Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Urgent: Torture can be stopped with the stroke of a pen
Urgent: Torture can be stopped with the stroke of a pen
Amnesty International Canada 11/10/15 Keep this message at the top of your inbox Newsletters
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Torture: You can help us make it stop with the stroke of a pen
Together, we can end the de-humanizing act of torture.
Dear Joseph,
I’m writing to you because we face a unique moment to prevent torture with the simple stroke of the pen: the stroke of Canada’s pen on a vital global treaty, and the strokes of millions of pens braced to protect those who have been tortured while wrongfully in prison and must be released.
Please help us seize the moment:
1. Demand that the new Canadian government signs on to the global treaty allowing inspections of detention centres
Amnesty International believes that government commitment to this treaty is the single most important step we can make to help put an end to this needless, cruel, illegal act of torture.
If our collective voices can convince Canada’s new government to sign on to this global treaty, we’ll close a loophole that allows torture to go undetected, and Canada will regain its influence and credibility when it speaks out to prevent torture from happening elsewhere in the world.
>> Ask our new government to make this a priority.
2. Help us prevent the torture of Yecinia Armenta
Yecinia Armenta was tortured and raped by undercover policemen in Mexico. She was hung upside down by her ankles, suffocated and beaten.
“They said they would bring my two children, rape them and cut them up into pieces,” she told Amnesty. “After many hours of torture and after they’d raped me, I signed the confession. I was still blindfolded. I never even read what I had signed.” Her ordeal lasted 15 hours.
Join us in taking action for Yecinia and other victims of torture. In five weeks, on December 10th, we’ll be speaking out with a powerful, unified voice on International Human Rights Day to stop torture and release prisoners of conscience during Amnesty’s global event Write for Rights.
>> Sign up to Write for Rights
3. Your financial support can make the difference
Joseph, if you’ve taken a moment through the past year to follow our campaign to Stop Torture, or if you saw us mobilize 3.2 million actions in 138 countries last year on Human Rights Day, you’ll know how much good can come from your support to Amnesty.
>> PLEASE DONATE NOW
When we work together – our campaigning backed by your activism and financial support - we can get results. I can promise you this because I've seen the absolute human magic created when millions of us speak with one voice against injustice:
All charges were dropped against Claudia Medina Tamariz who had been tortured and forced into a false confession in Mexico; hers is a story eerily similar to Yecinia’s
Your support helped me visit a prison in Mexico with a team of Amnesty researchers and film Angel Colon who had been wrongfully detained – and tortured. Our presence there helped tell Angel's story, and this summer Angel made a trip to Canada to thank Amnesty supporters - as a free man. It brought tears to our eyes.
Young Moses Akatugba was released from prison in Nigeria after being sentenced to death and tortured as a 16-year old. He's now reaching out to Amnesty activists around the world to urge us to get involved in Write for Rights, to help others like him
Please help us seize this moment.
We’re so close to a breakthrough on the treaty to prevent torture in detention centres. And, with your help, we’re pulling out all the stops for Yecinia Armenta, and ending the torture that goes on behind closed doors where no one watching.
>> Please give your voice to stop torture in detention centres
>> Please give generously to help Amnesty International lead a loud and robust campaign to protect people from torture
Thank you for taking action at this important moment and helping us seize this crucial moment in our campaign to Stop Torture.
Alex Neve
Secretary General, Amnesty International Canada
P.S. You can see how we're organizing right now to defend Yecinia Armenta and other victims of torture during our International Human Rights Day event Write for Rights. Your support will make our voice more powerful.
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"Cities produce 70% of anthropogenic global carbon dioxide emissions."
If you are concerned about the effects of climate change or simply want to understand why the climate is changing, there are good reasons to pay close attention to cities, particularly large cities.
Cities produce 70 percent of anthropogenic global carbon dioxide emissions. The 50 largest cities together emit greenhouse gases equivalent to 2,600 megatons of carbon dioxide per year. That is more than some countries. For instance, Russia emits about 2,200 megatons and Japan about 1,400 megatons per year.
Meanwhile, many cities around the world are growing at astounding rates. Several in Asia boast population growth rates around 4 percent per year, with emissions growth of 10 percent per year. Demographers expect the number of megacities—urban areas with populations higher than 10 million—to increase by at least a dozen by 2025.
Recognizing their impact on climate, some megacities have taken aggressive steps to curtail emissions. By 2030, the GreenLA plan aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from Los Angeles by 35 percent (in comparison to 1990 levels). The Paris Climate Plan aims to reduce emissions by 25 percent by 2020 (in comparison to 2004 levels). Many other megacities have set or are in the process of setting similar goals as part of Climate 40, a plan to reduce urban greenhouse gas emissions.
