Iman Maleki is an Iranian artist considered the world’s greatest realist painter..
His greatest skill, however, is not only that his pictures are photo quality, but mostly in his subject matters, composition, and the profound expressions on the faces of his characters.
Iman Malecki’s site
Submitted by a reader
From The Chronicle Herald
HOW CAN THIS person be only 11 years old?
He speaks so well, so maturely, has seen so much of the world, and is so conscious of the welfare of others.
He must be at least 25, just shorter than most adults.
Bilaal Rajan is a mere 11, a Grade 7 student at St. Andrews College in Toronto, and a worldwide ambassador for UNICEF.
A couple of hundred Grade 7 students at Sackville Heights Junior High School hear Bilaal speak of the impact they can have by raising UNICEF dollars at Halloween to provide poor countries with schools and shelter.
The ovation after his Power Point presentation is thunderous and every teacher in the room, and UNICEF Atlantic regional director John Humble, hope the message has been received.
“Today gave our students a chance to see beyond their own world,” says guidance counsellor Cathy Silverstein. “These good kids are very involved in fundraising for projects like the Terry Fox Foundation, Turkey Club and IWK. Many don’t have a lot, but they come across with funds for good causes.”
Student Kaitlin Welcher was impressed with Bilaal. “It’s amazing that he’s raised five million dollars,” she says. “And I’d never have the courage to talk in front of this number of people.”
“Bilaal grew up in a giving way of life,” says Aman, who, with his wife, Shamim, has always volunteered in their Ismaili Muslim community, which believes in taking care of the other person.
Bilaal, with two books on fundraising and motivation ready for publishing next spring, has spoken to groups for years. Just last summer, he spent several weeks in Tanzania on UNICEF’s behalf. After the tsunami in 2004, he visited Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Maldives to encourage children and adults, and to see where the needs were greatest so he could raise more money.
The young Richmond Hill resident speaks English and French fluently and understands and speaks some Spanish and Mandarin. His marks are straight A’s. He studies while on the road, as he has been for the last 10 days in the Maritimes, addressing schools on UNICEF’s trick-or-treat campaign.
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Bilaal Rajan’s website
(Submitted by Salim Amersi)
The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka – Terrorism, ethnicity, political economy
Author: Asoka Bandarage
279pp, Routledge, Contemporary South Asia Series
By Dr. Mahes Ladduwahetty
Dr. Asoka Bandarage’s timely book on the Sri Lankan conflict was launched on February 4, 2009, under the auspices of the Georgetown University’s Mortara Center for International Studies and the South Asia Forum. She was introduced by Dr. Joseph A. Ferrara, Associate Dean of the Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute where Dr. Bandarage teaches. Dr. Bandarage’s address at this well attended event covered the salient sections of her book, taking the political history of the conflict from pre-Independence, through the post-Independence years and into the current period with its new possibilities of a resolution.
There has been a significant dearth of scholarly works on the Sri Lankan conflict, and Dr. Bandarage’s book helps fill that vacuum. While its target is basically the academic community of political scientists, it is also an immensely readable book that relates a gripping tale to the lay reader interested in this conflict. She takes the reader through the historical underpinnings of the conflict, its British colonial history, the background events that led to the 1983 riots, the Indian intervention and its failure, and into the current internationalization of the conflict with its ramifications. It deals with the multiple actors, political, military and diplomatic, both internal and external, who entered the stage during the period covering the nearly 4 decades in which the LTTE was called to arms by Tamil political leaders; leaders who continue to be described by supporters as being “moderates’ and ‘Gandhian’ despite the LTTE’s modus operandi of violence of the most ruthless kind. The several cycles of the LTTE’s near defeat and revival, coupled with the entrance of international conflict resolution players such as the Norwegians who actively aided the LTTE, as well as the cycles of war and ceasefire/negotiations that have been experienced by the Sri Lankan people with hope and anguish in turn, all in the background of successive Sri Lankan governments with their political agendas as well as partisan politics, are dealt with and analyzed.
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The film was made in 1948 and shows the post Second World War condition in Italy; but it was true of whole of Europe.
Born in 1991, Declan Galbraith is an English singer of Irish and Scottish background. He is very popular in Germany and in schools in China his songs are used for teaching English language.
This is one of the most tumultuous times on record in the global financial markets.
TRILLION-DOLLAR BAIL-OUTS
Huge amounts of money have been committed in financial support for banks.
BILLION-DOLLAR STIMULUS PACKAGES
Governments are spending billions of dollars to kick-start economic growth. Measures include tax cuts and building projects.
VICTIMS
The financial landscape has changed dramatically, with several giants of the business world disappearing.
