Wednesday 1 September 2010
Petah Tikvah city hall won't let Ethiopian kids transfer out of elementary school
Dozens of parents of Ethiopian origin have been blocked by the Petah Tikva municipality from moving their children from the majority-Ethiopian religious Ner Etzion elementary school to other schools in the city.
Most of the requests were based on the parents' desire not to have their children studying in a school whose student population was nearly exclusively Ethiopian. The municipality, backed by the Education Ministry, rejected most of the requests, saying that it could not force the other religious schools, private and public, to accept a large group of Ethiopian students.
"The arrangement with the schools is based on the assumption that each religious school takes only a small group of Ethiopian students. Taking several dozen such children is out of the question," a source with close knowledge of the Petah Tikva education system told Haaretz.
Of the 290 students expected to attend Ner Etzion this year, only one, first-grader Ran Keinan, is not of Ethiopian origin. The process by which the Ethiopian students became the school's majority took place over a period of years, and is due to the large number of Ethiopian families in the underprivileged neighborhoods for whom this is their default school, and partly because the parents not of Ethiopian background removed their children from the school.
While some moved their children to independent Orthodox schools (most of them associated with Shas), while others moved their children to other state-religious schools, with the approval of the municipality.
Another source said that Ner Etzion provided a convenient solution for everyone involved - everyone, that is, except the parents who wanted to move their children to a different school. "The existence of a school that contains nearly 300 children of Ethiopian background means other schools don't need to take them," the source said.
Young Ran Keinan comes to the school from a "Shuvu" network kindergarden, where most children are from families with their origins in the former Soviet Union. "Ran had a great time in the kindergarten, and there's no reason why he shouldn't get along fine in Ner Etzion, even if he is the only 'white' kid in the school," said Ran's father, Rabbi Amiel Keinan. He said that the mass exodus of veteran Israelis from the increasingly Ethiopian-majority school was "utterly shameful. It's a phenomenon that disgusts me."
Rabbi Keinan teaches in a yeshiva in Petah Tikva, which includes students with special needs. "It's all about values," he says. "Integration and equality are very important in our yeshiva, so I thought, why not do the same at home. In the class I teach in the yeshiva there are recent immigrants from Ethiopia, France and the United States, as well as native Israelis. And it's fine. Why can't the same be happening in first grade? This was the background for my decision to register Ran at Ner Etzion."
Sources in the municipality stressed to Haaretz that the students at Nir Etzion "get special assistance not enjoyed by any other schools. They get longer schooldays, up to 4 P.M., a hot meal and hundreds of hours of extra classes [schoolwide] each week. Students who didn't read Hebrew a year ago have acquired the language, test results are excellent, and graduates are accepted into the best yeshivas."
One municipality source said: "With all due respect to the parents, in other schools these kids wouldn't get the same attention." The sources also stressed that all transfer requests to secular schools were confirmed.
The Education Ministry said in a statement that student registration falls under the responsibility of the local authority, but decisions made at the local authority level can be appealed to the district director at the ministry. "No appeals hav been received so far," the ministry said, noting it ran support programs in schools with high percentages of recent immigrants.
Children in the largely Ethiopian neighborhood were divided on the issue, with some saying they'd like to have some "white" friends and other saying caucasian Israelis shunned them at school and called them "Negroes."
Or Kashti @'Haaretz'
Artists Make DIY Bike Lane Along Helsinki Thoroughfare
Hämeentie is the longest street in Helsinki, Finland, and one of the city's main thoroughfares. It has four lanes of traffic, but no space whatsoever for cyclists. There's no bike lane between the buses and the sidewalk.
To create their own, the Finnish collective Länsiväylä poured paint along one section of the street and then invited a group of cyclists to ride through it at midnight, leaving a visible trace of where bikes would ride if there were space, and creating a colorful new boundary.
Law-and-order types, worry not: The paint they used washes away with water. Unfortunately, that means that Hämeentie won't really have a permanent new bike lane. At least not yet: The huge turnout might make city planners take notice.
Andrew Price @'GOOD'
Banksy targets BP oil spill with dolphin ride
Street artist/prankster Banksy has unveiled his latest work, a dolphin ride for children on the boardwalk in the English seaside resort town of Brighton. This coin-operated dolphin is seen leaping over a BP barrel of leaking oil.
