http://news.yahoo.com/photos/traditional-sulfur-mining-in-kawah-ijen-slideshow/traditional-sulfur-mining-in-kawah-ijen-photo-1381485193885.html?.uuid=f1c2d590-325a-11e3-b10f-e76ca07d0198&.st=5 |
Monday, October 14, 2013
Traditional sulfur mining in Kawah Ijen
‘Guardian of the Golden Gate’ star says documentary helping to raise awareness about mental illness
http://news.yahoo.com/‘guardian-of-the-golden-gate’-star-says-documentary-helping-to-raise-awareness-about-mental-illness-003900353.html?.b=index&.cf3=U.S.+News&.cf4=3&.cf5=Yahoo+News&.cf6=%2F |
Monday, October 07, 2013
Saudis take to Twitter to demand better pay
Riyadh (AFP) - Despite their country boasting the world's greatest oil wealth, many Saudis complain their salaries are not enough to make ends meet, and are taking to Twitter to demand more money.
"The salary is not enough", a hashtag launched in early summer on the micro-blogging website, triggered more than 17.5 million tweets, reflecting the frustration of many Saudis over their purchasing power.
The campaigners called on King Abdullah to order "by decree, an increase in the salaries of all civil servants" of the world's top oil exporter.
The basic monthly salary of a public employee ranges from between 3,945 riyals ($1,051) and 24,750 riyals ($6,599 dollars), in addition to various allowances, according to a study prepared by insurance companies.
In the private sector, the average wage is 6,400 riyals ($1,700), compared with 15,299 riyals ($4,000) in most other Gulf monarchies, according to a reported study prepared by the World Bank and the Saudi economy ministry.
"Let officials stop stealing... corruption has taken everything and people are the victims," tweeted journalist Fahd al-Fahid.
Others posted images they said reflected the misery in the kingdom -- a woman rummaging through rubbish, families living in dilapidated houses and students crammed into old trucks.
Some posted cartoons, one of which featured a Saudi man standing in the shadow of a palm tree whose fronds stretch far beyond the kingdom's borders.
The caption reads: "Our assets go to others: the kingdom receives five percent (of the wealth) and 95 percent goes abroad."
As an example, Saudi Arabia has announced five billion dollars in aid to Egypt since the army there ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in early July.
"Inflation and continually rising prices over several years have seriously affected the purchasing power of people," economist Abdullah al-Almi told AFP.
The result, he said, was "a shrinking middle class".
Unemployment stands officially at 12.5 percent and affects mainly young people, who represent 60 percent of the 20-million-strong native population.
The job market is still dominated by foreigners who come mainly from Southeast Asia and accept low wages.
The government has embarked on a policy of "Saudi-isation" of jobs, hoping to reduce unemployment among its citizens who also happen to be big spenders.
"Nearly 80 percent of Saudis are now living on bank loans," warned economic consultant Zeid al-Rummani, adding that their spending is more than their income.
And a housing crisis marked by soaring prices of land and property "puts heavy pressure on salaries", he said.
"Rising property prices, which is out of control, is a crime," complained Abdelhamid al-Amri in a tweet.
Saudi Arabia is not alone in taking to Twitter to voice economic gripes. Complaints have also emerged from other wealthy Gulf states.
In neighbouring Kuwait, youth activists launched two campaigns on Twitter to urge the oil-rich emirate to accelerate housing plans for Kuwaiti families, some of whom have been waiting for 15 years.
The campaigns "Nater Bait", or "waiting for a house", and "Watan Belijar", or "a rented homeland", have been successful, mainly among 107,000 Kuwaiti families placed on a waiting list for homes.
Kuwait has a national population of 1.2 million people and financial assets estimated at more than $400 billion. The government builds houses for Kuwaitis against an interest-free loan repayable over 30 years.
Those behind the campaign there now plan to lobby the newly elected parliament to make the housing problem a top priority.
Fast food workers reveal the menu items you should dodge
WERE you thinking about fast food for dinner tonight?
You might think again after reading confessions from fast food workers who wouldn't dare to eat the food they serve up to customers every day.
A recent Reddit thread asked "what item on the menu would you absolutely not eat and why?" The responses range from the obvious (fried food is full of calories) to the downright disgusting (looking at you, festering crab meat).
