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irritated
Taiwan government rapped for policy on US beef imports amid mad cow fears Sun Jun 26, 3:18 PM ET
TAIPEI (AFP) - Opposition politicians criticised the Taiwanese government's decision in April to lift a ban on US beef imports, after authorities reimposed the ban over the weekend following the discovery of a new US case of mad cow disease.
Taiwan reimposed the ban on Saturday but US beef which had been imported since April was not removed from sale.
The health department on April 16 had partially lifted the ban imposed in December 2003 after deciding that safety concerns had been alleviated. It allowed non-minced beef from cows aged 30 months or younger if high-risk parts such as brains and spinal cords have been removed.
"Unless the problem is properly solved, the budget of the Department of Health would be frozen," an angry Tsai Sheng-chia, legislator from the opposition People First Party, told reporters.
"We demand the Executive Yuan (Taiwan's cabinet) unveil the meetings and records regarding the lifting of the ban on US beef imports," said Chin Hui-chu, an official with the party's caucus in parliament.
A group of opposition parliamentarians had said they suspect politics was involved in the issue.
The United States was Taiwan's third largest beef supplier, selling some 14,000 tonnes or 55 million US dollars' worth of beef in 2002 and 19,225 tonnes worth 76.5 million dollars in 2003.
Taiwan has banned beef imports from 22 other countries where cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy or mad cow disease have been reported.
Beef affected by mad cow disease is feared to cause in humans a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which has claimed more than 140 lives.
The myth endures that illegal immigrants in the United States don't pay taxes. You hear it all the time, accompanied by complaints about how illegal immigrants are bankrupting the country and don't contribute to society.
Howard Stern is so dangerous to our culture that the bastions of morality are considering restricting satellite radio becausee of him!!!
Senate passes bankruptcy bill making it harder to shed debts
By Jennifer Brooks, Gannett News Service
WASHINGTON ? The Senate on Thursday passed sweeping changes of the nation's bankruptcy laws.
Stringent new standards would require tens of thousands of people who seek bankruptcy protection to repay at least part of what they owe and make it harder for them to wipe away their debts. The Senate voted 74-25 to pass the bill and it is expected to pass in the House.
The bill was blasted by consumer groups and the majority of Senate Democrats, who say the vast majority of people filing for bankruptcy protection were forced into it by medical crises, job loss or divorce ? not irresponsible spending. Critics said the bill would be unduly harsh on ordinary debtors, without closing loopholes still open to wealthy debtors and corporations.
"All that matters in this bill is for the credit card companies to have more profits," said Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass.
Democrats tried unsuccessfully to amend the bill to exempt veterans, active duty troops, senior citizens and families facing staggering medical bills from the new standards. The majority shot down dozens of proposed amendments, including efforts to link the bill to a minimum wage increase, an abortion provision and an effort to cap credit card interest rates.
Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., who sided against his own party to support the bill, argued that it will reform serious problems with the current bankruptcy system, including a provision that allowed debtors to stop paying child support if they filed for bankruptcy protection.
The bill would tighten standards for people attempting to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which is set up for people who fall so deeply into debt they have no hope of repaying what they owe. Debtors turn over a portion of their assets and in return, their debt is wiped away. The bankruptcy bill would tighten the standards for this category, and sweep an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 people a year into Chapter 13 bankruptcy instead. In Chapter 13, debtors are put on a stringent repayment schedule, their wages are garnished for years, in an effort to repay as many creditors as possible.
The nation's creditors stand to recover millions of dollars in assets if the bill becomes law. Banks credit card companies have spent millions of dollars to lobby for the bill over the past eight years. They have contributed more than $24.8 million to federal candidates and political parties in the past five years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics' study of campaign finance and lobbying disclosure reports.
President Bush has identified the bankruptcy bill as one of his top legislative priorities this year.
Introduction by Tom Engelhardt
Whether the Ten Commandments, graven in stone, sit on a lawn by a government building or in a courthouse, isn't for me exactly a life-and-death issue -- and I think I'm not alone on this, which is why the Ten Commandments cases at the Supreme Court right now are so dangerous. The Bush administration and its various fundamentalist allies (religious and political) have proven especially skilled at finding wedge issues that, because they only seem to go so far, successfully challenge and blur previous distinctions, thereby opening yet more possibilities. The Supreme Court's decision in these particular cases holds great promise for further blurring the lines that once separated church and state in our country.
We're in a period, of course, when lines of every sort, involving civil rights, privacy, foreign and domestic spying, presidential power, Congressional rules, the checks-and-balances that once were such a proud part of our political system, and so many other matters are blurring radically. We also have a President who is in the process of casting off the constraints of any presidency, while placing religion with powerful emphasis at the very center of Washington's new political culture. He is now adored, if not essentially worshipped, by his followers as he travels the country dropping in at carefully vetted "town meetings"; and the adoration is often not just of him as a political leader but as a religious one, as a manifestation of God's design for us. It's in this context that the modest Ten Commandments cases are being heard; in the context, that is, of the destruction of what's left of an authentic American republican (rather than Republican) culture.