However, for most of these megacities, tracking emissions remains a major challenge. Estimates of greenhouse emission are unavailable in many cases; in others, estimates are based on ground sensors that do not offer a complete portrait of a city’s emissions. So called “bottom-up” estimates of emissions regularly differ by as much as 50 percent in comparison to “top-down” observations from aircraft and satellites.
To address the lack of reliable emissions inventories, the Megacities Carbon Project will develop and test methods for monitoring city emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and carbon monoxide, with a particular emphasis on power plant emissions. Led by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists Riley Duren and Charles Miller, the team plans to deploy sensors that collect data from the ground, from airplanes, and from satellites. The effort will focus first on Los Angeles and Paris, then potentially expand into a city in South America or Asia.
“For robust verification of emission changes due to growth or stabilization policies, we need to establish measurement baselines and begin monitoring representative megacities immediately,” noted Duren and Miller in a commentary published in Nature Climate Change.
The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured these images of Los Angeles and Paris. The Los Angeles image is a mosaic based on data acquired on October 3 and October 11, 2015. The Paris image was captured on September 27, 2015. As part of the project, an instrument on Mount Wilson scans Los Angeles basin multiple times a day.
References
- Duren, R. M. & Miller, C.E. (2012, August) Measuring the carbon emissions of megacities. Nature Climate Change, 2, 560-562.
- NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Megacities Carbon Project. Accessed November 10, 2015.
- NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory NASA, Partners Target Megacities Carbon Emissions. Accessed November 10, 2015.
- Tollefson, J. (2012, December) Megacities move to track emissions. Nature, 492 (7427), 560-562.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Jesse Allen, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Caption by Adam Voiland.
- Instrument(s):
- Landsat 8 - OLI
Monday, November 16, 2015
Canada, an example for the world...Not!
Gentle readers:
If Canada as a country is an example to world, it is a bad example! A country so filthy and polluted and unimaginative, it has recently allowed one of it's provinces, Quebec, to dump 5 Billion Litres of raw sewage into the once magnificent St. Lawrence river!
For Ten long years, the Conservative and money oriented Federal government of Canada, has catered exclusively to industrial economic expansion without a thought or a care for the Natural environment.
For one sad example, the ' Tar Sands ' a prime minister Stephen Harper protected project in Alberta, continues to be a pollution filled eye-sore from outer space. If we begin tomorrow the Tar Sands will take over a century to clean up and restore to pristine wilderness, however, and less understood is the constant expansion of Condominium buildings across Canada.
These Bee-Hive style buildings are popping up in every Canadian city and the new inhabitans occupying these buildings will create a desperate need for sewage removal infrastructure. Infrastructure most cities like Montreal, cannot afford and often allow to deteriorate before doing emergency repair work. It's been Thirty Years from the time we thought of balancing the economy with the environment and nothing was done to mitigate the pollution! The natural environment took a back seat to big business. Instead of creating national sewage cleaning facilities using new sewage pipes leading to brand new sewage treatment plants, the federal government under Stephen Harper, backed by private international financiers, focused on extracting as much Oil as they could from the Tar Sands to sell to Asia and China and they attempted to create cross-country pipelines to pump the bitumen to shipping harbours using money gleaned from Canadian Tax revenue! This became headline news and a social problem as both Canadians and Americans began to realize they were being duped. To mitigate their pollution tracks based on Oil, companies began Green-washing their products. Every product sold in print and on television become ecologically friendly while the truth and the facts behind the truth were hidden from public view and often forcefully suppressed.
Greenwashing is not over, but now we are going to name names. Beginning in Canada and the United States, we are going around the world to spotlight the individuals and their companies behind the pollution. Polluting companies are going to be exposed for the dangers they create to human health and for the destruction they cause to the natural environment. They will have a chance to save themselves from humiliation, however, by creating projects and products that help nature and do not cause pollution. We will again be offering imaginative and creative as well as practical solutions to pollution but this time we expect honest changes and if not, the spotlight will shine constantly on the losers who refuse to change!
Fossil fuels are finally close to depletion but their legacy continues in the form of gas burning vehicles. That is changing quickly as Electric vehicles enter the marketplace. The faster the better!
In Canada, the companies and individuals involved in creating pollution will see their products boycotted. Their Puppet members of parliament will be hounded and exposed. We Canadians have had it with polluters and with their economic greed. We demand a better lifestyle based on a clean and healthy and Natural Environment.
