Owner seeks lawyer as dog faces euthanasia – The Recorder

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The Athol man whose dog was ordered by the Athol Selectboard to be euthanized said he is working on getting money to hire a Beverly-based law firm that defends dogs and their owners.

Eric F. Zewiey, 53, of 399 Unity Ave., said he wants to recruit the legal services of Jeremy Cohen of Boston Dog Lawyers, but there is a $5,750 fee required.

The Athol Selectboard voted last month to have Lillie, Zewieys pit bull, put down by a veterinarian, as allowed by state law, after the dog reportedly bit a woman on Feb. 11, 2016, and then a 15-year-old boy who was out jogging on June 12. The recommendation for euthanization came from Animal Control Officer Jennifer Arsenault, who said Lillie has also attacked several dogs.

The vote came three months after the Selectboard deemed the dog dangerous and ordered it to be restrained at all times.

Zewiey had until July 31 to file an appeal in Orange District Court. He insists he made the deadline, but Clerk Magistrate Joella E. Fortier disputes this. Clerks at the courthouse said there is no record of any appeal for a dog euthanization order. They add they found Zewieys check but didnt know what it was for and returned it by mail.

Zewiey said the court returned to him the $195 fee, but he didnt understand why. Fortier said it is because there is no appeal before the court.

Contending he filed the required paperwork with the check that was returned, Zewiey said the town and court have mishandled his situation.

This is a matter of life and death, he said, adding that courthouse employees have not been helpful. This isnt a (expletive) parking ticket.

Zewiey referred to Lillie as a family member.

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Owner seeks lawyer as dog faces euthanasia - The Recorder

9 Childfree Women Explain What Life Is Like Without Kids …

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I was recently working in a caf when a dad strolled in with his toddler daughter. They set up shop at the table next to me and it immediately became 10 times harder to focus on my writing. Kid was cute. Like, unbearably soshe was around two years old with full cheeks, wide eyes, and a cap of caramel-colored hair that turned up at the ends. She excitedly announced every dog she saw outside, and she face planted into a croissant in a way that really spoke to me.

A few years ago, seeing such a blatant display of adorableness would have made me excited to be a mother . I always assumed I'd have children, and that little girl would have only reinforced that idea. But I've recently realized having children is a choice, not something that will inevitably happen to me without my say. While I'm still undecided, the following nine women have decided they're in the childfree camp . Although they're quite happy with their choices, they acknowledge that there are both upsides and downsides (just as there are if you decide to have kids). Here, they discuss how being childfree affects their lives, from dating to nosy strangers to reclaiming their sense of purpose.

"After my doctors told me it would be difficult to have kids due to a medical condition, I got used to the idea of it. The luxury of not having children has allowed me to always be on the go, and I can't imagine it any other way. But to be completely honest, sometimes I do wonder if it's the right choice. Then I see my friends who had kids young and couldn't do things like finish school, pursue their careers, or travel.Combined with my tainted view of relationships I see so many of my friends struggling to raise kids on their ownI'm satisfied with my decision." Katie S., 26

"I'm the classic 'I didn't like kids even when I was a kid' person. I spent several years looking for a doctor who would sterilize me, but no one would do it unless I was married and had two kids. Luckily, I'm married to a woman, so it's not an issue anymore. I've never doubted my decision.

People always expect me to love kids because I love doing things children enjoy like going to the petting zoo and doing silly craft projects. But you don't have to have a toddler to go to the science center, I promise you. And sometimes it seems like I don't check off the boxes to be a 'real' adult unless I've had a baby. Small talk at the bank will turn into a bank teller grilling me about my life choices and my sex life, which is frankly not a good sales technique.But now that I'm older, strangers are less aggressive about thrusting their viewpoints on me." Cori C., 31

"Eversince I knew it was a choice, I haven't wanted children.I've never had the desire on a biological level, and I wish the question 'Why DO you want them?' were just as valid in our society. What I do have is a deep desire to leave a legacy, but I find it very fulfilling to create that through my business and my creative projects.

In my 20s, I got a lot of 'Oh, you'll change your mind' from friends and even my ob/gyn . I'm finally at an age where people respect my decision, but there are some downsides. The worst part of it is feeling alienated from my best friends whose lives change when they have kids." Ciara P., 37

"When I was 13, I was helping out at a daycare that had kids from a few months to 10 years old. I experienced teething babies, installing car seats, first periods, and 'early onset teenager condition' (yes, I made that up). It showed me some of what parents go through on a regular basis, and I want no part of it.

If I tell people like my mother, a random nosy person who asks, or my ob/gyn that I'd rather remain childfree, I'm usually met with disbelief and then dismissed with, 'Wait until you get married. You'll change your mind.' The truth is that every once in a while, I do question whether it's the right decision. Then I just go curl up with a book and enjoy the childless silence." Jasmine W., 23

"When I was younger, my friends would talk about what they would name their babies. I'd come up with a list of names too, but I was really thinking about them for future pets. Don't get me wrongI have a tremendous amount of respect for people who decide to become parents. ButI don't want my worth as a woman to hinge on my choice to have or not have children.

Luckily, my support system including my husband, parents, and extended family have been respectful of my choice. I feel sad when other women get pushed into thinking that their decision not to have children isn't 'legitimate.' I want other women to know that it is OK to just be a woman, not a mother." Kristen M., 26

"There are so many things I want for myself that having children could inhibit: travel, luxury, freedom. Also, depression and alcoholism run strong in my family, and the world today is not so kind! My parents have always respected my decision not to have kids. My sister, on the other hand, feels strongly that I should have them. She often jokes that when I change my mind in my mid-40s, shell go to the fertility clinic with me or help me with adoption.Ive also met many ob/gyns who refuse to tie my tubes . Even my current one indicated that she would only consider it in two years when Im 38. "Jessica B., 36

"I knew I didn't want children when I was about 11 years old, although I briefly revisited the question in my late 20s when I had a partner who really ** wanted them. But my current partner tried to get a vasectomy when he was 15we're so on the same page.

My job deals with sex and sexuality, so I live a pretty alternative life. From what Ive seen of human nature, many people would not be kind to a child of mine. To fully do the work that I do, Ive chosen not to have a traditional family. Ive had people imply that Ive made the wrong life choices because it meant I wouldnt have kids. But its not a womans job to have children.

Also, I was born not that long after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After learning about that and Holocaust concentration camps, I was left with the overwhelming sense that we had created an increasingly dangerous world. When I browse Google News, I am actively grateful that I dont have to fear for my children." Carol Q., 58

"Around age 26, I realized having kids was a choice, not a requirement.I'm not maternal, and I can't imagine having them. Potential partners have met my decision with hostile reactions; I'm single because I haven't found anyone who wants to also remain childfree. I keep meeting men who become very offended that they can't change my mind. Loved ones have gotten used to it, but I still think my parents wish things were different. But I know what's right for me. I enjoy a full life and am not missing anything." Sophia M., 34

"When I was 10 years old,I turned to my mom and said I didn't want to have kids. She laughed and responded that I was a bit young to decide that and I might change my mind. But I've never had a biological clock go off at all, and I think my mom resigned herself to the fact that she won't be a grandmother. She used to think I'd change my mind when I met the 'right' person, but I told her the right person would be someone who didn't want or have kids.

I actually worked in childcare and as a preschool teacher for over 15 years, I've just never felt the need to have any kids of my own. I don't worry about my legacy or carrying on my name because I'm doing what I need to right now: making the most of each day and not worrying out what may happen after I'm gone." Rachel W., 46

Quotes have been edited and condensed for clarity.

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9 Childfree Women Explain What Life Is Like Without Kids ...

List Of MicroNations No Trouble – Don’t Mess

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With several important qualifications, a micronation is any entity which purports to be or has the appearance of being a sovereign state but isnt. Micronations are typically created and maintained by one person or family. Many exist solely on the internet, or in the imagination of their creators. Some have a more corporeal existence, making ambit claims over, or occasionally even physically occupying defined geographical locations albeit often tiny, remote or uninhabitable ones and producing physical artefacts such as stamps, coins, banknotes, passports, medals and flags. Micronations are generally viewed as ephemeral, eccentric and somewhat amusing by most external observers. Micronations should not to be confused with, which are small extant sovereign states such as the Andorra, Kiribati, Monaco, Nauru, San Marino and the Vatican. Nor should they be confused with, or exile government groups, which typically have many hundreds or thousands of active supporters, and are often engaged in armed campaigns in support of their aims against the governments of one or more sovereign states. The purpose of this website is to serve as a portal to the world of micronations, document the micronation phenomenon in as objective, accurate, comprehensive and accessible a manner as possible, and to facilitate communication between micronationalists and those interested in micronations.

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Spinozism – Wikipedia

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Spinozism (also spelled Spinoza-ism or Spinozaism) is the monist philosophical system of Baruch Spinoza which defines "God" as a singular self-subsistent substance, with both matter and thought being attributes of such.

In a letter to Henry Oldenburg Spinoza wrote: "as to the view of certain people that I identify god with nature (taken as a kind of mass or corporeal matter), they are quite mistaken".[1] For Spinoza, our universe (cosmos) is a mode under two attributes of Thought and Extension. God has infinitely many other attributes which are not present in our world. According to German philosopher Karl Jaspers, when Spinoza wrote "Deus sive Natura" ("God or Nature") Spinoza meant God was Natura naturans not Natura naturata, that is, "a dynamic nature in action, growing and changing, not a passive or static thing."

In Spinozism, the concept of a personal relationship with God comes from the position that one is a part of an infinite interdependent "organism". Spinoza argued that everything is a derivative of God, interconnected with all of existence. Although humans only experience thought and extension, what happens to one aspect of existence will still affect others. Thus, Spinozism teaches a form of determinism and ecology and supports this as a basis for morality.[citation needed]

Additionally, a core doctrine of Spinozism is that the universe is essentially deterministic. All that happens or will happen could not have unfolded in any other way. Spinoza claimed that the third kind of knowledge, intuition, is the highest kind attainable. More specifically, he defined this as the ability for the human intellect to intuit knowledge based upon its accumulated understanding of the world around them.

