It's not about shoes. A great proportion of the people in 
the world do not have shoes — at least in the way the fashion 
world would conceive a pair to be. Their shoes are not 
made for visual appeal; they are made for working long 
arduous hours. They may even be worn by someone
who works in a factory that produces your favourite 
pair of designer heels, flip-flops or fancy sandshoes. 
These people, in those shoes, are not concerned with trends, 
fads, fazes or the latest luxury items; they just go to 
work and do their job, day in, day out, in order to survive. 
Sometimes life can throw up unexpected pitfalls, and it is how
we care for each other in times of crisis that defines our 
character, and help us to grow as human beings. Right now 
there are more than 20 million people affected by the floods 
in Pakistan who have lost their homes, their jobs, their children
and their livelihoods to a natural disaster of biblical proportions. 
So instead of purchasing that pair of shoes I saw in a shop 
window last week, I have made a donation to the 
UNICEF Pakistan Flood Appeal.

Jack Rolley
Editor

Editor: Jack Rolley

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07/03/2009

Obesity is more than a concern, it is a crisis that needs immediate attention, according to the Greens candidate for Clayfield, Dr Andrew Jeremijenko.

Dr Jeremijenko said the obesity epidemic could be combated by reducing junk food advertisements on television, encouraging children to play sport, and keeping our national parks in good condition.

He said he was disappointed the state government had blocked the Greens proposal to ban junk food advertisements during children’s television hours in 2006.

“When politicians give a higher priority to corporation profit then children’s health, it is a clear indication that something is not right.

“Parents are too often losing the battle and the future Australian adults are becoming fat Australian adults,” he said.

Dr Jeremijenko said in 2004 Australian advertisers had spent $410 million on food advertising but only 1 per cent of this promoted healthy food while the other 99 per cent promoted fast food, soft drinks, ice cream and other junk food.

Labor candidate for Clayfield Joff Leliott said obesity was a problem that needed to be addressed.

“It's especially important to keep our children at healthy weights - overweight children are far more likely to become overweight adults and suffer poor health as a consequence,” he said.

He said the state government had introduced many programs such as the “Go for 2 and 5” campaign to encourage children to eat healthier meals.

“We need to create communities where people feel comfortable walking or cycling, or walking to the station, bus stop, shops, church or bowls club - small things can often make a big difference,” he said.

Fears that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the Center for European Nuclear Research (CERN) on the Swiss-Franco border could create a micro black hole that could destroy the earth have been labelled as science fiction by Australian scientists working on the ATLAS project.

Nuclear physicist Walter L. Wagner and a group of seven others, have launched a civil injunction with the United Sates District Court while the final safety report is being compiled by CERN.

Mr Wagner states that scientists at CERN are taking a huge risk by operating the LHC, a gigantic particle accelerator, and he maintains that the earth could be destroyed by micro black holes that will be created in the experiments set to begin in August.

Mr Wagner stated that the LHC Safety Assessment Group, an CERN funded group of physicists has agreed with his group the LHC Defense Fund on the important safety factor.

“They have agreed that the original “cosmic ray argument” is not valid for the exact same reasons we found, namely that cosmic rays produce micro black holes at relativistic speeds, whereas the LHC will produce them at rest, due to the opposite momentum, which will allow them to become gravitationally trapped,” Mr Wagner said.

“They are in the process of trying to find another safety argument that would serve as a safety net, and will try to publish something - anything - soon.  They don’t have it.

”Otto Roessler, of Chaos Theory renown, has authored a paper showing that micro black holes could consume earth in months, not millions of years as previously believed,” he said.

Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Melbourne, Geoffrey Taylor, disagrees, and hopes that the experiments carried out in the LHC will help shed light on mysteries surrounding the creation of the universe.

“The LHC is designed to push back the frontier of knowledge about the nature of the fundamental particles and their interactions,” Professor Taylor said.

He said the experiments will address the unsolved issue of what gives mass to the fundamental particles of nature that we are made of.

“If black holes are produced and observed at the LHC, it would be a signal for gravity becoming strong at very short distances and high energies,” he said.

Professor Taylor said the high-energy interactions similar to those that will be created by the LHC, have occurred over the ages with high energetic cosmic rays that enter our atmosphere, and there has been little damage.

He said the production of black holes is not feared by physicists., and that tiny black holes would evaporate almost immediately, rather than be capable of accreting matter from their surroundings. He said only their much larger cousins, such as the giant black hole at the centre of our Galaxy are capable of such accretion.

“This would herald a revolution our thinking of the space-time structure of our Universe,” he said.

The LHC is set to become operational in June, with its first particle collision mid-August 2008.