Pesky! Top nutritious choice is in the can



CHALLENGING a long-held belief, a Choice study has found that canned and frozen vegetables can be more nutritious than their fresh counterparts. The consumer magazine tested frozen, canned, week-old and fresh vegetables, both cooked and uncooked, for the contents of certain nutrients. With the exception of broccoli, all canned and frozen vegetables tested contained more or equal percentages of vitamins and anti-oxidants.

"Frozen English spinach was more nutritious than cooked fresh spinach," Choice spokeswoman Indira Naidoo said. Canned tomatoes contained about five times more lycopine, which is believed to prevent heart diseases and prostate cancer, than fresh ones. Accordingly, canned green beans and carrots were more nutritious than their fresh counterparts, and there was little difference between canned and fresh corn.

The vegetables were purchased in Melbourne, but University of Queensland expert Mike Gidley said he would not expect different results for vegetables bought in a Queensland supermarket. "Absolutely fresh is the most nutritious," the director of Centre for Nutrition and Food Sciences said. "But what we call fresh has often taken a long time to get from the field to the supermarket."

New technologies made it possible to keep these vegetables looking fresh for weeks, Choice states. Frozen and canned vegetables, in contrast, are often processed directly after being picked. When buying canned vegetables, consumers may face another problem. Choice claims it is very difficult for Australian consumers "to compare the true cost of prices". Cans in different sizes have different prices, and sometimes bigger cans or packets are not the cheapest option as one might believe, Choice states.

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An Australian reaction to the latest IPCC "Wisdom"

From the political editor of "The Sydney Morning Herald" -- who gives SOME balance to his coverage

The first thing that strikes you on reading the latest consensus report from the world's climate scientists about the effect of global warming is that it is like the plot of an Armageddon movie. "The climate of the 21st century is virtually certain to be warmer with changes in extreme events," says the chapter on the effects on Australia and New Zealand, due to be published tonight in Brussels.

"Heatwaves and fires are virtually certain to increase in intensity and frequency (high confidence)", with the parenthetic notation meaning that the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change attach a likelihood of greater than 90 per cent to this forecast. "Floods, landslides, droughts and storm surges are very likely to become more frequent and intense, and snow and frost are likely to become less frequent (high confidence)," says the final draft of the document that the panel provided to the institutions that set it up, the world's governments. "Ongoing water security problems are very likely to increase by 2030 in southern and eastern Australia and parts of NZ that are distant from major rivers (high confidence). "Ongoing coastal development is very likely to exacerbate risk to lives and property from sea-level rise and storms. Sea level is virtually certain to rise (high confidence)."

So, for example, by 2050 a rise of 20 centimetres in the sea level along the Sydney coast combined with a big, once-in-50-year storm would bring the sea 110 metres further inland at Collaroy and Narrabeen beaches, a permanent loss of coast, the scientists project. Then there is the damage to major infrastructure from extreme weather by 2030: "Risks include failure of flood plain protection and urban drainage-sewage, increased storm and fire damage, and more heatwaves causing more deaths and more blackouts (high confidence)." Plus there is the expected damage to forestry and farming, the extinction of hundreds of species, and the destruction of unique environmental assets such as the Kakadu wetlands and the Great Barrier Reef.

And all this from a projected rise in average temperature of between 0.3 degrees and 3.4 degrees in the zone from Australia's coast to 800 kilometres inland, a warming that the scientists predict will happen by 2050 on present trends. The warming in Australia so far, since 1910, has been between 0.6 and 1.2 degrees, with most of the rise since 1950. The reported rise in the sea level is seven centimetres.

The report, five years in the making, is the state of knowledge of the world's climate scientists. The chapter on Australia and New Zealand bears the names of 22 authors. The panel operates in three working groups. The report of the first, on the physical science, went public in February. Tonight's is the work of the second, on impacts. The third, to be published next month, is on how to mitigate its effects.

The next thing that strikes you about the report is the high degree of uncertainty to which the authors readily confess. Climate change, the scientists write, "is taken to be due to both natural variability and human activities. The relative proportions are unknown unless otherwise stated". In Australia's case, "it is very likely that increases in greenhouse gases have significantly contributed to the warming since 1950". This wording - "very likely" and "significantly contributed" - is a useful reminder that we are still in the realm of hypothesis in trying to assess whether it is human activity that is responsible for global warming.

