‘Our first lady is better than yours’: Chinese laud ‘elegant’ Peng Liyuan as Michelle Obama tours Beijing

Malcolm Moore, The Telegraph | March 21, 2014

AP Photo/Andy Wong, PoolU.S. first lady Michelle Obama, foreground right, and Peng Liyuan, wife of Chinese President Xi Jinping, foreground right, share a light moment as they visit a Chinese traditional calligraphy class at the Beijing Normal School, a school that prepares students to go abroad in Beijing, China Friday, March 21, 2014.

 

It was the eagerly awaited meeting of the world’s two most important first ladies.
But, according to the Chinese, there was a clear winner when Michelle Obama met her counterpart Peng Liyuan Friday for the first time in Beijing.

Our first lady is so graceful and elegant, leaving Michelle far behind

As photographs and television footage emerged of Mrs Peng and Mrs Obama touring the Chinese capital, the country’s online forums were quick to claim victory in the “battle of the first ladies.”
“Our first lady is so graceful and elegant, leaving Michelle far behind,” said one critic. “We have won this time,” remarked another. “Ours is more refined and eye-catching,” said a third.

There was praise for Mrs Peng’s belted suit, with flashes of crimson at her neckline to match her red earrings and clutch bag, but some questioned whether her high heels were sensible enough for the cobbles of the Forbidden City. Without them, Mrs Obama would have towered over her. Mrs Obama won plaudits, however, for gamely embracing three of China’s favourite hobbies: ping pong, calligraphy and robot building.

The two first ladies began their day together at Beijing Normal School, an elite secondary school currently hosting 30 American exchange students, £30,000 ($55,390) for their year abroad.
Visiting a robotics class, Mrs Obama was introduced to a robot in the shape of a snowflake that promptly became snarled in an obstacle course.

AP Photo/Andy Wong, PoolU.S. first lady Michelle Obama, center, her daughters Malia, left, and Sasha, second from left, is accompanied by Peng Liyuan, wife of Chinese President Xi Jinping, third from right, watch students demonstrating remote control mechanical robots at the Beijing Normal School, a school that prepares students to attend universities abroad in Beijing, China Friday, March 21, 2014.

At the next desk, a cheeky student asked Mrs Obama if she wanted to try out his “bad boy” robot, that was “really naughty.” She passed the controls to her daughter Malia.

Feng Li/Getty ImagesU.S. First Lady Michelle Obama, right, visits the Forbidden City accompanied by Peng Liyuan (second right), wife of Chinese President Xi Jinping on March 21, 2014 in Beijing, China. 

 

Mrs Obama’s trip represents a new approach in Washington’s efforts to charm Beijing: a first ladies’ club. Partly it was a slightly stiff apology for the snub last year when Mrs Obama failed to show up for a meeting at Sunnylands, California, between Xi Jinping, Mrs Peng and her husband.
At other moments, it was more like a family holiday dressed as a diplomatic mission. One photograph, a holiday snap to treasure, showed Mrs Obama, her teenage daughters and her 76-year-old mother surrounding Mrs Peng, their tour guide to the Forbidden City. For China it was also an experiment. No politician’s wife has ever hosted a visiting dignitary. While Mrs Peng has won praise for her presence by Mr Xi’s side on his overseas trips, she does not have a high political profile at home.

As she rigidly picked up a brush to paint a scroll for Mrs Obama, Mrs Peng, a star singer who has performed before huge audiences across China, betrayed a hint of stage fright. “I am somewhat nervous too,” she said as she wrote.

China remains unsure about the role of the first lady. “The last high profile politician’s wife we had was Madame Mao,” remarked one local government official ahead of Mrs Obama’s visit. “And that did not turn out so well.”

Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao’s fourth wife, was executed for her crimes during the Cultural Revolution.
Both Mrs Obama and Mrs Peng steered clear of politics and barely spoke during their tour of the school, according to the reporters present. “The U.S. finds it hard to accept the communism and nationalism of China, but can easily accept Chinese food, calligraphy and other culture,” said Shen Dingli, the head of the U.S. Research Centre at Fudan university.

AFP/Getty ImagesJiang Qing (1914-91), third wife of Mao Zedong, during trial in January 1981.

“So after they have spent time together, eaten together and watched a show together, they will feel closer together and that may help the political process.”

He added that the presence of the Obama girls and their grandmother would show the Chinese public that even America’s first family is “normal” and not “iron-fisted” as some Chinese believe. “The trip will have an imperceptible, gentle, mollifying effect,” he said.

The image of the Obamas as two hard-working parents who delegate child care duties to granny would play well with the Chinese, the White House predicted in advance, aware of how many Chinese families were forced to do the same.

Toronto The Tawdry

Clearly, the worship of celebrity represents a human frailty. Celebrity owes little to performing acts of grace and courage, of dedicating one's self to the well-being of humanity, even at the local level, within one's geographic sphere. The celebrity culture of the day is one consumed with avid fascination and admiration mostly for entertainers. And the more outrageously anti-social their actions, the greater their iconic status.

Defiance of societal mores is right up there in leading to public fascination and esteem.

Jimmy Kimmel Live/YouTube   Center of attention: Rob Ford appears on Jimmy Kimmel live on Monday night.

