Subject: Daily Dose - 080414 - Cardinal
Nicklaus, News from the British Tabloids, temptation, DDL, Rotten News
Shortly after the Pope had apologized to the Jewish People for the treatment of Jews by the Catholic Church over the years, Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, sent a proposal to the College of Cardinals for a friendly game of golf to be played between the two leaders or their representatives to demonstrate the friendship and ecumenical spirit shared by the Catholics and the Jews.
The Pope then met with his College of Cardinals to discuss the proposal.
"Your Holiness," said one of the Cardinals, "Mr. Sharon wants to challenge you to a game of golf to show that you are old and unable to compete. I am afraid that this would tarnish our image in the world."
The Pope thought about this and since he had never held a golf club in his life asked "Don't we have a Cardinal to represent me?"
"None who plays golf very well," a Cardinal replied. "But," he added, "there is a man named Jack Nicklaus, an American golfer, who is a devout Catholic. We can offer to make him a Cardinal, and then ask him to play Mr. Sharon as your personal representative. In addition to showing our spirit of cooperation, we will also win the match."
Everyone agreed that this was a great idea. The call was made. Of course, Nicklaus was honored and he agreed to play as a representative of the Pope.
The day after the match, Nicklaus reported to the Vatican to inform the Pope of the result. "This is Cardinal Nicklaus. I have some good news and some bad news, Holiness," said the golfer.
"Tell me the good news, Cardinal Nicklaus," said the Pope.
"Well, Your Holiness, I don't like to brag, but even though I have played some pretty terrific rounds of golf in my life, this was the best I have ever played, by far. I must have been inspired from above. My drives were long and true, my irons were accurate and purposeful, and my putting was perfect. With all due respect, my play was truly miraculous.
"How can there be bad news?" the Pope asked.
Nicklaus sighed, "I lost by three strokes to Rabbi Tiger Woods. "
(Thanks Jim...)
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News from the British Tabloids....
Oh brother!
Two Bulgarian brothers have divided their family home with barbed-wire after suing each other more than two hundred times.
Taso Hadjiev, 74, and his brother Asen, 75, from Malka Arda in Bulgaria first sued each other in 1968 in a dispute over land left to them by their dead parents. Since then they have had persistent fall-outs and neither ever had the money to leave the home they grew up in because they used any income they had paying lawyers.
Neighbour Sabka Shehova said: "They've been at it for years. They go to court for any old reason they can dream up - and none of it is ever true, they just want to sue each other. They've been at it for so long they can barely remember what they first went to court over. It's like watching a soap opera."
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Dracula coach gaffe
Officials in Transylvania spent £200,000 on a luxury coach for Dracula sightseeing tours - only to find it was too big to get through the city gates.
Entry to the old centre of Brasov is through 10ft medieval gates and councillors were embarrassed to find the double-decker coach was too high. They had invested the money in an attempt to attract more tourists to the city to boost the local economy.
One Brasov councillor said: "Unbelievably nobody ever thought to measure the gates and compare it with the height of the bus. It's a complete waste of money. We have no idea what to do now."
Brasov is close to Bran Castle which attracts thousands of tourists each year as it's believed to have been the home of Vlad the Impaler - the inspiration for Dracula.
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Praying for a cuppa
The power of prayer is all it takes to relax with a drink at a newly opened Croatian cafe. Customers at the Jedro coffee shop in Zagreb are asked to say a certain number of prayers in return for their drinks.
The most expensive beverage is a Coca-Cola which costs five 'Hail Marys'. A cappuccino costs four 'Our Fathers'. The shop, which does not serve any alcohol, is run and financed by local parish authorities in Zagreb's Jarun district.
A spokesman said: "We started out with only five tables but we have so many people coming here now that we are already up to 20 tables and it is growing all the time."
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Italy gives sex films the thumbs up
In news that will bring great joy to furtive amateur pornographers everywhere, Italy's supreme court has ruled that recording secret videos of sex with your partner is not illegal.
Rome's highest appeals acquitted a 49-year-old man who, unbeknown to his girlfriend, had recorded and kept films of them having sex. It overruled two previous verdicts which had given him a four-month jail sentence.
The woman had agreed to the man using a video camera to project live images of them having sex on to the bedroom wall, but did not know he was recording the action.
The court acquitted the man because he had not distributed the films to other people.
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Boy, 8, got stuck in mum's handcuffs
An eight-year-old boy had to be freed by firefighters after getting stuck in a pair of handcuffs he found in his mum's bedroom.
Firefighters took the schoolboy to Copnor Fire Station in Portsmouth, Hampshire, to be freed with industrial metal cutters. The cuffs were described as made of "hardened steel" and not meant as a toy, reports Portsmouth's The News.
Firefighter Dan French said: "The little boy came to the fire station with his grandmother and had the cuffs hanging from one wrist. Before we released him I asked if he was on the run from the police but he assured me he wasn't. And then his grandmother said he'd found the cuffs in his mother's bedroom. She immediately realised what she'd said and put her hand over her mouth. It's beyond my wildest imagination why someone would keep handcuffs in their bedroom!"
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Just after Christmas I received a rather general thank-you note from my sister for the present I had sent her. However, her next letter in mid-March explained that upon receiving my gift, a well taped box of chocolates, she had immediately put it in the freezer because she had already gained about six pounds that Christmas and wanted to avoid temptation.
One day in March, having lost the excess weight and craving a chocolate, she went to the freezer, mouth watering in anticipation, opened the box, and discovered the frozen black sequined evening purse I had given her.
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DDL
There was an old man with brass balls
Who wore some old overalls.
He'd shimmey and shake
And the sound they would make
Was really disturbing to all.