Scepticism in science, indeed in every realm of human affairs, is a healthy attitude. The very highest accolade, the Nobel prize, has been awarded for acclaimed breakthroughs that are later discredited, like the 1949 decision to give the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz the prize for inventing the lobotomy as a cure for schizophrenia.

A leading Australian sceptic of man-made climate change is Ian Plimer, a professor of mining geology at the University of Adelaide. The fact that the Earth's atmospheric temperature is rising at the same time as humans emit more greenhouse gases is a correlation, and not a causation, he points out: "The Earth's temperature rose by 0.7 per cent in the 20th century, but there was also an increase in piracy. Does that mean piracy causes global warming?"

If Al Gore calls climate change an inconvenient truth, Plimer asks unfashionable questions. "There is new work emerging even in the last few weeks that shows we can have a very close correlation between the temperatures of the Earth and supernova and solar radiation. What if global warming has nothing to do with human activity? "What happens if the astronomers are right, and the world is actually entering a cooling period?" Plimer thinks the climate scientists are in the grip of groupthink and that other branches of science can lend perspective: "We geologists have seen climate change for 4500 million years. Tell us something new."

He dismissed the recent visit to Australia by Sir Nicholas Stern, an adviser to the British Treasury and author of the Stern report on climate change. Stern proposed that Australia cut its carbon emissions by 30 per cent by 2030, and by 60 per cent by 2050, to avert catastrophic global warming. Plimer's response: "Stern bases his argument on science, but he hasn't validated it. So from day one, I don't even let him out of the barrier."

What if the hypothesis is wrong? What if, like the Y2K hypothesis, all the experts turn out to be embarrassingly off the mark? What if Stern is wrong? He has proposed that the world spend 1 per cent of annual economic output for the next few decades to move from a high-carbon to a low-carbon economy. What if this money, about $US400 billion a year, is spent on the basis of a flawed theory?

It was a question Stern was quite happy to answer during his visit to Sydney. "What if I'm wrong?" he posited in an interview with the Herald. "Well, suppose this science is a big hoax, and we believe it and we invest 1 per cent of GDP per annum. What are we going to get? "We'll get a bunch of new technologies, some of which will turn out to be really super - say the price of solar energy really drops - this is the kind of thing we might get out of it. "We'd get much less air pollution. You'll get cleaner fuels for developing countries, which will make cooking much safer. Air pollution in huts is the second most important cause of death in developing countries, after water shortages from lack of infrastructure. "So you get a lot of collateral benefit. And you've spent 1 per cent of GDP for a while till you find out."

Then he turned the proposition around: "What if you take the much, much more likely hypothesis that the vast majority of the world's scientists are right. And you bet the other way. You say: 'I don't believe all this stuff, I'm going to wait and see.' "What if that bet's wrong? You end up in a position that's extremely hard to extricate yourself. The flow of carbon emissions building up into the stock is like a ratcheting effect. You can't turn the clock back. The basic economics of risk point very strongly to action."

The annual sales of the global insurance industry, excluding life insurance, amount to 3.5 per cent of global GDP, according to McKinsey's management consultants. If the world is prepared to pay the equivalent of 3.5 per cent of its total annual output to guard against the possibility of all sorts of risks that, in any one year for any one client, are quite remote, such as fire and theft, then the prospect of paying a 1 per cent premium to protect against a catastrophic global event seems entirely reasonable.

Australia's political leaders have abandoned scepticism on climate change. Both the Coalition and Labor are now pledged to overcoming climate change. They are going about it in very different ways. Kevin Rudd has embraced the targets for big cuts to Australia's carbon emissions, but refuses to say how these targets would operate. Will they be compulsory? How would they be enforced? He won't say. So Labor's policy is feelgood but, without a great deal more detail, it is phoney.

John Howard rejects any targets, any targets whatsoever, for cutting emissions. He offers a few specific initiatives but they are ad hoc, without any overall pattern or plan. Howard's biggest single environmental initiative to date is his $10 billion plan to revive the Murray-Darling River system, and it is a very good plan. But it seeks to fix a problem of water flow without addressing the climate that produces the water. It addresses a symptom, not a cause. Rudd accuses Howard of "not getting it". Howard accuses Rudd of seeking to destroy the jobs of Australian coalminers in a rush of green fundamentalism.

