Broiler (meat) chickens have been subjected to intense genetic selection. In the past 50 years, broiler growth rates have increased by over 300% (from 25 g per day to 100 g per day). There is growing societal concern that many broiler chickens have impaired locomotion or are even unable to walk. Here we present the results of a comprehensive survey of commercial flocks which quantifies the risk factors for poor locomotion in broiler chickens. We assessed the walking ability of 51,000 birds, representing 4.8 million birds within 176 flocks. We also obtained information on approximately 150 different management factors associated with each flock. At a mean age of 40 days, over 27.6% of birds in our study showed poor locomotion and 3.3% were almost unable to walk. The high prevalence of poor locomotion occurred despite culling policies designed to remove severely lame birds from flocks. We show that the primary risk factors associated with impaired locomotion and poor leg health are those specifically associated with rate of growth. Factors significantly associated with high gait score included the age of the bird (older birds), visit (second visit to same flock), bird genotype, not feeding whole wheat, a shorter dark period during the day, higher stocking density at the time of assessment, no use of antibiotic, and the use of intact feed pellets. The welfare implications are profound. Worldwide approximately 2x10^10 broilers are reared within similar husbandry systems. We identify a range of management factors that could be altered to reduce leg health problems, but implementation of these changes would be likely to reduce growth rate and production. A debate on the sustainability of current practice in the production of this important food source is required.

Leg Disorders in Broiler Chickens: Prevalence, Risk Factors and Prevention

IT may be a universal truth that war is hell, but in "One Soldier's War," Arkady Babchenko's jagged memoir of serving in the Russian army during the Chechen wars, nobody gets away unscathed, least of all the reader.

Babchenko's book was excerpted in the February issue of Harper's in a very sharp piece called The things they ate.

'One Soldier's War,' a memoir by Arkady Babchenko

George Packer, writing in the World Affairs Journal:

The Iraq War introduced entirely new kinds of cruelty to the world, so it’s strange how many of my memories are of kindness.

In wartime Iraq, perhaps in most wars, viciousness and generosity were never far apart. The menace in the streets of Baghdad was always overwhelming—the suspicious piles of roadside garbage, the dark sedans casing other cars, the checkpoint that wasn’t there thirty minutes ago, the hard stares in traffic, the hair trigger of American gunners, the heedless SUV convoys, and the explosions that always seemed to happen three streets away. In this national ruin, any act of kindness, even as small as offering someone a ride, created solidarity. You were always meeting someone who had run out of options, and someone else who would risk far more to help than he would in normal times. Perhaps it was part of their culture, and perhaps these were not normal times, but Iraqis lacked the sense of shame about heartfelt declarations and naked emotions that people in more secure, better functioning places possess naturally. All of this made them harsh and lovable, and it was possible to spend an hour with Haithem or Muna, or to see Abu Malik once every six months, and feel that more human business had been transacted than over a hundred New York lunches or dinners. The same was true of soldiers with whom I would have had nothing to discuss back at home. Without these connections, Iraq would have been unbearable.

Essential reading. Read it alongside the latest work of Drew Gilpin Faust.

Over Here: Iraq the Place vs. Iraq the Abstraction

In Mosul last March, the Provincial Reconstruction Team took me to a meeting of one of Iraq's new terrorism tribunals. Three judges were trucked up from Baghdad to preside over Baghdad-related terrorism cases -- all in Mosul, so the insurgents wouldn't, you know, kill the judges. Interesting idea, heavily billed as a rule-of-law achievement, but boring as hell to watch.

Then at the end, as people are milling about and chatting on their way out the door, one of the PRT officials tells a judge how important it is to stand up against terrorism and promote equality and fairness before an impartial system of law. The judge nods at the platitude. "Tell me," he says through a translator, "is it true that in America, Bush can fire prosecutors he doesn't like?"

Have you seen John Yoo in Taxi to the Dark Side?

Rule of Law

One of the world’s most notorious terrorists met a violent end late Tuesday night when a car bomb killed Hezbollah’s Imad Mughniyeh in the Syrian capitol of Damascus. Until 9/11, Mughniyeh was responsible for more American deaths than any other single terrorist, including the 1983 attack in Beirut that killed 241 Marines. And while many in the counterterrorism community cheered Mughniyeh’s death as a victory against jihadism, some in U.S. intelligence circles now fear potential reprisal attacks from Hezbollah against U.S. targets.

Intelligence Experts Fear Hezbollah Retaliation

Francis Fukuyama reviews Samantha Power's new book, "Chasing the Flame".

Samantha Power, whose earlier book, “‘A Problem From Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide,” won a Pulitzer Prize, has written a comprehensive biography of Vieira de Mello that explains how his personal evolution paralleled that of the United Nations and how his contradictions and failures were rooted in those of the institution he so loyally served.

In the wake of the Iraq debacle, the idea that strong countries like the United States should use their power to defend human rights or promote democracy around the world has become widely discredited. From an overmilitarized foreign policy, we are in danger of going to the opposite extreme, forgetting the lessons of the 1990s that hard power is sometimes needed to resolve political conflicts, and that we do not yet have an adequate set of international institutions to deploy it legitimately and effectively.

