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President Obama’s visits to Kenya and Ethiopia can be justified as policy by the dreadful state of South Sudan, which borders both countries, but it is hard to escape the thought that he had personal reasons for wanting to visit Kenya, his father’s homeland, while still president. However, though joyfully received, he has not been an uncritical guest. His criticisms of the flaws of Kenyan society have been plain and well aimed. His attack on the scourge of FGM was quite without diplomatic circumlocution. “There’s no excuse for sexual assault or domestic violence; there’s no reason that young girls should suffer genital mutilation … These traditions may go back centuries; they have no place in the 21st century,” he said. This was a message that Kenya was ready to hear. Less so his advocacy of human rights for gay people. But he showed more courage than most spiritual leaders can muster when it came to telling an African audience news they don’t want to hear about the wrongness of homophobia.

The tremendous energy, ingenuity and optimism visible in Africa is often betrayed by the quality of the continent’s leaders, whose energy is directed to self-enrichment and whose optimism to supposing they can get away with it. It is not just Mr Obama’s views on women, nor his probity, that he might commend to Africa: there is also his willingness to resign when his term is up and his taste for fighting free and fair elections. We have come a long way since the enthusiasm that attended Bill Clinton’s visit to Africa in 1995, when the talk was all of a “new generation” of African leaders, committed to democracy and clean government.

Nowhere has the cycle of optimism and disillusionment run faster or further downward than in South Sudan, whose independence four years ago seemed like a triumph of Mr Obama’s Africa policy. Within two years the two leaders of the independence movement had started a civil war of astonishing horror and cruelty, which has produced two million refugees and persists unabated. It cannot even be blamed on Christian/Muslim tensions as the earlier war against the mostly Muslim north can be. Both sides in this war are notionally Christian.

Stopping the war there may be an achievement beyond Mr Obama, or anyone else. The oil reserves in the provinces most fiercely fought over are just too tempting to the utterly ruthless men who lead the opposing sides. But it is clearly a part of his purpose in Ethiopia to do what little he can. There is talk of sanctions and an arms embargo, neither of which seem to hold out much hope – arms will always find a way to oil wars, and sanctions will no doubt hurt civilians most. If the suffering of civilians could halt a war, South Sudan would by now have earned a millennium of peace.

All this will involve pragmatic cooperation with some nasty regimes, among them the Ethiopian one which is hosting the president. But that kind of engagement is unavoidable and morally defensible if things are to change. America’s power is weakening in Africa, just as the rest of the west’s has done. China is now an alternative market and source of investment, one which has no scruples about human rights. The effects of climate change are adding to human cruelty and encouraging it. Mr Obama’s message, and his example, may have a more lasting effect than the spectacle and popular rejoicing that greeted him.
source:http://www.theguardian.com

A HASIDIC girl from Brooklyn, New York, wrote a clever poem that spread like wildfire online and became a hit after it was posted on a wall in London.

Chanie Gorkin, in eleventh grade at the all-girls Lubavitch high school Beth Rivkah in Crown Heights, jotted down the lines for a class assignment last year and then published it on PoetryNation.com.

What happened next is remarkable.


Zachery Stephenson, the events manager at the Nambucca bar on Holloway Road in North London had tacked the poem on a wall, after his cousin in New York had forwarded it in response to a negative Facebook post, US ABC News reports.

There it was seen by Ronnie Joice, who was feeling a “bit worn out” after a day of meetings about a prospective job.

The poem, which at first appears to be a bleak outlook on a bad day, contains a surprise. The ending instructs the reader to go back and re-read from the bottom to the top, which completely reverses its meaning.


Mr Joice was so taken with the clever poem, he photographed and posted it to Twitter, which resulted in thousands of shares on social media.

The uplifting poem — ironically titled “Worst Day Ever?” — has since been translated into multiple languages, including Hebrew, Chinese and Russian. Her father, Baruch Gorkin, posted some of the translations to his Facebook page.

Chanie’s brother, Shimon Gorkin, proudly posted: “That’s my sister!”


Chanie’s mother, Dena Gorkin, confirmed to ABC News that her daughter wrote the poem. She also said Chanie was away at summer camp and unavailable for comment, but Mrs Gorkin has been telling her daughter about the reaction to the poem and “she’s quite overwhelmed.”


“One of the major tenets of Hasidic philosophy is that the mind rules over the heart, that we are able to channel our emotions to the positive ... that there is God in everything, and it is part of our mission in life to look for the good, and to find it and to spread it,” Mrs Gorkin said.

So, when Chanie was given the assignment to write about her worst day ever, she used her writing skills to turn the question around.

