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Wednesday, July 30, 2008

They get by with mudcakes


From TODAY, World
Wednesday July 30, 2008

STARVING IN HAITI

Rocketing food, fuel prices have forced the destitute to take desperate measures

PICTURE: Children receiving free milk at a hospital in Haiti last month. AP

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Haiti) — In this city’s worst slums, making mud cakes is a major income earner. Mud cakes are the only inflation-proof food available to Haiti’s poor as sky-rocketing prices stop the poor from getting proper food.

In a dusty courtyard, women mould clay and water into hundreds of little platters and lay them out to harden under the Caribbean sun. The craftsmanship is rough and the finished products, uneven. But customers do not object. These platters are not to hold food. They are food.

For years they have been consumed by impoverished pregnant women seeking calcium, a risky and medically unproven supplement, but now the cakes have become a staple for entire families.

“It stops the hunger,” Ms Marie- Carmelle Baptiste, 35, a producer, said, eyeing up her stock laid out in rows. She did not embroider their appeal, saying, “You eat them when you have to.”

And these days, many people have to. The global food and fuel crisis has hit Haiti harder than perhaps any other country, pushing a population mired in extreme poverty towards starvation and revolt. Hunger burns are called “swallowing Clorox”, a brand of bleach.

The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation predicts Haiti’s food import bill will leap 80 per cent this year, the fastest globally.

Food riots toppled the Prime Minister and left five dead in April. Emergency subsidies curbed prices and bought calm but the cash-strapped government is gradually lifting them. Fresh unrest is expected.

Until recently, Haiti — which vies with Afghanistan for appalling human development statistics — had been showing signs of recovery: Political stability, new roads and infrastructure, less gang warfare.

“We had been going in the right direction and this crisis threatens that,” said Ms Eloune Doreus, the vice-president of parliament.

As desperation rises, so does production of mud cakes, an unofficial misery index. Now even bakers are struggling.

“We need to raise our prices but it’s their last resort and people won’t tolerate it,” lamented Baptiste, the Cité Soleil baker.

The signs of crisis are everywhere. Aid agency feeding centres reported that the numbers seeking help have tripled. In rural areas, the situation seems even worse, prompting a continued drift to the slums and their mirage of opportunities.

Haiti’s woes stem from global economic trends of higher oil and food prices, plus reduced remittances from migrant relatives affected by the United States downturn. What makes the country especially vulnerable, however, is its almost total reliance on food imports.

Domestic agriculture is a disaster. The slashing and burning of forests for farming and charcoal has degraded the soil and chronic under-investment has rendered rural infrastructure at best rickety, at worst non-existent.

The woes were compounded by a decision in the ’80s to lift tariffs, and flood the country with cheap imported rice and vegetables. Consumers gained but domestic farmers went bankrupt.

Now that imports are rocketing in price, the government has vowed to rebuild the withered agriculture but hurdles include scant resources, degraded soil and land ownership disputes.

Guardian

They get by with mudcakes


From TODAY, World
Wednesday July 30, 2008

STARVING IN HAITI

Rocketing food, fuel prices have forced the destitute to take desperate measures

PICTURE: Children receiving free milk at a hospital in Haiti last month. AP

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Haiti) — In this city’s worst slums, making mud cakes is a major income earner. Mud cakes are the only inflation-proof food available to Haiti’s poor as sky-rocketing prices stop the poor from getting proper food.

In a dusty courtyard, women mould clay and water into hundreds of little platters and lay them out to harden under the Caribbean sun. The craftsmanship is rough and the finished products, uneven. But customers do not object. These platters are not to hold food. They are food.

For years they have been consumed by impoverished pregnant women seeking calcium, a risky and medically unproven supplement, but now the cakes have become a staple for entire families.

“It stops the hunger,” Ms Marie- Carmelle Baptiste, 35, a producer, said, eyeing up her stock laid out in rows. She did not embroider their appeal, saying, “You eat them when you have to.”

And these days, many people have to. The global food and fuel crisis has hit Haiti harder than perhaps any other country, pushing a population mired in extreme poverty towards starvation and revolt. Hunger burns are called “swallowing Clorox”, a brand of bleach.

The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation predicts Haiti’s food import bill will leap 80 per cent this year, the fastest globally.

Food riots toppled the Prime Minister and left five dead in April. Emergency subsidies curbed prices and bought calm but the cash-strapped government is gradually lifting them. Fresh unrest is expected.

