Sunday, June 23, 2013

Massive protests hit Brazil's cities

Protesters gesture to riot police as they stand in front of a burning barricade during an anti-government protest in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Thursday, June 20, 2013. More than half a million ... more?Protesters gesture to riot police as they stand in front of a burning barricade during an anti-government protest in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Thursday, June 20, 2013. More than half a million Brazilians poured into the streets of at least 80 Brazilian cities Thursday in demonstrations that saw violent clashes and renewed calls for an end to government corruption and demands for better public services. Riot police battled protesters in at least five cities, with some of the most intense clashes happening in Rio de Janeiro, where an estimated 300,000 demonstrators swarmed into the seaside city's central area. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano) less?

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/lightbox/massive-protests-hit-brazil-s-cities-slideshow/

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Jon Stewart appears on Egyptian satirical TV show

CAIRO (AP) ? Jon Stewart took the guest's seat Friday on Egypt's top satirical TV show, modeled after his own program "The Daily Show."

Stewart was brought to the set wearing a black hood and introduced by host Bassem Youssef as a captured foreign spy.

Stewart, wearing a scruffy beard, spoke briefly in Arabic as the studio audience gave him a raucous welcome.

"Please sit down, I am a simple man who does not like to be fussed over," he said in Arabic to laughter.

Youssef, host of the show "Al-Bernameg" and one of Egypt's most popular TV presenters, has been questioned by prosecutors on accusations of blasphemy and insulting the president. Stewart defended his counterpart and friend in one of his monologues after Youssef was interrogated earlier this year, and Youssef has appeared as a guest on the popular New York-based show.

Stewart, who is on a summer-long break from anchoring the Comedy Central fake newscast is in the Middle East making his first movie. He expressed admiration for Youssef in Friday's episode, which was recorded earlier this week during a visit to Cairo.

"Satire is a settled law. If your regime is not strong enough to handle a joke, then you have no regime," Stewart said, adding that Youssef "is showing that satire can be relevant."

True to form, Youssef began the weekly show with a series of jokes about Islamist President Mohammed Morsi's appearance and address at a rally last weekend hosted by his hard-line Islamist backers.

The president, Egypt's first freely elected leader, announced at the rally a complete break of diplomatic relations with the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Youssef, however, criticized Morsi for remaining silent and wearing a stone face while one of the rally's organizers denounced as non-believers opposition protesters planning massive, anti-government demonstrations on June 30, the anniversary of the start of the president's term.

Stewart said he was overwhelmed with the generosity of Egyptians but took a jab at Cairo's horrendous traffic. "I flew in three days ago and I have just arrived to do the show," he joked.

Youssef ? known as Egypt's Jon Stewart ? was interrogated in April for allegedly insulting Islam and the country's leader. His questioning drew criticism from Washington and rights advocates. A trained heart surgeon, Youssef catapulted to fame when his video blogs mocking politics received hundreds of thousands of hits shortly after the 2011 uprising that toppled longtime leader Hosni Mubarak.

Unlike other local TV presenters, Youssef uses satire to mock fiery comments made by ultraconservative clerics and politicians, garnering him a legion of fans among the country's revolutionaries and liberals. He has 1.4 million fans on Facebook and nearly 850,000 followers on Twitter.

During his hiatus, Stewart will be directing and producing "Rosewater" from his own script, based on a memoir by Maziar Bahari. This Iranian journalist was falsely accused of being a spy and imprisoned by the Iranian government in 2009 while covering Iran's presidential election.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/jon-stewart-appears-egyptian-satirical-tv-show-211910354.html

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Saturday, June 22, 2013

Iowa man selling coffin gets questions about bones

(AP) ? An Iowa man's online classified ad offering an oak coffin for sale neglected to mention the full skeleton inside, so police interrupted the deal and seized the bones.

The Council Bluffs Daily Nonpareil reported (http://bit.ly/14eMNn6 ) that the coffin belonged to the now-defunct Council Bluffs chapter of the International Order of Odd Fellows, which promotes anonymous giving to the poor.

Dave Burgstrum placed the ad on the Craigslist website to sell the coffin for $12,000 because he's trying to raise money to pay the property taxes on the fraternal organization's hall.

Burgstrum said the coffin was made in the 1900s and had been used in the group's rituals to represent death. The bones had been in there for years.

"They were just there as long as anyone could remember," said Burgstrum, who is one of a handful of remaining members of the Council Bluffs chapter of the Odd Fellows.