Iranian media warned after paper calls Carla Bruni-Sarkozy a 'prostitute'
The Iranian government today urged the country's media to refrain from insults after a hardline newspaper twice described Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, France's first lady, as a "prostitute".
The Keyhan daily paper made the comments after Bruni-Sarkozy condemned the stoning sentence against an Iranian woman convicted of adultery.
Ramin Mehmanparast, a foreign ministry spokesman, said insulting foreign dignitaries was incorrect and was not officially sanctioned.
The paper first called Bruni-Sarkozy a prostitute on Saturday and repeated the comment today. It said that, like Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the woman sentenced to stoning, Bruni-Sarkozy deserved to die, as did actor Isabelle Adjani, who also condemned the sentence.
Ashtiani, whose sentence has been suspended, could still face execution after a review of her case, which has prompted international outrage that appears to have rattled the authorities in Tehran.
The mother of two has already received 99 lashes for having an illicit relationship with two men.
Bruni-Sarkozy was one of several French celebrities who published open letters to Ashtiani.
"In the depths of your cell, know that my husband will plead your cause unfailingly and that France will not abandon you," she wrote.
"Spill your blood, deprive your children of their mother? Why? Because you have lived, because you have loved, because you are a woman, an Iranian? Every part of me refuses to accept this."
Kayhan, whose editor in chief – currently Hossein Shariatmadari – is appointed by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reported Bruni-Sarkozy's letter on Saturday under the headline: "French prostitutes enter human rights uproar."
Today, it returned to the subject, criticising Bruni's "illicit relationships with various people" and blaming her for causing Nicolas Sarkozy's divorce from his second wife.
"Studying Carla Bruni's record clearly shows the reason why this immoral woman is backing an Iranian woman who has been condemned to death for committing adultery and being an accomplice in her husband's murder and, in fact, she herself deserves to die," the paper said.
"Bruni is the singer and decadent actress who managed to break the Sarkozy family and marry the French president."
Mehmanparast called on Iran's media to use more temperate language. "Insulting the officials of other countries and using inappropriate words … is not approved of by the Islamic Republic of Iran," he said.
"The policies, the manners and the comments of other countries' officials, we criticise them, we make objections to them and we call for them to review their deeds, but we don't think using inappropriate words and insulting words is the right thing to do."
However, Iranian state-run TV also described Bruni-Sarkozy as "proud of her immoral acts".
Earlier this month, an Iranian vice-president attacked Britons as "inhuman" idiots saddled with a dunce of a prime minister.
The president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, urged Americans to "pour water where it burns", a reference to a phrase about people who are so angry that their buttocks catch fire.
Ian Black @'The Guardian'
From 1968 to 1975, gangs ruled New York City. Beyond the idealistic hopes of the civil rights
movement lay a unfocused rage. Neither law enforcement nor social agency could end
the escalating bloodshed. Peace came only through the most unlikely and courageous of events that would change the world for generations to come by giving birth to hip-hop culture. Rubble Kings, the most comprehensive documentation of life during this era of gang rule to date, tells the story of how a few extraordinary, forgotten people did the impossible, and how their actions impacted the world over.
movement lay a unfocused rage. Neither law enforcement nor social agency could end
the escalating bloodshed. Peace came only through the most unlikely and courageous of events that would change the world for generations to come by giving birth to hip-hop culture. Rubble Kings, the most comprehensive documentation of life during this era of gang rule to date, tells the story of how a few extraordinary, forgotten people did the impossible, and how their actions impacted the world over.
How The Record Labels Kill Off Innovative Startups With Ridiculous Licensing Demands
We recently showed a graphic description of the ridiculous licensing spiderweb any new music startup needs to go through these days. That was a UK depiction, but it's quite similar in the US and other parts of the world as well. What's not seen in the graphic, however, is just what some of the demands are from those copyright holders in order to secure the necessary licenses. We've heard time and time again from innovative music startup after innovative music startup, that when the major record labels come calling, they do so with outrageous demands for upfront payments, excessively high ongoing royalties and a demand for equity. Quite frequently, the record labels try negotiating through lawsuit, by suing the startup as a part of the "negotiation." While many of these lead to "settlements," the results are ridiculously burdensome, leading many of these startups to go out of business.
