Comment On the front page of the CBC (Score 5, Insightful) 262
Sidebar: At least 61 killed in Kenya pipeline explosion
Also, I take issue with this meme that 25% of all those incarcerated are locked up ONLY for non-violent drug charges. For that to be true, it would require that ON AVERAGE one in for convicts behind bars was guilty of either using or selling drugs, without any associated crimes, like robbery, assault, possession of a gun, etc., and that is simply unbelievable.
There is a lot of evidence for statistics like this, you can start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#United_States_domestic_policy.
Federal prisons were estimated to hold 179,204 sentenced inmates in 2007. Of these, 15,647 were incarcerated for violent offenses, including 2,915 for homicide, 8,966 for robbery, and 3,939 for other violent crimes. In addition, 10,345 inmates were serving time for property crimes, including 504 for burglary, 7,834 for fraud, and 2,006 for other property offenses. A total of 95,446 were incarcerated for drug offenses. Also, 56,237 were incarcerated for public-order offenses, including 19,528 for immigration offenses and 24,435 for weapons offenses.
http://www.ojp.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/p07.pdf
According to a federal survey of jail inmates, of the total 440,670 jail inmates in the US in 2002, 112,447 (25.5%) were drug offenders: 48,823 (11.1%) for possession and 56,574 (12.8%) for trafficking.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/sdatji02.pdf
Post-consumer materials, like plastic, is almost never recycled because of the contamination issues. A water bottle can be recycled but if one neck ring from a cap gets into the mix the entire batch is worthless. As of yet, this level of sorting and handling removing neck rings and caps can only be done by hand - at union wages for the most part. This eliminates any reason for recycling water bottles or milk containers - it costs maybe 100x what the recycled materials would be worth to sort them to that level.
According to my research, the plastic top and ring are separated during processing nowadays, which is possible because the two kinds of plastic are of very different density; apparently one type floats in water and the other sinks.
A woman naturally has about a dozen kids. Breast cancer is quite rare in countries where women birth early and often.
That is probably because she is dead before she has a chance to develop it.
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.