Category: Lifestyle

{{For the sixth time in as many years, world-class athletes will grace the pages of ESPN Magazine in the buff for the publications sixth annual ESPN the Magazine’s Body Issue.

Past installments of the magazine’s annual Body Issue have included some of the biggest names in sports posing nude, including NBA stars Blake Griffith and Dwight Howard, and tennis star Serena Williams.

This year’s issue will not disappoint – and Williams’ sister makes her debut appearance in the highly anticipated special issue.}}

{Grace Mukantwari is an exemplary young survivor of the 1994 genocide against Tutsi and a member of the Umucyo (“Light” in Kinyarwandan) co-op, a group of 14 women that stitch unique accessories for local sales and a US based business partner Noonday Collection.}

After the death of her father who was slaughtered by the government-supported militia (Interahamwe), Grace’s mother realized she had only one choice to protect and save her children’s life which was to flee Kigali.

With her two-year-old son on her back and holding six-year-old Grace’s hands as they ran, they fled to Kibuye/ Rubengera in the refugee camp of course on foot like most Tutsis who were in the country.

Due to Genocide consequences, Grace did not manage to pass the national examination for secondary schools, “and my mom had no more means of paying my school fees since my mom was even struggling to keep us hungry but alive.” Grace speaking to us; she therefore decided to do something since her mother who was responsible for the family fell sick and there was no one else to sustain their lives.

As she was walking by the streets in Kimihurura, she happened to hear of a sewing training and she joined it. They trained for six months and then started sewing; “That was a big chance to me. Since we started partnering with Noonday Collections my life has changed significantly. I was able to renovate our house at home, get running water in our compound, take my mom to the hospital and so many more.”

When Grace opted for this profession while her former classmates were mocking and laughing at her saying they do not deserve to do that poor job as high school graduates. But she made her mind to use her power instead of taking on other bad behaviors which result to many risks. Grace in a smiling face she told us that she is happy with her profession regardless of how people perceive it.

“Most of the times, people go for unethical behaviors because of lack of jobs or neglecting some types of jobs. Now I find my dignity here though I have no high school certificate, I’m determined and all the powers lie in me.” This conviction has done a lot for Grace and will make her achieve many more as she says. The classmates who were laughing at her have started to respect her and some of them wish to get the same chance too.

Grace advices everyone to use their hands try to attain the best all the time as she always tries to bring out perfect products for Noonday Collections and other clients. Grace also expresses her thankfulness to Noonday Collections which has been helping them in unlocking her potentials and other colleagues they work together in Urufunguzo rw’Umucyo sewing co-operative which is going to receive a team of American Bloggers and their products ambassadors from the U.S in this coming month from July 12th to July 19th

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{{The article was Written {By UMUTESI Rehema }
A student in Mount Kenya University pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Mass Media and Communication.}}

{{No weekend in Rwanda passes by without a couple tying a knot after saying I do to each other.}}

The wedding event is a climax of several weeks of fundraising meetings that the couple holds to ensure that items on their wedding list are funded; including; food, wedding gown, flowers, shoes, wedding rings, hiring luxury cars, dance troupe, drinks, tents the lists are always long depending on the status of the couple.

Although marriage is a universal step in life that every couple looks up to, the manner in which ceremonies are planned and executed vary from one community to another.

In some parts of the world, as long as a couple is in love and agrees to start a family, they do not get hindered by not hiring luxury items and pompous wedding ceremony.

However, in some other parts of the world a wedding can become a mega event in the entire village as the community joins to honour and celebrate newly married couple.

In Rwanda, it has become very expensive for couples to think of a wedding ceremony coupled the fact that it has to be conducted in three phases including; civil, traditional and religious wedding ceremonies.

Recently the world’s showbiz media turned cameras to Florence in Italy to focus on the expensive wedding of an interracial celebrity couple Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. The list of invited guests included mostly celebrities.

Meanwhile a few days after Kim and Kanye wedding, another interracial couple in Uganda was involved in an exclusively simple beautiful wedding that excited the entire village.

An unidentified Dutch national and a Ugandan lady were seen riding on a bicycle after exchanging vows at a village church in remote Uganda. The couple was seen sharing from a pot of local brew (ajono- prepared from millet).

The Dutch are known to love their bicycles whereas bicycles are a common form of transport in this remote part of Uganda.

Although the Ugandan couple rode on a bicycle on their wedding day, they definitely had an expensive wedding dress and suit.

In Rwanda, it could make absolute sense for young couples to keep costs of their wedding ceremonies lower.

