“My mother was just happy that we were alive but she didn’t want us to live a meager existence,” Miss Kerigo said. “Being crowned Miss Norway gave me the opportunity to make sure that her dream came true.”

After waiting for some time to gain citizenship in a new country, Iman, her mother and siblings were finally accepted under refugee status to the Scandanavian country of Norway. Growing up thousands of miles away from everything she had ever known, Iman worked hard to adjust to her new adopted home, even learning to speak Norweigan and English, rather than her native Swahili.

Through hard work and dedication, she overcame tremendous odds to eventually become the first woman of African descent to ever be crowned Miss Norway. She credits much of her success in the Miss Norway Pageant to her coach, nutrition expert David Sandoval. David, author of The Green Foods Bible, had Iman follow his ‘Superfoods For Supermodels’ program, an eating program designed especially for those in the public eye.

David says, “I created this program in response to the epidemic of bulimia, anorexia and other eating disorders prevalent in the modeling and entertainment business.” But David is keen to explain that ‘Superfoods For Supermodels’ is not a diet. He adds, “Instead it features realistic guidelines for creating exceptionally healthy, lean, beautiful bodies through pure, organic, green food nutrition and core fitness.” David’s program also helps to build confidence and strength while focusing on taking personal responsibility for one’s own destiny.

Iman adds,”Part of my mission is to let young girls know that even if it seems all the odds are against you, you can still achieve great things.”

In the future, Iman hopes to forge a career in modeling and/or become a spokesperson for an African centric product line. Iman is available for interviews during her visit. All enquiries, including requests for press photos should be directed to David Sandoval’s assistant at dsandovalpa@organicbynatureinc.com

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Incredibly, the face, neck, and hands of the pretty young woman have become wrinkled and saggy, and she says even her stomach looks like she had a few children.

Before rapid aging

After Allergy Outbreak - Rapid Aging

It happened in 2008 when after eating seafood her face broke out in a rash and became itchy.

She thinks she used to scratch her face even in sleep.

Her husband Nguyen Thanh Tuyen (34) got her some medicines but they did not work and he had to take her to a local doctor. Phuong was diagnosed with dermatitis and prescribed some pills. However, after taking them for a week, her face swelled up and hives appeared on her skin.

She then stopped taking the medicines and went to some traditional Chinese doctors in town. The medicine they gave reduced the swelling but she says she put on weight. But the drugs cost VND30,000 (US$1.5) a day.

Soon she had to wear a mask all day to avoid curious stares.

“We consider it as fate decreed by God and so we stopped trying to cure the disease,” said Phuong.

Recognize only by voice

Ho Thi Hiep, a neighbor, said Phuong used to be a beautiful girl. But people meeting Phuong for the first time after her disfigurement were no longer able to recognize her until they heard her voice.

Le Van Thiem of Giong Trom town says: “A couple of days ago, Phuong went back to her hometown for her grandmother’s death anniversary. I met her and thought some old lady was visiting us. Only when I heard her voice did I realize it was her.”

Her saggy skin notwithstanding, Phuong still has the voice and posture of a young woman and black hair.

“It is not just my face that has become saggy but also my stomach,” Phuong says.

“I have never given birth but the skin on my stomach looks like I have had two or three kids.

“Last September when I had a stomachache and went to a doctor, he said I was caught with early aging syndrome.

phuong
Phuong(L) after catching the disease and her husband Tuyen (Source: Tuoi Tre)

But Phuong’s condition has not put off her husband Tuyen.

“When we got married, Phuong was a beautiful girl,” he says.

“It’s difficult to talk openly about conjugal matters, but just understand that I still love my wife.”

The couple now live in Bu Dop District in Binh Phuoc Province where she has a job shelling cashew while he works as a carpenter.

What doctors say?

Dr Mai The Trach, former head of the Ho Chi Minh City Endocrine Association, says allergies cause changes in facial skin. But Phuong has not aged since her memory and organs like heart, kidneys, liver, and lungs are normal, he says.

Hoang Viet, head of the Dong Nai Province-based Nguyen Dinh Chieu hospital, says he has dispatched personnel to Giong Trom to gather more information about Phuong’s condition.

