Germany, the most economically powerful nation in Europe, has been renowned for its male-dominated politics, making her election the end of an era. Besides being the first women to serve as chancellor, she is also the first East German to rise to the top position in Germany.
With one natural disaster striking after another, the polar ice caps melting and a possible pandemic looming over the planet, would it still be unwise for me to hope the human race can finally pull itself together, as opposed to devising even more ways to destroy one another?
Should we get flu shots? Would they even help? Do we need to kill all the poultry in the Far East? How can we even begin to combat a virus that is ever-changing and mutating to be resistant?
Although it's important to inform people that the government is starting to prepare for an upcoming threat, the media should be informing the public about how to prepare. The virus is predicted to be so deadly that the government will be able to do little once the pandemic begins.
"We need more refining capacity," said President Bush in a recent news conference. However, if he keeps his commitment, it will mean continuing with a reckless energy policy, one that will lead to severe problems.
Installing new oil-refining capacity is not the answer to lowering gas prices. The answer instead is conservation of current energy resources and researching clean, renewable energy resources.
This not only is of environmental importance, but also is essential to ensure continuity of our energy supply. America must not pursue short-sighted solutions to a problem that will never go away ? at least not until we achieve energy independence via domestically created renewable energy.
In the past week, a girl younger than 2 years old is sexually assaulted in the bathroom of the Des Moines Public Library by a sex offender, a 1-year-old baby is abducted by her father, who also happens to be a sexual abuser, and we've concluded that to date,14 Iowans have been killed by men in domestic-violence situations.
Senator Chuck Grassley stated that 700 women, on average, are raped each day in the U.S. The advocacy group Men Against Violence states that 90 percent of violent crimes are committed by men.
There are scores of young women, girls, and boys being abducted, raped, kidnapped or killed nationally. What is going on with our men? There is a crisis in masculinity that the public can no longer ignore. The sexual perversities that accompany many of these crimes compound this crisis, and are very telling of something terribly wrong in how our men and boys are being raised.
In Jackson Katz's 1999 film, "Tough Guise: Violence, Media, and the Crisis in Masculinity," he addresses the ways in which an overtly sexual and violent mainstream media and society's ignorance of its consequences is sculpting our men into violent and oppressive creatures, causing untold misery in the lives of thousands of women, girls, babies, and increasingly, young boys.
We must strongly reconsider how we teach our boys to be men, and the ways in which violent media, no matter how lucrative, may have the power to erode our hopes of a peaceful society.
No, I'm not a doctor and no, I don't play one on television. Yet I have made so many visits to the doctor's office, I feel safe in arguing an alarming statement issued in Monday's Register.
The idea that we can feed our infants anything we want is not only dangerous, it's ridiculous. The medical community claims that "new research proves old research to be false." Yet it is actually just the current opinion loosely based on some research facts, but not all of them. Case in point ? one year ago, Vioxx was the "miracle drug." Now, it's been pulled from the market due to the number of deaths it caused. It was accepted in the medical community through "research" that ended up being debunked.
Yet the statements I worry most about are those concerning peanut butter. I have a life-threatening allergy to peanuts (not to mention a plethora of other allergies), which I was diagnosed with at the age of 1 1/2.
I was given a miniature peanut butter sandwich cracker as part of an allergy test, and before I could even swallow the bite, I turned black and blue all over, I stopped breathing, and I began coughing up blood. I had a severe anaphylactic reaction, and I made it through because I was already in the emergency room when it happened.
In addition, I have absolutely no family history of food allergies. So parents simply "being careful" when feeding their children is not nearly careful enough, whether you have a family history of allergies or not.
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