Hasta La Gadget!

KATHMANDU (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Rani Maya Shrestha was working on a neighbor’s potato farm when the first of Nepal’s two massive earthquakes struck last year. She rushed home to find her husband buried in the ruins of their house northeast of the capital Kathmandu.

“I should have died with him,” said Shrestha inside the tin hovel that has been her home for the last year. “Without my husband, my life has become meaningless.”

The frail looking 45-year-old woman has no documents to prove her rights to her husband’s property in the ancient town of Sankhu. She survives on around 75 cents a day from knitting mufflers and woolen caps.

Twin quakes in April and May 2015 killed some 9,000 people in the Himalayan nation, leaving many women to fend for themselves in a country where widows face hostility, abuse, discrimination and even enslavement.

Mina Adhikari says her life was shattered after she lost her school teacher husband in the disaster. She is now struggling to bring up their two sons alone.

“It drastically changed the way I am treated by society. Society does not accept me as one of them,” the 33-year-old said by phone from the village of Gairigaon close to the 7.8 magnitude quake’s epicenter in west Nepal.

Women for Human Rights (WHR), a Nepali organization which campaigns for widows’ rights, said women who had lost their husbands in the disaster faced a multitude of problems.

“There is superstition and stigmatization. Widows have no status,” said WHR’s chief Lily Thapa ahead of International Widows’ Day on Thursday.

She said many widows lacked documents to claim their dead husband’s property or faced difficulties getting rebuilding grants because their marriage was not registered, as is common in Nepal.

Some widows have also been abandoned when family members moved to new locations following the disaster, she added.

Although Nepal has taken major steps to empower women since the end of its decade-long civil war in 2006, widowhood remains surrounded by taboos in this patriarchal society.

Like other widows, Adhikari said she was no longer allowed to attend religious ceremonies or other celebrations because women who have lost their husbands are seen as inauspicious.

DESTITUTION AND ENSLAVEMENT

Nepal has around half a million widows. Many lost their husbands during the war or to HIV. Others were widowed when their husbands died in accidents while working overseas as migrant laborers.

Another factor is child marriage, with girls in Nepal often married off as teenagers to much older men.

When their husbands die many widows are left destitute. If they remain with their in-laws they may be confined to the house and treated like servants, activists say. In some cases the family may even blame the widow for her husband’s death.

The Loomba Foundation, a widows’ rights charity, said widows could face hostility because it was sometimes believed their husbands had died as punishment for immoral acts or crimes their wives had committed in a previous life.

“The younger the age of the husbands when they died, the greater the severity of the crime the widows (are believed to have) committed in the past life,” the foundation said in a global report on widows last year.

The charity says widows in Nepal are also regularly accused of killing their husbands deliberately or through neglect – including by passing on HIV.

Traditionally, widows are required to shun merriment. They are banned from wearing red clothes and most jewelry. Many wear only white.

Often forced into virtual seclusion, they are not supposed to remarry or move out of their in-laws’ homes, which leaves many open to exploitation.

Most widows in Nepal are illiterate and two thirds are under 35, compounding the risks of abuse, activists say.

In 2008, in recognition of the large number of war widows and popular aversion to widow remarriage, the government put forward a scheme to pay men a 50,000 rupee ($460) incentive to marry widows.

But widows protested, saying the proposal was open to abuse by traffickers and would turn them into commodities. Nepal’s Supreme Court ordered the government to ditch the initiative.

WIDOW PRESIDENT

However, WHR’s Thapa says things are slowly improving. Some widows have even defied tradition by wearing red during protests against discrimination.

Thapa founded WHR 20 years ago following the death of her husband in the Gulf War while he was working with a peace mission in Iraq.

The organization, which has more than 2,000 widow groups nationwide, campaigns for better social and cultural rights, and helps widows secure property, economic independence and legal aid.

Thapa says several discriminatory laws and policies have been amended in recent years. For example, a widow who remarries no longer needs to return her deceased husband’s property.

Social protections have also been strengthened, with all widows now entitled to a monthly allowance.

But campaigners say it will likely take many years for old prejudices to die out.

When Nepal’s widowed President Bidhya Devi Bhandari visited a temple in the south last December some locals accused her of desecrating the shrine.

The following day they “cleansed” the temple with holy water, saying her worship there had made it impure.

Rights campaigner Durga Sob said the demeaning incident highlights the entrenched stigma faced by all widows in Nepal.