Spinoza's metaphysics consists of one thing, substance, and its modifications (modes). Early in The Ethics Spinoza argues that there is only one substance, which is absolutely infinite, self-caused, and eternal. From this substance, however, follow an infinite number of attributes (the intellect perceiving an abstract concept or essence) and modes (things actually existing which follow from attributes and modes). He calls this substance "God", or "Nature". In fact, he takes these two terms to be synonymous (in the Latin the phrase he uses is "Deus sive Natura"), but readers often disregard his neutral monism. During his time, this statement was seen as literally equating the existing world with God which is why he was accused of atheism. For Spinoza the whole of the natural universe is made of one substance, God, or, what's the same, Nature, and its modifications (modes).

It cannot be overemphasized how the rest of Spinoza's philosophy his philosophy of mind, his epistemology, his psychology, his moral philosophy, his political philosophy, and his philosophy of religion flows more or less directly from the metaphysical underpinnings in Part I of the Ethics.[2]

However, one should keep in mind the neutral monist position. While the natural universe humans experience in both the realm of the mind and the realm of physical reality is part of God, it is only two modes thought and extension that are part of infinite modes emanating from God.

Spinoza's doctrine was considered radical at the time he published and he was widely seen as the most infamous atheist-heretic of Europe. His philosophy was part of the philosophic debate in Europe during the Enlightenment, along with Cartesianism. Specifically, Spinoza disagreed with Descartes on substance duality, Descartes' views on the will and the intellect, and the subject of free will.[3]

Spinoza defines "substance" as follows:

By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e., that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed. (E1D3)[4]

This means, essentially, that substance is just whatever can be thought of without relating it to any other idea or thing. For example, if one thinks of a particular object, one thinks of it as a kind of thing, e.g., x is a cat. Substance, on the other hand, is to be conceived of by itself, without understanding it as a particular kind of thing (because it isn't a particular thing at all).

Spinoza defines "attribute" as follows:

By attribute I understand what the intellect perceives of a substance, as constituting its essence. (E1D4)[4]

From this it can be seen that attributes are related to substance in some way. It is not clear, however, even from Spinoza's direct definition, whether, a) attributes are really the way(s) substance is, or b) attributes are simply ways to understand substance, but not necessarily the ways it really is. Spinoza thinks that there are an infinite number of attributes, but there are two attributes for which Spinoza thinks we can have knowledge. Namely, thought and extension.[5]

The attribute of thought is how substance can be understood to be composed of thoughts, i.e., thinking things. When we understand a particular thing in the universe through the attribute of thought, we are understanding the mode as an idea of something (either another idea, or an object).

The attribute of extension is how substance can be understood to be physically extended in space. Particular things which have breadth and depth (that is, occupy space) are what is meant by extended. It follows from this that if substance and God are identical, in Spinoza's view, and contrary to the traditional conception, God has extension as one of his attributes.

Modes are particular modifications of substance, i.e., particular things in the world. Spinoza gives the following definition:

By mode I understand the affections of a substance, or that which is in another through which it is also conceived. (E1D5)[4]

The argument for there only being one substance (or, more colloquially, one kind of stuff) in the universe occurs in the first fourteen propositions of The Ethics. The following proposition expresses Spinoza's commitment to substance monism:

Except God, no substance can be or be conceived. (E1P14)[4]

Spinoza takes this proposition to follow directly from everything he says prior to it. Spinoza's monism is contrasted with Descartes' dualism and Leibniz's pluralism. It allows Spinoza to avoid the problem of interaction between mind and body, which troubled Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy.

The issue of causality and modality (possibility and necessity) in Spinoza's philosophy is contentious.[6] Spinoza's philosophy is, in one sense, thoroughly deterministic (or necessitarian). This can be seen directly from Axiom 3 of The Ethics:

From a given determinate cause the effect follows necessarily; and conversely, if there is no determinate cause, it is impossible for an effect to follow. (E1A3)[4]

Yet Spinoza seems to make room for a kind of freedom, especially in the fifth and final section of The Ethics, "On the Power of the Intellect, or on Human Freedom":

I pass, finally, to the remaining Part of the Ethics, which concerns the means or way, leading to Freedom. Here, then, I shall treat of the power of reason, showing what it can do against the affects, and what Freedom of Mind, or blessedness, is. (E5, Preface)[4]

So Spinoza certainly has a use for the word 'freedom', but he equates "Freedom of Mind" with "blessedness", a notion which is not traditionally associated with freedom of the will at all.

Though the PSR is most commonly associated with Gottfried Leibniz, it is arguably found in its strongest form in Spinoza's philosophy.[7] Within the context of Spinoza's philosophical system, the PSR can be understood to unify causation and explanation.[8] What this means is that for Spinoza, questions regarding the reason why a given phenomenon is the way it is (or exists) are always answerable, and are always answerable in terms of the relevant cause(s). This constitutes a rejection of teleological, or final causation, except possibly in a more restricted sense for human beings.[4][8] Given this, Spinoza's views regarding causality and modality begin to make much more sense.

Spinoza's philosophy contains as a key proposition the notion that mental and physical (thought and extension) phenomena occur in parallel, but without causal interaction between them. He expresses this proposition as follows:

The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things. (E2P7)[4]

His proof of this proposition is that:

The knowledge of an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause. (E1A4)[4]

The reason Spinoza thinks the parallelism follows from this axiom is that since the idea we have of each thing requires knowledge of its cause, and this cause must be understood under the same attribute. Further, there is only one substance, so whenever we understand some chain of ideas of things, we understand that the way the ideas are causally related must be the same as the way the things themselves are related, since the ideas and the things are the same modes understood under different attributes.

In 1785, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi published a condemnation of Spinoza's pantheism, after Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was thought to have confessed on his deathbed to being a "Spinozist", which was the equivalent in his time of being called a heretic. Jacobi claimed that Spinoza's doctrine was pure materialism, because all Nature and God are said to be nothing but extended substance. This, for Jacobi, was the result of Enlightenment rationalism and it would finally end in absolute atheism. Moses Mendelssohn disagreed with Jacobi, saying that there is no actual difference between theism and pantheism. The entire issue became a major intellectual and religious concern for European civilization at the time, which Immanuel Kant rejected, as he thought that attempts to conceive of transcendent reality would lead to antinomies (statements that could be proven both right and wrong) in thought.

The attraction of Spinoza's philosophy to late eighteenth-century Europeans was that it provided an alternative to materialism, atheism, and deism. Three of Spinoza's ideas strongly appealed to them:

Spinoza's "God or Nature" [Deus sive Natura] provided a living, natural God, in contrast to the Newtonian mechanical "First Cause" or the dead mechanism of the French "Man Machine." Coleridge and Shelley saw in Spinoza's philosophy a religion of nature[9] and called him the "God-intoxicated Man."[10][11] Spinoza inspired the poet Shelley to write his essay "The Necessity of Atheism."[10]

Spinoza was considered to be an atheist because he used the word "God" [Deus] to signify a concept that was different from that of traditional JudeoChristian monotheism. "Spinoza expressly denies personality and consciousness to God; he has neither intelligence, feeling, nor will; he does not act according to purpose, but everything follows necessarily from his nature, according to law...."[12] Thus, Spinoza's cool, indifferent God [13] differs from the concept of an anthropomorphic, fatherly God who cares about humanity.

German philosopher Karl Jaspers believed that Spinoza, in his philosophical system, did not mean to say that God and Nature are interchangeable terms, but rather that God's transcendence was attested by his infinitely many attributes, and that two attributes known by humans, namely Thought and Extension, signified God's immanence.[14] Even God under the attributes of thought and extension cannot be identified strictly with our world. That world is of course "divisible"; it has parts. But Spinoza insists that "no attribute of a substance can be truly conceived from which it follows that the substance can be divided" (Which means that one cannot conceive an attribute in a way that leads to division of substance), and that "a substance which is absolutely infinite is indivisible" (Ethics, Part I, Propositions 12 and 13).[15] Following this logic, our world should be considered as a mode under two attributes of thought and extension. Therefore, the pantheist formula "One and All" would apply to Spinoza only if the "One" preserves its transcendence and the "All" were not interpreted as the totality of finite things.[14]

French philosopher Martial Guroult suggested the term "panentheism", rather than "pantheism" to describe Spinoza's view of the relation between God and the world. The world is not God, but it is, in a strong sense, "in" God. Not only do finite things have God as their cause; they cannot be conceived without God.[15] In other words, the world is a subset of God. American philosopher Charles Hartshorne, on the other hand, suggested the term "Classical Pantheism" to describe Spinoza's philosophy.[16]

Similarities between Spinoza's philosophy and Eastern philosophical traditions have been discussed by many authorities. The 19th-century German Sanskritist Theodore Goldstcker was one of the early figures to notice the similarities between Spinoza's religious conceptions and the Vedanta tradition of India, writing that Spinoza's thought was "... a western system of philosophy which occupies a foremost rank amongst the philosophies of all nations and ages, and which is so exact a representation of the ideas of the Vedanta, that we might have suspected its founder to have borrowed the fundamental principles of his system from the Hindus, did his biography not satisfy us that he was wholly unacquainted with their doctrines... We mean the philosophy of Spinoza, a man whose very life is a picture of that moral purity and intellectual indifference to the transitory charms of this world, which is the constant longing of the true Vedanta philosopher... comparing the fundamental ideas of both we should have no difficulty in proving that, had Spinoza been a Hindu, his system would in all probability mark a last phase of the Vedanta philosophy."[17][18]

It has been said that Spinozism is similar to the Hindu doctrines of Samkhya and Yoga. Though within the various existing Indian traditions there exist many traditions which astonishingly had such similar doctrines from ages, out of which most similar and well known are the Kashmiri Shaivism and Nath tradition, apart from already existing Samkhya and Yoga.[19]

Max Muller, in his lectures, noted the striking similarities between Vedanta and the system of Spinoza, saying "the Brahman, as conceived in the Upanishads and defined by Sankara, is clearly the same as Spinoza's 'Substantia'."[20]Helena Blavatsky, a founder of the Theosophical Society also compared Spinoza's religious thought to Vedanta, writing in an unfinished essay "As to Spinoza's Deity natura naturans conceived in his attributes simply and alone; and the same Deity as natura naturata or as conceived in the endless series of modifications or correlations, the direct outflowing results from the properties of these attributes, it is the Vedantic Deity pure and simple."[21]

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Spinozism - Wikipedia

Dennis Andrew from Poole says ‘I am Druid’ – Somerset Live

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Dennis Andrew doesnt participate in human or animal sacrifices - in fact the retired engineer is really normal.