 

That great metropolis of Toronto has gained notoriety, diminishing its status as a great multilingual, pluralist gathering place for people from a multitude of other countries, cultures, religions and heritage, through the misfortune of the population somehow having thrown in their political fortunes with the sad and silly antics of a man professing to love the city, but unable to care for it through every fault of his own.

Screenshot     Mayor Rob Ford and Councillor Doug Ford appear on The Today Show with Matt Lauer.

 

And Mayor Rob Ford too is consumed with celebrity, envious of those who gain it, and hold it, and deserve that status now tarnished by adoring all those who manage to offend fundamental values of good taste and decency.

Despite the obvious exceptions by exceptional people who do offer themselves still as templates of human excellence, the vast majority of those who cling to their sordid celebrity function as living examples of what people aspiring to a life of good relations with others, obeying the law and contributing meaningfully to the society in which they live, living a satisfying lifestyle supported by friends and relatives, somehow manage to still clamour for ever more indications of human beings' propensity to shame themselves.

And Rob Ford is no different. And why should he be? He adores, and fixates on celebrity. And he has discovered his own. Manoeuvring himself skilfully into just such a position himself, and not by intention but by default. Defaulting to what comes naturally to a man who embodies all the elements of an oafish thug, but who manages regardless to convince people of his sincerity, probity and usefulness to them. As mayor of Canada's largest city.



He is so wedded to his celebrity that he will go to any means, inclusive of breaking the law, of offending the most basic morals, of challenging ethics and replacing them with his own of questionable heritage, for the payback it offers him. Attention. Lots and lots of attention. Not merely by outraged citizens of Toronto who cannot fathom where his popularity arises from among those who support him still, but internationally.

What other mayor's disgraced behaviour regularly pops up in international news, but his?

Causing him to primp and prance as much as someone of elephantine proportions can. True, his entertainment quotient both to those who abhor the man and those who admire him, cannot be denied, although it does all too often stretch the patience of even those who manage a grimace of amusement that someone could possibly land himself time after time in an aura of common-sense carnage.

o.canada.com/ Renata Ford just another political pawn. Like other political spouses, Toronto mayor's wife was used to help redeem her disgraced politician husband

Some theatre wag once said there is no such thing as bad publicity; all publicity has its value, for with it comes attention and those who are emotionally fixated on themselves crave attention. That in itself may go a long way to explaining actors' famous self-absorption expressed in an inability to see themselves in the round other than as thespians of entitled fame.

Rob Ford is a thespian of unentitled fame, unless consorting with underworld characters, exposing the public to exhibitions of alcohol-fuelled misbehaviour, surreptitiously acquiring illegal street drugs and using them with people of ill-repute identifies him as 'entitled' to his celebrity.

Toronto would do well to gift their mayor with a tight little island, say on the St.Lawrence, all of his own, and invite him to remove himself to that island, giving him also the means by which he can videotape himself endlessly performing all the little tricks and treats he so yearns toward. As long as he removes himself from public office and spares the city from any more needless embarrassment.

Now, what an ill-humoured, bad-mouthing tract this is...!

Spacecraft Awakens

Slate

Bad Astronomy

The entire universe in blog form

Jan. 21 2014 11:30 AM

Rosetta Awakens!

By Phil Plait

Rosetta phones home.

Photo by ESA

European Space Agency engineers and scientists hung nervously over their monitors, awaiting a feeble radio signal from a space voyager over 800 million kilometers (500 million miles) away. As the minutes dragged on, the tension in the Space Operations Centre was palpable. All over the world, people on Twitter and other social media typed out words of encouragement …

Phil Plait

Phil Plait writes Slate’s Bad Astronomy blog and is an astronomer, public speaker, science evangelizer, and author of Death from the Skies! 

… and then a thin, straight spike appeared among the noise of the cosmos. Rosetta had woken up, and was saying “Good morning!”

Rosetta is an ambitious mission: It will rendezvous with a comet, follow it through space around the Sun, and even send down a lander to the surface of the icy dirtball. Rosetta launched in 2004 and has used both Earth and Mars as gravitational boosters to get to its destination (at one point taking what may be my favorite picture of our home world of all time, and a similarly beautiful and astonishing photo of the Moon rising over the limb of the Earth).

In 2009, Rosetta borrowed a bit of Earth's energy to boost it ever outward toward its cometary target. On the way, it took this devastatingly beautiful photo.

Photo by ESA ©2009 MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

Rosetta’s target is the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, an ice ball with an estimated size of about four kilometers. It takes about 6.5 years to orbit the Sun, going well past the orbit of Jupiter and as far in toward the Sun as just outside the Earth’s orbit. We’ve only visited eight comets with spacecraft, and even then they’ve been flybys, where the probes have whizzed past the comets at high speed. This is the first time human probes will have stayed near the comet to examine it in detail.

And the lander … oh yes, the lander. Named Philae, it’s just under a meter across and has a mass of 100 kilograms (more than 200 pounds on Earth). It will touch down on the comet and shoot a harpoon into the ice to anchor itself (watch the movie Deep Impact to get an idea of how this works). It has 10 instruments on board to study the comet in situ, including a drill to study material under the surface and a camera that will return pictures that I will be very excited to see.

Rosetta was put into hibernation more than 30 months ago to preserve power as it swung away from the Sun. An internal alarm clock was set, and on Jan. 20, Rosetta woke up once again; it is now close enough to the Sun to get more juice through its solar panels. The single spike of energy in the photo above is Rosetta’s radio signal—the display shows frequencies, like a radio dial, and Rosetta’s signal is like a single station broadcasting, poking above the noise. It doesn’t look like much, perhaps, but it means everything.

