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Recommended Reading
from Bruce
The Hunt for Osama bin Laden
Armies have been mobilised, phones tapped, huge rewards offered - yet Osama bin Laden is still at liberty. Does anyone even have the faintest idea where he is? Declan Walsh investigates.
PAUL KRUGMAN: Promises Not Kept (The New York Times)
Five years ago, the nation rallied around a president who promised vengeance against those responsible for the atrocity of 9/11. Yet Osama bin Laden is still alive and at large. His trail, The Washington Post reports, has gone "stone cold." Osama and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are evidently secure enough in their hideaway that they can taunt us with professional-quality videos.
FOREIGN POLICY & The Center For American Progress: The Terrorism Index (web0.foreignpolicy.com)
Is the United States winning the war on terror? Not according to more than 100 of America's top foreign-policy hands. They see a national security apparatus in disrepair and a government that is failing to protect the public from the next attack.
FRANK RICH: Whatever Happened to the America of 9/12? (The New York Times)
"The most famous picture nobody's ever seen" is how the Associated Press photographer Richard Drew has referred to his photo of an unidentified World Trade Center victim hurtling to his death on 9/11. It appeared in some newspapers, including this one, on 9/12 but was soon shelved. "In the most photographed and videotaped day in the history of the world," Tom Junod later wrote in Esquire, "the images of people jumping were the only images that became, by consensus, taboo."
The Editors, Washington Monthly: A Completely Different College Ranking Guide (alternet.org)
Contrary to the U.S. News & World Report list, these colleges not only teach young people well, but their faculties and students alike are working to create a better world.
Ron Radosh: The Boss, Rooted (the-american-interest.com)
For more than six weeks (as I write in July 2006) Bruce Springsteen's retro-folk album, a tribute to the dean of American folksingers, Pete Seeger, has stayed way up in the Billboard charts of best-selling American records.
'He created his own universe and became its star' (arts.guardian.co.uk)
Director David Cronenberg explains the debt he owes to Andy Warhol's bizarre and chillingly prophetic work.
David Bruce: Wise Up! Good Deeds (athensnews.com)
In 1959, Duke Ellington decided to take his band on a European tour. Some band members flew across the ocean, but Duke and seven members of the band decided to sail across. Of course, he was treated with respect and ate frequently at the captain's table, and some of the first-class passengers asked him for a concert. On the last night of the voyage, Duke and the seven band members with him played for the captain and the first-class passengers, but Duke and his band members didn't stop there. They played next for the passengers sailing in cabin class, then for the passengers sailing in tourist class, and finally they played for the crewmen in the crew's quarters. According to Duke's nephew, Michael, "That's how he was about not leaving anybody out. He used to say, 'I never put anybody in a secondary position.'"
Cartoon: Missing: The America We Used to Know
The Washington Monthly College Rankings: National Universities
The Washington Monthly College Rankings: Liberal Arts Colleges
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and pleasant.
Funny how the Letterman show sounds great on every TV in the house, and how crappy & tinny Leno sounds, regardless.
No new flags.
Axed by MSGOP
Eric Alterman
Eric Alterman, perhaps the first writer to get a blog on a mainstream national news site, has been dismissed after 10 years by MSNBC.com.
"P.S., I?m Fired," he heads an email to others in the media.
His blog, Altercation, however, will be picked up by the liberal site Media Matters. He will also become a senior fellow there. Alterman has also been a longtime columnist at The Nation magazine. He teaches at City University of New York.
"Whether my termination is, in fact, a product of a political decision at GE/NBC, which according to reports I read and gossip I hear, has lately taken a much firmer hand in guiding the content of both MSNBC and MSNBC.com, I have no way of knowing.... It would surprise no one if this site caused some discomfort at 30 Rock, if and when they happen to notice it. But speculation is not the same thing as evidence, and the good folks MSNBC.com and GE/NBC can, I?m sure, give you good reasons why dumping Altercation is the right thing to do from a business standpoint-- though the natural speculation that arises is a damn good argument against the kind of media concentration that allows a company like GE to own NBC in the first place.
