Friday 5

One of my friends and frequent commenters does a Friday 5 on his MySpace blog but centers around his personal interests and whatever else seems to be floating his boat at present. Like Apple to Xerox I'm going to steal his idea and make it better by posting 5 stories that I think need to be read but are not something I can write a whole column on.

1) Iran - France emphasized on developing ties

Iran's first adviser of the President discussed world stability with his French counterpart.

Iran's first adviser of the President, Hashemi Samareh and his French counterpart discussed the most significant regional issues on the phone and they both asserted the need for playing a more influential role in the world equations.

While noting that Tehran and Paris could cooperate in generating world stability by increasing their talks and making more ties, Hashemi Samareh stated that Iran does not hold any limitation in the development of ties with France.

"The development of ties with France will serve regional peace and stability and the two nations' interests, "he added.

For his part, the first French adviser emphasized on the influential role of Iran and France in regional and international issues.

Most news sources are going with the story that France announced today sanctions against Iran should be progressive, proportionate and reversible. They might as well have said the sanctions need to be token, ineffective and meaningless. When push comes to shove China and Russia won't have to veto sanctions as France seems bound and determined to make them a paper tiger. More to the point, France will make sure that whatever happens in Iran, they will be able to profit off of it. Furthermore, I do not believe for a minute that France has any desire to stop Iran from having a nuclear bomb. No, they'd rather see both a nuclear armed Iran as well as Syria in the hopes of joining an alliance with them to counterbalance against the US. This is worse than their relationship with Iraq in the run up to the 2003 invasion.

2) Iran-Brazil Caspian Sea oil contract underway

Iran’s Economic Council is presently assessing the draft of a contract inked with Brazil on oil extraction from the Caspian Sea, member of the Majlis Economy Commission Elyas Naderan said, MNA reported.

“Iran and Brazil will finalize the contract to extract oil from the Caspian Sea, upon ratification by the Economic Council,” Naderan told reporters at the sideline of the Majlis open session.

Since the legal regime of the Caspian Sea is still unclear, Iran prefers to extract oil from the middle parts of the sea that are deeper and jointly owned with other littoral states, MP explained. However, Brazil is keen on carrying out extraction from less deep areas which are near the coast, he added.

Naderan did not say whether or not Iran and Brazil have reached a consensus over the area of the extraction, however, he said “Iran’s national interests have been violated in this contract, because it is failed to determine the exact area for drilling operations.”

Well they are not bosom buddies but any time an arch rival like Iran is doing business with one of the US' more amiable allies, it's generally not a good thing. This is not an indicator that the sky is falling or that even either country is doing anything wrong per se, it is yet just another example of how we really don't have 100% strategic allies anymore. This is not the world of the capitalists versus the communists. Now we're all capitalists and nobody is loyal to anyone. From a business sense this makes perfect sense. From a strategic and diplomatic point of view, the US is becoming slightly less relevant in the world every day.

3) Oil prices fall to below US $60 a barrel

Oil prices fell below US $60 a barrel in thin trading Friday on doubt that OPEC would cut output to lift crude prices.

"The market is not expecting any production cuts at the moment," said Tetsu Emori, an analyst with Mitsui Bussan Futures in Tokyo. "The market sentiment is not really confident. Some oil producing countries have already cut production but the market hasn't really reacted."

Light, sweet crude for November delivery dropped 40 cents to US $59.63 a barrel in Asian electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, midmorning in Singapore.

The contract rose 62 cents Thursday to settle at US $60.03 a barrel on expectations that OPEC would soon cut its output, though a representative of Saudi Arabia denied there was a deal to reduce production.

OPEC has the right to do this. None of us may like it, especially if gas goes back up to three dollars a gallon, but it is in their right as essentially they are just another business. Frankly, I say let them do what they need because the day the US stops buying OPEC oil and China realizes they don't have to either, they're going to need all the money they are making now just to survive. ::::crosses fingers for hydrogen power in the next 5 years:::::::::

4) Child prostitution becoming more common in Arizona

In November, a 15-year-old Valley girl was kidnapped, put in a cage and used as a sex slave inside a Glendale apartment.

In January, two men were arrested and jailed for kidnapping young girls and forcing them into child pornography and prostitution.

But, unfortunately, these two instances aren't as rare as you might think.

"Child prostitution has become and is growing epidemic in the state of Arizona and the city of Phoenix," said Chief Jack Harris of the Phoenix Police Department. "There have been over 35 child prostitutes. These are girls ranging from the age of 13 to 17 years of age."

Police say they are working for as many as 54 different pimps in our community.

The city of Phoenix hosted a six-hour conference Thursday on the subject of prostitution and sex trafficking.

"Big problem here in Phoenix. At least 80 percent of adults started as children," Vednita Carter said.

Carter is the founder and executive director of Breaking Free, "a program that provides services to help women and girls get out of prostitution in St. Paul, Minnesota," Carter said.