Below, William Dowell, a former Time magazine Middle Eastern correspondent and, at present, editor of the Global Beat ("resources for the global journalist"), a weekly on-line review of international security affairs published by New York University's Center for War, Peace, and the News Media, widens the religious lens to include the Middle East and so suggests another context in which the Ten Commandments cases might be considered. (A shorter version of this piece will appear Tuesday, March 8 on the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times.)
American Wahabbis and the Ten Commandments
By William Thatcher Dowell
For anyone who actually reads the Bible, there is a certain irony in the current debate over installing the Ten Commandments in public buildings. As everyone knows, the second commandment in the King James edition of the Bible states quite clearly: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth below, or that is in the water under the earth." It is doubtful that the prohibition on "graven images" was really concerned with images like the engraving of George Washington on the dollar bill. Rather it cautions against endowing a physical object, be it a "golden calf" or a two-ton slab of granite, with spiritual power.
In short, it is the spirit of the commandments, not their physical representation in stone or even on a parchment behind a glass frame, which is important. In trying to publicize the commandments, the self-styled Christian Right has essentially forgotten what they are really about. It has also overlooked the fact that there are several different versions of them. The King James Bible lists three: Exodus 20:2-17, Exodus 34: 12-26, and Deuteronomy 5:6-21. Catholic Bibles and the Jewish Torah also offer variants.
If the commandants are indeed to be green-lighted for our official landscape, however, let's at least remember that Christianity did not exist when the commandments were given. It might then seem more consistent to go with the Hebrew version rather than any modified Christian version adopted thousands of years after Moses lived. Since the Catholic Church predates the Protestant Reformation, it would again make more sense to go with the Catholic version than later revisions.
It is just this kind of theological debate which has been responsible for massacres carried out in the name of religion over thousands of years. It was, in fact, the mindless slaughter resulting from King Charles' efforts to impose the Church of England's prayer book on Calvinist Scots in the 17th century which played an important role in convincing the founding fathers to choose a secular form of government clearly separating church and state. They were not the first to recognize the wisdom in that approach. Jesus Christ, after all, advised his followers to render unto Caesar what was Caesar's due and unto God that which was due God.
The current debate, of course, has little to do with genuine religion. What it is really about is an effort to assert a cultural point of view. It is part of a reaction against social change, an American counter-reformation of sorts against the way our society has been evolving, and ultimately against the negative fallout that is inevitable when change comes too rapidly. The people pushing to blur the boundaries between church and state are many of the same who so fervently back the National Rifle Association and want to crack down on immigration. They feel that they are the ones losing out, much as, in the Middle East, Islamic fundamentalists fear they are losing out -- and their reactions are remarkably similar. In the Arab Middle East and Iran, the response is an insistence on the establishment of Islamic Law as the basis for political life; while in Israel, an increasingly reactionary interpretation of Jewish law which, taken to orthodox extremes, rejects marriages by reform Jewish rabbis in America, has settled over public life.
In a strange way, George Bush may now find himself in the same kind of trap that ensnared Saudi Arabia's founder, King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud. To gain political support, Saud mobilized the fanatical, ultra-religious Wahabbi movement -- the same movement which is spiritually at the core of al-Qaeda. Once the bargain was done, the Saudi Royal Family repeatedly found itself held political hostage to an extremist, barely controllable movement populated by radical ideologues. Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has found himself in a similar situation, drawing political power from the swing votes of the ultra-orthodox rightwing religious and fanatical settler's movement, and then finding his options limited by their obstinacy to change. President Bush has spent the last several months cajoling evangelicals and trying to pay off the political bill for their support.
In Saudi Arabia, the Wahabbis consider themselves ultra-religious, but what really drives their passions is a deep sense of grievance and an underlying conviction that a return to spiritual purity will restore the lost power they believe once belonged to their forefathers. The extremism that delights in stoning a woman to death for adultery or severing the hand of a vagrant accused of stealing depends on extreme interpretations of texts that are at best ambiguous. What is at stake is not so much service to God, as convincing oneself that it is still possible to enforce draconian discipline in a world that seems increasingly chaotic. We joke about a hassled husband kicking his dog to show he still has power. In the Middle East, it is often women who bear the brunt of the impotence of men. Nothing in the Koran calls for the mistreatment of women or even asks that a woman wear a veil. What is at stake here is not religion, but power, and who has a right to it.
The Christian Right, the evangelical movement that provided the added push needed to nudge President Bush past a tight election, is equally prone to selective interpretations of scripture. The Ten Commandments are used as a wedge to put across what is essentially a cultural protest against social change, but in the bitter disputes that have followed these seemingly ridiculous arguments the message of the commandments is usually lost. The Christian Right pretends to be concerned about the life of an unborn fetus, but expresses little interest for the fate of the living child who emerges from an unwanted pregnancy, and is even ready to kill or at least destroy the careers of those who do not agree with them. Although the commandments prohibit killing, and Christ advised his followers to leave vengeance to God, the fundamentalists seem to delight in the death penalty, and in reducing welfare support to unwed mothers who are struggling to deal with the results of pregnancies that they could not control and never wanted to have.
