| Wednesday, November 12, 2003 |  |
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 12 Nov 2003 @ 23:59
My father was born on 5/5 and died on 11/11. It has been 14 years since he died. Every year my mother and family attend the Veteran's Day Memorial Cervice at the cemeter where he is buried. We were given a flag which was drapped over his cofin when he was buried. It flys once a year in this ceremony honoring him and his commitment to his adopted home.
My two sisters and one heart sister toasted him at dinner. He is not forgotten.
I miss you Daddy, you live in my memories and heart!
My eldest sister wrote this piece in honor of our father last year.
Owa * Juan * John * Dad
(A Veteran’s Day Tribute – 2002)
by Carolina Layson Goodman
COURAGEOUS
· How brave of Owa to leave the comfort of his mother, father, nine brothers and sisters, cozy nipa hut, and beautiful rice fields on the island of Panay as a teenager to seek his fortune half-way around the world. (ca. 1918)
· Duty drew John to join the army in WWII to defend his homeland. (1943)
· With confidence in himself, John followed a dream and moved his family to Palm Springs. (1953)
SHY
· A man of few words, Dad always seemed ready with a smile or a joke.
· Either working (16 hours/day) or sleeping (6 hours/day), Dad had little time to chum with buddies.
INDUSTRIOUS
· Who was the lucky Stockton family who benefited from a devoted houseboy named Juan?
· Juan must have impressed the Manongs with his hard-working attitude as he learned to cleave meat in their butcher shop.
· By cooking meals for troops in WWII, John gained a skill that would serve him for the rest of his life.
· Opening a restaurant in Stockton was a tremendous undertaking for John. Giving free meals to friends and family was his downfall.
· Working in two different restaurants during the desert’s tourist season and also in Lone Pine or Lake Arrowhead from June to October made it possible for John to support his wife and five children.
· The fruit and vegetables that came from Dad’s garden impressed and delighted the whole filipino community.
GENEROUS
· John never failed to send money to family back in the Philippines.
· Dad would give everything he could to everyone else, wearing second-hand clothing and eating leftovers whenever possible.
LOVING
· Like a mother hen, late each night upon returning home from work, Dad would make the rounds, checking to see that each of his children was safe and well.
· Until he was wheelchair bound, John devoted himself to doing whatever he could to making his wife happy.
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 12 Nov 2003 @ 15:04
By John Noble Wilford New York Times November 11, 2003
Somewhere in the imagination, at an intersection of the idealized Golden Age and mankind's descent into manifest imperfection, existed the island civilization of Atlantis. This realm of divine origin was ruled from a splendid metropolis in the distant ocean. Its empire, described by a philosopher as "larger than Libya and Asia combined," enjoyed prosperity and great power.
In time, driven by overweening ambition, a common theme in antiquity and not unheard of today, Atlantis set out to conquer lands of the Mediterranean. But in a terrible day and night of floods and earthquakes, Atlantis was swallowed by the sea, sinking into legend.
The story endures as a classic in the genre of lost worlds long vanished, the ruins and treasures of which are surely somewhere out there yet to be found. Legends, though, are often mirages, forever shimmering out of reach, yet exerting an attractive power beyond reason.
Sometimes the pursuit of legends leads to unforeseen knowledge.
In the 12th century A.D., the legend of Prester John, a rich and powerful Christian monarch somewhere in Asia, drew intrepid seekers, eventually including Marco Polo, who opened Western eyes to the wonders of the East. When no one found Prester John in Asia, the legend did not go away; its locale shifted to Africa.
The golden city of El Dorado eluded hellbent adventurers, whose frustrated quest nonetheless put much of South America on the map.
The fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, castles in the air that proved to be nothing more than humble Indian pueblos, drew Europeans across tortured miles and years of discovery in what is now the Southwestern United States.
The tale of the lost continent has sent respected classical scholars to their texts for corroboration that Atlantis was more than fantasy. Archaeologists, geologists and divers have plumbed ocean depths where the island supposedly sank out of sight thousands of years ago. Not a scrap of compelling evidence supporting the legend has ever turned up.