If Canada as a country is an example to world, it is a bad example! A country so filthy and polluted and unimaginative, it has recently allowed one of it's provinces, Quebec, to dump 5 Billion Litres of raw sewage into the once magnificent St. Lawrence river!
For Ten long years, the Conservative and money oriented Federal government of Canada, has catered exclusively to industrial economic expansion without a thought or a care for the Natural environment.
For one sad example, the ' Tar Sands ' a prime minister Stephen Harper protected project in Alberta, continues to be a pollution filled eye-sore from outer space. If we begin tomorrow the Tar Sands will take over a century to clean up and restore to pristine wilderness, however, and less understood is the constant expansion of Condominium buildings across Canada.
These Bee-Hive style buildings are popping up in every Canadian city and the new inhabitans occupying these buildings will create a desperate need for sewage removal infrastructure. Infrastructure most cities like Montreal, cannot afford and often allow to deteriorate before doing emergency repair work. It's been Thirty Years from the time we thought of balancing the economy with the environment and nothing was done to mitigate the pollution! The natural environment took a back seat to big business. Instead of creating national sewage cleaning facilities using new sewage pipes leading to brand new sewage treatment plants, the federal government under Stephen Harper, backed by private international financiers, focused on extracting as much Oil as they could from the Tar Sands to sell to Asia and China and they attempted to create cross-country pipelines to pump the bitumen to shipping harbours using money gleaned from Canadian Tax revenue! This became headline news and a social problem as both Canadians and Americans began to realize they were being duped. To mitigate their pollution tracks based on Oil, companies began Green-washing their products. Every product sold in print and on television become ecologically friendly while the truth and the facts behind the truth were hidden from public view and often forcefully suppressed.
Greenwashing is not over, but now we are going to name names. Beginning in Canada and the United States, we are going around the world to spotlight the individuals and their companies behind the pollution. Polluting companies are going to be exposed for the dangers they create to human health and for the destruction they cause to the natural environment. They will have a chance to save themselves from humiliation, however, by creating projects and products that help nature and do not cause pollution. We will again be offering imaginative and creative as well as practical solutions to pollution but this time we expect honest changes and if not, the spotlight will shine constantly on the losers who refuse to change!
Fossil fuels are finally close to depletion but their legacy continues in the form of gas burning vehicles. That is changing quickly as Electric vehicles enter the marketplace. The faster the better!
In Canada, the companies and individuals involved in creating pollution will see their products boycotted. Their Puppet members of parliament will be hounded and exposed. We Canadians have had it with polluters and with their economic greed. We demand a better lifestyle based on a clean and healthy and Natural Environment.
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Sunday, November 8, 2015
How to stop Oil pollution... by president Obama..
Canada's new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, would be wise to listen to U.S. president Obama. I also have a positive suggestion for Canada's new government. Take the time to study global warming and the effect it is having on our world glaciers and on the Arctic and Antarctic ice fields, and then act to help stop the melting.
 THE WHITE HOUSE |
You should read the President's full Keystone XL remarks:
This morning, speaking from the Roosevelt Room, the President announced that the State Department determined that the Keystone XL Pipeline would not serve the national interest of the United States.
For years, this topic has occupied a huge portion of our country's climate discourse. And after explaining why this pipeline "would not serve the national interest of the United States," the President called attention to the broader climate challenges facing America and the global community heading into international climate negotiations in Paris this December:
"…we’ve got to come together around an ambitious framework to protect the one planet that we’ve got while we still can. If we want to prevent the worst effects of climate change before it’s too late, the time to act is now. Not later. Not someday. Right here, right now."
Here's the full text of his remarks -- they're worth a read.
THE PRESIDENT: Good morning, everybody. Several years ago, the State Department began a review process for the proposed construction of a pipeline that would carry Canadian crude oil through our heartland to ports in the Gulf of Mexico and out into the world market.
This morning, Secretary Kerry informed me that, after extensive public outreach and consultation with other Cabinet agencies, the State Department has decided that the Keystone XL Pipeline would not serve the national interest of the United States. I agree with that decision.
This morning, I also had the opportunity to speak with Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada. And while he expressed his disappointment, given Canada’s position on this issue, we both agreed that our close friendship on a whole range of issues, including energy and climate change, should provide the basis for even closer coordination between our countries going forward. And in the coming weeks, senior members of my team will be engaging with theirs in order to help deepen that cooperation.
