act on darfur!
Some seems to forget about the horrible massacare that has been ongoing in Darfur.
As a quick reminder- just another place where extreme religious Muslim decided to fight a Jihaad war, a holy war against those who are not Muslim. This time the victims were innocent Darfurians.
No one cares for them, so please visit act on darfur and donate some pennies for those who are unforunate.
Johnathan ross sex joke
“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,” said the American inventor Benjamin Franklin. To this list, we might now well add tabloid outrage over Jonathan Ross.
The News of the World splashes today with a story that the “megabucks” BBC star “infuriated listners” to his Saturday morning Radio 2 show yesterday with a “crude joke about sex with an 80-year-old woman”.
It was inevitable that the tabloids would be monitoring Ross’s every utterance after he returned to the air after being suspended by the BBC for three months over his part the “Sachsgate” affair.
The NoW and the Mail on Sunday reckon the banter between Ross and his producer about a “real” 80-year-old Alzheimer’s suffer shows he has no remorse for his part in the lewd prank phone calls to Andrew Sachs on Russell Brand’s Radio 2 show.
The NoW carries condemnation of Ross’s latest “shocking blunder” by the Tory MP David Davies and the former home secretary David Blunkett.
However, at the time of writing the majority of posters on the NoW’s website – which features a clip of yesterday’s broadcast – do not share the paper’s moral outrage.
One, Gordon d’Andilly, writes: “Oh for crying out loud! Can all these outraged sensitive souls just drop it now. Yes, we get the message you don’t like Jonathan Ross, we understand you think the licence fee is too high, pointless, an outrage etc etc etc …
“I am so bored by this false moral outrage by the same bunch of half-baked, slightly loony fruitcakes that crawl out of the woodwork every time something someone may find funny/offensive is aired … there was very little wrong in September, there is nothing wrong now. Go away! Go back to reading the Daily Mail and the Watchtower and leave normal people alone.”
Ross’s allegedly tasteless remarks seemed to pass the Observer’s Miranda Sawyer by in her review of the show.
And if the viewing figures for the first episode of the new series of Friday Night with Jonathan Ross are anything to go by – more than 1 million higher than before his suspension – the British public is either glad to have him back, or is carefully monitoring his conduct for further offence.
Perhaps to the disappointment of some in the media, it was left to the Scientology ambassador/Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise to provide the swearing on Friday night’s programme, which is still topping the most popular slot on the BBC iPlayer, although the NoW claims the corporation edited out some of Ross’s swearing …
Barak Obama on family organization
President Barack Obama today made the most contentious move of his young administration with an order, overturning a ban on federal funds to foreign family planning organisations that either offer abortions or provide information or counselling about abortion.
The rule change continues the dismantling of George Bush’s conservative policies. It is likely to encounter fierce criticism from the still robust anti-abortion movement.
It will allow US aid, usually through the US agency for international development, to flow to HIV/Aids clinics, birth-control providers and other organisations that advocate or provide counselling about abortion across the world. It is known as the “global gag rule” because it denies US taxpayer dollars to clinics that even mention abortion to women with unplanned pregnancies.
The rule was signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984, overturned by Bill Clinton in 1993, and reinstated by Bush. Critics of the rule say it deprives the world’s poor women of desperately needed medical care, while proponents say US tax dollars should not promote abortion.
Family planning groups in America and the UK cheered the rule change. Dr Gill Greer, director general of London-based International Planned Parenthood Federation, estimated the gag rule had cost the group more than $100m for family planning and sexual and reproductive health programmes during the eight years of the Bush administration, which she said amounted to 36 million unplanned pregnancies and 15 million induced abortions.
“The gag rule has done immense harm and caused untold suffering to millions around the world,” she said in a statement. “It has undermined health systems and endangered the lives and health of the poorest and most vulnerable women on the planet by denying access to life saving family planning, sexual and reproductive health and HIV services and exposing them to the dangers of unsafe abortion.”
