Saturday 17 January 2015
Margaret Cho Talks 'All About Sex' & Remembering Robin Williams
Read more at http://www.accesshollywood.com/margaret-cho-talks-all-about-sex-and-remembering-robin-williams_video_2575437#P5cq9IxTTbkIbZsx.99
Street children detained to clear way for Pope Francis' Manila visit
To ensure Manila is presentable for Pope Francis' visit, street children as young as five have been detained next to convicts in centres notorious for brutality, abuse and neglect. Simon Parry goes on a rescue mission with Father Shay Cullen
A seven-year-old boy stares nervously through the bars of the detention centre in Manila. Then, as charity workers gently explain to him that he is being taken to a children's home in the countryside, his face breaks out into a broad grin.
"Will there be toys there?" he asks.
Mak-Mak is among the few lucky ones. Put behind bars last month as part of a campaign to clear street children from the part of the Philippine capital to be visited by Pope Francis, Mak-Mak's nightmare is over, although it may take a long time to rid himself of the demons the nightmare brought with it.
With dozens of other children, he spent Christmas and New Year locked up in a concrete pen next to one holding convicted adult criminals in the grotesquely named House of Hope, where many children are brutalised and abused.
In recent weeks, hundreds of children have been rounded up from shop door-ways and roadsides by police and officials and put behind bars to make the city more presentable during Pope Francis' five-day visit, which began on Thursday. In a blatant violation of the country's child-protection laws, the terrified youngsters are locked up in filthy detention centres, where they sleep on concrete floors and where many are beaten or abused by older or adult prisoners and, in some cases, starved.
A few minutes' drive from some of the 17 detention centres that hold Manila's street children, an estimated six million people will on Sunday attend an open-air mass conducted by Pope Francis in Rizal Park, watched by a global television audience. City officials appear determined to ensure the urchins - normally a ubiquitous sight in the poverty-racked city - are nowhere to be seen, at least along the routes where the pope's cavalcade will travel. One has openly admitted there has been a major round-up to ensure street children are not encountered by the pontiff.
I have gained rare access to the House of Hope with Nobel Peace Prize-nominated Irish missionary Father Shay Cullen, 71, who, with pre-arranged paperwork at the ready, secures the release of Mak-Mak and another boy, aged 11 - their cases having been highlighted by social workers - before taking them to his Preda Foundation shelter for children, 160km away, in Subic Bay.
The House of Hope is set amid the slums of Manila's Paranaque district. Guiltless children are kept behind bars, made to go to the toilet in buckets and fed leftovers, which they eat from the floor. If past round-ups are any guide, some will be held for months before being freed.
Adult convicts are kept in a pen next to compounds holding boys and girls separately and freely enter the children's enclosures at certain times of the day, inmates and regular visitors to the centre tell us. Officials either ignore or fail to see any abuse.
"Lots of children have been brought here lately," says Paulo, 42, an inmate. "We're told they're being picked up from under the road bridges where the pope will travel."
AS CHARITY WORKERS drive Mak-Mak to his new home, an exasperated Father Shay says, "This boy is only about seven years old and he is behind bars. This is completely beneath human dignity and the rights of all the children here are being violated. There is no education. There is no entertainment. There is no proper human development. There is nowhere to eat and they sleep on a concrete floor. There is no proper judicial process.
"These kids are totally without protection. They have no legal representation. They are just put in jail and left to fend for themselves."
Pope Francis famously washed the feet of inmates in a youth detention centre in Rome, in 2013, but Father Shay, who has run his mission in the Philippines for 40 years, says, "Sadly, there is no way the pope will be visiting these detention centres in Manila.
"They are a shame on the nation. Officials here would be horrified at the prospect of the pope seeing children treated in this way."
In a local newspaper interview, Rosalinda Orobia, head of the Social Welfare Department in Manila's central Pasay district, confirmed officials had for weeks been detaining street children as young as five in the areas the pope will visit. She claimed the operations were aimed at stopping begging syndicates targeting the pope rather than tidying up the city.
