A Tomato a Day Keeps Corruption Away
"All police officers should grow tomatoes as this will help them raise their incomes and prevent them from taking bribes."
- Indonesia's regional police chief Anton Bachrul Alam
Hot cross buns banned for fear of offence
FOUR councils have removed hot cross buns from school menus to avoid offending children from non-Christian religions.
Tower Hamlets, Liverpool, York and Wolverhampton have stopped serving them for fear that they could provoke protests from Muslim, Hindu or Jewish students or their parents. It is the firs time that councils, rather than individual schools, have taken steps to ensure that hot cross buns are not served to pupils.
Tower Hamlets, in East London, acted after objections to pancakes being served on Shrove Tuesday. A spokesman said that the council was moving away
from a religious theme for Easter."We can't risk a similar outcry over Easter like we had on pancake day. We will probably be serving naan
breads instead."
More than a third of the population of Tower Hamlets is Bangladeshi, the highest in Britain. Liverpool council said that the symbol of the Cross had the "potential to offend", so it had banned the buns.
Iqbal Sacranie, Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Britain, said that the decisions were "very bizarre", particularly when Britain was about
to go to war. He said that the bans were an attempt to respect religious sensitivities, but it was "taking things a bit too far". Serving hot cross buns was "not very serious" and was not likely to offend Muslims, Mr Sacranie said.
Ann Widdecombe, the Conservative MP, said: "It's not as if eating a hot cross bun automatically makes you a born-again Christian."
The controversy follows a head teacher's decision this month to ban books containing stories about pigs from some classes in case they offended Muslims. Barbara Harris removed the literature, including The Three Little Pigs, from under-sevens classes at Park Road Junior, Infant and Nursery School in Batley, West Yorkshire. Sixty per cent of pupils are of Pakistani or Indian origin and 99 per cent of these are Muslims. The Muslim Council of Britain asked the school to end its "well-intentioned but misguided" ban.
By Chris Johnston (Times Newspapers)
I left a pair of shoes in another country some time back and I was thinking about them...wondering how they were...whether they'd found a new and happy home.....well, not exactly. I don't get
that attached to my footwear. But more along the line on how we only miss things we take for granted when they are gone. Its a pity, I think. To wait until its too late to realize to yourself that you have cared more than you expected and to realize that you feel the loss of something.
It actually occured to me that many of the foreign languages we are encouraged to take in school tend to be those with future "economic" value like Japanese and German. However, it it more difficult to find a language course for languages that may not increase our future salary. To find courses in Thai, Vietnamese and Cambodian is definitely more difficult. This is not unexpected. However, it is a pity that because these language courses are not as easily available, it will not occur to people to take them up. A couple of years back, I got a Cambodian bible from amazon.com. I thought the words were really pretty and liked to write them out even if I didn't know the meaning (and only knew which chapter I was at by cross referencing with an english copy). Recently, I gave it to a missionary family in Cambodia who came to our place for dinner. I'd like to think that somewhere out there, it is bringing comfort, joy and hope to someone who is in need of all these things as somehow I think we all are. The pastor in this family was also an optometrist running a free eye care centre for the locals. I was immensely pleased to give him all my spectacles, having been very myopic for many years and glad that they could be of some use. It also made me realize that we can keep our "vocations" and still serve. Perhaps one day I will be a plumber in a distant land. Who can tell? But it is through meeting the basic needs of people that they know we care for them and so serve their spiritual needs.
"All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates."
- Woody Allen
