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RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — A government-run Saudi Arabian newspaper reports that for the first time in the conservative Muslim country, women will be allowed to attend soccer matches in one of the country’s stadiums.
Al-Sharq newspaper on Saturday quoted unnamed officials as saying that women will be able to watch the matches in a new facility that will be completed in 2014 in the western port city of Jeddah.
The officials say that the new stadium will include a family section with private cabins and balconies for women who wish to attend the games. Read the rest of this entry »
He was imprisoned in a small padded cell in Dona Ana County, where he remained until May 2007, never once seeing a judge. Read the rest of this entry »
It will be “impossible” to tell how deep the level of fraud will go at this year’s Olympics until the event takes place, an official has told The Huffington Post UK.
There are already 103 known email scams identified by the Olympic organisers, as well as fake lotteries and prize draws.
Fake merchandise has been seized by councils in London, Birmingham, Coventry and other cities, and almost 100 arrests have been made by Scotland Yard in a pre-emptive strike at organised crime networks gearing up for the Games.
So before you get ready to hop out of the door in your Team GB T-shirt – clutching your tickets to the judo semis and a four-night stay at travel tavern – how sure are you that any of those things are exactly what they seem?
“When you actually think about the amount of people that may come to this country, we’re talking 200 plus nations, 17,000 athletes, 500,000 spectators a day. It’s supposed to be giving a £2.1bn boost to the economy. I can’t believe there won’t be someone out there who won’t want to make some money by scamming people,” John Peerless, the lead officer for scams at the Trading Standards Institute (TSI) told The Huffington Post UK.
“A lot of times people aren’t going to realise they’ve been scammed until the Olympics come along,” he said. “Determining the scale of the problem is virtually impossible.”
Anti-scam officials have cited a need for a more aggressive use of statistics and data to stop con artists in their tracks.
“We seem to be one step behind people,” Peerless added later. “The organised network don’t have organised processes and procedures to follow under Data Protection rules and things like that. Read the rest of this entry »
Some users are calling on fellow Twitterers to silence their tweets on January 28 as a way of expressing their opposition to Twitter’s plan. They are using the hashtag #TwitterBlackout to organize the boycott, and tweets tagged with the hashtag are rolling in at a clip of about 12 per minute. The tweets span a range of languages, including English, German, Spanish and Arabic.
”Wake Up Call” नाम रहेको यो कार्यक्रममा संसारभरका युवाहरुले फेब्रुवरी २१ को दिन आफ्नो सरकारका प्रतिनिधीहरुलाई कुनै एक सामाजिक समस्याबारे अवगत गराउने छन् र तिनलाई यसको समाधानतर्फ उन्मुख गराउने छन्। यसै कार्यक्रमको नेपाल च्याप्टर “Wake Up Call, Nepal” अन्तर्गत हामी हाम्रो सम्बन्धित मन्त्री र राज्यमन्त्रीहरुलाई भेटेर अपाङ्गता भएका व्यक्तिहरुलाई सजिलो पर्ने गरी सार्वजनिक भवन र स्थानहरुलाई अपाङ्गमैत्री बनाउने अपिल बुझाउने छौं । यो कार्यक्रमलाई एकदमै प्रभावकारी बनाउन तपाईंहरुको सहयोग आबस्यक पर्ने भएकोले पहिलो सहयोग स्वरुप यो हाम्रो पेजलाई लाईक गरिदिएर यो कार्यक्रम अवधिभर हामीसँग सम्पर्कमा रहिदिनु होला। LIKES पछी Wake Up Call Nepal को प्रोफायल को तस्बिर आफ्नो प्रोफायल को तस्बिर बनाइ हाम्रो यो कार्यकम मा सहयोग गरिदिनुस । आउनुहोस तपाईं पनि हातमा हात मिलाउनुहोस । हामी तपाईँहरुलाई नयाँ खबर दिईरहनेछौं ।
Petition to collect 10,000 signatures:
Hon. Minister Top Bahadur Rayamajhi,
Hon. State Minister GhanshyamYadav,
Ministry of Local Development of Nepal
Singha Durbar, Kathmandu, Nepal
Dear Minister,
The Wake Up Call is a global movement that is uniting youth worldwide under one message on one day: “World, this is a Wake Up Call”. As a Wake Up Call Nepal Chapter, we, as youth, are peacefully uniting and requesting physically disabled people friendly buildings in the urban centers of the country andare submitting this letter along with the signatures we have collected.
This letter is the outcome of the Wake Up Call Nepal Chapter Movement to request our government to take immediate steps towards building physically disabled friendly urban structures in the city. It further broadly emphasizes the understanding of the access and mobility issues experienced by the people with disabilities and to identify and specify the steps that can be taken in addressing these inequalities.
