MY WORLD OF TRUTH

Sunday 27 September 2015

Bill Clinton believes Donald Trump could win GOP nomination

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The Princess Goes to Prison! Kate Middleton Shines in Silver Peplum Dress

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The friendship that grew out of war

The friendship that grew out of war.

 In the aftermath of the Middle East War of 1967, two prominent women - the wife of Israel's famed general, and the woman who became Yasser Arafat's mother-in-law - forged an unlikely friendship. The story of their remarkable relationship is told in a new book An Improbable Friendship. Kevin Connolly went to meet them.

You may be familiar with the history of the 1967 Middle East War - a short, sharp conflict in which, Israel captured land from Egypt, Syria and Jordan in a series of lightning operations.

The territorial issues with the Egyptians were resolved in the Camp David Accords at the end of the 1970s. But in other respects the Middle East continues to live with the consequences of the fighting that ended 48 years ago.

The war of 1973 represented a failed attempt by the combined armies of Syria and Egypt to reverse the outcome. So Israel remains in control of the Golan Heights with its apple orchards and rolling pastures. And the West Bank of the River Jordan, with its huge Palestinian population and its growing number of Jewish settlers, is still under Israeli military occupation.

So far, so familiar.

But there is an untold story about the war of 1967 and its aftermath that you may not have heard - a story of how friendship can flourish in the most improbable of circumstances like a delicate flower clinging to life on the bleakest of landscapes.

It is the story of the friendship of the Palestinian Raymonda Tawil and the Israeli Ruth Dayan and it could hardly have begun in less promising circumstances.

The six-day war had made Ruth's husband Moshe Dayan an Israeli national hero.

His black eyepatch lent him an exotic, piratical air - he lost an eye serving alongside the Allies in World War Two. And although he was hated and feared in the Arab world for his military ruthlessness, he began to enjoy a degree of global recognition.

He made the cover of Time Magazine and it was reported that catwalk models in Paris sported eye-patches in solidarity with the dashing general.

In the aftermath of the fighting, Raymonda was at the battered hospital of the Palestinian city of Nablus, dealing with refugees, the dead and dying, when she heard that the wife of the very man people blamed for the devastation was on her way to visit.

"We were not kind to her," she recalls. "There were the injured people, the corpses, the bodies.

"When they told us it was Ruth Dayan I said 'This is your work, your work!' But she said, 'I am not Dayan.'"

Ruth says simply that her instincts were always humanitarian rather than political. She remembers filling her car with medicines and toys for injured children and then driving it into the Occupied Territories which were under her husband's direct control.

It was an extraordinary moment in a marriage which had never been ordinary.

Ruth continued her visits to Nablus and arranged to see Palestinian women prisoners accused by the Israelis of belonging to a terrorist organisation.

Her husband Moshe was outraged and in the row that followed a critical moment was reached.

Ruth recalls it like this.

"I said, 'Moshe, I want a divorce' and that was after 37 years of being married to him. I do everything on the spur of the moment and I did that too. I said, 'All the time you say that only the way I am working with the Arabs will bring great peace,' and all of a sudden he was cross that I was there. So I did it. I divorced."

Ruth was as good as her word but the row over her work in Nablus was hardly the first sign of strain in the marriage.

Dayan by that point had a reputation as a serial womaniser and in the book Improbable Friendship there is a poignant anecdote from earlier in the marriage which perhaps hinted at troubles to come.

Ruth was travelling the then newly created country of Israel providing work for women immigrants in a handicraft business that made bags and embroidered clothes.

They were hard times in the Jewish State and she hitchhiked around the country.

One evening her husband's motorcade - he was already a senior military commander - swept past her without stopping as she stood by the roadside, thumb outstretched. It's not clear if he or his men had noticed her but it felt like a bleak portent for the future.

Over time the relationship between Ruth and Raymonda began to develop.

In the early days of the military occupation it was still possible for Israeli peace activists like Ruth to travel into West Bank towns like Nablus to maintain a kind of grassroots dialogue.

It didn't produce peace in the end but those who took part remember it as a noble venture.

"My house was a salon for all these people meeting together to discuss," says Raymonda. "Outside, nobody would understand what was going on on the inside. I had to ask the Mayor to come and the personalities of the town to come and meet with these Israelis and important foreign figures to talk about the future - can you imagine this in 1967?"

The friendship endured in increasingly improbable circumstances.

There was the grim drumbeat of history to emphasise the difficulty of it all - the war of 1973, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the start of the first intifada, or Palestinian uprising in 1987.

And there was the manner in which their lives, on the surface at least, diverged.

