John Galliano, the talented and troubled designer who was fired by the fashion house Christian Dior for making anti-Semitic remarks in a drunken rant at a bar, will be put on trial for the offenses, the Paris prosecutors office has said.Rico says that, if there's one thing he does not care a damn thing about, it's the entire future of haute couture...
Mr. Galliano, who friends said has left France to enter a rehabilitation program, also issued an apology through his London lawyer’s office on Wednesday: "Anti-Semitism and racism have no part in our society. I unreservedly apologize for my behavior in causing any offense."
The prosecutors office said the trial could take place between April and June of this year and that, if found guilty, Mr. Galliano could face as long as six months in prison and up to €22,500 ($31,000) in fines. French law makes it a crime to incite racial hatred; the statute has been used in the past to punish anti-Semitic remarks.
The designer’s statement said he was "subjected to verbal harassment and an unprovoked assault when an individual tried to hit me with a chair having taken violent exception to my look and my clothing" during the altercation at a Paris cafe last week. He also has started legal action for defamation, his statement said.
Mr. Galliano was persuaded to accept treatment for his alcohol problems by close colleagues and friends like the supermodels Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss, sources said, asking to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the situation. While the treatment center is not known, it is likely that his destination is the Meadows, a facility in Wickenberg, Arizona, where Elton John and Donatella Versace were treated in the past.
For Christian Dior, the billion-dollar company, the problems are only multiplying. The Dior autumn 2011 women’s wear show will go ahead here on Friday, according to a person at Dior who asked not to be identified.
The future of the John Galliano brand, which is underwritten by Dior, relies on licenses and barely breaks even financially, is complex. Executives will have to see whether those external partners still want to be associated with a designer whose name has been globally smirched.
But more dramatic for Dior, and for the entire future of haute couture, is the problem of finding a replacement for Mr. Galliano. From the British designer’s tsunami of ideas in the twice-a-year haute couture and ready-to-wear collections, design teams build ranges of inter-season collections and accessory lines. Without leadership, the fashion house can run only a short time on empty.
In the past, Dior’s parent company, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, and its founder and chief executive, Bernard Arnault, have tended to switch both executives and designers from brand to brand. Mr. Galliano himself started his reign at LVMH at Givenchy in 1995, before switching to Dior the following year. So it is natural that the name of Riccardo Tisci, the current designer at Givenchy, is considered high on the list of possible replacements at Dior.
The Italian-born and British-trained Mr. Tisci, like Mr. Galliano an alumni of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, has climbed the steep learning curve toward the heights of haute couture at Givenchy. The theory goes that other LVMH brands, like Céline, Loewe and Louis Vuitton, might then follow with changes in a kind of fashion merry-go-round.
Other theories suggest that a rising fashion star might be plucked to take over at Dior or that an established success story, such as the invigoration of Lanvin by the designer Alber Elbaz, could be transferred to the LVMH stable. But with so many long-established houses searching for new talent, even with the might of Dior a speedy choice may not be easy.
03 March 2011
That'll learn him
Suzy Menkes has an article in The New York Times on the John Galliano tizzy:
All that, over a nasty little pie
The whoopie pie consists of two round pieces of chocolate cake, icing and, of late, controversy. Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and the state of Maine are fighting a whoopie pie war, battling over who can lay claim to a confection that both places say is a regional delicacy.Rico says he's had one, and they can have the privilege, either of them...
The first salvo was fired in January, when a bill to make the whoopie pie Maine’s official state dessert was filed in the Legislature. After all, the state was home last summer to a whoopie pie festival, and a former governor declared the fourth Saturday in June as Whoopie Pie Day.
“It’s sold all over Maine, in every corner of the state,” said Amos Orcutt, president of the Maine Whoopie Pies Association and the University of Maine Foundation. “A lot of alumni I’ve spoken with said, ‘I remember these whoopie pies.’ These are people who are 80 and 90 years old, eating whoopie pies when they were young.”
Labadie’s Bakery in Lewiston, Maine claims on its website that it has been making “The original (not a copy) Maine Whoopie Pie since 1925!”
But the treat, whose name is of uncertain origin, has long been an Amish country staple, and Pennsylvania is not eager to hand over such bragging rights. The Pennsylvania Dutch Convention and Visitors Bureau has created a website where readers are urged to “Save our Whoopie!” It claims Maine is trying to “steal our treat” in an “act of confectionary larceny”.
One group staged a rally last month in Lancaster, “making note of the fact that Lancaster County is most notably the home of the whoopie pie,” said John Smucker, owner of the Bird-in-Hand Family Restaurant and Smorgasbord in Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania.
Back in Maine, where the legislation is scheduled to be voted on in the next few weeks, there is dissent in the whoopie pie ranks. Donald Pilon, a state representative from Saco, objects to honoring the whoopie pie, believing that a dessert made from large amounts of shortening and sugar should not be heralded when a third of Maine children are obese. “Whoopie pie, it’s not even a pie,” Mr. Pilon said. “It’s two pieces of cake with frosting in the middle.” The legislation was recently amended, he said, to call the whoopie pie the state treat, rather than dessert, in light of his objections.
Mr. Orcutt thinks the bill will prevail and the dispute will rage on. “They’re really having a meltdown,” he said of the detractors in Pennsylvania, “and they’re somewhat deprived because they don’t have lobsters and they don’t have the wild Maine blueberry, so they’re clinging on to this whoopie pie.”
02 March 2011
Seems there's a change in the situation...
Rico says one Russell Tiner sends along this news, supposedly true:
About six months ago, a news program on oil had one of the Forbes brothers as the guest. The host said to Mr. Forbes: "I am going to ask you a direct question and I would like a direct answer. How much oil does the U.S. have in the ground?"Rico says his friend the Peripatetic Engineer says the problem is that it's shale oil, and "tree huggers" don't like us digging that crap up...
Mr. Forbes did not miss a beat. He said: "More than all the Middle East put together."
The US Geological Service issued a report in April of 2008 that only scientists and oil men knew was coming, but was it big. It was a revised report (which hadn't been updated since 1995) on how much oil was in an area of the western part of North Dakota, western South Dakota, and extreme eastern Montana.
Seems the Bakken area is the largest domestic oil discovery since Alaska's Prudhoe Bay find, and has the potential to eliminate all American dependence on foreign oil. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates it at 503 billion barrels. Even if just ten percent of the oil is recoverable, at $107 a barrel we're looking at a resource base worth more than $5.3 trillion.
"When I first briefed legislators on this, you could see their jaws practically hit the floor. They had no idea." That from Terry Johnson, financial analyst for the Montana Legislature.
"This sizable find is now the highest-producing onshore oil field found in the past 56 years," reports The Pittsburgh Post Gazette. It's a formation known as the Williston Basin, but is more commonly referred to as the Bakken. It stretches from Northern Montana through North Dakota and into Canada. For years, U.S. oil exploration has been considered a dead end. Even the 'Big Oil' companies gave up searching for major oil wells decades ago. However, a recent technological breakthrough has opened up the Bakken's massive reserves, and we now have access of up to 500 billion barrels. Because this is light, sweet oil, those billions of barrels will cost Americans just $16 per barrel!
That's enough crude to fully fuel the American economy for 2041 years straight.
Here are the official estimates:
• 8 times as much oil as Saudi Arabia
• 18 times as much oil as Iraq
• 21 times as much oil as Kuwait
• 22 times as much oil as Iran
• 500 times as much oil as Yemen, and it's all right here in the Western United States.
Poor Ireland...
...so far from God, so close to England. (A quote, though Rico misremembered it: "Poor Mexico; so far from God and so close to the United States."
But The New York Times has an editorial on the very subject:
But The New York Times has an editorial on the very subject:
Irish voters had every right to be angry at the catastrophic mismanagement of their economy. But the drubbing they administered to Fianna Fail, the longtime ruling party, by itself won’t undo the damage that came from years of lax government oversight and disastrous policy choices.
The new government being put together under Enda Kenny and his center-right Fine Gael party must restore faith in government by fairly apportioning economic sacrifices, aggressively regulating lenders, and ending cozy ties between politicians and bankers. Even then Ireland will have no chance, unless it also gets more enlightened help from its European partners.
Mr. Kenny is rightly seeking to renegotiate the terms of last year’s $112 billion bailout package. European Union leaders demanded deflationary tax increases and spending cuts that make it impossible for Ireland to grow its way out of debt and ruinous interest rates that will deepen those arrears. Funds that cost donors less than three percent must be paid back at close to six percent.
Ireland’s Celtic Tiger boom of the late 1990s was no mirage. Today’s problems began after Ireland started using the euro in 2002 and low interest rates and extremely lax bank regulation ignited a speculative housing bubble. When that burst in 2008, Ireland recklessly guaranteed the full liabilities of its six largest banks with public money. Those liabilities turned out to be far more than the government had or could raise, eventually forcing it into the European bailout. Now most of that borrowed money is going just to keep those banks afloat.
