hould be able to withstand the heat of a stove, you know? It’s obviously a piece of crap.” […]
The proceeds will be donated to the American Civil Liberties Union. Buyer pays approximately $25 in shipping costs, but will be refunded if shipping is less than that. If buyer is in London, pick-up (free) can be arranged.
Still 5 days to bid. Current price to beat: $36.
by Prof. Arpali’s attorney had been rejected. Prof. Askin, who discovered Prof. Arpali’s body, was hospitalized after suffering a heart attack. Two days after Prof. Arpali’s suicide, the office of the Van District Attorney filed the case against Prof. Askin, while the case against Prof. Arpali was dropped.
As one Turkish columnist noted, a recent law allows a maximum of four days of detention without trial, even for the worst murderers, drug smugglers, rapists, and terrorists. “Enver Arpali was kept in detention for over four months with no progress made in his case… so he killed himself.”
t to do? No surprise that, in Taheri’s view:
we are heading for another diplomatic fudge to allow all those concerned to dance around the real issue for as long as possible. The question is how long such a dance can go on.
More here:
Dr Peter Corry, Consultant Paediatrician at Bradford Royal Infirmary, says his hospital sees so many recessive genetic illnesses that it has become a centre of excellence for the treatment of some of them….
Birmingham Primary Care Trust estimates that one in ten of all children born to first cousin marriages in Birmingham’s large Pakistani community either dies in infancy or goes on to suffer serious disability as a result of recessive genetic disorders.
Recessive genetic illness is one of the main reasons for admission to the city’s children’s hospital.
ny after a leading British Olympic medallist professed that he was shocked and disturbed by the training methods he witnessed there.
Sir Matthew Pinsent, the four-time rowing gold medallist, claimed that gymnasts as young as five were routinely beaten as part of their training regime.
He made the allegations after visiting the Shichahai Sports School, a boarding school in Beijing that trains gymnasts.
Others who have visited the school in recent months have also remarked on the harsh regime and the director, Liu Hong Bin, has talked of the need for “discipline and order” among his young charges.
Sir Matthew, who is a member of the British Olympic Association and a former member of the International Olympic Association, said: “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I was wondering whether it’s a kind of Western approach, compared to an Eastern approach. [But] at the end of the day, I definitely think those kids were being abused.
I know I’m an old cynic, but really – why on earth does he think all those pubescent girls from Eastern Europe always used to do so well? I guess we’ll see more and more of this (with women’s tennis, where the main criterion for success is having a nutter for a dad, leading the way) until the whole ethos of the Olympics is completely soured. Probably some time around 2012.
[As an aside, I’ve been forced to attend a few “inspirational” talks in my working life, but Matthew Pinsent’s is the only one I remember with anything approaching fondness. Nice guy.]
giance to democracy, freedom, and progress were harming the reputation of the revolutionary country in the Islamic world [Iran]” and added, “They are competing with the Taliban in calling for violence and in carrying out extremist crimes that are counter to the religion…”
Iranian Leader Khamenei, on his part, is trying to prevent the media from exposing this struggle. In an attempt to calm matters, he took up a position next to Ahmadinejad, praising him and his functioning, requesting that none criticize him, and calling for the support of all the political forces in the government. Khamenei pointed out that Iran is now in a sensitive stage, and called for putting aside political rivalries – and indeed, Khatami’s comments were not subsequently reported in the Iranian press.
In our assessment, however, these measures are not sufficient to prevent the continuation of the internal struggle in the upper echelons of the Iranian regime. Indeed, every day there are new reports reflecting the tip of the iceberg. The reformist paper Sharq reported on November 15 that Majlis members denied that there was any plan to impeach Ahmadinejad, while the Iranian www.roozonline.com reported today, November 16, that “sources close to the Ahmadinejad speak of the existence of a secret group to overthrow the president.”
Amir Taheri, meanwhile, reports on the sutehdelan – the wealthy sophisticates who’ve found themselves sidelined in Ahmadinejad’s brave new Iran:
Since they were booted out of ministerial offices and the boardrooms of public companies, the sutehdelan have been coming together in regular lunch and dinner parties where, we are told, the food is excellent but the mood is fouled by an intense hatred of Ahmadinejad.
In the first lunches and dinners after Ahmadinejad’s victory, the sutehdelan comforted each other by talk of revenge. Hashemi Rafsanjani, the businessman-mullah who had represented the so-called “reformist” camp in last June’s election, had talked of contesting the results and forming a mass party to oppose Ahmadinejad. Another businessman-mullah, Mahdi Karrubi, had promised to set up a television channel to “expose and oppose” Ahmadinejad.
A third mullah, Mohammad Khatami, the outgoing president, had threatened to “appeal to the masses” against the new president.
Now, however, it is clear that, having lost most of their positions of power within the regime, the sutehdelan have no hope of winning any favours from the people. In fact, a good number of Iranians hold them responsible for the tragedies that the nation has suffered since the mullahs seized power in 1979.
Nevertheless, one should not write them off. They still have lots of money and powerful positions, often as representatives of giant Western and Japanese corporations, in Iran. They also have the immense advantages of being able to gather together and even to criticise the system without being murdered – a privilege denied to most other Iranians. But there is one thing the sutehdelan can no longer do: try to deceive everyone by claiming that they want to reform a system that is incapable of reform. The days of a two-faced mullah speaking with a forked tongue may well have come to an end with Ahmadinejad’s coming to power. And that, believe me, is no bad thing.
