Last month, Indian affairs officials from the Brazilian government photographed from the air an Amazonian tribe that seems to have had little or no contact with the modern world. Pictures show men, women and children staring up from thatched huts and men painted with yellow and red attempting to scare off the airplane flying above them.

The flyover is the latest development in a controversy over “uncontacted” indigenous tribes and whether governments should prohibit outsiders from crossing paths with them. Groups like Survival International say about 100 tribes around the world have avoided or cut off any contact with outsiders, and half of them live in Brazil or Peru. The government of Peru has pledged to investigate the existence of uncontacted tribes on its side of the border, and to find out if illegal logging is driving them from their native lands as some allege. Disputes over land encroachment are central to indigenous issues: The French oil company Perenco is involved in a lawsuit in Peru that will determine whether it can drill in a remote jungle area inhabited by natives.

Actress Julie Christie is helping Survival International promote an isolation policy toward tribal groups. Survival claims tribal lands should be protected from logging and from outsiders who could introduce foreign sicknesses to the natives. (An unfamiliar virus such as a flu bug can overpower and kill a significant portion of a tribe’s population.)

Last March, representatives of the British television company Cicada Films were accused of unwittingly introducing an epidemic that left four Matsigenka Indians dead while the filmmakers scouted locations for the Discovery Channel’s “World’s Lost Tribes” reality show. Cicada Films denies causing any such outbreak. Brazilian activist Sydney Possuelo, featured in a 2003 National Geographic story, once favored modern contact with tribes but changed his mind after seeing the sicknesses and cultural challenges indigenous people face as a result.

Survival International doesn’t exactly express a positive attitude toward America, which it lists among its 2007 “terrible ten” list of abusers of tribal peoples’ rights for being one of four nations that voted against the UN’s “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” The UN Declaration, adopted in September of 2007, grants broad national rights to natives and contains language that could cause problems for yet another group Survival isn’t positive about: missionaries.

New Tribes Mission seeks to establish indigenous churches around the globe, but Venezuela stopped the group’s work among indigenous groups in 2005, when, as WORLD reported, President Hugo Chavez denounced the agency in a speech and accused it of spying for the U.S. and exploiting indigenous people. (Hundreds of indigenous Venezuelans later marched in protest of Chavez’s speech.)

It’s hard to understand how providing medical care and literacy is exploitation, especially among indigenous groups where the life expectancy of men and women is lower than average and suicide rates among youth are alarmingly high, but New Tribes and other mission organizations may face increasing opposition as governments like Venezuela’s and Brazil’s restrict outside access to tribes. In the process, those governments seem to be promoting the ideology of the “noble savage” and assuming it’s in the best interests of indigenous people to have no access to the modern world, or to the gospel.

In a unanimous vote Tuesday, the government of Camden, Australia, rejected a proposal for the building of a 1200-student Muslim school in the quaint old town of 50,000 on the southwest edge of Sydney. The reason for the rejection, according to Camden mayor Chris Patterson, was “clearly a site issue” that involved traffic considerations and had nothing to do with religion. But given the public outrage that the Islamic school proposal has elicited from Camden citizenry in recent months, thrusting the historical town into international headlines, a “site issue” may be hard for some to believe. At last Tuesday’s vote, one resident reportedly said, “We just don’t want Muslim people in Camden, we don’t want them not only here, but we don’t want them in Australia.”

Camden keeps a tight reign on “development applications” (McDonald’s has been rebuffed twice), and when the Sydney-based Quranic Society purchased 15 acres of land and submitted plans for a two-story school, standard procedure included an invitation for public reaction. Of over 3,000 submitted responses from local residents, only about 100 were in favor of the school. At an open-air meeting last November, one thousand townspeople angrily expressed their opposition to the Quranic Society’s school proposal and took the opportunity to rail against the influx of Islam into Australia, intimidating town officials enough that riot police were placed on standby (see this YouTube clip of the event). A few scattered demonstrations in the town have turned ugly—with pig heads impaled on stakes and threats of physical violence toward the proposed Muslim school students. On a larger level, The Independent reported that opposition to the Islamic school was being led in part by Fred Nile, the “leader of a fundamentalist Christian” political party who has opposed Muslim immigration.

Camden’s predicament could be a rare outward manifestation of the tension many Westerners feel as Muslim mosques and schools pop up on traditionally “Christian” soil, obvious reminders of a growing Muslim population among us. There are only about 100 Muslim families living in Camden (the 1200-seat school planned to bus in students from Sydney), and although the town celebrates the “success of multiculturalism in our local community” each year on Harmony Day, residents still bristle at the rustle of a hijab headscarf. Evangelistic-minded Christians have their own decision to wrestle with: Welcome Muslim developments in hopes of building bridges for conversion—or oppose them to stunt Islamic culture’s germination in the West?