"[The syndicates] know the pope cares about poor kids, and they will take advantage of that," she told the Manila Standard.
In a commentary, the newspaper slammed the campaign, saying, "We all understand the natural tendency to put one's best foot forward when guests come calling, but hiding away poor street children completely misses the point of the pope's apostolic exhortation to hear the cry of the poor.
"We should all be scandalised by the government's artificial campaign to keep the streets free of poor children only for the duration of the papal visit, with no cogent plan to keep them in schools or their homes, where they belong, and to instil discipline among their parents, who should know better."
The editorial concluded: "There is no question that children should be kept off the streets, but a campaign to do so just for the duration of a dignitary's visit helps nobody except the officials who want to put on a show and pretend that all is well in our cities."
The practice of locking up street children ahead of major international events in Manila dates back to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) Leaders' Summit of 1996, says Catherine Scerri, deputy director of street children charity Bahay Tuluyan.
"There has been a pattern of this happening before big international events. It happened before [United States President Barack] Obama's visit to the Philippines in April last year," says the Australian, who has worked for 11 years to improve the lives of Manila's legions of street children. "When we tried to have them released we were told they couldn't come out until after Obama had gone and the children were very much given the impression that they were 'rescued' because of this visit."
A survey of street children by Bahay Tuluyan has found that the so-called rescues are indiscriminate, targeting youngsters who have committed no offences and do not want to go to detention centres. Children are taken in simply for sleeping on the street, for begging or for stealing food to relieve their hunger, with no proper judicial process and - rather than "rescued" - exposed to abuse.
"There is no reason the shelters should be like this and what I find soul-destroying is the apathy of the people who work in and around places like the RAC [the notorious Manila Reception and Action Centre] and allow this brutality," says Scerri. "I can understand a lack of resources, but what I find so frustrating is the violence, torture and apathy, and the fact that people are standing by and letting this happen. I think that is completely inexcusable.
"The RAC and other institutions call these children recidivists even though they have committed no crimes," she says. "One child of 13 we interviewed had been rescued 59 times and was back on the street."
Few people in Manila know how children are treated in the detention centres. "When people find out, they are outraged," says Scerri. "They are horrified to find out what the government is doing in their name."
Anger erupted in the Philippines in October, when the picture of a skeletal 11-year-old lying on the ground at the RAC, apparently near death, was published. The boy, who shares the pope's Christian name, Francisco, is now recovering at a children's home run by a charity but protests over his case have failed to halt round-ups or improve conditions at Philippine detention centres, where an estimated 20,000 children are held each year.
In an article written for a Catholic publication as the controversy over Francisco's case spread, Father Shay described the emaciated child as an innocent at the gates of hell and called the RAC a "house of horrors" and "a place of the living dead": "It was his protruding rib cage that shocked most of all. Each rib could be clearly counted. There was no discernible breathing but one could not know from looking at his starved naked body," he wrote. "He was close to the last stage of a painful death, it seemed.
"Government employees of this place seemed indifferent to the suffering child of Lazarus that lay sprawled at the foot of an institutional wall. Who could look on that emaciated, severely malnourished body of a child for a moment and not feel a pang of compassion and be shocked at his horrid state?
"Here was a human person with the dignity, value and importance as a Filipino child of God, endowed with rights and needs, left to die as if he were nothing more than a bag of bones."
Describing what he saw on his own visits to the RAC, where many of the children at the Preda Foundation were saved from, Father Shay says mentally disabled children at the centre are treated particularly harshly.
"The children clustered around the wooden bars and cried to be let out and begged me to help them go home to their parents. There was no therapeutic, educational or entertainment programme for the children," he wrote.
"There were no toys, comics, games or staff to conduct activities with them. The food is very basic and monotonous. There is no playground equipment to be seen or sports and games facilities. These children … are doomed to a life of ignorance without meaning and purpose."
