Category: Uncategorized

By Patrick Martin
Subordinating science to religion

Earlier this week, President Obama announced the selection of Francis S. Collins as the director of the National Institutes of Health. Collins, while an accomplished biologist and the leader of the groundbreaking Humane Genome Project, is an increasingly outspoken advocate of evangelical Christianity who has publicly declared that Darwin’s theory of evolution cannot explain the moral dimensions of humanity.

In selecting Collins, Obama clearly bypassed many qualified scientists whose appointment would not have generated controversy over their outspoken religious views. The decision was intended as a deliberate accommodation to the religious right.

In 2006, Collins published a volume entitled The Language of God. The title of Collins’ book was suggested to him by the statement made by President Bill Clinton welcoming the first successful mapping of the human genome. Clinton, like George W. Bush a Southern Baptist, declared, “Today, we are learning the language in which God created life.”

While opposing the pseudo-scientific teaching of the creationists, known as “intelligent design,” Collins argued instead that there was no contradiction between evolution and religion. He claimed that god created the world 13.7 billion years ago, set evolution in motion, and then intervened from time to time in human history, as in the Christ story.

Collins claimed that there were aspects of human nature that could not be explained by Darwin’s theory. “Selfless altruism presents a major challenge for the evolutionist,” he argued.

Shortly after the book was published—and more than four years after the Human Genome Project successfully mapped the genetic structure of man—Collins was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bush.

Collins left the government-run Genome Project in 2007 and launched the BioLogos Foundation to promote his claim that biological evolution is the product of the will of god. He reportedly had differences with the Bush administration’s suppression of certain areas of scientific research. He supported making use of the hundreds of thousands of human embryos discarded every year by in vitro fertilization clinics to conduct stem cell research. Collins supported Obama in both the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination and in the general election.

There is little argument that Collins is a fully qualified scientist who can capably lead a major research effort, as he did on the human genome. However, these advances were made in conflict with the religious views with which he has become publicly associated.
As director of the National Institutes of Health, Collins will have a different role from his position as a scientist. He will head the most important and well-funded scientific organization on the planet. Over the next 14 months, NIH will spend $4 billion on research at its Bethesda, Maryland campus, while distributing $37 billion in research grants throughout the United States and around the world.

Harvard experimental psychologist Steven Pinker wrote, “I have serious misgivings about Francis Collins being appointed director of NIH. It’s not that I think that there should be a religious litmus test for public science administrators, or that being a devout Christian is a disqualification. But in Collins’s case, it is not a matter of private belief, but public advocacy. The director of NIH is not just a bureaucrat who tends the money pipeline … He or she is also a public face of science, someone who commands one of the major bully pulpits for science in the country. The director testifies before Congress, sets priorities, selects speakers and panelists, and is in many regards a symbol for biomedical research in the US and the world. In that regard, many of Collins’s advocacy statements are deeply disturbing.”

The selection of Collins was generally hailed in the corporate-controlled media as a clever maneuver by Obama, a way of paying tribute to religion while selecting an individual who defends evolution against creationism and opposes restrictions on abortion rights and stem cell research.

Both Christian fundamentalist and Catholic groups hailed the nomination, except for those devoted specifically to the promotion of the theory of “intelligent design.”

Over the past several years, Collins has become an increasingly vocal religious advocate. In his blog for BioLogos, entitled “Science and the Sacred,” Collins wrote: “Suppose God chose to use the mechanism of evolution to create animals like us, knowing this process would lead to big-brained creatures with the capacity to think, ask questions about our own origins, discover the truth about the universe and discover pointers toward the One who provides meaning to life. Who are we to say that’s not how we would have done it?”

British naturalist Richard Dawkins ridiculed this argument in a dialogue with Collins on science and religion published by Time magazine. He said: “I think that’s a tremendous cop-out. If God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slightly odd that he should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings capable of worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in.”

WSWS for more

Press TV

As the Israeli siege keeps Gaza buried in ruins, an Iranian foundation works alongside a local Palestinian charity group to help families rebuild their homes.

Thee three-week-long Israeli military offensive in Gaza has left the Gaza Strip in a state of destruction. What remains of the properties of tens of thousands of Palestinians are just heaps of rubble.

Although several donor countries have pledged about USD 5 billion in aid to rebuild the region, reconstruction has been put on hold because Israel has banned building material — such as steel and cement — from entering Gaza.

However, in spite of Israeli restrictions, Iran has stepped in to offer direct assistance to the Palestinians who were left homeless by Operation Cast Lead.

Bypassing government bureaucracy, the Martyrs’ Foundation of the Islamic Republic of Iran has worked in partnership with the local Ansar Charity Institute to provide the necessary assistance.

