© Socioecohistory.wordpress.com
Hedy Epstein, one of the signers of the letter.
Hedy Epstein, one of the signers of the letter.
Their letter reads as follows:
Society's Child
Their letter reads as follows:
© Eagnews.com
"We don't have enough teachers in our classrooms and now we are expected to hire some type of food police to monitor whether we are having bake sales or not. That is just asinine," John Barge, Georgia state school superintendent tells WSB-TV.
Barge and the state Board of Education are attempting to get an exemption from the snack rules, which would allow only 30 sales per year per school.
Tennessee recently received such a restriction and even still, they were mad. State Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman said it was "quite remarkable" there would even be a cap at all. Other states have not plead for leniency from their federal overlords, so even 30 would be against the law.
"We need this money for competition, for outfits, for buses, without those sales we can't go," Harmony Hart tells the news station. She adds her dance team in Rockdale County is reliant on bake sales.
© news168.co.uk
20K gather for a Hyde Park rally to send hospital ship to Gaza.
20K gather for a Hyde Park rally to send hospital ship to Gaza.
Currently moored in Falmouth, Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) Argus is a 100-bed nautical hospital, which has a "four-bay operating theater with a 10-bed Critical Care Unit, a 20-bed High Dependency Unit and a CT Scanner," according to the Ministry of Defence website.
© navy-matters.beedall.com
The RFA Argus - Joint Casualty Treatment Ship
The RFA Argus - Joint Casualty Treatment Ship
A team of NHS medics will soon be deployed to Gaza to help treat the wounded. Downing Street announced it is sending doctors, paramedics, surgeons and anesthetists, who will initially be stationed with Medical Aid for Palestinians at Al Mokassed hospital in East Jerusalem until they are able to enter Gaza itself.Petitioners, however, argue the prime minister's commitment doesn't go far enough, as they continue to call for the ship's deployment.
Comment: As a UK campaign organizer states: "The scenes coming out of Gaza are truly horrific and we need to act. A health crisis is looming for trapped civilians with dire conditions in the main Gaza City El Shifa hospital. Doctors operate on the floor and in corridors. People die untreated. Only one X-ray machine is working with a lack of doctors, nurses, paramedics and the most basic equipment. We should be at the forefront of the humanitarian response..."
And what from the United States?
In the absence of hatred, one can understand the Palestinians. Without it, even some of Hamas' demands might sound reasonable and justified.
Can we possibly conduct a discussion, however brief, that is not saturated with venomous hatred? Can we let go for a moment of the dehumanization and demonization of the Palestinians and speak dispassionately of justice, leaving racism aside? It's crucial that we give it a try.
In the absence of hatred, one can understand the Palestinians. Without it, even some of Hamas' demands might sound reasonable and justified. Such a rational discourse would lead any decent person to clear-cut conclusions. Such a revolutionary dialogue might even advance the cause of peace, if one may still dare say such things. What are we facing? A people without rights that in 1948 was dispossessed of its land and its territory, in part by its own fault. In 1967 it was again stripped of its rights and lands. Ever since it has lived under conditions experienced by few nations. The West Bank is occupied and the Gaza Strip is besieged. This nation tries to resist, with its meager powers and with methods that are sometimes murderous, as every conquered nation throughout history, including Israel, has done. It has a right to resist, it must be said.
In the absence of hatred, one can understand the Palestinians. Without it, even some of Hamas' demands might sound reasonable and justified. Such a rational discourse would lead any decent person to clear-cut conclusions. Such a revolutionary dialogue might even advance the cause of peace, if one may still dare say such things. What are we facing? A people without rights that in 1948 was dispossessed of its land and its territory, in part by its own fault. In 1967 it was again stripped of its rights and lands. Ever since it has lived under conditions experienced by few nations. The West Bank is occupied and the Gaza Strip is besieged. This nation tries to resist, with its meager powers and with methods that are sometimes murderous, as every conquered nation throughout history, including Israel, has done. It has a right to resist, it must be said.
Phnom Penh - It was an extraordinary act of defiance, and it was extraordinarily risky. But all he did was take out a pen and write.
Nearly 40 years ago, hunched on the floor of the wood-and-leaf hut he was forced to live in away from his children, Cambodian school inspector Poch Younly kept a secret diary vividly recounting the horrors of life under the Khmer Rouge, the radical communist regime whose extreme experiment in social engineering took the lives of 1.7 million Cambodians from overwork, medical neglect, starvation and execution.
Acutely aware that he could be killed if discovered, Younly hid the diary inside a clay vase. In those dark days, when religion and schools were banned and anyone deemed educated was a threat, he had no right to own so much as a pen and paper.
"Why is it that I have to die here like a cat or a dog . . . without any reason, without any meaning?" he wrote in the spiral-bound notebook's last pages.