Raymonda became a kind of unofficial spokesperson for the West Bank, a familiar figure in international news broadcasts. There was house arrest and imprisonment by the Israelis suspicious of her contacts with the PLO and threats from extremists on her own side, suspicious of her contacts with Israelis.

Ruth's humanitarian impulses took her further afield. A lifetime of humanitarian work saw her travel everywhere from Congo to Vietnam and brought meetings with everyone from Elizabeth Taylor to Albert Schweitzer.

But always there was contact even if in times of tension it didn't take much to turn the warmth of friendship into the heat of argument.

And the story of their relationship eventually took an even more implausible turn.

In 1990 Raymonda's daughter Suha married the PLO leader Yasser Arafat - a hero to his own people who revered him as a kind of living embodiment of the Palestinian struggle and Israel's public enemy number one.

The two women now sat in the centre of an extraordinary network of relationships.

Ruth was the divorced wife of Israel's most celebrated warrior. But in addition to that her younger sister Reumah was married to Ezer Weizman - a former fighter pilot who also rose to become a senior military commander and who ended up as Israel's seventh president.

Anyone who was anyone in Israeli public life was in Ruth's contacts book.

Now Raymonda had privileged access to the PLO high command and a personal connection to the man Israel regarded as its most dangerous and determined enemy.

For a time it seemed that extraordinary coincidence might create some sort of back-channel of communication but in the end it came to nothing.

Messages were passed and some meetings were arranged but the crushing weight of the surrounding circumstances was simply too great to allow the fragile network of contacts to make any difference.

Anyone who knows the Middle East of course would have known that in that strictly political sense this was never going to be a story with a happy ending.

Dayan, Weizman and Arafat are long dead and a lasting agreement seems almost as remote today as it did on the day when Israel's tanks rumbled into Nablus back in 1967.

And yet the relationship between Ruth and Raymonda endures - when we met in Malta, where they had arranged to see each other, they held hands as they sat together on a sofa.

Ruth was full of praise for Raymonda's beauty while Raymonda compared Mrs Dayan to Mother Teresa. They talked over each other and bickered gently in the way that only people who've known each other for a very long time can do.

But for all the gentle warmth they look back on the past with sadness.

I brought footage from the BBC archives to show Raymonda - news reports from the late 1970s in which she appeared as a voice of the Palestinians of the West Bank warning that Jewish settlers would have to leave before there could be a chance of peace.

She watched the images of her younger self in thoughtful silence then said: "My God, the answers I'm giving are the same answers now. It hasn't changed.

Ruth struck a melancholic note too when I asked her if she was sad that the prospects for real peace between Israel and the Palestinians seem worse now than they've seemed in the past.

"It's sad that I feel I can't do anything," she told me. "Now, I can only go on with my life 'til I die. I'm 98 and a half now and soon I'll be 100."

But it's not in Ruth's nature to be melancholic for long.

She said her great-grandson who's five had had to use his fingers to calculate her age. "He said, 'Wow, that's crazy. You'll be 102 by the time of the next World Cup. So now I have to live to 102!"

The paths that brought these two remarkable women together could hardly have been more different.

Ruth was born when the Holy Land was still under Turkish rule, before the end of World War One and gave up a comfortable middle-class life to marry Moshe and live the hard simple life of a farmer. You sense too that that is how she prefers to see him rather than as the warrior that Israel remembers.

Raymonda was born in the early years of World War Two, in the ancient coastal city of Acre when Palestine was still governed by Britain under a League of Nations Mandate. Her affluent Palestinian family lost their home when Israel captured Acre and were never able to return to it. That sense of personal dispossession still rankles as it does for many Palestinians.

And yet those paths did cross in the city of Nablus in 1967 and have remained interconnected ever since.

Perhaps their story never inspired a greater closeness between their two peoples as they once hoped it might.

But it still stands after all these years as a testament to our human capacity to reach out to one another even in the darkest times.

And it shows that friendship which can sometimes seem a fragile flower can still flourish even in the bleak and rocky landscapes of the Holy Land.

Moshe Dayan 1915-1981

• Born in what was then Ottoman Palestine and raised on a co-operative farm, he began his military career in 1937 with British forces fighting Arab militia
• Fought with the Allies against the Vichy French in Syria, where he lost his left eye in action
• Commanded Jerusalem area in Israel's war of independence in 1948, and led 1956 invasion of the Sinai Peninsula as chief-of-staff of Israel's armed forces
• Elected to the Knesset (parliament) in 1959 and appointed minister of defence days before the 1967 Middle East War
• Crossed the political lines to join Menachem Begin's Likud government and was instrumental in reaching the historic Camp David peace accord with Egypt

posted by Davidblogger50 at 13:53 0 comments

HAS THIS GORILLA LEARNT TO TALK

HAS THIS GORILLA LEARNT TO TALK.