Meanwhile, Ireland’s people have paid a terrible price. Unemployment, under five percent in 2007, is more than thirteen percent and rising. As in the bad-old days Ireland thought it had left behind, growing numbers of young people are moving abroad in search of work.
Mr. Kenny is scheduled to meet Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, and France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Then he attends a special euro-zone summit meeting, which will try to thrash out a grand bargain for restoring financial stability to the currency. That ambitious goal may not yet be in reach. Renegotiating Ireland’s onerous bailout terms is. Irish voters have spoken clearly. European leaders should respond wisely. It is in no country’s interest to lock Ireland into long-term economic ruin.
Rico didn't even get to play one on TV
Roman Sarkisian easily passes for your average Fresno police officer: crew cut, tight-set jaw and “just-the-facts” demeanor. “I like to do law enforcement stuff,” said Mr. Sarkisian, 23, an immigrant from the republic of Georgia who is studying criminology at the city college in Fresno, California. “I like helping out putting bad guys in jail.”
But Mr. Sarkisian is not a police officer, and he does not carry a gun or a Taser. He is a police volunteer, part of an experiment by departments across the country that enlists trained amateurs to perform a broad, and occasionally dangerous, array of investigative duties like collecting evidence, interviewing witnesses, searching for missing persons, and looking into long-dormant cases.
Hamstrung by shrinking budgets, the police say the volunteers are indispensable in dealing with low-level offenses and allow sworn officers to focus on more pressing crimes and more violent criminals. “We had the option to either stop handling those calls or do it in a different manner,” said Fresno’s police chief, Jerry Dyer, whose department has lost more than 300 employees in recent years. “I’ve always operated under the premise of no risk, no success. And, in this instance, I felt we really didn’t have very much to lose.”
Other chiefs facing budget problems are also using volunteers. In Mesa, Arizona, a Phoenix suburb, ten of them have been trained to process crime scenes, dust for fingerprints, and even swab for DNA. In Pasadena, California, a team of retirees is combating identity theft and, apparently, their own ennui. “Once I retired and cleaned up my house, I was bored,” said Liz Diott, 67, a former vice president at the Bank of America who now works twenty hours a week at the Pasadena Police Department. “It keeps me on my toes.”
Civilians have long taken on administrative or menial duties for the police— there are volunteer programs at some 2,100 departments nationwide, according to the International Association of Chiefs of Police— and some departments, including in New York City, use auxiliary officers for traffic control, beat patrols and other duties.
But the use of volunteers in investigations raises legal and liability questions, said Robert Weisberg, the co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center. He suggested such programs could provide openings for defense attorneys to suppress evidence and attack witnesses’ testimony. “If I were a defense lawyer, I would certainly say in front of the jury, ‘Mr.’— and I would underline Mister— ‘Mr. Shoontz, you’re a volunteer. You’re not really a police officer, are you?” Mr. Weisberg said.
San Francisco’s district attorney, George Gascon, a former police chief in Mesa, said he was not worried that police volunteers would cause problems for prosecutors. “So long as there is appropriate training and supervision in place, that should not be an area of concern,” he said.
Mr. Gascon and other supporters say such programs, in addition to providing free labor, are a recruitment tool for police cadets and are popular with residents.
“Citizens are more receptive to our volunteers than to our officers,” said Officer Celestine Ratliff, the volunteer liaison for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina.
Still, Allen Hopper, the police practices director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, said volunteers needed to be aware of, and responsible for, suspects’ constitutional protections. While sworn officers can be punished for breaking those rules, he said, “It is unclear how these important safeguards would apply to civilians doing police officers’ jobs.”
Supporters say the volunteers are screened and extensively trained. In Mesa, the volunteer crime scene specialists have to demonstrate that they are competent in various types of evidence collection and, oddly, be able to lift 25 pounds. “We’re asking a lot for people we’re not paying,” said Linda Bailey, the department’s volunteer coordinator. “But these folks are handling evidence, and they have access to confidential information.”
Most departments say they do not want their volunteers to confront criminals in the act. In El Paso County, Colorado, which is home to Colorado Springs, the so-called citizen patrols check out burglar alarms, but if there is any indication that a crime is under way, they are instructed to call in an actual sworn officer, Sheriff Terry Maketa said.
In Fresno, where the pilot program began last year, officials say the program was vetted by the county’s district attorney to address legal concerns. The volunteers’ shirts are a different color than the sworn officers’, and they are restricted to handling nonviolent crimes such as petty theft, stolen vehicles, and vandalism that is not gang-related. “The reality is, we’ve not had any challenges yet,” Chief Dyer said.
The Fresno program has drawn a diverse roster of crime fighters, including a recent class that included an assistant golf pro, a Pizza Hut manager, and Steve Aberle, a Spanish teacher with a mop of gray hair. Mr. Aberle said he went through the eleven-week training course to get a taste of “the edge” of police life that he had read about in crime novels. “The whole thing is very cool,” he said.
The class also included several young men like Mr. Sarkisian who said they had volunteered as a way into a law enforcement career.
On a recent morning, Officer Kent Pichardo was training Mr. Sarkisian, part of the forty hours that each volunteer must spend in the field with an active-duty officer. They were answering calls in Southeast Fresno, a blue-collar neighborhood where the Bulldog street gang has pockets of members. And while he looked the part, with a blue jacket over his white shirt, there was little to distinguish him for Officer Pichardo, Mr. Sarkisian seemed nervous, chewing gum, sheepishly knocking on doors and scribbling in a worn notebook. (One page was labeled “Cop Notes.”)
By the end of his shift, Mr. Sarkisian had diligently worked his way through an interview with the parent of a missing teenager. At one point, Mr. Sarkisian asked whether the girl had any identifiable marks, and the parent mentioned a tattoo of a dog’s paw.
“So she was gang-affiliated,” Mr. Sarkisian said, recognizing it as a Bulldog symbol. Officer Pichardo nodded in approval. Officer Pichardo, a sixteen-year-veteran, said that volunteers like Mr. Sarkisian, who is allowed to carry a macelike spray, “could come across people who are anti-police” Still, he said, he would train Mr. Sarkisian “just as I’d train any other officer,” though he needs “to be aware of where the line stops. Do I want him to make an arrest? Not really,” Officer Pichardo said. “But I want him to be an outstanding witness.”
Oh, Rico can't imagine why
Seems Christian Dior fired his star designer, John Galliano, and Cathy Horyn has the story in The New York Times:
The career of Christian Dior’s star designer, John Galliano, may well be over after he was dismissed for a video that surfaced of him making anti-Semitic remarks. But Dior and its parent company, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, acted quickly and decisively in an attempt to limit any long-term damage to the Dior name.
Ronald Frasch, the president and chief merchandising officer at Saks Fifth Avenue, which carries Dior, said he did not think the brand would be left damaged. “My initial reaction is they gained respect by dealing with this directly,” Mr. Frasch said.
There is no doubt in the industry that Dior, one of the most recognizable and influential brands, will be able to attract a name designer as a successor to Mr. Galliano. There are no obvious choices yet , but among those being mentioned in the media are Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy and Alber Elbaz of Lanvin, both already in the LVMH stable.
The firing of Mr. Galliano, 50, a one-time punk stylist whose soaring imagination helped turn Dior into a multimillion-dollar brand, was the expected culmination of one of the strangest episodes in recent fashion history.
Dior suspended Mr. Galliano after he was accused by two people of making an anti-Semitic slur in the same Marais district bar, La Perle. Mr. Galliano lives nearby.
His lawyer, Stephane Zerbib, denied that his client had made anti-Semitic remarks. It is a crime in France to incite racial hatred, and the statute has been used to punish anti-Semitic speech.
A video, posted on the website of a British tabloid, The Sun, showed Mr. Galliano sitting alone in the bar and blearily telling some appalled-seeming patrons, “I love Hitler” and “people like you would be dead” and “your mothers, your forefathers would all be gassed". The video was reportedly made several months ago.
If Mr. Galliano’s once-brilliant future at Dior was tenuous last week, his fate seemed all but sealed on Monday evening when the actress Natalie Portman, who represents the brand’s Miss Dior Cherie perfume, denounced Mr. Galliano. In a statement, she said: “I am deeply shocked and disgusted by the video of John Galliano’s comments that surfaced today. In light of this video, and as an individual who is proud to be Jewish, I will not be associated with Mr. Galliano in any way.”
The news of Mr. Galliano’s dismissal cast a looming shadow over the opening of the Paris collections, as magazine editors and store buyers grappled with the implications for Dior and its retail business. One senior editor from an American magazine, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity in discussing a major advertiser, described the designer’s purported comments as “poisonous".
