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Girl Born With 4 Arms, 4 Legs Has Successful Surgery

Myanmar Junta's Hold on Power Must End, UN Envoy Says (Update1)

North Korea Still a Threat, South Korean Tells Gates

Extra Weight May Have Health Benefits

Nicotine Vaccine May Help Smokers Quit

A Planetary System That Looks Familiar

Bush speaks to Musharraf

In other news, yesterday Bergen saw its first snow of the season. The tips of the mountains were white, and all way beautiful. Then, as the day warmed, is began to rain and hail, with a bit of snow/hail/rain mix at the end of the day as it got colder again. I feared that Bergain was going to be covered in a thick layer of ice the next day (today) but no, it warmed and we had rain, lots and lots of rain and hail. Once it was hailing so hard that I could hardly see out the windows (wich are out our slanted ceiling rather than the wall)! Now it's just raining and Lisa said there's supposed to be some kind of big storm comming either tonight or tomorrow, let's take a look..... can't seem to find much about, just an alert for stormy weather, no actual named storm.

Breast Cancer, 1 year here, pluss more on Burma

Ok, so this is going to be a bit of a long one.

1. The first topic I want to address today is breast cancer. In the United States, October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The idea is to dedicate the entire month to making Americans aware and knowledgeable about breast cancer, as well as raise money for breast cancer research.

They do a good job raising awareness and money. Dozens of companies mark their products with a pink ribbon (the symbol for the disease, just as a red ribbon is for Aids) for the month, donating money whenever someone buys their pink-ribbon product. It's rather like the Product Red campaign, only Product RED(wiki) goes on year-round.

The problem sited by some is the knowledge part. Accourding to a survey by the National Breast Cancer Coalition many women don't rally know as much as they think about breast cancer. For an article by the Chicago Tribune about the survey, click here.

2. The next this I felt like mentioning was something I sort of missed a few weaks ago. I mean, I knew it happened, but I didn't say anything about it here, nor did I selebrate it. On September 21st one year ago, I arrived in Oslo, Norway origionating from Vineyard Haven, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, U.S.A. with the intention of moving in with my wife, Lisa. With the exeption of a 3 week visit back home(google maps) around Christmas and a couple day trip to Germany a bit after that for a church event, I've been in Norway for a year now.

We've got a letter from UDI recently, and we also called them, and both the contents of the letter and the phone call suggest that they probably won't make a decision untill the end of October or even possibly until some time in November.

3. Finally wqe come to Burma. Things are looking crappy for the Burmese people as a millitary officer who defected from the Junta claims that thousands of Burmese are being killed and either left in the jungle or burned. He himself defected when he was given orders to load a bunch of monks onto a truck, take them out to the jungle, and kill them and leave their bodies there.

It's good to hear that not all Junta will agree to participate in the massacre, but I would have rather had the massacre not be happening at all. many are calling for a boycott of Chinese goods and the Olympics being held in china as long as their government continues to support the Junta and refuses to denounce their actions. I think it may be a good idea.

Here are a few new articles on the subject.

The long road to freedom by David Cook of The Age.

Burma: UN envoy meets top general as regime blames foreigners for violence

I'll finish later...


Oct. 11th, 07 My goodness, this is quite annoying. I can't seem to get the text size right for this post. In addition, it's been so long since I started it that I don't remember what I was going to continue with. Oh well, maybe it was pictures of our Burma rallies in Bergen. I'll do a seperate post for that, along with pictures of John's visitng us this past weekend.

AAAS Satalite Images of Atrocities in Burma

I'll do a separate entry tomorrow to talk about how earlier tonight went, but in the meantime, I told Cho Cho (one of the organisers and a political refugee from Burma who hasn't been to his mother land since 1997) that I would post information about AAAS's satellite pictures of Burma here on my blog.

So, here's a few helpful links about the AAAS's work to reveal human rights concerns in Burma.

Satellite images show Burma's plight

NEWS ALERT: Burma Army Burns Christian Karen Villages, Satellite Images Show

Satellite Images Corroborate Eyewitness Accounts of Human Rights Abuses in Burma, AAAS Reports Note that here is where some actual images can be found. In addition to the ones on this news report page, you can find more in the full report at the bottom of the page where it says For your conveniance, you can also view a full copy of the Burma report. It is in pdf format, so your computer should be able to read it. If your computer can't open the document, you can downlowed a copy of Adobe Reader here.

I hope these are useful. God bless,

-Fipher

P.S.

Cho Cho told me there are talks of keeping the marches going every saturday untill the violence stops, the Monks and other political prisinors freed, and Burma is really on its way to democracy. However, he also said that they hadn't made any final decition. I gave him my email address so he can let me know when they've made a decision, but he seems like he's probably a busy man, so if anyone else hears news about further activities in Bergen, could you let me know by posting a comment here about it? Thanks!


Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms ofscience. Truth is what stands the test of experience.-- Albert Einstein