Author: Mick Hartley

From Yahoo (via):

A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite. The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment.

“Ann said losing toes and going forward at all costs was never part of the journey,” said Ann Atwood, who helped organize the expedition. […]

Then there was the cold — quite a bit colder, Atwood said, then Bancroft and Arnesen had expected. One night they measured the temperature inside their tent at 58 degrees below zero, and outside temperatures were exceeding 100 below zero at times, Atwood said.

“My first reaction when they called to say there were calling it off was that they just sounded really, really cold,” Atwood said.

She said Bancroft and Arnesen were applying hot water bottles to Arnesen’s foot every night, but had to wake up periodically because the bottles froze….

Atwood said there was some irony that a trip to call attention to global warming was scuttled in part by extreme cold temperatures.

“They were experiencing temperatures that weren’t expected with global warming,” Atwood said. “But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability.”

UN investigators, in a report issued to the UN Human Rights Council, accuse Sudan’s government of “orchestrating and participating” in crimes in Darfur that include murder, mass rape, and kidnap:

The UN team was blocked by the Sudanese government in Khartoum from visiting Darfur, but spoke to refugees and aid workers from the region.

The five UN team members travelled to neighbouring Chad, to where many refugees have fled, and where the war itself is spreading.

There they heard reports backing up well-established accusations of serious abuses in Darfur, including mass rape, abduction, and forcing people from their homes.

“There are gross violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, the government is complicit in those crimes with the Janjaweed militia that it arms and trains,” said the head of the mission, Nobel peace prize winner Jody Williams. […]

The report is the latest in a series by the UN and other international bodies to document large-scale attacks on civilians, and to demand an international response.

Ms Williams said the atrocities detailed in the report were not new. But the investigators were framing the document in a way that was meant to demand action.

It stated that if a state was failing to protect its own citizens, “then the international community has to step up to the plate and assume its responsibilities,” Ms Williams told BBC News.

So far, the international response had been “pathetic”, she said.

“There are so many hollow threats towards Khartoum, that if I were Khartoum I wouldn’t pay any attention either,” she said.

“It is more than a tragedy. It was after Rwanda that people said ‘never again’, and here we are again… and the world sits by.”

The full report is here (pdf file).

ve on; we’re going to take from the Qu’ran those things that we think are compatible with human hearts.” But the minute you start doing that, that’s when hell comes in, and the radicals will say “Oh, but then you are not a believer because you are refuting what God says.” […]

I think Islam is a superstition like every other superstition. But now because it’s a superstition, unlike Christianity, that hasn’t been tested and hasn’t gone through a process of enlightenment, I think it’s a dangerous superstition.

quote>Because of the possible offence to Muslim sensibilities, Western scholars who specialise in the early history of Islam have to be extremely careful what they say and some of them have developed subtle forms of double-speak when discussing contentious matters.

No doubt – but there are different forms of double-speak. Take Karen Armstrong for example. Her latest book, perhaps rather too aptly titled Muhammad: Prophet for Our Time, is a pick of the week at the Sunday Times:

The confident simplicity of the author’s writing belies the clear choices she has made: her Muhammad is a pluralistic monotheist with an enlightened and attractively modern view (to western eyes) of sexual equality, the problems of capitalism and the value of peace.

Muhammad had an attractively modern view of sexual equality? And of the problems of capitalism and the value of peace? Does this view, perhaps, conflict with the historical record? It’s not a problem:

She downplays the difficult, sometimes horrific events that contradict this — ie massacres, taking more wives than he allowed his followers, exiling opposing tribes…. Most of us are shamefully ignorant of Muslim history, and Armstrong legitimately portrays a version of Muhammad that could be used as an examplar by a “modern”, tolerant Islam.

That’s OK then. No matter that the book isn’t, strictly speaking, accurate. As long as it makes people feel good, and doesn’t cause any offence….

ell friends and colleagues from customers. Some people were trapped in the shops, choking on smoke. We could hear their cries.”

Abu Mohammad, a 65-year-old who scratches out a living selling books and magazines on the pavement, said he was heading to one of his favorite bookshops to see friends when the blast ripped through the street.

“I rushed to the scene to rescue my friends who sit beside me every day, but I found none of them,” he said. “I used to put my stand outside a print shop – the Ibn al-Arabi print works, one of the oldest in the street – but it collapsed completely. Four brothers who work there were crushed.”

