Beyonce,John Legend, & Others Meet President Obama!

Oh,the memories that they are going to have just from being able to attend this historic event.And to top it all off,they all got to meet & chat with the first black president of the U.S. President Barack Obama!I know Beyonce was especially thrilled to have President Obama acknowledge that he knows the lyrics to one of her songs.How cool is that! Damn,I wish I wasn't so broke because I would have jumped through hoops to be there!

Were The "Slumdog Millionaire" Children Exploited?!

How ironic that a movie that sheds light on how the children of the Mumbai slums are mistreated is alleged to be guilty of exploiting those very same kids. The child actors in the smash hit "Slumdog Millionaire" have allegedly received a pittance while the movie has made millions.Here's more from the Telegraph:

"Their roles in Slumdog Millionaire have won them international acclaim and seen them rub shoulders with the film’s glamorous stars and its British director.But the reality of life for Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail is far closer to that of the characters they play in the story of love, violent crime and extreme poverty in India.

The child actors’ parents have accused the hit film’s producers of exploiting and underpaying the eight-year-olds, disclosing that both face uncertain futures in one of Mumbai’s most squalid slums.

Slumdog Millionaire has won four Golden Globes and is nominated for 10 Oscars. It is on its way to making hundreds of millions of pounds in box office receipts.

The film’s British director, Danny Boyle, has spoken of how he set up trust funds for Rubina and Azharuddin and paid for their education. But it has emerged that the children, who played Latika and Salim in the early scenes of the film, were paid less than many Indian domestic servants.

Rubina was paid £500 for a year’s work while Azharuddin received £1,700, according to the children's parents.

However a spokesman for the film’s American distributors, Fox Searchlight, disputed this saying the fees were more than three times the average annual salary an adult in their neighbourhood would receive. They would not disclose the actual sum.

Both children were found places in a local school and receive £20 a month for books and food. However, they continue to live in grinding poverty and their families say they have received no details of the trust funds set up in their names. Their parents said that they had hoped the film would be their ticket out of the slums, and that its success had made them realise how little their children had been paid.

The children received considerably less than the poor Afghan child stars of The Kite Runner, who embarrassed their Hollywood producers when they disclosed that they had been paid £9,000.

Rubina and Azharuddin live a few hundreds yards from each other in a tangle of makeshift shacks alongside Mumbai’s railway tracks at Bandra. Azharuddin is in fact worse off than he was during filming: his family’s illegal hut was demolished by the local authorities and he now sleeps under a sheet of plastic tarpaulin with his father, who suffers from tuberculosis.

“There is none of the money left. It was all spent on medicines to help me fight TB,” Azharuddin’s father, Mohammed Ismail, said. “We feel that the kids have been left behind by the film. They have told us there is a trust fund but we know nothing about it and have no guarantees.”(END OF EXCERPT)Read the rest here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/4347472/Poor-parents-of-Slumdog-millionaire-stars-say-children-were-exploited.html

This is just absolutely despicable.And it's greed over need.

Yes,Climate Change Is Really An Issue!

I'm not on that side of the debate that claims global warming isn't happening.Sean Hannity claims that there are "scientists saying that we are facing an ice age"!Whether you want to call it global warming or an ice age,I think it should be clear to everyone that we are undergoing a serious climate change.We all need to be as diligent as we can in making sure we are not contributing to the eradication of the whole planet.Because some of the damage that we humans have already done is irreversible according to this BBC report:

"A team of environmental researchers in the US has warned many effects of climate change are irreversible.

The scientists concluded global temperatures could remain high for 1,000 years, even if carbon emissions can somehow be halted.

Their report was sponsored by the US Department of Energy and comes as President Obama announces a review of vehicle emission standards.

It appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The scientists have been researching global warming and the consequences for policymakers.

The team warned that, if carbon levels in the atmosphere continued to rise, there would be less rainfall in already dry areas of southern Europe, North America, parts of Africa and Australia.

The scientists say the oceans are currently slowing down global warming by absorbing heat, but they will eventually release that heat back into the air.

They say politicians must now offset environmental damage already done by man-made pollution.

"People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide the climate would go back to normal in 100 years, 200 year - that's not true," said researcher Susan Solomon, the lead author of the report, quoted by AP news agency.

Their conclusions come as President Obama ordered the US Environmental Protection Agency to review rules on carbon emissions from passenger vehicles."(Article taken from the following site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7852628.stm

Follow the above link for more graphs & info on climate change.