Away from the horrors of the RAC, social workers and child psychologists help rehabilitate street children at the Preda Foundation homes in lush countryside near Subic Bay. In an interview conducted by a trained child psychologist, a boy called Ben describes how, last year - aged six - he was abandoned by his mother and then picked up by police as he slept on the street. He woke to find himself in a police cell and then spent three months at the House of Hope, where he was sexually abused by 10 inmates.
"I was very unhappy there," he says, quietly.
Mak-Mak - who was abandoned by his parents and has never before been outside the city - is wide-eyed with wonder at the sight of a cow in a field as he leaves the slums of Manila behind him. As soon as he arrives at the children's home, he leaps out of the charity's van and sprints across a lawn to a rusty set of swings and a roundabout. After playing happily with other boys for two hours, however, he becomes tearful and withdrawn when questioned gently by the child psychologist about his ordeal.
"There's an awful lot of trauma there," says Father Shay.
Charities working with street children have been praying Pope Francis will speak out on children's rights during his visit to the Philippines, pricking the conscience of church leaders and officials in the devout country and pressing them to take more care of their unfortunate young. The pope has spoken out at an inter-faith conference on the need to make all forms of slavery a crime against humanity and Father Shay says he is impressed by the agenda the pontiff appears to be setting for the church.
"I am calling on the church hierarchy to take a stand and speak out for the child victims," says Father Shay. "They need to have real compassion and understanding and confront the government on this moral issue. We see human suffering every day and they should stand with us and support us."
In the meantime, the only prospect of an escape from the gates of hell for the vulnerable children still caged in Manila's brutal detention centres will come after the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church - shielded from their suffering - flies back to Rome, on Monday.
Text: Red Door News Hong Kong
More information about the missions to help street children in Manila by the Preda Foundation and Bahay Tuluyan is available at www.preda.org andwww.bahaytuluyan.org.
http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1679864/street-children-detained-clear-way-pope-francis-manila-visit
Learn to live with load shedding, says Eskom
Eskom CE Tshediso Matona briefs the media on Thursday on the state of the country’s power supply. Picture: PUXLEY MAKGATHO
A MUST learn to live with recurrent electricity cuts for the next three years as Eskom grapples with the twin problems of building new capacity while playing catch-up with the maintenance of its old, neglected power stations.
To fix the maintenance backlog will take about 10 years, the same time it took to accumulate.
Eskom CE Tshediso Matona said on Thursday that the company needed to build at least 5,000MW of new capacity before it could reliably supply power again and restore its spare generation capacity to appropriate levels.
"The question is not whether load shedding will be part of our lives, but it is how we cope with it. Eskom is not able to guarantee reliable supply on its own," Mr Matona said.
By June, Eskom will add 800MW of generating capacity when the first unit of the coal-fired Medupi power station under construction in Limpopo reaches full production. Medupi will start producing its first power six weeks from now, gradually rising to full capacity within six months.
In another setback to its capacity investment programme, Eskom has now pushed back the synchronisation of the first unit of the Kusile power station, which is under construction outside Emalahleni, in Mpumalanga.
Whereas the 4,800MW coal-powered station was scheduled to start producing power by the end of this year, its first 800MW unit will now start delivering only in the first half of 2017.
As Eskom’s older stations trip unexpectedly and frequently, any slight delay in commissioning the new projects puts the country at risk of load shedding.
The utility is operating with 11,500MW, nearly a third of its generating units’ installed capacity, unavailable due to such unplanned breakdowns. The international norm is to have up to 15% of installed capacity available to meet extra demand.
The major cause of the frequent breakdowns was Eskom’s decision in about 2008 to defer routine maintenance of power stations and keep the lights on for the Soccer World Cup, held two years later. "Eskom has not stayed faithful to the maintenance regime and that’s the real problem we’re having," said Mr Matona.
The country had to make difficult choices back then, and chose not to have load shedding during the tournament, Eskom chairman Zola Tsotsi said. "Had we had load shedding during the World Cup, SA would be a very different country today."
Due to the National Energy Regulator of SA (Nersa) granting Eskom lower electricity price increases than it applied for, Eskom has faced a cash crunch to maintain the power stations.