Such a negative discovery might be conclusive enough for most legends to pass from rock-hard belief to literary artifacts of prescientific cultures living in a world of limited horizons and boundless mystery. But true believers, complaining that scientists have got it all wrong, continue the search.
Generations of adventurers, writers, mystics and cranks have satisfied themselves of the legend's reality. Their "solutions" fill more than 2,000 books and countless articles. The lost continent also inspired works by authors as diverse as Francis Bacon and Arthur Conan Doyle, and Hollywood has weighed in with any number of forgettable movies.
Richard Ellis, author of "Imagining Atlantis," thinks the legend is fantasy. "Atlantis lives on in people's minds largely because you cannot prove it doesn't exist," he said recently. "You can't search every inch of the ocean bottom, and so the hope remains alive and the promise of finding treasures in sunken palaces."
The sole source of the Atlantis story is by no means obscure. In two dialogues, the "Critias" and the "Timaeus," Plato in the fourth century B.C. described a resplendent island empire in the Atlantic Ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar). "This dynasty, gathering its whole power together," Plato wrote, "attempted to enslave, at a single stroke, your country and ours."
Even after disbelief in ancient gods undercut literal acceptance of the legend, medieval maps were sprinkled with imaginary islands in the Atlantic, including Antillia. Some experts suspect this preserves in garbled form the name of Atlantis and a lingering belief that its remnants may still exist. The maps encouraged navigators in their quests, among them Columbus.
The 20th century was hard on Atlantis dreams. Detailed mapping of the sea floor and the new theory of plate tectonics made it clear, geophysicists say, that land masses resembling Atlantis never existed in the Atlantic.
Undeterred, ardent believers went looking elsewhere: in Scandinavia, the Bahamas and the Aegean Sea. Huge blocks of stone submerged off Cuba were recently proclaimed possible ruins of the lost empire.
A more plausible hypothesis, some scholars think, places Atlantis at Crete. The accomplished Minoan civilization there collapsed in the middle of the second millennium B.C., presumably destroyed by a volcanic eruption on nearby Thera, modern Santorini.
Was this in Plato's mind? Or he might have been inspired by an event in his own time, the earthquake in 373 B.C. that brought the Greek city of Helike, as ancient writers said, crashing into the sea.
The unknown fires the imagination. Whether the starry night or extraterrestrial beings, the mystery of life itself or life after death or any of the uncertain boundaries between reality and resolute yearning, it is unknowns that populate history with gods and heroes, monsters of the deep and chimeric islands, lost paradises and the elusive El Dorado at the end of greed's rainbow, not to mention Martians.
Some mysteries will be solved, but never all of them. As for Atlantis, another Greek philosopher delivered the verdict that has yet to be contradicted.
As noted by the British classicist J. V. Luce, Aristotle considered Atlantis a poetic fiction invented by Plato as a warning of the fate that befalls the arrogant and decadent. Plato placed Atlantis beyond the then known world and sank it to the ocean floor to preserve the power of the mystery.
"The man who dreamed it up made it vanish" was Aristotle's solution to the mystery of Atlantis.
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| Saturday, November 8, 2003 | |
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 8 Nov 2003 @ 16:14
By Celeste Biever
New Scientist November 5, 2003
Biologists have linked a mysterious, underwater farting sound to bubbles coming out of a herring's anus. No fish had been known to emit sound from its anus nor to be capable of producing such a high-pitched noise
"It sounds just like a high-pitched raspberry," says Ben Wilson of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Wilson and his colleagues cannot be sure why herring make this sound, but initial research suggests that it might explain the puzzle of how shoals keep together after dark.
"Surprising and interesting" is how aquatic acoustic specialist Dennis Higgs, of the University of Windsor in Ontario, describes the discovery. It is the first case of a fish potentially using high frequency for communication, he believes.
Arthur Popper, an aquatic bio-acoustic specialist at the University of Maryland, US, is also intrigued. "I'd not have thought of it, but fish do very strange and diverse things," he says.
Grunts and buzzes
Fish are known to call out to potential mates with low "grunts and buzzes", produced by wobbling a balloon of air called the swim bladder located in the abdomen. The swim bladder inflates and deflates to adjust the fish's buoyancy.
