Notables from
The Week Magazine:
Birthday boy absent: North Korea celebrated the 68th birthday of its Dear Leader this week with performances ranging from gun salutes to synchronized swimming—but the ailing Kim Jong Il himself did not attend. The state news agency released footage of Kim giving out cookies to children, but there were no photos of him at the massive military parade in his honor. Kim suffered a stroke in 2008 and has appeared in public only rarely since. His regime has been under un precedented internal pressure because of his recent revaluation of the country’s currency, which wiped out most North Koreans’ savings and sent food prices soaring. But according to the state-run media, Kim is “praised by mankind as the most outstanding political elder and the peerlessly brilliant commander of the present era.”
Ha, amazing what a controlled press will report.
Fatwas against technology: Egyptian clerics are cracking down on the sinful uses of modern technology. Egypt’s highest religious authority, the Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, recently issued a fatwa banning the use of the Muslim prayer call or any verse from the Quran as a cell phone ringtone. “Picking up the phone is sure to interrupt the verse, and this is disrespectful to the holy book,” he said. Another Egyptian cleric called for a ban on Facebook, saying that the social-networking site was breaking up marriages by encouraging people to reconnect with former flames. He was responding to reports of a study that found that one in five Egyptian divorces is the result of Facebook; the study turned out to be an Internet hoax.
Amazing the fear the internet brings to fundamentalists...
