Jesus has a very special love for you. [But] as for me - The silence and the emptiness is so great - that I look and do not see, - Listen and do not hear. - Mother Teresa to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September 1979 On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the ‘Saint of the Gutters,’ went to Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. ‘It is not enough for us to say, ‘I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,” she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had ‘[made] himself the hungry one - the naked one - the homeless one.’ Jesus’ hunger, she said, is what ‘you and I must find’ and alleviate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug addiction in the West. Finally, she suggested […]
An unprecedented study of sex and seniors finds that many older people are surprisingly frisky – willing to do, and talk about, intimate acts that would make their grandchildren blush. That may be too much information for some folks, but it comes from the most comprehensive sex survey ever done among 57- to 85-year-olds in the United States. Sex and interest in it do fall off when people are in their 70s, but more than a quarter of those up to age 85 reported having sex in the previous year. And the drop-off has a lot to do with health or lack of a partner, especially for women, the survey found. The federally funded study, done by respected scientists and published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine, overturns some stereotypical notions that physical pleasure is just a young person’s game. ‘Most people assume that people stop doing it after some vague age,’ said sex researcher Edward Laumann of the University of Chicago. However, more than half of those aged 57 to 75 said they gave or received oral sex, as did about a third of 75- to 85-year-olds. ‘Bravo that the New England Journal […]
PRINCETON, NJ — The majority of Republicans in the United States do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. This suggests that when three Republican presidential candidates at a May debate stated they did not believe in evolution, they were generally in sync with the bulk of the rank-and-file Republicans whose nomination they are seeking to obtain. Independents and Democrats are more likely than Republicans to believe in the theory of evolution. But even among non-Republicans there appears to be a significant minority who doubt that evolution adequately explains where humans came from. The data from several recent Gallup studies suggest that Americans’ religious behavior is highly correlated with beliefs about evolution. Those who attend church frequently are much less likely to believe in evolution than are those who seldom or never attend. That Republicans tend to be frequent churchgoers helps explain their doubts about evolution. The data indicate some seeming confusion on the part of Americans on this issue. About a quarter of Americans say they believe both in evolution’s explanation that humans evolved over millions of years […]
US intelligence eavesdrops on thousands of foreign telephone calls on lines that cross through US territory but monitors the calls of fewer than a hundred people in the United States, intelligence chief Mike McConnell has disclosed. McConnell’s comments followed passage by the US Congress this month of a law allowing the intelligence agencies to conduct warrantless intercepts of calls between two foreign points. McConnell stressed in an interview with the El Paso Times that intelligence agencies must still obtain court warrants to monitor calls in which at least one of the parties is in the United States. ‘And so if a terrorist calls in and it’s another terrorist, I think the American public would want us to do surveillance of that US person in this case,’ he said. ‘So we would just get a warrant and do that.’ ‘It’s a manageable thing. On the US persons side it’s 100 or less. And then the foreign side, it’s in the thousands,’ he said. The Texas newspaper, which interviewed McConnell last week, posted a transcript on its website on Wednesday. McConnell led the administration’s campaign for passage of the new law, which encountered fierce resistance in […]
For all the emphasis by TNG-CWA members on improving workplace diversity, the reality-as measured by the American Society of Newspaper Editors -is that newsrooms are becoming more monochromatic, not less. According to ASNE’s annual survey, the percentage of minority journalists working in daily newsrooms slipped this year for only the second time since 1978, to 13.62%. ASNE’s goal has been to increase minority representation until it mirrors society at large-which is now 33% non-white. Other indicators in the ASNE survey also are slipping into reverse. Minorities account for only 10.9% of all newsroom supervisors, reverting to a level reached two years ago. Meanwhile, the number of newspapers with no minorities at all on their newsroom staffs increased to 392, from 377 last year. Guild-represented newspapers by-and-large had better minority representation than the average, but none except those in Hawaii met or exceeded the 33% threshold. The San Jose Mercury News came closest, at 32.2%, although recent layoffs may have driven that percentage lower. Other newspapers with notable percentages include the Sacramento Bee, 30.3%; Fresno Bee, 26.2%; Washington Post, 23.7%; Seattle Times, 22.2%; and the Philadelphia Daily News and Inquirer, 21.6% and 20.1%, respectively. On the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