The news also brought some unwanted drama to shows that happened to be running around 5 p.m. Paris time. Five minutes after Anthony Vaccarello, a newcomer with enough excitement around him to attract Emmanuelle Alt, the editor of French Vogue, to his presentation, concluded his show, it was quickly forgotten as nearly every hand-held device in the place flickered to life and word spread down the front row that John Galliano had been fired an hour earlier.
Members of the fashion community who had been friendly with Mr. Galliano said they were surprised by his behavior and statements in the video because they seemed out of character. “He has always been pretty shy,” said Daphne Guinness, the British socialite. She speculated that the intensity of creative and commercial pressures on designers at global luxury houses may have had an impact on Mr. Galliano’s state of mind. She added: “It makes me terribly worried for him. He has had a couple of tough years.”
According to a Dior executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the company received numerous complaints from customers offended by Mr. Galliano’s conduct. This executive also said that Mr. Galliano remained in seclusion in his home over the weekend and did not try to contact his employer to possibly explain himself or offer an apology. Mr. Galliano did surface late on Monday afternoon, when he was questioned in a Paris police station about the altercation with the fellow customers at the Marais bar, and he was subsequently released. No charges have been filed.
In a brief statement, Sidney Toledano, Dior’s chief executive, said he condemned the words and conduct of Mr. Galliano, “which are in total contradiction to the longstanding core values of Christian Dior”. The company said it had initiated dismissal procedures.
Executives said a decision would soon be made whether to hold the fall ready-to-wear show as scheduled. But indications were the house planned to go ahead with its runway show. There was no word yet on whether Mr. Galliano’s show for the line designed under his own name would go ahead on Sunday afternoon as planned.
Mr. Galliano joined Dior in 1996, and he very quickly produced collections that made headlines and pleased his boss, Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH. One show in particular, a 2000 haute couture collection inspired by tramps, with models in torn newsprint-chiffon dresses and rope belts dangling with tin cups, was criticized in the French media as insensitive to the homeless. But, while Mr. Galliano apologized and riot police briefly surrounded Dior’s Avenue Montaigne headquarters, the outrage didn’t seem to hurt Dior or dim Mr. Galiano’s reputation for flamboyance.
Apart from a few weak seasons, Mr. Galliano’s collections for Dior (and for his own signature brand) have largely been critical triumphs and his runway shows regularly among the unquestioned highlights of Paris Fashion Week. He has been one of the great fashion talents of the last twenty years, known for his imagination and nearly unmatched technical skills.
In his knowledge of fashion, he was rivaled only by Karl Lagerfeld of Chanel, and in his showmanship he had few peers. And these peers were among of an influential generation of young designers that included Alexander McQueen (like Mr. Galliano, brash and British) before Mr. McQueen killed himself last year. Among Mr. Galliano’s most notable clients were Nicole Kidman, especially in the 1990s, when she became a red carpet luminary; the actress Marion Cotillard; and Carla Bruni, now the first lady of France.
In articles, Mr. Galliano seldom denied a wild past and taste for self-indulgence, though in more recent years it seemed directed toward physical improvement, special diets or some new spa experience. At least that was the side he showed the public and the fashion press. Not merely shy, Mr. Galliano seemed isolated.
In a 2007 profile of Mr. Galliano in The New York Times Magazine, Mr. Toledano said he often dealt with Mr. Galliano through intermediaries in the house, usually design assistants. And, yes, it bothered the chief executive that he sometimes didn’t have direct contact with his designer. “I still don’t know him personally,” Mr. Toledano said then.
A nice Jewish boy weighs in on the Mideast
Rico says and a smart one, too. Thomas Friedman in The New York Times:
Future historians will long puzzle over how the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, in protest over the confiscation of his fruit stand, managed to trigger popular uprisings across the Muslim world. We know the big causes: tyranny, rising food prices, youth unemployment, and social media. But, since being in Egypt, I’ve been putting together my own back-of-the-envelope guess list of what I’d call the “not-so-obvious forces” that fed this mass revolt. Here it is:
The Obama Factor: Americans have never fully appreciated what a radical thing we did, in the eyes of the rest of the world, in electing an African-American with the middle name Hussein as president. I’m convinced that listening to Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech, not the words, but the man, were more than a few young Arabs who were saying to themselves: “Hmmm, let’s see. He’s young. I’m young. He’s dark-skinned. I’m dark-skinned. His middle name is Hussein. My name is Hussein. His grandfather is a Muslim. My grandfather is a Muslim. He is president of the United States. And I’m an unemployed young Arab with no vote and no voice in my future.” I’d put that in my mix of forces fueling these revolts.
Google Earth: While Facebook has gotten all the face time in Egypt, Tunisia, and Bahrain, don’t forget Google Earth, which began roiling Bahraini politics in 2006. A big issue in Bahrain, particularly among Shi'ite men who want to get married and build homes, is the unequal distribution of land. On 27 November 2006, on the eve of parliamentary elections in Bahrain, The Washington Post ran this report from there: “Mahmood, who lives in a house with his parents, four siblings, and their children, said he became even more frustrated when he looked up Bahrain on Google Earth and saw vast tracts of empty land, while tens of thousands of mainly poor Shi'ites were squashed together in small, dense areas. ‘We are seventeen people crowded in one small house, like many people in the southern district,’ he said. ‘And you see on Google how many palaces there are and how the al-Khalifas [the Sunni ruling family] have the rest of the country to themselves.’ Bahraini activists have encouraged people to take a look at the country on Google Earth, and they have set up a special user group whose members have access to more than forty images of royal palaces.”
Israel: The Arab television network al-Jazeera has a big team covering Israel today. Here are some of the stories they have been beaming into the Arab world: Israel’s previous prime minister, Ehud Olmert, had to resign because he was accused of illicitly taking envelopes stuffed with money from a Jewish-American backer. An Israeli court recently convicted Israel’s former president Moshe Katsav on two counts of rape, based on accusations by former employees. And just a few weeks ago, Israel, at the last second, rescinded the appointment of Major General Yoav Galant as the army’s new chief of staff after Israeli environmentalists spurred a government investigation that concluded General Galant had seized public land near his home. (You can see his house on Google Maps!) This surely got a few laughs in Egypt, where land sales to fat cats and cronies of the regime that have resulted in huge overnight profits have been the talk of Cairo this past year. When you live right next to a country that is bringing to justice its top leaders for corruption and you live in a country where many of the top leaders are corrupt, well, you notice.
Beijing Olympics: China and Egypt were both great civilizations subjected to imperialism, and were both dirt poor back in the 1950s, with China even poorer than Egypt, Edward Goldberg, who teaches business strategy, wrote in The Globalist. But, today, China has built the world’s second-largest economy, and Egypt is still living on foreign aid. What do you think young Egyptians thought when they watched the dazzling opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics? China’s Olympics were another wake-up call “in a way that America or the West could never be”, telling young Egyptians that something was very wrong with their country, argued Goldberg.
The Fayyad Factor: Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad introduced a new form of government in the Arab world in the last three years, something I’ve dubbed Fayyadism. It said: judge me on my performance, on how I deliver government services and collect the garbage and create jobs, not simply on how I “resist” the West or Israel. Every Arab could relate to this. Chinese had to give up freedom but got economic growth and decent government in return. Arabs had to give up freedom and got the Arab-Israeli conflict and unemployment in return.
Add it all up and what does it say? It says you have a very powerful convergence of forces driving a broad movement for change. It says we’re just at the start of something huge. And it says that if we don’t have a more serious energy policy, the difference between a good day and bad day for America from here on will hinge on how the 86-year-old king of Saudi Arabia manages all this change.
Okay, no racist jokes, now...
...however tempting a story about a poor dead girl named Kamisha might be (one with a sister named Schneiqua), as Alan Baker and Tim Stelloh have it in The New York Times:
The dispute between the two friends began over $20, money that had been given to buy baby formula and diapers, but that went for some other purpose. Days later, it became a heated public matter, splayed on the two young women’s Facebook pages.Rico says okay, one question: how is it that Mom's last name is Colter-Henry, the dead girl is named Richards, and her sister is named Henry? Just asking...
At 5:44 p.m. on Sunday, one of them, Kamisha Richards, 22, wrote that this would be “the last time u will con me into giving u money.” Ten minutes later, the other, Kayla Henriques, 18, replied: “Dnt try to expose me mama but I’m not tha type to thug it ova facebook see u wen u get frm wrk.”
The war of words escalated over Facebook. In capital letters, at 8:52 p.m., Ms. Richards said that she would have the last laugh. Ms. Henriques replied within seconds: “We will see.”
They exchanged more messages, until about 9:30 p.m. on Sunday. About 24 hours after their last Facebook exchange, Ms. Richards was dead, killed by a kitchen knife to the chest delivered inside an apartment in East New York, Brooklyn; according to the police, the home of Ms. Henriques, Ms. Richards, and relatives of both women, including Ms. Henriques’s brother, who was dating Ms. Richards.