“We work on projects to help the families of Palestinian detainees in Israel and the families of those killed by Israel. This particular project provides 8,000 dollars to the families of those who were killed in the Gaza war and those who lost their homes,” Sami Abu Ayada of the Ansar Institute told Press TV.

So far, up to 102 families across the Gaza Strip have benefited from the project. Although the aid falls short of the amount needed by each family to rebuild their home, it is, nonetheless, more than many of them have received from other donors.

“I will use this money to build a small shack out of bricks and corrugated iron. It will shelter my family in the rainy season. It is better than the tent we live in now. Other people who can afford to rent homes will save this money to rebuild their homes once the border is opened,” a Gazan woman who received aid said when interviewed.

Press TV for more
(Submitted by Ingrid B. Mork)

WHO/Marie-Agnes Heine

In India, more than 100 000 women die from pregnancy-related causes every year, more than anywhere else in the world. If the current trend persists, India will not be able to achieve the Millennium Development Goal 5 of reducing maternal mortality by three quarters by 2015. But some Indian states have made progress in recent years.
The government of the western Indian state of Gujarat, with a population of 50 million, has brought on board private hospitals and doctors to provide free obstetric care to poor women. This private-public partnership, called Chiranjeevi Yojana, or ‘plan for a long life’, was launched in 2005 in five districts. The government pays for the services provided by the private practitioners. The programme now covers all 25 districts of Gujarat.

This photo story shows how women and newborn benefit from the Chiranjeevi scheme and why this public-private partnership could also serve as a model for other regions and states that want to improve maternal and newborn health.

WHO for more

EDITORIAL (The Star)

Stories of Canadians seized overseas, detained and thrown into squalid jails have become sadly commonplace in recent years. But the latest, of Bashir Makhtal, is especially alarming, because the former Toronto man faces a potential death sentence after an Ethiopian court declared him guilty of having links with a separatist and terrorist organization. His sentence will be handed down tomorrow.

Makhtal’s real crime appears to be having a grandfather who founded the Ogaden National Liberation Front, which Ethiopia has labelled a terrorist group – and to which Makhtal says he has never belonged. An ethnic Somali from Ethiopia’s embattled eastern Ogaden region, young Bashir was sent to Somalia for safety at the age of seven. But a flaring civil war forced him to flee to Canada in 1991.

After 10 years in Canada, Makhtal returned to Africa to open a trading business, apparently to support impoverished relatives. In December of 2006, he was arrested by Kenyan authorities while re-entering the country from a business trip to Somalia, which had enjoyed a period of relative calm until it was attacked by Ethiopian troops fighting to dislodge an Islamic government. Caught in a sweep of terrorism suspects, he was stripped of his Canadian passport and deported, under protest, to Ethiopia.

Since then, Makhtal has been subjected to solitary confinement, interrogated in a language he doesn’t speak, and hauled before a military tribunal. Canadian officials were denied access to him for 16 months. But after Transport Minister John Baird took an interest in his plight last year – following pleas from Somali constituents –Makhtal’s conditions improved and his case was moved to a civilian court.

The Star for more

By Carrie Johnson

Political adviser Karl Rove and other high-ranking figures in the Bush White House played a greater role than previously understood in the firing of federal prosecutors almost three years ago, according to newly obtained e-mails that shed light on a scandal that led to mass Justice Department resignations and an ongoing criminal probe.
The e-mails and new interviews with key participants reflect contacts among Rove, aides in the Bush political affairs office and White House lawyers about the dismissal of three of the nine U.S. attorneys fired in 2006: New Mexico’s David C. Iglesias, the focus of ire from GOP lawmakers; Missouri’s Todd Graves, who had clashed with one of Rove’s former clients; and Arkansas’s Bud Cummins, who was pushed out to make way for a Rove protege.

The documents and interviews provide new information about efforts by political aides in the Bush White House, for example, to push a former colleague as a favored candidate for one of the U.S. attorney posts. They also reflect the intensity of efforts by lawmakers and party officials in New Mexico to unseat the top prosecutor there. Rove described himself as merely passing along complaints by senators and state party officials to White House lawyers.
The e-mails emerged as Rove finished his second day of closed-door-testimony Thursday about the firings to the House Judiciary Committee. For years, Rove and former White House counsel Harriet Miers had rejected efforts by lawmakers to obtain their testimony and their correspondence about the issue, citing executive privilege. The House of Representatives sued, igniting a court fight that was resolved this year after discussions among lawyers for former president George W. Bush and President Obama.

