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Wednesday, 25 February 2015
Tuesday, 16 December 2014
Lost the beloved...
School pupil Mohammad Baqair lost his mother, a teacher, in the attack
A Taliban spokesman told BBC Urdu that the school, which is run by the army, had been targeted in response to military operations.
Hundreds of Taliban fighters are thought to have died in a recent offensive in North Waziristan and the nearby Khyber area.
US President Barack Obama said terrorists had "once again shown their depravity" while UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said it was "an act of horror and rank cowardice".
coffins of today's attack in Peshawar..
Coffins were stacked at this hospital in Peshawar in readiness
Wednesday Attack...
The BBC's Shaimaa Khalil reports from Peshawar: ''It started as a normal school day... but it turned into a massacre''
What we know
Militants from the Pakistani Taliban have attacked an army-run school in Peshawar, killing 141 people, 132 of them children, the military say.
Officials say the attack in the north-western city is over, with all the attackers killed. Seven militants took part in all, according to the army.
Scores of survivors are being treated in hospitals as frantic parents search for news of their children.
The attack - the Taliban's deadliest in Pakistan - has been widely condemned.
Describing the attack from his hospital bed to the BBC's Shaimaa Khalil, Shahrukh Khan, 17, said a gunman had entered his classroom and opened fire at random.
As he hid under a desk, he saw his friends being shot, one in the head and one in the chest. Two teachers were also killed.
WHY MANY OF US ARE RIGHT HANDED ?
WHY MANY OF US ARE RIGHT HANDED ..?
We humans don't typically agree on all that much, but there is at least one thing that
an impressive amount of us accept : Which hand is easiest to control. I you use one hand for the writing ,you probably use the same one for eating as well , and most of us- around 85% of our species prefer the right hand .
Lateralisation of limb use – that is, a bias towards one side or the other – usually begins in the brain. We know that some tasks are largely controlled by brain activity in the left hemisphere, while the right hemisphere governs other tasks. Confusingly, there is some crossing of nerves between the body and the brain, which means it’s actually the left side of the brain that has more control over the right side of the body and vice versa. In other words, the brain’s left hemisphere helps control the operation of the right hand, eye, leg and so on.
Some argue that this division of neurological labour has been a feature of animals for half a billion years. Perhaps it evolved because it is more efficient to allow the two hemispheres to carry out different computations at the same time. The left side of the brain, for instance, might have evolved to carry out routine operations – things like foraging for food – while the right side was kept free to detect and react rapidly to unexpected challenges in the environment – an approaching predator, for insrance. This can be seen in various fish, toads and birds, which are all more likely to attack prey seen in the right eye.
So it is possible (though hard to prove) that as our hominin ancestors began walking on two legs rather than four, freeing up their hands to perform new tasks like making tools, they were predisposed to begin using those hands differently. Or, as cognitive scientist Stephanie Braccini and colleagues put it in a Journal of Human Evolution study, "a strengthening of individual asymmetry [may have] started as soon as early hominins assumed a habitual upright posture during tool use or foraging".
In support of the idea, Braccini and her colleagues’ looked at handedness in chimpanzees, and found that when the apes stand on all fours, they displayed no real hand preferences. It was only when forced to assume an upright stance that a lateral preference emerged – although individual chimps in the study were equally likely to be left-handed as right-handed.
Evidently, then, something else was needed to push early humans from a lateral preference in general to the extremely high levels of right-handedness we see today.
We know roughly when that change occurred from experiments in which researchers made their own versions of ancient stone tools using either their left or right hands to chip – or knap – the tool into shape, before comparing them with the tools made by early hominins. Doing so suggests there is only limited evidence that hominin toolmakers working more than 2 million years ago were primarily right-handed.
However, stone tools that were made some 1.5 million years ago in Koobi Fora, Kenya, by two ancient human species – Homo habilis andHomo erectus – do show some evidence of species-wide right-handedness. And by the time a species called Homo heidelbergensis had appeared, perhaps around 600,000 years ago, there was a clear right-handed preference in prehistoric societies. Wear on the preserved teeth of Homo heidelbergensis, for instance, suggest that food was usually brought to the mouth with the right hand.