While Obama has spent the first two days of his presidency overturning Bush policies, for example restricting US interrogation practices of terror suspects and an order pledging to close the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, those were backed by a broad political consensus. Abortion, however, remains a bitterly contentious issue, as evidenced by the thousands of people who marched in Washington yesterday opposing abortion rights.
Yesterday was the 36th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v Wade, which guaranteed a woman’s right to choose abortion.
While both Clinton and Bush used the Roe v Wade anniversary to change US policy on abortion, Obama declined yesterday. He instead issued a statement reaffirming his commitment “to protecting a woman’s right to choose”.
“On the 36th anniversary of Roe v Wade, we are reminded that this decision not only protects women’s health and reproductive freedom, but stands for a broader principle: that government should not intrude on our most private family matters,” he said.
The rule comes as no surprise. During the president campaign Hillary Clinton, who as secretary of state will oversee foreign aid, pledged to end the rule.
The rule change “would be huge,” California Representative Diana DeGette of Colorado told National Public Radio. “By the US restricting women’s rights to reproductive planning internationally, it really destroys their lives. Because they can’t control the size of their family, that affects their use of resources and food and child nutrition and so many other things. The way to increase the stability in Third World countries, frankly, is for sensible family planning.”
Avoiding Impulse Spending
Answer these questions truthfully:
1.) Does your spouse or partner complain that you spend too much money?
2.) Are you surprised each month when your credit card bill arrives at how much more you charged than you thought you had?
3.) Do you have more shoes and clothes in your closet than you could ever possibly wear?
4.) Do you own every new gadget before it has time to collect dust on a retailer’s shelf?
5.) Do you buy things you didn’t know you wanted until you saw them on display in a store?
If you answered “yes” to any two of the above questions, you are an impulse spender and indulge yourself in retail therapy.
This is not a good thing. It will prevent you from saving for the important things like a house, a new car, a vacation or retirement. You must set some financial goals and resist spending money on items that really don’t matter in the long run.
Impulse spending will not only put a strain on your finances but your relationships, as well. To overcome the problem, the first thing to do is learn to separate your needs from your wants.
Advertisers blitz us hawking their products at us 24/7. The trick is to give yourself a cooling-off period before you buy anything that you have not planned for.
When you go shopping, make a list and take only enough cash to pay for what you have planned to buy. Leave your credit cards at home.
If you see something you think you really need, give yourself two weeks to decide if it is really something you need or something you can easily do without. By following this simple solution, you will mend your financial fences and your relationships.
Free marketing 101 Ebook
This is a PLR Ebook. Means its for free disritbution.
It seems solid and thought I could share it with our loyal readers, so if you are into internet marketing – try it.
Affiliate marketing 101 (2006)
Free marketing Ebooks will be available soon
Survivorlist crew is proud to announce we have bought a larger variety of Ebooks regarding marketing, SEO and other webmaster related issues.
Those Ebooks will be available for free download through survivorlist.org (there will be a new section dedciated for this issue).
We are sincerely hoping this would let you enjoy our magazine much more.
The digital generation
Children are spending increasing amounts of their lives in front of televisions, computers and games consoles, cramming in nearly six hours of screen time a day, according to research.
The online activity is building barriers between parents and children, the authors say, with a third of young people insisting they cannot live without their computer.
From the age of seven children are building multimedia hubs in their rooms, with games consoles, internet access and MP3 players, which they wake up to in the morning and fall asleep to at night, according to the study of five- to 16-year-olds.
Girls in particular are likely to chat online to their friends at night and 38% take a console to bed instead of a book.
Some parents who have stopped their children from having a TV in their bedroom for fear they will watch it too much have justified internet access on the basis that it will help with homework.
But the latest from market research agency ChildWise finds children and young teens are more likely to socialise than do homework online. Some 30% say they have a blog and 62% have a profile on a social networking site.