(Kim and Kanye drive in an expensive car)

(unidentified couple in Uganda seen riding on a bicycle after exchanging vows at a village church)

(Kim and Kanye kissing during their recent expensive wedding in Florence, Italy)

(The Ugandan Couple is seen sharing some local wine in a Pot seeping from the traditional wooden straws)

(Kim and Kanye whisper to each other while sharing wine)

{{We’ve all been told that men think about you-know-what far too often – every seven seconds, by some accounts. }}

Most of us have entertained this idea for long enough to be sceptical.

However, rather than merely wonder about whether this is true, stop for a moment to consider how you could – or could not – prove it.

If we believe the stats, thinking about sex every seven seconds adds up to 514 times an hour.

Or approximately 7,200 times during each waking day. Is that a lot? It sounds like a big number to me, I’d imagine it’s bigger than the number of thoughts I have about anything in a day.

So, here’s an interesting question: how is it possible to count the number of mine, or anyone else’s thoughts (sexual or otherwise) over the course of a day?

The scientific attempt to measure thoughts is known to psychologists as “experience sampling”. It involves interrupting people as they go about their daily lives and asking them to record the thoughts they are having right at that moment, in that place.

Terri Fisher and her research team at Ohio State University did this using ‘clickers’. They gave these to 283 college students, divided into three groups, and asked them to press and record each time they thought about sex, or food, or sleep.

Using this method they found that the average man in their study had 19 thoughts about sex a day. This was more than the women in their study – who had about 10 thoughts a day.

However, the men also had more thoughts about food and sleep, suggesting perhaps that men are more prone to indulgent impulses in general. Or they are more likely to decide to count any vague feeling as a thought. Or some combination of both.

The interesting thing about the study was the large variation in number of thoughts. Some people said they thought about sex only once per day, whereas the top respondent recorded 388 clicks, which is a sexual thought about every two minutes.

However, the big confounding factor with this study is “ironic processes”, more commonly known as the “white bear problem”.

If you want to have cruel fun with a child tell them to put their hand in their air and only put it down when they’ve stopped thinking about a white bear. Once you start thinking about something, trying to forget it just brings it back to mind.

This is exactly the circumstances the participants in Fisher’s study found themselves in. They were given a clicker by the researchers and asked to record when they thought about sex (or food or sleep).

Imagine them walking away from the psychology department, holding the clicker in their hand, trying hard not to think about sex all the time, yet also trying hard to remember to press the clicker every time they did think about it.

My bet is that the poor man who clicked 388 times was as much a victim of the experimental design as he was of his impulses.

{{Always on my mind}}

Another approach, used by Wilhelm Hoffman and colleagues, involved issuing German adult volunteers with smartphones, which were set to notify them seven times a day at random intervals for a week.

They were asked to record what featured in their most recent thoughts when they received the random alert, the idea being that putting the responsibility for remembering onto a device left participants’ minds more free to wander.

The results aren’t directly comparable to the Fisher study, as the most anyone could record thinking about sex was seven times a day. But what is clear is that people thought about it far less often than the seven-second myth suggests.

They recorded a sexual thought in the last half hour on approximately 4% of occasions, which works out as about once per day, compared with 19 reported in the Fisher study.

The real shock from Hoffman’s study is the relative unimportance of sex in the participants’ thoughts. People said they thought more about food, sleep, personal hygiene, social contact, time off, and (until about 5pm) coffee.

Watching TV, checking email and other forms of media use also won out over sex for the entire day. In fact, sex only became a predominant thought towards the end of the day (around midnight), and even then it was firmly in second place, behind sleep.

Hoffman’s method is also contaminated by a white bear effect, though, because participants knew at some point during the day they’d be asked to record what they had been thinking about.

This could lead to overestimating some thoughts. Alternately, people may have felt embarrassed about admitting to having sexual thoughts throughout the day, and therefore underreported it.

So, although we can confidently dismiss the story that the average male thinks about sex every seven seconds, we can’t know with much certainty what the true frequency actually is.

Probably it varies wildly between people, and within the same person depending on their circumstances, and this is further confounded by the fact that any efforts to measure the number of someone’s thoughts risks changing those thoughts.

There’s also the tricky issue that thoughts have no natural unit of measurement. Thoughts aren’t like distances we can measure in centimetres, metres and kilometres.

So what constitutes a thought, anyway? How big does it need to be to count? Have you had none, one or many while reading this? Plenty of things to think about!

BBC

{{Shakira has said she has no plans to marry the father of her child.

