The central province of Henan has already adopted the measures, which include stunning the animals before killing them, and herding pigs with plastic prods instead of electric ones.

“Since the quality of meat from China has drawn international attention, the Chinese government has conducted special treatment on this issue,” the report quoted an official from the Administrative Office of Livestock Slaughtering as saying.

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Six bullets from the 9 mm handgun slammed into Alexis, one piercing her right eye. Two slugs hit her mother.

Alexis’ mother pulled through. But two weeks later, Alexis lies in critical condition, blind in one eye. And to her classmates and many people in this city so depressingly familiar with violence, the little girl is a hero.

“She was trying to save me,” her mother, Seliethia Parker, 30, said.

“My baby is just an angel to her mother. I thought as the mother, I’d be saving my child. I never thought my daughter would be saving me.”

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Under the program to be announced on Tuesday, city officials would calculate the carbon cost of their travels and contribute to one of several city programs aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions — or forego the travel altogether.

“What we are trying to do by this is to set high standards to show carbon offset programs that work,” Gavin Newsom told Reuters, adding he was wary of offsets with little accountability that promise action in distant lands.

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The memorandum of understanding, signed in Budapest, covers the basic framework for the Japanese government to buy intergovernmental surpluses, or AAUs, from Hungary under the Green Investment Scheme (GIS).

Under the Kyoto Protocol, governments are able to sell AAUs to other countries that fall short of their emissions targets.

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Role of a lifetime

“I’m living my ideal role. I love being a mom and a wife. In terms of my career, I’d love to do a period piece.”

Tom Cruise, airplane pilot

“Trust. I don’t give it a thought. He knows what he’s doing. When he decides to do something, he does it. It’s great. [She giggles.] It’s hot.”

Danilo Latin dismissed the weather quirks with a wave of his calloused hand. “It is normal, the conditions and the catch vary from day to day, season to season.”

The veteran fisherman is more worried by what is going to happen to a protected fishing zone, known locally as ZERP, which Zagreb wants to enforce on its side of the Adriatic from January 1.

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‘Are you crazy?’ and he said, ‘It’s just a bit of fun,’” the homeowner said.Other adults in the neighborhood aren’t laughing.“We try as hard as we can to keep our kids on the straight and narrow, and then to find out it was a parent actually doing this, it makes you wonder,” said Jennifer Schuchmann, one of the residents allegedly victimized by Hayes’ group.CBS 46 went to Hayes’ home Monday night, but he refused to come to the door. Police said Hayes refuses to give up the names of his young accomplices.more

Biologists at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Illinois at Urbana discovered the opportunistic, changing dietary preferences of California’s Argentine ants—the first time researchers have documented what these invasive ants actually eat—by studying a population of ants for eight years in the foothills southeast of San Diego. An advance copy of their paper is being published online this week in the journal Proceedings of the NationalAcademy of Sciences.

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Half of those polled said they would make a “green” New Year’s resolution, according to the survey by GfK Roper and commissioned by marketing consultancy Tiller LLC.

Two-thirds of Americans plan to cut their use of household chemicals, while 42 percent said they would take reusable fabric bags to the supermarket to reduce the use of plastic bags.

“When it comes to life choices, green is clearly a primary color. Americans are viewing the environmental impact of their actions with increased responsibility and deliberation,” said Rob Densen, chief executive of Tiller.

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Unearthing new species of mammals in the 21st century is considered very rare. The discoveries by a team of American and Indonesian scientists are being studied further to confirm their status.

The animals were found in the Foja mountains rainforest in eastern Papua province in a June expedition, said U.S.-based Conservation International, which organized the trip along with the Indonesian Institute of Science.

“The giant rat is about five times the size of a typical city rat,” said Kristofer Helgen, a scientist with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. “With no fear of humans, it apparently came into the camp several times during the trip.”

The possum was described as “one of the world’s smallest marsupials.”

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His once brown, even complexion is now mottled with pale patches around his eyes and mouth, along his nose and on his ears; his arms, shoulders and chest are speckled and blotched.

“I’m a black man turning white on television and people can see it,” says Thomas, an anchor and entertainment reporter for the local Fox Broadcasting Company affiliate. “If you’ve watched me over the years, you’ve seen my hands completely change from brown to white.”

Thomas has vitiligo, a disorder in which pigment-making cells are destroyed. White patches appear on different parts of the body, tissues in the mouth and nose, and the retina.

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“For the global South, especially Africa, environmental issues are not a luxury,” the environmental activist said in an article in Kenya’s Business Daily newspaper on the final day of climate change talks in Bali.

“Arresting the world’s warming and protecting and restoring our natural systems are issues of life and death for much of the world’s population.”

The first African woman and ‘green’ activist to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, Maathai said the industrialized world needed to work with southern hemisphere nations to stop the devastation linked to global warming.

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Huckabee was the choice of 24 percent of South Carolina Republicans in the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll taken December 9-12, up from 3 percent when a similar poll was conducted in July.

Huckabee campaigned this weekend in the state, which holds its Republican primary on January 19, and voters placed him first when asked to name the most believable candidate.

Actor and former Sen. Fred Thompson came in second with 17 percent.

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A spokesman said on Friday expedition leader and veteran Polar explorer Pen Hadow had postponed the trip until February 2009 to expand the range of scientists and sponsors involved.

“It will only take a few months to organize this. But that means having to delay for a year because there is only one Arctic season in which you can do this,” the group spokesman told Reuters. “So, reluctantly Pen took this decision.”

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They found that nearly half of female students in six colleges across the United States who took part in their study said viewing pornography was an acceptable way to express their sexuality.

The researchers from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah suggest that the easy availability of pornography on the Internet and changing social attitudes have led to a generational shift in which pornography seems to be less taboo.

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“Our results show that close proximity to vehicular traffic-related emissions, either at home or at school, can lead to chronic effects in the respiratory health of children with asthma,” said Fernando Holguin, M.D., M.P.H., assistant professor of pulmonary medicine at Emory University School of Medicine, and lead author of the study, which appeared in the second issue for December of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, published by the American Thoracic Society.

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Piotr Staniaszek, a 22-year-old oil and gas well tester in rural northwest Alberta, became a figure of international media attention this week when his father went to the press to complain about the size of his son’s bill.

Staniaszek’s father, also named Piotr Staniaszek, said his son thought he could use his new phone as a modem for his computer as part of his C$10 unlimited browser plan from Bell Mobility, a division of Bell Canada.

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The breakthrough might eventually allow poor but forested nations to turn conservation into a tradeable commodity, with the potential to earn billions of dollars selling carbon credits.

But one of the scheme’s key architects warned that, if successful, it will create such large emissions reductions that carbon markets could collapse unless rich nations take on more stringent reductions targets.

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The Ottawa Citizen said at least 10 nasty letters had been delivered to little girls and boys in Ottawa who wrote to Santa this year care of the North Pole, which has a special H0H 0H0 Canadian postal code. Return letters from Santa are in fact written by an 11,000-strong army of Canada Post employees and volunteers.

“We firmly believe there is just one rogue elf out there,” a Canada Post spokeswoman told the paper.

Canada Post’s popular “Write to Santa” program — which last year delivered more than a million letters to children in Canada and around the world — has been shut down in Ottawa until the offender is caught.

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