Rosetta is ready for its close-up.

Artwork depicting Rosetta and Philae near the comet

Photo by Photo by ESA, image by AOES Medialab

It’s only about 9 million kilometers (6 million miles) from the comet now. It will fire thrusters to match orbits more carefully, and in May it should come to relative rest just a few hundred meters away. It will set up shop, and in November will release Philae for its journey down. And then, for the first time in history, we’ll soft-land a remote probe onto a comet.

Think on that! Rosetta has traveled for hundreds of million of kilometers, has spent years sleeping away in the cold of deep space, and now that it has reawakened it will complete this phase of its mission: to extend the minds and grasp of humanity across the solar system, and to truly go where no one has gone before.

You can follow the Rosetta spacecraft on Twitter at @ESA_Rosetta.

Beyond Science Fiction

"The important part is to realize that it wasn't any different [a century ago]. Everyone then thought it couldn't get any better. Everyone was amazed with the state of the art, you know. They had hot and cold running water, and an icebox. Maybe a few years later they had a radio. And life couldn't get any better, right? and yet it did."
Mike Lazaridis, founder, vice-chairman, BlackBerry

"My bet is that all these devices will be improved by going to the size of atoms and manipulating the quantum mechanics there. I think they'll be everywhere.
"We will eat them [not as food, but as medicines]."
Professor Raymond Laflamme, IQC executive director

Quantum mechanics, the wave of the future. The not-too-distant future, if Professor Laflamme, a quantum scientist who left Los Alamos National Laboratory for the opportunity to work at the University of Waterloo's Mike and Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum Nano Centre, has anything to say about the matter. Professor Laflamme was known for his influence at Cambridge University on his teacher, Stephen Hawking.

According to Professor Laflamme, within a few years his team will have succeeding in building a true quantum computer of 50 to 100 qubits. A qubit is a physical system, an etching on a metal chip cooled to near absolute zero or a gas held by a magnetic field, or floating freely in a liquid; it possesses the mystic ability to 'be' in multiple quantum states at the same time; superposition as it's known. Qubits have proven elusive to maintain, they tend to slip away.

Qubits would have to be stabilized, to ensure that the incredible power that potentially exists within them doesn't disappear randomly before a computer depending on their power could ever be produced. Professor Laflamme has a single qubit, a wafer of etched aluminum-coated silicon that fits in the palm of his hand with ample room for many others...and another tiny piece of lab-created diamond with a qubit built inside its carbon structure.

"A bridge of diamond. This is verging on science fiction and what I'm going to tell you is, even this is probably not crazy enough ... In a sense [investing in quantum] was just a bet, because you're betting against the prevailing culture, the prevailing idea, the prevailing attitudes. What you're looking for is exponential growth. Linear growth is boring. Anything you can predict is linear. What you really want is, you want to think about, well, you want to hope that no matter how wild your thinking is, it's not wild enough", Mike Lazaridis said, attempting to explain his vision.

A quantum computer will represent a device capable of achieving calculations with the use of qubits; a physical system etched sometimes into a chip of metal, for example. A quantum computer of 30 qubits would far exceed what current-model computers are capable of modeling with accuracy. A qubit computer could readily exceed the power of computers whose transistor bits place physical limits on the scope of their calculation; they are on or off, one or zero.

A qubit computer would have no limitations.

the Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre (QNC)

As though our world is not scientifically improbable and complex enough as it is. For such visionaries as Mr. Lazaridis and Professor Laflamme, the future is set to arrive. Humankind's capacity to manipulate the mysteries of nature seems to know no boundaries when such assured determination speaks of the opening of dimensions within nature that hypotheses suggest exist, but have yet to be fully demonstrated.

‘The Book of Books’ displays 200 of the rarest biblical manuscripts in an illuminating tale of how the world’s most-published book came to be.

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer November 28, 2013

• 

  Ardon Bar-Hama/Courtesy of the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem

  View Caption

Jerusalem — Copied by Jewish scribes and Christian monks. Written on everything from tiny silver scrolls to papyrus that turned brittle with time. First published for a mass audience by Gutenberg; now available in 2,800 languages.

These are fragments of the story of how the Bible evolved from the days of ancient Israel to the days of Barnes and Noble.

Now the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem has launched a landmark exhibit tracing that story, drawn largely from the collection of American philanthropist Steve Green.

Test your knowledge How much do you know about Israel? Take the quiz

 

“The Book of Books” exhibit is notable not only for its rare manuscripts but also its unusual balance between the Jewish and Christian narratives, and the reverence with which it treats both. Aiming to enrich both communities’ understanding of how the Bible has shaped Judeo-Christian civilization, it focuses on the development of the texts of the Bible rather than the development of divergent doctrines.

“We are trying to give a sense of how, as I jokingly say, ‘our Bible’ and ‘their Bible’ spread in our society and civilization,” says Lawrence Schiffman, vice provost and professor of Judaic studies at Yeshiva University in New York, who helped shape the exhibit. “We’re able to show everybody, artistically and technically, how those texts spread through our civilization and affected our civilization, and to do that in a way that everybody appreciates and sees the commonalities.”

