A cute story from CBS News in the states shows what we could learn from the Animal Kingdom about acceptance and diversity.
When elephants retire, many head for the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tenn. They arrive one by one, but they tend to live out their lives two-by-two.
“Every elephant that comes here searches out someone that she then spends most all of her time with,” says sanctuary co-founder Carol Buckley.
It’s like having a best girlfriend, Buckley says - “Somebody they can relate to, they have something in common with.” Debbie has Ronnie. Misty can’t live without Dulary.
Those are pachyderm-pachyderm pairs. But perhaps the closest friends of all are Tarra and Bella. That would be Tarra the 8,700 pound Asian elephant. And Bella. The dog.
“This is her friend,” Buckley says, scratching Bella’s tummy. “Her friend just happens to be a dog and not an elephant.” “Bella knows she’s not an elephant. Tarra knows she’s not a dog,” Buckley adds. “But that’s not a problem for them.”
Bella is one of more than a dozen stray dogs that have found a home at the sanctuary. Most want nothing to do with the elephants and vice versa. But not this odd couple. “When it’s time to eat they both eat together. They drink together. They sleep together. They play together,” Buckley says.
Tarra and Bella have been close for years — but no one really knew how close they were until recently. A few months ago Bella suffered a spinal cord injury. She couldn’t move her legs, couldn’t even wag her tail. For three weeks the dog lay motionless up in the sanctuary office.
And for three weeks the elephant held vigil: 2,700 acres to roam free, and Tarra just stood in the corner, beside a gate, right outside that sanctuary office. “She just stood outside the balcony - just stood there and waited,” says Buckley. “She was concerned about her friend.”
A Dubai resort will soon see a “refrigerated beach” which will cool the sand so it doesn’t burn your tootsies. Yes, I am being serious.
A LUXURY hotel in Dubai is to create the first refrigerated beach so hotel guests can walk comfortably across the sand on scorching days.
The Palazzo Versace fashion house will have a network of pipes beneath the sand containing a coolant that will absorb heat from the surface, reports The Australian.
The swimming pool will be refrigerated and there are also proposals to install giant blowers to waft a gentle breeze over the beach.
“We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool enough to lie on,” said Soheil Abedian, founder and president of Palazzo Versace.
“This is the kind of luxury that top people want.”
You don’t get to say that much, but I can of my Great Grandmother Lily who today on Sunday, 21 December 2008 turns 102 years old.
She obviously has had a large impact on my life and out of all my family members surprisingly we get along the best. I was happy to see her through her 98th birthday and now to see her get to 102 is a rare treat.
Here is for 103.
Some good news for once to come out of the States, instances of Capital Punishment aka the Death Penalty have dropped in 2008.
The use of capital punishment in the United States waned this year, as state and federal courts executed 37 inmates, a 14-year low, according to a new report. And courts sentenced 111 people to death in 2008, the lowest number of new condemnations in three decades. In 2007, 42 people were executed and 115 were sentenced to death.
The capital punishment data was compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center, a research and anti-death-penalty advocacy group.
The lull in executions defied predictions that more prisoners would be put to death after a Supreme Court ruling in April upheld lethal injection and ended an eight-month moratorium. Since that decision, Baze v. Rees, states have granted stays in 25 capital cases as courts worked through issues including the mental illness of defendants, ineffective representation and revelations of potentially exculpatory evidence.
Four death row inmates were exonerated in 2009, raising the total number of exonerations to 130 since 1976.
Richard C. Deiter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said that the decline in executions proved that capital punishment was becoming less popular.
“Revelations of mistakes, cases reversed by DNA testing, all of these things have put a dent in the whole system and caused hesitation,” Mr. Deiter said. “I don’t think what is happening is a moral opposition to the death penalty yet, but there is a greater scrutiny applied to the death penalty that wasn’t there before.”
Executions declined even in Texas, which led the nation with 26 inmates put to death in 2008. Over all, most of the nation’s executions occurred in Southern states.
New York Times
