TORONTO (Reuters Life!) - If mothers were paid for cooking, cleaning and caring for their families they could easily earn a six-figure salary, according to new calculations.

After asking 18,000 mothers to list their most common tasks such a cooking, cleaning and childcare, a salary compensation company determined the value of their job functions to calculate what they could earn if they were paid.

In Canada the 10 most popular jobs performed by a stay-at-home mother would equate to a C$125,000 ($124,280) salary, including overtime, and almost $75,000 for a working mother, in addition to her real salary.

(...)The salary calculations were based on the top ten jobs mothers said they did at home and the hours they spent doing them each day. The numbers were then compared to the market value each job was worth.

It's the anti-establishment movement that has taken the art market by storm, keenly collected by hedge-funders and Hollywood' s A-list. Now, even Tate Modern is giving Street Art its stamp of approval. Alice Fisher reports:

Disguised in a thick beard, wire-frame glasses and a rather crumpled bucket hat, Banksy sneaked into four of New York's most prestigious museums in March 2005. He hung work on their walls without permission - including a Warholesque painting of Tesco Value cream of tomato soup cans in the Museum of Modern Art and a harlequin beetle accessorised with Airfix weapons at the Natural History Museum. Afterwards, the Street Artist explained himself on graffiti website woostercollective.com: 'I've wandered around a lot of art galleries thinking: "I could have done that," so it seemed only right that I should try. These galleries are just trophy cabinets for a handful of millionaires. The public never has any real say in what art they see.'

This statement is no longer true. Bemusing events have happened since which have unbalanced the status quo of the art establishment as described by Banksy. This month Tate Modern - the world's most popular modern art gallery - hosts 'Street Art', a group exhibition which will turn the building's riverside façade over to be used as a canvas by the artists. The show features work by European Street Artists Blu, JR and Sixeart, São Paulo's Nunca and Os Gemeos and American collective Faile. If recent events are anything to go by, the show will be popular: last weekend's Cans Festival, held in a London railway tunnel, was a huge bank holiday hit. The event featured work by 40 artists and was organised by Banksy, the first show he's overseen since 2005. The crowds at Cans were no surprise - when the genteel Andipa Gallery in Knightsbridge held a Banksy show in March, 2,500 visitors turned up. Queues formed; extra security was hired. At Black Rat Press, a gallery in the more typical Street-Art territory of Hoxton, last month's Nick Walker show saw people camp overnight for the chance to buy one of his prints.The show was a sellout.

The public may still not have much say over what art they see in galleries, but they're certainly getting better at expressing their opinions. Banksy not only received the public nomination for the Turner Prize in 2005, but he was also voted one of the nation's top three art heroes in a YouGov survey last year. In Bristol, the artist's hometown, the city council held a public vote in 2006 on whether Banksy's graffiti on the wall of a local sexual-health clinic should be removed. The public decreed it should stay. Network Rail has since given its cleaners art lessons to ensure they don't erase any of Banksy's work.

I highly recommend visiting The Wooster Collective - one of my favorite blogs.  There's lovely photos of street art from cities all over the world.

Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding. -Hobbes

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 9 (IPS) - Recent efforts by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to clearly mark the difference between Brazilian ethanol and the agrofuels produced by the United States are an admission that signing an agreement with Washington to promote a global bioethanol market was a serious political mistake, say analysts.

Brazilian fuel alcohol, distilled from sugarcane, has been used as a partial substitute for gasoline in the country for 30 years, and makes an acknowledged contribution to mitigating global warming because it emits less greenhouse gases than fossil fuels.

However, in recent months a flood of criticism has engulfed all biofuels, because of their role in helping to drive up food prices. Jean Ziegler, former United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, called the conversion of food crops into biofuels "a crime against humanity."

A memorandum of understanding, signed in March 2007, for cooperation between Brazil and the United States in promoting ethanol production in tropical countries, as well as technology transfer and definition of technical standards, united the biofuels of both countries in terms of their international image.

Negative global perceptions of President George W. Bush and his government's war in Iraq may have contributed to the unpopularity of U.S. ethanol, with Brazil's alcohol being tarred with the same brush.

In January 2007, Bush announced a bold plan to cut gasoline consumption by 20 percent in the United States within 10 years, through the use of substitutes, mainly ethanol.

Dire food shortages that began last year have sparked violent protests in dozens of poor countries, and have led to widespread accusations that ethanol and biodiesel are worsening the food crisis.

BUFFALO, N.Y. - Maria Whyte's two-day experiment living at the poverty level left her with debt, a parking ticket and probably a few gray hairs.

"I was so stressed out!" the Erie County legislator said Thursday as she joined a call for the city to address its census ranking as the nation's second-poorest big city.

Whyte and other community leaders spent the past few days trying to make ends meet on $9.25 a day. If they factored in the daily cost of a car, health care, cell phone and cable television, they were in the hole before breakfast.

It was an exercise in solidarity, organizers said, for the 29.9 percent of Buffalo residents the U.S. Census Bureau says are living in poverty _ well over the 13.3 percent national rate. The federal poverty guideline is an annual income of $17,600 for a family of three and $10,400 for a single individual.

WASHINGTON, DC, May 8, 2008 (ENS) - The diversity of life in all the world's freshwater ecosystems is for the first time displayed on a comprehensive map and held in a database. These new tools can be of use to conservationists who are trying to save freshwater ecosystems that are under increasing pressure from human population growth, rising water use, and habitat alteration.

Unveiled today, Freshwater Ecoregions of the World is a collaborative project between the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy, two U.S. nonprofit organizations that are part of larger international networks.

WASHINGTON D.C., May 7, 2008 --WORLD-WIRE-- The senior leadership at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency "has repeatedly chosen to stray from the clear and science-based recommendations of expert advisory panels, public health organizations and advocates, and in some cases even its own career staff scientists, in order to make policies and decisions that fall short of adequately protecting children as well as the general public."

That was the conclusion of testimony today by a member of the EPA Children's Health Protection Advisory Committee before the Senate Public Sector Solutions to Global Warming, Oversight, and Children's Health Protection Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

"In some cases, EPA policies and decisions are justified on the basis of arguments that run counter to established scientific principles and the judgments of the most prominent experts in the country," said Dr. John Balbus, chief health scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund. "In other cases, EPA policies and decisions are made with little justification whatsoever. Greater transparency in agency decision-making and greater adherence to the recommendations of the agency's scientific experts will help bolster public trust in the agency and lead to greater protection of the public's health."

The world of computing could have been very different to that of today had a machine that was designed over 150 years ago been built at the time.

That is the view of Doron Swade, the man who is behind realising the creation of the famed Difference Engine No 2 which has just gone on display in Silicon Valley.

The reason the machine is so highly regarded is because it is seen as the first attempt at automated computing and viewed as something of a missing link in technology history.

Designed by the 19th Century computer pioneer Charles Babbage, the Difference Engine No 2 is a piece of Victorian technology meant to compute mathematical expressions called polynomials and return results to more than 31 digits, knocking the socks off your souped up pocket calculator.

Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing has said winning the prestigious award in 2007 had been a "bloody disaster".

The increased media interest in her has meant that writing a full novel was next to impossible, she told Radio 4's Front Row.

Lessing, 88, also said she would probably now be giving up writing novels altogether.

Her latest book is the partly fictional memoir entitled Alfred and Emily.

Since her Nobel win she has been constantly in demand, she said.

"All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed."

Speaking about her writing, she said: "It has stopped, I don't have any energy any more.