This is one big puppy.

A 17-month-old, 173-pound pit bull is making headlines today for being just that: A 17-month-old 173-pound pit bull.

A video of the dog was uploaded to YouTube by canine breeders Dark Dynasty K9s, who specialize in large pit bulls.

They hope the viral success of the video will soften people’s views of the oft-misunderstood breed.

“They wanna use hulk all over the UK to promote positive message for the pit bull in all the largest newspapers!” Dark Dynasty K9s wrote on Facebook. “Anyone knows the U.K. has a very backwards look at these dogs so changing things like THIS is what it’s all about! Can’t express the joy this brings me! They wanted to use this video which couldn’t explain it all better! “

The dog, nicknamed “The Hulk,” is being called the world’s biggest pit bull.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-buzz/meet-the-hulk-a-173-pound-pit-bull-175229895.html

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2945927/Hulk-bulk-Possibly-world-s-biggest-pitbull-174lbs.html#ixzz3RHIcOsrR

Radical Farmers Use Fresh Food to Fight Racial Injustice and the New Jim Crow
If we are to create a society that values black life, we cannot ignore the role of food and land.


Bus used to drive families and food to prisons


In August, five young men showed up at Soul Fire Farm, a sustainable farm near Albany, New York, where I work as educator and food justice coordinator. It was the first day of a new restorative justice program, in partnership with the county’s Department of Law. The teens had been convicted of theft, and, as an alternative to incarceration, chose this opportunity to earn money to pay back their victims while gaining farm skills. They looked wary and unprepared, with gleaming sneakers and averted eyes.

“I basically expected it to be like slavery, but it would be better than jail,” said a young man named Asan. “It was different though. We got paid and we got to bring food home. The farmers there are black like us, which I did not expect.

“I could see myself having my own farm one day,” he added.


As staff at Soul Fire, we were attempting to meet a challenge presented to us by Curtis Hayes Muhammad, the veteran civil rights activist: “Recognize that land and food have been used as a weapon to keep black people oppressed,” he said, while sitting at our dinner table months earlier. “Recognize also that land and food are essential to liberation for black people.”

Muhammad explained the central role that black farmers had played during the civil rights movement, coordinating campaigns for desegregation and voting rights as well as providing food, housing, and safe haven for other organizers. With his resolute and care-worn eyes, immense white Afro, and hands creased with the wisdom of years, this was a man who inspired us to listen attentively so that we might stand on the shoulders of activists who had gone before.
http://www.alternet.org/food/radical-farmers-use-fresh-food-fight-racial-injustice-and-new-jim-crow

Now doubts arise over Brian Williams' story about being mugged at gunpoint in his quiet childhood suburb where kids 'walked alone at night'
Locals in Red Bank, New Jersey, are questioning the credibility of claims by Brian Williams that he was threatened at gun point in the 1970s
According to a regularly repeated Williams tale, he was selling Christmas trees as a young man when someone 'stuck a .38-caliber pistol in my face'
Residents say the claims sound unlikely as Red Bank is a quiet suburb which was very safe in the 1970s
'I find it hard to believe anyone was held up in this area in the '70s. It was very safe,' said one local


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2944887/Residents-Brian-Williams-hometown-rubbish-claims-mugged-gunpoint-quiet-New-Jersey-suburb-kids-walked-night.html#ixzz3RCnxU0d4

A $200,000 playroom for your little princess: Inside the Frozen-inspired 'imagination suites' for the children of multi-millionaires
Parents prepared to splash out in order to pamper their little girls and keep up with the latest princess fashions
Designers are able to charge tens of thousands of dollars for their creative designs
Many stores are offering cheaper options for mass market appeal as the next Disney princess movie is released


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2944446/The-200-000-playrooms-world-s-wealthy-building-little-princesses-Inside-Frozen-inspired-imagination-suites-designed-children-world-s-multi-millionaires-cost-home.html#ixzz3RBLw2e4Z

Life in the Sickest Town in America
I drove from one of the healthiest counties in the country to the least-healthy, both in the same state. Here’s what I learned about work, well-being, and happiness.


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Just about everyone I spoke with at the Grundy clinic was a former manual worker, or married to one, and most had a story of a bone-crushing accident that had left them (or their spouse) out of work forever. For Rose, who came from the nearby town of Council, that day came in 1996, when he was pinned between two pillars in his job at a sawmill. He suffered through work until 2001, he told me, when he finally started collecting “his check,” as it’s often called. He had to go to a doctor to prove that he was truly hurting—he has deteriorating discs, he says, and chronic back pain. He was turned down twice, he thinks because he was just 30 years old at the time. Now the government sends him a monthly check for $956.