The exhibit is visually stunning, from a second-century Greek Septuagint on papyrus to a 1450 Gutenberg Bible leaf to an illuminated 17^th -century Hebrew scroll depicting the story of Esther. IPad displays zoom in on ancient scrolls and codexes and get forensic views of nearly invisible lettering. As visitors trace the path of those who copied the Bible in myriad languages, the floors change from the sands of the Sinai to the cobblestones of Europe – the last exhibit’s last stop, where visitors can get a freshly printed page off a replica Gutenberg press and see early editions of the King James Version.

Deciphering an erased Aramaic text
Most of The Book of Books exhibit comes from the collection of Mr. Green, president of the arts and crafts chain Hobby Lobby, who has been steadily acquiring an impressive array of manuscripts and artifacts.

Among Green’s most treasured pieces is the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, which features two Syriac treatises written on top of earlier Aramaic and Greek biblical texts. Green says it’s the largest remaining scripture in Palestinian Aramaic, the language closest to Jesus’s household language.
But some of the codex is not visible to the naked eye because the later writer, fishing around for a bit of parchment in the 9^th  century (very expensive in those days), partially erased the earlier text before writing on top of it. Oxford University has helped to bring to light the underlying text, and now Cambridge scholars are working to decipher it.

So what motivates a successful businessman to go on a global chase not only for such fragments, but their meaning as well? 

“[The Bible] didn’t show up on a bookshelf one day – there were blood and sweat and tears to give us what we have today,” says Green by phone from his Oklahoma office, crediting those whose meticulous transcription and translation led to modern Bible versions. “If we have a greater appreciation for them, then hopefully people will be more engaged.”

He is planning to open a Bible museum in Washington, D.C., in 2017, which aims to engage the public through three avenues: the stories, history, and impact of the Bible, including on the founding of America.

Part of a broader mission
While much of the material in the Book of Books exhibit will be incorporated into the Washington museum, its current configuration is uniquely designed for a Jerusalem audience.

Though modern Israel encompasses most of the key locations of Jesus’ ministry, many Israelis grow up with little exposure to the history, beliefs, or followers of Christianity, who today make up just 2 percent of the population in Jerusalem.

Museum director Amanda Weiss recalls one Israeli student years ago asking: “If Judaism and Christianity really come from the same source, why is there such animosity and hostility and in many places hatred, fear, bigotry between Christians and Jews?”

That’s the sort of question that the museum strives to both spark and answer, and The Book of Books exhibit has provided an unique avenue for emphasizing that common roots – understood and appreciated – can produce better modern-day relations.

“I think there’s no more fitting opportunity to really understand the Bible and the development of the Bible in text – how it was codified and how it developed in Judaism and Christianity than through the Book of Books exhibition,” says Weiss, pausing near the exit of the museum to read a passage of Scripture on the wall:

Come let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, … that He may instruct us in his ways and that we may walk in his paths. For out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
“We can’t say it any better than the Bible can,” she says.

Heading Off Hackers

"The more technology they add to the vehicle, the more opportunities there are for that to be abused for nefarious purposes. Anything with a computer chip in it is vulnerable, history keeps showing us."
Rich Mogull, Securosis, Phoenix

"We could control steering, braking, acceleration to a certain extent, seat belts, lights, horn, speedometer, gas gauge."
Chris Valasek, Pittsburgh computer security consulting company

If anything could go wrong in mechanical systems, it may do just that. Sometimes spontaneously, sometimes from fatigue of use, and sometimes as a result of skilled computer hackers entering a system and corrupting it to reflect their orders not the designed and inputted orders programmed to operate all the systems of a motor vehicle. What was once purely mechanical in design and function has been replaced with far more advanced computer-designed software in the control of mechanical functions.

Driving has become much more effortless, more pragmatically simplified for the driver and in some ways perhaps safer. But with less to be preoccupied with in the maintenance of one's driving skills attention can so easily become diverted because the driver is bored, and looks to other mind-absorbing things to round out his attention. Like, for example a cellphone; Bluetooth making even that more accessible

Our vehicles now resemble in function if not yet form, personal-computers-on-wheels. And since they're so profoundly computer-driven now, what makes them any less vulnerable than desk-top or laptop computers to the frustrating malicious intervention of hackers? The thing is, who might it even have occurred to, that what could be done with an ordinary computer could also be done with function-computerized vehicles?

There appears not yet to have been any reports of criminal hackers actually managing to manipulate the internal network of a car. But it has been done, and quite effectively, by computer security experts who have deliberately set out to test the access-vulnerability of vehicle-based computer networks. Their success didn't come easily. It took concentration and time, lots of it, for them to succeed, but succeed they did.

Demonstrating that high-tech hijackings could be just around the corner. Even, perhaps, demonstrations of road rage embarked upon by the skilled sociopath. And experts claim that these intrusions will become even easier as auto manufacturers give their products full Internet access, adding computer-controlled safety devices taking over more and more driving functions.

A technically skilled thief might discover how relatively easy it may be to unlock the doors of your vehicle and jauntily drive off with it. The last twenty-five years has seen automakers gradually embrace computerized functions like steering, braking, accelerating and shifting. There is greater performance reliability in electronic gas pedal position sensors than in the old throttle cables.

In the advances toward using less fuel in cars, electronic parts reduce the weight of the finished product as an additional bonus. Hackers have been able to convincingly demonstrate their capability of slamming a car's brakes at freeway speeds, pull the steering wheel one way or the other, shut down the engine ... from the vantage of their laptop computers. All cars and trucks possess from 20 to 70 computers.