To put the lie to myths perpetuated by some TV series and films, the retired engineer, cheesemaker and author has written a book entitled I am Druid.

We have fire festivals but not sacrifices, he said.

Knowlton Church and earthworks - a ruined Norman church between Wimborne and Cranborne which stands inside a late Neolithic Henge constructed in 2,500 BC - was the ideal place to meet so that he could explain his beliefs.

Knowlton is one of my favourite places; I sense things here. You can feel ancestry calling, its a spiritual place, said Dennis, who said he has been a Druid for most of his life.

My mother was a Christian and my father a pagan.

So what does it mean to be a Druid?

We dont have a corporate authority - there is no book of Common Prayer. It is a faith not a religion. We worship the divine in nature. Everything in nature is a temple. There is a god in a bird or a tree.

He added that Druids dont tell people what to believe and that they celebrate diversity.

Im as happy in a Christian church as in a Hindu temple, Dennis said. I feel thankful that in this country people are free to explore their faith.

He is a member of Dorset Grove, which numbers between 40 and 60 Druids. They meet at Knowlton Church eight times a year to celebrate - twice at the solstices, twice at the equinox and four times on cross quarter days.

Anyone can come to these rituals, he said. We dont preach or evangelise.

In addition they meet every fortnight in woodland areas.

We are modern druids, which means that our culture goes back no more than 250 years. In fact up to 50 years ago, there were Christian Druids such as Sir Winston Churchill.

Druidic membership extends to a cross section of society.

We have bankers, nurses, ex police officers and shop workers, he said.

If you want to know the definition of the five isms of Druidry - Animism, Pantheism, Polytheism, Monotheism and Dualism, just read Denniss book, I am Druid, which is available from Gullivers Bookshop in Wimborne as well as from http://www.iamdruid.tk.

Report and photos by Marilyn Barber

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Dennis Andrew from Poole says 'I am Druid' - Somerset Live

How San Francisco’s Summer of Love sparked religious movements – The Oakland Press

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SAN FRANCISCO In the past few months, the Bay Area has waxed nostalgic at the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love in 1967, when hippies and thousands of seekers, drifters and runaways poured into the citys suddenly chaotic Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

To many Americans, the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, which the Summer of Love came to represent, may seem like an irrelevant little experiment involving LSD, tie-dyes, free love, shaggy hairstyles and rock bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.

It was all of that, but the mind-blowing revolution that rocked the streets of San Francisco that summer may also be seen as a new religious movement that shaped the spiritual expression of millions of Americans who never dropped acid, grew beards, burned bras or set foot in a commune.

Anyone who has ever participated in yoga classes, practiced mindfulness meditation, looked into alternative medicine, or referred to oneself as spiritual but not religious, may want to thank a 70-year-old hippie this summer.

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San Francisco had drawn adventure seekers and freethinkers since the 1849 Gold Rush, but the immediate roots of the Summer of Love date from the 1950s and Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac (On the Road, 1957) and poet Allen Ginsberg (Howl, 1956).

The psychedelic experimentation in San Francisco took off in 1965, when novelist Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest) gathered a Dionysian band of artists, musicians and drug enthusiasts known as the Merry Pranksters and held a series of LSD-fueled happenings in the Bay Area. Their story was immortalized by Tom Wolfes 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Those in the middle of the San Francisco scene in the mid-60s say the best of times were over by the summer of 67, when the drugs got harder and the unconditional love got conditional.

It was all downhill, they say, following the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in January 1967, when former Harvard University psychologist and LSD guru Timothy Leary took the stage and told the stoned multitudes to turn on, tune in, drop out.

To Carolyn Mountain Girl Garcia, the Summer of Love was very much a media distortion.

It drove people in vast numbers with expectations that were never met, she said. It was kind of a sociological disaster. But it was really wonderful when it was working.

Garcia, now 71, was only 17 when she arrived with her older brother from New York in 1963. Within a year, she met Neal Cassady, the real-life, charismatic character of On the Road.

Cassady introduced Garcia to Kesey, who fathered her first daughter, Sunshine. Within a few years, Garcia was living with Sunshine and Jerry Garcia, lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead.

She later co-founded the Womens Visionary Congress, a community of adventurers from generations and traditions united to explore a more vivid and profound awareness of our inner and outer worlds.

Carolyn Garcia sees psychedelic drugs and plants as a major inspiration for much of the broader spiritual experimentation of the 1960s-70s, and beyond.

It got people into a spiritual dimension without the religion attached. It was personal contact with the realm of spiritual energy, with an unseen force that connects everybody to life itself, to nature, she said. Many spiritual communities have evolved from the hippie times, including people taking on Buddhism and other Asian religions and re-creating them as modern movements. If you want to find out about spirituality and psychedelics, just talk to your yoga teacher.

Some former psychedelic enthusiasts question whether the consciousness-raising counterculture was effective in transforming American society.

One is Robert Forte, who studied the history and psychology of religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School and has taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the California Institute of Integral Studies.

He sees the psychedelic counterculture as a microcosm of the best and worst of religion.

Religion is a very complex subject, spanning the whole spectrum of human behavior. It can be an ethical, exalted expression, but religion can also be a mind-control technique to subjugate the masses, said Forte, who edited two collections of essays in the late 1990s, Timothy Leary Outside Looking In, and Entheogens and the Future of Religion.

A lot of people in the 1960s had unitive experiences that informed their life in important ways.

Yet we also see all this fake New Ageism, he added. You hear a lot of cheerleading about the value of these drugs. ... But where is our anti-war movement today? Where are the visions we had in the 1960s about transforming the world in more ecologically sustainable ways? Weve failed.

Yet there are these people who think that by taking drugs and putting feathers in your hair and going to Burning Man you are somehow furthering this alternative culture.

For visual artist Bill Ham, the man who more or less invented the psychedelic light show, it was a magical time of creative freedom. Ham is now 84 and still living in San Francisco, not far from Haight Street. He arrived as an art student in 1958 and began hanging out with the Beats, who gathered in coffeehouses and poetry venues in the citys North Beach neighborhood.

Ham was among a small band of San Francisco beatniks and hippies who spent the summer of 1965 at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nev., a old mining town about five hours east of San Francisco, on the other side of the Sierras.

Some fledgling musicians, including Dan Hicks, formed the Charlatans and became the Red Dog house band. Ham had just developed an art form he calls light painting, a kinetic abstract expressionism that used an overhead projector, layers of glass, oils, pigments and other liquids to project pulsating amoeba-like patterns of color onto walls and ceilings.

According to some rock historians, the Charlatans were the first psychedelic rock band. They returned to San Francisco and began performing with other fledgling groups in small clubs and dance halls and for free in Golden Gate Park. In the early years, there was little separation between the performers and audience, a connection that was intensified by psychedelic plants like marijuana and peyote, and later with powerful mind-altering drugs like LSD, which at high doses have the ability to blur the boundary between self and other.

In the early 1960s, Ham said, there was this whole city of creative people, including jazz musicians, artists, writers, dancers, avant-garde actors, and the early electronic music creators. Then it got overwhelmed by the rock n roll scene, he said, because it turned out that was where the money was.

Americas music critics discovered the San Francisco sound at the Monterey Pop Festival in the spring of 1967, a concert where the imported Texas blues singer Janis Joplin, the new frontwoman for Big Brother and the Holding Company, blew everyone away. That spring also saw the release of the hit pop song, San Francisco, with its famous lyric, If youre going to San Francisco, be sure to wear flowers in your hair.

But the most influential musical release that spring was the Beatles classic psychedelic album, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. Those songs inspired millions of people around the world to experiment with psychedelic drugs and explore the mystical promises of Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism.

This was all two years before the Woodstock nation gathered on Max Yasgurs dairy farm in upstate New York.

All of the media attention focused on San Francisco and the 1967 Summer of Love attracted throngs of baby boomers to the Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It was not all peace and love.

Among the waves of psychedelic immigrants were hordes of troubled, runaway kids. Many found freedom, while others fell into drug addiction, sexual exploitation, and the worsening of pre-existing mental illness caused by the careless use of psychoactive drugs. There were definitely casualties, Ham said, but when you compare it to Vietnam, we dont have too much to apologize for.

Photographer Gene Anthony, author of a richly illustrated book, The Summer of Love Haight-Ashbury at its Highest, captured many magical moments during the Acid Tests and early gatherings of the tribe from which the soon-to-be-famous San Francisco rock bands would emerge.

In some ways it did seem like a religious movement, but more in the communal and political sense. There wasnt one charismatic leader, Anthony said. There were groups of people like the Mime Troupe and The Diggers, who were feeding the kids and trying to do something positive. There was the Free Clinic and a store where everything was free.

Anything could happen. One Sunday in the summer of 1967, Anthony was standing at the corner of Haight and Masonic streets when a black limo pulled up and out popped Beatle George Harrison with his wife, Pattie Boyd, both of them in fashionable hippie garb.

Harrison later revealed he was not impressed with the scene in the Haight. I expected it to be a brilliant place with groovy gypsy people, he said, but it was full of horrible spotty dropout kids.

