Hasta La Gadget!

Yvonne Chaka Chaka raising her voice on HIV/AIDS & TB w/ @action_tweets at #AIDS2012 rally.

The first AIDS “activist” I knew was a man who cared for his partner until his death from HIV/AIDS. I learned quietly over the years from him how you fight pain, loss, discrimination and setbacks, with love, beauty and grace. I didn’t know I was learning it at the time. It just was.

I like a fight. Not violence, but a good worthwhile slog for something that matters. And I like fighters. And maybe that’s how I stumbled into the HIV/AIDS community all those years ago. It’s a community full of fighters — men and women prepared for the long game against the health injustice that means that who you are and where you live determines whether or not this disease or another will kill you — or not. AIDS researchers, health workers and activists are prepared for a long hard fight but through their efforts, are making it shorter.

It’s a community that can weather tough times, take a punch, get up and keep fighting.

This tenacity and vision has led to a revolution in human health history. Even without a cure — with the strategies for prevention and treatment that have been developed and with the policies put in place to fight discrimination in access to treatment — we have now begun to talk about “the end of AIDS.”

When you fight, sometimes you get hurt. Even in a community born of suffering, of loss and outrage the senselessness can sometimes be too much. So it felt when the announcement that possibly more than 100 AIDS activists, researchers and experts had been lost on Malaysian flight 17. I know I was not alone in scrambling to find out where several close friends were.

It looks now like the loss will be much lower in numbers. This is small comfort. But for those headed to the HIV/AIDS Conference in Melbourne on fight on Flight 17, their lives were not more valuable than any other lives, and they would have been the very first people to tell you that.

That was always the whole point.

But, for their families and their extended family — the thousands of grassroots volunteers, doctors, nurses, community health workers, activists and political leaders who fought quietly or loud as hell along side them, and for those they fought for — well that’s just not true.

Not right now.

Right now it feels like we lost something of the best in us as humans. But the AIDS community has a long history of mourning by fighting. Taking this punch and getting up to fight harder.

And that’s what happens next.

—

Kolleen Bouchane is the Director of Policy and Advocacy for A World At School and Director of Policy and Research for the Global Business Coalition for Education. If all children received a complete primary education, around 700,000 cases of HIV in young adults could be prevented each year–seven million in a decade.

Widely considered one of Africa’s greatest art collectors, Joseph Murumbi spent his life collecting a vast collection of art and books. Born the son of a Goan father and Maasai mother, Murumbi rose to become one of the leaders in the Kenya African Union. When he died he left behind more than 50,000 books and letters of correspondance, which included 8,000 rare books (these were books that were published prior to 1900).

Before his death, Murumbi and his American-Kenyan friend, Alan Donovan, another prolific art collector, co-founded The African Heritage House (often called ‘Africa’s most photographed house.’). Designed by Donovan, the beautiful building overlooks Nairobi National Park, and is described by Architectural Digest as “an architecture rising from the serene Kenyan plain like an outcropping of earth, a vision of usefulness informed by the African genius for decoration.” The house itself is “a combination of the mud architectures from across Africa.”

Nessa in Kenya

In 1969 Alan Donovan, one of the last Americans sent to Nigeria by the State Department during the Biafran war, decided he no longer wanted to be a bureaucrat.  He did, however, want to see the rest of Africa, so he learned French, bought a Volkswagen bus and drove across the Sahara. — Architectural Digest, 1996

The House not only hosts art collections that span over 50 years of African history, but also rare artifacts whose value is considered priceless. The cultural value of The African Heritage House to all of Africa is “immeasurable.” Up until recently it was going to be turned into an Advanced African Studies Center, dedicated to the memory of Murumbi.

Donovan spoke to Architecture Digest about the inspiration behind the House in 1996:

Although I tried to use features from the various architectural forms that enchanted me in my travel in Africa,” says Alan Donovan, “an equally important reason for my home is to show people how to live with African arts and crafts.  I think this indigenous artistic and cultural heritage is under appreciated, both in Africa and worldwide.  My house is a step toward preservation.

