Archive for January, 2010

INGREDIENTS:

2 tbsp butter
1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into thin strips
salt and pepper, to taste
2 tbsp finely chopped garlic
1 (7 oz) jar roasted red pepper, drained and cut into thin strips
1 (6 oz) bag fresh spinach, torn into bite-size pieces
1 cup prepared light Alfredo sauce
1 (16 oz) pkg linguine noodles
grated Parmesan cheese

DIRECTIONS:

In a large skillet, over medium heat, melt butter.
Season chicken with salt and pepper. Add chicken and garlic to butter. Cook 5 to 7 mins or until no longer pink. Stir in roasted pepper. Layer spinach on top. Cover. Steam 3 mins or until spinach wilts. Stir Alfredo sauce into chicken mixture. Reduce heat to low and heat through. Meanwhile cook linguine according to package directions. Drain. Reserve 1/4 cup pasta cooking water. Stir cooking water into chicken mixture. Toss with hot pasta. Sprinkle with cheese.

Serves 8 (1-1/2 cups each)

Amount Per Serving Cals 380 Cals from Fat: 72 Total Fat 8g 12% Carbs 50g 16% Dietary Fiber 3g 12% Sat Fat 4.5g 22% Chol 55mg 18% Protein 23g 38% Sod 540mg 22%

*Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet. Your dailyvalues may be higher or lower depending on your calorie needs

Gods Love is like the ocean, you can see its beginnings
but not its end. Author Unknown

Read this a apply it to your life, it is good for the soul!

The Wicker Basket

The story is told of an old man who lived on a farm in the mountains of eastern Kentucky with his young grandson. Each morning, Grandpa was up early sitting at the kitchen table reading from his old worn-out Bible. His grandson who wanted to be just like him tried to imitate him in any way he could.

One day the grandson asked, ‘Papa, I try to read the Bible just like you but I don’t understand it, and what I do understand I forget as soon as I close the book. What good does reading the Bible do?’ The Grandfather quietly turned from putting coal in the stove and said, ‘Take this old wicker coal basket down to the river a nd bring back a basket of water.’

The boy did as he was told, even though all the water leaked out before he could get back to the house. The grandfather laughed and said, ‘You will have to move a little faster next time,’ and sent him back to the river with the basket to try again. This time the boy ran faster, but again the old wicker basket was empty before he returned home. Out of breath, he told his grandfather that it was ‘impossible to carry water in a basket,’ and he went to get a bucket instead. The old man said, ‘I don’t want a bucket of water; I want a basket of water. You can do this. You’re just not trying hard enough,’ and he went out the door to watch the boy try again.

At this point, the boy knew it was impossible, but he wanted to show his grandfather that even if he ran as fast as he could, the water would leak out before he got far at all. The boy scooped the water and ran hard, but when he reached his grandfather the basket was again empty. Out of breath, he said, ‘See Papa, it’s useless!’

‘So you think it is useless?’ The old man said, ‘Look at the basket.

The boy looked at the basket and for the first time he realized that the basket looked different. Instead of a dirty old wicker coal basket, it was clean.

‘Son, that’s what happens when you read the Bible. You might not understand or remember everything, but when you read it, it will change you from the inside out.’

Moral of the wicker basket story: Take time to read a portion of God’s Word each day; it will affect you for good even if you don’t retain a word.

A young schoolboy was having a hard time pronouncing the letter ”R,” and all the other kids were, of course, teasing him about it. To help him out, the teacher gave him a sentence to practice at home: ”Robert gave Richard a rap in the ribs for roasting the rabbit so rare.” In class a few days later, the teacher asked the boy to recite the sentence out loud.

The boy nervously eyed his classmates–many of them already laughing at him–then replied, ”Bob gave Dick a poke in the side because the bunny wasn’t cooked enough.”

From ArcaMax Jokes

Volvo has unveiled an auto designed by women for women called the YCC, ‘Your Concept Car.’ Among its cutting-edge femifeatures:

– Turn signals that are able to change their mind at the last minute.

– An OnStar satellite tracking system that can locate, on command, all retail outlets within 500 miles

– Permanent press fenders.

– A dashboard voice console that’s programmed to ask strangers for directions.

– Side mirrors that make the driver appear slimmer than she actually is.

From ArcaMax Jokes

Bumping into a woman on the sidewalk, the Tom Cruise look- alike apologized, “Pardon me!”

“That’s quite all right,” the woman replied. “You look just like my fourth husband.”

“Wow!” he said. “How many times have you been married?”

She winked at him and said, “Three.”

A man observed a woman in the grocery store with a three year old girl in her basket. As they passed the cookie section, the child asked for cookies and her mother told her “no.” The little girl immediately began to whine and fuss, and the mother said quietly, “Now Ellen, we just have half of the aisles left to go through; don’t be upset. It won’t be long.”

He passed the Mother again in the candy aisle. Of course, the little girl began to shout for candy. When she was told she couldn’t have any, she began to cry. The mother said, “There, there, Ellen, don’t cry. Only two more aisles to go, and then we’ll be checking out.”