The report is based on an annual survey, now into its 15th year, of 1,800 children at 92 schools across the country. “This year has seen a major boost to the intensity and the independence with which children approach online activities,” the report says.
Screen time has become so pervasive in the daily lives of five- to 16-year-olds that they are now skilled managers of their free time, juggling technology to fit in on average six hours of TV, playing games and surfing the net, it suggests.
But reading books is falling out of favour – 84% said they read for pleasure in 2006, 80% in 2007 and 74% this year.
To pay for their habits, ad hoc handouts from parents and grandparents are becoming more lucrative and in some cases replacing ordinary pocket money altogether. Two-thirds of children had been given a handout from a family member in the week before they were questioned, which they didn’t expect to pay back.
Children who use the internet spend on average 1.7 hours a day online, but one in six spent more than three hours a day online on top of the 1.5 hours they spent on their games consoles. They still have time for 2.7 hours of television – though the report says they tend to multitask, doing these activities simultaneously.
Where children initially began using the internet to do homework, that has become an afterthought and they are much more likely to spend their time online socialising. One in three said the computer is the single thing they couldn’t live without, compared with a declining number – one in five – who name television.
Pupils are using the internet less while at school, frustrated by the low-tech access and the restrictions put in place to stop them from accessing inappropriate material. Younger girls are now catching up with boys in the use of games consoles.
The government has moved to address what has been dubbed the “toxic childhood” of children living under intense media influence. Just over a year ago the government published a long-term plan that ordered a review of children’s media habits by psychologist Tanya Byron.
Byron recommended cinema-style ratings for video games as she warned of a “digital divide” growing up within families as children mastered the internet and video games while their parents and grandparents often had little clue about the material they were looking at.
Today’s research suggests that could now be the case. Rosemary Duff, ChildWise’s research director, said: “The internet has moved to a whole new level. They are watching the same amount of TV but there is a change in the way children communicate and get their information.
“It’s so clear that a lot of children are fluent communicators but not in a conventional way. They aren’t readers, they are reliant on spellchecks.
“They are a generation abandoning print and paper, and the whole integration of technology and the way they glide from one to the other is seamless. They will be surfing the net, talking to a friend and downloading a track simultaneously.
“It’s hard for the older generation to understand what’s going on with their children because they communicate in a completely different way.”
Duff said: “38% of nine- to 14-year-old girls take the games console to bed at night. That is the age group of girls who used to be the most avid readers. Now they have a media hub in their rooms.”
Kids connected
Ages five to eight
A quarter of five-year-olds have the internet in their room. One in three eight-year olds have a mobile phone
Nine to 12
By the time they leave primary school two in five have the net in their room. Four out of five still read for pleasure.
13-16
Around half have internet access, spending 2.2 hours a day on sites such as YouTube, Bebo and MySpace. Almost all have their own phone.
‘I bought my telly. I thought: I’m 14 and I’ve got Christmas money’
“My dad’s always trying to tell me about something in the news and I know it already,” says Louis Fitzherbert, 14, from south London.
Though keeping tabs on football is why he regularly dips into his bedroom TV, picking up doses of current affairs is an unintended bonus.
“I invested in my own telly,” he says. “A lot of my friends have tellies in their rooms. I thought: I’m 14 and I’ve got Christmas money …”
His family have thus recovered the use of the communal set, which he had colonised for another passion, Call of Duty (CoD), a PlayStation war game. He plays online with schoolmates and with like-minded enthusiasts all over the world.
He rations himself to an hour’s CoD on weekday evenings after homework. But weekend nights are a different story.
“At friends’ houses or at mine we find ourselves playing it past midnight,” he says.
If one eye is kept on Sky Sports News for the latest scores, the other clocks Facebook and MSN Messenger four or five times an evening to keep in touch with friends. A Facebook check is the first thing he does after school.
Louis sees a danger in spending too much time with screens but says a screen-free life would be difficult to imagine.
