GOOD NEWS FOR STEVEN AND TIWONGE!

From the BBC:

A gay couple jailed in Malawi after getting engaged have been pardoned by President Bingu wa Mutharika.

Mr Mutharika, speaking as UN chief Ban Ki-moon visited his country, said he had ordered their immediate release.

Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga were given 14-year jail terms earlier this month after being convicted of gross indecency and unnatural acts.

The case has sparked international condemnation and a debate about homosexuality in the country.

Mr Ban hailed the president's decision as "courageous".

"This outdated penal code should be reformed wherever it may exist," he said.

The BBC's Karen Allen, in Lilongwe, says Mr Ban is trying to put pressure on parliamentarians to reform anti-homosexuality laws that date back to colonial times.

Thanks be to God! And it's about time to reform the laws that date back to colonial times.

Thanks to Ann for the link.

BP - STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURES

From McClatchy:

Federal regulators complained in a scathing internal memo about "significant deficiencies" in BP's handling of the safety of oil spill workers and asked the Coast Guard to help pressure the company to address a litany of concerns.

The memo, written by a Labor Department official earlier this week and obtained by McClatchy, reveals the Obama administration's growing concerns about potential health and safety problems posed by the oil spill and its inability to force BP to respond to them.
....

David Michaels, the assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health who wrote the memo, raised the concerns on Tuesday, the day before seven oil spill workers on boats off the coast of Louisiana were hospitalized after they experienced nausea, dizziness and headaches.

Late Friday, the disaster response team sent four more workers to the hospital by helicopter, including two with chest pains.
....

Graham MacEwen, a spokesman for BP, maintained that his company is being responsive to any problems as they develop.

"We consider safety a number one priority," he said. "We will continue to try to improve our safety record."

Yes, and I have this bridge....

From the AP:

At nearly every step since the Deepwater Horizon exploded more than a month ago, causing the worst oil spill in U.S. history, rig operator BP PLC has downplayed the severity of the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.

On almost every issue — the amount of gushing oil, the environmental impact, even how to stop the leak — BP's statements have proven wrong. The erosion of the company's credibility may prove as difficult to stop as the oil spewing from the sea floor.

"They keep making one mistake after another. That gives the impression that they're hiding things," said U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who has been critical of BP's reluctance to publicly release videos of the underwater gusher. "These guys either do not have any sense of accountability to the public or they are Neanderthals when it comes to public relations."

Nothing new here really. As I've already said, the president, the federal and state agencies, and all the rest of us should verify every statement by anyone associated with BP before we believe a word of it.

"THE OCEANS CAN'T TAKE ANY MORE"

Philippe Cousteau, the grandson of French explorer and ecologist Jacques-Yves Cousteau, to Bill Maher:

The Florida Keys, third longest barrier reef in the world, is a dead zone. Ninety percent of the big fish, the tuna, the sharks, and other things, are already gone in the oceans. There's a dead zone in the Gulf Of Mexico every summer the size of New Jersey, where there's not enough oxygen for things to live. So it's not a question of 'Can the oceans take any more?' The oceans can't take any more. They couldn't take any more fifty years ago. The question is, when are we going to stop?

From the The Huffington Post:

THE CHORDETTES - "LOLLIPOP"

Because I feel silly, sad, addled, tired, a jumbled mixture of emotions, I take you back to 1958 to the Chordettes singing a good jitterbug song. A lively jitterbug session would shake all that stuff right outta my head.

And there's Andy Williams doing the "pop".

STORY OF THE DAY - FUNNY WORLD

He told me about Jesus & Arizona & the
best way to make beer & I said you're a
funny kind of preacher & he said it's a
funny kind of world & I still remember
his eyes clear as a desert morning.


From StoryPeople.

READ AND WEEP

From Yahoo News:

Perhaps you saw news footage of President Obama in Grand Isle, La., on Friday and thought things didn't look all that bad. Well, there may have been a reason for that: The town was evidently swarmed by an army of temp workers to spruce it up for the president and the national news crews following him.

Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts, whose district encompasses Grand Isle, told Yahoo! News that BP bused in "hundreds" of temporary workers to clean up local beaches. And as soon as the president was en route back to Washington, the workers were clearing out of Grand Isle too, Roberts said.

"The level of cleanup and cooperation we've gotten from BP in the past is in no way consistent to the effort shown on the island today," Roberts said by telephone. "As soon as the president left, they were immediately put back on the buses and sent home."

So much for BP putting forth its best efforts in the clean-up.

H/T to The Huffington Post.

NOT GOOD NEWS - PLEASE PRAY

Ann Fontaine informed me that her brother, Steve, for whom we prayed several days ago for a illness in his lungs, has been diagnosed with lung cancer, adenocarcinoma to be specific, with a prognosis of only six months or so.

Please pray for Steve, his wife and children, and all the family, including our friend, Ann.

Heavenly Father, giver of life and health: Comfort and relieve your sick servant Steve, and give your power of healing to those who minister to his needs, that he may be strengthened in his weakness and have confidence in your loving care; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
(Book of Common Prayer, p. 459)


GOD'S AID

God to enfold him,
God to surround him,
God in his speaking,
God in his thinking.

