes, magnitude 7.5 and greater, the odds of one of those happening within the San Francisco Bay region in the next 30 years is 10 percent,” said U.S.G.S. seismologist Tom Parsons.

• This past Tuesday 2/3 of Californians voted in favor of increasing farm animal space giving them free mobility. Farmers have been given till January 2015 to change their animal housing situation and get rid of all battery cages.

• Cheetahs are being reintroduced into South Africa's Mountain Zebra National Park.

• In Kenya, elephants are given a new high-tech collar that sends text messages when they cross a virtual fence. This allows the rangers to rush to the elephant's site and protect both crops and the elephant.
  

• Warmer temperatures due to climate changes are adversely affecting lemmings mainly in Norway, the Arctic region and Canada. The warmth causes wetter snow. This prevents them from burying food and burrowing into the snow to hide from predators.
  

• eBay will ban all black market sales of ivory by Jan 2009. This was declared just before the International Fund for Animal Welfare declared that in a 6-week period over 7,000 posts were made selling body parts of protected wildlife.

Cloning involves removing the nucleus from an egg and replacing it with the nucleus of a donor cell. Many of these "nuclear transfer" embryos never develop or miscarry. Even after birth some clones die. But many cloning scientists argue that the few survivors can be perfectly normal.

Atsuo Ogura of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases in Tokyo says his team's work suggests that some effects of cloning are not apparent in the days, weeks or even years after birth. "It is very probable that, at least for some populations of clones, some unpredictable defects will appear in the long run," he says.

The debate over the health of clones and how they age has swung one way and then the other. In November 2001, US biotech company Advanced Cell Technology reported the cloning of two dozen apparently healthy cloned cows. But in January, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, Dolly the sheep, was reported to have prematurely developed arthritis.

Rudolf Jaenisch, a mouse cloner at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston says the new work "shows that to look at animals at one point in time and say they are healthy and normal is really wishful thinking."

Immune system defect

Ogura's team cloned 12 male mice and these were compared with seven males from natural matings and six others produced using in vitro fertilisation. The clones appeared active and healthy, gained weight normally and matched the control animals in 14 of 16 physiological measurements.

But the first cloned animal died after only 311 days and, by day 800, 10 (83 per cent) of the animals were dead. In contrast, only three (23 per cent) of the controls died during the same period.

The dead clones showed high rates of pneumonia, liver disease, cancer and a lower level of antibody production, suggesting they had an immune system defect. Ogura's team is now trying to pinpoint the precise cause of death and repeat the experiment with more animals.

ACT's Tony Perry points out that it remains unclear if clones from other species such as cows or pigs die early. And even if clones in general do prove to have a shortened lifespan, he does not think that undermines data from ACT and others that clones can be healthy.

All the researchers agree that the work should be an additional warning to would-be human cloners.

Reference

2002. Cohen, Philip. Nature Genetics. 10: 1038.

Labels: animal week, Cloning

By V.A. Mohamad Ashrof
Activist and Writer - India

We live in a world inhabited not only by humans but also by countless other creatures that share the world with us. Animals provide resources and services that we use. They form part of the life-support system of the earth on which all life depends. Every kind of thing is produced on the earth in due balance and measure. The mineral kingdom supports the vegetable, which in turn support the animal kingdom, and there is a link of mutual dependence between them, in a chain of gradation and interdependence. This ecological and organic vision of the world is amply described by the Qur’an: [The earth We have spread out (like a carpet); set thereon mountains firm and immovable: and produced therein all kinds of things in due balance] (Al-Hijr 15:19).

What should be our relationship with creatures in the animal world? The Islamic view of human relation with animals cannot be evaluated in isolation from its tawheedi worldview. Islam inculcates a faith in the Eternal, Transcendental Creator, Who created according to a plan and purpose. From the smallest particle to the large galaxies, all the flora and fauna fulfill their assigned role in a unified divine scheme: [Do you not see that God is He, Whom obeys whoever is in the heavens and whoever is in the earth, and the sun and the moon and the stars, and the mountains and the trees, and the animals and many of the people] (Al-Hajj 22:18).