“It would be hard. I think it would be hard for any boy of my age.”
Plane crashes in NY
Some passengers screamed, others tucked their heads between their knees, and several prayed over and over: “Lord, forgive me for my sins.” But a man named Josh who was sitting in the exit row did exactly what everyone is supposed to do but few ever do: he pulled out the safety card and read the instructions on how to open the exit door.
US Airways Flight 1549 smacked into the Hudson river the way a speedboat lands after jumping over a wake – with a thud that rattled teeth and nerves and stunned the cabin silent. It was as if everyone was waiting for someone else to shout in pain and no one did.
Then Josh stood up. “Someone tried to pull the door in,” another passenger recalled, “and he said, ‘No, you’ve got to throw it out.’ He twisted it and threw it out.”
Thus began some of the most harrowing minutes of what the New York governor, David A Paterson, described as the Miracle on the Hudson. It was a perfect landing and a perfect ending: everyone survived. But from the moment the plane hit the water to the moment the last person reached dry land, scores of human dramas unfolded.
Friendships were struck on a frigid wing. Chivalrous heroes emerged beside selfish elbow-thrusters in what one survivor described as an “orderly mess” and another called “controlled panic”. There was tension, co-operation and even pure comedy, as more than a dozen passengers recounted in interviews the day after in New York, Charlotte, North Carolina, and beyond.
There was the woman in the fur coat who asked a stranger to go back inside the slowly sinking plane to fetch her purse. The man who carried his suit bag on to the wing with him. The mother who had to climb over seats holding her nine-month-old son to avoid a stampede and the man who eventually helped them to safety. An older woman who walked with great difficulty and a young one who tenderly kissed her fiancé before the landing. And the prayers: from simple pleas to the heavens to the Lord’s Prayer, only halfway completed when the jet began to swim.
The flight, which left LaGuardia airport late after a gate change, was packed with a diverse cross-section of people: 23 frequent-flying Bank of America executives returning home after meetings in New York; a band of buddies on a golf trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; a 74-year-old man who had just attended his brother’s funeral; a family trying to visit a grandmother before her surgery. And, in seat 13F, Emma Sophina, 26, a pop singer from Australia, who was working on a song called “Bittersweet”, forever linked in her mind now to a day that was anything but.
Martin Sosa, 48, who lives in New York’s West Village and was travelling with his wife and two young children, recalled thinking, “OK, so you survived the impact, now you are going to drown.” He added: “The plane is slowly sinking and there’s no movement to the outside.”
Inside, as if heeding one collective thought, everyone moved to the rear of the cabin, only to find the exit doors there locked tight and water rising as the tail dipped below the surface. “If that door opened, everything would go under,” said Brad Wentzell, 31, a patio-door salesman from Charlotte, the flight’s destination. The crowd turned and began moving up the aisle all at once.
“Everybody’s blocking everybody off and there’s a woman and a child,” Wentzell said. “She’s screaming that people were blocking them off.”
The woman was Sosa’s wife, Tess, who was carrying their nine-month-old son, Damian. Sosa was with their four-year-old, Sofia. “People were just saying, ‘Move, move, move!’,” he recalled. “Some people were actually gracious enough to let me go by with a child and kind of move my way up.”
But his wife was having a more difficult time and finally began trying to crawl over the backs of seats. “She didn’t want to get crushed by the stampede,” her husband said. Another passenger heard someone cry: “Get the baby out!”
Wentzell, the door salesman, moved to help. “I kind of bear-hugged them and picked them up and said, ‘You’re coming with me,’ and carried them to the front to the exit,” he said.
He passed them off to a stranger standing at the door, who helped them on to a wing. But the life raft attached to the plane was upside down in the river, just out of reach. Wentzell turned and found another passenger, Carl Bazarian, an investment banker from Florida who, at 62, was twice his age. Wentzell grabbed the wrist of Bazarian, who grabbed a third man who held on to the plane. Wentzell then leaned out to flip the raft.
