I love. You love.

reuters: Monster tornado devastates area near Oklahoma...

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:45:30 -0400

Monster tornado devastates area near Oklahoma City

TULSA, Oklahoma (Reuters) - A huge tornado flattened an area near Oklahoma City on Monday, tearing up at least two schools and leaving a wake of tangled wreckage as a dangerous storm system threatened as many as 10 U.S. states.

Television video showed homes destroyed, cars tossed and at least one building on fire. Rescue workers were pulling third-graders from a damaged school in Moore, Oklahoma, a KFOR television reporter said from the scene.

“I have never seen anything like this in my 18 years covering tornadoes here in Oklahoma City. This is without question the most horrific,” said Lance West, a reporter for KFOR television.

There were no reports of deaths and the number of injuries remained unconfirmed after the tornado struck near Moore, in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area, in mid afternoon.

“It seems that our worst fears have happened today,” said Bill Bunting, National Weather Service meteorologist in Norman, Oklahoma.

The massive twister struck at the height of tornado season, and more were forecast. On Sunday, tornadoes killed two people and injured 39 in Oklahoma.

Graphic: Oklahoma State University via Twitter

"At Bloomberg, reporters could sit at their desks and use a keyboard function to see the last time an..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 19:39:00 -0400

“At Bloomberg, reporters could sit at their desks and use a keyboard function to see the last time an official of the Federal Reserve logged on. And the Justice Department obtained the records of The Associated Press from phone companies with no advance notice, giving it no chance to challenge the action. The absence of friction has led to a culture of transgression. Clearly, if it can be known, it will be known.”

- David Carr, Snooping and the news media: it’s a two way street (via soupsoup)
Carr: always on point.

oscarprgirl: peace.

Fri, 10 May 2013 01:30:55 -0400

oscarprgirl:

peace.

This morning while driving I heard it on the radio that today was the National Prayer day. The host...

Fri, 03 May 2013 02:48:48 -0400

This morning while driving I heard it on the radio that today was the National Prayer day. The host on the Christian station urged that we pray for America, that America will head to the ‘right direction.’ I am growing each day more uncertain of what the ‘right’ direction looks like in our society, so the notion of praying for my country for a direction I don’t know made me switch the station back to KUT. Joy was on the radio and her piece on the diminishing African American community in Austin ran beautifully. Then I checked my facebook as I stopped on a red light and my pastor’s status asked people to pray for the nation. It read prayers can not only change a heart but a nation. So I turned off the radio. And I prayed.

Compassion.
It was the only word that came to my mind.

I think about the children and the teachers who were shot at Sandy Hook. I think of Syria where bombings and raids have become a normality. I think of starving detainees in Guantanamo who have been imprisoned without a trial for a decade and now being forced-fed. I think of Bangladesh where 400 people, 400 people, who were making less than $25 a month, were killed in a factory fire.

Despite the gravity of their despairs, life will go on. Life will go on for the fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters who have lost their loved ones. They will somehow garner up the strength to carry on. They will remember the beauty in the simplest things. They will learn to live with a pain that no words or amount of time can heal. One way or another, they will see that the ground they stand on will remain and wait for them to take another step. They will love, give, share, suffer and endure, yet again. Life is resilient.

But their resilience should never excuse our inaction.

I don’t know how I will be a part of Jesus’s work. I don’t know when the Spirit will lead me to places I only dare dream of going. But when, how or where I go is irrelevant. The heart He has given me to care, to weep, to love, to pray and fast for His people is the only thing that matters. To live out His compassion alone will stand tried and true.

“The only thing that matters is faith expressing itself through love.” Gal 5:6

Faith expressing itself through love.
I pray that we will be nation of compassion where we express our faith in humanity through loving, serving and caring for those near and far.

latimes: An end to Guantanamo Bay prison? President Obama...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:31:40 -0400

A detainee shields his face as he peers out through the so-called "bean hole" which is used to pass food and other items into detainee cells, at Camp Delta detention center.

A file photograph showing men dressed in orange coveralls, alleged al-Qaida and Taliban combatants captured in Afghanistan washing before midday prayers at controversial Camp X-Ray.

A U.S. soldier walking through a cell block in Camp Delta.

A group of activists in orange jump suits hold a protest in Times Square calling for the closure of the United State's detention site in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in New York City.

latimes:

An end to Guantanamo Bay prison?

