Wednesday, 15 December 2010

Interview with Richard Lowenstein on Sydney's FBi radio this morning focusing on Autoluminescence, the doco he's doing about Rowland S Howard but also talking about Dogs in Space, Melbourne in the eighties, Michael Hutchence, and filming rock videos in exotic locations.

@'FBi'

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Stagefright_Richard Lowenstein.mp3

♪♫ Chintu Ji - Akira Kurosawa

An Interview with Gnosis, the group behind the Gawker hacking

A Peek Inside A Suspected California Pimp's Real 'Business Plan'

Young Henry Rollins Produced An Album By Charles Manson

NaomiAKlein We have been living in a New Dark Age. #Wikileaks is turning on the lights. No wonder the rats are scurrying. 7 minutes ago via web

Michel Foucault: Fearless Speech (2001)

Comprised of six lectures delivered, in English, by Michel Foucault while teaching at Berkeley in the Fall of 1983, Fearless Speech was edited by Joseph Pearson and published in 2001. Reviewed by the author, it is the last book Foucault wrote before his death in 1984 and can be read as his last testament. Here, he positions the philosopher as the only person able to confront power with the truth, a stance that boldly sums up Foucault’s project as a philosopher.

Still unpublished in France, Fearless Speech concludes the genealogy of truth that Foucault pursued throughout his life, starting with his investigations in Madness and Civilization, into the question of power and its technology. The expression “fearless speech” is a rough translation of the Greek parrhesia, which designates those who take a risk to tell the truth; the citizen who has the moral qualities required to speak the truth, even if it differs from what the majority of people believe and faces danger for speaking it.

“Parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth through frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.”

@'Monoskop/log'

Stem cell transplant has cured HIV infection in 'Berlin patient', say doctors

Doctors who carried out a stem cell transplant on an HIV-infected man with leukaemia in 2007 say they now believe the man to have been cured of HIV infection as a result of the treatment, which introduced stem cells which happened to be resistant to HIV infection.

The man received bone marrow from a donor who had natural resistance to HIV infection; this was due to a genetic profile which led to the CCR5 co-receptor being absent from his cells. The most common variety of HIV uses CCR5 as its ‘docking station’, attaching to it in order to enter and infect CD4 cells, and people with this mutation are almost completely protected against infection.

The case was first reported at the 2008 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston, and Berlin doctors subsequently published a detailed case history in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 2009.

They have now published a follow-up report in the journal Blood, arguing that based on the results of extensive tests, “It is reasonable to conclude that cure of HIV infection has been achieved in this patient.”...

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Keith Alcorn @'aidsmap'

Oh this'll work part#whatever!

Afghan Ultraviolence: Petraeus Triples Air War

HA!

(Thanx Bodhi!)

Attempts to prosecute WikiLeaks endanger press freedoms

Violent clashes erupt in Italy after Berlusconi survives no-confidence vote

At least 50 police and 40 protesters have been injured as hundreds of students clashed with police near the residence of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy's capital on Tuesday. The riots came as parliament decided on the prime minister's future. Berlusconi secured a comfortable victory in the no-confidence vote at the senate, but survived a similar motion in the lower house by just three votes. Demonstrators marched through Rome's historic centre, throwing firecrackers that boomed as lawmakers cast their votes. Similar protests took place in other parts of the country

Kosovo PM is head of human organ and arms ring, Council of Europe reports

Hashim Thaci, prime minister of Kosovo. Photograph: Dieter Nagl/AFP/Getty Images

Kosovo's prime minister is the head of a "mafia-like" Albanian group responsible for smuggling weapons, drugs and human organs through eastern Europe, according to a Council of Europe inquiry report on organised crime.

Hashim Thaçi is identified as "the boss" of a network that began operating criminal rackets in the run-up to the 1999 Kosovo war, and has held powerful sway over the country's government since.

The report of the two-year inquiry, which cites FBI and other intelligence sources, has been obtained by the Guardian. It names Thaçi as having over the last decade exerted "violent control" over the heroin trade.

Figures from Thaçi's inner circle are accused of secretly taking captives across the border into Albania after the war, where a few Serbs are said to have been murdered for their kidneys, which were sold on the black market.

Legal proceedings began in a Pristina district court today into a case of alleged organ trafficking discovered by police in 2008. That case – in which organs are said to have been taken from impoverished victims at a clinic known as Medicus – is said by the report to be linked to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) organ harvesting in 2000.

It comes at a crucial period for Kosovo, which on Sunday held its first elections since declaring independence from Serbia in 2008. Thaçi claimed victory in the election and has been seeking to form a coalition with opposition parties...