Entries from March 2008
THE HAGUE (AFP) — Dutch businesses Saturday threatened to sue far-right lawmaker
Geert Wilders if his
anti-Islam film led to a commercial boycott, as EU foreign ministers and more Muslim countries condemned it.
“I don’t know if Wilders is rich, or well-insured, but in the case of a boycott, we would look to see if we could make him bear responsibility,” Bernard Wientjes, chairman of the Dutch employers’ organisation VNO-NCW, told the newspaper Het Financieel Dagblad.
“If we boycott Dutch products, they will have to close down their businesses,” Mohamad told reporters. “If the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims unite and say they won’t buy, then it (the boycott) will be effective.”
Muslim nations including Malaysia and Singapore have condemned the 17-minute film “Fitna,” released on the Internet on Thursday, which links images of extremist attacks to verses from the Koran.
Although there were no mass disturbances in the Netherlands, in Utrecht two cars were set ablaze overnight, with a written slogan calling for the death of Wilders.
Late Friday the British website host pulled “Fitna” from its site www.liveleak.com, citing threats made to staff. It can still be seen on YouTube and other sites.
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Categories: Boycott Dutch Products · Geert Wilders · anti-Islam
Snce 1968, much of black America has also been beset by disaster. A vast underclass inhabits America’s ghettos, mired in joblessness, drugs and gang violence. In the inner cities half of all black males do not finish high school. 6 in 10 of those will end up in jail by the time they reach their mid-thirties. These people grow up in an environment often more segregated, more hopeless and more dangerous than the Jim Crow era of the Deep South.
It is perhaps one of the greatest paradoxes facing modern American black leaders such as Charles Steele, now president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King founded and used as his tool to bring civil rights to America.
…Guardian
Martin Luther King Jr.
Forty years after the shot rang out, race fears still haunt the US
Life has changed beyond recognition for many Americans since an assassin’s bullet killed Martin Luther King in 1968. Yet despite the rise of a black middle class and Barack Obama’s challenge for the White House, the racial divide still exists – and for an urban underclass, things have only got worse.
King died four decades ago at the end of an era of civil rights victories that ended racial segregation and won black Americans the vote
It was a struggle that finally cost him his life, felled at the Lorraine by a white assassin’s bullet
black America itself is almost unrecognisable from King’s time. It has been transformed, both for the better and for the worse
Obama is running for President
Black politicians hold top offices in cities and states across the continent
large black middle class every bit as wealthy, suburban and professional as
since 1968, much of black America has also been beset by disaster
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Categories: Martin Luther King Jr. · Obama
“She said her family believed in the Bible and that healing came from God. But she insisted that they were not “crazy religious people”
“Even after her death, her parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, who did not belong to any organised faith, prayed over her body in the hope that she might be resurrected.”
Diabetic girl dies as parents pray instead of calling for medical aid
An 11-year-old girl died from diabetes after her parents prayed for her recovery rather than calling for medical assistance.
Madeline Neumann died on Sunday in Wisconsin, from an undiagnosed but treatable ailment.
Dan Vergin, the local police chief, said she had been ill for a month, suffering symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness.
“She just got sicker and sicker until she was dead,” he said.
Police are now preparing a report for prosecutors. However, legal action against the parents may be prevented by a Wisconsin state statute against failing to act to protect children from bodily harm.
The statute contains an exemption for what it refers to as “treatment through prayer”. Mrs Neumann, whose husband is a former policeman, said they had never expected her daughter to die. She suffered from diabetic ketoacidosis, which left her with too little insulin.
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Categories: Diabetic girl
“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain
“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard
“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” – Bill Bryson
“Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” – Robert Frost
“A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.”
“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux
“A wise traveler never despises his own country.” – Carlo Goldoni
 1. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain
2. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine
3. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
6. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac
7. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” – Moorish proverb
8. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert D. Runes
9. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck
10. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” – Lin Yutang
13. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
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Categories: Travel
Pi(π) appears where you least expect it.
Coincidentally, Pi Day is also the birthday of Albert Einstein, who no doubt knew more than a little about pi. Pi Day celebrants, usually children with an enthusiastic teacher and a varying degree of personal interest in the subject, learn about pi, circles, and, if they’re lucky, eat baked pies of various sorts.
It’s Pi Day, a celebration of the mathematical ratio that man has been trying to unlock for millennia. But why are we driven to find the answers behind it?
As we’re all taught at school, pi represents the number you get when you divide the distance around a circle (its circumference) by the distance across (the diameter).
The rough ratio of pi 3.14 gives us the date for Pi Day. March 14, or 3/14 in American dating style, makes sense for a celebration of this famous constant.
Famous constant
Pi, more commonly known by the 16th letter of the Greek alphabet, is the most widely-known mathematical constant in the world.
Pi conjures a sense of mystery, so the symbol makes regular appearances in popular culture – it’s the secret code in both Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain and the Sandra Bullock vehicle The Net.
In ancient Greece
the great mathematician Archimedes worked tirelessly to discover the ratio
Pi shows up everywhere.
We have pi in our eyes
Pi can be found in the design of the pyramids at Giza
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Categories: Pi
