Everything Matters

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) — From Rome’s Colosseum to the Sydney Opera House to the Sears Tower’s famous antennas in Chicago, floodlit icons of civilization have gone dark for Earth Hour, a worldwide campaign to highlight the waste of electricity and the threat of climate change.

The environmental group WWF has urged governments, businesses and households to turn back to candle power for at least 60 minutes Saturday starting at 8 p.m. wherever they were.

The campaign began last year in Australia and traveled this year from the South Pacific to Europe in cadence with the setting of the sun.

"What’s amazing is that it’s transcending political boundaries and happening in places like China, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea," said Andy Ridley, executive director of Earth Hour. "It really seems to have resonated with anybody and everybody."

Earth Hour officials hoped 100 million people would turn off their nonessential lights and electronic goods for the hour. Electricity plants produce greenhouse gases that fuel climate change.

CNN 

The Arroyo administration needs to invest in farmers’ productivity and raise their level of profitability to be competitive, a leading agricultural economist said.

“There is no way we can get our farmers out of poverty and be competitive in the world if we don’t invest in their productivity,” Balisacan said.

He added that government  needs professionals in the agriculture bureaucracy “who can appreciate and support continuity of programs.”

Balisacan traced the roots of the current rice crisis to the country’s fast growing population and low productivity. This is exacerbated by the soaring food prices worldwide.

 

But the novelist and English professor at Colby College was thrust into that role by her 2002 best-selling memoir about the transition to womanhood that freed her from the decades-long torment of being a female trapped in a male body.

With three appearances on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," two on "Larry King Live" and numerous other interviews and public appearances, Boylan, 49, has become a sunny-faced activist for the nation’s transgendered and one of the most widely recognized transsexuals of recent years.

"Activism for me takes the form of living a normal life and doing so very publicly," she said.

Boylan’s public schedule is getting busier with this year’s publication of her second memoir, "I’m Looking Through You," a poignant but laugh-out-loud story about growing up in a Charles Addams-like Victorian mansion on Philadelphia’s Main Line.

The author, then named James, concealed her conflicted sexuality, hiding her stash of lingerie in a secret panel in her bedroom. The spooky old house, with footsteps in the attic, clouds of blue mist and a ghostlike figure of an old woman in a mirror, serves as backdrop for an adolescence haunted by gender issues that forced Boylan to keep the nature of her true self hidden. In so doing, she became something of a ghost herself.

MANILA, Philippines—The Philippines could end up paying close to P60 billion this year for rice imports to avert a shortage, with P21.7 billion ending up as subsidies through the National Food Authority.

Sen. Francis Escudero said the rice import bill of P58.7 billion was roughly equivalent to the total value-added tax (VAT) collections from fuel, which would put the Arroyo administration in a tight spot of choosing between a “balanced budget or balanced diet.”

“(The rice import bill) is bigger than the budget of the AFP (military) or the PNP (police), and five times the allocation for the Department of Health. Taxes collected on the gas pump will just be swapped for rice. The rise in the world prices of rice, which translates into bigger corporate subsidy for the NFA, was never factored in this year’s expenditures,” said Escudero in a statement.

If the price of imported rice holds at the government’s most recent purchase of P29.40 per kilo throughout the year, Escudero said, the government would have to shoulder P10.90 per kilo of NFA rice, which was being sold at a fixed price of P18.50 per kilo.

Philippine Daily Inquirer