Now, for years, the Keystone Pipeline has occupied what I, frankly, consider an overinflated role in our political discourse. It became a symbol too often used as a campaign cudgel by both parties rather than a serious policy matter. And all of this obscured the fact that this pipeline would neither be a silver bullet for the economy, as was promised by some, nor the express lane to climate disaster proclaimed by others.
To illustrate this, let me briefly comment on some of the reasons why the State Department rejected this pipeline.
First: The pipeline would not make a meaningful long-term contribution to our economy. So if Congress is serious about wanting to create jobs, this was not the way to do it. If they want to do it, what we should be doing is passing a bipartisan infrastructure plan that, in the short term, could create more than 30 times as many jobs per year as the pipeline would, and in the long run would benefit our economy and our workers for decades to come.
Our businesses created 268,000 new jobs last month. They’ve created 13.5 million new jobs over the past 68 straight months -- the longest streak on record. The unemployment rate fell to 5 percent. This Congress should pass a serious infrastructure plan, and keep those jobs coming. That would make a difference. The pipeline would not have made a serious impact on those numbers and on the American people’s prospects for the future.
Second: The pipeline would not lower gas prices for American consumers. In fact, gas prices have already been falling -- steadily. The national average gas price is down about 77 cents over a year ago. It’s down a dollar over two years ago. It’s down $1.27 over three years ago. Today, in 41 states, drivers can find at least one gas station selling gas for less than two bucks a gallon. So while our politics have been consumed by a debate over whether or not this pipeline would create jobs and lower gas prices, we’ve gone ahead and created jobs and lowered gas prices.
Third: Shipping dirtier crude oil into our country would not increase America’s energy security. What has increased America’s energy security is our strategy over the past several years to reduce our reliance on dirty fossil fuels from unstable parts of the world. Three years ago, I set a goal to cut our oil imports in half by 2020. Between producing more oil here at home, and using less oil throughout our economy, we met that goal last year -- five years early. In fact, for the first time in two decades, the United States of America now produces more oil than we buy from other countries.
Now, the truth is, the United States will continue to rely on oil and gas as we transition -- as we must transition -- to a clean energy economy. That transition will take some time. But it’s also going more quickly than many anticipated. Think about it. Since I took office, we’ve doubled the distance our cars will go on a gallon of gas by 2025; tripled the power we generate from the wind; multiplied the power we generate from the sun 20 times over. Our biggest and most successful businesses are going all-in on clean energy. And thanks in part to the investments we’ve made, there are already parts of America where clean power from the wind or the sun is finally cheaper than dirtier, conventional power.
The point is the old rules said we couldn’t promote economic growth and protect our environment at the same time. The old rules said we couldn’t transition to clean energy without squeezing businesses and consumers. But this is America, and we have come up with new ways and new technologies to break down the old rules, so that today, homegrown American energy is booming, energy prices are falling, and over the past decade, even as our economy has continued to grow, America has cut our total carbon pollution more than any other country on Earth.
Today, the United States of America is leading on climate change with our investments in clean energy and energy efficiency. America is leading on climate change with new rules on power plants that will protect our air so that our kids can breathe. America is leading on climate change by working with other big emitters like China to encourage and announce new commitments to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions. In part because of that American leadership, more than 150 nations representing nearly 90 percent of global emissions have put forward plans to cut pollution.
America is now a global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change. And frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership. And that’s the biggest risk we face -- not acting.
Today, we’re continuing to lead by example. Because ultimately, if we’re going to prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we’re going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution into the sky.
As long as I’m President of the United States, America is going to hold ourselves to the same high standards to which we hold the rest of the world. And three weeks from now, I look forward to joining my fellow world leaders in Paris, where we’ve got to come together around an ambitious framework to protect the one planet that we’ve got while we still can.
If we want to prevent the worst effects of climate change before it’s too late, the time to act is now. Not later. Not someday. Right here, right now. And I’m optimistic about what we can accomplish together. I’m optimistic because our own country proves, every day -- one step at a time -- that not only do we have the power to combat this threat, we can do it while creating new jobs, while growing our economy, while saving money, while helping consumers, and most of all, leaving our kids a cleaner, safer planet at the same time.
That’s what our own ingenuity and action can do. That's what we can accomplish. And America is prepared to show the rest of the world the way forward.
Thank you very much.
-- President Barack Obama
Watch the President deliver his statement here.
Learn more about the President's Climate Action Plan here. Follow @FactsOnClimate to get the facts on how the President is combating climate change in the United States and mobilizing the world to take action. |
Gene editing, a promising cure for leukaemia.
