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budsimmons — 2010-02-09 14:10:58 GMT

Islam’s Child Martyrs in America Posted By Jamie Glazov On February 9, 2010 @ 12:13 am In FrontPage

A Few Goody GumDrops

A FEW GOODY GUMDROPS (noreply@blogger.com) — 2010-02-09 03:19:00 GMT

AMAZING VALENTINE'S DAY GIVEAWAY
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This beautiful wallet is made of Leather and Stingray (Shagrin) and retails for $240.00.It features a magnetic flap closure, a custom made removable gold or gunmetal plated box chain so it can be worn across the body and a Shagrin accent panel from front to back. The perfect size to carry your phone, credit card and your favorite gloss! Khirma's handbags can be seen on a number of celebs including Sienna Miller, Rihanna and Ciara.

Khirma began her creative career as an accessories assistant at Mademoiselle Magazine and quickly progressed into becoming a fashion stylist working with clients ranging from Saturn, Nikon and the Bravo Network to freelancing as an accessories and market editor at recognized fashion magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and TeenVogue. Khirma’s desire to create a fashion statement that represents style, vision, quality and creativity came to fruition in the design of her first collection of unique luxury handbags which debuted this Fall 2009. Khirma states, "Women now are more style conscious than ever. I did not want to just design arm candy, but rather, sophisticated, luxury handbags identifiable for their high quality construction, distinctive aesthetic and versatility that lends itself to complement a favorite pair of jeans or a cocktail dress.

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Atanu Dey on India's Development

Atanu Dey — 2010-02-09 10:55:43 GMT

The other day I was reflecting that the world has great literature and that it’s a great pity that I will probably never really get to read even a small fraction of it. I have not read Tolstoy’s “War and Peace“, for example. Those Russians, I tell you, were great authors. Take Dostoyevsky. I hope that I will get around to reading “The Brothers Karamazov” — . . . the final novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was ...

Search for "classical music"

2010-02-09 05:25:25 GMT

The New Bedford Symphony Orchestra's audience arrived at the Zeiterion on Saturday evening expecting a program of "Two Giants: Tchaikovsky & Beethoven." By the concert's end, they were undoubtedly counting three giants, the third being the talent of guest pianist Marina Lomazov.

Culture | guardian.co.uk

Nancy Groves — 2010-02-08 16:10:21 GMT

An enterprising soul has started a scheme that could enliven the journey into work for thousands of freesheet-weary commuters

God bless South West Trains. Not a phrase you'll often hear in London's leafier southern suburbs – but without one of their seasonal delays in service last week, I wouldn't have stumbled into the waiting room at Wimbledon Station and discovered, joy of joys, the Station Bookswap.

It was the poster pinned to the door that pulled me in. "Never be bored on a train journey again!" And there, propped up on the window sills, a smattering of books, their covers tantalisingly open to view. The selection ranged from a mint copy of Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down, through some battered Jodi Picoult and James Patterson hardbacks to a decent Penguin Classic edition of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, all bearing the fingerprints of Wimbledon readers.

And it's true what they say. Books really do furnish a (waiting) room. The formerly dank and draughty surroundings of Platform Five seemed instantly less prosaic. Most colourful of all were the children's picture books, not just Spot at Christmas but bilingual texts in Hindi, Tamil and Chinese.

Some reading around reveals the man behind the scheme: twenty-nine-year-old Anthony Fairclough, legal researcher and chair of Merton Liberal Democrats, who does the Wimbledon to Waterloo commute every morning at 7am. Finding the cut-and-paste PR of the Metro newspaper barely lasted him two stops to Clapham Junction, Fairclough set up the book-swap last November.

The rules are simple. Take away a book, any book, to read at your leisure and return it once you're done for another. The idea actually originated further down the line at Raynes Park, where a swap has been running since the local library refurbished and wanted to offload some stock in 2005. To date, commuters have picked up 22,000 titles and rumour has it they're swapping at Morden Tube now, too, making Merton London's most borrower-friendly borough.

Anything goes, says Fairclough, from cookery books to out-of-date legal textbooks. His last find was an old 80s anthology entitled Sixty Tales of the Supernatural – like a book club, the swap gets you reading things you might not pick out in a shop. It certainly brings new meaning to the term "travelling library", a bit like those dog-eared copies of Alex Garland's The Beach that do the rounds of the South East Asian backpacking circuit. Except these books are on a return ticket.

At least, that's the idea. As yet, they rarely make it back to base. The book-swap is getting through 100 volumes a week, and while local libraries and Wimbledon's Freecycle network help Fairclough keep up with supply, he is exploring other ways to encourage returns, from printing up stickers to tapping into BookCrossing, which allows you to register titles and track them from person to person across the world.

Buoyed by his community spirit, I drop off a bag o' books on my way into London, including one of the four One Hundred Years of Solitudes our house has somehow accumulated. Hanging around for as long as I can without risking arrest under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, I keep watch on the waiting room. No one goes in or out.

And yet, returning the same evening, Gabriel García Márquez has gone. It's a thrill, imagining his onward journey. (As blogger Cover Girl has discovered, reading on public transport can be quite the ticket to romance.) Is it too much to hope that one day there could be a swap in every waiting room of every station of every town in the country? Would you use them? And what books do you recommend for the daily commute? Anything has to beat Metro, after all.

Nancy Groves

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iheartmyart ♥

2010-02-07 23:54:42 GMT

Ivan Constantinovich Aivazovsky, Moonlit Seascape with Shipwreck, 1863

iheartmyart ♥

2010-02-08 00:21:28 GMT

Ivan Constantinovich Aivazovsky, The Ninth Wave, 1850

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vyazovaoyauguzep — 2010-02-07 12:45:01 GMT

	Screamers Full Movie Online part 1 HD Watch Screamers Full Movie here http://tinyurl.com/yclwcgb	From: vyazovaoyauguzep Views: 0 0 ratings
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Sinisa — 2010-02-07 03:26:08 GMT

Original text: http://www.srebrenica-project.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=83:appeal-to-president-boris-tadi-and-the-serbian-parliament-do-not-gamble-with-your-countrys-future-no-to-the-srebrenica-resolution&catid=12:2009-01-25-02-01-02

APPEAL TO PRESIDENT BORIS TADIĆ AND THE SERBIAN PARLIAMENT: DO NOT GAMBLE WITH YOUR COUNTRY’S FUTURE! NO TO THE SREBRENICA RESOLUTION.

