photo: Phillie Casablanca via flickr New York City has recently come under fire from rainforest advocates, and rightfully so: The City is the country’s number one buyer of endangered rainforest wood . However, as The New York Times reports, a movement is underway to replace the 127 year old bridge’s 11,000 tropical … Read the full story on TreeHugger
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A Rainforest Grows for Brooklyn Bridge: Sustainably Harvested Wood Proposed for Boardwalk
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Tagged bennyhollywood, casablanca, celeb news, child, discovery, Hollywood, mma, New York City, number-one, online-through, shirt-sold
“Bamboo Panda” by Tokyo Candies. Image via Wiloh . An eco-fashion brand born in social media heaven. Not only did I find out about this new fashion label through Twitter — thanks for the follow, Wiloh — but that’s exactly how the founders of green fashion label Wiloh met: New York-based Edward Cinelli met Sydney-based Angela Wozniakmet online through social networking and their mutual love for street style and eco-fashion co… Read the full story on TreeHugger
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For Every Green T-Shirt Sold, Eco-Fashion Label Wiloh Gives One to a Child in Need (Photos)
Posted in Gossip, Hollywood, Hot Stuff, News
Tagged bamboo, celeb news, child, edward-cinelli, green news, green-fashion, mma, mutual, online-through, shirt-sold, social-networking, sustainable clothing, tokyo, wiloh-gives
A man who was a minor himself when the incident occurred was convicted this week of raping another child. A jury found Tony Keith Straub Jr., who is now 23 years old, guilty of aggravated rape. According to the report filed by the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office, Straub was arrested in July 2008 and was indicted on the aggravated rape charge the next month. However, it is believed the actual rape occurred sometime between 2002 and 2004. George Bonnett, spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office, said according to the report, Straub was an acquaintance of the victim’s family and he was taking the small girl door-to-door to sell items as part of a school fund-raiser when he brought her into the woods near her home and raped her. The little girl did not tell her parents about the rape until several years later in 2008. While the exact date of the rape was not determined, it is believed that the victim was 6 years old at the time. Aggravated rape of someone under the age of 12 carries a mandatory life in prison. http://www.slidellsentry.com/articles/2010/08/27/news/doc4c76e217099a6933899423…. added by: Radical_Centrist
Posted in Celebrities, Hot Stuff
Tagged aggravated, bennyhollywood, charge-the-next, child, current, Hollywood, keith-straub, News, office, Rape, report, sheriff, under-the-age, Victim, while-the-exact
Facebook may think it's “inappropriate” to run ads depicting marijuana leaves, but apparently Google doesn't. Marijuana activists were stymied by Facebook this week when the social networking site, which had already been running ads from the group Just Say Now, told the organization that it would no longer run them because they contained images of a marijuana leaves. Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes explained to Just Say Now, which was launched this month by liberal blogger Jane Hamsher in conjunction with Students for a Sensible Drug Policy, that “the image of a pot leaf is classified with all smoking products and therefore is not acceptable under our policies,” in an e-mail obtained by The Huffington Post. But the group says Google agreed today to run the ads, which are similar to those declined by Facebook, and which also contain images of marijuana leaves. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/08/google-to-run-marijuana-ads-… added by: JackHerer
Posted in Celebrities, Hot Stuff
Tagged activists-were, celeb news, child, from-the-group, group, image, People, prophet
By Christian Purefoy, CNN August 25, 2010 5:09 p.m. EDT Photo: Godswill was abandoned by his mom after being called a witch Watch more about the extent of Nigeria's child witch scandal on CNN International's Connect The World this week at 2000 GMT _____ PART ONE… Akwa Ibom state, Nigeria (CNN) — Just after midnight, the pastor seized a woman's forehead with his large hand and she fell screaming and writhing on the ground. “Fire! Fire! Fire!” shouted the worshippers, raising their hands in the air. Pastor Celestine Effiong's congregants are being delivered from what they firmly believe to be witchcraft. And in the darkness of the city and the villages beyond, similar shouts and screams echo from makeshift church to makeshift church. “I have been delivered from witches and wizards today!” exclaimed one exhausted-looking woman. Pastors in southeast