Normally at this time of the year the paddocks would be green, and the grass would be six or eight inches high, and we'd have more feed than the cows can do with. "Now it looks like scrubland," says Malcolm, wearily. "It's useless."

Recently, he's had to sell off two-thirds of his herd and is saddled with so much debt that he's going to have to put his farm on the market. He can barely afford the straw to feed his bony cattleFor the farmers of Wakool, this has been the driest 12 months in 125 years. This area used to have 19 dairy farms. Now it has got just six.

Farmers here have suffered a double blow: a chronic shortfall of rainfall and the shutting off of vital irrigation water from the Murray River. If the Big Dry continues, the so-called Dethridge wheels - which regulate the flow of irrigation water - will stop turning across the entire Murray-Darling Basin. THE BASIN IS A REGION THE SIZE OF FRANCE AND SPAIN, SUPPLIES 40% OF THE COUNTRY'S PRODUCE AND IS THUS KNOWN AS THE "FOOD BOWL" OF AUSTRALIA. In the meantime, rural communities continue to suffer.

Take Wakool's local primary school. If just a couple more farming families sell up and move away, it will lose yet more funds, and its teaching staff will be reduced to one. No wonder there's a feeling of such despair. Just listen to local mayor Ken Trewin: "I was talking to our local GPs at lunchtime and I asked them how many farmers they are seeing with depression. "Sadly, it's a lot," he says, fighting back the tears. "A lot."

Staff blamed pressure from their head offices to hit sales targets and a lack of staff for the corner-cutting.
Some of the most serious breaches detailed in the Whistleblower programme, to be broadcast tonight, happened at Tesco's Woodford Green branch.

They include:

- Changing sell-by dates to extend the shelf-life of ready-to-eat prawns by three days.

- Refreezing partly defrosted crab claws and prawns.

- Using a "sniff test" to decide when fish already past its sell-by date was no longer fit to put out on the counter.

- Kicking a cooked chicken around the floor before serving it to a difficult customer.

- Making up entries in the logs that record cooked chicken meat temperatures.

- Using a fish knife to lever open the cover of a blocked drain.

- Moving from the hot chicken counter to the raw meat counter without washing hands or putting on a different apron.

- Using meat scissors to cut fingernails.

- Using bin liners to cover the meat counter overnight.

- Re-mincing partially cooked mince and illegally mincing meat past its use-by date.

At the Sainsbury's branch in Didcot, Oxfordshire, trolleys of chilled fresh food were left at room temperature for three hours, despite a limit of 30 minutes, because there was "no room for it in the fridge." Staff questioned by undercover reporters Audrey Brown and James Griffin said they were often too busy and overworked to follow the correct procedures. The programme also cast doubt on training standards. When Griffin got a job on the fish counter and had to fill in a health and safety questionnaire, he claimed a manager read out the right answers.

In a response to the BBC progrgamme, Tesco said: "With the little detail we have, we looked vigorously at the store and our suppliers and are satisfied any incidents were not representative of the high standards we insist on. "That said, we take allegations of this nature very seriously and, as a precaution, have retrained all counter staff in this store." In its response, Sainsbury's said it had "identified some instances where our procedures had not been followed correctly at that store and have taken the necessary action".

A Denver Zoo monkey has died of bubonic plague, apparently after eating a squirrel stricken with the disease, Colorado health and zoo officials said on Monday. Five squirrels and a rabbit found dead on zoo grounds tested positive for the flea-borne disease in recent weeks, Denver Zoo spokeswoman Ana Bowie said.

Zookeepers on May 15 noticed the 8-year-old hooded capuchin monkey was lethargic, and the next day it was found dead in its enclosure. Zoo veterinarians sent tissue samples to a state laboratory where it was determined the animal died of the plague. The death was announced on Monday. Zoo veterinarian Dave Kenny said that the risk of plague spreading to humans was extremely low but that visitors were being urged to avoid squirrels and rabbits.

For a second day hundreds of troops laid siege to the huge Nahr al-Bared camp on the outskirts of the port city of Tripoli, backed by tanks and armoured carriers. With relief agencies unable to enter the camp home to 40,000 refugees, including women and children it was impossible to determine how many had been killed or injured. About 50 combatants died on Sunday when battles broke out in the city centre before spreading to the camp.

Palestinian factions have offered their support for the Government's moves and have undertaken precautions to prevent fighting in other refugee camps. Fatah al-Islam is viewed with suspicion by other Palestinian groups, which should help to ensure that the violence in Nahr al-Bared is contained.