Starting in fall 1966 and continuing into the 1980s, laws were passed banning and increasing penalties for drugs like LSD and MDMA, known as Ecstasy or Molly. Scientific research into beneficial uses of these compounds, which date back to the 1950s, was shut down in the 1970s and 1980s. Richard Nixon declared his war on drugs, and the Just Say No mantra of Nancy Reagan became the federal drug policy.

Today, however, there is a growing appreciation of the potentially beneficial medical uses of still-banned, mind-altering compounds like MDMA and psilocybin, the drug that puts the magic in magic mushrooms. Government-approved clinical trials are underway at UCLA, New York University and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in which these drugs, alongside psychotherapy, are used to help people suffering from depression, substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Summer of Love exhibits have opened in San Francisco at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park and at the Mission Street offices of the California Historical Society.

Don Lattin is the author of Changing Our Mind Psychedelic Sacraments and the New Psychotherapy, donlattin.com.

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How San Francisco's Summer of Love sparked religious movements - The Oakland Press

Rangers Renew Partnership With Globe Life For Stadium Naming Rights – CBS DFW

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August 24, 2017 11:10 AM

ARLINGTON (CBSDFW.COM) The Texas Rangers have a name for their new ballpark slated to be open in 2020 and its very familiar.

The Rangers and Globe Life announced an extension of their naming rights partnership through the year 2048.

Proposed Rangers baseball stadium (credit: City of Arlington)

In a pressconferenceon Thursday, officials announced that the new ballpark will be called Globe Life Field, not to be confused with the Rangers current home, Globe Life Park.

The futurebillion-dollar climate-controlled stadium deal will keep the Texas Rangers in Arlington at least through 2054.

Half of the money for the new stadium comes from the city, the other half from the Rangers.

Last November, Arlington voters approved the extension of a half-cent sales tax, 2 percent hotel-occupancy tax and 5 percent car-rental tax for the new Rangers stadium.

That revenue previously went to defray Arlingtons $155 million debt on its share of the cost of AT&T Stadium, the home of the NFLs Dallas Cowboys.

The stadium should be completed in time for the 2020 MLB season.

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Rangers Renew Partnership With Globe Life For Stadium Naming Rights - CBS DFW

The life-saving browser shortcut everyone should know – CNET

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Lost tabs? No problem.

If I had a dollar for every time I'd accidentally closed a browser tab -- or worse, an entire windowful of 'em -- I'd be rich.

But there's a simple keyboard shortcut that can instantly correct this error: Ctrl-Shift-T.

OrApple-Shift-T, if you're using a Mac.

Honestly, I'm a little embarrassed to admit I only discovered the shortcut a few months back, but it's changed my life ever since. (I used to use a browser extension called TooManyTabs to do something similar, but this is way better.)

Just know that some browsers work better than others. With Chrome or Safari, you can restore an entire window full of tabs with this one quick three-button press, so long as your browser is open.

But with Firefox or Microsoft Edge, you can only restore tabs one at a time, and only if you opened those exact tabs in the same browser window.

If this keyboard shortcut is new to me, I'm betting it could be new to you too. If not, maybe it'll help someone else?

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The life-saving browser shortcut everyone should know - CNET

Keppel secures order worth more than US$400m to build two LNG containerships – Hellenic Shipping News Worldwide

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Keppel AmFELS, a wholly owned subsidiary of Keppel Offshore & Marine Ltd (Keppel O&M) in the United States (US), has secured a contract worth more than US$400m from Honolulu-based Pasha Hawaii for the construction of two Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) fueled containerships.

The dual fuel LNG vessels will be built to Keppels proprietary design with delivery of the first vessel expected in 1Q 2020, and the second vessel in 3Q 2020.

Mr Simon Lee, President of Keppel AmFELS said, We are pleased that Pasha has chosen us to build their first two LNG fueled containerships to our innovative design. Keppel O&M is at the forefront of designing vessels that run on LNG propulsion systems and has the experience in LNG vessel conversions as well as the expertise in newbuild specialised vessels. In addition, Keppel AmFELS is ideally located and well-equipped to build a wide variety of vessels for the Jones Act market. We look forward to building these ships which will have a direct impact on American jobs at our shipyard and suppliers across the country.

This contract with Keppel allows Pasha Hawaii to continue to move forward in our commitment to providing the best resources possible for our customers and Hawaiis shipping industry, while minimising our environmental footprint, said George Pasha, IV, President and CEO of The Pasha Group. We are proud supporters of the Jones Act and look forward to working with Keppels team of highly skilled shipbuilders.

Customised to Pasha Hawaiis requirements, the new, 774-foot Jones Act vessels will be able to carry 2,525 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units), including a fully laden capacity of 500 45-foot containers, 400 refrigerated containers, and 300 40-foot dry containers, with a sailing speed of 23 knots. The ships hull has been fully optimised using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and will be one of the most hydrodynamically efficient hulls in the world.

The containerships will be able to run completely on LNG fuel, dramatically reducing their environmental impact and increasing fuel efficiency. Energy savings will also be achieved with a state-of-the-art engine, an optimised hull form, and an underwater propulsion system with a high-efficiency rudder and propeller.

When compared to conventional fuels, LNG is a much cleaner alternative fuel for shipping and offers significant environmental benefits, including the reduction of up to 95 percent sulphur oxides, nearly 100 percent particulate matter, up to 90 percent nitrogen oxides, and up to 25 percent carbon dioxide emissions from engine exhaust emissions.

Located in Brownsville, Texas, Keppel AmFELS possesses comprehensive facilities, a highly-capable workforce, and a strong track record in the construction, refurbishment, conversion, life extension and repair of a variety of projects.

The Jones Act requires vessels carrying goods between US ports to be built in the US, and Keppel AmFELS is well-positioned to capture opportunities in this market. The average age of the US-built fleet of vessels is more than 30 years old, beyond the typical operating life of most ocean-going vessels, and new vessels will be needed to meet the latest safety and environmental standards.

The above contract is not expected to have a material impact on the net tangible assets or earnings per share of Keppel Corporation Limited for the current financial year. Source: Keppel AmFELS

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Keppel secures order worth more than US$400m to build two LNG containerships - Hellenic Shipping News Worldwide

South32 plans a BEE boost – Business Day (registration)

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Manganese ore production from mines in the Northern Cape rose 19% to take advantage of strong manganese prices.

South32 spent $356m on capital projects in the past year, including $37m on the second phase of underground development at the Wessels manganese mine. In the past year, the company has also made an $81m investment into Arizona Mining and signed other agreements in exploration projects.

An additional $7m was spent on greenfields exploration, mainly for base metals in the Americas and Australia. Kerr said copper, zinc, nickel and cobalt were attractive commodities, suited to Chinas move to a consumption-led economy, and South32 has decades technical expertise.

In SA, the feasibility study into the $265m Klipspruit life extension project has been completed and a final investment decision will be made before end-December. Kerr said Klipspruits current reserve would be depleted by 2020.

Mike Fraser, president and chief operating officer for Africa, said Klipspruit was close to Eskoms Kusile power station and although it was an export coal mine, the mix could be changed to suit Eskoms needs.

At the end of June South32 held $1.6bn in net cash, five times more than a year ago.

It recently began a $500m share buyback programme, which was raised to $750m, as the most efficient mechanism for returning cash to shareholders. About $539m of the programme is still to be spent.

The shares added 1% to R30.73 after the announcement.

mathewsc@fm.co.za

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South32 plans a BEE boost - Business Day (registration)

Why We Should Be Compassionate Toward Atheists – National Catholic Register (blog)

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Blogs | Aug. 18, 2017

Atheism is gaining converts every day, and we have a rather daunting job of evangelizing those who would rather God did not exist.

Dr. Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy at New York University, wrote in his 1997 book, The Last Word:

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-formed people I know are religious believers. It isnt just that I dont believe in God and, naturally, hope that Im right in my belief. Its that I hope there is no God! I dont want there to be a God; I dont want the universe to be like that.

Whether or not Dr. Nagel intended to speak for anyone other than himself, I suspect his sentiments are shared by many atheists who not only dont believe there is a God, but dont want there to be a God.

From the standpoint of Christianity, this prompts this question: Why would anyone not want a loving God to exist? This is a question that all apologistsindeed, all Christians who seek to evangelize atheistsmust ask and attempt to answer. Because if we dont know the answer to that question, we can have all the other answers to all the other questions, and it wont matter. For instance, we can talk about the inexplicable characteristics of the Shroud of Turin, the tilma of Guadalupe, the sun dancing at Fatima, the incorruptibles, and the Eucharistic miracle in Lanciano, but we may not have addressed the real issue for those who wish atheism to be true.

There may be lots of reasons for atheisms recent prevalence, but it is clear that the rise in atheism has taken place alongside the fall of the family. Is there a connection between the two? In his book Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, psychologist Dr. Paul Vitz answers in the affirmative.

Specifically, Vitz argues that a father often exerts a powerful influence on his childs concept of God. (Since his original book was published in 1999, other studies have provided support for this point.) Dr. Vitz takes a biographical tour of modern atheists and discovers a relatively consistent thread: Looking back at our thirteen major historical rejecters of a personal God, we find a weak, dead, or abusive father in every case. Of course, it is not true, nor is Vitz making the case, that every atheist had a bad fatheror that the mere absence of a father must propel one to atheism. It would also be a fallacy to claim that each atheists fundamental reason for embracing atheism is his paternal relationship. But to Vitzs point (and consistent with the findings of other studies), it is legitimate to argue that some persons may be predisposed to atheism because of their family circumstances.

In his book, Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI makes an interesting point along the same lines, alluding to the connection between fatherhood and faith. Pointing out that the Our Father is a great prayer of consolation, insofar as it recognizes and professes God as our Father with Whom we have a personal relationship, Pope Benedict XVI notes that consolation is not experienced by everyone:

It is true, of course, that contemporary men and women have difficulty experiencing the great consolation of the word father immediately, since the experience of the father is in many cases either completely absent or is obscured by inadequate examples of fatherhood.