“This is extremely shameful,” said Sob, head of Sankalpa, a network of women’s groups. “When the country’s president is treated this way, just imagine what treatment the voiceless, uneducated and poor widows may be facing.”

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Ever wondered what would happen if you tried to copy money on your printer or copier? Here’s your answer. 

Nothing.

Nothing happens because most modern scanners recognize money and won’t copy or print it, according to a clip posted online by Wendoverproductions. 

How do the scanners know? One way is a hidden pattern called the Eurion Constellation, which is found on banknotes issued all over the world: 

When a scanner spots the pattern, it stops.

But there’s also a newer and even more secretive system called the Counterfeit Deterrent System, and it’s so effective that photo-editing software will often refuse to open a file that contains even a small piece of an image of a banknote.

See the full explanation in the clip above.  

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

LONDON, June 22 (Reuters) – Four-times Major winner Rory McIlroy will not compete in this summer’s Rio Olympic Games, citing health fears over the Zika virus, he said on Wednesday.

“After speaking with those closest to me, I’ve come to realize that my health and my family’s health comes before anything else. Even though the risk of infection from the Zika virus is considered low, it is a risk nonetheless and a risk I am unwilling to take,” the Northern Irish world number four said.

Golf returns to the Olympics in August for the first time since 1904, but a number of big names including Fiji’s Vijay Singh and Charl Schwartzel of South Africa have also said they will not compete in the event.

Controversy over the Aug.5-21 Games has grown as more about the disease becomes known. The mosquito-borne virus can cause crippling birth defects and, in adults, has been linked to the neurological disorder Guillain-Barre.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Sustainability cannot be limited to a single department in a company, words in a glossy report, or on a poster on the wall.
It should be the focal point in every business’ purpose.
To me, making a real difference for the world within SDG 6, water, and SDG 13, climate change, leads othe way.

Today, I have the pleasure of sharing these thoughts with world- and business-leaders at the UN Global Compact Leaders’ Summit in New York. This, I am both honoured and excited to do. Because thinking businesses and sustainability in a common context is decisive. Not least in my business. The water business.

Water is actually in everything. To some it might be self-explanatory, but to many, it comes as a surprise. However, it is. This also goes for the SDG’s. In fact, 15 out of the 17 connect to water.

My thoughts mostly revolve around goals 6 and 13. Clean water and sanitation and climate change. Two goals, which are very closely connected.

The need for water and sanitation on a global scale is evident – and the lack for equal access to both is one of the world’s greatest risks in the future. Everybody needs access to drinking water to live, however, more than 663 million people lack access to it. That’s a staggering figure. Another eye-opener is that 2.4 billion are without basic sanitation. Roughly one third of the world’s population, at high risk of losing lives to waterborne diseases.

Meanwhile, climate change causes global water issues. Some places all too much water, other places way too little. Add to this, that solving the challenges takes a lot of energy and by this effect the climate as well, then it becomes evident that it’s important to find long lasting solutions.

What we are trying to do with the SDG’s is solving these issues. By 2030. That’s not far away. Therefore, it’s increasingly important that we all join forces and push for genuine change, which can make us able of reaching the very ambitious targets.

My claim is that without substantial action from the private sector, the targets cannot be reached.
My business can contribute with innovative water technology, which energy efficiently can move water to where it should be. This expertise, we have refined for decades, and I feel confident that our knowledge can make a difference.

What we also need is sustainable business models supporting the ambitious targets defined by the SDG’s. Something, which is necessary not only seen from a global citizen’s perspective, but also from a business standing point. Keeping with the water and climate challenges, these huge threats also poses very real risks to businesses and societies worldwide – and hold the capability of disrupting even the most firmly based institutions, companies and countries.

Therefore, what we come up with needs to be self-sustaining solutions. We need to make sure that resources put into solving these problems will not be one-time donations, but rather investments which can pay off and turned into reinvestments. We need commercial drivers in order to have a chance of fulfilling the ambitious and necessary goals we have set out to achieve together. We need to cooperate across NGO’s, governments and businesses to succeed.

And we need to take action fast, together and in the right ways.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Livestreaming games has become the hottest trend, not to mention lucrative business, in the gaming industry. But mostly due to hardware and platform limitations, that activity has mostly been limited to PCs and consoles. Mobile gaming, however, has started to also become serious, and again lucrative, business. So it only stands that it, too, should start having livestreaming services and … Continue reading