5 November 2015
Gene editing saves girl dying from leukaemia in world first
For the first time ever, a person’s life has been saved by gene editing.
One-year-old Layla was dying from leukaemia after all conventional treatments failed. “We didn’t want to give up on our daughter, though, so we asked the doctors to try anything,” her mother Lisa said in a statement released by Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, where Layla (pictured above) was treated.
And they did. Layla’s doctors got permission to use an experimental form of gene therapy using genetically engineered immune cells from a donor. Within a month these cells had killed off all the cancerous cells in her bone marrow.
It is too soon to say she is cured, the team stressed at a press conference in London on 5 November. That will only become clear after a year or two. So far, though, she is doing well and there is no sign of the cancer returning. Other patients are already receiving the same treatment.
Experimental therapy
Layla was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia when she was just three months old, a disease in which cancerous stem cells in the bone marrow release vast numbers of immature immune cells into the blood. She was immediately taken to Great Ormond Street to start the standard treatment of chemotherapy followed by a bone marrow transplant to restore the immune system.
In older children, this treatment is usually successful, says Sujith Samarasinghe, a leukaemia specialist at the hospital and one of Layla’s doctors. But for children as young as Layla, the cure rates are only 25 per cent.
Layla was one of the unlucky ones. Cancerous cells were still detectable after the chemotherapy. Despite this, it was decided to go ahead with a bone marrow transplant. “We hoped for a graft-versus-leukaemia reaction,” says Paul Veys, head of bone marrow transplants at the hospital. This is where immune cells in the donor bone marrow attack the cancer – but this failed too.
Within two months, Layla had relapsed. “At this stage, it is usually hopeless,” says Veys. Her parents Ashleigh and Lisa were told nothing more could be done. But they insisted the doctors did not give up. So the team emailed Waseem Qasim of University College London, who is developing a form of gene therapy to treat cancer.
Cell attack
The basic idea is to remove immune cells from a patient’s body, genetically engineer them to attack cancerous cells and place them back in the body. Several human trials are already underway around world. Some trials involve adding a gene for a receptor called CAR19, which sits on the outside of the T-cells. This programs the T-cells to seek out and kill any cells with a protein called CD19 on their surface – which is found on the cells that cause acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.
But engineering bespoke T-cells for every cancer patient is not cheap. And in Layla’s case, it would not have worked because she didn’t have enough T-cells left to modify. “She was too small and too sick,” says Qasim.
Qasim’s team, however, has been developing “off-the-shelf” treatments, in which T-cells from a healthy donor are modified so they could potentially be given to hundreds of patients. Normally if T-cells from another person were injected into a recipient who was not a perfect match, they would recognise all of the recipient’s cells as foreign and attack them. To prevent this, Qasim’s team used gene editing to disable a gene in the donor cells that makes a receptor that recognises other cells as foreign.
Molecular scissors
Conventional gene therapy can only be used to add genes to DNA. But with gene editing, specific DNA sequences can be cut with “molecular scissors”, introducing mutations that disable a particular gene. Qasim’s molecular scissors were of a kind known as TALEN proteins.
But there was still another problem to overcome. The recipient’s immune system also recognises non-matched T-cells as foreign and will attack them. In leukaemia patients, this is not a problem because they are given drugs that destroy their immune system. Except, one of these drugs – an antibody – also destroys donor T-cells. So Qasim’s team also disabled a second gene in the donor T-cells, which made them invisible to the antibody.
At the time that Qasim was contacted by Layla’s doctors, his engineered T-cells, called UCART19 cells and developed in collaboration with New York biotech company Cellectis, had only ever been tested in mice. “It was scary to think the treatment had never been used in a human before,” said Layla’s father Ashleigh, “but there was no doubt we wanted to try the treatment. She was sick and in lots of pain, so we had to do something.” And it worked within weeks.
This is only the second time that gene-edited cells have been used in people. The first ever trial involved modifying T-cells in people with HIV to make them more resistant to the virus, although these participants were not in immediate danger of dying.
Chop and change
The molecular scissors used to disable genes do sometimes make cuts in the wrong place, which carries a small risk of causing adverse effects such as turning cells cancerous.
But after three months, Layla was given a second bone marrow transplant to restore her immune system. These healthy immune cells recognised the UCART19 cells as foreign and destroyed them, so Layla no longer has any genetically modified cells in her body.
Layla will continue to have regular tests until her doctors are sure the cancer is gone. “It is too early to say she is cured,” says Samarasinghe, but she is alive and well.