As Pope Benedict suggests, the idea of God as a father can be a painful reminder that their own father did not, could not, or would not love them. Thus, the idea of spending fifteen minutes, much less eternity, with a father is remarkably unpleasant.

Where does that leave those who are sincerely and charitably trying to convey Gods love to those who are so desperate to disbelieve? Perhaps it starts by recognizing that they are hurt, and what we should do is act with compassion instead of trying to win a debate with them. If you convince someone that their best hope is to spend eternity with a Being they equate with someone who has been abusive to them, you have done them no favors. You may do well to first explain to them who God is, and what Gods love means to you. Along with true knowledge, love and mercy are the essential qualities of a Catholic apologist.

Try to explain Gods love to them, and ask the Holy Spirit for the right words. Sad though it may be, its entirely possible that no one has ever triednever talked about Gods love to them. Its entirely possible that no one has ever told them that God wants them to be happy.

Patience is also critical. Some might seem obstinate in their refusal to believe, or in their inability to admit the possibility that they might be wrong. Respond with patience, and remember that though the argument at hand might be Saint Thomas Aquinas five proofs for Gods existence or the Shroud of Turin, for instance, that may not be what they are actually arguing about. They might be really arguing about their parents, the past, and their pain. Thus, for them, the Shroud of Turin serves as a spiritual Rorschach test in which they dont see Gods pain, but their own. Explain to them that no one wants to ease their pain more than God. It sometimes helps to explain to them how God has eased your own. Dont forget that comforting the afflicted is a spiritual work of mercy not just for other Christians, and it very often must precede instructing the ignorant.

Atheism is gaining converts every day, and we have a rather daunting job of evangelizing those who would rather God did not exist. Many people have had difficult and painful family experiences, and they deserved better. We need to help people understand that God is better. Scripture does not assure us that our own parents will love us; quite the contrary, God warns us that some parents will not love their own children. Thats terribly sad, but its connected with an overwhelming promise that we need to remind people again and again and again: God will never stop loving you. This message is made many times in Scripture, but perhaps most explicitly in passage that must be in our hearts and on our lips going forward in our discussions. It is Isaiah 49:15, and it reads: Can a woman forget her nursing child and have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you.

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Why We Should Be Compassionate Toward Atheists - National Catholic Register (blog)

Everyone’s suspicious of atheists even other atheists – SBS

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In the U.S. and plenty of other places around the world, atheism is on the rise. In just under half of the worlds countries, according to Pew Research Center, the second-largest religious group is people who claim no religion at all. In the United States, while recent research has shown an uptick in the number of people who identify as atheist, definitive numbers are hard to come by; one survey last year put it around 10 percent, whilea more recent study argued that it was as high as 26 percent.

Whatever the true number is, though, there remains a disconnect between atheisms popularity and its reputation: According to a new study published last week in Nature, people all over the world connect immorality with atheism. In fact, the moral prejudice against atheists is so strong that it holds even in countries like the Netherlands, where most people arent religious. Even atheists themselves, according to the study, are inclined to see nonbelievers as more wicked than the faithful.

According to a new study published last week in Nature, people all over the world connect immorality with atheism.

Entrenched moral suspicion of atheists suggests that religions powerful influence on moral judgements persists, even among non-believers in secular societies, the authors wrote.

The study, led by University of Kentucky psychology professor Will Gervais, surveyed more than 3,000 people in 13 countries, including nations with Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, and non-religious majorities: Australia, China, Czech Republic, Finland, Hong Kong, India, Mauritius, Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Participants read a description of a man who tortured animals as a child and became even more sadistically violent as he grew up, eventually murdering five homeless people and hiding their dismembered bodies in his basement. The survey then asked some participants if they thought the man was more likely a teacher or religious teacher. Other participants were asked if they though the man was more likely a teacher or an atheist teacher. This setup meant that no one was directly asked if they thought the man was or was not an atheist, but researchers could draw conclusions by comparing how many participants said the man would be an atheist teacher versus how many said he would be a religious teacher.

Entrenched moral suspicion of atheists suggests that religions powerful influence on moral judgements persists, even among non-believers in secular societies, the authors wrote.

As they had hypothesised, the researchers found a universal suspicion of atheist morality across all 13 countries. People overall are roughly twice as likely to view extreme immorality as representative of atheists, relative to believers, they wrote. Consistent with predictions, extreme intuitive moral distrust of atheists is both globally evident and variable in its magnitude across countries.

The association was somewhat stronger in more religious countries, but even in very secular countries in the study Australia, China, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom people were more likely to associate serial killing with atheism, although the gap was narrower. The survey also asked participants to describe their religious beliefs, which allowed the research team to determine that even atheists connected immoral acts to atheism more often than to religious belief.

The authors concluded that people around the world see religion as a necessary restraint on depraved and dangerous behavior. In other words, despite the fact that we live in an increasingly secular world, people still fear those who arent God-fearing.

That finding didnt surprise Joseph Baker, author of American Secularism and a professor in the East Tennessee State University sociology department. An anti-atheist bias is really common and really well established, he said. In the United States, atheists used to be the most disliked among a number of unpopular groups, but are now tied at the top with Muslims, he said; what this new study adds is good data showing that the feeling is international.

Louise Antony, a philosophy professor at UMass Amherst who has written about atheism and morality, also found the study results unsurprising. I could predict it just from what I know about the stereotypes that people hold of atheists, she said.

It wouldnt be surprising that atheists who grow up in cultures disparaging atheists have the same associations.

But Antony also cautioned against drawing too much significance from experiments that may reveal only implicit bias, but not accurately portray peoples more holistic feelings about atheists. For example, Antony said, she has a terrible fear of spiders, the result of some deep-seated association that she wishes she didnt have, since she knows that spiders are almost entirely harmless and kill pests like mosquitoes. Likewise, people even avowed atheists may be handicapped by an implicit connection between atheism and immorality, despite a genuine belief that they themselves are as moral as believers.

The study might also be picking up on a fairly superficial response, Antony said: It wouldnt be surprising that atheists who grow up in cultures disparaging atheists have the same associations.

But even superficial biases can have very real effects, she added. Thats especially true in moments of hot cognition, when people dont have time to stop and reason out their beliefs before taking action, Baker noted.

This latest study is more evidence that atheists are still mistrusted in contemporary society, he said. It means that people who are secular still have a long way to go in terms of getting equal footing in civil discourse. Theres still a lot of prejudice they have to overcome.

This article originally appeared on Science of Us: Article 2017. All Rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content.

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Beware the War Against ASEAN’s Atheists | The Diplomat – The Diplomat

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There is one minority that knows no borders, isnt divided by race or gender, and yet still faces persecution across the world: atheists. And in recent weeks, they have been under attack in Malaysia. The government has announced that it will hunt down atheists who, it says, could face prosecution exactly what for remains in question. This all began earlier this month, when the Kuala Lumpur branch of the Atheist Republic, a Canada-based organization, posted a photo of their annual meeting on social media.

The Hunt for Atheists Continues

In response, the Federal Territories Islamic Religious Department, Malaysias religious watchdog, said it is now constantly monitoring atheists groups, presumably those also online, and its director said that they would provide treatment to those caught. Shahidan Kassim, a minister in the Prime Ministers Department, said later that: I suggest we go all-out to hunt down these groups and we ask the media to help us identify them because this is a religious country.

Inspector-General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar upped the ante when he commented that the the police would scrutinize the existing laws to enable appropriate action to be taken should the atheist group cause anxiety among Muslims, as FreeMalaysiaToday, an online newspaper, put it.

One can make many things of this comment. Primarily, though, if a few dozen, mostly young people who gather once a year in private can make Malaysias Muslims anxious (note Khalid cared little about the nerves of Malaysian Christians or Buddhists) then isnt his comment an affront to their commitment to the faith itself?

But the Malaysian authorities took the issue back to a perennial one: apostasy.

According to Malaysias federal laws, apostasy is not a crime. But in practice, the countrys state-run courts, which hold the sway over religious matters, rarely allow Muslims to formally leave the faith. Instead they are punished with counseling, fines, or jail time. Similarly, atheism is not strictly illegal in Malaysia, but blasphemy is. This makes atheism a grey area, since the most fundamental point of it is the belief that there is no god.

A similar problem exists in Indonesia. In 2012, Alexander Aan was almost beaten to death by a mob and then sentenced to two and a half years in prison while his attackers were set free after he posted a message on Facebook that read: God doesnt exist. The commentary surrounding the case frequently asked whether atheism was illegal in Indonesia or not. Most pundits took the opinion that it wasnt illegal: Alexander Aan, they said, wasnt convicted for his atheism but for blasphemy. To some, that was no more than intellectual contortionism at work.

But none of this should have come as a surprise. A 2016 report by the International Humanist and Ethical Union found Malaysia to be one of the least tolerant countries in the world of atheists. The report singled out Prime Minister Najib Razak for criticism. In May of that year, he described atheism and secularism, along with liberalism and humanism, as deviant and a threat to Islam and the state. He stated clearly: We will not tolerate any demands or right to apostasy by Muslims.

Over the years I have met a number of Malaysian atheists. Many have to hide their lack of faith from their families, lest they be ostracized. Social media, here, has been a massive help. And many are forced to hide behind less-controversial monikers, like freethinker, in order to avoid the thought police. By way of a comparison, I have met Vietnamese pro-democracy activists more willing to criticize the Communist Party in public places than Malaysian atheists willing to talk about religion at coffee shops. I am worried. I have already accepted that something might happen to me that I might be killed, one Malaysian atheist recently told Channel News Asia.

No Freedom From Religion

We are often told that Malaysia and Indonesia are secular nations. That is not quite true. At best, they are secular-lite. Secularism has three main components, and that is often forgotten conveniently by some. The first is a genuine separation of the church or mosque, or pagoda and the state. The second is freedom of religion, which brings with it pluralism and religious tolerance. Put simply, all faiths have equal status within the eyes of the state.

