thought

I have made a decision but some how I am not able to put it through in action... I wonder what is holding me back? Maybe the course of action is not clear.

Slice of history... and part of the present

King's Final Years from NewsWeek

The Northern campaign went into high gear with a rally at Soldier Field and a march to city hall, where King, like Martin Luther before him, nailed his 14 demands (for things like open housing and jobs in all-white industries) to the door. At first, Daley was conciliatory. He claimed that the problems all predated him and that he had already repaired more than 100,000 apartments. When a summer riot broke out in North Lawndale (Coretta told the children to back away from the windows), the mayor sought a truce with token concessions like fire-hydrant nozzles so black kids could cool off. King held all-night talks with gang leaders and Justice Department officials in the same room, but his commitment to nonviolence was belittled by newer "Black Power" leaders like Stokely Carmichael as "too Sunday-school."

The point of the Chicago campaign was to show race as a national problem, and it did so with a bang when King led an integrated group of marchers into the racist enclave of Marquette Park. "I have never in my life seen such hate," said King, who was hit by a rock there. "Not in Mississippi or Alabama." But unlike the battle with Alabama state troopers the year before at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, marches into Marquette Park (and later into the white suburb of Cicero) led to no national catharsis or landmark legislation. Congress defeated a new civil-rights bill that would have banned housing discrimination (it finally passed in 1968). Although Northern authorities—the National Guard and Daley's police—defended the marchers rather than attack them, a backlash against the movement was setting in. "Don't you find," Mike Wallace asked King on CBS News, "that the American people are getting a little bit tired, truly, of the whole civil-rights struggle?"

...

Yet it is simply inaccurate to say that every period since King has been what he called a "valley moment." The Voting Rights Act transformed American politics, and the growth of the black middle class has changed the lives of millions of families. While New Orleans got worse, Chicago got better. Today it's a much healthier city than it was in Boss Daley's time, thanks in part to his son, Richard M. Daley, who has been mayor since 1989, and his predecessor, Harold Washington, the city's first African-American mayor.

While Chicago's public-school system remains troubled and stubbornly segregated, it now boasts several highly successful schools and realistic hope for more. Housing, too, is still largely segregated by neighborhood and is unaffordable for the poor and working class, with long waiting lists for subsidies. But notorious housing projects like the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green have been mostly torn down and replaced by townhouse-style public housing units, a third of them owned by the residents.

BBC classic news clips over the past 50 years

Open News Archives from BBC

Some good but mostly ghastly things in history... but good selection. Refresh your memory but to view the clips you have to download them.

Cute cute cute....

The Cute Factor from NYTimes

If the mere sight of Tai Shan, the roly-poly, goofily gamboling masked bandit of a panda cub now on view at the National Zoo isn't enough to make you melt, then maybe the crush of his human onlookers, the furious flashing of their cameras and the heated gasps of their mass rapture will do the trick.

"Omigosh, look at him! He is too cute!"

"How adorable! I wish I could just reach in there and give him a big squeeze!"

"He's so fuzzy! I've never seen anything so cute in my life!"

A guard's sonorous voice rises above the burble. "OK, folks, five oohs and aahs per person, then it's time to let someone else step up front."

cute isn't it :) However, there is more to read in this article.

Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.

Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can't lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.

The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession.

The greater the number of cute cues that an animal or object happens to possess, or the more exaggerated the signals may be, the louder and more italicized are the squeals provoked.

Cuteness is distinct from beauty, researchers say, emphasizing rounded over sculptured, soft over refined, clumsy over quick. Beauty attracts admiration and demands a pedestal; cuteness attracts affection and demands a lap. Beauty is rare and brutal, despoiled by a single pimple. Cuteness is commonplace and generous, content on occasion to cosegregate with homeliness.

First non-depressing post of the year :)

New seven wonders: Taj in contention from HT

Here is the list:
Taj Mahal, India
Acropolis, Greece;
Alhambra, Spain
Angkor Wat, Cambodia
Chichen Itza, Mexico
Christ Redeemer, Brazil
Colosseum, Rome
The statues of Easter Island
Eiffel Tower, Paris
Great Wall, China
Hagia Sophia, Turkey
Kiyomizu Temple, Japan
Kremlin, Moscow
Machu Picchu, Peru
Neuschwanstein Castle, Germany
Petra, Jordan
Pyramids of Giza, Egypt
Statue of Liberty, New York
Stonehenge, Britain
Sydney Opera House, Australia
Timbuktu, Mali.

Domino effect

RR Package: A 'tribute' to minister from bar girls pushed into one-night stands from The Telegraph [via India Uncut]

Caste cruelity

Woman, 5 children burnt alive in Bihar from The Hindu

RAGHOPUR: A woman and her five minor children, including two girls, were burnt to death in Rampur-Shyamchak village of Vaishali district early on Sunday, after her husband refused to withdraw a police complaint about the theft of a buffalo. The complainant, Bijendra Mahto, belonging to the extremely backward Kahar caste, with 90 per cent burns, is battling for life at the Patna Medical College Hospital.

According to the police, about 10 persons tied up Bijendra Mahto and set fire to his thatched hut past midnight. When Mahto lodged the complaint, Jagat Rai, his son and nephew were arrested and later let off on bail. Mahto charged that Rai had been insisting that he withdraw the complaint.

According to witnesses, Rai led the mob that torched the house and also fired in the air to prevent others from coming to the rescue of the family.