Amerikai Magyar Hírlap, 2006 (18. évfolyam, 1-50. szám)

2006-12-22 / 50. szám

A Sign of the Cross Miraculously Reappears

Los Angeles Daily News

Is it divine intervention or just a government goof?

The crosses on two original Los Angeles County seals in the Board of Supervisors hearing room were “shining through” decals that were meant to cover them, county officials said Monday.

In fact, the cross is clearly visible directly over the rendering of the San Gabriel Mission on the new seal, which was recently redesigned to omit the controversial Christian symbol.

“It’s amazing,” said Tony Bell, spokesman to Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich. “It’s a Christmas miracle. The cross is shining through. (County officials) are talking about replacing it again. We are going to ask them to leave it the way it is.”

After $1,800 was spent to replace the large pair of county seals in the hearing room, the small cross from the original seal has begun to “shine through to be visible” in the new seal, Supervisor Don Knabe wrote in a prepared release.

“The cross has resurrected itself on the county seal,” Knabe said. “County employees just covered the old seal on Friday afternoon, and, in three days, the original cross has begun to bleed through to be visible again. I don’t think we should spend another dollar of taxpayer money to replace the seal to eliminate that cross.

“It is very symbolic that the cross has reappeared on the new seal directly above the new icon of a mission, which does not have a cross,” Knabe said. “It is only appropriate.”

ACLU spokeswoman Elizabeth Brennan said the incident was unfortunate.

“But they’ve made a good-faith effort,” Brennan said. “It is kind of amusing.”

Earlier this year, county workers installed the two six-foot-diameter seals costing $3,800 on the wall directly behind the supervisors’ chairs at the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration.

In May, the ACLU threatened to sue unless the cross was removed. In June, the supervisors took the first of several votes to replace the seal with a cross-less version. The county plans to spend $700,000 to replace the seal on thousands of county buildings,, vehicles and park signs, as well as on employee uniforms as they wear out.

Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen said officials were considering taking down the two seals and sending them back to the sign shop to find out what went wrong and how they can be fixed.

“It looks just like hell,” Janssen said. “They were trying to do it on the cheap, just by plastering another seal over the old ones. And they did it on the wall. They didn’t really have a good angle or surface to work with.”

Tom Tindall, a Internal Services Department general manager who oversees the sign shop, said he doubts that the faintly glowing cross is a miracle.

“I’m not really clear what it is, but I’m pretty sure it’s a graphics problem,” Tindall said. “There was relief in those symbols. It’s not noticeable in the back of the room, but you can see them when you get closer.”

Tod Tamberg, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, said the church would have to view the seals before commenting on whether it’s anything more than a graphics problem.

“So much for the best-laid plans,” Tamberg said. “The goof is not that they didn’t use thick-enough paper on the seal to cover the cross. The goof is that they took the cross off in the first place.”

San Fernando Valley activist David Hernandez, who is spearheading a petition drive to collect 314,212 signatures by March 1 to give voters a chance to decide the issue, said it just adds to the “comedy of errors.”

“Do we call it divine intervention? There are just some things in life where you can’t just make this stuff up.”

Antonovich said he planned to bring the issue up at a board meeting in January and hoped to convince his fellow supervisors to call off the $700,000 project to replace the seals until the petition drive is finished.

News of the Hungarian American Coalition

Hungarian American Coalition Receives Grant Supporting Horse Riding Therapy For Disabled Children In Hungary Washington, DC - On December 23, 2004 the Hungarian American Coalition received a $25,000 grant from the Charles Simonyi Fund for the Arts and Sciences to support hippo therapy for disabled children in Hungary. The grant’s beneficiary will be the Eilika Habsburg Foundation,

located in Sóskút on the outskirts of Budapest.

The Eilika Habsburg Foundation is one of the most important rehabilitation centers of its nature in Hungary. Their program works with more than 100 disabled children and adults who attend weekly sessions. The Foundation is managed by Eilika Habsburg-Lothringen, a professional therapist who is donating her services and considerable financial resources to help the disabled in Hungary.

The grant will partially fund the construction of an indoor riding course so that the disabled children and adults can have therapy sessions during the winter as well as the summer months. The construction is well underway and the new facility is expected to be operational by March 2005.

Maximilian Teleki, President of the Hungarian American Coalition, said that “it is remarkable how much good can be made with the generosity of a few to help dedicated professionals like Eilika Habsburg-Lothringen. We encourage others to help the Foundation’s mission to improve the life of the physically impaired.”

The Hungarian American Coalition is a nationwide non-profit organization that promotes public understanding and awareness of Hungarian American issues.