Malaysia and Indonesia do to some extent practice these but certainly not the third, which is freedom from religion. It means that I, a non-believer, am not interfered with by the forces of religion, and am protected against this by the state. It also means that a believer is allowed, by law, to remove himself from a religion. As has been indicated above, that is not quite the case by any means.

More Than Politics

Some pundits will simply claim that politics is at hand. Malaysian elections are approaching, and Malaysias ruling party is playing the religious card, fearful that Malay-Muslims will vote for one of the opposition parties. In Indonesia, the arrest and imprisonment of Basuki Ahok Purnama for blasphemy, coming as it did during the Jakartas mayoral election, was also politicians using religion, some say. President Joko Widodo weighed in here with the opinion that the anti-Ahok protests, some of the largest Indonesia has ever witnessed, were steered by political actors who were exploiting the situation.

There is some merit in this view, but it is far from the whole picture. For starters, if they are exploiting conservative religious sentiments, then surely those sentiments themselves must have been there in the first place and must be thought by a sizeable number of people for opportunistic politicians to take notice. That itself is something that ought not to be ignored, since it is the root cause of the issue we are addressing here.

Second, if it is only politicians exploiting the situation, why havent the moderate Muslim organizations come out and defend the atheists, for instance, or, to take a more specific example, why didnt they campaign for Ahok? As some experts have already noted, Nahdlatul Ulama, the largest Indonesian Muslim organization, with more than 50 million followers, made a lot of noise against the radical protestors at the time, but was conspicuously quiet on defending Ahoks right to say what he did.

A More Radical Mainstream?

Some have argued that the extremists in Malaysia and Indonesia are becoming more open. But there is also some evidence that points to the mainstream, or even the public at large, being more conservative. For instance, in 2013, the Pew Research Center conducted a worldwide survey on the attitudes of Muslims towards different elements of faith. When Indonesian respondents were asked if they favored making Sharia the national law of the country, 72 percent said they would it is currently only the law in the semi-autonomous state of Aceh. Of Malaysian respondents, 86 percent said they would, higher than the percentages recorded in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Egypt, countries which are not typically described as moderate.

Some might argue that Muslims were merely responding in such a way because they perceived that doing so was in line with what their religion called for and what it meant to be a good, practicing Muslim. But what was striking was that, of those respondents who favored introducing Sharia, 41 percent from Malaysia and 50 percent from Indonesia thought it should apply to all citizens, not just Muslims. And 60 percent from Malaysia and 48 percent from Indonesia thought stoning to death was an appropriate penalty for adultery.

One can quibble with any single poll or statistic or development. But the point here is that there are enough of each of these out there for a level of concern to be raised. Or, at the very least, for more attention to be paid to a relatively neglected issue.

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Atheists go after Sen. Marco Rubio with guns blazing this is why they’re dead wrong – TheBlaze.com

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Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) continues to facebacklashfor sharing daily Bible verses on Twitter, and this time, the largest atheist organization in America is trying to hit the Christian senator where it hurts.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, aWisconsin-based atheist group, on Tuesday attacked Rubios outpouring of love for God, Jesus, and the Bible in an open letter, and called for the senator to stop sharing his faith in a public manner. The organization has publicly condemned Rubio for sharing Bible verses on his Twitter page.

Aportion of the letter from the foundation to Rubio read:

We protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church, and educate the public on matters relating tonontheism.

We understand that you have been tweeting bible verses from @MarcoRubio to nearly three million followers. It appears that you began tweeting the bible in mid-May and have been doing so regularly ever since. This is not an errant bible verse or two, but more than 60 bible verses in three months. Thats enough verses to tweet the entire Book of Jude. Twice. One of the most recent verses, tweeted during the eclipse, appears to suggest that the eclipse is the work of god, quoting Exodus 10:21.1.

Of course, we have no issue with people reading and discussing the bible. The road to atheism is littered with bibles that have been read cover to cover. But it is not for the government in our secular republic to promote one religious book over others or to promote religion over nonreligion.

Doing so violates the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.

If the law and your oath to uphold the Constitution are not sufficient to convince you to stop, perhaps you might consider reading Matthew 6:5-6, in which Jesus condemns public prayer as hypocrisy in his Sermon on the Mount. None of Jesuss supposed words mentions Twitter perhaps he wasnt that prescient but the condemnation of public piety is reasonably clear.

To remedy Rubios infractions, the group suggested one of two options: Rubio should either stop quoting Scripture on his personal Twitter account or purge all mentions of the fact that he holds a publicly elected office as a U.S. senator on the same Twitter page.

Currently in the United States, people are fighting for their rights to express their beliefs, whether they be cultural, racial, historical, familial, sexual, or gender-related.

There is a one-size-fits-all solution to this issue, and its in practicing theconstitutionally protected inalienable right as mentioned in theFirst Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

If Rubio cant share his faith something thats clearly important to him simply because he holds a public office, thenwhats next for our society?

The bottomline is that if you dont want to publicly proclaim the word of God, thats fine but dont try to stop others from doing it themselves. Either censor all speech, or censor no speech.

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Atheists go after Sen. Marco Rubio with guns blazing this is why they're dead wrong - TheBlaze.com

Floating island will battle algae in Davenport park – Quad-Cities Online

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DAVENPORT -- The ancient city of Babylon had its hanging gardens; now Davenport has some that float at Eastern Avenue Park.

Thursday, a group coordinated by

launched five "floating islands" into the park's lagoon. Each of the mattress-sized platforms was covered with dozens of young plants and drifts of brown potting mixture.

The plants, all natives that thrive in wet conditions, are there to absorb excess nitrogen and phosphorous, said Laura Morris, program manager at River Action.

"The real goal is to get rid of blue-green algae," Ms. Morris said Thursday as people bustled around her before the launch, tucking plants into holes in the islands' surfaces and layering the potting soil over the top.

Blue-green algae appears naturally in anecosystem, but if too much nitrogen and phosphorous is present, there is a risk of the algae growing beyond the environment's ability to support it in that area.

Such an unbalanced arrangement can use upoxygen in the water and lead totoxic conditions that can cause illnesses in people and kill animals.

Critics blame Mississippi River pollution caused by nitrogen and phosphorous, which are used in agriculture production, for a "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico -- an oxygen-depleted area where little or no animal life can survive.

Ms. Morris said the lagoon has a history of problems with algae, and testing is planned to see how the islands affect water quality.

Other islands were scheduled to be placed in Credit Island lagoon later Thursday, and more installations were planned Friday at Nahant Marsh's Carp Lake.

The islands, made of recycled plastic, have a life span of up to 10 years, Ms. Morris said. As the plants grow, their roots will extend into the water below the island, and the plants will spread along the island's surface, filling in the spaces between planting holes.

The plants are perennials and will stay in place during the winter, Ms. Morris said. The islands will have to be monitored on occasion to replace plants that did not survive, and to remove invasive plant species.

The plants being used consist of grasses in the center of each island, and flowering plants along the edges, she said.

They will provide habitat and food for animals -- fish, insects and birds, she said. Until the plants are fully established, however, the islands will be netted to temporarily prevent birds from making use of them.

The islands are made by

, she said. They are a fairly new method of dealing with algae, but they have been used in other areas. They have been used at least once before in the Quad-Cities, and there are some in Bettendorf.

The project cost is about $60,000, and it is being funded by a Scott County Regional Authority grant, Ms. Morris said. Other entities that are taking part include Nahant and Davenport.

Ms. Morris said the islands also will serve as a tool for teaching people about pollution.

"It really opens the door for conversations in our area," she said.

More about Floating Island can be found atfloatingislandinternational.com.River Action's website is riveraction.org.

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Floating island will battle algae in Davenport park - Quad-Cities Online

Tony de Brum, Voice of Pacific Islands on Climate Change, Dies at 72 – New York Times

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The Marshall Islands declared independence in 1979 and were granted sovereignty in 1986. Mr. de Brum helped negotiate the countrys Compact of Free Association with the United States and led the drafting of the Marshall Islands constitution.

In a nearly 50-year government career, he went on to serve as foreign minister (three times), minister of finance, minister of health and the environment, minister-in-assistance to the former president Christopher Loeak, and Marshall Islands climate ambassador.

In 2013, Mr. de Brum criticized the Security Council for declaring that it was not the right body to address climate change. He reminded its members that 35 years earlier he had come before them to petition for his countrys independence.

It seems to me ironic, he said, bizarre, perhaps, that the very same agency whose approval was needed for my country to become a country again would consider that my coming back to ask for help to survive, to keep that country going, was not relevant to their work.

He often linked the issues of nuclear testing and climate change, noting that the Marshallese had already been resettled onto other islands because of radioactive fallout related to nuclear testing. He said the idea that citizens might have to leave the islands again if seas rose higher was repugnant.

Even the loss of a tiny island is, for us, significant, he said.

In 2014 Mr. de Brum filed lawsuits against nine nations in the International Court of Justice, the United Nations highest court, arguing that they had breached their obligations under international law by failing to pursue nuclear disarmament. The court later ruled the suit inadmissible.

At the Paris climate change negotiations in 2015, Mr. de Brum convened a group of about 100 nations, both rich and poor, to demand that the accord call for aggressive action, like establishing a clear long-term goal on global warming that was in line with scientific advice.

Calling themselves the High Ambition Coalition, leaders of the group walked into the final day of talks wearing coconut leaves on their lapels in solidarity with island nations.

The Paris accord, signed by nearly 200 countries, called for concerted efforts to keep the global temperature increase no higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius (34.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels by 2100.

Mr. de Brum was vocal in arguing that even if the temperature increase were held at 2 degrees which scientists often describe as a relatively safe guardrail a resulting rise in sea levels would be devastating for the Marshall Islands and other low-lying countries.

Todd Stern, who was United States special envoy for climate change under President Barack Obama, said in an interview that Mr. de Brum had been able to bridge divides among countries of different levels of wealth and responsibility for causing climate change and convince them that everyone must act.

We all owe a debt to Tony for getting Paris done, Mr. Stern said. When I think of people who were meaningful in getting the Paris deal, he is definitely on the short list.

