Eclipse Spooks Superstitious

Indian astrologers are predicting violence and turmoil across the world as a result of this week’s total solar eclipse, which the superstitious and religious view as a sign of potential doom.

But astronomers, scientists and secularists are trying to play down claims of evil portent in connection with Wednesday’s natural spectacle, when the moon will come between the Earth and the sun, completely obscuring the sun.

In Hindu mythology, the two demons Rahu and Ketu are said to “swallow” the sun during eclipses, snuffing out its life-giving light and causing food to become inedible and water undrinkable.

Pregnant women are advised to stay indoors to prevent their babies developing birth defects, while prayers, fasting and ritual bathing, particularly in holy rivers, are encouraged.

Shivani Sachdev Gour, a gynaecologist at the Fortis Hospital in New Delhi, said a number of expectant mothers scheduled for caesarian deliveries on July 22 had asked to change the date.

“This is a belief deeply rooted in Indian society. Couples are willing to do anything to ensure that the baby is not born on that day,” Gour said.

Astrologers have predicted a rise in communal and regional violence in the days following the eclipse, particularly in India, China and other Southeast Asian nations where it can be seen on Wednesday morning.

Mumbai astrologer Raj Kumar Sharma predicted “some sort of attack by (Kashmiri separatists) Jaish-e-Mohammad or Al-Qaeda on Indian soil” and a devastating natural disaster in Southeast Asia.

An Indian political leader could be killed, he said, and tension between the West and Iran is likely to increase, escalating into possible US military action after September 9, when fiery Saturn moves from Leo into Virgo.

“The last 200 years, whenever Saturn has gone into Virgo there has been either a world war or a mini world war,” he told AFP.

It is not just in India that some are uneasy about what will transpire because of the eclipse.

In ancient China they were often associated with disasters, the death of an emperor or other dark events, and similar superstitions persist.

“The probability for unrest or war to take place in years when a solar eclipse happens is 95 percent,” announced an article that attracted a lot of hits on the popular Chinese web portal Baidu.com.

Sanal Edamaruku, president of the Indian Rationalist Association, dismissed such doomsday predictions.

“Primarily, what we see with all these soothsayers and astrologers is that they’re looking for opportunities to enhance their business with predictions of danger and calamity,” he told AFP.

“They have been very powerful in India but over the last decade they have been in systematic decline.”

Astronomers and scientists are also working to educate the public about the eclipse.

Travel firm Cox and Kings has chartered a Boeing 737-700 aircraft to give people the chance to see the eclipse from 41,000 feet (12,500 metres).

Experts will be on board to explain it to passengers, some of whom have paid 79,000 rupees (1,600 dollars) for a “sun-side” seat on the three-hour flight from New Delhi.

The eclipse’s shadow is expected to pass over the aircraft at 15 times the speed of sound (Mach 15), said Ajay Talwar, president of the SPACE Group of companies that promotes science and astronomy.

“It’s coming in the middle of the monsoon season. On the ground, there’s a 40 percent chance of seeing it in India. On the aircraft you have almost a 90 percent chance of seeing the eclipse,” he added.

Siva Prasad Tata, who runs the Astro Jyoti website, straddles the two worlds.

“There’s no need to get too alarmed about the eclipse, they are a natural phenomenon,” the astrologer told AFP.

But he added: “During the period of the eclipse, the opposite attracting forces are very, very powerful. From a spiritual point of view, this is a wonderful time to do any type of worship.

“It will bring about good results, much more than on an ordinary day.”

by Phil Hazlewood Phil Hazlewood
AFP

700 NYC School Teachers Paid to do Nothing

Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that’s what they want to do.

Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its “rubber rooms” — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.

The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues — pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year.

“You just basically sit there for eight hours,” said Orlando Ramos, who spent seven months in a rubber room, officially known as a temporary reassignment center, in 2004-05. “I saw several near-fights. `This is my seat.’ `I’ve been sitting here for six months.’ That sort of thing.”

Ramos was an assistant principal in East Harlem when he was accused of lying at a hearing on whether to suspend a student. Ramos denied the allegation but quit before his case was resolved and took a job in California.

Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.

“It is extremely difficult to fire a tenured teacher because of the protections afforded to them in their contract,” spokeswoman Ann Forte said.

City officials said that they make teachers report to a rubber room instead of sending they home because the union contract requires that they be allowed to continue in their jobs in some fashion while their cases are being heard. The contract does not permit them to be given other work.