Eric Alterman
Altercation - MSNBC.com
Wins Top Prize At Deauville
'Little Miss Sunshine'
"Little Miss Sunshine", an offbeat comedy about a seven-year-old girl who enters a junior beauty contest, picked up the top prize at the Deauville film festival in France.
The film, by Jonathan Dayton et Valerie Faris, was met with loud applause and raucous laughter when it was shown at the festival and won the Grand Prix on Sunday evening.
The jury prize was awarded to Ryan Fleck's "Half Nelson", which looks at the relationship between a brilliant teacher at a school in Brooklyn and a young female student.
The award for best screenplay and the international critics' prize went to "Sherrybaby", a film by Laurie Collyer about the struggle of a former drug addict to win back custody of his daughter.
'Little Miss Sunshine'
Woman Wins Solti Conducting Competition
Shi-Yeon Sung
A 31-year-old South Korean, Shi-Yeon Sung, has become the first woman to win the prestigious Sir Georg Solti International Conductors' Competition, held here every two years.
Organizers announced Sunday that Sung was the winner of the competition, named after the legendary British conductor Sir Georg Solti (1912-1997), and she received the 15,000-euro (19,050-dollar) prize money after a concert in Frankfurt's Alte Oper concert hall.
Runners-up in the final were US-Japanese conductor Shizuo Kuwahara, 30, who took home the second prize of 10,000 euros and Australian Matthew Coorey, 32, who was awarded the third prize of 5,000 euros.
Shi-Yeon Sung
Develops Post-Katrina Drama For NBC
Spike Lee
Spike Lee will follow his documentary on Hurricane Katrina with a scripted drama for NBC set in New Orleans.
Titled "NoLa," after the local slang for the Big Easy, the project is a multicultural ensemble exploring the post-Katrina lives of New Orleans residents from different social and economic backgrounds.
Stylistically, he will pay homage to the great tradition of Italian neorealism, a 1942-52 movement in Italian cinema that involved such acclaimed filmmakers as Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini and spawned such films as De Sica's "The Bicycle Thief" and "Miracle in Milan."
Spike Lee
Diddy Can't Be Diddy In Britain
Sean Combs
Sean Combs is Diddy no more - at least in Britain. The musician and entertainment mogul has agreed to drop the Diddy name as part of an out-of court legal settlement with London-based music producer Richard "Diddy" Dearlove, the law firm representing Dearlove said Monday.
Solicitors Jens Hills & Co. said Combs had agreed to "rebrand his commercial activities" in Britain and would "no longer be able to trade in the U.K. as 'Diddy.'"
Dearlove launched a lawsuit for unfair competition, claiming the name change had caused confusion. The case had been due to go to the High Court next month.
Sean Combs
Documentary Film
Mukhtaran Mai
Quiet and unsmiling behind a pink headscarf and a brown wool shawl, Pakistani seamstress Mukhtaran Mai is an unlikely icon for women's rights.
But Mai is a gang-rape victim who broke with tradition to tell the world her story and insist that Pakistan prosecute the men from her village who raped her as punishment for a crime they said her brother committed.
Her tale has become a gripping, but still-unpolished documentary that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, explaining how Mai spoke out about the rape, rather than taking the traditional route of committing suicide to save her family's honor.
Mukhtaran Mai
Plans To Stay In Ohio
Dave Chappelle
Dave Chappelle is home. The comedian, who abruptly halted his hit television show last year, told the crowd at a blues and jazz festival on Sunday that he enjoys living in the community and doesn't plan to leave.
"I used to be cable's hottest star and now I'm just a Yellow Springs guy," said Chappelle, who introduced musicians and told jokes.
"Turns out you don't need $50 million to live around these parts, just a nice smile and a kind way about you. You guys are the best neighbors ever. ... That's why I came back and that's why I'm staying."
