Baby urgently needs RM30,000 for heart operation

Baby urgently needs RM30,000 for heart operation


Source: http://www.nst.com.my/

Science and Faith

Once Science said to Faith:

"My eye can see all that is in this world;
The Entire world is within my net.
I am only concerned with material things,
What have I to do with spiritual matters?
I can strike a thousand melodies,
And openly proclaim all the secrets that I learn."

Faith said:

"With your magic even the waves in the sea are set ablaze,
You can pollute the atmosphere with foul, poisonous gases.
When you associated with me, you were light,
When you broke off from me, your light became fire.
You were of Divine origin,
But you have been caught in the clutches of Shaytan.
Come, make this wasteland a garden once again.
Borrow from me a little of my ecstasy,
And in the world set up a paradise.
From the day of creation we have been associates,
We are the low and high tunes of the same melody."

by Iqbal

Vitamin C - The Medical Benefits

Vitamin C is perhaps the most famous—and the most misunderstood—of all the vital nutrients. Get the facts here.
Collection of illumistream

Hyperactiver Marienkäfer

This video is so funny, enjoy it!
Collection of Slombie

Dream Fable

Dream Fable

I saw myself in a wide green garden, more beautiful than I could begin to understand. In this garden was a young girl. I said to her, "How wonderful this place is!"

"Would you like to see a place even more wonderful than this?" she asked.

"Oh yes," I answered. Then taking me by the hand, she led me on until we came to a magnificent palace, like nothing that was ever seen by human eyes. The young girl knocked on the door, and someone opened it. Immediately both of us were flooded with light.

Only Allah knows the inner meaning of the maidens we saw living there. Each one carried in her hand a serving-tray filled with light. The young girl asked the maidens where they were going, and they answered her, "We are looking for someone who was drowned in the sea, and so became a martyr. She never slept at night, not one wink! We are going to rub funeral spices on her body."

"Then rub some on my friend here," the young girl said.

"Once upon a time," said the maidens, "part of this spice and the fragrance of it clung to her body -- but then she shied away."

Quickly the young girl let go of my hand, turned, and said to me:

"Your prayers are your light;
Your devotion is your strength;
Sleep is the enemy of both.
Your life is the only opportunity that life can give you.
If you ignore it, if you waste it,
You will only turn to dust."

Then the young girl disappeared.

by Rabi'ah al Adawiyya

Source: islamicedfoundation.com

My Beloved

My Beloved

My peace, O my brothers and sisters, is my solitude,
And my Beloved is with me always,
For His love I can find no substitute,
And His love is the test for me among mortal beings,
Whenever His Beauty I may contemplate,
He is my "mihrab", towards Him is my "qiblah"
If I die of love, before completing satisfaction,
Alas, for my anxiety in the world, alas for my distress,
O Healer (of souls) the heart feeds upon its desire,
The striving after union with Thee has healed my soul,
O my Joy and my Life abidingly,
You were the source of my life and from Thee also came my ecstasy.
I have separated myself from all created beings,
My hope is for union with Thee, for that is the goal of my desire.

by Rabi'ah al Adawiyya
Source: islamicedfoundation.com

The sad saga of Helen Smith

Nov 15, 2009
WAN A. HULAIMI: Elsewhere
The sad saga of Helen Smith finally laid to rest

2009/11/15

Wan A. Hulaimi

LAST Monday, Ron Smith in a red scarf that glowed even in the soft light of fall leant on a stick and walked his slow paces, troubled and stooped by the weight of his illness and years.

He had come to bury his past, and his future too, if I may add.

I can say that I know more than a little of what was going on in his head.

I met Ron at the height of his determination, and of his family's great sadness.

His spirit was strong and his mind dark, with thoughts that no parent should be made to bear; but he was reinforced by arguments and how things just did not add up.

He had been a policeman, and there was method in his search, some say madness, but Ron pushed back the pain and tears and drove down the 190 miles from Guiseley in his native Yorkshire to London and parked his Volvo beneath the window of our flat.

