Advertisement

Unveiling female Muslim teachers so students can see their lips

BANGKOK, Thailand -- The Philippines, Asia's only Catholic-majority country, has ordered Muslim women to remove their facial veils when teaching the government's experimental curriculum of Arabic language and Islamic values, because students benefit by "seeing the teacher's lips."

"Teachers handling Arabic Language and Islamic Values Education (ALIVE) are requested to remove the veil covering the face -- 'niqab' -- when teaching in the classroom," said Education Department Secretary Armin Luistro in an Official Gazette announcement dated July 24.

"This is to promote better teacher-pupil relationship, and to support effective language teaching since seeing the teacher's lips helps in the correct production of letter sounds," Luistro said.

"Inside the classroom, she [the teacher] is requested to remove" any veil covering her entire face, "for proper identification of the teacher by the pupils," the Education Department had said in the Gazette one day earlier on July 23.

The Education Department expressed concern that its ban may be misunderstood as also including the Islamic female head scarf, known

ODNR proposes elimination of important habitat protections in 8,000-acre Shawnee Forest Backcountry Area; Feds plan to open entire Blue Rock State Forest to fracking

Reversing 14 years of management for habitat protection, the Ohio Division of Forestry (DOF) has announced plans to eliminate an 8,000 acre Backcountry Management Area (BCMA) in Shawnee State Forest in Scioto and Adams Counties. Conservation leaders believe the radical change in management will devalue the public's investment and threaten rare and endangered species, including the timber rattlesnake.

The Shawnee BCMA currently includes the following special protections not enjoyed by most of Ohio's state forest lands: (1) Two existing roads in the BCMA are closed to vehicular traffic; (2) clear-cuts are limited to 25 acres maximum; (3) cuts can only occur on a 250-year rotation cycle; (4) management must be coordinated with the Ohio Division of Natural Areas and Preserves and the Division of Wildlife to help protect state listed species; and (6) future recreational developments must be “low impact.” DOF is proposing to dissolve all of these protections along with the BCMA designation, itself, in favor of a new "Intensive Management" zoning designation.

North Carolina’s Tea Party nightmares

North Carolina — once poster child for the New South — now displays the nightmares spawned by the Tea Party right no longer restrained by the Voting Rights Act after the Supreme Court’s conservative gang of five disemboweled it in the Shelby case.

In North Carolina, Republicans took the General Assembly in 2010 and the governorship in 2012. The takeover received rather unprecedented support from one right-wing multimillionaire, Art Pope — who, according to progressive publication The American Prospect, singlehandedly provided about 80 percent of the funding for the state’s conservative groups.

Decline and fall – Drop dead date pushed up, new Pharaoh in town

Drop dead date pushed up – Man made pollution, mostly CO2, is accelerating at a rate that has a definite endpoint for world civilization as we know it. Since accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere sticks around for hundreds of years, we won’t be able to change the cycle of oblivion once it gets rolling. (Image: Takver)

In 2004, Lawrence Smith of UCLA pointed out that vast reservoirs of methane gas stored under Siberian permafrost could enter the atmosphere as global warming accelerated ice melts holding the tundra together. By 2008, the beginning of the permafrost melt was imminent and warnings were sounded. Now, we hear that the methane release, 20 times the pollution effect of CO2, will cost $60 trillion in adaptions to the damage to the environment (yes, $60 trillion).

What profound denial. Why characterize catastrophic global climate change in terms of dollars? Why not just say: there is no chance to mitigate this emerging cycle of oblivion because world leaders won’t even mention the topic and by the time they do, it will be too late. We’re done. Stick a fork in us.

Yemen, Guantanamo Bay, drones and the war on journalists

When we think about a secret drone strikes, we often imagine remote and mountainous North West Pakistan, where Taliban fighters flee from neighboring Afghanistan in order to rest, recruit and regroup. Although the majority of America’s robotic death rains down there, other parts of the world are on the receiving end of this superpower’s displeasure.

Yemen is one such place. There the US supported government struggles against rebels and, according to diplomatic cables, allegedly acquired by Bradley Manning and released by Wikileaks, the Yemeni government pretends US drone strikes are its own. The puppet state imprisons journalists at the direct request of President Obama, and the military actions are approved by him at a weekly meeting that the White House staff and others call “Terror Tuesday.”

