<a href="http://www.supportunicef.org/site/pp.asp?c=9fLEJSOALpE&b=7542627"><img alt="" src="http://www.unicef.org/images/hp_banner_horn_africa.gif" title="horncrisis" width="120" height="80" /></a>...
Jesse Mohr from rev967.com has quite the strong opinion about Linkin Park's ongoing relief efforts for the Tsunami victims in Japan. You can read his post below. I wanna make clear, that I so don't agree with that!
1. Of course there are a million places, where people need help, but you got to start somewhere and Linkin Park have also supported and organized relief stuff for Haiti and tons of other regions that were hit by natural disasters. Also, we really shouldn't forget that millions of people will suffer from the after effects of the Tsunami in Japan for decades!
2. The point that people should invest their "hard-earned" money in their own countries first really pisses me off! When do we finally realize that we are ONE people on ONE earth? Everybody should decide for themselves which relief organisations they want to support, and in my opinion you should just listen to your heart instead of sorting people and their problems into hierarchies. For example, I have donated to Save the Children, MFR, Donate Life and I am an online volunteer for UNHCR, but that doesn't mean that I think other issues are less important, I just had to make a decision eventually.
You can discuss Jesse's opinion in the comment section!
Here's his post:...
Health minister Ghulum Nabi Azad says homosexuality is a "disease" © Demotix
GENEVA, July 5 (UNHCR) – The UN refugee agency is concerned about the high incidence of malnutrition among Somali refugees flowing into Ethiopia and Kenya amid a devastating drought in their conflict-racked country.
The relentless violence, compounded by drought, has forced more than 135,000 Somalis to flee so far this year. In June alone, 54,000 people fled across the two borders, three times the number of people who fled in May.
"UNHCR is particularly disturbed by unprecedented levels of malnutrition among the new arrivals – especially among refugee children," UNHCR's chief spokesperson, Melissa Fleming, said in Geneva on Tuesday. "More than 50 per cent of Somali children arriving in Ethiopia are seriously malnourished, while among those arriving to Kenya that rate is somewhat lower, but equally worrying – between 30 to 40 per cent," she added.
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SHIKA, Japan — Near a nuclear power plant facing the Sea of Japan, a series of exhibitions in a large public relations building here extols the virtues of the energy source with some help from “Alice in Wonderland.”
“It’s terrible, just terrible,” the White Rabbit says in the first exhibit. “We’re running out of energy, Alice.”
A Dodo robot figure, swiveling to address Alice and the visitors to the building, declares that there is an “ace” form of energy called nuclear power. It is clean, safe and renewable if you reprocess uranium and plutonium, the Dodo says.
“Wow, you can even do that!” Alice says of nuclear power. “You could say that it’s optimal for resource-poor Japan!”
Over several decades, Japan’s nuclear establishment has devoted vast resources to persuade the Japanese public of the safety and necessity of nuclear power. Plant operators built lavish, fantasy-filled public relations buildings that became tourist attractions. Bureaucrats spun elaborate advertising campaigns through a multitude of organizations established solely to advertise the safety of nuclear plants. Politicians pushed through the adoption of government-mandated school textbooks with friendly views of nuclear power.
The result was the widespread adoption of the belief — called the “safety myth” — that Japan’s nuclear power plants were absolutely safe. Japan single-mindedly pursued nuclear power even as Western nations distanced themselves from it....
The tiny island nation of Malta is rallying behind a stray dog that defied the odds and miraculously survived a horrible act of animal cruelty at the hands of an unknown assailant.
Officers investigating an unrelated case near the city of Birzebbuga last week heard faint whispers from under a plank with a tree stump on top of it. After removing the plank, they made the gruesome discovery: a dog buried alive in dirt up to its face, its snout and limbs tied up, and multiple bullet wounds in its head, The Times of Malta reported.
The dog, a female mixed-breed that rescuers named "Star," was dug out and taken for emergency surgery at the Ta' Qali hospital. Doctors were able to save her life, despite removing more than 40 gun pellets from her skull.
The case caused an uproar in Malta and led to calls for the country to revise its animal cruelty laws. Currently, anyone convicted of animal abuse faces a maximum one-year jail sentence....
If pregnancy were a musical composition, finding out whether you're having a boy or a girl would be the coda. Indeed, "Do you know what you're having?" is probably the question lobbed most frequently at pregnant women, right up there with, "When are you due?" So news that a Canadian couple is raising their third child "genderless" in what amounts to a grand social experiment has set parental tongues a-wagging.
Gender is so central to parents' concept of their unborn children that most moms- and dads-to-be can't even wait until delivery day to learn what they're having. A 2007 Gallup poll found that 66% of 18-to-34-year-olds said they would choose to learn their baby's sex before seeing their newborn's birthday suit for the first time.
Yet Kathy Witterick and her husband, David Stocker, have kept their baby Storm's gender a secret. The only people who know are one family friend and Storm's older brothers, Jazz, 5, and Kio, 2. (Not surprisingly, the two midwives who delivered Storm on New Year's Day are in the know as well.)
A lengthy feature last week in the Toronto Star profiled the family and their quest to raise their baby unfettered by the rules of pinks and blues. The couple began by sending out an email after Storm's birth: "We've decided not to share Storm's sex for now — a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm's lifetime (a more progressive place? ...)."...
Take home this pair of MS/DC sneakers, doodled on by Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park. The sneakers were also on display in the Los Angeles DC store!
The proceeds for this item benefit Music for Relief for Japan Earthquake & Tsunami Relief