, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20201024IPR90107/
Scientologists Share Their Stories of How They Stay Active & Positive While They Get Through the Pandemic Safe and Well
“Scientologists @ home” showcases the many people across the globe who are staying safe, staying well and thriving in life.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES, October 28, 2020 /EINPresswire.com/ — Pamela whips up waffles with a protein-packed punch, topping off her creation with a healthy dose of fresh berries. Think of it as healthy comfort food.
After a hiatus, Giuseppe’s deli is back in business. He’s serving up the same pasta and antipasto, with a sanitation station on the side. Through this challenging time, whether behind a mask or not, he’s still smiling.
Brad is a martial arts master. He is also a teacher. Since he can’t work with his students in person, he’s guiding them online.
What do they have in common? They are Scientologists and they are sharing their stories of how to stay upbeat and make the most of these challenging times. They also share their favorite Scientology books and explain how they give them the tools to stay extroverted and happy.
New videos are published daily on Scientology/Daily Connect on the Scientology website and cover a broad gamut of interests and locales but each is a microcosm of the way the pandemic has affected us all.
Scientology/Daily Connect was created as part of a program to ensure we all make it through the pandemic safe and well. As soon as the pandemic began, the most effective measures were researched for ensuring the safety of Scientology staff and parishioners, and these were implemented internationally as protocols under the direction of Scientology ecclesiastical leader Mr. David Miscavige.
To make this prevention information broadly available, the Church of Scientology created more than a dozen videos and three educational booklets: How to Keep Yourself & Others Well, How to Protect Yourself & Others with a Mask & Gloves and How to Prevent the Spread of Illness with Isolation. These are all available in 21 languages on the How to Stay Well Prevention Resource Center on the Scientology website.
Since May, Scientologists have distributed 5 million copies of these educational booklets in communities around Scientology Churches and Missions across the globe.
Northland Rescue Helicopter introduces now chopper Oscar in fundraising book
/cloudfront-ap-southeast-2.images.arcpublishing.com/nzme/2JNCC7KCMDXC7X3Y5CXPDVRSSI.jpg?w=696&resize=696,0&ssl=1 "Northland Rescue Helicopter introduces now chopper Oscar in fundraising book")
Peter Davies, Vanessa Furze, Josh McInnes, and St Francis Xavier Catholic School’s Lachie Ross, Chloe Mainland, Thorfinn Mainland, Kate Mainland, Karien Schutte, Madison Macmillan with the new book.
SUP261020NADoscarbook.JPG The Northland Rescue Helicopter’s fifth book Oscar’s Wild ‘n’ Windy Rescue
The Northland Rescue Helicopter is releasing its fifth children’s story book in time for its 2020 annual fundraising appeal with all proceeds going to the Northland Emergency Services Trust.
Oscar’s Wild ‘n’ Windy Rescue follows brother and sister duo Ollie and Tia as they explore Cape Reinga when some wild weather and daring antics puts them in a spot of bother.
Luckily, the Northland Rescue Helicopter’s new chopper, Oscar, Chief Pilot Tama and Paramedic Poppy are not too far away.
The fifth instalment in the rescue service’s series of books follows the success of Cheeky Charlie to the Rescue, Mighty Mike to the Rescue, Lima Leaps to the Rescue, and Juliet to the Rescue. All books are illustrated by Auckland artist Tony McNeight.
Oscar’s Wild ‘n’ Windy Rescue has been launched during the Northland Rescue Helicopter’s annual fundraising campaign which runs until mid-December.
Vanessa Furze, general manager at Northland Rescue Helicopter, said like many charities the rescue chopper service relies on community events to raise funds throughout the year and due to Covid-19 disruptions the majority of these were cancelled.
“This year’s fundraising appeal is more important than ever. The air ambulance service is not fully funded by the government and requires additional funding from the Northland community,” Furze said.
