Korean Air Pilots Mistakenly Identified in TV News Prank: Sum Ting Wong
Someone will lose their job, if it is ever discovered who pranked this totally politically incorrect news broadcast. This from Reuters via Huffington Post on AOL:
NTSB Intern Mistakenly Confirmed To KTVU Wrong Asiana Names, Statement Says
(Please note offensive language in paragraph 6)
July 12 (Reuters) – The National Transportation Safety Board apologized on Friday after an intern mistakenly confirmed to a local television station racially offensive fake names for the pilots of an Asiana flight that crashed in San Francisco.
“The National Transportation Safety Board apologizes for inaccurate and offensive names that were mistakenly confirmed as those of the pilots of Asiana flight 214, which crashed at San Francisco International Airport on July 6,” the NTSB said in a statement.
“Earlier today, in response to an inquiry from a media outlet, a summer intern acted outside the scope of his authority when he erroneously confirmed the names of the flight crew on the aircraft,” the NTSB said.
The crash of the Boeing 777 plane resulted in the deaths of three teenage girls in a group of students from eastern China who were visiting the United States for a summer camp, one of whom died on Friday in the hospital. Over 180 passengers and crew members were injured.
On Friday, an anchor for Oakland, California, station KTVU read a list of the supposed names of the pilots of the South Korean carrier on its noon broadcast after an employee apparently called the NTSB seeking to verify them.
The names appear to mock the events of the crash. The prank names were: Captain Sum Ting Wong, Wi Tu Lo, Ho Lee Fuk and Bang Ding Ow.
Kuwait has Highest BMI in the World
The countries which contain the heaviest and lightest citizens can be revealed today.
This extraordinary graphic shows the average body mass index values for adults around the globe – with some surprising results.
With its wealthy society and love of fast food outlets, many would place the U.S. at the top of the list.
But it is pipped to first place in the body mass index chart by Kuwait. The Arab state has an average body mass index of 27.5 for men and 31.4 for women.
This beats America in second place which averages 26.5 for men and 29 for women.
From UPI:
Mexico is world fattest nation, United States No. 2
UNITED NATIONS, July 10 (UPI) — Officials at the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization say Mexico with a 32.8 percent adult obesity rate is the most overweight of the industrialized nations.
Previously, the United States with an adult obesity rate of 31.8 percent was the world’s fattest nation. Last year, the percentage of U.S. adults overweight went down slightly.
A report by the FAO said Mexico’s widely available inexpensive junk food and penetration of U.S. fast-food chains combined with a more sedentary lifestyle all contributed to Mexico’s bulging waistline.
About 70 percent of Mexican adults are overweight, while childhood obesity tripled in a decade and about a third of teenagers are overweight as well, the Global Post said.
Weight-related diabetes claims 1-of-6 one of Mexican adults — or 70,000 people a year — suffering from the disease each year, the report said.
Welcome Ramadan 2013!
My first Ramadan was in Tunisia. It was summer, it was hot, and the days were long. The days dragged by, and then, in the evenings, our neighbors would send over huge platters of lamb and couscous, hot and spicy, to share with us. Our neighbors had ten children, all around our age, some older, some younger, and cars would arrive endlessly, bringing and taking people. They often included us in the family gatherings, out of the kindness and generosity of their hearts.
I didn’t understand how it all worked, Ramadan and fasting, and they would explain it to me. It’s a lot to take in. It took me a long time, many years, many Muslem countries, many Muslim friends. I still don’t think I understand all of it, but I understand enough of it to know this – it’s like a month of Christmas Eves.
A good Muslim won’t just fast from sunrise to sundown. A good Muslim circumcises his or her heart in this time. A good Muslim will read through the entire Quran at least once during Ramadan. The whole point of the sacrifice is to purify the soul.
I wish for my Muslim friends a joyful Ramadan, full of blessings. May God our Creator and Heavenly Father receive your sacrifice and bless your fasting. May your Mama prepare all your favorite foods for the breaking of the fast. 🙂
“It’s Just Like Living in Alaska, Mom . . . or Kuwait . . . “
My Mom was concerned; the temperatures are approaching 90°F in Seattle, and most of Seattle does not bother with air conditioning. At night, the temperatures go down into the fifties, cooling everything off, but the day time highs can be more than a little uncomfortable.
“How do you manage?” she asks. “I see the temperatures in (nearby) Mobile are in the 90’s almost every day.”