The biologists initially assumed that the swim bladder was also producing the high-pitched sound they had detected. But then they noticed that a stream of bubbles expelled from the fish's anus corresponded exactly with the timing of the noise. So a more likely cause was air escaping from the swim bladder through the anus.
It was at this point that the team named the noise Fast Repetitive Tick (FRT). But Wilson points that, unlike a human fart, the sounds are probably not caused by digestive gases because the number of sounds does not change when the fish are fed.
The researchers also tested whether the fish were farting from fear, perhaps to sound an alarm. But when they exposed fish to a shark scent, there was again no change in the number of FRTs.
Night waves
Finally, three observations persuaded the researchers that the FRT is most likely produced for communication. Firstly, when more herring are in a tank, the researchers record more FRTs per fish.
Secondly, the herring are only noisy after dark, indicating that the sounds might allow the fish to locate one another when they cannot be seen. Thirdly, the biologists know that herrings can hear sounds of this frequency, while most fish cannot. This would allow them to communicate by FRT without alerting predators to their presence.
Wilson emphasises that at present this idea is just a theory. But the discovery is still useful, he says. Herring might be tracked by their FRTs, in the same way that whales and dolphins are monitored by their high-pitched squeals. Fishermen might even exploit this to locate shoals.
There may even be a conservation issue. Some experts believe human-generated sounds can damage underwater mammals. Now it seems underwater noise might disrupt fish too.
Journal reference: Biology Letters
(DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2003.0107)
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| Thursday, November 6, 2003 | |
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 6 Nov 2003 @ 22:35
WASHINGTON http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/10/25/clay.life.reut/index.html --Science backed up religion this week in a study that suggests life may have indeed sprung from clay -- just as many faiths teach.
A team at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston said they had shown materials in clay were key to some of the initial processes in forming life.
Specifically, a clay mixture called montmorillonite not only helps form little bags of fat and liquid but helps cells use genetic material called RNA. That, in turn, is one of the key processes of life.
Jack Szostak, Martin Hanczyc and Shelly Fujikawa were building on earlier work that found clays could catalyze the chemical reactions needed to make RNA from building blocks called nucleotides.
They found the clay sped along the process by which fatty acids formed little bag-like structures called vesicles. The clay also carried RNA into those vesicles. A cell is, in essence, a complex bag of liquidy compounds.
"Thus, we have demonstrated that not only can clay and other mineral surfaces accelerate vesicle assembly, but assuming that the clay ends up inside at least some of the time, this provides a pathway by which RNA could get into vesicles," Szostak said in a statement Thursday.
"The formation, growth and division of the earliest cells may have occurred in response to similar interactions with mineral particles and inputs of material and energy," the researchers wrote in their report, published in the journal Science.
"We are not claiming that this is how life started," Szostak stressed.
"We are saying that we have demonstrated growth and division without any biochemical machinery. Ultimately, if we can demonstrate more natural ways this might have happened, it may begin to give us clues about how life could have actually gotten started on the primitive Earth."
Among religious texts that refer to life being formed from the soil is the Bible's Book of Genesis where God tells Adam, (King James translation), "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."
Copyright 2003 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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| Thursday, October 30, 2003 | |
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 30 Oct 2003 @ 06:38
When will the Witch Hunts end???
Couple beheaded for being 'witches'
news.com.au 09Jul03
AN elderly couple in the central Philippines were beheaded by neighbours who accused them of being witches, police said today.
Police in the remote town of Cauayan on Negros island detained three men including the victims' son-in-law, who was implicated by the two other suspects in the grisly July 4 killings. Generoso Casupong, 65, and his 64 year-old wife Isabelita were both decapitated inside their home by two men armed with a large curved knife used to harvest coconut fruit, said Cauayan police investigator Alvin Cuenca. Detained suspect Eugenio Tanguar blames the couple for the death of his daughter from unspecified illness last year. Speaking to reporters behind his jail cell, Tanguar said he threw the woman's severed head in the hearth in the belief that the ashes would prevent the alleged witch from reattaching her body and coming back to life. Another suspect, Carlito Hibolan, said he used the same knife to kill the husband. "He was shouting for help and I was in a hurry to kill him because I know aswang (witches) are strong and was afraid he might overpower me," Hibolan said.
