Month: June 2010

by B. R. GOWANI

In Monroe, Ohio, a 6-story statue of Jesus, known as “Touchdown Jesus,” was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. PHOTOS/Nick Graham & Tiffani West-May/AP/Guardian

The second killing of Jesus!
Not in person but in form
Who struck down Jesus?

No human being was involved
For sure … it was a non-human crime
It was lightning that struck uninvited

Was it Yahweh?
Jesus was born and died a Jew
Yahweh can’t do this to his own

Was it Allah?
Ibn-e-Mariam or Son of Mary
Is one of the prophets in the Qur’an
So no Islamic culpability

Was it Zeus?
Nay. Zeus is history

Ahura Mazda?
Is on the way to history

Was it Indra?
He had his glorious days
Now he’s a minor deity
He wouldn’t risk such a blunder

Was it Theos*?
Theos can’t kill himself
It’s a suicide
It’s anti-Elah*

Last year,
Passing through Ohio
I stopped by
To catch a glimpse of Jesus
Did I sense some vibrations then …
Which reverberated on June 15?
Tlaloc* forbid!

Or is it a heavenly sign
Of the coming times
There have been Tsunami, Katrina, Layla
Then the volcano in Europe
Of such a magnitude
That, for many days
Planes couldn’t fly there
Now the BP oil spill

Is the 2012 for real?
Is this the future of our planet?
Is this how all the gods, Gods, and goddesses
Are going to end?

A scary thought, indeed!

A blackened steel skeleton is all that is left now. PHOTO/Nick Graham/The Dayton Daily News via AP/MSNBC

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

*Theos and Elah means God in Greek and Aramaic respectively, the original languages of the New Testament, the Christian Bible.
Tlaloc was an Aztec god of fertility as well as lightning.

by CHRIS IMPWY

It’s true that the Mayan odometer will hit zeros on 21 December 2012, as it reaches the end of a 394-year cycle called a baktun. But this baktun is part of a larger 8,000-year cycle called a pictun, and there’s no evidence that anything astronomically untoward will happen as the current baktun slides into the next. However, that hasn’t stopped the feverish speculating that sells books and cinema tickets.

What kind of catastrophe would it take to end the world? Astronomical intruders provide a potentially serious threat. Impacts can be caused by stray rubble from the Asteroid Belt and the rocky snowballs that travel in highly elliptical orbits in the comet cloud. There are many fewer large bits of debris than small bits, so the interval between large impacts is much longer than the interval between small impacts.

The Independent for more

“Women refugees around the globe face rape, beatings, even death when they venture out away from their camps into land that is unprotected as they gather wood for cook stoves. Rebel forces, independent militias and corrupt soldiers can and do hurt women as they seek wook in order to cook a meal. Women risk their lives daily to feed their families. The Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) is bringing a protective answer to women by working to get solar cookers and alternative sustainable cook stoves to women.”

Link

Women News Network

by NADEEM F. PARACHA

Many Arab as well as some western academics (who were paid large sums of money and perks) were continuously invited to the rich, conservative kingdoms and asked to scribble books claiming that the Muslim holy book was punctuated with scientific truths hundreds of years before the West discovered them in their labs.

…

In addition to such claptrap, there are already books out there claiming that electricity can be generated from jinns. A whole session was organised in Islamabad in the late 1980s during the Ziaul Haq regime in which fringe crackpots (disguised as scientists) were invited by the dictator to determine the ‘speed of heaven’, and how to overcome the energy crisis with the aid of jinns!

Dawn for more

by A. G. NOORANI

AMERICAN columnists cheerfully draw a distinction between “a war of necessity” in Afghanistan and “a war of choice” in Iraq. This book should convince them that the war in Afghanistan was as unnecessary.

Zbigniew Brzezinski rightly said that 9/11 was an act of terrorism, not an act of war. Yet, a whole country was wantonly laid waste by the United States in an act of criminal folly. The Taliban was prepared to negotiate on Osama bin Laden. As ever, the U.S. preferred to dictate.

Frontline for more

by BRUCE A. DIXON

Maintenance of the US empire has cost millions of human lives in recent years. A cursory count might start with Vietnam, with two or three million dead, and another million in Iraq since the Bush invasion alone. Madeline Albright didn’t quibble with the figure of half a million dead Iraqi children sacrificed by the US blockade during the Clinton years. A US-engineered civil war in Colombia has taken a six figure death toll, and a series of murderous US-backed regimes in Central America, and the wars to protect them took another six figures in the Reagan era alone. A series of civil wars and invasions of Somalia have been fomented by the US, as well as the invasion and plunder of the Congo, with perhaps a higher death toll than any conflict since World War II. A decisive factor in the HIV-AIDS epidemic on the African continent has been US-imposed policies of structural adjustment, which have prohibited African countries from using their own resources to extend the education and health care to their population which might have saved ten or twenty million lives. Calling this genocidal enterprise “foreign policy” doesn’t help us understand it. Calling it what it is —- empire — is a good, an indispensable place to begin.

Black Agenda Report for more

by JULIANNA RICARDO

LUANDA, Jun 18, 2010 (IPS) – She may have been little-known in political circles until now, but by putting herself forward as the first female independent presidential candidate, Luisete Macedo Araújo (50) has thrust herself into the limelight.

Inter Press Services for more

THE PHNOM PENH POST

Commune officials in Phnom Penh’s Boeung Kak lake area are intentionally inflating the number of families affected by a massive development project in order to pocket compensation payments, Phnom Penh Governor Kep Chuktema alleged Thursday.

The Phnom Penh Post for more

by TIM HOILAND

Why do 700 Salvadorans leave their native country every day? This is the burning question behind documentary filmmaker Jamie Moffett’s latest project, Return to El Salvador. Narrated by Martin Sheen and endorsed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the film provides a rare glimpse into how the lives of North Americans are directly tied to those of this tiny Central American nation. I recently interviewed Moffett about the film.

Upside Down World for more

by MICHAEL ALBERT

What happened in mid February 2008 is that as a favor Noam Chomsky sent a message to Andres Izarra, then Communications Minister of Venezuela, addressed, however, to President Chavez. Chomsky’s message accompanied a second message and three “proposals” I prepared, and testified to the proposal’s value and my seriousness. Later, a fourth proposal was added to the list.

The first proposal suggested establishing a yearly Bolivar Internationalist Solidarity Prize on the same fiscal, celebratory, and media scale as the yearly Swedish Nobel Prize, but awarded in Caracas not Stockholm, and given for revolutionary contributions not science.

Z Net for more