Creating messages.

You think I took that picture?
In a way... I just created it through  http://www.says-it.com/ !
Choose your sign, choose the message. Have fun!

Great new site...

... to improve your English.
Thanks very much to its creator: Annette Porte. Fabulous job !

The idea is simple. You have a text that is recorded. You also have the script (remember it's better to listen to the audio or video several times without the script.).

Then, you have access to a pdf doc with vocabulary pertaining to the script in an exercise and then, you can fill in the blanks of the text.

I'm gonna add it below the oral comprehension label on your left. Use it!
https://tinytexts.wordpress.com/

Rolihlahla: Tugging at the branches of a tree

As Nelson Mandela is preparing for transition, I enjoyed discovering the meaning of his real name:  Rolihlahla: Tugging at the branches of a tree.                                                                                     He was tugging at the branches of the tree of life to yield its fruits: Liberty, peace and justice for all. Let his patience inspire us all. Here are the final words in his four-and-a-half-hour-long speech at the Rivonia Trial. 

"I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the idea of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve but, if need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." 

He wasn't sentenced to death but spent 27 years in prison...

He must have read Henry David Thoreau: "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." 

The Wiki page in French refers to the CIA's involvement in Mandela's arrest in 1962.
It doesn't appear in the English Wiki page. A little research about the subject is very enlightening, especially these days. Let's tug at the branches! 

 "It is music and dancing that make me at peace with the world." he declared at a Johny Clegg's concert in 1999.http://youtu.be/BGS7SpI7obY

Revelation: we're in the abyss

By now, you've all heard of the Edward Snowden and about the documents he leaked to the Guardian's journalists that proved the existence of an extensive  US NSA (National Security Agency)’s spying program called PRISM, which was designed to collect information about digital communications, allowing real-time online surveillance of US citizens.
That is of course absolutely unconstitutional and unacceptable. U.S. citizens can be disappointed.
This is sensational news in MSM (Main Stream Media.) Please learn more about it
and see how a Gallup poll shows most Americans oppose NSA surveillance programs, and are evenly split on the rightness of Snowden's actions:http://www.gallup.com/poll/163043/americans-disapprove-government-surveillance-programs.aspx

The following video is as worrying as the news because this is Orwellian double talk. 



There was this very interesting series by the Washington Post in 2010 that I had reported here:
http://bilien.blogspot.fr/2010/09/top-secret-america.html
And I suggest you also read this http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/general-keith-alexander-cyberwar/all/ and this http://www.bradblog.com/?p=10067