By about 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Ms. Henriques had been arrested, after witnesses helped point investigators in her direction, and the suspect “said things to implicate herself,” according to a law enforcement official. “It was witnessed by several people, in the apartment,” the official said.
In retrospect, some of the clues were spread like electronic bread crumbs for anyone to see.
Ms. Henriques was charged with second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon, said a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said the internet postings added pieces to investigators’ knowledge, though it was not immediately clear if those clues had been gleaned before Ms. Henriques’s arrest. “Like so many things these days, elements of this case emerged on Facebook,” Mr. Browne said.
To the victim’s relatives, it seemed unreal that the Facebook entries could foreshadow such violence. In fact, Ms. Richards did not consider the exchange she had with Ms. Henriques serious, said her sister, Schneiqua Henry, 20. “She didn’t pay it any mind,” Ms. Henry said. “She thought it was just another argument.”
Ms. Richards’s stepfather, Dunstan Henry, 42, said she was not someone who was easily provoked to fight. “She’s the type of person that would let you run your mouth off and she wouldn’t say nothing,” said Mr. Henry, who raised Ms. Richards since she was a newborn, after her biological father returned to Kingston, Jamaica.
Ms. Richards graduated from college in May, held two jobs and hoped to enter law school. She had been dating Ramel Henriques on and off for about seven years. Ms. Henry said she lived in the same complex as Ms. Henriques, the Cypress Hills Houses, but in a different apartment.
Ms. Henry said she believed her sister had given Ms. Henriques money in the past, though she said the two had never fought over the loans.
Mr. Henry said Ms. Richards had helped care for Ms. Henriques’s eleven-month-old son. “My daughter was taking care of Kayla,” he said. “She gave her $20 to be there for her like a big sister.”
Detectives are investigating whether Ms. Richards had claimed Ms. Henriques’s son as a dependent for tax purposes, and “whether that was an element in the dispute between the women,” the official said.
But that notion angered the victim’s brother, Donell Henry, 21, who said of Ms. Richards: “She didn’t use nobody as a tax write-off. When anyone needed anything in that house, she provided for them.”
What Ms. Henriques used the $20 for was not immediately clear. But those who knew Ms. Richards said that, when it became clear that the money had not been spent on milk and diapers, she asked for it back.
In one Facebook exchange, Ms. Richards used an acronym indicating she was laughing hard, and wrote, “girl bye I guess I’ll c u later just bring the money.”
Things quickly deteriorated when the two met on Monday night in an apartment of the complex where the women were living, officials said.
An argument started in the kitchen, and Ms. Henriques, who had her son with her, passed the child to a friend who was there, Ms. Henry said.
At one point, Ms. Richards opened the refrigerator door and saw the baby formula and poured some of it out, and said it was “half of what” Ms. Henriques owed her, the official said.
The argument then continued into one of the three bedrooms in the apartment, where Ms. Richards was mortally wounded.
“The next thing you know, she stabbed my sister in the heart,” Ms. Henry said.
Ms. Richards staggered out into the hallway, and someone tried to apply pressure to her wound, as others called 911. But she was declared dead on arrival at Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center, officials said.
On Tuesday, Ms. Richards’ relatives were still making funeral arrangements. The oldest of five siblings, she had graduated from John Jay College in May with a degree in criminal justice, said Yasmin Payne, 22, a longtime friend. Ms. Richards planned on attending Brooklyn Law School, and took the LSAT in December. She worked two jobs through college, friends and family members said, one as a security guard at JPMorgan Chase in Manhattan and the other as a housekeeper.
At her home in Jamaica, Queens, Ms. Richards’s mother, Nicole Colter-Henry, 39, said she had raised her family in the Cypress Hills Houses but moved because she was “tired of the projects. I wanted something better for them,” she said of her children as she stood surrounded by photos of her oldest daughter. “I’m never going to see my daughter. All over twenty dollars.”
No one from Ms. Henriques’s family could be reached for comment. But later Tuesday, a message appeared on Ms. Henriques’s Facebook page, even as she was in custody. It said: “I can’t be leave this happen I’m sorry I send my condolences to her family RiP kamisha.” As that message was added, many others that chronicled the women’s fight suddenly disappeared.
History for the day
Geez, that's limited of them
Quote for the day:
We basically decided, on principle, that we couldn't work for a country that was using snipers on rooftops to pick off its citizens.
Gregory Vistica, president of the Washington Media Group, which dropped Tunisia as a public relations client after that nation cracked down on protesters.
Now that's fast
01 March 2011
Science student? Who knew?
The Intel Science Talent Search is considered the nation’s most elite and demanding high school research competition, attracting the crème de la milk-fats-encased-in-a-phospholipid-and-protein-membrane of aspiring young scientists. Victors and near-victors in the 69-year-old contest have gone on to win seven Nobel Prizes in physics or chemistry, two Fields Medals in mathematics, a half-dozen National Medals in science and technology, a long string of MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants, and now, an Academy Award as best actress in a leading role.Rico says he didn't graduate summa-cum-anything, and his sole acting credit was in a junior high school production (and he wasn't very good), so he's terribly impressed by all these folks. (And he couldn't remember who the actress playing Amy Farrah Fowler on The Big Bang Theory was; she's gotten bigger since Blossom.)
On Sunday night, the gorgeously pregnant Natalie Portman, 29, won an Oscar for her performance as Nina, a mentally precarious ballerina in the shock fantasy Black Swan. Among the lesser-known but nonetheless depressingly impressive details in Ms. Portman’s altogether too-precociously-storied career is that, as a student at Syosset High School on Long Island back in the late 1990s, Ms. Portman made it all the way to the semifinal rounds of the Intel competition.
For those who know how grueling it can be to put together a prize-worthy project and devote hundreds of hours of “free” time at night, on weekends, during spring break and summer vacation, doing real, original scientific research while one’s friends are busy adolescing, the achievement is testimony enough to Ms. Portman’s self-discipline and drive.
Yet there’s more. While carrying out her investigation into a new, “environmentally friendly” method of converting waste into useful forms of energy, and maintaining the straight-A average she’d managed since grade school, Ms. Portman already was a rising movie star. She’d been in films directed by Woody Allen, Tim Burton, and Luc Besson, appeared opposite Julia Roberts, Jack Nicholson, Matt Dillon, Uma Thurman, and Drew Barrymore (and I’m getting tired of typing celebrity names here). She took on the major role of Queen Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy that rocketed her to international fame. And then she went on to Harvard University to study neuroscience and the evolution of the mind.
“I’ve taught at Harvard, Dartmouth and Vassar, and I’ve had the privilege of teaching a lot of very bright kids,” said Abigail A. Baird, who was one of Ms. Portman’s mentors at Harvard. “There are very few who are as inherently bright as Natalie is, who have as much intellectual horsepower, who work as hard as she did. She didn’t take a single thing for granted.”
Ms. Portman is one of a handful of high-profile actors who happen to have serious scientific credentials: awards, degrees, patents, and theorems in their name.
Hedy Lamarr, the actress habitually regarded as “that most beautiful woman in Hollywood”, was a rocket scientist on the side, inventing and patenting a torpedo guidance technique she called “frequency hopping”, which thwarted efforts to jam the signals that kept the missiles on track.
Danica McKellar, who has appeared on such shows as The Wonder Years, The West Wing, NYPD Blue, and Young Justice, graduated summa cum laude in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she helped devise a mathematical proof for certain properties of magnetic fields, a theorem that bears her name along with those of her collaborators. She also writes popular books about math with clever PG-13 titles like Math Doesn’t Suck and Kiss My Math.
As a teenager in the 1990s, Mayim Bialik starred in the title role of the hit kid-com Blossom. Now she appears in another hit sitcom aimed at slightly older kids, The Big Bang Theory, playing the adorably frumpy-nerdy Amy Farrah Fowler, a neurobiologist and sometime love interest for the adorably nerdy germophobic physicist Sheldon Cooper. The actress is pleased with her new role. After all, Dr. Bialik has a Ph.D. from U.C.L.A. in neurobiology. “I tell people I am a neuroscientist, and I play one on TV,” said Dr. Bialik.
That relatively few screen stars have a scientific back story may seem surprising, given the immense popularity of the science fiction genre and evergreen narrative devices like the mad scientist, not to mention all the doctor shows and CSI spinoffs. Yet most actors who take on techie parts, tackling scripts that may be written with the help of scientific consultants, freely admit they simply mouth the lines without necessarily understanding their sense.
Leonard Nimoy, who played the most famous TV scientist of all time, Mr. Spock, came from an arts and theater background and in real life is nothing like his character. Yet he told me that because Mr. Spock and Star Trek have inspired so many young viewers to become scientists, researchers who meet him are always desperate to give him lab tours and explain the projects they’re pursuing in peer-to-peer terms. Mr. Nimoy nods sagely and intones to each one, “Well, it certainly looks like you’re headed in the right direction.”