In the gorilla world Koko is a bit of a celebrity. At least, to humans. She's known for her incredible sign language skills, learnt in her 40 years of living with humans. 

She's a Western Lowland gorilla and started her training when she was one.

If you've read the headlines, you could be forgiven for thinking that Koko was in the process of mastering the ability to talk. "The most famous gorilla is showing signs of earth speech" – wrote one influential website. "She is showing signs that she may be able to learn to talk" a newspaper wrote. You get the idea.

But is this true, is Koko really showing any such ability?

Spoiler alert:

In short no. What Koko can in fact do, is manipulate her vocal chords to create an assortment of sounds. For example, she coughs on cue:
 Well, I hear you say, that's not quite as exciting as a gorilla being able to talk. True, but it's still an interesting finding, one which - along with similar studies - is changing our idea of how speech evolved.

To understand why, I spoke with the man behind these new observations of Koko, Marcus Perlman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US.

Their grunts are not only meaningful, but can change over time

He sifted through 71 hours of footage of Koko and started noticing some "amazing vocal repertoires". His intention was to look at her gestures, not her vocal abilities, so he was surprised by what he discovered.

As well as her fake coughes, she also fakes sneezes, blows "raspberries" with her tongue and was observed pretending to talk on the phone.

These behaviours all require her to control her vocalisation and breathing. The observations are published in the journal Animal Cognition.

There has been a longstanding idea that all non-human primates, such as great apes such as chimpanzees and gorillas, were unable to control their vocal sounds at all.

It was thought their grunts were just automatic response to stimuli. It was also not believed possible for apes to learn new vocalisations.

These flexible sounds may have been the framework on which our language capacity was built

Because of that, the idea that "flexible vocal behaviour" was important to human speech was dismissed, says Perlman.

Instead, gestures were deemed more important and we have long known that apes can make distinct, meaningful gestures. The idea was that "maybe their gestures evolved into human language, and maybe the original language of our ancestors were more gesture-like," Perlman explains. 

Backwards puzzle

Koko, along with other studies, puts this idea to rest. For example, other research found that chimps changed the type of grunt they use to signal the word 'apple', to make it align with their new companions. This shows that their grunts are not only meaningful, but can change over time.

If apes have these vocal abilities, in addition to gestures, their flexible sounds may have been the framework on which our language capacity was built over the course of millions of years, says Perlman.

It's funny that there is so much excitement over the gorilla that coughs

This all points to one thing: the fact that apes are able to manipulate their vocal sounds suggests our common ancestor did too.

It's like a backwards puzzle, all other early-humans have gone extinct, so we can only look at living apes to infer how our extinct ancestors may have developed language abilities.  

Koko, we must remember, grew up in unique circumstances and was immersed in human interaction from birth. Her repertoire of meaningful gestures is therefore unusually large.

What do other researchers think?

Joseph Devlin from University College London's department of experimental psychology, in the UK, also studies the evolution of language.

She exhibits conscious control of her breathing like we do

It's funny that there is so much excitement over the gorilla that coughs, he says. Still, though it sounds banal, "there is something cool here".

"Speech is impossible without cognitive control of breathing. So grunts, chuffs and the noises that other primates make might just be emotional vocalisations that occur automatically without conscious control.  

"The fact that Koko can blow her nose or fake a cough when asked to demonstrates that she exhibits conscious control of her breathing like we do."

Language has many aspects to it. Koko's gestures and grunts may seem mundane but they represent crucial manipulations, the ability of which is important in everday speech. 

Language in its full form may be unique to humans, but every species has traits which make them unique. As Darwin said, we differ from our closest relatives in degree, not kind.  

And I have written before, many traits which we once believed were unique to humans are found in the animal kingdom.

Devlin agrees.

"Perhaps what is unique to humans is that we may be the only species that has *all* of these abilities. But it is increasingly evidence that most, if not all, of the component abilities that make up language are also found in other species, and that’s pretty exciting."

posted by Davidblogger50 at 13:38 0 comments

Veggie Orangutans turn carnivore

Some orangutans can be very secretive, as a research team discovered when trying to follow a wild male Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) in a remote forest in Borneo.

They managed to locate him by following the sound of his long, bellowing calls, which advertised his presence to others nearby.

The closer they came, the more apparent it was that he was not used to having people around him, says Benjamin Buckley of the University of Cambridge in the UK. "He was acting aggressively, throwing branches and shaking trees, and soon began to flee from us."

Eventually, the orangutan calmed down and sat quietly in a tree munching on some food. He turned his back each time the team tried to see what he was eating.