When Muhaibs completed his performance, renowned poet Abdul Zahra Zaki took over, mounting the wreckage of what was once the popular Al-Shabanda cafe to recite a poem entitled “Words, words, words.”

Zaki described the wasteland before him, mourned the desolation wrought by the bombers, and concluded, “There is nothing here, there is nothing but burning words.”

Other poets, such as Kareem Shugaidel, Majed Mujed and Ahmed Abdulsadr, took turns to pay homage to Mutanabi Street, which before the bombing was regarded by Iraqis as one of the most important centres of the literary world.

They spoke lovingly of their once-favorite hangout, opened in 1932 by King Faisal II and named after Arab poet Abu Taib al-Mutanabi, and tearfully mourned its destruction.

Iraqis have long been regarded as among the most avid readers in the Middle East. As a popular dictum of the 1960s had it: “Books are written in Cairo, published in Beirut and read in Baghdad.”

Poet Tawfeeq Timemi then strode forward, urging his fellow writers not to give in to despair.

“We won’t give up even though these criminal acts are targeting our culture,” he said. “We won’t give in to the repression. We must rebuild and restore Mutanabi Street so that culture will again flourish.”

e undergoing debriefing at a Nato base in Germany after he escaped from Iran, followed by his family.

A daring getaway via Damascus was organised by western intelligence agencies after it became clear that his cover was about to be blown. Iran’s notorious secret service, the Vavak, is believed to have suspected that he was a high-level mole.

According to the Iranian sources, the escape took several months to arrange. At least 10 close members of his family had to flee the country. Asgari has two sons, a daughter and several grandchildren and it is believed that all, including his daughters-in-law, are now out of Iran. Their final destination is unknown.

Asgari is said to have carried with him documents disclosing Iran’s links to terrorists in the Middle East. It is not thought that he had details of the country’s nuclear programme.

otographers’ Gallery, Great Newport St, is Philippe Chancel, whose stunning photos of Pyongyang – like this one, right, of Reunification Avenue – are definitely worth checking out (entry’s free).

Looking at his book in the gallery’s bookstore only made me wish they’d shown more of his work. Unfortunately it’s a small gallery, and he’s only one of four finalists.

The others? Well, there’s Anders Petersen, with photos of what might be termed the fringes of society – in black and white, a “raw and intimate social portrait” – from a couple of towns in the South of France. Gritty, brutal…you know the kind of thing. The men are all hairy and covered in tattoos, and the women are all, well, um, hairy and covered in tattoos. Some genitalia are featured. Not the sort of pictures one would want one’s family or one’s servants to see, frankly. But, to be fair, well done if you like that kind of social realism.

Then there’s Fiona Tan.

Central to Fiona Tan’s work is the human subject. She questions and explores the complexities of culture and place, and how these elements come to shape our individual identity.

I’m sorry? Come again…

Fiona Tan’s works engage the traditional dialectic between the ethnographic claim to veritable objectivity of unprejudiced witness and the personal travelogue as the search for the subjective. She draws on photographic and filmic footage and combines the two in expanded film and video installations. Crossing the threshold of early 20th Century missionaries’ and travellers’ reportages, which served to reinforce the sense of ‘place’ of Africans and Asians in the colonial hierarchy of power, Tan interlinks personal and social formations of identity.

Oh good. So what have we got? Well, there are a couple of screens displaying photographs of Japanese schoolgirls from the 20s, and then a hundred-odd small postcard-sized, framed pictures selected from photo albums of Sydney residents. And that’s it. It’s one of those displays where we the viewers have to do all the work, because there’s nothing remotely attractive or noteworthy or interesting even about the photos on display to draw you in. Just keep telling yourself that it’s all about the traditional dialectic between the ethnographic claim to veritable objectivity of unprejudiced witnesses and the personal travelogue as the search for the subjective, and before you can say Judith Chalmers you’ll find yourself having a high old artistic experience. Indeed you may even find yourself questioning and exploring the complexities of culture and place, and how these elements come to shape our individual identity. Otherwise, like me, you’ll wonder at the sheer witless self-indulgence of it all.

And finally…Walid Raad.

The Atlas Group consists of documents and records including photographs, films and video that Walid Raad produces and then attributes to a number of imaginary characters.

Don’t ask.

