Banquets we’d like to see. According to Purdue agriculture professor Al Heber, chair of the First International Conference on Air Pollution from Agricultural Operations, which is set for February, “Forty-five of the papers, three of the workshops, and two banquet speeches will be associated with the technical and regulatory issues of livestock odor.”
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“The government’s involvement in National Consumers Week is doubly ironic because government itself is often the consumer’s worst enemy,” contends Joseph Bast of the Palatine-based Heartland Institute in a news release. For instance, “The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) needlessly delays approval of thousands of life-saving and life-extending drugs, resulting in thousands of unnecessary deaths each year. This ‘death by regulation’ occurs in the name of greater product safety, but the deaths it prevents each year pale in comparison to the number it causes.” Similarly, he argues, “to meet [the Corporate Average Fuel Economy] standard, automobile manufacturers build cars that are lighter and smaller than they otherwise would be. But lighter and smaller cars are less safe, resulting in more deaths on the nation’s highways each year. Researchers at the Brookings Institution estimate that CAFE standards kill as many as 4,509 people each year.”
“I can’t tell you if it’s different being a Black general manager,” says Channel Five’s Lyle Banks in N’Digo (October 19-November 2), “because I’ve always been Black. I’ve never been anything else.”
Who are Father Michael Pfleger’s worst enemies? According to Nora Solitano in the Critic (Fall), the crusading south-side priest says they aren’t street drug dealers. “It’s the corporate world. I mean, when we started fighting the tobacco and alcohol industry, that’s when I got a brick through my window; that’s when the tires on my car were slashed and paint was thrown across the windshield of our church bus.”