"After a short while I managed to find a spot to watch him clearly," says Buckley. "I saw that he had a squirrel in his hand, which he was tugging at with his teeth, and I could hear crunching noises as he chewed."

That came as a surprise, because Bornean orangutans are thought to be virtually vegetarian. They mainly eat fruit, but also occasionally munch on leaves, flowers, bark and small insects.

The team did not witness a chase or see any fresh blood. They think that the squirrel must already have been dead before the male started eating it.

The observation is published in the journal Primates. The researchers report: "The entrails of the squirrel were dropped but every other part of the carcass was chewed and swallowed, including bones, skin, fur and tail."

Much like humans, wild orangutans can develop their own dietary preferences

It is the first time a Bornean orangutan has been seen eating any kind of meat since a project looking into their lives started in 2003. These apes have been observed for 16,000 hours since theTropical Peatland Project began. 

Despite the new observation, the scientists do not think that meat is a normal part of the orangutans' diet. "It is unlikely that a large adult male orangutan would be capable of chasing and catching a creature as agile as a squirrel," says Buckley. 

It is more likely that the orangutan scavenged the squirrel opportunistically, especially considering that there was plenty of fruit to eat. 

There is a second species of orangutan, which lives on the island of Sumatra. They occasionally eat meat, having been observed preying on slow lorises on five occasions since 1999. However, they only did so when fruit was scarce, which was not the case with this latest observation.

It is now clear that, much like humans, wild orangutans can develop their own dietary preferences, says Adriano Lameiraof Durham University in the UK, who was part of the team that observed Sumatran orangutans eating meat.

"Such individual food preference can be passed on through generations, or spread horizontally across populations, giving raise to diet cultures," says Lameira.

Orangutans and humans share a common ancestor, which lived over 12 million years ago. The fact that both orangutan species sometimes eat meat suggests that this common ancestor did so too, at least on occasion.

"This study puts us a step further in understanding what may have been the 'ingredients' of the first food cultures to emerge in our lineage," says Lameira.

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Kylie Jenner is the New Kim Kardashian, Says Kim

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Poles furious after Russia blames them for starting WWII

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Thursday 24 September 2015

How to Naturally Whiten Your Teeth Without Spending 100's of Dollars

How to Naturally Whiten Your Teeth Without Spending 100's of Dollars.

 Ever wish your teeth could be just a little bit whiter? Not crazy, glow-in-the-dark white, but a nice shade of clean, bright white - but without all the harsh chemicals? We hear ya!

Whitened teeth often come with messy trays, stinging solutions and awful formulas you’re really not supposed to swallow (but it’s going in your mouth!!), and the thought of using them has you feeling like you might just settle for a nice shade of pale yellow. Not to mention the cost! Professional teeth whitening can run you a small fortune!

We suggest you do what you can at home, in a safe, inexpensive and gentle manner. Here are three DIY teeth whiteners to get you on your way to pearly whites. 

Strawberries

The malic acid in strawberries acts as an all-natural stain lifter for your teeth. We recommend doing this once a week, as overdoing it can wear away your enamel. 

Materials:

• Fresh Strawberries

Tools:

• Fork, or muddler
• Toothbrush

Instructions:

1. Mash up strawberries into a paste.

2. Apply the paste to your teeth and let it sit for a few minutes, giving the malic acid time to work.

3. Brush teeth with strawberries.

4. Rinse.

Baking Soda and Hydrogen Peroxide

It seems there’s nothing this power couple can’t accomplish. Add bright, white teeth to the list!

Materials:

• Baking Soda
• Hydrogen Peroxide

Tools:

• Toothbrush

Instructions:

1. Mix equal parts of baking soda and hydrogen peroxide.

2. Brush your teeth with the solution, you can add more peroxide if the paste becomes too thick.

3. Rinse well.

Related on Yahoo Makers: DIY Teeth Whitening vs. Professional Treatments

Coconut Oil Pulling

Coconut oil pulling has been around for ages, but has come back on trend in the last few years. It may sound strange, but once you get used to having a big spoonful of oil swimming around in your mouth, you’ll notice your oral health improve dramatically. 

Materials:

• Coconut oil

Tools:

• Toothbrush
• Spoon

Instructions:

1. Take a spoonful of coconut oil and place it in your mouth. Swish the oil forcefully around your mouth for at least 5 minutes (ideally up to 20 ).  If you do this while you are showering, getting dressed, etc.  the time goes by quickly.

2. Spit out the oil into the garbage (don’t spit in sink, it may clog your pipes.)

3. Rinse with warm water.

4. Brush teeth.

posted by Davidblogger50 at 20:04 0 comments

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