Food For Thought

To: YOU
Date: TODAY
From: God
Subject: YOURSELF
Reference: LIFE
 

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I am God. Today I will be handling all of your problems. Please remember that I do not need your help. If life happens to deliver a situation to you that you cannot handle, do not attempt to resolve it. Kindly put it in the SFGTD (something for God to do) box. All situations will be resolved, but in My time, not yours. Once the matter is placed into the box, do not hold onto it by worrying about it. Instead, focus on all the wonderful things that are present in your life now.

If you find yourself stuck in traffic; Don't despair. There are people in this world for whom driving is an unheard of privilege.

Should you have a bad day at work; Think of the man who has been out of work for years.

Should you despair over a relationship gone bad; Think of the person who has never known what it's like to love and be loved in return.

Should you grieve the passing of another weekend; Think of the woman in dire straits, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week to feed her children.

Should your car break down, leaving you miles away from assistance; Think of the paraplegic who would love the opportunity to take that walk.

Should you notice a new gray hair in the mirror; Think of the cancer patient in chemo who wishes she had hair to examine.

Should you find yourself at a loss and pondering what is life all about, asking what is my purpose? Be thankful. There are those who didn't live long enough to get the opportunity.

Should you find yourself the victim of other people's bitterness, ignorance, smallness or insecurities; Remember, things could be worse. You could be one of them!

Should you decide to send this to a friend; Thank you, you may have touched their life in ways you will never know!

Hard Work Pays, Be Focused.

China elite's drive to success

By Peter Day BBC News, China

In 2009 China overtook the US to become the world's largest car market and, for some, ambitions for the country to become the biggest global exporter is now in their sights.

Yin Mingshan started his motorcycle company in 1992 with eight people

When I first met him eight years ago, Yin Mingshan was standing on a greasy hillside in the middle of what may be the biggest city in the world, Chongqing, 1,400km (900 miles) up the Yangtze river from Shanghai.
He was in the oily workshop where, 10 years earlier, he and a tiny team had started making motorcycle engines.
Ten years later, his Lifan motorcycles group had become the second-largest manufacturer in China. He was a rich man.
This was a big change from the 20 years he had previously spent in prison during the cultural revolution.
Yin Mingshan is a clever man. When he finally got out of prison he started publishing school textbooks, then switched to motorcycle engines when publishing seemed a bit risky after the events of Tiananmen Square.
The other day I met Yin Mingshan again. He was in Beijing for a celebration event for some of the people on the Hunan China Rich List, the country's wealthiest.
He told me how he has now pushed the motorcycle company into cars, a small-scale car company in China but a big exporter to countries such as Vietnam, Uruguay and Iran.
These happen to be places where people have a similar earning power to the population of his home city Chongqing. Yin Mingshan is following his instincts once again: that at a certain stage of economic development, people want the simple sort of cars he can make.
As with his motorcycles eight years ago, he told me now: "We have always targeted the countryside where the Communist revolution started."
Building dreams
Just one day later, I flew down to the extraordinary city of Shenzhen on the border with Hong Kong to revisit another car company.

China is the world's biggest car market - 13.6m vehicles were sold last year

BYD started life 15 years ago as a battery maker. It now makes rechargeable batteries for a huge proportion of the world's mobile phones. But then, BYD decided to make cars as well, electric cars driven by battery.
Two years ago, I was one of the first Westerners to drive the dual petrol-battery-powered F3 model.
I was pretty impressed by a 13-year-old battery company that had built a car plant from the ground up in just 15 months.
It is a growth rate commonplace in the astonishing city of Shenzhen, which has grown from a population of 78,000 people 35 years ago, to a vibrant city of 14 million people today.
This time I went to meet the company founder, Wang Chuanfu, who is also near the top of the country's rich list.
In his BYD uniform, he looked like a factory line manager. But his identity badge gave him away - employee number 0000001.
A quietly spoken chemist, Wang Chuanfu told me about his hugely ambitious plans to build electric cars for a country rapidly becoming aware - so he said - of environmental issues.
BYD stands for "Build Your Dreams". It already employs almost 200,000 people and he repeated the business strategy which had so shocked me when I first encountered it two years ago - number one in China by 2015, number one in world car production by 2025.
After my encounter with the boss and a spin in the all-electric car he is now making for taxi fleets, and which recharges in one hour, a BYD driver in a petrol-powered car took me to a less salubrious part of the city.
Worker isolation
There I met a young woman who represents the other side of this Chinese industrial revolution.