Nigeria claim illness and poverty are caused by witches who bring terrible misfortune to those around them. And those denounced as witches must be cleansed through deliverance or cast out. As daylight breaks, and we travel out to the rural villages it becomes apparent the most vulnerable to this stigmatization of witchcraft are children. A crowd gathered around two brothers and their sister. Tears streamed down their mother's face as she cast out her children from the family, accusing them of causing the premature deaths of two of their siblings with black magic. I was beaten by the prophet in the church. –Samuel, 15, now homeless “I am afraid. They are witches and they can kill me as well,” she sobbed. Taking his time to talk to the mother, Sam Ikpe-Itauma, an imposing man wearing a “Child's Rights & Rehabilitation Network” t-shirt, has come to try to rescue the three children. “If we are not here there's a possibility of them being thrown into the river, buried alive or stabbed to death,” Sam said. He tries to persuade their mother and a crowd of villagers that the three children are not witches – but no one believes him. And so, putting the children in his white pick-up, he drives away to his orphanage and safety. Sam runs Child's Rights & Rehabilitation Network, or CRARN — an orphanage that supports nearly 200 children. All of them were accused of witchcraft and cast out by their families, often after being tortured. The orphanage provides security, healthcare, nutrition and counseling. Godwin's story is typical. As he sat next to the quiet 5-year-old, Sam said that after Godwin's mother died, the church pastor told his family that “Godwin is responsible.” From his own investigation, questioning Godwin and talking with neighbors, Sam said that when a relative asked Godwin if he was a witch, “he said no and was beaten and made the confession that he actually killed the mother.” Sam said Godwin was locked up with his mother's corpse every night for three weeks with little food or water before a neighbor contacted Sam, who was able to rescue him. Witches and wizards, they started getting afraid. I never gave them rest. –Pastor Helen Ukpabio Other children at his orphanage bear the scars of being beaten, attacked with boiling water, and cuts from machetes. But these children are the ones lucky to be alive. “A child witch is said to be a witch when that child possessed with certain spiritual spells capable of making that child transform into cat, snake, vipers, insects, any other animal and that child is capable of wreaking havoc like killing of people, bringing diseases, misfortune into the family,” Sam said. “When a child is accused of being a witch — that child is hated absolutely by everybody surrounding him so such children are sent out of the home… But unfortunately such children do not always live long. A lot of them, they're either killed, abandoned by the parents, tortured in the church or trafficked out of the city.” Sam doesn't believe in witchcraft and is trying to raise awareness in local communities now gripped by hysteria. Belief in witchcraft is rooted in centuries of tradition, but it's only in the last 10 years, that it has become associated with child abuse, he said. “It's a social crisis,” he added. “Poverty propels this child witch phenomenon and poverty is a twin sister to ignorance. “Most vulnerable children come from single parents, divorced parents, dysfunctional families.” But the orphanage has very little space for more children. Overstretched finances mean he can barely pay a skeleton staff of four people, as well as feed the children. Instead, many children are left to roam the streets. “My parents sent me out of the house — said I'm a witch,” said Samuel, a 15-year-old who has lived on the streets for five years after a local pastor blamed him for unexpected deaths in the family. “I was beaten by the prophet in the church,” he said in a quiet voice. Samuel lives in an abandoned building with 10 other children accused of witchcraft. A local group, 'Stepping Stones Nigeria,' which is dedicated to helping street children, visits them. “Religious leaders capitalize on the ignorance of some parents in the villages just to make some money off them,” said Lucky Inyang, project coordinator for 'Stepping Stones Nigeria'. “They can say your child is a witch and if you bring the child to the church we can deliver the child but eventually they don't deliver the children… The parents go back to the pastor and say, 'why is it you have not been able to deliver the child' and the pastor says 'Oh – this one has gone past deliverance – they've eaten too much flesh so you have to throw the child out.'” CONTINUED… added by: EthicalVegan