The singer has a 17-month-old son, Milan, with 27-year-old Spanish footballer Gerard Pique, who she met in 2010.}}

She told Glam Belleza Latina’s summer issue : “We already have what’s essential, you know? We have a union, a love for each other, and a baby.”

She added: “I think that those aspects of our relationship are already established, and marriage is not going to change them. But if I’m ever going to get married, he’s the one.”

She said she loved being a mum, telling the mag: “I love teaching him something new every day.”

Shakira, who recently left The Voice USA, said that she was playing tennis to stay toned, but that she eats ” whatever I want”.

“I don’t believe in depriving myself or being a slave to diets. I generally eat healthy, but I indulge too,” she said.

“And when I have to, for a video or a performance, I pull back a little. But it’s all about balance.”
{click to watch}

{{When it comes to sex, most guys aren’t clueless. In fact, some are experts/national treasures who should teach lessons.

But they don’t all always get it right, and sometimes, that’s just because of a simple misunderstanding.}}

For instance, most guys know that finishing too quickly isn’t optimal. But according to Swiss research, the real problem most women have with premature ejaculation isn’t that the actual intercourse doesn’t last very long.

It’s that men get so focused on delaying their orgasm that they ignore women’s other needs like kissing, caressing, and other stimulation that’s just as important for women to have satisfying sex.

{{Sure, guys, we want sex to last longer than two minutes}}. But what good is it if he stretches it out to 15 minutes of the kind of sex where his eyes are glazed over as he clearly recites baseball statistics to distract himself and basically forgets you’re even there? (Yeah, dudes, we can tell when you do that.)

Besides dealing with the timing, here are a few other things we think could clear up a lot of problems during sex if guys would pay attention to them.

{{Confidence =/= Aggression}}. Guys are told over and over to be confident, and that’s good advice.

But sometimes it seems like they equate confidence with force. A guy who confidently goes in for the kiss is good, but a guy who’s too pushy is never, ever OK.

Plus, even when you want him to touch you, hardly any woman I know appreciates a tongue jammed down her throat or a too-tight embrace. Ease up, dudes.

{{Not every girl likes the same things.}} We’re all different, but some guys find a move that works for one girl and then stick with it for the next five, despite the fact that those girls clearly aren’t into it.

{{Follow her lead.}} We know, we know, it’s confusing when we don’t all like the same things.

But guys would find it much easier to figure out the next girl if they’d just pay attention to her own actions. If she’s doing it, she probably would like you to do it as well.

If she’s pulling away for more than just catching a breath, she doesn’t like it. Don’t do it again.

{{It’s more about passion than technical skill}}. Some guys are technically good at sex, sure. We’re grateful for that.

But the best guys in bed aren’t always the ones who seemed like they’ve had a ton of practice. More often, it’s the ones who seem like they really want to be there, in that moment, with you specifically. Guys, it makes all the difference in the world.

What do you wish more guys would or wouldn’t do during sex?

{{British singer Sarah Brightman is scheduled to begin training this year for a 2015 flight to the International Space Station where she hopes to become the first professional musician to sing from space, the company arranging the trip said.}}

Brightman, a famed soprano who starred in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera,” will pay about $52 million for a 10-day stay aboard the orbital outpost, Tom Shelley, president of privately owned Space Adventures, said.

“She’s absolutely 100 percent committed,” Shelley said during a National Space Club Florida Committee meeting. “She’s putting together her mission plan now.”

Brightman, who would become the eighth privately funded space tourist, is slated to fly in September 2015. Her training to fly on a Russian Soyuz capsule is scheduled to begin as early as this fall, Shelley said.

He said she planned to be the first professional musician to sing from space.

But she faces competition from Lady Gaga, who according to media reports late last year intends to be the first when she performs one song in space in early 2015 on a Virgin Galactic flight. Virgin Galactic, part of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, plans to offer suborbital space flights.

Brightman said in 2012 that she would travel to the space station, but her plans were not confirmed until now.

So far, Space Adventures has arranged for nine private missions to the space station, a $100 billion research laboratory that flies about that flies about 418 kilometers above Earth. Microsoft co-founder Charles Simonyi made two trips.

Brightman will be the first private citizen to visit the station since Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Lalibarte paid about $35 million for an 11-day stay in September 2009.

Google co-founder Sergei Brin has an option to fly on the next available Soyuz seat after Brightman, which most likely will be in 2017, Shelley said.

“He paid us a deposit and whenever we have a seat available, he has the right of first refusal,” Shelley added.

{themoscowtimes}