A major outcome of the International Year of Disabled Persons was the formation of World Program of Action concerning Disabled persons (WPA), adopted by the General Assembly on 3rd December, 1982 by resolution 37/52. The European Commission also highlighted the Design forAll (DFA) in seeking a more user- friendly society in Europe where urban design ensures that environment, products, services and interfaces should work for all ages and abilities in different situations and under various circumstances. Accessibilityfor physically disabled people has been practice in the urban centers of the world, for example Curitiba’s public transportation in Brazil, wheelchair access ramps in Wroclaw, Poland and other utilities such astactile paving, automatic doors and low-floor busses. Read the rest of this entry »
Ngima Tendup Sherpa drives us through Sukedhara, into one of the alleys of Kapan, to meet his artist brother-in-law Ang Tsherin Sherpa (Tsherin).
On Wednesday, January 4, Tsherin had been in town for nearly a month and was returning to San Francisco a week later. But even during his short trip, Tsherin had shipped in stacks of canvases to work on, and at Kapan, he had set up his temporary studio.
A 100” x 72” canvas, laid out on a pair of wooden panels, leans against the wall in one of the rooms. A work in progress, we are faced by a large female demonic figure in blue.
Bright orange flames lick her and butterflies, in their under painting, flutter all around. The painting is very similar to Tsherin’s first contemporary work made in 2008, titled ‘The Butterfly Effect/Chaos Theory.’ Only then, it was a blue male figure painted on a much smaller scale of 22.5” x 28”.
“The Butterfly Effect/Chaos Theory was my response to the then financial meltdown in the US, where the blue figure represents the corporate giant,” Tsherin states.
Within the figure is a corporate chart, in Tibetan, outlining the eight worldly concerns of Buddhism.
“It is about how the corporate giant’s actions would impact the general public,” he adds and further expresses, “The butterfly effect, where one action can affect something totally different, is very much tied in to the Buddhist view of cause and effect, and to karma.”
Tsherin’s new painting, although similar in composition, refers to the more recent Occupy Wall Street movement.
The female version of the butterfly effect will be one of the 17 works at his upcoming solo exhibition in London, in October this year. Read the rest of this entry »
By Renee Parsons, Fmr. lobbyist for Friends of the Earth in Washington, D.C. focusing on nuclear energy issues
As an attack on Iran remains temporarily on the backburner and Syria, home to US-identified terrorist group Hamas, moves up the queue as the next target for military intervention, both are part of a larger strategy proposed to newly-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996.
The “Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” suggested a “new approach to peace’ premised on a ‘clean break’ from the Oslo peace process of the 1990′s. Oslo would have withdrawn Israeli troops from the occupied territories while affirming Palestine’s right of self-determination. Rather than pursuing a ‘comprehensive peace’ with the Arab world, Clean Break advocated an aggressive pre-emptive military strategy to destabilize Iraq and eliminate Saddam Hussein. In addition, Clean Break retained the ‘right of hot pursuit’ anywhere within the occupied territories and encouraged ‘seizing the initiative’ by “engaging” Hezbollah, Syria and Iran to trigger ultimate regime change.
The key authors of that document, American neo-cons Richard Perle, David Wurmser and Douglas Feith (who Gen. Tommy Franks called the ‘f… stupidest guy on the face of the earth” ie Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack, pg 281), soon found themselves influential national security positions within a receptive Bush Administration from which to proselytize their recommendations.
A decade later, the authors of that study are gone in name but their spirit of unending wars is alive and well within the Obama Administration’s recently announced “Defense Strategic Guidance” as part of “Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense,” Where Clean Break offered what was then a radical Middle East military strategy, Obama’s DSG identifies US military priorities for the 21st century to “confront and defeat aggression anywhere in the world” with an emphasis on the Middle East and Asia-Pacific region as the “greatest challenges for the future.” (Panetta, 1-5-2012) Read the rest of this entry »
BEIRUT — Two days of bloody turmoil in Syria killed at least 74 people, including small children, as forces loyal to President Bashar Assad shelled residential buildings and fired on crowds in a dramatic escalation of violence, activists said Friday.
Video posted online showed the bodies of five small children, five women and a man, all bloodied and piled on beds in what appeared to be an apartment after a building was hit in the city of Homs. A narrator said an entire family had been “slaughtered.”
Much of the violence was focused in Homs, where heavy gunfire hammered the city Friday in a second day of chaos. A day earlier, the city saw a flare-up of sectarian kidnappings and killings between its Sunni and Alawite communities, and pro-regime forces blasted residential buildings with mortars and gunfire, according to activists.
At least 384 children have been killed, as of Jan. 7, in the crackdown on Syria’s uprising since it began nearly 11 months ago, the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF said Friday. The count, based on reports from human rights groups, included children under age 18.
Most of the deaths took place in Homs and most of the victims were boys, UNICEF said. It said 380 children have been detained, including some under age 14. The United Nations estimates that more than 5,400 people have died in the turmoil. Read the rest of this entry »
DARREN MCCOLLESTER / GETTY IMAGES Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg could take take his social networking site public as early as next week, according to a published report.
