Iran seizes Shirin Ebadi's Nobel Peace Prize medal, demands taxes on fiancial award

From MSNBC:

Iranian authorities have confiscated Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi's medal, the human rights lawyer said Thursday, in a sign of the increasingly drastic steps Tehran is taking against any dissent....

Acting on orders from Tehran's Revolutionary Court, authorities took the peace prize medal about three weeks ago from a safe-deposit box in Iran, Ebadi said in a phone interview from London. They also seized her Legion of Honor and a ring awarded to her by a German association of journalists, she said.

Authorities froze the bank accounts of her and her husband and demanded $410,000 in taxes that they claimed were owed on the $1.3 million she was awarded. Ebadi said, however, that such prizes are exempt from tax under Iranian law. She said the government also appears intent on trying to confiscate her home.

Ebadi, the first Muslim woman to be awarded the peace prize and the first female judge in Iran, said she would not be intimidated and that her absence from the country since June did not mean she felt exiled.

"Nobody is able to send me to exile from my home country," she said. "I have received many threatening messages. ... They said they would detain me if I returned, or that they would make the environment unsafe for me wherever I am.

"But my activities are legal and nobody can ban me from my legal activities."

Read the whole story here.

Lectio Poetica

I just presented in class tonight on the film Dead Poets Society, and the place of poetry in the church. In preparation for the presentation, I read an article by Thomas Frank, “We're Going to Read Poetry in This Class?” (Teaching Theology and Religion, vol 8 no 1, 2005: pp 47-50). Frank reads poems to his students in his church administration classes at Candler School of Theology. In the article, he outlines his method, which I've named "Lectio Poetica" because it reminded me of Lectio Divina, a slow, repetitious, prayerful reading of scripture.

I tried Lectio Poetica with a poem in class tonite, and it worked out to be even more like Lectio Divina than I expected. After my experiment, I can see this method being carried out in more seminary class rooms, in Sunday school, in retreats, meetings, or even worship.

Three points are worth mentioning. 1) The poem that is read need not be a religious work; in fact, a poem that does not speak of faith at all may be the best choice for this meditative reading. I used "The Dream" by Naomi Shihab Nye for my first trial run of this method. 2) This model may be followed for personal use as well. 3) I have not considered this yet, but the four basic movements of Lectio Divina --Lectio, Meditatio, Oratio, Contemplatio-- may prove useful in Lectio Poetica.

Here's the Lectio Poetica method as I've adapted it from Frank.

Lectio Poetica: Reading Poetry in Class (or Church)

1. Read the poem out loud twice.


2. Project the poem on a screen, or hand out the poem on paper, leaving a moment of silence.


3. The initial reader may comment on what strikes them in the poem.


4. Invite reflection from the group, silent or spoken.

Hulu on Ubuntu 9.04 problem fixed - check Firefox Adblock

Here's a possible solve for a problem many people seem to be having getting hulu.com to play videos in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackelope.

After I put Ubuntu 9.04 on my new laptop, I started having problems loading videos from hulu.com. It worked for a day or so in Mozilla Firefox browser then suddenly stopped, and I couldn't figure out why. I thought maybe hulu didn't support Linux, but found on their support page that they in fact do, and all that's really need is a Flash plugin, which I already had installed.

I searched forums for several days, tried uninstalling flash plugins and installing new ones and various other fixes, but still nothing worked. Then last night I installed a different browser and hulu worked just fine, so it was pretty clear that flash wasn't the problem. As a last ditch resort, I decided to reinstall Firefox, and it was that decision that led to the discovery of what was really wrong. I searched for info on uninstalling Firefox (which isn't that easy to find!) and stumbled upon the Firefox support pages. Mozilla recommended troubleshooting before doing a complete reinstall, so I (serendipitously) followed their advice.

Starting Firefox in safe mode (type firefox -safe-mode in Terminal), with add-ons switched off, hulu miraculously ran just fine. Then I closed the safe Firefox window, and started Firefox in normal mode (just clicking on the icon in the menu, without running safe mode) then started by disabling all add-ons, then enabling them one by one (of course, restarting Firefox after each new enable).

I finally discovered it was the Adblock Plus add-on causing all the trouble. I had blocked an ad on hulu, but made the mistake of blocking the entire http://www.hulu.com/* domain. I unblocked it, then found I could block http://www.hulu.com/banner_container.swf instead and keep the video player unaffected.

So if you're having trouble with hulu on Ubuntu (or on any system with Firefox I suppose), try starting Firefox in safe mode to see if hulu runs. If it does, check your add-ons. It could be something with flash, or it could be as simple as unblocking hulu on Adblcok. If hulu won't run in safe mode, it looks like you're on your own.

My New Ubuntu ThinkPad

It's nice when technology is affordable, easy to use and open source, all in one package. That's why I'm so psyched about my new laptop, an IBM ThinkPad T43 for under $300 from a supplier on ebay. It came loaded with Windows, but I replaced it with the Linux operating system Ubuntu 9.04. I couldn't get it to load from the download, but got ahold of a CD and the process took about 15 minutes! For a final touch, I've loaded it with an awesome purple theme from Gnome-Colors.

Apparently ThinkPads have been rented to corporate folks who barely use them, which makes it possible to purchase them nearly new on the cheap. My friend Mark was the one who got the ThinkPad Linux idea in my head, but apparently he's not the first one to think it up. There's a whole website called ThinkWiki about ThinkPads running Linux. Lenovo bought the ThinkPad line several years back, but IBM as he original manufacturer is not only fine with Linux on their machines, but promoted it in a series of ads a couple years back.

Poet(witte)ry

On my ever-growing list of things I want to do more of is writing poems. If I don't happen to have pen and paper with me at any given moment, I should have no excuse, because, like so many people nowadays, I always have my cell phone with me. It might sound strange to some, but Twitter and other technologies are more and more becoming platforms for writing poetry.

Witness my latest T9 poem on Twitter.