Mr. de Brum was critical of President Trump for announcing this year that the United States would withdraw from the Paris agreement. Celebrating the one-year anniversary of the pact, he wrote, My country felt a little bit safer as a result of the historic agreement.

Tony Anton de Brum was born on Feb. 26, 1945, in Tuvalu, an island nation in the South Pacific. He grew up on the Marshallese atoll of Likiep and attended the University of Hawaii. President Heine said he was one of the first Marshallese to attend college.

Working with the linguist Alfred Capelle, he created the first Marshallese-English dictionary.

He is survived by his father; his wife, Rosalie; his daughters, Doreen, Dolores and Sally Ann; 10 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

Throughout his life Mr. de Brum carried a searing memory of a nuclear bomb exploding on the Pacific horizon. In March 1954 he was 9 years old and on the water fishing with his grandfather when, over Bikini Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands, the United States tested the most powerful bomb it had ever developed till then one 1,000 times as destructive as those that had leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.

Everything turned red, he recalled years later, the ocean, the fish, the sky, and my grandfathers net.

A version of this article appears in print on August 24, 2017, on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Tony de Brum, Marshall Islands Outsize Voice on Climate Change, Dies at 72.

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Tony de Brum, Voice of Pacific Islands on Climate Change, Dies at 72 - New York Times

Spill of farmed Atlantic salmon near San Juan Islands much bigger … – The Seattle Times

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The company initially said Saturday that 4,000 to 5,000 of the nearly 2-year-old fish, weighing from 8 to 10 pounds, had escaped several damaged net pens in the farm. But by Sunday afternoon, "the whole thing came apart."

The fish spill from an Atlantic salmon farm near Cypress Island is much bigger than initially thought, after the entire farm was destroyed over the weekend.

Its basically a salvage operation, said Nell Halse, vice president, communications for Cooke Aquaculture Pacific, which owns and operates several Atlantic salmon fish farms in Puget Sound and the Salish Sea, including the Deepwater Bay facility off Cypress Island.

The company initially said Saturday that 4,000 to 5,000 of the nearly 2-year-old fish, weighing from 8 to 10 pounds, had escaped several damaged net pens in the farm. The farm held a total of more than 300,000 fish weighing some 3 million pounds.

But on Sunday afternoon, the whole thing came apart, she said of the fish farm. That is when we realized we were in a really serious situation. The numbers started out low and we still dont know the full number, but there is clearly a lot of them out there. Very, very much more.

The farm totally collapsed, she said. It is a very difficult situation. These guys are farmers and they have invested a year and a half in taking care of these animals, and now they have lost them and seeing the devastation of the farm, it is a hard thing.

The company, which bought the salmon farm about a year ago, last month flew in experts to repair it because it had begun to drift, Halse said. Additional anchors were installed, she noted. The verdict was that the farm was good to go until harvest, she said, then just months away.

Scientists debunked the statement from Cooke on Tuesday that exceptionally high tides and currents coinciding with this weeks solar eclipse caused the damage.

Parker MacCready, an oceanographer at the University of Washington, noted tide data do not support the companys claim. The data speak for themselves: there were large tidal ranges around the day of the eclipse, but not out of the ordinary, and in fact they were smaller than during some recent months.

Jonathan White, author of Tides the Science and Spirit of the Ocean (Trinity University Press, 2017), said there were 105 tides this year as large or larger than those experienced over the weekend. If they were not prepared for this tide, they were not prepared for any tide, he said.

Kurt Beardslee, of the Wild Fish Conservancy, which opposes fish farming as well as a planned expansion by the company in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, blamed the company for inadequate equipment and maintenance.

Its an engineering issue. All engineering is about adding safety buffers, Beardslee said. They have this great benefit of using this water, this resource, and they have the obligation to engineer (the facility) so these failures wont happen.

The company had more to say Wednesday about the cause. We dont want to debate the data about the tides, Halse said. It says what it says. Whatever the reason, the guys experienced something they had not experienced in their memory, she said of farm employees.

There obviously is not one reason why this happened; it was not just the tides. We will be doing a full assessment as to what really caused it, and most importantly, what we can do to make sure it never happens again. Meanwhile, a fishing frenzy is under way, with some anglers eager to get the fish for their table and others mopping the Atlantic salmon up like a pollutant.

Some found passions against farmed salmon undercut a golden opportunity in the no-limit fishery. I had no idea there would be that many, said Nik Mardesich, a commercial gillnetter who kept pulling up Atlantics by the hundreds in his net while he was out for native chinook Monday night. However, he couldnt find a buyer for his bounty on Tuesday morning.

They wont even take them for crab bait, he said of the Atlantic salmon. I dont want to just throw them on the beach, so I am trying to give them away, Mardesich said.

He resorted to putting a sign reading free fish on his pickup at the Guemes ferry, and passing the salmon out in garbage bags.

A commercial fisherman all his life, he has his own objections to net-pen Atlantic salmon. I have no objection to farmed fish, Mardesich said. But there is a right way and a wrong way. The wrong way is open pens in wild salmon migration routes. The right way is a closed system, on land.

The Lummi Nation mounted a cleanup fishery Tuesday, deploying boats to mop up the fish like an oil spill. This type of incident is unacceptable, said Timothy Ballew II, chairman of the Lummi Nation business council. Halse and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife maintain the fish are safe to eat and pose little risk to the environment.

However, the Washington Department of Ecology considers the escaped fish a pollutant, and the company could potentially face penalties for the incident, said Larry Altose, an agency spokesman. They are supposed to be released to the store, he said of the Atlantic salmon. Not the Sound.

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Spill of farmed Atlantic salmon near San Juan Islands much bigger ... - The Seattle Times

The Lakshadweep islands: a sublime coral jewel – Reuters

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Many people who think "vacation" go to the sea. Most of them don't immediately think of the Lakshadweep Islands, an archipelago of 36 islands about 300 kilometres off India's southwestern coast. Fewer think of going there during the monsoon rains that lash the islands as they sweep by on their way over the mainland toward the Himalayas.

This is what my wife Aashima and I chose to do, disregarding our friends and colleagues who imagined us restricted to our cottage on Bangaram and Kavaratti and surviving on biscuits. They did not need to worry. The rains came, but lasted just short of a half hour at a time. They would come as suddenly as they would disappear, blown away by the winds - the kind that one loves watching from a window sill over a cup of tea or go for a walk on a beach.

Their absence revealed turquoise seas melting into an azure sky, sandy beaches of almost platinum blonde, and emerald green interiors lush with coconut trees, shrubs and mangroves.

The Lakshadweep is a congregation of coral islands, and is one of India's Union Territories. (The name is from Sanskrit and means "one hundred thousand islands"). They are part of a long chain that extends close to the Maldives, a nation of atolls stretching well below India's southwest tip. The islands have changed hands since their first known mention nearly 2,000 years ago. Now, more than 60,000 people live over 10 islands, and all of them follow one religion, Islam.

And the reason why alcohol doesn't flow as easily. Only Bangaram, uninhabited by natives and meant only for tourists, allows alcohol.

Bangaram is where we spent two days on this trip. That's a feat in itself, given that the island is a little more than half a square mile in area - a visitor can walk the length of the beach in 20 minutes. On our trip, there was plenty of space to share. There were only two other couples on the island, one from Italy and one from Switzerland.

Around noon, when the temperature was 29 Celsius - remember it's a tropical island - we decided to walk to the southern tip of the eastern shore, and spend time wetting our feet in the tides and watching as the white surf along the coral reef, which encloses the lagoon 4 kilometres out, divided the water into turquoise within and electric blue on the open sea.

We also walked to the middle of the island, where a brackish pond cuts a crescent through the trees, and to a sandbar near the island's western shore that appears during the day in low tides and disappears during the evening with the onset of high tides.

Anne Vuilleumier, one of the Swiss tourists, said she appreciated the island's natural beauty, which she said was "still intact", as opposed to other island vacation destinations which are built up and lose something of what made them attractive to begin with. She also appreciated opportunities to canoe and fish in the lagoon area.

Anne, who has a masters in human geography, pointed out another feature of some islands that have maintained their pristine nature instead of becoming modern tourist traps - sometimes the amenities are not what many travelers might expect. In this case, that meant no hot water for a shower, and the water at times, she said, was "blackish". In our case, there was a tinge of sulfuric yellow. Nor were there beach towels and umbrellas for tourists, or enough deck chairs.

But rustic and spare are qualities that some people want in a vacation. The beauty of the place is what they seek. And there is plenty. One option is to take a 15-minute speedboat ride to the nearby tiny islands of Thinnakara and Parali 1 and 2, where hawk-billed turtles come to hatch their young.

We also stayed on Kavaratti island, the islands capital, a 15-minute helicopter ride from Bangaram. Kavaratti is the most populous island with 11,210 inhabitants as per the 2011 census. We stayed at the 26-bed hotel, Paradise Island Hut, a Lakshadweep tourism department property located barely 10 metres from the beach.

There, Abdul Samad, a water-sport instructor with the tourism department, took us to the southwestern tip of the island for snorkelling. The shallow corals lie only 25 metres offshore. While snorkelling, we saw close to 30 species of fish, including rainbow, surgeon, porcupine, lion and butterfly fish, giant clams and sea cucumber. We also saw a young hawksbill turtle lurking under a giant coral boulder. Samad held its flippers gently and brought it to us to hold for a few seconds.

Live corals of bright yellow, pink, green and white colour provided a perfect background to the schools of fishes and shell molluscs. If you take this trip, be advised - snorkelling is good for building up your appetite. Take fruit juice and energy bars or granola bars with you.

Also note that the monsoon is not the best time for speed-boating, parasailing, yachting or scuba diving. October to January typically offer calmer seas and better weather as temperatures vary between 17 and 19 Celsius. We were disappointed not to get the opportunity to strap on any gear and disappear beneath the surface for scuba diving, but we cured this by eating. The freshly caught tuna and local chicken dishes are delicious.

