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A French fast food chain announced on Tuesday it would almost triple its line of halal hamburger restaurants because sales had doubled in a trial that sparked a heated debate about the integration of Muslims.

The Quick chain of 358 restaurants around France said it would boost its halal-only outlets to 22 on Wednesday after the trial in eight areas with a strong Muslim population also saw a doubling of customers and a rise in the amounts they spent. Here’s their communique in French.

(Photo: Halal-only Quick restaurant in Roubaix, northern France, February 18, 2010/Pascal Rossignol)

Quick, which is a challenger to the U.S. hamburger chain McDonald’s and runs franchises in seven other countries including Belgium, Russia and Algeria, said the move was purely commercial.

Quick came in for criticism earlier this year when its trial, which sold only halal beef and replaced bacon with smoked turkey, hit national headlines. Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire said ethnic marketing like this was against French values.

(Photo: Halal label at halal food fair in Paris, March 30, 2010, REUTERS/Regis Duvignau)

But the growing halal market is now twice as large as that for organic food in France, whose five million Muslims make up Europe’s largest Islamic minority. A survey this year estimated the French halal market at 5.5 billion euros ($6.95 billion) annually with growth expected at 20 percent a year as the Muslim middle class expands.

UPDATE: Municipal leaders in Strasbourg later described the decision to switch a Quick outlet there to all-halal as “inopportune.” Mayor Roland Ries and Serge Oehler, a deputy for the neighbourhood where the outlet stands, said in a statement: “City policy aims to support diversity, not sectarianism.”

Read the full story here.

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My kids have been in school for three weeks already, but the rest of the neighborhood just started yesterday.  Because the money is so tight this year, most of the bus stops have been eliminated and my kids have to walk about four times further this year than in previous years.  This works out fine for me because my kids are getting older (6,8,9) and there are three of them to watch out for each other, but still, for the first two and a half weeks of school I took the long walk with them until they felt really comfortable getting to the bus on their own.

Yesterday was only the third time I let them walk to the school bus without me, they were totally over me and totally confident about the route. It’s great to watch them build confidence and independence.  Right? (more…)

New Yorkers have very mixed impulses about the proposed Islamic center two blocks from Ground Zero.

According to a new poll from Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., New Yorkers agreed—by a 54% to 40% margin—with this statement: “that because of American freedom of religion, Muslims have the right to build the mosque near Ground Zero…”

At the same time, though, respondents agreed—by a 53% to 39% margin—with this statement: “that because of the sensitivities of 9/11 relatives, Muslims should not be allowed to build the mosque near Ground Zero.”

In the end, poll respondents prefer that the developers CHOOSE to move the site, which makes sense if you consider the above results.

By a large 71% to 21% percent majority, voters agree “that because of the opposition of Ground Zero relatives, the Muslim group should voluntarily build the mosque somewhere else. (italics mine)”

Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, explains: “The heated, sometimes angry, debate over the proposal to build a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero has New York State voters twisted in knots, with some of them taking contradictory positions depending on how the question is asked.”

He also says: “Overwhelmingly, across all party and regional lines, New Yorkers say the sponsors ought to voluntarily move the proposed mosque to another location.”

According to the poll, New Yorkers  (meaning across the state) agree that Islam is a peaceful religion, by a 54-21 margin (with 24% undecided).

The “peaceful” numbers vary across the state: 62-21 in NYC; 51-25 in the Burbs; and 49-28 upstate.

Finally, respondents overwhelmingly said—71  to 22 percent—that Attorney General Andrew Cuomo should investigate the financing of the proposed Islamic center.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi has upset some Italians during his current visit to Italy. On Sunday and Monday, Gadhafi held a series of private meetings with 800 Italian women and a small group of men all recruited online by an agency, Hostessweb. They were all paid by the Libyan government to attend. At the meetings, Gadhafi lectured the attendees on Islam, handed out copies of the Quran, and apparently converted a handful of women. At the meetings, Gadhafi told participants that Islam should become the religion of Europe.

Both abortion and contraception take place in a semi-public manner because they must be procured in public. Even contraception, which is used in the privacy of one's own home, must be purchased in public and is advertised in public. The public aspects cause the involvement of others in a public manner, making control and even restrictions easier. What if this could all change? Abortion and contraception are defended on the basis of privacy, so what if they really were completely private?

 

Read Article: Abortion & Contraception: What if They Really Were Private?

Abortion & Contraception: What if They Really Were Private? originally appeared on About.com Agnosticism / Atheism on Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 at 15:00:00.

