(Locate the moon: The moon is seen behind the Orthodox church Christ the Saviour in Pristina, a Scottish church which featured in the best-selling novel ‘The Da Vinci Code’ has revealed another musical mystery hidden in secret code for almost 600 years. photo Hazir Reka/Reuters) Any mention of Scotland and the Rocky mountains in Canada evokes in me a wonderful nostalgia. Apart from the memorable...

During my brief stint as a journalist with the Saudi Gazette at Riyadh in the late 1970s, my favourite question to the Saudis from different walks of life was: “What would you do if, suppose, your country runs out of oil?” The general refrain then was something like this: “We are not prisoners to our present lifestyle. God has been kind. If He wishes otherwise…we would still thank him...

Yet another sign that we need some new ideas about how to address the issue of drugs in America. From the AP: (AP) Cocaine prices in the United States have dropped and the drug’s purity increased, despite years of effort and nearly $5 billion spent by the U.S. government to combat Colombia’s drug industry, the White House drug czar acknowledged in a letter to a key senator. The drug czar, John...

Celebrities including Elton John, Mick Jagger, Bob Geldof, George Clooney and Mia Farrow have appealed to the international community to do more to protect the civilians of Darfur, the province of Sudan where 200,000 have died in four years of war, and millions have lost their homes. This appeal comes from these celebrities to mark the fourth anniversary of the start of the conflict, and coincides with the...

A haunting tribute to the Virginia Tech victims written by Evanmusic and posted on You Tube. He writes: It is to send a message of healing”: The TV, replaying like a broken record. The image, it’s numbing, another record broken. More questions, no answers, left to imagination Alarming, disturbing, what are the implications? All as one and all at once, we ask why they had to die There’s no...

From moderate cartoonist Tom Briscoe:

(Photo courtesy Ramin Farahani, who has made a film on Iranian Jews.) The Iranian Jews make up the largest community of Jews in the Middle East outside Israel. But despite what appears to be a dwindling minority under constant threat of persecution, Iranian Jews say they live in relative freedom in the Islamic Republic (of Iran), remain loyal to the land of their birth, and are striving to separate politics...

A leaflet given out to wedding guests on Sunday as a souvenir showing Aunty Maiduguri in the centre surrounded by her four ‘brides’. A Nigerian lesbian who ‘married’ four women last weekend in Kano State has gone into hiding from the Islamic police, with her partners, says BBC. “Eyewitnesses say there was a large turnout for the marriage and guests were given leaflets as a souvenir...

No one can accuse this lawyer of being a slacker: When the neighborhood dry cleaner misplaced Roy Pearson’s pants, he took action. He complained. He demanded compensation. And then he sued. Man, did he sue. Two years, thousands of pages of legal documents and many hundreds of hours of investigative work later, Pearson is seeking to make Custom Cleaners pay — would you believe more than the payroll...

Time is trying to whittle down a list of 200 influential people to 100 people — and they want everyone’s help. They also want to know who should have been on this list that wasn’t (besides ME, that is..). CLICK HERE to help them out. PS. Sanjaya Malakar is #11 — which shows our civilization is lost. (At least Perez Hilton is only #15.)

Joe has already addressed Newt Gingrich’s claim that liberalism is to blame for the Virginia Tech shootings, but here, below, are my thoughts in response to that idiotic claim. ********** In case you haven’t heard, Newt Gingrich has found the cause of the Virginia Tech shootings. Or, rather, he has found something upon which to pin the blame: Liberalism. Yes, that’s right. Liberalism. On ABC’s...

Singer Sheryl Crow is on a roll. Or trying to get everyone off one. Her latest battle is a war against the use of toilet paper: Singer Sheryl Crow has said a ban on using too much toilet paper should be introduced to help the environment. Crow has suggested using “only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required”. The 45-year-old,...

Recently I wrote a post on Climate Change: Australia Faces ‘Epic Drought’ An interesting comment was sent by Ivaylo Avramov and I repeat it here in this post because of its importance. “So far we were fighting global problems one by one – no matter whether we discuss the Global Warming, the water scarcity, the Poverty, the problems in free trade, the AIDS, the illiteracy and religious...

To watch some vintage TV ads please click here… There was a time (not long ago) when the readers/viewers attention was riveted more towards the advertisements than the news/programmes while reading/watching newspapers/magazines and television. But times are changing. Now as the newspapers and the TV opt more for the dramatic and jazzy approach of the ads, many ad practitioners fear, ironically, that...

Yaakov Kirschen, The Jerusalem Post, Dry Bones

Olle Johansson, Sweden

RJ Matson, The St. Louis Post Dispatch

It was 10:10 a.m. Thursday morning and I was 15 minutes away from finishing my second performance with a No Bullying theme in my non-blogging incarnation at an elementary school in Torrance, California. The kids were laughing because I had just gotten five volunteers up to the stage and the students had just put on ratty wigs and were JUST about to lip-sync “Tutti Frutti” while I would provide nutty...

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com

Larry Wright, The Detroit News

For a critique of Michelle Malkin — specifically her argument for concealed weapons — see here. It deals with the Virginia Tech shootings and addresses issues raised in this post. From a different perspective, and with a different tone, Heraclitus looks at these issues in a separate post here. ********** As expected — because it is always so — a media event has become a media orgy. I’m...

Christo Komarnitski, Bulgaria

RJ Matson, The St. Louis Post Dispatch

Heads up: Calling all sister and brother bikers for funeral patrol… bring ’round those fatheads and flatheads, shovelheads, and ironheads, and make ready to ride the pegs if need be… your services may be called upon very shortly. Pastor Fred, a/k/a/ Fred Waldron Phelps Sr., who refers to himself and his grown children as “the most hated family in America,â€? claims he and his Topeka,...

From my former colleagues on the Editorial Board of the Philadelphia Daily News: The innocent young people who were slaughtered were not even finished being identified, and their families notified, before gun- rights advocates were broadcasting their specious argument, the same argument they used after the shooting of 10 students in an Amish school in Lancaster just six months ago: Forget controls on gun ownership,...