Monday, May 24, 2010

Report: Marijuana cultivation in Mexico rises

Report: Marijuana cultivation in Mexico rises

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • Marijuana cultivation in Mexico increased 35 percent in 2008, continues to grow, report says
  • Total of 36,332 drug-trafficking arrests in Mexico made in 2009, according to report
  • Report noted that drug production in Colombia also decreased

Washington (CNN) -- Marijuana cultivation in Mexico increased 35 percent in 2008 and continues to grow, even as authorities there push forward with a large offensive against drug cartels that smuggle the product into the United States, according to a State Department report released this week.

The 2010 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR), is a yearly report that assess anti-drug efforts around the world. The part of the report dealing with Mexico is illuminating because most of the illegal drugs in the United States are transported and smuggled through there.

"There's a broad impact in the United States of cartel operations that are based or emanating from Mexico," Assistant Secretary of State David T. Johnson said at the news conference where the report was released.

The report could be additional fuel for critics who say that Mexican President Felipe Calderon's war against the drug cartels has been ineffective at stopping the drug violence or the flow of illegal drugs.

"Despite the efforts of the (Mexican government), drug cultivation rose significantly in 2009 according to U.S. government agencies' estimates," the report stated.

In 2008, 12,000 hectacres were used for marijuana cultivation, up from 8,900 in 2007.

The 35 percent increase is the most recent statistic available, and marks a 16-year high.

Mexico also eradicated fewer marijuana plants than in previous years, the study said.

"Much of this can be attributed to Mexican law enforcement's shift in focus to harder drugs such as methamphetamine as well as more military and law enforcement resources being diverted to confront the (cartels) and violence," the report said.

In the State Department's assessment, Mexico fared better in other areas.

By November of last year, Mexico had already seized more metric tons of cocaine than in 2008, 20 compared to 19. More opium gum had also been seized.

The report also lauded arrests of Mexican traffickers.

There were 36,332 total drug-trafficking arrests made in 2009, a new record for the country, the report stated.

Mexico also set a new record for people extradited to the United States, with 100 people sent to face the U.S. justice system, compared to 95 in 2008.

Meanwhile, drug production in Colombia, another key international player in the drug trade, decreased, according to the most recent statistics.

"I'd say that of the three major coca-producing states in the Andes, Colombia continues to have significant declines, although it remains by far the largest producer," Johnson told reporters. "Peru had a modest increase. And Bolivia has a continuing trend of a step up per year in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 percent that's taken place over the course of the last several years."


http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/03/02/marijuana.cultivation/index.html

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Rooibos - Good Stuff

People ask me about the rooibos tea I like so much - what is it?
So from the scientific view, an abstract I came upon recently:

Phytother Res. 2007 Jan;21(1):1-16.

A review of the bioactivity of South African herbal teas: rooibos (Aspalathus linearis) and honeybush (Cyclopia intermedia).

McKay DL, Blumberg JB.

USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, 711 Washington St., Boston, MA 02111, USA. diane.mckay@tufts.edu

Abstract

Rooibos (Aspalathus linearis) and honeybush (Cyclopia intermedia) are popular tisanes in their native South Africa and have a growing worldwide market. Both herbal teas are used traditionally for medicinal purposes and are rich in polyphenols with rooibos a rare source of the dietary dihydrochalcones, aspalathin and nothofagin. The principal polyphenols in honeybush include the xanthone mangiferin and the flavonones hesperitin and isokuranetin. Despite their divergent phytochemical and nutrient compositions, rooibos and honeybush share potent antioxidant and antimutagenic activities in vitro. Animal model studies indicate both herbal teas possess potent antioxidant, immune-modulating and chemopreventive actions. However, human studies of rooibos are limited and of honeybush are absent. No adverse effects of rooibos or honeybush consumption as tisanes have been reported.


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16927447

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Jewish Jamaica

A friend sent me this email about a conference in Jamaica - and following the conference announcement is an article from the Wall Street Journal about the conference.

The Jewish Diaspora of the Caribbean: An International Conference Kingston Jamaica, January 12-14 2010

"The Jewish Diaspora of the Caribbean" is an international conference to = be held at Kingston, Jamaica's Pegasus Hotel, Tuesday, January = 12-Thursday, January 14, 2010. The conference is co-chaired by Jane S. = Gerber (professor of Jewish history at the Graduate Center, CUNY) and = Ainsley Henriques (Director of the United Congregation of Israelites of = Kingston). Our conference coordinator, Stan Mirvis, can be contacted by = visiting our website: http://www.ucija.org/conferenceaa.htm.