Social networking juggernaut Facebook could file the paperwork for its much-anticipated initial public offering as early as next Wednesday, according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal. If previous reports are correct, the eight-year-old company could seek to raise as much as $10 billion, making the offering the largest technology IPO in history. Facebook is looking at a valuation of between $75 billion and $100 billion, the paper reported.
Although the IPO filing could come next week, the actual offering wouldn’t be until some time in the spring.
Facebook, which has amassed over 800 million users worldwide, had revenue of about $4 billion last year, according to published reports. Its public debut would be the capstone for a series of Internet IPOs that have occurred since the beginning of 2011. The company would be hoping to avoid the less-than-successful performance of some of the other offerings. For example, discount sales website Groupon and web-radio service Pandora both saw their stock prices fall below their IPO levels.
The bureau has asked contractors to suggest possible solutions including the estimated cost.
Privacy campaigners say they are concerned that the move could have implications for free speech.
The FBI’s Strategic Information and Operations Center (SOIC) posted its “Social Media Application” market research request onto the web on 19 January, and it was subsequently flagged up by New Scientist magazine.
The document says: “Social media has become a primary source of intelligence because it has become the premier first response to key events and the primal alert to possible developing situations.”
It says the application should collect “open source” information and have the ability to:
Provide an automated search and scrape capability of social networks including Facebook and Twitter.
Allow users to create new keyword searches.
Display different levels of threats as alerts on maps, possibly using colour coding to distinguish priority. Google Maps 3D and Yahoo Maps are listed among the “preferred” mapping options.
Plot a wide range of domestic and global terror data.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – YouTube, Google Inc’s video website, is streaming 4 billion online videos every day, a 25 percent increase in the past eight months, according to the company.
The jump in video views comes as Google pushes YouTube beyond the personal computer, with versions of the site that work on smartphones and televisions, and as the company steps up efforts to offer more professional-grade content on the site.
According to the company, roughly 60 hours of video is now uploaded to YouTube every minute, compared with the 48 hours of video uploaded per minute in May.
YouTube, which Google acquired for $1.65 billion in 2006, represents one of Google’s key opportunities to generate new sources of revenue outside its traditional Internet search advertising business.
Last week, Google said that its business running graphical “display” ads – many of which are integrated alongside YouTube videos – was generating $5 billion in revenue on an annualized run rate basis. Read the rest of this entry »
By Gordon Brown, Former prime Minister of the United Kingdom
The world is currently at risk of falling woefully short of the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education by 2015. If we are to avoid this fate, a game-changing reform is needed. I believe that a Global Fund for Education is that game-changing initiative.
As you’ll see in the report below, I propose that World Bank’s Global Partnership for Education (formerly, the Fast Track Initiative) should be converted into an independent Global Fund for Education (GFE) that draws on the experience of the global funds in health, and that serves as a focal point for a renewed drive toward getting another 68 million children into school by 2015. The GFE would engage the business sector, and have the flexibility to make grants to NGOs and private companies, as well as national governments and multinational agencies. Read the rest of this entry »
Photo: Marcus Benigno/IRIN A girl drinks from a public tap installed last year in Nepal's Nawalparasi District
27 January 2012 (IRIN) – After the discovery of unsafe levels of arsenic in Nepal’s groundwater more than a decade ago, government officials and aid groups are finally taking a critical look at whether their efforts have made a difference.
“We didn’t raise money for broken filters,” said US-based geologist Linda Smith, expressing frustration during a recent visit to Nawalparasi District in the southern Terai region, one of Nepal’s hardest-hit areas by arsenic-contaminated groundwater, when she came across abandoned water filters.
At one home, two broken cement water filters were being used as planters, while another filter distributed by the NGO she heads, Filters for Families (FFF), sat dismantled in the yard.
At a neighbouring home, parts were missing from a two-bucket filtration system from Bangladesh known as a Sono. The filter stand had been converted to a clothes-drying rack.
Smith retrieved unused filters and reimbursed families for the US$5 they had paid per filter, which has an actual cost of $70.
“There are people who need filters, and they need to realize this,” she said.
Some 2.7 million people in Nepal – nearly 10 percent of the population – are drinking water with arsenic concentrations above the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended 10 parts per billion (ppb), according to 2011 government estimates.
In Nawalparasi District alone, a 2008 government survey of tube wells (shallow wells 14-24m deep controlled by hand pumps) found almost 4,000 wells had arsenic that exceeded national standards (50ppb).
Another 4,418 met national standards, but not the international 10ppb threshold – altogether affecting nearly 140,000 people who depend on those tube wells for drinking water.
Not a priority?
More than half of the country’s 33,000 tube wells that contain unsafe levels of arsenic have been addressed with the distribution of filters, but it does not mean the filters are used or maintained properly, said Madhav Pahari, water and sanitation specialist for the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Kathmandu, which supports the government with arsenic containment. Read the rest of this entry »