The two claimed the third suspect, Rosendo Cabug-os, had encouraged them to kill his in-laws, also believing them to be witches. Cabug-os denies any role in the attacks. All three were arrested yesterday.
In local folklore, aswang or witches are believed to feast on human flesh and can transform themselves into animals.
From Anova
More than 800 people have been killed in northeastern Congo on suspicion of taking part in witchcraft.
Ugandan army commander Major General Odongo Jeje confirmed lynchings had taken place. But he refused to be specific about the number of deaths in Congo's Ituri province.
The New Vision newspaper has quoted the Ugandan military command in Aru, Lieutenant Colonel Fenekasi Mugenyi, as saying 800 people had been killed by July 8.
Residents of Aru began killing people suspected of witchcraft in June, but the killings have been stopped by Ugandan forces, Maj Gen Jeje said.
"I have just contacted the officers there and the situation is calm. Nobody will give you the exact figure because nobody has gone to the villages to count the bodies, there are just estimates," he added.
A senior military officer said last week that Ugandan forces were being withdrawn from Ituri in keeping with the Congolese peace process, which requires all foreign forces to withdraw from Congo. The area is administered by the rebel Congolese Liberation Front.
Uganda and Rwanda entered Congo in August 1998 to back rebels opposed to then Congolese President Laurent Kabila.
The rebels accused him of ethnic warmongering and Ugandan and Rwanda accused him of backing rebels using Congo to launch attacks on those countries.
Reports from the densely forested area, where there are few roads, no regular telephones or electricity, are difficult to confirm.
The area, which borders northwestern Uganda and southern Sudan, is also home to 74,000 Sudanese refugees, according to the UN refugee agency.
Story filed: 11:28 Thursday 12th July 2001
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| Monday, October 27, 2003 | |
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 27 Oct 2003 @ 07:27
Friday, October 10, 2003
WASHINGTON - A University of California-led team of psychologists has found that two key areas of the brain respond to the pain of rejection in the same way as physical pain.
"While everyone accepts that physical pain is real, people are tempted to think that social pain is just in their heads. But physical and social pain may be more similar than we realized," says Matthew D. Lieberman, one of the paper's three authors and an assistant professor of psychology at the UCLA.
"In the English language, we use physical metaphors to describe social pain like 'a broken heart' and 'hurt feelings'. Now, we see that there is good reason for this," says Naomi I. Eisenberger, a UCLA Ph.D. candidate in social psychology and the study's lead author.
Eisenberger and Lieberman used functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) to monitor the brain activity in 13 UCLA undergraduates while they played a computer ball tossing game designed to provoke feelings of social exclusion.
In the first of the three rounds, the experimenters instructed the participants just to watch the two other players because "technical difficulties" prevented them from participating. In the second round, the students were included in the ball tossing game, but were excluded from the last three-quarters of the third round by the other players.
While the undergraduates later reported feeling excluded in the third round, FMRI scans revealed elevated activity during the first and third rounds in the anterior cingulate. Located in the center of the brain, the cingulate has been implicated in generating the adverse experience of physical pain.
"Rationally we can say being excluded doesn't matter, but rejection of any form still appears to register automatically in the brain, and the mechanism appears to be similar to the experience of physical pain," Lieberman said.
When the undergraduates were conscious of being snubbed, cingulate activity directly responded to the amount of distress that they later reported feeling at being excluded. The psychologists theorize that the pain of being rejected might have evolved because of the importance of social bonds for the survival of most mammals.
[link] eatures+%2D+Health+%26+Science&rLink=-162
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| Tuesday, September 30, 2003 | |
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 30 Sep 2003 @ 13:02
Challenging a narcissist on his or her behavior is like trying to interact with a bucket of tar. The more you try to get at it, the more you become stuck in it because all they know how to do is take.
Yesterday I went to see my doctor, and when I put down the book I was reading, she noticed the title and asked me if it was good. The book is Narcissism, Denial of the True Self by Alexander Lowen. She said she thought denial of the true self is counterintuitive. I wholeheartedly agreed and said to her that it was a good book about narcissism, and she told me her mother was definitely a narcissist. I said I felt that narcissism is an epidemic, to which she agreed with nervous laughter. I also told her I was doing research on narcissism because I am writing a book about it from a feminist perspective.
