“Despite political and economic challenges, 2023 saw air cargo markets regain ground lost in 2022 after the extraordinary Covid peak in 2021. Although full-year demand was shy of pre-Covid levels by 3.6 percent, the significant strengthening in the past quarter is a sign that markets are stabilising towards more normal demand patterns,”

I am looking at Gaza and the lives whose loss we are witnessing every hour and thinking how this will directly shape the US election. The traditional US camps are pro-Israel as usual, and I don’t expect any of them to relent on that position else they lose the “numbers at the polls”.

We saw in 2020 how COVID response was constrained by the general election in the US. Even when it was clear why public policy should have saved more lives, the assumptions in Republican strategy limited clear action on the biological threat.

In 2024, we are faced with a similar scenario where clear decisions on saving lives and avoiding genocide in Gaza — and easily avoiding an unpredictable war — is constrained by the upcoming 2024 elections.

Fuel prices will blow up, inflation always lurks behind fuel prices, social dislocation, and perhaps more authoritarian rules emerging around the world as they justify increased (in)security measures to ward off terrorism.

We are staring at a dark phase.

First, the lawsuit challenges USDA's unprecedented allowance of electronic or digital disclosure on packaging, also known as "QR code" or "smartphone" labeling, without requiring additional on-package labeling. Second, CFS is challenging USDA's labeling language restrictions. When on-package text is used, the rules limit it to only "bioengineered," despite the law allowing use of similar terms. But for 25 years, every aspect of the issue—science, policy, and marketplace—has used genetically engineered (GE) or genetically modified organism (GMO). Lastly, the USDA rules prohibit grocers from providing more and better labeling, in violation of their First Amendment rights.

According to Alex Lewin, author of Real Food Fermentation and Kombucha, Kefir, and Beyond, fermenting is the opposite: ‘It’s unlike canning—with canning you kill all of the microbes and seal it hermetically. With fermentation you invite the microbes you want and don’t let in the ones you don’t. Fermentation is diplomacy and canning is a massacre. Canning is a high-tech food technology.’

The pomegranate tree was also the source of life-giving waters in Mesopotamian religion (Muthmann 1982: 13–14), and Neoassyrian seals often depicted pomegranate, the “tree of life” (Avigad 1990: 165). Scholars have suggested that the Tree of Life from the book of Genesis was a pomegranate because of this symbolic history, though of course many fruit-bearing trees have auditioned for this role.