coming out

Pedro Zamora was the first openly gay man with AIDS to be portrayed in popular media. This is a true story of one man who lived in a house with six people who did not fear his disease. Before MTV's "The Real World" in San Francisco, many of us had only seen the devastating side of HIV/AIDS. Keep in mind that in the '90s, people still thought you could contract the disease by sitting on a toilet seat. Pedro showed us that we were wrong and made us think differently. He showed us that living with or around someone with HIV is nothing we should fear.

warren buffet's buffet of axioms

Life Lessons

Warren Buffett says these lessons that he learned when he was younger are important in business and in other parts of life

MARCH 21, 2014

By TFK Staff

Print

BY KIDS FOR KIDS

Warren Buffett gives a check to Matthew Meyer.

-The best investment you can make is an investment in yourself.

-The more you learn, the more you’ll earn.

-Learn from your mistakes and the mistakes of others.

-Great partnerships make any job easier.

-Fail to plan, plan to fail.

-Get to know people before you judge them.

-It’s not just the outside that counts—it’s the whole package.

malala goes back to school

On March 19, Malala Yousafzai, a 15-year-old Pakistani student and women’s-education activist, returned to the classroom on for the first time since being violently attacked by a member of the Taliban on October 9, 2012. Malala was shot on her way home from school in Mingora, Pakistan. The Taliban group Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) took responsibility for the attack. The group said the attack should serve as a warning to others. TTP’s members follow a strict version of Islam and believe girls should not go to school. Malala was targeted because she is vocal about girls’ rights to education in Swat Valley, Pakistan.

AFP/GETTY IMAGES/NEWSCOM

Malala recovers from the attack at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, England.

After a long period of recovery, Malala is starting as a ninth-year student at Edgbaston High School. It is the oldest independent girls school in Birmingham, England. Though she has no concrete plans to return to Pakistan, Malala still speaks out as a voice for change in her country, and everywhere. “I am excited that today I have achieved my dream of going back to school. I want all girls in the world to have this basic opportunity,” Malala said in a statement. “I miss my classmates from Pakistan very much but I am looking forward to meeting my teachers and making new friends here in Birmingham.”

Malala’s Journey

Malala has been an Internet blogger, or writer, since she was 11 years old. In 2011 she was awarded Pakistan’s National Peace Award for her bravery in writing about the difficulties of life and education in the shadow of the Taliban. She has spoken publicly about children’s rights and been nominated for an international children’s peace prize.

After the attack in 2012, support for Malala poured in from around the world. The United Nations declared November 10 Malala Day. Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the day honors Malala and shows the world that people of all sexes, all backgrounds and all countries stand behind her.

something good can come out of tragedy...you can make it happen

Do you know what happened to the girl in this iconic Pulitzer prize winning photo from the Vietnam War?

On 8 June 1972, a plane bombed the village of Trang Bang, near Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in South Vietnam after the South Vietnamese pilot mistook a group of civilians leaving the temple for enemy troops.

The bombs contained napalm, a highly flammable fuel, which killed and badly burned the people on the ground.

The iconic black-and-white image taken of children fleeing the scene won the Pulitzer Prize and was chosen as the World Press Photo of the Year in 1972.

It communicated the horrors of the Vietnam War in a way words never could, helping to end one of the most divisive wars in American history and later becoming a symbol of the cruelty of all wars for children and civilian victims.

In the centre of the photo was a nine year old girl, who ran naked down the highway after stripping off her burning clothes.

Kim Phuc Phan Thi was with her family at the pagoda attending a religious celebration when the plane struck and lost several relatives in the attack. The children running with her were her own brothers and sisters.

I had the privilege of hearing Kim speak at a meeting in New Zealand a few years ago and the 40^th anniversary of the bombing was commemorated last year.

She said, looking back, that three miracles happened on that dreadful day.

The first was that, despite suffering extensive third degree burns to her left arm, back and side, the soles of her feet were not burnt and she could run.

The second was that after she collapsed and lost consciousness the photographer, Nick Ut, took her to Barsky Hospital in Saigon.

The third was that her own mother found her there later that day whilst searching for her children.

Kim remained hospitalized for 14 months, and underwent 17 surgical procedures, until she recovered from the burns.

Grateful for the care she had received she later decided to study medicine but struggled to come to terms with her deep physical and psychological scars.

‘My heart was exactly like a black coffee cup,’ she said. ‘I wished I died in that attack with my cousin. I wish I died at that time so I won’t suffer like that anymore ... it was so hard for me to carry all that burden with that hatred, with that anger and bitterness.’

But it was as a second year medical student in Saigon that she discovered a New Testament in the university library, committed her life to following Jesus Christ, and realised that God had a plan for her life.