The good news is that it is an election year and problems, such as this one, that have been long ignored in Australia are getting a lot of attention. The bad news is that it's an election year, a feverish time when, as the Treasury Secretary, Ken Henry, told his department recently: "There is a greater than usual risk of the development of policy proposals that are, frankly, bad." The overheating of the political climate in this election year is one form of climate change for which there is 100 per cent certainty.

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Hire, fire power for principals coming

PUBLIC school principals will be given the right to hire and fire staff and determine how much to pay teachers based on merit under a new push to improve performance. At the annual meeting of education ministers next week in Darwin, Education Minister Julie Bishop will recommend a shift in the pay structure for teachers to align salary with the quality of their teaching rather than length of service.

Ms Bishop will also outline a plan to extend an agreement by the states to ensure school principals are granted more power over teacher appointments to expressly include recruitment and dismissal of staff and control of school budgets. Under the proposal, a new legal indemnity will be provided for principals to veto the transfer to their school of a new staff member and to sack staff for inadequate performance.

Ms Bishop will also recommend that the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs empower principals to pay teachers according to performance, based on criteria including the relative improvement in their students' academic achievement. Other measures suggested by Ms Bishop are feedback from parents and students, the contribution of the teacher to broader school life, and the attainment by the teacher of relevant academic and professional standards, including continuing professional development. Under Ms Bishop's plan, the states will run pilot programs of performance pay schemes next year, and while state governments will pay the salaries and cost of implementing any schemes, the federal Government will pay up to half of the administrative costs of conducting the pilots.

At present, teachers' pay is largely based on an incremental scale linked to years in the job, with about eight or 10 salary bands with little requirement to meet professional standards. Ms Bishop's proposal calls on the states and territories to recognise that quality teaching is the "single most important school-based factor in improving student learning" and that teacher salaries should reflect performance measures. "Yet current salary arrangements could be considered to undervalue quality teaching in the classroom," the proposal says.

School principals yesterday welcomed the proposals after years of warnings that bureaucratic red tape forced them to accept the hiring of sub-standard teachers. "There's nothing more important for a principal than having the people he or she chooses in front of students in the classroom," Australian Secondary Principals Association president Andrew Blair said. "You can't be accountable for school performance when you haven't got control over the teachers who are hired or the budget that determines how school funds are spent. If it's applied across the country, that's fantastic."

Primary control of school budgets would be devolved to principals at individual schools under Ms Bishop's plan, to ensure state bureaucrats do not continue to control the funds. Under the proposal, the states and territories would provide the commonwealth with advice on the introduction and implementation of the scheme within weeks, with the legislation to be introduced no later than next year.

"It is recommended that council agree that principals should be provided with a statutory right to veto the transfer to their school of a new staff member, appoint any registered teacher to the staff of their school, and terminate a staff member from their school on prescribed grounds, including for a lack of performance," the discussion paper states. "Primary control of school budgets should be devolved to principals at individual schools."

Primary Principals Association vice-president Colin Pettitt said research showed that where principals could select teachers they could get a better team together than those who were simply appointed.

But the Victorian Government dismissed the Bishop proposal, saying it has in place a system that rewards high-performing teachers and takes into account student achievement. "Ms Bishop is simply trying to pass the cost of education on to the states after her ideas were rejected by Peter Costello," a government spokesman said yesterday....

Kevin Rudd and Labor education spokesman Stephen Smith have embraced merit-based pay for teachers and greater autonomy for schools and principals. The ALP wants to offer top teachers up to $100,000 a year to work in the toughest schools and offer all teachers a pay rise of up to $10,000 a year if they meet rigorous standards. But performance pay advocates have criticised Labor's plan because it would not link teachers' pay to student success in exams or the views of parents and principals, but to accreditation by a bureaucratic body.

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Elite bias against Christianity getting a bit embarassed?

An excellent post below by Andrew Bolt. I most particularly applaud the final paragraph. I have Bach's divine "Passio secundum Matthaeum" playing as I write this. I particularly love the great baritone aria: "Mache dich mein Herze rein". It always moves me to tears

MOCKING Christ has not, in years, seemed this childish – even cowardly. And no, I’m not a Christian. Of course, this being Easter, Christianity’s most holy festival, we’ve seen some of the usual tributes of disrespect from the cultural elite. While the ABC refused to show the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, for fear of God knows what mayhem, it had no such fear this week of mocking Jesus, whose crucifixion is remembered today.

