👶 HAIR OF THE SPROG ‘World’s hairiest baby’ born with one-in-a-BILLION ‘werewolf syndrome’ – and his mum fears it’s down to what she ate
His ultra-hairy body sees the boy complaining about itchy rashes when it’s hot
MEET the extraordinary boy who looks a real-life werewolf with hair enveloping his face and body – all due to a one-in-a-billion medical anomaly.
Dubbed potentially as the world’s hairiest baby, his mother’s peculiar theory blames her “cursed” pregnancy craving for a wild animal.
Jaren Gamongan from Apayao, the Philippines, was born with a full head of hair, black sideburns, and patches that filled his face, neck, back, and arms.
His superstitious mum, Alma, believed the boy’s appearance was due to a curse wrought upon her when she ate a wild cat while pregnant with the child.
Despite Alma’s beliefs there’s no medical evidence the cat consumption sparked the condition.
She said that during her pregnancy, she had uncontrollable cravings for wild cats, an exotic dish that is found in the remote mountain region where she lives.
Alma sought out a black feline from village friends and had it sauteed with herbs – a decision she later regretted when Jaren was born.
Her neighbours kept feeding her ideas about a curse, but when she finally took Jaren to qualified doctors this month, they found out he had a medical condition called hypertrichosis.
The incredibly rare syndrome only affects an estimated “one in every one billion people” as only 50 to 100 cases were reported worldwide since the Middle Ages.
Footage shows the two-year-old playing around a building and their home, but Alma worries his unique looks will be a challenge in school.
But then recently the doctors told me it was not related.”
Out of Alma’s three kids, middle child Jaren was the only one looking different.
She said Jaren was a happy and playful boy but he complains about having itchy rashes when the weather becomes hot.
“I will give him a bath when it’s hot. We even tried to cut the hair, but it would just grow back even longer and thicker, so we stopped doing it,” she explained.
After seeing baby Jaren this month, dermatologist Dr Ravelinda Soriano Perez said: “We believe this was an inherited condition, but it is very rare. One in only one billion people could have it.”
The doctor added that while hypertrichosis did not have a cure, treatments such as laser hair removal could help the condition.
She said: “We will try to do ten sessions in four to six weeks and then observe.”
Mum Alma now pleads with good Samaritans for help since each session would cost the family 2,500 PHP (£34.97).
She said: “I am very thankful to those who already helped us. I hope my son could have a better chance in life with your help.”
💭 Security video caught a female bodybuilder fighting off a man trying to attack her while she was working out alone in a Florida gym.
Nashali Alma, 24, was exercising in the gym at the Inwood Park Apartment Complex in Tampa when Xavier Thomas-Jones attacked her Jan. 22, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office charged.
One alleged activist group in Norway is calling for Aretha Franklin’s hit 1968 song “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” to be removed from both Apple Music and Spotify after they deemed its lyrics offensive.
The Trans Cultural Mindfulness Alliance took to Twitter last week to condemn the ballad, citing that it has ignited harm against transgender women.
“Aretha Franklin’s 1968 song ‘Natural Woman’ perpetuates multiple harmful anti-trans stereotypes,” the organization tweeted. “There is no such thing as a ‘natural’ woman.”
The message continued, “The song has helped inspire acts of harm against transgender women. TCMA is requesting it is removed from Spotify & Apple Music.”
A Texas suspects she was poisoned by touching a napkin stuffed in her car’s door handle outside a Houston restaurant. Doctors agreed she had been poisoned but were unable to identify the poisonous material.
Erin Mims joined her husband at a Houston-area restaurant to celebrate her birthday last Tuesday afternoon. As she left the restaurant she noticed someone stuck a napkin in the door handle on the passenger side of her car, Fox 26 Houston’s Sherman Desselle reported.
She pulled the napkin out of the door and opened it to get in the car. Once inside she asked her husband if he stuck the napkin in the door — he said no.
Mims decided to go back into the restaurant and wash her hands. A few minutes later, she began to feel a tingling sensation in her arm.
“Maybe five minutes, my whole arm started tingling and feeling numb. I couldn’t breathe,” Mims told the Fox 26 reporter. “I started getting hot flashes, my chest was hurting, my heart was beating really fast.”
Mim’s husband quickly took her to a hospital where doctors raced to determine what substance had been used to create the numbness and other symptoms her body experienced. Her vital signs jumped all over the place, she explained.
“The doctor came in, and told me it wasn’t enough in my system to determine what it was, but said it was acute poisoning from an unknown substance,” the woman said. He told her he thought it might have been an attempt to kidnap her.
