Thursday, 16 June 2011
Wednesday, 15 June 2011
Pakistan Arrests C.I.A. Informants in Bin Laden Raid
Pakistan’s top military spy agency has arrested some of the Pakistani informants who fed information to the Central Intelligence Agency in the months leading up to the raid that led to the death of Osama bin Laden, according to American officials.
Pakistan’s detention of five C.I.A. informants, including a Pakistani Army major who officials said copied the license plates of cars visiting Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in the weeks before the raid, is the latest evidence of the fractured relationship between the United States and Pakistan. It comes at a time when the Obama administration is seeking Pakistan’s support in brokering an endgame in the war in neighboring Afghanistan.
At a closed briefing last week, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Michael J. Morell, the deputy C.I.A. director, to rate Pakistan’s cooperation with the United States on counterterrorism operations, on a scale of 1 to 10.
“Three,” Mr. Morell replied, according to officials familiar with the exchange.
The fate of the C.I.A. informants arrested in Pakistan is unclear, but American officials said that the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, raised the issue when he travelled to Islamabad last week to meet with Pakistani military and intelligence officers.
Some in Washington see the arrests as illustrative of the disconnect between Pakistani and American priorities at a time when they are supposed to be allies in the fight against Al Qaeda — instead of hunting down the support network that allowed Bin Laden to live comfortably for years, the Pakistani authorities are arresting those who assisted in the raid that killed the world’s most wanted man.
The Bin Laden raid and more recent attacks by militants in Pakistan have been blows to the country’s military, a revered institution in the country. Some officials and outside experts said the military is mired in its worst crisis of confidence in decades.
American officials cautioned that Mr. Morell’s comments about Pakistani support was a snapshot of the current relationship, and did not represent the administration’s overall assessment...
Pakistan’s detention of five C.I.A. informants, including a Pakistani Army major who officials said copied the license plates of cars visiting Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in the weeks before the raid, is the latest evidence of the fractured relationship between the United States and Pakistan. It comes at a time when the Obama administration is seeking Pakistan’s support in brokering an endgame in the war in neighboring Afghanistan.
At a closed briefing last week, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Michael J. Morell, the deputy C.I.A. director, to rate Pakistan’s cooperation with the United States on counterterrorism operations, on a scale of 1 to 10.
“Three,” Mr. Morell replied, according to officials familiar with the exchange.
The fate of the C.I.A. informants arrested in Pakistan is unclear, but American officials said that the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, raised the issue when he travelled to Islamabad last week to meet with Pakistani military and intelligence officers.
Some in Washington see the arrests as illustrative of the disconnect between Pakistani and American priorities at a time when they are supposed to be allies in the fight against Al Qaeda — instead of hunting down the support network that allowed Bin Laden to live comfortably for years, the Pakistani authorities are arresting those who assisted in the raid that killed the world’s most wanted man.
The Bin Laden raid and more recent attacks by militants in Pakistan have been blows to the country’s military, a revered institution in the country. Some officials and outside experts said the military is mired in its worst crisis of confidence in decades.
American officials cautioned that Mr. Morell’s comments about Pakistani support was a snapshot of the current relationship, and did not represent the administration’s overall assessment...
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Nigeria's pastors 'as rich as oil barons'
Nigeria's pastors run multi-million dollar businesses which rival that of oil tycoons, a Nigerian blogger who has researched the issue has told the BBC.
Mfonobong Nsehe, who blogs for Forbes business magazine, says pastors own businesses from hotels to fast-food chains. "Preaching is big business. It's almost as profitable as the oil business," he said.
The joint wealth of five pastors was at least $200m (£121m), he said.
Mr Nsehe said the richest of them, Bishop David Oyedepo of the Living Faith World Outreach Ministry, was worth about $150m.
Bishop Oyedepo owned a publishing company, university, an elite private school, four jets and homes in London and the United States, according to Mr Nsehe.
'Private jets'
The Nigerian blogger said Bishop Oyedepo was followed on the rich list by Pastor Chris Oyakhilome of the Believers' Loveworld Ministries. He was worth between $30 and $50m.
"Oyakhilome's diversified interests include newspapers, magazines, a local television station, a record label, satellite TV, hotels and extensive real estate," Mr Nsehe said.
He said three of the other richest pastors were: - Temitope Joshua Matthew of the Synagogue Church Of All Nations (worth between $10m and $15m);
- Matthew Ashimolowo of Kingsway International Christian Centre (worth between $6 million and $10 million) and
- Chris Okotie of the Household of God Church (worth between $3 million and $10 million).
