Word: closing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies...
...sickened 600 - has consumers rightly worried about the safety of their meals. A food system - from seed to 7?Eleven - that generates cheap, filling food at the literal expense of healthier produce is also a principal cause of America's obesity epidemic. At a time when the nation is close to a civil war over health-care reform, obesity adds $147 billion a year to our doctor bills. "The way we farm now is destructive of the soil, the environment and us," says Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist with the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned...
...burger or your sausage came from what are called concentrated-animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which are every bit as industrial as they sound. In CAFOs, large numbers of animals - 1,000 or more in the case of cattle and tens of thousands for chicken and pigs - are kept in close, concentrated conditions and fattened up for slaughter as fast as possible, contributing to efficiencies of scale and thus lower prices. But animals aren't widgets with legs. They're living creatures, and there are consequences to packing them in prison-like conditions. For instance: Where does all that manure...
...this year - a school whose ranking has jumped from last year? There wasn't a lot of change from this year to last. Harvard was No. 1 last year, and now Harvard and Princeton are [both] No. 1. People are going to write about that. But they were very close before, and now they're tied. That's not really a big change. Schools are pretty stable, and the top schools have the resources to continue to draw the best students and graduate them at a high rate year after year. It's hard to move big institutions...
...Outside of Kabul, the situation was indeed worse, with rocket attacks throughout the country scaring voters away from the polls. In Wardak province, next to Kabul, Taliban intimidation on the roads forced the provincial government to close all polling stations. As a last resort, soldiers from the Afghan army started going door to door with ballots, a practice that could easily be mistaken as a coercive tactic in favor of the current government. International and independent Afghanistan observers worry that the lack of voters could open the way to fraud: corrupt officials might use the names and registration numbers...