Dear Mr. President and honorable deputies,

As concerned American and European intellectuals and citizens, we call on you to seriously reconsider the plan to adopt a parliamentary resolution that would treat the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995 as a paradigmatic event of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in doing so to use language that could be interpreted as Serbia’s acceptance of responsibility for “genocide.”

The execution of Moslem prisoners in July of 1995, after Bosnian Serb forces took over Srebrenica, was a war crime, but it is by no means a paradigmatic event. The informed public in Western countries knows that, at that time, forces attributed to the Republic of Srpska executed in three days approximately as many Moslems as Moslem forces, raiding surrounding Serbian villages out of Srebrenica, had murdered during the preceding three years. There is nothing to set one crime apart from the other, except that its commission was more condensed in time. In a vicious civil war, in which all sides commit crimes, all innocent victims are entitled to compassion but the victims of one ethnic group should have no special moral claim to unique recognition. Putting the suffering of one group on a pedestal necessarily derogates from the right of the other group – in this case Serbian non-combatants in the devastated villages surrounding the enclave of Srebrenica – to an equal measure of sympathy.

More importantly, what really happened in Srebrenica in July of 1995 is an issue that is still not settled, or why it occurred, and who was behind it. The accepted version of events, shaped mainly by war propaganda and hyperbolic media reports, is becoming increasingly obsolete because it is being vigorously questioned and reassessed by critical thinkers in the Western world. Much reliable information on these events is still unavailable and needs to be researched, but without it responsible conclusions on the nature and scope of the Srebrenica massacre cannot be drawn. Both the event’s alleged scope and its legal description as “genocide” are intensely in dispute. It would therefore be very unwise for Serbia and its parliament to formally commit themselves to a version of events that is thin on evidence but long on moral and political implications that are extremely detrimental to Serbia and its people.

We are also troubled by the prospect of Serbia and its parliament might accept the thesis that the massacre in Srebrenica, regrettable as it may be, amounts to “genocide.” That would unpardonably diminish genuine genocide as a phenomenon of the 20th century, of which the Holocaust of the Jewish people and the mass extermination campaigns against Armenians, Pontus Greeks, Assyrians, Kurds, and the Roma are some outstanding examples.

We are concerned that the politicisation of human suffering and the frivolous usage of the grave legal category of genocide greatly cheapens these important concepts and constitutes an undeserved insult to innocent victims of political violence everywhere in the world.

Not only would Serbia, by an act of its own parliament, put itself in the same league with Nazi Germany if such a resolution were passed. It would also sanctify at Serbia's extreme disadvantage a propaganda narrative whose key components are factually unsupported. It would implicitly endorse the view that the Republic of Srpska was built on genocide and thus endanger its further existence and play into the hands of those pressuring for the centralisation of Bosnia. Finally, it would expose Serbian taxpayers to the possibility of a multi billion euro suit for damages which they are ill equipped at the present moment to pay [and have no obligation to do so, for that matter].

For all these reasons, we appeal to you to refrain from passing the projected Srebrenica resolution. If you feel it your duty to perform an act of public compassion toward the victims of the Bosnian war, we recommend as the only proper method that you pass a single resolution, written in ethnically neutral language, encompassing all of the victims and honoring them equally.

Signed:

Prof. Edward Herman, academic, United States

Jurgen Elsaesser, author and journalist, Germany

Germinal Civikov, author and journalist, the Netherlands

Alexander Dorin, author, Switzerland

Prof. Alexander Mezyaev, Russian Federation

Eckart Spoo, journalist and publicist, Germany

Diana Johnstone, political analyst and writer, United States and France

Daniel Salvatore Schiffer, philosopher and humanist, Belgium

Klaus von Raussendorff, ex-diplomat and publicist, Bonn/Germany

Klaus Hartmann, Chairman of the German Freethinkers Association,

Vice president of World Union of Freethinkers, Germany

Cathrin Schütz, journalist, political scientist, Author of "Der NATO-Krieg gegen Jugoslawien.

Hintergründe, Nebenwirkungen und Folgen" (Braumüller Verlag, Wien), Germany

Prof. Dr. Velko Valkanov, president, National Peace Council of Bulgaria, Bulgaria

Nikola Zivkovic, author and political analyst, Germany

Dr. Patrick Barriot, physician, France

Michele Altamura, journalist and political commentator, Italy

Christopher Black, barrister, Canada

Jonathan Rooper, ex-political analyst for BBC, independent journalist, Great Britain

Danilo Zolo, professor of Philosophy of International Law, Law Department, University of

Florence, Italy

Theodosios Kyriakidis, Director of the St. George Peristereota Research Centre, Greece

Ing. Bernhard Frerichs, Nemacka

Dirk Frerichs, student elektronike u Nemackoj Darmstadt

Ing. Jan-Hendrik, Frerichs, Nemacka

Ing. Ina Frerichs, Arhitekta, Nemacka

Ing. Seidel Klaus, Rüsselsheim, Nemacka

Reiner Bingel, tehnicar, Taunusstein, Nemacka

Hödt Otti, med. sestra, Groß Gerau, Nemacka

Ing. Dirksmeier Klaus, Berlin, Nemacka

Ing. Davide Braga, Italy

Ing. Marco Bellini, vice-president , European Development Centre, independent think-tank, Italy

