I really love stories like this where people slog it out in the trenches in their local community and seek to make a difference–watch it all.

Six Maasai warriors have left their village in Tanzania for the first time in their lives. On Sunday, they will be among 30,000 people running the London Marathon. The Maasai aren’t running for glory, but to raise money to build a drinking water well for their village.

In anticipation of their trip, the conservation charity Greenforce prepared a pamphlet to help the Maasai meet the strange residents of London. Below are two selections typical of the cultural translation:

Even though some may look like they have a frown on their face, they are very friendly people ”” many of them just work in offices in jobs they don’t enjoy and so they do not smile as much as they should do!!

Although English people share a lot, they do not do so to the same extent that the Maasai do. If you see something that someone else has (like a bracelet) and you like it, then the person will find it very unusual if you were to take it and wear it!

A very good story on cultural differences and culture shock–read or listen to it all.

This is a helpful compendium.

Watch it all.

Watch it all (hat tip: PM)

Check out all the pictures if you care to; my favorite is here.

Listen to it all, it includes an interview with the evangelist himself.

There is more here, including this:

Northern Ireland has always had a soft spot for evangelists, and it was no surprise that Franklin Graham, a son of the famous Billy, should have drawn more than 30,000 people to the Odyssey last weekend. He will be able to tell his father how the tumultuous scenes at his Windsor Park mission in 1961 were rekindled in post-Troubles Belfast.

A lot has happened here since Billy Graham thrilled huge audiences with his inspiring Christian message, changing many lives for good.

Yet despite, or because of, 35 years of civil conflict – turning neighbours against each other – there is still an appetite for a message that was born 2,000 years ago.

I really like the chosen title of a Festival of Hope–KSH.

Further research is needed into a US treatment for Alzheimer’s disease that appears to produce marked improvements in some patients, experts say.

California researchers believe they have found a way of improving brain cell communication by injecting a drug called etanercept into the neck.

The Institute for Neurological Research team has described changes taking place in Alzheimer’s patients within minutes.

British experts have expressed caution, but say further research is merited.

More than 400,000 people in the UK have Alzheimer’s disease.

Current medication can slow the disease, but charities say there is a desperate need for research to develop more effective treatments.

Read it all.

Update: There is a lot more in the Belfast Telegraph here.

The race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to be the Democrat nominee for the US presidential election seems to have gone negative, with each team attempting to exploit the opposing candidate’s alleged flaws and weaknesses. The furore over Senator Clinton’s “exaggeration” of her war experiences in Bosnia has rivalled fierce criticism of Senator Obama, for failing to leave his Chicago church over the pastor, Jeremiah Wright’s, controversial sermons.

African-American churchgoers have largely rallied to defend Obama’s handling of the affair, but as Matthew Wells reports from New York, many black leaders remain firmly inside the Clinton camp.

Listen to it all.

General Electric underlined the depth of the global financial crisis on Friday, announcing its worst quarter in five years and slashing full-year forecasts.

The news, described as “shocking” by a senior GE executive, combined with data showing that US consumer confidence was at a 26-year low to send shares lower. The S&P 500 fell 2 per cent in New York to 1,332.83.

Shares in GE, which derives more than half its revenues overseas and is seen as a bellwether of the global economy, led the way, falling 12.8 per cent ”“ its biggest loss since the 1987 stock market crash.

The results are a blow to Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and chief executive, and could increase pressure for action at the group’s underperforming financial and healthcare divisions.

Read it all.

Video of the fundraiser, which was closed to the press, surfaced as Obama was campaigning in Indiana, trying to highlight issues of concern to working-class voters, such as job losses and rising mortgage foreclosures.

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama, an Illinois senator, said.

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” he said.

Read it all.

Home foreclosures in the Charleston area rose dramatically during the first three months of this year, mirroring national trends and reinforcing worries about the shaky U.S. economy.

Lenders filed foreclosure proceedings on 874 residential properties in the tri-county area in the first quarter, according to statistics compiled by The Post and Courier.

While comparable data from a year ago is unavailable for Dorchester County, the number of foreclosures in Charleston and Berkeley counties jumped to 638 this year from 425 in the same period last year, a 50.1 percent increase.

Dorchester County, which reports the number of properties set for county auctions, rather than foreclosure filings, saw a 53.8 percent increase from the same period last year.

Read it all from this morning’s front page.

Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness; To the end that my glory may sing praise to thee, and not be silent. O LORD my God, I will give thanks unto thee for ever.

–Psalm 30:11, 12 (KJV)

AAC: Was any progress toward reconciliation made at this House of Bishops’ meeting?

+Lawrence: We spent a day and a half on what was called a reconciliation retreat. What makes it difficult to answer that question is that, based at our table discussion, the table I was at, I thought we began to talk about the difficulties that are connected with that whole area of reconciliation. So in that sense, on a table level, I would say, yes, we made some progress. But once we got to the legislative portion of the meeting”¦reconciliation is always costly and the question is, who it’s going to cost and who wants to sacrifice in order to reconcile. Once we got to the legislative portion of the meeting and the deposition for Bishop Schofield and Bishop Cox, I wouldn’t describe the mood of the house as conciliatory to those who, for issues of faith, don’t feel like they can conform to order of the church.

What we have in The Episcopal Church (TEC) today is that many people feel like the faith of the church has been compromised or violated and in order to deal with what they feel is a profound compromise or denial of the faith of the church historically and biblically, they feel like they have to do things contrary to the order of the church. At that point, many in the House of Bishops and in various other formats of the church desire to impose the order of the church upon them. That is, if Bishop Schofield believes the faith of the church has been denied, he has to go beyond the order of the church as in the canons and constitution of TEC, and those who are in the forefront who are quite comfortable with the new faith of the church, so to speak, feel like they have to impose the order upon him or upon Bishop Cox.

The difficulty we have, then, is the very way we went about imposing the order of the church. That is, after the House of Bishops’ meeting, after the voting on the canonical depositions of Bishop Cox and Bishop Schofield, it seemed to be revealed that those depositions were done in a way that was contrary to the order of the church…

AAC: What is your next step?

+Lawrence: I know that Bishop Howe has recently called for a re-examination of this. The Standing committee and Bishop of South Carolina, myself, have issued a letter of protest that the canons were not followed. I don’t know where we will end up with all of that.

Read it carefully and read it all, noting that there is more to come later.

Wonderful stuff, moved me to tears when I listen to it this morning, better if you listen but if you can’t read it all.

Colleges concerned about the addictive potential of gambling face an uphill battle against its glamorized image. Think ESPN’s all-out coverage of poker tournaments or the parade of movies: Now it’s “21,” about six students beating the house in Vegas; 10 years ago, the popular film “Rounders” featured Matt Damon as a law student and high-stakes poker player.

Whether it’s in dorm rooms or at a “casino night” fundraiser, gambling pervades college campuses. And more schools are starting to take notice of the problems it can spawn.

In Missouri, for example, a coalition of 12 schools is working hard to reach out to students about gambling. They’re starting to address betting through orientations and health surveys. They’re training financial-aid officers to ask about gambling debts if a student requests an emergency loan. And earlier this month, they promoted an educational website (Keeping the Score) with giveaways during National Problem Gambling Awareness Week.

Silence is still too often the response to the surge of gambling on campus, prevention advocates say, but they see hopeful signs of change in nascent efforts like these around the country.

Read it all.

[Bishop Tom] Wright has deep family roots in the Durham area, which from the 14th to the mid-19th century was ruled by the prince-bishops; in medieval times they had the right to mint their own coins and raise armies. Today’s incumbent may not have wanted to fight this last battle, but there are plenty for which he is ready. One, in particular, will have evangelicals itching to draw swords. “The massive denial of reality by the cheap and cheerful universalism of western liberalism has a lot to answer for,” he thunders in his new book. “The nihilism to which secularism has given birth leaves many with no reason for living.” The bishop would like to see nothing less than an end to the Enlightenment split between religion and politics.

“There is a Christian view of politics,” he says after lunch at a fish restaurant by the coast, “and whether or not the government knows it, it has a God-given duty to bring wise order and to facilitate human flourishing.” The Church does not just have a right to comment on whether ministers are failing in their divine task, he argues. “To try to shut us up, to say, ‘You keep off the patch'” is “totalitarian”. So, no apologies for his Easter Sunday sermon on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, in which he criticised the government for “pushing through, hard and fast, legislation that comes from a militantly atheist and secularist lobby” whose aims are a “1984-style world” where “we create our own utopia by our own efforts, particularly our science and technology”.