Fatah al-Islam arose after its leader, Shaker al-Absi, a Palestinian, was expelled from Syria, where he had been held in custody, and set himself up in Nahr al-Bared last year. This year he told The New York Times that he was training fighters inside the camp for attacks on other countries and that he aimed to spread al-Qaeda's ideology.

Yesterday the US State Department said that the Lebanese Army was working in a legitimate manner against provocations by violent extremists operating in the camp. Germany, which holds the EU presidency, promised its support for the Government of Fouad Siniora, the Prime Minister, but urged both sides to do everything possible to prevent the situation from escalating.

Egypt began releasing members of al-Jihad, which was formerly headed by al-Qaida's No. 2 Ayman Al-Zawahri, two weeks ago after some of their leaders agreed to renounce violence against the Egyptian state, officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

Al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya, which in Arabic means Islamic Group, and to a lesser extent al-Jihad, which means holy war, were responsible for a violent campaign against the Egyptian regime in the 1990s. Neither has been involved in attacks in Egypt since.

Both groups were accused of participating in the 1981 assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat. Hundreds if not thousands of militants are still believed to be in prison from both militant groups as well as other smaller networks. Egypt has never disclosed an official figure of militants or political inmates in its prisons.

Controversial emergency laws imposed since Sadat's assassination give security forces broad powers - including great leeway in making arrests and detaining people indefinitely.

Following Monday night's deadly rocket salvo in which 32-year-old Shirel Freedman was killed in Sderot when a rocket hit her car, the IAF carried out overnight airstrikes on targets in the Gaza Strip.

Aircraft fired missiles at a Hamas weapons warehouse and an operations room used by the Popular Resistance Committees for directing terror activity.
Freedman was scheduled to be buried in Sderot late Tuesday morning and the funeral was set to be secured by a heavy police presence.

Shortly after 8 p.m. Monday, five rockets were fired from Gaza and one struck Freedman's car near Sderot's commercial center. She died en route to hospital, becoming the first Israeli to die in a rocket attack since November. Two other people were wounded in the attack, one moderately and the other lightly, and were evacuated to Ashkelon's Barzilai Hospital.

Tens of thousands of people on Monday attended a funeral in Gaza City for the people killed in Sunday evening's IAF air strike. "You are under attack because you are strong, because you are the supporters of the resistance in Palestine," Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas told the crowd.

The latest air strikes followed Sunday's security cabinet decision to step up operations against Hamas and Islamic Jihad and to begin targeted killings of terrorist leaders and politicians.

He said relying on techniques from the so-called experts could be destroying parents' confidence in their own child-rearing abilities, weakening their control over their offspring. Professor Frank Furedi also warned that the spread of the nanny state was adding to bewilderment among parents. He said: "They basically assume the high ground - 'I am the supernanny, unlike you, the incompetent, bumbling idiot'."

Professor Furedi, author of Paranoid Parenting and the Culture of Fear, went on to accuse Labour of politicising parenting. "Over the last ten years, virtually every aspect of childrearing is turned into a problem that requires their support or intervention," he said. "This undermines parents' confidence.

"Targeting parents has become a national sport. New Labour politicians appear to take the view that almost every social problem is caused by bad parenting. "This allows failed politicians to avoid confronting their policy failures in health, education and community building." He added, "Parenting has become an industry. It's no longer about the relationship with your children, it's something for politicians and professionals to have an opinion about."

According to the Census Bureau, from mid-2005 to mid-2006, the U.S. minority population rose 2.4 million, to exceed 100 million. Hispanics, 1 percent of the population in 1950, are now 14.4 percent. Their total number has soared 25 percent since 2000 alone. The Asian population has also grown by 25 percent since 2000.
The number of white kids of school age fell 4 percent, however. HALF THE CHILDREN 5 AND YOUNGER IN THE UNITED STATES ARE NOW MINORITIES.

What is happening to us? AN IMMIGRANT INVASION OF THE UNITED STATES FROM THE THIRD WORLD, as America's white majority is no longer even reproducing itself. Since Roe v. Wade, AMERICA HAS ABORTED 45 MILLION OF HER CHILDREN. AND ASIA, AFRICA AND LATIN AMERICA HAVE SENT 45 MILLION OF THEIR CHILDREN TO INHERIT THE ESTATE THE ABORTED AMERICAN CHILDREN NEVER SAW. God is not mocked.