Lina Bertorello, Italy

Ing. Antonio Tassone, Belgium

Mick Collins, Artistic and Pedagogical Director, CirqueMinime, Paris, France

Israel Adam Shamir, writer and political philosopher, Jaffa, Israel

Prof. Wolfgang Richter, acting President of the European Peace Forum, Germany

Zorica Surla, teacher, Germany

Aleksandar Pavicevic, teacher, Germany

Christina Grbic-Buddingh, Arnhem, the Netherlands

Godfred Louis-Jensen, architect, Oktoberbevaegelsen, Denmark

Dr. Monika Nehr, Berlin, Germany

Joachim Guilliard, journalist and author, Heidelberg, Germany

Brigitte Queck, "Mother against War Berlin -Brandenburg", Berlin, Germany

Ewald Ressel, Germany

Prof. Wolf Lettmayer, Austria

Thomas Werner, Nuernberd, Germany

Peter Betscher, Dipl. Ing., Association for International Solidarity, Germany

Hermann Kopp, journalist, Dusseldorf, Germany

Maria Tsouras, Frankfurt, Germany

Albrecht Frenzel, Germany

Peter Franz, Member of VDS, Weimar, Germany

David Peterson, attorney, Chicago, United States

Prof. Dr. Hans Fischer, Berlin, Germany

Irene Eckert, lecturer, Berlin, Germany

Hartmut Drewes, Pastor (ret.), Germany

Elke Zwinge-Makamizile, documentarist, Berlin, Germany

Rolf Becker, actor, Hamburg, Germany

Thomas Immanuel Steinberg, Hamburg, Germany

Dr. Erika Kosse, Berlin, Germany

Peter Franz, Member of the Association of Writers VDS, Weimar, Germany

Maria Melkova, free-lance translator, Russia

Andrey Migalin, artist, Russia

Svetlana Bogatyryova, lawer, Russia

Dr. Andrej Bazilevski, writer, Russia

Rainer Rupp, Journalist, Germany

Dr. Hans-Georg Ruf, member of the "Forum solidarisches und friedliches

Augsburg" (http://www.forumaugsburg.de), Germany

Victoria Knopp, MA Sociology, Frankfurt/Main, Germany

Martin Dressel, Germany

Brigitte Dressel, Germany

Eduard Mader, Ingenieur i.R., Member of Freethinker Organisation DFV, Germany

Dr. sc. med. Uta Mader, Medical doctor, Germany

Kaspar Trümpy, Ingenier, Switzerland

Karl Marek, Germany

Witold Fischer, Historian, Jena, Germany

Marina Borisova, analyst, Moscow, Russia

Elena Borisova, professor at the Moscow City Pedagogical University, Russia

Stefan Zeuge, Student, Berlin, Germany

Jean Toschi Marazzani Visconti, journalist and writer, Italy

Yasik Antonov [???? ???????], Moscow, Russia

Ivan Priima, writer, Russia

Dragana Drakulic-Priima, university professor, Russia

Aleksandr Orlov, St. Petersburg, Russia

Dr. med Donka Lange, Farstar medical GmbH, Germany

Baramzina Nadezhda Anatolevna, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

Vladislav Kuprin, internal auditor, Moscow, Russia

Andey Torshin, Russia

Igor Leonov, Russia

Chazov Vadim, Perm, Russia

Hermann Cebulla, Gelsenkirchen/Buer, Germany

Nina Nechaeva, journalist, Lobno, Russia

Rule von Bismarck, Hamburg, Germany

Andrei Tikhomirov, historian, Russia

Additional remarks suggested by Professor Edward Herman: “(1) When is the EU going to insist on an apology to Serbs from Croatia and the United States and UN for Operations Flash and Storm, which involved the greatest ethnic cleansing operations in the Balkan wars, and ones where, in contrast with others, the victims have never been able to return?; (2) when will the EU and NATO apologize to the Kosovo Serbs for the greatest "proportionate" ethnic cleansing of the Yugoslav wars carried out under NATO auspices after June 10, 1999? (and to the Roma for their ethnic victimization in the same period?); (3) when will the EU and United States apologize for introducing Al Qaeda into Bosnia and Europe to fight (and behead) Serbs, as described in detail in "Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al Qaida, and the Rise of Global Jihad," by John R. Schindler, Professor at the U.S. National War College and former National Security Council specialist in Bosnia?”

Additional remarks suggested by Prof. Daniel Salvatore Schieffer:

“Io firmo certo questo appello, in nome della giustizia per tutti popoli della Bosnia-Herzegovina, e quindi anche dei Serbi, che hanno certo diritto allo stesso trattamento morale et legale degli altri. Questo principio fa parte dell'articolo numero 1 della carta dellle Nazioni Unite dei diritti dell'uomo.”

Additional remarks suggested by Prof. Alex Mezyaev:

"Та форма и методы, которые использованы МТБЮ и Международным судом ООН для признания геноцида в Сребренице в июле 1995 года лишь подчёркивают отсутствие реальных доказательств вины сербских военных и сербских властей. В этих условиях принятие резолюции означает выступление на стороне антисербских сил. "

Additional remarks suggested by barrister Christopher Black:

“It is necessary to include a demand for an admission by all Nato countries that they committed war crimes against the people of Serbia in the massive aerial
bombardment of the spring of 1999 in which all rules of war were broken
and that the final agreement to cease that bombardment by allowing Nato
forces to occupy Kosovo was forced on the Serbian government under threat
of the mass murder of the the people of Belgrade by American B52's which
threat was made to president Milosevic and others by Mssrs. Athisaari and
Chernomyrdin as agents of the USA; a threat in which they promised to kill
500,000 people in Belgrade and flatten the city unless the terms they
presented were accepted. Srebrinica, even if the Nato propaganda were true
(which I do not accept) pales in comparison against such terror.”