President Obama opened the doors for a renewed push to close the much-criticized prison in Cuba, where the U.S. detains a number of suspected terrorists

Said Obama earlier today during a press conference marking the 100th day of his second term:

“I think it is critical for us to understand that Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counterterrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed.”

But Obama has promised to close Guantanamo, where a large number of prisoners are currently on hunger strikes, before - making it a prominent pledge in his first presidential campaign.

Photos: J. Scott Applewhite, Brennan Llinsley, Shawn Thew, Justin Lane / EPA

nationalpost: Shoppers turn blind eye to Bangladesh tragedies...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:07:01 -0400

nationalpost:

Shoppers turn blind eye to Bangladesh tragedies as cheap clothes win
In the wake of disasters in Bangladesh garment factories that have claimed hundreds of lives in recent months, shoppers in the West have shown growing concern about worker safety in developing countries. As long as it doesn’t mean an end to bargains.

“It bothers me, but a lot of retailers are getting their clothes from these places and I can’t see how I can change anything,” 21-year-old university student Elizabeth McNail said, clutching a brown paper bag from clothier Primark the day after a building collapse in Savar, Bangladesh, killed at least 381 people. “They definitely need to improve, but I’ll still shop here. It’s so cheap.” (Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty Images)

Jesus’s grace doesn’t make any sense. Guess if it did, it wouldn’t be called...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 03:28:20 -0400

Jesus’s grace doesn’t make any sense. Guess if it did, it wouldn’t be called grace.

reportagebygettyimages: Yesterday’s news of a deadly building...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:25:09 -0400

reportagebygettyimages:

Yesterday’s news of a deadly building collapse near Dhaka, Bangladesh, comes five months after a horrific fire at similar facility, which also housed factories making clothing for European and American consumers. The earlier incident, in which over 100 people died in a blaze at Tazreen Fashions Limited, inspired photographer Abir Abdullah to document the dangerous working conditions in Bangladesh’s garment industry. In March, his project, “The Deadly Cost of Cheap Clothing,”was awarded the Alexia Foundation professional grant to help him continue this work.

Read more about Abir’s project on the Alexia Foundation’s Web site.

CAPTION: More than 100 people were killed after a devastating fire took place at Tazreen Fashions Limited garment factory at Nischintapur, in Savar, on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, late on Nov. 24, 2012. (Photo by Abir Abdullah/Courtesy of the Alexia Foundation)

"Things we’ll do to keep people safe: Lock down an entire city for hours. Things we won’t do: A 5 min..."

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 00:48:31 -0400

“Things we’ll do to keep people safe: Lock down an entire city for hours. Things we won’t do: A 5 min background check before you buy a gun.”

- Judd Legum (via azspot)

This won't be the last time Amy Davidson leaves me shaken

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:46:00 -0400

A twenty-year-old man who had been watching the Boston Marathon had his body torn into by the force of a bomb. He wasn’t alone; a hundred and seventy-six people were injured. But he was the only one who, while in the hospital being treated for his wounds, had his apartment searched in “a startling show of force,” as his fellow-tenants described it to the Boston Herald, with a “phalanx” of officers and agents and two K9 units. He was the one whose belongings were carried out in paper bags as his neighbors watched; whose roommate, also a student, was questioned for five hours (“I was scared”) before coming out to say that he didn’t think his friend was someone who’d plant a bomb—that he was a nice guy who liked sports. “Let me go to school, dude,” the roommate said later in the day, covering his face with his hands and almost crying, as a Fox News producer followed him and asked him, again and again, if he was sure he hadn’t been living with a killer.

Why the search and the interrogation and the dogs and the bomb squad and the injured man’s name tweeted out, attached to the word “suspect”? After the bombs went off, people were running in every direction—so was the young man. Many, like him, were hurt badly; many of them were saved by the unflinching kindness of strangers, who carried them or stopped the bleeding with their own hands and improvised tourniquets. “Exhausted runners who kept running to the nearest hospital to give blood,” President Obama said. “They helped one another, consoled one another,” Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, said. In the midst of that, according to a CBS News report, a bystander saw the young man running, badly hurt, ran to him, and then tackled him and knocked him to the ground. The bystander thought he looked suspicious.

What made them suspect him? He was running—so was everyone. The bystander handed the man to the police, who reportedly thought he smelled like explosives; his wounds might have suggested why. He said something about thinking there would be a second bomb—as there was, and often is, to target responders. If that was the reason he gave for running, it was a sensible one. He asked if anyone was dead—a question people were screaming. And he was from Saudi Arabia, which is around where the logic stops. Was it just the way he looked, or did he, in the chaos, maybe call for God with a name that someone found strange?