“It’s not that hard; it’s like living in Alaska – or Kuwait,” I tell her. “When it gets cold in Alaska, you dress warmly, you turn on the heat, you stay inside, and when you need to go out, you get into your car in the heated garage, go in your heated car to a heated store, and you come back home. You don’t spend a lot of time outside.”
I do pretty much the same thing I did in Qatar and Kuwait. I get up and do my devotional readings, and on some days I go to my aqua-aerobics class. on other mornings I volunteer. If I need something, I stop at a store on the way home. Sometimes, I clean house, or do laundry. We often go out for lunch, from the air conditioned car to the air conditioned restaurant and back 🙂 In the afternoons, I quilt or I read, or I quilt and I read.
AdventureMan grew up in the South, he is comfortable with the heat and the humidity. He works out in his gardens; once the temperatures go over 80° I rarely even visit the gardens, maybe when October comes and the temperatures drop. Yesterday morning I looked out as the sun was rising over the gardens and all I could see was swarms of insects rising. I don’t think they were mosquitoes, they looked like little no-see-up kind of things, all speeding around in the rising sun. I don’t do insects, the same way I really don’t do heat and humidity.
The Qatari Cat loves the heat. Part of his daily routine is to eat, then to go into the garage and sleep on one of the cars. It’s like an oven in the garage; it must remind him of living on the streets of Qatar when he was just a tiny thing. He is no longer a tiny thing. When we have international guests over for dinner, they always ask to take photos of him; he has grown to be a very long, tall cat, kingly but gracious.
Yesterday morning, as I headed out, there was a hint of – well, it was not coolness, but it was just not blasting me with heat. It was a respite from the relentless heat. I don’t begin to think it was a hint of winter to come; the summer torment has really just begun and is unlikely to end before late October, but I treasure even a hint of “not a blast of heat.”
AdventureMan asks me if I miss Seattle. Not so much, really, traffic has gotten so bad there, but I miss the climate. I feel energized by the cool mornings, even rain doesn’t bother me. I love the sound of the wind whistling around, I love taking a walk along the waterfront after lunch or dinner. I don’t find it at all surprising that diabetes is associated highly with countries with hot climates; heat makes you lethargic, inactive, all the things that encourage sloth.
Torrential rains are forecasted for this 4th of July weekend; in Pensacola there is a possibility they will diminish just in time for the fireworks. Hmmm. Heat. Humidity. Mosquitoes . . . I love fireworks . . . weighing my options 🙂
Arabs wary of expressing their opinions online
Fascinating study results published in Qatar’s Gulf Times:
Northwestern University in Qatar has released new findings from an eight-nation survey indicating many people in the Arab world do not feel safe expressing political opinions online despite sweeping changes in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.
From over 10,000 people surveyed in Lebanon, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan and the UAE, 44% expressed some doubt as to whether people should be free to criticise governments or powerful institutions online.
Over a third of Internet users surveyed said they worry about governments checking what they do online.
According to the report, “The implied concern (of governments checking what they do online) is fairly consistent in almost all countries covered, but more acute in Saudi Arabia, where the majority (53%) of those surveyed expressed this concern.”
The study – titled ‘Media Use in the Middle East – An Eight-Nation Survey’ – was undertaken by researchers at NU-Q to better understand how people in the region use the Internet and other media. It comes as the university moves towards a more formalised research agenda and is the first in what will be a series of reports relating to Internet use.
The survey includes a specific chapter on Qatar, the only country where those surveyed regarded the Internet as a more important source of news than television. “We took an especially close look at media use in the State of Qatar – a country with one of the highest Internet penetration rates in the Arab world—and internationally,” said NU-Q dean and CEO Everette Dennis.
These findings follow a preliminary report NU-Q released last April that showed web users in the Middle East support the freedom to express opinions online, but they also believe the Internet should be more tightly regulated. “While this may seem a puzzling paradox, it has not been uncommon for people the world over to support freedom in the abstract but less so in practice,” Dennis explained.
Among other findings, the research shows: 45% of people think public officials will care more about what they think and 48% believe they can have more influence by using the Internet.
Adults in Lebanon (75%) and Tunisia (63%) are the most pessimistic about the direction of their countries and feel they are on the ‘wrong track.’
Respondents were far more likely to agree (61%) than disagree (14%) that the quality of news reporting in the Arab world has improved in the past two years, however less than half think overall that the news sources in their countries are credible.
Online transactions are rare in the Middle East, with only 35% purchasing items online and only 16% investing online.
The complete set of results from the survey is available online at menamediasurvey.northwestern.edu. The new interactive pages hosting the survey on the website have features that allow users to make comparisons between different countries, as well as between different demographics within each country.