Additional remarks suggested by Professor Velko Valkanov, Bulgaria:

“Решително не мога да се съглася, че това, което стана в Сребреница, може да бъде квалифицирано като геноцид. Това бе трагичен епизод от една гражданска война, която враждебни на сръбския народ сили разпалиха. Заставам твърдо зад един протест срещу евентуалното признаване на някакъв геноцид в Сребреница.”
Проф.д-р Велко Вълканов,
председател на Българския национален съвет за мир

Additional remarks suggested by attotney David Peterson, Chicago USA:

Whatever the fate of the Srebrenica "safe area" population in July 1995, this most assuredly was not a case of genocide, notwithstanding a series of political judgments handed down by the ICTY, and later reiterated by the ICJ. The European Parliament's passage by a near-unanimous vote of a resolution proclaiming July 11 a Day of Commemoration of the Srebrenica Genocide only adds to the debasement of this important concept, and to the trivialization of real genocides past, present, and future.

Additional remarks suggested by attotney Cathrin Schütz, Berlin, Germany:

“I am not happy with the part of the appeal that condemns the act of the forces of Republika Srpska as „war crime“ and speaks about an equal death toll on the sides of the Muslims and Serbs around Srebrenica. I fully support the appeal's statement that ‘what really happened in Srebrenica in July of 1995 is an issue that is still not settled... why it occurred, or who was behind it.’ This is, in my view, the most correct way to address the issue. And if I have to admit that I do not know what happened, what is the purpose of admitting to some „war crime“? Is there any reliable information about ‘Srebrenica’ to this date? Information other than from Western media, Western politicians and their so-called NGO’s?”

Additional remarks suggested by Vladislav Kuprin, Russia:

Dear Mr. President and honorable Deputies,
I ask you not to adopt a parliamentary resolution that would treat the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995 in such language that could be interpreted as Serbia’s acceptance of responsibility for “genocide”.
All people of good will know that the description of those hard events as “genocide executed in Srebrenica by Serbs in relation to Moslems ” is a lie that is propagated by Moslems’ extreme nationalists and fanatics all over the world.
I ask you to support the truth, not lie for Serbia’s sake.

Additional remarks suggested by Andrey Tihomirov, Russia:

Необходимо полное изучение всех вопросов этой трагедии и привлечение всех сторон, а не одностороннее рассмотрение.

Yahoo! Answers: Latest Questions

2010-02-07 02:40:40 GMT

halo majmune, nazovi nekada

Real Lawyers Have Blogs

Colin O'Keefe — 2010-02-05 23:21:16 GMT

We have five launches in total this week with topics covered ranging from construction law to human resources to employment and human rights to oil and gas evaluation to nano and clean technology. Whew, a lot. Whether these blogs cover your area of expertise or not, feel free to drop in and take a look, maybe leave a comment if you feel so inclined.

Toronto lawyer Lisa Stam authors Employment & Human Rights in Canada. One of the reasons Lisa decided to start the blog was that social media in the workplace has been such an important legal issue that she wanted to get firsthand experience with it.
The professionals at Southwest Florida law firm Henderson Franklin publish the HR Law & Solutions blog. Topics covered on the blog include HR seminars, workplace safety, employee benefits and workplace policies.
Looking to provide a good resource for lawyers in the energy field, the Obsidian Energy Company has launched The Oil and Gas Evaluation Report. On the blog they aim to discuss current issues and developments pertaining to oil and gas evaluations for both the non-industry and industry professional.
AmLaw 200 firm Foley & Lardner launched their great-looking Nano & Cleantech Blog, with Dr. J. Steven Rutt —a Partner and the Vice-Chairman of the firm's Nanotechnology Industry Team—serving as the blog's editor.
Boasting a very sharp design, Construction Law Today is published by Chicago lawyer Joshua Glazov, who aptly describes the publication as "a legal blog about construction contracts, disputes, finance, and the people whose job it is to deal with them."

Culture | guardian.co.uk

James Lasdun — 2010-02-06 00:05:40 GMT

His short stories explore life's mysteries and mundanity in equal measure. James Lasdun celebrates Chekhov on the 150th anniversary of his birth

The canonised writers of the past have a tendency to assume a fixed expression in their readers' imaginations. Dostoevsky always appears in the same aura of morbidly enthralling hysteria; Proust in the same velvety atmosphere of hyper-attuned sensory receptiveness. To think of Tolstoy is to conjure, at once, the note of impassive grandeur, as of creation being set out in glittering ranks for inspection.

Anton Chekhov, whose short career was as momentous as any of these, has his own distinct tone and manner, but the impression it leaves is curiously elusive, offering reticence and hesitation in place of "personality", and a series of moods rather than a discernible attitude to life, even the attitude of uncertainty.

This elusiveness – a feature of both the life and the work – is a large part of what gives him his enduring fascination, as well as his striking modernity. In Chekhov literature seems to break its wand like Prospero, renouncing the magic of artifice, ceremony and idealisation, and facing us, for the first time, with a reflection of ourselves in our unadorned ordinariness as well as our unfathomable strangeness.

Ordinariness – the social fabric at its most drably functional – was to some extent his birthright. He was born in 1860, in Taganrog, a provincial town on the Sea of Azov. Said to be the shallowest sea on the planet, this minor appendage to the Black Sea shows up a muddy grey on satellite pictures, in contrast to the deep azure of the Black Sea itself. Whether this influenced the muted shading of Chekhov's prose – described by Nabokov as "a tint between the colour of an old fence and that of a low cloud" – history doesn't relate, but the city itself clearly became a key element in his imagination, forming the template for the stultifying provincial backdrops against which so many of his characters act out their dramas of ill-fated defiance or sullen resignation.

