Censure is not enough. A resignation is demanded.

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A little known group called the Consortium of Pub Going, Loose and Forward Women with a membership of more than 5,000 within just one week of its formation is making news on the social networking site, Facebook. The group has decided to give pink colored under wears to the Hindu right wing group called Sri Ram Sene whose khaki-shorts-wearing cadres are often derisively called the chaddi wallhas. The move will clearly put to shame the Sene activists for chasing and beating up innocent women who were just enjoying themselves at a bar in Mangalore. It is a peaceful, non violent way to lodge protest against those who are bent upon imposing their fundamentalist style values over the whole of Indian society.

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Thirty million Americans, a record number, are receiving food stamps. Food stamps are a state-subsidised programme that helps people with a low income buy food at lower prices. But for many US citizens it may not be enough to help them weather the economic crisis, as Al Jazeera’s Lucy Keating discovers in the US town of Knoxville in Tennessee.

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Approximately half of the world’s 7,000 languages may disappear by the end of this century. The world loses another language approximately every two weeks as speakers die off. Languages are not mere words but each language a different construct, a window unto our world. When a language is lost, so is a conception of our world.

In the state of Chiapas, Mexico, about 25 percent of people do not speak any Spanish. Rather, they speak a host of indigenous languages, many of which originated in ancient Mayan times. Some organizations, like the Intercultural University of Chiapas school in San Cristobal, work to keep these dying languages alive by teaching them to the next generation.

Worldfocus special correspondent Lynn Sherr and producer Megan Thompson highlight Mexico’s attempt to preserve the past by speaking ancient languages in the present tense.

Learn about other endangered languages across Latin America and listen to audio samples courtesy of the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America

I doubt that this arrangement will work but we’ll see.

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Richard Holbrooke, US ambassador to Pakistan and Afghanistan, arrived in Pakistan for a four day visit in an attempt to solve regional instability.
President Obama needs to win Afghanistan and has moved his focus from Iraq to Afghanistan to fight the “right war”.

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