And white America is in flight. In the 1990s, for the first time since the Spanish came, whites left California. Two million departed. From July 1, 2005, to July 1, 2006, 100,000 more packed up and headed back whence their fathers came. The "Anglo" population of the Golden State is down to 43 percent and falling fast. White folks are now a minority in Texas and New Mexico. In Arizona, Hispanics account for over half the population under 20.
Moreover, since the cultural revolution of the 1960s, we have been fighting one another over issues of race and ethnicity, history, heroes and holidays, morality and religion, right and wrong.

Ll over the Western world, multiethnic, multicultural countries are coming apart over language, ethnicity, history. The Soviet Union broke into 15 nations, Yugoslavia into half a dozen. Czechs and Slovaks divorced. Scots want separation from England. Catalans and Basques seek independence. Corsicans and Bretons want out of France. Northern Italians want to secede. Only immigrants who prefer Ottawa prevent Quebecois from breaking free of Canada.

As we see from the election battles in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Mexico, race and ethnicity are not receding as issues, but rising. In South Central Los Angeles, black and Hispanic gangs are at war over race and turf.
Addressing the Knights of Columbus in 1915, Theodore Roosevelt warned, "The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities."

IN EVERY WAY POSSIBLE, AMERICANS HAVE SAID THEY DO NOT WANT TO TAKE THIS RISK WITH THEIR COUNTRY. WHY, THEN, ARE OUR ELITES TAKING IT?

No tainted toothpaste has been found in the United States, but a spokesman for the Food and Drug Administration said yesterday that the agency would be taking a hard look at whether to issue an import alert.

Authorities in the Dominican Republic said they seized 36,000 tubes of toothpaste suspected of containing diethylene glycol, an industrial solvent and prime ingredient in some antifreeze. Included were tubes of toothpaste marketed for children with bubble gum and strawberry flavors sold under the name of Mr. Cool Junior.Toothpaste containing the toxic solvent was also found in Panama and Australia in the last week.

DIETHYLENE GLYCOL is the same poison that the Panamanian government unwittingly mixed into cold medicine last year, killing at least 100 people. In that case, the poison falsely labeled as glycerin, a harmless syrup, originated in China, shipping records show. Diethylene glycol is generally less expensive than its chemical cousin glycerin.
Mr. Hu said his company exports toothpaste, toothbrushes, glue and other goods to the United States, Europe and other regions but that his company no longer uses diethylene glycol. He said, however, that most TOOTHPASTE MAKERS IN THIS REGION USE DIETHYLENE GLYCOL BECAUSE IT IS CONSIDERED A CHEAP SUBSTITUTE FOR GLYCERIN.

"You know, if you're in the export market, the margins are small, so people use the substitute," he said. "Even one percent or half a percent price difference can matter to people here."

"Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq and it's a very dangerous course for them to be following. They are already committing daily acts of war against US and British forces," a senior US official in Baghdad warned. "They [Iran] are behind a lot of high-profile attacks meant to undermine US will and British will, such as the rocket attacks on Basra palace and the Green Zone [in Baghdad]. The attacks are directed by the Revolutionary Guard who are connected right to the top [of the Iranian government]."

The official said US commanders were bracing for a nationwide, Iranian-orchestrated summer offensive, linking al-Qaida and Sunni insurgents to Tehran's Shia militia allies, that Iran hoped would trigger a political mutiny in Washington and a US retreat. "We expect that al-Qaida and Iran will both attempt to increase the propaganda and increase the violence prior to Petraeus's report in September [when the US commander General David Petraeus will report to Congress on President George Bush's controversial, six-month security "surge" of 30,000 troop reinforcements]," the official said.

The instructions came from JOEL BECKER, AN ASSOCIATE CLINICAL PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES. "I am going to encourage you to have sex and encourage you to use drugs appropriately," Becker said during his appearance at the school as part of a recent panel sponsored by the University of Colorado's Conference on World Affairs.

A guest speaker at a Boulder, Colo., High School assembly has told STUDENTS AS YOUNG AS 14 TO GO HAVE SEX AND USE DRUGS, prompting school officials to say they will investigate.

"Why I am going to take that position is because you are going to do it anyway," he continued. "I think as a psychologist and health educator, it is more important to educate you in a direction that you might actually stick to. So, I am going to stay mostly on with the sex side because that is the area I know more about. I want to encourage you to all have healthy, sexual behavior."

WND also has reported on similar assemblies that have been used by schools to promote homosexuality, including one where parents were banned from the event, and a second where WND reported school officials ordered their 14-year-old freshman class into a "gay" indoctrination seminar after having them sign a confidentiality agreement promising not to tell their parents.