Washington Post for more

By James Crabtree

Ten years ago Pakistan had one television channel. Today it has over 100. Together they have begun to open up a country long shrouded by political, moral and religious censorship—taking on the government, breaking social taboos and, most recently, pushing a new national consensus against the Taliban. One channel in particular, Geo TV, has won a reputation for controversy more akin to America’s Fox News than CNN or Sky News. Some Pakistanis see it and its competitors as a force for progress; others as a creator of anarchy and disorder. Certainly, the channels now wield huge political influence in a country where half the population is illiterate. But their effect is now felt beyond Pakistan’s borders too—revealing an underappreciated face of globalisation, in which access to television news means that immigrant communities, and in particular Britain’s 0.7m Pakistanis, often follow events in their country of origin more closely than those of the country where they actually live.

I went to Islamabad this April to learn about what many Pakistanis call their “media revolution.” The previous month, during a spate of anti-government protests, Geo TV had again demonstrated its influence by using its popular news programmes to support a “long-march” by opposition groups on the capital Islamabad, and even hosting a celebratory rock concert on the city’s streets when the government caved in to demands to reinstate the country’s most prominent judge.

I had chosen a tense time to visit. On my first day a man loyal to the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud walked into an army camp two blocks from where I was staying and blew himself up, killing eight soldiers. That same day news channels first aired a grainy video of a Taliban punishment beating in the Swat valley on the northwest frontier. A girl had been accused of infidelity and in the clip she was pinned face down by two men in a dusty village square while a third beat her with a stick. It topped the news for days, causing controversy for its brutality and for exposing the reality behind a “peace deal” to hand Swat over to the Taliban.

The video marked the start of an important new phase in Pakistan’s internal battles, with the army launching a bloody offensive to retake Swat in May, and a further push against the Taliban’s mountainous strongholds during July. Pakistanis have often felt sympathy for the Taliban, seeing their struggle as an understandable reaction to America’s military presence. This view began to change as militants launched more frequent bombings in major cities. But media coverage of Taliban brutality—beheadings, murders and most gruesomely the exhumation of a corpse to be hung in a public square—swayed opinion further. At the beginning of June one story in particular captured the country’s attention: a young army captain, killed on his birthday in a battle with Taliban fighters in Swat. The night before he had written to his father, worrying that he might die, but asking his family to be proud of him and his country. Pictures of his distraught mother ran for days, further pushing anti-Taliban opinion with far-reaching implications in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. And behind this shift lies a new power in Pakistan’s normally rigid hierarchy, which now rivals the ability of politicians, generals, spies and mullahs to shape events: the media itself.

Pakistani television’s great unshackling was sparked by an earlier military campaign. In May 1999 Pervez Musharraf, then head of the army, launched an incursion into Kargil, a mountainous region of Indian Kashmir. Here the Pakistani and Indian armies faced each other at 18,000 feet, in conditions so inhospitable that both abandon the area in winter. In the spring of 1999 Musharraf snuck his troops in early, taking the empty Indian positions without a fight. The subsequent war saw Pakistan beaten back, withdrawing under US pressure. In the aftermath Musharraf launched a coup to become president. But he also took a more unusual lesson from his defeat.

At the time Pakistan Television (PTV) was the only source for television news. The state broadcaster was closely controlled, earning the moniker “seeing is not believing.” In desperation many bought illegal satellite dishes, tuning in to Indian television during the war, which while jingoistic was broadly truthful. Musharraf would later paint his decision to loosen media restrictions as evidence of his liberalism. But it was a calculation born of losing both an actual war and a PR one: if India had a private television sector, so must Pakistan.

Pakistan has long had a vibrant print media, both in Urdu and English. Television was different: the elite could get CNN and the BBC World Service but access for most Pakistanis was strictly limited. Just as limited, says Rana Jawad, Geo TV’s Islamabad bureau chief, was the news that did make it onto air. Bulletins had a familiar pattern: “First you had what the president had said that day, then prime minister, then minister of foreign affairs, and so on… it had no credibility.” Musharraf liberalised the system in 2002. It was a decision that, six years later, would play a major role in his downfall.

Prospect Magazine for more
(Submitted by reader)

Dear friends,
Akbar Ilahbadi or Allahabadi(1846-1921) was a great Urdu poet. He was master of pun and sarcasm. He lived during time of Sir Syed Ahmed a great educationist and reformist. Akbar was not warm to Sir Syed’s ideas; Akbar was a conservative and was critical of foreign culture.
Here is his famous Ghazal that was sung by an equally famous singer Ghulam Ali. Till today it remains very popular. I have rendered it in three scripts and have provided meaning and translation of the verses for your enjoyment. The current Ghazal is very beautiful with deep meaning and, intricacy of symbolism and play on words. It may take hours discussing its details.