In one instance a pair of hackers manipulated two vehicles by plugging a laptop into a port beneath the dashboard. The very place where mechanics connect their computers in an effort to electronically search out operating problems in vehicles. Yet another group of hackers took control of a car's computers through cellular telephone and Bluetooth connections, the compact disc player, even the tire-pressure monitoring system.

The idea behind all of this effort, taken up by security experts was to make vehicle manufacturers fully aware of just how potentially vulnerable their products are to malevolent intrusion. Ford Motor Co. defensively said it takes the issue seriously indeed. Toyota responded by assuring it has added security and tests regularly to ensure its products advance safety beyond the reach of hackers.

Its computers, they stated, are programmed to recognize rogue commands and to reject them. Reassuring, isn't it?

Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook Page Hacked

by Kochava Rozenbaum -- ArutzSheva 7 -- 19 August 2013

A skilled computer hacker from the Palestinian Authority, Khalil Shreateh, found a dangerous glitch in the privacy sector of Facebook. Yet, after his warnings were generally ignored by Facebook, Shreateh took matters up with the CEO of the company, Mark Zuckerberg, by breaking the rules and posting on Zuckerbergs’s wall, reported the Daily Mail.

The native Arabic speaker wrote to the Facebook security team: “My name is Khalil Shreateh. I finished school with B.A degree in Information Systems . I would like to report a bug in your main site (www.facebook.com) which i discovered it [sic]...The bug allow Facebook users to share links to other facebook users, I tested it on Sarah.Goodin wall and I got success post.”

Shreateh is referring to Mark Zuckerberg’s fellow Harvard alumnus, Sarah Goodin, whose Facebook page was used to prove the point that hackers have the ability to post information on anyone’s pages, regardless if you are “friends” with that person. 

The security team, however, responded to Shreateh saying that it "was not a bug" and did not fix the obvious issue.

That’s when Shreateh used the hacking method to write on the Facebook founder’s personal wall with this message: “First sorry for breaking your privacy and post to your wall, I has no other choice to make after all the reports I sent to Facebook team.”

The post has since been removed from Zuckerberg’s page, but the plea was answered within minutes after Shreateh contacted the founder’s Facebook.

Since Shreateh used this unorthodox method to catch Facebook’s attention in order to finally convince them of the threat, Facebook later denied him the bounty reward usually given to programmers who report holes in the site’s security.

Validated reports of glitches are usually worth $500.

“In order to qualify for a payout you must make a good faith effort to avoid privacy violations and use a test account instead of a real account when investigating bugs,”’ said Matt Jones from Facebook’s security team.

By posting to Zuckerberg and Goodin’s accounts, says Jones, Shreateh violated the terms of service and will not be rewarded for his find.

Facebook said that it welcomes Shreateh to inform them of any additional glitches he may find for them in the future.

“[We] will pay out for future reports from him,’ writes Jones, “if they're found and demonstrated within these guidelines.”

Tags: Facebook ,Zuckerberg ,computer hacking

Unfortunate Realities

When people are in anguished pain, they want some relief from their suffering. When a child dies, preferring to voluntarily surrender life to the expedient of suicide, because life seems just too much to bear, a sense of guilt infuses all of society. Someone is surely to blame, the reason for that child's abandonment of life must be sought out, and the accused must carry the stigma of responsibility. There are times when a single cause is discovered and relief is found from the emotional dungeon of despair.

And then there are those times when the reasons are numerous, intertwined, and confusing. Where the victim of the tragedy that ensued out of what might be construed as a deviation of a normal rite of passage to social maturity caused shame and a social outcasting of someone who like everyone else wants to 'fit in' be just like everyone else finds herself the subject of universal scorn among her peers. The fault, if such can be said, can be found in personality, circumstances and opportunity.

Rehtaeh Parsons is shown in a handout photo from the Facebook tribute page "Angel Rehtaeh." The RCMP say they have made two arrests in the case of Rehtaeh Parsons, the 17-year-old Halifax girl who was taken off life-support following a suicide attempt in April.    Photograph by: Handout, Facebook, THE CANADIAN PRESS

 

Grieving parents of a 17-year-old girl, raised in a culture and a society where sexual experimentation sometimes goes beyond experiment into practise and in the process brings shame to girls, want to find someone to blame. Where else to look but at those whose participation in a social event led them to a situation where alcohol sufficiently loosened inhibitions to the point where mutual acquiescence to sex benefited them?

Perhaps the parents of all concerned were consumed with guilt that they knew very well from their own experiences that the formula of youth, hormones, sex, alcohol and social partying could result in an orgy of distraction and compulsion. And while knowing, do nothing to forewarn, to chaperone, to themselves take guiding parental responsibility. In the case of Rehteah Parsons, who appealed for a stop to the shaming and the Internet circulation of a cellphone video that disgraced her, there are no easy solutions.

She is dead by her own hand, badgered, ridiculed and shamed as representing someone she had no wish to be, a "slut". At a party of her peers where young people mingled, listened to music, drank alcohol and flirted, daring one another, enticing each other, and some breaking off to isolate themselves in upstairs home bedrooms, Rehteah Parsons was a drunk, giggling and willing participant in sex; group sex actually.