Episode three of the Australian Muslim show Salam Cafe makes a joke of the Camden situation (and of the politically correct Mayor Patterson) in an on-site spoof that betrays the attitude Western-bred Muslims have toward perceived “Islamophobes.” What more fundamentalist Muslims might perceive throughout the West is a public decadence conflicting with our supposed Christian convictions, and it certainly doesn’t help that Camden’s website lists local development codes for legal brothels. Could a Muslim school be worse?

In a world where food prices have doubled or tripled, sparking deadly riots and threatening the world’s poorest with starvation diets, biofuel is taking heat as the possible culprit in a global food shortage. Jean Ziegler, a UN “Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food,” spoke out this week against U.S. and European Union energy policies that he says have taken biofuel production down a “criminal path.“

In utter disagreement with him is German Chancellor Angela Merkel (who blames agricultural policies and evolving eating habits), along with the prime minister of Thailand (who blames oil-producing nations), the world’s largest exporter of rice.

In the U.S., Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas politely criticized the energy bill of last December, which mandated an incremental increase in biofuel production over 14 years—raising a 7 billion gallon quota to 36 billion gallons between 2012 and 2022. Hutchison is introducing legislation to freeze the biofuel mandates at current rates. As the argument goes, croplands growing consumables like corn are being set aside instead for ethanol production, driving up grain prices in general and triggering a supply-and-demand cascade that eventually wallops the urban poor in undeveloped nations. Ziegler has called for a five-year moratorium on biofuel production.

He’s not the only one. In a phone press conference Tuesday, three agriculture research experts agreed one of main causes of the world food crisis was the “biofuels frenzy;” but while they favored a biofuel moratorium on consumable crops, they stressed the current crisis was complex and shouldn’t be pinned on one issue. Other guilty parties: Bad weather, rising rates of consumption, poor investments in agricultural science, high oil prices, and recent export bans by countries skittish over their internal grain supply. Proposed solutions? Wealthy nations should increase humanitarian aid (the World Food Programme announced it needs $755 million to offset rising food costs), increase investments in agricultural research, and reform unwise trade and energy policies, which might include biofuel subsidization and export bans.

One of the researchers, International Rice Research Institute director Robert Zeigler (not to be confused with Jean Ziegler of the UN) said although his organization had expected an increase in rice prices, they hadn’t expected it so quickly. Rice selling for $300 a ton last December was $1000 this month. Ziegler thinks a lackadaisical attitude of past years is partly to blame.

We’re victims of our own success. The tremendous achievements in agricultural research that resulted in the green revolution in the developing world led to a sense of complacency. People felt that the world food crisis was solved. It really fell off the agenda of funding in developing countries and in developed countries.

With U.S. wheat bins at their lowest levels since World War II, American consumers—even our own Anthony Randazzo—are feeling the crunch of pricier bagels and pizzas. Two thoughts come to mind: First, let’s count our blessings and send a few dollars to someone who’s really hungry. Second, does anyone remember how to garden?

A seven-month moratorium on executions across the states has ended with a 7-2 decision by the Supreme Court to uphold Kentucky’s lethal injection procedure. At first glance, the 7-2 result gives an illusion of unity among the justices, but their conclusions are actually quite varied.

Although Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court’s main opinion (that the defendants in Baze v. Rees hadn’t demonstrated Kentucky’s protocol carries an “objectively intolerable risk of harm”) only Justices Alito and Kennedy joined his opinion, which left a door open for future challenges to lethal injection. According to the chief justice, a state that refuses to adopt an alternate execution method may be in violation of the constitution if “the alternative procedure is feasible, readily implemented, and in fact significantly reduces a substantial risk of severe pain.”

Justices Thomas and Scalia concurred but thought Chief Justice Roberts had left loose ends that could “embroil the states in never-ending litigation concerning the adequacy of their execution procedures.” Thomas wrote he believed an execution method “violates the Eighth Amendment only if it is deliberately designed to inflict pain.” Justice Ginsburg, with Justice Souter joining, wrote a dissenting opinion criticizing Kentucky for not taking more safeguards against causing possible “severe and unnecessary pain.” Justice Breyer, while concurring with the court’s judgment, sort of agreed with Ginsburg—yet sort of didn’t.

But perhaps as notable as the ruling itself was the previously unexpressed opinion of Justice John Paul Stevens that capital punishment is a “pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes.” Although Stevens concurred with the majority, and has ruled in favor of the death penalty during his 32 years at court, he used part of his written opinion to explain why he has now changed his mind. “State-sanctioned killing is . . . becoming more and more anachronistic.”

Some predict more legal challenges to the death penalty will rise in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision. A blog at the Institute for Southern Studies has a roundup of reactions to the ruling from several Southeast states—which are rescheduling executions that were stayed when Baze v. Rees went to the Supreme Court last September—and implies there is bloodthirstiness involved.

