How Do I plan To Improve???

Effective Communicator:
I think I need to talk more with a lot of people
ex. friends and family and teacher's classmate's

Person of High Chatacter:
I think I need to help people more and help more anything I can do and Be a good person of high character and show everybody and let everyone be a good person of high character too.

Critical Thinker:
I think I need to think more of everything before I do anything.

Community Contributor:
I think I need to help school much more.

Active Learner:
Ask more with teacher's classmate and friends and family's or search the internet and look up dictionary and read books and find the answer by myself if I have something that I don't know or I don't really understand.

Peanut Butter Suspected In Salmonella Outbreak

An Ohio company recalled its creamy peanut butter after Minnesota health authorities identified the sandwich spread as the likely source of a wave of salmonella infections in the state.

Minnesota investigators found that every one of the 30 people with recent salmonella infections in that state had eaten peanut butter before falling ill, and confirmed in the "overwhelming majority" of those cases that the victims had eaten King Nut brand, according to state Department of Health spokesman Doug Schultz. The Minnesota salmonella strain matches the bacteria that have sickened at least 369 people in 41 other states since early September, although Minnesota authorities haven't connected the peanut butter to the national outbreak.

Minnesota officials, who are working with the federal Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, expect further test results as early as Monday. CDC spokeswoman Lola Russell identified peanut butter as "one of the major hypotheses" for the source of the outbreak.

Martin Kanan, chief executive of King Nut Cos., Solon, Ohio, which issued the recall, said in a release, "We are very sorry this happened. We are taking immediate and voluntary action because the health and safety of those who use our products is always our highest priority."

One salmonella-infected Minnesota woman in her 70s died. State health authorities are unsure whether other medical conditions caused or contributed to her death, Mr. Schultz said.

King Nut said it had purchased the peanut butter from Peanut Corp. of America of Lynchburg, Va., and sold it under the King Nut and Parnell's Pride brands. King Nut distributed it to universities, restaurants, hospitals and other institutional food services. The brands aren't sold in retail stores. Investigators discovered the salmonella in a five-pound container of King Nut-labeled peanut butter at a nursing home. All of the Minnesota cases occurred in people who had eaten at institutional facilities, Mr. Schultz said.

Peanut Corp. of America issued a statement expressing its "deep regret" over the "apparent finding" of salmonella in its product. But the company said the contamination was in an open container "in a large, institutional kitchen," raising the possibility of cross-contamination.

Israel pounds Hamas leaders' homes as troops edge closer to urban areas

Israel sought to deliver a knockout blow to Hamas in the Gaza Strip today, pounding the homes of Hamas leaders and edging troops deeper into populated urban centres.

Israeli security officials said that the move was both tactical and psychological.

“We want to send a clear message to Hamas that we can keep going as long as it takes. We will do whatever we need to protect our citizens from rocket attacks,” said a member of the Israeli security council.
The council has already voted to approve the use of reserves in Gaza, thousands of whom entered Gaza last night. Defence officials said that those units had been taking over areas cleared by the regular troops, allowing those forces to push forward toward new targets and sending a strong signal that Israel is planning on continuing its offensive.

Israeli officials said that the Government was torn on whether to continue expanding the offensive, with Ehud Barak, the Defence Minister, and Tzipi Livni, the Foreign Minister, pushing for the army to end the operation in the coming days and Ehud Olmert, the outgoing Prime Minister, arguing for an expanded offensive.

“Israel is a country that reacts vigorously when its citizens are fired up, which is a good thing. That is something that Hamas now understands and that is how we are going to react in the future, if they so much as dare fire one missile at Israel,” said Ms Livni.

Hamas, at least publicly, has vowed to continue fighting, though senior Hamas leaders in Gaza have signalled that the Israeli operation has dealt them a severe blow.

In 17 days of fighting, Israel has moved from targeted air strikes to a massive ground operation aimed at combing the Gaza Strip for Hamas rocket-launching stations. Military analysts said that troops were edging into the populated areas slowly, avoiding the numerous booby-traps that Hamas had prepared.

