“Collective grief” of Tamil community paralyzes Ottawa

by Stuart Neatby

Demonstrators wave the flag of the Tamil Tigers in the midst of a snowstorm in downtown Ottawa, Tuesday, April 7. Photo: Stuart Neatby

OTTAWA–Canada’s 300,000-strong Tamil community, the largest Tamil diaspora on earth, has been mobilizing for months in major cities in Canada to draw attention to the dire situation in Sri Lanka.
“There is a collective grief amongst the Tamil community in Canada right now,” says David Poopalapillai, national spokesperson for the Canadian Tamil Congress (CTC). In recent months this “collective grief” has brought sections of at least two Canadian cities to a standstill.
Since Sri Lanka’s military captured the port city of Kilinochchi, a stronghold of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the country’s northern region, the death toll within the mostly Tamil region has risen to alarming levels.
In response, Tamil-Canadians have organized fasts, parliamentary meetings, vigils, protests, and acts of non-violent civil disobedience to draw attention to what many see as a campaign of deliberate killings of Tamil civilians by the Sri Lankan government. This campaign included a march of more than 45,000 through downtown Toronto on January 30, the biggest march in Canada against an international conflict since Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon during the summer of 2006.
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Harappan civilisation was indeed literate, says new study

From Press Trust of India (PTI)
New York: The 4,000-year-old Indus Valley civilisation that thrived around what is now the Indo-Pakistan border might have been marked by a literate society that used a script that is close to present-day languages such as Tamil, Sanskrit and English, a new finding claims.
A group of Indian scientists conducted a statistical study of the symbols found in Indus Valley remains and compared them with various linguistic scripts and non-linguistic systems. They found that the inscriptions closely matched those of spoken languages such as Tamil, Sanskrit and English. It had been believed that Indus Valley’s was not a literate civilisation.
The results, published in the journal Science, show that the Indus script could be an “as-yet-unknown language.”
Rajesh Rao, the lead author of the paper ,who is with Washington University, said: “A widely publicised article in 2004 claimed that the Indus script does not represent a language at all, but just represented religious or political symbols. The claim was made that the Indus civilisation was not a literate civilisation. At this point we can say that the Indus script seems to have statistical regularities that are in line with natural languages.” Scientists from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai and the Indus Research Centre in Chennai collaborated with Mr. Rao to develop models which helped compare the symbols with present-day languages. According to the scientists, symbols in any language follow neither a random order nor a rigid one but have some amount of flexibility in choosing the next letter or word. This flexibility, also known as conditional entropy, helps in the analysis of the structure of a language.
Mr. Rao explained: “For example, the letter ‘t’ can be followed by vowels like ‘a,’ ‘e,’ and some consonants like ‘r’ but typically not by ‘b,’, ‘d,’ etc. We measured this flexibility, or randomness, in the choice of the next symbol in a sequence using the mathematical concept of conditional entropy.”
Scientists found that randomness in symbols for Indus inscriptions closely match those of natural spoken languages. “Despite more than a hundred attempts, the script has not yet been deciphered. The underlying assumption has always been that the script encodes language,” Mr. Rao said.
“This is to our knowledge the first quantitative evidence that the Indus script likely encoded natural language rather than just religious or political symbols, suggesting the Harappans were likely a literate civilisation after all,” Mr. Rao said in an e-mail interview.
The Indus Valley civilisation, also known as the Harappan civilisation, was contemporaneous with Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures. It was spread across present-day eastern Pakistan and the northwestern parts of India.
The researchers are now working on deciphering the grammar and rules governing the language. “For now we want to analyse the structure and syntax of the script and infer its grammatical rules. Someday we could leverage this information to get to a decipherment,” Mr. Rao said.
The team hopes that if the script is proven to be of a spoken language, then deciphering it would give detailed insights into the ancient civilisation. — PTI
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Police in Uniform Join In as Victim Is Whipped, Beaten, Electrocuted, Run Over by SUV

By VIC WALTER, REHAB EL-BURI, ANGELA HILL and BRIAN ROSS

A video tape smuggled out of the United Arab Emirates shows a member of the country’s royal family mercilessly torturing a man with whips, electric cattle prods and wooden planks with protruding nails.
An investigation into a savage torture by a royal family member of a close ally.