The man again happened to be behind the pair at the check-out, where the little girl immediately began to clamor for gum and burst into a terrible tantrum upon discovering there would be no gum purchased today.

The mother patiently said, “Ellen, we’ll be through this check out stand in five minutes, and then you can go home and have a nice nap.”

The man followed them out to the parking lot and stopped the woman to compliment her. “I couldn’t help noticing how patient you were with little Ellen…”

The mother broke in, “My little girl’s name is Tammy… I’m Ellen.”

Perilous Times

Body of $31m lottery winner Abraham Shakespeare found buried

* From correspondents in Orlando
* From: NewsCore
* January 30, 2010 7:26AM

A BODY found buried in a backyard has been identified by authorities as missing Florida lottery winner Abraham Shakespeare.

Mr Shakespeare, a 43-year-old truck driver’s assistant, has been missing since April – though he wasn’t reported missing until November.

He had won a $31 million lottery jackpot in 2006, opting for a lump sum payment of nearly $17 million.

The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s office said the remains were identified through fingerprints, according to MyFox Orlando.

The body was found on Thursday at a Plant City home connected to a woman who had befriended him.

Read more at MyFoxOrlando

Perilous Times

From The Times
January 30, 2010

*Japanese suicide rate in rapid rise*

Yukio Shige, a retired policeman, has talked 226 people out of jumping

Yukio Shige, a retired policeman, has talked 226 people out of jumping Richard Lloyd Parry in Kyoko Onoki, Tokyo

The Tojinbo cliffs had always made Yukio Shige sad — and the final straw was the “death tourists”.

They looked like any other tour group, arriving in their big coaches with a flag-waving guide who led them to peer over the edge. But it wasn’t the spectacular basalt rock formations or the giddy view that drew them. It was the cliffs’ status as one of the most popular suicide spots in Japan. “The travel companies needed something that distinguished Tojinbo from other places, to appeal to tourists, and they chose suicide,” says Mr Shige indignantly.

“Given that 20 or 30 people die here every year, and there are 80 or 100 attempts, with some of them seriously injured, I made an earnest request that they stop.” Mr Shige was ignored, and the ghouls kept coming — but by this time he was well used to suicide not being taken seriously in the country.

For the past five years, Mr Shige, 65, and a band of volunteers have struggled to turn back the wave of suicides.

Since 1998, more than 30,000 people a year have killed themselves, a rate almost four times as high as in Britain — even allowing for the difference in population. More than 100 make the attempt at Tojinbo, a beetling cliff overlooking the Sea of Japan. Thanks to Mr Shige’s efforts, only about 20 people succeed at Tojinbo every year. But the number of attempts is going up as Japan’s economy struggles, and increasing numbers of young people find themselves jobless and without hope.

Suicides in Japan went down by 844 to 32,349 in 2008, but increased among the young. Over a decade the number in their thirties who kill themselves has risen by 30 per cent. Among those who leave notes, failure to find a job is increasingly cited. Apart from the effect on bereaved families and friends, it has coldly practical effects on society: half of the 46,000 trains delayed in Tokyo last year were caused by someone jumping on to the tracks.

It was during his 40 years as a local policeman that Mr Shige came into contact with the Tojinbo phenomenon, with bodies regularly washed up on the rocks below.

They were easy enough to spot before they jumped, he said — single individuals, without tourist cameras and guidebooks, staring blankly out to sea, often as the light was dying.

Over the years he has talked down 226 people, many of whom stay gratefully in touch with him. “They are waiting,” said Mr Shige. “They want someone to talk to them. And just talking to them often saves a life.

“We are abandoning this obligation, and I think it is a crime.”

From The Times
January 30, 2010

Anarchy and death rule in Mogadishu, a city on the front line of terror

On Monday afternoon a seven-year-old boy called Mohamed was hit when an 82mm mortar shell exploded outside a health clinic in Mogadishu where his mother works as a cleaner.

Afterwards he lay on a hospital floor, shivering and terrified. His bandaged left arm, hand and leg were peppered with angular chunks of shrapnel. Crouched beside him his mother, Fatima, wiped tears from her eyes.

But Mohamed was luckier than the five Somali civilians and Ugandan peacekeeper who died in the explosion at the busy outpatient centre.

The mortar landed just beyond the concrete and razor-wire perimeter of the main base of the African Union peacekeeping force, known as Amisom. There were dozens of civilians, mostly women and children, waiting to be seen by doctors. Only two hours earlier Captain Ronald Mukuyi, an Amisom doctor — the peacekeeping force runs the clinic and the nearby hospital — had told The Times: “When people are inside we can ensure their safety but when they are outside we cannot.”

Death or injury comes often and randomly to the inhabitants of Mogadishu, a place where the thump of mortars and staccato pop of machinegun fire punctuates day and night. The human cost of 22 years of war has been catastrophic. Hundreds of thousands have died, more than half a million scrape by in refugee camps across East Africa and almost half the population depend on food aid for survival. This month another 80,000 were forced to flee their homes.

The Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG) has been in place now for exactly a year. To mark the occasion al-Shabaab, the Islamist militant group linked to al-Qaeda, launched a ferocious attack yesterday morning. It was the worst fighting that residents had witnessed in months: explosions rocked the capital and bursts of gunfire rang out through the night.

Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, the President, has the backing of the UN and Western powers but his administration and its security forces face almost daily attacks by al-Shabaab and another Islamist fighting group, Hizb al-Islam. Today Somalia is a new frontline in the global war against terror, its violent anarchy the perfect breeding ground for jihadist fighters who train here and in Yemen, a few hundred miles to the north.

Throughout the overlapping and almost continuous rounds of fighting it is the ordinary people of Somalia who have suffered most. Nowhere is this clearer than in Mogadishu, a city that stands as a blasted monument to the years of destruction. Spread along the Indian Ocean coast, the city offers glimpses of its former beauty. Close to the port are ornate piazzas, colonnades and extravagant curving façades overlooking a clear blue sea.

But an array of weaponry has taken its toll, the gutted and wall-less buildings left like listing honeycombs. Mile follows mile of shattered city blocks and sun-bleached broken streets. In some areas multistorey buildings have crumpled to the ground; others are flecked with fist-sized bullet holes gouged out by high-calibre weapons. Barely a pane of glass or doorframe remains, just crumbling walls, rubble-filled rooms and staircases rising through broken roofs to nowhere.

Mad Max-style battlewagons known as technicals race along the roads — they are made by welding a high-calibre machinegun on to the flatbed of a pick-up truck or a 4×4 with the roof sawn off. A single bullet can rip a person in two. These DIY killing machines are ever present in the street battles between Somali gunmen.

From the city’s central business district of Bakara market, a forbidden zone where al-Shabaab holds sway, occasional mortars fall on the tiny part of the city under the nominal control of the Government and its 5,300 Amisom protectors.

On Tuesday afternoon the sounds of assault rifles, machineguns and mortar fire rang out for hours. On Thursday morning the barrages were just as heavy. Yesterday al-Shabaab fighters lobbed mortars until AU peacekeepers returned fire with tanks.

For the visitor it was unrelenting and frightening but it was nothing unusual to the people of Mogadishu, who have learnt to live with the imminence of death. “We can be talking like this, then a minute later a stray bullet or a mortar, and you are finished,” one resident said.

Despite the horror and destruction, a semblance of life goes on. Battered minibus taxis rattle down the streets; money transfer agencies funnel remittances to relatives; shops sell electronics from Dubai. Men in sarong-like cotton macawis, sandals and shirts drink sweet strong tea and smoke cigarettes on the dusty pavements. Some have guns but most do not. Veiled women walk by, their bright robes billowing in the sea breeze. Children wave eagerly from behind the corrugated iron doors of makeshift homes tucked into abandoned ground-floor shops.

At the seaport, thousands of stevedores earn a few dollars a day unloading goods brought in on wooden dhows from Yemen, India, or Saudi Arabia. Sacks of second-hand clothes, plastic jerry cans of vegetable oil and pallets of fizzy drinks pile up on the quayside. Control of the port means control of Mogadishu’s economy and it has been bitterly fought over by warring militias in the past, but for now it is firmly under Amisom control.

Even so, the twice-monthly peacekeeper supply ship invites a flurry of mortars launched at the port by al-Shabaab. When locals saw white foreigners there this week, they muttered that mortars would surely follow.

Yasin Osman, the deputy port manager, concedes that almost nothing is exported but the port is nevertheless a key earner for the cash-strapped Government, bringing in $11 million (£7 million) in taxes last year. “Government revenue only comes from here and the airport,” Mr Osman said.

Amisom also defends the airport, where a new departure terminal has just opened, complete with lounge, coffee bar and duty-free shop. Two airlines connect Mogadishu with Nairobi and Dubai and a handful of local and private flights also land daily.

Mahamoud Sheikh Ali, the director-general of the Civil Aviation Authority, says that in the next few weeks he will be getting an X-ray machine and a computerised passport control system donated by the International Organisation for Migration, an intergovernmental group. He proudly explains that insurgents have not mortared the airport in more than six months.

Even this apparent normality is a façade: arriving passengers complete an immigration form demanding their name and address as well as the type, serial number, trademark and calibre of their weapons.

Torn nation

. Somalia was formed in 1960 by amalgamating Italian Somaliland and British Somaliland. The democratic Government was overthrown by Major-General Mohamed Siad Barre in 1969. He aligned himself to the USSR but Moscow later withdrew its support

. In 1991 General Barre was forced to flee Mogadishu. An insurgent group in the former British Somaliland then proclaimed the Somaliland Republic and a power struggle began between forces loyal to Mohamed Ali Mahdi and those of Mohamed Farrah Aidid

. The UN sent peacekeepers and food aid in 1992 but became embroiled in the conflict when convoys came under attack. The US sent in Marines but they were forced to withdraw in March 1994 — but not before the notorious Black Hawk Down catastrophe of 1993

. UN peacekeepers abandoned the country in 1995. Somalia was controlled by warlords until 2006, when they were defeated by militias loyal to the Union of Islamic Courts

. Fighting between the militias and government forces backed by Ethiopia continues

Sources: Times archive; BBC