You may still remember nurse Helen Smith. She was the nurse who was found dead in the street below the balcony of the flat of a British surgeon in Jeddah, the morning after an alleged drunken party.

Not far from her was another body, of Dutch tugboat captain Johannes Otten, impaled on some railing spikes.

Last Monday, Ron and his family members gathered together to say their last farewell to poor Helen, 30 years after Jeddah.

Stooped and slow now with age and a serious kidney ailment, Ron said what he had always believed: that his daughter did not fall from the balcony during a drunken embrace but was murdered, and even probably raped.

There's little chance now of his going round the world again to prove that.

As I sat him in our lounge, this bluff man with piercing eyes, he gave a long, detailed description of how Helen's injuries were inconsistent with her fall. I tried to look for pain, a hint even in his voice, of the sadness that was within.

His eyes twinkled with the light of his driven self -- he was tough, this former policeman from Guiseley, and it was this toughness that had borne this awesome weight.

He spoke sometimes with a humour that I could not fathom of how ridiculous the establishment version of the story was; in grief he had his balance yet, the man who was to keep the body of his daughter frozen for 30 years still had a sense of fun and a sense of place.

I was taken to Ron by a man who is also now sadly dead. Paul Foot was probably his generation's best, a serious and a funny man from a colourful family that had contributed a lawyer, a diplomat and a politician to Britain, all famous in their turn.


Paul was in the left of left of British politics, but he was also a founder member of the satirical magazine Private Eye, that strange mix of serious journalism and debunking fun.

When I spoke to Paul he said I must meet Ron Smith as there was a Malaysian twist in the narrative. In fact it was Paul's exposures in Private Eye that held Ron back from burying Helen.

In his book The Helen Smith Story, Paul mentioned Wan Hulaimi, "a young Malaysian journalist". (Well, I told you we are going back now more than a few weeks.) And that was the small part, a very small part that I played in the story of Helen Smith.

Ron wanted to go to Malaysia to follow the trail of Helen's death. In Jeddah she had become friendly with a Malaysian nurse and there were questions that Ron wanted to ask him that he felt could shed more light on what had happened that night in the Jeddah flat.

The story so far had all the trappings of intrigue: CIA divers and British intelligence, a prominent British surgeon and his fun-loving wife, and allegedly one or two men in flowing white robes. And now it was the turn of a Malaysian male nurse.

I managed to get Ron a return ticket to Kuala Lumpur where he stayed for over a week.

There he spoke to this newspaper as I had asked him to, and the Ron Smith story ran and ran as they say, for almost a week, the longest and most detailed story yet in any newspaper of Helen's mysterious death.

Ron was elated when he came back, more determined than ever to fight on and to keep Helen's body in cryonic storage until the day came for another post-mortem that would prove him right.

Last Wednesday, Ron and his family members met again in Yorkshire, to scatter the ashes of Helen Smith, on Ilkla Moor Bar't'at (on Ilkey Moor without a hat) as they sing in the Yorkshire dialect...

Then we shall ha' to bury thee,

Then we shall ha' to bury thee,

On Ilkla Moor bar't'at.

Wan A. Hulaimi also writes under the pen name of Awang Goneng. He can be reached at elsewhere@columnist.com

Source: nst.com.my

Poker champion - World Series

Joe Cada, left, and Darvin Moon, right, go heads up during the World Series of Poker final table with dealer Jeannette Rivera at the Rio Hotel & Casino Monday, Nov. 9, 2009 in Las Vegas.


Joe Cada, a 21-year old poker professional from Michigan, poses with bundles of cash after winning $8.5 million in prize money at the World Series of Poker tournament at the Rio hotel-casino in Las Vegas, Nevada November 9, 2009. Darvin Moon, a 45-year-old logger from Maryland, came in second place.