“Using what is in effect live human tissue for experimental purposes is not a frontier we think people ought to cross,” he says, “and we’re going to go on saying that. The more of these moral frontiers a government crosses, the more it owes to citizens to make a space for conscience, not just in voting but in how scientists and doctors carry this work out. To think that the Church should not be involved in politics is to say: ‘Here are some areas of crucial concern for human flourishing, but the Church is not allowed to address these matters of public debate.’ I think that’s ridiculous.”

Read it all.

The verses [of the hymn ‘Jerusalem’], which were written by William Blake more than two centuries ago, cannot be sung by choirs or congregations at Southwark Cathedral because the words do not praise God and are too nationalistic, according to senior clergy.

Last week the Dean of Southwark, the Very Rev Colin Slee, advised guests at a private memorial service that the hymn would not be sung because it was “not in the glory of God”.

A spokesman for the Diocese of Southwark disclosed that the Dean had not allowed the verses to be sung during services for some time.

“The Dean, on common with all other cathedral deans, has the authority to decide what material is used in liturgy in the cathedral,” he said.

Read it all and there is more food for thought on this here.

Listen to it all from one of my favorite voices on the English religious scene.

This meant a lot to me as exercise is a serious part of the diet program I have been on since August 2006.

Watch it all.

To Israel Wayne, marriage “was equivalent to the prospect of living as a missionary in some foreign land where you know you may end up a martyr,” he said. “You can accept it and believe it, but it’s hard to be enthusiastic about it.” Yet within two weeks of his mother suggesting a wife to him over lunch in Michigan, Mr. Wayne would engage himself to Brooke Tingom, an Arizona woman he had barely seen face to face. Their wedding took place about five months later, on Jan. 23, 1999. The Waynes have been happily married ever since and now have five children.

“In seeking to live every area of life fully trusting the Lord, we could not help but see that He desired us to trust him even in the area of marriage,” Mr. Wayne said. “We honor and respect our parents and their wisdom . . . . They’ve experienced more life than we have; they may have insights that are helpful to us.”

The process that the Waynes chose, called betrothal, requires a man and woman to make a binding commitment to marry before beginning any romantic — much less physical — relationship. Generally, the couple’s parents are responsible for arranging the match.

Read it all.

THE ROMAN Catholic Church in Germany has released a report detailing its use of slave labour during the Nazi era. The report commissioned in 2000 by the German Catholic Bishops’ Conference found that during the war church institutions employed 4,829 civilians and 1,075 prisoners of war as slave labourers.

The Archbishop of Mainz, Cardinal Karl Lehmann said the 700-page history entitled “Forced Labour in the Catholic Church 1939-1945″ found that 776 church hospitals, homes, monasteries, farms and gardens were provided with slave labour imported from Russia, Poland and the Ukraine by the Nazi regime.

“The comparatively small number of labourers, many of whom spent barely a year working in Catholic institutions, doesn’t even amount to a thousandth of the estimated total of 13 million forced labourers employed throughout the Reich,” Cardinal Lehmann said at a press conference broadcast on German television on April 8.

“But it remains an historical burden which will continue to challenge our church in the future. There is no collective guilt, but as Christians and as a church we are aware of the responsibility that results from the burden of the past,” the former president of the German Catholic Bishops Conference said.

Read it all.

One of Australia’s first Anglican women priests has shattered the stained glass ceiling to become the nation’s first woman bishop.

Perth Archdeacon Kay Goldsworthy, 51, was named as an assistant bishop, to be consecrated on May 22.

But if she visits Sydney, which remains opposed to women bishops, she will only be formally acknowledged as a deacon and unable to exercise her ministry as a priest or bishop.

The unanimous decision to appoint Archdeacon Goldsworthy was made by Perth Archbishop Roger Herft and his diocesan council Thursday night following an agreement reached this week between Australia’s Anglican bishops on a protocol to handle opponents of women bishops.

Read it all.

THE question of women bishops will inevitably come back, the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, said, after the prospect of women bishops in the Church in Wales received an indefinite setback on Wednesday of last week.

The House of Clergy in the Governing Body lacked a two-thirds majority in their favour. The House of Bishops was unanimously in favour of the Bill to enable women to be ordained as bishops, and the Laity voted for it 52-19, but in the House of Clergy the voting was 27 for and 18 against, which was just 60 per cent in favour.

The Bill had been published in July 2007, and a select committee had been established to consider amendments from the dioceses, of which 12 had been included in their report to the Governing Body meeting in Lampeter last week. At the start of the debate, however, all but the select committee’s own two amendments had been withdrawn.