Houston Police Department officials took an assault report but told Fox 26 they had not seen any kind of similar complaint before. An official with the Drug Enforcement Administration also said they had never heard of this type of attack.
Fox 26 consulted with poison control expert Mark Winter from the Southeast Houston Poison Center. He said her symptoms could match up to hundreds of different toxins. He called her exposure “casual” or minimal, the report explains.
Mims told Fox 26 she decided to share her story on social media and then her post went viral. She said several people said they had similar situations. Fox 26 said they were unable to confirm the reports.
“All I could do was think about my babies. It was the scariest moment of my life,” says Mims.
😇 Today, according to the Ethiopian calendar it’s Saturday, August 14, 2014 – Saint Abuna Aregawi commemorated on this very Day.
💭 Ladies and gentlemen; I swear to you; If America does not stop supporting the evil fascist Oromo regime of Ethiopia – and if it does not refrain from its diabolical plot to disintegrate, weaken and destroy the historical Christian-Zionist Ethiopia – then, mark my words, the state of Texas would become the first state to secede from the National Union of the United States of America very soon.
☆ TExas
☆ TEgray (Tigray)
☆ TEdros (Tigray Native)
☆ TEsla (Besides, Elon Musk owns Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH = Ethiopia)
👉 Elon Musk’s ranch and his SpaceX Starbase are located in Texas.
A nun working in war-torn Tigray has shared her harrowing testimony of the atrocities taking place.
The Ethiopian nun, who has to remain anonymous for her own security, is working in Mekelle, Tigray’s capital, and surrounding areas, helping some of the tens of thousands of people displaced by the fighting who have been streaming into camps in the hope of finding shelter and food. Both are in short supply. Humanitarian aid is being largely blocked and a wholesale crackdown is seeing civilians being picked off in the countryside, either shot or rounded up and taken to overcrowded prisons. She spoke to Tracy McVeigh this week.
“After the last few months I’m happy to be alive. I have to be OK. Mostly we are going out to the IDP [internally displaced people] camps and the community centres where people are. They are in a bad way.
“In comparison to the other places, Mekelle is much better, although I consider it chaotic as we have 40 to 65 people sleeping in one room. For 3,000 to 6,000 people, there are four toilets for men and four for women. Sanitation is very poor, water is not always available. Food and medicines … they are difficult to find.
“People have been here for three or four months and still have no blankets, and the numbers of IDPs is increasing every day, maybe 100 come every day from the worst part of the region. So the demand does not match supply. The community, the people here, they are trying to help but they have very little to share themselves. No one can withdraw any money from the banks; there’s no businesses operating. But still, whatever people have, they share.
“It happened so quickly. For us, it’s so shocking. So sudden. We had a normal life, things were improving – health centres, lives and education programmes. We were reaching 24,000 children and had plans to expand the school feeding programme. But all that had to stop because of the coronavirus. Then as if in a day, there’s a fully fledged war. For the past three months now we are trying to feed 25,000 IDPs in about 23 centres; some are 75 miles away from Mekelle. Many, many have been raped.
“There were some indicators late last year: the roads out were closed, the budget to this area had been cut and when we had the locust attacks, there was no support from central government. They were not allowing face masks for the schoolchildren. A lot of other humiliations were happening. So there was a lot of discrimination leading up to it, but war? War was so sudden.
“People are traumatised. Some of them have lost immediate family members. People are worried about where members of their family are. Some people are out in the bush. Their homes are occupied. People are worried, anxious, sad, angry. They are really worried about the future.
“I met an old person who had been displaced three times in their lifetime, all because of these ethnic wars, but for younger people, anyone aged 30, 40, this is all new. I’m 48 and I have never witnessed any war. It is very strange and very scary. It really puts you in darkness.
“When I think of our lives here a year ago, we had peace and signs of development in all areas, in water, communications systems. It was so inspiring, giving us hope. But now the hospitals have all been attacked, looted and destroyed.
“Now that feels like history. In just a few months.
“In Mekelle the shelling has now stopped but it is still going on not far from us. The bodies are being left to be eaten by the hyenas, not even having the dignity of burial.
“Rape is happening to girls as young as eight and to women of 72. It is so widespread, I go on seeing it everywhere, thousands. This rape is in public, in front of family, husbands, in front of everyone. Their legs and their hands are cut, all in the same way.
“You wonder if the people doing this are human. I don’t know who is training these people.