However, this priceless piece of cultural history is now under threat. The Standard Gauge Railway seeks to demolish the house to use the land for construction. 

There are several points to challenge this:

1. The present railway was built in l889, fifty years before the Nairobi National Park came into existence which used the railway line as its border. As there were no blasting materials at the time, the Railway line meanders around stone outcrops. The SG railway should stay on the railway reserve but it needs to straighten the old colonial line for the 21st century train and should be allowed to do so.

2. The SG railway can be built on a platform so that wild animals can pass freely below it. This would not require any additional land, just a leeway to pass through park land as is already being planned through Tsavo National Park by the same SG railway.

3. The families living along the border of the Nairobi National Park have all occupied these lands for over 40 years. These borderlands provide a bulwark to protect the park from unwanted structures, poaching, sewage, lights and noise. To take these lands would not only be an environmental disaster but would cost taxpayers huge amounts for compensation. Whereas if the SG railway remains on the present railway route the costs for construction, including the platforms, would be paid by the contractor, not the public.

4. The existing route would provide passengers with sweeping views of the park, as well as preserve the borderlands along the park for other uses that are compatible with the Nairobi National Park.

When asked about the possibility of reconstructing the house elsewhere, Donovan says he may move the Murumbi collection to California. However, this vast collection of African art and artifacts should remain in Africa, where it belongs with the African people. 

What you can do: Sign this petition to the President of Kenya.

Read more at Daily Nation.

By Laurie Moison for Divorce360

Your spouse wants you to pick up the dry cleaning, but you’re running late from work. If you stop to get it, you won’t be able to work out. So you head to the gym, go home and say, “Sorry, I forgot.”

Couples tell each other little white lies all the time. They’ve learned that sometimes telling the truth starts a fight. But the fight really isn’t about whether the dry cleaning was picked up, according to Dr. Peter Pearson, co-author of Tell Me No Lies. “It’s about all the other times in the spouse’s life where someone else’s needs came before theirs,” he says.

While this type of lying is relatively benign, lies tend to undermine the glue that holds relationships together — trust. Trust is the expectation that another person won’t hurt you when you’re vulnerable.

Yet people deceive each other anyway. Why? “People lie for three reasons,” says Stan Walters, author of The Truth About Lying: How To Spot A Lie and Protect Yourself From Deception. “They lie to hide something from you, to harm you in some way or to hype themselves.”

Is someone is lying to you? There is no way to be 100 percent sure. Even the experts can’t always tell. “I’ve had couples in my office and I know one person is lying to their partner and I do my best to scrutinize for signals and I can’t pick them up. Some people are that good,” Pearson says.

Behaviors we often associate with lying — arm crossing, sweating and sweaty palms, increased heart rate, skyrocketing blood pressure, ums and ahs, fidgeting, crossing legs and laughing inappropriately — aren’t accurate either. They may be more about feeling intimidated than telling the truth. The biggest myth is that you can catch a liar by watching their eyes. “Looking away or looking down are the least reliable indicators of lying,” Walters says.

But there are some clues to spotting a liar. One sign by itself doesn’t necessarily mean someone is lying. However, Walters says, when you see two or more signs, you can be pretty sure someone lying.

How to spot a liar:

1. Pinocchio’s your man.
When a person lies, specific tissues in the nose usually engorge, says Dr. Alan Hirsch of The Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago. This nasal engorgement, which Hirsch calls the “Pinocchio Sign,” causes cells to release histamine, which in turn causes the nose to itch.

2. The big cover up.
Look for negation cues such as covering or blocking the mouth or covering or rubbing the eyes, nose or ears, and aversion clues such as turning the head or body away when making a crucial statement.

3. God’s on his or her side.
Religious phrases such as “I swear on my mother’s grave,” “God, no” or “As God is my witness.”

4. Deny, deny, deny.
Denial phrases such as “trust me,” “honestly,” “and “to be perfectly honest” are evasive. Evasion is about trying to change a perception about actions. Denial phrases repeated over and over are typical clues to lying.

