Jagat

Jana-gana-mana-adhinaayaka, jaya he Bhaarata-bhagya-vidhaataa Punjaaba-Sindhu-Gujarata-Marathaa Draavida-Utkala -Banga Vindhya-Himaachala-Yamunaa-Gangaa Uchchala-Jaladhi-taranga Tava shubha naame jaage Tava shubha ashisha maange Gaaye tava jaya gaatha Jana-gana-mangala-daayaka jaya he Bhaarata-bhaagya-vidhaataa Jaya he, jaya he, jaya he Jaya jaya, jaya, jaya he!! " The following is Tagore's English rendering of the stanza: "Thou art the ruler of the minds of all people, dispenser of India's destiny. Thy name rouses the hearts of Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat and Maratha, of the Dravida and Orissa and Bengal it echoes in the hills of the Vindhyas and Himalayas, Mingles in the music of Jamuna and Ganges and is chanted by the waves of the Indian Sea. They pray for thy blessings and sing thy praise. The saving of all people waits in thy hand, thou dispenser of India's destiny victory, victory, victory, victory to thee."

Saare jahaan se achha Hindustan hamaara Hum bulbule(n) hai(n) uski Woh gulsitaan hamaara. Parbat woh sabse uncha Hamsaya a’smanka Woh santari hamaara Woh pasban hamaara. Godime(n) khelti hai(n) Jiski hazaaro(n) nadiya Gulshan hai jinki damse Raksh-I-jinan hamaara.. Mazhab nahin sikhaata Aapas main bair rakhna Hindi hain hum watan hai Hindustan hamaara.

<center><h3>The Word, unheeded</h3> Religious leaders may tell us what to do, but for more than a century, Canadians -- unlike our U.S. neighbours -- have been choosing whether to listen, or not, says pollster MICHAEL ADAMS By MICHAEL ADAMS Friday, August 15, 2003 - Globe&Mail</center> The debate over same-sex marriage occurs at a time when Canadians are realizing how quickly social values have evolved in this country -- and diverging from those of Americans. But the historical record shows that, for more than a century, we Canadians have refused to defer automatically to the admonitions of popes and bishops. During the 1896 federal election campaign, Catholic priests in Quebec, on orders from their bishops, instructed parishioners to only vote for candidates who formally agreed to support legislation granting educational rights to Catholics in Manitoba. Liberal leader Wilfrid Laurier, a Catholic, refused to make such a promise. Archbishop Louis-François Laflèche told Quebeckers that voting for a party led by such a man would be "sinning in a grave manner." On election day, Laurier and his Liberals won 53.5 per cent of the popular vote and 49 of 65 seats in the province. Now, more than a century later, another Catholic Prime Minister from Quebec has agreed to allow a free vote in the House of Commons on a law that would allow marital unions between people of the same sex. As in the 1890s, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, this time on orders from the Vatican, is advising its priests and laity to oppose Jean Chrétien's plan, and is explicitly instructing Catholic parliamentarians to vote against the bill. Bishop Fred Henry of Calgary has warned Mr. Chrétien that he risks eternal damnation if he continues on his present course. Ontario's senior bishop, Jean-Louis Plouffe, has also called on Catholic MPs to vote against the bill, and has said that Liberal leadership front-runner Paul Martin, a devout Catholic, would be betraying his religion if he voted to legalize same-sex marriage. The Prime Minister's office has issued a statement on the necessary separation of church and state, affirming that Mr. Chrétien's primary responsibility is to serve the Canadian people, not his church. As for Mr. Martin, he says that his responsibilities as an MP require him to take a wider perspective than his religious faith. In the Chrétien/Martin era, it is no easier for religious authorities to influence the behaviour of their flocks than it was in Laurier's Canada. For decades, "good Catholics" have defied their church's prohibition on artificial birth control; in a 2000 Environics poll, 63 per cent of self-identified Roman Catholics agreed that "every woman who wants to have an abortion should be able to have one" -- in direct defiance of one of the Vatican's most vehement moral edicts. Today, the majority of those Canadians who tell census takers they belong to a particular faith see nothing wrong with their questioning or rejecting altogether some of the tenets and behavioural prescriptions of that faith. As for Mr. Chrétien and Mr. Martin, the threat of eternal hellfire will likely have as little effect on their decisions as politicians, as it did on Sir Wilfrid nearly 11 decades ago. However, politicians are more likely to listen to polls than priests. And polling this summer has detected a slight erosion in public support for the current same-sex legislation as debate over the issue has intensified. Respondents are now split, 49 per cent for, and 49 per cent against. Polls find one-third or more of Canadians in strong opposition (some of these people could tolerate civil unions, as long as "marriage" was left to the preserve of the heterosexuals). Some politicians may be tempted to vote against same-sex marriage, thinking that it may be more of a vote-determining "wedge issue" for strong opponents of the legislation than for its supporters. They may also believe that in any case, the courts will continue to interpret the Charter of Rights and Freedoms so as to ensure homosexuals the right to marry -- similar to the way in which parliamentary inaction led to the decriminalization of abortion. Still, there is no doubting the decline of conventional religious belief and practice in Canada. Three in five Canadians reported that they attended church regularly in the mid 1950s; now that's just one in five. In this, Canadian attitudes have been diverging from American views for the past half century, as I document in my new book Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values. American religiosity has remained constant (and high) at least since the mid-1930s, when pioneering U.S. pollster George Gallup first began interviewing random samples of his fellow citizens on the subject. About 45 per cent of Americans reported attending a religious service each week in the mid-1930s and that figure has not altered significantly to this day. A Pew/Environics research poll conducted in 2002 found that religion is important to 59 per cent of Americans but only 30 per cent of Canadians. More significantly, the nature of the religiosity of Canadians and Americans has diverged over the decades. Environics research finds about 33 per cent of Americans (representing 43 per cent of Christians) to be fundamentalist in orientation, that is, believing in the literal interpretation of the Bible. The figure in Canada is only 14 per cent (representing 20 per cent of Christians in the country). The evolution of Canadian Christianity to a more liberal, open, inclusive and less judgmental spiritual quest contrasts with the more conservative, closed, and dogmatic orientation south of the border. Canada's values orientation has tended toward "both/and" while in the United States, it's more "either/or." The country's largest Protestant denomination, the United Church, for example, affirms that gays and lesbians are eligible to be ministers, that local congregations can bless same-sex relationships, and since 2000, has advocated civil recognition of same-sex unions -- a stance that would be viewed as radically, even dangerously, liberal by churches south of the border. Just yesterday, the United Church's General Council meeting passed a motion calling on Ottawa to allow same-sex marriages -- after only 45 minutes of debate. These divergent religious and moral attitudes are reflected in the changing orientation to other traditional institutions and authorities, including that most familiar of authority figures -- dad. Canadians have brought their questioning of traditional authority right into the home and are far less likely than Americans to agree with the statement: "The father of the family must be master in his own home." A 1992 Environics poll found that 26 per cent of Canadians believed that "father must be master" (down from 42 per cent in 1983). That same year, 42 per cent of Americans told us dad should be on top. Since then, the gap has widened: down to 18 per cent in Canada in 2000, and up to 49 per cent in the U.S. in that year. As Canadians become ever less deferential to patriarchal authority, Americans are becoming more and more willing to see if dad says it's okay to watch The Simpsons. Quebeckers are the North Americans least likely to think that father should be master (15 per cent). In more conservative Alberta, the figure is 21 per cent, the highest in Canada. In the United States, the proportion supporting traditional patriarchy ranges from a low of 29 per cent in liberal New England, to a high of 71 per cent in the Deep South. Religiosity and deference to patriarchal authority reinforce each other. In this context, it is no surprise that a June Environics poll found that 53 per cent of all Canadians (including 64 per cent of Quebeckers who say they are Roman Catholics) support allowing same-sex couples to marry. Meanwhile, south of the border, same-sex marriage has been condemned by U.S. President George W. Bush. He recently stated, "I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman and I think we ought to codify that," adding that "I am mindful that we're all sinners," a statement sure to resonate with the Christian fundamentalists in that country who are an important component of his electoral coalition. This week, a Washington Post poll reported that a strong majority -- 60 per cent -- of Americans disapproved of the Episcopal Church's decision to bless same-sex unions. Opposition was strongest among those who attended church regularly. Recall, too, that the U.S. Supreme Court has just overturned the anti-sodomy laws in the President's home state of Texas. This move comes a generation later than it did in Canada. (In 1968, the country's Parliament fell officially silent on sodomy during the term of then-justice minister Pierre Trudeau, a Roman Catholic from Quebec, who stated: "The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.") The U.S. Supreme Court may be forcing George Bush to cede a little territory in the bedrooms of his nation. But given the high and rising levels of deference to patriarchal and religious authority in the United States, Mr. Bush's fatherly "my house, my rules" statement will undoubtedly serve to retard any official moves to sanction same-sex unions in the United States. In the meantime, gay and politically progressive Americans will slink back to their rooms like defeated teenagers, to crank up the Dixie Chicks and await the next election. And Canadians -- Catholic and otherwise -- will keep going their own way. Michael Adams is the president of the Environics group of companies, and author of Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and The Myth of Converging Values, </ipublished by Penguin.

