The posters began appearing last week on public transport in San Francisco. The above photographs with the moniker “Yes they are THAT serious!”
On July 10 -15 2008 San Francisco, California will host the 42nd International Children’s Games. Athletes from 100 cities representing 50 countries and spanning six (6) continents will compete in eight sports and participate in cultural activities designed to foster understanding and friendship. World famous Golden Gate Park, the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University and AT&T Park will provide venues for this exciting event. The San Francisco Games will bring together 2,000 athletes, 12 to 15 years of age, from 100 cities representing 50 countries from around the world, to put forth their personal best in track and field, tennis, swimming, volleyball, soccer, table tennis, basketball and golf.
I don’t find it exciting at all. It’s rather exploitive. Children competing? We are not Spartans. And the ad campaign by GREY San Francisco is downright sickening.
“The Supreme Council for Motherhood and Childhood (SCMC), a government body, has drawn up a national action plan to end the practice of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) in Yemen.
As a first step, the plan - the first of its kind in Yemen - aims to reduce FGM/C prevalence by 30 percent by 2012.
The plan has yet to be presented to Cabinet for approval, but was discussed at a workshop on 24 June, with the 65 participants representing UN agencies, the government, donors and civil society.
According to a new, unpublished, study on FGM/C presented at the workshop, FGM/C is practised in five of Yemen’s 21 governorates, with prevalence rates of 97.3 percent in al-Hudeidah Governorate; 97.3 percent in Hadhramaut; 96.5 percent in al-Mahrah; 82.2 percent in Aden; and 45.5 percent in Sanaa.”
It’s among the most bizarre places that I have ever been. And unless you’re a sucker for Stanlist architecture, you’re bound to be disappointed. And as for the steppes, they are as vast as they say. At any rate, Mongolia remains an isolated country of three million people.
Mongolians went to the polls on 29th June to elect a new parliament. The results were expected tomorrow. However, violent protests erupted in Ulan Bator following the re-election of President Nambariin Enkhbayar’s government.
The decree by President Nambaryn Enkhbayar allows the police to use force in dealing with thousands of rock-throwing protesters who mobbed the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party headquarters Tuesday and set it on fire. The crowd had not dispersed by Tuesday night, despite repeated volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets and the use of water cannons.
“Police will use necessary force to crack down on criminals who are looting private and government property,” said Munkhorgil, the minister of justice and home affairs, who like some Mongolians goes by one name. Ulan Bator was placed under curfew from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m., he said.
The crowd thinned slightly after the emergency declaration in the early hours of Wednesday, though some protesters had begun looting paintings from an art gallery and televisions from government offices. Others vandalized cars parked on downtown streets.
Enkhbayar, a member of the governing party, acknowledged the protesters’ complaints about the election but appealed for calm.”Let’s sit down and solve the election fraud,” he said on national television.
Mongolians went to the polls Sunday after a campaign focused on how to share the country’s mineral wealth.
Fraud accusations originally centered on two districts in Ulan Bator that were awarded to the governing party but were contested by two popular members of the Civic Movement party. Following that, protesters called the entire election into question, with opposition Democrats saying that their party, not the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, or MPRP, had won the election.
Some protesters pushed into the General Election Commission offices to demand that officials resign because of alleged voting irregularities and fraud. The commission defended the vote, but at least one party called for a recount in some districts of Ulan Bator.
“The Mongolian people voted for democracy and not for the MPRP, who are ex-communists,” said Magnai Otgonjargal, vice chairman of the Civic Movement party.
According to preliminary results, the People’s Revolutionary Party - which also governed the country when it was a Soviet satellite - won 46 seats in voting Sunday. That would give the party far more than half of the 76 seats in Parliament, called the State Great Khural.
The other major party, the Mongolian Democratic Party, took 26 seats. An independent won one seat and a minor party another. Results in two other seats were not yet clear. The General Election Commission has until July 10 to announce the final results.
Tuesday’s clashes far surpass the usual minor violence that has often accompanied elections in the 18 years since Mongolia cast off communist rule for democracy. The police seemed unprepared to deal with the crowd, which trampled one police officer, apparently leaving him badly hurt.
Video from Mongolia
Mongolia imposed a four-day state of emergency after riots in the capital, Ulan Bator, by protesters saying the June 29 elections won by the ruling party were rigged.
The headquarters of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party was set on fire yesterday, Badral Bayasal, an official with the Mongolian National Mining Association, said by telephone from the city today. Supporters of the Mongolian Democratic Party demonstrated after preliminary results of the ballot showed the MPRP winning a majority in parliament.