Acting and science may simply appeal to very different personalities. If you’re eager for attention, fans, and face recognition, scientific research is not for you. With few exceptions, even the most illustrious researchers in the world are utterly unknown to the wider public, an obscurity captured brilliantly in an Onion spoof about “the reckless throngs of photographers that relentlessly hound America’s top scientists”. “Just because I’m a scientist,” one string theorist complained in the article, “doesn’t mean I have to completely surrender my privacy.” Moreover, if extreme good looks score you big points in a screen career, they can detract from being taken seriously in science.
Hedy Lamarr complained bitterly that people would look at her face and assume there was nothing behind it. Perhaps it was a case of projection. “When you see a very beautiful face, it’s stunning, and you yourself become stupefied,” said Lisa Heiserman Perkins, who has completed a documentary about Lamarr. “So you project your own stupidity onto the person you’re looking at.”
For her part, Dr. Bialik doesn’t see science and show business as being entirely immiscible liquids. In both cases, she said, “a large ego is necessary. Everybody’s a pastry chef serving up humble pie. It’s humbling to audition for parts, and", said Dr. Bialik, “there’s nothing like being a graduate student to bring you to tears.”
Still, she loved the research, on the brain chemistry of patients with a genetic condition called Prader-Willi syndrome, and she loved being “hooded” for her doctorate while she was “very, very pregnant” with her second child. “Better pregnant and getting a doctorate,” she said, “than pregnant at your high school graduation.”
If anything, stories like Ms. Portman’s show that great success, like DNA, is constructed of a few basic building blocks: tenacity, focus, and the old Woody Allen line about just showing up.
Whether as a student in her class, or a research assistant in her lab, said Dr. Baird, who is now an associate professor of psychology at Vassar, “Natalie never once asked for an extension or to be excused from her responsibilities.”
If she was scheduled to appear on Letterman, for example, she would finish her paper early. “She’s sincerely confident and has a good grasp of her strengths and weaknesses,” said Dr. Baird, and she is wise beyond her years. “One of things she said was: ‘It’s weird that there are so many people at Harvard who do amazing things outside the classroom. It just so happens that people like to watch what I do.’”
You can be a scientist, but if you want your name in lights, you’d better play one on TV.
Charlie doesn't even have colonel's rank
Only Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times could make invidious comparisons between Charlie Sheen and Muammar el-Qaddafi:
Mr. Sheen took a drug test on Saturday and allowed the results (negative) to be revealed on Good Morning America on ABC. He also assured the Today show on NBC that he had cured himself of substance abuse. “I closed my eyes and made it so with the power of my mind,” is how he put it.
But a urine sample and a blood test can’t trace what troubles Mr. Sheen at the moment: he is addicted to explaining himself on the air.
His dependence is not unique. Troubled politicians and celebrities often turn to television and radio to retune their images radically; it’s a One Step program to persuade themselves of their own powers of persuasion. And self-delusion has no borders. The embattled Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, is turning out to be the Charlie Sheen of Middle Eastern dictators: he couldn’t resist a chance to tell Christiane Amanpour that there have been no anti-government demonstrations in Tripoli. “They love me,” he said of his people in an interview scheduled for this week on ABC.
Mr. Sheen’s grandiose rants on the nation’s two leading morning talk shows (and via live stream on the gossip website TMZ) were more unmoored than most, but he showed all the usual symptoms of an insulated star with an unreasoned belief in his own invulnerability. (20/20 is showing the full interview on ABC on Tuesday.)
Asked if he was bipolar, Mr. Sheen said he was “bi-winning.” That he only made himself look worse isn’t exactly new. Mr. Sheen, who spoke out after CBS suspended production of his hit television sitcom, Two and a Half Men, follows in the unsteady footsteps of Tom Cruise and his 2005 diatribe against psychiatry, Ritalin, and Brooke Shields. There were echoes of Michael Jackson’s infamous 2003 interview with Martin Bashir, in which he described sharing a bed with children at the Neverland ranch, and also of Whitney Houston, who in 2002 denied to Diane Sawyer that she used crack. (“Crack is whack,” she said.)
Many disgraced politicians suffer from the same blend of naïveté and grandiosity, but oddly, some of them are better actors. John Edwards, who kept changing his story on network television but never stopped trying to seduce his audience, was a tableau of candor and remorse, except about the things he hadn’t yet admitted were true.
This week Mr. Sheen has to share the spotlight of self-delusion. There is Colonel Qaddafi and also Bernard L. Madoff. After trying to explain himself in The New York Times in February, Mr. Madoff gave a second prison interview, published in this week’s New York magazine, saying on tape: “I am a good person.” Even Lindsay Lohan, who could be facing jail time if she is found guilty of stealing a $2,500 necklace, sat down for a two-part interview with Extra, which will be shown this week.
Like a lot of bad habits, Mr. Sheen’s addiction started out small, with a few rambling calls to radio shows, then escalated into full-blown interviews on network television and TMZ. The camera was even more damaging than his words, and those were downright nutty.
“I am on a drug; it’s called Charlie Sheen,” he told ABC. “It’s not available because if you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off, and your children will weep over your exploded body,” he said.
When the ABC reporter told him he seemed “erratic”, Mr. Sheen tried to explain. “You borrow my brain for five seconds, you’d be like, ‘Dude, can’t handle it, unplug this bastard,’ ” he said, adding that his brain “fires in a way that is, I don’t know, maybe not from this particular terrestrial realm.” As he spoke, Mr. Sheen shifted, weaved, and gesticulated; at times, his performance looked like an impersonation of Christian Bale’s impersonation of a crack-addicted former boxer in The Fighter.
Mr. Sheen denied charges of violence against women (“Consider the source”) and he railed against Alcoholics Anonymous, CBS, and most of all his show’s executive producer, Chuck Lorre, though this time he refrained from referring to Mr. Lorre as “Chaim”, as he did on a radio show and which was interpreted by many as an anti-Semitic slur. (It was after that last straw that CBS suspended the show.) Mr. Sheen didn’t exactly apologize for his remarks; he told ABC that he was sorry that Mr. Lorre couldn’t take a joke.
It’s always a little shocking when self-absorbed celebrities with all the resources and high-priced advice in the world do something so clearly against their own self-interest, but it shouldn’t be surprising. Whatever it was that led them to go off the rails in the first place is the very thing pushing them to make matters worse.
Options? We've got options?
Mark Landler and Thom Shanker have an article in The New York Times entitled U.S. Readies Military Options on Libya (as if):
The United States began moving warships toward Libya and froze $30 billion in the country’s assets on Monday as the administration declared all options on the table in its diplomatic, economic and military campaign to drive Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi from power.Rico asks who, even if he was willing to go, would accept Qaddafi as a refugee? (No, he can't come to Rico's house.)
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the administration was conferring with allies about imposing a no-fly zone over Libya. Such a move would likely be carried out only under a mandate from the United Nations or NATO, but Mrs. Clinton’s blunt confirmation that it was under consideration was clearly intended to ratchet up the pressure on Colonel Qaddafi and his dwindling band of loyalists. “Qaddafi has lost the legitimacy to govern, and it is time for him to go without further violence or delay,” Mrs. Clinton told reporters after a special meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council. “No option is off the table,” she said, adding “that of course includes a no-fly zone.”
But officials in Washington and elsewhere said that direct military action remained unlikely, and that the moves were designed as much as anything as a warning to Colonel Qaddafi and a show of support to the protesters seeking to overthrow his government.
Speaking in Geneva, Mrs. Clinton said the United States was sending two teams of aid workers to Libyan border regions with Tunisia and Egypt, where tens of thousands of refugees are massing in a desperate flight from Libya’s strife-torn cities. The administration has set aside $10 million for emergency relief.
As part of a potential military role in the humanitarian effort, Pentagon officials said that military aircraft and ships were being ordered to move into position closer to the Libyan coast. The Navy has an aircraft carrier strike group, equipped with ample planes and helicopters, and an amphibious landing vessel with Marines and helicopters in the nearby Red Sea.
“As part of our contingency planning to provide the president flexibility on a full range of options regarding Libya, we are repositioning forces in the region,” said Colonel David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman.
The coordinated statements were part of a rapidly accelerating Western response to the bloody clashes between rebels and loyalists of Colonel Qaddafi. Administration officials said they were held back until Friday because of fears that the Libyan government might take its diplomats and other Americans there hostage.
Now, with most Americans safely out of the country, senior administration officials are demanding Colonel Qaddafi’s immediate resignation and ridiculing his claims that he enjoys the support of his people. Working with European allies, the administration has rolled out a battery of measures to seek to peel away senior officials and military commanders who remain loyal to the Libyan strongman.