God in his sleeping,
God in his waking,
God in his watching,
God in his hoping.

God in his life,
God in his lips,
God in his soul,
God in his heart.

God in his sufficing,
God in his slumber,
God in his ever-living soul,
God in his eternity.


From the Carmina Gadelica. (Edit.)

AN IMPROVEMENT?

This:

 

From this:

 

My daughter at the age of one year. The portrait was originally beautiful and colorful, but it faded and yellowed over the years. I brought the picture home with me last time I visited my daughter, and today, with my quite limited photo-shopping program, I fiddled and fixed and came up with what I think is an improvement, but, by no means, is the result as good as was the original. I printed the copy on picture-quality paper and put the copy in the frame which held the original. The yellowed, faded version should be put away in a dark place to insure that it doesn't fade further.

PUNCTUATION!

An English professor wrote the words: "A woman without her man is nothing" on the chalkboard and asked his students to punctuate it correctly.

All of the males in the class wrote: "A woman, without her man, is nothing."

All the females in the class wrote: "A woman: without her, man is nothing."

Punctuation is powerful.


Don't blame me. Blame Lisa.

"WE ARE ALL CONNECTED" - BP. KATHARINE JEFFORTS SCHORI

A young heron sits dying amidst oil splattering underneath mangrove on an island impacted by oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in Barataria Bay, just inside the the coast of Lousiana, Sunday, May 23.

The original peoples of the North American continent understand that we are all connected, and that harm to one part of the sacred circle of life harms the whole. Scientists, both the ecological and physical sorts, know the same reality, expressed in different terms. The Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) also charge human beings with care for the whole of creation, because it is God's good gift to humanity. Another way of saying this is that we are all connected and there is no escape; our common future depends on how we care for the rest of the natural world, not just the square feet of soil we may call "our own." We breathe the same air, our food comes from the same ground and seas, and the water we have to share cycles through the same airshed, watershed, and terra firma.

The still-unfolding disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is good evidence of the interconnectedness of the whole. It has its origins in this nation's addiction to oil, uninhibited growth, and consumerism, as well as old-fashioned greed and what my tradition calls hubris and idolatry. Our collective sins are being visited on those who have had little or no part in them: birds, marine mammals, the tiny plants and animals that constitute the base of the vast food chain in the Gulf, and on which a major part of the seafood production of the United States depends. Our sins are being visited on the fishers of southern Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, who seek to feed their families with the proceeds of what they catch each day. Our sins will expose New Orleans and other coastal cities to the increased likelihood of devastating floods, as the marshes that constitute the shrinking margin of storm protection continue to disappear, fouled and killed by oil.

The oil that continues to vent from the sea floor has spread through hundreds of cubic miles of ocean, poisoning creatures of all sizes and forms, from birds, turtles, and whales to the shrimp, fish, oysters, and crabs that human beings so value, and the plankton, whose life supports the whole biological system -- the very kind of creatures whose dead and decomposed tissues began the process of producing that oil so many millions of years ago.

We know, at least intellectually, that that oil is a limited resource, yet we continue to extract and use it at increasing rates and with apparently decreasing care. The great scandal of this disaster is the one related to all kinds of "commons," resources held by the whole community. Like tropical forests in Madagascar and Brazil, and the gold and silver deposits of the American West, "commons" have in human history too often been greedily exploited by a few, with the aftermath left for others to deal with, or suffer with.

Yet the reality is that this disaster just may show us as a nation how interconnected we really are. The waste of this oil -- both its unusability and the mess it is making -- will be visited on all of us, for years and even generations to come. The hydrocarbons in those coastal marshes and at the base of the food chain leading to marketable seafood resources will taint us all, eventually. That oil is already frightening away vacationers who form the economic base for countless coastal communities, whose livelihoods have something to do with the economic health of this nation. The workers in those communities, even when they have employment, are some of the poorest among us. That oil will move beyond the immediate environs of a broken wellhead, spreading around the coasts of Florida and northward along the east coast of the U.S. That oil will foul the coastal marshes that also constitute a major nursery for coastal fauna, again a vital part of the food chain. That oil will further stress and poison the coral reefs of Florida, already much endangered from warming and ocean acidification. Those reefs have historically provided significant storm protection to the coastal communities behind them.

The dispersants that are being so wantonly deployed will have consequences we're not yet cognizant of, and the experience of gold and silver mining in the West is instructive. The methods used in those old mining operations liberated plenty of arsenic, mercury, other heavy metals, left cyanide and acids, all of which have significant health effects on those who live in the immediate area of mines and tailings, as well as those who use water downstream and breathe downwind air.

There is no place to go "away" from these consequences; there is no ultimate escape on this planet. The effects at a distance may seem minor or tolerable, but the cumulative effect is not. We are all connected, we will all suffer the consequences of this tragic disaster in the Gulf, and we must wake up and put a stop to the kind of robber baron behavior we supposedly regulated out of existence a hundred years ago. Our lives, and the liveliness of the entire planet, depend on it.

And they all said, "Amen!"


Image from MSNBC.

Thanks to AmyJ for the link to the essay at The Huffington Post.