"These pastors are flamboyant. You see them with private jets and expensive cars. This extravagance sends out the wrong message to their followers," he told the BBC's Network Africa programme.
He said the pastors acquired their wealth from various sources, including their congregations.
"We have Nigerians who are desperate, looking for solutions to their problems. They go to church for salvation, redemption and healing and pastors sometimes take advantage of them," Mr Nsehe said.
@'BBC'
Overground
Returning for a second year, Overground – the "festival within a festival" — may well become a regular feature of the Melbourne International Jazz Festival. Once again, the event sold out before the doors opened, demonstrating that there is a strong following for music that sits at the outer edges of jazz and improvisation.
The six-hour event took over the Melbourne Town Hall, with musicians playing on multiple stages, and roaming performance artists in the foyers and stairwells. The emphasis was on in-the-moment creativity.
Japanese duo Satoko Fujii (on piano) and Yoshida Tatsuya (drums) offered a dazzling set that fused bursts of percussive energy with ritualistic chanted vocals. Jerome Noetinger's solo set was another highlight, the French music-concrete artist using a vintage reel-to-reel machine to construct a rhythmic soundscape with loops and analog effects.
Many acts were one-off collaborations between local and visiting international artists. Charlemagne Palestine's tonal explorations on the Town Hall's Grand Organ were augmented by Oren Ambarchi's processed electric guitar, producing a series of layered, humming vibrations that were both hypnotic and ear-bleedingly loud.
Extremes of volume and sonic density featured in so many performances that the afternoon did become something of an endurance test, with instruments used as weapons and amplification used for shock rather than musical effect. Still, it was heartening to see so many drawn to such adventurous fare, an affirmation that the city's creative music roots are in fertile ground.
Murdoch's mother backs carbon price
A group of prominent Australians has published an open letter calling for a price on carbon to help deal with climate change.
The letter is signed by four former Australians of the year - including Professor Fiona Stanley, Ian Kiernan, Professor Pat McGorry and Sir Gustav Nossal.It is also signed by Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, the philanthopist and mother of News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch.
Last month, Australian actress Cate Blanchett fronted an advertising campaign for a carbon price.
Professor David de Kretser, a former governor of Victoria, organised the letter and says he hopes it leads to climate change action "to ensure that we have an environment and a planet which actually is there for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren."
The letter says a carbon price is fundamental to reducing emissions and driving low-carbon technologies.
The group says it is confident that given the incentives, sustainable industries will flourish.
@'ABC'
...and I hope she gives Rupert a bollocking for all the crap his papers have come out with!
See A Little Light (The Trail of Rage & Melody)
“Dog on Fire” — the bouncy version on “The Daily Show” was recorded by They Might Be Giants — doesn’t exactly capture Mr. Mould’s signature sound. When people talk about Bob Mould and his guitar onslaught, the adjectives tend to be of the sort CNN anchors use when describing natural disasters: enormous, deafening, slashing, chaotic, flattening, consuming. These things are meant as steep compliments.
With Hüsker Dü in the 1980s, his band Sugar in the ’90s and as a solo artist, Mr. Mould has made many kinds of music, some of them acoustic and quite spare. But he’s best known for making, long before Nirvana, metal music for the kind of people who don’t like metal, or at any rate the kind of people who wouldn’t be caught dead flashing the Devil horns hand sign or reading Aleister Crowley. His songs matter so much to so many people, myself included, because of the introspection and pain he manages to layer into them behind and below their sonic brutality. There’s a high signal-to-noise ratio.
One of the pleasures of Mr. Mould’s new memoir, “See a Little Light,” is watching him try to conjure up words to describe his own majestic din. “Imagine the sound of someone starting up a chain saw in preparation for clearing a parcel of overgrown land,” he writes in one early, wobbly stab. Later he calls a song “the musical equivalent of the sound of throwing a box of glass off the roof of a house.” Another song is likened to the sound of “someone regaining consciousness in a hospital after being pounded for hours with bare knuckles.” Hey, you think, he’s getting closer.
“See a Little Light,” written with the rock journalist Michael Azerrad, is on some levels a typical, and typically flat, rock memoir. There are road stories, bad record label deals, dim memories of greasy sexual and pharmacological buffets. Mr. Mould’s drugs of choice included “trucker speed,” crystal meth and cocaine. When in Kansas, he’d stop in to “smoke pot and throw knives” with his friend the writer William S. Burroughs.