What's bad for diving is good for surfing, however. A handful of young boys who run the island's only surfing club lent me a board. It was difficult to get the hang of it, but it was worth the fleeting moments of gliding over the waves before losing balance and wiping out. The boys also recommended that surfers try Minicoy, the southernmost Lakshadweep island.

A day before our return journey, we went back to Agatti, a 7.6-kilometre-long island with the territory's only air strip. Agatti has a small museum that has preserved a few relics of the eighth and ninth centuries, which chronicle how Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam influenced the people of Lakshadweep. Though devoted to maintaining the island's history, it's in poor shape and desperately requires upkeep.

The food was in better shape. During a boat ride along the eastern shore of the island, a local who was accompanying us caught a metre-long Needle fish and simply gave it to us. This kind of hospitality is what made Agatti and, indeed, the Lakshadweep generally, special for us. How to get there

It's important to get permission from the Lakshadweep Administration to visit the island. Call: + 91 04842666789 or +91 9495984001.

Flights take a little more than three hours from Bangalore to Agatti, with a stopover in Kochi. Direct flights from Kochi take 80 minutes.

Peak season is October to May. Monsoon season is June to July.

The SPORTS (Society for Promotion Of Nature Tourism and Sports), a nodal agency of Lakshadweep administration, offers tour packages on ship from Kochi, Kerala. You can see them on their website here

'Lakshadweep Samudram' is a five-day cruise to visit the islands of Kavaratti, Kalpeni and Minicoy.

'Swaying Palm' is a week-long tour to Minicoy. Tourists are hosted in cottages on the beach front.'Weekend Package' is a one-day trip to the Kalpeni Island.

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The Lakshadweep islands: a sublime coral jewel - Reuters

The best beach islands are in the Caribbean – Cleveland Jewish News

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The best Caribbean beaches in the world are all within reach of Northern Ohio. And there are plenty of islands bursting with adventures, activities, clear water and stunning natural sites. The question remains, which Caribbean island is best suited for you?

The way to determine that is simple. Visit the island. And you can do so by cruise ship, where you can spend the day getting a lovely taste of the area. Here are some exceptional Caribbean islands that most of the major cruise lines call on.

Antigua

Discover all of Antiguas amazing treasures and fascinating past. Explore three of Antiguas best-known locations while traveling through the heart of the countryside, past rolling hills and local villages. Visit the famous Nelsons Dockyard, the worlds only Georgian-era dockyard still in use, Blockhouse Ruins, and Shirley Heights for an amazing view of the harbor. Relax as you explore one of the most gorgeous cities in the eastern Caribbean.

St. Lucia

Embark on a leisurely cruise from St. Lucias north coast to discover the magnificent volcanic peaks known as the Gros and Petit Pitons. Rising dramatically from the ocean, these incredible geographic landmarks each reach heights of more than 2,000 feet. After your visit to the Pitons, continue sailing northward, with a stop for swimming and a visit to Marigot Bay.

Aruba

Explore the island of Aruba on a scenic drive. Enjoy spectacular views while learning about the culture and rich history of Aruba. Visit key landmarks and natural wonders. See the charming capital of Oranjestad, with its Dutch Colonial architecture, and schooner harbor. Marvel at the unusual geological formations of the Casibari Rock Formations. See the gold mill ruins, breathtaking beaches, and the natural bridge, a geological wonder formed by the forces of the wind and the sea.

St. Croix

Visit St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, and explore its historic, cultural and natural sites. Marvel at St. Croixs tropical beauty and captivating views as you make your way along the island. Learn about the cultural traditions of the islanders before arriving to the historical town of Christiansted. Browse the shops or enjoy a stroll over to the famous Fort Christiansvern.

Dominica

Explore natures island with unspoiled beauty, a divers dream and its listed as one of the 10 best destinations to dive. A hikers paradise with 300 miles of trails a true nature lovers dream and an adventure, unlike any other Caribbean destination. Dominica has volcanic peaks, boiling waters and underwater champagne springs, sparkling waterfalls, rushing streams, rainforest canopies with spectacular drops and a submerged volcanic crater.

St. Thomas

A gateway isle of the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. Its known for its beaches and snorkeling spots and duty free shopping. Territorial capital Charlotte Amalie, founded by the Danish in the 1600s, is a busy cruise-ship port. Historic buildings include a 1679 watch tower, Blackbeards Castle, in reference to the areas pirate history. On the harbor, 17th-century Fort Christian is now a local-history museum.

St. Maarten / St. Martin

St. Martin is part of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean Sea. It comprises two- separate countries, divided between its northern French side, Saint Martin, and its southern Dutch side, St. Maarten. The island is home to busy resort beaches and secluded coves. Its also known for fusion cuisine, vibrant nightlife and duty-free shops selling jewelry and liquor.

Grand Cayman

Grand Cayman is the largest of the Cayman Islands, a British overseas territory in the Caribbean. George Town, its capital, is home to the Cayman Islands National Museum, dedicated to Caymanian heritage. The city is also a major cruise-ship port and site of the ruins of colonial-era Fort George. Beaches and vibrant coral reefs are the islands hallmarks.

Jamaica

A Caribbean island nation has a lush topography of mountains, rainforests and reef-lined beaches. Many of its all-inclusive resorts are clustered in Montego Bay, with its British-colonial architecture, and Negril, known for its diving and snorkeling sites. Jamaica is famed as the birthplace of reggae music, and its capital Kingston is home to the Bob Marley Museum, dedicated to the famous singer.

Turks and Caicos

An archipelago of 40 low-lying coral islands in the Atlantic Ocean, a British overseas territory southeast of the Bahamas. The gateway island of Providenciales, known as Provo, is home to expansive Grace Bay Beach, with luxury resorts, shops and restaurants. Scuba-diving sites include a 14-mile barrier reef on Provos north shore and a dramatic 2,134m underwater wall off Grand Turk Island.

Arlene Goldberg is president and owner of Action Travel Center in Solon.

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The best beach islands are in the Caribbean - Cleveland Jewish News

Magdalen Islands, where kitesurfers go to fly – CBC.ca

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The Magdalen Islands, which are known for red cliffs, rolling dunes and powerful winds, have become a magnet for kitesurfing aficionados.

Fans of the sport who have travelled the globe looking for ideal conditions say the archipelago in the Gulf of Saint Lawrenceis "world class."

Christian Labb is aprofessionalkitesurfer who has competed in dozens of competitions, some of which were overseas.

For the past decade, he has been making the 1,300-kilometre trip to Magdalen Islands from where he lives inBromont, Que.

Arosport kitesurfing school owner, ric Marchand catches some wind near Havre Aubert on the Magdalen Islands, Que. (Marika Wheeler/CBC)

"I've been coming here for 10 years because it's a beautiful place," Labb said.

"We can go from one place to another every day, the lagoons, in the sea, from one end of the islands depending on the winds and what we feel like doing on a given day."

Christian Labb has competed and kitesurfed all over the world, but says the Magdalen Islands, Que. is his favourite place to practice the sport. (Marika Wheeler/CBC)

ric Marchand, who says he registered Canada's first kitesurfing school in 1998, said the industry on the Magdalen Islands has seen steady growth in past few years.

He believes it's the best place in Canada for kitesurfing.

"The wind is always there, very steady and very predictable," he said.

"We have very shallow lagoons here, so to learn and to practice safely there's no jellyfish, there's no sharks."

Avid kitesurfers say strong, steady winds, and shallow lagoons make the Magdalen Islands, Que. an ideal place to learn or practice kitesurfing. (Marika Wheeler/CBC)

Each summer, hundreds of people kitesurf on the Islands, according to the local tourism board.

Ian Franklin, 66, and his wife, JoAnn Franklin, 60, decided to try kitesurfing during their 20th wedding anniversary trip on the Magdalen Islands. They took a lesson and spent part of a sunny Sunday morning learning to manage the large kite.

ric Marchand opened the Arosport 'wind school' nearly 20 years ago and is a pioneer when it comes to kitesurfing in Quebec. (Marika Wheeler/CBC)

"They told us it would be pretty easy to get started so we said, 'Okay, let's go!'" said Ian.

"It looked like a fun adventure, a wonderful way to enjoy the water and the wind here," said JoAnn.

The Franklins plan on trying the sport again when they return to New Brunswick.

"It'll probably take four or five times before you get good," said Ian Franklin.

Kitesurfing instructor, Adam Andersen, helps Ian and JoAnn Franklin learn to manage the kite during their first lesson. (Marika Wheeler/CBC)

Normand Mcguire uses a different kind of board called a hydrofoil.

The fin cuts the water, lifting the board 15 to 30 centimetresoff it,reaching speeds comparable to those achieved by certain sailboats.

"When you're out on the water you're all alone and quiet and it just gives you the ability to relax completely,"said Mcguire.

"You just leave everything that could have been on your mind on shore."

In 1995,Mcguire started to fly stunt kites and loved being pulled hard by the kite.Eventually he discovered that large kites meant for pulling people over water, sand or snow existed.

"Being out there, being pulled by the wind is just a really nice feeling of liberty and somehow great power," said Mcguire.

Mcguire spends a good part of the summer on the Magdalen Islands living out of a converted, red, full sized school bus. The back doors open onto a storage space that is packed with gear.

Normand Mcguire uses a special board called a hydrofoil to kitesurf. The fin cuts the water, lifting the board 15 to 30 cm off the water, reaching speeds comparable to those achieved by certain sailboats. (Marika Wheeler/CBC)

Mcguire says he particularly loves the kitesurfing community in the Magdalen Islands where people are always willing to swap tips and help one another out.

On the day he spoke with CBC News, he pointed out an eight-year-old boy who had tried kitesurfing for the first time, and another group of his friends in their 60s who are also kitesurfers.

"We all kite, we all share the same passion," he said. "It's just the passion of the wind of being pulled by it that drives us together."

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Magdalen Islands, where kitesurfers go to fly - CBC.ca