Dennis confirmed that the research report is the first in an annual series of reports produced in collaboration with the World Internet Project; one of the world’s most extensive studies on the Internet, in which NU-Q is a participating institution.
NU-Q and WIP signed an agreement earlier in the year, providing a global platform for the current research.
Lamborghini Aventador: Qatari Royal’s £350k supercar towed in Knightsbridge
LLOOOLLLLL! Great story, thanks John Mueller!
Little cross cultural problem going on . . . no license? No registration? No problem, you know my uncle, right, the Amir of Qatar . . . LOL!
Batman wouldn’t stand for it: Police peer inside the garish car’s doors (Picture: SWNS)
It’s hard not to notice a bright purple Lamborghini with orange trim. So the driver of this £350,000 supercar was asking for trouble when he went for a spin without a front numberplate.
Police spotted the infringement and impounded the vehicle after its 24-year-old owner – thought to be a member of the Qatari royal family – was unable to produce evidence that he had a driving licence or insurance.
Crowds gathered as the 220mph Aventador was towed away in London’s Knightsbridge.
Arab playboys descend on the wealthy neighbourhood each summer in costly cars flown from home and often hit trouble for lacking the correct papers.
The mean machines are a draw for petrolheads but the roaring engines annoy residents.
Off we tow: The Lamborghini Aventador is loaded onto a truck (Picture: SWNS)
Dozens of onlookers gathered to photograph the scissor-doored supercar, which has been customised by a Japanese tuning company.
One fan said: ‘It is great when the wealthy foreign tourists come over to London every summer as you always see these amazing supercars.
‘The Lamborghini looked like something out of Tron, it was absolutely stunning.
‘Hopefully there was just some confusion over the correct paperwork and it will be back on the road
UPDATE:
First it was carted off on the back of a truck, then it faced the crusher, now glow-in-the dark Lamborghini is ticketed in Mayfair
- Police impounded £350k supercar after owner failed to produce documents
- But he was slapped with ticket just hours after retrieving it from police
- Purple Lamborghini Aventador customised to glow in the dark
- Owner believed to be Nasser Al-Thani, 24, of Qatar’s ruling family
PUBLISHED: 04:49 EST, 5 July 2013 | UPDATED: 14:32 EST, 5 July 2013
He was only a hair’s breadth away from seeing his beloved £350,000 supercar crushed to a pulp after it was seized by police for driving offences.
So you might think the owner of this glow-in-the-dark Lamborghini would be a bit more careful next time.
But within hours of retrieving his purple sports car from the Metropolitan Police, he found himself on the wrong side of the law again after being slapped with a parking ticket.
Americanah and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Rushing from one meeting to another yesterday, I had just an hour – but during that hour, Terry Gross was interviewing one of my favorite authors, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie does GREAT interviews. She is funny, and educated and insightful; she can talk about painful topics and make you laugh and cry with her. That interview was a blessing on my day.
I started reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie when I was in Kuwait. A good friend approached me and asked me to form a book club. LOL. This is a friend I can’t say no to. Every introverted bone in my body was screaming “NO! NO!” and I smiled at her and said “Yes.”
God is good. He laughed when I said “yes” and through the book club, introduced me to authors I might never otherwise read. The club was made up of many nationalities, and we read books from everywhere, unforgettable books. We read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie “Half of a Yellow Sun.” Once you read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, there is no going back. I wonder if I will be able to hold out on Americanah until it comes out in paperback?
This is from the National Public Radio website, so you can actually listen to the interview yourself, should you want to get to know this delightful author a little better.
‘Americanah’ Author Explains ‘Learning’ To Be Black In The U.S.
When the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was growing up in Nigeria she was not used to being identified by the color of her skin. That changed when she arrived in the United States for college. As a black African in America, Adichie was suddenly confronted with what it meant to be a person of color in the United States. Race as an idea became something that she had to navigate and learn.
The learning process took some time and was episodic. Adichie recalls, for example, an undergraduate class in which the subject of watermelon came up. A student had said something about watermelon to an African-American classmate, who was offended by the comment.
“I remember sitting there thinking, ‘But what’s so bad about watermelons? Because I quite like watermelons,’ ” Adichie tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross.
She felt that her African-American classmate was annoyed with her because Adichie didn’t share her anger — but she didn’t have the context to understand why. The history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was not taught to students in Nigeria. Adichie had yet to learn fully about the history of slavery — and its continuing reverberations — in the U.S.
