To the Point

How Safe Is Our Food from the Sea?

Recent warnings about farm-raised salmon reveal that different government agencies have distinct standards for evaluating food safety. Contamination that-s acceptable to the Food and Drug Administration is banned outright by the Environmental Protection Agency. Meantime, tribes who live off the oceans above the Arctic Circle have become the unwitting laboratory rats for industrial civilization, as Inuit breast milk has been found to contain enormous concentrations of Mercury and the banned chemicals called PCB-s. If the most nutritious food of all has become a poison, how safe is our food from the sea? We hear from Canada's Northern Contaminants Program, the National Environmental Trust, the Institute of Food Technology, the author of an article on a recent farmed salmon study and researcher who first identified the pollutants among the Inuit. Making News: America Appeals to the United Nations over Iraq-s Future Yesterday, tens of thousands of Iraqi Shiites took to the streets to pressure the United States to change its plans for handing over political power by July 1. Today, the American governor in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, is in Washington, and on Monday, he-ll go to the United Nations. Robin Wright, diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Post, says the latest events all dramatize important shifts in American strategy. Reporter's Notebook: Bush-s Marriage Initiative, and Gays and Lesbians Statistics show that children are better off if they grow up in married, two-parent families. As President Bush proposes spending $1.5 billion to train low-income couples to develop "healthy marriage" skills, conservatives are demanding he back a Constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages. Former Massachusetts State Senator Cheryl Jacques, president of a national gay and lesbian rights group, calls the initiative "an amazing irony."