He plans to bring Phuong to his hospital and, if he is unable to help, then to take her the Ho Chi Minh Hospital of Dermatology and Venereology.
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A reforestation project that paid poor women to plant trees is just one example of how Maathai, a Kenyan, empowered and educated local African people, particularly women.

“She was a fearless champion of nature and women,” Mark Tercek, president and CEO of the Nature Conservancy, told The Huffington Post.

On a panel last Thursday at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York City, Tercek described the key role that forests play in flood control and water quality — a lesson that has been learned the hard way, repeatedly, around the world. It took a major flood that ravaged homes, topsoil and fish stocks throughout the Yangtze region two decades ago for China to recognize that a standing forest was worth three times its mere value in timber.

Overall, forests, watersheds and other ecosystems provide an estimated $33 trillion in essentially free goods and services for communities around the world. But because these services are typically excluded from market calculations, widespread environmental degradation continues more or less unabated.

“Many people think nature is nice because of its spiritual value, or they like hiking, or they want to preserve it to hand it off to their descendants,” said Tercek. “These are all good reasons, but there are some really practical reasons to value nature too.”

Tercek is overflowing with practical examples. In an effort to thwart poaching in Kenya, his organization helped persuade villages to appoint local men to work as rangers. As poaching rates then dropped and the wildlife returned, tourism revenue rose. With less threat of violence from poachers, the village women also felt safer. In fact, one told Tercek that she was sleeping without her shoes on for the first time in her life.

He also tells a story about Quito, Ecuador, where a few years ago local business leaders were contemplating a major investment in a water filtration plant. He and his colleagues persuaded the city to invest instead in conservation efforts to secure clean water, such as changes in farming methods in the villages upstream. Sewing machines were one of the early purchases. They allowed women to stop grazing sheep — a common practice that leads to deforestation — and start making clothes to sell at local markets. The village people continue to work together with city leaders to determine how to spend the upstream conservation fees, imposed in lieu of filtration taxes.

Today, not only does nature keep Quito’s water clean, but it does so at a lower cost than so-called grey infrastructure.

“This was beautiful habitat that we would want to protect anyway. But now the argument was different. It was an economic one,” Tercek told HuffPost in an interview after the meeting. “And it worked.”

“People are getting it,” he added. “Conservation pays for itself. No philanthropy needed.”

The Nature Conservancy plans to replicate the water conservation initiative within 30 other watersheds around Latin America.

“The potential is enormous,” said Marta Echavarria, founding director of EcoDecision, an environmental business promotion firm that worked with Tercek’s team in Ecuador, and another member of last Thursday’s panel. “Any mechanisms where we could link livelihoods and the conservation through water can really bring people together.”

The island of Dominica offers another case in point of how investing in natural infrastructure can benefit economic development. On one side, the Dominican Republic is home to vast stands of forest. While it is still a poor country, its economy is growing thanks in large part to a strong tourism industry. The other side of the island, however, tells a starkly different story.

“Haiti is a disaster,” said Tercek. The biggest difference, he noted, is that Haiti didn’t take care of its natural capital, including forests, topsoil, reefs and fish stocks. Or, as he put it simply, “They screwed themselves.”

Meanwhile, efforts started by Maathai in Africa are helping to fend off a similar disaster. Her Green Belt Movement has now planted more than 30 million trees and helped nearly 900,000 women.

“Maathai understood the value of nature — in particular, the value of trees — and she understood the role of the common people, especially women,” said Tercek. “The conservation movement doesn’t have enough heroes like her.”

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The 25-year-old Lopes is Angola’s first winner. She beat out 88 other competitors to win the title during the 60th anniversary of the world’s biggest beauty pageant. She replaces last year’s winner, Ximena Navarrete of Mexico.

“Thank God I’m very satisfied with the way God created me and I wouldn’t change a thing,” Lopes said when asked her interview question. “I consider myself a woman endowed with inner beauty. I have acquired many wonderful principles from my family and I intend to follow these for the rest of my life.”

The first runner-up was 23-year-old Olesia Stefanko of Ukraine and the second runner-up was Priscila Machado of Brazil. The third was Miss Philippines and the fourth Miss China.