Playlist.com is a startup that has gone through much of this cycle, including lawsuits from the majors and "settlements." Except, the settlements were so burdensome that Playlist declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy to try to get out from under some of its liabilities. What that's also done is given us a glimpse behind the scenes of just how much the labels end up getting from such startups. For example, Playlist apparently owes the four major labels a combined $24.4 million for helping people find and listen to music.
Playlist.com is a startup that has gone through much of this cycle, including lawsuits from the majors and "settlements." Except, the settlements were so burdensome that Playlist declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy to try to get out from under some of its liabilities. What that's also done is given us a glimpse behind the scenes of just how much the labels end up getting from such startups. For example, Playlist apparently owes the four major labels a combined $24.4 million for helping people find and listen to music.
(Click to enlarge)
These fees were the result of the settlement licenses worked out by the labels, but the company can't even come close to paying them off. And, because of this, people will just get the same music elsewhere -- from offerings that probably don't pay the labels a dime. It's really quite impressive when you look at the long list of innovative music services startups killed by ridiculous major label demands.
Die Antwoord & Aphex Twin live @ LED Festival
comment on youtube:
"good video quality but *REALLY* bad sound recording. Aphex was playing the most insane sounds and Die Antwoord were merely background sounds like ghostly voices in a raging sonic storm, it worked quite well. This video shows Die Antwoord as the main sound and aphex as the background."
Tuesday 31 August 2010
Leonard Cohen - Bird On A Wire (DVD)
Thirty-eight years after it was completed, a 1972 documentary following Leonard Cohen—the enormously influential poet, folk musician and, since 2008, member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—on tour in Europe finally has its moment. Originally made as a promotional film for the artist, whose record sales were meager at the time, Bird on a Wire was produced and edited by Tony Palmer, then famed for his seminal 1968 documentary All My Loving, an eye-opening dissection of rock n' roll that featured, among others, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Donovan. In Bird on a Wire, Palmer neatly captured the tour itself––threadbare, fraught with technical difficulties and emotional upheavals––but on first viewing, Cohen balked at the bare bones honesty of the film and demanded a complete re-edit from another source. The result was so disastrous that the film opened and closed on the same day, was forgotten about, then lost. In 2009, 294 cans of celluloid labeled “Bird an a Wire” were found locked in a Hollywood warehouse and immediately shipped to Palmer, who set about re-creating the original film he made all those years ago. The work is a visual poem—Palmer’s camera followed Cohen without judgment, opening the floor to the man as well as the artist. Today’s exclusive clip shows the music legend during an abortive attempt to ask a young German fan out on a date.
Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire by Tony Palmer is available now on DVD. Tony Palmer tells us more about his first meeting with Cohen here.
I still have a video of this great documentary.
He is such a smooth talker in the clip above..."breakfast" indeed!
United States Gives Itself High Marks on Human Rights, but What Comes Next?
This month, the United States submitted an assessment of its human rights record to the UN Human Rights Council as part of the UN’s newest human rights mechanism, the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). Unsurprisingly, its report immediately caught flak from the right and the left. Nationalists and conservatives at the Wall Street Journal and Heritage Foundation complained we should not bother to subject ourselves to scrutiny by states with lesser human rights records and that by doing so we give ammunition to autocrats who can mock our shortcomings. Progressives applauded the administration for participating seriously in a multilateral process but lamented the failure to address a host of human rights deficits.
In our view, the administration’s report perhaps tries too hard to please everyone and in doing so falls short of what it could have achieved if it had taken a more critical and honest approach to some of the more troublesome elements on the human rights agenda. It deserves praise for engaging in serious consultations around the country with critics and victims alike to prepare its findings. Its political instincts, though, were apparently to mute self-criticism in order to forestall attacks from the U.S.-can-do-no-wrong crowd while simultaneously highlighting progress since 2009 as a way to remind voters at home and constituencies abroad that it is different from the Bush administration.
The real test, however, is how this administration will address such ongoing and thorny issues around detention policy, impunity for torture, immigration and protection of civilians caught in conflict. On these matters, the report offers very little...