This tells us when that shift occurred, but not why. Some have argued that it all comes down to language. Just as most people are right-handed – a trait, remember, controlled by the left side of the brain – so do most people do the bulk of their linguistic processing in their brain’s left hemisphere. Indeed, this left-brained specialisation for language is even more common than right-handedness – which might suggest that as the left hemisphere evolved for language, the preference for the right hand may have intensified simply as a side effect. This is called the Homo loquens hypothesis: lateralisation in general was driven by the evolution of an upright, bipedal stance, while the rightward preference was driven, some time later, by the evolution of language.
Right-handedness, then, may simply be an accidental by-product of the way most of our brains are wired up. But proving the hypothesis is difficult, or even impossible, since it would ideally involve running neurological tests on our long-dead ancestors. The truth is we'll probably never quite know what the sequence of events was that led our species to lean so overwhelmingly on the right sides of our bodies and the left sides of our brains.
As for the left-handers out there? Take heart! According to a 1977 paper in the journal Psychological Bulletin, "there is remarkably little evidence for any association of left-handedness with deficit, as has often been suggested". In fact, some research shows that left-handed folks might even have an easier time recovering from brain damage. And their left hand seems to have the advantage of surprise in a fight, which means they can be better at combat sports. All of which suggests there are advantages to breaking from the norm.
Malala's Heart broken by a senseless act
"I am heartbroken by this senseless and cold blooded act of terror in Peshawar that is unfolding before us. Innocent children in their school have no place in horror such as this," Malala said in a statement.
At least 130 people, most of them children, were killed when gunmen stormed an army-run school in Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar in an act that drew swift global condemnation.
PESHAWAR: Taliban gunmen stormed a military-run school in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar on Tuesday, killing 126 people, officials said, in the worst attack to hit the country in years.
The overwhelming majority of the victims were students at the army public school, which has children and teenagers in grades 1-10. Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif condemned the assault and rushed to Peshawar to show his support for the victims.
The horrific attack, carried out by a relatively small number of militants from the Tehreek-e-Taliban group, a Pakistani militant group trying to overthrow the government, also sent dozens of wounded flooding into local hospitals as terrified parents searched for their children.
Monday, 15 December 2014
"It Isn't About Waving That Magic Wand " says Mark Whalberg
Mark Wahlberg says pardon request isn't about 'waving that magic wand' over past crimes
He's an actor and producer who started his career as a rapper. But before all of that, Mark Wahlberg was a young man facing major troubles.
In 1988, after a series of serious brushes with the law, 16-year-old Wahlberg was charged as an adult following an attack on two Vietnamese-American men. He pleaded guilty to assault and served 45 days in prison.
Now, 26 years and a whole new life later, the star wants to put the past behind him — and he's petitioned for a pardon to do just that.
"Of course everyone has an opinion — is entitled to it — on whether I'm deserving of it or not," Wahlberg said during a Friday morning visit to TODAY. "But you know, from the day I woke up in prison realizing the mistakes that I had made and the pain that I caused people, I committed to turning my life around."
According to the actor, that was no small feat given that he'd broken away from gang life and had to navigate prison and his release alone.
"Going back into the community, still living in the neighborhood, and having to go to the train station every day and pass those guys was a tough thing to do," he explained.
A lot has changed for Wahlberg since those days decades ago, including his current work with at-risk kids, and he's hoping all of that will be considered in his request.
"If I'm not granted the pardon, it will not change my commitment to working in the communities," he insisted.
And if he does get the pardon, he wants to be clear that it's not about getting any of the rumored perks he'd have access to without that felony conviction (such as being able to get a liquor license for his restaurants or sign up as a reserve police officer). Nor, he says, is it an effort to pretend his crimes never happened.
"People have said because of my celebrity, my success, that I'm basically waving that magic wand," Walberg said on TODAY. "It's not about that. It's never been about that. … I've always been completely open about my past. … I've been talking about it for over 25 years, since I've been in the public eye."
Wahlberg, who'll soon be back on the big screen in the crime drama "The Gambler," explained that he's not proud of what he's done. "I'm just committed to making sure that I've paid for my mistakes and … hopefully help kids avoid making those mistakes."
"The Gambler" opens in theaters nationwide on Christmas Day.
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