Tag Archives: world
Violence in Pretoria threatens World Cup
With only 93 days to go before the start of the 2010 World Cup, residents in Mamelodi townships are threatening to disrupt the tournament. They are demanding that the government immediately supply them with houses, electricity, running water and flushing toilets
South Africa sent 42m condoms
• Host nation has one-in-five rate of HIV/Aids among adults • Plea for an extra billion condoms before football fans descend Britain is to give 42m condoms to South Africa in response to a request for an extra billion as part of an HIV prevention drive before the World Cup, the government will announce today. The request for British help in stockpiling sufficient condoms for the expected influx of thousands of football supporters in three months’ time was made during President Jacob Zuma’s recent visit to the UK to meet the Queen. “Obviously there’s a big focus on the World Cup coming up and a huge increase in the number of people coming into South Africa,” said the international development minister, Gareth Thomas, who will announce the £1m funding today at an emergency summit in London on HIV prevention and treatment. “The South Africans have identified themselves the need to get more condoms in place. South Africa specifically asked for British assistance and we are responding to that request.” He pointed out that the fans would inevitably spill over into neighbouring African countries with high HIV rates, which would also need to take precautions. The South African government estimates that up to half a million visitors could travel to the country, raising fears of a rise in prostitution and sex trafficking from neighbouring countries and eastern Europe, and creating a potential HIV timebomb. Last week South Africa’s Central Drug Authority warned that 40,000 prostitutes were expected to arrive for the month-long tournament. South Africa is embroiled in a struggle to combat the world’s biggest HIV caseload and to convince its population of the importance of safe sex. The South African health minister, Aaron Motsoaledi, expressed concern that the message was being ignored because people believe HIV can now be easily treated. “President [Jacob] Zuma made two far-reaching statements on World Aids Day,” Motsoaledi said. “He made a strong statement about prevention and a strong statement about treatment regimes, but after World Aids Day South Africans were only talking about the one. “That’s what is worrying me. I am saying treatment must only come after prevention … We are worried that South Africans seem to be thinking that we have
Canada puts seal meat back on menu
Seal meat banned by the EU will be served to Canadian MPs in Ottawa to show public backing for the country’s annual seal hunt Canadian MPs will be served seal meat this week in support of hunters fighting an EU ban on products from the animals. A Liberal MP, Celine Hervieux-Payette, said Wednesday’s seal meat menu in the parliamentary restaurant would allow politicians to show their backing for the annual hunt. “All political parties will have the opportunity to demonstrate to the international community the solidarity of the Canadian parliament behind those who earn a living from the seal hunt,” she said. The EU ban on seal imports was imposed last July on the grounds that Canada’s annual hunt was cruel. The east coast seal hunt, the largest in the world, kills about 275,000 harp seals between mid-November and mid-May. The seals are either shot or hit over the head with a spiked club called a hakapik. Animal rights groups believe the hunt is cruel, poorly monitored and provides little economic benefit. Seal hunters and Canadian authorities say it is sustainable, humane and provides income for isolated communities. The EU ban includes processed goods derived from seals, including their skins which are used to make coats, bags and clothing, as well as meat, oil blubber, organs and seal oil, which is used in some omega-3 pills. It exempts products derived from traditional hunts carried out by Inuit in Canada’s Arctic, as well as those from Greenland, Alaska and Russia. Canada has requested talks with the EU at the World Trade Organisation, which is the first step before launching an official trade challenge to salvage a Canadian industry valued at £6.46m in exports last year. Last month, an offer of seal meat caught by indigenous hunters to the world’s leading economic ministers at a G7 meeting in Iqaluit, 200 miles south of the Arctic circle, sparked outrage. Arlene McCarthy, a Labour MEP who was involved in agreeing the ban, accused the Canadians of using the summit to put seal hunting back on to the agenda: “This is quite a callous way to manipulate an indigenous community which we’ve already given exemption to on this issue.” Canada European Union Animal welfare James Sturcke guardian.co.uk
Stirling Moss breaks ankles in lift shaft fall