His grandfather was a serf who bought his family's freedom. His father, Paul, ran a grocery-cum-general store where Taganrog society congregated to purchase rice, coffee, paraffin, mousetraps, ammonia, penknives and vodka, and were duly cheated by the proprietor. Family lore records an occasion where a drowned rat was found in a cask of cooking oil. Instead of throwing out the oil, Paul had it "sanctified" by a priest, and continued selling it – an ur-Chekhovian episode, complete with a climax that is at once a non-event (business going on as usual), and a pitiless illumination of the father's character. A bullying, fanatically religious man as well as a total failure (he went bankrupt in 1876 and fled to Moscow with the rest of the family, leaving the 16-year-old Anton to fend for himself in Taganrog), the father too becomes a major generative element in his son's imagination. His presence can be felt in Chekhov's stories in the tyrannical father figures of "My Life" and "Three Years" as well as Jacob, the benighted zealot in "The Murder". In a more general sense, his spirit becomes absorbed into what might be called the negative pole in Chekhov's vision of reality: the force of oppression, petty-mindedness and outright cruelty that periodically discharges itself into the stories, sweeping over the characters as a sudden mood of melancholy or pure blackness (like the hallucinated Black Monk in the story of that title), or an impulse of vicious brutality, as in the notorious baby-killing episode of "In the Hollow".

As a human being – a doctor who went out of his way to help the poor and needy – Chekhov was unambiguously repelled by this aspect of life, and many of his better known remarks are either denunciations of it or defences of its opposite, which he identified chiefly as culture, rationality and scientific progress. There is the famous retort to Tolstoy, whom he revered as a novelist but rejected as a teacher: "Reason and justice tell me there's more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity or vegetarianism," while the much-quoted lines from his letter to the poet Alexey Plescheyev are perhaps the clearest articulation of his "beliefs" such as they were: "My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and absolute freedom – freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves."

But as an artist, Chekhov is more complicated than these apparently crystalline convictions suggest. Certainly his stories are full of people who espouse views very similar to the above – enlightened misfits, philanthropic gentry, civilised professionals (often doctors like himself) holding a candle for reason, justice and all the rest. But the stories themselves invariably subject this posture to challenges that cast doubt over its relevance, even its basic validity, so that to pin down an authorial point of view becomes impossible. Decency and rationality lead to failure, self-disgust and madness in pieces such as "A Dreary Story" or "Ward Number Six". In "The Princess", as in several other stories that feature do-gooding types, the philanthropic attitude is revealed as a rather nasty form of vanity. Even where it is sincere, it arouses baffling forces of resistance. Consider the well-intentioned couple in "New Villa", an engineer and his wife who settle in a rural spot after the engineer has built a bridge there. As if to extend the physical bridge into a social one, they attempt to befriend their peasant neighbours, only to find themselves opposed by malice and incomprehension at every turn. The bewildering irrationality of their treatment is brought home with gently comic poignancy by the story's ending, where the couple flee, selling their villa to a pompous government clerk who disdains the peasants, and is treated in return with paradoxical civility.

Comedy is of course another key element in Chekhov's imaginative armoury, and a further destabilising factor in the handling of his own "views". However tragic or despicable or exasperating the moralist in him found the world, the writer in him was constantly drawn to its comic variousness and oddity. No other writer has evoked boredom, dreariness, ennui with such richly entertaining specificity. Who but Chekhov could have conceived a story such as "A Hard Case", built around a living embodiment of stifling conventionality in the person of Belikov, who reduces a whole town to his own state of cowering joylessness before the inhabitants finally turn against him? The exorcising of such baleful spirits seems to have been one of the primal drives underlying the production of the 800-odd stories Chekhov left behind: happiness, in his work, almost always occurs against an encroaching darkness that requires constant warding off. In life he was known as an aficionado of jokes, pranks, festivities, the burlesque spirit in general. And his writing career, which he embarked on to make money for his family after his father's bankruptcy (as well as to pay for his own medical studies), began strictly as a comic enterprise: skits, spoofs, "humour pieces" full of daft names and slapstick comeuppances, churned out for sale to popular journals.

"Oh, with what trash I began," he remarked later in life, "my god with what trash." Turning away from "trash" seems to have entailed turning away, not from comedy itself, but from a certain conception of what constitutes a "story". The traditional idea, seen at its best in, say, Pushkin's "Queen of Spades", or Maupassant's much maligned "The Necklace", tended to rely heavily on contrivance to achieve its effects – ghosts, coincidences, characters suddenly going mad, priceless jewels turning out to be fake, and so on. The aim was to create a high stakes drama in a short space and above all to bring off a surprise ending; the twist in the tail that reverses one's understanding of what has gone before.

While Chekhov never totally abandoned this approach, he discovered early on how to create compelling stories that mirrored – or seemed to mirror – the casual movement of reality itself. In "The Steppe", the first of his stories to be published in a serious literary journal, the artless artistry of his later masterpieces is already substantially evolved. Here, instead of neat twists or morally pointed drama, we have simply the flow of life registering itself on the senses and emotions of a nine-year-old boy as he journeys with his uncle across the Ukrainian steppe.

There are fluctuations of mood, ranging from lyrical delight at the natural beauty of the steppe, to brooding menace as the bully Dymov begins picking on the boy. But rather than pressing these fluctuations into service as steps towards some definitive conflict or revelation, Chekhov traces them purely for their own sake, as events in his protagonist's consciousness. Most writers, having sketched a character like Dymov in such deftly illuminating detail, and built up the hostility between him and the boy with such psychologically precise touches, would have found the temptation to stage a showdown between them irresistible, but Chekhov merely lets the pent energies of the situation disperse into an inconsequentiality that even today – after so many imitators have made the gesture commonplace – feels shockingly true to life.

Meanwhile the comic impulse, ousted from its early role in shaping the structure of the stories, becomes reabsorbed into the grain of the narrative itself, blending in with the other principal tonalities to form the characteristic hybrid Chekhovian note, where the tragic and the farcical, the lyrical and the prosaic, the tender and the grotesque are inextricable from each other.

