We’re waiting to see if Mount St. Helens will erupt again inWashington State, but we never hear about volcanic activityon the East Coast of the U.S. There’s a scientific reasonfor this.

Sally Harris writes that the kinds of geological conditionsthere don?t support volcanic activity. Geoscientist R.J.Tracy says, “The active margin of North America is itswestern margin, and only the northwestern segment of itcurrently has the right conditions to produce volcanoes likeMount St. Helens. The interior of North America and the Eastcoast lie far from any currently active plate boundaries andtherefore are not locales where volcanism can occur.”
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In her new diary,Anne Strieber writes: “We expect all politicians and leadersto have ideals and surprisingly, despite the various dirtytricks some of them gotten up to, most of them do. I defineideals as moral goals?to get better education for kids, morehousing for the poor, more jobs for the middle class, etc.But when do ideals become ideology and how do we recognizethis when it happens?”

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In another of our series of newCommunionLetters, we hear fromFrank,who writes: “On July 28th at 2 a.m., they came. I heard mybasset hound begin to whine. She was cut off in mid stream.I was lying in my bed, and everyone in the house was asleep,except me. I heard off to my left a rustling sound like abird fluttering and I was aware of a shape moving down theside of my bed?a standard ‘gray.’ Immediately I felt likesomething was holding me from the back with one arm aroundmy neck as if trying to hold me down.”

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Litter is becoming an international problem. A Brazilianphotographer looks for trash that has washed up on the beachnear his home. When he identifies what country it came from,he returns it to that country?s embassy in Brazil.

Fabio Barreto, who runs Global Garbage, has collected trashfrom 69 different countries on Bahia’ Costa dos Coqueirosbeach. He catalogues each piece before sending it to theembassies.

Trash is also becoming an intergalactic problem, as theInternational Space Station has starting dumping trash inspace, now that the shuttle is no longer available to takethe garbage back to Earth on a regular basis. In space, eventrash that would be biodegradable on Earth will probablystay around for eons?or maybe forever.
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