A man in a UAE police uniform is seen on the tape tying the victim’s arms and legs, and later holding him down as the Sheikh pours salt on the man’s wounds and then drives over him with his Mercedes SUV.
In a statement to ABC News, the UAE Ministry of the Interior said it had reviewed the tape and acknowledged the involvement of Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan, brother of the country’s crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed.
“The incidents depicted in the video tapes were not part of a pattern of behavior,” the Interior Ministry’s statement declared.
The Minister of the Interior is also one of Sheikh Issa’s brother.
The government statement said its review found “all rules, policies and procedures were followed correctly by the Police Department.”
Watch video

(Submitted by Nizar Dhanani)

The UC Santa Barbara sociologist, who is Jewish, sent images from the Holocaust and from Israel’s Gaza offensive to students in his class. He has drawn denunciation and support.

By Duke Helfand

Controversy has erupted at UC Santa Barbara over a professor’s decision to send his students an e-mail in which he compared graphic images of Jews in the Holocaust to pictures of Palestinians caught up in Israel’s recent Gaza offensive.

The e-mail by tenured sociology professor William I. Robinson has triggered a campus investigation and drawn accusations of anti-Semitism from two national Jewish groups, even as many students and faculty members have voiced support for him.

The uproar began in January when Robinson sent his message — titled “parallel images of Nazis and Israelis” — to the 80 students in his sociology of globalization class.

The e-mail contained more than two dozen photographs of Jewish victims of the Nazis, including those of dead children, juxtaposed with nearly identical images from the Gaza Strip. It also included an article critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and a note from Robinson.

“Gaza is Israel’s Warsaw — a vast concentration camp that confined and blockaded Palestinians,” the professor wrote. “We are witness to a slow-motion process of genocide.”

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(Submitted by Asghar G. Vasanwala)

century
By Stefan Stern
‘The empires of the future will be the empires of the mind,” Winston Churchill once said. Perhaps it is not surprising to see Howard Gardner quoting him approvingly. Professor Gardner holds the chair in cognition and education at the Harvard graduate school of education and has been a prominent analyst of the human mind for 20 years.

His 1983 publication, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, started a debate on human intelligence that continues to this day. Gardner argued that, rather than looking at intelligence as a single quality or capacity, we need to consider eight or nine kinds of intelligence that, in his view, people are capable of displaying.

Psychologists and educationalists have been having a jolly good row about that one ever since.
This new book’s “five minds” should not be confused with Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. The latest work looks at the intellectual approaches managers and employees will need to function successfully in the 21st century.

Gardner identifies these five different minds as: disciplined, synthesising, creating, respectful and ethical. The disciplined mind “has mastered at least one way of thinking”, Gardner says. “Without at least one discipline . . . the individual is destined to march to someone else’s tune.”
The synthesising mind “takes information from disparate sources . . . and puts it together in ways that make sense to the synthesiser and also other persons . . . the capacity to synthesise becomes ever more crucial as information continues to mount at dizzying rates”.
The creating mind “breaks new ground”, the author says. “It puts forth new ideas, poses unfamiliar questions, conjures up fresh ways of thinking, arrives at unexpected answers.” In so doing, the creating mind “seeks to remain at least one step ahead” of computers.
The respectful mind “notes and welcomes differences between human individuals and between human groups . . . In a world where we are all interlinked, in-tolerance or disrespect isno longer a viable option.”

Last, the ethical mind “conceptualises how workers can serve purposes beyond self-interest”. The ethical mind then “acts on the basis of these analyses”.
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(Submitted by a reader)

By B. R. Gowani

Lesbians and gays
Have always been there
Sometimes accepted, or ignored
Mostly harassed, or persecuted
We are all humans, homos or heteros
Heteros prefer certain geographic location
More than the other
Homos visit the other location only
Unless bisexual
Lesbians ignore the bloody organ
Unless bisexual

Just for this slight difference
Religions and custodians of morality
Inflict wrath, incite revulsion
As if the world will come to an end
Without understanding the simple truth
Different people, different desires
Different needs, different chemicals
If pleasure is derived from one’s own gender
Where is the harm?

Amidst this backdrop
Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir
Is great news and an inspiration
To millions of gays and lesbians
One hopes, the next country to elect a gay or a lesbian
Would be Pureland or Land of the Pure
Pakistan –
Sorely in need of such a revolution

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

In Iceland, he’s loved by just about everybody, gay AND straight. No small accomplishment when you consider this guy has a reputation for being very out, and very candid.

