Book Review: Healing After Loss, by Martha W. Hickman ...

As we approach the holidays, it can be both a joyful and a sorrowful time for those who have lost loved ones.? For a season that cherishes time spent with friends and family, it can be also be a harsh reminder of those who are missing.? Martha W. Hickman has endured tremendous loss in her own life after her young daughter died unexpectedly in a riding accident.? She grappled with many of the common phases that accompany grief: feeling entirely absorbed by sorrow, feeling guilt when not consumed by it and thinking happiness is no longer achievable before channeling those struggles into a thoughtful book that can help others.

Much like a day-to-day calendar, Healing After Loss catalogues every day of the year with a tidbit of reassuring advice or a memorable anecdote.? These daily meditations provide for an overall calming experience that can gently guide a person through their grief.? Hickman reminds us that grief is a process, saying, ?In case we are feeling driven to somehow ?get done with? our grieving (if I do it faster, maybe I will feel better sooner), let us be reminded that, as in many of life?s profoundest experiences, faster is not necessarily better? It will take as much time as it needs.?? Again and again throughout the book, we are reminded to accept our emotions as they come?the good and the bad?which can be much harder than it sounds.

Calm Sea at The Channel

Calm Sea at The Channel (Wikipedia)

Along with supplying quotes from a wide range of intellectuals, she also provides practical advice that can improve the well-being of someone grieving.? Hickman recommends getting exercise, even simply going for a walk, because ?it?s hard to continue to feel depressed when muscles are working vigorously, when we are paying attention to covering ground or swimming through water.?? She also suggests doing something creative, because it can serve as an outlet we might not have otherwise found.? For her, it was as simple as writing down her daily activities and feelings in a journal.

Most importantly, Hickman reassures us that our darkest moments will pass as we grieve the loss of a loved one.? Although everyday activities might seem like a jarring reminder that someone is missing at first, there will come a time when, ?perhaps after months, perhaps after years, you feel like a whole person again,? she says, ?The hurt is still there, but it has become a part of your inner self.?? And perhaps more than anything, that is her message to anyone going through the grieving process: respect your feelings, stay true to yourself, and find peace in the memory of loved ones passed.

For information on buying the book, visit: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/68470.Healing_After_Loss

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Source: http://blog.sevenponds.com/lending-insight/book-review-healing-after-loss-daily-meditations-by-martha-w-hickman

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UK police: royal bodyguard fired accidental shot

LONDON (AP) ? Police are investigating an incident in which an officer believed to be guarding the home of Prince William and his wife the former Kate Middleton accidentally fired a shot inside a vehicle.

Metropolitan Police confirmed Friday that the incident involving a Specialist Operations officer happened last week in north Wales.

Police said the shot damaged the floor of the vehicle but did not injure either of the officers inside.

The officer involved has been removed from firearms duty while the incident is investigated.

William and his wife, now known as the Duchess of Cambridge, have a rented home in Wales, where the prince is a Royal Air Force search and rescue helicopter pilot.

The royal couple has managed to stay out of the limelight while in Wales.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/uk-police-royal-bodyguard-fired-accidental-shot-123916176.html

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Business and Financial News: Why Reporters ... - korea mothball ...

The news sure isn't what it used to be, in fact, I am even amazed at some of the stuff that I hear on the TV Financial news, as commentators give it their best guess on potential solutions to solve the economic crisis. All these notions about too big to fail, nationalizing banks and having the government decide who gets paid how much is just a lot of hot air.

Indeed, I feel embarrassed for some of the news reporters as they misspeak on issues surrounding capitalism. You know, maybe we ought to tell our news reporters that they cannot comment on business matters unless they had once run a business? I mean anyone can get a nice haircut, nice suit and smile for the camera with a little make-up and a complete make-over. Heck, why is it that anyone who can read a teleprompter is assumed to know what he's talking about, come on already.

We live in the most powerful and greatest nation on Earth, it is by far and away the most awesome country ever created in human history. Why you ask? Simple, one word actually, it's called; Capitalism. And it's just amazing that no one gets it. Maybe a re-read of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is in order for all those news commentators and newspaper reporters who love to take a jab or make a persnickety comment in their otherwise shallow news stories.

And why is it that the editors of these TV News programs, newspapers and radio segments allow this nonsense to be played on the air, why It's pure opinion and it's not based on anything. Socialism doesn't work, communism is a dead end (literally) and we've proven capitalism pushes people, society and civilization up. Next time you hear someone on TV or read an article in the newspaper trashing capitalism, consider the source. There is someone who has never once had to make a payroll.