We see that each animal has been created with a specific purpose, either to benefit human beings directly, or as symbols for people to ponder over God’s greatness (An-Nahl 16:5,8, An-Naziat 79; An-Noor 24:45). The existence of animals is proof for the very existence of God (An-Noor 24:45). Even animals’ geographical distribution is ordained by God (Al-Jathiya 45:4, 29). Any beholder can see the simple homely things of life in which human beings receive so many benefits from divine mercy (Ya-Seen 36:71-73). The Qur’an invites man to contemplate the cattle, sheep, horses, camels, mules, and other domestic animals, the birds of the sky, and all the innumerable species and genera that they comprise (Al-Ghashiya 88:17; Ya-Seen 36:71; and An-Noor 24:41). The way in which the birds fly and stay in the air is a sign of God in which there is guidance for humankind (Al-Insan 67:19; An-Nahl 16:79). God established and maintained a balance between all His creations (Ar-Rahman 55:7-10). God alone is the real Sustainer and Provider. He has taken upon Himself the responsibility to provide for every living creature (Hud 11:6; Adh-Dhariyat 51:58; Al-Hijr 15:19-21; Al-`Ankaboot 29:60).

By creating right instincts, God has bestowed a balanced chain so that food is available for everyone. Terrible consequences will follow if this chain is broken (Ar-Rahman 55:8; Ar-Room 30:41). By over-killing and destroying, man has exterminated magnificent creatures in the wild. He has almost wiped out whales in the northern hemisphere and is continuing in the other. Widespread beating, kicking, overriding, torturing, cruel slaughtering methods and vivisection, causing animal pain and suffering have created an enlightened demand for more humane ethics. Philosopher Charles Hartshorne expressed the need thus: “We need new ethical and practical ideas to mediate between ultimate ideas and our concrete situation.”1

The Islamic worldview and guidelines give sufficient basis for a humane treatment of animals. If one compares Islam with other worldviews, one can see different approaches to such concepts. For example, a pantheistic worldview of reality will have problems in fighting against pain, cruelty, and injustice since, ultimately, these things are only part of the reality that is “god” in the pantheistic sense. One major objective of Islam is that it seeks to make the human being kind hearted towards fellow creatures. Kindness is an important ingredient of the human conscience. God Himself is compassionate and kind and wants man, His vicegerent on earth, to be kindhearted towards all living creatures.

Read on:

• Animal Rights Through History
• Animals in the Qur’an
• The Concept of Steward
• Unparalleled Guidelines
• Glimpses From Islamic History
• In Defense of Halal Method of Slaughter
• A Theology of Vivisection
• The Attitude of Moderation
• Is the Status of Humans and Animals at Par?
• Conclusion

• Arrogance against others and mistreatment of animals - from Major Sins by Imam Shamsu ed Deen adh Dhahabi (673 - 748 AH)
• Al-Jahiz - the First Islamic Zoologist and author of Kitab al-Hayawan (Book of Animals)
  
• The History of Veterinary Medicine in the late Islamic Period - download pdf
• Islam & Animals Overview by Al-Hafiz B.A. Masri
• People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)
  
  

Labels: animal rights, animal treatment, animal week, cruelty, sunnah, vertinary medicine, zoology

• The government allows cow feed to include

1. pork(!)
2. cow fat (!)
3. blood (!)
4. poultry and
5. horse to name a few things

• chicken feed includes an arsenic-based additive called Roxarsone, which is used to ‘to promote growth, kill parasites and improve pigmentation of chicken meat.’. What is interesting is that studies have found that the bacteria found in chicken litter (which is fed to cows) makes the arsenic more toxic, and if the chicken litter is used as fertilizer, it has even shown up in streams and areas with large chicken factories have shown higher levels of rare cancers.

• They die from the stunning: As described by Temple Grandin who audits slaughter for McDonalds, and is perhaps the world renowned designer of livestock handling facilities and a Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University: “The stunner has a pneumatic-powered ‘gun’ that fires a steel bolt about seven inches long and the diameter of a fat pencil. He leans over and puts it smack in the middle of the forehead. When it’s done correctly it will kill the animal on the first shot.” So, one of the head auditors states that by default the animal is killed by the stunning, this meat is mayta, dead from an Islamic perspective

Labels: animal treatment, halal, organic meat

Lecithin is one of those mysterious, but common, ingredients found on the label of many packaged foods. It's an essential emulsifier that helps blend ingredients that don't naturally mix.

Due to the lack of adequate organic sources of soy lecithin, the USDA allowed the use of non-organic sources when it drafted the national organic standards in 2002. The Cornucopia Institute is alerting consumers and other organic stakeholders that it's time to tell the USDA to remove non-organic soy lecithin from the allowed ingredient list as reliable organic sources are now available. But, you have to act fast as the input deadline is Monday, November 3.

Click through for an explanation of the issue and details on how to have your voice heard.