 
Kim never finished medical school as the communist government of Vietnam realised the value of the ‘napalm girl’ value as a propaganda symbol.

She believed that no man could ever love her with her disfigurement but later studied in Cuba where she met Bui Huy Toan, another Vietnamese student whom she married in 1992.  

Kim and Toan went on their honeymoon in Moscow. During a refuelling stop in Gander, Newfoundland, they left the plane and asked for political asylum in Canada, which was granted. 

In 1994, UNESCO designated her a Goodwill Ambassador for Peace.

In 1997 she established the first Kim Phuc Foundation in the US, with the aim of providing medical and psychological assistance to child victims of war. Later, other foundations were set up, with the same name, under an umbrella organization, Kim Foundation International.

Her biography, The Girl in the Picture, written by Denise Chong was published in 1999.

 

In 2004, Kim spoke at the University of Connecticut about her life and experience, learning how to be ‘strong in the face of pain’ and how compassion and love helped her heal.

On 28 December 2009, National Public Radio broadcast her spoken essay, ‘The Long Road to Forgiveness’.

Kim Phuc, now 50, lives near Toronto, Canada, with her husband and two children, Thomas and Stephen.

She has dedicated her life to promoting peace and providing medical and psychological support to help children who are victims of war in Uganda, East Timor, Romania, Tajikistan, Kenya, Ghana and Afghanistan.

‘Forgiveness made me free from hatred. I still have many scars on my body and severe pain most days but my heart is cleansed. Napalm is very powerful, but faith, forgiveness, and love are much more powerful. We would not have war at all if everyone could learn how to live with true love, hope, and forgiveness. If that little girl in the picture can do it, ask yourself: Can you?’ (Kim Phuc, 2008)

I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth.
And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God;

I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another.

How my heart yearns within me! (Job 19:25-27)

political activist uses social media

Wael Ghonim embodies the youth who constitute the majority of Egyptian society — a young man who excelled and became a Google executive but, as with many of his generation, remained apolitical due to loss of hope that things could change in a society permeated for decades with a culture of fear.

Over the past few years, Wael, 30, began working outside the box to make his peers understand that only their unstoppable people power could effect real change. He quickly grasped that social media, notably Facebook,

 

By emphasizing that the regime would listen only when citizens exercised their right of peaceful demonstration and civil disobedience, Wael helped initiate a call for a peaceful revolution.

The response was miraculous: a movement that started with thousands on Jan. 25 ended with 12 million Egyptians removing Hosni Mubarak and his regime. What Wael and the young Egyptians did spread like wildfire across the Arab world.

HOW THE ARAB SPRING BEGAN

It began in Tunisia, where the dictator's power grabbing and high living crossed a line of shamelessness, and a commonplace bit of government callousness against an ordinary citizen — a 26-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi — became the final straw. Bouazizi lived in the charmless Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, 125 miles south of Tunis. On a Friday morning almost exactly a year ago, he set out for work, selling produce from a cart. Police had hassled Bouazizi routinely for years, his family says, fining him, making him jump through bureaucratic hoops. On Dec. 17, 2010, a cop started giving him grief yet again. She confiscated his scale and allegedly slapped him. He walked straight to the provincial-capital building to complain and got no response. At the gate, he drenched himself in paint thinner and lit a match. (See pictures of Sidi Bouzid.)
"My son set himself on fire for dignity," Mannoubia Bouazizi told me when I visited her.
"In Tunisia," added her 16-year-old daughter Basma, "dignity is more important than bread."

CAN ONE PERSON MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

 

MOTHER TERESA DID IT FOR THE POOR

AL GORE DID IT FOR THE ENVIRONMENT

THIS MAN IN THE STREET DID IT FOR HIS COUNTRY

support ecuador!!!

How long will Ecuador be able to hold out?

are you optimistic or pessimistic about the outcome?

• Ivonne A-Baki, the secretary of state for Ecuador, worked the corridors in Rio to drum up support for protecting a 1 million–hectare patch of unspoiled rainforest. 
• Yasuni Natonal Park, where the equator meets the Andes, is famed for its fabulous variety of plants and animals. 
• It also sits on 846 million barrels of oil, fully a fifth of Ecuador’s proven reserves, worth an estimated $7.2 billion, a treasure trove for a poor country.
•  But instead of cashing in that wealth, Ecuador declared the Yasuni off-limits to drilling and wants the world to pitch in.
• “By leaving the oil in the ground, we avoid releasing 400 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,” says Baki.
•  “That’s about as much as France or Brazil emit in a year.” 
• In exchange for leaving the area intact, Ecuador is looking to raise $3.6 billion from international donors to help protect the park.
•  Though Rio+20 failed to pass the vaunted $30 billion green fund, it was the perfect venue to tout the project.
  

