Month: June 2010

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(Submitted by Robin Khundkar)

ARCHAEOLOGY

Italian authorities are investigating a curator at the Princeton University Museum of Art for allegedly assisting a Princeton alumnus and art dealer by exporting and laundering stolen artifacts.

Britain has reportedly rejected a request from the Archaeological Survey of India for the return of artifacts carried away during British colonial rule.

Archaeology for more

by DR. SAROJINI SAHOO

‘The Cockfight’ (1846) is a painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme (May 11, 1824 – January 10, 1904), a French painter, kept in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. ( Source: Wikipedia)

In my speech at Nandini Satpathhy’s 79th Birth Anniversary at Jaydev Bhavan, Bhubaneswar, India, last June, my claim that sexual rights for women are mandatory, raised the eye brows of our social gurus and some intellectuals. I think it is time for a new feminist perception without any misandrist ideas. If men and women would be aware that the other has a problem, then they should tend to treat the other in exactly the way they want to be treated (a.k.a. ‘do unto others’). And if this were done, I think we could solve a major sexual crisis without having to do any more lengthy and costly research studies. To me, the answer seems clear. We are all first and foremost human beings and are basically against any type of chauvinism, be it in the form of misandry or be it in the form of misogyny.

In my previous article, I have discussed about Prakruti and Purusha concept in Sankhya Darshan, a well-known Hindu philosophy which denoted co-eternal binary opposition. The concept of such dualism is not only seen in India.
Continue reading “Beyond the Mars and Venus dilemma”

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(Submitted by Amin Jan Mohammad)Link

by MUKUL DUBE

Corporations buy other corporations all the time: in capitalism it is a routine matter. The sale of Union Carbide to Dow Chemical — not including Union Carbide India — may also have been routine, or it may have been exceptional. In essence, what happened because of it was that there is no entity or individual left to be made to pay for the Bhopal disaster. As gas vanishes into the atmosphere, so the criminals of the gas leak have vanished. This suits all concerned, not least the Government of India, which goes about with a begging bowl asking for U.S. investment and which uses its powers and its chicanery as a stick to beat down ordinary Indians.

RICHARD WEITZ

The official reason for the CSTO’s limited role in the Kyrgyz crisis was that the situation involved an internal political crisis in a member country rather than an act of foreign aggression requiring a collective response. Bordyuzha said that “our stance is that the current situation is purely a domestic affair of Kyrgyzstan”. Yet, there is no guarantee that the organization might not respond more vigorously in a future domestic upheaval in a neighboring country. Bakiyev’s removal was not unwelcome in Moscow, and Russian policy makers were happy to let its ally Kazakhstan, also a CSTO member and fortuitously the current chairman of the OSCE, take the lead role in resolving the immediate crisis. Bordyuzha has since stated that the organization can in principle use its CORF in any CSTO member state “with or without a UN mandate, at any time”. In the Kyrgyz case, the Moscow-led CSTO did not behave as a modern version of the Warsaw Pact and send Russian tanks into Bishkek under its auspices in the same way as the Moscow-led Warsaw Treaty Organization legitimized the Soviet military interventions in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. But it is not too difficult imagining the CSTO might do so in the future under different circumstances.

The Central Asia-Caucasus Institute for more

by GOPAL KRISHNA

New Delhi: The 55 page Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) documents (PDF attached) gathered using Right To Information Act (RTI) shows manifest collusion between ministers, officials and Dow Chemicals to protect it from the liabilities of Industrial catastrophe of Bhopal. The documents reveal how some of the ministers who have been made part of Group of Ministers (GoM) by the Prime Minister have been acting to safeguard the interest of the US corporation in question, which is liable for Bhopal disaster.

Counter Currents for more

(Submitted by Mukul Dube)

by ALISON WEIR

For example, the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz quotes Jeffrey Goldberg without mentioning that Goldberg is an Israeli citizen who served as a prison guard at an Israeli prison that held hundreds of Palestinians without charge, some killed in cold blood by the prison commander.

Mainstream media organizations do not seem to have investigated reports that the man who videotaped [reporter Helen] Thomas, Rabbi David Nesenoff, also made an offensive video featuring himself and another man impersonating a buffoonish Catholic priest and Mexican immigrant.

Counterpunch for more

by JOE LEAHY

Until the green revolution of the 1970s, which introduced high-yielding seeds for rice and wheat, most of India’s produce was completely organic. Even today, many farmers by default still use few chemicals.

Financial Times for more

(Submitted by reader)

(An ac­u­punc­ture nee­dle com­mon­ly used to­day. PHOTO/Takumi Fu­jita)

East­ern prac­ti­tion­ers say ac­u­punc­ture works by chang­ing en­er­gy flows in the body. West­ern sci­en­tists tend not to buy this ac­count, ar­gu­ing that the pro­posed en­er­gy fields have nev­er been seen or meas­ured.

Ac­u­punc­ture in­volves in­sert­ing thin nee­dles in­to the skin at se­lected points to treat a range of cond­itions. Sev­er­al stud­ies have shown that it works for cer­tain kinds of pain; a study last year found that ac­u­punc­ture beats con­ven­tion­al treat­ment for chron­ic low­er back pain.

The new stu­dy, pub­lished in the May 30 on­line is­sue of the jour­nal Na­ture Neu­ro­sci­ence, sug­gests that ac­u­punc­ture works by ac­ti­vat­ing pain-sup­press­ing re­cep­tors, or mol­e­cules, in the ar­ea of the body where the nee­dle is in­sert­ed.

World Science for more