Author: Mick Hartley

nd indoctrinated by a small army of propagandists, police informers, party officials, security officers and the like.

No unauthorized contacts with the dangerous outside world would be permitted, and no unauthorized social or commercial activity would happen under such system. Neither Kim nor his close associates are fools; they know perfectly well that such a system is not efficient, but they also know that only under such system can their privileges and security be guaranteed.

This is a sad paradox: aid that is often presented as a potential incentive for market-oriented reforms is actually the major reason North Korean leaders are now able to contemplate re-Stalinization of their country.

Here’s Ahmadinejad again:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has told a conference in Tehran questioning the Holocaust that Israel’s days are numbered.

“Just as the USSR disappeared, soon the Zionist regime will disappear,” he said to the applause of the participants.

The two-day conference provoked widespread international outrage.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned the forum and British Prime Minister Tony Blair called it “shocking beyond belief”….

The BBC’s Frances Harrison in Tehran said the conference was like a roll call of the world’s most infamous Holocaust deniers – all delighted that Iran had given them the oxygen of publicity.

“The trend for the existence of the Zionist regime is downwards and this is what God has promised and what all nations want,” President Ahmadinejad said.

(I can’t recall now where I read this, but if you want to remember the guy’s name – and frankly, it’s a name that you’re going to need to remember, because one way or another it’ll figure in the history books – try the phrase, “ah, my dinner jacket…”. You can then impress your friends, and avoid those embarrassing, “that Iranian president Ahmani-whatsisname” moments)

n of these findings. As well as showing that the outbreaks predated the medics’ arrival, the study suggests that the HIV strain is related most closely to strains from West Africa, suggesting a natural introduction, probably via the many migrant workers in Libya, says co-author Tulio de Oliveira of the University of Oxford, UK.

Nice clip of a Honda robot.

Ah well, back to the drawing board….

(via Japundit)

Today marks the start of the conference being held in Iran on Holocaust denial – supporting Holocaust denial, that is. Dissenting views are not welcome:

An outspoken Palestinian lawyer was hoping to challenge Holocaust deniers during a provocative conference that opens in Iran today. The international gathering will question whether six million Jews were actually slaughtered by the Nazis in the Second World War.
But yesterday Khaled Kasab Mahameed learnt from the Iranian Foreign Ministry — which had invited him to speak — that he would not receive a visa. No reason was given.
Mr Mahameed suspects that it was because he has an Israeli passport. It may also have been because he has made clear what he intended to say.

“I’m bitterly disappointed,” Mr Mahameed, who studied at a British university, told The Times. He was seeking a personal audience with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President, to tell him that denials or questioning of “such huge, monstrous horror” harmed the Palestinian cause.

Mr Mahameed lives in Israel, where he has established the Arab Institute for Holocaust Research and Education, the Arab world’s first Holocaust museum, in Nazareth. He believes that the “study, analysis and acknowledgement” of the Holocaust by Arabs is important for a durable peace between the Palestinians and Israel. “It’s not enough to curse these Holocaust deniers as foolish. We have to convince them the Holocaust did happen,” Mr Mahameed said.

David Irving, sadly, is denied what could have been his finest hour:

Irving was understood to be on the original invitation list to the Tehran conference when Mr Ahmadinejad first proposed the gathering last January. But a month later Irving was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in Austria after disputing the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz.

stand this. Everything would be much calmer if the Palestinians were given their rights.

Do you mean to say that if Israel did not exist, there would suddenly be democracy in Egypt, that the schools in Morocco would be better, that the public clinics in Jordan would function better?

I think so.

Can you please explain to me what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has to do with these problems?

The Palestinian cause is central for Arab thinking.

In the end, is it a matter of feelings of self-esteem?

Exactly. It’s because we always lose to Israel. It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about 7 million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the genes of every Arab. The West’s problem is that it does not understand this.

Strange goings-on in Southwark:

Scotland Yard is investigating a curious incident in which his lordship, the Bishop of Southwark, appears to have got rather tipsy and believed he had been robbed.

Tom Butler, 66, is thought to have been well entertained at an embassy function in London’s Belgravia last week. During his walk home he lost his bishop’s cross and personal belongings, and in a bizarre act is alleged to have got into the back seat of a parked Mercedes in a street called Crucifix Lane, south London, and begun throwing children’s toys out of the window…..

The bishop, a regular on Thought for the Day on Radio 4’s Today programme, told worshippers at the inauguration of a new vicar that night that he had been mugged and that his head was so bruised that he could not wear his mitre.

But people living and working near Southwark Cathedral in south London describe an altogether different incident in which the bishop, wearing his robe under a black coat, was found in the rear of the unlocked silver Mercedes A200 car.