She was asked to speak at the conference by Kathleen Mitchell, founder and coordinator of Catholic Charities Dignity Program.

"And what we're finding out here in the streets are kids who are 11 years old, 12 years old and 15 years old," Mitchell said.

Both women believe you can combat child prostitution through education.

"Education is power, you know, and if we don't start talking about what's happening we're going to lose our children," Mitchell said.

Parenting also helps folks. This is an absolute tragedy. I also found out today that two of our teenage girls ran from our program and one of them pimped the other into becoming a teenage prostitute. The newbie of the pair is headed back to our program. Wish me luck here because I suspect this will end in tears.

...and now for the final story of the day:

5) California to Measure Toxic Pollutants in People

The Governor of California wants to terminate the toxins in your body. Unfortunately he's up against a foe more insidious than anything he ever faced in the movies.

Last Friday Gov. Schwarzenegger signed into law the nation's first statewide biomonitoring program. The plan is to collect blood, urine, breast milk and hair from a few thousand Californians who volunteer to have their bodies tested for pollutants.

What's in you is bound to scare you. Locked in fat cells and bone and circulating through your blood is a potentially toxic cocktail of thousands of human-made chemicals, some of which have been banned for decades. They have names with pronunciations as troublesome as the chemicals themselves, such as mono-2-ethylhexyl-phthalate.

Seeing how the daily recommended allowance for mono-2-ethylhexyl-phthalate is zero milligrams, its presence in your body—along with so many other chemical byproducts of our industrial age—might spell trouble.

You failed the drug test

You can eat right and exercise, swear off cigarettes, and bypass north Jersey by a good 100 miles on your way to New England, but you cannot avoid a daily dose of these substances that—in a laboratory, fed to animals at high doses—cause cancer and neurological problems.

These chemicals are everywhere, in the soil, air and water; and now they are in us as a result of eating things that soak up soil, air and water. Switching to organic foods won't help that much, because chemicals such as dioxins and furans are ubiquitous, released into the air by industry and even forest fires. These chemicals settle on organic crops and on the grass that organic cattle eat.

Running off to the ends of the Earth won't help either. The Inuit of Nunavut and Greenland have the highest levels of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) contamination in the world. PCBs, banned in the 1970s, were used for decades in paints, adhesives, coolants and insulating materials. These chemicals leaked into the waterways from landfills or outright ocean dumping, settled into sediment, were absorbed by plants and microorganisms, and slowly made their way into seal, salmon and whale fat, the Inuit's primary food sources. Nice, huh?

Will it kill you?

Are these chemicals causing the higher rates of certain cancers and Alzheimer's seen in recent years? Scientists aren't sure. Some say we are living longer and healthier than ever, in part because of chemicals that, say, make fabrics flame-resistant. Plastics are lighter to ship than glass and reduce fuel burning, a good thing.

Others say that modern chemicals accumulated in the body are bound to do us in. It's hard to argue the added health benefit of fabric softeners and sweet-scented hand lotions containing phthalates, which alter the sexual development of laboratory mice.

California's biomonitoring program, targeting pollution in people instead of in the environment, could be a valuable tool to assess the true danger. The program builds upon reports from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention on human exposure to chemicals, which analyzed bodily samples from a diverse group of Americans.

Safe as mother's milk

Not all health advocates favor the California plan. Once you know what's inside you, what do you do?

Of greatest concern is how the mass media will handle the inevitable discovery that mother's milk contains banned and potentially dangerous chemicals. California is testing mother's milk chiefly because the breasts' fat cells so readily accumulate certain chemicals.

Yet except in rare, acute poisoning cases, the benefits of breastfeeding outweigh the risks, if any, of passing pollutants from mother to infant. Will the decades' old campaign to encourage breastfeeding be side-railed by hyperbole of tainted mother's milk? In some cultures, mothers might become depressed, seeing themselves as failures for not keeping their bodies pure.

At issue is the public's misunderstanding of hazard versus risk. A ladder is a hazard. Standing on the top rung is a risk. The mere presence of all these chemicals in our body is a hazard; that much is not refuted. The risk of levels at one part per million, billion or trillion is not well understood.

Humans as lab rats

Having your body tested for the presence of a hundred or so of the most worrisome chemicals will set you back at least $10,000. Lead and mercury, dangerous at that part-per-million level, are easy and inexpensive to spot. Dioxin, dangerous at perhaps the part-per-trillion level, is harder to test for.

Sadly it is for this cost reason that so many chemicals cooked up since the 1940s haven't been "officially" tested on humans. But we're all taking part in a great big lab experiment as these chemicals are pumped into the environment and retracted—like lead and PCBs—only after it becomes obvious that they pose serious health risks.

California will take at least a small step in understanding how pollutants from hot spots, such as farmlands or factories, penetrate those closest to the source (farm and factory workers) as well as those downstream (consumers and residents). The law once again places California on the cutting edge, or reaffirms its reputation as a land granola-crunching loonies, depending on your opinion.

:::::::::blinks twice::::::::::