Scores are settled. He pokes another beloved Minneapolis band, the Replacements, because it “didn’t give back” to other bands the way Hüsker Dü did. He pours gasoline atop his long-running feud with a founding member of Hüsker Dü, Grant Hart, and then pulls out a Bic lighter.
There’s rock world gossip. Michael Stipe of R.E.M. liked to force some guests to enter his house, humiliatingly, through a window. Mr. Mould was in the running to produce “Nevermind,” Nirvana’s breakthrough LP. The guitarist Chris Stamey complains, while playing with Mr. Mould on tour, about the volume.
“Alex Chilton took this ear, and you’re not taking this one,” Mr. Stamey said, pointing to his other. The author describes his weird detour into script consulting for World Championship Wrestling.
There’s even a big emotional revelation (Mr. Mould may have been sexually abused as a child) that’s ready-made for afternoon television. At the book’s end there are tidy clichés about redemption that made me groan.
In more important ways, however, “See a Little Light” isn’t typical at all. Most centrally, it’s an audacious and moving account of Mr. Mould’s coming of age as a (mostly closeted) gay man in the macho alternative rock scene of the 1980s and 1990s. The book is impressive, too, for its author’s radical unwillingness to ingratiate himself. He was famously severe onstage; mostly, that’s what he is here.
Mr. Mould’s book is also frequently well observed. It doesn’t leap out of the box like a cat, the way Bob Dylan’s and Keith Richards’s memoirs do. But the nice moments start early and maintain a steady drip.
Mr. Mould was born in Malone, N.Y., a small town near the Canadian border, in 1960. His father was a TV repairman; his mother was a switchboard operator. His father, who sometimes beat his mother, was paranoid. (He’d leave a tape recorder running when he left a room.) But Mr. Mould’s childhood was, he reports, relatively un-insane.
He learned to play the guitar early and started Hüsker Dü, a trio, while attending Macalester College in Minnesota. (The band’s name came from a Swedish children’s board game.) The band got famous fast, and released its first studio album, “Everything Falls Apart,” in 1982. Mr. Mould dropped out of Macalester.
Hüsker Dü played faster and louder than almost any band of its era. The noise was an evocation of, and a cover for, Mr. Mould’s roiling emotions. He knew he was gay at 5, but throughout most of his career he fled from the stereotypical gay lifestyle. There was nothing campy or effeminate about Bob Mould.
After the years with Hüsker Dü and Sugar blow past, “See a Little Light” changes, and so does Mr. Mould. He begins to seek out pieces of what he calls “the big gay puzzle” and, typically for him, does nothing halfway. He gets buff. He becomes a D.J. and makes electronic music. He begins to describe himself as a “bear” and hangs out in leather bars.
Mr. Mould had several long-term relationships, but once those end, his libido begins to roar the way his guitar did. He writes about his fondness for gay military porn and sleeps with “someone from every branch of the military.” He has so many one-night stands that he learns to “keep a Costco family pack of toothbrushes on hand” because he is, he says, a “thoughtful whore.”
Among rock memoirs I’ve read, “See a Little Light” calls out to be a serious comic book, a graphic memoir. Sex aside, it’s a book with an interestingly Manichean, superherolike worldview; its author calls his younger self a “Miserabalist” and he wrestles with “the darker side of life.” This is the kind of book in which relationships are discussed using phrases like “mutually assured destruction.”
The critic Lester Bangs used a phrase, “imperative groin thunder,” to describe the loud, raw music he loved most. Mr. Mould’s music brings that kind of thunder. Some of the time, and in surprising ways, so does his book.
Dwight Garner @'NY Times'
Gay Girl in Damascus debacle: lessons from the echo chamber
In 1782, Europeans were shocked to learn of reports emanating from a newspaper in Boston that Native Americans were sending the scalps of women, girls and boys to members of the British royal family and MPs as war trophies.
In fact, no such trophies existed. The newspaper was a fake, printed as a propaganda tool by one of the US' founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin.
Fast forward to 2011 and it seems the apparent ease with which some sections of the public and the media can be duped has changed little in more than two centuries.
To the Guardian, Amina Arraf - author of the Gay Girl in Damascus blog - was the "unlikely hero of revolt in a conservative country". She was quoted by CNN in an article about gay rights in the Arab world. When Amina was apparently abducted by security agents in Syria, thousands joined a Facebook campaign demanding her release.
But of course, as we now know, Amina Arraf was a fiction. The 35-year-old Syrian-American lesbian was in fact Tom MacMaster - a middle-aged, married man from Atlanta, Georgia.
