Wednesday, August 17, 2005
In this topsy-turvy world, many voters are looking for a clear moral standard, says the NZ Herald. They want a law which defines what is right and wrong and sets out a process by which wrongdoers can accept responsibility for their actions, apologise and make restitution to those they harmed.
Veteran BBC newsreader Michael Buerk has complained that "almost all the big jobs in broadcasting [are] held by women," and that men have been reduced to "sperm donors". Buerk says the "shift in the balance of power between the sexes" has gone too far, and "life is now lived in accordance with women's rules". The development has "changed the nature of almost every aspect of the marketplace". "There is no manufacturing industry any more; there are no mines; few vital jobs require physical strength. What we have now are lots of jobs that require people skills and multi-tasking - which women are a lot better at. The traits that have traditionally been associated with men - reticence, stoicism, single-mindedness - have been marginalised," he said. "The result is that men are becoming more like women. "Look at the men who are being held up as sporting icons - David Beckham and, God forbid, Tim Henman," he said. "What are the men left with?" He said that, while men measure themselves in terms of their jobs, many traditionally male careers no longer exist. "Men gauge themselves in terms of their career, but many of those have disappeared," he said. "All they are is sperm donors, and most women aren't going to want an unemployable sperm donor loafing around and making the house look untidy. They are choosing not to have a male in the household."
Workers repairing a sewage pipe in the Old City of Jerusalem have discovered the biblical Pool of Siloam, a freshwater reservoir that was a major gathering place for ancient Jews making religious pilgrimages to the city and the reputed site where Jesus cured a man blind from birth, according to the Gospel of John. The pool was fed by the now famous Hezekiah's Tunnel and is "a much grander affair" than archeologists previously believed, with three tiers of stone stairs allowing easy access to the water, said Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, which reported the find. "Scholars have said that there wasn't a Pool of Siloam and that John was using a religious conceit" to illustrate a point, said New Testament scholar James H. Charlesworth of the Princeton Theological Seminary. "Now we have found the Pool of Siloam … exactly where John said it was."
"While some are heaving a sigh of despair that Europe simply forgot its Christian roots somewhere along the way, George Weigel demonstrates that apathy alone is not the cause of empty churches, plummeting birthrates, and defunct welfare programs on the European continent. Nor is it a matter of Europe deciding that God isn't so important, after all, for public life. Rather, it is the overt and occasionally militant attitude that Christianity is actually harmful to political stability and social progress. Europe is not suffering so much from amnesia as from a severe case of what Joseph Weiler calls "Christophobia." Those who campaigned against the inclusion of any reference to Christianity in the EU constitution stood on the following platform: "not only can there be politics without God, there must be politics without God." Weigel points out that the sinking morale across Europe suggests "that the winners of the European constitutional debate are seriously mistaken."
Paramount Pictures is headed to Sunday school with the purchase of the A.J. Jacobs novel The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Obey the Bible as Literally as Possible. The studio has taken the book to Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment, which will serve as the producer of the adaptation. Living Biblically will be published by Simon & Schuster in fall 2006. In the book, Jacobs, an editor-at-large at Esquire magazine, spent a year of his life trying to live, literally, by the rules set forth in both the Old and New Testaments.
Getting restless Muslim youths to watch more English Premier League soccer is the latest Thai Government initiative to quell an Islamic insurgency in the country's south, a key government minister said yesterday. Under the plan, Thailand's Interior Ministry will bear the cost of installing 500 television sets at community tea and coffee shops, where cable operators will televise every English Premier League match. The commentary and narration will be in Yawi, the dialect of Muslims living in the restive area. The ministry "will tame these young people, getting them to think of sports and watch the league on television rather than going out and killing people", Interior Minister Kongsak Wanthana told reporters.
Archivists worldwide are struggling with a giant dilemma: they are looking for just one stable format for digital storage that will last more than just a few decades. In an era exploding with digital formats it seems that microfilm has become the last back-up, a simple strip of celluloid film that only needs a torch and a magnifying glass to access it. Long after the original paper documents have crumbled to dust and photographs have faded, long after hard drives, digital tapes and CDs have become obsolete, many experts believe these film strips will continue to reveal our history - perhaps for as long as 500 years.