Jennifer Aniston, Jason Bateman and the search for a kid in a cup Jason Bateman in “The Switch” Photo: Miramax “The Switch” is set in that fantasy Manhattan, familiar from Woody Allen movies, in which everyone seems to be a highly compensated white professional and all ethnic coloration has been drained away. The movie wants us to care about these people’s problems — which include things like imaginary medical maladies — but many viewers may wish that such trifling complaints were the only ones they had. Jennifer Aniston plays Kassie Larson, a top TV producer who’s facing 40 and desperate to have a child. Jason Bateman is Wally Mars, a stock trader who was once Kassie’s boyfriend but is now simply her best pal — although of course he still secretly pines for her love. Kassie has never found the right guy to have a family with, so she’s decided to go the artificial-insemination route. She’s found the ideal donor in a guy named Roland (Patrick Wilson), who’s both a hearty jock and an assistant professor of feminist theory at Columbia University. Obviously Mr. Right, at least for purposes of impregnation. Do women desirous of offspring actually throw “I’m Getting Pregnant” parties at which their chosen sperm donor arrives bearing baby juice in a plastic cup? Kassie does. Unfortunately, Wally is among the many friends in attendance, and he gets drunk, stumbles into the bathroom, finds Roland’s cup, accidentally spills its contents, and then — using a magazine photo of Diane Sawyer for stimulation — brings forth his own seminal contribution, which he leaves to be passed off as Roland’s. Wally is so drunk that the next day he doesn’t remember doing this. Two weeks later, Kassie announces she’s pregnant. She relocates to Minnesota to raise the child she’ll soon be having. Seven years later she returns to New York with her little boy, Sebastian (Thomas Robinson). She reconnects with Wally — who’s still in the dark about what he did at the party that night, and doesn’t realize Sebastian is his son — but also with Roland, who quickly develops a romantic interest in her. And so forth. Romantic comedies aren’t often an arena for violence, but this one’s different — the movie’s script continually manhandles its characters into situations of brazen implausibility. The picture does have some funny moments, mostly provided by Jeff Goldblum, as Wally’s distracted boss (Goldblum always seems to have another, more interesting conversation going on in his head while he’s delivering his character’s lines); and by Juliette Lewis, who enlivens a few scenes with her blowsy, wisecracking energy. (“I’ve had orgasms that last longer than his relationships.”) And Robinson is unusually engaging as little Sebastian — he’s a cute kid with a surprisingly wry intelligence. It’s too bad that Bateman, so expert at underplaying comic characters, has a character here that’s so thinly conceived it can’t bear much underplaying. Wally — who exhibits none of the sharkish
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip, Hollywood, Music
Tagged child, jason-bateman, Jennifer Aniston, Love, mostly-provided, movie, News, party, Photos, sawyer, search, sebastian, stars, thomas-robinson
http://blog.algore.com/2010/08/the_movement_we_need.html In a post on his blog yesterday, Al Gore called for climate protests in America in response to the betrayal by our Congress in doing its moral duty to address the climate crisis. This is no small news, (though it will be treated as such in our media) this is a clarion call to begin a social movement to reclaim our soul as a nation and our moral conscience as a species make no mistake about that. Yet already the naysayers are attacking his words saying it is impossible, insane, and won't happen, especially in a bad recession. Funny how these same people don't seem to be complaining about unnecessary wars on two fronts causing trillions in deficits during a bad recession. But I digress. But allow me to answer their claims. Firstly, this will be an arduous task. That is a given especially here in America where on the whole people do not yet equate climate justice with jobs. We need to change that. People in America on the whole also do not yet equate something happening across the world with the potential to affect their lives. We need to explain that it indeed does and show them how it is affecting them now. People due to the already overabundance of partisan political spin also think this is solely a political issue. We definitely need to debunk that. In other words, this movement must not only be about protest, but accountability, education, enlightenment, moral conscience and solutions. Though as arduous a task as that may be it is definitely not impossible. It is no more impossible than the Civil Rights Movement or the Women's Suffrage Movement which dealt with many more obstacles regarding apparatus and getting the word out. In this technological age there should be little problem in organizing such a sustained movement. All we