The " Mother Teresa's" Stamp [ 602 ]

Atheist Group Blasts Postal Service for Mother Teresa Stamp

Thursday, January 28, 2010
By Diane Macedo

USPS.com

The Mother Teresa Stamp is set to be issued Aug. 26, 2010, on what would have been her 100th birthday.

An atheist organization is blasting the U.S. Postal Service for its plan to honor Mother Teresa with a commemorative stamp, saying it violates postal regulations against honoring "individuals whose principal achievements are associated with religious undertakings."

The Freedom from Religion Foundation is urging its supporters to boycott the stamp — and also to engage in a letter-writing campaign to spread the word about what it calls the "darker side" of Mother Teresa.

The stamp — set to be released on Aug. 26, which would have been Mother Teresa's 100th birthday — will recognize the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize winner for her humanitarian work, the Postal Service announced last month.

"Noted for her compassion toward the poor and suffering, Mother Teresa, a diminutive Roman Catholic nun and honorary U.S. citizen, served the sick and destitute of India and the world for nearly 50 years," the Postal Service said in a press release. "Her humility and compassion, as well as her respect for the innate worth and dignity of humankind, inspired people of all ages and backgrounds to work on behalf of the world’s poorest populations."

But Freedom from Religion Foundation spokeswoman Annie Laurie Gaylor says issuing the stamp runs against Postal Service regulations.

"Mother Teresa is principally known as a religious figure who ran a religious institution. You can't really separate her being a nun and being a Roman Catholic from everything she did," Gaylor told FoxNews.com.

Postal Service spokesman Roy Betts expressed surprise at the protest, given the long list of previous honorees with strong religious backgrounds, including Malcolm X, the former chief spokesman for the Nation of Islam, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister and co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

"In fact we honored Father Flanagan in 1986 for his humanitarian work. This has nothing to do with religion or faith," Betts told FoxNews.com.

Click here to see other controversial U.S. stamps.

Gaylor said the atheist group opposed Father Flanagan's stamp but not those for King and Malcolm X, because she said they were known for their civil rights activities, not for their religion.

Martin Luther King "just happened to be a minister," and "Malcolm X was not principally known for being a religious figure," she said.

"And he's not called Father Malcolm X like Mother Teresa. I mean, even her name is a Roman Catholic honorific."

Gaylor said Mother Teresa infused Catholicism into her secular honors — including an "anti-abortion rant" during her Nobel Prize acceptance speech — and that even her humanitarian work was controversial.

"There was criticism by the end of her life that she turned what was a tiny charity into an extremely wealthy charity that had the means to provide better care than it did," Gaylor said. "...There's this knee jerk response that everything she did was humanitarian, and I think many people would differ that what she was doing was to promote religion, and what she wanted to do was baptize people before they die, and that doesn't have a secular purpose for a stamp."

But the Postal Service said the commemorative stamp has nothing to do with Mother Teresa's religion.

"Mother Teresa is not being honored because of her religion, she's being honored for her work with the poor and her acts of humanitarian relief," Betts told FoxNews.com.

"Her contribution to the world as a humanitarian speaks for itself and is unprecedented," he added.

Some atheists, too, spoke out against the group's objections, including Bruce Sheiman, author of "An Atheist Defends Religion." He said the Freedom from Religion Foundation is being "hypocritical" and really "stepping over the line."

"Clearly there are a number of things that you can point to and say it's religious and a number of things you can point to and say that it's areligious," Sheiman told FoxNews.com. "So it really doesn't make sense to protest it."

He said the Foundation's campaign stems from concern that the abundance of humanitarian work done by believers will overshadow that done by atheists.

"Like billboards and bus ads, this is just part of the whole campaign that they're doing to make non-belief more visible," he said.

Gaylor said the foundation's only concern is the "other things that deserve to be commemorated but are not because the people behind it didn't have the power of the Catholic church."

"It's enormously difficult to get them," she said, referring to commemorative stamps, "and people have huge campaigns, and to me this speaks of the power of the Roman Catholic Church in hierarchy.

