Word: australia
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...Forgotten Allies No one would wish to devalue the sacrifice of Canada's soldiers in Afghanistan, but Samantha Power's statement [April 28] that "Canada occupies the fighting tier, alongside the U.S. Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands" is disappointingly incomplete. It might interest Power to learn that Australia has almost a thousand troops on the ground in Afghanistan, 350 dedicated to the reconstruction effort, but at least 400 more on operational duties, which puts them very much in the fighting tier. Anthony Connell, Sydney...
...Power forgets Australia. One of our precious boys died in action there last week. Considering we should never have been there in the first place, perhaps Canada, along with Australia, should move out, and soon. Peter Jones, Albion, Victoria...
...Continents have become classifications of convention, rather than strict geography. If continents were simply “continuous bodies of land,” as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, there would be only four—America, Antarctica, Afro-Eurasia, and Australia. Since that is not the case, it is clear that “continent” now includes national political borders, language isoglosses, and historical circumstances. For example, although Greenland is physically closer to North America, it is a Danish province, and thus a part of the European continent...
...poorest countries, caused by their inability to pay for seeds, fertilizers and irrigation. The second is the misguided policy in the U.S. and Europe of subsidizing the diversion of food crops to produce biofuels like corn-based ethanol. The third is climate change; take the recent droughts in Australia and Europe, which cut the global production of grain in 2005 and '06. The fourth is the growing global demand for food and feed grains brought on by swelling populations and incomes. In short, rising demand has hit a limited supply, with the poor taking the hardest blow...
...developed countries produce more biofuels from food-crop feedstocks, and as people in China and India take advantage of their rapid income growth and start eating more meat (which requires more grain to feed more animals). Add to that a few short-term weather shocks, like drought in Australia, and emergency stores get depleted leaving prices to skyrocket. Fearful of food shortages, some large producer nations, including India, Vietnam and Kazakhstan, have limited exports. That can keep prices lower at home, but drives up costs further for people who people in import-dependent nations...