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| Business of Green: Storm Over the Chamber Thomas Donohue, the United States Chamber of Commerce’s president, expressed hostility toward climate legislation, which led several businesses to resign in protest. feeds.nytimes.com |
In pictures Nepal's greater one-horned rhino makes a comeback news.bbc.co.uk |
Nature or sinister design: what's going on in town with highest rate of twins? In Candido Godoi rumours about tests on villagers by Nazi geneticist Mengele vie with theories about water supplyStaring out over the rolling pastures of Brazil's deep south, 65-year-old twin Cecilia Kunkel placed the blame squarely with her parents. "It's hereditary, isn't it," she said. "It's like an illness."Across the valley, on the porch of his wooden farmhouse, Jose Ignacio Lunkes, 63, the father of identical twins, said it was all about nature."It's the water," he beamed, before adding: "Or perhaps it is a message from God."Facts are as scarce as twins are common in Candido Godoi, a tiny agricultural town in southern Brazil that is said to boast the highest rates of twin births on earth. According to one Brazilian university study, 10% of births in one region of Candido Godoi between 1990 and 1994 were of twins, more than five times the state average. The same study showed nearly 50% of these twins were identical, far higher that normal rates.And in the absence of any concrete scientific explanation, myth and rumour abound in this town of 6,400 inhabitants.Many, like Lunkes, who is also the grandfather of twins, believe the town's twin boom is down to the water supply, extracted from the appropriately named rio Duvida, or Doubt river, that runs past his home. Others say minerals in the earth must be responsible. Recent years, however, have seen a more sinister explanation in this remote farming town where nearly 80% of residents are of German descent, shopfronts bear names like Danzer or Finkler and where an antiquated German dialect is still largely preferred to Brazil's official language, Portuguese.According to these rumours Josef Mengele – a Nazi scientist often referred to as the "Angel of Death" – is the man behind what locals call the "twin revolution".Mengele, thought to have died near Sao Paulo in 1979, is said to have visited the region in the 1960s, performing a number of obscure tests on local women who subsequently gave birth to twins, often with blonde hair and blue eyes. One of the town's former mayors has claimed that Mengele went about his work under the alias Rudolf Weiss.Mengele, who fled to South America, was notorious for his obsession with creating an Aryan master race through genetic experimentation and his tests on twins in Auschwitz. Holocaust survivors say that the Nazi doctor routinely used twins – dubbed "Mengele's children" – as human guinea pigs. He is said to have diverted thousands of young children from the gas chambers to his operating tables, convinced that twins held the key to this master race.Long-held suspicions about Mengele's activities in the region around Candido Godoi gained strength last year after the launch of a book by Argentine journalist, Jorge Camarasa, called Mengele: the Angel of Death in South America.The book reiterated claims that Mengele had spent time clattering around Candido Godoi's dirt tracks in a mobile laboratory conducting genetic experiments on women.Brazilian scientists and historians have dismissed such theories as spurious and scientifically impossible but with geneticists struggling to explain the "twin revolution", the Mengele theory still carries some weight.Until the theory reappeared in Candido Godoi, locals saw the twin phenomenon as a major selling point. They built a fertility statue for tourists to visit, sold bottles of fertility water to women who hoped to bear twins. They continue to hold annual "twin parties" at which twins gather for a banquet.Today many of Candido Godoi's residents still get a visible kick out of the outside attention from visiting academics and film crews ‑ but the Mengele theories have angered many.One local historian was visibly upset and refused to talk to the Guardian this week, claiming he did not have enough time to discuss the situation."It's genetic," one local woman yelled one morning at the bus station. "Tell the world it wasn't the Nazi."Osmar Mallmann, headmaster of the local school, agreed. "It's a myth, just like those old indigenous myths."Lunkes, who says that Menegle was in the region but not performing genetic experiments, added that government persecution of Brazil's German communities following the South American country's allegiance with the allied forces during the second world war had left many locals reluctant to revisit the past. "It was a very complicated period. Nobody wants to relive that time," he said. "[Back then] anybody caught with any German symbol was punished. Everything was forbidden."Alice Szinwelshi, Candido Godoi's education secretary, said: "I believe that Mengele really did pass through these parts. That is not being ruled out."But that he carried out experiments that resulted in the big rise in the number of twins – that is not true."Others are not so certain. Ms Kunkel said her uncle had told her that Mengele, supposedly a visiting vet, had come to the region in the 1960s and did experiments on animals with what they later discovered were placebos.Kunkel said she believed that Mengele's reputed ability to breed twin animals had caught the imagination of local families who, obsessed with the idea, became more likely to have twins. "It's about what is in the mind, not what is in the water," she claimed.Lunkes, a retired teacher who lives in the Linha Sao Pedro community, a particular twin hotspot where 43 pairs have been born into little more than 80 families all living within a 4km radius, said he hoped a scientific explanation would be found, with one local university now preparing a study into the phenomenon."We want to be recognised around the world but not because of the Nazis," he said. "Nobody can really say what it is but it must be