• Moss fell three storeys down lift shaft at home • 80-year-old broke ankles, feet and damaged vertabrae Having survived several crashes, including the one that forced his premature retirement from motor sport in 1962, Sir Stirling Moss’s powers of recovery are undergoing another stern test following a potentially lethal accident at his home. Moss, 80, suffered two broken ankles, four broken bones in his foot, skin abrasions and four chipped vertebrae when he fell down three floors of a lift shaft in his town house in Mayfair. A statement from the Moss family said: “The door to the lift, that should have remained locked if the lift was not on the floor that it was called from, opened in error. He stepped into the narrow open shaft in the expectation that the lift would be present for him to walk into, as it should have been.” Moss, who won 16 grands prix but never the world championship, was taken to the Royal London Hospital before being moved to the Princess Grace Hospital, where he underwent surgery on both ankles, which were plated and pinned. Lady Moss, Stirling’s wife, stated: “This was a very unfortunate accident; it could have just as easily been another member of the family stepping into where the lift should have been. The family are very relieved that Stirling survived the fall, demonstrating that his body still has the same resilience to injury as it did in his racing days. He is comfortable and well on the road to recovery. It is expected that it will take up to six weeks for him to recover from his injuries.” Moss is extremely fortunate to have avoided head injuries within the narrow confines of a shaft designed to cater for a small lift capable of carrying just two people. The car of the lift – and nothing to do with the operation of the lift itself – was made of carbon fibre by the Williams F1 team at Moss’s request. It was typical of Moss’s fascination with gadgets within a home that was ahead of its time 40 years ago when Moss introduced electronic controls for curtains, a heated toilet seat and remote filling of the bath. A dumb waiter formed the basis for the eventual conversion to a lift in order to avoid a spiral staircase which, despite Moss’s spritely condition, was beginning to prove difficult to negotiate. Sir Stirling and Lady Moss are close friends of Lord and Lady Tebbit. The lift was also installed to accommodate Margaret Tebbit, confined to a wheelchair following the Brighton bombing in 1984. Moss began racing in 1948 and took part in grands prix from the start of the world championship in 1950 until 1962, a period when accidents were commonplace. Moss had his fair share, largely due to the fragility of the equipment, but the most severe was a crash at Goodwood on Easter Monday 1962. Moss had to be cut from his Lotus and remained unconscious for six weeks. The Englishman returned to the cockpit a year later for a private test session but decided to quit because he was no longer driving instinctively. Formula One Motor sport Maurice Hamilton guardian.co.uk
The ethics of reportage photography
Do you look away from images of real-life horror, or look closer? A series of shocking photographs from Somalia asks disturbing questions about the ethics of bearing witness “To catch a death actually happening and embalm it for all time is something only cameras can do,” w rites Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others , “and pictures taken out in the field of the moment of (or just before) death are among the most celebrated and often reproduced of war photographs.” Sontag goes on to describe the context in which Eddie Adams took what was arguably the most shocking image of the Vietnam war: the moment in which a South Vietnamese police officer executes a Vietcong suspect by shooting him point-blank in the head . She points out that the picture was both authentic and staged – “by General Loan, who had led the prisoner, hands tied behind his back, out to the street where journalists had gathered. He would not have carried out the summary execution there had they not been available to witness it”. Wearily, Sontag concludes that “one can gaze at these faces for a long time and not come to the end of the mystery, and the indecency, of such co-authorship”. I was reminded of that final quotation when, a few weeks ago, I navigated the winner’s gallery of the World Press Photo of the Year website . There, amidst the many dramatic images of conflict, death and destruction, was a series by an Associated Press photographer, Farah Abdl Warsameh, entitled Stoned to Death, Somalia, 13 December . The four images are shocking in a way that even the most graphic war reportage seldom is any more. The first shows the victim being buried up to his neck in earth. The second shows a group of men, their faces concealed by headscarves, raining rocks down on his head. The third shows his bloodied torso being dragged out of the soil. The last shows the men hurling large rocks at his prone and lifeless body to finish off their gruesome ritual. There are no captions; we are left to guess the context. One’s immediate instinct on coming upon the photographs is to recoil in horror, which is what almost everyone I showed them to did. A colleague described them as “a kind of pornography of suffering”. (The Sunday Times ran the series last week in their Spectrum section devoted to the World Press awards. Many readers were outraged and appalled.) Last week, in a blogpost for Foto8 magazine, the veteran picture editor, Colin Jacobson, wrote that “the rather disgusting pictures … raised some interesting ethical matters” , which is one – somewhat understated – way of putting it. More problematically, Jacobson said that “obviously there was collaboration between the photographer and those carrying out this gruesome death sentence”. Perhaps. But what kind of collaboration? Unlike the shooting of the Vietcong suspect, the dreadful execution of the Somalian man would seemingly have gone ahead at that time had the photographer not been present. (Other images from the series, not included in the World Press selection, show an audience of villagers who had gathered to witness the execution.) On that level, the photographer did not collaborate with the killers, though he almost certainly gained permission from someone to shoot the stoning. He also shot every stage of the killing