The Worst Day Ever, by Chanie Gorkin

Today was the absolute worst day ever
And don’t try to convince me that
There’s something good in every day
Because, when you take a closer look,
This world is a pretty evil place.
Even if
Some goodness does shine through once in a while
Satisfaction and happiness don’t last.
And it’s not true that
It’s all in the mind and heart
Because
True happiness can be attained
Only if one’s surroundings are good
It’s not true that good exists
I’m sure you can agree that
The reality
Creates
My attitude
It’s all beyond my control
And you’ll never in a million years hear me say
Today was a very good day
Now read it from bottom to top, the other way,
And see what I really feel about my day.
Additional reporting by Network Writers

source : http://www.news.com.au

In her diary entry for 11 March 1968, Barbara Castle noted with an attempt at nonchalance: “The Daily Express has an incredible feature article: Why Barbara is King of the Castle.” She continued, “Frank Allaun [a backbench MP] popped up to me in the dining room in the House to tell me that at more than one meeting recently … my name has seriously been canvassed for PM.”

In June that year, 850 women workers at Ford began a strike for equal pay. The abortion act had become law. Second-wave feminism was beginning to lodge in the popular imagination. Equal pay legislation, Spare Rib and divorce reform were just around the corner. A woman leader of the Labour party, it seemed, was surely the next step.

Nearly 50 years on, the UK’s biggest and oldest mainstream progressive party has still not elected a woman leader. Women – Margaret Beckett, in the months after John Smith’s death, and Harriet Harman now – are OK to stand in as sensible, effective, interim leaders. But elected? Not a chance. Yet within seven years of the suggestion that Castle could be the pioneer, the Conservatives had elected Margaret Thatcher. Why Thatcher, and why not Castle?

Come to that, why Nicola Sturgeon and Natalie Bennett in the 2015 general election? Why do new parties that have progressive agendas understand that women leaders can bring a humanity and engagement to the dry old bloke atmosphere of Westminster. Yet Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall are cringingly quizzed about their weight, fertility and fashion choices, and the implication from one of the other camps that they might not be tough enough for the five years ahead. “Startlingly retro” Cooper called it. There are other ways of putting it.

Writing a biography of Barbara Castle, it struck me as inarguable that her failure to make it to the top was partly an everyday tale of luck. Timing and chance shape political destinies. But 1968 was also the peak of her popularity. Within a year, she had destroyed her standing and undermined – almost fatally – her own political legacy.

After the Thatcher assault on trade union rights, many people would say that Castle’s attempt to reform union law, In Place of Strife, was a courageous attempt to meet the challenge posed by strikes and industrial disruption, which in the end played a big part in exiling Labour from power.

It is also clear now that Castle’s politics were feminine in a way that she – who only ever described herself as a feminist when it seemed to offer some advantage – never considered. Well before she trespassed on the trade unions’ right to self-regulation, she had affronted millions of men by introducing the breathalyser to stop them killing other people, and demanding that they avoid killing themselves by wearing seat belts. She had a blithe disregard for the pay differentials in a way that ate into generations of carefully guarded privilege. A party that was still predominantly about trade union representation in parliament would never have let Castle become leader.

Anecdotally, that hypermasculine legacy lingers in other parties with close ties to the old industrial left. Germany’s SPD, for example, remains a strongly male preserve. And if there is a pattern to where women break through to lead long-established parties of the left, as Ségolène Royal did briefly in France, it has been as an emergency response that triumphs over old hostilities.

It was a sense of crisis that propelled Thatcher into the leadership of the Conservatives. In a party where she was one of only seven Tory women among 270 men, she alone had the nerve to challenge the orthodoxy and appeal to a panic-stricken demand for something completely different.

That was only part of the story. Thatcher herself used to pretend it was as much of a surprise to her as it had been to most observers. But that was one of the fictions she employed in order to disguise how confident she was in her own abilities.

As the first volume of Charles Moore’s biography makes clear, it was Thatcher’s radicalism that mattered, not her gender, which was fortunate since the knights of the shires referred to the contest as “the filly against the gelding”. What they saw in her, along with her good legs, was the guts to make the country great again. They were in a mess. She dared to offer something completely different.

This is not only a political phenomenon. It’s evident in the corporate world, as two recent studies have shown. In crisis? Send for a woman. Boards appoint women to lead when the share price is on the floor, financial crisis looms or a predator lurks.

Maybe it’s because crisis puts a priority on traditionally feminine strengths of team-building and people management skills that generate the confidence to tackle problems. Or maybe it’s just that the male candidates look at the balance sheet and say, nah, not this time. It often doesn’t turn out well, so they call it the glass cliff. Thatcher stepped off it and prospered, but for eight wobbly years it was a close-run thing. In the corporate sphere, women like Xerox’s Anne Mulcahy who turned the firm from junk share to investment status in three short years, have done it too.

