Today’s NYT has an article about the new Japanese prime minister and his cabinet. An excerpt:

Another [cabinet member] was the education adviser, Eriko Yamatani, 56, a critic of sex education and the teaching of “excessive” equality of the sexes in schools.

The new state minister in charge of sex equality, Sanae Takaichi, 45, has opposed allowing women to have different legal family names from their husbands, a freedom women sued to win in the late 1980’s.

This post refers to:

Fackler, Martin. New Premier Seeks a Japan With Muscle and a Voice. New York Times. September 27, 2006.

The new president of the Islamic Society of North America is a woman. Her name is Ingrid Mattson, and she is a professor of Islamic Studies and was a Canadian-born Roman Catholic.

This is pretty exciting, and I think it’s a good thing. I hope that it won’t turn out to be a devisive (schism-causing, I’m sure it will divide people) issue.

This post refers to:

MacFarquhar, Neil. Putting a Different Face on Islam in America. New York Times. September 20, 2006.

Apparently Mark Haddon has a new book out called A Spot of Bother. Haddon is the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which was on the British Librarian’s must read list. The latter book is written from the point of view of Christopher, a teenage boy with autism. Christopher sets out to investigate the death of his neighbor’s dog, a crime in which he is initially a suspect, but winds up learning more about his family and his own past.

I had trouble putting down The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, so I think I’ll be picking up A Spot of Bother when I get a chance.

Basque is a language spoken in the Pyrenees Mountains, the border between France and Spain. I think there are more Basque in Spain than France. The language is supposed to be unrelated to any other language spoken today. I’ve always been curious about it, and I finally got to hear some samples of it here, on one of the BBC language pages. It really does sound different from anything I’ve heard before, not that that’s much.