Sunday's festival was sponsored by the African American Cross Cultural Works, an organization that Chappelle's late father, Bill Chappelle, helped found.
Dave Chappelle
New Baggage Rules
Musicians
A group of top classical musicians has warned of the threat to artistic life from a hand baggage ban introduced after British police foiled an alleged bomb plot against transatlantic airliners.
The issue even struck a false note at the world-renowned Last Night of the Proms on Saturday night, with one conductor joking that next year audiences may have to put up with "Concerto for Laptop and Orchestra".
Many performers refuse to let their instruments, often centuries old and extremely valuable, out of their sight when they travel on planes in case they are damaged in the hold.
But now they are falling foul of strict rules introduced in August amid fears that apparently innocuous materials could be used to build and detonate bombs on flights to and from the United States.
Musicians
NFL Topped
ABC's Propaganda
Editing changes made by ABC to the first part of its miniseries "The Path to 9/11" were cosmetic and didn't change the meaning of scenes that had angered several former Clinton administration officials, a spokesman for the former president said Monday.
Former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, now an ABC News consultant, denounced the movie Monday as an "egregious distortion."
Clarke said the movie "is an egregious distortion that does a deep disservice both to history and to those in both the Clinton and Bush administrations who are depicted."
"There is throughout the screenplay a consistent bias and distortion seeking to portray senior Clinton administration officials as holding back the hard-charging CIA, FBI and military officers who would otherwise have prevented 9/11," he said. "The exact opposite is true."
ABC's Propaganda
Where You Live Matters
Life Expectancy
Where you live, combined with race and income, plays a huge role in the nation's health disparities, differences so stark that a report issued Monday contends it's as if there are eight separate Americas instead of one.
Asian-American women living in Bergen County, N.J., lead the nation in longevity, typically reaching their 91st birthdays. Worst off are American Indian men in swaths of South Dakota, who die around age 58 - three decades sooner.
Millions of the worst-off Americans have life expectancies typical of developing countries, concluded Dr. Christopher Murray of the Harvard School of Public Health.
Asian-American women can expect to live 13 years longer than low-income black women in the rural South, for example. That's like comparing women in wealthy Japan to those in poverty-ridden Nicaragua.
Life Expectancy
More Bad Behavior
Hong Kong Disneyland
Hong Kong's Disneyland was putting up the bunting to marks its first anniversary but growing protests over shadowy business dealings and accusations of labour abuse threaten to spoil the party.
China's first Disney theme park will be a year old on Tuesday and a series of high-profile extravaganzas are planned to celebrate its opening last September 12 amid a wave of hype and hoopla.
The year since then has been anything but a fairytale, however, with union strife, low turnouts and a very public ticket mix up sparking near riots at the gates tarnishing what park bosses had hoped would be a showcase 12 months.
Hong Kong's Disneyland
Spain Marks 25th Anniversary of Arrival
'Guernica'
Pablo Picasso's masterpiece, "Guernica," arrived in Spain 25 years ago from New York's Museum of Modern Art - a symbolic event the Spanish remembered over the weekend with an anniversary celebration.
The treasured canvas represents the horrors of the civil war that engulfed Spain in 1936 as dictator Gen. Francisco Franco fought to defeat a democratically elected republican government.
Spain's republican government originally commissioned the oil painting to hang in the Spanish pavilion of the 1937 Paris World's Fair, when Spain was fighting its civil war.
But the artist would not allow "Guernica" to go to the country of his birth until "public liberties and democratic institutions" were restored after Franco's dictatorship. Franco died in 1975, paving the way for Spain's return to democracy and for the painting's return from its temporary home in New York.
'Guernica'
Viral Video Global Guitar Star
Lim Jeong-hyun
South Korean student Lim Jeong-hyun has basked in five minutes and 20 seconds of fame nearly 9 million times over.
Lim, 22, was identified by the New York Times about two weeks ago as the mysterious man bathed in sunlight who played guitar in one of the most-watched videos of all time on the popular video sharing YouTube.com Web site.