But the great example is the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. It was she who had the courage to challenge Helmut Kohl after a scandal over party funding threatened to engulf the CDU in the late 1990s. She wrote an opinion piece for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung demanding change and said Kohl, her mentor and boss, was an “old warhorse” incapable of the new leadership the challenge demanded. She was party chairman within the year.

It’s a bit late for Cooper to reinvent herself as an aggressive iconoclast ready to challenge party orthodoxy now, and Kendall, who has made it her stock in trade, could scarcely be said to have prospered by it. But there is no one on the planet who thinks that one more heave will return Labour to office.

This is only a guess, but all the evidence tells us that however progressive their policies, old parties of the left are in the grip of creaky, outdated institutional structures – too easily dominated by men, too hostile to women – to create a culture that encourages women to flourish. Labour needs radicalism, innovation, a sense of excitement, a different style of engagement. Just the moment to send for a woman.
source:http://www.theguardian.com

Property porn. Want some? I know you love to hate this stuff. “A new level of luxury living has arrived in the heart of London,” reads the marketing mush for the promised Aykon Tower, a 50-storey freak erection on the south side of the Thames that doesn’t actually exist except as a sky-scraping stack of “off-plan” sales and its architect’s glistening CGIs. Its blurb breathes that the so-called “Jenga Tower” will provide “the ultimate in branded living experiences”, with “lavish interiors designed by Versace Home”. Fancy a bedsit there for £700,000? Something larger for £4m? Too late, the prices of what’s left have just gone up.
Come see London's latest luxury housing venture – where a car space is £50,000
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This is the type of thing that makes people loathe London and makes an awful lot of Londoners feel ill. Most Aykon advance sales have been to the overseas super-rich who have (metaphorically) slapped vast wads of cash into estate agents’ hands and expect to see fat returns even before the 360 Versace pads for private purchase have become real. What’s in all this for everyone else?

Well, there is something, actually. Also promised as part of the deal negotiated with Labour-run Lambeth council before it granted the Aykon’s developer planning consent are 90 dwellings that residents of Lambeth who aren’t filthy rich will be able to afford. Of these, 38 will be for “shared ownership”, the form of “affordable” home designed for households on middling London incomes who can’t afford to buy outright. The other 52, of which 21 are family-sized, will be for rent levels well below local market rates – not as low as traditional social housing, but at least within the realm of sanity and still coverable by housing benefit.

Some will say this isn’t good enough. They will variously complain that Lambeth should have driven a harder bargain, that the 90 “affordable” homes aren’t “affordable” enough, and that the “planning gain” they represent isn’t worth the aesthetic pain another giant Thames-side tower will inflict. They will be outraged that the Aykon’s 20% minority of relatively cheap homes will be served by a separate “poor door” and their inhabitants barred from the swimming pool, roof garden, cinema and other exclusive amenities to be provided for the rich folk next door.

    Off-plan sales to the rich help fund housebuilding when the industry is still emerging from a credit crunch-shaped hole

Yes, it’s sickening. Yes, things shouldn’t be this way. And, yes, those objections may have some force. But do you want those 90 homes or don’t you? And if you don’t, what have you to say to the 90 Lambeth households you’d deprive? If you were running a London borough whose lower-middle classes are being steadily priced out and whose poorest have effectively formed a queue for social housing that stretches right around the block, where would you find the land and the money to help them with? Were you London’s mayor, what would you do to make things better?

Here are some miserable things to think about. Housing activists and mayoral hopefuls of the left call for an end to “off-plan” sales and promise bans on “poor doors”. They join the popular cry against “rich foreign investors,” saying that their filthy lucre jacks up prices and that they won’t even live in their speculator eyries, being casually content to ”buy to leave”.

Not so fast. Off-plan sales to the rich, be they from Hammersmith or Hong Kong, help fund London housebuilding when the industry is still emerging from a credit crunch-shaped hole. Private housing schemes, be they spectacular or small, have generated about one-third of the affordable homes of all kinds built in London in recent years, according to the Greater London Authority. “Poor doors” are often desired by the housing associations that build the flats behind them because it holds down their cost, making them that bit more affordable.

Steepling “prime central” inflation is seen by market analysts as only one driver among several pushing London house prices up, but as pretty confined in its effects. Posh estate agent Savills thinks there’s a lot less “buy to leave” than some politicians would have you believe. After all, why would you let a bunch of flats stand empty when you can make money by letting them?