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Immaculate was kind to share with me the photos she took of the 2010 Western Washington Baha'i Summer School. If you were a kid, what memories would you have of such an experience? If you are a parent, what memories will you have of contributing to your child's sense of being a Baha'i were you to ensure that your family went every year. How I regret not having taken my children every summer to Baha'i summer school. -gw




Letter of 5 November 1949
http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/se/UD/ud-292-printable.html

Posted via email from Baha'i Views

One of the hardest things to explain to people who have never worked in a real newsroom is why some events are news at one moment in time and in one location, but a similar story is not news at some other time in some other location.

Read more on Another sanctuary at Ground Zero…

Use pokeberries to make natural ink.
Image © Patti Wigington 2010 A reader asks, "I do a lot of spellwork that involves writing on parchment, and I'm a little tired of using a plain old pen. I know there are inks available on the market, but I'd like to make my own if possible. Any suggestions?"

Actually, yes! This time of year is perfect for gathering pokeberries, or pokeweed, which grows in many parts of North America. The berries are super-toxic, but they produce a lovely pinkish-purple ink that you can use in your workings. The ink does eventually fade to brown if it's exposed to sunlight, but that's not such a bad thing - rumor has it that the Declaration of Independence was written with pokeberry ink! How to Make Pokeberry Ink

Addendum: Thanks to reader Makarios for clearing up the question of the Declaration of Independence -- turns out the finalized version that is sitting in the National Archives was actually written with iron-gall ink. However, it's possible that earlier drafts were done in a less permanent method. Thanks, Makarios, for the link!

Readers, have you made your own ink using magical ingredients? What suggestions and ideas can you offer?

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Go Green Ganesha - G3 is a Social and Environmental non - Profit cause initiated by Oh! Wonderful Emotions and Friends Dreamz to save our...

A quarter-century since Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's watershed Report on the state of the church twenty years after the close of Vatican II, this morning the Holy See announced that B16's first book-length interview since becoming Pope will appear before year's end.

In a Roman Noon statement, the director of the Holy See Press Office, Jesuit Fr Federico Lombardi, relayed that the pontiff sat for a full week of on-record conversations last month with Peter Seewald -- the German journalist whose prior no-holds-barred sessions with the then-CDF prefect were released in 1996 under the title Salt of the Earth, with a 2002 sequel, God and the World.

An atheist on his first encounters with Ratzinger, Seewald has credited Benedict with his conversion. Prior to the latest Seewald chats, the lone interview B16 has conducted since his 2005 election was an hourlong 2006 sitdown at Castel Gandolfo with four German reporters in advance of his homecoming trip to Bavaria... that said, one can't leave out the numerous question-and-answer sessions with groups of clerics, children and students which have become one of the German Pope's most preferred outlets for floating ideas and reaching beyond the bubble of the Papal Apartment.

Of course, the latest interview comes at a crucial moment in Benedict's five-year reign, following this year's European deluge of revelations of clergy sexual abuse and cover-ups perpetrated by church officials, with attempts being made to lay the scandals' trail at the Pope's doorstep. While no indicators of the sessions' content have yet emerged, amid the fallout of a crisis where, it could be said, the only voice missing was his, the backdrop's emergence in the conversations, even tangentially, would appear to be conspicuous by its absence.

On a related note, the third Seewald chat won't be the only new Ratzinger release hitting the shelves over the coming months: the Pope's second volume of his Jesus of Nazareth series is tipped for a Lenten release, most likely in March.

While 2007's first edition of the historical chronicle (Benedict's response to the Da Vinci Code craze) was released in English by Doubleday, the coming book is seeing a papal return to friendly confines -- Jesus II will be published by Ignatius Press, the San Francisco-based house that shepherded the pontiff's pre-papal works into the Anglophone world.

SVILUPPO: According to a German report picked up by the National Catholic Register's Edward Pentin, the book has the working title Das Licht Der Welt -- "The Light of the World."

PHOTO: AP

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I’ve mumbled to myself how interesting it is that New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, not known for his strong defense of property rights, has been so good on the issue when it comes to the proposed Cordoba mosque project. This Wall Street Journal story attempts to show a similar discrepancy on Bloomberg’s religious views. I think it fails because it confuses personal religious views with civic duty. Here’s how it begins:

Read more on Religion on the sleeve…

Iraq ranks fourth in the Middle East on the Index of Political Freedom from The Economist’s Intelligence Unit — behind Israel, Lebanon and Morocco, but ahead of Jordan, Egypt, Qatar and Tunisia. Nearly two-thirds of Iraqis say they want a democracy, while only 19 percent want an Islamic state.