Cellectis plans to start full clinical trials early in 2016. Qasim says other patients in the UK are already being treated with these cells, although he would not reveal any details. The team will present the case study at the American Society of Hematology meeting in Florida in December.
We will have to wait for the results of those trials to be sure this was not a one-off, but if they are successful, it would be a huge step forward for treating leukaemia and other cancers, Qasim says. “It’s incredibly encouraging,” he says. “There are a whole bunch of other disorders we can now create fixes for.”
Image credits: Top image: Sharon Lees/GOSH; Second image: GOSH
Thursday, November 5, 2015
A message from wonderful Michelle Obama, first lady of the world.
| THE WHITE HOUSE |
Join me on this journey:
This week, I will be traveling to Qatar and Jordan -- countries located in a part of the world known as the “Middle East” (if you look on a map, it’s just to the east of Africa) -- and I want young people like you all across America to join me on this journey!
On this trip, just like on previous international trips, I’ll be focusing on global girls’ education, an issue I care deeply about as a First Lady, a mother of two daughters, and a woman whose life was transformed by my education. You see, neither of my parents went to college, and they didn’t have much money. But they pushed me to work as hard as I could in school, and thanks to a lot of financial aid, I was able to go to college and law school and have all kinds of exciting jobs and opportunities.
Unfortunately, so many girls around the world never have the opportunities I had to get an education and fulfill their dreams. In fact, right now, 62 million girls across the globe aren’t going to school at all.
Many of them simply can’t afford it because, unlike here in the U.S., in some countries, parents actually have to pay for their kids to attend school. Sometimes the nearest school is miles away, and parents are afraid their daughters will be hurt or kidnapped while walking to or from school. Some schools don’t have adequate bathrooms for girls, so they have to stay home when they have their periods, and they may fall behind and even wind up dropping out.
Imagine what it would be like for you if you had to stop your own education.
Imagine being told, at the age of 12 or 13, “That’s it, you’re done with school. You’ve gotten all the education you’re ever going to get -- you won’t do any more science projects, or read any more books for English class, or have any more music, or art, or sports, or time with your friends in the lunchroom. And any dreams you have for what you want to be when you grow up -- a teacher, an astronaut, a nurse, a writer -- you have to give them up because you’ll never get the knowledge and skills you need to do those jobs.”
Pretty awful, right? And I don’t think any young person should ever have to give up their dreams like this. I think every child on this planet -- boys and girls -- should be able to get an education.
That’s why, last spring, President Obama and I launched Let Girls Learn, a new initiative to help adolescent girls across the globe go to school. Through Let Girls Learn, we’ll be helping communities around the world create girls’ leadership and mentorship projects, build school bathrooms for girls (because sometimes, schools don’t have adequate bathroom facilities for girls, which is one of the reasons why they can’t attend school), and more. We’ll also be funding girls’ education programs in countries that are torn apart by war or violence, and we’ll be working to address issues like poverty that make it hard for girls to get an education (because their families can’t afford to send them to school).
And this week, I’m heading to Qatar to speak at a global education conference attended by people from 120 countries around the world. I’ll be urging other countries to invest more in girls’ education and to challenge cultural beliefs and practices that make people think girls are less worthy of an education than boys.
In Jordan, I’ll be visiting a school and speaking to several hundred middle school-aged girls. Like the U.S., Jordan is committed to educating every child in their country -- both boys and girls, including many children whose families have fled from Syria, a neighboring country that’s in the midst of a horrific civil war (millions of Syrians have had to leave their country because of the violence). Many of the girls at the school I’m visiting are Syrian refugees, and even though they’ve faced all kinds of challenges and hardships in their lives, they’re working hard in school and making their families proud. I’m excited to meet these girls -- and I’m excited to share their stories with all of you.
I’ll also be visiting a military base in Qatar to spend time with some of our extraordinary men and women in uniform and tell them how thankful I am for their service. And I’ll be visiting an amazing historical and archeological site in Jordan called Petra -- a beautifully preserved city that’s thousands of years old!
I want to share this journey with you, because I think it’s important for young people like you to be global citizens -- to connect with other young people around the world and learn about their lives. I also want you to be inspired and motivated by the girls I meet and to realize that if they can succeed in school even in the face of so many challenges, so can you.
That’s why I’ll be using social media to share my trip with you. I hope you’ll join me! Here’s how:
So stay tuned.
-- Michelle Obama
|
The White House • 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW • Washington, DC 20500 • 202-456-1111
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