News Is Like a Box of Chocolates

Random Assortment

Gym Class
In an effort to cater to a wider variety of theocrats, Harvard is running one of its student gyms gender-segregated part time.

In a test of Harvard's famed open-mindedness, the university has banned men from one of its gyms for a few hours a week to accommodate Muslim women who say it offends their sense of modesty to exercise in front of the opposite sex.

The policy is already unpopular with many on campus, including some women who consider it sexist.

"I think that it's incorrect in a college setting to institute a policy in which half of the campus gets wronged or denied a resource that's supposed to be for everyone," said student Lucy Caldwell, who also wrote a column in The Harvard Crimson newspaper critical of the new hours.

Student Ola Aljawhary, who is Muslim and works out elsewhere on campus but is not one of the women who requested the change, rejected that argument.

"The majority should be willing to compromise," she said. "I think that's just basic courtesy. We must show tolerance and respect for all others."

No, Ola, the majority should not be willing to compromise our secular state to accomodate your partiarchial desert cult.

Nor that of the Mormons in Utah who want the same thing.

If you don't like men in your gym, work out at home. There's no reason to accomodate your backward religious crap in a public institution, any more than we should have to teach Creationism to appease idiot Christians.

Kent Blumenthal, executive director of the National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association, which has 660 member colleges and universities nationwide, said he could not think of any other institution with a similar policy.

"It seems in some ways contrary to the purpose of campus recreational programs, which is all about access," he said.

Harvard's policy is no different from commercial gyms that cater partially or even exclusively to women, said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations.

"The Muslim bashers portray it as the world coming to end, but if women have a couple hours a week to work out in private, I don't see it as a major issue," he said.

Now now, I bash many kinds of religious nuts. Be fair.

Though I don't think it's the end of the world; I think it's creeping theocracy. If theocracy could end the world we'd all be dead already.

Still, hardly a positive development.

Source: Raw Story

Crete

Around 300 priceless artifacts from Europe's oldest civilisation, the Minoans of ancient Crete, will go on display in New York from March 13, the private Alexander S. Onassis foundation said Wednesday.

Titled "From the Land of the Labyrinth: Minoan Crete, 3000-1100 BC", the six-month exhibition will feature gold jewellery, seals, votive figures, tools, weapons, engravings and frescoes from several Cretan museums, including the prestigious museum of Heraklion in the island's capital.

Most of the artifacts have never been displayed outside Greece, said archaeologist Maria Vlazakis, supervisor of museums in western Crete.

"The first palatial civilisation on European soil flourished on Crete during the third and second millennia BCE," she told a news conference.

Awesome! I love the Minoans.

A highly technological, refined culture thousands of years ahead of its time, brought low by environmental disaster and weak politics.

Sound familiar?

Source: Raw Story

Intertubes
So Youtube is now more popular than Wikipedia (in the UK at least), in terms of unique users.

Not really surprised. Youtube is just so popular, and Wikipedia's glamour is wearing pretty thin these days.

Source: The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/05/digitalmedia.youtube

Free Trade?
The next time you hear someone ramble on about how Free Trade is the best policy, remind them that the US engages in its own protectivist tariff scheme.

If that doesn't work, you could remind them of our huge agricultural subsidies too.

Source: US Government
(A hat-tip to Atrios for pointing this out)

Feet
So three right feet have washed up off a couple of islands in Canada.

That can't be good.

Canadian police are investigating the mystery of three right feet that have turned up off Vancouver Island in the past six months.


The first was washed up in August on an isolated island in British Columbia. A 12-year-old girl beachcombing with her family found a size 12 running shoe with a human right foot still inside. Six days later a couple hiking around coves on another remote island found another size 12 right foot in a trainer under a tree trunk. Then, last month, another right foot was spotted, this time bobbing about in the water off a third island.

Although the discoveries sound like a film plot, the scenario is flummoxing police in western Canada. They collected DNA from the remains but could not match them to anyone on their database.

Dr Simon Boxall, an oceanographer from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, said: "It is not that unusual for body parts to turn up in the sea - they can be the result of a fishing accident, or a whole body getting hit by a passing ship, for example - but the fact that all three were clustered so close together does suggest dodgy dealings."

...

As for why all three feet were right and not left, Boxall believes it is a coincidence.

Not everyone agrees. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a former professor of oceanography at the University of Washington, and an expert in floating objects (he is writing a book called The Floating World for HarperCollins), said: "Left footwear and right footwear often tend to wash up at different times at different places because they float differently.

"There are beaches that collect mostly rights and other beaches that collect mostly lefts. The winds or the currents sort out left and right footwear."

However, resident Digby Jones, 80, told the New York Times: "The whole thing is a scam, as far as I'm concerned, all part of a big joke. If they go to the mortuaries on the mainland, they'll find some guy laughing his head off."

Beaches that collect one foot or the other?

This I'd have to see. Though I think I might not want to.

Also, let's all hope it's just a sick and unjustifiable joke, eheh. The alternative is of course even worse.

Source: The Guardian