We encourage anyone with an interest in the Jewish Caribbean, Sephardic = genealogy, general Caribbean/Atlantic history, or just looking for = creative vacation opportunities to attend. Advanced registration is now = available on our website http://www.ucija.org/conferenceaa.htm. Special = activities in addition to the conference proceedings are being arranged = for those in attendance including "breakfasts with the experts" and = Jamaican Jewish heritage tours of Kingston's beautiful Sha'are Shalom = Synagogue and Hunt's Bay cemetery with author and local historian Ed = Kritzler. The United Congregation of Israelites of Jamaica is organizing = additional activities to explore historic and contemporary Jewish = Jamaica for those who will be staying in Kingston over the weekend.

Conference Program=20

Sephardic Trade Networks in the Colonial Caribbean =20

Chair: Jane S. Gerber=20

Miriam Bodian (University of Texas)

G=E9rard Nahon (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris) Jonathan I. Israel (Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton) Holly Snyder (Brown University)

Material and Visual Culture of Caribbean Jewry=20

Chair: Judah Cohen=20

Rachel Frankel (Architect)

Sharman Kadish (Director, Jewish Heritage, UK; University of

Manchester)

Jackie Ranston (Independent Scholar)

Caribbean Jewish Identity and Heritage: From Conversos to Modern Jews=20

Chair: Miriam Bodian

Mordechai Arbell (Independent Scholar)

Ronnie Perelis (Yeshiva University)

Hilit Surowitz (University of Florida)

Judah Cohen (University of Indiana)

Blacks and Jews in the English Caribbean

Chair: Eli Faber=20

James Robertson (University of the West Indies, Mona) Stan Mirvis (The Graduate Center, CUNY) Swithin Wilmot (University of the West Indies, Mona)

Reassessing the Geographic and Ethnic Definitions of Caribbean Jewry

Chair: Jane S. Gerber=20

Eli Faber (John Jay College, CUNY)

Matt Goldish (Ohio State University

Dale Rosengarten and Barry Steifel (The College of Charleston) Joanna Newman (The University of Southampton; The British Library)=20

The Art of Sephardic Genealogy Workshop

John DeMercado

(Independent Scholar), Ainsley Henriquis (Director, the United = Congregation of Israelites, Kingston), and David Kleiman (President, = Heritage Muse inc.)


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


In the picture below, note the sand covering the floor of the synagogue. This is a Sephardic tradition with lots of meanings relating to the sands of time an impermanence. Check the original article linked at the bottom for more photos, video and interactive graphics - worth checking out.

From the March 9, 2010, Wall Street Journal, page 1:

Jamaica's New Tourism Spiel: Beaches and Reggae and Jews

Island Lures Travelers With Hidden History; Moses Cohen Henriques, Pirate of Caribbean



[JEWMAICA_1] Tammy Audi/The Wall Street Journal

Norma Haddad passes out prayer books before services at the Kingston synagogue.



KINGSTON, Jamaica—This island nation boasts miles of pristine beaches, reggae music and the Western hemisphere's largest butterfly.

Now, it's promoting a new asset to tourists: its Jews.

From the tourism minister on down, Jamaican officialdom has embraced a plan to market the nation's Jewish history as a way of wooing a new segment of travelers.

No matter that Jamaica has just one synagogue and no rabbi, or that its Jewish community is down to around 200 people. It was once home to a Jewish pirate named Moses, according to one account.

A global economic downturn and "ferocious" competition from Mexico, says Jamaican tourism director John Lynch, mean that every traveler counts these days. Jamaica's Jewish history, he concedes, has "been a well-kept secret."

Mr. Lynch wants to put together a tourism package that includes stops at historic Jewish cemeteries, a visit to the island's synagogue and a traditional post-worship repast with Jewish families—with some beach time thrown in.

Since most of the island's Jewish history is centered around Kingston, the strategy fits the government's desire to boost tourism in the scruffy capital city most vacationers skip.

In January, Kingston hosted a five-day conference on Jewish-Caribbean history that drew 200 academics, genealogists and history buffs from Israel to Oregon

But Jamaica is still finding its way in this new market. Two conference attendees negotiated a kosher meal with a waitress at a Kingston restaurant, insisting that a fish not touch a cooking surface that might have been used to cook meat. "You'll wrap the fish in two pieces of foil?" a diner shouted as reggae music crackled in the background. "Yeah, mon," she said.

