Pakistan Information & News

The beatroot writes about a homophobic gay icon, alcohol consumption data, an “unbelievable new alliance” of two Polish politicians, President Lech Kaczynski’s meeting with George W. Bush, and one politician’s anti-German rhetoric.
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Borin in Cambodia is demanding better food safety. “I can’t sit and see my family, friend, my colleague, eating unsafe food everyday without knowing how to stop it.”

Read more at Preetam Rai

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With a total population estimated at just under 16 million, five years after the end of the thirty-year long civil war, the state telecommunications enterprise Angola Telecom’s fixed-line network still serves less than one percent of the population, Internet Service Providers hardly serve one person per one thousand people and there are just around fourteen Internet users per one thousand people.* Still, in spite of this grim picture, there are a handful of bloggers in the country, although most blogging from the capital, Luanda. There are also at least two brave souls blogging from the interior provinces. Of these, I have been following the postings from “Serra da Chela”, a blog (commemorating this month its first anniversary) by Manuel Vieira, a journalist based in Lubango, the capital of the Southern province of Huila. Though blogging mostly on/from that location, he also posts from Luanda and other interior provinces (and, in the last few days, from Mozambique and Swaziland).
One of his posts that has particularly called my attention was on an issue that brings to the fore, on the one hand, the spectrum of hunger caused by climate and local weather conditions and, on the other, the conflicts opposing local authorities, on behalf of their communities, and extractive companies exploiting natural resources in the region while dodging their social responsibilities:
Populares do município dos Gambos, província da Huíla, denunciam gritantes espectros de fome no interior daquela localidade.
Os casos de fome terão se agravado nos finais de Novembro do ano passado, quando a seca na região semi árida dos Gambos começou a ser sentida, com os sinais mais evidentes serem a destruição das culturas e a seca das chimpankas ( lagos artificias para a acumulação de agua para o uso humano e abeberamento de gado).
Grandes hectares cultivados com massango e massambala são descritos como totalmente secos devido a falta de chuvas em claro contraste com o resto do país onde caiem fortes cargas de aguas pluviais com destruição á mistura. As localidades de VILHAMBWNDO, CHIANGE ( sede municipal) e CHIMBEMBA são as mais visadas. Os gritos de fome terão chegado em Dezembro ultimo ao conhecimento das autoridades do governo da Huíla, no Lubango, mas ainda não há informações de um “plano de emergência” para travar ou minimizar a situação por forma a evitar a perda de vidas humanas e mesmo de gado bovino, principal riqueza das populações agro pastorais do municípios.
Numa deslocação recente ao município o chefe do executivo huilano, Ramos da Cruz, terá sido confrontado com as informações dos sobas da zona, devido as dificuldades por que passam populações de pelo menos quatro comunas, onde a falta de mantimentos a mais sentida. Noutras localidades desta província, no principio do ano passado, varias localidades tiveram o mesmo problema devido a destruição das culturas de milho e massango por acção directa das intensas chuvas que se abateram sobre a região. Na altura a reacção das autoridades foi tímida na contenção das consequências do problema. SOBAS E EMPRESAS DE EXTRAÇÃO DE MINEIROS EM PÉ DE [...]

Read more at koluki

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“A typical Saturday doesn’t usually involve having lunch with a celebrity, roasting amazing Herdwick lamb and stabbing myself with an oyster knife. But yesterday was different.” Can Cook, Must Cook has an eventful weekend.
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Read more at Janine Mendes-Franco

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The top featured story at Sina blogs yesterday was the rodent invasion into the areas surrounding Dongting lake in southern Hunan province precipitated by flooding on the Yangtze river, and the resulting extermination campaign.
Among discussion were the reasons the rodent population has flourished in the south, as well as what’s being done with the corpses, ninety tons of which have already been collected, according to officials, with two billion rodents running loose in total [zh]. Video and photos have been posted and, notes Sina blogger ‘Everywhere is my Home‘, the area affected spans four million mu—just more than 1,000 square miles—which includes twenty-two counties, leaving the local flood protection dike and eight million mu of rice paddies at serious risk:
据分析，洞庭鼠灾的原因在于近年湖南受广州菜肴的影响，造成”口味蛇”的时兴，蛇被大量拿来”果腹”，而老鼠的另一个天地”猫头鹰”由于当地流传的偏方『治偏头痛』也残遭杀害。缺少天敌的田鼠们，繁殖、破坏起来自然”随心所欲”。

According to analysis, the reason for the mice disaster in Dongting lies in the influence of recent years that Cantonese cuisine has had in Hunan, bringing “a taste for snake” into popularity, with massive numbers of snakes having been turned into tasty treats, and the other natural predator of mice, owls, killed as a result of the folk medicine belief in their ability to cure headaches. The field mice, lacking natural predators, have flourished in numbers and are running amok destroying nature.