What happened next didn’t take long. “Investigators have a suspect—a Saudi Arabian national—in the horrific Boston Marathon bombings, The Post has learned.” That’s the New York Post, which went on to cite Fox News. The “Saudi suspect”—still faceless—suddenly gave anxieties a form. He was said to be in custody; or maybe his hospital bed was being guarded. The Boston police, who weren’t saying much of anything, disputed the report—sort of. “Honestly, I don’t know where they’re getting their information from, but it didn’t come from us,” a police spokesman said. But were they talking to someone? Maybe. “person of interest” became a phrase of both avoidance and insinuation. On the Atlas Shrugs Web site, there was a note that his name in Arabic meant “war.” At an evening press conference, Ed Davis, the police commissioner, said that no suspect was in custody. But that was about when the dogs were in the apartment building in Revere—an inquiry that was seized on by some as, if not an indictment, at least a vindication of their suspicions.

“There must be enough evidence to keep him there,” Andrew Napolitano said on “Fox and Friends”—“there” being the hospital. “They must be learning information which is of a suspicious nature,” Steve Doocy interjected, “If he was clearly innocent, would they have been able to search his house?” Napolitano thought that a judge would take any reason at a moment like this, but there had to be “something”—maybe he appeared “deceitful.” As Mediaite pointed out, Megyn Kelly put a slight break on it (as she has been known to do) by asking if there might have been some “racial profiling,” but then, after a round of speculation about his visa (Napolitano: “was he a real student, or was that a front?), she asked, “What’s the story on his ability to lawyer up?”

By Tuesday afternoon, the fever had broken. Report after report said that he was a witness, not a suspect. “He was just at the wrong place at the wrong time,” a “U.S. official” told CNN. (So were a lot of people at the marathon.) Even Fox News reported that he’d been “ruled out.” At a press conference, Governor Deval Patrick spoke, not so obliquely, about being careful not to treat “categories of people in uncharitable ways.”

We don’t know yet who did this. “The range of suspects and motives remains wide open,” Richard Deslauriers of the F.B.I. said early Tuesday evening. In a minute, with a claim of responsibility, our expectations could be scrambled. The bombing could, for all we know, be the work of a Saudi man—or an American or an Icelandic or a person from any nation you can think of. It still won’t mean that this Saudi man can be treated the way he was, or that people who love him might have had to find out that a bomb had hit him when his name popped up on the Web next to the word “suspect.” It is at these moments that we need to be most careful, not least.

It might be comforting to think of this as a blip, an aberration, something that will be forgotten tomorrow—if not by this young man. There are people at Guanátanmo who have also been cleared by our own government and are still there. A new report on the legacy of torture after 9/11, released Tuesday, is a well-timed admonition. The F.B.I. said that they would “go to the ends of the earth” to get the Boston perpetrators. One wants them to be able to go with their heads held high.

“If you want to know who we are, what America is, how we respond to evil—that’s it. Selflessly. Compassionately. Unafraid,” President Obama said. That was mostly true on Monday; a terrible day, when an eight-year-old boy was killed, his sister maimed, two others dead, and many more in critical condition. And yet when there was so much to fear that we were so brave about, there was panic about a wounded man barely out of his teens who needed help. We get so close to all that Obama described. What’s missing? Is it humility?

—

This piece.

This perspective she provides in the hubris of rushed, heightened, sensationalized attempts to make sense of a tragedy we face as a society is why a reporter, an editor, an institute of publication not only propels a just, trying society but also sustains one.

Read the piece here.

futurejournalismproject: Only A Third of the World’s Population...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 22:55:00 -0400

futurejournalismproject:

Only A Third of the World’s Population is Online

Via Statista. Select to embiggen.

A dose of reality.

nparts: Justin Bieber visits Anne Frank museum, says he hoped...

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 21:09:36 -0400

nparts:

Justin Bieber visits Anne Frank museum, says he hoped Holocaust victim ‘would have been a Belieber’ if she lived
Justin Bieber has visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, and the museum says the Canadian pop star wrote in the guestbook that he hoped Frank “would have been a Belieber” if she had lived.

Museum spokeswoman Maatje Mostart confirmed Sunday that Bieber visited Friday evening.