Hungarian American Coalition

1120 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 280, Washington, D.C. 20036, U.S.A. Phone: (202) 296- 9505, Fax (202) 775-5175, E-mail: hac@hacusa.org

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Január 1,2005

©

Asia Disaster Death Toll ül at 59,000 ■■

GALLE, Sri Lanka - The sea and wreckage of coastal towns around the Indian Ocean yielded up tens of thousands of bodies on Tuesday, pushing the toll from Sunday’s tsunami close to 60,000.

The apocalyptic destruction caused by the ocean surge dwarfed the efforts of governments and relief agencies as they recovered countless corpses while trying to treat survivors and take care of millions of homeless, increasingly threatened by disease amid the rotting corpses. Thousands more were injured.

The United Nations launched what it called an unprecedented relief effort to assist nations hit by a devastating tsunami triggered by a magnitude 9.0 undersea earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

In a further threat to the region, disease could kill as many people as those killed by the wall of water, a top World Health Organization (WHO) official said.

While grieving families in wrecked coastal towns and resorts buried their loved ones, others, including many foreign tourists, looked for friends and relatives still missing.

“Why did you do this to us, God?” wailed an old woman in a devastated fishing village in southern India’s Tamil Nadu state. “What did we do to upset you? This is worse than death.”

In Thailand, where thousands of tourists were enjoying a Christmas break to escape the northern winter, many of the country’s paradise resorts were turned into graveyards.

In a French-run hotel at Khao Lak on the Thai mainland north of the island of Phuket, up to half the 415 guests were believed killed. A reporter from France’s Europe 1 radio said many bodies had been found in their rooms.

“The army is still bringing out bodies from the rooms, because most of the tourists and staff of the hotel who were there were trapped by the wave which completely swamped this hotel,” reporter Anthony Dufour said.

“The enormity of the disaster is unbelievable,” said Bekele Geleta, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Southeast Asia.

In Sri Lanka, hundreds of people were killed when the wave crashed into a train, wrecking eight carriages and uprooting the track it was traveling on. The train was called “Sea Queen.”

Of the overall death toll so far of 59,186, Indonesia has suffered the biggest number of victims, with its Health Ministry reporting 27,174 dead while Sri Lanka reported around 19,000.

India’s toll of 11,500 included at least 7,000 on one archipelago, the Andamans and Nicobar. On one island, the surge of water killed twothirds of the population.

Hundreds of others died in the Maldives, Myanmar and Malaysia. The arc of water struck as far as Somalia and Kenya. Fishing villages, ports and resorts were devastated, power and communications cut and homes destroyed. The United Nations said the cost of the damage will reach billions of dollars.

The tremor, the biggest in 40 years, tore a chasm in the sea bed which launched the tsunami, which appeared to be the deadliest in more than 200 years.

A tsunami at Krakatoa in 1883 killed 36,000 and one in the south China Sea in 1782 40,000, according to the National Geophysical Data Center in the United States.

In northern Indonesia’s remote Aceh region, closest to the epicenter, bodies littered the streets. About 1,000 people lay on a sports field where they were killed when the three-story-high wall of water struck.

“My son is crying for his mother,” said Bejkhajorn Saithong, 39, searching for his wife at a wrecked hotel on the beach. Body parts jutted from the wreckage.

“I think this is her,” he said. “I recognize her hand, but I’m not sure.”

At the Thai holiday resort of Phuket, foreign tourists pored over names on hospital lists and peered at 80 hospital photos of swollen, unidentified bodies.

“My father was not there,” said German yacht skipper Jerzy Chojnowski, who was looking for his 83-year-old father, missing since the tsunami struck. “My father was not a good swimmer.”

Many of the bodies were already decomposing in the heat, underlining the growing health risk.

Relief teams and rescuers flew into the region from around the globe to help in what the United Nations said will be the biggest and costliest relief effort in its history.

Gerhard Berz, a top risk researcher at Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer, estimated the economic cost of the devastation at over $13 billion.

More than 20 countries have pledged emergency aid worth more than $60 million. Several Asian nations have sent naval ships carrying supplies and doctors to devastated areas.

In Geneva, the WHO’s Dr David Nabarro said it was vital to rush medicine and fresh water to the worst-hit countries to prevent further catastrophe.

“There is certainly a chance that we could have as many dying from communicable diseases as from the tsunami,” Nabarro told a news conference.

There was a serious risk of an explosion of malaria and dengue fever, already endemic in southeast Asia, he said.

Around the ring of devastation, Sweden reported 1,500 citizens missing, the Czech Republic almost 400, Finland 200 and Italy and Germany 100.

Around Sri Lanka’s southern coasts about 1.5 million people - or one in 12 of the population - were homeless, many sheltering in Buddhist temples and schools.

AMERIKAI

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