Contestants from 89 nations on six continents spent the past three weeks in Sao Paulo, trying to learn samba dance steps, visiting impoverished children and kicking a football around for cameras as the globe’s biggest beauty contest is held in Brazil for the first time.

“It was well deserved, we were cheering for her all along,” said 36-year-old Sao Paulo resident Carolina Rocha, a fan who attended the event. “Her smile and her friendliness was what set her apart from the others. She also answered her question very well, that likely helped her a lot.”

Before the contest began, judges offered little insight into who they thought might win.

“I know my job and I’ll be tough, but fair,” said pageant judge and journalist Connie Chung. “You have to keep in mind that these women are not objects just to be looked at. They’re to be taken seriously. I want to choose somebody I take seriously and the world takes seriously, too.”

Paula Shugart, president of the Miss Universe organization, was hyped for the night.

“It’s our 60th anniversary, it’s a very big show,” she said. “We’re anticipating close to a billion viewers from around the world.”

Shugart said it was fitting the globe’s biggest beauty pageant be held in Brazil at this time, as the nation prepares to host some major events in the coming years.

“I don’t think there is any doubt in the rest of the world’s mind that Brazil is the place, between hosting the Olympics and hosting the World Cup,” she said. “I love the fact we’re going to kick it off. I always say we’re the ‘World Cup’ of beauty.”

The contestants, who must never have been married or had children and who must be at least 18 years of age and under 27 years of age by Feb. 1 of the competition year.

The pageant, hosted by NBC “Today” anchor Natalie Morales and the Bravo network’s Andy Cohen, will air live on NBC and be distributed to about 170 countries. The contest is co-owned by Donald Trump and NBC, and will be judged by celebrities including Connie Chung, supermodel Isabeli Fontana and Indy race car driver Helio Castroneves.

Morales, who is half Brazilian, said that “what’s most important is for the women to be beautiful inside and out.”

For Cohen, the task of hosting is an easy one.

“It’s a fun job. All I have to do is stand there, smile and scream the names of countries,” he said.

Sharply dressed women and men were jostling for chances to have their photos taken with stars on the red carpet. Some traveled from across the globe to support contestants.

Jehona Dreshaj, 17, arrived from Kosovo to cheer on her sister, Aferdita Dreshaj, who is representing the European country.

“It doesn’t really matter the outcome, she is already a winner in our eye and we are so proud of her,” she said. “This has been an incredible experience for her and for all of us. It’s great for her to be representing our country in an event like this”

There have been no headline-grabbing gaffes going into this year’s competition, as opposed to past years that have seen controversies of various stripes. The show itself went off without a hitch.

Some of the contestants have complained to the local news media about the size of bikinis used in some photo shoots, with Miss Mexico Karin Ontiveros saying they were “very small.”

That was enough to draw chuckles in Brazil, where women from all walks of life, not just beauty queens, sport barely there swimwear on beaches throughout the country.

Miss USA Alyssa Campanella, from California, will be trying to end a long losing spell for the U.S. in the competition. An American has not been named Miss Universe since Brook Lee won the title in 1997.

The pageant started as a local bathing suit revue in Long Beach, California, organized by a swimwear company.

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“NTC seems to confuse black people with mercenaries,” AU chairman Jean Ping said Monday, referring to the rebels’ National Transitional Council. “All blacks are mercenaries. If you do that, it means (that the) one-third of the population of Libya, which is black, is also mercenaries. They are killing people, normal workers, mistreating them.”

He added: “Maybe it’s looters, uncontrolled forces. But then the government should say something, condemn this. We want to see a signal that the African workers that are there, they should be evacuated.”

Ping’s comments follow concerns from international rights groups about beatings and detentions of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa.

“I really fear vigilante justice and retribution and attacks by civilians against other civilians,” said Richard Sollom, deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights, who is back from a June fact-finding mission in Misrata, Libya.

Sollom said Monday that his Boston-based group knew of about 500 Darfuris “who are desperately trying to get out of Libya. They have no money, they are basically homeless because they are from Darfur, and they very much fear for their lives because of the color of their skin.”