Hagama hai kyoN barpa, thoRi si jo pee lee hai
Hangama=commotion, uproar
Daka to nahiN Dala, chori to nahiN ki hai
Why there is uproar, for I just sipped a little wine
I didn’t commit stealing, neither did I waylay

Na tajruba-kari se, Wa’iz ki ye bateN haiN
na tajruba-kari= inexperience
Is rang ko kya jane, puchho to kabhi pee hai?
Cleric is inexperienced, so is his advice
How can he appreciate color of wine? Ask him if ever had it?

Oos mai se nahiN matlab, dil jis se hai begana
Begana=stranger, removed
Maqsood hai is mai se, dil hi meiN jo khinchti hai
Maqsood=intent
I do not yearn for that wine which has made my heart a stranger
My intent is that love-wine which oozes in heart

Ae shouq vahi mai pee, ae hosh zara so ja
Mehman nazar is dam, ek barq-e-tajjali hai
barq=lightening Tajalli= expose, shining appearance of Allah
Oh my passion! Have the same wine, oh my awareness, slumber
Right now my eyes’ guest is her unveiled shining face

VaaN, dil meiN ke sadmeN do, yaaN, jee meiN ke sab seh lo Sadma=shock, pain
Un ka bhi ajab dil hai, mera bhi ajab jee hai
Her heart plots shocks; I plan to bear everything
She has unique mind set, mine is a sublime way

Har zarra chamkta hai anvar-e-ilahi se
anvar-e-ilahi=Halo of Allah
Har saNs yeh kehti hai, hum haiN to Khuda bhi hai
Every particle shines from light borrowed from Allah
Yet, every life boasts, “God exists because of me”

Suraj meiN lage dhabba, fitrat ke karishme haiN
Fitrat=nature
B’ut hum ko kaheN kafir, Allah ki marzi hai
B’ut=idol, false God
The mighty sun gets a dark patch, it is nature’s magic
The false God is accusing me of being a Kefir; it is Allah’s will!

In Islam, idols are considered false Gods. Beloved is also called a diva or idol. Here poet has added pun False God is calling him a Kafir. Since every thing happens from will of God, so False God is calling poet a Kafir, must be Allah’s will. A beautiful verse.
Asghar Vasanwala can be reached at asgharf@att.net

Ghulam Ali singing: Hangama hai kyoN barpa by Akbar Ilah Abadi

Kyodo News

The Democratic Party of Japan will pledge a 25 percent cut in Japan’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 from 1990 levels in its manifesto for the upcoming national campaign, party officials said Sunday.
Bidding to wrest power from the Liberal Democratic Party-led ruling coalition, the DPJ has decided to set a more ambitious emissions goal than the 8 percent target set last month by Prime Minister Taro Aso. The DPJ’s target, however, is the same as that pledged by the LDP’s coalition partner, New Komeito.

The DPJ’s strategy would entail the adoption of a cap-and-trade system under which each company’s emissions would be capped at a certain level and quotas could be traded between companies, the officials said.

Emissions trading was taken up as an effective way to control heat-trapping gases at the Group of Eight summit earlier this month in Italy, but the government is reluctant to implement such a system in light of opposition from the business sector.

The DPJ is also pledging introduction of a feed-in tariff, or minimum price standard system, that would oblige electric utilities to buy all renewable energy output at a fixed, incentive price to overcome cost disadvantages compared with fossil fuels, according to the officials.

Japan Times for more

Written by Jason Tockman Friday, 24 July 2009
Source: NACLA

For the first time since Chile’s return to democracy, the country’s ruling political coalition may lose the presidency. The centrist “Concertación” coalition is being challenged from both the left and the right, facing perhaps its toughest electoral battle yet. Previous elections have been mostly battled out between a consensus Concertación candidate and a right-wing opponent. But this year a relative newcomer to Chile’s political scene has shaken things up, gaining momentum in the race for the presidency. The political ascendance of 36-year-old Congressman Marco Enríquez-Ominami sets up a competitive three-way contest in the December 2009 election.

Candidates of the Concertación – formally known as the Agreement of Parties for Democracy – have won every presidential election since 1989. Among them is former President Eduardo Frei (1994-2000), a Christian Democrat, who is seeking a second term as the Concertación’s chosen candidate. Sitting President Michelle Bachelet, of the Concertación-affiliated Socialist Party, has won record high approval ratings (74 percent) for her handling of Chile’s economic crisis. However, this has not dented deep public disillusionment with the Concertación, which has become increasingly disconnected from any popular base, stagnating into an ossified political institution incapable of responding to social forces.

“Not only is the system detached from civil society, but it possesses little capacity for renovation and high degrees of endogamy,” explain scholars David Altman and Juan Pablo Luna in a recent report on Chilean politics. “One observes a political system co-opted by the elites and with low levels of citizen participation and activation.”

Upside Down World for more