something to do with nature – the earth or the water. We just don't have any scientific proof."Lunkes, a farmer, said the area around the Doubt river produced "twin manioc roots, twinned pieces of sugar cane, twinned corn. It makes me think that there is something in the earth."Such theories fail to convince the area's younger generations, people such as Daiane, Daniele and Denise Spies, (left), aged 12, the first triplets to grace Candido Godoi's dusty streets."My parents say they don't really believe that it was the water," admitted Daiane. But why were there so many twins in Candido Godoi? The three girls shrugged, simultaneously.BrazilSecond world warTom Phillipsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Disgraced Miss. judge reports to federal prison JACKSON, Miss. (AP) -- Bobby DeLaughter, a former Mississippi prosecutor and judge whose legal conquests became the subject of books and a movie, reported to federal prison Monday for lying to the FBI in a judicial bribery investigation.... hosted.ap.org |
Prayer and nonsense | Andrew Brown The patent untruth of religious language might have more benefits besides making it memorableI have been reading the letters of CS Lewis again: they seem written from an immense distance. In important ways, they are. He reached the trenches, as a second lieutenant in France, on his 19th birthday; of the time when he got his blighty wound, the regimental history records that The casualties of the 1st battalion between 14th and 16th April were: 2/Lieut. L.B. Johnson died of wounds (15/4/18) and 2/Lieuts C.S. Lewis, A.G. Rawlence, J.R. Hill and C.S. Dowding wounded: in other ranks the estimated losses were 210 killed, wounded and missing.Incidentally, the wounds that ended his war were caused by a British shell dropping short, or what we would now call "friendly fire". But when there are 215 casualties in one unexceptional regiment within two days, no one makes a big fuss about whose shells kill whom. But for all the social distance to Lewis's world, two of his characteristics leap straight to ours. The first is what a good reader he was, which is to say a good critic. The other is that it mattered. He was always trying to write something more than "a readable and convincing slab of claptrap" (as he described Macauley) and very seldom failed, however often he was wrong. But his mythology of language was extremely strange. In a letter to his brother, (17 January 1932) he writes As we learn to talk we forget what we have to say. Humanity, from this point of view, is rather like a man coming gradually awake and trying to describe his dreams: as soon as his mind is sufficiently awake for a clear description, the thing which was to be described is gone … Religion and poetry are about the only languages in modern Europe – if you can regard them as "languages" – which till have traces of the dream in them, still have something to say. Compare "Our Father which art in Heaven" with "The supreme being transcends space and time". The first goes to pieces if you begin to apply literal meaning to it. How can anything but a sexual animal really be a father? How can it be in the sky? The second falls into no such traps. On the other hand the first really means something, really represents a concrete experience in the minds of those who use it: the second is mere dextrous playing with counters, and once a man has learned the rule he can go on that way for two volumes without really using the words to refer to any concrete fact at all ...I am not interested here in the question of whether there is any external referent for "Our Father, who art in Heaven", though I suppose I should point out for the benefit of the sky-pixie crowd that Lewis takes for granted that the meaning cannot be literal. That is the whole point of his argument. I am more interested in a a potentially much more destructive approach, which came out of a paper published last year with the wonderful title "Connections from Kafka" by two psychologists, Travis Proulx, and Steven Heine. The very short form of their argument (which deserves a longer post on its own) is that nonsense or the violation of expectations actually strengthens our ability to find meaning. What's more, if we are exposed to nonsense or loss of meaning in one area , this will increase the meaning and order we find in others. Earlier work of theirs has shown that moral beliefs or group affiliation can be strengthened simply by swapping the experimenter out, without explanation, halfway through a test. That, surely, is the mechanism behind all modern fundamentalisms. Anyway, there is lots of evidence that anxiety increases our tendency to see patterns and meaning in the world. The standard atheist assumption is of course that these patterns don't really exist. In some cases, and some experiments, they don't. But the latest Proulx and Heine paper had a fascinating twist: after being exposed to a twisted version of a Kafka story, in which nothing at all made sense, their subjects were better able to detect patterns that really existed in letter strings they were given to match. The counter-intuitive nature of religious language is often remarked. There are whole theories about just how much counter-intuitiveness is needed to make a religious story most memorable and thus most widespread. But counter-intuitiveness is really just another term for the violation of expectation and the denial of meaning. If Proulx and Heine are right, then counter-intuitive religious language will not just be more memorable: it will help the participants to perceive meaning in the threatening world around them. Sometimes that meaning will be objectively there. This is a long way back to CS Lewis, but I think it shows his instinct was right: "Our Father, who art in heaven" actually means something to the people who say it, in a way that more literally sensible language just couldn't. The rule for religious language is clear: if a dalek could understand it, it wouldn't be worth saying.ReligionPsychologyAtheismCS LewisChristianityAndrew Brownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |