WORLD MEDIA WATCH FOR DECEMBER 31, 2001

BUZZFLASH NOTE: Once again, these are the views and perspectives of the individual papers, not of BuzzFlash or Gloria. They offer BuzzFlash readers a way of reading what other nations are saying about the crisis, whether we like it or not.

http://www.buzzflash.com/mediawatch

1//The Toronto Star, Canada--TOMORROW, JUPITER AT ITS BRIGHTEST ("On New Year's Eve, if you raise your glasses high enough, you'll see more than a nighttime tapestry of tiny stars.")

2//The Japan Times, Japan--STARTING ANEW THROUGH THE AGES ("Jan. 1, the date most commonly recognized today, was set by the Julian calendar drawn up in 45 B.C. by order of Julius Caesar.")

3//The Hindustan Times, India--TEAM TO VISIT KABUL TO FIT 'JAIPUR FOOT' TO MAIMED AFGHANS ("'The Union Government is sending the team under a humanitarian venture in Afghanistan,' Mehta said. 'Our team has already served the Afghan people twice in the past by organising similar camps in 1996 and 1997 fitting foot to landmine victims,' he said.")

4//The Guardian, UK-- Riddle of the Pyramids: WHY DE MILLE DIDN'T NEED ALL THOSE SLAVES ON SCREEN ("But French architects and scientists believe they are nothing more than weathered concrete blocks, moulded on the spot,.")

5//The Moscow Times, Russia--ARMY EYES PETS ("Under the proposals, donkeys, horses, camel, reindeer and sled-dogs will have to be registered at local military commandant offices across the nation, the report said.")

6//The Pioneer, India--IT'S A MAN-EAT-DOG WORLD ("South Korean lawmakers on Thursday put forth a bill to legalise the commercial slaughter of dogs in a bid to stem international criticism and protect the custom of eating dogmeat.")

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1//The Toronto Star Dec. 30, 2001. 01:00 AM
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?GXHC_gx_session_id_=5e4d0a961384
515a&pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1009666952474&call_page
=TS_News&call_pageid=968332188492&call_pagepath=News/News

TOMORROW, JUPITER AT ITS BRIGHTEST

On New Year's Eve, if you raise your glasses high enough, you'll see more than a nighttime tapestry of tiny stars.

Jupiter, the largest planet of the solar system, will be at its brightest. The planet reaches opposition tomorrow night, meaning it reaches a point in the sky opposite that of the sun. And that puts it so close to Earth - a mere 635 million ilometres way - that it'll appear super-bright. Only the sun and the moon are brighter.

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2//The Japan Times Sunday, December 30, 2001
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fl20011230a2.htm

STARTING ANEW THROUGH THE AGES
By VICTORIA JAMES, Staff writer

The world's most universally observed festival, New Year is also its most diverse, with timing, inspiration and celebration differing among countries, cultures and religions. For some, it is an occasion on which to give thanks for another year of survival; for others it's a vantage point from which to look forward to the coming year; while for still others, it is a "thin place" -- a moment when the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead flickers and fades.

Sowing or harvest, the phases of the sun or moon, religious festivals and civic events, all have served as the year's pivot -- and though Christmas comes but once a year, the dawn of a new year is celebrated somewhere every month of our 12.

Jan. 1, the date most commonly recognized today, was set by the Julian calendar drawn up in 45 B.C. by order of Julius Caesar. However, it wasn't until the calendrical reform of Pope Gregory XII in 1582 that European countries formally recognized the day as the beginning of the new year. Even then, Protestant countries took longer to come round: Germany in 1700, Britain in 1752. Japan adopted the Western calendar in 1873, and China followed suit in 1912; while among later
converts have been Christian countries of the Orthodox Church, including Russia, which subscribed to the Gregorian calendar only in 1923.

Perhaps the dry secular reasoning behind the choice of Jan. 1 (the day when newly elected consuls took up their appointments throughout the Roman Empire) set the desultory tone of much modern-day merrymaking -- bargain-hunting at the sales, or TV specials and day-long sports coverage swept along on a tide of alcohol.

