Soraida (Martinez) is a Puerto Rican artist and is credited with introducing the word Verdadism or Truthism to describe her work.
To see her work, visit her site

By Silje Stangeland

Norwegian women spend three times as many hours on housework than men do. Still, Norwegian couples are among those who spend less time on domestic work in the world, says sociology professor Knud Knudsen at the University of Stavanger.

He has studied the work input made by spouses in their homes in relation to national levels of gender equality and economic development. In a comprehensive comparative study women and men’s housework has been mapped in 34 countries.

Under the auspices of The International Social Survey Program (ISSP) around 18 000 couples from the age of 25 to 65 answered questions on how much time they spent weekly on cooking, washing, tidying up, shopping and care.

UiS researcher Knud Knudsen and coauthor Kari Wærnes at the University of Bergen found several interesting patterns in and between the different countries.

The input of the partners and the distribution between them are influenced by the position of women in society and the national economic level. Factors on the macro level influence the micro level in the home and in everyday life, Knudsen says.

In every country women work more
According to the survey Norwegian women spend 12 weekly hours on housework while Norwegian men spend just over four. Even if Norwegian women do least domestic work in the world, Norwegian men do little housework compared to men in other countries. The women’s part of domestic work is proportionately high also in Norway.

It may be an exaggeration that gender equality is so far advanced in Norway. It is strange that we have not progressed more, Knudsen says, and continues:

There are no modern countries in the world where men do more, or as much, housework than women. Women perform two thirds of all domestic work in the world, he says.
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There is nothing incomprehensible about the portrayal of the drama in Davos as a “scandal” by those whose political calculations at home will be spoiled. There is no word to say to those who criticize Tayyip Erdo?an this time for his performance in Davos.
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By RANNIE AMIRI
As staggering as the statistics detailing Gaza’s destruction may be, they still do not present a complete picture of the unique travesties and tragedies suffered by individuals, families, neighborhoods and villages during Israel’s savage 22-day assault on the tiny territory. Yet, they bear repeating. From the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (www.pcbs.gov.ps) and various NGOs:
• 1,334 killed, one-third of them children (more children than ‘militants’ were killed)
• 5,450 injured, one-third of them children
• 100,000 displaced, 50,000 made homeless
• 4,100 residential homes and buildings destroyed, 17,000 damaged (together accounting for 14 percent of all buildings in Gaza)
• 29 destroyed educational institutions, including the American International School
• 92 destroyed or damaged mosques
• 1,500 destroyed shops, factories and other commercial facilities
• 20 destroyed ambulances
• 35-60% of agricultural land ruined
• $1.9 billion in total estimated damages
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Discover the cosmos!
Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
Today’s Image

By B. R. Gowani

The female literacy rate in Pakistan is a mere 36% compared to 63% for men. This literacy rate denotes only reading capability — that is, it doesn’t show how intelligent or smart the person is and is not a measure of the critical thinking prowess. The country does not believe in women’s rights or in human rights for its citizens — except for the elite class.

The beautiful Swat Valley is now the base of Maulana Fazalullah. He is known as “Mullah Radio” for his operation of an illegal FM radio station. Many schools have been blown up here – the majority of them were Girls’ schools.

The Militants’ Menace

Extremism has seeped into the veins of Pakistan (and many other Muslim countries) that are being destroyed by this poison. And when it infiltrates the system of education, you don’t need a panel of pundits to forecast the country’s doom.

In its fanatic zeal to fight communism, the United States played an important role in weakening the secular elements in the Muslim countries, hence strengthening the militant forces there. The influence and violence of these zealots is disturbingly visible in Pakistan and most other Muslim countries and in countries with sizeable Muslim populations. Learning institutions are meant to be centers which facilitate the creation and free flow of secular ideas. But that is not the case here. The social science fields are also not flourishing as freely as they should, in order to meet the demands of free rational enquiries, because of the fear and interference of the religious elements.

Although a truly free environment has never existed in Pakistan; recently, however, the environment has become unbearably suffocating. Pakistan’s Quaid-i-Azam University, ranked as the second best university among the Muslim countries, has three mosques and the fourth one is being planned. However, it has no book store! It is a sad commentary on the state of education there, when more importance is given to mosques — which should have no place whatsoever in learning centers — than a book store, which is so critical to a university.