"They want to make her a saint and this is part of the PR machine."

The Foundation is encouraging its supporters to purchase the new stamp honoring the late actress Katharine Hepburn, who was an atheist, instead — or any of the other 2010 stamps, which include cartoonist Bill Mauldin, singer Kate Smith, filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, painter Winslow Homer and poet Julia de Burgos.

Betts said that despite the Foundation's accusations and letter-writing campaign, "The response to Mother Teresa has been overwhelmingly in favor of this stamp."

He said the Mother Teresa stamp, like other stamp subjects, will "stand the test of time, reflect the cultural diversity of our nation and have broad national appeal."

NASA's Constellation program [ 601 ]

White House to Outsource Space Flight

FOXNews.com.,, Updated January 27, 2010

NASA's Constellation program should replace our aging fleet of space shuttles, which make their last flight in July. But reports indicate Obama may eliminate the program entirely, leaving the U.S. relying on Russian vehicles for space transportation.

NASA, courtesy of Scott Andrews

A bow shock forms around the Ares I-X test rocket traveling at supersonic speed during its Oct. 28, 2009 launch from the Kennedy Space Center, Fla.

NASA's Constellation program should replace our aging fleet of space shuttles, which make their last flight in September. But reports indicate Obama may eliminate the program entirely, leaving the U.S. relying on Russian vehicles for space transportation.

Under the Constellation umbrella, NASA has been building the Ares I and Ares V launch vehicles, the Orion crew capsule and the Altair Lunar Lander. The space agency successfully test-launched Ares 1-X on Oct. 28, 2009. The spacecraft were supposed to be perform a variety of missions, from International Space Station resupply to lunar landings.

SLIDESHOW: The Ares Rocket

But according to a report in the Orlando Sentinel, the forthcoming budget — which the president will announce in detail during tonight's State of the Union address — will include no funding for lunar landers, no moon bases, and no Constellation program at all.

Once the shuttle completes its final mission, NASA will have no way of its own to bring men into space or supplies to the Space Station — arguably a hole in our ability to remain competitive in the field of space exploration.

UK -Northern Ireland sharing talks....[ 600 ]

Northern Ireland power sharing talks end in tension

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said a crunch summit to save Northern Ireland's power sharing government had failed to secure a settlement but insisted a "pathway" to an agreement had been laid.

BBC Published: 2:28PM GMT 27 Jan 2010

Prime Minister Gordon Brown with his Irish counterpart Brian Cowen : PA

Speaking alongside Irish premier Brian Cowen, Mr Brown said three days of intensive negotiations between the main parties had seen progress made on the row surrounding stalled devolution of policing powers.

But he said the party leaders had now been given 48 hours to try to hammer out a deal. If they fail to do so, Mr Brown said, the British and Irish governments would publish their own plans for moving the process forward.

Mr Brown said: "We believe we have proposals that make for a reasonable deal on devolution of policing and justice, we believe we have proposals that make for a reasonable settlement on all the outstanding issues."

But he added in regard to the 48-hour deadline: "If we judge that insubstantial progress has been made we will publish our own proposals."

Sinn Fein has threatened serious consequences for the devolved administration without a swift transfer of law and order powers.

But the DUP has insisted it will only give the go-ahead when other outstanding issues, such as the management of controversial parades, are resolved.

Moments before the premiers wound up proceedings, tensions between the two main parties apparently reached boiling point at a round table plenary session, with Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness venting his anger that the summit had failed to secure a settlement.

Afterwards Mr Brown said he believed proposals to devolve policing powers to Stormont in May could be brought to a vote in the Assembly as early as March.

But he said the other issues had to be settled.

Mr Brown said: "The importance of these decisions for the future of Northern Ireland cannot be under-estimated. With leadership and courage they can be achieved."