HUNGRY JACK'S
"I would never order the fish burger or the vegie burger. Not many people ordered them so if you did there was a good chance that you got a patty that had been sitting there for well over an hour. The patties took quite a while to deep fry so they quite often had one ready to go in the warmer, just in case.
"Whilst working there though, I used to love eating them when I could make one fresh for myself.
"I should also add that there was always a massive tub of tartare sauce for the fish burgers but not people ordering them. Did you know tartare sauce goes kinda translucent and yellowish after a while?" - reddit user Bangersss
McDONALD'S
"Filet o Fishes are the biggest scam, you get the same bun as a cheeseburger, tiny amount of dirt cheap sauce, cheap deep fried fish square and you don't even get a full slice of cheese." - reddit user Mortaris
"Big Macs are an even bigger rip off. Same amount of meat as a double cheeseburger, one less slice of cheese than a double cheeseburger. And three times as expensive as a double cheeseburger. And for what? A little lettuce, different sauce and a middle bun? Just ask for a double cheeseburger made like a Mac." - reddit user iBuzzKill
"There were two things I would not be caught dead with: 1. Filet-o-fish, on the box of frozen patties the ingredients say "pollock and/or other fish" I have no idea what "other fish" could be. 2. Any of the juices. On a particularly slow evening i decided to clean the nozzles. They were absolutely covered with mold. Oh and we only got the machine about 6 months before. As far as I know, the one previous was NEVER cleaned." - reddit user LodoreAdove
French, not fresh, fries. Source: Supplied
BUFFETS
"I work at a Mexican restaurant that has a happy hour that includes a completely free "nacho bar." It has pans of queso, ground beef, refried beans, salsa, and chips. Sounds like a dream come true, and it would be, but I will never ever eat off that thing. This isn't because of anything the restaurant does. The food quality is excellent and fresh and the bar is kept clean, but I have seen customers put their fingers in it, cough all over it, I've even seen a grown lady EATING BEEF RIGHT OFF THE LADLE. I'm sure this goes for most places with self-serve buffets, but this experience has just scarred me from anything like that." - reddit user brinyfaceho
QUESTIONABLE SAUCES
"I worked at the Old Spaghetti Factory. Our "special" is a spicy pasta dish called the Vesuvius. The sauce is made by mashing together the unused chicken, pork, and beef from the previous 6-7 days. And the vesuvius sauce is allowed to remain for up to a week without being thrown out. So theoretically, you could be eating a pasta dish with 14-day-old meat. But hey, at least you get free ice cream." - reddit user koma0029
SUBWAY
"Cold cut combo: literally smells like ass out of the package. Tuna: way too much f***in mayo. More like cream of tuna soup. Meatballs: if its a slow restaurant, I guarantee those are from yesterday. Subway." - reddit user john92t
"Only thing that really disgusted me was the crab meat. It was made by taking imitation crab meat and mixing it in with a giant tub of mayo. When making the sandwich the thing would come out slathered in mayo and then the few people that did order it would ask for more mayo to put on top of it. People would also do this with the tuna sub. Might as well just have ordered a mayonnaise sandwich." - reddit user statisticalhornist
But really, how healthy did you think this was? Source: News Limited
UNEXPECTED FAT
"I used to work in a restaurant where we had a lunch special of chowder in a bread bowl and a salad. Now, the chowder has so much fat in it that it is a solid at room temp. Talking about 1,500 calories for the bowl. But everyday women would ask for 'light dressing'. Lady, the dressing is not the problem with your meal." - reddit user Khokhmah
But for every negative piece of advice, there's a fast food worker who stands up for their employer. Here's one from Macca's.
McDONALD'S
"I worked at McDonald's and found a bee in a salad I was making. It was unsure whether the bug was in one of the bags of ingredients but for safety we threw out all bags of ingredients that were used for the salad because we didn't know which one it came from. Oh and we threw out the other salads that was made from the safe stuff even though there wasn't anything in them." - reddit user Train0Thought
China warns U.S., Japan, Australia not to gang up in sea disputes
http://news.yahoo.com/china-warns-u-japan-australia-not-gang-sea-033430365.html?.b=world%2F%3F.b%3Dkerry%252dpleased%252dsyria%252dchemical%252ddisarmament%252d032603135%252d%252dpolitics.html%253f.b%253dindex&.cf3=Jumbotron&.cf4=3&.cf5=Reuters&.cf6=%2Fworld%2F&.h=World |
Friday, October 04, 2013
Take a look at my check-in at A.W. Lake Spa Concept with 1 photo
watching kecak at uluwatu (@ A.W. Lake Spa Concept) [pic]: http://4sq.com/1a5Ox55 |
Thursday, October 03, 2013
Qatar under growing pressure over workers' deaths as Fifa is urged to act
Qatar under growing pressure over workers' deaths as Fifa is urged to act http://gu.com/p/3j8t2 |
Twitter co-founder tweets Iranian president, asks, 'Are citizens of Iran able to read your tweets?'