The educational curriculum of subjects related to science and technology between the Muslim countries and, not only the western countries, but even India, Brazil, and China, is disappointing.

Eminent physics Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy points out that it has not always been like this:

“Islam’s magnificent Golden Age in the 9th–13th centuries brought about major advances in mathematics, science, and medicine. The Arabic language held sway in an age that created algebra, elucidated principles of optics, established the body’s circulation of blood, named stars, and created universities. But with the end of that period, science in the Islamic world essentially collapsed. No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now.”

A tiny minority [albeit, rising] of these religious zealots has succeeded in intimidating the society at large. The result is that very few female students dare to be seen without veils in Pakistani universities.

The faculty members at the Quaid-i-Azam University agree “that over time most students — particularly veiled females — have largely lapsed into becoming silent note-takers, are increasingly timid, and are less inclined to ask questions or take part in discussions.” And the reason is the rising and violent power of the fanatics. A former student of the university issued the following warning on April 12, 2007, on FM radio:

“The government should abolish co-education. Quaid-e-Azam University has become a brothel. Its female professors and students roam in objectionable dresses. I think I will have to send my daughters of Jamia Hafsa [Islamic seminary in Islamabad, Figure 4] to these immoral women. They will have to hide themselves in hijab otherwise they will be punished according to Islam. Our female students have not issued the threat of throwing acid on the uncovered faces of women. However, such a threat could be used for creating the fear of Islam among sinful women. There is no harm in it. There are far more horrible punishments in the hereafter for such women.”

It’s a very serious matter when such a prestigious university is labeled as a brothel and the women are threatened by these Muslim criminals who justify their actions with the excuse of the dreamy hereafter.

In certain areas of Pakistan bombing of schools have become common place, leaving thousands of students without any place to learn.

Musharraf’s Involvement

Since the 1980s, Pakistan has become the epicenter of religious fanaticism with very bloody and destructive consequences. And so it was up to the governments of Pakistan to rein in this menace.

When General Pervez Musharraf came to power in a military coup in 1999, the Taliban peril, with all its barbarity and hatred of women, was already entrenched in Afghanistan. The US support of the Taliban had waned for many reasons. The people of Pakistan were fed up with the corrupt civilian leadership. It was a golden opportunity for Musharraf to strike at the Taliban by cutting off all kinds of aid, but he wasted the opportunity. This was his biggest crime.

The second biggest crime Musharraf committed was to allow the radical madrassas to flourish. At least some of the $11 billion in aid that Pakistan received from the US in the wake of September 11, could have been spent on ransoming as many children as possible from the madrassas and placing them in secular schools. This could have made a huge difference in their lives. He wasted that opportunity too. Instead, many more children joined the madrassas after September 11, 2001. (Many financially desperate parents send their children to madrassas where they receive free boarding, lodging, and food.) Even though Musharraf himself is not a religious person, he acted like a politician and joined hands with the Islamic parties in order to weaken the opposing secular and semi-secular political parties.

What do the radical madrassas produce? They produce war mongers, women-haters, and intolerant bigots. In these places, one sees students reciting the Qur’an in Arabic, a language they don’t understand, with their heads rocking back and forth like drug addicts. They are also taught Urdu, Pakistan’s national language with the alphabet letters being associated with words such as gun, jihad, etc.

Everything is in the Scripture

In every religion, there are followers who have this fantastic notion:

“The things the scientists are discovering now are already in our Holy Book [Gita, Qur’an, Bible, Hebrew Bible…].”

If such was the case, then:
• Moses would have used helicopter to see the God on Mount Sinai, instead of climbing it —(unless he liked hiking);
• Jesus’ resurrection from the dead could have been telecast live on TV;
• Muhammad could have used a spacecraft for his journey to the heavens;
• Krishna could have fought the Kurukshetra battle in a Toyota van covered up as a chariot;
• Buddha could have known about disease, old, age and other unpleasant things at a much earlier age through the internet.

Many devout people claim that the Qur’an has all knowledge in it. If that were true then computers, super colliders, satellites, and more would have been invented by the time of Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 CE.