The sophomore, Daphne, had been required to attend the panel called "STDs: Sex, Teens and Drugs," and accused panel members of presenting one-sided views and discrediting abstinence. The White family said the conference statement wasn't even accurate.

"The panelists irresponsibly advised Boulder High students to have sex and use drugs," the family responded. "TEENAGE ABSTINENCE WAS DISMISSED AS AN UNWISE CHOICE AND INDICATIVE OF RELIGIOUS HANG-UPS."
"THESE EXPERTS CAME IN TO UNDERMINE AND CONTRADICT EVERYTHING MOST PARENTS AT THAT SCHOOL ARE TRYING TO TEACH THEIR KIDS ABOUT SEX AND DRUGS. And I believe that a lot of those parents are ready to fight back," Caplis said.

Added Louise Benson, on another: "The attitude towards the Whites and the wildly left-wing agenda at BHS as represented by the amazing thinking that a panel encouraging sex and drugs would be just fine is one reason families are fleeing public schools.

"The culture wars really are in full swing in schools," she said.

The Christian relief and development agency Tearfund released the report "Churchgoing in the U.K." in April, which revealed that more than half of those polled claim to be Christians. Monsignor Keith Barltrop, director of the Catholic Agency to Support Evangelization (CASE) of the bishops' conference of England and Wales, tells ZENIT in this interview that the key to successful evangelization in the modern world is renewing a sense of confidence among Catholics in their faith.

Q: What are the biggest obstacles to evangelization in Europe today?

MONSIGNOR BARLTROP: The biggest obstacles are SHEER IGNORANCE OR "FORGETTING" OF THE GOSPEL, and the fact that many people who think they know what Christianity means ACTUALLY HAVE A DISTORTED AND WOEFULLY INCOMPLETE PICTURE. People have now become CONSUMERS OF SPIRITUALITY AND RELIGION, as they are of material products, and Catholic truth itself can become one more lifestyle option among others.

This problem is compounded by the way values of Christian origin -- such as justice, equality and human rights -- have become detached from their Christian roots and are now even being turned against the Church, so that the very proclamation of the truth is seen as somehow oppressive and destructive of human freedom and happiness. In such a world it becomes difficult to avoid the impression that evangelization is about clever manipulation of the truth or, even worse, associated with that fundamentalism which the modern world both fears and is, paradoxically, responsible for.

Q: Why is it often difficult to engage Catholics with the need to support evangelization?

MONSIGNOR BARLTROP: In Britain, one of the main factors is that evangelization is associated with a certain kind of Protestantism, or with related images such as people preaching aggressively on street corners and "televangelists" looking for money. By making known a variety of Catholic methods of evangelization, AND ESPECIALLY BY ASSOCIATING IT WITH THE EUCHARIST AND EUCHARISTIC ADORATION, ( Sunday Worship) CASE tries to get across the message that there is a Catholic way of evangelizing.

Q: A report released recently by Tearfund on church attendance in the United Kingdom found that, while 53% of adults still claim to be Christian, only 15% attend church at least once a month. How do you explain this discrepancy?

MONSIGNOR BARLTROP: I think that by claiming to be Christian, people are saying they want to be associated with Christian values such as kindness, fairness and compassion. Obviously that is an inadequate understanding of Christian identity, which is actually based on faith in Christ leading to a personal relationship with him which can only be real if it is rooted in active membership of his body, the Church.

Vic Carnevale points to the piled-up cases of garlic. On the right side they're from Mexico. On the left, from China. "Those are $55 a case," Carnevale, president of Veg-Pak Product Ltd., a vegetable wholesaler at the terminal, says of the Mexican garlic. Then he points to the left. "Those? $13.""See those (Chinese) peas?" he continues, dodging hurried buyers in the aisle. "Ten dollars a case. In Canada you couldn't do it for that price if everybody worked for free!"

Every year Carnevale gets more and more fresh produce from China. In the span of just a few years, CHINA HAS BECOME ONE OF THE WORLD'S BIGGEST EXPORTERS OF FOOD. It has become the leading exporter of fruits and vegetables, food additives and ingredients. "They're coming on stronger and stronger," Carnevale says. "They're going to take over."

Even as this is happening, the safety of food from China is increasingly becoming an issue. The recent pet food scandal crystallized these fears after thousands of North American cats and dogs fell ill the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has so far confirmed 16 deaths from pet food containing Chinese wheat gluten tainted with the plastics-related chemical melamine.