As a result, it had "all but exhausted the reserve margin and is now vulnerable", said Mr Matona, and "load shedding is going to be part of our lives, the power system will be severely constrained for a long time".
Asked what a long time was, he said three years was needed to restore the generating assets to regular, routine maintenance.
That would help limit the number of equipment breakdowns that have frequently plunged the country into controlled blackouts.
"Our problem has accumulated over a long period and it will not be reversed overnight. We will probably need the same amount of time to overcome it."
The equipment breakdowns mean Eskom is forced to sell less and less electricity, eroding its revenue base, and needs more financial assistance from the government to cover its costs.
Mr Matona said the utility was still waiting for the R20bn that Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene promised in October as part of its recapitalisation.
Eskom had requested a "capital injection of at least R50bn". The government said it would sell as yet unnamed "noncore assets" to raise the R20bn for Eskom. For the rest, the electricity provider must approach capital markets.
In addition to the promised R20bn, Eskom has asked for R3bn to enable it to buy diesel to power its emergency open-cycle gas turbines.
"On the financial side, there is interaction between our operational challenges and liquidity," Mr Matona said. "Because of the loss of capacity at Majuba power station, we have had to use more diesel. But this is not the only factor. Our electricity sales have reduced and debt has increased because of cost overruns on the new build programme."
Eskom has indicated it will apply to Nersa for additional tariff increases to raise enough revenue to cover its costs.
Whereas it applied for a tariff increase of 16% for each of the five years to April 2018, Nersa approved only half that rate.
"Fundamentally, our financial health depends on getting the right tariff, since we cannot recover on our costs of production," said Mr Matona.
The company can apply for a revision only after the first two years, which end this April.
http://www.bdlive.co.za/business/energy/2015/01/16/learn-to-live-with-load-shedding-says-eskom
Europe on high alert over terrorist threat
Guns, munitions and explosives, as well as police uniforms and a large amount of money, were all seized by police overnight.
France and Germany have joined Belgium in the hunt for terrorists
Eric Van Der Sypt, an official at the prosecutors' office, told AFP that: "The investigation... has shown that these people had the intention to kill several policemen in the street and at police commissariats [police stations]."
Thirteen people were arrested in total but only five would be prosecuted, he said. Belgium would also seek the extradition of two suspects held in France.
On Friday, the Belgian government also announced new measures to deal with terrorist suspects.
They include making travelling abroad for terrorist activities a crime and expanding the cases where Belgian citizenship can be revoked for dual nationals who are thought to pose a terror risk.
No link has been established between the terrorist plot in Belgium and last week's attacks in Paris.
But French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on Friday that, despite this, both countries face the same threats.
"The link that exists is the will to attack our values," he said.
Twelve suspects are being held by police in the Paris region over last week's attacks in the French capital that killed 17 people.
Police carried out raids in five towns, iTele reported. Those arrested are now being questioned about "possible logistical support", such as weapons or vehicles, they could have given the three gunmen, according to police.
France remains on its highest terrorism alert level and authorities have said that some 120,000 police and soldiers have been mobilised across France.
In a separate incident on Friday, authorities shut down and evacuated the Gare de l'Est train station after a bomb scare.
Security forces have been mobilised across France
Security has also been enhanced in Belgium
The incidents in France and Belgium have had a wider impact on their European neighbours.
Spain has launched an investigation into the visit of one of the Paris gunmen, Amedy Coulibaly, to Madrid just days before the attacks in Paris.
Police in Germany have also arrested two men following raids on 11 properties on Friday, involving some 250 officers.
One of the men was suspected of leading an extremist group of Turkish and Russian nationals.
Police said that the group was preparing a serious act of violence in Syria but that there was "no indication" that the group had been planning attacks inside Germany.
Potential terrorists
In the UK, police have been warned to be on their guard for a terror attack against them.
The head of Europol, Rob Wainwright, told the BBC that the need for tightened security across Europe highlighted the complex nature of the terrorist threat in the region.
