Month: July 2009

Courage of the One

The case of Lubna Hussein is one of those rare instances where an individual chooses to step forward and challenge an unjust system knowing full well the effort may fail. Her bravery should serve as a reminder to us all of the importance of standing up to act for what we believe in.

 Hussein, a Sudanese journalist working in the media department of the United Nations mission, was arrested with a dozen other women on July 3 by members of the public order police for wearing pants in a restaurant. Most of the women were reportedly flogged at the police station.

Continue reading Courage of the One

Lament for days gone by

That the death of Walter Cronkite, the voice of the world in America’s living room for decades, should occur at a time when traditional media is getting battered by the up-to-the -minute news access on the Internet, is perhaps fitting. A living legend has passed into memory. Tragic, but a sign of the times.

Others who knew Cronkite far better than a little girl in front of the television ever would, have penned loving and awed tributes to his iconic career, his work ethic and personal grace. One of the most honest remembrances I’ve seen came from ABC’s Stu Schutzman.

Continue reading Lament for days gone by

The better to see you with …

File this one under “too cute to pass up.”

An east German company has rolled out a line of contact lenses – for animals!!

 Giraffes, lions, rabbits, bear and owls are among the clients that can benefit from the new uber-specialized acrylic intraocular lenses. Since the product launch last year, S&V Technologies has reportedly had orders from San Diego’s Sea World, an Australian park and a Romanian zoo.

 The company even fielded a request to outfit brown bears at a preserve in China to help rejuvenate the animals’ sex drive.

 The lenses combat the indications of cataracts, which tend to affect animals more seriously than humans by causing complete blindness. Unlike human patients who place and remove their lenses frequently, these lenses are implanted.

World’s economic woes no cause for celebration

I guess Rick Newman’s article on the state of global economies was intended to give Americans something to feel good about as the U.S. economy continues to stumble along on crutches. But the idea that we should be elated to learn that the International Monetary Fund now predicts at least 11 major economies will fair worse than ours in 2010 is naïve at best.

Rejoice, Newman writes, for “when times are tough, one thing that tends to raise the spirit is knowing that somebody else has it worse.”

The reality is that economic distress brews a nasty stew of undesirable societal ills – extremism, militancy, xenophobia, jealousy, crime, authoritarian leadership and violence.

Continue reading World’s economic woes no cause for celebration

We ARE the world …..

Welcome to my blog

Global Citizen

– where you’ll find discussion, observation and analysis of issues facing people of the world today.

For years, I advocated the belief that events in a far flung Pakistani, Bulgarian or Zimbabwean village should matter to every citizen of the world for we are all intertwined in some way. Nowadays with the advent of the Internet age and common threats like climate change, more and more people ascribe to a similar view. Yet even as all our individual worlds have expanded with tools like Facebook and Twitter and the ease of digesting news in pithy sound bytes, we remain divorced from each others’ lives in disturbing ways that promote misunderstanding and conflict.

I’m not sure if it’s coincidence, destiny or divine providence but the day I sat down to write this first little missive happened to be the same day of Michael Jackson’s memorial.

Continue reading We ARE the world …..