Krinda

The report, called "Through Albino Eyes", says that as many as 300 children and teenagers are now in hiding and stranded in Tanzanian schools for the disabled or in emergency shelters established by the police in Burundi, where they exist in dire conditions.

Thousands more albinos across a huge swathe of countryside - perhaps as many as 10,000 - are unable to move freely to trade, study or cultivate fields for fear of albino hunters in search of body parts and hired mainly by witch doctors and big-money traders.

The Tanzania Red Cross Society (TRCS) intends to provide health education about skin care, protective widebrimmed hats, long-sleeved shirts and vocational teaching equipment that will improve chances of finding indoor employment.

Salif Keita, the Malian albino singer and human rights activist said that "even before the killings began two years ago, albino people in tropical Africa suffered an array of afflictions that made physical survival a desperate struggle".

"These included, above all, needlessly high rates of fatal skin cancer that are the result of their acute sensitivity to sunlight."

IFRC Secretary General Bekele Geleta described albinism as "one of the most unfortunate vulnerabilities, that needs to be addressed immediately at the international level".

"Our national societies closest to this tragic story have responded well, and they will continue focusing on areas where they can really add value - like public-health education and anti-discrimination awareness raising."

LATELY more people have begun to express an interest in where the meat they eat comes from and how it was raised. Were the animals humanely treated? Did they have a good quality of life before the death that turned them into someone's dinner?

Some of these questions, which reach a fever pitch in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, pertain to the ways in which animals are treated. (Did your turkey get to live outdoors?) Others focus on the question of how eating the animals in question will affect the consumer's health and well-being. (Was it given hormones and antibiotics?)

None of these questions, however, make any consideration of whether it is wrong to kill animals for human consumption. And even when people ask this question, they almost always find a variety of resourceful answers that purport to justify the killing and consumption of animals in the name of human welfare. Strict ethical vegans, of which I am one, are customarily excoriated for equating our society's treatment of animals with mass murder. Can anyone seriously consider animal suffering even remotely comparable to human suffering? Those who answer with a resounding no typically argue in one of two ways.

Oooh, I sure do wish I could be there for this exhibit!

SAN FRANCISCO -- Thomas J. Graff, a leading environmentalist who championed the idea of offering financial incentives for environmentally friendly behavior, an approach that had far-reaching impact on state and federal policies, especially on water use in the drought-prone West, died Nov. 12 in Oakland, Calif., where he lived. He was 65.

Mr. Graff, who founded the first California office of the Environmental Defense Fund and led it for 37 years, dealt with a host of environmental issues, including AB 32, the first-of-its-kind legislation, adopted in 2006, that sets limits on greenhouse gas emissions in California. But he made his biggest impact in the realm of water use, a constant source of vexation in the West.

By STEPHEN KING
Published: November 19, 2009

Raymond Carver, surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century, makes an early appearance in Carol Sklenicka's exhaustive and sometimes exhausting biography as a 3- or 4-year-old on a leash. "Well, of course I had to keep him on a leash," his mother, Ella Carver, said much later -- and seemingly without irony.

(CNN) -- Authorities at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant were investigating what caused a weekend radiation leak that resulted in 150 workers being sent home, officials said Sunday.

In memory of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, assassinated 22 November 1963...