Watch Chilean miners told of rescue delay

Chilean miners told of rescue delay


Engineers say it will take up to 4 months to complete a narrow escape tunnel to free the miners

A group of workers trapped in a collapsed mine have been told they may be stuck underground for months before rescuers can free them.

Officials on Wednesday said it could take up to four months before the 33 men can be freed, saying until then they will get oxygen, food, water and medical supplies.

The news was delivered as the government prepared a special programme to help the miners cope mentally and physically with their prolonged captivity.

Chilean engineers said they needed at least 120 days using a hydraulic bore to dig a narrow escape shaft measuring just 66 centimetres in diameter, or roughly the size of a mountain bicycle wheel, to get the men out.

Rescuers on Tuesday began sending down emergency food, water and oxygen supplies to the miners trapped alive after the gold and copper mine collapsed on August 5.

The mine runs like a corkscrew for more than seven kilometres under a barren mountain in northern Chile's Atacama Desert.

Long rescue

"We were able to tell them... they would not be rescued before the Fiestas Patrias [Chile's September 18 Independence Day celebrations], and that we hoped to get them out before Christmas," Jaime Manalich, the Chilean health minister, said.


The 33 miners will be stuck half a mile below the surface until the end of the year [EPA]
Manalich said the men, trapped 700 metres below ground, took the information calmly, but he warned "a period of depression, anguish and severe malaise" could ensue.

Sebastian Pinera, the Chilean president, earlier assured anxious families that their loved ones "will be with us for Christmas and New Year".

Rodrigo Hinzpeter, the Chilean interior minister, said the men have a general idea that the rescue will take time but have not been told how long they will remain stuck nearly half a mile below the surface.

"I hope that nobody commits the imprudence of telling them something like this. We have asked the families to be careful in the letters they write," Hinzpeter said.

"It's going to be very hard. We're going to have to give them a great deal of attention, care and psychological support."

Families sent letters in an attempt to minimise the psychological impact on the men
Psychological impact

Officials say they are concerned about the psychological impact of being trapped in close proximity in a hot, dank shelter with their only lifeline a tiny hole to the surface providing sustenance, water and communication.
Family members holding a vigil on the surface used an eight-centimetre wide drill hole to the men to send written notes to buoy the men's spirits.

Health minister Manalich said the first stage of the preparation plan calls for the miners to receive "nutritional recuperation" and occupational therapy.

He said they had been sent chocolate- and raspberry-flavoured milkshakes, which would be followed by solid food in the coming days, when their metabolisms could cope.

The men have been told to split their living area for sleeping, working, and for bodily waste, with tiny lamps illuminating the cramped space.

"Then they will start a daily exercise routine," Manalich said. "The programme includes singing, games involving movement, card games, pencils and anything that they can use."

The US space agency NASA has also offered to help sustain the trapped men, based on its long experience with keeping astronauts healthy during long, isolated missions.
Coppied by http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/08/2010825233512757958.html

Watch Liya Kebede: star of Africa

Liya Kebede models Lemlem’s autumn/winter 2010 range, all of which is made from cotton woven in Ethiopia
We are saw this Liya Kebede: star of Africa

Flicking through Liya Kebede's pile of fashion magazine covers passes a calm and perfumed afternoon. In 2002, French Vogue declared May was "All About Liya" month, dedicating a whole issue to the African supermodel after the editor saw her in Tom Ford's Gucci catwalk show. Describing the day they first met, Ford recalls: "She looked me in the eyes, and I was quite literally stunned. Liya projects an aura of goodness and calm that outshines even her extraordinary physical beauty. Later in the day," Ford continues, "when trying to remember what she looked like, I could only remember her eyes."

Born 32 years ago in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, Kebede was spotted twice. The first time, as a teenager, took her to Paris, where she failed, homesick. When she returned to Ethiopia, she met her husband, a hedge-fund manager 20 years her senior, and it wasn't until the second time, aged 23 in Chicago, where the couple had set up home, that it stuck. In no time Kebede signed a £1.65m contract to become the first black face of Estée Lauder; her face and long, generous limbs sold underwear, handbags, evening dresses and Tiffany diamonds. She took a role in a Robert De Niro film, she was named 11th in a Forbes list of the world's top-earning models, she had a son and a daughter, Suhul and Raee, then in 2005 she took a breath…

We speak as she dashes through Manhattan between meetings. Taxis honk and men yell as she quietly talks about her childhood, growing up under "vast blue skies". She describes the "beautiful, raw land", the space. And then the way that New York shook her up, "the way it does everyone". It was when she returned to Ethiopia from the USA, where pregnancy is so celebrated, that she became involved in raising awareness of her home country's maternal health crisis. In Ethiopia a mother dies in childbirth every minute, leaving her baby 10 times less likely to survive past the age of two.

"There's a saying in Africa: To find out you are pregnant is to have one foot in the grave," she says. "Every time I go back home I'm introduced to women who've barely made it."

Her soft accent leaps from drawl to drawl as she remembers meeting an elderly woman who, after her daughter died giving birth to her third child, was forced to bring up her grandchildren alone. "She couldn't afford food, let alone schools, so the baby was given away. It was such a tragedy – not only did she lose her daughter but the whole family was destroyed. When, in an African community like that, a mother dies, it affects everyone."

In 2006 she set up the Liya Kebede Foundation. Her mission was to reduce maternal, newborn and child mortality in Ethiopia, and around the world. Funding advocacy and awareness-raising projects, as well as providing direct support for community-based education and training, the foundation's success led to her recognition by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader. While Kebede's aims are ambitious, she's particularly good at promoting the small, gentle steps towards life-changing aid. She talks, for instance, about the importance of providing torches to villages in developing countries, to light midwives' paths to the houses of women with no electricity, but she's clear, too, that there's no small solution to a global problem. "In these villages there are no roads, let alone hospitals. The last time I visited, I was told about a local woman who started bleeding halfway through delivering her child. The whole village carried her to hospital, but she died on the way." These are preventable deaths, she stresses.