This song,”International,” is the second single from Paul Oscar’s dance project “Allt fyrir ástina.” It was released in Iceland in October 2007. This song was also used as the anthem for the Reykjavik Gay Pride festival in August last year. Written by Örlygur Smári, Niclas Kings, Daniela Vecchia and Páll Óskar.

By Rene Rosechild

On February 1, Iceland made history by choosing Johanna Sigurðardóttir to be their prime minister, making her the world’s first openly gay head of state. After its government collapsed in January, the country’s political parties chose Sigurðardóttir, one of Iceland’s most trusted and longest serving politicians, to lead them out of economic turmoil.

But to Icelanders, the fact that Sigurðardóttir is a lesbian is of minor importance. In Iceland, the news about the new prime minister’s sexual orientation is that the rest of the world sees it as news. “Whom the new prime minister crawls into bed with at night seems to be fairly far down the list of priorities for people,” says Ingo Sigfusson of the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service (RUV). The Icelanders I talked to all know that that Sigurðardóttir is a lesbian, but none of them care. When I asked Inga Rós Antoníusdóttir of Reykjavik about it, she said, “I couldn’t care less and I honestly don’t know anyone who could. It’s not an issue for us here. We find it quite amusing to read how much the foreign media writes about it.”

Sigurðardóttir’s civil partnership to Jónína Leósdóttir is well known in Iceland. It appears on her official biography on her government ministry’s website. Sigfusson states that Sigurðardóttir’s emergence as the world’s first openly gay PM has barely rated mention in Iceland. “It’s by no means a big deal. It’s been reported, but it’s not something the public is focusing on,” he told the BBC. While headlines around the world report that she’s the “First Gay prime minister,” Icelandic bloggers are discussing whether Sigurðardóttir will be able to resuscitate their economy.

Sigurðardóttir’s rise to head of state was sparked by an economic and political crisis. After Iceland’s economy crashed last fall, unemployment soared, leading to widespread street protests, and the resignation of the ruling conservative Independence party. Under Iceland’s parliamentary system, the leading political parties agreed on a coalition government to hold power until elections can be held in April. Sigurðardóttir is not expected to be re-elected, because her party, the Social Democratic Alliance, holds a minority of seats in the Althingi (Parliament). Because the ruling parties felt that the government needs to restore the trust of the people, they chose the country’s most trusted politician to lead them until the election. According to a Capacent Gallup poll, she is the most popular politician in the country, and the only one whose popularity increased while the economy tanked.

Sigurðardóttir’s background is not that of a traditional politician. She did not go to university, which many Icelanders consider more controversial than her sexual orientation. Instead, she went to work as an airline stewardess after graduating from a commercial high school. From there she became a union organizer, which led her into politics. She was first elected to the Althingi from Reykjavik in 1978, and has been in and out of government ever since, held several cabinet posts, formed her own political party, rejoined her old one, led a new alliance, and was appointed as Minister of Social Affairs again in 2007. When she lost her bid to lead her party in 1994, she raised her fist and said, “My time will come.”

These words became part of the Icelandic cultural idiom and have proven prophetic. Icelanders can be seen sporting T-shirts in Reykjavik that read, “Her Time Has Come.” Many in Iceland are pleased they have chosen their first female prime minister. Árný Sandra Skúladóttir of Reykjavic thinks it’s great that Iceland has a woman prime minister, and no one in her family cares that she is gay.

At about the same time she was being elected to the Althingi, Sigurðardóttir left her banker husband and began living with Jónína Leósdóttir and both of their sons. That same year, gay and lesbian activists founded Iceland’s first gay rights organization, Samtokin 78. The gay movement has since made steady progress to full integration. In 1996, Iceland granted gay couples the right to civil partnership, which made Sigurðardóttir and Leósdóttir’s 2002 union possible.

Iceland is an island, about the size of Kentucky, with a population roughly equal to that of Connecticut. Until last fall, it had a thriving economy. The U.N. named it the world’s most developed country. However, its banks invested in risky securities and its economy nosedived last fall. In rapid succession, it borrowed money from the International Monetary Fund, nationalized banks, street protests broke out and its government fell. Just as the United States turned to Obama during its economic crisis, Iceland chose Sigurðardóttir. As Árný Skúladóttir told me, “She is hard working and she always stands by her beliefs. She works for the people. I hope that she can do something good for the Icelandic people, especially for the ones that are about to lose their homes and jobs.” Skúladóttir’s time has certainly come.

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