Guest workers from Sudan, Chad, Darfur and other sub-Saharan African locales have been targeted in part because Gadhafi did hire foreign African mercenaries, Sollom said.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said Sunday that the evidence it has collected so far “strongly suggests that (Moammar Gadhafi’s) government forces went on a spate of arbitrary killing as Tripoli was falling.”

So far, there have been no specific allegations of atrocities carried out by rebel fighters, though human rights groups are continuing to investigate some unsolved cases.

Reporters for The Associated Press have witnessed several episodes of rebels mistreating detainees or sub-Saharan Africans suspected of being hired Gadhafi guns, including an incident where about a dozen black men were detained and some were punched.

Council spokesman Abdel-Hafiz Ghoga denied Ping’s claims that rebels were responsible for such killings.

“These allegations have been made during the early days of the revolution,” he said. “This never took place.”

He added: “If happened, it will be the Gadhafi forces. Until now, we keeping finding mass graves of the newly liberated cities.”

Libyan rebels appear to have secured the capital after a week of fierce fighting with loyalists to Gadhafi.

“It is over. The NTC took power … they won,” Ping said. “And now it is time for both sides to stop all the killing.”

The AU has so far refused to recognize the council, although some of its member states, including Nigeria and Ethiopia, have done so. The United Nations has urged the AU to “encourage Libya’s new leadership” and help unlock billions of dollars in frozen assets that the Libyan rebels say they urgently need to provide social services.

But many African nations have long-held ties with Gadhafi and the AU has had difficulties taking a unanimous position on Libya.

Ping also called for an immediate cease-fire and the formation of a coalition government that reflected the diversity of Libya. He said the world had ignored the AU’s suggestions about Libya’s crisis but that their roadmap — which calls for a cease-fire but not for Gadhafi to step down — was still relevant.

Ping said some of the Libyan rebel leaders insulted African countries by saying they have favored Gadhafi.

“The (rebels’) attitude has been negative all along. I went to Benghazi. We have treated them equally,” he said.

Ping said the AU will work with the U.N. and any other partners, including NATO, to find a political solution for Libya that leads to democracy.

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See photos and read more

Miria, known as the Holy Mother of her Umbanda religious group, is assisted by other worshippers as she falls to the floor in a trance during a ritual in the Vila Flavia favela in Sao Paulo, August 26, 2011. Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian religion that combines African religions with Catholicism and local indigenous beliefs, uses rituals to induce trances in worshippers who “incorporate” the spirits of slaves born in Africa and buried in Brazil. During the ritual trances, the followers will smoke tobacco and drink alcohol, stagger like old slaves, beat their chests and prance around as prostitutes or drunks.

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The former U.S. Secretary of State paid a visit to Tripoli in 2008 during a brief interlude that saw Gadhafi begin to be welcomed back into the international fold. As Jason Ukman of the Washington Post wrote on Wednesday, “it was only three short years ago that Rice shared a late-night dinner with Gaddafi to break the Ramadan fast, three short years ago that the United States and Libya were celebrating what was to be a new chapter in their relations.”

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I already pretty much thought so already, I mean George did say that poor black people make him uncomfortable..at least he was being honest..this is horrible and very embrassing to our country..watch

During their first joint visit to Haiti this week, George W. Bush appears to have wiped his hand on Bill Clinton’s shirt after shaking hands with a crowd of Haitians.

If that is what happened — Breitbart.TV first raised the question after seeing the video below — it builds on Barack Obama’s story of Bush’s compulsive need for hand sanitizer. But whatever Bush’s reason, it looks pretty bad.

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The rescue was captured on camera. As you’ll see below, Kiki’s older sister, Sabrina, was pulled out first. Seven-year-old Kiki comes out next, looking a bit dazed. However, after seeing the crowd, the survivor immediately smiles and extends his arms in triumph. A photographer from the New York Post described the scene and the crowd’s reaction.

After so much heartbreak and tragedy, this was a rescue that inspired the masses. When asked why he smiled so broadly, Kiki responded, “I smiled because I was free, I smiled because I was alive.”

After being treated for their injuries and dehydration, the two children were reunited with their parents. No doubt the children were happy. In time they’ll understand just how happy they’d made everyone else.

Watch the incredible moment below, and learn how you can donate to Haiti here.

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