<center><h3>Limited War In Iraq Is Illusion</h3> Jimmy Breslin, August 10, 2003 http://www.newsday.com/mynews/ny-nybres103409213aug10,0,1582960.column </center> George Harrison, age 88, sat in his Brooklyn apartment and recited lines from Irish poet Patraic Pearse who, upon standing at the grave of Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, executed by the British, wrote these lines, and Harrison wishes the Lord would make everyone in Washington read them:<blockquote>"The fools, the fools. They have left us our Feinian dead. While, where grass grows or water flows Ireland unfree will never be at peace."</blockquote>This was in 1916 and it has kept them going until now, when the British finally are getting out. "The displaying of the bodies of Saddam's sons was unnecessary." George says. "I heard Pearse as I watched our people show them off. There are people of Iraq who have not come out of the mother's womb yet who will come to ask questions of us 50 years from now. The women are the worst. They will come and they will ask. We think it will all go away. Time makes no difference." Harrison is an example. He was indicted for gun running to the IRA in a famous trial in Brooklyn federal court a few years ago. At the outset, the federal prosecutor told the jury, "George Harrison has been running guns to Ireland for the last six months." At which point, Harrison squirmed in anger and had his attorney, Frank Durkan, rise and announce: "My client is insulted by the prosecutor's statement of six months. George Harrison has not been gun running for six months. He has been gun running to Ireland for the last 25 or 30 years." The other day, Durkan went to Europe. For the first time in his life he went on a British ship, the Queen Elizabeth 2. Everybody had to hide this from George Harrison, who would neither forgive nor forget if he found out. It seems like a small amusing thing. But fighting the British is a living thing with Harrison, and the problem with this is that he is a reminder of all those others everywhere. I don't know much about Iraq at all. But George Harrison's Irish emotion on behalf of the long dead is a passing argument when placed alongside the feelings in Tikrit. We called this incursion into Iraq "Operation Iraqi Freedom" or was it "Operation Iraqi Liberation"? The tough chins in Washington said that once the people knew that Saddam was gone, they would welcome us with open arms. Instead, they look on sullenly, and murder one of our soldiers every day or so. And they do nothing to improve things. Somebody pointed out yesterday that many weeks after the incursion, there still is no electricity in Iraq. In Ridgewood on Friday, we buried a soldier, Spc. Wilfredo Perez Jr., 24, at St. Matthias church on Catalpa Avenue. On Monday there was a funeral in Deer Park for Pfc. Raheen Tyson Heighter. Right before that, Marine Cpl. Roberto Marcus was buried out at Blessed Sacrament church in Cypress Hills and there was a funeral for Marine Riayan Tejada at St. Elizabeth's church in Washington Heights. Already reported here was the Saturday night service at St. Barbara's church in Bushwick, when the ushers passed out a sheet that said to pray for the men in Iraq. There was a list of 75 Latino names from the one parish. From a distance, from watching television news and reading, I hear and see a general or Defense Department politician skipping over words or mumbling and saying that there now is a "limited guerrilla war." There doesn't seem to be any such thing. I can tell you a little bit about a guerrilla war I know something about, the one in Northern Ireland. There were once 1,000 people in the IRA and that got cut down to maybe 75 men in three-man units, one not knowing the other. One of the IRA leaders insisted that 12 people would be all that was needed. Whatever, the British asked the IRA what it would take to make them stop. That was another guerrilla war lost by a major country. While Britain cut up Muslims in Malaysia so that they never came back, the rest of their colonial history is filled with being slaughtered in Iraq and Afghanistan. See Rudyard Kipling. The French could not win in Vietnam. The United States had 58,000 of our young killed there. And you keep reading of how well we are doing against Filipino guerrillas, keep hearing of it every year. Russia tried Afghanistan and caught a frightful beating. Russia now cannot handle Chechen guerrillas. The car bomb in Indonesia tells you how much helicopters and tanks can stop young men with bombs. The worst part is that these are Arabs who don't let venom be ruled by a calendar. George Harrison, in his living room, is a small illustration of how long anger can be carried. In Iraq and the Middle East, surely somebody can come out of a dust storm to try revenge in a half-century or so. 2003, Newsday, Inc.

<h3><center>A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles</h3> By Dan Morgan The Washington Post Sunday 10 August 2003</center> At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected? Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials. For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement. "Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament." The stirrings among Republicans are still muted. Most in the GOP -- as well as a large number of Democrats -- support bigger military budgets and see no alternative to a forceful U.S. role abroad. But those leading the debate say it is, at the very least, bringing in voices across the ideological spectrum for a long overdue appraisal of what the nation's role should be. After World War II, the United States was instrumental in setting up a web of international economic, military and political organizations founded on American principles of democracy and free markets. To combat communist influence, real or imagined, the United States also used covert operations to undermine or topple governments in Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Chile and other countries. While U.S. influence was vast, many scholars deny that it constituted an "empire," which the dictionary defines as a group of countries or territories under a single sovereign power. The U.S. invasion of Iraq with few allies may be the immediate cause of heightened interest in the topic of empire. But there is broad agreement that the United States' drift toward empire -- if it has occurred -- long predates the Bush administration. According to Christopher A. Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, which espouses libertarian views, the United States should have faced this issue when the Soviet Union collapsed. "That's when we should have had a discussion," he said. "Instead, we maintained all our Cold War commitments and added new ones, without much of a debate at all." The United States retained its worldwide network of spy satellites, ballistic missile submarines and aircraft carriers, and stationed several hundred thousand troops in dozens of countries. After dipping sharply in the early 1990s, the military budget began rising after Bill Clinton was reelected president in 1996. Between the end of the Cold War and the start of the current presidency, the U.S. military intervened in Panama, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo. In Panama and Haiti, the United States ousted dictators and installed its handpicked successors. In Somalia, a humanitarian mission to protect relief supplies for famine victims became a hunt for a warlord that led to U.S. deaths and withdrawal. In the former Yugoslavia, the United States intervened on humanitarian grounds but has remained to keep order and provide civic stability. Preble considers the U.S. ouster of the Taliban from Afghanistan a legitimate response to the terrorist threat after Sept. 11, 2001. But the longer the United States remains in Afghanistan and Iraq, he says, the more it looks like an "occupier" -- a term associated with imperial powers. For ideological conservatives, the United States' vast global commitments should pose a difficult philosophical dilemma, Preble said. "You cannot be for a system of limited government at home and for maintaining military garrisons all over the world," he said. Not so, say many "neoconservatives," members of an amorphous political group that has its origins in the defection of left-wing Democrats to the GOP during the Cold War. Neoconservatives tend to favor the use of U.S. power to spread American political values, preempt hostile nations' ability to threaten the United States with weapons of mass destruction, and rebuild nations in America's image. Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has put forward the idea of a U.S. "empire of liberty" to spread democracy around the world. On National Public Radio's "Diane Rehm Show" last month, Boot called for a doubling of U.S. military spending to carry out America's global commitments. The label of empire does not bother William Kristol, a neoconservative leader and editor of the Weekly Standard magazine. "If people want to say we're an imperial power, fine," he has stated. There are echoes of President John F. Kennedy -- and of the more zealous elements of President Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy -- in the neoconservative vision, said Ivo H. Daalder, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Kennedy pledged in his 1961 inaugural address to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." Wilson believed World War I could "make the world safe for democracy." But Daalder said there is a key difference. Kennedy and Wilson believed in the benefits of working through international organizations, while neoconservatives want the United States to act alone. "They're democratic imperialists," Daalder said of the neoconservatives. Oxford University historian Niall Ferguson, author of "Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power," says the United States should stop denying its imperial role and study the good the British Empire did in spreading prosperity and progressive thought in the 19th and 20th centuries. Ferguson recently took the pro-empire case before a packed auditorium at the American Enterprise Institute, where he debated scholar Robert Kagan on the proposition, "The United States is and should be an empire." At the conclusion, the audience was polled and rejected the proposition. Broadening this debate is the goal of the infant Committee for the Republic, whose members include Gray; former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles W. Freeman Jr.; Stephen P. Cohen, president of the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development in New York; William A. Nitze, son of Paul Nitze, the Reagan administration's top arms control negotiator; and John B. Henry, a Washington businessman and descendant of Revolutionary War patriot Patrick Henry. Members have met over lunch and are drafting a manifesto. A draft of the mission statement says, "America has begun to stray far from its founding tradition of leading the world by example rather than by force." Henry said the group may set up a nonprofit organization and could sponsor seminars examining how imperial behavior weakened earlier republics, such as the Roman Empire. "We want to have a great national debate about what our role in the world is," Henry said. James M. Lindsay, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says the United States veered away from the founders' notion of avoiding foreign entanglements more than a century ago, when it went to war with Spain in 1898. "America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy," a book by Lindsay and Daalder, finds parallels with the past in the foreign policy disputes taking place inside the Bush administration. After World War I, Wilson fought for U.S. membership in the League of Nations but was outmaneuvered by Senate Republicans led by Henry Cabot Lodge (Mass.). Wilson and Lodge wanted the United States to exercise power overseas, but Lodge feared the league would limit the United States' freedom of action. Lindsay sees some of the same conflicts in the dispute between Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and "aggressive nationalists" in the Bush administration led by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney. The nationalists, Lindsay contends, "believe that killing bad guys is the way to create democracy, not building institutions."

Democracy at home, imperial power abroad.