Since established in 1988 Northland Rescue Helicopter has flown more than 21,000 people to safety. In September alone, the service attended 116 missions. This year is on track to overtake 2019 with 779 rescue missions so far, compared to 702 this time last year.
“With the influx of holiday makers to Northland and locals taking breaks in their own backyard, the summer is our busiest time of year and demand for our choppers is likely to be higher than ever,” Furze said.
The new book introduces new chopper Oscar and incorporates elements of te reo as an educational component as well as reflecting the influence and importance of Māori in Northland.
“Setting the book in Cape Reinga is also a chance to showcase yet another beautiful part of Northland as well as educate children about the historical and cultural importance of the region in a fun and exciting way,” she said.
“Like the previous books, we expect Oscar’s Wild ‘n’ Windy Rescue will be just as popular with parents as it will be with kids. Not only are the books a way to raise money for Northland’s dedicated air ambulance, they are also an opportunity to raise awareness about the lifesaving work our team does.”
The story also has an underlying safety message about the importance of sticking to the tracks and being cautious of Northland’s unpredictable weather conditions, especially when near the water.
Buy Oscar’s Wild ‘n’ Windy Rescue at www.nest.org.nz/bookstore with all proceeds going to Northland Rescue Helicopter.
More FM is also holding a 12-hour All-Day Breakfast show on Friday, October 30, with hosts John, Flash and Toast locked in its Northland studio from 6am to 6pm to raise funds for the Northland Rescue Chopper.
Churches condemn ‘savage’ killing of three in Nice church attack
Pope Francis has expressed his sorrow and offered prayers for a “savage attack” in at a church in the French city of Nice in which three people were killed in a knife attack described as a “terrorist incident” and which was denounced by the French president.
The attack took place in the Basilica of Notre Dame on Oct. 29 in which an elederly person’s throat was slit.
It occurred in the city of on the Mediterranean coast during a time of mounting heightened tensions in France over radical Islamism, secularism and freedom of speech.
President Emmanuel Macron denounced the “Islamist terrorist attack” at the Notre-Dame basilica after visiting the scene in the southern city, the BBC reported.
World Council of Churches interim general secretary Rev. Ioan Sauca expressed solidarity with the churches and people of France, and condolences to the families of the victims,
“Following the horrific killing of teacher Samuel Paty earlier this month, these atrocities demand a renewed search for an effective response to the phenomenon of violent religious extremism, not only in France, but in the many countries around the world that continue to be afflicted by it each day.”
“There can be no legitimate religious justification for this brutality, and any and all attempts to justify such attacks on religious grounds must be categorically denounced.”
One elderly victim who was praying was “virtually beheaded”. Another woman and a man also died. A suspect was shot and detained shortly afterwards.
The sexton, a lay member of staff responsible for the upkeep of the church, aged in his late 40s or early 50s and with two children had his throat cut while preparing for morning mass, said Gil Florini, a Catholic priest in Nice, Reuters news agency reported.
MAN BEHEADED
The main beheaded an elderly woman, and badly wounded a third woman, according to a police source.
The attack came just weeks after Samuel Paty, a high school teacher, was beheaded in a terrorist attack in Paris.
Two other attacks were carried ou on the same day in France and Saudi Arabia.
A man was shot dead in Montfavet near the southern French city of Avignon after threatening police with a handgun.
Separately, a guard was attacked outside the French consulate in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. A suspect was arrested and the guard taken to hospital.
“Informed of the savage attack that was perpetrated this morning in a church in Nice, causing the death of several innocent people, His Holiness Pope Francis joins in prayer with the suffering of the families who were affected and shares their sorrow,” the pontiff said in a message to Bishop André Marceau of Nice.
“Condemning such violent acts of terror in the strongest possible way, he assures the Catholic Community of France and all the French people of his closeness and he calls for unity,” said the message.
Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi spoke of “Islamo-fascism” and said the suspect had “repeated endlessly ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is greatest).”