Ainsley Henriques, an energetic 70-year-old who organized the conference, says Jamaica's Jewish community does have a rich history. Mr. Henriques, with blue eyes and a lilting Jamaican accent, catches many off guard.

"When I travel, people say to me, 'What, you're Jamaican?' And then, 'What, you're Jewish? There are Jews in Jamaica?' They have no idea we've been here for 350 years."

An ancestor arrived in Jamaica from Amsterdam in 1740. He now serves as the unofficial Jewish historian, and is Israel's honorary consul in Jamaica.

"I wear many hats. That's why I'm bald," Mr. Henriques says.

Starting in the 17th century, Jews fleeing the Inquisition arrived in Jamaica from Portugal and Spain. By the end of the 19th century, Jamaica had six synagogues and around 2,000 Jews. Some thrived as merchants in the shipping trade.

Over generations, many of the island's Jews married locals and stopped practicing Judaism. Others left to help establish nascent Jewish communities in the American colonies. Recently, young Jews have left to work in Australia, the U.S. and Canada.

The remaining Jews worship at their Kingston synagogue. With no rabbi, services are led by lay people. The synagogue is one of the few in the world with a sand floor—a feature some believe dates from days when Jews had to worship in secret and used sand to muffle footsteps.

Other Caribbean nations also claim Jewish roots. CuraƧao says it is among the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the Western Hemisphere. Its sand-floor synagogue is a popular tourist attraction.

With such a small Jewish community, Jamaica's Jewish-tourism boosters had to get creative with the visitors' itinerary.

A tour for conference attendees included a stop at Kingston's Hillel school. The school runs on a Jewish calendar and has 750 students; around 20 are Jewish.

It also included a kosher lunch at Strawberry Hill, a mountain resort above Kingston owned by Chris Blackwell, founder of music label Island Records. Born in London, he grew up in Jamaica and his mother was Jewish. Mr. Blackwell told the tourists that while he wasn't raised Jewish, he finds the island's Jewish history fascinating.

Jamaica may have claim to one unusual historical chapter: Jewish pirates. Among them: Moses Cohen Henriques, who attacked Spanish ships loaded with silver, according to Edward Kritzler's "Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean."

Mr. Kritzler, who attended the conference, is an American who has been in Jamaica on and off since the late 1960s. He's fond of wearing a Star of David pendant over shirts studded with skull and crossbones.

Many Jewish pirates, he writes, were "secret Jews" who converted to Catholicism in name only to survive the Inquisition, then fled to the Caribbean.

"Jamaica was at one time the largest Jewish community in the Caribbean," said Jane Gerber, director of the Institute for Sephardic Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. "It was a hub of Jewish commerce that had a triangular trade with colonial America and England. Jamaica was where they came to get kosher stuff."

Today, finding a kosher kitchen can be tough. But the island is used to preparing vegetarian meals for its religious Rastafarian population—some of whom consider themselves a lost tribe of Israel and follow Jewish dietary restrictions forbidding shellfish and pork. One Kingston hotel recently purchased new cooking tools dedicated to kosher meals for guests.

Eli Gabay, a Philadelphia lawyer who attended the conference and tour, marveled at a tombstone with his family name on it. Mr. Gabay said he doesn't know if his family has direct ties to Jamaica, but added, "It brought history to life."

Behn Goldis, a New York reggae artist and orthodox Jew whose stage name is BennyBwoy, calls himself "the original Jewmaican."

A former Wall Street analyst, he was invited to the conference to perform. He did so wearing a yarmulke knitted in the colors of the Jamaican flag, braided hair and sunglasses decorated with gold snakes. "I'm not Jamaican. I just love the music and the people," Mr. Goldis said. "But I really am Jewish."

Write to Tamara Audi at tammy.audi@wsj.com



http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703382904575059113221038280.html

Smell That Smell

This is from (press release on their web site) a law firm that has also recently represented plaintiffs in cases regarding harm from improperly manufactured drywall that was made in China. This case is regarding odors from feedlot livestock raising.

Seeger Weiss Delivers $11 Million Verdict to Small, Family Farms Overrun by Corporate Agriculture's Waste

March 4, 2010

Seeger Weiss brought home another victory against giant agro-business Premium Standard Farms, when a Missouri jury awarded $11.05 million to the 15 neighboring owners of small farms today. Co-founder Stephen A. Weiss has led the charge against these giant factory farms, whose careless and illegal disposal of waste products degrades the air and land around them. As co-lead counsel for the farmers’ whose lives and livelihoods had been handicapped by overpowering hog odors, Mr. Weiss proved to the jury, seated in Jackson County, Missouri, that Premium Standard Farms had failed to sufficiently address the problem in the 11 years since the Missouri Attorney General issued an order to do so. This verdict is the largest monetary award against a hog farm in an odor nuisance case.