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‘Drainspotting’: Japanese Manhole Cover Art
These aren’t your average manhole covers. In Japan, they actually look pretty, not those cast-iron monstrosities on sidewalks.
Photographer Remo Camerota has gone around the land of the rising sun and snapping away at these gorgeous street art, publishing an award-winning book Drainspotting while he’s at it.
The book, which is also released as an iPad app, took the award for Best Art Book at the NY Book Festival.
The adorned manhole covers feature anything from firemen to birds to flowers. It’s a beautifully simple idea to liven up city streets—just plaster typically ugly urban structures with colorful, vibrant art.
Photographer Remo Camerota has gone around the land of the rising sun and snapping away at these gorgeous street art, publishing an award-winning book Drainspotting while he’s at it.
The book, which is also released as an iPad app, took the award for Best Art Book at the NY Book Festival.
The adorned manhole covers feature anything from firemen to birds to flowers. It’s a beautifully simple idea to liven up city streets—just plaster typically ugly urban structures with colorful, vibrant art.
Max Tannone - Dub Kweli - Your Gospel
The Secret Killers: Covert Assassins Charged With Hunting Down and Killing Afghans
"Find, fix, finish, and follow-up" is the way the Pentagon describes the mission of secret military teams in Afghanistan which have been given a mandate to pursue alleged members of the Taliban or al-Qaeda wherever they may be found. Some call these “manhunting” operations and the units assigned to them “capture/kill” teams.
Whatever terminology you choose, the details of dozens of their specific operations -- and how they regularly went badly wrong -- have been revealed for the first time in the mass of secret U.S. military and intelligence documents published by the website Wikileaks in July to a storm of news coverage and official protest. Representing a form of U.S. covert warfare now on the rise, these teams regularly make more enemies than friends and undermine any goodwill created by U.S. reconstruction projects.
When Danny Hall and Gordon Phillips, the civilian and military directors of the U.S. provincial reconstruction team in Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, arrived for a meeting with Gul Agha Sherzai, the local governor, in mid-June 2007, they knew that they had a lot of apologizing to do. Philips had to explain why a covert U.S. military “capture/kill” team named Task Force 373, hunting for Qari Ur-Rahman, an alleged Taliban commander given the code-name “Carbon,” had called in an AC-130 Spectre gunship and inadvertently killed seven Afghan police officers in the middle of the night.
The incident vividly demonstrated the inherent clash between two doctrines in the U.S. war in Afghanistan -- counterinsurgency (“protecting the people”) and counterterrorism (killing terrorists). Although the Obama administration has given lip service to the former, the latter has been, and continues to be, the driving force in its war in Afghanistan.
For Hall, a Foreign Service officer who was less than two months away from a plush assignment in London, working with the military had already proven more difficult than he expected. In an article for Foreign Service Journal published a couple of months before the meeting, he wrote, “I felt like I never really knew what was going on, where I was supposed to be, what my role was, or if I even had one. In particular, I didn't speak either language that I needed: Pashtu or military.”
It had been no less awkward for Phillips. Just a month earlier, he had personally handed over “solatia” payments -- condolence payments for civilian deaths wrongfully caused by U.S. forces -- in Governor Sherzai's presence, while condemning the act of a Taliban suicide bomber who had killed 19 civilians, setting off the incident in question. “We come here as your guests,” he told the relatives of those killed, “invited to aid in the reconstruction and improved security and governance of Nangarhar, to bring you a better life and a brighter future for you and your children. Today, as I look upon the victims and their families, I join you in mourning for your loved ones.”
Pratap Chatterjee @'Alternet'
How Google Unwittingly Helped Propagate the Misleading "Ground Zero Mosque" Label
As the inane controversy over the Cordoba House, the Islamic community center being planned in Manhattan, gained momentum, the facility quickly came to be known as the "Ground Zero Mosque." And that label is misleading because it's not at Ground Zero and it's not a mosque.
Where the label started, who knows? Cable news (read: Fox) seems like a good bet. But what's interesting, as the Nieman Journalism Lab points out, is how it came to stick.
When a handy label like "Ground Zero Mosque" emerges, it's immediately attractive to bloggers and editors because it's short and a little provocative. And once it becomes the accepted, if inaccurate, term for the thing, then not using it means sacrificing the easy searchability of the piece you've written.