Time and again moments of potential solemnity are deflated by some mundane detail, the effect of which is a kind of constant assertion of the lifelike over the "literary". Gurov, in "A Lady with a Dog", famously responds to Anne's sudden onset of remorse after they consummate their affair, not by attempting to rise to her anguished, high-flown rhetoric, but by cutting himself a slice of watermelon and eating it in silence. Gusev, in the story of that title, dies a death as moving, in its understated way, as any of the great deaths in short fiction, but its pathos is all implicit; the outward detail being noted in precisely the kind of droll, off-kilter manner in which Gusev himself sees things. In death, sewn into a canvas bag, he is described as resembling – of all things – "a carrot or radish – broad at the head and narrow at the base". And in a stunning, unexpected coda that at once makes light of his death and confers on it a curiously sublime apotheosis, the story follows his corpse after it is thrown overboard, noting the reactions of the "delighted" little pilot fish as it sinks past them, observing the shark that "nonchalantly" rips open the bag, and then veering into a passage in which the casual and the cosmic mingle with transcendent strangeness: "Overhead . . . clouds are massing . . . one like a triumphal arch, another like a lion, a third like a pair of scissors."

With its final image, of the sky taking on "tender, joyous, ardent hues for which human speech hardly has a name", Gusev brings us close to the essence of Chekhov; the underlying state of mind that produces the two basic moods of his work – wonder and horror.

Again and again, as emotional pressures mount in his characters, the crisis expresses itself in this state of bewildered disjuncture. Olga, the compulsively loving woman in "Angel", enters it as soon as she finds herself without a mate, describing it in her homely way: "You see an upright bottle, say – or rain, or a peasant in a cart. But what are they for: that bottle, that rain, that peasant? What sense do they make? That you couldn't say . . ." The more intellectual narrator of "My Life" puts it in terms of alienation from his fellow townsfolk: "What kept these sixty-five thousand people going? That's what I couldn't see . . . what our town was and what it did, I had no idea." Sometimes even the inner life becomes a source of mystery. Gusev again, as he learns that he is going to die, experiences a kind of climactic bafflement at his own feelings: "A vague urge disturbs him. He drinks water, but that isn't it. He stretches towards the port-hole and breathes in the hot, dank air, but that isn't it either. He tries to think of home and frost – and it still isn't right."

"You confuse two concepts," Chekhov wrote to his friend AS Suvorin, who had been pressing him to be more definitive in his statements as a writer, "the solution of a problem and its correct presentation. Only the second is incumbent on the artist." The remark is generally taken as a kind of miniature manifesto; a defense of his own highly original, open-ended narrative art. This is valid as far as it goes, but it would be a mistake to regard Chekhov as a purely technical or aesthetic innovator. The radical attentiveness to emotion, the embrace of the trivia and inconsequentiality of daily existence, the fading ellipses as one mood gives way to another, the unpredictable shapes of his stories (ask yourself, as you read them, where they might be going: it's almost always impossible to guess, and yet when you get there it feels inevitable and entirely natural), the endings that "solve" nothing in the conventional sense but do indeed finalise the "correct presentation" of the problem – all this is premised, not on some simple ambition to strike a new note, but on a new way of looking at reality that required new methods to express it. There had been sceptics, agnostics, doubters, questioners of every kind before Chekhov, but perhaps no writer in whom the utter mysteriousness of existence was felt so deeply, or counterpoised by such inexhaustible interest in the teeming variety of forms – human and otherwise – in which it manifests itself. To have found a way of expressing both, with such profligate inventiveness and such apparent ease, was, above all else, the mark of Chekhov's genius; his unsurpassed greatness as a teller of stories.

A new Folio Society edition of Chekhov's stories is published this month. www.foliosociety.com

James Lasdun

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Spero News

2010-02-05 01:08:52 GMT

Fugitive Kazakh banker Mukhtar Ablyazov has vowed to continue publishing documents implicating Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev's son-in-law, Timur Kulibaev, has been involved in corrupt business deals, RFE/RL's Kazakh Service reports.

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drncavysidlo — 2010-02-04 15:24:58 GMT

	Vxhazování papíru z okna školy tak asi takhle nějak by paníučitelka Robenhauprová dělala "betlém"	From: drncavysidlo Views: 3 0 ratings
	Time: 02:39	More in Comedy

TechNet Blogs

windowscz — 2010-02-04 13:44:00 GMT

Patříte-li mezi uživatele systému Windows Vista, není asi třeba vysvětlovat, co miniaplikace (anglicky gadgety) jsou. Pro uživatele Windows XP krátké vysvětlení. Jedná se vlastně o malý prográmek, který je k dispozici kdykoliv na ploše vašeho počítače.

V systému Windows 7 zmizel postranní panel a miniaplikace si dáte libovolně na plochu. Stačí kliknout pravým tlačítkem myši na plochu a vybrat položku Miniaplikace (Gadgets). Následně se objeví okno se seznamem miniaplikací. Stačí pouze miniaplikaci vzít a přetáhnout ji na požadované místo na ploše. Rychle se na ně můžete podívat stiskem tlačítek Win + D, najetím do pravého dolního rohu obrazovky na náhled plochy nebo stiskem tlačítka Win + G. Tato poslední kombinace zobrazí miniaplikace nad právě otevřeným oknem.

V systému Windows 7 je několik miniaplikací již zahrnuto, další si můžete stáhnout z Internetu. Mezi nejpoužívanější miniaplikace patří hodiny a kalendář, ale každý si samozřejmě může nainstalovat další podle své potřeby. O čem mnoho uživatelů neví je možnost mít jednu miniaplikaci spuštěnou vícekrát a využít tak její funkce. V případě hodin tak můžete mít přehled o reálném čase v konkrétní zemi. Nemusíte pak mít starost s tím, že někomu za oceánem zavoláte uprostřed noci.

K dispozici je v současné době několik zajímavých miniaplikací. O některých z nich se budeme postupně zmiňovat na tomto blogu.