<center><h3>Mirror Mirror On The Wall, Who's The Biggest Rogue Of All?</h3> by Richard Du Boff; August 07, 2003 http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm</center> 1. Comprehensive [Nuclear] Test Ban Treaty, 1996. Signed by 164 nations and ratified by 89 including France, Great Britain, and Russia; signed by President Clinton in 1996 but rejected by the Senate in 1999. The US is one of 13 nonratifiers among countries that have nuclear weapons or nuclear power programs. In November 2001, the US forced a vote in the UN Committee on Disarmament and Security to demonstrate its opposition to the Treaty, and announced plans to resume nuclear testing for development of new short-range tactical nuclear weapons. 2. Antiballistic Missile Treaty, 1972. In December 2001, the US officially withdrew from the landmark agreement--the first time in the nuclear era that the US renounced a major arms control accord. 3. Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, 1972, ratified by 144 nations including the US. In July 2001 the US walked out of a London conference to discuss a 1994 protocol designed to strengthen the Convention by providing for on-site inspections. At Geneva in November 2001, Undersecretary of State for arms control John Bolton stated that "the protocol is dead," at the same time accusing Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Sudan, and Syria of violating the Convention but offering no specific allegations or supporting evidence to substantiate the charges. In May 2002 Bolton accused Cuba of carrying out germ-warfare research, again producing no evidence. The same month, three Pentagon documents revealed proposals, dating from 1994, to develop US offensive bioweapons that destroy materials ("biofouling and biocorrosion"), in violation of the Convention and a 1989 US law that implements the Convention. 4. UN Agreement to Curb the International Flow of Illicit Small Arms, 2001: the US was the only nation in opposition. Undersecretary Bolton said the agreement was an "important initiative" for the international community, but one that the US "cannot and will not" support, since it could impinge on the Constitutional right of Americans to keep and bear arms. 5. International Criminal Court (ICC) Treaty, 1998. Set up in The Hague to try political leaders and military personnel charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Concluded in Rome in July 1998, the Treaty was signed by 120 countries. Although President Clinton signed the Treaty in December 2000, he announced that the US would oppose it, along with 6 others (including China, Russia, and Israel). In May 2002 the Bush administration announced that it was "unsigning"--renouncing--the Treaty, something the US had never before done, and that it will neither recognize the Court's jurisdiction nor furnish any information to help the Court bring cases against any individuals. In July 2002 the ICC went into force after being ratified by more than the required number of 60 nations, including Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Spain (Russia now having signed but not ratified). Throughout 2002 and 2003, the US worked to scuttle the treaty by signing bilateral agreements not to send each other's citizens before the ICC. By mid-2003 the US had signed 37 mutual immunity pacts, mostly with poor, small countries in Africa, Asia, Central America, and Eastern Europe. Threatened with the loss of $73 million in US aid, for example, Bosnia signed such a deal. In July 2003 the Bush administration suspended all military assistance to 35 countries which refused to pledge to give US citizens immunity before the ICC. 6. Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, 1969, which the US signed but did not ratify. In May 2002, as the US was unsigning the ICC Treaty, it simultaneously announced that it will not be bound by the Vienna Convention, which outlines the obligations of nations to obey other treaties. Article 18 requires signatory nations not to take steps to undermine treaties they sign even if they do not ratify them. 7. The American Servicemen's Protection Act, 2002. The Bush administration has been working overtime to nullify the ICC. In November 2002 the President signed this Act, which not only bars cooperation with the ICC and threatens sanctions for countries that ratify it, but authorizes the use of "all means necessary" to free any US national who might be held in The Hague for trial before the ICC. 8. Land Mine Treaty, 1997. Banning the use, production or shipment of anti-personnel bombs and mines, the treaty was signed in Ottawa in December 1997 by 123 nations. President Clinton refused to submit it for ratification, claiming that mines were needed to protect South Korea against North Korea's "overwhelming military advantage," a proposition denied by the heads of North and South Korea in June 2000. In August 2001 President Bush rejected the treaty. 9. Kyoto Protocol of 1997, for controlling greenhouse gas emissions and reducing global warming: declared "dead" by President Bush in March 2001. No other country has chosen to abandon the treaty completely. In November 2001 the Bush administration shunned negotiations in Marrakech (Morocco) to revise the accord, mainly by watering it down in an attempt to gain US approval. In February 2002 Mr. Bush announced a new plan to limit emissions--by measures that are to be strictly voluntary. The US is the largest single producer of emissions, generating 20 percent of the world's total. 10. International Plan for Cleaner Energy, 2001. The US was the only nation to oppose this Plan, put forth by the G-8 group of industrial nations (US, Canada, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, UK) in Genoa in July 2001. It would phase out fossil fuel subsidies and increase financing for nonpolluting energy sources worldwide. 11. UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, 1982, and the 1994 Agreement relating to Implementation of Part IX (Deep Seabed Mining), establishing a legal framework for management of marine resources and preservation of the marine environment for future generations (including fish stocks, minerals, international navigation, marine scientific research and marine technologies). President Clinton submitted these treaties to the Senate in 1994, but they have not been ratified, as they have been by 135 and 100 countries respectively. The primary obstacle to applying them remains the absence of US ratification. 12. Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, 2000: an international treaty sponsored by 130 nations, seeking to protect biological diversity from risks posed by genetically modified organisms resulting from biotechnology. To date, it has been ratified by 13 countries and signed by 95 more, including United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, both Koreas, China, India, Indonesia, Argentina, Mexico. The US has long argued that there is no reason for such a protocol, has not ratified it, and is not expected to do so. 13. European Union (EU) Talks on economic espionage and electronic surveillance of phone calls, e-mail, and faxes, May 2001. The US refused to meet with EU nations to discuss, even at lower levels of government, these activities carried out under its Echelon program. Meanwhile, the US escalated its opposition to the EU's Galileo project, a global satellite navigation system that would rival the US Global Positioning System (GPS), funded and controlled by the Department of Defense and serving thousands of corporate and individual users worldwide, all monitored and recorded by the US. In December 2001 Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the EU that Galileo would have "negative consequences for future NATO operations" and would interfere with GPS (in fact it is planned to be compatible). In March 2002 the EU announced that it would proceed with Galileo, slated to be operational in 2008. 14. Multilateral talks sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris, May 2001, on ways to end "Harmful Tax Competition"-- tax evasion and money-laundering operations carried out through off-shore tax havens. The US refused to participate. The US, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill stated, "will not participate in any initiative to harmonize world tax systems." In negotiations in Vienna under the auspices of the UN, the US and the EU are also battling over a proposed global Convention Against Corruption. Europe wants the pact to cover businesses and governments; the US wants it restricted to governments. 15. World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, September 2001, convened by UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and the UN High Commission for Human Rights and bringing together 163 countries. The US withdrew from the conference, alleging anti-Israel and anti-semitic politics on the part of many delegations. The final declaration of the Conference expressed "concern about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation" and "recognized the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent State and . . . the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel." 16. The illegal embargo against Cuba by the US, now 39 years old: under Bush II, it has been tightened. In November 2002, the UN General Assembly passed, for the eleventh consecutive year, a resolution calling for an end to the boycott by a vote of 173 to 3, the largest majority since the General Assembly first debated the issue in 1992. As usual, the US, Israel, and the Marshall Islands voted against the resolution. 17. The US quit UNESCO and ceased its payments for UNESCO's budget, 1984. The pretext was the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), which was not a UNESCO project but a proposal, backed by several groups including UNESCO, for change in global communications designed to lessen dependence of developing countries on Western media, news agencies, and advertising firms. The NWICO proposal was dropped in 1989; the US nonetheless refused to rejoin UNESCO. In 1995 the Clinton administration proposed rejoining; the move was blocked in Congress. In February 2000 the US finally paid some of its arrears to the UN but excluded UNESCO. President Bush stated that the US would rejoin UNESCO in September 2002, when he appeared before the UN to ask for a resolution authorizing him to attack Iraq. 18. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague held the US in violation of international law for "unlawful use of force" in Nicaragua, 1986, through its own actions and those of its Contra proxy army. The US refused to recognize the Court's jurisdiction. A 1988 UN resolution that "urgently calls for full and immediate compliance with the Judgment of the International Court of Justice of 27 June 1986 in the case of 'Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua' in conformity with the relevant provisions of the Charter of the United Nations" was approved 94-2 (US and Israel voting no). 19. Optional Protocol, 1989, to the UN's International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), aimed at abolition of the death penalty and containing a provision banning the execution of those under 18. The US has neither signed nor ratified and exempts itself from the latter provision, making it one of five countries that still execute juveniles (with Saudi Arabia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Nigeria). China abolished the practice in 1997, Pakistan in 2000. 20. UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, 1979, ratified by 169 nations. President Carter signed CEDAW in 1980, but the Senate blocked it. The only countries that have signed but not ratified are the US, Afghanistan, Sao Tome and Principe. 21. UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989, which protects the economic and social rights of children. The US has signed but not ratified. The only other country not to ratify is Somalia. 22. Cairo Action Plan, adopted by 179 nations at the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, for establishing "reproductive health services and health care" as a means for curbing population growth in developing countries. In July 2002 the US cut off its $34 million annual contribution to the UN family-planning program, and in November withdrew its support of the Cairo Action Plan. The State Department's population office stated that the Plan implied a right to abortion and undermined the US international campaign for sexual abstinence to avoid pregnancy. "This hit like a bombshell. People were stunned," the senior UN official stated. 23. UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948. The US finally ratified in 1988, adding several "reservations" to the effect that the US Constitution and the "advice and consent" of the Senate are required to judge whether any "acts in the course of armed conflict" constitute genocide. The reservations are rejected by Britain, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Mexico, Estonia, and others. 24. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, 1987, ratified by the US in 1994. In the UN Economic and Social Council in July 2002, the US tried to stop a vote on a protocol to reinforce the Convention. The protocol would establish a system of inspections of prisons and detention centers worldwide to check for abuses. The US claimed that the new plan would allow monitors to gain access to American prisoners and detainees--including, presumably, those held in US detention camps in Guantanamo and Afghanistan, and now Iraq. 25. Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and Optional Protocols, 1963. The US is a long-time violator, by detaining foreign nationals and failing to notify their governments. In 1999 two German citizens, Walter LeGrand and his brother Karl, were put to death in an Arizona gas chamber. When arrested in 1984 for the murder of a bank teller, the LeGrands were not informed of their right to contact the German embassy, and German officials were unable to provide legal aid. In 1998 the World Court (the ICJ) ruled that the US had violated international law in the case and asked the US Supreme Court to stay the execution; the Supreme Court dismissed the request. In 2002 Mexico petitioned the ICJ to grant stays of execution for 54 Mexicans held on death row in the US, arguing that US municipal and state officials are violating the Vienna Convention. In August 2002 Mexican President Vicente Fox cancelled a meeting with President Bush at his Texas ranch to protest Alabama's execution of Mexican citizen Javier Suarez Medina, who was denied the right to seek help from his government when arrested in 1988. After September 11, 2001 US violations of the Convention multiplied, with more than 600 "unlawful combatants" detained in Guantanamo and elsewhere without charges, denied all legal rights, and held for possible trial before closed military tribunals. 26. Agreement among all other 143 members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to help poor nations buy medicines to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other diseases, by relaxing patent laws which keep prices of drugs beyond their reach, concluded at the WTO Ministerial Conference in Doha, Qatar in November 2001. In December 2002, the US single-handedly destroyed the agreement. Sources at the WTO in Geneva said that the US decision came directly from the White House, following intense lobbying from US pharmaceutical companies. 27. Is the status of "we're number one!" Rogue overcome by generous foreign aid given to less fortunate countries? The three best foreign aid providers in 2002, measured by the aid percentage of their gross domestic products, were Denmark (1.01%), Norway (0.91%), and the Netherlands (0.79). The worst was the US (0.10%) followed by the UK (0.23%). A 2003 index, put together by the Center for Global Development and Foreign Policy magazine and ranking the contribution made by 21 developed nations to growth in the developing world, placed the US 20th; only Japan ranked lower. The foregoing record of the biggest Rogue of all excludes . . . the use of armed force against other nations. According to the Congressional Research Service (Report 96-119F, "Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad"), from 1798 through 1995 there were 251 instances, of which only five were declared wars, when the US used its armed forces abroad, in situations of military conflict or potential conflict or for other than normal peacetime purposes. For an account of US intervention abroad since the Second World War, see William Blum, Rogue State (Common Courage Press, 2000). Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the level of US military activism abroad has been "unprecedented.Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has embarked on nearly four dozen military interventions [during 1989-1999] as opposed to only 16 during the entire period of the Cold War. Many of these interventions, such as those in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, were launched into areas traditionally considered marginal to US interests" (United States Commission on National Security/21st Century, New World Coming. American Security in the 21st Century, September 1999).