Poynter ethicist Kelly McBride zeroed in on that idea of search-engine optimization, noting that the AP is being punished for their stand against the term “ground zero mosque” by not appearing very highly on the all-important news searches for that phrase. In order to stay relevant to search engines, news organizations have to continue using an inaccurate term once it’s taken hold, she concluded.
There's a positive feedback loop that reinforces the popular term and it's hard to break out of because, with web traffic as the currency of digital media, optimizing the stuff you publish for search engines is a real revenue consideration.
How do we fix this? I don't know. It would be nice if Google could somehow flag certain terms as epithets or weasel words, but I'm pretty sure that's beyond its capacity and the company doesn't seem very interested in assuming editorial responsibility for anything anyway.
More likely it will just be a matter of responsible media outlets thinking twice before adopting whatever slangy, loaded term gets bandied around on cable news. On that count, my colleague Morgan, who refused to use the label at the height of the controversy, did a better job than I.
Andrew Price @'Good'
Monday 30 August 2010
Help Stop the Terminator's Return
Four years after the moratorium on Terminator technology was reaffirmed by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), proposals to develop and commercialize ‘genetic-use restriction technologies’ (GURTs) are back on the agenda for policymakers and the biotechnology industry. Terminator is a threat to food sovereignty and agrobiodiversity: ending the moratorium on Terminator will increase control of seed by transnational corporations (TNCs) and restrictions on farmers’ rights to save and plant harvested seed. Additionally, pollen from genetically-modified (GM) crops with Terminator will contaminate non-GM and organic crops, and native plant species.
GURTs (herein referred to as ‘Terminator’) are genetic engineering technologies that seek to control plant fertility. First-generation Terminator (also called ‘suicide seed’) was developedjointly by the US Department of Agriculture and Delta and Pine Land Company in the 1990s to protect the intellectual property of US agricultural biotechnology TNCs. GM crops produce sterile seeds to prevent farmers from replanting harvested seed with patented DNA. Due to international public outcry from farmers and civil society worldwide, Terminator has never been commercialized anywhere, and Brazil and India have national moratoriums prohibiting it. In 2000, the CBD recommended a de facto moratorium on field-testing and commercial sale of Terminator seeds. In 2006, pressure from La Via Campesina and its allies helped to strengthen this moratorium in Curitiba, Brazil.
That year, US-based TNC Monsanto Company, the largest seed company in the world, acquired Delta and Pine Land, along with the intellectual property rights to Terminator. Since then industry, the US and European governments and ultra-rich philanthro-capitalists have ramped up rhetoric on the need for Terminator and other biotechnologies to adapt to the climate, energy and food crises. Various false solutions are being proposed to sell the lie that techno-fixes allow rich countries to continue consuming resources and emitting carbon dioxide, unabated: GM crops for cellulosic and second-generation agrofuels; geoengineering ‘climate ready’ GM crops and trees with increased albedo (reflectivity) and resistance to drought, heat and salt; monoculture plantation forests of GM trees to industrially produce biochar for carbon sequestration; and GM algae and marine microbes for carbon dioxide sequestration. Monsanto is proposing that monoculture plantations of its Roundup Ready soybeans qualify for carbon credits under so-called “no-till” agriculture. All of these false solutions create new markets for agricultural biotechnology and ‘extreme genetic engineering’.
With financing by the US government and British Petroleum (BP), in May, Synthetic Genomics, the company founded J. Craig Venter (which helped to sequence the human genome)announced that it had created the first-ever synthetic, self-reproducing microbe with synthetic biology. Venter’s team claims that the microbe can be used to produce clean, green algal biofuels; however, what will happen if this microbe escapes into the wild and contaminates non-synthetic algae with its DNA? Similarly, what will happen when a GM maize variety engineered to have a high amount of stover (the stalks, husks, etc. of maize) for cellulosic agrofuels contaminates food maize varieties? The implications are frightening. Industry is now claiming that Terminator is needed to contain genetic contamination (transgene flow) of food crops and other natural life forms from genetically-engineered DNA in non-food crops; in essence, as a precautionary, environmental necessity. Venter recently told the New York Times that Terminator should be employed to contain transgenic contamination...
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Sunday 29 August 2010
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