In addition to a no-fly zone, designed to prevent the Libyan Air Force from attacking its citizens, options under review include using military transports to deliver food and medicine, or evacuating Libyans who want to leave the country. But there are clear risks to involving the military, officials said, especially if the effort is led by the United States.
Privately, American officials said any United States military presence could undermine the legitimacy of the Libyan revolt as an internal, grass-roots movement. Qaddafi supporters, and even those across the Arab world who do not like the dictator, could denounce American action as being only about oil.
A NATO operation could produce a similar backlash, given the bitter residue of European colonialism in North Africa. In meetings at NATO and the United Nations, European officials have resisted military action, officials said. “Should NATO get involved in a civil war to the south of the Mediterranean?” said Prime Minister François Fillon of France. “It is a question that at least merits some reflection before being launched.”
Egypt’s foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, said his country would not endorse any foreign military intervention. An Egyptian official noted that the use of Egyptian forces was wholly a decision for the military, which controls the country.
Indeed, there is an element of gunboat diplomacy to the talk of military action. Besides reassuring protesters, a senior American official said, the naval vessels and warplanes could be used as a show of force to embolden members of Colonel Qaddafi’s military to turn on him. The announcement of American military planning could have an impact even without carrying out any operations, the official said.
The Treasury Department’s move against Colonel Qaddafi’s wealth was more concrete. Hours after President Obama signed an executive order on Friday freezing assets belonging to the Qaddafi family and other Libyan government entities, an unspecified number of American financial institutions cut off access to some $30 billion, including Libya’s oil-enriched sovereign wealth funds.
“This is the largest blocking under any sanctions program ever,” said David Cohen, the acting undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. The $30 billion is separate from Libyan government money being blocked by European countries and banks under separate orders, he said, and it speaks to the vast holdings Colonel Qaddafi acquired in more than four decades in power.
Britain and Switzerland had already frozen Libyan assets, and the European Union announced further sanctions, including an embargo on the sales of arms and police equipment, and a visa ban for Libyan officials. Those measures go beyond the sanctions passed by the United Nations, though the Security Council also referred Colonel Qaddafi to the International Criminal Court for an investigation into possible war crimes.
In Washington, Mr. Obama met with the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to reinforce the sense of international consensus. Afterward, the American ambassador to the United Nations, Susan E. Rice, delivered a blistering denunciation of Colonel Qaddafi from the White House briefing room.
Citing an interview the Libyan leader gave Monday to Christiane Amanpour of ABC News and others, Ms. Rice said, “When he can laugh in talking to American and international journalists while he is slaughtering his own people, it only underscores how unfit he is to lead and how disconnected he is from reality.”
Pentagon officials said the United States would seek an international mandate for action, most likely from the United Nations or NATO. There is no appetite for assigning ground troops to any mission, officials said.
But the scope and pacing of planning under way is a substantial increase from just a week ago, when officials said that the most likely military action would come from European countries like Italy or France.
Officials said the administration had realized that only the American military was equipped to lead across a range of options to halt the violence. “This has been a fast-moving scenario, with the violence really accelerating over recent days,” one Pentagon official said.
Fast forward works, fortunately
Alas, some are just turkeys, and there's not a damn thing you can do except pray the fast forward will get you through the worst parts (and there are many).
Even on fast forward, however, this was a bad movie... (Proving, with its gang of pathetic-loser criminals, however, that the old adage of 'shoot first and ask questions later' still holds true.)
Sounds like a civil war to Rico
Kareem Fahim and David Kirkpatrick have an article in The New York Times about the latest in Libya:
Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces struck back at his opponents on three fronts, with special forces, regular army troops, and, rebels said, fighter jets, in an escalation of hostilities that brought Libya a step closer to civil war.Rico says he doesn't know what "an obvious al-Qaeda look" might be, but we should find out...
But the rebels dismissed the attacks as ineffectual, and Colonel Qaddafi faced a growing international campaign to force him from power, as the Obama administration announced it had seized $30 billion in Libyan assets and the European Union adopted an arms embargo and other sanctions.
As the Pentagon began repositioning Navy warships to support a possible humanitarian or military intervention, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton bluntly told the Libyan leader to surrender power “now, without further violence or delay”.
The attacks by the Colonel’s troops on an oil refinery in central Libya and on cities on either side of the country unsettled rebel leaders— who have maintained that they are close to liberating the country— and showed that, despite defections by the military, the government may still possess powerful assets, including fighter pilots willing to bomb Libyan cities.
Rebel leaders said the attacks smacked of desperation, and the ease with which at least one assault, on the western city of Zawiyah, was repelled raised questions about the ability of the government to muster a serious challenge to the rebels’ growing power.
In an interview with ABC News, Colonel Qaddafi said he was fighting against “terrorists”, and he accused the West of seeking to “occupy Libya”. He gave no hint of surrender. “My people love me,” he said. “They would die for me.”
Those unyielding words, and the Colonel’s attacks on Monday, were met with both nerves and defiance by rebel military leaders, as the two sides seemed to steel themselves for a long battle along shifting and ever-more-violent front lines.
The anti-government protesters, who started their uprising with peaceful sit-ins but have increasingly turned to arms to counter Colonel Qaddafi’s brutal paramilitary forces, have promised a large military response that has yet to come. At the same time, government forces have been unable to reverse the costly loss of territory to a popular revolt that has brought together lawyers, young people, and tribal leaders.
Across the region, the tumult that has already toppled two leaders and threatened one autocrat after another continued unabated on Monday. In Yemen, protests drove President Ali Abdullah Saleh to make a bid for a unity government, but the political opposition quickly refused. An opposition leader, Mohamed al-Sabry, said in a statement that the president’s proposal was a “desperate attempt” to counter major protests planned for Tuesday.
In Bahrain, protesters blocked access to Parliament, according to news agencies. In Oman, whose first major protests were reported over the weekend, demonstrations turned into violent clashes with the security forces in the port city of Sohar, and the unrest spread for the first time to the capital, Muscat.
Libya itself seemed to be brewing a major humanitarian crisis, as tens of thousands of mostly impoverished contract workers tried desperately to flee to its neighbors, Tunisia to the west and Egypt to the east. The United Nations refugee agency called the situation a humanitarian emergency as workers hauling suitcases stood in long lines to leave Libya, many of them uncertain how they would finally get home.
The country they left behind faced similar uncertainty, as warplanes took to the sky for the first time in ten days, according to military officials allied with the rebels. In a direct challenge to claims by those officials, who have asserted that Libyan Air Force pilots were no longer taking orders from Colonel Qaddafi, two Libyan Air Force jets conducted bombing raids on Monday, according to witnesses and two military officers in Benghazi allied with the antigovernment protesters.
Colonel Hamed Bilkhair said that the jets, two MIG-23s that took off from an air base near Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown, Surt, struck three targets, but were deterred by rebel antiaircraft fire from striking a fourth at an air base in Benghazi. The jets, a bomber and an escort plane, attacked three other locations south of Benghazi and the outskirts of the eastern city of Ajdabiya.
Colonel Bilkhair said that a weapons depot was struck, but that the other strikes, including one on a water pipeline, were “ineffective”. It was not immediately clear whether there were any casualties, and the airstrikes could not be independently verified.
The colonel said that government special forces took control of the oil refinery at Ras Lanuf on Monday, though he and other rebel leaders played down the significance of the assault, saying the refinery was only lightly guarded. “It was only briefly occupied,” by the rebels, Colonel Bilkhair said. “They occupied it for four days, and they had no weapons.”
The colonel said government troops were in the midst of shelling Misurata, a breakaway city 130 miles east of the capital.
In Zawiyah, a city with important oil resources just thirty miles from the capital, residents said they rebuffed a series of attacks on Monday, suffering no casualties but killing about ten soldiers and capturing about a dozen others. A government spokesman confirmed the death toll.
“It is perfect news,” said A. K. Nasrat, 51, an engineer who is among the rebels, before adding, “There is no way they are going to take this city out of our hands unless we all die first.”
The first attack took place shortly after midnight, when some pro-Qaddafi soldiers in pickup trucks tried to pass through the city’s eastern gate, Mr. Nasrat said. But they were spotted by rebel sentries, who defeated them with help from army and police defectors defending the town. Four soldiers were killed and several captured, with some of the captives readily surrendering their arms and switching sides, he said
Then, in the early evening, several witnesses said, the Qaddafi forces— believed to be led by his son Khamis’s private militia— attacked from both the east and the west. Three pickup trucks tried to enter the narrow city gates from the west, but a rebel-held artillery unit struck one, blowing it up and overturning a second truck, Mr. Nasrat said. Six more pickup trucks tried to breach the eastern gate, he said, but, after an exchange of fire, the rebels captured two of the trucks and several of the soldiers. “So about 12 or 14 soldiers are hostages,” he said, “and 8 of them turned over their arms and joined the people. They are on our side now.”