Editor: Fang Yang
Source: www.chinanews.com.cn/Reuters photo
My source: news.xinhuanet.com

Like to see a lot of money but halal will come first -rb



Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

Homely Beast

Original title: Beast in their own home
Submitted by pekwan on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Girls allege their father abused them sexually
Muzliza Mustafa
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 07:40:00

SHE was only nine when her father allegedly started to treat her as a sex slave to satisfy his bizarre sexual needs.

It went on for two years until the Standard Five pupil of a primary school in Setapak could not stand the pressure of keeping the secret and spilled it all to her school teacher recently.

Accompanied by her teacher and her mother, the girl — who is now 11 — went to the Wangsa Maju police station to lodge a report against her father yesterday.

The girl, the elder of two children, claimed her father had not only abused her for no apparent reason, but also
forced her to perform oral sex on him.

She claimed that the father, an ex-serviceman in his 40s, also sodomised her repeatedly since she was nine at their flat in Setapak.

The latest assault was a few months ago when the mother, a factory worker in her 30s, was at work.

The sad part was, she was not the only victim. The girl said her younger sister, now aged nine, was also used
by their father to satisfy his “bizarre” sexual needs.

All the incidents are said to have occurred at their flat in Setapak while their mother was out at work.

A police source said the father, who was discharged from duty due to disciplinary problems, had not only sexually abused his daughters but had also hit and kicked them for no apparent reason.

It is not known when the father, who currently works as a bouncer, was discharged from duty.

It is learnt that the mother knew what was happening but never brought the matter to police attention.

The source said the girls have been sent to hospital for checkup and observation after their statements were
recorded by a Kuala Lumpur police headquarters Rape, Sexual and Child Abuse Investigation Unit investigation
officer last night.

Police would be contacting Welfare Department officers for further action. Sentul police deputy chief Supt Zainuddin Ahmad, confirmed that a report had been lodged on the case but declined to give further details.

Source: mmail.com.my/

Hamster's Villa

French architect Frederic Tabary poses inside the "Hamster's Villa", imagined and conceived by Tabary together with architect Yann Falquerho, during an interview with Reuters in Nantes, western France, November 8, 2009. For 99 euros ($148) a night, guests can sleep in the 18th century caretaker's room designed to give the impression of living in a hamster's cage, complete with a 2-metre wheel to run in. Picture taken November 8, 2009.


French architect Frederic Tabary poses inside the "Hamster's Villa", imagined and conceived by Tabary together with architect Yann Falquerho, during an interview with Reuters in Nantes, western France, November 8, 2009.

Original title: Having a taste of sleeping in "Hamster's Villa"
Photos:Xinhua/Reuters
Editor: Lu Hui
Source: news.xinhuanet.com/english

Baboon baby to be bottle fed

Kira, a 5-day-old baboon, is fed by an employee of the Royev Ruchey Zoo in Russia's Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk November 5, 2009. Kira's mother refused to feed her cub and now it will be bottle fed.


Kira, a 5-day-old baboon baby, is fed by an employee of the Royev Ruchey Zoo in Russia's Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk November 5, 2009. Kira's mother refused to feed her cub and now it will be bottle fed.

Photos: Xinhua/Reuters Photo
Editor: Fang Yang Source: news.xinhuanet.com/

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the social anthropologist, who died on October 31 aged 100, was one of the dominating postwar influences in French intellectual life and the leading exponent of Structuralism in the social sciences; his work inspired a school of academic followers in the 1960s and 1970s in disciplines ranging from music to literary criticism.

His originality was to interpret myth and custom not so much as the distinct creation of a particular culture, but as different expressions of images universally innate to homo sapiens. In elucidating these common mental structures he relied less on meticulous observation in the field than upon a series of imaginative insights which were often greeted with scepticism in the pragmatic Anglo-Saxon world.

The true meaning of myth, Lévi-Strauss held, lay below the narrative surface, and was to be detected by considering the changes apparent in different versions of the same legend. In his own metaphor, he studied the relationship between various narratives rather as a musician would seek to weave together different instrumental parts to form a symphony.

