Hello,
welcome to the English language edition of Cacao, brought to you together with Logos.
The mass media adore pessimism. They're so good at selecting bad news. They'd rather not tell us the good stuff in case it affects the consumption of tranquillisers, antidepressants, padlocks and weapons.
But every day, all over the world, millions of people are working to make positive things happen. And you should know about it because it's good for your health.
This is why our daily has been coming out for the last five years in Italy. It's a real success, with 20 thousand subscribers to the weekday edition and 50 thousand to the Sunday version. And saying as good news goes well with funny, strange news, Cacao also features a full repertoire of exhilarating absurdities and incredible things. Have a good day!
The president of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, said that Paradise awaits all those who read his book "Rukhnama" (Book of the soul), written and published in 2001.
Anyone skipping the odd page will have to make do with Limbo.
Perhaps when Curtis Gokey woke up the other morning he knew it wasn't going to be his lucky day. He works for the local council (name of council not given) and he crashed the municipal vehicle he was driving into his own car, damaging his car to the tune of over 3,600 dollars.
Council procedure meant that Gokey was obliged to take legal action against the municipal driver, i.e. himself. He won.
New observations and measurements have shown that the Milky Way, the galaxy we live in, may be bigger than we thought.
It's shaped like a deformed 150 thousand-light-year-rpm vinyl record.
Furthermore, up to now we thought there was a dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way that was part of the Great Dog (Canis Major) constellation. But we were barking up the wrong tree.
Sydney traffic police arrested a man for reversing 40 km along the road to Melbourne.
He has been charged with "reversing further than necessary ".
He was trying to go back in time.
A few kilometres away, a lady from Turramurra, a well-to-do area in the south of Sydney, captured a little crocodile that was having a swim in her private pool, without a bathing cap.
The animal didn't take kindly to this and so she tied its jaws up with rope. It missed being made into handbags by the skin of its teeth.
Roxana Pons, from Mendoza, in Argentina, has been living in a tree near the railway station for more than a year. He has built a sort of giant nest with branches and cushions. "I'm not homeless", he explained, "I'd just rather live in a tree, that's all ".
After the universal declarations of human rights, children's rights and animal rights, we could soon be having a declaration of plant rights. It's been proposed by a Venezuelan environmentalist association, the Avepalmas, formed to protect Venezuelan palms.
The declaration, which they're now working on, reminds the whole world of the vitally important need to protect trees, plants and flowers.
Remember that plants have evergreen arboreal self-knowledge.
This is how you could sum up the philosophy of "Breaking the Ice", a non-profit foundation founded in Israel in 2003, based in Berlin.
It's an organisation that brings together people at war, Israelis and Palestinians, and puts them through a survival test (the first exercise was climbing an unconquered peak in the Antarctic). By the end of the test they had got to know and understand each other and learnt how to work together in peace.
One of the characteristics of the foundation is its choice of participants: not pacifists but former soldiers, people who have experienced the war and its horrors directly.
The next challenge will be a journey from Jerusalem to Tripoli in Libya, in a specially converted old fire engine, symbolising the need to put out conflicts.
One winter's evening, on the New York subway, Judith Levine decided she was tired. She was tired of all those people crammed together with their bags of shopping, iPods, expensive shoes and designer clothes.
She decided she was tired of consumerism and that she wasn't going to buy anything for 12 months. To increase her resolve, she blocked her credit card.
On the basis of her long adventure, during which she was offered all kinds of incentives to get back to a normal life, Judith wrote a book, a personal diary. You can buy it on the Web, by credit card...
We'll give you a summary of it so you can save your money. The book discovers what many psychologists have been saying for some time: that shopping can really be a mania and an addiction, an illness like tabagism and alcoholism.
The American consumer is lured into the trap by the 400 billion dollars spent on advertising every year.
No economic trend worries a government more than a slump in consumer spending.
Chilean president Michelle Bachelet announced that people aged over 60 can be treated free of charge in the country's public hospitals, starting from ... now!
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