Police did not initially impute a motive for the NIce attack.
It followeed days of protests in some Muslim-majority countries triggered by President Macron’s defence of the publication of cartoons that depicted the Prophet Mohammed which in turn trigged calls in some countries for a boycott of French goods.
Four years ago Nice was wracked by another terror attack, on the Frnech national dday on July 14 when a Tunisian man drove ploughed his struck into crowds, killing 86 people.
What new operating system is Harapan offering?
The real issue here in Malaysia is that we have never got over our original sin of race and religion. S Thayaparan
Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.”
– US author James Bovard
COMMENT | What the recently failed half-past-six emergency declaration has demonstrated is that the Malay political establishment is in total disarray. The fact that Muhyiddin Yassin loyalists – from the diverse political parties that make up PN or whatever it is called – are calling for ceasefire and cooperation indicates that the gang from the Sheraton Move are in trouble. This means Malaysia is in trouble.
All over the world, political systems and institutions are going through the wringer because what this Covid-19 pandemic is doing is ruthlessly pointing out the flaws in systems of governance. This could have been a time of reset and a reshaping of priorities, but here in Malaysia, we continue to meander and have become numb to the antics of the political class.
DAP senator Liew Chin Tong thinks that Malaysia needs a new operating system (OS), but what he considers a new reality that requires a new OS – a divided electorate, coalition building and bipartisanship – are merely baseline features of messy democracies all over the world.
The real issue here in Malaysia is that we have never got over our original sin of race and religion. The fact that the two biggest parties, in terms of representation and voter share, cannot find common ground because both sides use race and religion (in their own ways) to gin up their respective base, indicates that this country will never move forward…
Thoughts on International Religious Freedom Day From the Church of Scientology Nashville
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‘We must avoid a tragedy’: European Council head on Covid-19 mistakes
The email dropped late on Tuesday night: “A word from the president.”
<p class="no_name">This was a missive from <a class="search" href="/topics/topics-7.1213540?article=true&tag_person=Charles+Michel" rel="nofollow">Charles Michel</a>, the <a class="search" href="/topics/topics-7.1213540?article=true&tag_organisation=European+Council" rel="nofollow">European Council</a> president who has taken to sharing his thoughts in the form of a newsletter. A former Belgian prime minister, Michel is the man who has chaired the meetings of the European Union’s national leaders since December, with the task of nudging them towards consensus. Since March, that has meant a lot of pandemic co-ordinating: on re-opening borders, on sponsoring vaccines, on helping the economy.</p>
<p class="no_name">The subject of his letter? It’s all gone wrong.</p>
<p class="no_name">“Within the space of just a few weeks, the situation has escalated from worrying to alarming. Now we must avoid a tragedy,” Michel wrote. “This was not how things were supposed to turn out.”</p>
<p class="no_name">It comes after a week in which 1.1 million new Covid-19 infections were logged in <a class="search" href="/topics/topics-7.1213540?article=true&tag_location=Europe" rel="nofollow">Europe</a> alone. An average of 1,000 Europeans died of the virus each day, a rise of one third compared to the week before. Hospitals across the continent began warning that they had no beds left, and that too many staff were sick with the virus to care for the patients they had.</p>
<p class="no_name">How had this happened?</p>
<p class="no_name">“When in late spring we succeeded in drastically slowing the speed at which Covid-19 was spreading, the priority became the recovery of economic, social and cultural life,” Michel wrote.</p>
<aside class="related-articles--instream has-3"/>
<p class="no_name">“This choice needed to be backed up by a robust testing and tracing policy. . . At European level, this plan of action has not achieved the desired results.”</p>
<p class="no_name">In other words, once citizens brought infections down to low levels by staying at home for months, their governments failed to put in place adequate measures to stop them rising again.</p>
