lost their babies because guards kicked and beat them around the abdomen.
She gave a precise description of the prison and said she could identify its deputy director, a lieutenant-colonel of police aged about 60, who exercised day-to-day authority. Her explanation was the same as in other such accounts. The regime is obsessed by racial purity, and so it exterminates children feared to be of Chinese blood.
I’ve just bought the book, and now here are all (well, nearly all) the photos on screen (via Metafilter). It’s a beautifully designed site – and the photos are shown at a decent size.
From a review by Gary Imlach:
The football in Hans van der Meer’s photographs is at a level below match programmes — in fact pretty much below the interest of anyone except those taking part. European Fields is subtitled The Landscape of Lower League Football, and it shows us the game in its natural setting, which is to say just about anywhere a pitch can be marked out.
There’s everything and nothing going on in these shots. Van der Meer elevates each local fixture by his very presence. His viewpoint is elevated too — implying a grandstand that isn’t there. Yet even as he is inflating their status, his expansive compositions reduce the players to scale, locating them firmly within the surroundings from which — for 90 minutes — they are trying to escape: small towns in Portugal or his native Netherlands, mountain pastures in Austria, the backyards of Bradford and Belgium.
This is football as played by millions, not watched by millions, although the Champions League line-ups in the centre circle and the self-conscious waves to no one suggest dreams of television.
Most of all, however, the photographs, like the programme covers, have a marvellous mundane beauty about them. As the grand narratives of sport continue to look ever more compromised, mining them for moments of beauty might be the approach that leaves us least likely to be let down.
Disembowelled, then torn apart – for teaching girls:
The gunmen came at night to drag Mohammed Halim away from his home, in front of his crying children and his wife begging for mercy.
The 46-year-old schoolteacher tried to reassure his family that he would return safely.
But his life was over.
He was partly disembowelled and then torn apart with his arms and legs tied to motorbikes. The remains were put on display as a warning to others against defying Taleban orders to stop educating girls.
Halim is one of four teachers killed in rapid succession by the Islamists at Ghazni, a strategic point on the routes from Kabul to the south and east which has become the scene of fierce clashes between the Taleban and United States and Afghan forces….At the village of Qara Bagh, Halim’s family is distraught and terrified. His cousin, Ahmed Gul, shook his head. “They killed him like an animal. No, no. We do not kill animals like that. They took away a father and a husband, they had no pity. We are all very worried. Please go now, you see those men standing over there? They are watching. It is dangerous for you, and for us.”
Fatima Mustaq, the director of education at Ghazni, has had repeated death threats, the notorious ‘night letters’. Her gender, as well as her refusal to send girls home from school, has made her a hate figure for Islamist zealots. “I think they killed him that way to frighten us, otherwise why make a man suffer so much? Mohammed Halim and his family were good friends of ours and we are very, very upset by what has happened. He came to me when the threats first began and asked what he should do. I told him to move somewhere safe. I think he was trying to arrange that when they came and took him.”
The threats against Mushtaq also extend to her husband Sayyid Abdul and their eight children. “When the first letters arrived, I tried to hide them from my husband. But then he found the next few. He said we must stand together. We talked, and we decided that we must tell the children, so that they can be prepared. But it is not a good way for them to grow up.”
During the Taleban’s rule she and her sister ran secret schools for girls at their home. “They found out and raided us. We managed to persuade them that we were only teaching the Koran. But they spied and found out we were teaching algebra. So they came and beat us. Can you imagine, beating someone for teaching algebra.”
Is this site a spoof? If it is, it’s done with a very straight face. Check out the Ask a Korean!! section:
I have two questions:
You do know that most of these people writing to you are patronizing you, right? and, is this site a spoof?Frederick Estonia
Hello Frederick
First of all, these people that write to us sometimes may think they are patronizing us, but they are really crying out for help. Many of them are risking their lives just to write to us, as they could be caught by the fascist police that I am sure patrols much of the internet access there. We can only give them advice and encouragement in the hope that one day they will rise above the imperialist regimes they live in, which abuse their human rights day after day.
