Sister Mary Celine, an elderly nun who taught children for many years, was hit and killed walking on a Harlem sidewalk by a van driven by robbers fleeing from the police.
I’m sure she is in heaven today, praying for their conversion.
But there is more to the story than a sad ending. You see, Sister Mary […]

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If you follow the British news, you might have noticed an ongoing scandal about Scotland releasing the mastermind of the Lockerbie bombing (the bomb at Christmas time of 1988  that destroyed Pan Am 103 and took the lives of 270 people).
Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was released last August at Libya’s request because he was terminally ill […]

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A small headline in the news: Guinea pig touted as solution to Congo food crisis.
…it’s not known how or when guinea pigs — native to South America — arrived in Congo, but CIAT (the Colombia-based agricultural research institute, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture) researchers discovered them last year being kept as “micro-livestock” in the […]

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The story carries the headline: France: Catholic Church Rejects Ban on Full-Face Veils
Except the “Catholic Church” did no such thing. The Bishop in charge of “interreligious dialogue” in France made a statement, but his opinion is not the opinion of the Catholic church.
“If we want Christian minorities in Muslim majority countries to enjoy […]

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When I came to the Philippines, I ripped my CD collection into MP3’s and brought most of my collection here on mp3 CD’s or on my hard drive. I had a fairly nice collection of “elevator music” (to use my son’s description), mainly because I worked in rural areas where it was easier to listen […]

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What does one do with a country like Haiti, where years of occupation, corruption, and many different types of aid from outside hasn’t worked?
Lots of “it’s your fault” type stuff all over the internet: a lot of it uses the left wing’s meme of “Blame America” (and the right shouts back “Blame France”). Not mentioned, […]

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A headline about President Obama’s Speech on national security from the Philippine Inquirer notes:
Obama speech won’t bump ‘Lost’ premiere–White House 
Well, after a kerfuffle about the President “bumping” Charlie Brown’s Christmas Special, it’s nice to see that President Obama has his priorities intact. (I should note that Pope John Paul II rescheduled his installation […]

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TedLipien.com, SAN FRANCISCO — One group of U.S. Government employees that has not received much media scrutiny in the aftermath of the failed terrorist attack are U.S. diplomats who had issued and failed to cancel Mr. Abdulmutallab’s U.S. visa.
U.S. Consular Officers at the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, the U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria Robin […]

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A Broken System
To say that there was a breakdown in our transportaion security system, does a disservice to the word breakdown. 
Red flags and clear warnings not being used to thwart the recent attempted airliner bombing,  Shine a light on more than just a lack of screening equipment.  The basic threat assessment process was shelved […]

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Those who travel by air in the future might soon face full body pat downs to check for bombs in the bosom and crotch, thanks to Umar the Panty bomber.
But the real problem is that “no using the rest room for the last two hours of flight”. Apparantly, Umar spent an hour in the restroom […]

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Those Medieval painters were a bit less puritanical than we moderns: A common motif in paintings was the Madonna Les Latte: the Virgin Mother breastfeeding the baby Jesus.
Back in those days, if a woman didn’t breast feed her baby, it died. Yes, upper class women often would find a “wet nurse” to provide nutrition,  and […]

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Just when you thought animal lovers couldn’t get more ridiculous comes this story, via NPR.
Holy Baboon! A ‘Mystical’ Moment In Africa by Robert Krulwich.
It tells the story of baboons who were romping down to a lake, and suddenly they all stopped and were quiet. After a few minutes, they started down again to get a […]

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I’m not really following the Copenhagen conference on global warming. My specialty was public health, and I see both the problems of chemicals and pollution destroying people’s health, but I have worked enough in third world countries to think that a little pollution might be worth it if it helps poor people live a bit […]

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Quick. Name the most dangerous terrorist organization in the US, organizations that are responsible for  47 of the53 most destructive terrorist attacks in the US.
Muslims? No.
Right wing Militias? No.
The Christian fundamentalist types? No.
It’s the Animal rights extremists.
Via SecondhandsmokeBlog, quoting from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals decision U.S. v Christianson:
… between 2000 and 2005, 43 […]

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One of the major causes of death in the world is malaria, but the World Health Organization estimates that 20 percent of the one million deaths from malaria are dying because the medicines that they are taking are substandard or outright counterfeits. If you include fake antibiotics and fake drugs used to treat tuberculosis, the […]