Veteran BBC newsreader Michael Buerk has complained that "almost all the big jobs in broadcasting [are] held by women," and that men have been reduced to "sperm donors". Buerk says the "shift in the balance of power between the sexes" has gone too far, and "life is now lived in accordance with women's rules". The development has "changed the nature of almost every aspect of the marketplace". "There is no manufacturing industry any more; there are no mines; few vital jobs require physical strength. What we have now are lots of jobs that require people skills and multi-tasking - which women are a lot better at. The traits that have traditionally been associated with men - reticence, stoicism, single-mindedness - have been marginalised," he said. "The result is that men are becoming more like women. "Look at the men who are being held up as sporting icons - David Beckham and, God forbid, Tim Henman," he said. "What are the men left with?" He said that, while men measure themselves in terms of their jobs, many traditionally male careers no longer exist. "Men gauge themselves in terms of their career, but many of those have disappeared," he said. "All they are is sperm donors, and most women aren't going to want an unemployable sperm donor loafing around and making the house look untidy. They are choosing not to have a male in the household."
Workers repairing a sewage pipe in the Old City of Jerusalem have discovered the biblical Pool of Siloam, a freshwater reservoir that was a major gathering place for ancient Jews making religious pilgrimages to the city and the reputed site where Jesus cured a man blind from birth, according to the Gospel of John. The pool was fed by the now famous Hezekiah's Tunnel and is "a much grander affair" than archeologists previously believed, with three tiers of stone stairs allowing easy access to the water, said Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, which reported the find. "Scholars have said that there wasn't a Pool of Siloam and that John was using a religious conceit" to illustrate a point, said New Testament scholar James H. Charlesworth of the Princeton Theological Seminary. "Now we have found the Pool of Siloam … exactly where John said it was."
"While some are heaving a sigh of despair that Europe simply forgot its Christian roots somewhere along the way, George Weigel demonstrates that apathy alone is not the cause of empty churches, plummeting birthrates, and defunct welfare programs on the European continent. Nor is it a matter of Europe deciding that God isn't so important, after all, for public life. Rather, it is the overt and occasionally militant attitude that Christianity is actually harmful to political stability and social progress. Europe is not suffering so much from amnesia as from a severe case of what Joseph Weiler calls "Christophobia." Those who campaigned against the inclusion of any reference to Christianity in the EU constitution stood on the following platform: "not only can there be politics without God, there must be politics without God." Weigel points out that the sinking morale across Europe suggests "that the winners of the European constitutional debate are seriously mistaken."
Paramount Pictures is headed to Sunday school with the purchase of the A.J. Jacobs novel The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Obey the Bible as Literally as Possible. The studio has taken the book to Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment, which will serve as the producer of the adaptation. Living Biblically will be published by Simon & Schuster in fall 2006. In the book, Jacobs, an editor-at-large at Esquire magazine, spent a year of his life trying to live, literally, by the rules set forth in both the Old and New Testaments.
Getting restless Muslim youths to watch more English Premier League soccer is the latest Thai Government initiative to quell an Islamic insurgency in the country's south, a key government minister said yesterday. Under the plan, Thailand's Interior Ministry will bear the cost of installing 500 television sets at community tea and coffee shops, where cable operators will televise every English Premier League match. The commentary and narration will be in Yawi, the dialect of Muslims living in the restive area. The ministry "will tame these young people, getting them to think of sports and watch the league on television rather than going out and killing people", Interior Minister Kongsak Wanthana told reporters.
Archivists worldwide are struggling with a giant dilemma: they are looking for just one stable format for digital storage that will last more than just a few decades. In an era exploding with digital formats it seems that microfilm has become the last back-up, a simple strip of celluloid film that only needs a torch and a magnifying glass to access it. Long after the original paper documents have crumbled to dust and photographs have faded, long after hard drives, digital tapes and CDs have become obsolete, many experts believe these film strips will continue to reveal our history - perhaps for as long as 500 years.