“Belieber” is what Bieber fans call themselves. Anne Frank was a Jewish teenager who hid with her family in a small apartment above a warehouse during the Nazi occupation of World War II. Her family was caught and deported, and Anne died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

The diary she kept in hiding was recovered and published after the war, and has become the most widely read document to emerge from the Holocaust. (Walter Bieri/The Associated Press; NIGEL TREBLIN/AFP/Getty Images)

Love how the article is written in a way other Beliebers would have an easy time following.

longreads: “I’m For Sale.” Genevieve Smith, Elle.

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 03:48:27 -0400

longreads:

“I’m For Sale.” Genevieve Smith, Elle.

Part, a significant part, of being a reporter is distinguishing which voice to listen to. Deciding...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:10:00 -0400

Part, a significant part, of being a reporter is distinguishing which voice to listen to. Deciding which opinion’s worth amounts to, well, shit.

It’s one of the hardest parts of the job but I am learning the art — both in the work field and in my personal life.

Brushing my shoulders off and here I go again.

"I think for, you know, the moms and dads out there, the people who give money to Christian advocacy..."

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:33:21 -0400

“

I think for, you know, the moms and dads out there, the people who give money to Christian advocacy groups, to the RNC, what they want is something really, you know, important. They want to try and make America better. And they’ve been led to believe that somehow all of that can be achieved through politics. All of if can be achieved particularly through conservative politics. And you fast from something not because it’s evil, but because you want to step away and focus on something more spiritual.

And I really would love to see a period of time for a couple of years where evangelical voter stopped giving to all these political groups and started giving to the poor, you know, started giving their time to after-school programs, started, you know, doing two things that Jesus said, like loving your neighbor and — and again, redirecting that money towards the poor. And I think that it would provide some much-needed perspective on the political environment.

”

- The late David Kuo talking to Terry Gross in 2006 about his call for a fast from politics for evangelicals. Kuo, the Deputy Director of President George W. Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, became disillusioned with the politics of the Bush White House. He died on Friday at age 44. He had brain cancer. (via nprfreshair)

"Certainly, I find it hard to believe in a sanctity that is free from sin."

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:31:05 -0400

“Certainly, I find it hard to believe in a sanctity that is free from sin.”

- Andrew Sullivan

"One reality should not cancel out the other."

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 14:00:00 -0400

“One reality should not cancel out the other.”

- Alfredo Corchado, in reporting Mexico — or any conflict area.

"I came to the Sun-Times with a lot of experience from the News-Gazette and the Daily Illini, but..."

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:12:00 -0400

““I came to the Sun-Times with a lot of experience from the News-Gazette and the Daily Illini, but [Robert] Zonka taught me his newspaper code, which he liked to express as, ‘When you have to march, march.’ This included writing a story you lacked all enthusiasm for, meeting a deadline no matter what hours were necessary, getting an interview after you’d been decisively turned down, not falling in love with your deathless prose, remembering that you were there to write a story and not have a good time.”

- Robert Eger, first journalist to win the Pulitzer Prize with his movie criticism

The amount of information I gather out of one chapter of a book is a terrifying, humiliating and ...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 02:18:14 -0400

The amount of information I gather out of one chapter of a book is a terrifying, humiliating and gut-wrenching reminder of the unread, unheard and unknown bits of reality that I so naively claim a residency in.

I’d be foolish to wish that I would gain overnight a wholistic perspective of a region when I can’t understand even the root of my fascination for it. But the unknown is daunting especially when there lacks an justified excuse for not consuming information incessantly.

I desire for courage to not cave in. I ask for endurance to take one step at a time, even two steps backwards, when necessary - all to map out my passion to meet my calling one day. Whether the calling be in Kabul or not, that I will be humble before Jesus and honest with myself.

theatlantic: In Focus: Holi 2013: The Festival of Colors This...

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 13:08:50 -0400

theatlantic:

In Focus: Holi 2013: The Festival of Colors

This week Hindus around the world celebrated Holi, the Festival of Colors. Holi is a popular springtime celebration observed on the last full moon of the lunar month. Participants traditionally throw bright, vibrant powders at friends and strangers alike as they celebrate the arrival of spring, commemorate Krishna’s pranks, and allow each other a momentary freedom — a chance to drop their inhibitions and simply play and dance. Gathered here are images of this year’s Holi festival from across India.

See more. [Images: AP, Reuters, Getty]

The Atlantic’s support if long-form photojournalism is so uplifting