Raiméis

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone has broken the church’s silence and spoken out about Dan Brown’s best seller The Da Vinci Code branding it “shameful and unfounded”. Tomorrow the Cardinal will host a seminar on the subject “Story Without History” to rebut the claims of the book. The book itself [roughtly: a story about the Church suppressing the "truth" that Jesus had a child with Mary Magdalene] has been a huge hit worldwide and has even spawned 10 related books and a film!

The Irish Language Commissioner, Sean O’Cuirreain has reportedly called for a review of how Irish is taught in primary and secondary schools. His advice is contained in his first annual report as Commissioner.
“Reports this morning said Sean O’Cuirreain had advised that such a review was essential if the State was truly committed to promoting the Irish language.”
If the state was committed to promoting the Irish language such reviews would be done 20 years ago and new systems implemented! Sean is spot on, after learning Irish for approximately 13 years few of us can speak it fluently, we should be ashamed and the government should be bloody ashamed of our poxy education system especially the way Irish [and other languages I might add] is taught.
I am constantly amazed at the fluency level Finnish people achieve in English after just a few years of school. I even know some people who never finished school (roughly our secondary school) yet have fluent English. What are they doing so right that we are doing so wrong? How is it that we learn the language for 2-3 times longer yet can’t achieve close to the same level of proficiency? Is it simply students attitude to the language? Teachers attitude? Society’s? Or is it attitude at all but just an education system that is failing us? Our useless shaggin government needs to get the finger out.
I have to go for a coffee to get the blood pressure down.

I was at Cebit a few years ago, very interesting experience but over the two days I was there we barely scratched the surface such is the wealth of exhibitors to see. BBC has taken a snapshot of the event and highlighted some of the more interesting products on display this year. Sony Ericsson’s bluetooth rolling camera caught my eye, as did Samsungs SGH-i300 – its 3Gb of harddrive is long overdue [what use is an MP3 playing phone when you can only store 5 songs on it? *cough Nokia*]. It’s well worth a visit if you are ever able to make it.

Interesting one here, Apple has won it’s legal battle to force three bloggers to reveal the source who gave them information on unreleased Apple products. The bloggers posted information about Apple’s Asteroid product on the PowerPage, Apple Insider and Think Secret and Apple have been fighting since then to find the leak in their company. With the result this week Apple can now get access to the bloggers emails records. The Electronic Frontier Foundation are quite concerned about the ruling as it could have much wider implications.

Via a Slugger discussion on a South African Police Chief Robert McBride [yes, there is an Irish connection] I discovered Africa’s self-proclaimed ‘premier hard news website’ African Crisis, and within those pages attitudes which shocked and astounded me. It’s worth taking a look just to see the sort of people which exist.

Interesting one here from Mexico where the 1,100 strong police force of the Nezahualcoyotl district of Mexico City have been ordered to read at least one book every month or lose any chance of promotion! Currently a substantial proportion of the force are semi-literate with about 20% not even educated beyond primary level. With a repuration for being lazy, incompetent and corrupt the idea is that by reading books such as Don Quixote or The Labyrinth of Solitude, for example, they will become better people and better police officers! It’s certainly a novel idea (fuckit I couldn’t resist), it would be interesting to see how it improves their situation.

Apparantly the IRA offered to shoot the killers of Robert McCarthy. Disgusting – that’s the only think I can think of to say. It’s astounding.

Believe it or not Bono has been suggested for the role of head of the World Bank by the LA Times and US Treasury Secretary John Snow has said he would not rule out the idea of Bono making the shortlist of potential candidates!! It’s also believed that Bono might be among the nominees for a Nobel Peace Prize for international social justice efforts. 2005 could well be a good year for the bauld Bono.

I really didn’t think this sort of thing still went on these days. A tribunal is ongoing in Reading in which a Galway woman is claiming under the Race Discrimination Act that she suffered racial abuse at work. It makes interesting reading. Sad to see this sort of thing still happens, no doubt the number of such cases are small but anyway one case is one too many.

The war in Iraq is certainly taking it’s toll. Latest figures show 1502 US troops killed in Iraq so far, with approximatly 11,000 wounded, half of them being able to return to duty. Sustainable by military standards, how about politically?
In A poll a year ago 23% of Americans believed that the war in Iraq was a mistake. Now that figure is 47%!