<center><h2>Preventive War 'the Supreme Crime'</h2> <h3>Iraq: invasion that will live in infamy</h3> by NOAM CHOMSKY ; August 11, 2003 http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm</center> SEPTEMBER 2002 was marked by three events of considerable importance, closely related. The United States, the most powerful state in history, announced a new national security strategy asserting that it will maintain global hegemony permanently. Any challenge will be blocked by force, the dimension in which the US reigns supreme. At the same time, the war drums began to beat to mobilise the population for an invasion of Iraq. And the campaign opened for the mid-term congressional elections, which would determine whether the administration would be able to carry forward its radical international and domestic agenda. The new "imperial grand strategy", as it was termed at once by John Ikenberry writing in the leading establishment journal, presents the US as "a revisionist state seeking to parlay its moment ary advantages into a world order in which it runs the show", a unipolar world in which "no state or coalition could ever challenge it as global leader, protector, and enforcer" (1). These policies are fraught with danger even for the US itself, Ikenberry warned, joining many others in the foreign policy elite. What is to be protected is US power and the interests it represents, not the world, which vigorously opposed the concept. Within a few months studies revealed that fear of the US had reached remarkable heights, along with distrust of the political leadership. An international Gallup poll in December, which was barely noticed in the US, found almost no support for Washington's announced plans for a war in Iraq carried out unilaterally by America and its allies - in effect, the US-United Kingdom coalition. Washington told the United Nations that it could be relevant by endorsing US plans, or it could be a debating society. The US had the "sovereign right to take military action", the administration's moderate Colin Powell told the World Economic Forum, which also vigorously opposed the war plans: "When we feel strongly about something we will lead, even if no one is following us" (2). President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair underscored their contempt for international law and institutions at their Azores summit meeting on the eve of the invasion. They issued an ultimatum, not to Iraq, but to the Security Council: capitulate, or we will invade without your meaningless seal of approval. And we will do so whether or not Saddam Hussein and his family leave the country (3). The crucial principle is that the US must effectively rule Iraq. President Bush declared that the US "has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security", threatened by Iraq with or without Saddam, according to the Bush doctrine. The US will be happy to establish an Arab facade, to borrow the term of the British during their days in the sun, while US power is firmly implanted at the heart of the world's major energy-producing region. Formal democracy will be fine, but only if it is of a submissive kind accepted in the US's backyard, at least if history and current practice are any guide. The grand strategy authorises the US to carry out preventive war: preventive, not pre-emptive. Whatever the justifications for pre-emptive war might be, they do not hold for preventive war, particularly as that concept is interpreted by its current enthusiasts: the use of military force to eliminate an invented or imagined threat, so that even the term "preventive" is too charitable. Preventive war is, very simply, the supreme crime that was condemned at Nuremberg. That was understood by those with some concern for their country. As the US invaded Iraq, the historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote that Bush's grand strategy was "alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at the time of Pearl Harbor, on a date which, as an earlier American president [Franklin D Roosevelt] said it would, lives in infamy". It was no surprise, added Schlesinger, that "the global wave of sympathy that engulfed the US after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism" and the belief that Bush was "a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein" (4). For the political leadership, mostly recycled from the more reactionary sectors of the Reagan-Bush Senior administrations, the global wave of hatred is not a particular problem. They want to be feared, not loved. It is natural for the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, to quote the words of Chicago gangster Al Capone: "You will get more with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone." They understand just as well as their establishment critics that their actions increase the risk of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and terror. But that too is not a major problem. Far higher in the scale of their priorities are the goals of establishing global hegemony and implementing their domestic agenda, which is to dismantle the progressive achievements that have been won by popular struggle over the past century, and to institutionalise their radical changes so that recovering the achievements will be no easy task. It is not enough for a hegemonic power to declare an official policy. It must establish it as a new norm of international law by exemplary action. Distinguished commentators may then explain that the law is a flexible living instrument, so that the new norm is now available as a guide to action. It is understood that only those with the guns can establish norms and modify international law. The selected target must meet several conditions. It must be defenceless, important enough to be worth the trouble, an imminent threat to our survival and an ultimate evil. Iraq qualified on all counts. The first two conditions are obvious. For the third, it suffices to repeat the orations of Bush, Blair, and their colleagues: the dictator "is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons [in order to] dominate, intimidate or attack"; and he "has already used them on whole villages leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or transfigured. If this is not evil then evil has no meaning." Bush's eloquent denunciation surely rings true. And those who contributed to enhancing evil should certainly not enjoy impunity: among them, the speaker of these lofty words and his current associates, and all those who joined them in the years when they were supporting that man of ultimate evil, Saddam Hussein, long after he had committed these terrible crimes, and after the first war with Iraq. Supported him because of our duty to help US exporters, the Bush Senior administration explained. It is impressive to see how easy it is for polit ical leaders, while recounting Saddam the monster's worst crimes, to suppress the crucial words "with our help, because we don't care about such matters". Support shifted to denunciation as soon as their friend Saddam committed his first authentic crime, which was disobeying (or perhaps misunderstanding) orders, by invading Kuwait. Punishment was severe - for his subjects. The tyrant escaped unscathed, and was further strengthened by the sanctions regime then imposed by his former allies. Also easy to suppress are the reasons why the US returned to support Saddam immediately after the Gulf war, as he crushed rebellions that might have overthrown him. The chief diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times, Thomas Friedman, explained that the best of all worlds for the US would be "an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein", but since that goal seemed unattainable, we would have to be satisfied with second best (5). The rebels failed because the US and its allies held the "strikingly unanimous view [that] whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for his country's stability than did those who have suffered his repression" (6). All of this was suppressed in the commentary on the mass graves of the victims of the US- authorised paroxysm of terror of Saddam Hussein, which commentary was offered as a justification for the war on "moral grounds". It was all known in 1991, but ignored for reasons of state. A reluctant US population had to be whipped to a proper mood of war fever. From September grim warnings were issued about the dire threat that Saddam posed to the US and his links to al-Qaida, with broad hints that he had been involved in the 9/11 attacks. Many of the charges that had been "dangled in front of [the media] failed the laugh test," commented the editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, "but the more ridiculous [they were,] the more the media strove to make whole-hearted swallowing of them a test of patriotism" (7). The propaganda assault had its effects. Within weeks, a majority of Americans came to regard Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat to the US. Soon almost half believed that Iraq was behind the 9/11 terror. Support for the war correlated with these beliefs. The propaganda campaign was just enough to give the administration a bare majority in the mid-term elections, as voters put aside their immediate concerns and huddled under the umbrella of power in fear of a demonic enemy. The brilliant success of public diplomacy was revealed when Bush, in the words of one commentator, "provided a powerful Reaganesque finale to a six-week war on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on 1 May". This reference is presumably to President Ronald Reagan's proud declaration that America was "standing tall" after conquering Grenada, the nutmeg cap ital of the world, in 1983, preventing the Russians from using it to bomb the US. Bush, as Reagan's mimic, was free to declare - without concern for sceptical comment at home - that he had won a "victory in a war on terror [by having] removed an ally of al-Qaida" (8). It has been immaterial that no credible evidence was provided for the alleged link between Saddam Hussein and his bitter enemy Osama bin Laden and that the charge was dismissed by competent observers. Also immaterial was the only known connection between the victory and terror: the invasion appears to have been "a huge setback in the war on terror" by sharply increasing al-Qaida recruitment, as US officials concede (9). The Wall Street Journal recognised that Bush's carefully staged aircraft carrier extravaganza "marks the beginning of his 2004 re-election campaign" which the White House hopes "will be built as much as possible around national-security themes". The electoral campaign will focus on "the battle of Iraq, not the war", chief Republican political strategist Karl Rove explained : the war must continue, if only to control the population at home (10). Before the 2002 elections Rove had instructed party activists to stress security issues, diverting attention from unpopular Republican domestic policies. All of this is second-nature to the re cycled Reaganites now in office. That is how they held on to political power during their first tenure in office. They regularly pushed the panic button to avoid public opposition to the policies that had left Reagan as the most disliked living president by 1992, by which time he may have ranked even lower than Richard Nixon. Despite its narrow successes, the intensive propaganda campaign left the public unswayed in fundamental respects. Most continue to prefer UN rather than US leadership in international crises, and by two to one prefer that the UN, rather than the US, should direct reconstruction in Iraq (11). When the occupying coalition army failed to discover WMD, the US administration's stance shifted from absolute certainty that Iraq possessed WMD to the position that the accusations were "justified by the discovery of equipment that potentially could be used to produce weapons" (12). Senior officials then suggested a refinement in the concept of preventive war, to entitle the US to attack a country that has "deadly weapons in mass quantities". The revision "suggests that the administration will act against a hostile regime that has nothing more than the intent and ability to develop WMD" (13). Lowering the criteria for a resort to force is the most significant consequence of the collapse of the proclaimed argument for the invasion. Perhaps the most spectacular propaganda achievement was the praising of Bush's vision to bring democracy to the Middle East in the midst of an extraordinary display of hatred and contempt for democracy. This was illustrated by the distinction that was made by Washington between Old and New Europe, the former being reviled and the latter hailed for its courage. The criterion was sharp: Old Europe consists of governments that took the same position over the war on Iraq as most of their populations; while the heroes of New Europe followed orders from Crawford, Texas, disregarding, in most cases, an even larger majority of citizens who were against the war. Political commentators ranted about disobedient Old Europe and its psychic maladies, while Congress descended to low comedy. At the liberal end of the spectrum, the former US ambassador to the UN, Richard Holbrooke, stressed the "very important point" that the population of the eight original members of New Europe is larger than that of Old Europe, which proves that France and Germany are "isolated". So it does, unless we succumb to the radical-left heresy that the public might have some role in a democracy. Thomas Friedman then urged that France be removed from the permanent members of the Security Council, because it is "in kindergarten, and does not play well with others". It follows that the population of New Europe must still be in nursery school, at least judging by the polls (14). Turkey was a particularly instructive case. Its government resisted the heavy pressure from the US to prove its democratic credentials by following US orders and overruling 95% of its population. Turkey did not cooperate. US commentators were infuriated by this lesson in democracy, so much so that some even reported Turkey's crimes against the Kurds in the 1990s, previously a taboo topic because of the crucial US role in what happened, although that was still carefully concealed in the lamentations. The crucial point was expressed by the deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, who condemned the Turkish military because they "did not play the strong leadership role that we would have expected" - that is they did not intervene to prevent the Turkish government from honouring near-unanimous public opinion. Turkey had therefore to step up and say, "We made a mistake - let's figure out how we can be as helpful as possible to the Americans" (15). Wolfowitz's stand was particularly informative because he had been portrayed as the leading figure in the administration's crusade to democratise the Middle East. Anger at Old Europe has much deeper roots than just contempt for democracy. The US has always regarded European unification with some ambivalence. In his Year of Europe address 30 years ago, Henry Kissinger advised Europeans to keep to their regional responsibilities within the "overall framework of order managed by the US". Europe must not pursue its own independent course, based on its Franco-German industrial and financial heartland. The US administration's concerns now extend as well to Northeast Asia, the world's most dynamic economic region, with ample resources and advanced industrial economies, a potentially integrated region that might also flirt with challenging the overall framework of world order, which is to be maintained permanently, by force if necessary, Washington has declared. ______ * Noam Chomsky is professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1) John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs, Sept.-Oct. 2002. (2) Wall Street Journal, 27 January 2003. (3) Michael Gordon, The New York Times, 18 March 2003. (4) Los Angeles Times, 23 March 2003. (5) The New York Times, 7 June 1991. Alan Cowell, The New York Times, 11 April 1991. (6) The New York Times, 4 June 2003. (7) Linda Rothstein, editor, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, July 2003. (8) Elisabeth Bumiller, The New York Times, 2 May 2003; transcript, 2 May 2003. (9) Jason Burke, The Observer, London 18 May 2003. (10) Jeanne Cummings and Greg Hite, Wall Street Journal, 2 May 2003. Francis Clines, The New York Times, 10 May 2003. (11) Program on International Policy Attitudes, University of Maryland, April 18-22. (12) Dana Milbank, Washington Post, 1 June 2003 (13) Guy Dinmore and James Harding, Financial Times, 3/4 May 2003. (14) Lee Michael Katz, National Journal, 8 February 2003; Friedman, The New York Times, 9 February 2003. (15) Marc Lacey, The New York Times, 7/8 May 2003.