This column is not about the usual PMS we hear about. I am writing about PMS -- the patriarchal mind-set -- and its relationship to narcissism. I see this mind-set as a 5000 year-old invasive virus, a dis-ease of the soul we have all been suffering from, including the planet, for a very long time. All the ills I see come from this virus. In shamanic terms, an invasive energy is causing a deep soul loss, resulting in horrendous physical, mental, emotional, environmental and spiritual sickness (when I went to type the previous word, I accidentally typed "dickness" instead. I couldn't help but notice this unconscious connection to what I am saying). PMS is a view founded on male domination and control, absent of love and full of hate. It is one we have all internalized, because we have all been living inside of it for 5000 years. And now it lives inside of us. Because energy follows thought, the deep gorge carved by this fear-based thinking exists inside our collective unconscious, our subconscious and our conscious mind. And, we are held in this deep abysmal gorge of the patriarchal mind, surrounded by steep slopes of isolation and fear. This grinding energy cuts and shapes our hearts and those of our children. We are dry, lost and covered over with the dust of ignorance, starving in a parched wasteland, desperate to be seen and heard as the loving beings we are and want to be.
Because we are caught and bound in this painful reality, very often our only survival is to become narcissistic -- desperate for the attention that we deserve but never got, and devoid of feelings and empathy. We spend lifetimes searching for a way out but creating karma instead, because we don't know what we are running from and why we are so scared. In the process, we have managed to create an image of ourselves we hide behind -- one that is only good. Therefore, all the rest of us, the not-so-good parts, are projected outwardly, and we blame others for our pain. We deny the true self in order to survive. This situation makes it nearly impossible to have truth and magic, the threads necessary for weaving transformation. We are too busy defending ourselves and striving to be right, to be good. Meanwhile, our normalized addictions grow out of control, and no one notices because we are all in so much pain, and it feels not quite so lonely to suffer in company.
Lowen writes it is the denial of the true self that creates narcissism. What is our true self? If our parents denied their true selves, how could we possibly learn about our own? As I see it, like the invasion of the body-snatchers, the PMS has taken over our true self -- that which is rooted in love, compassion, justice, equality, cooperation, beauty, ecstasy, joy, presence, kindness, creativity, and celebration. These are the practices of the Goddess. We have lost the connection to the Goddess within. This is why narcissism exists at all. The Goddess is anathema to the PMS because Her energy threatens the constructs of domination and control. Our egos have become hard and rigid and we identify with our pain. We become our pain. The Goddess energy, like a loving and caring mother, seeks to heal the wounding of the reality of the PMS, but this love is not passive. It is fierce and active, and therefore scares the egoic structures of delusion. Challenging a narcissist on his or her behavior is like trying to interact with a bucket of tar. The more you try to get at it, the more stuck you become in it, because all narcissists know how to do is to take. That is how devoid a narcissist is of love and feeling.
In Euro-Western society, I feel we are all on this continuum. Some of us are more devoid and self-centered than others, but we all suffer from the same condition. I believe this condition is directly caused by a lack of respect for women and our power to bleed, birth and give milk. Without connection to this energy, this very sacred life-giving and life sustaining energy, narcissism grows, because there is no choice. The human being experiences this absence as a deep betrayal and from this betrayal comes a consuming rage -- a healthy response. But because this rage is not identified early on as the reaction against the denial of love, it can only fester into a murderous rage when what it really needs is to be transformed. Hence violence, war, destruction, wanton hatred and the general non-caring and disrespect for life that we see all around us, which males perpetuate more than females. Why is that?