当读了这篇新闻报道的时候，想到了前不久在上海发生的一件事，840只流浪猫（其中也有些家猫）被上海小动物保护者在上海至广州的高速公路闸口处解救下来（这些猫是从浙江、安徽等地被猫贩子收购下来送往广州餐馆里做菜肴用的），并在各个论坛里发帖子征集药品、食物来救治这些可怜的小生命。而当时的警察却以猫不属于国家保护动物而拒绝出警，更可恨的是猫贩子手持伪造的林业部门文件，叫嚣着谁搬猫就打死谁。此外，第二天又有辆运猫车闯关去了广州。

When I read this piece of news, I thought of something that happened not that long ago in Shanghai, 840 vagrant cats (with some house cats among them) were rescued by Shanghai Society for the Protection of Small Animal members at a toll booth on the Shanghai-Guangzhou expressway (these cats were purchased by cat dealers in Zhejiang, Anhui and other places then shipped to Guangzhou restaurants to be turned into food), who then posted messages to every bbs forum to collect medicine and food to cure these poor little lives. At the same time, police refused to get involved on the grounds that cats do not count as nationally protected animals; what’s most despicable is that the cat dealers carried fake Department of Forests documents, and made a commotion, saying that whoever moved the cats would be beaten to death. Then, the next day another shipment rushed off to Guangzhou.
为什么会把这两件事情放在一起，还有个重要的原因：新闻报道里说湖南省农业厅厅长程海波提出的化学灭鼠方案，主要是投放毒饵，用溴敌隆、敌鼠钠盐等杀鼠剂配制毒饵。而大通湖区、乡两级政府拨付应急防治经费购买鼠药和饵料，投放毒饵毒杀害鼠40多吨灭鼠。

Why do I connect these two incidents? There’s another major reason: news reports are saying that director of the Hunan province Department of Agriculture Cheng Haibo has put forth a proposal for the chemical extermination of the mice, mainly to prepare to use poisoned bait, the pesticide bromadiolone or diphacinone sodium salt etc. to kill the mice. Governments in both Datong Lake District and Datong Lake County put up emergency control funds to purchase the rodent poisons, over forty tons to be dropped down on the mice to exterminate them.
要有点常识的人都知道，化学灭鼠产生的效果是不错，但对当地的生态环境造成更大的负面影响是无法估量的。由此可以看出，政府政绩思想又一次出来做了跳梁小丑的角色。
现在让我们设想一个美丽的结局吧：这840只猫如果在洞庭湖生活的话，那里还会有鼠灾的发生吗？
最后要问一句：广州的居民们，当你们吃着小动物的尸体，看到这样的新闻，你们还吃的下吗？？？

Anyone with a little common sense will know that while using chemicals to exterminate rodents will be quite effective, the even larger negative impact it will have on the local environment is immeasurable. From this it can be seen. Once again we see that government drive to accomplish has taken on the role of being clumsy and up to no good.
Let’s [...]

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A hilarious post by positive solution on his day-to-day toxic life.
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Zeena from Kuwait updates us on her weight loss programme here.

Original post by Amira Al Hussaini and plugin by Elliott Back

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Zeena from Kuwait updates us on her weight loss programme here.

Original post by Amira Al Hussaini and a wordpress plugin by Elliott

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Real Thai introduces some Northern Thai dishes and recommends a place in Bangkok where one can get these dishes.

Original post by Preetam Rai and powered by Img Fly

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He made his first windmill when he was 14 years old, having dropped out of school due to lack of school fees in 2002. And until two weeks ago, he had never touched a computer before, let alone use email. This month he was the toast of an international technology conference in Arusha, Tanzania, where he shared the limelight with Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Jane Goodall,Bono, Larry Page (the inventor of Google), among many famous names. The story of William Kamkwamba and his genius achievement is the highlight of this round-up of the Malawian blogosphere, in addition to a recent conference on VOIP; the recent death of Malawi’s first lady, Mrs Ethel Mutharika; returning on air after a year’s absence; defining white collar and armed crime; broadening solutions to problems of food security; and remembering forgotten nationalists. Herewith another round-up of the Malawi blogosphere.
Boy genius and the windmill at the TEDGlobal conference
The most exciting phenomenon in the Malawian blogosphere as I am writing is the 19-year-old William Kamkwamba. Five years ago William dropped out of secondary school just after two terms due to lack of money for school fees. Visiting a nearby school library supplied by the Malawi Teacher Training Activity (MTTA), a USAID project, he one day found a book on how to make electricity using home-made materials, and today he has not only built a windmill that is attracting attention around the world, he was also given a standing ovation at the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference, held June 4-7 in Arusha, Tanzania. On his one-week old blog, which has already attracted comments from different parts of the globe, William describes how it all started with MTTA’s deputy chief of party, Dr. Hartford Mchazime, who was visiting one of his project’s schools, which turned out to be the one [...]

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TEDGlobal 2007 in Arusha, Tanzania, gave birth to Africa Cookbook Project: “At TEDGLOBAL in Arusha, Tanzania in June, 2007, we launched the “Africa Cookbook Project,” whose goal is to archive African culinary writing and make it widely available on the continent and beyond. A database is being developed and copies of hundreds of cookbooks are already being catalogued at BETUMI: The African Culinary Network. Google has offered assistance in eventually digitizing some of the information.”
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Olechko prepares to spend August in Lviv: in this post, she writes about the newly-discovered local coffee houses and restaurants.
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