“The city center has been totally blocked off,” Bayasal said. “I can see the military out as well, tanks and everything close to my work.” There are reports that three people were killed in the violence, he said.
Bienvenido a mi país natal y al amor de todos mis tiempos. Colombiano soy and colombiano moriré. A las 5:45 p.m. hora colombiana el candidato del partido Republicano de los Estados Unidos John McCain llegó a Cartagena, en medio de fuertes medidas de seguridad. De inmediato se trasladó a la Casa de Huéspedes Ilustres en donde esta noche se reunirá con el presidente Uribe y otros miembros del gobierno colombiano.
Yo se que vienes a demonstrar claramente a los norteamericanos el éxito de la transformación colombiano de los últimos años. Colombia es otra ahora y ese hecho se debe no sólo a las esfuerzos del pueblo colombiano sino también a la ayuda que los Estados Unidos e otros países nos han brindado. Y sabemos que hay mucho más por hacer. La campaña contra el terrorisimo es algo que nosotros los colombianos entendemos perfectamente bién.
Lo que me preocupa de tu agrada visita es francamente que en la prensa norteamericana nos vengan a pintar en Colombia cómo un gobierno de ultra-derecha, algo que no somos. Colombia tiene un gobierno de seguridad y orden, es cierto pero nuestra política económica no se puede describir cómo de derecha. Y el otro problema para nosotros es que Colombia no quiere ser un tema en la campaña política de los gringos. No nos conviene serlo y les conviene a usted a hacernos un tema de su campaña electoral. La batalla contra el terrorismo no se puede polítizar de tal manera. Y ante el tema de libre comercio, ustedes bién pueden discutir los méritos del libre comercio sin tener que referirse sólo al TLC con Colombia. Por ejemplo, los EEUU tiene pendiente TLCs con Panamá y con Corea del Sur no sólo con Colombia. El gobierno colombiano no puede tener preferencia quien salga elegido cómo presidente de los EEUU. Nosotros, los colombianos, pues eso sí podemos tener preferencias. Y ojalá la suerte sea suya porque el otro es un peligro que el mundo no puede correr.
This is something Muhammad Yunus warned about in his latest book: the Corporate Social Responsibility is often just a disguise for profit-making activity, which he opposes. Yunus is in favor of full social entrepreneurship: no profits involved. Take the case of Ethos, the bottled water, which the New Internationalist calls “bullshit in a bottle” (I agree). What is Ethos?
“In what is quite possibly the last word in cynical advertising, Starbucks and PepsiCo have teamed up with Matt Damon (the Hollywood star who drives a Toyoto Prius to save money, not to be part of an ‘environmental trend’, so he says) to distribute a brand of ‘charitable’ bottled water called Ethos.”
What’s wrong with that? First, it is environmentally bad: we need to reduce the amount of bottled water we use in our countries. We have perfectly good tap water (it is even sometimes bottled and sold to us as bottled water). And if it has a little taste, get a Brita filter, ok? Our societies invested a lot of money so we could turn on the tap and get clean water, which went a long way to improve our health and living conditions.
And of course, plastic bottles are, well, plastic… petroleum products. We should reduce our use of those, as much as possible. We should Think Outside the Bottle.
And of course, we should also be careful with our consumption of water. Here is a map of water use, from the great Worldmapper website.
On more than one blog, I see comments such as this one:
Since the choice is between Barack and McCain I’d prefer that Barack be elected.
How stupid can you be? You have other choices. Wake up and see that having two candidates rammed down your throats by two political parties both of which are controlled by corporate interests is NO CHOICE AT ALL.
Stop accepting this false dichotomy. By falling into this trap, you have marginalized third parties which through the 1940s remained a vibrant part of American political life.
I’m guessing that media is simply confused. The question is why?
From Mike Allen at Politico on Yahoo News Service:
Obama to scrap Bush’s faith-based office
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) plans to slam President Bush’s faith-based program as “a photo op” and a failure on Tuesday, and says he would scrap the office and create a new Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships that would be a “critical” part of his administration. Obama, unveiling a plan to overhaul and expand Bush’s faith-based program during remarks at a community ministry in Zanesville, Ohio, said the White House Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives — which Bush founded during his second week in office — “never fulfilled its promise.”
“Support for social services to the poor and the needy have been consistently underfunded,” Obama says in prepared remarks. “Rather than promoting the cause of all faith-based organizations, former officials in the Office have described how it was used to promote partisan interests. As a result, the smaller congregations and community groups that were supposed to be empowered ended up getting short-changed.”