Where London’s many housing problems are concerned, there’s a lot more rhetoric than realism. People call for statutory rent regulation, a land value tax, more freedom for boroughs to borrow money to build, increased grant funding from the Treasury, fiercer council tax penalties on empty homes and larger compulsory purchase powers. Don’t hold your breath. Only national government can provide such things and the current one is not that way inclined. That is despite even London’s Tories, Boris Johnson included, and its big businesses favouring of much of the above and, by the way, regarding David Cameron’s plan to extend the right to buy to housing association tenants as a recipe for catastrophe.

The realism that’s required is not the type that dignifies subservience to an absurd status quo, but the variety that recognises the predicaments faced by London boroughs who want to help their less wealthy residents get better housed: predicaments that also await whoever succeeds Boris Johnson at the helm of City Hall after the mayoral election next May.

We all know what we want: more and better homes for Londoners on low and middle incomes; a bigger, cheaper and better-run private rented sector; a settlement of the tensions between conservation and development, one relating to historic buildings and council-owned estates alike, that serves the best interest of the city as whole. The next mayor and the boroughs he or she will work with will have limited assets and powers for working towards those goals. There will be exacting dilemmas and uncomfortable compromises. Progress will not come easily. The best mayoral candidate will be one who sees all this, and tailors policy accordingly.
source:http://www.theguardian.com

A bat found inside a Silverton home has tested positive for rabies according to county health officials.

The bat, which was tested July 20, is the fifth bat to test positive for rabies in Oregon this year, but the first in Marion County since 2012.

There are simple steps homeowners can take to safely handle or avoid a rabid bat.

“If it’s outside and no one’s touched it, leave it alone. Make sure your dogs and cats stay away from it,” said Richard Sherman, Program Supervisor for Environmental Health at the Marion County Health Department.

“If its flying around and it came in at night because its chasing an insect, leave the window open and it’ll probably fly right back out and you’re fine. If you find it lying around in the daytime or flopping around, I’d be more concerned.”

Seeing a bat on the ground in the daytime can be a sign that it’s sick, according to a Marion County Health Department press release.

Animals and pets usually acquire rabies by attempting to eat a rabid bat or coming into contact with its saliva. If a pet has come into contact with a bat, contact your veterinarian.

The health department recommends that homeowners vaccinate their pets against rabies and keep away from wildlife, including feeding wildlife. Homeowners should also seal openings into houses, barns, sheds, and screen chimneys so bats cannot roost there.

If you find a bat that may be rabid, call the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife at (866) 968-2600 to report its location.
source : http://www.statesmanjournal.com

OKLAHOMA CITY – Officials are warning livestock owners of the dangers associated with rabies.

When you think about protecting your animals from rabies, you might imagine shots for your dogs or cats.

However, officials with the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food, and Forestry are warning livestock owners about the disease.

Rabies is usually spread through a bite, but patients can also be exposed through contact with saliva or nervous tissue.

In Oklahoma, the disease is more common in livestock, but may not always be recognized.

In carnivores, experts say you may notice aggressive behavior. However, the symptoms are much different in horses, cattle and other livestock.

In those cases, symptoms include loss of appetite, limb paralysis, abdominal straining or difficulty swallowing.

“As we move toward show season, Oklahoma youth will be having daily contact with livestock that are susceptible,” said Justin Roach, ODAFF staff veterinarian. “That’s why it is important for all owners to properly vaccinate their animals and prevent the spread of this disease.”
source : http://kfor.com

British actress Kate Winslet struggled to accept her fuller figure during her youth because the women in her life failed to promote a positive attitude toward body image.

The star has famously embraced her curves throughout her career, but she admits it was something she had to learn on her own as she was only exposed to “damaging” comments about women’s bodies as a child, reports UsMagazine.com.

During a thrill-seeking trip with adventurer Bear Grylls on his series “Running Wild With Bear Grylls,” she explains, “When I grew up, I never heard positive reinforcement about body image from any female in my life. I only heard negatives. That’s very damaging, because then you’re programmed as a young woman to immediately scrutinize yourself and how you look.”

Winslet’s childhood experiences have made the actress more conscious of how her daughter, Mia, views her own body and she actively encourages the 14 year old to admire her own figure.

She says, “I stand in front of the mirror and say to Mia, ‘We are so lucky we have a shape. We’re so lucky we’re curvy. We’re so lucky we’ve got good bums.’ And she’ll say, ‘Mummy, I know, thank God.’”

Winslet’s “Running Wild With Bear Grylls” episode airs on Monday night.
Oh, and take a look at Winslet recreate a famous scene from “Titanic” on the side of a mountain below.