As the Bill was defeated in only one House, it could come back at any time, Dr Morgan said, “but there is no point in bringing it back to the Governing Body in two or three years just for it to be defeated again; so we need to take stock.”

Read it all.

For public schools in the No Child Left Behind era, it has become routine to analyze test scores and other academic indicators by race and ethnicity. But the Fairfax County School Board, to promote character education, has discovered the pitfalls of applying the same analytical techniques to measures of student behavior, especially when the findings imply disparities in behavior among racial, ethnic and other groups.

The county School Board, which oversees one of the country’s largest and most diverse suburban school systems, is scheduled to vote tonight on whether to accept a staff report that concludes, in part, that black and Hispanic students and special education students received lower marks than white and Asian American students for demonstration of “sound moral character and ethical judgment.”

Such findings have prompted a debate on the potential bias in how teachers evaluate student behavior and how the school system analyzes and presents information about race. Board member Martina A. “Tina” Hone (At Large), who is African American, called the school system’s decision to break down data by race “potentially damaging and hurtful.”

Read it all.

A failed jump by one of the world’s finest riders and a spate of deaths have unnerved the equestrian community.

Darren Chiacchia, 43, who helped the United States Olympic team win a bronze medal at the Athens Games and was considered a favorite for this year’s team, was training a horse on an intermediate course in Tallahassee, Fla., last month when the stallion crashed over a fence, crushing ”” and nearly killing ”” its celebrated rider.

Mr. Chiacchia spent a week in a coma and is now recovering at a rehabilitation facility near his home in Buffalo. Meanwhile, the sport he devoted his life to faces an identity crisis. Considered alongside the deaths of 12 riders worldwide over the past year and a half, his crash has reignited a fierce debate over whether the risks involved with the equestrian discipline known as eventing ”” an arduous three-phase competition ”” have become too great.

Top competitors and coaches argue that the sport’s growing popularity has attracted inexperienced riders who take too many risks, and amateur riders complain that courses are being designed beyond their skill level in order to challenge elite riders. There is also frustration that the governing bodies for eventing have not mandated the safety improvements they identified after another cluster of deaths nine years ago.

As many of you know, our youngest daughter is now eventing with horses, so this is of more than passing interest here–KSH.

From here:

[This past Wednesday] We heard a feature about noisy restaurants. Food critic Tom Sietsema of The Washington Post surveyed a number of hotspots in the Washington area. He told me some of them topped 90 decibels, that’s like standing next to a lawnmower.

[ROBERT] SIEGEL: Thank you for doing this story, writes Ann Rabelfetcher(ph) of Atlanta. I wish you all restaurant reviewers would include noise levels in their coverage. The woman who said she liked noisy restaurants embodied the reason we detest them, quote, “I can bring my kid into there, he might be screaming and banging on the glasses or whatever, and no one notices.” Oh good, I’m so happy for pay for that ambiance.

[MICHELE] NORRIS: Jennifer Woods(ph) of Frankfort, Illinois, adds this: Your guest failed to mention what I think is another major reason for noisy restaurants. Most of them play music or television too loudly, so even if there are only a few diners, right away the conversation level has to overcome the entertainment. I once asked for the music to be turned off. The response from the waiter: Oh, we couldn’t do that; silence is oppressive.

Love that last line–the emphasis is mine–KSH..

Complaints have been on the rise in recent years about the volume level in restaurants. Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema took a noise monitor to some of the hottest eateries in the nation’s capital.

Listen to it all from NPR.

The secret site where Iran is suspected of developing long-range ballistic missiles capable of reaching targets in Europe has been uncovered by new satellite photographs.

The imagery has pinpointed the facility from where the Iranians launched their Kavoshgar 1 “research rocket” on February 4, claiming that it was in connection with their space programme.

Analysis of the photographs taken by the Digital Globe QuickBird satellite four days after the launch has revealed a number of intriguing features that indicate to experts that it is the same site where Iran is focusing its efforts on developing a ballistic missile with a range of about 6,000km (4,000 miles).

A previously unknown missile location, the site, about 230km southeast of Tehran, and the link with Iran’s long-range programme, was revealed by Jane’s Intelligence Review after a study of the imagery by a former Iraq weapons inspector. A close examination of the photographs has indicated that the Iranians are following the same path as North Korea, pursuing a space programme that enables Tehran to acquire expertise in long-range missile technology.

Read it all.