Nearly 40 years ago, hunched on the floor of the wood-and-leaf hut he was forced to live in away from his children, Cambodian school inspector Poch Younly kept a secret diary vividly recounting the horrors of life under the Khmer Rouge, the radical communist regime whose extreme experiment in social engineering took the lives of 1.7 million Cambodians from overwork, medical neglect, starvation and execution.
Acutely aware that he could be killed if discovered, Younly hid the diary inside a clay vase. In those dark days, when religion and schools were banned and anyone deemed educated was a threat, he had no right to own so much as a pen and paper.
"Why is it that I have to die here like a cat or a dog . . . without any reason, without any meaning?" he wrote in the spiral-bound notebook's last pages.
Comment: One wonders what will survive our time. You can prevent the reporting of history in two ways. The Khmer Rouge picked the easy way, ban books, ban education. The other way is to ban nothing, but promote ignorance. To proliferate pointless education. Guess which way we chose?
Of course while you're in it, you are so busy surviving that you don't have time to think about the judgement of history.
© Reuters / Valery Belokryl
Stirol chemical plant in the town of Gorlovka in the Donetsk region
Stirol chemical plant in the town of Gorlovka in the Donetsk region
For the past three weeks, the Ukrainian army has been intensely shelling Gorlovka, located in Ukraine's Donetsk region - home to the nation's largest chemical plant, Stirol.
"Due to the irresponsible actions of the Ukrainian army, citizens of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus are exposed to a deadly threat from an ecological disaster on a daily basis, the size of which cannot be predicted," Pavel Brykov, a spokesman for the plant, said in a YouTube message on Sunday.
According to Brykov, an accident at the plant could cause a toxic leak of nitrochlorobenzene - a lethal substance which, if it enters the human body, affects the liver, heart, and bone marrow, causing death.
© INAH
Researchers at Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) said this week they made the discovery after performing X-rays on the Lord of Patience, as the figure is known, during a restoration operation.
The fangs are only slightly visible through Christ's open lips, but anthropologists said X-rays showed the eight teeth are complete and intact, all the way to the root.
The 3'8" tall icon - depicting a patient, pained Christ resting momentarily during the Passion - is usually seated in a church in San Bartolo Cuautlalpan, a town of 10,000 in the municipality of Zumpango, about 30 miles north of Mexico City.
An image of the Palestinian flag has been projected onto the Houses of Parliament in London, on August 2, 2014.
Hugh Lanning, Chair of PSC, criticized the British government for standing by while Israel slaughters Palestinians.
"The prime minister, David Cameron, has failed to listen to the voices of hundreds and thousands of British people who have taken to the streets. He has failed to stand up for an occupied people being ruthlessly murdered by an occupying power. The prime minister has weakly accepted the US's political position, which is totally out-of-step with the mood of this country. It is time for firm action consistent with international law."
He said Cameron must demand an end to the massacre in Gaza, implement an immediate and total arms embargo on Israel and impose sanctions until Israel ends its illegal occupation."
Speaking at a meeting of Respect Party activists in Leeds on August 2, Galloway slammed Israel for the massacre of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and urged party members to issue a boycott of Israeli goods, services, academics and tourists.
"We reject this illegal, barbarous, savage state that calls itself Israel. And you have to do the same," he added. The Respect MP had distinguished between Israel and the world's Jewish population earlier in the speech."We have declared Bradford an Israel-free zone...We don't want any Israeli goods. We don't want any Israeli services. We don't want any Israeli academics coming to the university or the college," Galloway told activists.
“He was fighting to save his life to the very end, till he was completely burned up,” Jarecke says of the man he photographed. “He was trying to get out of that truck.”
The Iraqi soldier died attempting to pull himself up over the dashboard of his truck. The flames engulfed his vehicle and incinerated his body, turning him to dusty ash and blackened bone. In a photograph taken soon afterward, the soldier's hand reaches out of the shattered windshield, which frames his face and chest. The colors and textures of his hand and shoulders look like those of the scorched and rusted metal around him. Fire has destroyed most of his features, leaving behind a skeletal face, fixed in a final rictus. He stares without eyes.
On February 28, 1991, Kenneth Jarecke stood in front of the charred man, parked amid the carbonized bodies of his fellow soldiers, and photographed him. At one point, before he died this dramatic mid-retreat death, the soldier had had a name. He'd fought in Saddam Hussein's army and had a rank and an assignment and a unit. He might have been devoted to the dictator who sent him to occupy Kuwait and fight the Americans. Or he might have been an unlucky young man with no prospects, recruited off the streets of Baghdad.
Jarecke took the picture just before a ceasefire officially ended Operation Desert Storm - the U.S.-led military action that drove Saddam Hussein and his troops out of Kuwait, which they had annexed and occupied the previous August. The image and its anonymous subject might have come to symbolize the Gulf War. Instead, it went unpublished in the United States, not because of military obstruction but because of editorial choices.
Comment: The letter has been updated with even MORE signatures.