"We're dealing with multiple thousands of potential terrorists," he told the BBC World Service.
He said it was hard for police to identify plans because suspects were "working in a self-radicalised way very often, not necessarily under any command and control structure".
In Washington, President Barack Obama and UK Prime Minister David Cameron agreed to share expertise on preventing radicalism and tackling domestic "violent extremism".
A taskforce will report back to the two leaders within six months.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30860064
CHRISTOPHE BEAUGRAND
CHRISTOPHE BEAUGRAND
Animateur télé, Journaliste
- Date de naissance :
- 02 Janvier 1977 (Capricorne)
- Age :
- 38 ans
- Pays :
- France
Honda wins Formula 1 engine battle with FIA
Honda wins Formula 1 engine battle with FIA
McLaren's new engine partner Honda has won its fight to be allowed to develop its engine during 2015.
Formula 1's governing body the FIA has backtracked on an earlier ruling that allowed Mercedes, Renault and Ferrari to upgrade their engines but not Honda.
The move comes after Honda expressed its unhappiness about what it considered to be an unfair situation.
Honda will now be allowed to develop its brand new engine within limits explicitly laid out by the FIA.
What can Honda do?
Mercedes, Renault and Ferrari are allowed to change up to 48% of the engines they used in 2014 by the end of the 2015 season.
This is defined by a number of 'tokens', which are assigned to parts of the engine on the basis of their influence on performance.
Out of a total of 66 tokens, Mercedes, Renault and Ferrari can modify 32 through 2015.
Previously Honda had been barred from changing any of its engine after it was approved for competition on 28 February.
Friday's ruling will allow Honda to change a given amount of its engine calculated by the average of the number of tokens unused by the other manufacturers by the time of the first race in Australia on 16 March.
In the example given by FIA race director Charlie Whiting, and seen by BBC Sport, he writes: "If the three 2014 manufacturers have eight, seven and five unused tokens respectively at the start of the season, then the new manufacturer will be allowed to use six during the season (the average rounded down to the nearest whole number)".
Why has this been done?
Honda, which is the first new engine manufacturer to enter F1 for well over a decade, had been concerned that it was not being treated fairly.
Its senior management flew over from Japan to meet the FIA on Monday to express its concerns at the situation.
This followed the decision by the FIA to allow Mercedes, Renault and Ferrari to use their 32 development tokens over the course of the 2015 season, rather than by the originally intended approval date of 28 February.
That came after Ferrari, who had the worst engine in 2014, pointed out to the FIA that the rules did not clearly define when the modified engines for 2015 should be submitted for approval.
Whiting admitted in his note to the teams on Friday evening that that ruling left "unaddressed uncertainty" within the rules on the permitted engine development.
What appeared unfair to Honda: |
|---|
Its rivals could develop their engines in 2015 following the FIA's initial U-turn but it could not
|
It was being forced to supply only four engines to its drivers in 2015, the same as the other manufacturers, even though its rivals were allowed to supply five in their first season with their new engines in 2014
|
In 2016, it was being allowed to use only 25 units of development, the same restrictions on it as the other manufacturers, meaning it missed out on the 32 its rivals could use in 2015.
|
The FIA's decision also takes into account the opinions of Honda's rivals that it had an advantage inherent in entering a year late in that it knew a target to aim for, because it was aware of the performance of the rival engines in 2014.
By contrast, Mercedes, Renault and Ferrari were shooting in the dark before 2014, when the new turbo hybrid engine formula, with accompanying fuel restriction, was introduced.
What number of tokens will Honda have available?
None of the three existing manufacturers are expected to start the season with an engine that uses all 32 development tokens.
Mercedes are in the best position, but both Renault and to an even greater extent Ferrari will leave substantial leeway to make major changes to their engine architecture during the season as they are both behind where they wanted to be in terms of development.
It is unclear exactly how much Honda will be able to develop its engine, but the latest FIA ruling and the positions of its rivals mean it is likely to have a significant amount of development available.
http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/formula1/30860212
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