Until recently, Haiti — which vies with Afghanistan for appalling human development statistics — had been showing signs of recovery: Political stability, new roads and infrastructure, less gang warfare.

“We had been going in the right direction and this crisis threatens that,” said Ms Eloune Doreus, the vice-president of parliament.

As desperation rises, so does production of mud cakes, an unofficial misery index. Now even bakers are struggling.

“We need to raise our prices but it’s their last resort and people won’t tolerate it,” lamented Baptiste, the Cité Soleil baker.

The signs of crisis are everywhere. Aid agency feeding centres reported that the numbers seeking help have tripled. In rural areas, the situation seems even worse, prompting a continued drift to the slums and their mirage of opportunities.

Haiti’s woes stem from global economic trends of higher oil and food prices, plus reduced remittances from migrant relatives affected by the United States downturn. What makes the country especially vulnerable, however, is its almost total reliance on food imports.

Domestic agriculture is a disaster. The slashing and burning of forests for farming and charcoal has degraded the soil and chronic under-investment has rendered rural infrastructure at best rickety, at worst non-existent.

The woes were compounded by a decision in the ’80s to lift tariffs, and flood the country with cheap imported rice and vegetables. Consumers gained but domestic farmers went bankrupt.

Now that imports are rocketing in price, the government has vowed to rebuild the withered agriculture but hurdles include scant resources, degraded soil and land ownership disputes.

Guardian

Singapore Garden Festival


From TODAY, News
Friday July 25, 2008

Seeking Shangri-La by local designer Peter Cheok. The work uses an artistic combination of lights and special effects to highlight how surviving plant-life have transformed to exist amid the corals. The display won the Best of Show and Gold medal award in the Fantasy Garden category at the Singapore Garden Festival.The show runs from today to Aug 1 at Suntec International Convention and Exhibition Centre. This year’s festival showcases 32 masterpieces by garden and floral designers from 17 countries.


WEE TECK HIAN

Singapore Garden Festival


From TODAY, News
Friday July 25, 2008

Seeking Shangri-La by local designer Peter Cheok. The work uses an artistic combination of lights and special effects to highlight how surviving plant-life have transformed to exist amid the corals. The display won the Best of Show and Gold medal award in the Fantasy Garden category at the Singapore Garden Festival.The show runs from today to Aug 1 at Suntec International Convention and Exhibition Centre. This year’s festival showcases 32 masterpieces by garden and floral designers from 17 countries.


WEE TECK HIAN

Travel Destination: Switzerland




Photos from TODAY, Traveller
Thursday July 24, 2008

Travel Destination: Switzerland




Photos from TODAY, Traveller
Thursday July 24, 2008

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Grades not everything

GIFTED EDU CATION PROGRAMME
Litmus test is if it will produce individuals useful to society

From News
TODAY Tuesday July 15, 2008

ZUL OTHMAN
zul@mediacorp.com.sg


BRIGHT they may be — the brightest of their cohort, in fact — but when it comes to intellectually gifted children, good grades should not be mistaken as the critical goal of any gifted education programme.

Top marks in examinations do not, after all, “necessarily create a good entrepreneur, violinist or politician”, according to Professor Robert Sternberg, a keynote speaker at the 10th Asia-Pacific Conference on Giftedness which opened here yesterday.

The litmus test for such programmes is whether they produce individuals “who will make a difference in the world”, he told Today.

And the way to do that is to identify and nurture children “gifted in creative and practical competencies”, said the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, a private college based in Boston.

It is an outcome that Education Minister Ng Eng Hen said Singapore also hopes to achieve with its Gifted Education Programme (GEP), which was introduced in 1984.

“Our system aims to nurture an admirable individual, one who will be an inspiration and a pillar of strength for his or her community and also a valuable global citizen,” he said in his address to 1,600 participants from 29 countries.

In particular, such programmes are needed to develop “creators, inventors and problem solvers”, said Dr Ng.

He cited a well-regarded study which found that a group of 2,409 adults in the United States, identified as the top 1 per cent of ability at age 13, had produced 817 patents and published 93 books by the time they reached their thirties. In addition, half had earned a doctorate.

While such data for Singapore’s GEP graduates — there are 8,000 in total as of this year — are not readily available, a 2005 Ministry of Education (MOE) survey of six cohorts found that “not only have GEP graduates excelled academically, they are serving in diverse fields in both public and private sectors — academia, education, engineering, finance, law and medicine”, said the ministry.

