Palm Oil

First the ethanol boom created a surge in corn prices; now bio-diesel made from palm oil is threatening tropical rain forests.

To view a continually growing list of products that use palm oil, click here.

To see the website for the Rainforest Agribusiness Campaign, click here.

How do you improve the health of a whole county? That’s the challenge that Sonoma Health Action is tackling.

The number of uninsured in Sonoma County is estimated at over 42,000 and growing. Physicians continue to leave the community and specialists are in short supply. District hospitals are struggling financially as the competitive pressures of a rapidly changing health care marketplace continue to threaten and destabilize an already broken health care system.

Sonoma County is not alone in experiencing the impacts of the health care situation. Communities throughout the state have come together seeking solutions at the local level.  On August 14, 2007, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors authorized the Department of Health Services to convene a health action council to work on improving health and health care for all Sonoma County residents.

Visit their website here .

To take the Health Action Survey, click here .

There's  a schedule of upcoming public meetings hosted by Health Action here (pdf).

It's CAMP season in California once again.

As of this summer, CAMP, the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, has been underway for 25 years. They have charted the operation's annual impacts on charts on the state's CAMP website.

The Marijuana Policy Program argues that CAMP is not only ineffective but harmful to the community. They advocate the decriminalization of marijuana as a first step toward theregulation and control of its cultivation and use. You can read more about MPP here .

Concerns about “usage creep,” in which tasers are used when other methods might be more appropriate, were raised in the 2005 report Stun Gun Fallacy: How the Lack of Taser Regulation Endangers Lives , published by the ACLU of Northern California in 2005.

Tasers are aggressively marketed by the manufacturer, Taser International. Their latest model, the C2, is designed for personal use (only in self-defense of course) and comes in 9 designer colors.