So far this year, more than 2.1 million acres have burned in wildfires nation-wide. In my home state of Colorado alone, this has been one of the most destructive and costly fire seasons ever recorded.

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i have been watching a ton of movies lately. this latest, running with scissors, was based on a memoir by augusten burroughs about his life growing up the son of a would-be poet. augusten's mother was plagued with mental illness, in and out of hospitals until she finally gave her son up for adoption to her psychiatrist. margaret robison, his mother, can be heard in an interview here. alongside the interview is a brilliant poem that i just had to share. enjoy. --AL.

Stigma

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We have signed the Manifesto for Economic Sense put together by leading economists and which is growing daily. I encourage you to read it and sign it. Let us together end the madness of austerity that is crippling western economies further and in turn has slowed down the global economic engine. The conclusion below from the manifesto says it best :

As a result of their mistaken ideas, many Western policy-makers are inflicting massive suffering on their peoples. But the ideas they espouse about how to handle recessions were rejected by nearly all economists after the disasters of the 1930s, and for the following forty years or so the West enjoyed an unparalleled period of economic stability and low unemployment. It is tragic that in recent years the old ideas have again taken root. But we ...

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Uganda's Ethics and Integrity Minister is drooling over a document he has misinterpreted. In an article in The Observer, also highlighted on the blog Towleroad, we read that a strategy document developed by gay civil rights advocacy groups was confiscated: The government says it has intercepted minutes of a recent meeting that discussed wide-ranging strategies [...]

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As the Somali Independence Day yesterday marked 52 years of independence, I started thinking about what that meant and how it feels to celebrate victory and hope so far from home at a time when it feels as though there is little to rejoice. It may only have been half a century since the Italians and the British left but we've certainly been roaming for hundreds of years in the land we came to know and love as Soomaaliya.

The last time I was on Somali soil, I was four and a half years old, making my way to the Kenyan border, literally by foot (or sandal) for a part of the way. It was 1990 and by then the civil war in Somalia had already taken the lives of numerous family members and distant relatives. At that age, I had very little concept of war but I was already well aware of the sound of ...

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I know that many people have been watching Hausa videoclips on this blog. There used to be a "widget" on the left, where one could find them. Due to a problem with the blog service provider, this widget doesn't show right now. If you would still like to watch the Hausa videoclips I have collected, [...]

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João Luiz Telles Penetra, one of the two murdered activists Almir Nogueira de Amorim and João Luiz Telles "Pituca" Penetra were both leaders of the Associação Homens do Mar. AHOMAR (Association of Sea Men) is an organisation set up in 2009 to defend the rights of the fisher-folk working in Rio de Janeiro, and particularly those affected by the construction of a gas pipeline for Petrobras. On June 19, both fishermen attended a meeting at Peoples' Summit, a RIO+20 side event in Rio de... Full post on www.theroadtothehorizon.org

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After receiving nearly 2000 entries, the judges announced the finalists and winners of the Rockefeller Foundation 2012 Innovation Challenges Competition. The winning ideas were developed based on the results of the Foundation's Innovation Forum in 2011, which gathered a number of leading global thinkers and innovators in New York to generate innovative ideas for how [...]

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En Français

Earlier this month we hosted 148 of the 170 university students selected as 2012-2013 Google Student Ambassadors in Nairobi, Kenya for the first-ever SSA Ambassador Summit. These students - most of whom were traveling outside their home countries for the first time - represent over 100 universities across 12 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa including Angola, Cameroon, Cote d'ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda.

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I'm a guest over at my friend Judy Croome's blog today. I'm writing about my recipe for being a writer in Botswana, how to write a book under our harsh conditions- and I'm not talking about the weather!

Stop by and you could win yourself one of two copies of one of my ebooks on offer.

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