<h2><center>Courts Weighing Rights of States to Curb Aid for Religion Majors</h2> By ADAM LIPTAK (NY TIMES http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/10/national/10SCHO.html?pagewanted=all&position=)</center> RAVERSE CITY, Mich., Aug. 5 — Teresa Becker made a costly decision when she chose after her sophomore year to major in theology. She had received $1,200 in state scholarship money for her freshman year at Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Mich., in 2000. The next year she received $2,750 in state aid. Last June, she was promised that amount for her junior year, too. A month later, when word of her choice of a major reached state officials, they wrote her a new letter. "Students enrolled in a course of study leading to a degree in theology, divinity or religious education are not eligible to receive an award," it said, paraphrasing a state law. "Your award has changed from $2,750.00 to $0.00." Ms. Becker sued. On July 21, Judge George Caram Steeh of Federal District Court in Detroit issued a preliminary ruling in her favor, saying the state had probably engaged in religious discrimination. Judge Steeh ordered the state to put her scholarship money in escrow until there is a final court ruling. A case much like Ms. Becker's from Washington State will be decided by the United States Supreme Court in its next term. A trial in Ms. Becker's case has not been scheduled and may never be needed; the Supreme Court case will probably effectively decide hers as well. Eleven states prohibit aid for the study of theology. In addition to Michigan and Washington, they are New York, New Jersey, Alabama, Louisiana, Missouri, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wisconsin, according to a supporting brief filed in the Supreme Court by five state attorneys general. The Washington case is in some ways the narrower one. The State Supreme Court interpreted theology to mean "instruction that resembles worship and manifests a devotion to religion and religious principles in thought, feeling, belief and conduct." In Washington, then, teaching about religion as an academic subject, as opposed to religious teaching meant to inspire devotion, is fine. The Michigan law is seemingly broader, and its original purpose is not well understood. In an e-mail message to an Ave Maria College official in January, the director of the state's scholarship office, Diana Todd Sprague, wrote: "I am not clear on why this was part of the statute since it was established in the 60's. It has been described to me as having to do with the separation of church and state, but I am not certain." Jason Allen, a Republican state senator from here, called the history of the law murky. Senator Allen has introduced legislation to allow state aid for students studying theology. Ronald Muller, the president of Ave Maria College, a Roman Catholic college, said its theology major is part of its liberal arts curriculum. Theology "is an academic discipline like philosophy, English literature or the classics," he said. Barry Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which opposes state financing for most religious education, said the Michigan statute might be too sweeping. "The statute should probably read that persons preparing for the ministry or religious education are excluded," Mr. Lynn said. The plaintiff in the Washington case, Joshua Davey, acknowledged that he is preparing for a career as a Christian minister. Ms. Becker, on the other hand, says she does not know what career she will choose. "I am not seriously considering any sort of religious life," she said in an interview at her parents' home here. But she said that her interest in theology is not only academic. "I selected theology as my undergraduate major," she wrote in court papers, "based on my sincere religious conviction that this course of study will help me pursue my vocation in life, to know, love and serve God and my fellow men." Ms. Becker, 21, is spending the summer in this resort town where she grew up, on the shore of Lake Michigan. She is direct and serious, and she talked about the central role her Catholic faith plays in her life. "I was raised in it," she said. "I love it. It influences how I act around others, how I treat others. It's my salvation. In a sense, it's everything." She is working at a doctor's office to make up for the loss of state aid, and she volunteers with the local anti-abortion advocacy group. In the fall, she will start her senior year. She said she has heard nothing from the state about a fourth year of aid. Ms. Becker said the scholarship law might have discouraged some of her fellow students at Ave Maria from choosing theology as their majors. That did not stop them, she said, from taking theology classes. In a brief to the Supreme Court, Mr. Davey's lawyers said that having scholarship decisions turn on what major a student declares is a little odd. A student "could take numerous theology courses, paid for by state grants, so long as his major was something else (like psychology or math)," the lawyers wrote. But a student who declares a theology major would get no state money for an entire year "even if the student takes nothing but language, literature, philosophy and science," they said. Ms. Becker's lawyers at the Thomas More Law Center, a conservative public interest law firm in Ann Arbor, Mich., emphasized what they called the unfairness of the distinction the Michigan law draws. "An atheist committed to scientific materialism may study the Big Bang, the laws governing the subsequent organization of matter and, ultimately, the amphibian from which man is said to have evolved — all without forfeiting his scholarship," they wrote in court papers. "But Teresa must forfeit her scholarship if she wishes to discuss the Uncaused Cause that created the stuff of the Big Bang, and the notion that the laws that govern creation are not merely statistically improbable but so irreducibly complex that the heavens proclaim the glory of the Lord." Aaron Caplan, a staff lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington State, said that states should be free to decide what kinds of study to support. They can, for instance, offer scholarships for medical school but not law school. And while court decisions hold that states are free to offer scholarships for religious study, Mr. Caplan said, it does not follow that states should be required to do so. The Washington case and Ms. Becker's boil down to one proposition, he said: "A state may legally choose not to fund people's religious education." Ms. Becker saw it differently. "The state is violating people's rights to religious freedom," she said. Her fellow students have expressed support. "They're praying for me and rooting for me," she said.

