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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Just one week after revealing her diagnosis with the autoimmune disorder, Graves' Disease, rapper Missy Elliott has opened up about her troubled childhood, including that she was the victim of sexual abuse. [Via AOL]
In her episode of VH1's Behind the Music, which debuted earlier this week -- and can be streamed in full below -- Missy said that she was abused by her 16-year-old cousin when she was only eight years old. "Each day he wanted me to come to the house after school," she explained. "It became sexual, which, for me at eight years old, I had no clue what that was, but I knew something was wrong."
"Being molested ... it don't disappear," she added. "You remember it as if it was yesterday." She explained that the abuse took place over the course of a year, but that she had never told anyone before.
Missy, who turns 40 on July 1, also talked about witnessing her mother being abused by her father, including an incident when she was 14, in which she saw her father pull out a loaded pistol. Missy's mother, Patricia Elliott, also appeared on the TV special. "Missy saw that the fight was just beyond measures," Patricia said. "My husband said, 'This is it, I'm gonna kill you. It's over!' I was so tired of being beaten over and over I just said, 'Fine, just do it.'"...
ANKARA, Turkey, 12 May 2011 – Thirty-three child members of Turkey’s provincial child rights committees undertook a train journey of almost 2,000 km in April, as part of a UN joint programme targeting the development of Eastern Anatolia through cultural tourism.
“I expected it to be very tiring and it was,” said Ismail Pelenkoglu, one of the children who made the journey, and a national coordinator for the child rights committees. “But we learned a lot about our culture. We also made a lot of new friends.”
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BEIJING — The dissident artist Ai Weiwei was allowed a visit from his wife on Sunday, the first time he has been seen or heard from since being detained by authorities 43 days ago and held incommunicado in a secret Beijing-area location, Mr. Ai’s attorney said on Monday.
The attorney and family friend, Liu Xiaoyuan, said he had met on Monday with Ms. Lu and that she said her husband appeared to be in good physical condition. Mr. Ai also asked about the health of his mother and family, he said, but the circumstance of the supervised visit offered no chance to discuss how his captors were treating him or other details of his confinement....