Burgstrum said lodge records suggest the skeleton was donated by a doctor who retired in the 1880s.

But Council Bluffs Police detective Michael Roberts said human remains cannot be sold without proper identification.

"If they had papers of origination, then they would be OK to own," Roberts said.

The skeleton was sent to the Iowa State Medical Examiner. Pottawattamie County forensic investigator Karen Foreman said it's unlikely the skeleton will be identified, but the race and gender can be determined. And if the skeleton is Native American, federal law requires that it be returned to the tribe.

Burgstrum said the laboratory is welcome to keep the skeleton. His interest has always been in selling the coffin.

"I'm ready to wheel and deal on it," he said. "I'd like to get those taxes paid."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/aa9398e6757a46fa93ed5dea7bd3729e/Article_2013-06-22-Coffin%20Classified/id-ecf2c7e9cb1e4990887ca2a4804105d9

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Nevada's governor shows GOP strength in states (The Arizona Republic)

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Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/314323361?client_source=feed&format=rss

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Book Talk: The dark doubts in the heart of a Mormon missionary

By Elaine Lies

TOKYO (Reuters) - They're a familiar sight around the world, whether in northern Japan or southern Argentina: a pair of men in dark suits, with nameplates, often riding bicycles as they go about their job preaching the Mormon religion.

"Elders", Ryan McIlvain's debut novel, illuminates the lives of one such pair, American Elder McLeod and his Brazilian counterpart Elder Passos, through their frustrating daily round of knocking on doors and missionary work, the service that all adult Mormons must perform.

McIlvain, a former Mormon who went to Brazil on his mission, spoke about his book and basing fiction on his own life.

Q: How did this book get going?

A: It's something I know a lot about just by virtue of the fact that I was a Mormon missionary. More broadly, I thought it would be interesting to pay very close attention to the interior lives of two Mormon missionaries, people that we see almost exclusively from the outside ... They're so lonely, the pressures they face on a daily basis are so tremendous. Because of the nature of their work, they're seen as annoying at best and predatory at worst.

Q: Are a lot of the events in the book your own?

A: I gave some of my own experiences to McLeod and Passos, particularly mental experiences, to the extent that McLeod doubts and Passos feels a worldly longing for success. But the behavior themselves was where the fiction started to take over.

The experience of being a missionary is the experience of being a permanent foreigner, you wear this nametag and uniform that is meant to mark you out as different so you never feel that you can just blend in or have a lazy afternoon. You always feel on call and in fact, you are. Mormon missionaries are told to believe that they've received a call from God and that involves certain responsibilities. So instead of going to parties or football games or whatever your average 19 to 20-year-old does, they go out and preach the Gospel for two years.

Q: What was it like to put the fictional stamp on some of your own experiences and take it to the next level?

A: If a memory or an image surfaced and it felt like it would serve the story well, I'd put it in there ... The fiction kind of existed in its own world with its own set of needs and its own expedient rhythms that were different from the reality and that would be different from the needs of a non-fiction writer. Now it's funny, as I look back, I started to confuse what was real and what I'd embellished onto the real. There's something sad about that. I've now muddied the waters of my memories a little bit, I've kind of lost hold of that time.

Q: People talk about "the great Mormon novel"? What do you think about that idea?

A: I came to the material a little hesitantly, because I was nervous about being seen as a Mormon writer or someone that could be pigeon-holed. But I think that fear is almost universal. I remember reading Roth or Bellow as I was growing up ... They would very much bristle if someone tried to describe them as Jewish writers even though the vast majority of their protagonists were Jewish. People don't want to be labeled for fear of being dismissed or marginalized, maybe. So I don't identify as a Mormon writer - but then again, I'm not sure who would. You just want to be a writer who happens to take up this subject and that subject.

Q: In this book, there's a lot of questions the characters face about their beliefs. Is it common to be thrown into your mission experience and have a lot of questions?

A: Yes, I think it is. First of all, it's such a formative time. Young men serve at 19, typically, and young women at least until very recently served their missions at 21. Whether it's 19 or 21, your mind is still in its formative stages and especially when you're taken out of the comfort zone of your country and language, things get shaken up. I served in Brazil at the same time as I set the story, as the United States was revving up to the war with Iraq. It was really formative to see that political theatre from an outsider's perspective. I came back to the United States much more tentative in thinking about my country's role in the world. When I left I was pretty cocksure and confident that America was more just than not in the way it dealt with other countries. I came back without any of that certainty. It wasn't just doctrinal uncertainty that the mission gave me, it was a sort of national uncertainty as well.