http://news.yahoo.com/twitter-co-founder-tweets-iranian-president--asks-him-if-people-of-iran-can-read-his-tweets-152851230.html?.b=index&.cf3=U.S.+News&.cf4=2&.cf5=Yahoo+News&.cf6=%2F |
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Friday, September 27, 2013
Kenya: Corruption Made Nairobi Mall Massacre Easier - Media - allAfrica.com
http://m.allafrica.com/stories/201309270004.html/?maneref=http%3A%2F%2Fmobile.newsnow.co.uk%2FA%2F670231401%3F-30665 |
5 things to know about Day 1 of Nairobi mall siege - TribToday.com - News, Sports, Jobs, Community Information - Tribune Chr...
AL-SHABAB MILITANTS TARGET |
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Baby and Ice Cream: Baby gets a lick. Dramatic pause. Eyes bulge. Baby demands more
Yahoo News
Ice cream is great no matter how often you've had it. But nothing tops the first time. To paraphrase, Frank the Tank, "Once it hits your lips, it's so good!"
Parents videotaped their baby tasting ice cream for the first (but surely not the last) time, and the results are as adorable as you might expect.
Baby gets a lick. Dramatic pause. Eyes bulge. Baby demands more ... but you know, in a cute way. Parents oblige. How could you not?
Oh yeah, this is definitely the beginning of a long and delicious relationship.
Women in 15 nations need spouse's okay to work
WASHINGTON (AFP) - At least 15 countries give husbands the power to prevent their wives from working, the World Bank said in a report on gender equality in business.
"Many societies have made progress, gradually moving to dismantle ingrained forms of discrimination against women. Yet a great deal remains to be done," said World Bank President Jim Yong Kim in the preface to the report.
Among 143 countries covered in the report "Women, Business and the Law 2014", 15 -- including Iran, Syria, Bolivia and Gabon -- give men the right to object to and prevent their wives from taking jobs.
In 79 countries, laws restrict the kind of work women can do, the report said.
"The most extensive restrictions on women's employment are in Eastern Europe and Central Asia," the report said.
In the Republic of Guinea, it said, a wife can fight her husband's decision in court, but she must prove that it is unjustified to have his decision overturned.
Such rules remain in part due to history.
"Vestiges of history remain codified in certain economies simply because legislation such as the Code Napoleon was adopted wholesale and not regularly reviewed or updated.
"The notion of head of household, for example, was removed from France's Civil Code in 1970 but persists in many civil codes throughout West Africa."
In Russia, women are banned from 456 professions, including drivers of farm trucks, conducting freight trains and woodworking.
Many of those rules were inherited from the former communist regime of the Soviet Union and were left unchang ed.
One result, the report said, was that the Russian Federation had a high earnings difference between genders during the transition to a market economy.
But at least 29 countries, including Saudi Arabia, Honduras and Senegal, have laws that systematically establish men has family heads giving them powers over crucial decisions such as where to live, obtaining important documents like passports, or opening bank accounts.
But the report notes that developed Western countries have also been slow to change their rules. Permission for women to launch their own court cases without their husbands' permission came in Spain only in 1981 and, in Switzerland, in 1984.
Progress continues, according to the report. In two years, 48 legal changes increased gender parity in 44 countries, including Ivory Coast's 2013 decision to allow women to work without their husband's permission.
On the other hand, Egypt recently moved the other way: in the wake of the country's revolution, and the political rise of Islamic forces, the country removed constitutional guarantees against gender discrimination.