Israel has accused Hamas of endangering civilian populations by launching rockets from mosques and schools and using them to hide weapons. Israel also said that Hamas fighters were wearing civilian clothes and using ambulances to move around the Gaza Strip.

Since Israel began its offensive, Gaza health officials have counted nearly 900 dead, at least half of them civilians. The Israeli military said that troops had killed some 300 armed militants. Thirteen Israelis have died, three of them civilians.

German and British envoys have pressed efforts to negotiate an end to the war, even though Israel and Hamas have ignored a UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate and durable ceasefire.

Israel’s conditions for a ceasefire include a complete stop to Hamas rocket fire and weapons smuggling from Egypt. Hamas wants Israel to open all border crossings with Gaza and implement an international border to monitor the crossings.

Government fights slave labor in Brazil

Slavery may seem like a quaint notion in a 21st century world, but that distinction is lost on up to 40,000 Brazilians who find themselves toiling for no real wages and can't leave the distant work camps where they live.
Brazilian government officials and human rights activists call it slave labor, a condition they are aggressively trying to eradicate. A special government task force established in 1995 says it freed 4,634 workers last year in 133 raids on large farms and businesses that rely on workers driven to take these jobs by hunger and the empty promises of labor recruiters.

"Slavery is the tail end of a lot of abuse of poor people and workers in Brazil," said Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based policy center. "Bad treatment reaches over to abusive treatment to treatment that becomes virtual slavery."

In Brazil, it often works this way: A recruiter known as a "gato," or cat, plumbs the slums and other poor areas of the vast country and gets people to agree to jobs in distant places. Once separated from home and family, workers are vulnerable to all sorts of abuses, such as being told they owe money for transportation, food, housing and other services.

"This is known as debt bondage, which also fits official definitions of slavery," says Anti-slavery International, a lobbying group based in Great Britain. "A person is in debt bondage when their labor is demanded as the means of repayment for a loan or an advance. Once in debt they lose all control over their conditions of work and what, if anything they are paid ... often making it impossible to repay and trapping them in a cycle of debt."

The United Nations International Labour Organization estimated there were between 25,000 and 40,000 Brazilians working under such conditions in 2003, the latest year for which it offered figures.
Leonardo Sakamoto, the director of the human rights group Reporter Brasil, says he's certain there are still more than 25,000 slave laborers in Brazil.

According to Anti-slavery International, the greatest number of slave laborers is employed in ranching (43 percent). That's followed by deforestation (28 percent), agriculture (24 percent), logging (4 percent) and charcoal (1 percent). Though those figures are from 2003, Sakamoto says they still apply, with cattle ranches and sugar cane plantations among the top employers.

Anti-slavery International estimates there are 12.3 million people working under such conditions worldwide.

"Forced labor exists in Sudan, Nepal, India, Mauritania as well as many wealthier countries (including the UK), where vulnerable people are trafficked into forced labor or sexual slavery," the group says. "A similar situation to the use of forced labor on estates in Brazil can be found in the Chaco region of both Paraguay and Bolivia."

But what may set Brazil apart are the government's attempts to wipe out the practice. One of Brazil's chief tools is a "Special Mobile Inspection Group" that consists of labor inspectors, federal police and attorneys from the federal labor prosecution branch. The group often raids workplaces, looking for abuses and laborers held against their will.

In 2007, the task force freed 5,999 workers, a record number. In 2003, the agency freed 5,223 laborers.

Since the group's inception in 1995, it has freed 33,000 people.

Labor Minister Carlos Lupi vowed in a recent interview with the state-run Brazilian news agency that efforts will be stepped up this year.

"The Brazilian government is to be commended for rescuing more than 4,500 people from the nightmare of slavery during the past year," Aidan McQuade, director of Anti-Slavery International, said in a statement to CNN.

"Their commitment to step up their efforts in 2009 is even more heartening. The vocal and effective leadership we are seeing from Brazil is rare. Even India, like Brazil a democracy and a G20 member, seems content to remain the country with the most slaves in the world."

Poverty fuels slave labor, experts say

But everyone agrees it's going to take more than police efforts to seriously dent the practice.

"Slave labor is not a disease," Sakamoto said. "It's like a fever. Fever is a symptom that something is wrong."