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But visiting a place like Grundy reveals a more complicated picture. There are undoubtedly some who exaggerate their ailments in order to collect their checks. But many of the coal workers here have experienced horrific on-the-job accidents and can’t go back to the mines. Other residents have been battered by diabetes, obesity, and tobacco. Others still suffer from severe depression and intellectual disabilities that would preclude most kinds of work. And most importantly, there are no other options here: no orthodontist’s office where someone can work the front desk; no big firms brimming with entry-level secretarial jobs. It’s not even clear how a person would go about calling around for a job here: My iPhone stopped working a few miles outside the county line.

Few white-collar people understand the degree to which manual labor chews up workers’ bodies. And in Grundy, there’s nowhere for them to go afterward.

“Here you have a Pandora's box of every social issue that might contribute to disability,” said Martin Wegbreit, the director of litigation at the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society. Before coming to Richmond in 2004, Wegbreit worked in southwest Virginia for nearly 20 years.

“These are jobs that even if they don't injure people, they wear people down,” he told me. “It's hard on the back, it's hard on the knees, it's hard on the entire body.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/01/life-in-the-sickest-town-in-america/384718/


Waiting for free health care from remote area medical

It’s an unfortunate reality: Mississippi regularly ranks last in a lot of things—lowest education rate, highest poverty rate, and a lack of LGBT equality.

Yet, the state is coming up a winner in one unlikely category: It is completely measles free, despite a national surge that has infected more than 100 people in 14 states this year.

At least in part, that’s thanks to the fact that Mississippi has the highest vaccination rate for school-age children in the country. Kids in Mississippi may have a better chance of avoiding diseases such as the measles because it’s one of only two states—along with West Virginia—that doesn’t allow parents to refuse vaccinations because of personal philosophies or religious beliefs. In Mississippi, children can’t enroll in school until their immunizations are up-to-date.

In the 2013–2014 school year, 99.7 percent of Mississippi kids entering kindergarten were vaccinated, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s a few points higher than the national median vaccination rate of 94.7 percent.
http://news.yahoo.com/poorest-state-america-ranks-1-comes-vaccines-010216593.html

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New Zealand train station erects questionably shaped sculpture
A train station near the city of Auckland put up an aluminum sculpture called 'Transit Cloud,' although not many locals see much of a cloud in the shape. The artist said that the reaction has been a 'little but upsetting,' but added that art 'is there to provoke the reaction.'
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/new-zealand-rail-station-erects-phallic-shaped-sculpture-article-1.2106771

SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE, Mexico -- Mexico is offering undocumented foreigners including Americans amnesty if they come forward and apply for legal status.

"I have heard there are people here who don't have the proper documents. We have illegal aliens here also," said Arlene Van Note, a resident in San Miguel de Allende.

"I'm a permanente. I live here all the time," said Van Note who is retired.

She has her documents in order but other Americans do not.

They're not climbing over the walls either. They're driving in. They come in on trains and planes and buses.

Many enter on tourist visas and stay after the document expires.

The issue of undocumented Americans living in Mexico is an open secret in places like San Miguel de Allende, a colonial city that is popular with tourists.

"Yeah, there are some people that I believe are here that are probably undocumented and working," said Christine Johnson, a legal permanent resident in San Miguel de Allende.

Undocumented Mexicans caught crossing the border into the U.S. are "sent back quickly," said Francisco Sanchez, a San Miguel native who earns a living shining shoes in the town square.

Rather than face deportation Americans and other foreigners who don't have documents are getting a chance to legalize their status under a temporary program.
http://www.kvue.com/story/news/state/2015/02/04/mexican-government-offering-amnesty-to-american-immigrants/22907519/

Turkey saves cats from extinction
The world-famous Van cats, snow-white, with odd colored eyes and found in Turkey’s eastern province of Van, have been saved from the threat of extinction. Their number, both in Van and other Turkish regions, is now near a thousand. The Van Cats Research Center, established by Van’s Yuzuncu Yil University in 1992, has played a key role in saving the species from extinction. The number of purebred Van cats at the center has increased from 30 in 1992 to 144 in 2014. In the 23 years since its creation, the center has also given away hundreds of cats to animal lovers in Van on the condition that the felines remain under the center’s scrutiny. The cats have been issued ID cards and the university has banned them from being sold or given away as presents. Taking the cats abroad is also prohibited.
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Distinguished for their white silky coat and mismatched eye color — usually one amber, one blue — and their swimming talent, the Van cats were declared a “national species” in a communique published in Turkey’s Official Gazette in 2006. The same year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources included the Van cat into its report on endangered species, listing it among 16,111 species across the world faced with the threat of extinction due to human abuses. The report contributed greatly to accelerating the project to save the cats, which have lived with the peoples of Anatolia for millennia.



Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/02/turkey-van-cats-extinction.html##ixzz3R20cCsYC