How to avoid getting taken:

If you’re living with someone who lies, there’s a formula that goes with the lying process: “Desire, opportunity, ability,” says Walters. “Spouses can’t do much about mate’s desire or ability to lie to them. The only thing a spouse can do is control the opportunity for the lie to succeed.”

Refusing to buy into a lie removes you from the target list because people continue to lie when they know they can get away with it. On the other hand, unless you want to destroy the relationship, don’t scream, “You’re a liar!” Instead, give the other person an opportunity to be forthcoming. Say, “I think there’s something going on that you’re worried about how I’m going to react when I find out and I think we need to bring it out into the open so we can handle it together.”

“If you tell your spouse, ‘I want the best relationship. So, I’ll always be honest with you. Can you commit to being honest with me, even if it’s hard?’ It’s amazing how people will stick to that commitment,” Walters says.

On the other hand, if you find that your spouse is continually abusing you by lying, it’s time to reconsider the relationship. No one has to be a victim of deception.

Read more from Divorce 360:
My Spouse Says He Loves Me, So Why Did He Cheat?
11 Ways To Know If Your Spouse Is Having An Affair
Why We Lie — to Ourselves

Keep in touch! Check out HuffPost Divorce on Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our newsletter here.

Lifetime cast a new lead in its Aaliyah biopic after Zendaya Coleman backed out of the role last month without comment. Nickelodeon actress Alexandra Shipp will now take her place, but Coleman took to Instagram to explain why she exited the made-for-TV movie.

In three separate videos (watch them below) she said she didn’t leave because of the haters like many fans thought. “The main reason is that the production value wasn’t there, there were complications with the music rights, and I just felt like it wasn’t being handled delicately considering the situation,” she said.

Aaliyah died in a plane crash at age 22 in 2001 and her family has been outspoken about fighting the film. Zendaya addressed their concerns and said, “I tried my best to reach out to the family on my own, and I wrote a letter, but I was unable to do so; therefore, I felt not really morally OK with moving forward with the project.”

She wished Shipp well in the new role and asked fans to drop the drama. “Let’s practice motivation and love; not discrimination and hate. All right?”

Israeli police raided the home of 15-year-old Tariq Abu Khdeir early Friday, just hours after the Palestinian-American teenager left for Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport to return home to Tampa, Florida.

Abu Khdeir, whose brutal beating at the hands of Israeli security forces was captured on camera, had been under house arrest in East Jerusalem. He was released on Thursday after pressure from the U.S. State Department and an ABC interview, wherein he defended his presence at a protest of the murder of his cousin, Muhammad Abu Khdeir, who was burned alive.

According to Hassan Shibly, Abu Khdeir’s legal counsel and the director of the Florida branch of the Council on American–Islamic Relations, Israeli police burst into the family home in Shufat on Friday and destroyed furniture and emptied cabinets. Shibly said the police then arrested and detained Abu Khdeir’s uncle and two other cousins without charges.

Abu Khdeir’s mother said she was informed by a judge that they would be released, according to Mondoweiss. However, Shibly told HuffPost that they still remain in custody, and it is unclear when or if they would be released.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a press briefing Friday that the United States was “shocked by the treatment of Tariq and strongly condemned any excessive use of force.”

“We are deeply concerned about this latest development and reports and are closely tracking them on the ground,” Psaki said.

But Psaki couldn’t confirm whether Secretary of State John Kerry and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had discussed the latest reports about the incident.

In a statement to HuffPost, CAIR urged the State Department to investigate the matter, which it called an “apparent retaliation” against the family for publicizing Abu Khdeir’s beating.

“This is clearly unacceptable retaliation against the Khdeir family for exposing the brutal treatment Tariq received at the hands of the Israeli police,” it read. “The State Department must send a clear message that Israel cannot continue to violate human rights and international law with impunity.”

CAIR released photos that allegedly show the Khdeir home after the visit by Israeli police: