When one of my daughters was small, she was mad about elephants.  At the zoo, the elephant bath was the high point of our visit. Her room was covered in toy versions, even on the duvet. When she sat down to watch a video, nine times out of ten it was Babar. They were sweet little cartoons, with a gently instructive message to them, and this week’s tumultuous events, when attempts were made to ban our new magazine, reminded me of one in particular.

In this episode, one of Babar’s aids rushes in to tell the young elephant king that the rhinoceroses, led by Rataxas, are blockading their kingdom and demanding white feathers.  Babar’s subjects begin rounding up mountain of white feathers from every corner of the kingdom, but as soon as they are delivered, the news comes back:  Rataxas isn’t satisfied. He has no use for white feathers; now he wants fuchsia feathers.

Where the US leads, the UK meekly follows, and drugs are no exception. Last month the UK launched a major drive to offer the Gardasil vaccine, first launched in America six years ago, for all 11- to 18-year-old girls to prevent some strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) purported to cause cervical cancer.

The UK government’s official line, as dutifully reported in the press, was that by replacing Cervarix, the HPV vaccine offered since 2008, the UK now had a superior vaccine on offer.

Today is both the International Day of Peace, the historic day of our Peace America Intention Experiment.  If you haven’t yet signed up to participate in this live event, being broadcast by Gaiam TV, please do so right now:   www.gaiamtv.com/experiment.  

As soon you as you sign up, you’ll be sent an email by Gaiam that gives you a free live link to the TV show, which will be broadcast for about 20 minutes at 1 pm Eastern DST.

Every so often, I trip across yet more evidence about the extraordinarily holistic grand design of our world.  Today that astounding little factoid had to do with why exactly cats purr.

Dr. David Williams, the American medical researcher, biochemist and chiropractor, recently wrote about some fascinating research from the Fauna Communications Research Institute in Hillsborough, North Carolina, a group devoted to animal acoustical sounds, who decided to investigate the very fundamental question of exactly why cats purr.

Today, I’m thrilled to tell you, is the first official day that What Doctors Don’t Tell You is on the British newsstands as a 100-page magazine.  Next week it will be on sale in most supermarkets in the UK.  

The launch is this magazine is not a birth so much as a coming of age.  Although this marks the start of our publication as a magazine, this title is in its third decade.  

In 1990, my husband Bryan and I first launched a 12-page newsletter from our top bedroom out of a conviction that patients were being left in the dark about the true safety and effectiveness of most standard treatments in modern medicine.

I’m back from a restful few weeks in Cyprus, and got this wonderful story from Bill Sweet of Spindrift, which I thought I’d share with all of you.

Lawrence Anthony, the South African conservationist and ‘elephant whisperer’ died last March of a heart attack. Of all the remarkable life events of this outstanding person, the most extraordinary of all was his funeral, because arriving there, with no invitation or warning was a herd of elephants, who’d come to pay tribute to one of their best friends.

Gore Vidal, who died this week, is an unlikely hero of mine.  For all his deliberate offensiveness and wilful antagonism, for all his apparent contradiction, he was one of the most clear-eyed critics America has ever had.

His collection of essays:  United States:  Essays 1952-1992, which won an honorary National Book Award, are unsurpassed in their summing up of America’s shortcomings.  All of Vidal’s ascerbic wit derived from a sense that America had passed its best and that we’d somehow lost the plot in the last half of the last century, ‘the ancient American sense that whatever is wrong with human society can be put right by human action.’

Dear Readers,

What would Jesus do?

Five years ago, I stumbled on a healing mechanism I considered a miracle that I’d never heard of before.  I had decided to begin teaching intention workshops, but since it was impossible to have my students manifest something major like a car or a new job over the weekend, we hit upon the idea of carrying out intention in a small group, asking the group to send healing intention to someone in the group with a healing challenge.  

During weekend workshops, we decided to divide the audience of attendees into small groups of eight, and ask these groups of complete strangers to send loving thoughts to each other.

We often hear about how we are moving to higher frequency and will evolve to a higher plane after 2012, as though we’re all going to get sprinkled with fairy dust and wake up one morning to a completely new world. I’m not one of those people who believes ‘the Shift’ is going to happen automatically.  I think it’s going to take a lot of new thinking, new action and new community by the likes of you and me.