As I see it, all narcissism is not the same. Male narcissism has the component of entitlement and privilege that female narcissism does not have. While it is true that the undifferentiated ego claims privilege in its rage, the conditions of patriarchy and its effects on people and culture play a profound role in how narcissism develops in men and in women. Because women are the oppressed in a male dominated society, the narcissism developing from their experience does not have the same sanctified position and acceptance as male narcissism. Women generally do not rape. Some, yes, but most certainly not like men do. Male narcissism is supported and encouraged by the use and abuse of women as objects and pornography. Female narcissism is not supported at all. If we are not the good servers of patriarchy, we are condemned and demonized. It is male narcissism that is the father of narcissism. Any woman caught in this trap -- this "dickness" -- loses her soul, becomes male identified and her self-centeredness becomes a struggle for survival in a male world.
The male already has privilege in a male world. His narcissism is cute. Television commercials abound with such things as the husband waking up in the night with a cough while the pert and sweet wife jumps up out of bed, heads to the medicine cabinet to find just the right syrup, runs back, and pours it in a spoon and feeds it to him -- to this grown man. He is just so cute sitting there in his bed, completely unable to do anything for himself, in total and complete expectation of being taken care of. She then comforts him so that he can go back to sleep.
Women have to become more like men in order to be seen. It most certainly is not the other way around. Because of this, women lose connection to a deep sense of self. For in patriarchy, our choices of who we may become are limited to either being virginal or "whorific". Narcissism from either of these two realities is still defined by the PMS. Male narcissism and female narcissism both stem from the patriarchal male point of view, but female narcissism is a direct result of being oppressed, abused and dominated. Male narcissism rules. In a "kingdumb" where male narcissism rules, all are subjected to the influence of this out-of-control, disrespectful, insane perpetration/penetration.
A male psychiatrist diagnosing a female as narcissistic would really need to know the depth of her pain and the depth of her colonization and assimilation and have empathy with the total and complete loss of her culture in order to understand her as a narcissist. A narcissistic male psychiatrist can sit in his privileged position and diagnose a woman while his own narcissism goes completely unnoticed. Freud could manipulate his findings of sexual abuse of women, blame them for it, call them hysterical, and come up with penis envy as a viable insight, all because he was too afraid to tell the truth and be criticized by the PMS of his day. His own narcissism went completely unchallenged, and yet we have a whole system of "healing" based on his work.
From my perspective, our only hope lies in the restoration of women to sacredness and respect, since life flows from our wombs, and all that is birthed by us is therefore sacred. When women reclaim this truth, the culture created from that wisdom will create beauty and peace. Women must exorcise any and all male identification in order to be free from this virus. Women's culture is vastly different from the current patriarchal paradigm we are agonizing in. Women's culture is based on love. Patriarchy is based on domination and hatred. Love is not a word. It is action. It is being. It is vital and alive. It soothes the parched hearts and souls of our narcissistic imprisonment and restores the wellness of our being. If men were to become more like women who have re-membered our culture and dis-identified with the current ruling paradigm, things on this planet would be very different indeed.
How do we begin to become part of the solution? We begin by loving ourselves. How do we do that? By looking closely and directly at any and all of our addictions and freeing our energy to access our love. By giving space to our pain, and understanding it with compassion and self-forgiveness. By looking in the mirror and noticing all the negating self-talk and changing it to loving talk. By refusing to be a slave of the PMS and holding a space that can create something very different. This change that is so necessary is huge. It will not be possible to shift things overnight. But we can begin with ourselves,and take to heart the changes we need to make in ourselves. I do not think it is of much value to be a political activist when one isn't an activist of the heart. Things will continue to spin around and around with very little movement until we understand the deep roots of the PMS and how all life everywhere on our planet is profoundly and grievously affected by it.
Is it possible to heal narcissism? Some say it is not. I feel that it is, because where there is courage (meaning "to take heart") there is infinite possibility.
Feminist shamanic healer Leslene Della Madre is a contributing editor of Awakened Woman. Hotflash! is her new column. Leslene's book, Midwifing Death: Into the Arms of the Mother is due to be published very soon by Plain View Press. She is now working on a second book, about narcissism.
Note: Check here if you want to read more on narcissism.
