Experiments. Lesotho - better than the UK for gender equality. 8 March 2011Last updated at 09:09 By Karen Allen BBC News, Lesotho Girls are given football training to raise their self-esteem Lesotho sits like pearl in a shell, surrounded by the land mass of South Africa. But this tiny kingdom of 1.8 million people boasts another jewel, which is perhaps astonishing given its size. Lesotho is ranked eighth in the world by the World Economic Forum (WEF) when it comes to bridging the gap between the sexes. The reasons are cultural, political and economic, but one explanation keeps being repeated when you probe the gender issue, and it relates to Lesotho's recent past. Historically, large numbers of men from Lesotho crossed the border to work in South Africa's mines, forcing women to step into their shoes and take up school places and jobs. Many of the men have now come back, having been retrenched from the mines, and they face a more female-focused world. In politics, one in five government ministers in Lesotho is female.
"The defining factor is education. Europeans learned to farm by marrying Eastern farmers 8,000 years ago. Imam who believes in evolution retracts statements. 7 March 2011Last updated at 02:32 Many British Muslims do not believe in Darwin's theory of evolution An imam has retracted statements about evolution and the right of Muslim women not to cover their hair after death threats were made against him. Dr Usama Hasan, a science lecturer, has voluntarily suspended his role in taking Friday prayers at Leyton Mosque in east London. He said he went too far in the way he defended the theory of evolution. He acknowledged many British Muslims believe in creationism, adding that he intended only to begin a debate.
Dr Hasan - a senior lecturer at Middlesex University - used an opinion piece on the Guardian newspaper's website in 2008 to suggest Darwin's theory of evolution was not incompatible with the teaching of Islam. He wrote that there were many Muslim biologists who had no doubt about the essential correctness of evolutionary theory and he added: "Many believers in God have no problem with an obvious solution: that God created man via evolution. " Big society: More than a soundbite? 14 February 2011Last updated at 11:14 ET By Brian Wheeler Political reporter, BBC News It is a "coral reef" and we are the fishes. It is the hidden hand behind all government action. It is everywhere and nowhere at once. It is, in case you hadn't guessed by now, the "big society". When David Cameron unveiled his vision of a more socially active Britain - in which volunteers would step in to take the place of an over-mighty state - some Conservative election candidates were incredulous.
How were they supposed to sell this woolly nonsense on the doorstep? What did "the big society" even mean? But Mr Cameron was deadly serious - and eight months down the line, far from being quietly dropped as some assumed, or hoped, it might be, the big society is being pursued with surprising vigour across Whitehall. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote You can call it liberalism.
End QuoteDavid Cameron, July 2010 Some of this activity stems from a natural desire to please the new boss. 'Impact' Trust. The Rise of the New Global Elite - Magazine. F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he declared the rich different from you and me. But today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind.
Stephen Webster/Wonderful Machine If you happened to be watching NBC on the first Sunday morning in August last summer, you would have seen something curious. There, on the set of Meet the Press, the host, David Gregory, was interviewing a guest who made a forceful case that the U.S. economy had become “very distorted.”
This diagnosis, though alarming, was hardly unique: drawing attention to the divide between the wealthy and everyone else has long been standard fare on the left. This widening gap between the rich and non-rich has been evident for years. In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”.