“Carl was Iron Man that day,” Wentzell said. “We got the raft stabilised and we got on.” A man went into the water, and the door salesman and the banker hauled him aboard. He curled in a foetal position, freezing.
On another wing, Craig Black, a 46-year-old auditor, stood at the tip and thought of the Titanic, as in, he said, “there wouldn’t have been enough rafts for everyone”.
Don Norton, 35, one of three passengers who work at LendingTree.com, a Charlotte-based financial services company, had opened one of the other emergency exits. Then he had to work out what to do with the hatch, finally tossing it into the river. He was the first to step on to the slippery wing and struggled to maintain his balance in his black Aldo dress shoes as he made room for those behind. About 20 or 30 people had joined him when he realised that in his rush to remove the door he had forgotten to grab a seat cushion – how many hundreds of times had he heard that announcement? At that moment, “the woman next to me handed me my seat cushion,” he recalled. “She had hers and handed me mine. We bonded.”
He needed it, too, because the New York Waterway ferry stopped about three feet from the wing’s edge, so he had to jump in and swim. The cushion kept his head dry. Lucille Palmer, 85, grabbed for her purse. Her daughter, Diane Higgins, 58, told her to leave it.
Dick Richardson, 57, a frequent flyer, had, on takeoff, done his ritual count of the rows between his seat and the nearest exit (eight) before closing his eyes to try to sleep. On impact, he moved his BlackBerry from his belt clip to the inside pocket of his blue-grey tweed blazer.
Debbie Ramsey, 48, of Knoxville, Tennessee, said she hesitated for a minute over leaving her Eddie Bauer down jacket and her carry-on bag containing the chocolates she had bought for her two-year-old grandson, but grabbed her seat cushion instead.
Dave Sanderson, 47, a salesman for Oracle, said he saw a woman in her 60s pulling her luggage out of the overhead bin. “I just started screaming, ‘Get out, get out!’ She said, ‘I need my stuff,’ Sanderson said. “Another gentleman who did a great job – he’s a hero – actually picked her up and threw her on the lifeboat.” Her luggage was floating in the river.
David Sontag, who had just buried his brother in New York, recalled a man in the doorway, demanding that the passengers count off as they passed; now he believes it was the hero-pilot, Captain Chesley B Sullenberger III.
Moments earlier, Nick Gamache, 32, a software salesman, had sent his wife a text message that read, “Planes on fire love you and the kids,” so he was naturally in a hurry to update her. But he paused as the pilot told him to carefully step into the raft.
On the wing, Laurie Crane, 58, watched the water rise to her waist. “I’m like, ‘I’m not supposed to drown,’ ” she said. ” ‘This isn’t the way I’m going to go. Keep fighting.’ So I did.”
The Sosa family made their way slowly on to the right wing. “We were being very cautious, because we didn’t want to lose hold of our children and many people were trying to grab our children away from us,” Sosa said. Indeed, Sanderson – who said that since 9/11 he says a silent prayer every time he boards a flight – recalled Sosa “standing there screaming”.
“The ladies on the lifeboat said, ‘Give us the baby, give us the baby, throw us the baby’,” Sanderson said. “And she wouldn’t do it.” Eventually, he said, “the other guy who was on the wing and myself sort of grabbed her and heaved”.
There was no room on the overcrowded raft for Sosa. “It was kind of first come, first served,” he said. “I have to say, some things could have been done a little differently to get my wife and kids on board first.”
Sosa ended up chest-deep in the frigid water and was soon unable to feel his legs – his fingers stayed numb throughout Friday – but the children were fine and joined their parents on the Today show on Friday morning. “My daughter said, ‘Daddy, the plane turned into a boat’,” Sosa recalled.
The rescue boats streamed towards the jet from all directions. A police helicopter hovered just above the river, and divers dropped down.
