This article is from the BBC News website. ? British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/sport1/hi/football/13770519.stm
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Patients had been degraded and humiliated, according to a commissioner's report Targeted spot checks of hospitals in Wales to ensure dignity of care for older people are being introduced.
It follows a report by the older people's commissioner for Wales, Ruth Marks, which said some care was "shamefully inadequate".
Recommendations included improving communication and patient privacy.
The report in April, Dignified Care, examined whether older people in NHS hospitals in Wales received care in a dignified and respectful way.
It found that some patients had been degraded and humiliated by their experiences, prompting Ms Marks to call for "fundamental change".
The report said a "lack of timely response to continence needs" and the sharing of patients' personal information within earshot of others were both widely reported.
Lesley Griffiths Health Minister“It is never acceptable for older people to feel ignored or ill-treated while in hospital - I am committed to ensuring that they feel respected and are treated with dignity”
The following day, public services ombudsman Peter Tyndall revealed that health-related complaints had increased by almost 70% over the past five years.
The commissioner's report made a series of recommendations, including improvements in communication and discharge times, and increased privacy for patients.
The then Health Minister, Edwina Hart, said the recommendations would be considered as part of a drive to improve patient care, but claimed the vast majority of people were satisfied with the way they were treated.
Her successor Lesley Griffiths said the Welsh Government would ask the NHS watchdog to introduce spot checks to ensure that dignity of care for older patients was a top priority for health boards.
She said NHS staff should be allowed to spend more time with older patients to give them the respect and help they deserved.
But she added that the government would take a "zero tolerance" approach to hospitals falling short on the issue.
"It is never acceptable for older people to feel ignored or ill-treated while in hospital," Ms Griffiths said.
"I am committed to ensuring that they feel respected and are treated with dignity."
She added: "To ensure compliance with recently revised standards, I am asking Healthcare Inspectorate Wales to carry out unannounced spot checks on standards of dignity in care for older people in our hospitals."
Other measures being introduced include a national customer care programme to improve communication with patients and their families, and a dementia care awareness programme for all health workers in Wales.
The minister said improvements were already under way, including more single-sex wards and freedom for charge nurses and sisters to manage their wards.
This article is from the BBC News website. ? British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/uk-wales-13754722
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June 13, 2011
MEXICO CITY (AP) ? "Narco Polo" is the new fashion trend sweeping lower?class neighborhoods in Mexico, inspired by seven high?ranking drug traffickers who were arrested over a three?month stretch wearing open?neck, short?sleeved jerseys with the familiar horseman?with?a?stick emblem.
The polo shirts are becoming ubiquitous in street vendors' stalls from the drug?war?ravaged state of Tamaulipas to the cradle of Mexican drug trafficking, Sinaloa.
Demand is so high that a Mexico City street vendor named Felipe stocks several colors, and names them after the drug lord who was wearing that color at the time of his arrest.
"This is the 'J.J'," he says, pointing to a blue one, "and this is 'La Barbie,'" indicating a green number. That was a reference to Jose Jorge ("J.J.") Balderas, who allegedly dealt drugs and shot soccer star Salvador Cabanas in the head, and to U.S.?born Edgar Valdez Villarreal, "La Barbie."
Despite their Ralph Lauren labels, the shirts on sale on Mexico City streets for 160 pesos ($13.50) are clearly pirated goods, sold by unlicensed vendors like Felipe who don't want their full names used for fear of attracting police attention.
But some of Felipe's customers have their first names embroidered on the back of the shirts, a service he offers for an extra fee, as a sort of dare.
It's probably not the demographic that designers at Ralph Lauren were thinking of for their polo shirts. The company did not respond to several requests for comment about the shirts' popularity in Mexican criminal circles.
The shirt La Barbie wore when captured appeared to be the only potentially authentic one of the bunch. The rest of the drug traffickers appeared to be wearing cheap knockoffs of the $98 to $145 Ralph Lauren "Big Pony" jerseys.
The shirt is becoming so pervasive that it provoked public grumbling from Sinaloa Gov. Mario Lopez Valdez.
"Now you see how these shirts like La Barbie's have become the fashion," said Lopez Valdez. While he didn't suggest an outright ban, he told a local radio station that "I think we have to close off everything that promotes criminal behavior."
He complained that the fad glorifies traffickers.
"Many young people want to emulate them as idols in some way ... and they want to be drug traffickers. And there are a lot of young girls who want to be the girlfriends of drug traffickers."
But it may not be sheer adulation; wearing the shirts may also be a way for youths to thumb their noses at authority, a time?honored pastime among young people around the world.
"To the police, it's a message that says 'I could be a drug trafficker and walk right in front of you and you can't say anything to me because I'm just wearing a shirt,'" said Oscar Galicia Castillo, a psychologist at the IberoAmerican University who studies prison inmates. "Many youths are also using it as a way of making fun of snobbish status markers."
For Pedro, who sells snacks at a stand on a downtown Mexico City street, his light blue polo shirt just represents an indefinable sense of cool. He said the shirts had become all the rage in his tough neighborhood of Tepito, and that his wife bought him one as a surprise.
"It looks good. It gives you class," he said. He declined to give his last name, saying police had recently caught him selling cigarettes to minors.
In some rough barrios, a shirt that conveys a vague sense of menace and a "don't mess with me" attitude may be helpful.
"The guys who buy them want people to think they're tough," said Cesar, a counterfeit?shirt vendor who said most of the customers at his downtown Mexico City stall are young males. "It's about putting on a look."
For at least two decades, Mexicans have fretted about youths emulating drug traffickers, from the days when narcos favored the designs of Versace and exotic?leather boots, or marijuana?leaf insignia on belt buckles, shirts and baseball caps. But such trends remained largely regional, and were derided as tacky.