Source: http://kyrmissionary.blogspot.com/2012/10/why-reporters-dont-have-clue-about.html

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Source: http://vertdavidvert.posterous.com/business-and-financial-news-why-reporters-don

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Source: http://korea-mothball.blogspot.com/2012/10/business-and-financial-news-why.html

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Source: http://cannonwhitney.typepad.com/blog/2012/10/business-and-financial-news-why-reporters-korea-mothball.html

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Source: http://leeroth.typepad.com/blog/2012/10/business-and-financial-news-why-reporters-korea-mothball.html

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Presidents Message: Networking and Problem Solving | Women's ...

When we attend networking events and go to the classes on ?How to Network,? we?re generally thinking about selling and job hunting. Lately I?ve realized just how resourceful a network can be when other challenges arise.
In the last three or four months, I?ve used my network for a new doctor, web site help, guest speaker connections, and elder care assistance for the upcoming holidays. The people you meet in business, volunteering, in a classroom or at church add richness to your life in unexpected ways.
When you get to know someone, you later discover your network connection is a lot richer than you initially anticipated. Technology made it much more accessible when smart phones replaced the Rolodex. Now we can mine our contacts for keywords relevant to a ?challenge? and call, email or text them immediately.I love the efficiency of that!
Membership in the Women?s Business Network of Frederick provided resources for three of four recent challenges for me, as well as on-going growth and enrichment. It?s a good network.


Comments are closed.

Source: http://www.wbnfrederick.org/2012/presidents-message-networking-and-problem-solving/

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Musicians: Iran's national orchestra disbanded

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) ? The Iranian national symphony orchestra has been disbanded for lack of funds, musicians said Monday, another sign of the effects of Western economic sanctions..

Orchestra members told the semiofficial ILNA news agency Monday that they have not rehearsed together and have not been paid for three months.

Arsalan Kamkar, a violinist in the orchestra, told The Associated Press Monday that "only seven or eight members of the orchestra have valid contracts. Unfortunately the rest have not had contracts over the past months, and it seems unlikely their contracts will be extended."

The orchestra was reactivated just last year, after a two-year break.

Another musician, Babak Riahipour, said the orchestra has been suffering from mismanagement, "Nobody cares about its destiny. There is no budget for replacing decades-old instruments. Nobody pays the players enough," he said.

The step is likely tied to heightening economic woes in Iran because of government mismanagement and Western sanctions over Iran's nuclear development program. Another key effect of the sanctions has been the collapse of the Iranian currency.

The West suspects that Iran may be heading toward production of nuclear weapons, imposing the sanctions to persuade Iran to drop its uranium enrichment project. Iran insists its program is for peaceful purposes.

Iran's orchestra is one of the oldest in the Middle East, founded in the 1930s. It has hosted performances by world famous musicians like Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern in the past.

The orchestra has had eight different conductors since the 1979 revolution that brought Islamists to power in Iran.

Many hard-line Iranian clerics believe that Western music undermines Islamic values.

Kamkar said the shutdown shows that Iran's rulers are not favorable to the orchestra, because its budget is a "small portion of Iran's income from oil."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/musicians-irans-national-orchestra-disbanded-133557208.html

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Plague of office-buying wears at China's image

XILINHOT, China (AP) ? In a small town in northern China's Inner Mongolia where sheep and cattle easily outnumber humans, Fan Chen paid a party boss three times an average urban resident's annual salary to become a local police chief.

The scheme was exposed and fell apart, but it was hardly explosive news. It received just a one-line mention in state media. And a friend of Fan's defended him by saying that by current standards, his misdeeds were insignificant.

"What he paid was simply a drizzle," said Xu Huaiwei, a 68-year-old retired engineer. "It's too common in China, and people have paid far more ? millions, or tens of millions of yuan ? for a government job."

Fan was a small player in the latest of countless office-buying scandals that have touched Chinese officials from the village up to the provincial level. Some scandals implicate hundreds of officials, and state media reports show that the practice has spread to all arms of the government, including the legislature, police and courts.

Buying and selling office is so rampant in China that it has battered the ruling Communist Party's image as an institution that promotes the competent, not the connected. The practice continues despite vows by Chinese leaders to eradicate it, and the public has grown increasingly disgusted.

Fighting corruption will be one of the biggest challenges for the party leadership that will be installed in November in a once-a-decade transition.

Anti-corruption crusaders have particularly warned against personnel corruption, saying it inevitably breeds other forms of corruption as office buyers seek returns on their money. But there have been no recent signs of new action from the government; the last time a leading official talked publicly about office-buying was two years ago.

"We want those who sell offices to be utterly discredited, and those who buy offices to suffer a double loss," Li Yuanchao, head of the party's central organization commission, said in 2010, when Beijing introduced a set of new personnel measures and waged a crackdown campaign.

Xilinhot, nearly 400 miles north of Beijing, is a growing town that presents ripe opportunities for graft. It is the government seat to Xilingol, a Nebraska-sized region of about 1 million people where coal-mine pits are emerging from the premium grasslands.