Foxconn is part of the world's largest maker of consumer electronics

Qing Tong became a migrant worker in Shenzhen at the age of 18. She found the work of checking computer parts repetitive, boring, soul-destroying.
It is the plight of millions of cheap labourers who have flooded into the cities from the countryside in search of a better life, assembling famous brand consumer goods for the world.
Qing Tong went on to work as a supervisor at the vast Foxconn factory. Its 400,000 employees assemble products such as Apple iPads.
Foxconn recently hurtled into world headlines with a spate of migrant worker suicides that forced the company to erect safety nets under the windows of the corporate dormitories.
Qing Tong was not overly critical of her Foxconn experience, but she said that after 30 years of this economic system, a new generation of migrant workers feel homeless. They are far away from their real homes, without any spiritual life or permanent resident status in their adopted cities.
She has written a novel about the plight of the migrant worker called From the Wolf's Burrow into the Tiger Den. She is voicing concerns about the rush to urbanise and modernise China that have become big talking points.
For 30 years China has built a new export-led economy on cheap labour from the countryside. Now that disconnected workforce is beginning to seek recognition of the things it has created in a country still aiming to be global number one in economic terms some time around 2030.

Passive smoking 'kills 600,000' worldwide

Children are particularly at risk of the effects of passive smoking in their own homes

Continue reading the main story

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The first global study into the effects of passive smoking has found it causes 600,000 deaths every year.

One-third of those killed are children, often exposed to smoke at home, the World Health Organization (WHO) found.
The study, in 192 countries, found that passive smoking is particularly dangerous for children, said to be at higher risk of sudden infant death syndrome, pneumonia and asthma.
Passive smoking causes heart disease, respiratory illness and lung cancer.
"This helps us understand the real toll of tobacco," said Armando Peruga, of the WHO's Tobacco-Free Initiative, who led the study.
'Deadly combination'
The study used estimates of the incidence of specific diseases and of the number of people exposed to second-hand smoke in particular areas.
The global health body said it was particularly concerned about the estimated 165,000 children who die of smoke-related respiratory infections, mostly in South East Asia and in Africa.

It said that this group was more exposed to passive smoking than any other group, principally in their own homes.
"The mix of infectious diseases and second-hand smoke is a deadly combination," Mr Peruga said.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

An education programme to help people understand the dangers they cause to these children would be a starting point.”

End Quote Tio Terry

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As well as being at increased risk of a series of respiratory conditions, the lungs of children who breathe in passive smoke may also develop more slowly than children who grow up in smoke-free homes.

Worldwide, as many as 40% of children, 33% of non-smoking men and 35% non-smoking women were exposed to second-hand smoke in 2004, researchers found.
This exposure was estimated to have caused 379,000 deaths from heart disease, 165,000 from lower respiratory infections, 36,900 from asthma and 21,400 from lung cancer.
According to the study, the highest numbers of people exposed to second-hand smoke are in Europe and Asia and the lowest rates of exposure were in the Americas, the Eastern Mediterranean and Africa.
The research also revealed that passive smoking had a large impact on women, killing about 281,000 worldwide. This is due to the fact that in many parts of the world, the study suggests, women are at least 50% more likely to be exposed to second-hand smoke than men.
However, the researchers said were limitations to the study, including uncertainties about the underlying health data and gaps in the data relating to exposure to second-hand smoke.
Writing in the Lancet, Dr Heather Wipfli of the University of Southern California and colleagues, said: "There are well acknowledged uncertainties in estimates of disease burden.
"However, there can be no question that the 1.2bn smokers in the world are exposing billions of non-smokers to second-hand smoke, a disease-causing indoor air pollutant."