Paul Sumpter, the car’s owner, was playing pool in the Suchard bar nearby. He and some other customers came out to confront Butler after the car’s alarm sounded and its hazard lights began to flash.

Sumpter said to Butler: “Oi, what are you doing in my car?” The bishop allegedly replied: “I’m the Bishop of Southwark. It’s what I do.”

Two of the men pulled him from the car and in the fracas the bishop, a married father of two, accidentally fell to the pavement and injured his head.

He sat and then lay on the pavement for several minutes while an onlooker dialled 999, but Butler declined medical attention and an ambulance was cancelled…..

The bishop spent more than two hours at the party and is said to have imbibed several glasses of Portuguese wine.

The Dean is puzzled:

Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark, said: “I’m immensely concerned for the bishop because it is so out of character. I wonder if we are looking at a cerebral phase, a sort of mini stroke.

I don’t think so, Colin, to be honest.

This merits a link.

Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.

Hitchens at his best: contrarian, witty, and possibly (I’m not committing myself) profound.

na Ercimoda
Ezequiel Paludi and Sabrina Masso
Federico and Ariadna Naveira
Geraldine y Ezequiel Paludi
Osvaldo Zotto and Lorena Ercimoda

Then a couple from Istanbul (yes I know, tango in Istanbul??):
Ezequiel Paludi ve Geraldine Paludi
Fabian Salas ve Carolina del Rivero.

Then Gachi Fernandez con Sergio dancing to Milonga de mis Amores.

Luna Palacios y Oliver Kolker at La Viruta (OK, playing to the crowd a bit, but I think we can forgive them).

A theatrical one – Passionale, with Carlos Gavito y Maria Plazaola.

You want more? Here’s Mariela Franganillo y Pablo Pugliese. Doesn’t say who these two are. These are Ney Melo & Jennifer Bratt (what kind of a name is that for a tango dancer?). Short but sweet.

No need to just sit back and watch of course. Check out TangoCity’s Learn How To Dance Tango in YouTube. “The tango as a dance is a game of seduction….” Only 20 lessons to work through.

I couldn’t finish without some music.

Perhaps the greatest of the tangueros, the legendary Carlos Gardel, here and here.

The master of tango nuevo, Astor Piazzolla, with Libertango (and, um, Libeltango, by four Japanese girls).

These guys make the Buena Vista Social Club look like youngsters, but they’re pretty good.

Finally, a video from the excellent Gotan Project, the contemporary face of tango.

had been reached to allow the UN to deploy troops alongside the AU in Darfur. Predictably, once the pressure was off, Sudan said it never agreed to this.

Instead, in South Darfur, Antonov bombers supported the Janjawid and the Sudanese Army in destroying villages. One witness interviewed by Aegis had seen 70 villages destroyed since August this year, the last in mid-November, before he was forced to flee the region. He made an appeal to Tony Blair; “Please, please come and save us.” But today, after three years of strong words and empty threats, our Prime Minister still has no new plans for action — just more words: “if rapid progress is not made, we will need to consider alternative approaches.”

Sudan is also destabilising neighbouring Chad in order to assist its campaign in Western Sudan. The ideologues in Khartoum, just as they are doing in Darfur, want to “Arabise” Chad and topple its black African president. Last week Sudanese-backed rebels in Chad briefly took Abeche, a town that is crucial to getting aid across the border and into Darfur.

What is happening in Chad revives bleak memories of Congo. The UN’s failure to mobilise sufficient forces on the Rwanda-Congo border allowed Rwandan genocidaires to slip across the border and spark a civil war in Congo that left four million dead. The UN is still there now, picking up the pieces. We know that genocidal violence does not respect borders and can quickly become a regional problem, yet we are standing by and allowing it to spill over from Darfur into Chad. Once security is lost in Chad, the aid agencies that use bases there to reach the four million Darfuris that depend on them will have to withdraw.

Negotiating with Khartoum to allow a UN peacekeeping force into Darfur is a waste of time. Sudan will never consent to allow UN troops on its soil and China will veto any intervention by force. In the meantime, more people die and the crisis deepens.

So let’s stop fiddling and deploy UN forces into Chad, on the border with Darfur. This will serve three purposes — helping to stabilise the region, putting UN soldiers in striking distance of Darfur’s camps if all-out attacks require immediate intervention, and signalling to Khartoum that the international community takes the protection of civilians seriously. Finally, the UN Security Council should sanction a no-fly zone. We lent our Awacs equipment to monitor the Winter Olympics last year. Why can’t we lend it to monitor the safety of desperate human beings in Africa?