<h2>That old black magic</h2> Violence is never far from the surface in Cambodia. With the recent election only days away, a triple homicide is assumed to be political carnage, the last thing this troubled nation needs. But, as Canadian writer CHRIS TENOVE learns when he finally reaches the scene of the crime, the real motive for the killings may be something ancient and much more sinister By CHRIS TENOVE Saturday, August 9, 2003 - Globe&Mail POUL COMMUNE, CAMBODIA -- This is something you can't do in Canada. You can't drop by the jail and say, "I'd like to talk to the famous brothers, the ones you recently arrested for killing their neighbours," and expect that the prison warden will round them up for you. But things work differently in Cambodia. The warden finds an abandoned room, and we sit behind a wooden table with scraps of plastic tablecloth stapled to it. Through a tiny window, I can hear the shouts of inmates as they chase an old soccer ball through the puddle-strewn courtyard inside. Meas Nhoeun, Meas Sreing and Meas Nhong -- the brothers -- are accused of murdering three neighbours in Poul commune, a tiny farming community several hours north of Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. The killings were splashed across the news because they happened five days before the country's national election and were said to be politically motivated. But a visit to their hardscrabble village has revealed a much stranger possible motive, and I want to hear what the men themselves have to say. The warden comes in for a last look at the room and notices something on a dusty staircase in the corner. He smiles sheepishly. Someone has left a machete and an axe -- just what the brothers allegedly used to butcher their neighbours. The warden chuckles a little uncomfortably. He takes the weapons out, then returns with the three men. They are extremely short. The tallest is maybe 5-foot-2. There are no shackles, no maniac glint in the eyes, just three quiet, almost impish men with a familial likeness in their flat noses and wavy hair. I try to think of something innocuous to break the tension, but instead blurt out: "I read in the newspaper that you had an argument about the elections." Cambodia and its people are full of surprises. I know this. And yet I am caught off guard when the brothers reply by talking about the deadly threat posed by magical cows. "Be honest with me," I insist through a translator. "Why did you really do it?" A day earlier, on Friday, July 25, the capital city was gripped by the last, feverish political campaigning before Sunday's national election. At Phnom pagoda -- the city's birthplace -- thousands of supporters of the ruling Cambodian People's Party gathered in their white shirts and ball caps. Even the tourist elephant twitched its ears along with the dance music on stage, while the women happily trilled out "rrrrrrrr-eeeahhh" in impending triumph. Prime Minister Hun Sen decided not to campaign for this election -- the wily, one-eyed politician knows that he is a lodestone for both adulation and resentment. Instead, the final rally was headlined by party chairman Chea Sim. When he arrived, a corridor of hundreds of seething white shirts snaked all the way from his SUV to the stage. The crowd, intoxicated by their solidarity, chanted, "Chnas! Chnas! Chnas!" (Win! Win! Win!) This campaign was less bloody than those in the past. But a gruesome homicide had made the front pages of Phnom Penh's newspapers. According to The Cambodia Daily, three CPP supporters in the countryside had hacked up three members of the royalist opposition FUNCINPEC party (formally known as the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Co-operative Cambodia). This was the kind of story everyone had been expecting. Five years ago, the previous National Assembly election left dozens of corpses in its wake, when the Prime Minister fought the opposition at the polls and in the streets to maintain control of the country. This time, observers from around the world arrived to monitor the campaign. When U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was in town for a summit meeting of Southeast Asian nations in June, he made a point of warning the government to "do everything possible to ensure that the upcoming elections" are free and fair. The triple killing was exactly the kind of violence people worried about. Cambodians are wondrously gentle and loath to argue. In three visits here, including lengthy research for a master's thesis, the most violent tendency I have come across is a swift, hard slap on the back the men tend to deliver after making, in their opinion, a particularly good joke. But there is another side to Cambodia, of course. Tourists who arrive at Phnom Penh are immediately presented with three options: They can visit a high school where tens of thousands of Cambodians were tortured by the Khmer Rouge, a killing field with a giant glass tower full of human bones, or a firing range where a small fee allows you to blast away with guns and rocket launchers. Flip to the "Police Blotter" section of the local newspapers, and you can read about horrific crimes seemingly motivated by the pettiest of causes. In bookstores and street-side stalls, you can buy biographies of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge regime, which caused the deaths of 1.7 million people in the late 1970s. Violence and death haunt the country. Every time I come here, I can't help but wonder why these seemingly gentle people have a tendency, perhaps more than any others in Asia, to kill each other. The shocking triple homicide in Poul commune seemed like a good place to look for answers. On the day before the vote, all political campaigning is prohibited, a wise cooling-off period, so I seize the opportunity to head north to Poul. Before leaving, I run a bizarre detail buried in one of the news reports past an Australian-Cambodian acquaintance: that the brothers were retaliating against black magic. My friend is skeptical. "Everyone knows what that means. It means the police don't want to talk about politics. . . . A lot of things get blamed on black magic near election time." Licadho, a Cambodian human-rights organization, has investigated several cases in which a crime with apparent political motivations was attributed to magic. "It's true that Cambodians are superstitious," Licadho director Naly Pilorge says, "but courts and politicians tend to emphasize personal disputes, and they often mention magic. Officials use this as an excuse to avoid all political implications." And sure enough, what is one of the first things police commissioner Touch Naroth tells me when I arrive in the capital of Kompong Chhnang province? "No politics!" He is emphatic that, when arrested, the suspects said the killings were revenge against black magic. Colonel Naroth wears a thick gold chain and a huge glittering ring, and I can't help but think that the CPP has set him up nicely. Just then, he stops to take a call and shares a chuckle with fellow officers. A FUNCINPEC supporter has dressed a dog in a CPP shirt, a calculated insult. An officer is dispatched to deal with it. Another drives us to the jetty in a plush Mitsubishi SUV, with soft leather seats and syrupy love songs on the high-end stereo. Throughout the drive, the officer's pistol bounces against the headrest behind me. To reach Poul, we must hire a boat and navigate through several braids of the immense Tonle Sap River. The boat soon slips through a curtain of reeds, and the modest urbanization of the Kompong Chhnang capital is left behind. It is quiet, the river shimmers with heat. We drift past an old fisherman with skin like dried leather; he hunches over the wooden prow of his boat, staring into the milky brown water and slowly lowering his line. The fens around us are flat, but in the distance to the northeast there are a few limestone mountains. One is shaped like a sleeping woman -- according to myth, this is the daughter of a giantess. She fell in love with a normal man, but her mother was furious and threatened to devour him. (Apparently, fear of mothers-in-law is cross-cultural.) The man escaped across the Tonle Sap and the daughter, distraught, committed suicide. My boat takes me from the human side of the river to the land of the giantess. After half an hour, the boat docks at a scabrous little fishing village whose buildings of corroded metal have turned a weather-beaten brown, except for a bright blue CPP sign. Nintendo hasn't reached here yet, so kids have to invent their own fun. Several have gathered in the hot morning sun to play a game that involves thumping and shrieking through a pile of trash. Several minutes later, a boy holds the limp body of a mouse by its tail, a proud look on his face. From here, it is a half-hour trip inland on the back of a motorcycle to get to Poul commune and the victims' house. Along the road, the rice fields are studded with solitary sugar palms and the occasional bony white cow, chewing thoughtfully, or grey water buffalo waiting for its next burden. The moto winds past tiny wood huts with stilts and thatched roofs. Every field is submerged in brownish water, the farmers shin-deep and bent over to harvest and replant by hand. From time to time, we pass freshly painted and incongruously large signs for political parties. They seem foreign, token references to democracy in a landscape apparently untouched by the 20th century, let alone the 21st. This is what Cambodia looks like after 10 years of nation building. When the United Nations touched down like a hurricane in 1993, its goal was to transform a country with a raging civil war and an inefficient Communist government into a functioning democracy. The job was made more difficult by the fact that the Khmer Rouge killing machine struck with particular ferocity at civil servants, business people, lawyers, journalists, doctors and all the intellectual capital most needed to build a working state. The UN and the international aid community have brought billions of dollars and thousands of experts to Cambodia, and they have learned to congratulate themselves for small improvements. But there is also stagnation and backsliding. In the past 10 years, the mortality rate for children under 5 has actually climbed from 115 per 1,000 births to 135, and the average annual income is about $270 (U.S.), less than 75 cents a day. Poverty, corruption, disease and ignorance still have a stranglehold on the country. Hun Sen wins elections because of places like Poul. Here they know him as the son of impoverished farmers who began his career with the Khmer Rouge, lost an eye fighting for Phnom Penh and then escaped down the Mekong River to Vietnam. He returned several years later when the Vietnamese army crushed the Khmer Rouge and installed a sympathetic Communist government. In 1985, at just 33, he became the country's leader. Before this year's campaign, the Prime Minister had weathered two elections. In 1993, he lost a UN-supervised vote, but then orchestrated countrywide unrest until he was named co-prime minister. In 1997, he seized sole power in a coup, consolidated his control, and then allowed another election in 1998, which the CPP won. Human-rights groups have accused all Cambodian parties of misdeeds, but when it comes to vote-buying, loans that are contingent on particular votes, and threats of violence and reprisal, the CPP is in a league of its own. Poul is not so much a village as a few homes scattered along a stretch of road. We stop at one little cluster of houses. The homicide victims lived in a two-room hut whose interior walls have been stripped of wood to build the three coffins. And right beside it, separated by a dusty cow path and a barbed wire fence, is the house of the accused brothers. The region's police chief, Meas Sok Tim, was the first officer on the scene three days earlier, and he sits us down to explain what he found. Upstairs in the two-room hut were the bodies of Ray Kuch, 84, and his daughter-in-law, Krim Yan, 51. They had been dead since 9:30 the night before. Neighbours on either side apparently didn't hear a thing. The killers then waited below, between the stilts of the house, for Ray Kuch's son to return home. Ray Mong Ly was at a FUNCINPEC meeting, and returned around 10 o'clock. It was his screams that alerted distant villagers; strangely, the immediate neighbours still heard nothing. "It was a very dark night," the police chief explains, rather elliptically. As he speaks, we all flinch periodically -- not from disgust, but from the yellow, apple-sized fruits falling from above. The slight afternoon breeze is coaxing them loose. There is a rattle of leaves, we shield our heads, and the fruit hits the ground with a wet thud. It's incredibly hot, but the only other shade is inside the home of the recently deceased, which we have tacitly agreed to avoid. So we cower as the fruit gathers around us, bruised and smelling sweetly. Ray Mong Ly screamed because he was set upon with machete and axe. He tried to escape, but got no farther than the roadside ditch. Borith, my translator, is interested in the exact details of each killing. He and the chief move to the ditch, where the policeman plays the role of the killer. They are joined by Ray Mong Ly's daughter, who has wandered up the road from her home. She watches as Borith, playing her father, holds up an arm and pretends to fend off the blows of a machete. The chief hacks at the arm, and then mimes a vicious slash across the throat. He continues to swing as Borith falls to one knee. The young woman stands still, watching the whole re-enactment, her expression rigidly impassive except for a slight movement at her throat as she swallows, again and again. Upon arriving, Chief Sok Tim sealed off the area and looked for clues in the morning light. He found blood on the barbed-wire fence between the two houses, and then more blood on leaves in a grove of bamboo behind the neighbours' home. When he dug down among the roots of the bamboo, he found an axe and two long knives, suitably blood-smeared. The three brothers were arrested immediately. The first reporters on the scene arrived before the bodies were removed. They described fingers hacked off hands, throats and mouths cut wide open, and abdomens split with insides spilling out. It was hard to believe this was motivated by mere politics, one reporter told me. The attack seemed too frenzied, too vicious. I ask Ray Mong Ly's daughter if there was a grudge between the two families. "We never had any problems with them," she replies. "Sometimes my grandfather would use his traditional medicine to help cure sick children in the neighbour's family." As we walk over to the brothers' house, Chief Sok Tim shows me the blood stains on the wire fence. The look on his face says: "These boys are no criminal geniuses." Then he coaxes an old man, the father of the three brothers, out of the house. He is unclothed, except for a red-checked loincloth and a single sandal. I ask him to sit beside me on a plastic chair to chat, but he refuses. "I can't use it," he says. "After my wife died 10 days ago, I feel like I am going crazy." Instead, he squats in the dirt. The father claims to have no ill will for the family next door. He also denies that he or his sons were involved in politics. In fact, on a wall in his house, Borith spots a mounted photograph of Prince Ranariddh, leader of FUNCINPEC; it was the victims who were supposed to be supporters of this party. If not politics, I ask the old man, what was the reason? He says that several months ago his wife's belly became swollen, and she grew very sick. A year earlier, his brother had the same symptoms and died. A medical doctor said the wife would do the same. A traditional Khmer doctor was called, gave her some medicine and next morning checked her feces. "There was buffalo skin there," the father says. "There was hair in it. That meant she was being killed by magic." The old man's sentences gush out, stop and start again, proceeding almost randomly. Somehow, he says, the sons became convinced that the next-door neighbours were responsible. The day their mother died, they began to plot revenge. On the evening of the killing, they asked another neighbour to collect extra palm juice for them, saying they needed extra energy because they had some killing to do. The father's comments are somewhat disjointed, and I'm not sure whether they should be fully believed. But while he talks, I am struck by the fact that I can hear the police deputy and a local man speaking under the victims' home next door. For decades, these two families would have heard each other's conversations. How can you spend your life next door to people, and then kill them so horrifically over a lousy election? The old man doesn't seem to be angry, and he neither endorses nor denounces his sons. He is more concerned with finding a way to feed himself, now that his family is dead or behind bars. "God will decide their punishment," he says. "But it is a sin for Cambodia that this has happened." Then he repeats this last remark. It's as if his sons aren't individually responsible, as if Cambodia is a single entity, and the killings somehow part of the burden of sin the whole country must bear. Maybe this is how you come to think of violence when an entire generation -- those who lived through "Pol Pot time" -- were either victim or aggressor, and often both. Perhaps that is how Ray Mong Ly's daughter, having watching the re-enactment of her father's death, was able to walk away without crying. Or maybe the old man was just making excuses for his kids. The three impish brothers sit across the table from me, patiently answering questions. Their chins are just a few inches above the table, so it is like I am speaking with three disembodied heads. By now I don't really believe the killings were political, but I ask about the newspaper allegations anyway. They don't so much deny the accusation as completely misunderstand it. Meas Nhoeun, the head in the middle, with the missing bottom teeth, does the talking. At 39, he's oldest. "We don't know anything about politics," he says, and soon he is repeating the story of the buffalo skin in the feces. When the brothers paid for another visit by the traditional doctor, he says, they were told that their mother would die, but also that he would find the source of the sickness. Doctor and family began to pray -- the brothers imitate this, all three clenching their fists in front of them and shutting their eyes -- until finally an image appeared in the doctor's mind. "It is one of your neighbours," he said, "but I don't know which one." Once the mother had died, Meas Nhoeun became very frightened. He started to get a sore stomach at night and was sure that the neighbour was now cursing him. Not only that, he claimed the old man next door, Ray Mong Kuch, had poured his magical powers into a cow shaped out of wet earth. If you touched it, your arm would swell and start to burn. "Did you say a 'magic cow?' " I ask my translator. The brothers saw the cow in the neighbour's house, Meas Nhoeun says, but it must have been moved before the police could find it. "But why would you touch a magic cow?" I ask. This question is unanswered, so I try another. "Why, if you thought your neighbour was cursing you, didn't you just move? Why did you kill all of them?" The older brother explains that they were too poor to move anywhere else, and I still can't grasp the poverty of imagination this answer implies. No denial, no cat-and-mouse game between accuser and accused, just a simple confession: We did it because we were scared of getting sick. It's the same answer they later give to the investigating judge, who decides to charge all three with premeditated murder. To confirm a suspicion, I ask if any of them can read. No, they say, although the youngest brother, now 28, did finish the first grade. It starts to rain outside. The warden, bored, wanders off and leaves Borith and me alone with the brothers. They sit and stare at us. It would be too much to say that their eyes were filled with unspoken pain, that regret had begun to tear them up inside, but I think I see a hint of it. "Do you feel bad for what you did?" I ask, feeling like an American TV journalist. "I am worried about my wife," Meas Nhoeun responds. "Now she is pregnant, and we have two small children." "Be honest with me," I respond. "Why did you really do it?" They talk to each other, and Borith summarizes. "They thought the old man next door was magic." The warden comes and takes the brothers away. Once we are alone, Borith informs me that "there are many people like this in Cambodia who have no know- ledge. They don't know what is right and wrong. If they get angry, they take action. That is it. This is not politics, it is only a problem of over-belief." Now, two weeks after the election, there is still uncertainty about who will run the country. The CPP took about 50 per cent of the total vote, but to rule, the constitution requires a two-thirds majority, so the party needs a coalition partner. But the opposition parties are stonewalling, saying they won't co-operate unless Hun Sen quits. Thus far, the Prime Minister's responses have been bellicose. He has outfoxed and outmuscled rivals before, and feels he can do it again. He's probably right. In Kompong Chhnang, the brothers are awaiting their day in court. A guilty verdict could put them in prison for 15 years. Opposition parties still have their doubts, so Licadho continues to investigate the case for political overtones, but has yet to find any. If not politics, what is to blame? I once drove past two tourists fighting on the shore of the Mekong River. They threw a few slow roundhouses at each other and then fell into a beery clinch. "I don't understand how foreigners fight like this, and the next morning they are friends," my moto driver said. "The Khmer people, when we fight, it's serious. If two people fight, the next morning one is dead." This anecdote doesn't explain what happened in Poul, but Cambodians do seem to play without a net. When it begins, violence runs its bloody course. Then again, a totally different argument could be made: that Cambodians are too trusting, not too violent. The brothers and their father never doubted the traditional doctor and his buffalo-skin explanation (no one has questioned the man whose diagnosis was so fatal. "We don't have time for that," the police say). And documents taken from the Khmer Rouge suggest that their murderous cadres were motivated by a desire to please their leaders as much as by ideology. It's probably a mistake for a visitor to try to decipher a nation's character, but there is something provocative and baffling about what takes place in Cambodia. Asking "why did this happen?" rarely yields much of an answer. But as if to balance the acts of unimaginable violence, there are moments of complete enchantment. That day in Kompong Chhnang, as we drove away from the jail, I felt as though I had slipped into another realm, where pungent fruit falls from the sky, and buffalo skin and magic cows are reason enough to slice up the neighbours. I watched a white duck hop up the rungs of a ladder and into a house as though he owned it. My moto driver, a young man from the shabby fishing village, swerved through potholes and then suddenly reached into the wind and grabbed a dragonfly. He trapped it within his fingers for a few seconds and held it to my face, close enough to see the translucent wings and green eyes, then threw it into the air. We passed a motorcycle carrying an enormous megaphone blaring its reminder to participate in the great democratic act, the next day's elections. Any of these could have been good or bad omens. Either way, there is magic in this country. Chris Tenove is a Vancouver writer who often visits Southeast Asia.

