From daily The Independent in Britain:
France bans foie gras for three months over bird flu scare
The country is responsible for 75 per cent of the global production
Caroline Mortimer
Producers of foie gras have said they will lose millions of euros as France introduces a three-month ban on production.
The measure, which has been prompted by a bird flu scare, means breeders in 18 départments in south west France will not be allowed to have any ducks or geese in their slaughterhouses until August.
Foie gras – or fattened duck or goose liver – is considered a delicacy by some but is denounced as cruel by animal rights campaigners due the practice of force-feeding.
Breeder Florence Lasserre told the France Info news channel that her gavage room – meaning the room where the birds are force fed – was currently empty.
She said: “Usually it’s full here, and it…
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The Instruments of Human Sustenance (Humani Victus Instrumenta). Etching, 16th cen. Italy. Humanity is inseparable from its tools, which can be invented to destroy life—or to create things for our benefit instead.



It was the winter of 1996, and maybe just six months before, some anecdotes from a beloved radical teacher got me curious about a thing called anarchism. Soon enough, I was doodling circle-As in the margins of my notebooks. Then I was trying, through brute force, to make my way through Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. Then—oh, the most cliché gateway into anarchism for kids of my demographic—I found punk rock. And there, in the insert of one of my first punk albums, I learned about AK Press. Brandishing a 56k modem, a phone, and a few hundred dollars that I got once a year from Alaska’s strange, oil-based dividend checks, I ordered a load of literature and odds and ends: Anarchy by Errico Malatesta. Living…