Versus this report by Jennifer Loven of the Associated Press on Yahoo News Service:
Obama courts conservatives with new faith program
Taking a page from President Bush, Democrat Barack Obama said Tuesday he wants to expand White House efforts to steer social service dollars to religious groups, risking protests in his own party with his latest aggressive reach for voters who usually vote Republican.
Obama contended he is merely stating long-held positions — surprising to some, he said, after a primary campaign in which he was “tagged as being on the left.”
In recent days, with the Democratic nomination in hand and the general election battle with Republican John McCain ahead, Obama has been sounding centrist themes with comments on guns, government surveillance and capital punishment. He’s even quoted Ronald Reagan.
On Tuesday, touring Presbyterian Church-based social services facility, the Democratic senator said he would get religious charities more involved in government anti-poverty efforts if elected.
“We need an all-hands-on-deck approach,” he said at Eastside Community Ministry.
The event was part of a series leading into Friday’s Fourth of July holiday aimed at reassuring skeptical voters and shifting away from being stamped as part of the Democratic Party’s most liberal wing.
He said the connection of religion and public service was nothing new in his personal life.
Obama showed he was comfortable using the kind of language that is familiar in evangelical churches and Bible studies by calling his faith “a personal commitment to Christ.” He said that his time as a community organizer in decimated Chicago neighborhoods, supported in part by a Catholic group, brought him to a deeper faith and also convinced him that faith is useless without works.
“While I could sit in church and pray all I want, I wouldn’t be fulfilling God’s will unless I went out and did the Lord’s work,” he declared.
His talk on faith in the battleground state of Ohio came a day after a speech on patriotism in Missouri, another November election battleground. Wednesday, he travels to Colorado Springs, Colo., a hub of conservative Christian organizations, for a speech focused on service.
God’s will? How about the people’s will and the people’s work instead? Is he that obtuse?
As per the conflicting reports, it is quite simple. Mike Allen has a political agenda to sell for Politico. Jennifer Loven of the Associated Press is actually reporting.
I am so disgusted that I don’t even know to start. Via the New York Times:
“The fact is, the challenges we face today — from saving our planet to ending poverty — are simply too big for government to solve alone,” Mr. Obama said. “We need an all hands on deck approach.”
So call in the Churches and give them government money to “save our planet” and to “end poverty”. Last I checked, they had not been successful on either count over say the past fifteen hundred years or so. Is this man insane? Or is simply trying to out do George W. Bush?
“I know there are some who bristle at the notion that faith has a place in the public square,” Mr. Obama said. “But the fact is, leaders in both parties have recognized the value of a partnership between the White House and faith-based groups.”
I don’t bristle at it. I abhor the notion of giving state money to espouse and advance the work of religious groups. It is unconstitutional. Leaders in both parties? That’s his rationale?
Today marks the sesquicentennial of the first public debate on the topic of evolution at the Linnean Society of London. It was an event planned in haste and set off by a letter received by Charles Darwin on 18 June 1858. The letter came from Ambon in the Ternate, a group of islands known as the Moluccas, between Sulawesi and Papua New Guinea. Writing to Darwin was a young English ornithologist named Alfred Russel Wallace who had been collecting specimens throughout the Malay Archipelago. Wallace would collect over 125,000 different specimens, over 80,000 of them beetles alone. Over a thousand of them were new to science. More importantly, Wallace noticed a distinction between the fauna of islands closer to the Asian mainland and those closer to Australia, the zoogeographical boundary now known as the Wallace line.
Recovering from a bout with malaria in 1858, Wallace took the time to write to Darwin about his observations.
The problem then was not only how and why do species change, but how and why do they change into new and well defined species, distinguished from each other in so many ways; why and how they become so exactly adapted to distinct modes of life; and why do all the intermediate grades die out (as geology shows they have died out) and leave only clearly defined and well marked species, genera, and higher groups of animals?
Darwin read Wallace’s maunscript with alarm for he had sat on his ideas (he had discussed them with others but had never set them to paper) on natural selection since his return on the Beagle in 1841. It is thus in the fortnight between 18 June and 1 July, 1858 that Darwin wrote a quick paper that together with the Wallace manuscript were presented to the Linnean Society of London.
For the next year and half, Darwin would write feverishly and in November 1859, The Origen of Species would be published. It is, without a doubt, the greatest book ever written.