Q: In terms of writing, did having grown up as a Mormon have any influence?

A: Well, I'll say yes, though of course I've only lived one life. Having grown up Mormon, I can say that it's a people of the book. In some corners, a somewhat anti-intellectual strain, but certainly in the corners that I felt drawn to, Mormons read a lot and they read closely. Every morning during high school I would wake up early and go to seminary, an hour of scripture study and Bible before school. Those pitch-black, cold Massachusetts mornings, my twin sister and I would flip a coin to see who had to go start the car, and let it warm up. We'd drive the twenty minutes to church and sit there and pay very close attention to those wonderful, rich Biblical texts. So yes, I do think that the prose of particularly the King James Bible has been an influence, and I've tried to take the best of that and update it for a contemporary prose style. Also just the economy and the really magical arcs that those Biblical stories manage to accomplish in such a short amount of space really influenced me?.I did imbibe some of that.

(Reporting by Elaine Lies, editing by Paul Casciato)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/book-talk-dark-doubts-heart-mormon-missionary-141748796.html

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A Few Search Engine Optimization You Need To Know About ...

SEO can be hard to understand if you are new at it, but it is essential for a online business. With appropriate tools and information, you have the ability to implement SEO so that your website attracts more visitors and gets better rank in search results.

Keyword density is important when optimizing an internet page for various search engines. Any keyword content on an optimized web page should not exceed 20 percent of the total page.

You should be patient when increasing the SEO for your website. You can not build up huge traffic overnight. Rather, it may take many weeks, even months, especially if your website is brand new. Just like any company, time is needed to build a reputation with an online business.

Register a domain that is both related to your product and is easy to recall. Memorable domain names that are easy to pronounce are advantageous for Internet users who locate your content through YouTube.

Try creating a robots. txt file and putting it in the root of your directory. What this does is it disallows the search engine from accessing certain files on your website.

Try to market yourself as a subject matter expert in lots of areas. This tactic will maximize internet marketing efforts. You can do this by starting a website focused around your niche. You can additionally implement search engine optimization strategies to attract as much targeted traffic as possible. Always remember to give the customers what they want, not what you think they want.

Title Tags

Search engines are more likely to correctly grasp the content in your website if you use descriptive title tags appropriately. Limit your title tags to sixty characters. Search engines usually only preview the first few words. This also holds true for keywords appearing at the end of longer tags.

Hosting your blog on your own site can actually improve your search engine ranking. Then, more visitors will visit your website.

Do keyword research first. Search for ways to implement keywords in your website and titles. Keyword research will allow you to understand what search terms people use to navigate in your particular categories. Highlight these items throughout your site to rise in the rankings of the major engines.

Site Map

Create a site map that includes your keywords. A good site map helps your viewers by acting like an index of all your site?s pages. Search engines also use these to place websites higher on their search lists, because ease of access is important to their ratings.

Image links are a rarity on websites that have undergone thorough search engine optimization. Pictures only contain the image?s URL, which crawlers aren?t as adept at handling.

Orienting your business to search engine optimization allows you to achieve higher rankings and more web traffic. Unfortunately, some online businesses still underestimate the importance of their search engine rankings.

The title tag in your page?s HTML code is an important place to put keywords to maximize your site?s SEO. The title tags have more weight than any other words that appear on the page. Use your best keywords in your page titles to bring in the visitors!

Using relevant links to trusted reference sites will also improve your search engine ranking. Choice linking is an extremely significant part of SEO. When you have relevant external links, search engines value them more than internal links that connect different areas of your site. Be sure to look for options that allow links back to your website, so you can maximize the effects of your rank.

Keyword Stemming

Earn more search hits by using longer or plural versions of keywords. Keyword stemming is a popular technique of some search engines. For example, if your keyword is ?accountant,? searches for ?accountants? or ?accounting? may not lead users to your site. Use the longer form when it comes to using keyword stemming for your advantage. For example, if you use accounting, then you have your site returned with accountant search results.

Try basing your articles on keywords to help improve SEO of your articles. Putting the right keywords in your articles will make search engines respond positively to them. It will be easier to draw new readers into your site. Your focused keyword should be repeated several times in the article?s text, and in its summary and title, too.