About eight months ago, a video simply titled "guitar" appeared on YouTube. It shows a young man sitting between his desk and bed, bowing his head so that his baseball cap covers his eyes, ferociously playing a rock version of Johann Pachelbel's "Canon" -- the music often played at weddings.
The guitarist's face is never seen. His real name is not mentioned but he calls himself "funtwo." The focus is on his fingers.
Lim Jeong-hyun
In Memory
Hilda Bernstein
Veteran anti-apartheid activist and author Hilda Bernstein has died, her family said Monday. She was 91.
Bernstein died of heart failure at her home in Cape Town on Friday night, her son Keith said. She was the wife of the late Rusty Bernstein, an anti-apartheid activist who was tried for treason alongside Nelson Mandela in the famous Rivonia Trial in 1964. Both she and her husband fought tirelessly in South Africa and abroad for the end of white racist rule.
Bernstein was a founding member of the Federation of South African Women, the first nonracial women's organization in South Africa.
Bernstein was born in London in 1915, the youngest of three sisters. She emigrated to South Africa in 1932 and worked in advertising, later publishing and journalism.
Both she and her husband were active in the early days of the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. They suffered banning and detention by the apartheid state.
At the Rivonia trial, which sentenced Mandela and other anti-apartheid leaders to life imprisonment, Rusty was the only one found not guilty and was discharged. But police harassment made life afterward so untenable that the couple were forced into exile, leaving their children behind.
In exile, Bernstein was an active member of the External Mission of the ANC, and a regular speaker on behalf of ANC and Anti-Apartheid Movement, both in Britain and abroad. She toured extensively in many countries of Europe, Canada and since 1994, South Africa, on behalf of the ANC and the Women's League.
Eventually they settled in England where Rusty Bernstein worked as an architect. They returned to South Africa after the 1994 democratic elections.
She is survived by four children, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. There was no immediate word on funeral arrangements. The funeral will be held Saturday.
Hilda Bernstein
In Memory
Henry Ynostroza
Henry Ynostroza, who was among a group of 12 men wrongly convicted in the racially tinged Sleepy Lagoon murder case, died Tuesday, his daughter said. He was 82.
Ynostroza, a retired warehouse supervisor, died of natural causes at a convalescent home in Pasadena, said his daughter, Marie Ruvalcava.
Ynostroza was 18 and married when he was arrested in 1942 in connection with the beating death of 21-year-old Jose Diaz near a Los Angeles-area reservoir dubbed "Sleepy Lagoon" after a popular song.
Suspicion was cast on Hispanic men known as "pachucos," who wore the long coats, wide pants and long watch chains of the "Zoot Suit." Hundreds were arrested in a sweep of the local barrios, and a grand jury indicted 24 of them, including Ynostroza, for conspiracy to commit murder and assault with a deadly weapon.
In January 1943, the all-white jury found three of the defendants guilty of first-degree murder. Nine, including Ynostroza, were convicted of second-degree murder. Five other defendants were found guilty of assault, and five were acquitted.
The state's 2nd District Court of Appeal reversed all of the convictions in October 1944, citing insufficient evidence to establish the guilt of the defendants. The panel also severely reprimanded the trial judge for displaying prejudice.
Henry Ynostroza
In Memory
Melanie Lomax
Melanie Lomax, a civil rights lawyer and former Police Commission president, died Sunday after her car plunged off a steep slope near her home, police said Monday. She was 56.
Lomax was backing out of her Hollywood Hills home driveway when her vehicle overshot the roadway and somersaulted down a slope, Officer Michael Lopez said. Paramedics rushed Lomax to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in full cardiac arrest, he said.
Police said Lomax had sustained no visible injuries, and the coroner's office will determine her cause of death.
Lomax began practicing law in the 1970s. She rose to prominence as a civil rights lawyer and later became a confidante of Mayor Tom Bradley.
Melanie Lomax
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