Here’s a man with taste (via). On Milan Kundera’s overblown “The Unbearable Lightness of Being“:
The book has that sexy whiff of the Eastern Bloc to it (very effective on anyone who hasn’t been immunized by an actual relationship with an Eastern European), it’s full of young people having complex, turgid sex with one another, and since the first sentence of the book mentions ‘Nietzsche’, it is ipso facto philosophical. It doesn’t hurt, either, that Milan Kundera’s craggy, intellectual face with the thunderbolt eyebrows is staring from the back cover.
The problem, though, is that the Unbearable Lightness of Being is a really bad book. Milan Kundera is the Dave Matthews of Slavic letters, a talented hack, certainly a hack who’s paid his dues, but a hack nonetheless. And by his own admission, this is his worst book. If you strip off the exoticism of Brezhnev-era Czechoslovakia (this rinses off easily in soapy water), you are left with a book full of vapid characters bouncing against each other like little perfectly elastic balls of condensed ego.
There’s an alternative list from an A-team of Slavic authors, rated for slav-o-liciousness, starting with Mikhail Bulgakov’s wonderful “The Master and Margarita“.
I’m no expert here, but what about “I Served the King of England” by Bohumil Hrabal? (new edition coming out in January) – a little man making his own way through the Czech collision with Nazism and Communism. The first paragraph:
When I started to work at the Golden Prague Hotel, the boss took hold of my left ear, pulled me up, and said, You’re a busboy here, so remember, you don’t see anything and you don’t hear anything. Repeat what I just said. So I said I wouldn’t see anything and I wouldn’t hear anything. Then the boss pulled me up by my right ear and said, But remember too that you’ve got to see everything and hear everything. Repeat it after me. I was taken aback, but I promised I would see everything and hear everything. That’s how I began.
If you can stomach it, MEMRI TV have a clip of Galloway speaking at Damascus University, aired on Al-Jazeera on November 13:
I want to be very clear. I was clear in July, and what I said in July has followed me all over the world by the American and Israeli propaganda machine, so I want to be very clear again. All dignified people in the world, whether Arabs or Muslims or others with dignity, are very proud of the speech made by President Bashar Al-Assad a few days ago here in Damascus. […]
For me he is the last Arab ruler, and Syria is the last Arab country. It is the fortress of the remaining dignity of the Arabs, and that’s why I’m proud to be here and addressing you this evening.
Hmm – he really has a thing about Baathist dictators, doesn’t he?
f the world’s largest corporations.
But this week, contrary to the way things usually work out in Mexico, the big guys lost as the government imposed its largest ever anti-monopoly fines, totalling about $68 million, against Coca-Cola and dozens of its distributors and bottlers.
Even Raquel Chavez, 49, expected to lose when a Coke distributor told her to get rid of Big Cola, an upstart brand that arrived in Mexico recently from Peru, or risk having Coke stop selling to her.
“I told them, ‘You can’t refuse to sell to me. That’s unconstitutional’,” Mrs Chavez said. “I didn’t really know if it was unconstitutional, but I said it anyway.” […]
“I thought we were going to go out of business,” she said. Mrs Chavez was forced to buy Coke from wholesale centres and lug dozens of cases home in her elderly car.
“My husband just watched me,” she said, adding that he was angry with her for taking on such an impossible battle.
that they confessed after enduring torture, including beatings, electric shock and sexual assault. Libyan officials denied all of the defendants prompt access to a lawyer, they said. In June, a Tripoli court acquitted 10 Libyan security officials accused of using torture against the defendants.
“There are credible allegations of torture against the foreign health workers,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director of Human Rights Watch. “The Libyan Supreme Court should take these facts into account and reject the death sentences.” […]
Luc Montagnier, the co-discoverer of the HIV virus, testified in the trial that the children were probably infected as a result of poor hygiene at the hospital, and that many of the children had been infected with HIV before the arrival of the foreign health workers in 1998.
But Libyan medical experts for the prosecution claimed the infections resulted from intentional injections of the AIDS virus by the Bulgarian and Palestinian medical workers. The prosecution claims the defendants confessed to their crime.
Four of the foreign health workers told Human Rights Watch that interrogators subjected them to electric shocks, beatings to the body with cables and wooden sticks, and beatings on the soles of their feet, in order to extract their confessions. In May, Human Rights Watch interviewed the foreign health workers in Tripoli’s Jadida prison.
“I confessed during torture with electricity. They put small wires on my toes and on my thumbs. Sometimes they put one on my thumb and another on either my tongue, neck or ear,” Valentina Siropulo, one of the Bulgarian defendants, told Human Rights Watch. “They had two kinds of machines, one with a crank and one with buttons.”
Another Bulgarian defendant, Kristiana Valceva, said interrogators used a small machine with cables and a handle that produced electricity.
“During the shocks and torture they asked me where the AIDS came from and what is your role,” she told Human Rights Watch. She said that Libyan interrogators subjected her to electric shocks on her breasts and genitals.
“My confession was all in Arabic without translation,” she said. “We were ready to sign anything just to stop the torture.”
Update: the Supreme Court has delayed a ruling until the end of January 2006.
This is interesting:
Bulgaria has refused a Libyan demand for payment to secure the release of the nurses, who have been held since 1999.
Bulgaria believes that to pay any money would be to accept the women’s guilt – something it has refused to do.