IATA:Passenger traffic dropped in 2009...[ 599 ]

Iata says airlines suffered 'worst year' in 2009

Iata expects : more passengers in 2010 BBC ,,12:29 GMT, Wednesday, 27 January 2010 The year 2009 saw the biggest decline in air passenger traffic in the post-war era, according to the International Air Transport Association (Iata). "In terms of demand, 2009 goes into the history books as the worst year the industry has ever seen," said the group's boss Giovanni Bisignani. Passenger traffic dropped by 3.5% from a year earlier, while freight traffic fell 10.1% as the downturn hit demand. However, figures for December showed a rise in traffic of 1.6% on a year ago. 'Spartan year' Despite the improvement at the end of 2009, Iata said 2010 would be a tough year for airlines the world over. "The industry starts 2010 with some enormous challenges," Mr Bisignani said. "The worst is behind us, but it's not time to celebrate. Adjusting to 2.5 to 3.5 years of lost growth means that airlines face another spartan year, focused on matching capacity carefully to demand and controlling costs." African airlines suffered the most in 2009, with passenger demand down 6.8%. Asia-Pacific and North American carriers saw demand fall by 5.8%, while European airlines suffered a 5% fall in demand. But Middle Eastern carriers saw passenger demand climb 11.3%, while Latin American airlines experienced a 0.3% rise. Price wars Iata has estimated that airlines collectively lost $11bn (£6.8bn) last year, and stand to lose a further $5.6bn this year. Analysts said that price cuts designed to attract customers would continue to eat into airlines' profits. "Continued fare wars between airlines mean that yields and profitability will be low. Airlines are struggling to fill their airplanes and discounted ticketing has done little to alleviate the pressures on their costs," said independent airline analyst Saj Ahmad. "Capacity has come out of the global airline system, but until a few airlines perhaps exit the industry through bankruptcy or mergers, there is still a very long road until we see serious stability, let alone growth."

China, the Yellow River Delta...[ 598 ]

Yellow River Delta

Picture from February 13, 1989

China’s Huang He (Yellow River) is the most sediment-filled river on Earth. Flowing northeast to the Bo Hai Sea from the Bayan Har Mountains, the Yellow River crosses a plateau blanketed with up to 300 meters (980 feet) of fine, wind-blown soil. The soil is easily eroded, and millions of tons of it are carried away by the river every year. Some of it reaches the river’s mouth, where it builds and rebuilds the delta.

The Yellow River Delta has wandered up and down several hundred kilometers of coastline over the past two thousand years. Since the mid-nineteenth century, however, the lower reaches of the river and the delta have been extensively engineered to control flooding and to protect coastal development. This sequence of natural-color images from NASA's Landsat satellites shows the delta near the present river mouth at five-year intervals from 1989 to 2009.

Between 1989 and 1995, the delta became longer and narrower along a southeast-bending arc. In 1996, however, Chinese engineers blocked the main channel and forced the river to veer northeast. By 1999, erosion and settling along the old channel caused the tip of the delta to retreat, while a new peninsula had formed to the north.

The new peninsula thickened in the next five-year interval, and what appears to be aquaculture (dark-colored rectangles) expanded significantly in areas south of the river as of 2004. By 2009, the shoreline northwest of the new river mouth had filled in considerably.

This may be the outcome that the engineers were anxious to achieve: the land northwest of the newly fortified shoreline is home to an extensive field of oil and gas wells. Their protection is a primary concern.

Although levees, jetties, and seawalls allow officials to slow erosion and direct the flow of the river, other challenges to protecting the delta’s natural wetlands and its agricultural and industrial development remain. Water and sediment flows to the delta have declined dramatically since the 1970s, due to both reduced rainfall and explosive urban and agricultural demand for water upstream.

In the 1990s, the river frequently ran dry well before reaching the delta.

These low- and no-flow periods are a huge problem in the lower reaches of the river and the delta.

They severely damage wetlands and aquaculture and worsen the river’s already severe water pollution problem. Ironically, they also increase the flood risk because when flows are low, sediment fills in the riverbed. The river becomes shallower and higher in elevation. In places, the river is already perched above the surrounding floodplain by as much as 10 meters (30 feet).

A levee breach during a high water event could be devastating.