UK BANK BAIL-OUT PACKAGE
The UK has spent £81bn to prop up Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS and Lloyds TSB as well as nationalised Northern Rock and parts of Bradford & Bingley.
The Treasury and the Bank of England have pledged hundreds of billions of pounds of further support for the fragile banking system.
A £250bn credit guarantee scheme announced in October is being expanded to encourage banks to lend more, with a commitment of up to £50bn.
US BANK BAIL-OUT PACKAGE
There has been an array of measures to provide support to the battered US financial system.
A $700bn scheme approved last year, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Programme, was used to help lenders like Citigroup and Bank of America as well as the automobile industry.
Major changes to the programme have been announced by the new administration, including a partnership with the private sector to buy toxic assets from banks.
ECONOMIES HIT
World economic growth is expected to slow sharply, with the UK among the hardest hit. Developing countries such as China and India should fare better.
LEGACY OF DEBT
As countries try to spend their way out of recession, debt levels are forecast to rise.
See the graphics here
The nation paid homage to the martyrs of the language movement midnight past Friday, with thousand of people streaming barefooted along the roads towards shaheed minars with wreaths and flowers.
The president, Zillur Rahman, in Dhaka, first placed a wreath at the altar of the Central Shaheed Minar on the campus of Dhaka University a minute past midnight, followed by the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina.
Hasina, along with the council of ministers, advisers, lawmkers and her sister Sheikh Rehana, placed one more wreath on behalf of the ruling Awami League.
The Jatiya Sangsad speaker, Abdul Hamid, and the deputy speaker, Shawkat Ali Chowdhury, then placed wreaths. They were followed by the chief whip, Abdush Shahid, and the Dhaka mayor, Sadeque Hossain Khoka.
The chiefs of the three services, General Moeen U Ahmed, Rear Admiral Zahir Uddin Ahmed, and Air Marshal SM Ziaur Rahman, then placed wreaths followed by the attorney general, Mahbubey Alam. The sector commanders of the war of independence, under the banner of the Sector Commanders’ Forum, then placed a wreath.
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(Submitted by Rohila Pritam)
Whoever it was probably lived a few thousand years ago, somewhere in East Asia — Taiwan, Malaysia and Siberia all are likely locations. He or she did nothing more remarkable than be born, live, have children and die.
Yet this was the ancestor of every person now living on Earth — the last person in history whose family tree branches out to touch all 6.5 billion people on the planet today.
That means everybody on Earth descends from somebody who was around as recently as the reign of Tutankhamen, maybe even during the Golden Age of ancient Greece. There’s even a chance that our last shared ancestor lived at the time of Christ.
“It’s a mathematical certainty that that person existed,” said Steve Olson, whose 2002 book Mapping Human History traces the history of the species since its origins in Africa more than 100,000 years ago.
It is human nature to wonder about our ancestors — who they were, where they lived, what they were like. People trace their genealogy, collect antiques and visit historical sites hoping to capture just a glimpse of those who came before, to locate themselves in the sweep of history and position themselves in the web of human existence.
But few people realize just how intricately that web connects them not just to people living on the planet today, but to everyone who ever lived.
With the help of a statistician, a computer scientist and a supercomputer, Olson has calculated just how interconnected the human family tree is. You would have to go back in time only 2,000 to 5,000 years — and probably on the low side of that range — to find somebody who could count every person alive today as a descendant.
Furthermore, Olson and his colleagues have found that if you go back a little farther — about 5,000 to 7,000 years ago — everybody living today has exactly the same set of ancestors. In other words, every person who was alive at that time is either an ancestor to all 6 billion people living today, or their line died out and they have no remaining descendants.
That revelation is “especially startling,” statistician Jotun Hein of England’s Oxford University wrote in a commentary on the research published by the journal Nature.
“Had you entered any village on Earth in around 3,000 B.C., the first person you would have met would probably be your ancestor,” Hein marveled.
It also means that all of us have ancestors of every color and creed. Every Palestinian suicide bomber has Jews in his past. Every Sunni Muslim in Iraq is descended from at least one Shiite. And every Klansman’s family has African roots.
How can this be?
It’s simple math. Every person has two parents, four grandparents and eight great-grandparents. Keep doubling back through the generations — 16, 32, 64, 128 — and within a few hundred years you have thousands of ancestors.
It’s nothing more than exponential growth combined with the facts of life. By the 15th century you’ve got a million ancestors. By the 13th you’ve got a billion. Sometime around the 9th century — just 40 generations ago — the number tops a trillion.
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(submitted by a reader)
By Mirela Xanthaki
“Dora”, a young Mexican woman, was helped by another Mexican woman to cross the U.S. border in the promise of a good job there. She ended up in Texas, working in a sweatshop and not allowed to go out or even take a shower.