“Race is such a strange construct,” says Adichie, “because you have to learn what it means to be black in America. So you have to learn that watermelon is supposed to be offensive.”
Adichie is a MacArthur Fellowship winner and author of the novels Purple Hibiscusand Half of A Yellow Sun. Her new novel, Americanah, explores this question of what it means to be black in the U.S., and tells the story of a young Nigerian couple, one of whom leaves for England and the other of whom leaves for America.
The title, she says, is a Nigerian word for those who have been to the U.S. and return with American affectations.
“It’s often used,” she says, “in the context of a kind of gentle mockery.”
St. John the Baptist and the Holy Spirit
This entry is a totally Here There and Everywhere moment; the impetus of which is today’s reading from Luke about the birth of John the Baptist, or as he is known in the Moslem world, the Prophet Yahya. We visited his tomb in Damascus; at our church in Kuwait on the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, one of the readings was from the Quran. I love it when our worlds intersect and we can discover what we can learn from one another, to the advantage of all.
I also love it that each meditation from Forward Day by Day lists at the bottom the area of the world we are to include in our daily prayers. I love praying for Nigeria. I have old friends from my Kuwait church living there, and also a neighbor from Doha, a sweet book-club friend who lived across the street, who now lives in Lagos.
When I pray for Nigeria, I see the tiny flame of the holy spirit entering into each heart, and then I see God blowing lightly on each person, so that the flame grows. The flame helps them reach out and encourage one another, and others see, and are attracted, and thus the holy spirit spreads. I imagine it covering Nigeria, all believers, seeing one another as fellow believers, not as Ibo or Christian or village or . . . you get the drill. I pray that the light spreads through all Africa, and tiny embers spread out to join, and then further, so that sparks unite all over the world.
I pray, too, for Damascus, and for Syria, and all our friends there; I think of all the wonderful adventures and times we have shared in Syria, and I know and trust with all my heart that our good and loving God can bring good out of this horror. I pray for it to happen sooner rather than to allow this suffering to endure.
. . . And that was just ONE synapse connecting early on a Monday morning, LOL. Have a great day. 🙂
MONDAY, June 24 The Nativity of Saint John the Baptist
Luke 1:57-80.
On the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they were going to name him Zechariah after his father. But his mother said, “No; he is to be called John.”
Most of us don’t receive such pointed visions that show us the fork in the road—“this way, not that way”—but all of us are constantly cultivating either a disposition of “my will be done” or of “thy will be done” that will suddenly show up in those crossroads moments. It may appear like divine intervention, but it is long-term divine cultivation.
Living into a larger pattern is both exciting and terrifying, because it means letting go of convention and stepping into new territory. Like Elizabeth and Zechariah, we do not step forward blind but with a promise: God remembers, and God is gracious.
Countdown
“We’ve started the count-down calendar,” said my beautiful and very pregnant daughter-in-law, “We have so many things we want to get done before the baby comes.”
We were gathered at one of our favorite casual lunch places, a place where we could eat well and our 3 year old could be both free to roam a little, and safe to roam, while the grown-ups talked.
“We’ve started, too,” I smiled at her, “I need to finish up her baby quilt, and two quilts for the homeless project I have due in September. And of course, we will be out of the loop the last two weeks before she is born, so I need to keep motivated now.” I know she will call on me once the new baby is here; I am the back-up, the “can you fix dinner / wash the dishes / hold the baby while I shower / clean up the baby spit / run to the grocery store/ feed the cats” person. I love it. It’s why we moved here, to be here when they need us, when they need the help. Being close to family, being there to help when they need the help – this is one of the great lessons we learned from our friends in Amman, in Kuwait, in Doha, in Tunis.
We also have an Alaska adventure in store, planned before any of us knew the new baby was en route. It’s not Africa, but we aren’t up for another of those 17 hour rides from Atlanta to Johannesburg this year. Alaska will be fun, a sentimental journey back to my origins for me, and a whole new environment for AdventureMan.
“We’ll also have the school break to cover,” beautiful D-I-L added, “but I know there is going to be a cousin’s camp; I just don’t know when it is going to be.”
Cousins camp – oh what fun. All the little like-aged cousins get together for a week of hell-bent-for-leather activities, from water parks to fire departments to scavenger hunts, they keep those little rascals so busy that they just fall into bed at night. It’s all good.
“I know it’s all going to fall into place,” she sighed, smiling at our son, “but we need that calendar to keep us on track.”
Yeh. Us too!
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