Free Republic

AMSTERDAM, Feb 9 (Reuters Life!) - A Dutch journalist asked an Amsterdam court on Friday to convict him for eating chocolate, saying by doing so he was benefiting from child slavery on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast. Teun van de Keuken, 35, is seeking a jail sentence to raise consumer awareness and force the cocoa and chocolate industry to take tougher measures to stamp out child labor. "If I am found guilty of this crime, any chocolate consumer can be prosecuted after that. I hope that people would stop buying chocolate and thus hurt the sales of big corporations and...

Bolivia's incoming President Evo Morales could easily become the nightmare for the United States that he boasted about becoming on the campaign trail. He supports the growing of coca, the raw material for cocaine, is an ally of a prominent anti-U.S. firebrand, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and wants to nationalize Bolivia's oil sector. He will undoubtedly do everything in his power to counter U.S. economic and geopolitical interests in Latin America. Interestingly enough, the electoral landslide that will be bringing Mr. Morales to power was unwittingly aided by the architects of U.S. drug policy in Latin America. While it is...

Mars, Incorporated, the privately held U.S. company company that produces M&Ms, Twix, Snickers and other confectionaries is in talks with several large pharmaceutical companies to develop medications based on flavanols -- plant chemicals with health benefits found in cocoa, according to a report from Reuters. Flavonoids are naturally-occurring compounds found in plant-based foods that have been shown to have a number of health-benefiting properties including anti-inflammatory, anti-allergic, and anti-cancer activity. Cocoa, especially dark chocolate, has high amounts of the flavonoid Epicatechin and has been found to have nearly twice the antioxidants of red wine and up to three times those...

In 2001, two American congressmen set up legislation pushing for a cocoa certification program designed to protect the thousands of children working in the sector. Four-years later, little has changed for the working children of Ivory Coast. Joe Bavier visited a plantation near Agboville in southeast Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa exporter and has this report for VOA. At the end of a trail head leading through dense forest to a 30-hectare cocoa plantation, a half-dozen shirtless young men and adolescents take a break from work. During the July lull in the cocoa-growing season, they had been 'cleaning', hacking...

MARGATE, N.J. - He's a diehard surfer, an eccentric millionaire, a sun-seeking recluse. Given all that, Ron DiMenna's choice of retirement home makes perfect sense.Who else would spend $500,000 to buy an RV, equip it with a slew of high-tech electronic features, paint it to look like a 21st-century woodie and then hit the road, destinations unknown?But DiMenna, the 66-year-old founder of Cocoa Beach, Fla.-based Ron Jon Surf Shops, is not the retiring type. He has three shops in Florida - Cocoa Beach, Orlando and Sunrise.More than 40 years after he started selling boards on nearby Long Beach Island, the...