It's perhaps tempting to see the Amina Arraf affair (Aminagate?) as proof that social media can't be trusted as a reliable source of information. Rumours and myths are repeated so often and so quickly via Twitter and Facebook that they seem to take on a life of their own. If so many people are saying the same thing, it HAS to be true - doesn't it?
It's what Alan Fisher from Al Jazeera called the "echo chamber" at last week's POLIS Media and Power conference at the LSE. The amplifying effect of social media, some believe, can help bring ordinary citizens out onto the streets and topple dictators. Equally, though, it can easily lead to thousands of well-meaning people being misled - especially when countries like Syria, where independent verification is difficult, are involved.
Yes, social media spread the Amina myth around the world at lightning speed, but it also played a central part in debunking the hoax as well.
While some journalists and social community organisers initially believed Amina to be genuine, their efforts, along with those of websites like Electronic Intifada, began to highlight the inconsistencies in Amina's story.
The Guardian has promised to redouble its verification efforts. The BBC's Robin Lustig believes the affair will make journalists more sceptical about anonymous blogs in future.
On Monday's PM programme, Tom MacMaster apologised to bloggers in the Middle East for any harm caused. For some activists, however, an experiment that got out of hand has caused real damage - and may even put lives at risk.
"Shame on you," said Sami Hamwi on the website Gay Middle East (GME).
"You took away my voice, Mr MacMaster, and the voices of many people who I know," added Daniel Nassar on GME.
"To bring attention to yourself and blog; you managed to bring the LGBT movement in the Middle East years back."
Stuart Hughes @'BBC College of Journalism'
In fact, no such trophies existed. The newspaper was a fake, printed as a propaganda tool by one of the US' founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin.
Fast forward to 2011 and it seems the apparent ease with which some sections of the public and the media can be duped has changed little in more than two centuries.
To the Guardian, Amina Arraf - author of the Gay Girl in Damascus blog - was the "unlikely hero of revolt in a conservative country". She was quoted by CNN in an article about gay rights in the Arab world. When Amina was apparently abducted by security agents in Syria, thousands joined a Facebook campaign demanding her release.
But of course, as we now know, Amina Arraf was a fiction. The 35-year-old Syrian-American lesbian was in fact Tom MacMaster - a middle-aged, married man from Atlanta, Georgia.
It's perhaps tempting to see the Amina Arraf affair (Aminagate?) as proof that social media can't be trusted as a reliable source of information. Rumours and myths are repeated so often and so quickly via Twitter and Facebook that they seem to take on a life of their own. If so many people are saying the same thing, it HAS to be true - doesn't it?
It's what Alan Fisher from Al Jazeera called the "echo chamber" at last week's POLIS Media and Power conference at the LSE. The amplifying effect of social media, some believe, can help bring ordinary citizens out onto the streets and topple dictators. Equally, though, it can easily lead to thousands of well-meaning people being misled - especially when countries like Syria, where independent verification is difficult, are involved.
Yes, social media spread the Amina myth around the world at lightning speed, but it also played a central part in debunking the hoax as well.
While some journalists and social community organisers initially believed Amina to be genuine, their efforts, along with those of websites like Electronic Intifada, began to highlight the inconsistencies in Amina's story.
The Guardian has promised to redouble its verification efforts. The BBC's Robin Lustig believes the affair will make journalists more sceptical about anonymous blogs in future.
On Monday's PM programme, Tom MacMaster apologised to bloggers in the Middle East for any harm caused. For some activists, however, an experiment that got out of hand has caused real damage - and may even put lives at risk.
"Shame on you," said Sami Hamwi on the website Gay Middle East (GME).
"You took away my voice, Mr MacMaster, and the voices of many people who I know," added Daniel Nassar on GME.
"To bring attention to yourself and blog; you managed to bring the LGBT movement in the Middle East years back."
Stuart Hughes @'BBC College of Journalism'
#polis11: After Wikileaks
Charlie Beckett chaired this debate about what impact Wikileaks has had on the future of journalism. It was part of the BBC College of Journalism/POLIS conference at the London School of Economics.
The panel: James Ball of the Guardian, George Brock of City University, Angela Phillips of Goldsmiths University, Alison Powell of LSE and John Naughton of Cambridge University/the Observer.
Via
The panel: James Ball of the Guardian, George Brock of City University, Angela Phillips of Goldsmiths University, Alison Powell of LSE and John Naughton of Cambridge University/the Observer.
Via
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