Ron Davis, a spokesman for the United Federation of Teachers, said the union and the Department of Education reached an agreement last year to try to reduce the amount of time educators spend in reassignment centers, but progress has been slow.

“No one wants teachers who don’t belong in the classroom. However, we cannot neglect the teachers’ rights to due process,” Davis said. The union represents more than 228,000 employees, including nearly 90,000 teachers.

Many teachers say they are being punished because they ran afoul of a vindictive boss or because they blew the whistle when somebody fudged test scores.

“The principal wants you out, you’re gone,” said Michael Thomas, a high school math teacher who has been in a reassignment center for 14 months after accusing an assistant principal of tinkering with test results.

City education officials deny teachers are unfairly targeted but say there has been an effort under Mayor Michael Bloomberg to get incompetents out of the classroom. “There’s been a push to report anything that you see wrong,” Forte said.

Some other school systems likewise pay teachers to do nothing.

The Los Angeles district, the nation’s second-largest school system with 620,000 students, behind New York’s 1.1 million, said it has 178 teachers and other staff members who are being “housed” while they wait for misconduct charges to be resolved.

Similarly, Mimi Shapiro, who is now retired, said she was assigned to sit in what Philadelphia calls a “cluster office.” “They just sit you in a room in a hard chair,” she said, “and you just sit.”

Teacher advocates say New York’s rubber rooms are more extensive than anything that exists elsewhere.

Teachers awaiting disciplinary hearings around the nation typically are sent home, with or without pay, Karen Horwitz, a former Chicago-area teacher who founded the National Association for the Prevention of Teacher Abuse. Some districts find non-classroom work — office duties, for example — for teachers accused of misconduct.

New York City’s reassignment centers have existed since the late 1990s, Forte said. But the number of employees assigned to them has ballooned since Bloomberg won more control over the schools in 2002. Most of those sent to rubber rooms are teachers; others are assistant principals, social workers, psychologists and secretaries.

Once their hearings are over, they are either sent back to the classroom or fired. But because their cases are heard by 23 arbitrators who work only five days a month, stints of two or three years in a rubber room are common, and some teachers have been there for five or six.

The nickname refers to the padded cells of old insane asylums. Some teachers say that is fitting, since some of the inhabitants are unstable and don’t belong in the classroom. They add that being in a rubber room itself is bad for your mental health.

“Most people in that room are depressed,” said Jennifer Saunders, a high school teacher who was in a reassignment center from 2005 to 2008. Saunders said she was charged with petty infractions in an effort to get rid of her: “I was charged with having a student sit in my class with a hat on, singing.”

The rubber rooms are monitored, some more strictly than others, teachers said.

“There was a bar across the street,” Saunders said. “Teachers would sneak out and hang out there for hours.”

Judith Cohen, an art teacher who has been in a rubber room near Madison Square Garden for three years, said she passes the time by painting watercolors of her fellow detainees.

“The day just seemed to crawl by until I started painting,” Cohen said, adding that others read, play dominoes or sleep. Cohen said she was charged with using abusive language when a girl cut her with scissors.

Some sell real estate, earn graduate degrees or teach each other yoga and tai chi.

David Suker, who has been in a Brooklyn reassignment center for three months, said he has used the time to plan summer trips to Alaska, Cape Cod and Costa Rica. Suker said he was falsely accused of throwing a girl’s test sign-up form in the garbage during an argument.

“It’s sort of peaceful knowing that you’re going to work to do nothing,” he said.

Philip Nobile is a journalist who has written for New York Magazine and the Village Voice and is known for his scathing criticism of public figures. A teacher at Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill School of American Studies, Nobile was assigned to a rubber room in 2007, “supposedly for pushing a boy while I was breaking up a fight.” He contends the school system is retaliating against him for exposing wrongdoing.

He is spending his time working on his case and writing magazine articles and a novel.

“This is what happens to political prisoners throughout history,” he said, alluding to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “They put us in prison and we write our `Letter From the Birmingham Jail.’”

By KAREN MATTHEWS, Associated Press Writer

Teen Cracks 300-Year-Old Math Mystery

A 16-year-old Iraqi immigrant living in Sweden has cracked a maths puzzle that has stumped experts for more than 300 years, Swedish media reported on Thursday.