In short, there has been substantial progress on the things development efforts can touch most directly: economic growth, basic security, and political and legal institutions. After the disaster of the first few years, nation building, much derided, has been a success. When President Obama speaks to the country on Iraq, he’ll be able to point to a large national project that has contributed to measurable, positive results.

Of course, to be honest, he’ll also have to say how fragile and incomplete this success is. Iraqi material conditions are better, but the Iraqi mind has not caught up with the Iraqi opportunity.

Read it all.

For decades, the intellectual descendants of Darwin have pored over ancient bones and bits of fossils, trying to piece together how fish evolved into man, theorizing about the evolutionary advantage conferred by each physical change. And over the past 10 years, a small group of academics have begun to look at religion in the same way: they've started to look at God and the supernatural through the lens of evolution.

In the history of the world, every culture in every location at every point in time has developed some supernatural belief system. And when a human behavior is so universal, scientists often argue that it must be an evolutionary adaptation along the lines of standing upright. That is, something so helpful that the people who had it thrived, and the people who didn't slowly died out until we were all left with the trait. But what could be the evolutionary advantage of believing in God?

[Jesse] Bering is one of the academics who are trying to figure that out. In the years since his mother's death, Bering has done experiments in his lab at Queens University, Belfast, in an attempt to understand how belief in the supernatural might have conferred some advantage and made us into the species we are today.

Read or listen to it all.

Following the formal announcement and a press conference with the local media, Bishop Stephen spent the day touring the Diocese visiting some of his future colleagues and parishioners.

After meeting Diocesan Office staff and others he visited a farm in Ramsey. He then went to Hampton, the site of a new church, for lunch with others from the Diocese. In the afternoon he met with a headteacher from one of our church schools, and visited a small innovative hi-tech business and one of the Universities in Cambridge. His day concluded at Ely Cathedral where he joined worshippers for Evening Prayer.

Read it all and enjoy the pictures.

There has been some talk about younger evangelicals being more liberal than their elders, but that idea stems largely from the extent to which younger evangelicals tend to be more "green" than their elders -- they are more supportive of environmentalism. Unfortunately, liberalism on environmental issues does not extend to liberalism on anything else. On the contrary, younger evangelicals are just as conservative and authoritarian as their elders on personal moral issues. Read more...

Young Evangelicals: Illiberal to the Core originally appeared on About.com Agnosticism / Atheism on Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 at 12:00:40.

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You may find some information on this here--read it all.

It is one part of a very full fall.

Today's Washington Post reports that law and religion scholar Steven P. Goldberg died last week. Goldberg was a professor at Georgetown University's Law Center since 1977 and has written a number of books on the intersection of law, science and religion, including Bleached Faith: The Tragic Cost When Religion is Forced Into the Public Square, (Stanford Univ. Press, 2008).

In today's San Francisco Chronicle, New York University Professor Jonathan Zimmerman calls attention to an interesting parallel between the persistent rumors that President Barack Obama is a Muslim and rumors faced by Abraham Lincoln. Here is an excerpt:
Just as Obama's enemies call him a closet Muslim, Lincoln's opponents hinted that he was ... a closet Catholic. And in each case, the reason was exactly the same: Millions of Americans feared, derided or despised these faiths....

The whispers about Lincoln's religion began right after he was elected president. The "evidence" was simple, and altogether spurious. Jesuits were active in Lincoln's region of Illinois, so he must have been baptized by them. Oh, and Lincoln had once defended a prominent priest in a slander lawsuit.

.... Lincoln also denounced the bigotry and prejudice of the Know-Nothings, America's most vehemently anti-Catholic political party. "If the Know-Nothings get control," Lincoln warned in 1855, "the Declaration of Independence will read: All men are created equal except for Negroes, foreigners, and Catholics."

And here's why it mattered: Across the political spectrum, including Lincoln's Republican Party, Protestant Americans assumed that Catholics were disloyal to the Republic. "We" respected individual rights, liberties, and freedoms; but "they" took orders from the Vatican. After a Pew poll earlier this month revealed that 18% of Americans thought Obama is Muslim and 43% did not know his religious affiliation (see prior posting), Obama told NBC interviewer Brian Williams on Sunday that this there is a "network of misinformation" in today's "new-media era." (Los Angeles Times).