“Sometimes in a big meeting like this, the good intentions stay on paper,” she said. “But we were in Rio to raise awareness. We have to understand that climate change is going to be a lot more expensive for the world than the current economic crisis.”

note - what do the words in bold tell us? 

steve jobs has passed on

The visionary co-founder of Apple helped usher in the era of personal computers and led a cultural transformation in music and mobile communications for the digital age...




Just to say that you are a born-genius
you have done a good job in making this world a better place
and although I feel that technology has progressed too fast for our own good,
I do not blame you

for we cannot blame the sea for its high tides and currents when someone drowns
it is we who should have heeded all warnings and been more careful

rest in peace
Good Job!

Well the print media has done it again!!!

TEH PRINT MEDIA SENSATIONALISED THE ALLEGED HOMOSEXUAL RELATIONSHIP GANDHI HAD WITH A GERMAN... AND NOW

The author of a book on Mahatma Gandhi has said it is "shameful" that it has been banned in India's western state of Gujarat.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Lelyveld said the book was banned on the basis of newspaper reviews.

He said the reviews had sensationalised his account of Gandhi's friendship with a German man, who may have been homosexual.

Although legal, homosexuality still carries a stigma in India.

Gujarat's state assembly voted unanimously on Wednesday to ban Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India with immediate effect, even though it has not yet been released in India and few people will have read it.

"In a country (India) that calls itself a democracy, it is shameful to ban a book that no one has read, including the people who are doing the banning," Mr Lelyveld was quoted as saying by the Press Trust of India news agency.
'Extreme step'

"They should at least make an effort to see the pages that they think offend them before they take such an extreme step. I find it very discouraging to think that India would so limit discussion," he said.

Indian writers and relatives of Mahatma Gandhi have protested against the ban.

Gandhi's great grandson Tushar Gandhi said he was against banning of books, and that it did not matter "if the Mahatma was straight, gay or bisexual".


TRUST THE MEDIA TO FOCUS ON THE TRIVIAL...DOES IT MATTER IF HE WERE GAY, NOW THAT HE IS DEAD?

Akrit Jaswal: The Seven Year-Old Surgeon

Akrit Jaswal is a young Indian who has been called “the world’s smartest boy” and it’s easy to see why. His IQ is 146 and is considered the smartest person his age in India —a country of more than a billion people.
Akrit came to public attention when in 2000 he performed his first medical procedure at his family home. He was seven. His patient — a local girl who could not afford a doctor — was eight. Her hand had been burnt in a fire, causing her fingers to close into a tight fist that wouldn’t open. Akrit had no formal medical training and no experience of surgery, yet he managed to free her fingers and she was able to use her hand again.
He focused his phenomenal intelligence on medicine and at the age of twelve he claimed to be on the verge of discovering a cure for cancer. He is now studying for a science degree at Chandigarh College and is the youngest student ever accepted by an Indian University .

Gregory Smith: Nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize at age 12

Born in 1990, Gregory Smith could read at age two and had enrolled in university at 10. But “genius” is only one half of the Greg Smith story. When not voraciously learning, this young man travels the globe as a peace and children’s rights activist.
He is the founder of International Youth Advocates, an organization that promotes principles of peace and understanding among young people throughout the world. He has met with Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev and spoken in front of the UN. For these and other humanitarian and advocacy efforts, Smith has been nominated four times for a Nobel Peace Prize. His latest achievement? He just got his driver's license.

1. Kim Ung-Yong: Attended University at age 4, Ph.D at age 15; world’s highest IQ

This Korean super-genius was born in 1962 and might just be the smartest guy alive today (he’s recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as having the highest IQ of anyone on the planet). By the age of four he was already able to read in Japanese, Korean, German, and English. At his fifth birthday, he solved complicated differential and integral calculus problems.. Later, on Japanese television, he demonstrated his proficiency in Chinese, Spanish, Vietnamese, Tagalog, German, English, Japanese, and Korean. Kim was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records under “Highest IQ”; the book estimated the boy’s score at over 210.
Kim was a guest student of physics at Hanyang University from the age of 3 until he was 6. At the age of 7 he was invited to America by NASA. He finished his university studies, eventually getting a Ph.D. in physics at Colorado State University before he was 15. In 1974, during his university studies, he began his research work at NASA and continued this work until his return to Korea in 1978 where he decided to switch from physics to civil engineering and eventually received a doctorate in that field. Kim was offered the chance to study at the most prestigious universities in Korea , but instead chose to attend a provincial university. As of 2007 he also serves as adjunct faculty at Chungbuk National University .

gus dur dies 30/12/2009

FORMER Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid died in hospital on Wednesday aged 69, after a long battle with illness, a party official said.

