“The bleak tally now at 50,000 dead, 250,000 injured and 1.5 million homeless…”
Sunday, 17 January 2010
Afghan MPs reject many new Karzai cabinet nominees
The Afghan parliament has rejected 10 of 17 new cabinet nominees suggested by President Hamid Karzai.
The vote comes two weeks after MPs turned down most of Mr Karzai's first choices, dealing him a serious blow. Two key posts were approved - Mr Karzai's former security adviser Zalmay Rasul as foreign minister and Habibullah Ghalib as justice minister.
However, MPs backed only one of the three women nominees, Amina Afzali, as work and social affairs minister.
The two women put forward for the posts of public health and women's affairs were rejected.
The BBC's Mark Dummett, in Kabul, says Mr Karzai had hoped to have his new cabinet in place before a crucial donor conference in London on 28 January, but that now appears impossible.
However despite the setback, the president now has 14 of 24 ministers confirmed including the most powerful ones in charge of foreign, defence and interior ministries, our correspondent adds.
It is not yet clear when the president will propose names to fill the vacant positions and when Parliament will vote for these candidates.
After the first vote on 2 January, Mr Karzai ordered MPs to cancel their winter break to speed up progress towards getting a functioning government in place.
The rejection of 17 of Mr Karzai's 24 original choices was seen as a blow to his authority, already damaged after an election marred by fraud in August.
The new list included none of the previously rejected nominees.
MPs spent the last week questioning the new candidates ahead of Saturday's vote, which was carried out by secret ballot.
Some had complained that candidates were not suitably qualified or that others were too closely aligned to warlords.
Mr Karzai faces strong international pressure to create a government that can oversee reforms.
The UN has said international funding for Afghanistan's parliamentary elections this year will depend on reform of the country's election institutions.
Mr Karzai is also under pressure to form a government before a crucial donor conference in London on 28 January.
Afghanistan “Hearts and Minds” Special: Take a Photo, Win a Camera!
The NATO Joint Forces Command in Afghanistan announces a photo contest: “Why Afghanistan Matters”. From the website:
Here’s your chance to let the world see “Why Afghanistan Matters” through your lens!
Send us your original photos and compete for the chance to win one of FIVE digital cameras! The public will be asked to choose a winner in one of the following four categories, with a panel of judges selecting an overall winner from the top three in all categories.
Here are some examples, in NATO’s eyes, of photos you might want to submit.
Here, EA suggests, are photos that might not get you that “brand new Nikon D90 12.3MP Digital SLR Camera plus a Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G AF-S ED VRII Telephoto Zoom Lens”:
HA! (True story)
A floor collapsed beneath a group of about 20 members of Weight Watchers as they gathered to compare how many pounds they had shed over Christmas.
Members of the weight-loss club were lining up to compare readings on the scales when they heard a bang as the floor came away from the walls of their meeting room in Växjö in southern Sweden.
“We suddenly heard a huge thud – we almost thought it was an earthquake and everything flew up in the air. The floor collapsed in one corner of the room and along the walls,” one of the those present told the Smålandsposten newspaper.
They abandoned the room as the floor started to give way in other areas.
"We are going to have to find a replacement premises," Therese Levin, a consultant for Weight Watchers told the newspaper.
No one was injured in the incident, the cause of which is being investigated. The scales were not damaged and the weigh-in continued in a nearby corridor.
(Thanx Stan!)
Why France is still in love with Serge
To older Britons, Serge Gainsbourg will always be the ugly, unshaven Frenchman who sang a filthy pop duet with a sweet English rose.
