Freedom of religion
By Venkata Vemuri
Religion is on the altar of British courts once again. A female employee of British Airways, Nadia Eweida, was grounded in 2006 for wearing a cross — considered a Christian religious symbol — for work. The employment tribunal ignored her pleas that she was a victim of religious discrimination. But in 2007 BA changed its policy to allow some religious symbols, like the Muslim hijab and the Sikh kara. Now the employee is back in courts again, seeking damages for the tribunal ruling.
The case has sparked off another row on the issue of discrimination on grounds of religion at work places. Prominent lawyer Shami Chakrabarti who heads the human rights group Liberty — and is backing the employee — says one should always have the right to wear religious symbols, as long as they do not cause harm or stop one doing one’s job.
Arraigned against her are the liberals who argue that Britain is sinking into a “religious litigation culture”, as Guardian columnist puts it. This is not a case about freedom of religion but religious discrimination under the Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations, 2003.The distinction being made is that the employee is not saying that wearing a cross is an article of faith for all Christians. Rather, she is saying that she was treated unfavourably.
They mean to say that the distinction is between the freedom to wear a religious symbol, like the cross necklace in this case, and the freedom to wear any necklace. While employers do consider cases where wearing strictly religious symbols is necessary, they should be able to ban wearing articles which religion does not require, for the sake of practicality, safety and equality at work.
They argue that Eweida has the right to file a case of discrimination on grounds of religion given the fact that BA changed its policy in 2007. Of course, even here the case stands only if it is proved that Christianity requires all faithful to wear the cross symbol. But to fight for the cause of freedom to wear anything to work is to question an employer’s rationale for banning certain articles in the work place. This amounts to unnecessary litigation in the name of religion, which it is not.
Debt threat
England’s leading football club Manchester United is in dire straits. The premier league championship is not going their way, with five losses putting them behind Chelsea. Now, the Man U fans are up in arms protesting the mishandling of the club’s finances by their current American owners, the Glazers.
The issue came to a head recently when it was revealed that the club’s overall debt had crossed the £700 million-mark and the owners announced plans for a £500 million bond issue to refinance the debt secured on the club. Man U’s profits, which had nosedived to a loss of £42.7 million last year, rose to £6.4 million this year. But the fact is the clubs losses this year would have crossed the £60 million-mark but for the fact that Man U received £80 million for the sale of striker Christiano Ronaldo to Real Madrid last July.
Adding fuel to the fire, it has now emerged that the club’s owners had taken £10 million out of the club in “management and administration fees” and had personally borrowed a further £10 million in the last one year.
Man U fans feel the club’s financial situation cannot improve until the club is in the hands of its current owners. They had protested heavily when the Glazers bought over the club in 2005. They have now threatened protests to keep the owners out of the club, including asking for the resignation of club manager Sir Alex Ferguson. They are also planning a 10-minute boycott of the Champions League clash against AC Milan on March 10 in an attempt to raise global awareness of their bid to force the Glazer family out of the club.
Meanwhile, the Man U management has asked its players not to maintain personal profiles on social networking websites.
Future jobs
Business, Innovation and Skills Minister Lord Mandelson wants to encourage the study of sciences among British school-goers. So he asked his department to make a list of careers available for them in the future. Some of the jobs of the future are really awesome!
The report says among the most popular professions in 2030 will be body-part maker, which is about using stem cell technology and prosthetics to create replacements for damaged, diseased and worn-out body parts.
The list includes memory augmentation surgeons, who will boost the brain’s storage capacity, and space architects, who will design accommodation on the Moon and perhaps elsewhere in outer space.
Space tourism is a fetching profession in the future, with space pilots, space tour guides and space architects expected to be highly popular jobs. With climate a big issue, climate change reversal specialists, weather modification police — who check scientific measures such as triggering rainfall — and science ethicists, will be in demand.
Other top professions include memory augmentation surgery, virtual law and nano-medicine, vertical farming, narrow-casting, and even waste data handling to stop people being tracked by cyber-criminals.
Eastern roots
Even as Britain questions Tony Blair’s rationale to wage a war against Iraq, new research reveals most Britons are direct descendants of farmers who left modern day Iraq and Syria 10,000 years ago.
Researchers at Leicester University studied the DNA of more than 2,000 men — the common genetic mutation on the Y chromosome, the DNA that is passed down from fathers to sons — to conclude that four out of five white Europeans have roots in the ‘Near East’.
They found that 80 per cent of European men shared the same Y chromosome mutation and after analysing how the mutation was distributed across Europe, were able to retrace how Europe was colonised around 8,000 BC.
European farming began around 9,000 BC in the region extending from the eastern Mediterranean coast to the Persian Gulf and which includes modern day Iraq, Syria, Israel and southeast Turkey. Until now, researchers were skeptical about the arguments of archaeologists that some of these early farmers travelled around the world, settling new lands and bringing farming skills with them.
But the new study, whose findings are published in the science journal PLoS Biology, suggests the farmers regularly moved west when their villages became too crowded, eventually reaching Britain and Ireland. The migrants brought their new skills with them, taught locals how to farm and even produced offspring though relationships with the local women, the researchers believe.