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| Thursday, September 25, 2003 | |
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 25 Sep 2003 @ 13:59
Reporters Without Borders is an association officially recognised as serving the public interest
More than a third of the world's people live in countries where there is no press freedom. Reporters Without Borders works constantly to restore their right to be informed. Thirty-one media professionals lost their lives in 2001 for doing what they were paid to do -- keeping us informed. Today, more than 120 journalists around the world are in prison simply for doing their job. In Nepal, Eritrea and China, they can spend years in jail just for using the "wrong" word or photo. Reporters Without Borders believes imprisoning or killing a journalist is like eliminating a key witness and threatens everyone's right to be informed. It has been fighting such practices for more than 17 years.
Defending press freedom… every day
Reporters Without Borders, kept on constant alert via its network of over 100 correspondents, rigorously condemns any attack on press freedom world-wide by keeping the media and public opinion informed through press releases and public-awareness campaigns. The association defends journalists and other media contributors and professionals who have been imprisoned or persecuted for doing their work. It speaks out against the abusive treatment and torture that is still common practice in many countries. The organisation supports journalists who are being threatened in their own countries and provides financial and other types of support to their needy families. Reporters Without Borders is fighting to reduce the use of censorship and to oppose laws designed to restrict press freedom. The association is also working to improve the safety of journalists world-wide, particularly in war zones. It is committed to assist in the rebuilding of media groups and to provide financial and material support to news staffs experiencing hardships. Finally, since January 2002, when it created the Damocles Network, Reporters Without Borders acquired a judicial arm. In order to ensure that murderers and torturers of journalists are brought to trial, the Network provides victims with legal services and represents them before the competent national and international courts, so that proper judicial procedures can be implemented.
Reporters Without Borders : an international organisation
The organisation's initiatives are being carried out on five continents through its national branches (Germany, Austria, Belgium, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Sweden and Switzerland) and its offices in Abidjan, Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Montreal, Nairobi, New York, Tokyo and Washington. It also works in close co-operation with local and regional press freedom organisations and with members of the "Reporters without Borders' Network," who represent Afghanistan, Argentina, Bangladesh, Myanmar ("Burma"), Cuba, Eritrea, Haiti, Peru, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Russia, Tunisia and the Ukraine.
Complete contact information about the organisation's various branches is available at : www.rsf.org
www.rsf.org : a news website devoted to press freedom
Reporters Without Borders' maintains this trilingual (French, English and Spanish) website in order to keep a daily tally of attacks on press freedom as they occur throughout the world. Updated several times a day, it functions like a press-freedom news agency. It gives Internet users an opportunity to act as a group to demand the release of jailed journalists by signing on-line petitions. To circumvent censorship, it presents occasionally articles that have been banned in their country of origin, hosts newspapers that have been closed down in their homeland and serves as a forum where journalists who have been "silenced" by authorities can voice their opinions. This website, which welcomes 35,000 to 45,000 visitors per month, also provides complete reports on cases covered in the press, as well as a daily "barometer" summarising the most recent attacks on press freedom.
Three key events support the cause of press freedom
Every year, on 3 May, Reporters Without Borders celebrates World Press Freedom Day. On this occasion, it publishes a full report of the status of press freedom in more than 150 countries. In addition, the association offers news staffs around the world an opportunity to support incarcerated journalists through its "sponsorship" programme. Once a year, Sponsorship Day provides an occasion to break the silence and openly discuss the situation of these journalists who have been jailed because they chose to keep us informed. On 10 December of every year, the association awards the Reporters Without Borders - Fondation de France Prize to the journalist who has contributed the most to the cause of press freedom in his(her) country. The funds that make it possible for Reporters Without Borders to carry on its daily fight are derived from the annual sale of two photo magazines, public donations and the support provided by various institutions. Click on the image to download the campaign : Fasten your seatbelts and let's go see… Cuba, Tunisia, Turkey... Three countries that tourists dream about. This summer, Reporters Without Borders invites you to look on the other side of the picture postcard, to see the hidden face of these countries, where censorship is ever-present. You won't hear any interviews with opposition figures on the radio in Havana. Tunisian TV never fails to sing the praises of the country's president. And in Turkey, you won't hear any Kurdish music on the air waves. All the product of well-oiled systems of clamping down on dissident voices. Consult the press release
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 25 Sep 2003 @ 10:06
Propulsion Laboratory September 21, 2003
The Galileo spacecraft's 14-year odyssey came to an end on Sunday, Sept. 21, when the spacecraft passed into Jupiter's shadow then disintegrated in the planet's dense atmosphere at 11:57 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time. The Deep Space Network tracking station in Goldstone, Calif., received the last signal at 12:43:14 PDT. The delay is due to the time it takes for the signal to travel to Earth.