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You may or may not know that the largest film industry in the world is not Hollywood, but Bollywood: the film industry of India. But do you know which country has the second largest film industry in the world?
Nollywood.
The Nigerian film industry.
According to Wikipedia the industry is a $250 million dollar industry which produces […]

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When last Zimbabwe was in the news, people were dying of cholera, there was a huge inflation rate that made the local dollar worthless, and the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC party, along with an MDC offshoot, had agreed to make a unity government with the President Mugabe.
But although the verbal agreement was that Tsvangirai’s […]

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 Millions of refugees live in temporary camps all over the world today, and few westerners know or care about their problems.
Although most of these refugees will eventually return to the country of their origin, one question is what does one do with those who for political reasons cannot or are not allowed to go home? […]

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The father of the “green revolution”, Norman Borlaug, has died.
Some of use are old enough to remember when famines in Asia were common, and when the “Population bomb” types were predicting mass starvation of millions of poor people.
The famines didn’t happen, because Borlaug, and other agricultural scientists, developed high yield wheat and grains, along with […]

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The headlines are not helpful. This one is from CBS News:
“Mutant Polio Virus Spreads in Nigeria
124 Children Afflicted This Year By Paralyzing Disease, Believed To Be Caused By Same Vaccine Used To Fight It
And other new sources print the same story with even more frightening headlines…
Reality check please.
Let’s talk about Polio. I’m old enough to […]

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The Anchoress today linked to a story in the National Catholic Reporter about a woman in North Korea who was executed for the “crime” of distributing Bibles.
Well, the gulags and executions in North Korea are an under-covered story in the West, at least until National Geographic’s roving reporter got arrested for “spying” a couple months […]

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White House Photos, Lawrence Jackson. The President discusses Iran during his opening remarks at the Press Conference at the White House, June 23, 2009.

FreeMediaOnline.org,  Free Media Online Blog,  GovoritAmerika.us, Commentary by Ted Lipien, June 26, 2009, San Francisco – Ronald Reagan’s strong response to the imposition of martial law  against the independent Solidarity trade union in Poland in 1981 was distinctly different […]

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Self-styled pro-family advocate, Scott Lively, has made a career of drawing parallels from Nazi Germany to modern homosexuality. He has gone around the world with the message that homosexuals were responsible for Nazi totalitarianism. Throughout the next month or so, I will provide counter arguments to Lively’s thesis.
In this article, however, I raise the thesis […]

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The New York Times has an article on the obstacles to safe childbirth in Tanzania.
I worked in two other African countries thirty years ago, and it doesn’t look like much has changed in these isolated and poor rural areas.
… Only 20 percent of women in the area give birth at the hospital, and many do […]

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Lawyers representing the British-based oil firm Trafigura have taken their first steps toward suing BBC’s current affairs television program, BBC Newsnight, for “libelous statements” in their May 13 investigative report, Dirty tricks and toxic waste in Ivory Coast .
The company’s law firm has yet to specify what statements in the report they […]

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In Africa alone, 800,000 children die of malaria each year.
The death rate was actually once lower, but then economic problems, and the banning of DDT caused a rebound of disease carrying mosquitoes, and a resurgence in these diseases.
But it’s not only malaria: Southeast Asia has had a rebound in Dengue fever in the last few […]

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Yeserday I reported that Human Rights Activist Jestina Mukoko and 17 others, mainly members of the opposition party, had been rearrested and denied bail for the “crime” of “treason”.
This resulted in a huge international outcry. The original arrests occurred last December,when many were abducted by unknown abductors, and only after one month was it admitted […]

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Human Rights Activist Jestina Mukoko and 18 others have had their bail revoked and were rearrested by the Zimbabwe government.
Jestina Mukoko is a journalist and head of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, which has monitored the violence against civilians and intimidation of voters during previous political campaigns.
Others who had their bail revoked include several opposition MDC […]

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The incumbent head of state of Algeria, Abdelaziz Bouteflika , has won the presidential election for the 3rd term on Thursday by securing an overwhelming 90.24% of the cast votes, according to the Interior Minister of the country.”Abdelaziz Bouteflika won 12,911,707 votes” or “90.24% of the votes cast,” said Interior Minister Yazid Zerhouni during a press […]

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Adoption is about childless couples getting children, right?
Wrong.
Adoption is about a child without a family getting a stable, permenant family to care for him or her.
It’s better for a rich person to adopt a child than to let them live in poverty, right?
Not always.
The “cure” for poverty is…money, not adoption.  In the case of poor […]

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