But the melamine scandal is just the most notorious in a long string of ongoing problems that China faces. They include overuse of highly toxic pesticides and fertilizers to boost yields, improper use of animal drugs, fraud and corruption. And as Western countries are finding out from fish pumped full of antibiotics to filthy seafood China is exporting these problems abroad.

Primarily because of low costs, but also longer growing seasons, Canada has joined many other Western nations in relying increasingly on China for its food supply. Food imports from China have exploded over the past decade, rising nearly 300 per cent to more than $705 million last year, according to Statistics Canada. About half of that is fresh fruits and vegetables, of which China is now this country's fifth largest supplier. Another big category is fish and seafood.

South of the border, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration readily compiles data that suggest otherwise. Over the past year, the data show that China has consistently had the most shipment rejections of any country. Last month, China had 257 rejections. The next highest were Mexico and India, with 140 and 122, respectively.
The rejections captured even though A MERE 1 PER CENT OF ALL SHIPMENTS ARE INSPECTED IN THE U.S. were for everything from filthy salted bean cubes to unsafe colourants in jujubes, from dangerous additives, such as dulcin (a sweetener believed to be carcinogenic) in dried fruit and nitrofuran (an antibiotic banned in Canada) in breaded shrimp, to banned drugs in all sorts of fish.

Canada imports all sorts of food from China. In some cases it comes from Chinese companies. In others, Canadian companies may grow the food in China and ship it back here. Aside from garlic and peas, there's also ginger, tomatoes, water chestnuts, the edible root burdock, apples, oranges, exotic fruits like loquat or pomelo, fish, seafood, cereals, fruit juices, nuts, tea and candy. The only meat imported is canned pork and sausage casings.

China's food safety record is dismal, experts say. Much of it stems from the farm system: still largely tiny-plot farmers hundreds of millions of them often using barred or fake pesticides and fertilizers. Much of their crop or livestock is sold to traders without documentation or records. Bekedam says what China exports is better controlled than what's produced for the domestic market. Earlier this month, state media reported that cancer became China's top killer last year, and put the blame on pollution, heavy use of additives to make animals grow faster, and pesticides.

An infamous example of greed trumping safety occurred in 2004, when 12 babies died after being fed fake baby formula. And last November, authorities discovered that farmers had added a cancer-causing dye to the feed of their ducks, in order to gives the yolks of their eggs a red colour and thus fetch a higher price.

For his part, Carnevale says that in his time as a produce wholesaler, he's seen Chinese products improve in quality. Garlic was "lousy. But gradually they worked on it to the point where they were better than everybody else." China has to do this, for a lot of money is at stake. Last Friday, The Los Angeles Times reported that two major food manufacturers in the U.S., Mission Foods Corp. and Tyson Foods Inc., ordered their suppliers to stop using ingredients from China.

A senior Hamas leader in Gaza declared Monday morning that it was signed and sealed within his party that Israel would be wiped off the map and replaced by a Palestinian State, Israel Radio reported. He added that rockets and missiles were the means of removing Israel from the picture.

Meanwhile, a Hamas-affiliated group in the PA parliament called for suicide attacks and other violence against IDF troops in the Gaza Strip in retaliation for the strikes. The organization's armed wing, Izzadin Kassam, threatened the same and warned Sderot residents that even fleeing to Ashkelon would not protect them from rocket attacks.

Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, called on the IDF to keep civilians out of the circle of violence. At the same time, he called on Palestinians to attack anything that could be considered Israeli, since, he claimed, it was Israel that declared war on the Palestinians. Barhoum made the comments in an interview with the "Voice of Palestine" radio station.

It was originally used for military reconnaissance but is now being trialled by a mainstream police force.

The spy plane was launched as a senior police officer warned the surveillance society in the UK is eroding civil liberties.

Ian Readhead, deputy chief constable of Hampshire Police, said Britain could face an Orwellian situation with cameras on every street corner. However, senior officers in Merseyside, who are trialling the drone, said they did not believe it was the next phase in creating a Big Brother society.

Assistant chief constable Simon Byrne said: "People clamour for the feeling of safety which cameras give.
"Obviously there is a point of view that has been expressed but our feedback from the public is anything we can do to fight crime is a good thing. "There are safeguards in place legally covering the use of CCTV and the higher the level of intrusion, the higher the level of authority needed within the police force to use it. So there is that balance there."

Police said the drone is expected to be operational by June and will be given a three-month trial.