Sees all, knows all: Is it God or Google? By STEPHEN STRAUSS Wednesday, July 30, 2003 - Globe&Mail A few weeks ago The New York Times printed a column with the tingling headline: "Is Google God?" Google is, of course, the Internet search engine, and god is, of course . . . well, what constitutes a deity turned out to be one of the interesting issues of the debate that followed publication. The article quoted a high-tech supremo saying that Google, when linked to a wireless system that allowed you to access the search engine's powers from your laptop or cell phone, "is a little bit like god" because "god is wireless, god is everywhere and god sees and knows everything." Internet skeptics quickly responded that god is also eternal, while Google was founded in 1998; God is omnipresent, and Google is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. Others pointed out that within five years, Google might be technologically obsolete. One technophile smirked, "God is, like, in the machine." However, what was most interesting to me was that the Times headline writer had almost off-handedly captured something essential about most people's feelings about Google. The article appeared on June 29. As of yesterday, if you typed the phrase "Is Google God" into the search field, in something less than a second you got 2,200 hits. None, as far as I can tell, contains any pre-New York Times reference to a god-like Google. Moreover, if you entered the phrase "is Google" followed by Christ or Allah or Buddha or Yahweh or Satan or Lucifer, nothing turns up. What is awe-inspiring is that Google instantaneously appears to know everything about a topic that was just born. This capaciousness fills a simple Web searcher with the sense of being in the presence of something that, if it doesn't know everything about everything yet, will some day. Moreover, Google's connective capacities seem divine because they are quite literally beyond the average person's ability to truly understand how they work. As Arthur C. Clarke famously observed, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And Google does have some attributes that make it very appealing as a deity. The most obvious is that Google answers back when you ask it a question -- in contrast to the problematic nature of prayer, which leaves petitioning humans struggling to figure out whether the unseen has even heard, much less responded. Moreover, if Google's answer is negative or vague, it lets you do an instant "repray." You simply change your search terms and tease a truer (or shorter) answer back. But what I am less sure about is what humans are doing with the god-like technology they created. Last year in Italy, the police shut down five Internet sites that featured pornography and a picture of the Virgin Mary. A British newspaper reported, "Police said they censored the images so that the 'precious freedom of expression' was not used to offend 'the dignity of people.' " French and German browsers have been denied Google access to sites deemed to be racist. The Chinese government for a time blocked Google access entirely. Now Chinese searching for terms like "falun gong" or "human rights in China" are either directed to a government-approved page or have their Google access blocked for a few hours. Such incidents have raised much debate over freedom of speech and civil liberties. Now, in the light of the Times headline, I have been wondering about the issues censorship raises when faced with claimants to divinity. Can you limit a divinity's powers, even those of a completely accidental and imperfect god, simply because you don't approve of the extent of its reach? Put another way, can one justly censor the growth of any technology that threatens to become more than its human creators can comprehend? If the short answer is "I don't know," then the longer one is, "I am waiting to see." My sense is that a truly divine technology will manifest its omnipotence by finding a way not to be limited. It will make itself so miraculously useful that to prevent it from being all it can be will seem not a question of bad public policy but of technological impiety. Maybe, in an actualized Google universe, those who have attempted to limit Google's apogee will be seen as our age's equivalent of pagans. But while awaiting the answer to this larger question, I am still wondering about something the search engine doesn't tell me today. If Google does turn out to be god, pray what was the name of the New York Times copy editor who one blithe day became its first prophet? Stephen Strauss is The Globe and Mail's science reporter.