“Sandra” was sold as a child for 400 dollars to a pedophile, who repeatedly raped her for four years.
Both were victims of a global trafficking network that has ensnared an estimated 10 million people, although hard data about the underworld of human slavery remains elusive – partly because of the reluctance of some countries to cooperate with investigations.
“We have a big picture, but it is impressionistic and lacks depth,” admitted Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which just released its annual Global Report on Trafficking in Persons on Thursday.
“Although we can talk with specific numbers about drug trafficking, for example, we do not have an estimate for this area of crime [human trafficking],” Costa said.
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates 2 million as the yearly net addition to the total number of slaves worldwide. Subtracting the number of people rescued or who die annually, the total number is thought to be over 10 million.
However, the actual number of known trafficking victims is only 22,500.
“We are not able to segment today’s slave markets into their components. We must – but cannot – catalogue different types of slavery. Exploitation through child-begging in Europe is different from what goes on in a brothel, or in a street corner in Australia,” Costa noted.
“Preventive measures must also be adapted to take into account that an Asian father sells his underage daughter under circumstances different than what pushes an illegal immigrant at a sweatshop in the Americas,” he explained. “If we do not overcome this knowledge crisis, we will be fighting the problem blindfolded.”
The report is based on data gathered from 155 countries. Of these, 125 have signed the U.N. Protocol against Trafficking in Persons. However, not all of those who ratified it are enforcing the provisions of the treaty – 40 percent of the countries in the sample did not convict anyone for trafficking in the past year.
Overall, the number of convictions for human trafficking is growing, says the report, notably in a handful of countries, but it is still much lower than the estimated number of victims.
Many large countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Iran remain uncooperative and provided no data.
The most common form of human trafficking is sexual exploitation (79 percent) followed by forced labour (18 percent). Forced labour is detected and reported less because it is frequently goes unnoticed, especially in big cities.
Nearly four in five victims are women and girls. Including boys, 20 percent of all trafficking victims in the world are children, but in some parts of Africa and Asia’s Mekong region, children are the majority.
The report also reveals that intra-regional and domestic trafficking are the major forms of trafficking in persons. “Criminals prey on their own kin, something even animals don’t do,” Costa said.
The report shatters some illusions about victims and victimisers. Although generally speaking, most crimes are committed by young men, when it comes to trafficking, women perpetrators play an important role. In 30 percent of the countries that provided evidence on the gender of traffickers, women make up the largest proportion.
In regions like Eastern Europe and Central Asia, women trafficking women is the norm, according to Costa. Psychological, financial and coercive reasons often induce former victims to become traffickers.
Mira Sorvino, an actress and UNODC Goodwill Ambassador, shared stories of trafficking victims that she had met.
Dora’s trafficker threatened that if she ran away, her family would be killed. “Here in Texas you are lower than a dog,” she would tell Dora. “People here actually care if a dog is abused. No one cares about you.”
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Monali Meher is graduated in Fine arts (BFA-1990) from Sir J.J. School of Arts, Mumbai. In 1998 she received ‘Unesco -Aschberg’ Residency in Vienna by Federal Chancellery for the Arts and Science where she researched the time and space factor in her work and focused on the process of decay. She felt immense necessity to work with her own body and emotions in public as a new expression/ tool. In 1998 she made her first performance, Reflect, ‘A personal window display’ , at Jehangir art gallery in Mumbai with the statement “Nothing is permanent’ & ‘it’s a nature’s law”.
In 2000-01, accepted in Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, funded by Dutch Ministry foreign Affairs; Nuffic, Huygens grant, Amsterdam for research residency programme. In 2006 Sep. she performed at Tate modern museum, London in Mapping Mumbai event, Dadao international performance festival in Beijing, China, Sinop Biennale Turkey and participated in Nederlands Een exhibition in Museum Gouda.
In 2007, she performed at National review on live art Festival (NRLA) Glasgow where she was also invited for the panel discussion, ‘Performance Art and Other Histories’. In (2006-07) manifested a Community Art Project, ‘Quilt/ Deken’ , with Artwalk Stichting funded by Amsterdam fonds voor de kunst, SVP Kunst Stadsdeel Westerpark. Quilts are on permanent installation in Raadszaal, Stadsdeel Westerpark, Amsterdam. Her work has been published in books: ‘Student Body’ by Marina Abramovic, ‘Shifting Map’, ‘RAIN’ project by RABK, ‘Third Text’, ‘Love & Death’, Egon Schiele catalogue, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, ‘Cleaning the house’ , NMAC foundation, Spain. For the last 9 years she has been working with performances, video, photography, Installations. Since year 2000, she is based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.