In the region's largest city, Western-style villas have mushroomed along a man-made lake in one of its newest developments, and young families go to the KFC, but sheep traders still haul their animals to a business-filled street to find buyers.

Fan was part of a web of office-buying centered on Liu Zhuozhi. First as Xilingol's top executive and then as its chief party secretary, Liu ran the region from 2001 to 2008 before advancing to a vice governor post in Inner Mongolia's capital city, Hohhot.

Last summer in a Beijing court, Liu was sentenced to life in prison for corruption, including selling various government jobs, according to the state-run Beijing News. Liu's lawyer Xu Lanting confirmed the report, which says Liu took more than 8 million yuan ($1.2 million) in bribes ? mostly by selling positions, including the one for Fan.

The report said Liu took 650,000 yuan ($103,000) from a man who eventually became the chief planner for Xilinhot, sold the city's party secretary position for 640,000 yuan ($101,000), and accepted 500,000 yuan ($80,000) to promote a person to oversee government archives.

The report identifies Fan Chen only by his family name and said he paid 100,000 yuan ($16,000) to be promoted from a deputy to a chief in a different government unit.

AP could not reach Fan. His friend Xu said Fan paid 300,000 ($48,000) for the promotion to be the police chief in Sunitezuoqi, another town in Xilingol. A propaganda officer from Sunitezuoqi confirmed that Fan Cheng was its last police chief.

An official government site also showed Fan was to be promoted to be the police chief of Sunitezuoqi from a lower-ranked deputy position in Xilinhot. Xu said Fan lost his rank last year when he was implicated during the investigation against Liu, and is now a regular police officer.

In Xilingol, local officials said Liu's case is a thing of past and that office-buying is limited to a handful.

"The majority of our cadres are good. Only a few are corrupt," said Yao Situ, director of foreign affairs.

He said local governments are recruiting and promoting cadres through democratic, fair and transparent competitions that value merit above anything else.

Many experts, however, say graft continues to flourish thanks to opaque government, a lack of accountability, the absence of independent supervision and ineffective punishment. They say that in China's one-party government, personnel decisions are made by a few powerful people despite policies and procedures stipulating collective rulings.

"Simply put, in China's cadre selection procedure, the party chief, the deputy chief for personnel, and the director of personnel wield the real power. For office-seekers, it is far more cost-effective to bribe them than to bribe voters in a democratic election," said He Zengke, who has studied China's corruption for more than 20 years. He is director of the China Center for Comparative Politics and Economics, a Beijing-based think tank.

In a heavily regulated country where the government controls resources, it seems almost all government offices can be a profit-making enterprise.

Transportation officials take kickbacks for road projects. Planning directors cash in on their approval powers. Police chiefs dismiss cases for private payments. Judges accept bribes for lighter sentences.

Office-buying is difficult to root out in part because it is so prevalent in China. Those tasked with combatting corruption ? such as party chiefs and prosecutors ? are often guilty of it themselves.

Sometimes office-buying is uncovered by chance. In northeastern China's Heilongjiang province, a scandal emerged following an assault on police officers who were investigating prostitution in a bath center.

The assault led authorities to examine the business's finances. They found problematic loans that implicated a senior official at a local state-run bank, according to state media.

Investigators uncovered a pyramid of graft. One official, Li Gang, accepted bribes totaling 2,100,000 yuan ($330,000) from more than 35 people over promotional issues. Li himself paid Suihua party secretary Ma De to be a county party secretary. And Ma got his job by paying 800,000 yuan ($127,000) to Han Guizhi, a Heilongjiang party official in charge of personnel affairs.

Han sold other top positions as well, including the chief prosecutor, the chief of the provincial supreme court and the chief of the personnel bureau, according to state media reports.

In 2010, several senior officials fell to corruption charges, including Huang Yao, former deputy party secretary for southwestern China's Guizhou province, and Wang Huayuan, a party standing committee member overseeing discipline inspection in eastern China's Zhejiang province. State media said they had profited from "job assignments" but did not offer more details.

Now, a criminal investigation against Huang Sheng, formerly the vice governor of eastern China's Shandong province, has silenced the Dezhou government, where many officials were promoted during Huang's tenure as the city's party secretary, according to state media.

Office-buying is just one facet of the pervasive corruption culture in China, where government officials routinely embezzle public funds, take bribes in awarding contracts, and favor family and friends in promotion.

China's most notorious corruption scandal in years involves disgraced politician Bo Xilai, who is accused of taking "huge amounts" of money to seek profits for others through public power. His deputy Wang Lijun took money from businesspeople and other contacts, and in exchange, he released detained criminal suspects when his contributors asked. But there is no confirmed report that Bo bought or sold public office.