GEP graduates have received various international and local awards, such as in science and technology, even sports, and more GEP graduates (22.1 per cent) in their mid-20s continue to be involved in community work compared to non-GEP graduates (15.2 per cent), the ministry added.

This year, however, the MOE has begun phasing out the GEP, which is offered from Primary 4, at the secondary school level. Gifted students would be placed in integrated classes to allow them a chance to mix with a broader spectrum of people.

The issue of greater integration between elite students and their mainstream friends is also an issue in other countries, but Professor Kuo Chin-chih, president of the Asia-Pacific Federation of the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children, told Today it was important to continue investing in such programmes because students “are our natural resources”.

“I think that although we need to give opportunity to every student … we also need to communicate to our society how to pay more attention and give more resources to gifted education,” she said on the sidelines of the four-day conference, being held here for the first time.

Grades not everything

GIFTED EDU CATION PROGRAMME
Litmus test is if it will produce individuals useful to society

From News
TODAY Tuesday July 15, 2008

ZUL OTHMAN
zul@mediacorp.com.sg


BRIGHT they may be — the brightest of their cohort, in fact — but when it comes to intellectually gifted children, good grades should not be mistaken as the critical goal of any gifted education programme.

Top marks in examinations do not, after all, “necessarily create a good entrepreneur, violinist or politician”, according to Professor Robert Sternberg, a keynote speaker at the 10th Asia-Pacific Conference on Giftedness which opened here yesterday.

The litmus test for such programmes is whether they produce individuals “who will make a difference in the world”, he told Today.

And the way to do that is to identify and nurture children “gifted in creative and practical competencies”, said the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, a private college based in Boston.

It is an outcome that Education Minister Ng Eng Hen said Singapore also hopes to achieve with its Gifted Education Programme (GEP), which was introduced in 1984.

“Our system aims to nurture an admirable individual, one who will be an inspiration and a pillar of strength for his or her community and also a valuable global citizen,” he said in his address to 1,600 participants from 29 countries.

In particular, such programmes are needed to develop “creators, inventors and problem solvers”, said Dr Ng.

He cited a well-regarded study which found that a group of 2,409 adults in the United States, identified as the top 1 per cent of ability at age 13, had produced 817 patents and published 93 books by the time they reached their thirties. In addition, half had earned a doctorate.

While such data for Singapore’s GEP graduates — there are 8,000 in total as of this year — are not readily available, a 2005 Ministry of Education (MOE) survey of six cohorts found that “not only have GEP graduates excelled academically, they are serving in diverse fields in both public and private sectors — academia, education, engineering, finance, law and medicine”, said the ministry.

GEP graduates have received various international and local awards, such as in science and technology, even sports, and more GEP graduates (22.1 per cent) in their mid-20s continue to be involved in community work compared to non-GEP graduates (15.2 per cent), the ministry added.

This year, however, the MOE has begun phasing out the GEP, which is offered from Primary 4, at the secondary school level. Gifted students would be placed in integrated classes to allow them a chance to mix with a broader spectrum of people.

The issue of greater integration between elite students and their mainstream friends is also an issue in other countries, but Professor Kuo Chin-chih, president of the Asia-Pacific Federation of the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children, told Today it was important to continue investing in such programmes because students “are our natural resources”.

“I think that although we need to give opportunity to every student … we also need to communicate to our society how to pay more attention and give more resources to gifted education,” she said on the sidelines of the four-day conference, being held here for the first time.

Schoolbags part of holistic health too

From News
TODAY Tuesday July 15, 2008

Ong Dai Lin
dailin@mediacorp.com.sg

NUTRITION and physical exercise — these are the obvious elements of good health promotion in schools. But to create a holistic school environment, smaller factors, such as the weight of schoolbags, count too.

At an inaugural conference on school health hosted by the Health Promotion Board (HPB), a Hong Kong educator shared how her pupils help as “health ambassadors” to weigh their friends’ schoolbags.

“If the bags are too heavy, the ambassadors will teach the students how to pack their bags. For instance, they will teach them to not bring unnecessary books and to bring plastic pencil cases instead of metal ones,” Ms Lam Wai Ling, principal of Tai Po Market Public School, told 285 representatives from 225 schools here.

Holistic health is one of the goals of an inter-ministry collaboration formed this year — the Healthy Youth Committee — tasked to establish a “common vision” for healthy lifestyle among students, said Senior Parliamentary Secretary (Education) Masagos Zulkifli at the one-day conference.

And schools are also being recognised for programmes that focus more on holistic health through a joint awards programme by HPB and the Education Ministry.