Urge Your Senator to Champion Safer Nuclear Power Waste Disposal

For decades, the federal government has failed to properly manage and dispose of the nation's radioactive nuclear waste. As a result, the waste has remained on site at nuclear power plants across the country. The waste poses significant risks to millions of Americans' health and safety because most of it is stored in overcrowded pools.

Tomorrow, a critical hearing in the Senate could determine whether any progress is made in addressing this unacceptable, avoidable risk—and your senator needs to hear from you.

To better protect Americans, independent experts agree that radioactive waste that has cooled sufficiently should be transferred to concrete and steel dry casks. In fact, in most cases the pools contain much more radiation than the reactors. An accident or terrorist attack resulting in a rapid loss of cooling water from a pool could lead to a fire and the release of a massive quantity of highly radioactive material.

The Founding Contradiction

How many years are we away from a national apology over slavery?

Wait, scratch that word, “apology.” Too late, not possible. The scope of the wrong was too great. Make that a national atonement — an owning up to the crime, a pause in the collective heartbeat, eye contact, prayer, remorse. And the question: What can we do to right matters?

Perhaps the time is no longer to be measured in generations.

Let’s begin with the names of the insured: Aaron, Abby, Abraham … Chloe, Congo, Courtney … all the sundry Jacks and Jims and Williams … Winney, Woodley, Woodson, Zach. Human beings with single names, like pets. Commodities, severed — for legal purposes — from their souls. No ties to a past, no depth of existence. _Here, boy._ They came when you whistled. They had a function. And they were worth money to their owners.

We have to understand what we have done. That’s the only way to make sure we’re not still doing it.

My opinion on the whole Trayvon Martin situation

Well, I am very disappointed at the fact that Zimmerman was found not guilty because I know, as well as everyone else, that George Zimmerman committed homicide, on the day of April 11, 2012. The fact that his father was a retired judge and that his parents had money means they could have paid the judge and the police off so that George could be proven not guilty. In other words, who really knows the reason he wasn't found guilty?

Also, I do not understand why African Americans get so enraged when a white person kills a black person. We have people dying every day from black-on-black crime and no one ever cares, right? Because it’s no big deal.

So, before we point the finger, I believe it is important to make a difference in the world we live in, to start a change, and be the change. Believe it or not, according a report published by Columbus Dispatch on July 18, 2013, the crime rate for homicides in Columbus from 2000-2012 has actually lowered down to 44.

Progressivism needs to grow mobile

Nearly 10 percent of Americans – more than 30 million people- now live in mobile homes. Recently, my wife and I became two of them.

We had been living in a $1,000 per month (rent plus utilities) Wilmington, NC site-built house whose owner, following five years of our tenancy, chose to re-occupy. We had to go. With little savings, two dogs and three cats our options were limited. Other rental houses were too expensive and apartments that would accept our menagerie were non-existent.

Luckily, we found a 1968 40’x12’ fixer-upper with an 8’x16’screen porch for four grand ($2500 purchase price and $1500 renovations). Now we’re on Lot 16 in a tree-packed RV park in Holden Beach, midway between the Myrtles and Wilmington, - ground zero of Trailer-land.

Holden is a quasi-resort town which still has anti-Obama billboards mixed in with the Repent signs on the main drag nearly a year past the election. It has its share of million dollar homes on the waterfront but two miles inland, where we are, the stock is mostly working-class.

Obama's willing executioners of the Fourth Amendment

It’s now painfully clear that the president has put out a contract on the Fourth Amendment. And at the Capitol, the hierarchies of both parties are stuffing it into the trunks of their limousines, so each provision can be neatly fitted with cement shoes and delivered to the bottom of the Potomac.

Some other Americans are on a rescue mission. One of them, Congressman Justin Amash, began a debate on the House floor Wednesday with a vow to “defend the Fourth Amendment.” That’s really what his amendment -- requiring that surveillance be warranted -- was all about.

No argument for the Amash amendment was more trenchant than the one offered by South Carolina Republican Jeff Duncan, who simply read the Fourth Amendment aloud.

To quote those words was to take a clear side: “_The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized._”

Pages

Subscribe to Freepress.org RSS