Her best friend, with a more level, self-preserving mindset, tried to persuade Rehteah to leave the bedroom where she lay naked with several boys, but she refused. That friend left the premises and brought her mother back with her, and neither was able to persuade Rehteah to leave. Whom to blame? There was no rape, as Rehteah's desperately bereaved parents wanted to believe, and consequently no young men to shame and blame and place on trial for the death of their daughter.

There was, however, the circulation of a cellphone video on social media that serviced quite well to appeal to the mean streak in most people, who enjoy seeing the social alienation that can be brought upon others victimized by misfortune and circumstances often beyond their control. Rehteah did not enjoy being an object of derision, her pleas that these things halt and desist went unanswered. She responded by taking steps to put a stop to her own very personal anguish.

The only criminal charges left to be exercised to help society and mourning parents exorcise their demons is to charge three young men with the crime of circulating child pornography, victims of their very own misfortune.

Woman’s work

The twisted reality of an Italian freelancer in Syria -- Columbia Journalism Review

By Francesca Borri

A dark, rancid corner Borri says journalists have failed to explain Syria’s civil war because editors only want ‘blood.’ (Alessio Romenzi)
 
He finally wrote to me. After more than a year of freelancing for him, during which I contracted typhoid fever and was shot in the knee, my editor watched the news, thought I was among the Italian journalists who’d been kidnapped, and sent me an email that said: “Should you get a connection, could you tweet your detention?”

That same day, I returned in the evening to a rebel base where I was staying in the middle of the hell that is Aleppo, and amid the dust and the hunger and the fear, I hoped to find a friend, a kind word, a hug. Instead, I found only another email from Clara, who’s spending her holidays at my home in Italy. She’s already sent me eight “Urgent!” messages. Today she’s looking for my spa badge, so she can enter for free. The rest of the messages in my inbox were like this one: “Brilliant piece today; brilliant like your book on Iraq.” Unfortunately, my book wasn’t on Iraq, but on Kosovo.

People have this romantic image of the freelancer as a journalist who’s exchanged the certainty of a regular salary for the freedom to cover the stories she is most fascinated by. But we aren’t free at all; it’s just the opposite. The truth is that the only job opportunity I have today is staying in Syria, where nobody else wants to stay. And it’s not even Aleppo, to be precise; it’s the frontline. Because the editors back in Italy only ask us for the blood, the bang-bang. I write about the Islamists and their network of social services, the roots of their power—a piece that is definitely more complex to build than a frontline piece. I strive to explain, not just to move, to touch, and I am answered with: “What’s this? Six thousand words and nobody died?”

Actually, I should have realized it that time my editor asked me for a piece on Gaza, because Gaza, as usual, was being bombed. I got this email: “You know Gaza by heart,” he wrote. “Who cares if you are in Aleppo?” Exactly. The truth is, I ended up in Syria because I saw the photographs in Time by Alessio Romenzi, who was smuggled into Homs through the water pipes when nobody was yet aware of the existence of Homs. I saw his shots while I was listening to Radiohead—those eyes, staring at me; the eyes of people being killed by Assad’s army, one by one, and nobody had even heard of a place called Homs. A vise clamped around my conscience, and I had to go to Syria immediately.
But whether you’re writing from Aleppo or Gaza or Rome, the editors see no difference. You are paid the same: $70 per piece. Even in places like Syria, where prices triple because of rampant speculation. So, for example, sleeping in this rebel base, under mortar fire, on a mattress on the ground, with yellow water that gave me typhoid, costs $50 per night; a car costs $250 per day. So you end up maximizing, rather than minimizing, the risks. Not only can you not afford insurance—it’s almost $1,000 a month—but you cannot afford a fixer or a translator. You find yourself alone in the unknown. The editors are well aware that $70 a piece pushes you to save on everything. They know, too, that if you happen to be seriously wounded, there is a temptation to hope not to survive, because you cannot afford to be wounded. But they buy your article anyway, even if they would never buy the Nike soccer ball handmade by a Pakistani child.

With new communication technologies there is this temptation to believe that speed is information. But it is based on a self-destructive logic: The content is now standardized, and your newspaper, your magazine, no longer has any distinctiveness, and so there is no reason to pay for the reporter. I mean, for the news, I have the Internet—and for free. The crisis today is of the media, not of the readership. Readers are still there, and contrary to what many editors believe, they are bright readers who ask for simplicity without simplification. They want to understand, not simply to know. Every time I publish an eyewitness account from the war, I get a dozen emails from people who say, “Okay, great piece, great tableaux, but I want to understand what’s going on in Syria.” And it would so please me to reply that I cannot submit an analysis piece, because the editors would simply spike it and tell me, “Who do you think you are, kid?”—even though I have three degrees, have written two books, and spent 10 years in various wars, first as a human-rights officer and now as a journalist. My youth, for what it’s worth, vanished when bits of brain splattered on me in Bosnia, when I was 23.

Freelancers are second-class journalists—even if there are only freelancers here, in Syria, because this is a dirty war, a war of the last century; it’s trench warfare between rebels and loyalists who are so close that they scream at each other while they shoot each other. The first time on the frontline, you can’t believe it, with these bayonets you have seen only in history books. Today’s wars are drone wars, but here they fight meter by meter, street by street, and it’s fucking scary. Yet the editors back in Italy treat you like a kid; you get a front-page photo, and they say you were just lucky, in the right place at the right time. You get an exclusive story, like the one I wrote last September on Aleppo’s old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site, burning as the rebels and Syrian army battled for control. I was the first foreign reporter to enter, and the editors say: “How can I justify that my staff writer wasn’t able to enter and you were?” I got this email from an editor about that story: “I’ll buy it, but I will publish it under my staff writer’s name.”

