'Killer Cucumber' Outbreak Spreads

The world's biggest outbreak of a deadly form of E.coli bacteria has claimed another life as it continues to spread across Europe.

Health officials say the virus, believed to have originated from organic cucumbers imported from Spain , has killed 10 people and infected hundreds more in Germany.

 

Experts said the outbreak of hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS), which affects the blood, kidneys and, in severe cases, the nervous system, was the largest ever in Germany - and the biggest of its kind worldwide.

Health officials have advised people in affected areas in Europe to avoid eating cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce.

The E. coli pathogen has been identified on cucumbers imported from Spain but it is unclear if they were contaminated there, during transport or in Germany.

Horticultural farms in the southern Spanish region of Andalusia have been losing 7-8 million euros a day since German authorities linked the bacteria to Spanish cucumbers last week.

Czech authorities said 120 organic Spanish cucumbers were being pulled off shelves while their counterparts in neighboring Austria announced that "small amounts" of cucumbers, as well as tomatoes and eggplants, were being removed from 33 stores.

What is E. Coli?
Escherichia coli, E. Coli is a bacteria found living in the intestines of people and animals. It can be transmitted through contaminated water of food -- especially raw vegetables and undercooked meat.

It is usually harmless, but can cause brief bouts of diarrhea. Some nastier strains can cause severe diarrhea and followed by serious organ system damage such as kidney failure. Healthy adults usually recover within a week, but young children and older adults can develop a life-threatening kidney failure.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13569874

Yasmin Levy

"Yasmin Levy is part of the trend of “world music” that has so greatly enriched the music scene over the past two decades. 

While she is not yet as well known as such great divas of world music as Cesaria Evora or the Portuguese Fado singer, Mariza, with a handful of well-reviewed albums over the last seven years, she appears well on her way to joining them. 

Born in Jerusalem, the daughter of a well-known ethnomusicologist father, Levy has fashioned an oeuvre that is a mélange of different styles. She mixes music from Sephardic and Middle Eastern traditions with the Ladino songs that her father sought to preserve. 

For those unfamiliar with Ladino, it is the language spoken by Jews in the Iberian Peninsula until their expulsion at the end of the 15th century. It is a mixture of medieval Spanish with Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and various other languages."

"As you might expect, this is passionate music and it requires a voice capable of fully expressing its deep feeling, and Levy’s voice is entirely up to the task. 

It is rich, sensuous and powerful, with a broad range of emotional expression that allows her to range easily from traditional Bedouin tunes such as the eponymous “Mano Suave” from her most recent CD, to the achingly beautiful, flamenco-influenced, “La Alegria.” I particularly enjoyed “Irme Kero,” a sultry mix of Levy’s sinuous tones over a fast paced guitar and flute that somehow managed to conjure up desert landscapes even in the air-conditioned, urban comfort of the Skirball."

http://www.aljadid.com/content/yasmin-levy-skirball-center

Project V.O.I.C.E.

Project V.O.I.C.E. (Vocal Outreach Into Creative Expression) is a national movement that celebrates and inspires youth self-expression through Spoken Word Poetry.

Conceived in 2004, Project V.O.I.C.E. encourages young people to engage with the world around them and use Spoken Word Poetry as an instrument through which they can explore and better understand their culture, their society, and ultimately themselves.

Project V.O.I.C.E. brings together performance, writing, and a supportive environment to inspire youth to recognize that their views are significant, valid, and necessary. 

Sarah Kay, Founder and Co-Director

Sarah Kay is a Spoken Word Poet who grew up in New York City and began performing her poetry when she was only fourteen years old.  Even though she was often the youngest poet by a decade, Sarah made herself at home at the Bowery Poetry Club, one of New York's most famous Spoken Word venues.

EIS Amnesty Club and The Practice of Vidomegon in Benin: Amnesty International marks 50 years of fighting!!!

I long for the day when Amnesty is needed NO MORE! Human beings inflict on one another uninmaginable horrors!

I have started an Amnesty Club in the Middle school two years ago and I am so proud to see the Middle School and High School students taking their role of freedom fighters so seriously!! Through Socratic dialogues, I try to raise their consciousness and awareness of problems in our society.

Our club has re-energised the idea of the global citizen in our English International School of Cotonou.

The students and I care about individuals and we are all together united in action, standing in solidarity. We care about children and oppressed minorities. We fight torture, campaign against the death penalty, defend prisoners of conscience and the right of refugees, and calls oppressive regimes to account (by writting letters).

We yearn for a world in which every person enjoys the freedom of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This year our play is about the Practice of Vidomegon in Benin. Doxa, one of my students in Year 9, has written a wonderful play script about the Vidomegon problem in Rep of Benin which I promise to put on the blog next time.

Poor, rural families in Benin and elsewhere in Africa often engage in vidomegon, a social practice whereby a child, usually a daughter, is sent to live as a servant with a wealthier family. 

The practice has fallen into the realm of child traffickers, who go from village to village to collect children and sell them to other nations. Benin has become a supplier of illicit child labour. 

The students and I want our cry, STOP THE PRACTICE OF VIDOMEGON NOW, to be heard all over the world.

Through our plays and stories, we hope that our voices will become a worldwide chorus.

"La persistance du phénomène Vidomègon: Les droits des enfants toujours bafoués en dépit des efforts consentis. 

Dètondji Déguénon est originaire de la région d’Agonlin, et âgée de dix ans à peine. Mais, la voilà depuis confrontée à tous les travaux domestiques, voire plus à Cotonou chez sa tutrice, une fonctionnaire du même village qu’elle à qui elle a été confiée depuis environ trois ans par ses parents. 