<h4 class="crosshead">Deceptive feeling</h4><p class="no_name">Instead, leaders pinned their hopes on the rapid appearance of a vaccine and focused on addressing social and economic concerns, Michel wrote. On top of this, “fatigue and a deceptive feeling of getting back to normal” allowed the virus to begin circulating again.</p>
<p class="no_name">Nowhere was this deceptive feeling of normality more evident than in <a class="search" href="/topics/topics-7.1213540?article=true&tag_location=Brussels" rel="nofollow">Brussels</a> itself.</p>
<p class="no_name">Early on, top officials and political organisations in the city reverted to old habits of presenteeism and began requiring staff to be present in the office again, even for jobs that are easily done remotely. It was normal to spot MEPs having working lunches with groups of colleagues inside busy restaurants. National delegations began holding events for journalists that could only be covered in person, in rooms with windows that do not open. Objections – and there were objectors – were steamrolled over.</p>
<p class="no_name">It should have come as little surprise that infections among officials and their staff shot up from September on. It seemed every few days a new prominent person tested positive. Top officials were in and out of quarantine like a jack-in-the-boxes. It began to disrupt meetings: first a meeting of national leaders had to be delayed because Michel himself was in isolation, then attendees began pulling out at short notice.</p>
<p class="no_name">Nevertheless, a “business as usual” mood prevailed. This was “living with the virus”, we were told. Hand sanitiser was ubiquitous. Rapid tests were available – for the VIPs. Everyone wore masks, albeit along with the self-defeating practice, endemic among politicians, of removing them in order to speak.</p>
<p class="no_name">It was common to hear wishful talk that perhaps the virus had somehow become weaker or that people had perhaps become immune. There was a widespread sense of invulnerability. Politicians and the successful people who surround them do not view themselves as frail. “Even if I got it,” many seemed to reason, “I would surely be a mild case.”</p>
<h4 class="crosshead">‘No one is safe’</h4><p class="no_name">This changed when Sophie Wilmès went into intensive care. Wilmès was prime minister of <a class="search" href="/topics/topics-7.1213540?article=true&tag_location=Belgium" rel="nofollow">Belgium</a> until October 1st, and led the country through the pandemic, attending all those meetings with Michel and her EU counterparts. She was serving as foreign minister and deputy prime minister in Belgium’s new government when she was admitted to hospital. She tweeted: “no one is safe” from the virus.</p>
<p class="no_name">That someone aged 45 with no apparent medical conditions can end up in intensive care should not have been news to Brussels. And yet the bubble was still shaken that it had happened to one of their own. Simultaneously, the sheer number of infections was starting to strain even the highest levels. The European Commission revealed its testing service could now only cater for priority staff.</p>
<p class="no_name">Then chancellor <a class="search" href="/topics/topics-7.1213540?article=true&tag_person=Angela+Merkel" rel="nofollow">Angela Merkel</a> put her foot down. <a class="search" href="/topics/topics-7.1213540?article=true&tag_location=Germany" rel="nofollow">Germany</a> holds the rotating presidency of the EU Council. Two days ago a spokesman announced that all physical meetings – except for the absolutely essential – were off.</p>
<p class="no_name">The national leaders are to meet over video conference on Thursday. “The Covid-19 pandemic is intensifying across member states,” a letter convening the meeting read. “We are all facing renewed pressure on our societies, economies, healthcare systems and public morale.”</p>
<p class="no_name">On the agenda are testing, vaccines, and “the scope for facilitating mutual assistance between member states”. In plain English, what that last item means is: some member states are running out of hospital beds. Can anyone help?</p>
Column: Religion, politics and Mark Curran
Trump ally Robert Jeffress, a Southern Baptist pastor, has pronounced Democrats “a godless party.” In reality, two-thirds of Democratic primary voters have a religious affiliation, and Democrats showed no qualms about choosing a devout Catholic as their presidential nominee. But the party is open both to non-Christian believers and to nonbelievers — who, at a Republican convention, might have flashbacks to the Salem witch trials.