In France, he is remembered either as one of the great masters of chanson française or a drunken, pretentious, unpatriotic bore. Both sides of Serge Gainsbourg's career – and his little-known early years as a terrified Jewish child in wartime France – are explored in a bio-pic opening in France next week. The movie, Gainsbourg, une vie héroique (Gainsbourg, A Heroic Life) is, in its way, as poignant and painful as the singer's own life. One of its principal roles, that of Gainsbourg's British muse and third wife, Jane Birkin, is played, brilliantly, by a young British actress, Lucy Gordon, who committed suicide soon after the film was completed last year. The director, Joann Sfar, previously a writer of comic-strip books, has dedicated his movie to Ms Gordon, who was 29 when she died. "The film owes a great deal to the warmth, the sweetness and the immense talent of Lucy Gordon," Mr Sfar said. "Her personality was so luminous, so light, so funny." French film critics who saw a gala première in Paris on Thursday night also gave high praise to Ms Gordon's portrayal of Jane Birkin. They were equally impressed by the performance of the French theatre actor, Eric Elmosnino, as Gainsbourg at the height of his career. They were less convinced by the model and actress Laetitia Casta's portrayal of the French sex symbol and queen of pout, Brigitte Bardot, one of the singer's many other conquests. A curiosity of the film is Mr Sfar's insistence that the actors must sing for themselves and not mime to original recordings. The recreation by Ms Gordon and Mr Elmosnino of the 1969 classic of heavy breathing and orgasmic noises, "Je t'aime, Moi non plus" – Gainsbourg's only global hit – is reasonably convincing. Other actors' efforts range from the effective to the courageous to the karaoke borderline. Mr Sfar admits that he has simplified and exaggerated the life of a man who, in any case, loved to caricature himself. By doing so he has angered Ms Birkin, now a 62-year-old English rose and the most popular Briton living in France. As the chief guardian of the temple of Gainsbourg's memory, she insisted that the film's title must be followed by a disclaimer describing it as not a biography but a "conte" or "folk-tale" by the director. Another curiosity of the movie is the fact that Mr Sfar originally tried to cast the daughter of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, the actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, as her father. Ms Gainsbourg considered this startling offer but then refused. Mr Elmosnino, 45, looks, in fact, much more like the seductively unlovely Gainsbourg than the singer's beautiful daughter does. When asked once to explain his serial success with women despite what he described as his "cabbage-head" looks, Gainsbourg said: "Ugliness is superior to beauty because it lasts longer." A further curiosity in the film is that Gainsbourg is portrayed as constantly battling with an alter-ego – humorous and creative but also self-destructive – which assumes a physical form, played by the American actor, Doug Jones. The director, Mr Sfar, said that he wanted to tell the story of a man who had a "love- hate relationship with his country and the women he loved ... a man who was terrified of being alone and had a desperate desire to be liked but muddled the love of his loved ones and the love of the public." The story of Gainsbourg's often destructive relationships with women will also be examined in a documentary which will be shown on French TV next week. Gainsbourg was born in Paris as Lucien Ginsburg, the son of a poor Russian-Jewish immigrant family in 1928. As a 12-year-old child in Vichy France, he was forced to wear a yellow star and was lucky to escape deportation to the death camps. After the war, he attempted unsuccessfully to become a painter before finding work as a songwriter and a crooner in bars. Edith Piaf asked him to write songs for her but he declined. His early career as a pop singer and pop writer, after his first album in 1958, was a mixture of rebellion, originality and cynical mimicry of commercial pop. He wrote songs for, among others, Juliette Greco, Petula Clarke and Françoise Hardy, Marianne Faithfull, Anna Karina and Nana Mouskouri. He even composed a Eurovision Song Contest winner – "Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son" – for France Gall in 1965. He wrote an album of songs for the actress Catherine Deneuve and sang duets – and had a year-long love affair – with Brigitte Bardot. The infamous "Je t'aime. Moi non Plus" ("I love you. Me neither") was originally written for and recorded with Bardot but she banned its release (a judgement seconded by the BBC and the Vatican when the celebrated Jane Birkin version emerged in 1969). In the last decade, Gainsbourg has become a cult hero and inspiration to British bands from Portishead to Franz Ferdinand. He has also been rediscovered by young people in his home country as one of the few truly original musicians that France produced in the classic years of pop and rock. He is now seen as a precursor of Queen or David Bowie – as someone who successfully spliced rock and jazz and classical music and a writer who produced poetic rather than crass pop lyrics (although he also wrote plenty of those in his time). The first half of the 130-minute movie follows Gainsbourg's life when he was still Ginsburg, a shy, poetic boy and teenager, ashamed of what he calls his "ugly Jewish face". The second half – less effective according to French critics – shows his emergence as "Gainsbourg", the provocative womaniser and singer-songwriter. It ends with his descent into alcoholism as the man that the French press nicknamed "Gainsbarre". But the film steers clear of one of his most disturbing aspects: his obsession in song with the sexual attraction of under-age girls.