Aboard one of the ferries that helped in the rescue, Captain Sullenberger took a metal clipboard with the manifest up to the wheelhouse, and used the emergency services radio network to get a count from all the other vessels: everyone was alive.
Billy Campbell, 49, a television executive, had watched water seeping through seams in the plane’s windows and, seeing the clogged aisles, started climbing over the seats instead. His waterlogged shoes gave him little traction, so he would put a knee on a seat, fall and keep moving. He reached the exit on the right wing, but it was blocked. The exit on the left was clear, but the wing was full of people.
The pilot and the flight attendants had beckoned Campbell to the front, and he ended up on the same raft as the pilot. “I said, ‘Thank you’ and held his arm,” Campbell recalled, “and he said, ‘You’re welcome’.”
Maryann Bruce, 48, of Cornelius, North Carolina, said that while others were “thinking of dying, I was actually thinking about living. I wanted to see my kids and my husband.” She said she had survived disasters before, including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre, where she worked then.
“I must have nine lives,” she said. “I was vacationing in Honolulu and had to be evacuated for a tsunami. I was skiing in Denver and had an avalanche. I was at the big LA earthquake.”
At a downtown hotel where survivors waited to meet airline representatives, one of the passengers ordered a martini. Before long, nine of the passengers were exchanging stories and wine was poured, and someone decided that he had seen enough of New York City for one day, thank you.
The group returned to LaGuardia, where they boarded US Airways Flight 2591 to Charlotte, which took off just before 10pm.
“They applauded us,” said Wentzell, the door salesman. “We had some wine and we thought about just how great it was to be alive.”
• © 2009 The New York Times Company
Addition of syndicated posts to survivorlist.org
Hello,
As a new service for our readers we have added syndicated relevant news from the largest networks. Right now we are only using the English guardian as a source of information but soon interesting news will be added here on an hourly basis.
All syndicated posts are done according to use of terms and will not be “automated” – only approve posts will apear here.
We hoped you will like this new feature.
British student dies on ski holiday
A British student froze to death after apparently slipping on ice and falling into a river while on holiday in the French Alps, police said today.
Rachel Ward, 20, a second year natural sciences student at Durham University, was found dead in Val d’Isère early yesterday.
Ward, from Halifax, West Yorkshire, had been out with friends on Monday night but left early to return to her apartment alone. At around 1.15am she sent a text message to a friend saying that she was lost.
French police believe that soon after she slipped on ice and tumbled into the Isère river, where she died of hypothermia.
“There’s no trace of bruising and we are investigating it as a probable accident,” said an official from the gendarmerie in Val d’Isère.
Her body was found the next morning by a man on his way to work.
Durham University paid tribute to Ward, who attended Collingwood College, saying she was both academically gifted and active in extra-curricular activities.
“Everyone in Collingwood is shocked by Rachel’s tragic death. She was a bright, popular student, who was academically talented and enjoyed participating in sport and other college activities,” said Professor Ed Corrigan, principal of the college. “She will be missed by all of us. We extend our deeply felt sympathy to her family and to her many friends.”
Ward’s team-mates from Durham University hockey club also paid tribute to the student.
“Rachel was an active member of our hockey club as club treasurer and regular player in the women’s 3rd team,” said the club’s captain, Phil Mutlow. “Rachel was one of the best – she always had a smile on her face and was lovely to be around.”
Ward’s parents have travelled to Val d’Isère where they are being assisted by British consular officials.
The student’s death came days after two young British friends, Rob Gauntlett and James Atkinson, both 21, died in a climbing accident in nearby Chamonix.
Ward was on a student-organised ski and snowboarding holiday with travel operator On the Piste.
The company, based in Withington, Manchester, said in a statement: “The police have confirmed that the incident was an accidental death and they are not looking for anyone else in connection with the incident.
“Our staff are doing everything possible to assist the family and local authorities. Senior managers are in the resort to accompany the family, in addition to supporting local staff and customers who may have been affected.”
