Six In The Morning

Kenya mourns victims of Garissa al-Shabab attack

   

BBC

Kenya has begun three days of mourning for the 148 victims of an attack on students by militant group al-Shabab.

Easter ceremonies will be held to remember those who died in Thursday’s attack on Garissa University, and flags are expected to fly at half-mast.

President Uhuru Kenyatta has vowed to respond to the attack “in the severest ways possible”.

Sunni Islam’s most respected seat of learning, Cairo’s al-Azhar University, has also condemned the attack.

The Kenyan Red Cross says that so far 54 of the victims have been identified by relatives at a morgue in the capital, Nairobi.

 Tenancingo: the small town at the dark heart of Mexico’s sex-slave trade

 Local crime families have grown rich by luring poor, uneducated girls into fake romances, then forcing them into prostitution

  Nina Lakhani in Tlaxcala Sunday 5 Apr

María Méndez was a live-in domestic worker when she met Ricardo López on her way to the supermarket. She was 15, from a poor family in the state of Mexico, and had been cleaning houses since the age of eight. He was a cocky, charming 16-year-old from Tenancingo, a small town in the neighbouring state of Tlaxcala. He courted her, promising marriage and a home. She desperately wanted it to be true, and within a fortnight moved with him to Tenancingo.

At first López and his family treated her well, but it quickly turned violent. “He sent me to work as a prostitute in Tijuana, Guadalajara, Torreón, Aguascalientes – all over the country to make money selling my body,” Méndez, now 59, told the Observer. “He said the money was to buy land so we could build a little house, but it was all false, even the name he’d given me was false. He made me live a very sad, ugly, desperate life. I was so ashamed.”

 Was Judas – Christianity’s great traitor – wrongfully condemned?

 Without the betrayal, there could have been no crucifixion – and no redemption. Was the apostle whose name is a byword for betrayal actually history’s greatest scapegoat? On Easter Sunday, Peter Stanford reconsiders the evidence

Peter Standford  Sunday 05 April 2015

There are still some in the small Dorset village of Moreton who wish their row about Judas Iscariot had remained a purely local matter. But the refusal, 30 years ago, of a gift to their parish church of a window that depicted the notorious apostle divided both worshippers and the community – and brought the international media to this sleepy hollow.

They were drawn, above all, by the pedigree of the artist being snubbed, Sir Laurence Whistler – an internationally renowned glass engraver and brother of the more famous Rex. Yet the media fascination was all the more intense because the dispute centred on Judas, the arch-traitor who sold out Jesus with a kiss for 30 pieces of silver. Even in our secular, sceptical age, his name retains a rare power to intrigue and inflame.

 Challenging tradition in Iraqi Kurdistan

 A number of female journalists in Iraqi Kurdistan are shaking up a male-dominated domain with a magazine that aims to highlight the problems and abuse many women still face. Melissa Tabeek reports from Sulaymaniyah.

 DW

 In a sparsely decorated but chic space in the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah, a group of Iraqi Kurdish women are finishing up final drafts of articles, creating publishing schedules and reviewing photos. Editors Koral Noori and Alaa Lattif debate content, while Tafan Najat works on fashion and beauty stories. With the editor-in-chief set to return to the city later that evening, they are preparing for their third issue of ZHIN magazine, a special on marriage, to go to the printers. The three are excited, as the layout has been improving with each issue, they say.

“It is very important to show readers and society what is happening with women here in Kurdistan. They are facing violence, different kinds of abuse, stress, but no one is worried about showing this kind of situation. For us, for ZHIN magazine, every one of the different parts of women’s lives are very important,” Lattif told DW.

  Chinese taxi drivers drink pesticide in Beijing protest

 April 5, 2015 – 5:26PM

    Dan Levin

Beijing: More than 30 taxi drivers drank from bottles of pesticide in central Beijing to protest what they said was poor treatment by their taxi companies, state and social media outlets reported.

Dozens of men, some of them frothing from the mouth, fell to the ground on a busy sidewalk at the Wangfujing shopping centre on Saturday after drinking the pesticide, according to the Beijing police force’s official microblog account. The men were rushed to nearby hospitals and they all survived, the police said. Taxi drivers are poorly-paid in China, and many struggle to earn a living.

France bans models who are too thin. Should US follow suit?

 France just joined other countries in adopting a law making it illegal for agencies to hire models deemed ‘too thin.’ Is this a good step towards adopting a more realistic idea of body image?

  By Samantha Laine, Staff Writer

France has joined Italy, Spain, and Israel in banning models that are “excessively thin” in advertising campaigns or on catwalks.

The law, which passed on Friday, also details possible fines and imprisonment for modeling agencies and fashion houses who hire models who do not meet the required size. They can face imprisonment up to six months and fines of up to 75,000 euros ($82,000).

NBC News.com reported on the measured standards of a model’s body type in the legislation.

‘The activity of model is banned for any person whose Body Mass Index (BMI) is lower than levels proposed by health authorities and decreed by the ministers of health and labor,’ the bill said. The lawmaker behind the bill previously said models would have to present a medical certificate showing a BMI of at least 18, about 121 pounds for a height of 5.7 feet, before being hired for a job and for a few weeks afterwards.