The Berlin, Missouri factory farm processes roughly 200,000 hogs every year and houses about 80,000 at any given time. Nationwide, the average hog farm houses only 5,000 animals per year. These local farmers are no strangers to the realities of livestock and agriculture, but the staggering mass of bodies and waste contained within the Premium Standard hog farm overwhelmed them. The plaintiffs, some of whom have owned their farms for well over 100 years and spanning five generations, alleged that relentless and extreme odors emanating from defendants' finishing farm – known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs – created an unreasonable nuisance. Family members testified at trial that the smell was intense enough to prevent them from venturing outdoors on many days.

Law firms The Middleton Firm, Seeger Weiss LLP and the Speer Law Firm represented the seven households, who filed their case in 2002. After hearing nearly 5 weeks of evidence centering on defendants' land application of massive quantities of liquid hog manure, maintenance of multiple-acre wastewater lagoons, and other odor-producing activities at the Homan farm inGentry County, MO, the 12-person jury agreed. Their verdict was delivered on March 4, 2010, awarding nearly $1 million to each of the 13 farmers who lived next to the Premium Standard facility in Berlin with an another $325 thousand for two additional plaintiffs.

In the early 1990s, Premium Standard Farms bought and leased some 4,300 acres in the community of Berlin, Missouri, to create a "finishing farm," which processes nearly a quarter million hogs per year. Premium Standard Farms is a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods and the privately held ContiGroup Companies (previously Continental Grain). The swine are brought into the facility weighing approximately 60 pounds and are grown to 260 pounds for slaughter. Each hog lives its entire adult life in a single hog pen, with no ability to roam. Berlin is located in Gentry County some 80 miles north of Kansas City.

The odors emanating from the hogs come from multiple sources. The hogs excrete waste into a slatted floor, which collects in basins beneath each barn, where it is evacuated through a piped flushing system that deposits it in four-to-five acre lagoons located across the property. Collectively, the lake-sized lagoons collect some 83 million gallons of hog waste during the course of a year – generating enormous quantities of methane, ammonia and hydrogen sulfide that can be detected for miles. The Berlin facility houses 80 barns, each holding 1,000 hogs at a time.

The waste is continually pumped out of the lagoons, which the defendants argued was used as fertilizer. "In reality, the jury recognized that the pumping is merely a disguised form of waste disposal – with the farms releasing far more effluent than the land can possibly absorb," said Charles F. Speer, who first started representing PSF neighbors in the mid-1990s. "The odors and flies coming off this farm have devastated the lives of these fine Missouri citizens. For them, it's been a living torment."

"The families who brought this case have been living under a toxic cloud of hog waste produced by Premium Standard for more than 11 years," said lead trial counsel Richard H. Middleton, Jr. of Savannah, GA. "Defendants claimed their operations complied with state environmental regulations – however, this trial showed that PSF produced industrial-scale pollution with complete lack of regard for the extreme toxicity its operation caused for its neighbors, day in and day out."

Co-trial counsel, Stephen A. Weiss of New York City added: "Rather than accept responsibility for their actions like a good neighbor, these defendants continue to deflect blame. We've offered repeatedly to sit down with their representatives to try to forge a fair resolution, but they continue to choose the courtroom over the settlement table. If I were a Smithfieldshareholder today, I'd be none too pleased with their chosen path."

The $11 million verdict represents one of the largest jury awards in Jackson County in the last year. The ruling follows a $4.5 million verdict in 2006 against Premium Standard Farms on behalf of six plaintiffs, a case also won by the trial team of Messrs. Speer, Middleton and Weiss. Premium Standard Farms has lost three of four trials brought against them because of hog odors, and after today’s verdict have been ordered to pay almost $21 million by juries.

"It's time these agri-businesses get serious and start taking care of what continues to be a serious problem with the pollution caused by their factory farm operations," Mr. Middleton added. "Their battalions of high-priced lawyers are not going to make the stench go away."

The three lawyers represent another 250 or so plaintiffs whose cases against Premium Standard Farms are still pending in Jackson County and various counties in northern Missouri.

The case caption is Owens, et al v. ContiGroup Companies, et al.


http://www.seegerweiss.com/news/hog-farm-victory.aspx?gclid=CKfZ796MyqECFciA5QodVB1leQ