“Wherever there are Eritrean or Ethiopian troops. Tragic. Every single woman, not only once. It is intentional, deliberate. I am confident in that from what I am witnessing. There are 70,000 civilians under attack. So much looting, fighting, raping. All targeting the civilians. The brutality, the killings, the harassing.
“This region has been closed off. Cut off from all the support that people deserve. We are isolated, lonely, neglected. If the world is not moved to take action against such terribleness, you wonder why. This suffering is appalling.
“I don’t know what is worse, to die in the bush, starving, or in jail or by gun. The young people are so scared.
“The world should condemn the killing of civilians. People having to leave their homes and the sexual violence – so many woman and girls raped.
“I would like to say to the world: in the 21st century there should be no one dying of hunger when the world can take action. Whoever can do this, they must not wait for another second. Everybody in the world must act, they should condemn this.
“I know it can be done. There has to be someone who can do it and do it fast.”
This month, Ethiopia, a low-income country facing economic difficulties, is making its case for a financial bailout at the spring meetings of the World Bank and IMF.
It is also conducting a war of starvation in the northern Tigray region. Week by week soldiers are destroying everything essential to sustain life — food and farms, clinics and hospitals, water supplies.
How should the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development treat a government engaged in widespread and systematic destruction and impoverishment, not to mention killing and rape? Bank staff don’t like to make political judgments, but in this case the directors — representing the shareholders including the US and UK — cannot shirk their obligation to acknowledge the political realities in Ethiopia.
Despite an information blackout, evidence of mass atrocities is coming to light. A Belgian university group has documented more than 150 massacres. Health workers are treating hundreds of victims of rape. The aid group Médecins Sans Frontières says that 70 per cent of health facilities have been ransacked and vandalised. The US State Department reports that militia from the Amhara region have ethnically cleansed the western part of Tigray. The huge army of neighbouring Eritrea has rampaged through the region — invited in by Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed.
On April 6, the World Peace Foundation published evidence that a tripartite coalition of the Ethiopian and Eritrean armies plus Amhara militia is using starvation as a weapon of war. Before the outbreak of conflict in November, Tigray was largely free from hunger. Today, three-quarters of its 5.7m people need emergency aid. Just over 1m are receiving support — but it is routinely stolen by soldiers after it is distributed. We can expect death rates from hunger already to be rising.
The scorched earth campaign is undoing decades of development. Fruit orchards have been cut down and industries employing tens of thousands have been looted. Hotels that once hosted tourists visiting Tigray’s historic obelisks and cave churches have been stripped bare. Fertile lands in the western lowlands have been annexed by the Amhara region and Tigrayans expelled.
This looks like a concerted plan to reduce Tigray to poverty and leave its people dependent on food handouts. Regardless of who started the war and why, these actions go far beyond legitimate war aims. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has promised to investigate allegations of war crimes.
Alongside the human rights violations, donors will assess the reconstruction needs and compile an inventory of stolen or vandalised assets. On the list will be schools, clinics, water supply systems and university research departments, among other things — many of them paid for by multilateral agencies and governments. Who will foot the bill for rebuilding? At a time of straitened aid budgets, taxpayers in donor countries will balk at paying a second time around. Shouldn’t reconstruction be the responsibility of those who inflicted the damage?
This debate takes the World Bank into the troubled water of political conditionality on economic assistance. Ethiopia will raise objections, arguing that the conflict is a domestic affair and donors have no business interfering. It will also say that there are millions of people elsewhere in the country who need donor-financed assistance, such as through the flagship productive safety net programme, which helps poor farmers. An implicit threat lurking is the potential shockwave across Africa and beyond should a country of 110m people lurch into nationwide crisis.
But the war in Tigray isn’t a regrettable bump on the road to reform. A long war will devour Ethiopia’s resources, harden its authoritarian turn and deter investment.
It is not too late to turn the country back from its track towards famine, protracted conflict and impoverishment. It starts with a ceasefire, so that aid can reach the hungry and farmers can plant. The agricultural calendar means this can’t wait. Next is peace negotiations including the agenda of restitution and reconstruction. Rebuilding will be an expense for the cash-strapped government of Ethiopia, but essential to restore its reputation as a credible partner for investors and donors.
The directors of the World Bank and IMF cannot shy away from these hard issues when they consider Ethiopian requests for additional funds over the coming weeks. They should not fund Ethiopia’s self-destruction, but instead use their leverage to insist on an end to war and starvation.
_______
_______
_______
_______
_______
Addis Ethiopia Weblog 