Chétive, Dètondji Déguénon, toujours habillée en haillons est la première à se lever et souvent la dernière à se coucher. Elle a le devoir tous les jours de balayer la cour, la devanture de la maison, de faire la vaisselle, la lessive." (laraignee.org: http://www.laraignee.org/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=6944)

The students and I called an urgent action to encourage people around the world to send letters and emails to President Yayi Boni who has the power to intervene and stop the practice of Videmegon in Rep of Benin. 

We must stop children abuses, we must stop the practice of Vidomegon in Benin!

Happy Mother's Day Gift :)

The moon has become a dancer at this festival of love. 
This dance of light, this sacred blessing, this divine love beckons us to a world beyond, that only lovers can see with their eyes of fiery passion. 
They are the chosen ones who have surrendered. 
Once they were particles of light, now they are the radiant sun. 
They have left behind the world of defeat-full games. 
They are the privileged lovers who created new worlds with their eyes of fiery passion. Rumi

Peace, Peace, We need Peace!

Peace is needed in the Middle East. Barack Obama is to pursue a peace plan involving the recognition of Israel by the Arab world in exchange for its withdrawal to pre-1967 borders.

Obama wants to throw his support behind a 2002 Saudi Peace initiative endorsed by the Arab League and backed by Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister and leader of the ruling Kadima Party.

The Arab Peace plan received a boost when President Shimon Peres, a Nobel Peace laureate and leading Israeli Dove, commanded the initiative at a Saudi-sponsored United Nations conference in New York. Peres told King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (who was behind this original intiative), "I wish that your voice will become the prevailing voice of the whole region."

Most of us don't want further procrastination BUT an END to the conflict! Barack Obama should lose no time in pursuing this peace plan.

After 63 years of the Palestinian Nakba, and despite 20 years of unsuccessful peace negotiations, the Palestinian people continue to be denied their most fundamental and inalienable rights to self-determination, national independence, sovereignty and return to their homes and properties from which they have been forcibly displaced.

“By virtue of the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, all peoples have the right freely to determine, without external interference, their political status and to pursue their economic, social and cultural development, and every State has the duty to respect this right in accordance with the provisions of the Charter.”

The U.S. president said that an independent Palestine should be based on 1967 borders — before the Six Day War in which Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza — as adjusted by possible land swaps agreed upon by both sides. He said Israel can never live in true peace as a Jewish state if it insists on "permanent occupation."

"For the Palestinians, efforts to delegitimize Israel will end in failure. Symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations in September won’t create an independent state," Obama said, in a speech in which he repeatedly praised nonviolent protest in other parts of the region in pursuit of national "self-determination."

Livni, the leader of Kadima, which favours the plan, is the front-runner in Israeli elections due in February. Her rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of Likud, is adamantly against withdrawing to borders that predate the Six Day war in 1967.

But Netanyahu, don't be fooled by the applause! People around the world want peace, Peace. 

According to a Washington source Obama told Abbas: “The Israelis would accept this initiative because it would give them peace with the Muslim world from Indonesia to Morocco." 

Obama is endorsing the Palestinians' demand for their future state to be based on the borders that existed before the 1967 Middle East war. Israel says the borders of a Palestinian state have to be determined through negotiations.

Then, Please, let us start the negotiations! Palestinian people cannot live anymore in forced exile and they do need a state, a Palestinian state!

I cannot see my friends!!

I do not know what happened today...but I cannot see my friends anymore! I cannot see the list of the followers in my Blogger dashboard! Who can help me? I cannot see my friends anymore!! I need help!

Refugees by Suheir Hammad

Suhair Hammad: "I was born a Black woman"

Brooklynite Hammad may be the first Palestinian-American to make it big in the spoken-word or performance poetry scene!

She writes, Home is within me. I carry everyone and everything I am with me wherever I go. Use my history as the road in front of me, the land beneath me. Paths are many, but essence is one and eternal.

But what does Suheir Hammad mean when she says she is "born Black?" According to Kazim Ali, Black, in her case, not being mere ethnic marker but a political position in relation to a dominant power structure.

As Hammad herself explains in her book, the word has numerous historical and political meanings that she embraces.

In "Jabaliya" Suheir Hammad writes,

a woman wears a bell carries a light calls searches

through madness of deir yessin calls for  afah for bread 

orange peel under nails blue glass under feet gathers 

children in zeitoun sitting  ith dead mothers she unearths 

tunnels and buries sun onto trauma a score and a day rings 

a bell she is dizzy more than yesterday less than 

tomorrow a zig zag back dawaiyma back humming suba

back shatilla back ramleh back jenin back il khalil back il quds 

all of it all underground in ancestral chests she rings 

a bell promising something she can’t see faith is that 

faith is this all over the land under the belly 

of wind she perfumed the love of a burning sea 

concentrating refugee camp 

crescent targeted red

a girl’s charred cold face dog eaten body 

angels rounded into lock down shelled injured shock 

weapons for advancing armie   is clearing forests sprayed onto a city

o sage tree human skin contact explosion these are our children

she chimes through nablus back yaffa backs shot under 

spotlight phosphorous murdered libeled public relations

public

relation

a bell fired in jericho rings through blasted windows a woman 

carries bones in bags under eyes disbelieving becoming 

numb dumbed by numbers front and back gaza onto gaza 

for gaza am sorry gaza am sorry she sings for the whole 

powerless world her notes pitch perfect the bell a death toll