need is the will to do it, and we must. Secondly, I truly do question those who would call standing up for our only home insane. I personally believe it is insanity to continue to plunder and destroy the biodiversity of this planet. And that is exactly what we are doing. Our species, our oceans, plantlife, crops, all suffering from the overabundance of pollutants and toxins in our water and atmosphere and the effects of a warming world. Crops worldwide ruined by floods, droughts, and wildlfires which bring soil degradation, erosion to beaches causing sea level rise, and hunger from lack of food as well as a decline in potable water sources. Glaciers worldwide melting at a rapacious pace due to warming temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, burning of carbon sinks, wasteful land management practices, black carbon(soot)and political impasse. The cost of such catastrophes if we remain on the road we are on will far exceed any such accountability placed on those causing this devastation. And the cost will not only be monetary, but it has been and will be in lives and in the quality of life. Therefore, standing up for our planet to reverse these destructive behaviors is the least insane thing we could do now as a species as we see our world hurtling towards the abyss. And lastly, it won't happen. This sounds more like wishful thinking for some than an actual fact to me, because even though there are many who fall in the above categories there are also millions in this country who do see the threat this crisis places on our ability to sustain our species in years to come. Only, they have been silent, or silenced. Silenced by big oil and coal lobbies. Silenced by a complicit media pumping out talking points and misinformation 24/7 in a desperate attempt to stay awash in profits. Silenced by a political system stained by oil and fear of change. And that is exactly why a nationwide climate justice movement is so desperately needed now. Strength in numbers, in purpose, in focus. I have lived my life from the time I was a very young girl of 12 always cognizant of my actions and how they would affect the present and the future. Always cognizant of the world I wanted my child to live in. A world of peace, prosperity, equality, and with an environment that reflected the true beauty and balance of humans. I'm not about to give up on that now. So I applaud Mr. Gore's throwing down the gauntlet and hope to see it and will participate in it. Because as arduous a task as it may be fraught with intimidation and even fears, there are some things more important than fear and this is one of them. Looking into the future taking into account the present world we live in and the world we will make if we do this as opposed to not doing it, there is no choice. And contrary to what some are saying, it wouldn't be a movement to call just for a carbon tax. This is about having a social movement that defines what we are as a species. This is about working to preserve this planet for future generations because as it stands now we are failing miserably on that score. This is about calling on politicians of all parties to do what is morally right. This is about us standing up with our collective conscience to a threat to our survival. This is about seeing the big picture. I have no illusions regarding the road ahead. However, it is a moment in history that will be shaped by what we choose to do and the future will judge us on it. I choose to stand on the side of truth and on the side of moral conscience. We cannot desert our Earth now for to do so would be a grave offense as well to those we love. This isn't just about carbon taxes or dividends; or solar panels; or green jobs; this is about who you see when you look in the mirror, and who looks up to you. Thank you Mr. Gore. I surely hope we are up to this generational challenge. added by: JanforGore
Good question! added by: kennymotown
Posted in Celebrities, Hot Stuff
http://blog.algore.com/2010/08/the_movement_we_need.html In a post on his blog yesterday, Al Gore called for climate protests in America in response to the betrayal by our Congress in doing its moral duty to address the climate crisis. This is no small news, (though it will be treated as such in our media) this is a clarion call to begin a social movement to reclaim our soul as a nation and our moral conscience as a species make no mistake about that. Yet already the naysayers are attacking his words saying it is impossible, insane, and won't happen, especially in a bad recession. Funny how these same people don't seem to be complaining about unnecessary wars on two fronts causing trillions in deficits during a bad recession. But I digress. But allow me to answer their claims. Firstly, this will be an arduous task. That is a given especially here in America where on the whole people do