At about 11 p.m. residents of Zawiyah reported in telephone interviews that they heard a renewed outbreak of gunfire from the west lasting five to fifteen minutes, suggesting that sporadic attacks might continue through the night.
For days, military leaders in Benghazi have said they are preparing to assemble a force of thousands to conduct a final assault on Tripoli; some of the officials have even promised to send planes to bomb Colonel Qaddafi’s fortified compound, Bab al-Aziziya. But there are few signs that such a plan has materialized, though military leaders maintain they are simply waiting for the right time. A fighter pilot sympathetic to the antigovernment protesters, Mohammed Miftah Dinali, expressed some frustration that he had not yet been called on to aid the rebel effort. “My friends and I are willing to go and do an airstrike on Qaddafi’s compound,” he said. “I cannot just sit and watch this happen.”
In Tripoli, Musa Ibrahim, a spokesman for the Qaddafi government, conducted a bizarre news conference, in which he attributed the unrest in Libya to what he described as an alliance between radical Islamists and the Western powers. The Islamists want a Somalia-style base on the Mediterranean, and the West wants oil, Mr. Ibrahim said. And to achieve their ends both want chaos in Libya, he argued, asserting that such outside forces had turned a small and peaceful protest movement into a dangerous armed force. Addressing an incredulous audience of foreign journalists whom the Qaddafi government had invited to Tripoli, Mr. Ibrahim repeatedly denied that any massacres had taken place, contradicting the testimony of scores of Libyans in Tripoli and Benghazi. Reporters told him that, on Sunday, when they visited Zawiyah, they saw no evidence of Islamist forces. “They knew you were coming,” the spokesman said. “They were hiding those with an obvious al-Qaeda look.”
Oh, goodie, more drilling
John Broder and Clifford Krauss have an article in The New York Times about the resumption of deep-water drilling in the Gulf:
The Interior Department said that it had approved the first new deepwater drilling permit in the Gulf of Mexico since the BP explosion and spill last spring, a milestone after a period of intense uncertainty for industry and a wholesale remaking of the nation’s system of offshore oil and gas regulation.
Michael R. Bromwich, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, said that Noble Energy had been granted permission to resume drilling in 6,500 feet of water off the coast of Louisiana.
Work on the well was suspended, along with virtually all other drilling activity in water deeper than 5,000 feet, immediately after the Deepwater Horizon accident last April. The disaster killed eleven rig workers and spewed nearly five million barrels of oil into the ocean.
Still, there was no indication that drilling in the gulf would return anytime soon to levels preceding the BP well blowout.
Mr. Bromwich made clear that each new permit would be closely reviewed on a well-by-well basis and that the old system of rapid approvals of drilling permits had been permanently changed. Noble Energy said it expected to resume drilling by late March.
Approval of the Noble Energy application comes as oil prices are rising in response to unrest in the Middle East and North Africa and many in Congress and in industry are complaining of burdensome rules that are thwarting the development of domestic energy resources.
The interior secretary, Ken Salazar, plans to testify before Congress this week in defense of his department’s budget, and is certain to face harsh questioning about why it has taken so long to resume drilling in the gulf.
Judge Martin Feldman, of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, recently ordered the Obama administration to move quickly on permits for new deepwater wells in the gulf, saying that the continuing delays were “increasingly inexcusable”.
But, in a conference call with reporters, Mr. Bromwich said that there were “absolutely no politics associated with the approval of this application”. He also said that the decision to grant Noble Energy the drilling permit was not a response to Judge Feldman’s order; he said the department disagreed with the ruling and was preparing a legal response.
It is not clear how quickly federal regulators will move on the six pending deepwater drilling permits, or how soon the normal flow of applications will resume after a nearly yearlong halt to deepwater activity.
“We are taking these applications to drill as they come in,” Mr. Bromwich said. “Industry has been waiting for signals that in fact deepwater drilling will be allowed to resume and many will take this as that signal. I have no idea how quickly new applications to drill will be filed,” he added. “I have no idea how long it will take to approve the next one or the next one after that or the next one after that.” Mr. Bromwich noted that Noble’s permit was the first in deep water since the BP accident, but that 37 shallow-water applications had been approved over the last ten months. The decision was cautiously welcomed by the oil industry.
Gary Luquette, president of Chevron’s North America exploration and production, called the permit “a step in the right direction”. But, he added: “It is time for the government to clear the backlog of deepwater drilling permit applications so industry can create the energy, jobs and economic growth our nation needs so badly.”
Lee Hunt, president of the International Association of Drilling Contractors, said the industry was seeking clarity on the pacing of additional permits. “A permit for any well prohibited by the moratorium represents progress,” he said. “The question now is how quickly will they proceed to approve other permits that are awaiting approval.”
Mr. Hunt said that six deepwater permits were awaiting federal approval and that the industry could put 33 projects back in operation if companies could obtain permits.
At least six rigs affected by the drilling moratorium, imposed last June, have left the gulf to drill elsewhere.
Mr. Bromwich said that Noble had met new safety and environmental rules that were put in place after the spill, and had a contract with a company that was capable of capping a blowout and handling a discharge of as much as 69,000 barrels a day, roughly the same volume of oil that leaked from the crippled BP well for nearly three months. The emergency well-capping system will be furnished by the Helix Well Containment Group, which Mr. Bromwich said was capable of meeting the government’s spill response requirements for the Noble Energy well.
Mr. Salazar and Mr. Bromwich were briefed in Houston by Helix executives and representatives of another group developing a new oil spill response system. The second group, a consortium of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and BP, has developed a system meant to cap a well in up to 8,000 feet of water and collect 60,000 barrels of spilled oil a day.
The consortium is also working on a second system that by the end of the year will be capable of operating in up to 10,000 feet and contain 100,000 barrels a day.
Randall B. Luthi, former director of offshore drilling regulation at the Interior Department and now president of the National Ocean Industries Association, a drillers’ trade group, said the approval came at a critical moment. “With all the world-complicating factors, including rising oil prices, political turmoil in the Middle East and the loss of jobs in the Gulf of Mexico, this decision offers hope,” he said.
Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, sounded a less magnanimous note: “This slow-moving process continues to stifle domestic production and puts thousands of jobs at risk in the gulf and around the country,” he said.
Senator Mary Landrieu, the Louisiana Democrat who has pressed the administration to begin issuing deepwater permits at a steady clip, called the permit “long overdue”, adding: “I hope that this permit is the first of many to come, and I will continue to use every lever at my disposal to ensure that it is.”
An act of damnation
An editorial in The New York Times titled Acts of contrition pretty well sums up the problem with the Catholic Church:
One can scarcely imagine the pain borne into St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral in Dublin last month at a Mass— “A Liturgy of Lament and Repentance”— offered for the victims of sexually abusive priests.Rico says that, of course, a few public executions of child molesters would go a long way to slowing this shit down...
It was a reminder that the scandal, a global catastrophe for the Roman Catholic Church and a national tragedy in Ireland, is also a universe of individual tragedies. But there was also hope that some church leaders, at least, are facing up to that pain and that catastrophe. The archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, and Cardinal Séan O’Malley, the archbishop of Boston, presided over the Mass, which went to unusual lengths to involve victims and to gaze unflinchingly at their suffering.
With four hundred people in attendance, lectors read long passages from official reports on decades of abuse in Irish parishes and schools; horrific reading for a sacred space. A few victims interrupted the proceedings with their own stories of shame and terror.
Just as unusual, even startling, was the way the Archbishop and Cardinal made personal the church’s act of contrition. They lay prostrate in silence before a bare altar. They washed and dried the feet of eight abuse victims, just as the Catholic clergy do at Mass on Holy Thursday to recall how Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, a gesture of humility and service.
Archbishop Martin offered what may be the most specific apology yet, showing an understanding (rare among his peers) of the difference between lip service and true repentance: “When I say ‘sorry,’” the Archbishop said, “I am in charge. When I ask forgiveness, however, I am no longer in charge. I am in the hands of the others. Only you can forgive me; only God can forgive me.”
Not all survivors of abuse will likely accept the apology. They are right that the Church has a long way to go to cleaning house and repairing trust with its flock. Reforms are lagging, many victims are still waiting for compensation and a full accounting of crimes. Some predator priests are still in ministry. Bishops have largely avoided punishment or credible repentance.
Still, gestures and ritual can be meaningful, and forgiveness has to begin somewhere, which is why the Dublin Mass seemed to be a true step forward. “We want to be part of a church that puts survivors, the victims of abuse, first,” Cardinal O’Malley said, getting it right.
For that Sunday, anyway, the victims took precedence. “What the hell did I do wrong as a child?” asked a man, Robert Dempsey, who told of being abused in a mental institution. “What the hell did any of us do?
Who knew? Who cares?