Jezebel

Tracie — 2010-02-02 17:00:00 GMT

Previously on Lost, Locke was resurrected from the dead, Jack was detonating a nuclear bomb, and everyone—the Survivors, the Others, the Hostiles, the audience—wanted to find answers. Here's our ultimate primer to tonight's season premiere.

Brief (as possible) recap: In 2007, Jack, Kate, Sayid, Hurley, Ben, Sun, and Locke's dead body hopped on Ajira flight 316 after creepy-eyed Eloise Hawking (Daniel Faraday's mother) told them it was the only way to get back to The Island to (presumably) retrieve those they left behind. And it worked! Sort of. They all managed to end up in the same place, but they landed in different times. (Jack, Kate, Sayid and Hurley joined Jin, Sawyer, Juliet, and Daniel in 1977, while Sun, Ben, Captain Frank and a resurrected Locke were still in 2007.)

Sun and Ben followed Locke (who isn't the same after returning from the dead) to meet up with Richard Alpert (aka Guyliner), and on Locke's orders, they all traveled to the four-toed statue (which has been confirmed to be Taweret) to find Jacob. Ben and zombie Locke entered the statue where Ben stabbed Jacob—fn his own free will, but totally under the suggestion of zombie Locke—while Richard, Sun and the Others/Hostiles waited on the beach. That's when Ilana and Bram—who claim to be "the good guys"—showed up with Captain Frank and showed Richard something disturbing: Locke's dead body.

Meanwhile, back in 1977, mad scientist Daniel Faraday was shot and killed by his mother (Eloise) while she was pregnant with him (trippy, I know!) and Jack decided that the only way to correct all the shit that they fucked up was to detonate the nuclear bomb that the Hostiles hid under their Temple, with the theory that if they could destroy the construction of the Swan (aka The Hatch)—the source of "unique electromagnetic fluctuations" on the Island—then Desmond would never have activated the fail-safe in 2004, and Oceanic flight 815 never would have crashed on the Island.

After finally getting Sawyer, Kate, and Juliet on-board with this plan, they traveled to the construction site of the Swan to toss the bomb in the hole that DHARMA workers were drilling. However, it didn't go off, and the magnetic energy went haywire, sucking everything metal into said hole, including Juliet, who got tangled in a bunch of chains. After she fell down the hole, Juliet—who was barely alive—landed next to the nuke, and began smashing it with a rock until it blew, causing a bright white light, and leaving viewers waiting - for nine freaking months - to find out what the hell happened.

(You can read the full recap of the finale of season 5 here.)

So, now with that out of the way, onto the questions:
1.) When are they now?
If Jack was correct, then the passengers of Oceanic 815 should be on that plane in 2004, and safely landing in LAX. The title of tonight's season premiere is "LA X," so presumably, the plan has worked. But was it really that great of a plan? Most of them were in pretty shitty situations that had, for the most part, been resolved by being on the Island:
Sun and Jin have a bad marriage and their daughter will most likely never be conceived.
Jack is becoming an alcoholic.
Kate is headed to jail, most likely, for the rest of her natural life.
Sawyer is an asshole conman.
Shannon is a selfish bitch.
Boone wants to engage in incest.
Hurley is tortured by what he deems is his curse of the Numbers.
Locke is paralyzed.
Charlie is a junkie.
Claire will give her unborn son Aaron up for adoption.
Rose is dying of cancer and Bernard's heart will be broken.
Michael and Walt don't have a great relationship.
Mr. Eko is still tortured by the guilt of getting his brother killed.
Ana Lucia is still miserable.
Libby must have some shit going on.
And as for Desmond—who wasn't on the flight—who the fuck knows what his alternate life has in store for him, but it probably doesn't involve happiness with Penny, or the birth of their son Charlie.

Theory: While the first three seasons of Lost centered on the the castaways trying to get off the Island, the fourth and fifth season centered on why they wanted to get back to it, the sixth and final season might play out sort of like It's a Wonderful Life, except in this case, It's a Shitty Life. Instead of seeing how crappy life in the "real world" would be without them, the passengers of Oceanic 815 will experience how crappy life in the "real world" is with them.

For the castaways, the purpose—of trying to get off the Island, trying to get back on the Island, trying to destroy the Island with a nuclear weapon—is always they same: they want to find their own personal paradise, and until they do, they will always be "lost."

In Dostoyevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov—which has remarkably similar themes to Lost: spirituality, free will, morality, faith, doubt, and reason—paradise is described as life itself.

Do not weep, life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we don't want to realize it, and if we did care to realize it, paradise would be established in all the world tomorrow.

Much of the mysticism of Lost is tied up in a "higher power," which culls from a number of sources like Buddhism, Egyptian gods, the 12-Step program, and Christianity. Take a look at this season 6 promo photo (click image to view full size):

Obviously based on da Vinci's The Last Supper—which is supposed to depict the exact moment when Jesus said to his apostles, "Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me"—Locke is the resurrected one, Jack stands in the place of Doubting Thomas, and Kate sits in what's arguably (and obviously it's totally a female!) Mary Magdalene's place.

Which brings me to Milton's Paradise Lost, the epic poem that tells the story of Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden, aka The Fall of Man, which is also based on the concept of "free will." The most applicable passage:

The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

Basically, when these idiots crash-landed on the Island, their problems had been solved and they were too caught up in their own paranoia to recognize what they had around them. So they ran around with guns and bombs and fucked shit up, instead of eating mangoes, getting a tan, enjoying themselves, and avoiding the Smoke Monster.

That brings us to the next question:
2.) What is the Smoke Monster?

Theory: It's totally this guy:

He takes the form of dead bodies on the Island (first Christian, and now Locke).

He's Jacob's unnamed nemesis—aka, the Man in Black—who, in last year's finale, promised to find a "loophole" to kill Jacob. And it would appear that he did. Black and white have also been a major theme of Lost, ever since the pilot when Locke explained backgammon to Walt.

