Word: givens
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...have a place for the few family members and friends who want to see Laszlo's baby pictures. And now all the photos other people posted of Laszlo are gone, and I have to e-mail every damn photo to our parents and siblings. I wish Facebook had given me some kind of warning so I could have archived all this stuff or transferred it to the Facebook application Baby Book, which I found out about too late and is oddly O.K. with Facebook, even though it's exactly the same as Laszlo's having his own page...
...decade, the Federal Government has poured more than $50 billion into the corn industry, keeping prices for the crop - at least until corn ethanol skewed the market - artificially low. That's why McDonald's can sell you a Big Mac, fries and a Coke for around $5 - a bargain, given that the meal contains nearly 1,200 calories, more than half the daily recommended requirement for adults. "Taxpayer subsidies basically underwrite cheap grain, and that's what the factory-farming system for meat is entirely dependent on," says Gurian-Sherman. (See the 10 worst fast food meals...
...calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit. With the backing of the government, farmers are producing more calories - some 500 more per person per day since the 1970s - but too many are unhealthy calories. Given that, it's no surprise we're so fat; it simply costs too much to be thin...
...farm animals need pharmaceutical help, which can have further damaging consequences for humans. Overuse of antibiotics on farm animals leads, inevitably, to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and the same bugs that infect animals can infect us too. The UCS estimates that about 70% of antimicrobial drugs used in America are given not to people but to animals, which means we're breeding more of those deadly organisms every day. The Institute of Medicine estimated in 1998 that antibiotic resistance cost the public-health system $4 billion to $5 billion a year - a figure that's almost certainly higher...
...Candace Rondeaux, Afghanistan analyst for the International Crisis Group, says the insecurity and questions about the value of the vote "given the potential for fraud has kept a number of voters from the polls." A low turnout will do "little to enhance the sense that all Afghans are included in the democratic process," Rondeaux says. "It also raises the possible threat that the incumbent's main rivals will question the results and perhaps encourage a violent response, leaving open a window for the Taliban to fully disrupt Afghanistan's progress." (Watch a video on the Afghanistan election...