Trauma can be treated, but not erased @guardian
Post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers need compassion, and swift, quality treatment – as I discovered myself
by
I am one of those women. In September 2010 I was subjected to a random attack, during which I was cornered by three men, one of whom strangled me. I was lucky to get away alive, but I was left profoundly affected by what happened. But it isn't just me – traumatised people walk among us, unseen. There's a feeling that friends, family, members of the public, or even the system at large can never truly understand. Whether you're a veteran, a victim of abuse, or a refugee, the condition itself is profoundly isolating.
While science is not quite at the stage where it can erase memories of our ex-partners, the story did make me wonder how I would respond if faced with a pill or a procedure that could make the memory of the bad thing that happened go away for ever. Would I do it?
As recent speculation as to whether Aaron Alexis, the Washington navy yard gunman, was suffering from PTSD illustrates, the effects of trauma are little understood. Studies have shown how difficult it is to link the disorder and extreme violence without resorting to the anecdotal, as many studies rely on war veterans responding to questionnaires. There is little doubt that PTSD increases feelings of anger and aggression (veterans with the disorder are two to three times more likely to be violent towards wives or girlfriends), but the jump to murder is a big one to make without further research.
As far as my own condition, yes, there were times when I felt like killing people, but there were many, many more times where I felt like people were trying to kill me. One person had tried, but in my confused and traumatised brain, there were more where he came from. Like many trauma victims, I was constantly on high alert but, naturally, other people just thought I was mad.
Fury, paranoia, hypervigilance, overreaction to a perceived threat – all are common in a traumatised person. The psychologist who helped me to get better characterised the condition thus: imagine your memories are a conveyor belt of cardboard boxes heading towards a final point, where they are processed. But if something life-threatening disrupts that process, the box memories get stuck, trapped in the amygdala, that bit of the brain that triggers your fight or flight survival impulse. The amygdala knows no sense of past or present, and so, when faced with a perceived threat, it responds how it sees fit, unbeholden to logic, in the form of blind panic.
This is, of course, a very basic way of explaining an extremely complicated condition, but it certainly helped me. When faced with irrational outbursts of anger, flashbacks, paranoia, sleeplessness, knowing this was a source of comfort. For months I was terrified that the tube was crawling with terrorists intent on blowing me up. "What's the worst that can happen?" my therapist would ask, appealing to my rational self. "What's the worst?"
I was treated using trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy, provided by the NHS. I was fortunate that there wasn't too long a waiting list; others aren't so lucky. A survey by the We Need To Talk coalitionfound that one in five of those with mental health problems were waiting more than a year for referral, but studies have shown that those with PTSD should be given therapy within three months.
Part of the treatment involves reliving – an emotional and arduous process where every moment of the event is recounted and expanded upon. I was surprised by the things I remembered, how the patchwork quilt of that evening became increasingly more detailed. It made me wonder about those legal cases involving victims, fleeing conflict zones and seeking asylum, that hang on the consistency of their evidence. What if, instead of sanctuary, a guilty verdict, and someone saying "I believe you", I had been told that my fractured, confused story didn't add up? If you'd been through an experience like that, wouldn't you take the magic pill?
I don't know how many people there are in this country walking the streets addled by trauma, but I know that they need to be better looked after. And I wonder if the research will ever come to anything. Just how much horror, after all, can a mouse experience?
15 percent of American adults do not use the Internet, study finds
http://news.yahoo.com/do-not-use-internet-140141223.html?.b=index&.cf3=U.S.+News&.cf4=5&.cf5=Yahoo+News&.cf6=%2F |
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
| The History of #—and 6 Other Symbols that Rule Twitter (and the Web) | TIME.com
http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/23/the-history-of-and-6-other-symbols-that-rule-twitter-and-the-web/slide/intro/ |
Kenya Official: Several Americans Among Attackers | TIME.com
http://world.time.com/2013/09/23/kenya-official-several-americans-among-attackers/ |
Monday, September 23, 2013
The Best Way to Conquer Fear? Sleep on It | TIME.com
http://healthland.time.com/2013/09/23/the-best-way-to-conquer-fear-sleep-on-it/ emotional memories can be |
The FAA Could Relax In-Flight Device Rules Next Year | TIME.com
http://techland.time.com/2013/09/23/faa-could-relax-in-flight-device-rules-next-year/ |
Egypt Bans Muslim Brotherhood Group | TIME.com
http://world.time.com/2013/09/23/egypt-bans-muslim-brotherhood-group/ |
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