Wahid was Indonesia's fourth president, coming to power in 1999 after the country's first general elections following the fall of military strongman Suharto in 1998

orwell birthplace - another tourist attraction

Orwell's birthplace to be saved

PATNA (India) - AFTER being neglected and forgotten for decades, the birthplace of George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and 1984, is finally set for a makeover.

Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903 in Motihari, a tiny town in the impoverished eastern Indian state of Bihar, near the border with Nepal.

His father, Richard W. Blair, worked at the time as an agent in the opium department of the Indian Civil Service during the height of British rule over the subcontinent.

For years, the family's simple white colonial bungalow has been left to decay; damaged in an earthquake it was an occasional home to stray animals and, more recently, a state school teacher.

Now, after years of dithering and failed attempts by Orwell enthusiasts to restore the building, the provincial government says it is coming to the rescue in a bid to lure tourists to one of the most underdeveloped areas of India.

'The house has been in a bad condition for years. The government has decided to initiate work to protect it,' Bihar's art and culture secretary, Vivek Singh, told AFP. 'We will not allow George Orwell's ancestral house, where he was born, to be lost to history. The government priority is to protect it followed by renovation.'

madoff has made off with their money

A criminal saga that began in December 2008 with a string of superlatives — the largest, longest and most widespread Ponzi scheme** in history — ended the same way on Monday as Bernard L. Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison, the maximum for his crimes.

**In a Ponzi scheme, potential investors are wooed with promises of unusually large returns, usually attributed to the investment manager’s savvy, skill or some other secret sauce.

The returns are repaid, at least for a time, out of new investors’ principal, not from profits. This can continue as long as new investors line up with cash, and old investors don’t try to withdraw too much of their money at once.

what you might want to know

On Wall Street, his name was legendary. Now it is infamous.

With money Bernard L. Madoff had earned as a lifeguard on the beaches of Long Island, he built a trading powerhouse that had prospered for more than four decades.

largest fraud in Wall Street history

Mr. Madoff left a zigzagged path of financial destruction across the world, from HSBC bank to BNP Paribas, to industry leaders and celebrities in the United States, from Elie Wiesel, the Hollywood director Steven Spielberg and the publisher Mortimer B. Zuckerman.

. Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet a prominent hedge fund manager who apparently had lost $1.4 billion with Mr. Madoff, was found dead in his office on Madison Avenue on Dec. 22. The evidence pointed to suicide

mag
the question is - how did this go on for so many years undetected

cecelia
it's simple - take from the very rich and spend it all on a lavish lifestyle; take from the rich and pay the very rich their "lucrative returns" and spend the rest; then take from the poor and pay the rich...sounds like a clever scheme...

sane thomas
clever? more like - devious...one that has devastated many...

NEDA

neda - The woman whose death has come to symbolize Iranian resistance to the government's official election



THERE HAS BEEN two weeks of protests against the official results of the presidential elections, which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called for an end to street demonstrations

Ahmadinejad won the disputed election by a margin of two-to-one over Moussavi, his nearest rival, according to official results. Moussavi and Karroubi said the results were rigged and have called for the vote to be annulled.

Footage of Ms Soltan bleeding to death captured in amateur videos posted on the Internet and broadcast across the world triggered an outcry over Iranian authorities' clampdown on protests against the disputed presidential vote.

hitler an artist?

A SERIES of watercolours by Adolf Hitler were sold at a British auction house on Thursday for over 100,000 euros.

The 13 paintings, most of them landscapes and found in a garage earlier this year by the seller, went for 95,589 pounds (S$210,773) at auctioneers Mullock's.

The paintings date back to between 1908 and about 1914, when the former German leader was a young man trying to earn a living as an artist in Vienna.

'Unfortunately for the world, he was not accepted into the Vienna Academy, which was where he wanted to be,' Mr Westwood-Brookes said.

'Of course, if he had been accepted, then we would have known him today as an artist and not as an evil tyrant.' Mr Westwood-Brookes said the seller bought them from someone who found them in 1945.

Many of the works are signed with the initials 'A.H.'

about media moguls /media tycoon

rupert murdoch 77

inherited the Adelaide News in Australia from his father.

When he bought The Sun in London in 1969, it turned him into Britain’s greatest tabloid publisher

just bought over Wall Street Journal

is planning to buy The times

gossip

marriage to Wendi Deng, The woman from Shandong Province, 38 years his junior, whom he married after breaking up his 32-year marriage to his second wife, Anna, has brought him into the liberal world.

about media moguls

Rupert Murdoch

- just bought the The Wall Street Journal

- When he bought The Sun in London in 1969, it turned him into Britain’s greatest tabloid publisher

-77-year-old mogul, looking forward to buy the Times