Yesterday was the Day of the African Child, and international aid officials that met to mark the day noted that it would cost approximately 1 billion dollars per year to adequately care for the millions of children in Africa orphaned by AIDS or war or famine. The money is needed to pay for school fees or health care. A small investment in Africa’s children now means more stable societies in the future, because the people are educated and productive. This seems like another good reason to make poverty history. BBC NEWS | Africa | Appeal to help Africa’s orphans
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BBC NEWS | Americas | ‘Freedom fries’ lawmaker’s U-turn Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) has reversed his support for the Iraq war and now wants the troops brought home. He was formerly an adamant supporter of the war who led the whole Congressional “Freedom Fries” campaign to rename fried potatoes to get back at those wimpy peaceloving French bastards. His change of heart took place when he attended the funeral of a US sergeant and listened as the widow read her husband’s last letter home. He’s attended a lot of funerals, actually, and written over 1,300 letters of condolence, and he…
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… whether Michael Jackson is guilty or not. Naturally, everyone in the office is all a-quiver and jumping online to try to find live video. I can hear live feed-type audio coming from all over. Naturally, this will slow the office network to a crawl. If only the Onion had a live feed. That would be a lot more bearable. And of course now I’m curious enough to try to get a live feed going, but must try to resist. But if he’s guilty and he starts to cry in court, I’m betting his nose falls off. UPDATE: Huh? Okay,…
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The G8 ministers are attending next month’s summit are invited to bag the lavish banquet they’ll be served one night at Gleneagles, Scotland and have a single bowl of rice on Devonshire Green with some nice people from MakePovertyHistory.org. More information: G8: You’re Invited! Please RSVP
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All right, that’s a bit better. I still have to manually add the category and upload the photo to the right directory, but that’s almost as good as Mfop2 could do. Here’s Steve in his new Prius. His car is different than ours… it starts with the push of a button. We’re thinking of starting a club for hybrid car owners in the area, and might have a few people at the “Holy Rollers Classic Car Show” event at Holy Moly (which is July 10th if anyone was thinking of dropping by). Link Original upload: GinnyRED57.
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Gack. Well, I clearly have some more work to do with templates and such. Here’s my first attempt to fix the post; I think I’ve got the Flickr template set right but that’ll be another test. I had to remember (duh) that Firefox now requires image size to be specified in order to display the float properly without busting the middle column out all over. Original upload: GinnyRED57.
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I see via various blogs (BoingBoing and others) that the Downing Street Memo still hasn’t gotten much mainstream media attention. The new website on the Memo has a lot of information on the issues surrounding the document, and also under the Take Action link, you can sign on to the letter to the President that asks the questions originally asked by Sen. John Conyers and 88 other members of Congress on May 5, 2005. There’s a link to a PDF copy of the actual document, with the signatures in various hands and ink-colors. Then there’s a link to an alphabetized…
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This is the first post in a new category, MakePovertyHistory. I’m pledging to post links to stories, at least once a week, that illustrate the need for an organization whose purpose is the eradication of poverty and the reduction of suffering from disease, world debt, and corruption in Africa and the world over. Rather than harangue all 2 of my readers, I’ll just post the links and a short quote and let you decide for yourselves if you are moved to respond in some way of your own. Sometimes the stories will be outrageous or horrific, and sometimes they’ll be…
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Father Jake wonders if anyone out there is listening to the “smoking gun” revelations of the Downing Street Memo, which reveals that the decision to go to war in Iraq was a foregone conclusion. Well, as pointed out in his comments, bloggers have been listening all along. In fact, I thought one of the whistle-blowing books that came out last year detailed off-the-cuff comments by Bush in the months following 9/11 that Iraq was on his radar. He reportedly stuck his head in a policy wonk’s office around March, 2002 and said “we’re going” in connection with the Iraq “problem.”…
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Seen at ***DDtB: BBC NEWS | Health | Blondes ‘to die out in 200 years’ Do I believe it? No. As a natural-born redhead myself, I’d be more interested in knowing if the gene responsible for redheadedness is “dying out.” The funny thing about recessive genes is that they lurk, and then spring out unexpectedly, pouncing on their helpless prey and making them the butt of jokes. So even though for centuries, non-redheads tried to kill us off or burn us as witches, we keep coming back. Like a bright, shiny copper penny. Not bad at all. 😉 So no,…