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POPSWaiting To Find Someone Else "Even when she lived in Afghanistan, she did not wear a burka as her mother and sisters do. When she was 12, she said, she broke a cultural taboo by sitting with Afghan men to talk politics, encouraged by her father. She then raised $8,000 in a single night, selling home-cooked Afghan meals to American donors. She used the money to create the 100 Mothers Literacy Program to help educate women in her village. At first, there was resistance in Afghanistan, she said -- from village elders and the women themselves. The women said they were too old to learn and preferred that the money be used to build toilets. She said she feared Taliban insurgents or sympathizers would retaliate against them for teaching women -- considered apostasy by some Afghans. "My dad is one of the best dads ever," she said. "If he was a mean dad, it wouldn't be so hard to say no to him."
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POPSMan becomes talented artist after brain-surgery more: She looked at it and asked me if I was an artist. I said no and she said I should look into doing a course. Since then I've never looked back.' I had never even set foot in an art gallery, let alone tried creating my own art work.' Alan, who has three children, Joshua, 16, Ellie, 10 and Maisy, eight, is now about to graduate from Worcester university with a Fine Art Degree. He has also decided to open his own art gallery in Malvern after turning his back on selling double-glazing.
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POPSThe Howls Of A Fading Species
"Are we supposed to not notice that these are the tribunes of a party that rose to power on the filthy waves of racial demagoguery. I don’t remember hearing their voices or the voices of their intellectual heroes when the Republican Party, as part of its Southern strategy, aggressively courted the bigots who fled the Democratic Party because the Democrats had become insufficiently hostile to blacks. Where were the howls of outrage at this strategy that was articulated by Lee Atwater as follows: “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.” Never a peep did you hear. Where were the right-wing protests when Ronald Reagan went out of his way to kick off his general election campaign in 1980 with a salute to states’ rights in, of all places, Philadelphia, Miss., not far from the site where three young civil rights workers had been snatched and murdered by real-life, rabid, blood-thirsty racists?"
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POPSDecoding Antiquity: Eight Scripts... in 1823, they extended the span of recorded history by around 2000 years and allowed us to read the words of Ramses the Great. The decipherment of the Mayan glyphs revealed that the New World had a sophisticated, literate civilisation at the time of the Roman empire. So how do you decipher an unknown script? There are two minimum requirements. First, there has to be enough material to work with. Secondly, there must be some link to a known language. It helps enormously if there is a bilingual inscription or identifiable proper names - the Rosetta Stone (see image), for example, is written in both ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek, and also contains the name of the Ptolemy dynasty. If there is no clear link, an attempt must be made to relate the concealed language to a known one.
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POPS2065: Planet Earth Just a little of an interesting article. We really have made a mess of things, but the scientists proved correct on this occasion.