This site is most definitely not a spoof. We do apologize that there have not been a regular updates, but this is due to some technical problems from our end that the editor is trying to work out. I can only assume that you must be from Estonia, a country that used to be a part of a beautiful and free nation called the USSR, so I can understand why this site might seem like a shock to you, as I am sure the freedoms we enjoy remind you of the freedoms you enjoyed living in the USSR. It is sad that you are repeatedly denied those freedoms after the imperialists destroyed your country and created fascist puppet regimes such as Estonia. For many people, after hearing so much lies and propaganda, they are obviously in denial when they see the truth. We hope our website will continue to provide the truth about Korea to the progressive people of the world.
Han See-Na
Citizen of Pyongyang
(via The Marmot’s Hole)
Here’s the winner of this year’s Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award:
“I can feel her breasts against her chest. I cup my hands round her face and start to kiss her properly. She slides one of her slender legs in between mine.
“Oh Jack, she was moaning now, her curves pushed up against me, her crotch taut against my bulging trousers, her hands gripping fistfuls of my hair.
“She reaches for my belt. I groan too, in expectation. And then I’m inside her, and everything is pure white as we’re lost in a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles.”
Well yes, “bulging trousers” is funny (and shouldn’t that be “against my chest”?), but really – it’s not all that bad, is it? If this is the best/worst they can find, maybe it’s time to pack the whole thing in.
The winning author, Iain Hollingshead, goes through the usual “yes, ha ha, I can see the funny side of it now” motions, and at this stage in the awards, after 13 years, it’s probably not even through gritted teeth. It was all very Auberon Waugh back in 1993, but now it seems pointless.
No I wasn’t aware of the history of Indonesian imperialism in West Papua – the western half of New Guinea – till now. Peter Tatchell tells the story at CiF.
More on Iran’s willingness to, as Ahmadinejad put it, “promote and protect freedom and human dignity and integrity”:
One of Iran’s most senior clergymen has issued a fatwa on an Azeri writer said to have insulted the Prophet Muhammad.
The call on Muslims to murder Rafiq Tagi, who writes for Azerbaijan’s Senet newspaper, echoes the Iranian fatwa against Indian writer Salman Rushdie.
It was issued by the conservative Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Fazel Lankarani.
The writings of Rafiq Tagi sparked recent demonstrations outside the Azerbaijani embassy in the Iranian capital, Teheran.
The Iranian media is reporting that Grand Ayatollah Lankarani’s followers inside the republic of Azerbaijan wrote to him asking for advice about what they called “the apostate writer”.
They accuse the Azeri writer of portraying Christianity as superior to Islam and Europe as superior to the Middle East.
They allege that he has ridiculed all the sanctities of Islam and done it knowingly, fully aware of the consequences of his action.
In response, Grand Ayatollah Lankarani is said to have issued a fatwa calling for the death of the writer and also the person responsible for publishing his articles.
Earlier, an Iranian cleric had offered his house as a reward to anyone who killed the Azeri writer.
/blockquote>
It’s nicely tailored to appeal to sections of the American left – and not without success, to judge from some of the comments at Metafilter. No mention of the destruction of Israel, or holocaust denial, or the glories of martyrdom, or the coming of the seventh imam….
nment to rein in rights violations and bring those involved to justice.
But the Council rejected the EU move by 22 votes to 20, with 4 abstentions, and the African proposal was then approved by a wider 25-11 margin, with 10 abstentions….
The African resolution, the first on Darfur the Geneva-based rights body has debated since coming into being in June, noted “with concern the seriousness of the human rights and humanitarian situation in Darfur.”
But African states, backed by Muslim and Arab countries, refused to accept additional wording that would have called on U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour to draw up a new report on the situation there….
The EU also tried to draw attention to violations such as the use of child soldiers, and said it was up to the government to end a “climate of impunity.”
Arbour, a former Canadian Supreme Court judge and war crimes prosecutor, has been extremely critical of Khartoum in the past, particularly on the issue of impunity. She is expected to address the Council on Wednesday. “The human rights situation in Darfur continues to be of grave concern and according to reliable reports continues to show signs of deteriorating,” said Finland’s ambassador Vesa Himanen, speaking for the EU.
But his remarks were dismissed by Algerian ambassador Idriss Jazairy, chairing the African group, who echoed Sudan’s assertion that things are getting better. “We do not share the pessimism that has just been expressed,” said Jazairy.
Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on Tuesday rejected a U.N. role in the African peace mission in Darfur and accused aid agencies, which have 14,000 staff in Darfur, of giving false information on the crisis to prolong their jobs in the region.