“Chasing the Flame” argues, as Vieira de Mello himself once did, that the United Nations is often unfairly blamed for failures to protect the vulnerable or deter aggression, when the real failure is that of the great powers standing behind it. Those powers are seldom willing to give it sufficient resources, attention and boots on the ground to accomplish the ambitious mandates they set for it. At present, the United Nations is involved in eight separate peacekeeping operations in Africa alone; failure in a high-profile case like Darfur (which seems likely) will once again discredit the organization. Power (who has been a foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama) makes the case for powerful countries like the United States putting much greater effort into making the institution work.

In the end, the book does not make a persuasive case that the United Nations will ever be able to evolve into an organization that can deploy adequate amounts of hard power or take sides in contentious political disputes. Its weaknesses as a bureaucracy and its political constraints make it very unlikely that the United States and other powerful countries will ever delegate to it direct control over their soldiers or trust it with large sums of money. But surely the life and death of Sergio Vieira de Mello is a good place to begin a serious debate about the proper way to manage world order in the future.

The Internationalist

The success of "The Dangerous Book for Boys" — which has been on the best-seller list for the last nine months — and its step-by-step instructions for activities like folding paper airplanes is testament to the generalized longing for play’s good old days. So were the questions after Stuart Brown’s library talk; one woman asked how her children will learn trust, empathy and social skills when their most frequent playing is done online. Brown told her that while video games do have some play value, a true sense of "interpersonal nuance" can be achieved only by a child who is engaging all five senses by playing in the three-dimensional world.

This is part of a larger conversation Americans are having about play. Parents bobble between a nostalgia-infused yearning for their children to play and fear that time spent playing is time lost to more practical pursuits. Alarming headlines about U.S. students falling behind other countries in science and math, combined with the ever-more-intense competition to get kids into college, make parents rush to sign up their children for piano lessons and test-prep courses instead of just leaving them to improvise on their own; playtime versus résumé building.

Discussions about play force us to reckon with our underlying ideas about childhood, sex differences, creativity and success. Do boys play differently than girls? Are children being damaged by staring at computer screens and video games? Are they missing something when fantasy play is populated with characters from Hollywood’s imagination and not their own? Most of these issues are too vast to be addressed by a single field of study (let alone a magazine article). But the growing science of play does have much to add to the conversation.

Taking Play Seriously

Po Bronson, in New York Magazine:

Kids lie early, often, and for all sorts of reasons -- to avoid punishment, to bond with friends, to gain a sense of control. But now there’s a singular theory for one way this habit develops: They are just copying their parents.

Learning to Lie

As if on cue ...

A technical glitch gave the FBI access to the e-mail messages from an entire computer network — perhaps hundreds of accounts or more — instead of simply the lone e-mail address that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal report of the 2006 episode.

FBI officials blamed an “apparent miscommunication” with the unnamed Internet provider, which mistakenly turned over all the e-mail from a small e-mail domain for which it served as host. The records were ultimately destroyed, officials said.

Bureau officials noticed a “surge” in the e-mail activity they were monitoring and realized that the provider had mistakenly set its filtering equipment to trap far more data than a judge had actually authorized.

The episode is an unusual example of what has become a regular if little-noticed occurrence, as American officials have expanded their technological tools: government officials, or the private companies they rely on for surveillance operations, sometimes foul up their instructions about what they can and cannot collect.

'Overproduction'

A Letter to America boldly faces the question of how long the United States, with only six percent of the world’s population, can remain a global superpower. University of Oklahoma president David Boren explains with unsparing clarity why the country is at a crossroads and why decisive action is urgently needed. He draws on his experiences as the longest-serving chair of the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence and as a state governor and leader of a major public university.

America is in trouble because its people are losing faith in the country’s future. What the country needs, Boren asserts, are major reforms to restore the ability of our political system to act responsibly. We have shared values, and we should use them to replace cynicism with hope and the determination to build a better future. Bipartisan cooperation on behalf of national interests needs to replace destructive partisanship, and we should not rule out electing a president independent of both existing parties. We must fashion a post–Cold War foreign policy that fits twenty-first-century realities—including several contending superpowers. We must adopt campaign finance reform that restores political power to the voters, rather than special interests. Universal health care coverage, budget deficit reduction, affordable higher education, and a more progressive tax structure will strengthen the middle class.

Boren also describes how we can renew our emphasis on quality primary and secondary education, revitalize our spirit of community, and promote volunteerism. He urges the teaching of more American history and government, for without educated citizens our system cannot function and our rights will not be preserved. Unless we understand how we became great, we will not remain great. The plan Boren puts forward is ambitious and hopeful. It challenges Americans to look into the future, decide what we want to be and where we want to go, and then implement the policies and actions we need to take us there. A Rhodes Scholar, David Boren is President of the University of Oklahoma. A former governor of Oklahoma, he served as U.S. Senator from Oklahoma from 1979 to 1994 and chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from 1987 to 1993.

David Boren: A Letter To America