The British fashion designer John Galliano, already suspended by Christian Dior for allegedly making anti-Semitic remarks, has been captured on video saying "I love Hitler" and glorifying the Holocaust.Rico says gee, ya think the guy's gay? (Not that that matters; as Charlie Sheen has proven, you can be straight and an idiot, too...)
Mr Galliano, 50, was summoned by Paris police yesterday to face three people who accused him of racially abusing them in a Parisian bar in two separate incidents. The fashion designer denies the allegations and has made counter-accusations that a couple defamed, insulted, and threatened him. However, a mobile phone video posted on the internet shows Mr Galliano making a verbal racial attack on customers in a Paris bar in December. The Dior creative director, apparently the worse for drink, is captured in mid-argument.
A woman asks: "Are you blond, with blue eyes?" Mr Galliano, wearing a large, felt hat, replies: "No, but I love Hitler, and people like you would be dead today. Your mothers, your forefathers, would be... gassed and... dead."
In the third alleged incident, a woman approached Paris police at the weekend claiming she had suffered anti-Semitic abuse from Mr. Galliano in La Perle bar in the Marais district last October.
Christian Dior suspended Mr Galliano pending further investigations after the first allegations, saying it had a "zero-tolerance" policy on racism and anti-Semitism. The Gibraltar-born designer was to present the Dior autumn-winter ready-to-wear collection at the end of this week.
Mr. Galliano's lawyer, Stéphane Zerbib, said yesterday that he knew nothing of the video and his client insisted he was not anti-Semitic. "What matters isn't what's on the internet, what matters are the testimonies and the hearings," Mr Zerbib said. "What's on the internet doesn't have much value."
Mr. Galliano was driven to a police station near the La Perle bar to meet his accusers. French police often bring plaintiffs and defendants together in private to test different versions of events. Galliano made no comment as he arrived. After news reports of the first allegations, a young woman approached police to tell of a similar exchange with the designer in the La Perle bar last October. This appears to have been a separate incident from the one shown on the telephone video.
The woman said Mr. Galliano had begun to insult her for no reason. She said that she had thought no more of the incident at the time, assuming he had been drunk. After the reports of his comments to a Jewish and Asian couple in the bar last Thursday, she said she had decided to come forward.
The Jewish and Asian couple brought formal complaints alleging Galliano said "Dirty Jewish face, you should be dead", and "Fucking Asian bastard, I will kill you". They also accused the designer of "mild acts of violence".
Under French law racial insults are punishable by fines of up to €22,500 (£19,000) and six months in prison.
Galliano's outburst:
* Female 1: "I can't believe he said that..."
* Female 2: "It's not good... [to Galliano] Are you blond... Are you blond with blue eyes?"
* Galliano: "No, but I love Hitler and people like you would be dead today. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed and fucking dead."
* Females: "Oh my God."
* Female 2: "Do you have a problem?"
* Galliano: "With you – you're ugly."
* Female 2: "You don't like peace? You don't want peace in the world?"
* Galliano: "Not with people, like ugly people."
* Female 2: "Where are you from?"
* Galliano: "Your asshole."
Two and a half idiots
TMZ has a piece on the Charlie Sheen disaster:
Sheen blasted CBS honcho Les Moonves for not firing the creator of Two and a Half Men, Chuck Lorre, and then scoffed at the studio for giving him way too much money.
Sheen also ripped a false report that he checked himself into rehab this morning (because he obviously isn't at a rehab facility) and the at-home interview is all the proof he needs.
Among the hits: Charlie explained that he “hopes” his five kids ask him about all of the drug use one day, so he can fill them in on all of the “epic” stories. Sheen also explained that his father, Martin Sheen, should stop passing judgment, because Charlie’s a grown-ass man, and can make his own life choices. Charlie also told a story about how he woke up in the middle of downtown L.A. by himself when he was seven years old, and had to find his own way home.
You can watch the full interview 42-minute here or click here for a four-minute highlight reel.
And another job Rico's happy not to have
Since 2000, when Putin first became the President of Russia, Yawara-Neva has shot to incredible heights right alongside its general director Arkady Rotenberg, Putin's childhood sparring partner. This month, in the annual ranking of Russia's wealthiest put out by Finans magazine, Rotenberg jumped 17 spots from the previous year to officially join the list of Russia's billionaires. His fortune is now pegged at $1.75 billion, which seems like a lot for a man whose work before Putin took office was mostly confined to running average businesses and promoting judo. But, for the members of their St. Petersburg clique, this isn't extraordinary.
Most of Rotenberg's fortune has come through his deals with Russia's state-controlled natural-gas monopoly, Gazprom, which is headed by one of Putin's old friends from the St. Petersburg mayor's office. In 2008, Gazprom started selling Rotenberg its subsidiaries, in particular the ones that supply and build pipelines, and then it started placing huge orders with these companies once they were in Rotenberg's control. In 2009 alone, Rotenberg's firm StroyGazMontazh won nineteen of these tenders with Gazprom, sometimes at auctions in which it was the only bidder.
One of the main competitors of StroyGazMontazh for these Gazprom tenders is a company controlled by another one of Putin's judo buddies, Gennady Timchenko, the billionaire oil trader (worth $8.9 billion according to the Finans list) who also helped found Yawara-Neva in 1998. Both men deny that their friendship with Putin has helped them make their fortunes. "Acquaintance with a state official of such a high rank has never hurt anyone yet in our country, but it hasn't helped everyone," Rotenberg said in an interview last April with the daily Kommersant. "It is no guarantee." In 2008, Timchenko said reports of his links to Putin were "overblown" and insisted his career was not built on "favors or political connections".
For their part, the trainers and champions in Russia's judo circuit are quite proud about being close to Putin, Rotenberg and Gazprom, which was the other sponsor of Saturday's tournament. "We're all in it together," says the event's organizer, Vladimir Gladchenko, gesturing at the banner with the logos of Gazprom and Yawara-Neva that hung above the judo mats. "We have the political support, the financial support, so all we have to do is keep winning tournaments." And with a budget that seems practically limitless, that has come easy so far. Yawara-Neva (the name Yawara refers to a blunt weapon used in the martial arts, while Neva is the river that runs through St. Petersburg) has won the European judo championship seven years running, more than any other team in history.
It is in many ways a gilded incarnation of the old Soviet judo club where Putin and a handful of his friends trained in the 1960s and '70s, forming a tight circle that seems to have more than its share of distinguished alumni. Besides Rotenberg and his younger brother Boris, who ranked just below his brother on the Finans richest list with a fortune of $1.75 billion, Putin's original judo set included Vasily Shestakov, another co-founder of Yawara-Neva. In 1999, when Putin was first appointed Prime Minister by then President Boris Yeltsin, Shestakov made a sudden break from his life as a judo trainer in St. Petersburg and went into politics, helping create the Unity Party that formed Putin's early base of support. In 2001, that party merged with two others to become United Russia, the political machine that now staffs virtually the entire bureaucracy and every elected chamber in the country. Today Shestakov is a deputy in the federal parliament for Fair Russia, another party loyal to the Kremlin. He is not on Russia's list of billionaires.
"But Putin, as far as I know, replies to the requests of Arkady, Boris, Vasily, and the other boys," said Putin's childhood trainer, Anatoly Rakhlin, in an interview with the Izvestia daily in 2007, referring to Shestakov and the Rotenberg brothers. "They are friends, and Putin's character has maintained that healthy camaraderie. He doesn't take the St. Petersburg boys to work with him because of their pretty eyes, but because he trusts people who are tried and true."
The world of judo is apparently no exception in the ethos of access and influence that dominates Russia. "Clubs without that kind of political support are closing left and right," says Sergei Yudayev, a senior trainer for the Moscow team, as he looks out over the mats where one of his fighters just got creamed. "Yawara is milking its connections," he says bitterly. "Hell, in their place I would do the same." And who can blame him? It may not be the gentle way, but perhaps the surest way to success in Russia lies in having the right connections.
Another job Rico's happy he doesn't have
Aaron Nelsen has an article at Time.com about a really lousy job:Armed with only a lantern and basic tools, Aladino Olivares crawls down a crude mine shaft little more than three feet high inside a mountain near Copiapó in Chile's northern Atacama Desert. He does this so often that he doesn't wear a helmet anymore, only a stocking cap holding a pack of cigarettes and two lighters. "It's just a little bit farther," Olivares, 58, says about two hundred feet down. At three hundred feet, he slides into a parallel shaft. The only ceiling supports are rocks that he's stacked over the years. "Right there, that's the vein..."Rico says there's more to the article, but Time is making it a nuisance to see, sorry...
History for the day
28 February 2011
Some things turn out as expected
Along with that award, Colin Firth (shown, deservedly) won for best actor, but Natalie Portman won best actress for Black Swan, and Christian Bale for best supporting actor and Melissa Leo for best supporting actress for The Fighter.
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