I. SKYNEWS - The New UN Human Rights Joke. The One About Women...
United Nations staff, aware that the joke about electing Libya to chair the Human Rights Council a few years back has become bit stale, have come up with a new one. This one starts, 'Have you heard the one about Iran’s election to the UN Women Rights Council?’ Iran, having lost the battle for a place on the Human Rights Council, managed instead this week to get onto the 'Commission on the Status of Women'(CSW ) a body dedicated ‘exclusively to promote gender equality and advancement of women'. Iran was 'elected' by acclaim, meaning no-one voted, but no-one opposed membership in a classic UN stitch up by the Asian bloc. A campaign by women's rights champions inside and outside Iran calling on the UN not to take this step fell on deaf ears. In practice the CSW has only ever issued one resolution condemning a country, and that country was ..….Israel. So a resolution drawing attention to some of Iran’s laws, germane to women, cannot be expected anytime soon. Instead the body charged with promoting women rights can be expected to tirelessly ignore some of the more interesting Iranian legal practices. For example, Article 1133 of the Civil Code: A man can divorce his wife whenever he so chooses and does not have to give her advance notice. There are numerous others, laws requiring a women to have her husbands permission to get a passport, laws enforcing segregation in health care which results in too few women doctors being available to treat women etc. A stand out law is Article 102 of the Penal code. Whoever wrote it appears to have been influenced by Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’ as it stipulates that a male adultery be buried up to his waist before being stoned to death, but a women be buried up to her neck. It continues - if the man escapes during the stoning, that’s the end of the matter, but if the women escapes, she must be arrested and killed by firing squad. Many countries have similar laws, all of them are in the UN, and some of them are on women rights and human rights committees. Which says as much about the UN as it does about the offending states.
In an attempt to launch indirect proximity talks between Israel and the Palestinians, the US has given private assurances that it would consider not using its veto power against UN Security Council condemnations of any significant new settlement activity, the Guardian reported. A Palestinian source quoted by the UK paper said David Hale, a deputy of US Middle East envoy George Mitchell, told Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas last week that if there was "significantly provocative settlement activity," including in east Jerusalem, Washington may consider allowing UNSC resolutions censuring Israel to pass. According to the paper, the source said "it was understood that meant the US would abstain from voting on a resolution rather than use its veto." However, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat denied assurances were given. "It's not true," he said, according to the Guardian. "We are still talking to the Americans." Meanwhile, in an interview with the Chinese Xinhua news agency on Wednesday, Abbas claimed the US had vowed to stop "any provocative activities" by Israel in a bid to resume Middle East peace talks. Abbas said when "the credibility of the US pledges are demonstrated," the negotiations "would restart immediately." The PA president criticized Washington for "not exerting enough effort to press Israel to achieve peace," but reiterated his opposition to a unilateral declaration of statehood. "We want our state to be declared under an international agreement," he said. "If this doesn't happen, the Arabs will go to the UN Security Council to get the recognition of the Palestinian statehood," the PA president told Xinhua.
III. ETAIWANNEWS - NATO urges all Balkan states to join alliance
NATO's chief is urging all states of ex-Yugoslavia to join the western alliance because he says they belong "in the Euro-Atlantic community." Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen says NATO's expansion to include a number of former communist countries has "stabilized Europe and contributed to a safe and peaceful development." Bosnia and Montenegro have been invited to join a NATO program that paves the way to full membership. Macedonia's membership has been blocked because of a prolonged dispute with neighboring Greece. The region's largest nation, Serbia, has not expressed interest in alliance membership. NATO was militarily involved in efforts to end the Bosnian war and in 2000 bombed Serbia to end a crackdown on Kosovo [Albanian] separatists.
Men in Iceland and women in Cyprus have the lowest risk of dying worldwide, a new study says. In a survey from 1970 to 2010, researchers found a widening gap between countries with the highest and lowest premature death rates in adults aged 15 to 60. The study was published Friday in the medical journal, Lancet. The findings are in contrast to the trends in child and maternal mortality, where rates are mostly dropping worldwide. Health officials have long thought if child deaths were decreasing and health systems were improving, adult deaths would similarly decline. But that's not what researchers found. Researchers in Australia and the U.S. calculated death rates in 187 countries using records from government registries, censuses, household surveys and other sources. It was paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Only a few countries have cut death rates by more than 2 percent per year in the last 40 years: Australia, Italy, South Korea, Chile, Tunisia and Algeria. The U.S. lagged significantly behind, dropping to 49th in the rankings for women and 45th for men. That puts it behind all of Western Europe as well as countries including Peru, Chile and Libya. Death rates were highest for men in Swaziland and for women in Zambia. Researchers also found death rates jumped in eastern Europe, perhaps because health systems fell apart after the collapse of the Soviet Union and widespread smoking. In sub-Saharan Africa, deaths have fallen, possibly due to the rollout of lifesaving AIDS drugs.