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"Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual."
-Mark Twain
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"New Year's Eve, where auld acquaintance be forgot. Unless, of course, those tests come back positive"
-Jay Leno
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"Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account."
-Oscar Wilde
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Rotten News.... (true)
Brits urged to make fun of Poles
A Polish anthropologist wants British people to make jokes about Poles to help them blend into UK society.
Michal Garapich, a social anthropologist at Roehampton University, told Polish media that his countrymen were too sensitive and needed to lighten up.
He said: "What the English love to knock down most is pompousness, false ideas of self-importance. Poles are touchy and have their taboo subjects. How Polish people react to being the butt of English humour would be the real test of whether or not Poles were really integrating in Britain.
"If the Poles can learn anything from the British, it's not to take themselves too seriously."
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Pleas for condemned Saudi 'witch'
By Heba Saleh
BBC News
Human Rights Watch has appealed to Saudi Arabia to halt the execution of a woman convicted of witchcraft. In a letter to King Abdullah, the rights group described the trial and conviction of Fawza Falih as a miscarriage of justice.
The illiterate woman was detained by religious police in 2005 and allegedly beaten and forced to fingerprint a confession that she could not read. Among her accusers was a man who alleged she made him impotent.
Human Rights Watch said that Ms Falih had exhausted all her chances of appealing against her death sentence and she could only now be saved if King Abdullah intervened. Its letter to King Abdullah says the woman was tried for the undefined crime of witchcraft and that her conviction was on the basis of the written statements of witnesses who said that she had bewitched them.
Human Rights Watch says the trial failed to meet the safeguards in the Saudi justice system. The confession which the defendant was forced to fingerprint was not even read out to her, the group says. Also Ms Falih and her representatives were not allowed to attend most of the hearings.
When an appeal court decided she should not be executed, the law courts imposed the death sentence again, arguing that it would be in the public interest.
The US-based group is asking the Saudi ruler to void Ms Falih's conviction and to bring charges against the religious police who detained her and are alleged to have mistreated her.
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February 7, 2008
Religious police in Saudi Arabia arrest mother for sitting with a man
Sonia Verma in Dubai
A 37-year-old American businesswoman and married mother of three is seeking justice after she was thrown in jail by Saudi Arabia's religious police for sitting with a male colleague at a Starbucks coffee shop in Riyadh.
Yara, who does not want her last name published for fear of retribution, was bruised and crying when she was freed from a day in prison after she was strip-searched, threatened and forced to sign false confessions by the Kingdom's “Mutaween” police.
Her story offers a rare first-hand glimpse of the discrimination faced by women living in Saudi Arabia. In her first interview with the foreign press, Yara told The Times that she would remain in Saudi Arabia to challenge its harsh enforcement of conservative Islam rather than return to America.
“If I want to make a difference I have to stick around. If I leave they win. I can't just surrender to the terrorist acts of these people,” said Yara, who moved to Jeddah eight years ago with her husband, a prominent businessman.
Her ordeal began with a routine visit to the new Riyadh offices of her finance company, where she is a managing partner. The electricity temporarily cut out, so Yara and her colleagues — who are all men — went to a nearby Starbucks to use its wireless internet.
She sat in a curtained booth with her business partner in the café's “family” area, the only seats where men and women are allowed to mix. For Yara, it was a matter of convenience. But in Saudi Arabia, public contact between unrelated men and women is strictly prohibited.
“Some men came up to us with very long beards and white dresses. They asked ‘Why are you here together?'. I explained about the power being out in our office. They got very angry and told me what I was doing was a great sin,” recalled Yara, who wears an abaya and headscarf, like most Saudi women.
The men were from Saudi Arabia's Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a police force of several thousand men charged with enforcing dress codes, sex segregation and the observance of prayers.
“I was lucky. I met other women in that prison who don't have the connections I did,” she said. Her story has received rare coverage in Saudi Arabia, where the press has been sharply critical of the police.
Yara was visited yesterday by officials from the American Embassy, who promised they would file a report. An embassy official told The Times that it was being treated as “an internal Saudi matter” and refused to comment on her case.
Tough justice
— Saudi Arabia’s Mutaween has 10,000 members in almost 500 offices
— Ahmad al-Bluwi, 50, died in custody in 2007 in the city of Tabuk after he invited a woman outside his immediate family into his car
— In 2007 the victim of a gang rape was sentenced to 200 lashes and six years in jail for having been in an unrelated man’s car at the time. She was pardoned by King Abdullah, although he maintained the sentence had been fair.
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Photo News from the British Tabloids....
Lads' mag offers free divorce
An Australian lads' mag is running a competition with a free divorce as the prize.
The competition will allow one disgruntled husband to "unleash themselves back to bachelor hood". Zoo Weekly's £5,000 divorce package includes lawyers fees, court costs - and a divorce party with pin-up girls.
There is also a three-tiered divorce cake, a cleaner for two months, a plasma TV, Playstation 3 and a year's subscription to Zoo.
Zoo editor Paul Merrill said the divorce competition was the perfect way for a reader to "win back their freedom".
"If a marriage fails it's sad, but what's sadder is being stuck under the same roof as a woman who's just slept with your best mate," said Mr Merrill. "Our lucky winner will get to escape and start a new whole new life. We'll help him at every stage - from buying a new plasma screen and throwing him a party, to finding him a new girlfriend."
The give away follows Zoo's previous offer of a free breast enhancement for a reader's girlfriend. Girls were urged to send in snaps of their cleavage for readers to decide who needed the surgical enhancement the most. There were thousands of entries received for what the magazine described as "the most romantic gift of all".