Glavin: On the death of Samuel Paty – Shouldn’t freedom of religion mean freedom from religion too?
The French school teacher’s brutal murder by a radical Islamist set off an outpouring of revulsion across the country. But somehow, several world leaders are attacking France’s president over it.
Samuel Paty was a quiet 47-year-old middle-school civics teacher at the Collège du Bois d’Aulne, in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, in the suburbs of Paris. He would walk to and from school from his second-floor apartment in nearby Eragny, where he lived alone with his five-year-old son. After class, he liked to play tennis. By all accounts passionately devoted to teaching, Samuel Paty was otherwise a man of temperate disposition, well-regarded by his students and by his colleagues.
That was just three weeks ago. Now, Paty’s name is coming up in blood-curdling slogans shouted in the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and in arguments and imbecilities erupting in Ankara, Riyadh, Islamabad and Tehran. Ambassadors have been summoned. Diplomats have been recalled. Tuesday this week was officially International Religious Freedom Day. If there was anything worth observing about it, it’s that religious freedom must mean freedom from religion, too, or it means nothing at all.
How Samuel Paty’s name ended up in all of this is a horrible story.
At the Collège du Bois d’Aulne, Paty often used art as a medium for teaching the French national curriculum. In his lessons on the French republic’s rigorous commitment to secularism and free speech, Paty’s custom was to encourage class discussion by considering a pair of cartoons. They were the caricatures of the Muslim prophet Mohammed published in the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, where terrorists allied with al-Qaida, claiming the right to avenge a blasphemy, murdered 11 of the magazine’s staff on Jan. 7, 2015.
Ordinarily, Paty would invite students to look away or briefly leave the room if they preferred to be spared Charlie Hebdo’s vulgar depictions, and then the class would proceed, and debate would unfold in a civil way. No exceptional umbrage had been taken by anyone until this year. Earlier this month, lurid allegations about Paty’s class began to circulate on Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms.
Originating in rabble-rousing loudmouths associated with what it is usually called radical Islam, the online expressions of outrage veered into incitement to murder. Education ministry officials and the police were called in to investigate allegations of Paty’s “Islamophobia.” Disciplinary action was considered – then sensibly rejected outright.
Related
Paty filed a libel case against a particularly obnoxious parent who had made outrageous claims about him, and he took to avoiding the woods he usually walked in on his way home. But the light of day offered Paty no safety.
On Oct. 16, at around 5 p.m., an 18-year-old fanatic confronted Paty on a street near the school, killing him, beheading him and mutilating his body. The killer, a Chechen immigrant, broadcast pictures and videos of his atrocity on Twitter and Instagram, boasting that he’d “avenged the prophet.” He was later shot and killed in a confrontation with police.
Paty’s murder set off an outpouring of revulsion across France, where the right to blaspheme and the strict secularist doctrine of laïcité have been law for more than a century.
The Charlie Hebdo outrage was just one incident in a series of Islamist atrocities carried out across France, including the single deadliest terrorist event in French history, the November 2015 massacres at the Bataclan nightclub, the Stade de France and several restaurants and bars that left 131 people dead. The following year, a Tunisian jihadist drove a cargo truck through the crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, killing 86 people. Since then, the atrocities have been kept to a dull roar, two or three people stabbed to death here, three or four people shot and killed there. Since 2017, French police have broken up and thwarted 32 attempted terrorist operations.
Within hours of Paty’s beheading, French President Emmanuel Macron gave every impression that he’d had quite enough. His statement was terse and direct. “Ils ne passeront pas,” Macron said, borrowing from the anti-fascist rallying cry of the 1930s: They shall not pass. A dozen high-profile Islamists have been detained for questioning, and among other measures, Macron’s government is considering a law that would ban home-schooling, which is being used as a cover for “radical” Koranic schools.
And now, the hysterical propaganda that roiled around Paty’s class at the Collège du Bois d’Aulne has spread outward into the United Nations’ member states with the most dismal records in upholding religious freedom and freedom of conscience.