By comparison, countries and cultures that have best maintained their native new year traditions -- among them the colorful lantern festivals of China (late Jan./mid Feb.), the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, or Head of the Year (early/mid Sept.) and India's Diwali, or Festival of Lights (early Nov.) -- are those where the event is not tied to the civil calendar but to the rhythm of natural or spiritual cycles.

The civilization of Babylon (in present-day Iraq) was the first to divide the four seasons as we do today, and a Mesopotamian record of 2,000 B.C. contains the earliest known reference to a new-year festival. The Babylonians quartered the year along the summer and winter solstices, when days are at their longest and shortest respectively, and the autumn and vernal equinoxes, when night and day are of equal duration. The new year was observed at the start of spring (mid-April), with the sighting of the first crescent moon after the vernal equinox.

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No longer customary in the West, fortune telling remains a key new-year ritual in many Asian countries. Shortcuts to securing a favorable fortune abound: Chinese smear the lips of their kitchen god with honey, to ensure he carries sweet reports of them back to heaven; Cambodians jostle to secure a paper talisman smeared with the blood of a shaman known as the "Pig God," who cuts his tongue with a razor blade at the start of the ritual; Vietnamese leave a whole chicken on a platter outside their door at midnight to entice the new year, mua xuan, into the house bringing fortune.

More skeptical in the West, people try to improve their lives by making New Year
resolutions. Although these may seem the quintessential expression of contemporary self-help culture, they too have Babylonian roots. The most common resolution four millennia ago was to return borrowed farm implements -- setting a practical and realistic level we'd do well to emulate today.

Nowadays, Americans make on average 1.8 resolutions each -- that's upward of 400 million nationwide, or an awful lot of disappointment in store when resolve breaks down. For some, the stress of new-year expectations is all too much. One survey in the mid-1990s that examined U.S. government records of suicides found that although Thanksgiving and Christmas recorded daily rates below the 34-per-million average, New Year's Day saw a jump to 41-per-million -- a statistic made all the sadder because, whatever its particular timing or traditions, New Year has principally been a time for celebrating life itself.

3//The Hindustan Times December 30, 2001
http://www.hindustantimes.com/nonfram/301201/dlame19.asp

TEAM TO VISIT KABUL TO FIT 'JAIPUR FOOT' TO MAIMED AFGHANS
PTI, Jaipur

A 20-member team, led by well-known orthopaedic surgeon M K Mathur, is visiting Kabul for organising a camp to fit artificial limbs ('Jaipur Foot'), to the Afghans maimed in war.

Mathur, professor and head of the Rehabilitation Research Centre of the S M S Medical college and hospital here, and his team would be fitting about 1,000 artificial limbs to Afghans during their stay in Kabul, Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti (BMVSS) secretary S R Mehta said here today.

The unique feature of the composition of the team is that more than half the technicians are themselves limb-less persons fitted with the Jaipur Foot.

"The Union Government is sending the team under a humanitarian venture in Afghanistan," Mehta said. "Our team has already served the Afghan people twice in the past by organising similar camps in 1996 and 1997 fitting foot to landmine victims," he said.

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Functionally and aesthetically the Jaipur Foot is considered as one of the best appliances for the
handicapped that enable people to walk, run, crouch, and climb. It is especially useful in undulated hilly areas like Afghanistan.

4//The Guardian Sunday December 30, 2001
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,625686,00.html

Riddle of the Pyramids
WHY DE MILLE DIDN'T NEED ALL THOSE SLAVES ON SCREEN

Paul Webster in Paris
The Observer

Like millions of tourists, from the Ancient Greeks on, the Blairs may have been victims
of one of the world's oldest confidence tricks when they walked round the Pyramids on
the Prime Minister's holiday trip to Egypt.

To the uninitiated eye, the 2.3 million blocks of stones rising to a 146-metre peak on the
4,500-year-old Great Pyramid near Cairo look as solid as pure granite. But French architects and scientists believe they are nothing more than weathered concrete blocks, moulded on the spot, stone by stone and layer by layer, from the ground upwards.