As mentioned earlier in the article, if you are looking to earn your income via the Internet, then SEO is critical for you. Keep a copy of this article, and refer to it while you are putting its secrets to use. As long as your website is of high-quality, you will be more likely to receive a lot of traffic, which will lead to more profits.

Freddy Gandarilla

This Post Was Written By Freddy Gandarilla

Freddy Gandarilla has written 1354 posts in this blog.

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Christian group apologizes to gay community

The leader of Exodus International, a Christian ministry that worked to help people repress same-sex attraction, has apologized to the gay community for inflicting "years of undue suffering." He plans to close the organization while launching a new effort to promote reconciliation.

"The church has waged the culture war, and it's time to put the weapons down," Alan Chambers told The Associated Press on Thursday, hours after announcing his decision at Exodus' annual conference and posting his apology online.

"While there has been so much good at Exodus, there has also been bad," Chambers said at the conference. "We've hurt people."

Based in Orlando, Fla., Exodus was founded 37 years ago and claimed 260 member ministries around the U.S. and abroad. It offered to help conflicted Christians rid themselves of unwanted homosexual inclinations through counseling and prayer, infuriating gay rights activists in the process.

Exodus had seen its influence wane in recent years as mainstream associations representing psychiatrists and psychologists rejected its approach. However, the idea that gays could be "converted" to heterosexuality through prayer persists among some evangelicals and fundamentalists.

The announcement that Exodus would close was not a total surprise. Last year, Chambers ? who is married to a woman but has spoken openly about his own sexual attraction to men ? said he was trying to distance his ministry from the idea that gays' sexual orientation can be permanently changed or "cured."

In his statement Thursday, Chambers said the board had decided to close Exodus and form a new ministry, which he referred to as reducefear.org.

He told the AP that the new initiative would seek to promote dialogue among those who've been on opposite sides in the debate over gay rights.

"We want to see bridges built, we want peace to be at the forefront of anything we do in the future," he said.

Gay rights activists welcomed Chambers' apology, while reiterating their belief that Exodus had caused great damage.

"This is a welcome first step in honestly addressing the harm the organization and its leaders have caused," said Sharon Groves, director of the Human Rights Campaign's religion and faith program. "Now we need them to take the next step of leadership and persuade all other religious-based institutions that they got it wrong."

Chambers said the decisions announced this week had been under consideration by Exodus' board for a year. Regarding the timing, he said it was not linked to rulings from the Supreme Court on same-sex marriage that are expected within the next week.

"I hold to a biblical view that the original intent for sexuality was designed for heterosexual marriage," he said. "Yet I realize there are a lot of people who fall outside of that, gay and straight ... It's time to find out how we can pursue the common good."

He said there were many influences on his personal decision. Among them, he said, was the interfaith work overseas of the U.S.-based Christian relief group World Vision, which he praised for its cooperation with Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist groups to aid at-risk children.

Truth Wins Out, another group that had been harshly critical of Exodus, praised Chambers for "integrity and authenticity."

"It takes a real man to publicly confront the people whose lives were destroyed by his organization's work, and to take real, concrete action to begin to repair that damage," said the group's associate director, Evan Hurst.

However, Hurst noted that some of Exodus' former followers ? disenchanted by Chambers' evolution ? had formed a new group called the Restored Hope Network, which calls itself an "ex-gay ministry" and continues to promote the idea that gays can be converted to heterosexuality.

That group's board members, gathering in Oklahoma City for their annual meeting, issued a statement saying they "grieved" Chambers' decision.

"It feels like the unnecessary death of a dear friend," said the board, vowing to carry on with Exodus' original mission.

Chambers was criticized by Regina Griggs, executive director of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays. Her group had been a member of Exodus before resigning four years ago, and it's now part of the Restored Hope Network.

Griggs said Chambers was entitled to decide what was best for himself, but shouldn't be discrediting the efforts of others to help people who were uncomfortable with same-sex attraction.

"We do not owe an apology to the gay community," she said. "Nobody's ever forced to change. That's an individual's right."

Among those commending Chambers was California state Sen. Ted Lieu, author of a recently passed law seeking to ban licensed counselors from trying to turn gay teens straight. The law has been put on hold by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals pending resolution of lawsuits challenging it.

"In the past, Exodus International practiced the quackery known as reparative therapy or various versions of gay conversion therapy," Lieu said. "Exodus International's mea culpa and shut-down puts another nail in the coffin for reparative therapy."

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Follow David Crary on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/craryap

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/christian-group-apologizes-gay-community-143320199.html

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