The clownish Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been busy transforming the secular Turkish republic into his own personal neo-caliphate, is questioning Macron’s mental acuity, calling for a boycott of French products, demanding an apology from France for allowing Charlie Hebdo to publish a saucy cartoon of him on its cover, and accusing Macron of subjecting French Muslims to “a lynch campaign similar to that against Jews in Europe before World War II.”
Not to be outperformed in stupidity, Pakistan’s national assembly passed a resolution damning Macron for his persistent refusal to condemn the depiction of Mohammed in cartoons, and demanding that the oafish Pakistani prime minister, Imran Khan, recall Pakistan’s ambassador to France. Fun fact: Pakistan doesn’t have an ambassador to France. He was reassigned to China three months ago.
For his part, Khan has issued an open letter to the Muslim leaders of the world to “collectively counter the growing Islamophobia in non-Muslim states, especially western states.” Khan has been quiet, meanwhile, about China’s internment-without-trial of perhaps two million Uighur Muslims, the forced sterilization of Uighur women, the systematic obliteration of centuries-old Muslim holy places in Xinjiang, and the reduction of the Uighurs and other Muslim minorities into captive populations in forced-labour gulags.
The uproar in the Arab countries has been muted and mixed. The Saudis and the Egyptians have reiterated the offence many Muslims take to the taboo of depicting Mohammed in any form, but have also expressed sympathy and solidarity with the people of France as they grieve the death of Samuel Paty.
As for French Muslims, the response is similarly mixed. Several French imams have declared Paty a shaheed, a martyr, and joined in laying wreaths in his honour at the Collège du Bois d’Aulne.
In his statement observing the International Day of Religious Freedom, Canada’s foreign affairs minister, François Philippe-Champagne, said this: “As a multicultural, multi-faith and multi-ethnic society, Canada will continue to stand up for human rights, including the promotion and protection of freedom of religion or belief, at home and around the world.”
That would be nice. We might also stand up, for once, for the human right to be free of religious belief, and to be protected from religious bullies and fanatics, at home and around the world.
Terry Glavin is an author and journalist.
UN builds momentum for restoring forests as world enters key decade for ecosystems
The world has made considerable progress in the past decade, according to the new edition of FAO‘s international forestry journal Unasylva, entitled Restoring the Earth – the next decade, since 63 countries, subnational governments and private organisations have already committed to restoring 173 million hectares, and regional responses are making significant advances in Africa and Latin America.
Meet the challenge
The goal is to meet the “Bonn Challenge” – the world’s largest voluntary forest landscape restoration initiative, which was launched in 2011. It is a global target to bring 150 million hectares of degraded and deforested lands into restoration by 2020 and 350 million by 2030.
“Societies worldwide will need to be convinced of the global restoration imperative by rational economic argument, compassion for current and future generations, and an emotional connection to nature”, according to the authors of one article in the journal.
The Unasylva issue looks at prospects for meeting the Bonn Challenge and mechanisms for measuring and accelerating progress, and examines work going on in China, Kenya, Brazil, Madagascar, Cambodia and Sao Tome and Principe.
It also discusses how restoration work can be scaled up, including various initiatives that are underway to increase funding and boost local stakeholders and technical assistance.
Enormous potential
“These have enormous potential to be mainstreamed because of their cost-effectiveness, adaptability, applicability to many ecosystems and contexts, and ease of implementation”, the opening editorial in Unasylva said.
Next year sees the start of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, a rallying call for the protection and revival of ecosystems all around the world, which runs from 2021 until the deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2030.
“There is a great opportunity for the Bonn Challenge process and its contributing regional platforms to provide a model for aspiring actors to embrace or reinforce restoration efforts in other ecosystems, such as wetlands and coral reefs,” senior officials at the International Union for Conservation of Nature wrote in one of the articles in Unasylva.