And then, of course, I am a woman. One recent evening there was shelling everywhere, and I was sitting in a corner, wearing the only expression you could have when death might come at any second, and another reporter comes over, looks me up and down, and says: “This isn’t a place for women.” What can you say to such a guy? Idiot, this isn’t a place for anyone. If I’m scared, it’s because I’m sane. Because Aleppo is all gunpowder and testosterone, and everyone is traumatized: Henri, who speaks only of war; Ryan, tanked up on amphetamines. And yet, at every torn-apart child we see, they come only to me, a “fragile” female, and want to know how I am. And I am tempted to reply: I am as you are. And those evenings when I wear a hurt expression, actually, are the evenings I protect myself, chasing out all emotion and feeling; they are the evenings I save myself.

Because Syria is no longer Syria. It is a nuthouse. There is the Italian guy who was unemployed and joined al-Qaeda, and whose mom is hunting for him around Aleppo to give him a good beating; there is the Japanese tourist who is on the frontlines, because he says he needs two weeks of “thrills”; the Swedish law-school graduate who came to collect evidence of war crimes; the American musicians with bin Laden-style beards who insist this helps them blend in, even though they are blonde and six-feet, five-inches tall. (They brought malaria drugs, even if there’s no malaria here, and want to deliver them while playing violin.) There are the various officers of the various UN agencies who, when you tell them you know of a child with leishmaniasis (a disease spread by the bite of a sand fly) and could they help his parents get him to Turkey for treatment, say they can’t because it is but a single child, and they only deal with “childhood” as a whole.

But we’re war reporters, after all, aren’t we? A band of brothers (and sisters). We risk our lives to give voice to the voiceless. We have seen things most people will never see. We are a wealth of stories at the dinner table, the cool guests who everyone wants to invite. But the dirty secret is that instead of being united, we are our own worst enemies; and the reason for the $70 per piece isn’t that there isn’t any money, because there is always money for a piece on Berlusconi’s girlfriends. The true reason is that you ask for $100 and somebody else is ready to do it for $70. It’s the fiercest competition. Like Beatriz, who today pointed me in the wrong direction so she would be the only one to cover the demonstration, and I found myself amid the snipers as a result of her deception. Just to cover a demonstration, like hundreds of others.

Yet we pretend to be here so that nobody will be able to say, “But I didn’t know what was happening in Syria.” When really we are here just to get an award, to gain visibility. We are here thwarting one another as if there were a Pulitzer within our grasp, when there’s absolutely nothing. We are squeezed between a regime that grants you a visa only if you are against the rebels, and rebels who, if you are with them, allow you to see only what they want you to see. The truth is, we are failures. Two years on, our readers barely remember where Damascus is, and the world instinctively describes what’s happening in Syria as “that mayhem,” because nobody understands anything about Syria—only blood, blood, blood. And that’s why the Syrians cannot stand us now. Because we show the world photos like that 7-year-old child with a cigarette and a Kalashnikov. It’s clear that it’s a contrived photo, but it appeared in newspapers and websites around the world in March, and everyone was screaming: “These Syrians, these Arabs, what barbarians!” When I first got here, the Syrians stopped me and said, “Thank you for showing the world the regime’s crimes.” Today, a man stopped me; he told me, “Shame on you.”

Had I really understood something of war, I wouldn’t have gotten sidetracked trying to write about rebels and loyalists, Sunnis and Shia. Because really the only story to tell in war is how to live without fear. It all could be over in an instant. If I knew that, then I wouldn’t have been so afraid to love, to dare, in my life; instead of being here, now, hugging myself in this dark, rancid corner, desperately regretting all I didn’t do, all I didn’t say. You who tomorrow are still alive, what are you waiting for? Why don’t you love enough? You who have everything, why you are so afraid?

With the exception of Alessio Romenzi, the names in this article have been changed for reasons of privacy.


Maximum risk The author dodges sniper fire in Aleppo’s Salaheddin neighborhood. (Alessio Romenzi)

 

Francesca Borri published two books, one on Kosovo and another on Israel/Palestine, while working as a human-rights officer. She turned to journalism when she realized that power players were more upset by what she wrote than what she did as a jurist.

Taking Grave Exception....

Ignorance of all the News Fit to Print?

The British government has funded research of somewhat peculiar value, into the habits and proclivities of the genders where consumption of news is concerned. And the female of the species has been found spectacularly wanting. Which is, in a sense, puzzling. After all, what is news, but a type of gossip; passing information from one to another. Granted, gossip is taken to represent news of a more intimate, personal nature, in a limited geography, usually news that does not reflect particularly well on the individual under discussion.

But there are social scientists who hold that the human proclivity to engage in gossip is simply the beginning, fanning out to an extension of news-gathering and -dissemination. And in publishing news on a large scale, we have just enlarged the scope, as it were. The study, now concluded, has come to the understanding that women are curiously lacking in news uptake. In tests to determine the extent to which men imbibe news and become knowledgeable about current events as opposed to women, men win the stakes.

