“In central Sumatra, the impact of APP’s operations on wildlife has been devastating. The company’s forest clearing in Riau Province has been driving Sumatran elephants and tigers toward local extinction,” the report said.

Both paper companies have also begun clearing peat swamp forests. According to Indonesian ministry of forestry estimates, deforestation associated with peat decomposition and burning totals 1.2 giga-tons of carbon emissions per year. Indonesia has since become the world’s third largest greenhouse gas emitter.

“Products made with APP fiber linked to forest destruction are flooding the U.S. market and landing in grocery stores, other retail chains, restaurants, hotels, schools and municipalities in the form of toilet tissue, paper towels, copier paper, stationery, paper bags and paper-based packaging,” WWF reported.

The two most common products of the company in the U.S. are Paseo and Livi tissues. APP products are distributed and marketed in North America by a variety of subsidiaries and affiliates including Solaris Paper, Mercury Paper and Papermax.

APP claims to be “committed to being socially, environmentally and economically sustainable throughout its operations.” When Indonesia’s Eyes on the Forest released a report on APP clearing Sumatra’s Senepis Tiger Sanctuary, the company declared that the allegations were “clearly false.”

CEO of Oasis Brands Philip Rundle, which markets Paseo and Livi wrote in a letter that their products are “100 percent sustainable . (made from) plantation-grown, rapidly renewable fiber supplied by APP.

“It’s plainly ridiculous, profoundly untrue to claim that anything APP produces is environmentally sustainable. To me, it borders on false labeling. .There are maps, evidence. It’s incontrovertible that some of the practices APP engages in are not sustainable,” Andrea Johnson, director of forest campaigns for the Environmental Investigation Agency, told IPS.

APP is engaging in a “very strong campaign” to “greenwash” their activities and to assert they are actually doing everything legally, Johnson added. APP’s declarations include asserting that only “degraded” land is being cleared, that only a little of Indonesian land is allocated for mills, and emphasizing APP’s donations to environmental foundations.

Experts say that a strong case can be made that Indonesia has affectively subsidized the pulp and paper industry by not enforcing its own laws.

© 2012, Catholic Online. Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.

Sukuk issuance during the month of April declined to the lowest level since July 2010 with $4,862.6bn coming from the primary market. The month was dominated by sovereign issuers, particularly in Malaysia where the central bank contributed $3bn of the total sukuk for the month. The Middle East market remains relatively dry this year as conditions remain tough given the continued spread of political uprisings. Hence, there have only been four corporate issues from the region so far this year.

Among the sukuk placed was the first sukuk out of Jordan by Al-Rajhi Cement, a company registered in the Dubai International Financial Centre which invests in the global cement industry. The inaugural sukuk was structured as an Ijarah transaction with a maturity of seven years. The sukuk was subscribed for by a number of leading Islamic and commercial banks including Capital Bank, Cairo Amman Bank, Islamic International Arab Bank, Union Bank, Jordan Kuwait Bank, Bank of Jordan, and Arab Islamic Bank.

The Central Bank of Bahrain issued a $530.4m Ijarah sukuk during the month with a tenure of five years. The sukuk marks the second largest issuance by the central bank and the largest issue from the country since June 2009.

Sukuk issuances for the month were led by sovereign issuers who accounted for 80.4% of the value, followed with corporates with 15.8% and government related entities with 3.8%. So far this year, sovereigns have made up for 88% of all issuance while corporate constitute 8.5%.

On the currency front, sukuk issued during March 2011 were again mostly denominated in Malaysian Ringgit, accounting for 78.1% of issuance, while the rest of the sukuk were issued in Bahraini Dinar (12.1%), Indonesian Rupiah (7.4%) and Jordanian Dinar (2.4%). The largest for the month was the Bank Negara issuance at MYR2bn ($661.64m).

A total of 53 sukuk were issued in April vs. 44 sukuk in March and 40 in February. Among these, 29 were issued by the corporate sector which totalled $772.8m (Mar: $276.4m, 180%) while there were 14 sovereign issuances which totalled $3.93bn (Mar: $3.70bn, 6.2%).

The only corporate issuance outside of Malaysia during the month of April was the Jordanian sukuk by Al-Rajhi Cement.

Experts say specialized diets won’t help rid the body of toxins any more than what the liver and kidneys already do every day.

Between lingering New Year’s resolutions and impending Lenten restraint, it’s the season when many people are inspired to get healthy by refusing foods they normally delight in.

And increasingly, we’re seeing elimination diets that promise weight loss and a tantalizing bonus: detoxification.

“Cleansing diets” trade on this most alluring idea: By limiting our intake of food to a few superpure items, we can free up the body to get rid of all the gunk accumulated in our cells.

There’s only one problem with the idea of using food, or a lack thereof, to detox: Medical experts say it’s baloney. What’s most ironic about the detox myth, they say, is that the body is already quite capable of eliminating toxins – a gift from human evolution.

“The body has its own amazing detoxification systems: the liver and the kidneys,” says Ranit Mishori, a faculty member in family medicine at the Georgetown University School of Medicine who has reviewed the medical literature on colon cleanses. “Unless there’s a blockage in one of these organs that do it day and night, there’s absolutely no need to help the body get rid of toxins.”