That something is widespread poverty.

Although the poverty rate dropped recently to its lowest levels in 25 years, nearly one of every four Brazilians still lives in poverty, according to a 2006 survey by the Getulio Vargas Foundation's Center for Social Policy Studies. The Web-based Index Mundi, which says it obtains its figures from the CIA World Factbook, estimates the poverty rate could be as high as one of every three Brazilians.

With a population approaching 200 million people, that means at least 49 million Brazilians live under squalid economic conditions.

"We have poverty. We have greed. And we have impunity," Sakamoto said. "We have to fight these three pieces at the same time. We have been fighting against impunity and we have been fighting against greed, but we are just starting to fight against poverty."

The situation is made worse because of Brazil's vastness -- about the size of the United States.

"Brazil is a big, huge country and there are lots of poor people," said Hakim of the Inter-American Dialogue. "The farther you get away from the populated, industrialized areas, you'll find large populations of people who do whatever they can to make a living."

And slave labor seems to be spreading.

"We are discovering new occurrences of slave labor in regions where we hadn't registered slave labor in Brazil," the Rev. Xavier Plassat of the Catholic Pastoral Land Commission told the independent Radioagencia NP.

Opposition to laws

By most accounts, the administration of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who took office in 2003, has done much to reduce poverty and fight slave labor. But Brazil's agricultural, mining and manufacturing sectors are large and well-developed. And they are politically powerful.

"We have a very, very strong agribusiness sector," Sakamoto said. "It is very, very difficult to get other measures to fight against slave labor."

For example, he said, a proposed law for the government to confiscate land on which slave labor is used has languished in congress for years.

"There's a group of very strong congressmen fighting against it," said Sakamoto, who is also a member Brazil's National Commission for the Eradication of Slave Labor.

There are those who object to use of the word "slavery" or the phrase "slave labor," saying it mischaracterizes the situation.

"The word has very heavy connotations regarding 19th century slavery," said Latin America scholar Robert Pastor, a former National Security adviser to President Jimmy Carter and now a professor of international relations at American University in Washington. "Modern-day practices are quite distinct from what we normally thought of as slavery."

But Pastor agrees that no matter what you call it, what is happening in Brazil and elsewhere is "a phenomenon that is based on a simple intent to exploit individuals."

Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, also believes that calling the practice slavery overstates the case.

"To use the word 'slave labor' sometimes does not describe what it is," Sotero said from Washington. "It's more unfair, abusive labor conditions."

He points out that Brazil's sugar cane industry employs 900,000 people but only 4,000 Brazilians were freed last year for being held as slave laborers. Many businesses, he said, are being smeared by the bad actions of a few.

"One case of slave labor is one too many," Sotero said. "But at the same time, some of their considerations are valid. Claims of abuse tend to be exaggerated and more general than they are."

Culture

In the second Humanities Class We Watched The Movie called The ten commandments the second part Because We watch The first Part already so This class we start the second Part of this vidio
And the second Vidio is talking about He had been found by 7 women who were the daughters of Jethro the shepherd.....
and I learned about the Culture more of more about slavery in Egypt Or how slaves were treated and I also learn about more about Moses. I see that how a family rescued him when he was in the desert and the last one I learn is about how the pharaoh could do whatever he wanted.

The Ten Commandment Movie

In the humanities Class we all watch a movie called The ten commandment and that story is talking about the story of Moses and Egypt.
In that short Movie I learn that the Egyptians they often tortured the Jewish cuz they were their slaves.
And I like that short movie cuz it's very intersting
This is the picture:

Myholiday Break and my school Goals for 2009

My Holiday Break

What I did in my holiday Break is......
The first thing that I do is I hand out with Friends and I went to my Friends house and sleep over
The second thing I do is just stay at home and clean up my room and stuff
The third thing I do in Break is Go out with Family.


My Goals for 2009

And This is for my 2009 Goals
My 2009 Goals is to......
1. Get a good grade, A more better grade then I had in 2008
2. And I hope I can to more better in learning my english and also typing and I hope I can do my work on time
This is my 2 Goals for 2009