To clarify my point: Let’s put a group of young children in a madrassa and let them keep on reciting Qur’an for a few years. Then what? Are they even going to be able to manufacture one pencil? No. (This holds true for all religious texts.)

Did Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, Abdus Salam, and hundreds of thousands of others become scientists by reading the Vedas, Bible, Tanekh, Qur’an, and other religious scriptures? If that was the case, Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, then in the Netherlands, would have returned back to Pakistan in 1974 (when India exploded its first nuclear bomb code named the “Smiling Buddha”) and researched the bomb-making formula from the Qur’an and named it the “Laughing Allah.”

For the believers, reading the scriptures may provide personal solace and strengthen their belief and it may provide some values (including violence, which many of the scriptures contain.) That’s fine. But for those people and countries who want to survive and progress in this cutthroat world – they need to have modern education and state of the art technology. Pakistan and other Muslim countries cannot survive on Islam and the Qur’an. The custodians of these nations will have to rethink their strategy; and … time has almost run out.

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

By CHRISTOPHER BENFEY

Charles Darwin, a 22-year-old dropout from medical school who subsequently considered becoming a priest, boarded the Beagle in late 1831 and spent five years on the ship, traveling the world and collecting natural specimens. Despite its cuddly name, the Beagle was a naval brig outfitted with 10 guns. Darwin was a “gentleman dining companion” whose official responsibility was to provide civilized banter with the captain.
Darwin visited Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti and Tasmania, along with other exotic locales, but he never set foot in the United States. Around 1850, charmed by popular tales of lush countryside and the exciting adventures of the Underground Railroad, and still withholding from public view his explosive theory of evolution, he flirted briefly with the idea of moving his large family, with seven children under the age of 11 and another on the way, to Ohio. The middle states, he wrote, are “what I fancy most.”
Two arresting new books, timed to coincide with Darwin’s 200th birthday, make the case that his epochal achievement in Victorian England can best be understood in relation to events — involving neither tortoises nor finches — on the other side of the Atlantic. Both books confront the touchy subject of Darwin and race head on; both conclude that Darwin, despite the pernicious spread of “social Darwinism” (the notion, popularized by Herbert Spencer, that human society progresses through the “survival of the fittest”), was no racist.
Adrian Desmond and James Moore published a highly regarded biography of Darwin in 1991. The argument of their new book, “Darwin’s Sacred Cause,” is bluntly stated in its subtitle: “How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution.” They set out to overturn the widespread view that Darwin was a “tough-minded scientist” who unflinchingly followed the trail of empirical research until it led to the stunning and unavoidable theory of evolution. This narrative, they claim, is precisely backward. “Darwin’s starting point,” they write, “was the abolitionist belief in blood kinship, a ‘common descent’ ” of all human beings.
“The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather,” Darwin wrote, but his human grandfathers are more central to the circumstantial case that Desmond and Moore assemble. The poet-physician Erasmus Darwin and the industrial potter Josiah Wedgwood were close friends among a circle of mechanical-minded Dissenters from the Anglican Church. Darwin and Wedgwood shared a hatred of the slave trade, contributing money and propaganda — in the form of anti-slavery verse and ceramic curios — to the “sacred cause” of abolition. Wedgwood’s cameo medallion of a chained slave, with the caption “Am I not a Man and a Brother?,” was “a must-have solidarity accessory.”
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Indonesia
By Okamoto Masaaki (associate professor at Kyoto University, Japan) can be reached at okamoto@cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp.

A new breed of politics?

The fall of Suharto and the resulting social and political upheaval made many Indonesians feel insecure, feeding the proliferation of various kinds of violent groups offering their own particular brands of ‘security’. While some such groups are ethnic-based, others cite religion as a pretext when pursuing their political and economic interests. These groups have successfully gained formal political power at the local level in places like Jakarta, Madura, Lombok and Bali. Continuing insecurity and the persistence of rampant corruption, collusion and nepotism (KKN), combined with the atmosphere of political openness, has also prompted a yearning for social justice among the Indonesian people. Through its particular brand of grass roots activism and Islamic morality the PKS has been perhaps the most successful of the post-New Order political parties to tap into this desire for a politics free of the habits of the past.
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