I happen to know a few people who recently embarked on the Clean Program, a 21-day diet created by Alejandro Junger — who was once called the “detox movement’s It Boy.” A cardiologist by training, the Uruguayan-born, Los Angeles-based Junger has managed to sell a lot of books (a best-seller titled Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body’s Natural Ability to Heal Itself) and a lot of dietary supplements to people on his program.

One of Junger’s fundamental arguments is that our body is full of toxins we’ve picked up from food and the environment. These toxins slow us down and make us sick. As Junger recently tweeted, a “main cause of dysfunction in the body is the presence of obstacles [toxins] to the normal functioning of things.”

However, Junger writes, it is possible to get rid of them by giving our digestive system a break. That system is normally so busy breaking down irritating foods that it rarely has time to do the hard work of detox. In effect, Junger sees the average body on an average American diet akin to a dirty house that needs an occasional deep scrubbing.

His diet bans a laundry list of foods: dairy, sugar, alcohol, caffeine, gluten, nightshade vegetables, soy and peanuts — all foods he calls irritants to good digestion. His website also actively encourages people to spend $425 on the Clean supplement package, which comes in vanilla or chocolate flavor.

After several years of promoting the Clean Program, Junger has hundreds of devotees who chatter on the Clean forum and elsewhere about feeling marvelous, and indeed cleaner after the program — like this writer from Outside. That group of believers includes such celebrities as Donna Karan and Gwyneth Paltrow, who recently launched her own $425 goop cleanse with Junger.

Despite its heavy restrictions, it’s not hard to see why Clean is compelling. Who doesn’t sometimes feel icky, or bloated, or displeased with his decision to wolf down a few too many cookies or french fries? And surely there’s a benefit to eating a lot more fruits and vegetables.

But will that change in diet really push out toxins?

“The body is constantly filtering the toxins in alcohol, food and medicines, not storing them,” Boston dietitian Maria Adams tells The Salt. “So they’re not going to build up. I think the reason people feel better on a cleanse is probably just they’re losing weight and are less bloated.”

It’s true there are plenty of very real toxins in the environment we could be exposed to: the ultrafine particulate matter we inhale from dirty air, asbestos from old homes, or heavy metals like lead or mercury. Unfortunately, there’s really no easy way to get these toxins out. Chelation therapy may work for some metals, but particulates in our lungs are probably there to stay, says Mishori. “A lot of these are irreversible,” she says.

So why, despite the science, does the idea of cleansing with food remain so powerful?

“We live in an era where there are daily assaults on our psyche and body, so cleansing may give you a false sense of getting the gunk out,” says Mishori. As for psychological gunk? Try a little exercise and nature, she says.

"When we first moved in, the walls were bare and every room looked the same," says Toni, a freelance interior designer. Thanks to her years of design experience, the villa has now been transformed from a regular Meadows property into a beautiful home with plenty of tribal references, stunning attention to detail and colour.

"Much of my furniture and art has been collected from around the world. This, combined with the open-plan living and fantastic light quality that a Meadows villa has to offer provides all the inspiration I need," she says. "However, I do feel that a home has to be a home not a design set, so giving it the comfort factor, above all else, inspires me," she says. "From a young age I was constantly painting my bedroom weird and wonderful colours and rearranging the furniture. I went on to do a degree in art history, but only got into professional decorating when we lived in the US."

The villa has a spacious entrance, hallway and living room so it is perfect to accommodate the couple’s art. "We still have a lot of things that we left behind in the UK; I selected items that worked best in this set-up," Toni says.

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A gauge of future economic activity rose in January for the fourth straight month, adding to evidence that the economy has strengthened in the new year.

The Conference Board said Friday that its index of leading economic indicators rose 0.4 percent in January. The increase pushed the index to its highest point since July 2008.

The measure of leading indicators is designed to anticipate economic conditions three to six months out. Its steady rise has coincided with other positive data that suggest the recovery is picking up.

The unemployment rate fell to 8.3 percent, the lowest in nearly three years, after employers added 243,000 net jobs the most in nine months. Auto sales are up, unemployment aid applications are down, and factories are cranking out goods at a healthy pace.

“Recent data reflect an economy that started the year on a positive note,” said Ken Goldstein, an economist at the Conference Board.

Seven of the 10 indicators measure by the Conference Board increased in January, led by strength in the spread between short-term and long-term interest rates. Three indicators held the index back. The largest negative was a drop in consumer expectations.

Goldstein said a separate index that tracks indicators tied to the current health of the economy had shown some strengthening in the October-December period and in January.

The seven indicators strengthened in January: the spread in interest rates, average factory hours worked per week, stock prices, a credit index, building permits, and two measures for manufactured goods.

Melissa Block talks to E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and Brookings Institution and Ramesh Ponnuru, senior editor at the National Review, about the showdown between Republican presidential contenders Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney in Michigan and Arizona ahead of those states’ primaries, and the extension of the payroll tax cut through the end of the year.

Narciso Rodriguez stuck to his signature, structured style at New York Fashion Week.

He must be doing something right. Sitting in the front row was Golden Globe-winning actress Claire Danes, a few seats away from another Rodriguez fan, singer Gloria Estefan. She said the designer has dressed her for some of the most special moments in her life.

"I love the stitching," she said. "I love the construction, the materials he uses are great because they hold you in well. He just thinks of the woman when he’s designing these clothes, and sometimes that’s not always the case with other designers," she said.

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