In France, he is remembered either as one of the great masters of chanson française or a drunken, pretentious, unpatriotic bore. Both sides of Serge Gainsbourg's career – and his little-known early years as a terrified Jewish child in wartime France – are explored in a bio-pic opening in France next week. The movie, Gainsbourg, une vie héroique (Gainsbourg, A Heroic Life) is, in its way, as poignant and painful as the singer's own life. One of its principal roles, that of Gainsbourg's British muse and third wife, Jane Birkin, is played, brilliantly, by a young British actress, Lucy Gordon, who committed suicide soon after the film was completed last year. The director, Joann Sfar, previously a writer of comic-strip books, has dedicated his movie to Ms Gordon, who was 29 when she died. "The film owes a great deal to the warmth, the sweetness and the immense talent of Lucy Gordon," Mr Sfar said. "Her personality was so luminous, so light, so funny." French film critics who saw a gala première in Paris on Thursday night also gave high praise to Ms Gordon's portrayal of Jane Birkin. They were equally impressed by the performance of the French theatre actor, Eric Elmosnino, as Gainsbourg at the height of his career. They were less convinced by the model and actress Laetitia Casta's portrayal of the French sex symbol and queen of pout, Brigitte Bardot, one of the singer's many other conquests. A curiosity of the film is Mr Sfar's insistence that the actors must sing for themselves and not mime to original recordings. The recreation by Ms Gordon and Mr Elmosnino of the 1969 classic of heavy breathing and orgasmic noises, "Je t'aime, Moi non plus" – Gainsbourg's only global hit – is reasonably convincing. Other actors' efforts range from the effective to the courageous to the karaoke borderline. Mr Sfar admits that he has simplified and exaggerated the life of a man who, in any case, loved to caricature himself. By doing so he has angered Ms Birkin, now a 62-year-old English rose and the most popular Briton living in France. As the chief guardian of the temple of Gainsbourg's memory, she insisted that the film's title must be followed by a disclaimer describing it as not a biography but a "conte" or "folk-tale" by the director. Another curiosity of the movie is the fact that Mr Sfar originally tried to cast the daughter of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, the actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, as her father. Ms Gainsbourg considered this startling offer but then refused. Mr Elmosnino, 45, looks, in fact, much more like the seductively unlovely Gainsbourg than the singer's beautiful daughter does. When asked once to explain his serial success with women despite what he described as his "cabbage-head" looks, Gainsbourg said: "Ugliness is superior to beauty because it lasts longer." A further curiosity in the film is that Gainsbourg is portrayed as constantly battling with an alter-ego – humorous and creative but also self-destructive – which assumes a physical form, played by the American actor, Doug Jones. The director, Mr Sfar, said that he wanted to tell the story of a man who had a "love- hate relationship with his country and the women he loved ... a man who was terrified of being alone and had a desperate desire to be liked but muddled the love of his loved ones and the love of the public." The story of Gainsbourg's often destructive relationships with women will also be examined in a documentary which will be shown on French TV next week. Gainsbourg was born in Paris as Lucien Ginsburg, the son of a poor Russian-Jewish immigrant family in 1928. As a 12-year-old child in Vichy France, he was forced to wear a yellow star and was lucky to escape deportation to the death camps. After the war, he attempted unsuccessfully to become a painter before finding work as a songwriter and a crooner in bars. Edith Piaf asked him to write songs for her but he declined. His early career as a pop singer and pop writer, after his first album in 1958, was a mixture of rebellion, originality and cynical mimicry of commercial pop. He wrote songs for, among others, Juliette Greco, Petula Clarke and Françoise Hardy, Marianne Faithfull, Anna Karina and Nana Mouskouri. He even composed a Eurovision Song Contest winner – "Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son" – for France Gall in 1965. He wrote an album of songs for the actress Catherine Deneuve and sang duets – and had a year-long love affair – with Brigitte Bardot. The infamous "Je t'aime. Moi non Plus" ("I love you. Me neither") was originally written for and recorded with Bardot but she banned its release (a judgement seconded by the BBC and the Vatican when the celebrated Jane Birkin version emerged in 1969). In the last decade, Gainsbourg has become a cult hero and inspiration to British bands from Portishead to Franz Ferdinand. He has also been rediscovered by young people in his home country as one of the few truly original musicians that France produced in the classic years of pop and rock. He is now seen as a precursor of Queen or David Bowie – as someone who successfully spliced rock and jazz and classical music and a writer who produced poetic rather than crass pop lyrics (although he also wrote plenty of those in his time). The first half of the 130-minute movie follows Gainsbourg's life when he was still Ginsburg, a shy, poetic boy and teenager, ashamed of what he calls his "ugly Jewish face". The second half – less effective according to French critics – shows his emergence as "Gainsbourg", the provocative womaniser and singer-songwriter. It ends with his descent into alcoholism as the man that the French press nicknamed "Gainsbarre". But the film steers clear of one of his most disturbing aspects: his obsession in song with the sexual attraction of under-age girls.
(Thanx Nick!)
Obama confidant's spine-chilling proposal by Glenn Greenwald
Sunstein advocates that the Government's stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into "chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups." He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called "independent" credible voices to bolster the Government's messaging (on the ground that those who don't believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government). This program would target those advocating false "conspiracy theories," which they define to mean: "an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role." Sunstein's 2008 paper was flagged by this blogger, and then amplified in an excellent report by Raw Story's Daniel Tencer.
There's no evidence that the Obama administration has actually implemented a program exactly of the type advocated by Sunstein, though in light of this paper and the fact that Sunstein's position would include exactly such policies, that question certainly ought to be asked. Regardless, Sunstein's closeness to the President, as well as the highly influential position he occupies, merits an examination of the mentality behind what he wrote. This isn't an instance where some government official wrote a bizarre paper in college 30 years ago about matters unrelated to his official powers; this was written 18 months ago, at a time when the ascendancy of Sunstein's close friend to the Presidency looked likely, in exactly the area he now oversees. Additionally, the government-controlled messaging that Sunstein desires has been a prominent feature of U.S. Government actions over the last decade, including in some recently revealed practices of the current administration, and the mindset in which it is grounded explains a great deal about our political class. All of that makes Sunstein's paper worth examining in greater detail...
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