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Thursday, 18 November 2010
Wednesday, 17 November 2010
Researchers find that beached dolphins are often deaf
New research into the cause of dolphin "strandings" - incidents in which weakened or dead dolphins are found near shore - has shown that in some species, many stranded creatures share the same problem.
They are nearly deaf, in a world where hearing can be as valuable as sight.
That understanding - gained from a study of dolphins' brain activity - could help explain why such intelligent animals do something so seemingly dumb. Unable to use sound to find food or family members, dolphins can wind up weak and disoriented.
Researchers are unsure what is causing the hearing loss: It might be old age, birth defects or a cacophony of man-made noise in the ocean, including Navy sonar, which has been associated with some marine mammal strandings in recent years.
The news, researchers say, is a warning for those who rescue and release injured dolphins: In some cases, the animals might be going back to a world they can't hear.
"Rehab is pretty time-consuming and pretty expensive," said David Mann, a professor at the University of South Florida and the study's lead author. If the dolphin can't hear, he said, "there's almost no point in rehabbing it and releasing it."
The study, published Nov. 3 in the journal PLoS One, examined several species of marine mammals - including dolphins and small whales - in the Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. The animals had been found stranded in the wild and taken in for medical treatment and feeding.
Each year, 1,200 to 1,600 whales and dolphins are found stranded off the U.S. coast, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Most are dead: In 2007, the most recent year with data, 195 out of 1,263 animals were found alive...
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David Farenthold @'Washington Post'
50,000 People Face Humanitarian Disaster -- In South Dakota
All it took was a one-minute commentary. On February 9, 2010, Keith Olbermann told his viewers about a humanitarian crisis affecting 50,000 people. It was so bad, college basketball fans were being asked to share their soles. "Haiti?" he asked. "South Dakota. The shoe donations are being sought at the University of South Dakota and they are for the residents of the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation."On January 21, 2010, a devastating blizzard and snowstorm hit the area, one of the poorest in the country, knocking down over 3,000 utility poles. Residents were without electricity, water or heat in subzero temperatures for weeks. The tribe declared a state of emergency. "The government has done next to nothing for the Native Americans, who on a nice, sunny spring day there still face unemployment of 85 percent," Olbermann said sternly. "Doing nothing for these people, an American tradition since at least 1776."
He then directed viewers who wanted to donate to the Countdown website, where they would find a link to the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe storm relief fund.
There were no videos or photos of the devastation. There was no interview with a tribal member. It was a one-minute commentary. According to Tribal Chairman Joe Brings Plenty, Olbermann's call for donations, coupled with community efforts and matching money from the Bush and Northwest Area Foundations, brought in $975,000. Daily Kos blogger Bill in Maryland posted a diary with donation links for neighboring tribes.
Chairman Brings Plenty said the response was overwhelming. "It was crazy. It had a huge effect compared to what we were doing to get coverage and people in DC to take notice. The government had to take notice because of the phone calls that were coming in."
Leo Fischer, general manger of the Tri-County/Mni Waste Water System, said that after the commentary aired, his phone wouldn't stop ringing. People who saw it drove 13 hours to drop off clothes, food and bottled water. "Very few people had generators, so they had to find a spot for the bottled water so it wouldn't freeze," he said. It was that cold...
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Rose Aquilar @'Alternet'
Tuesday, 16 November 2010
WTF???
"In return for the [90 day] freeze, which would not include settlement construction in East Jerusalem, the Israelis would receive 20 advanced U.S. fighter jets and other military aid, as well as a U.S. pledge to block Palestinian attempts to work through the United Nations or other international bodies to achieve state...hood."
This is is the cost for a 90 day freeze in settlement construction!
(Thanx Son#1!)
Monday, 15 November 2010
Christopher Hitchens: 'You have to choose your future regrets'
I wasn't sure what, or perhaps whom, to expect as the door opened at Christopher Hitchens's top-floor apartment in downtown Washington. The last time I had interviewed the renowned polemicist, author, literary critic and new resident in the medical state he's called "Tumortown" was in 2005. On that occasion, after a 5am finish to our extravagantly lubricated conversation, it was I who had felt the pressing need of hospital attention.
Since then there have been two dramatic changes in his circumstances. The first was the international bestselling success of his 2007 anti-theist tome God is Not Great. After decades of acclaimed but essentially confined labour, Hitchens suddenly broke out to a mass audience, becoming arguably the global figurehead of the so-called New Atheists. Almost overnight he was upgraded from intellectual notoriety, as an outspoken supporter of the invasion of Iraq, to the business end of mainstream fame. In America, in particular, he has reached that rare position for a journalist of becoming a news story himself.
Unfortunately the news, which provided the second personal transformation, was that in June he was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, a malignancy whose survival ratings do not make soothing bedtime reading. As restraint is a quality for which neither Hitchens nor his critics are known, the ironies proved irresistible to many commentators. For the religiously zealous, the arch atheist suffering a mortal illness spoke of divine retribution – the unacknowledged irony being that belief in such a vindictive god served only to endorse Hitchens's thesis...
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Andrew Anthony @'The Guardian'
Film of Paul Bowles Short Story Rediscovered
The tale had all the hallmarks of a baroque Paul Bowles short story, set among the remaindered possessions of Bowles himself: a film director gets a call from a stranger, who says he has stumbled across an original print of the filmmaker’s long-lost first film in a windowless Tangier apartment, coated in dust and insect powder. The director, Sara Driver, at first thought the call might be a joke, but for reasons almost as strange as fiction, she kept listening.