He may have a point. The dictionary defines "demigod" as "son of a god and a mortal" or "a deified man." But the word "deva" is not interchangeable with "isvara, parameshvara," etc.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1002183,00.html <h3>Britain ignores Bangladeshi persecution </h3> John Vidal in Dhaka Monday July 21, 2003 The Guardian The British government has effectively closed the door on asylum seekers from Bangladesh despite having seen a dossier which detailed more than 700 attacks by fundamentalists on ethnic and religious minorities in the country. The document offers compelling evidence that serious attacks and persecution of Hindu, Christian and other minorities are rising. Backed by evidence from local and international development groups sent to the government several months ago, it includes reports on tortures, extra-judicial killings, gang rapes, the looting and burning of temples and churches, evictions, beatings, the theft of land, destruction of property, financial extortion and threats of physical violence. All the cases have been reported to the police. Yet the Home Office apparently ignored the dossier when it announced last month that Bangladesh, along with five other countries, was being added to the "white list" of 24 countries from where asylum applications are presumed from the outset to be unlikely to succeed. "The countries that we are adding to the list today are generally safe - individuals from these countries are not routinely fleeing for their lives and do not routinely need our protection under the Geneva convention," the Home Office minister, Beverley Hughes, said. The Home Office has reiterated that position. "Bangladesh is a parliamentary democracy with a constitution that allows for an independent judiciary. We maintain our commitment to providing a safe haven for asylum seekers," a spokeswoman said, adding that Bangladeshis would still be able to seek asylum here. But the Guardian has uncovered evidence that Bangladesh is sliding into a situation in which oppression of minorities is becoming systematic. The country, which is 85% Muslim but has a long tradition of tolerance to religious minorities, is being pushed towards fundamentalism by the Jamaat-e-Islami party, which is growing rapidly in the poorest rural areas, according to organisations on the ground. It now shares power with the majority Bangladesh National party and effectively runs two key ministries. "The British government knows what is happening. They have been sent the information," said Rosaline Costa, director of the human rights group, Hotline Bangladesh. "It says there is communal harmony, but this is a lie ... There are many genuine asylum seekers." The present wave of attacks was triggered by the 2001 elections when violence flared across Bangladesh. The Human Rights Congress for Bangladeshi Minorities estimated that dozens of people were killed, more than 1,000 women from minority groups were raped and several thousand people lost their land in the three months around the election. "We have not seen human rights violations like this before. It has never been so bad," says Sultana Kamal, director of the legal aid group ASK. "The assaults are taking place every day. The oppression is continuous now." Amnesty International, which has expressed grave concern to the Bangladeshi government about mounting human rights abuses, said Britain's decision to put Bangladesh on the white list "made no sense". The Bangladeshi government has admitted that some atrocities have taken place, but insists that the violence is not religiously motivated.

Kali and Kama use this bija. Sometimes krIM sometimes klIM.

Rather odd. The Sanskrit translated as "self-situated" is yatAtmavAn, or yata ("controlled") AtmavAn "possessing self" So the idea is "possessing self control." So what do other commentaries say? Gaudiya Math: B.R.Sridhar: "controlling your mind." Narayan Maharaj: "with a controlled mind" BV Tripurari: "with self-restraint." Other sampradayas: Tapasyananda: Kripananda (Jnaneshwari): "act with self restraint" Gandhi: with mind controlled Sivananda: self-controlled Scholars: Radhakrishnan: "with the self subdued" Miller "self-controlled" Zaehner: "with self restrained." Sanskrit Sankara--saMyata-cittaH Ramanuja--yata-manaskaH Sridhara--niyata-cittam Madhusudana--yatAtmavAn yataH saMyata-sarvendriya AtmavAn vivekI ca san Visvanatha--nothing Baladeva--vijita-manA So there is not much variety here. "self controlled, i.e. mind-controlled."

Sanskrit is so full of trite and repetitive metaphors and similes that new ones are often very striking. Like this one in Samaya-matrika by Kshemendra (1.9) pIvaraM tIra-maNDUkair mArjAram iva zAradam "Her belly was as fat as that of an autumn cat which has eaten its fill of shore-frogs."

I am surprised that Hamsadutta's illness was not reported earlier. Do you know anything more about it? I am afraid that this is a case where the devotees' compassion will be tested. After Tamal Krishna died, there was a great deal of "good riddance", "he got what he deserved", "the world is a better place now," etc. Just the other day here in Montreal, a leader of the separatist movement died. The current premier of Quebec came to his funeral, even though they were bitter political enemies. I heard that he was booed inside the church (!) by the dead leader's supporters. One newspaper columnist complimented the premier for his courage in coming and putting aside political rivalries in order to honor the man. Perhaps those who through their behavior shattered our illusions did us a service, bringing us to a more complex and nuanced understanding of what it means to be Krishna conscious.

Looks like this is becoming a popular service, Madhavaji. Perhaps you should charge a certain amount per letter or something...

Just checked Champu Ramayana of Bhojadeva, who concludes sAketaM samupetyavAn sa vijayI saMsevito bhrAtRbhiH sugrIva-pramukhAn api priya-sakhAn sve pade sthApayan | svacchandaM suciraM sukhAny anubhavan devyA tathA sItayA rAmaH pAlayati sma kIrti-vibhavair AmodinIM medinIm || Which briefly stated means that Rama ruled the kingdome "freely enjoying the delights of life with his wife Sita." So Bhoja had some problems with the classic conclusion of the Ramayana.

nityArdra-duHkhe jana-jIvite’smin sukhAny anityAni sa-yauvanAni | ghanAni vidyud-dyuti-caJcalAni kSaNa-kSayANi priya-saGgamAni ||263|| In this human life, which is soaked in constant misery, the pleasures associated with youth are but fleeting. Like the flashes of lightning reflected against the clouds, the company of our loved ones disappears in a moment. The problem is that Rama's commitment to society was greater than his commitment to the truth of Sita's purity. And even if she had been raped, or worse, willingly succumbed to Ravana, could she not have been forgiven? The scenario is one of commitment to public office over private considerations, even if that means abandoning one's vow to protect, etc., one's wife. He saved her from Ravana, and that is the end of his obligations to her. It's a real tough one. This is in connection to "honor", by the way.

jAyAM sa jAnann api zuddha-zIlAM lokApavAda-prasarAsahiSNuH | saumitrim Adizya sa-garbha-bhArAM tatyAja vAlmIki-tapovane tAm || Though he knew his wife to be pure in character, he was unable to tolerate the spread of calumny. So he abandoned her, pregnant, ordering Lakshman to leave her in Valmiki's hermitage. (Dasavatara-carita 7.262)

I know nothing about Purnaprajna's Bhagavatam. Can you tell us something about it? Who is Purnaprajna? What has he done to the BHagavatam? Where can it be purchased, etc?

Prostitutes are mentioned in the Ramayan, Mahabharata and Bhagavata. Indeed, it appears from a careful analysis of these texts that they played an important role in Vedic society. In any society of rigid rules, there are always exceptions--hijras, prostitutes, kings with their harems, etc., etc., who are not abhorred by the society, but given a certain recognition. As such, our whore, who has performed her svadharma so honorably that she has serviced a thousand men is indeed worthy of a seat in heaven. sva-karmanA tam abhyarcya siddhiM vindati mAnavaH. <hr> The verse is indeed from PadmaP, 3.61.37 to be exact. The correct reading is: Udhva-bAhur ahaM vacmi zRNu me paramaM vacaH | govinde dhehi hRdayaM na yonau yAtanA-juSi ||

Here I absolutely must put my foot down. This is unacceptable. The Muslim world is full of this horror known as "honor killing." That anyone would advocate such a thing in the name of Krishna is horrendous and unacceptable. It cannot be passed unnoticed and must not be condoned in any way. The fear and abhorrence of human sexuality is NOT what religion or spirituality is about. But no matter what our views, sex desire is a powerful urge that causes even the most chaste to occasionally wilter. To condemn someone to death (or any other kind of draconian punishment) for adultery or other sexual transgression is entirely in contrast to the religion of mercy and love. Rigid puritanism goes against the spirit of Vaishnavism.

Jayavallabha's VajjA-lagga (ca. 740A.D.). It's in Prakrit. Here is the Sanskrit version: SaSThyA bhavati subhagA zatena rambhAtvaM ca prApnoti | pUrNe jAra-sahasra indro'rdhAsanaM dadAti ||