Practices Search Results
On May 24, 2022, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos opened fire at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, United States, killing nineteen students and two teachers, and wounding seventeen people. Just a week prior, on May 14, 10 people were killed and three were injured in a racially motivated attack at a Tops Friendly Market in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo.
November 2011. The former Defensive Coordinator for the Penn State University football team, Jerry Sandusky, was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting 8 young boys over a 15-year period. Much of the news has revolved around the subsequent firing of the legendary football coach Joe Paterno and a TV interview with Sandusky. But we believe that the focus should be on the victims of sexual abuse.
According to a 1998 Boston University School of Medicine report:
• One in four girls is sexually abused before the age of fourteen.
• One in six boys is sexually abused before the age of sixteen.
As of October 31, 2011, according to the U.N. Population Fund, there will be 7 billion people on the planet. China and India are the two most populous nations. Large challenges face the peoples of the Earth as a result of this population explosion — poverty and the ever-growing global gap between the haves and the have-nots, food and water shortages, homelessness and an increase in refugees wandering from one place to another, urban problems stemming from people unable to work or provide for their families elsewhere.
Two earthquakes in northwest Iran on Saturday, August 11, 2012, have killed 300 people and injured 2,600 more, according to reports from Reuters and other news agencies.
The first quake registered at a 6.4 magnitude. It struck 60 kilometers northeast of the city of Tabriz, a trading hub and the home centuries ago of Shams of Tabriz, the spiritual teacher of Rumi. The second quake measured 6.3. More than 1000 villages were affected; 130 villages suffered more than 70 percent damage, and 20 were completely destroyed. About 16,000 people in the areas hit by the quakes have been given emergency shelter by the Red Crescent.
On Sunday, August 5, as Sikh Americans gathered for communal prayers in their temple south of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a gunman entered the building, opened fire, and killed six people and wounded three others. For Sikh Americans, this event was a sad reminder of the many times in their history when they have been the victims of hate violence. Coming just two weeks after another gunman killed 12 people at a midnight screening of a Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado, it was also a grim example of the prevalence of guns in America and our vulnerability to random and/or premeditated gun violence.
In an article in The New York Times, Lincoln Brower and Homero Aridjis note the winter monarch colonies near Mexico City have shrunk considerably. Between 1993 and 2003, they covered an average of 22 acres; this year's area hit a record low of 2.3 acres. Like the loss of bees, the decline of the monarch butterflies has many causes, including the destruction of breeding habitats in the United States from toxic herbicides and genetically engineered crops and illegal logging in Mexico's fir forests. Other factors are ecotourism, extreme weather, and diversion of water. What this means is that the very future of these beauties of the sky is in danger. 