One of the gold award winners this year, Pasir Ris Primary School, has installed lockers, for example, to address the issue of heavy schoolbags. “Having a lighter school bag will definitely help the well-being of students. Sometimes students tend to bring everything and their bags can be too heavy for them,” said PE teacher Shahizan Ahmad.

For Ang Mo Kio Secondary principal Tan Chee Siong, cyber wellness is one of his top concerns.

“Students are spending so much time online in front of the computer and are not leading a physically active lifestyle. They are also exposing themselves to potential cyber bullies and predators,” said Mr Tan, whose school won the platinum award this year.

According to Professor Lawrence St Leger, the keynote speaker yesterday, a conducive school environment is more important than lessons about good health.

“You don’t get any change if you teach health. But you get significant changes when you promote a healthy school environment when you combine action with the curriculum to get students involved,” said Prof St Leger, who has helped to implement health programmes in other countries.

HPB said that it would work with the don from Deakin University in Australia to further develop health programmes and guidelines for schools to follow.

Schoolbags part of holistic health too

From News
TODAY Tuesday July 15, 2008

Ong Dai Lin
dailin@mediacorp.com.sg

NUTRITION and physical exercise — these are the obvious elements of good health promotion in schools. But to create a holistic school environment, smaller factors, such as the weight of schoolbags, count too.

At an inaugural conference on school health hosted by the Health Promotion Board (HPB), a Hong Kong educator shared how her pupils help as “health ambassadors” to weigh their friends’ schoolbags.

“If the bags are too heavy, the ambassadors will teach the students how to pack their bags. For instance, they will teach them to not bring unnecessary books and to bring plastic pencil cases instead of metal ones,” Ms Lam Wai Ling, principal of Tai Po Market Public School, told 285 representatives from 225 schools here.

Holistic health is one of the goals of an inter-ministry collaboration formed this year — the Healthy Youth Committee — tasked to establish a “common vision” for healthy lifestyle among students, said Senior Parliamentary Secretary (Education) Masagos Zulkifli at the one-day conference.

And schools are also being recognised for programmes that focus more on holistic health through a joint awards programme by HPB and the Education Ministry.

One of the gold award winners this year, Pasir Ris Primary School, has installed lockers, for example, to address the issue of heavy schoolbags. “Having a lighter school bag will definitely help the well-being of students. Sometimes students tend to bring everything and their bags can be too heavy for them,” said PE teacher Shahizan Ahmad.

For Ang Mo Kio Secondary principal Tan Chee Siong, cyber wellness is one of his top concerns.

“Students are spending so much time online in front of the computer and are not leading a physically active lifestyle. They are also exposing themselves to potential cyber bullies and predators,” said Mr Tan, whose school won the platinum award this year.

According to Professor Lawrence St Leger, the keynote speaker yesterday, a conducive school environment is more important than lessons about good health.

“You don’t get any change if you teach health. But you get significant changes when you promote a healthy school environment when you combine action with the curriculum to get students involved,” said Prof St Leger, who has helped to implement health programmes in other countries.

HPB said that it would work with the don from Deakin University in Australia to further develop health programmes and guidelines for schools to follow.

Monday, July 14, 2008

Travel Destination: Kyoto, Japan

2 pictures on Kyoto, Japan. One is the Ginkaku Pavilion.

 

Travel Destination: Kyoto, Japan

2 pictures on Kyoto, Japan. One is the Ginkaku Pavilion.

 

Travel Destination: Hakka

A picture of a place in Hakka. The smaller picture is the Hakka Museum…

 

Travel Destination: Hakka

A picture of a place in Hakka. The smaller picture is the Hakka Museum…

 

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Rock-a-bye baby, on a leaf top


From My News - World

MY PAPER TUESDAY JULY 8, 2008



A BABY sleeps on the leaf of the water lily Victoria Amazonica in the
Hortus Botanicus of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands on
Sunday. The enormous leaves of the Victoria Amazonica can grow up to a
diameter of 1.5m and can support a weight of up to 40 kg.
(PHOTO: AFP)

Rock-a-bye baby, on a leaf top


From My News - World

MY PAPER TUESDAY JULY 8, 2008



A BABY sleeps on the leaf of the water lily Victoria Amazonica in the
Hortus Botanicus of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands on
Sunday. The enormous leaves of the Victoria Amazonica can grow up to a
diameter of 1.5m and can support a weight of up to 40 kg.
(PHOTO: AFP)