After making national headlines for a new law on illegal immigrants, the Arizona Legislature passed a bill Thursday that would ban ethnic studies programs in the state that critics say currently advocate separatism and racial preferences. The bill, which passed 32-26 in the state House, had been approved by the Senate a day earlier. It now goes to Gov. Jan Brewer for her signature. The new bill would make it illegal for a school district to teach any courses that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or "advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals." The bill stipulates that courses can continue to be taught for Native American pupils in compliance with federal law and does not prohibit English as a second language classes. It also does not prohibit the teaching of the Holocaust or other cases of genocide. Schools that fail to abide by the law would have state funds withheld. To read the bill, click here.
VI. ISRAELNATIONALNEWS - New Film Tells the Story of Greek Jewry
A film documenting Jewish life in Greece prior to and during the Holocaust (Shoa) premiered this week in New York City. The film, In the Shadow of the Acropolis, was created by Laura Zelle, whose mother's family is from Athens. The premier was held in the Kehila Kedosha Janina synagogue, which was built in the 1920s by Romaniote Jews from Greece. For centuries, Greece was home to two Jewish communities, the Romaniote, and Sephardi Jews, whose ancestors fled Spain during the Inquisition. The Zelle family belonged to the Romaniote community. Many members of the family were rounded up and deported to Auchwitz-Birkenau in 1944. Laura Zelle's mother, grandmother, and some others were saved. The surviving members of the Zelle family lived through the war with the help of a local Greek Orthodox Christian woman, who was later honored as Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial project. In the Shadow of the Acroplis documents attempts by members of the Greek Christian community to protect Greek's Jews, as well as the destruction of Jewish life by the Nazis. The Romaniote Jewish community in Greece dates back approximately 2000 years. The community was the oldest Jewish community in Europe, and members spoke a unique dialect, Yevanic. Roughly 86% of the Jews living in Greece in 1940 were murdered in the Holocaust. Between 8,000 and 10,000 survived, largely due to aid from the Christian community, including senior figures in the Greek Orthodox Church. Today, the Jewish population of Greece is approximately 5,000.
VII. GLORYTOGODFORALLTHINGS - Praying for the World
We must pray for other people with contrition and pain in our soul. We can only achieve this, if, due to our humbleness, we consider ourselves the cause of all the problems in the world. +++ The Elder Paisios of the Holy Mountain. This insightful but “hard” saying of the Elder Paisios is very similar to a statement made by the literary character, the Elder Zossima, in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, who taught that “each man is responsible for the sins of all.” In our individualized culture, particularly as it is marked by a strongly legal world-view, such statements sound like madness or an invitation to an extreme form of neurosis. And yet these things are taught by some of the most sane among us. An insanity of our world is to refuse to acknowledge that we share a common life. None of us is saved alone, the fathers teach. If we do not share a common life, then the life of Christ cannot become the life of all. There would be no possibility of union with God nor would love mean anything deeper than the feelings and attitudes we have for one another. Instead, the opposite is true. Our lives are a common life. Whether I want it to be so or not – my life is intimately connected with the life of every human being – both those now living as well has those who have gone before and those who are yet to come. This is an inherent part of the fullness of the Christian fate. Refusals of this teaching mark the earliest sins of mankind. Adam refuses to accept union with his wife when he seeks to pass blame on her (and through her to God): “The woman You gave me – she gave me and I did eat…” In a similar fashion Cain, when confronted by God about the murder of his brother, defends himself by saying, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” There are many things in life that sustain the delusion of radical individuality. Wealth can insulate a person from the true sense of their interdependence on others. Many seek wealth in order to avoid necessities of dependence. We admire the strong and despise the weak. But all of us are weak. We enter the world in a state of complete dependence and often leave in the same manner. Our fear of a common life is not unreasonable. Dependence, in our fallen world, often means that we are subject to the abuse of power by those around us. Of course only someone living in a fortress and resist much of the abuse of power that infects our world. But we are not told to overcome evil by running away. We are told to “overcome evil by doing good” (Romans 12:21). It is this “good” which the elders of the Church enjoin. Recognizing and embracing our common humanity – our common life – is an act of love and an offering of the self. The act of prayer for another, when rightly prayed, always means taking upon ourselves the life of the other. This is the great mystery of life as communion. It is the very heart of love. For those who have a strong psychological take on human relationships – I would quickly want to say that I am not arguing for the destruction of proper “boundaries.” To have a common life with others does not mean to destroy the uniqueness of our own personhood, nor to confuse my life with the life of another. It is to step into one of the deeper mysteries of our existence. In my own life, perhaps because of my weaknesses, I have frequently been aware that I could not live except for the mercy and prayers of others. I have suffered only small things and been spared many greater sufferings through the kindness and prayer of others. Ultimately, we all live through the life of God who sustains us in our very existence. I venture to pray for the world from time to time – but I know that my prayers in this regard are quite weak – for my love of the world and my willingness of be the “cause of all the problems in the world” is virtually nil. On most days it is enough of a struggle to take on prayer for those whom I know, particularly those with whom relationships are damaged. But such prayer is the path of the Cross. It leads us to a place where Christ is, taking on the sins of the world – for the life of the world and its salvation.