in all its protracted and torturous barbarity. What it takes to do that, and at what personal cost, only he can say. Images as extreme as these beg so many questions about the morality of reportage. Did the photographer, one wonders, have any communication with the victim in the time leading up to the event? Would our reaction to the photographs be different if we knew that the condemned man granted the photographer permission to bear witness to his dreadful death? Would it be different if we knew that the photographer risked his own life to travel though strife-torn Somalia to bear witness, which, as one of the respondents to Jacobson’s blog points out, was probably the case. Does such extremity diminish us or enlighten us? Or simply shock us into a kind of impassioned helplessness? Part of the complex power of these photographs comes from what Sontag calls the “provocation” inherent in all images of real suffering. The first of many questions they ask is: “Can you look at this?” Perhaps Sontag comes closest to articulating the moral dilemma at the heart of extreme images of suffering when she writes: “There is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it … or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.” Now see this Nigeria is the sixth largest producer of oil in the world and one of the main suppliers to America. Subtitled 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta, Ed Kashi’s exhibition, Curse of the Black Gold, chronicles the long-term human and environmental cost of oil exploitation in west Africa. You can see this monumental work of reportage at London’s Host Gallery . Photography Exhibitions Press freedom Sean O’Hagan guardian.co.uk
24 hours in pictures
A selection of the best images from around the world
Hot Girl laughs at Top PVP’ers GETTING OWNED
Get More Videos: www.youtube.com Subscribe! ———————- ———————- ———————- THIS IS THE LINK YO: www.youtube.com Tania’s Twitter: twitter.com I Power: www.youtube.com TANIA UNCENSORED: www.youtube.com Soundtrack partially by Brad Sucks: www.bradsucks.net Athene www.WorldOfAthene.com Athene movie www.wrathofthe1337king.com
Affiliate Marketing – Unlimited Earning Potential
Guest Post by Paul How do you fancy earning money online without having your own product? Or even having your own web site? Allow me to introduce you to affiliate marketing. It’s one of the more popular ways of making money online is how I have managed to make a full time income online over just the last 8 weeks. The really great thing about affiliate marketing is that once you get everything in place, it runs automatically. Essentially, you can potentially earn money whilst you’re on holiday – it’s an auto pilot system. That’s what attracted me to this industry. What’s even more attractive is the earning potential. There are more millionaire affiliate marketers than any other sector online – you can’t say you’re not intrigued now, can you! But how does it work? Well, you are an online salesman. It all comes down to this: You find people with a problem and you solve their problems by introducing them to a product. If somebody lands on a sales page having clicked one of your hyperlinks and then buys the product, you are entitled to a commission. I know what you’re thinking – how do I get people to click on my link? Well, that’s the skill involved. You have to find hungry markets of people and somehow put your articles or advertisements in front of them. There are a huge variety of ways of doing this. One of my favorite ways is called article marketing – largely because it’s the easiest! As an article marketer you write for audiences of people, find places to distribute your article, recommend products and make sales. Here’s The Clever Bit Though… A lot of people fail at affiliate marketing. Want to know why? They don’t understand their target audience. It’s as simple as that. Let me give you an example. If you’re the best looking guy in the world, with bucket loads of personality and a huge wallet full of cash, do you think you’d be able to attract a girl? OK, what about if you hang out in a gay bar? You catch my drift? You can have the best product and sales pitch in the world but if you don’t advertise to the right crowd of people then you’ll never make any money! So How Do You Get To Know Your Target Market? You hang out where they do…I’m talking about forums. Forums are the greatest weapon in an internet marketer’s arsenal. It’s one place where you can really understand that mindset of your target market. What concerns are they having? What makes them tick? What problems are they trying to solve. Where Can You Find Products To Promote? Personally, I like selling digital products because the profit margin is so great. For instance, if I lead someone to buy a $37 e-book, then I can expect to take home over $20. $29 for one quick sale! You can clearly see how this adds up over time. The best digital product retailer is called Clickbank. They have a plethora of products in all sorts of niches that you can sell – just have a look in the marketplace and find one that takes your fancy. Affiliate Marketing Is Not Easy… This is not a get rich quick scheme that many people are trying to tell you. It’s a skill that needs to be learned just like playing golf or a musical instrument. But let me assure you, when you learn the skill, you’re set for a life of financial freedom. Resource Box: There are five shortcuts to affiliate marketing success that 95% of people miss out. To find out what they are and to triple your affiliate marketing revenue then don’t miss what I have here: http://www.amshortcuts.com .
Recent Comments