Though comprehensiveness was the very essence of Lévi-Strauss’s approach, his researches were concentrated chiefly on various tribes of Amerindians. He maintained that the structure of the human mind was more easily elicited in “cold” primitive societies, where the existing way of life was not questioned, than in the “hot” societies of the developed world, where the pursuit of progress undermined stability.

Lévi-Strauss’s principal anthropological monument is Les Mythologiques, a four-volume work which demands from the reader both penetration and faith. The first volume, Le Cru et le Cuit (1964), presents the origins of cookery as a paradigm of the transition from nature to culture that runs through a legion of myths.

The second volume, Du Miel aux Cendres (1966), considers honey and tobacco as ritual embodiments of fundamental antitheses pre-existing in the brain.

The third volume, L’Origine des manières de table (1968), and the fourth, L’Homme Nu (1971), concentrate on the North American Indians. The same myths, Lévi-Strauss insisted, manifested themselves in both North and South America, but “from one region to the other an interior transformation evolved deep within them”.

Whereas for the South American Indians the advent of civilisation is symbolised by the passage from the raw to the cooked, for the North Americans it is represented by the invention of ornmanents and clothing, and eventually by the introduction of trade.

The text of Les Mythologiques was littered, though hardly illuminated, by all manner of visual aids — diagrams, arrows, charts of the night sky, fragments of algebra, and an array of small boxes shaded with hatchings and cross-hatchings.

While Lévi-Strauss’s capacity for creating complex intellectual jigsaws was never in question, it was not always obvious what relation his hypotheses bore to reality. The English anthropologist Sir Edmund Leach drew attention to the Frenchman’s propensity for discovering exactly what he was searching for.

“Any evidence, however dubious,” Leach complained, “is acceptable so long as it fits with logically calculated expectations; but wherever the data runs counter to the theory, Lévi-Strauss will either bypass the evidence or marshal the full resources of his powerful invective to have the heresy thrown out of court.”

Lévi-Strauss himself accepted the limits of his method. “The idea behind structuralism”, he explained, “is that there are things we may not know but we can learn how they are related to each other. This has been used by science since it existed and can be extended to a few other studies — linguistics and mythology — but certainly not to everything.

“The great speculative structures are made to be broken. There is not one of them that can hope to last more than a few decades, or at most a century or two.”

The son of a painter, Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels on November 28 1908. When the First World War broke out he was sent to Paris to live with his grandfather, a rabbi, in whose household he soon lost his faith. He was educated at the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris and at the Sorbonne, where he read Law and Philosophy. As a teenager he became interested in Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism.

After completing his studies, Lévi-Strauss taught in secondary schools. Among his colleagues was Simone de Beauvoir, who remembered him warning his students “in a deadpan voice, and with a deadpan expression, against the folly of the passions”.

In 1934 Lévi-Strauss became Professor of Sociology at Sao Paulo University, which had recently been founded on a French initiative. During his four years with the faculty he travelled extensively in the interior of Brazil, visiting the communities of Caduveo and Bororo Indians.

In 1938 he resigned his Chair and embarked on a year-long expedition, funded by the French government, up the Rio Machado to the wilds of Matto Grosso, where he studied the Nambikwara and Kawahib tribes and encountered another, previously quite unknown to anthropology, whose members referred to themselves as Mundé.

The Second World War saw Lévi-Strauss as a French army officer, responsible for liaison with the British. After the fall of France he escaped to the United States, where he took up a visiting professorship at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In this post he was greatly influenced by Roman Jakobson, who had developed a mathematical view of language which stressed not so much the meaning of individual words as the overall configuration of the grammatical relationships between them.

Back in France after the war, Lévi-Strauss published La Vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara (1948), and Les Structures Elémentaires de la parenté (1949). In opposition to “Functionalist” anthropologists, who argue that kinship systems are a response to differing patterns of social organisation, Lévi-Strauss contended, in the second book, that kinship systems reflected underlying principles of the human mind. A basic principle, he sought to demonstrate, was an unconscious – and therefore fundamental – aversion to incest (the incest taboo) which was interlinked with systems of exchange and gift-giving throughout the ages.