Hundreds of former Galileo project members and their families were present at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., for a celebration to bid the spacecraft goodbye.
"We learned mind-boggling things. This mission was worth its weight in gold," said Dr. Claudia Alexander, Galileo project manager.
Having traveled approximately 4.6 billion kilometers (about 2.8 billion miles), the hardy spacecraft endured more than four times the cumulative dose of harmful jovian radiation it was designed to withstand. During a previous flyby of the moon Amalthea in November 2002, flashes of light were seen by the star scanner that indicated the presence of rocky debris circling Jupiter in the vicinity of the small moon. Another measurement of this area was taken today during Galileo's final pass. Further analysis may help confirm or constrain the existence of a ring at Amalthea's orbit.
"We haven't lost a spacecraft, we've gained a steppingstone into the future of space exploration," said Dr. Torrance Johnson, Galileo project scientist.
The spacecraft was purposely put on a collision course with Jupiter because the onboard propellant was nearly depleted and to eliminate any chance of an unwanted impact between the spacecraft and Jupiter's moon Europa, which Galileo discovered is likely to have a subsurface ocean. Without propellant, the spacecraft would not be able to point its antenna toward Earth or adjust its trajectory, so controlling the spacecraft would no longer be possible. The possibility of life existing on Europa is so compelling and has raised so many unanswered questions that it is prompting plans for future spacecraft to return to the icy moon.
Galileo was launched from the cargo bay of Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1989. The exciting list of discoveries started even before Galileo got a glimpse of Jupiter. As it crossed the asteroid belt in October 1991, Galileo snapped images of Gaspra, returning the first ever close-up image of an asteroid. Less then a year later, the spacecraft got up close to yet another asteroid, Ida, revealing it had its own little "moon," Dactyl, the first known moon of an asteroid. In 1994 the spacecraft made the only direct observation of a comet impacting a planet-- comet Shoemaker-Levy 9's collision with Jupiter.
The descent probe made the first in-place studies of the planet's clouds and winds, and it furthered scientists' understanding of how Jupiter evolved. The probe also made composition measurements designed to assess the degree of evolution of Jupiter compared to the Sun.
Galileo made the first observation of ammonia clouds in another planet's atmosphere. It also observed numerous large thunderstorms on Jupiter many times larger than those on Earth, with lightning strikes up to 1,000 times more powerful than on Earth. It was the first spacecraft to dwell in a giant planet's magnetosphere long enough to identify its global structure and to investigate the dynamics of Jupiter's magnetic field. Galileo determined that Jupiter's ring system is formed by dust kicked up as interplanetary meteoroids smash into the planet's four small inner moons. Galileo data showed that Jupiter's outermost ring is actually two rings, one embedded within the other.
Galileo extensively investigated the geologic diversity of Jupiter's four largest moons: Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa. Galileo found that Io's extensive volcanic activity is 100 times greater than that found on Earth. The moon Europa, Galileo unveiled, could be hiding a salty ocean up to 100 kilometers (62 miles) deep underneath its frozen surface containing about twice as much water as all the Earth's oceans. Data also showed Ganymede and Callisto may have a liquid-saltwater layer. The biggest discovery surrounding Ganymede was the presence of a magnetic field. No other moon of any planet is known to have one.
The prime mission ended six years ago, after two years of orbiting Jupiter. NASA extended the mission three times to continue taking advantage of Galileo's unique capabilities for accomplishing valuable science. The mission was possible because it drew its power from two long-lasting radioisotope thermoelectric generators provided by the Department of Energy.
"The mission was a testimonial to the persistence of NASA even through tremendous challenges. It was a phenomenal mission," said Sean O'Keefe, NASA administrator.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Galileo mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. JPL designed and built the Galileo orbiter, and operated the mission.
Additional information about the Galileo mission and its discoveries is available online or here
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Morphogenesis - Priestessing on the edge of chaos
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