In Xilinhot, the mood alternates between indignation and resignation among retired cadres who gather every day in an old hospital administration building to exchange gossip over mahjong tiles and playing cards.

"I cannot understand today's corruption. No one dared to do that under Mao," said 73-year-old Wu Lagai, a retired weather bureau official who was watching a game of Chinese chess.

"I simply cannot accept it. Is this because the punishment is too light? I think that might be the problem's source," he said.

"There are countless Liu Zhuozhis," said Wang Qi, a 70-year-old retired economic development official. "For village cadre and up, if you want any position, you pay for it. The more money you pay, the higher position you get. That's an open secret. The public knows, but there's nothing they can do.

"Unless Chairman Mao came back," Xu said.

"Not even Chairman Mao," Wang said. "It needs a thorough reform."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/plague-office-buying-wears-chinas-image-080904130.html

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Pocket brings its 'read it later' service to Mac App Store, keeps its free status

Pocket brings its 'read it later' service to Mac App Store, keeps its free status

We know Pocket has had a strong presence on iOS, Android and other platforms for quite some time now, but today the service formerly known as Read it Later announced it is now making its way to a bigger Cupertino screen. Naturally, Pocket's new application isn't much different than its mobile versions, meaning it'll offer the same offline access, save-for-later features as it currently does on the mobile front but with a more "native Mac experience" -- of course, this includes the ability to sync across multiple devices, stream videos and share tidbits via those cherished social networks. What's more, Pocket won't be charging a dime for its novel and handy OS X app, though this shouldn't come as a surprise given the outfit's somewhat recently adopted no-cost model -- still, it's a gesture most people will certainly appreciate, and one you Mac folk can start enjoying now by downloading from to the desktop-based App Store.

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Atmore author wins national award ? Bonnie Latino's ... - Atmore News

By JOYCE FAULKNER
Special to Atmore News

?Your Gift to Me,? a military-themed novel by Atmore native Bonnie Bartel Latino and New Jersey resident Bob Vale recently received a 2012 Gold Medal from the Military Writers Society of America in Dayton, Ohio. The award nomination package described the book as, ??a story of love and war spliced with historical fiction?warm, engaging ? and oh so thought provoking, the novel celebrates the resilience of human connections across time and space and mortality.?

A former columnist for Stars and Stripes in Europe, Bonnie met Bob, who is now an award-winning writer, graphic designer and photographer, online in 1996 on CompuServe?s Military Forum. They have been writing together professionally for over a decade, sharing a byline on freelance articles for The Birmingham News, Mobile-Press Register, Atmore News and ?atmore? magazine. They have never met in person.

Bonnie, a correspondent for the Press-Register book page from 2004 until October of this year, describes ?Your Gift to Me? as sharing the same subtle, but central, theme of the healing powers of love and laughter to triumph over grief that was found in ?Top Gun? and ?Steel Magnolias.? The book concludes at Air Force Special Operations Headquarters (AFSOC) at Hurlburt Field, in the Florida Panhandle. A brief synopsis reveals the novel?s Special Operations connection: Nearly ten years after Emily Ann Meade?s husband died in a fiery Special Ops Pave-Hawk helicopter crash in the 1991 Gulf War, she moves from Hurlburt to Hawaii, where she meets charismatic F-16 pilot, Colonel Ted Foley. Although she is attracted to Ted, his fighter wing has recently lost two pilots in unexplained air crashes. He is the very type of man she has sworn to avoid?a man whose life could be in danger.

The co-authors set their story in the world of the contemporary fighter pilot, writing about what Bonnie knows best, the military way of life. She was an Air Force spouse for 30 years before her husband Colonel Tom Latino retired, and they moved back to her hometown of Atmore.

Among the book?s impressive endorsements is one from Alabama native and New York Times best-selling author, Andy Andrews, ??What would you get if Stephen Ambrose, Patricia Cornwell, and Max Lucado teamed up to create a story? The result, I suspect, would turn out to be something very close to the compelling narrative found in ?Your Gift To Me.? Get your copy right now?You owe yourself the attention this book deserves.?

A recent review in The Tampa Tribune described the novel as, ?An accurate, smart, sensitive look at military lives and military wives.? The October Midwest Book Review said, ?This is a book you do not want to miss. It is an entrancing story??

?Your Gift to Me? is available in paperback and eBook formats from Amazon.com.

Editor?s note: Bonnie Latino will have signed copies of ?Your Gift to Me? for sale at the Atmore News / ?atmore? magazine booth at WSD. She will accept Patron of the Arts scrip.

Joyce Faulkner is immediate past president, Military Writers Society of America.

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Source: http://www.atmorenews.com/2012/10/24/atmore-author-wins-national-award-bonnie-latinos-book-available-at-wsd/

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