Chatty Crowd Forces Clinton to Cut Speech Short

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:37:04 GMT

clipped by: reimers

Hillary Clinton was forced to cut her normal stump speech short when a chatty and meddlesome crowd kept her from grasping their attention. Clinton, who was addressing the Philadelphia County Democratic Party's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, spoke for just over five minutes, despite having the press arrive almost two hours beforehand.

The crowd never settled down during her remarks. A spokesman for Clinton denied that she cut the speech short, and told reporters that Clinton was advised by her Pennsylvania team to deliver “a short speech" given the set up of the event.

In previous party dinners, most recently in Butte, Mt., Clinton spoke for almost an hour to a crowd that seemed to be paying attention. The aide said this was a “different type” of J-J Dinner, primarily because people were not seated at tables, and were “milling around” the banquet hall.

Global warming rage lets global hunger grow

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:35:31 GMT

clipped by: reimers

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

We drive, they starve. The mass diversion of the North American grain harvest into ethanol plants for fuel is reaching its political and moral limits.

"The reality is that people are dying already," said Jacques Diouf, of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). "Naturally people won't be sitting dying of starvation, they will react," he said.

The UN says it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol. That is enough to feed a child for a year. Last week, the UN predicted "massacres" unless the biofuel policy is halted.

We are all part of this drama whether we fill up with petrol or ethanol. The substitution effect across global markets makes the two morally identical.

Mr Diouf says world grain stocks have fallen to a quarter-century low of 5m tonnes, rations for eight to 12 weeks. America - the world's food superpower - will divert 18pc of its grain output for ethanol this year, chiefly to break dependency on oil imports. It has a 45pc biofuel target for corn

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Chatty Crowd Forces Clinton to Cut Speech Short

Global warming rage lets global hunger grow