On:

No matter how we feel about the torture of prisons and whether or not it is sometimes necessary, most of us were shocked by the photos from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Many of us are worried about what may be happening in our Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. Now the international organization Human Rights Watch has discovered secret US prisons in Poland and Romania. What’s going on in these places?

Andrew Buncombe writes in the Independent that like Guantanamo, these prisons, both based in ex-Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe, are out of the reach of US law and have been kept secret from international organizations, such as the UN. Both hold prisoners suspected of being terrorists. It’s believed that they have been in use since 2003.
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On:

Wal-Mart is wonderful?it brings us cheap consumer goods and plenty of them. While the store chain has meant the death of many mom-and-pop stores in the last few years, this is the way capitalism works?or is it? Some critics think that Wal-Mart is an unnecessary evil.
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On:

Newswise – Recent studies have suggested that we have a “second brain” in our intestines, which means that our guts get all twisted up when we’re under stress, because they “worry,” just like our brains do. Patients with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) know this well. It turns out that not only do our intestines worry, our stomachs cannot tell a lie.

A new study suggests that measuring the changes in gastric output works better than standard polygraphs in distinguishing between lying and telling the truth. There is a clear link between the act of lying and a significant increase in gastric problems.
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On:

On the anniversary of my burst aneurysm in October of 2004, many people have asked me what I’ve learned. I’ve written about this extensively in many of my earlier diaries, but I thought I’d sum it up here. You might even call this diary “What I Learned from the Sick Year” (to paraphrase of the diet book I am posting, one chapter at a time, every week on this website).

I guess the simplest way to put it is, you must live out of love. You must operate from a basic platform of loving other people. This must be your stance as you go through life.
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