In just four months, Mohamed Altoumaimi has found a formula to explain and simplify the so-called Bernoulli numbers, a sequence of calculations named after the 17th century Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, the Dagens Nyheter daily said.

Altoumaimi, who came to Sweden six years ago, said teachers at his high school in Falun, central Sweden were not convinced about his work at first.

“When I first showed it to my teachers, none of them thought the formula I had written down really worked,” Altoumaimi told the Falu Kuriren newspaper.

He then got in touch with professors at Uppsala University, one of Sweden’s top institutions, to ask them to check his work.

After going through his notebooks, the professors found his work was indeed correct and offered him a place in Uppsala.

But for now, Altoumaimi is focusing on his school studies and plans to take summer classes in advanced mathematics and physics this year.

“I wanted to be a researcher in physics or mathematics; I really like those subjects. But I have to improve in English and social sciences,” he told the Falu Kuriren.

By AFP

When Winning The Lottery Turn into a ‘Curse’

In today’s rough economic times, the dream of winning the lottery looms large. This week, somebody’s dream came true. The lucky winner hasn’t come forward yet, but various news outlets are reporting that someone in Winner, South Dakota (yes, that’s the town’s real name), has a ticket worth $232 million. The numbers, in case you have a time machine and want a cut of the winnings, were 5, 6, 12, 16, 21, and 7 (Powerball).

News that there is a flimsy piece of paper worth close to a quarter of a billion bucks inspired a mad rush to the Search box. Though they were nowhere near as popular as the “lotto winner” queries, searches on “lottery curse” were conducted by more than a few. Indeed, there seems to be many times when someone wins millions of dollars only to suffer misfortune shortly thereafter.

An ABC article from 2007 highlights some of the more glaring incidents. A couple won $25 million and saw their marriage end just months later. In 2002, another man won millions of dollars but “his life was consumed by hardship,” including the death of his granddaughter and the end of his marriage. Most bizarrely, a 1996 lotto winner was kidnapped and killed by his sister-in-law and an accomplice.

But before you get too depressed, let’s get back to today’s news: A very lucky $232 million ticket. Queries on “powerball numbers may 27 2009,” “powerball winner,” and “powerball winnings” posted immediate gains.

Also surging among the greedy and curious: “biggest lotto win ever.” While $232 million is nothing to sneeze at, it’s far from the biggest jackpot ever. That title belongs to a $390 million jackpot from 2007. (Although, according to MegaMillions.com, that prize was shared between two winners. Sheesh, only $195 million each? Why even bother?)

Here’s hoping the winner of this recent windfall manages to do what so many past winners have tried to accomplish: Do some good while continuing to live a happy life. Oh, and don’t forget to pay your taxes.

by Mike Krumboltz

Man Without Fingerprints Held at US Airport

A Singapore cancer patient was held for four hours by immigration officials in the United States when they could not detect his fingerprints — which had apparently disappeared because of a drug he was taking.

The incident, highlighted in the Annals of Oncology, was reported by the patient’s doctor, Tan Eng Huat, who advised cancer patients taking this drug to carry a doctor’s letter when traveling to the United States.

The drug, capecitabine, is commonly used to treat cancers in the head and neck, breast, stomach and colorectum.

One side-effect is chronic inflammation of the palms or soles of the feet and the skin can peel, bleed and develop ulcers or blisters — or what is known as hand-foot syndrome.

“This can give rise to eradication of fingerprints with time,” explained Tan, senior consultant in the medical oncology department at Singapore’s National Cancer Center.

The patient, a 62-year-old man, had head and neck cancer that had spread but responded well to chemotherapy. To prevent the cancer from recurring, he was put on capecitabine.

“In December 2008, after more than three years of capecitabine, he went to the United States to visit his relatives,” Tan wrote.

“He was detained at the airport customs for four hours because the immigration officers could not detect his fingerprints. He was allowed to enter after the custom officers were satisfied that he was not a security threat.”

Tan said the loss of fingerprints is not described in the packaging of the drug, although chronic inflammation of the palms and soles of feet is included.

“The topmost layer … is the layer that accounts for the fingerprint, that (losing that top layer) is all it takes (to lose a fingerprint),” Tan told Reuters.

“Theoretically, if you stop the drug, it will grow back but details are scanty. No one knows the frequency of this occurrence among patients taking this drug and nobody knows how long a person must be on this drug before the loss of fingerprints.”

By Tan Ee Lyn
Reuters