Bird’s Eye: Well, we don’t have Kodachrome to shoot any more, but with digital cameras (and the saturation filter) those colours are as bright as ever, or maybe even brighter. Holi has to be any photographer’s favourite festival.
* The Colors of Holi 2012 In Focus – The Atlantic
* Lathmar Holi festival The Big Picture
A few overlaps with In Focus, but some lovely different shots too.
* The Maasai Cricket Warriors In Focus – The Atlantic
* 8 Oddly Colored Creatures Buzzfeed
“You think you are doing it for stretching, but it leads to Hinduism.”
The Vatican’s chief exorcist, Father Gabriele Amorth, on the dangers of yoga.
Bird’s Eye: Cultural or religious, ceremonies help us transcend our individuality. Look at the pictures of the world’s largest food fight, a 1 minute history of a hundred years of dancing and clothing styles, and two religious ceremonies. Pretty colours, too!
* Food Fight: Tomatina festival 2011 The Big Picture
Tons of overripe tomatoes were hurled for an hour in a massive red food fight in town of Brunol, Spain, on Aug. 31. The La Tomatina festival — held each year on the last Wednesday of August — evolved from a street fight in the 1940s when a group of young men who wanted to participate in the “gigantes y cabezudos” parade used tomatoes from a vegetable stand as weapons. An estimated 40,000 people showed up this year for the food fight.
The film is a 100 year countdown to the grand opening of Westfield Stratford City on September 13th 2011, and celebrates a century of East London fashion, dance and music. The film was shot over 4 days in east London locations with hundreds of costume changes.
* Krishna Janmashtami The Big Picture
* Praying in Tahrir Square, Cairo Eyewitness
Bird’s Eye: Eid Murbarak, and the start of Hajj… and that’s just a part of it. (Though as the photos are from Big Picture, it’s a very good start.) Then we have a look at the Sadhus (holy Hindu teachers) of Katmandu (snooty commentary, but fascinating pictures), and photos of Buddhist sand mandalas, which give a strange permanence to a religious rite that celebrates impermanence.
* Mandalas: Stunningly Colored Religious Images Made from Sand
Bird’s Eye: Conflicts start down the road to resolution when people on opposite sides talk to each other. So it’s a pleasure to offer three stories that are good news, as three major areas of conflict start to have enemies communicating. Every step forward helps.
* India Makes Major Shift in Policy in Kashmir New York Times
The Indian government announced a major policy shift in Kashmir on Saturday, calling for the release of jailed student protesters, easing security strictures in major cities, reopening schools and universities, and offering financial compensation to the families of the more than 100 civilians killed since the restive region erupted in protests in June.
Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, who led a parliamentary delegation on a fact-finding trip last week, also said a high-level government committee would be established to open a dialogue with political parties, students and civil society groups in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, the Indian-controlled part of the disputed region.
* Settlers replace Korans burnt in West Bank mosque Haaretz
Settlers on Tuesday gave new copies of the Koran to Palestinians in a West Bank village whose mosque was burned in an attack blamed by Palestinians on settlers.
Several copies of Islam’s holy book were scorched in the arson attack and threats in Hebrew were scrawled on the wall of the mosque of Beit Fajjar early on Monday.
“This visit is to say that although there are people who oppose peace, he who opposes peace is opposed to God,” said Rabbi Menachem Froman, a well-known peace activist and one of a handful of settlers who went to Beit Fajjar to show solidarity with their Muslim neighbors.
* Taliban In Talks With Karzai Government Washington Post
Taliban representatives and the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai have begun secret, high-level talks over a negotiated end to the war, according to Afghan and Arab sources.
The talks follow inconclusive meetings, hosted by Saudi Arabia, that ended more than a year ago. While emphasizing the preliminary nature of the current discussions, the sources said that for the first time they believe that Taliban representatives are fully authorized to speak for the Quetta Shura, the Afghan Taliban organization based in Pakistan, and its leader, Mohammad Omar. “They are very, very serious about finding a way out,” one source close to the talks said of the Taliban.
Bird’s-Eye: You can assign the appropriate category: we just offer the data, starting with two lovely Guardian Eyewitness photos of religious festivals, then moving on into a study linking degree of religious following to national income levels, and guess which country is different from all the rest? Then two humourous spins on burning Qurans (’cos if we don’t laugh, we’ll cry) and the strange end of the stick: Mormons promise to no longer baptize Jews who died in the Holocaust, and a Jewish student who draws swastikas on her dorm door so she can complain about anti-Semitism to the university. That counts as a fail, we believe.
* Eyewitness Muslim Ramadan, and Hindu Krishna Janmashtami
* Religious Outlier New York Times
According to a new Gallup poll, richer countries in general are less religious. But that doesn’t seem to be true of the United States.
* Burn a Qur’an Day Fails Miserably – Maniac Muslim
A fringe Christian group from Florida is dismayed at how poorly their planned Burn a Quran Day ended up turning out. “This was the worst book burning event in history,” said book burning enthusiast Jen Kennedy, “Almost as bad as the time we burned ‘Book Burning for Dummies’”
* Fake Commercial For “Burn A Quran Day” - Boing Boing
* Fewer Jews In Mormon Heaven USA Today
The Mormon church says it has changed its genealogical database to better prevent the names of Jewish Holocaust victims from being submitted for posthumous baptism by proxy.
* Jewish Student Caught Painting Swastikas On Her Own Door Then Claiming Anti-Semitic Attack Youtube