The theory, being explored by scientists at Montpellier University, has thrown Egyptology into turmoil. It could destroy thousands of years of speculation on the greatest of all riddles of the sands, one that has fascinated Hollywood and made fortunes for novelists such as Christian Jacq. Researchers believe that only the reluctance of the Egyptian authorities to allow more samples to be examined stands between them and final proof.

Joël Bertho, an architect and specialist in trompe-l'oeil, used his expert knowledge of
reconstituted stone to explain how easy it was to pass off concrete and mortar for real
carved stone. 'It needs a trained specialist to identify the basic material,' he said.

'The Egyptians had mastered many techniques of plaster and mortar and knew all about
making bricks. There is no reason why they could not reconstitute stone into blocks
weighing two or three tonnes layer by layer rather than try to heave huge weights up
several hundred feet without even the benefit of crude cranes. I have even been able to
identify frame marks left by some moulds.'

The theory, set out in a book called La Pyramide Reconsti tuée (Unic), is largely based
on the precision of the joints between the stones. 'Joints are invisible and it would be
impossible to pass a cigarette paper between them. To carve blocks of solid stone to
tolerances of hardly a millimetre would need incredible skill without the benefit of machine tools.'

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5//The Moscow Times Friday, Dec. 28, 2001. Page 5
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2001/12/28/031.html

ARMY EYES PETS (Full article)

MOSCOW (MT) -- The Defense Ministry, which this month announced it would commandeer Russian-made jeeps in the event of war, is considering enlisting pets as well, TV6 reported.
Under the proposals, donkeys, horses, camel, reindeer and sled-dogs will have to be
registered at local military commandant offices across the nation, the report said.

Moscow deputy military commissar, Mikhail Prostodushev, was quoted as saying that
reindeer and dogs would be useful in the north, while horses would be useful in the
southern mountains.

6//The Pioneer New Delhi, Sunday, December 30, 2001
http://www.dailypioneer.com/secon3.asp?cat=\wld4&d=WORLD

IT'S A MAN-EAT-DOG WORLD
Agencies/Seoul

South Korean lawmakers on Thursday put forth a bill to legalise the commercial slaughter of dogs in a bid to stem international criticism and protect the custom of eating dogmeat.

Some dogs are bred to be eaten in South Korea, notably in poshintang, literally "body preservation stew", which, advocates say, is good for the health.

But while culinary canines rank third as commercial livestock in South Korea behind cattle and pigs, dogs raised for food fall outside the Livestock Processing Act.

Unregulated slaughter has spawned abuses including burning, beating and boiling of live dogs - drawing sharp criticism from overseas animal activists in the run up to next year's world cup soccer finals, which Korea will co-host with Japan. The bill to bring dogmeat under commercial livestock laws, proposed by 20 ruling and opposition legislators, follows a bitter spat pitting French actress-turned-activist Brigitte Bardot against angry South Korean dogmeat defenders. Bardot touched off a nationalistic outcry in Korea when she told local media she would distribute protest pictures depicting the torture of dogs before next year's world cup soccer finals.

Her campaign drew a torrent of attacks and threats, with anti-Bardot web sites launched carrying Korean profanities and pornographic references to Bardot's fame as a cinema sex symbol.

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"Foreign criticism of dogmeat reflects lack of understanding of our nation's ancient culture -- it is blasphemy, not criticism," conservative lawmaker Kim Hong-Shin told Parliament.

But other advocates of the legislation said it would help the government impose more stringent checks to enforce laws that ban cruelty to animals.

South Korea has received a letter from FIFA, the sport's world governing body, urging it to be sensitive to foreign public antipathy to the practice of eating dogs.

But Seoul world cup organisers say dogmeat is not a matter for FIFA.

Copyright 2001, Gloria R. Lalumia.
More Stuff at: http://www.zianet.com/insightanalytical/

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