In the late 1970s she had fallen in love with a haunting 1948 Bowles story called “You Are Not I,” about a young woman who escapes from an asylum, and decided she wanted to make a film of it. With no money for the rights and the thinnest of shoestrings to make the movie itself — a $12,000 budget, some of it supplied by her small salary at a copy shop — she forged ahead anyway. And before its well-received premiere at the Public Theater in 1983, she shipped a print of the 48-minute black-and-white film, the first screen adaptation of one of Bowles’s stories, to his apartment in Tangier, Morocco, praying simply not to be sued.
“To my great relief, he liked it,” Ms. Driver recalled recently. “And not only that, but he wrote me back with a long, detailed critique of the film, saying, among other things, that he thought one woman overacted — which he was right about.”
Bowles’s agent granted the rights to Ms. Driver, and the movie — shot in six days near her parents’ house in western New Jersey, with an unlikely cast that included two friends, the writer Luc Sante, little known at the time, and an equally unknown photographer, Nan Goldin — developed a following. The film was named one of the best movies of the 1980s by a critic in Cahiers du Cinéma.
But almost as quickly as it built a cult reputation, the film fell from view, the victim of a leak in a New Jersey warehouse that destroyed Ms. Driver’s negative. That left her with only one film-festival print so battered that it would barely run through a projector. When museums and art house theaters called over the years asking to show it, she would turn them down, not wanting the film to be seen in such bad shape.
“Every time I’d get back to someone and tell them, my heart would just sink,” said Ms. Driver, now 54 and the director of three other films.
The film’s story might have ended there, but two years ago a film librarian from the University of Delaware, one of the most important repositories of Bowles’s papers, traveled to Morocco to speak at a conference. While in Tangier, the librarian, Francis Poole, who knew Bowles well during the last years of his life, was contacted by Abdelouahed Boulaich, Bowles’s longtime butler and his heir, who after Bowles’s death in 1999 had helped to secure many of his papers. Mr. Boulaich told Mr. Poole that he still had a few of the writer’s things and asked if he wanted to see them. The two took a taxi from Mr. Poole’s hotel to an empty house owned by Mr. Boulaich, who unlocked a door to a small ground-floor salon that smelled as if it had been closed for years.
With a small flashlight and a digital camera, Mr. Poole set about documenting the room’s contents, which included piles of letters and books and two manual Olympic typewriters, one long used by Paul Bowles and the other by his wife, Jane. Below them on a bookcase sat a film box with two reels inside; the label was faded except for a New York return address visible beneath the dust and insecticide.
“For a second I felt like I was in one of the bug powder scenes from David Cronenberg’s film of William Burroughs’s novel ‘Naked Lunch,’ ” Mr. Poole said. “There were even letters from Burroughs to Paul Bowles scattered around. And some of those had insecticide on them.”
The University of Delaware acquired the contents of the room from Mr. Boulaich, and Mr. Poole and Tim Murray, who oversees the special collections of the university’s library, returned in 2008 and 2009 to box them all up. Mr. Poole still had no idea what was on the film reels, and he acknowledged that he almost decided to leave them. But he put the film box in his carry-on bag and took it to Delaware, where he watched the 16-millimeter reels for the first time — grimy but miraculously, given the humid storage conditions, in good shape — and realized what he had found.
“It was like stumbling upon some kind of treasure in an archaeological dig,” he said. “I wasn’t there thinking I was going to find a lost film. I must say it’s been a once-in-a-lifetime bizarre experience for me.”
For Ms. Driver, the film’s rediscovery has been like opening a time capsule of the No Wave independent-film scene, which flourished in New York in the late 1970s and early ’80s. It included directors like Jim Jarmusch (Ms. Driver’s longtime romantic partner and the cinematographer and co-writer for “You Are Not I”), Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, Bette Gordon, Susan Seidelman (“Desperately Seeking Susan”) and even Kathryn Bigelow, of “The Hurt Locker” fame, who made her first short in New York in 1978 (featuring the odd pairing of Gary Busey and the French semiotician Sylvère Lotringer).
It was a tiny film world where favors and friendships often stood in for the money no one had. Mr. Sante recalled that his role in “You Are Not I” required him to be able to drive, which he could not.
“I just needed to go across a parking lot in one scene, and I thought, ‘O.K., I can handle this,’ ” he said. “And I managed to run into a garbage can, which was the only other thing in the parking lot.” (A volunteer body double was recruited.)
The unearthed print of the film, which will remain in the University of Delaware collection, has been completely cleaned and restored. A digital copy has been created, which was used to screen “You Are Not I” for the first time in almost 20 years, at the Reykjavik International Film Festival in Iceland in September and last month at the Portuguese Cinémathèque in Lisbon, where the film first played during its initial run in the early 1980s. Ms. Driver is now applying for grants to help her produce a corrected negative and additional prints.
She said she had been overjoyed to have an important part of her past back, though she pointed out that, technically, “You Are Not I” was not her first film. “I made a little student short before it that was about Troilus and Cressida, and all the dialogue in it was in Middle English,” she said, adding, “That one I don’t think anyone’s ever going to see again.”
Randy Kennedy @'NY Times'
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