not yet equate climate justice with jobs. We need to change that. People in America on the whole also do not yet equate something happening across the world with the potential to affect their lives. We need to explain that it indeed does and show them how it is affecting them now. People due to the already overabundance of partisan political spin also think this is solely a political issue. We definitely need to debunk that. In other words, this movement must not only be about protest, but accountability, education, enlightenment, moral conscience and solutions. Though as arduous a task as that may be it is definitely not impossible. It is no more impossible than the Civil Rights Movement or the Women's Suffrage Movement which dealt with many more obstacles regarding apparatus and getting the word out. In this technological age there should be little problem in organizing such a sustained movement. All we need is the will to do it, and we must. Secondly, I truly do question those who would call standing up for our only home insane. I personally believe it is insanity to continue to plunder and destroy the biodiversity of this planet. And that is exactly what we are doing. Our species, our oceans, plantlife, crops, all suffering from the overabundance of pollutants and toxins in our water and atmosphere and the effects of a warming world. Crops worldwide ruined by floods, droughts, and wildlfires which bring soil degradation, erosion to beaches causing sea level rise, and hunger from lack of food as well as a decline in potable water sources. Glaciers worldwide melting at a rapacious pace due to warming temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, burning of carbon sinks, wasteful land management practices, black carbon(soot)and political impasse. The cost of such catastrophes if we remain on the road we are on will far exceed any such accountability placed on those causing this devastation. And the cost will not only be monetary, but it has been and will be in lives and in the quality of life. Therefore, standing up for our planet to reverse these destructive behaviors is the least insane thing we could do now as a species as we see our world hurtling towards the abyss. And lastly, it won't happen. This sounds more like wishful thinking for some than an actual fact to me, because even though there are many who fall in the above categories there are also millions in this country who do see the threat this crisis places on our ability to sustain our species in years to come. Only, they have been silent, or silenced. Silenced by big oil and coal lobbies. Silenced by a complicit media pumping out talking points and misinformation 24/7 in a desperate attempt to stay awash in profits. Silenced by a political system stained by oil and fear of change. And that is exactly why a nationwide climate justice movement is so desperately needed now. Strength in numbers, in purpose, in focus. I have lived my life from the time I was a very young girl of 12 always cognizant of my actions and how they would affect the present and the future. Always cognizant of the world I wanted my child to live in. A world of peace, prosperity, equality, and with an environment that reflected the true beauty and balance of humans. I'm not about to give up on that now. So I applaud Mr. Gore's throwing down the gauntlet and hope to see it and will participate in it. Because as arduous a task as it may be fraught with intimidation and even fears, there are some things more important than fear and this is one of them. Looking into the future taking into account the present world we live in and the world we will make if we do this as opposed to not doing it, there is no choice. And contrary to what some are saying, it wouldn't be a movement to call just for a carbon tax. This is about having a social movement that defines what we are as a species. This is about working to preserve this planet for future generations because as it stands now we are failing miserably on that score. This is about calling on politicians of all parties to do what is morally right. This is about us standing up with our collective conscience to a threat to our survival. This is about seeing the big picture. I have no illusions regarding the road ahead. However, it is a moment in history that will be shaped by what we choose to do and the future will judge us on it. I choose to stand on the side of truth and on the side of moral conscience. We cannot desert our Earth now for to do so would be a grave offense as well to those we love. This isn't just about carbon taxes or dividends; or solar panels; or green jobs; this is about who you see when you look in the mirror, and who looks up to you. Thank you Mr. Gore. I surely hope we are up to this generational challenge. added by: JanforGore
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