But the new fashion trend has been helped along by a new, more urbane and sophisticated generation of drug traffickers, who dress more like Mexico's wealthier classes.
In 2010, Vicente Zambada Niebla, the son of drug lord Vicente "El Mayo" Zambada, was arrested in an upscale Mexico City neighborhood, wearing a preppy ensemble of sports coat, designer jeans and striped cotton shirt.
Vicente Carrillo Leyva, the son of another drug lord, was collared around the same time wearing a jogging suit emblazoned with the name "Abercrombie."
Media coverage also can promote the trend. Newly captured capos are paraded before television cameras wearing the latest narco?fashion, often with beautiful girlfriends at their sides. Authorities allow some, like J.J., to sit down for interviews looking self?assured, fit and unrepentant.
"My business improved. Everybody wanted to work with me," Balderas said of the notoriety he achieved while a wanted man.
It wouldn't be the first time designers have faced an unexpected market. Uber?preppy designer Tommy Hilfiger's clothes became a must?have item for inner?city youths a few years ago.
For Galicia Castillo, the psychologist, it's all about standing out, identifying oneself as a member of a certain sector of a crowded world, probably much the same reason people shell out $145 for the original: "That's why I wear it, so that everyone will look at me, will see that I can afford this. And I could be a narco, so don't mess with me."
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Over the past three days, two influential, self-styled "lesbian" bloggers have been "outed" as straight, married men. Monday -- just a day after Tom MacMaster confessed to being "Gay Girl in Damascus" blogger "Amina Arraf" -- the Washington Post reported that "Paula Brooks" (the LezGetReal.com editor who had originally encouraged "Amina" to start a blog) was actually 58-year-old Bill Graber.
Men posing as lesbians online is nothing new. Some claim it's fairly easy to spot these impostors (an Andrew Sullivan reader notes that she "learned how to spot a dude in a 'women4women' AOL chat room as a teen") -- but clearly, it's not quite easy enough; Graber and MacMaster managed to fool thousands of people, including some of the most respected international media organizations, into thinking they were homosexual females.
The general reaction to the revelation of "Paula Brooks"/Bill Graber's true identity has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been one of anger and frustration. For instance, FemPop blogger Alexandra Hinton writes:
[T]he insult is that Arraf and Brooks were housed in the bodies of perfectly normal, and (I assume) relatively sane men who wanted to find an outlet for their passion and creativity. ... They were cold and calculated constructs designed to reel us in with engaging words. ...
[N]om de plumes are very different from fabricated people. Nom de plumes don?t interact with people on the internet.
On the Daily Kos's community site, user "Michellebird" (a lesbian) adds:
I'm thinking about the implications of these two cases for any actual lesbian who speaks out online. I wonder if "are you really a straight man playing a lesbian?" will become a way to silence certain opinions or voices from us? ... This moves into ugly side of the disembodied nature of the internet. I can see myself learning to hate the dis-embodied-ness of the web because of lies like the ones these two straight men have told.
What motivated Graber and MacMaster to do what they did? In MacMaster's case, his project was born partly of "vanity" -- he told NPR yesterday that he was "extremely flattered and impressed with [himself]" when he realized that his writing was "getting taken seriously" -- and partly of an impulse to experiment with fiction (he says he now recognizes that he took his creative writing project much too far). For his part, Graber claims he simply wanted to draw attention to topics he felt he couldn't write about if people knew he was a straight man. According to the Washington Post's Elizabeth Flock and Melissa Bell:
Graber said he started the site to write about gay issues after seeing the mistreatment of close friends who were a lesbian couple. He said the site was "done with the best of intentions." As a former Air Force pilot, he also said he used the site to argue in favor of the Don?t Ask Don?t Tell repeal.
"I didn?t start this with my name because ... I thought people wouldn?t take it seriously, me being a straight man," he said.
The Rumpus' Brian Spears makes some powerful points in encouraging his "fellow white males" to avoid deceptions of this kind, arguing:
Look, you can claim that "while the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on th?s blog are true and not misleading as to the situation on the ground," but you're just rationalizing your dishonesty. ... Don't co-opt the voice of a minority in hopes that people will take your writing more seriously, especially when you belong to the most privileged demographic group on the planet. ... When you claim to be reporting on "the situation on the ground," you've entered into a contract with your readers which includes the promise that you are who you claim to be, especially if you're claiming to be a minority in a dangerous area. ... If you really have something unique and important to report on, your white male-ness will not get in the way of your being heard. In most cases, it will be an advantage, as bylines and television appearances testify every day.
Clearly, this double-deception story raises major questions about the ethics of online interaction -- questions that will no doubt be debated actively in the coming weeks and months. For the moment, however, the blogosphere seems to be thoroughly captivated by the following colorful detail (reported by Bell and Flock in the Post):
In the guise of Paula Brooks, Graber corresponded online with Tom McMaster, thinking he was writing to Amina Arraf. Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian.
?
Source: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2011/06/14/lesbian_bloggers/index.html
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Just because you can fly doesn't mean you can't surf.
Al Swearengen captured this footage -- which has begun to go viral on YouTube -- of a flock of geese getting caught in and surfing the rapids of Glenwood Whitewater Park in Glenwood Springs, CO. Initially he was photographing a group of kayakers when he saw this group getting pulled downriver.
The rapids were at a 27-year high in terms of pressure, apparently amounting to 25,500 cfs according to the videographer.
It appears that the birds emerged from the whitewater unharmed. Rad!
WATCH (the surfing starts 25 seconds in):
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/13/surfing-geese-colorado-video_n_876052.html
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