Liya Kebede (far left) on the cover of Vogue's May 2009 issue.
It was on another trip home, a star by now, that Kebede met the local traditional weavers, who were losing their jobs due to a decline in demand. She giggles quietly and sighs: "I promised to come up with something to help." She launched Lemlem (meaning "to flourish" in Amharic), a line of cotton children's clothes hand spun and embroidered in Ethiopia, as a way to inspire economic independence in her native country. "Once mums bought pieces for their kids, of course they asked for bigger sizes for themselves," Kebede boasts. Now the label offers womenswear, gifts and accessories – simple, soft striped shawls and dresses. And as one of few ethical ranges to make it into high-end fashion stores Matches and Net-a-porter.com, it is doing phenomenally well.

"The Lemlem collection has almost sold out at Matches, as it's quite hard to find stylish cover-ups in pure cottons, and the fits and lengths are really on-trend," says Matches buyer Georgina Gainza. "Our customers are interested in the style, primarily, but it's an added bonus that the collection has an ethical approach."

"It's always a tricky thing, trying to make aid sustainable," Kebede says. "It's important that we try and help the workers become independent, so by employing traditional weavers we're trying to break their cycle of poverty, at the same time preserving the art of weaving while creating modern, casual, comfortable stuff that we really want to wear."

"In today's world, celebrity advocates are not rare," Tom Ford admits. "What is rare is to encounter one whose devotion and drive come from a genuine desire to better our world. Liya's work comes from a place of sincerity, and her beauty is much more than skin deep." Ford is not alone in his adoration – Anna Wintour keenly supports her ("She's so willing," Kebede says of the American Vogue editor, "so wonderful"), and she's still in demand to open fashion shows despite being 15 years older than her fellow models. Last month she was named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People, alongside Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey.

She finds a balance, Kebede says, between campaigning and fashion, though we speak in a month that also sees her at Cannes promoting her first lead role in a film – Desert Flower, based on the critically acclaimed autobiography about female genital mutilation by Somali model Waris Dirie. Kebede recently travelled back to Djibouti, where they shot much of it, to host a screening in the village where the film is based. "That was amazing," she says, "to reach out to people and show them something and teach them without being forceful, or shoving it down their throat."

As a model her success grows, and as a philanthropist she's taking on ever more campaigns, ever more problems. I ask how the two sides of her life sit with each other, and she answers quickly: "Fashion has always given me a platform, introduced me to inspiring people, allowed me to balance my life, but most importantly, allowed me to do something quite amazing."
coppied by http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/13/liya-kebede-model-ethical-fashion

Background and writing

Michael Jackson in 1984, several months before he completed the writing of "We Are the World"
We are know this Background and writing
Before the writing of "We Are the World", American entertainer and social activist Harry Belafonte had sought for some time to have a song recorded by the most famous artists in the music industry at the time. He planned to have the proceeds donated to a new organization called United Support of Artists for Africa (USA for Africa). The non-profit foundation would then feed and relieve starving people in Africa, specifically Ethiopia, where around one million people died during the country's 1984–1985 famine.[1][2] The idea followed Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas" project in the UK, which Belafonte had heard about.[nb 1][4] In the activist's plans, money would also be set aside to help eliminate hunger in the United States of America. Entertainment manager and fellow fundraiser Ken Kragen was contacted by Belafonte, who asked for singers Lionel Richie and Kenny Rogers—Kragen's clients—to participate in Belafonte's musical endeavor. Kragen and the two musicians agreed to help with Belafonte's mission, and in turn, enlisted the cooperation of Stevie Wonder, to add more "name value" to their project.[1] Quincy Jones was drafted to co-produce the song, taking time out from his work on The Color Purple.[1][5] Richie also telephoned Michael Jackson, who had just released the commercially successful Thriller album and had concluded a tour with his brothers.[1]
Jackson revealed to Richie that he not only wanted to sing the song, but to participate in its writing as well.[1][6] To begin with, "We Are the World" was to be written by Jackson, Richie and Wonder. As Wonder had limited time to work on the project, Jackson and Richie proceeded to write "We Are the World" themselves.[6] They began work on the song's creation at Hayvenhurst, the Encino home of Jackson and his family. For a week, the two spent every night working on lyrics and melodies in the singer's bedroom. They knew that they wanted a song which would be easy to sing and memorable. The pair wanted to create an anthem. Jackson's older sister, La Toya, watched the two work on the song, and later contended that Richie only wrote a few lines for the track.[5] She stated that her younger brother wrote 99 percent of the lyrics, "but he's never felt it necessary to say that".[5] La Toya further commented on the song's creation in an interview with the American celebrity news magazine People. "I'd go into the room while they were writing and it would be very quiet, which is odd, since Michael's usually very cheery when he works. It was very emotional for them."[6]
Richie had recorded two melodies for "We Are the World", which Jackson took, adding music and words to the song in the same day. Jackson stated, "I love working quickly. I went ahead without even Lionel knowing, I couldn't wait. I went in and came out the same night with the song completed—drums, piano, strings, and words to the chorus."[7] Jackson then presented his demo to Richie and Jones, who were both shocked; they did not expect the pop star to see the structure of the song so quickly. The next meetings between Jackson and Richie were unfruitful; the pair did not produce any additional vocals and got no work done. It was not until the night of January 21, 1985, that Richie and Jackson completed the lyrics and melody of "We Are the World" within two and a half hours, one night before the song's first recording session.[7]
coppied by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_the_World