Blog Archives
How Billionaires Will Survive The Apocalypse (Video)
What’s the one percent to do when the world they probably helped destroy finally crumbles? From luxury bunkers and floating cities to an escape route to Mars, AJ+ takes a look at doomsday prepping for the super rich.
Turkey is No. 1 in global humanitarian aid
Source: worldbulletin.net
Turkey managed $4.3 billion in humanitarian aid sent through its official channels and non-profit organizations around the world, and that amount, with respect to Turkey’s Gross National Product, ranks it as first in the world. Countries are ranked in the report by the amount of aid provided with respect to the country’s GNP.
The report explains that the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency played an important role in conducting Turkey’s “soft power” foreign policy.
HalalTrip wants to be every Muslim’s handy travel guide
Source: techinasia.com
By: Enricko Lukman
The Muslim tourism industry is huge. A study estimates that the “global Muslim tourism market in 2011 was US $126.1 billion in outbound expenditure 1” or 12.3 percent of the global outbound tourism expenditure in that year. It’s estimated that the Muslim tourism market will grow an average of 4.79 percent year-on-year until 2020.
This explains why Crescent Rating, a ratings company for halal friendly travel services behind that study, decided to launch a B2C Muslim tourism service called HalalTrip.
Launched in December 2013, HalalTrip will sell three travel services to Muslims online: the booking of flight tickets, hotels, and tour packages (to be launched this week). All three are offered in cooperation with travel companies Wego (flights), Booking.com (hotels), and Kuoni (travel packages).
What makes the site special however is that it offers travel recommendations based on the halal friendliness of each product 2. The “halal friendliness level” is derived from the parent company’s database of halal tourism ratings. The website also carries a directory of halal friendly restaurants and mosques.
Israel/Palestine: a ‘one-state solution’
Source: mwcnews.net
By: Ludwig Watzal
Israel’s economy minister Naftali Bennett, the leader of the right-wing party “The Jewish Home”, published an article in the New York Times in which he buried the concept of a “two-state solution” as a way out of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Bennett does not belong to the radical Zionist fringe. Although he is an advocate of extremist colonial Zionist ideas, he is considered to be the successor of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. In his Op-ED, Bennett has made a mockery of the policy of the last 20 years, which was connected to the Oslo Accords and the two-state solution. His words won’t bear fruit right now, but they might be in the future.
Study suggests US Muslim population unknown to Americans
Source: idigitaltimes.com
By: Andrew Whalen
About 1.6 billion of the world’s population are Muslim, collectively comprising the world’s second largest religion and 23 percent of the world’s population. Contrary to popular association, the vast majority of Muslims live in Asia and the Pacific Rim, rather than the Middle East. The Middle Eastern Islamic population is more comparable to Sub-Saharan Africa’s 248 million than Asia’s nearly one billion. But the distribution of Islam throughout the world is not the only perception radically distorted by our current foreign policy and political fixation on Muslim populations. It turns out that most of us don’t even know how many Muslims live in the US.
How Sustainable Farming Could Feed 3 Billion More People
Source: http://themindunleashed.org/2014/07/sustainable-farming-feed-3-billion-people.html
A three-pronged approach has been developed to remedy the global food shortage.
With the population of the world expected to hit 9.7 billion by 2050, it’s no secret that reliable, sustainable, and nutritious food sources need to be developed today to provide for the future tomorrow. But the outlook of providing enough food for future generations is skeptical at best, and scientists, researchers, and farmers are concerned that not enough is being done in the present to prevent food-related catastrophe.
However, some individuals do hold positive outlook that if given the right tools for change and support, another 3 billion people could be fed from sustainable farming methods.
Paul West, from the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, along with colleagues believe that if‘given the right levers’, feeding the whole world will be possible. The team believes that the majority of food production problems stem from just a handful of countries, and if such areas could be concentrated on, three billion more people could potentially be fed, along with reduced environmental damage.
“The way we are growing agriculture right now is totally not sustainable.” said West
West and his colleagues have been looking for “leverage points”, or areas with the most potential to change how we grow food. The team focused on the 17 crops that represent 86 percent of the world’s crop calories and consume the most water and fertilizer. From their findings, they developed a three-pronged approach to remedy the global food shortage situation.
Stated Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institute for Science in Stanford, California, “They’re taking a high-altitude view of all the possible points that need to be made if we’re going to feed a planet full of people. It’s incredibly valuable to have all that in one place.”
The study led by West suggests three fundamental areas where food production can be boosted and grown sustainably, leading to increased yields from unproductive farms, decreased amount of waste produced, and change in the way people eat.
In the map below, highlighted areas depict where the most money could be saved.
How to Sit with Painful Emotions
Source: psychcentral.com
By: Margarita Tartakovsky
Feeling painful emotions, not surprisingly, can be painful. This is why so many of us don’t do it. Instead, we ignore our emotions, or dismiss them. We try to numb the pain with a glass of wine or three. We isolate ourselves. We cut or burn ourselves, or engage in other kinds of self-harm.
Basically, we turn to anything that’ll help us get rid of our feelings.“As humans, we do everything we can do to reduce our suffering and to avoid pain — emotional or physical. So it is difficult to accept the pain [of our emotions] and not try to do anything to fight it,” said Sheri Van Dijk, MSW, a psychotherapist in Sharon, Ontario, Canada.
PunditFact ‘scorecards’ show false statements on Fox News, NBC/MSNBC
PunditFact, a spinoff of the popular PolitiFact, last week launched a batch of “scorecards” that rate news channels on truth.
Source: washingtonpost.com
By: Erik Wemple
To sum up the bad side of things: In a post on the scorecards, PunditFact combined ratings of “Mostly False,” “False” or “Pants on Fire.” Sixty percent of Fox News statements examined by PunditFact fell on this dark side, as did 46 percent of NBC/MSNBC statements and 18 percent of CNN statements.
The Rundown On The Worst Drought In California History (Video)
Wildfires have been spreading across California all summer. Hundreds of thousands of acres are already scorched, and the conditions are ideal fuel for more devastating blazes. Over 80 percent of California is in the midst of an exceptionally severe drought as a result of erratic weather patterns caused by climate change.
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