ItoBlog

Feist me

Long exhausting week, but still found time to discover canadian singer Feist this weekend (yeah yeah, i know she's been around for a while...). That peppiness and that wide repertoire (some folk, some jazz, and a twist of disco), and that oh-so sensual voice...Best album of the month hands down.

Check her out here:

This referendum is a farce, dummy

After hearing the deep skepticism voiced by radio host and leading anti-war guru Amy Goodman and her guests (including George Galloway, Robert Fisk, Tariq Ali, no less) about the fairness and significance of Iraq's referendum, my mind raced back to October 2002, when the same host and the same program offered an utterly non-skeptical report on Iraq's previous "election," which featured a 100 percent turnout and a 100 percent vote for the only candidate, Saddam Hussein.

via Harry

Robert Fisk at the IMA

For all of you who happen to be in Paris tomorrow, make sure to drop by the Institut du Monde Arabe for what is sure to be an "interesting" talk by Robert Fisk. I'm recently been developing an allergy to him since his dire, self-flagellating and completely biased reporting in Iraq. However, it is Robert Fisk after all, and it's now or never to ask him a question or two.

ROBERT FISK. Le journaliste de The Independent et spécialiste du Moyen-Orient, qui publie La Grande Guerre pour la civilisation (La Découverte), donnera une conférence à l’Institut du monde arabe à Paris-5e le 27 octobre à 18h30 (salle du Haut Conseil). (Tél. : 01-40-51-38-38.)

Cartoons galore

Saudi Arabia's champion reformer King Abdullah means business and what better way to show this than to lift the country's ban on...cartoons. That's right. Today Saudis are allowed to watch cartoons in public theaters. One little note though: the law applies only to women and children.

In other happy news, Iran has also gone cartoon-crazy.

The Union of Islamic Students Associations and Iran's House of Cartoons are jointly sponsoring a global competition on caricature, painting and graphic design under the main theme of "A World without Zionism," a morning English-language daily said on Wednesday.

Students between the ages of 7 and 18 can submit their art works to the organizing committee of the competition at this address: Tehran, P.O. Box 5745-774, or e-mail them to [email protected] by November 21, Tehran Times announced.

The competition will also focus on the themes "A World without America," "A Mirage Named Zionism," "The Wishes of a Palestinian Student," and "The Intifada," noted the paper.

The daily went on to say that the international invitation to artists is posted in Persian, Arabic and English at the website of Iran Photographers' House.

In addition, 13 selected cartoons by students from China, Argentina, France, the Netherlands, Brazil, Iran and the United States on the theme "Palestine and the Occupier Zionist Regime" are on view at the site, according to Tehran Times.

If...surely...

Jose Ramos-Horta, foreign minister of East Timor:

Time and again as I watch the barbarity inflicted on innocent Iraqi civilians, often women and children, pass with seeming silence and indifference from the rest of the world, I ask where are those who are so quick to take to the streets to protest every alleged US sin, be it real or imaginary?

If they are so appalled at the graphic photos showing the depraved acts committed by a small number of American servicemen – photos that, never let it be forgotten, were unearthed as a result of the US Army's own investigation – surely they should be even more appalled by the daily carnage inflicted on the Shiah majority in Iraq.

(Via Norm)

Jose Ramos-Horta, foreign minister of East Timor:

Time and again as I watch the barbarity inflicted on innocent Iraqi civilians, often women and children, pass with seeming silence and indifference from the rest of the world, I ask where are those who are so quick to take to the streets to protest every alleged US sin, be it real or imaginary?

If they are so appalled at the graphic photos showing the depraved acts committed by a small number of American servicemen – photos that, never let it be forgotten, were unearthed as a result of the US Army's own investigation – surely they should be even more appalled by the daily carnage inflicted on the Shiah majority in Iraq.

(Via Norm)

Bush in Freefall

Some of you might have come across this site already. Pretty funny. It's crazy how Bush inspires the wackiest programming. I wonder how long it took to create this one.

Link: Bush in Freefall.

View from rooftop of Place des Vosges Sunday afternoon.

The world's top minds...

Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine asked readers to vote for the top five public intellectuals from their Top 100. See who came out on top and what the results say about the world’s leading minds.

1 Noam Chomsky
2 Umberto Eco
3 Richard Dawkins
4 Vaclav Havel
5 Christopher Hitchens
6 Paul Krugman
7 Jürgen Habermas
8 Amartya Sen
9 Jared Diamond
10 Salman Rushdie
11 Naomi Klein
12 Shirin Ebadi
13 Hernando de Soto
14 Bjorn Lomborg
15 Abdolkarim Soroush
16 Thomas Friedman
17 Pope Benedict XVI
18 Eric Hobsbawm
19 Paul Wolfowitz
20 Camille Paglia

Interesting comments by David Herman:

The two most striking things about this poll are the number of people who took part and the age of the winners. Well over 20,000 people voted, and they tended to reinforce most of the trends that stood out in the original long list of 100. More than half of the top 30 are based in North America. Europe, by contrast, is surprisingly underrepresented—a cluster of well-known names in the top 20 (Eco, Havel, Jürgen Habermas) but, then, it is a long way down to Julia Kristeva (48) and Antonio Negri (50). The most striking absence is France—one name in the top 40, fewer than Iran or Peru.
There is not one woman in the top 10, and only three in the top 20. The big names of the left did well (Chomsky, Habermas, Eric Hobsbawm) but there weren’t many of them. Scientists, literary critics, philosophers and psychologists all fared badly. And voters did not use the “bonus ball” to champion new faces. The top two names, Milton Friedman and Stephen Hawking, do not represent new strands of thought. (In fact, Friedman was specifically named in last month’s criteria for inclusion—along with other ancient greats like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—as an example of someone who had been deliberately left off the long list on the grounds that they were no longer actively contributing to their discipline.)

 

A doobie a day?

Taken from the New Scientist:

A synthetic chemical similar to the active ingredient in marijuana makes new cells grow in rat brains. What is more, in rats this cell growth appears to be linked with reducing anxiety and depression. The results suggest that marijuana, or its derivatives, could actually be good for the brain.

In mammals, new nerve cells are constantly being produced in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is associated with learning, memory, anxiety and depression. Other recreational drugs, such as alcohol, nicotine and cocaine, have been shown to suppress this new growth. Xia Zhang of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and colleagues decided to see what effects a synthetic cannabinoid called HU210 had on rats' brains.

They found that giving rats high doses of HU210 twice a day for 10 days increased the rate of nerve cell formation, or neurogenesis, in the hippocampus by about 40%.

Read the full article here.

Beat me, I deserve it

Some members of the Ethiopian government are concerned about cultural excuses for the abuse of women:

"Regrettably, a lot of women die during pregnancy. A large number of girls are subjected to harmful traditional practices on the pretext of culture and girls are married too early, without their consent and often to people they do not know,"

The UN also has some appalling statistics on domestic violence.

Domestic violence is so rampant in Ethiopia that nine out of ten women think their husbands are justified in beating them, a UN report released on Wednesday said.

The report, compiled by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), said the women believed it was in order to be punished, especially when a wife went out without telling her spouse, neglected the children or prepared food badly. ... The report focuses on the plight of women across the globe. It found that in Egypt, 94 percent of women thought it was acceptable to be beaten, as did 91 percent in Zambia.

(courtesy of DSTPFW)