This information-gap by gender is constant whether one is speaking of the United States, Greece, Japan or Australia. Most people of either gender scored low in Colombia as opposed to Norway where such general knowledge tends to score high, yet in all countries tested, men's score of knowledge of current events ranked higher than their female counterparts. Cultural gender equality played no part in this; the evidence was similar whether from Britain or the U.S. or Japan and South Korea.

"The fact that political knowledge gender gaps have not shrunk in advanced industrial nations, despite women's progress in areas such as education and work presents a grim prospect for many developing countries.(?)
"In this cross-national comparative study, we confirmed that women's inferiority in political knowledge is a global phenomenon. This general conclusion can be explained, albeit not fully, by gender-biased hard-news contents in all countries and less exposure to media by women than by men.
"But we also discovered that gender gaps in political knowledge were wider in societies with advanced gender equity than in those with less advanced gender equity. Particularly, men in Canada Australia, Norway, and the U.S. score substantially higher than women."
Report, published in the journal Global Media and Communication

 In Canada, it seems older Canadian men appear more informed than younger men, the trend less evident for Canadian women. The more television news a person watches, evidently, the better informed, except, confoundedly in the United States and Colombia. Nationally, Americans were marginally more informed than Colombians! Norwegian women narrowly beat out Canadian men while Norwegian men scored supremely well.

Women in Canada correctly responded to one-third of questions put to them on current events. Men responded correctly in just short of half the questions. Placing Canadian women on a par with American men, as American women scored dismally; barely one in five questions. "I think it's because public affairs is indeed dominated by men. It may be that there is also patriarchal bias, but whether reality is being distorted or whether it is merely being reflected" is unknown.

"What is clear is that TV news is dominated by men in terms of the sourcing of stories across the world", said Professor James Curran, lead author of the study; professor of communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, and director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre.

Seems clear it hadn't occurred to him or his researchers that women are simply resigned to men "messing up the world", and pay them as little heed as possible, preferring to get on with life.

Egad!

28 June 2013 -- News In Brief

• The United States plans to start supplying arms directly to Syrian rebels within a month, American officials said Thursday, as it emerged that the CIA has begun shipping weapons to a secret network of warehouses in Syria's neighbour, Jordan. Leaked CIA plans disclose that Washington will dispatch arms from Jordan to specially vetted groups in the Free Syrian Army in co-ordination with European and Arab allies. The arms supplies are intended to be in the hands of the rebels before an offensive against Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime is launched in early August, according to the Wall Street Journal.
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• Readings by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft confirm it is in unfamiliar territory, but it is still inside our solar system. Voyager 1 is about 18.5 billion kilometres from the sun and is poised to become the first spacecraft to break out of the solar system into the space between stars. Scientists do not know how far this region extends.
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• Police in Tennessee say a puppy was killed when a man put it in a dishwasher and ran the machine. Police charged 27-year-old Marcus Curry with aggravated abuse to animals. He is being held on a $40,000 bond. Police were called Wednesday by an apartment maintenance man who found a dead puppy in a trash bin.
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• The UN is raising the alarm about the recent rape of nine young girls in conflict-ridden eastern Congo, the youngest 18 months old. Two girls died, though their ages weren't released. Two officials say the girls were admitted to Panzi Hospital in South Kivu province over the past two months with serious internal wounds. UN special representative to Congo, Roger Meece, and UNICEF representative Barbara Bentein released their statement through UN deputy spokesman Eduardo del Buey on Thursday. Officials said two suspects have been arrested.
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•  Civilians in hospitals, schools, churches and mosques are increasingly put in harm's way in armed conflicts around the world, including in Syria, Red Cross head Peter Maurer said Thursday. "Weaponization of medical facilities" and similar misuse of schools, churches and mosques is a worrisome trend, he said.
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• An autopsy confirms that a 2-year-old found dead in a car west of Toronto had been exposed to searing temperatures while left alone in the vehicle, police say. Investigators say the boy was found Wednesday outside a Milton, Ontario home. They say the boy was in the care of his grandmother, who is in her 50s. Police say they are awaiting further toxicology tests for an exact cause of death. The homicide squad is investigating.
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• Matteo Renzi, Florence's mayor has denied his city is a hotbed of "bunga bunga" amid a growing scandal involving prostitutes being paid for sex by council officials and local worthies. Goings-on in the Tuscan city have invited comparisons with parties organized by Silvio Berlusconi, who was this week sentenced to seven years' jail after being found guilty of paying for sex with an underage prostitutes. Prosecutors are investigating a network of 142 prostitutes, many of them from Eastern Europe, who were allegedly paid for sex by council officials and businessmen. Fourteen people are being investigated for procuring prostitutes based on 4,000 pages of transcripts of telephone calls.
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• Pope Francis told the Vatican's ambassadors they risked "ridicule" if they lived overly comfortable lives, in the latest expression of his desire for a more austere Roman Catholic Church. The Argentinian Pope said the apostolic nuncios (ambassadors) should eschew a "bourgeois" style of life and reject the pursuit of worldly goods. He said they had a vital role in the countries they represent by recommending who should be made bishops. But they should avoid candidates who were overly ambitious or showed "a princely psychology". "There is always a risk ... of giving in to that sort of "bourgeoisie of the spirit and life' which drives one to recline, to seek out a comfortable and tranquil life", he said.