Its Triple J station held “Jesus, you’ve got talent!” – a talent quest for singing toga wearers and the like, (and did so without the protection of one policeman). Chicago’s School of Art Institute, meanwhile, displayed an art work showing Christ resurrected as Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama, son of a Muslim-born Kenyan. And New York’s Lab Gallery unveiled a life-sized Jesus made of chocolate, anatomically accurate right down to his bared penis.

I know, it’s tame stuff given what we’ve seen before. Who can forget Piss Christ, the crucifix plopped in a jar of urine at the National Gallery of Victoria? Or the Chris Ofili picture of the Virgin Mary, decorated with cow dung, which the National Gallery of Australia tried to bring in? Or the ABC’s Christmas special of 1999 – a comparison of the Sistine Chapel’s religious frescoes with the paintings made by hip British artists Gilbert and George of their semen, faeces, spit and blood?

But all these are just accent points of an elite culture that slurs Christians so naturally that The Age blithely ran opinion pieces last month with yet more priest-baiting lines, such as these: "Being Catholic, the ‘70s meant rock masses, liturgical dancing and clapping to Rock My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham until you lost all will to live. When you heard the word `priest’ you didn’t immediately think `child molester’ – you thought of that guy with sideburns and shocking breath who played the guitar badly and wanted to be `down with the youth’ . . . “(W)e’d watch Mass for You at Home: just as soul-destroying and mind-numbing as the real thing, but it took half the time and you didn’t have to shake hands with that weird guy with the eczema.”

Ask any Christian politician how hard it is now, given the Gulf Stream of anti-Christian bigotry, to discuss moral issues in the media. Their opinions will be dismissed as the he-would-say-that prattlings of a Vatican parrot or of a nice-but zealot. Ask Tony Abbott, the Health Minister and a Catholic, whose reasoned arguments on an abortion pill were sniggered away by a slogan on a gloating Greens senator’s T-shirt: “Get your rosaries off my ovaries.”

YET it seems the cheap-shot sneers of intolerant atheists are fewer this year. More muted. And the squawks we still hear seem more contemptible. It would be no wonder. I wouldn’t be alone in thinking each time an artist or commentator insults Christians: "friend, if you’re so brave, say that about Islam". Show us your chocolate Mohammeds. Show us your Korans dipped in urine. Where is the singer who will rip up a Koran as Marilyn Manson ripped up a Bible? Or will on television tear up a picture of Islam’s most honoured preacher as Sinead O’Connor shredded one of the great Pope John Paul II?

It’s not as if Islam doesn’t threaten our artists more than does Christianity. See only the murder of film director Theo van Gogh or the fatwa on writer Salman Rushdie or the stabbing of Rushdie’s translator. Or see those deadly riots against the Mohammed cartoons. So when I see a Western artist mock Christ, I see an artist advertising not his courage but his cowardice – by not daring to mock what would threaten him more.

I am most certainly not saying that moderate Islam should now be treated with the childish disrespect so often shown to Christianity. Nor am I saying most Muslims endorse violence, or that there aren’t a few Christians who might turn violent, too. After all, the chocolate Jesus has been removed from display when Lab Gallery’s boss was bombarded with complaints and even – he claims – threats. But I am saying that more people now know there is a double standard here illustrated perfectly by the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, which banned acts that told jokes against Muslims but promoted ones that lampooned Christians. It’s this blatant double standard that may finally have shamed some of the usual jeerers into showing Christianity a little respect.

And perhaps – just perhaps – more of us might be wakening to a truth we too long took for granted. It’s no accident that we feel safer insulting Christians than trashing almost anyone else. This is a religion that’s always preached tolerance, reason and non-violence, even if too many of its followers have seemed deaf. It’s also urged us to leave the judgment of others to God (a message I ignore for professional reasons). We are the beneficiaries of that preaching, even those of us who aren’t Christians.

We live in a society, founded on Christian principles, that guards our right to speak, and even to abuse things we should praise. We can now vilify Jesus and damn priests, and risk nothing but hard looks from a soft bishop, and a job offer from The Age. We dare all that because we do not actually fear what we condemn. We know Christians are taught not to punch our smarmy face, and we even count on it. Indeed, it is the very faith we mock that has made us so safe.

This is one reason why I, an agnostic, will today do what I do every Easter, and play Bach’s divine St Matthew Passion while I sit for a while and give thanks. I will be thanking again not only a preacher of astonishing moral clarity and courage, but one who inspired a faith that has brought us unparalleled gifts – including the freedom to create even a chocolate Jesus in this most holy of weeks

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