A couple of excerpts on YouTube from a recent National Geographic documentary on North Korea. They’re each about eight to nine minutes long, and, despite a slightly irritating commentary, well worth watching. Highlights of the first clip include scenes of hysteria at Kim Il Sung’s funeral, as a distraught commentator wails, “The Great Leader’s hearse is approaching! Great Leader, is this true? Are you leaving without us?”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTNvaZu30UQ&w=425&h=350]

The end of the first clip and the start of the second are in an eye hospital where, according to The Daily NK, a Professor Ruit, who had been providing “free optical services to the lower income bracket in Nepal”, operates to restore the sight of some North Koreans. The patients come together when it’s time to remove the bandages, and are filmed with hidden cameras. Their joy is expressed solely in terms of….well, see for yourselves. Let’s just say the Great Leader and the Dear Leader feature prominently.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmLJ8j5PIys&w=425&h=350]

And don’t miss, as a rousing finale, “Dear Leader Kim Jong Il The Great Brilliant Commander”. You’ll want to turn the volume up high for this one.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp7RkdvyDDI&w=425&h=350]

anish_.html”>this, though the dates for original colonisation have moved back from 7000 to 16000 years:

Britain and Ireland are so thoroughly divided in their histories that there is no single word to refer to the inhabitants of both islands. Historians teach that they are mostly descended from different peoples: the Irish from the Celts and the English from the Anglo-Saxons who invaded from northern Europe and drove the Celts to the country’s western and northern fringes.

But geneticists who have tested DNA throughout the British Isles are edging toward a different conclusion. Many are struck by the overall genetic similarities, leading some to claim that both Britain and Ireland have been inhabited for thousands of years by a single people that have remained in the majority, with only minor additions from later invaders like Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings and Normans. The implication that the Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh have a great deal in common with each other, at least from the geneticist’s point of view, seems likely to please no one. The genetic evidence is still under development, however, and because only very rough dates can be derived from it, it is hard to weave evidence from DNA, archaeology, history and linguistics into a coherent picture of British and Irish origins.

That has not stopped the attempt. Stephen Oppenheimer, a medical geneticist at the University of Oxford, says the historians’ account is wrong in almost every detail. In Dr. Oppenheimer’s reconstruction of events, the principal ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived from Spain about 16,000 years ago, speaking a language related to Basque.

The British Isles were unpopulated then, wiped clean of people by glaciers that had smothered northern Europe for about 4,000 years and forced the former inhabitants into southern refuges in Spain and Italy. When the climate warmed and the glaciers retreated, people moved back north. The new arrivals in the British Isles would have found an empty territory, which they could have reached just by walking along the Atlantic coastline, since the English Channel and the Irish Sea were still land.

This new population, who lived by hunting and gathering, survived a sharp cold spell called the Younger Dryas that lasted from 12,300 to 11,000 years ago. Much later, some 6,000 years ago, agriculture finally reached the British Isles from its birthplace in the Near East. Agriculture may have been introduced by people speaking Celtic, in Dr. Oppenheimer’s view. Although the Celtic immigrants may have been few in number, they spread their farming techniques and their language throughout Ireland and the western coast of Britain. Later immigrants arrived from northern Europe had more influence on the eastern and southern coasts. They too spread their language, a branch of German, but these invaders’ numbers were also small compared with the local population.

In all, about three-quarters of the ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, when rising sea levels split Britain and Ireland from the Continent and from each other, Dr. Oppenheimer calculates in a new book, “The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story”

Official policy in Libya, it seems, is to ban women from traveling abroad without a legal male guardian. Now a state-controlled newspaper has published a strongly-worded criticism (via b&w):

The state-controlled al-Jamahiriya daily Wednesday described the decision as “stupid and stains the entire state with backwardness,” adding it constitutes a clear violation of the most basic women’s and human rights.

In a rare public criticism of an official policy, the paper blasted unnamed officials for having issued instructions that would forbid females from traveling outside the country without a legal male guardian, saying it violates the domestic human rights document which stipulates that every Libyan has the right to free movement in times of peace. The document provides women with equal rights to men and considers gender discrimination as “unjustified blatant injustice.”

The paper asked what type of male guardian female journalists, lawyers, businesswomen, pilots and university professors should have. It called for taking legal action against “anyone who permits or forbids a Libyan woman, as if this woman comes from the medieval times.”

Of course it’s not clear whether this is the voice of an exceptionally brave editor, or, rather, the opinions of sections within the government (Gaddafi himself?) unhappy with such pandering to the voices of conservative Islam.