In the United States as in the Middle East, the core of this Puritanism stems from a nostalgia for an imaginary past ? in our case, a belief that the U.S. was a wonderful place when it was peopled mostly by pioneers who came from good northern European stock, who knew right from wrong, and weren't afraid to back up their beliefs with a gun, or by going to war, if they needed to.
The founding fathers, of course, had a very different vision. They had seen the damage caused by the arcane disputes which triggered the religious wars of the seventeenth century. They preferred the ideas of the secular enlightenment, which instead of forcing men to accept the religious interpretations of other men, provided the space and security for each man to seek God in his own way.
The idea that religious values should affect, and indeed control politics, is something that you hear quite often in the Islamic world. But perhaps the strongest rationale for separating these two dimensions of our daily lives is that politics inevitably involves compromise, while religion involves a spiritual ideal in which compromise can be fatal. The conflict is easy to see in contemporary Iran. Iran's rulers have had to choose whether they consider politics or religion to be most important. Ayatollah Khomeini himself once stated that if forced to choose between Islamic law and Islamic rule, he would choose Islamic rule. The effect of that decision was to betray Islamic law and ultimately God. Iran's genuine Islamic scholars have found themselves under continual pressure to change their understanding of God in order to conform to political realities.
The appointment of Ayatollah Sayyid al Khamenei to replace Khomeini as the supreme guide, is a case in point. Khamenei's credentials as a religious thinker are comparable to a number of other Iranian ayatollahs. But his real power stems from his political status. Because of that, he is in a position to affect and ultimately censor the religious writings of religious scholars who may be more thoughtful than he is, but whose thinking is considered threatening to Khamenei's vision of a theocratic state.
Politics inevitably trumps religion when the two domains are merged. Religion, when incorporated into a political structure, is almost invariably diluted and deformed, and ultimately loses its most essential power. Worse, as we have seen recently in the Islamic world (as in the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trials in the Christian world), a fanatical passion for one's own interpretation of justice often leads to horror -- as in the obsession of some practitioners of Sharia law to engage such punishments as amputations or stoning women to death.
The fact is that, as Saint Paul so eloquently put it, "Now we see through a glass darkly." We have a great deal of religious experience behind us, but only God can understand to the full extent what it really means. Men have their interpretations, but they are only human and, by their nature, they are flawed. We see a part of what is there -- but only a part. In that context, isn't it best to keep our minds open, the Ten Commandants in whatever version out of our public buildings or off our governmental lawns, and to lead by example rather than pressuring others to see life the way we do. As Christ once put it, "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
William Thatcher Dowell is the editor of the Global Beat, a review of international security affairs published weekly over the internet by New York University's Center for War, Peace, and the News Media. He has worked for NBC News, ABC News, and TIME magazine. He was a Middle East correspondent based in Cairo for TIME from 1989 through 1993.
Copyright 2005 William Thatcher Dowell
This piece first appeared at Tomdispatch.com.
i am probably a godless heathen because i have read the bible, and i have yet to find this compassionate conservatism that Reichskanzler Bush and his nouveau riche Sturmabteilung so vociferously proclaim from the streetcorners and sinagogues!!!
New AIDS discovery met with fear but little shock
By Richard Perez-Pena And Marc Santora
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
NEW YORK - As news spread of a rare and deadlier form of AIDS, communities already hard-hit by the disease reacted with fear and skepticism but little surprise, given that the sense of urgency about the disease had waned.
"They should have been doing more teaching about safe sex and the virus itself, the seriousness of it," said Albert Wright, 59, who is HIV-positive and lives at a treatment center in East New York, Brooklyn. "I'm afraid for the public. People probably have it and don't know that they have it."
City health officials announced Friday that they had detected a rare strain of HIV that is resistant to virtually all anti-retroviral drugs and appears to have led to the rapid onset of AIDS in a New York City man. That combination, the officials said, could signal a new, more menacing strain of the virus, and it set in motion an anxious search by city workers to find the man's sexual partners and have them tested.
Those who specialize in HIV treatment and prevention were particularly focused on news that the more virulent infection had appeared in a man who used methamphetamine during extended episodes of unprotected sex with multiple partners. It is a pattern experts have seen repeatedly in recent years.
Yesterday at the Big Cup, a popular coffee shop in Manhattan, the customers, most of them gay men, all talked about how the fear of AIDS had declined, especially among a younger generation that did not have the searing experience of watching friends die. Some said they feared that a new strain of the disease might have emerged, but none were surprised, given the prevailing attitude.
"People got so comfortable with the drugs that they have started becoming complacent," said Will Elosei, 37, from Jersey City. Now, he said: "I think people are going to be more paranoid about everything."
Among people who deal with HIV, the response was tinged with caution, with many saying it was too soon to say whether the single infection reported in New York was truly something new.
"We need better characterization of the virus in this man," said Dr. Marcus Conant, a professor at the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. "What does it look like genetically?"
But he added: "All of us have been expecting for some time there would be the multidrug resistance. This virus has mutated around what we've thrown at it."
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