These in turn were symbolic gestures that underwrote the whole network of relationships that were the basis of human society. A work of enormous erudition if, at times, almost ludicrous complexity, it established Lévi-Strauss as one of the foremost anthropologists of his generation.

In 1950 he became director of the laboratory of Social Anthropology at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at Paris University, and in the early 1950s did field work in East Pakistan and the South Pacific. His short study, Race et Histoire, was published by Unesco in 1952.

Then, three years later, came his masterpiece, Tristes Tropiques — translated into English by John Russell as A World on the Wane (1961).

This was an intellectual autobiography concentrated on his pre-war travels in Brazil. Lévi-Strauss described how the book sprang out of depression: “So I said, 'I had enough, I shall never come to anything, so I can write very freely about whatever passes through my head.’ I wrote without scientific scruples, without worrying whether the result was scientifically sound. The result was a sort of wild fantasy.”

In the book, Lévi-Strauss formulated his distinction between “Nature” and “Culture” based on language and man’s unique ability to see an object not merely as itself, but also as a symbol. It was in this ability to symbolise, a characteristic shared by all humans, no matter how primitive, that he sought the unconscious similarities of the human mind.

These “universal attributes” were the inspiration for Lévi-Strauss’s intellectual quest. But in detecting them, he was also accused of reductionism. Even his severest critics would not deny his importance, however, his immense influence beyond his chosen field, or the sense of intellectual excitement he was able to generate. This lay in his highly original interpretation of data, in the poetic scope of his associations and in his methodology, which was always capable of shedding new light on established facts even if his conclusions were sometimes subject to doubt.

By the time that Tristes Tropiques was published the tribes about which he wrote had largely succumbed to famine and disease, a fate which the author seemed to regard as a foreshadowing of that in store for Western culture.

“I knew that, slowly and steadily, humanity was breeding such situations as a sick body breeds pus,” he wrote. “It was as if our race was no longer able to cope with its own numbers... War and defeat had accelerated a universal process, and facilitated the establishment of an infection that would never again disappear from the face of the world.”

In 1958 Lévi-Strauss issued a collection of his essays under the title Anthropologie Structurale (1958, English translation 1964). Two years later he took over the Chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France; his inaugural lecture was published in Britain as The Scope of Anthropology (1967).

La Pensée Sauvage — the English translation of which, The Savage Mind, appeared in 1966 — was one of his most important books. It presented the complex totemism prevailing among Australian aborigines as the expression of the world view that orders and explains their everyday lives.

Lévi-Strauss’s later works included Anthropologie Structurale Deux (1967), La Voie des Masques (1975, English translation 1983), Le Regard Eloigné (1983), Paroles Données (1984), La Potière Jalouse (1985) and Histoire de Lynx (1991).

The sage’s views were never predictable. Asked to deliver the 1971 Unesco lecture on the causes of racism, he took the opportunity, even while condemning all forms of discrimination, to attack anti-racist propaganda for undermining “ancient individualism” and for driving humanity towards the insipid goal of a world civilisation.

He was appointed a member of the Légion d’honneur in 1964 and elected to the Academie Française in 1973, taking Henri de Montherland’s chair. In 1978 President Giscard d’Estaing solicited Lévi-Strauss’s aid to ensure that France remained “a lighthouse for the world in the evolution of ideas and societies, as it has done throughout its history”.

Lévi-Strauss did so by continuing to give lectures, write articles and indulge his love of music. His attempt to create a scientific basis for the study of culture was recognised by the Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique, which awarded him its Gold Medal, the highest French scientific distinction.

Though bound to Paris, Lévi-Strauss preferred to live in Burgundy. “I like trees, I like plants, I like animals,” he explained. “But I am not very fond of humans.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss married first, in 1932, Dina Dreyfus; secondly, in 1946, Rose Marie Ullmo — they had a son; and, thirdly, in 1954, Monique Roman, with whom he had another son.

Fully adopted from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/