But not every state is rushing to carry out sentences. In Texas, where the majority of U.S. executions take place, the death penalty will likely remain on hold until a local challenge to Texas’s lethal injection protocol is resolved.

Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins told The Dallas Morning News that, like Justice Stevens, he has misgivings about capital punishment, and although the court’s ruling will force him to move forward with executions in his district, “I’m not thrilled.” University of Houston law professor David Dow said that given the state’s large “sample size,” it is possible a “lethal injection challenge will get some traction in Texas.”

An angry mother and her teenage son are suing bestselling hip hop artist 50 Cent and his associated record labels for an unusual but believable reason: They promote a violent, “gangsta lifestyle.”

In 2007 on a Manhattan sidewalk, four men (one of whom was Tony Yayo, a member of 50 Cent’s hip hip group “G-Unit”) intimidated and assaulted 14-year-old James Rosemond. They allegedly approached the boy because he was wearing a T-shirt promoting Czar Entertainment, a management label representing 50 Cent’s archrival (and former G-unit member) The Game—and because Rosemond is the son of Jimmy “Henchman” Rosemond, The Game’s manager. Yayo was sentenced to 10 days of community service for grabbing and “glaring” at Rosemond, while another man involved in the incident was sentenced to nine months in jail for slapping the teen.

Although 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, wasn’t present during the attack, the lawsuit names him along with Yayo and Universal Music Group labels for marketing a “‘gangsta’ image” that led to the assault. According to the suit, the defendants “encouraged, sanctioned, approved and condoned its members threatening violence, and or engaging in violent acts in furtherance of its business.” Prosecutors have been known to use rappers’ violent lyrics against them in assault and murder trials as evidence of their motives or character. Sometimes judges are willing to take the lyrics into account, and sometimes not.

Rap and hip hop received renewed criticism last year in the wake of shock jock Don Imus’ firing due to his on-the-air racial slur. Gangsta rappers regularly use that same slur in their songs, including 50 Cent, whose sexually explicit lyrics normally replace the word “woman” with “b—ch” and tend to glorify violence. (See 50 Cent song “In My Hood.” Warning: Explicit lyrics).

50 Cent himself bears nine bullet scars from a shooting in 2000. He was named the world’s bestselling hip hop artist by the 2007 World Music Awards.

In a separate case last week from Gainesville, Florida, five people shot during a fight after a rap concert are suing the nightclub, the rapper and his record label for negligence. The clients’ attorney claims the rapper’s gangsta lifestyle and violent lyrics contributed to the incident. Recent lawsuits follow on the heels of a study that points out rappers’ general glamorization of drug use. But while the lyrics and lives of gangsta rappers continue to give hip hop a bad name, some artists—like TobyMac, The Cross Movement, and KJ-52—are working to redeem the genre and use it to reach the unchurched.

Scientists are conducting the largest physics experiment in the world and searching for “the God particle” — a mysterious bit of stuff that would prove the prevailing theory of particle physics. Since the Higgs boson particle should disintegrate and disappear almost as soon as it is created, actually detecting one is a long shot. But if an accelerator can do it, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can.

The LHC, a 17-mile circular tunnel, straddles the border of Switzerland and France. This July, it is scheduled to accelerate protons to collisions at 99.9999991% the speed of light. Scientists hope these collisions will produce fundamental particles that are the building blocks of all matter. The 14-year, $8 billion project has enough gigantic magnets, vacuum tubes, and high-tech detectors and gadgetry to satisfy the most fastidious physicist.

Okay, almost every physicist. As Harrison Scott Key notes at WMB, a couple scientists have filed a lawsuit (in a Hawaii court) against the LHC, worried that the high-energy collisions may accidentally spawn a black hole that swallows the Earth or create “strangelets” that will turnthe Earth into lifeless “strange matter.” While both creations are theoretically possible, LHC officials say it’s crazy that either would destroy Earth. (If you disagree, you can contribute to the lawsuit instigators here.)

Scientists hope the LHC will decide what occurred in those legendary moments after the big bang. In a Newsweek interview, theoretical physicist and atheist Steven Weinberg in a answered questions about how the LHC could impact religion if it results in a “final theory of how the universe was created:”

As science explains more and more, there is less and less need for religious explanations. Originally, in the history of human beings, everything was mysterious. Fire, rain, birth, death, all seemed to require the action of some kind of divine being. As time has passed, we have explained more and more in a purely naturalistic way. This doesn’t contradict religion, but it does [take] away one of the original motivations for religion.

Atheist though he is, Weinberg touches on a problem Christians must wrestle through every day. Does scientific knowledge of the natural world detract from God’s sovereignty in it? Although weather results from atmospheric conditions, can God still change the weather?