Black shirt would obviously represent black, while Jacob (seen in a white shirt) would represent light. While it would appear that Black would be "evil" and White would be "good," it's a little more complex than that. I think instead, the colors—and Black Shirt and Jacob, respectively—represent negativity and positivity. In their discussion on the beach in the opening season of the last episode, Black Shirt expresses dismay at the approaching Black Rock (the slave ship) telling Jacob that they will just come to the Island and destroy it, insisting that "it always ends the same." Jacob tells Black Shirt that "it only ends once" and that "everything leading up to that is progress." Jacob is obviously a "glass is half full" guy while Black shirt is "glass is half empty." North and south poles are required for magnetic fields, of which the Island is apparently a gigantic version.

So what else? There are a bajillion unanswered questions! Here are a few more:

3.) Is Claire dead?
4.) What's with the food drops?
5.) Who ran over Sayid's wife?
6.) What's the loophole?
7.) Who built the statue?
8.) Who was Ben having Sayid kill?
9.) How did the DHARMA barracks get updated furnishings?
10.) What's the significance of Ben's painting?
11.) Why did the Others speak Latin?
12.) How did Charlie appear to Hurley?
13.) What's the significance of the Numbers?
14.) Why does Eloise Hawking have a different last name than her son Daniel Faraday?
15.) Why doesn't Daniel Faraday have a British accent?
16.) Why doesn't Daniel have a relationship with his father Charles Widmore?
17.) Who is Penny's mother?
18.) Why did Christian's body disappear but Locke's did not?
19.) Why can't women on the Island give birth?
20.) What's inside the Temple?
21.) Why doesn't Richard age?
22.) Who is Ilana?
23.) Who built the ancient time wheel?
24.) Why does Miles have a different last name from his father, Dr. Chang?
25.) Why does Widmore want to get back to the Island so badly?
26.) Why didn't Eloise want to return to the Island?
27.) Who funded DHARMA?
28.) What's the Annapolis station like?
29.) Why does Walt have special powers?
30.) Why does Miles hear dead people?
31.) How did Claire's mother recover from her irreversible coma?
32.) What dangerous mission was Christian on in Australia that he needed a body guard?
33.) Why was Amy (Horace's wife) so obsessed with "the children"?
34.) Was Karl conceived on the Island?
35.) If so, how and by whom?
36.) Libby!?!?!?!?!?
37.) Why did Jacob need to touch certain castaways in their flashbacks?
38.) Is Bram really a good guy?
39.) What's fake Locke's plan?
40.) Geronimo Jackson!?!?!?!?!
41.) How did Eko's drug plane land on the Island?
42.) How did Eloise and Charles come to live on the Island?

It's very unlikely that all of these questions will be answered in this final season, because it's clear that even Richard Alpert is clueless about some things. Basically, what we can expect is that some of our burning questions will be resolved, but that, in the end, nobody really has all the answers…except maybe God. (And is Jacob God!?!?!?!?)

Artes. Noticias, vídeos y fotos de Artes en lainformacion.com

2010-02-02 16:28:09 GMT

Vicente Aranda estrenará el próximo viernes su última película, 'Luna caliente', una metáfora de la España "violada por la dictadura", según explicó hoy. Eduard Fernández y Thas Blume desatan sus instintos en esta cinta que el cineasta ha querido situar en el año 70, en pleno Proceso de Burgos. Emilio Gutiérrez Caba, José Coronado, Carla Sánchez y Héctor Colomé, completan el reparto. 'Luna caliente', con guión de Aranda a partir de la novela homónima de Mempo Giardinelli (con la que ganó el Premio Nacional en México en 1983), cuenta la historia de Juan (Fernández) un poeta que trabaja en la Unesco en París y regresa a Burgos a pasar unas vacaciones. Un viejo amigo, el doctor Muniente (Gutiérrez Caba), le invita a cenar en su casa. Allí conocerá a su hija Ramona (Blume), una sensual joven, que le hará brotar sus instintos más básicos. Aranda habló con el autor de 'Luna caliente' quien le confesó que la historia era una metáfora de la Argentina de 1977. El director español quiso traer la historia a España y realizar su propia metáfora de una España "violada por la dictadura". "Todo país ha intentado demostrar que ha sido de otra manera", consideró el también responsable de títulos como 'Amantes', 'Carmen', 'Juana la Loca' o 'La pasión turca'. "Me interesa que mi cine sea testimonial", argumentó el realizador, que fue uno de los 300 intelectuales encerrados en el Monasterio de Montserrat a finales del régimen franquista. Mentiras que parecen verdad Aranda estuvo encerrado allí tres días y las imágenes nunca vistas sobre el Proceso de Burgos, y contadas por otros, las ha querido recrear en este filme. "Me hacía gracia reconstruirlo", admitió el director, que en imágenes en blanco y negro muestra cómo los reos de ETA "armaron la marimorena" en el juicio y los militares llegaron a sacar sus sables. "El cine tiene la capacidad de que las mentiras sean verdad", apuntó. Aparte del momento histórico, a Aranda le interesaba la historia apasionada que narra Giardinelli en su novela. "Cuando leí la novela me recordó al 'Doctor Jekyll y Míster Hyde', de Stevenson. La violencia engendra monstruos", anotó. Pero aquí no hace falta brebaje para que los personajes cambien su comportamiento y falten a sus principios, como explicó, ya que el papel encarnado por Fernández muestra una dualidad. "Por lo menos, el hombre es cinco hombres a la vez", anotó citando a 'Los hermanos Karamazov'. Eduard Fernández se preparó a fondo para encarnar a este personaje "dual". "Es un intelectual que no se moja ni en el agua, que vive fuera de España y, de repente, se desatan sus instintos y muestra su parte más animal". "Una mujer fría y potente" Por su parte, Thas Blume es Ramona, una joven que se enfrenta "de forma valiente a su sexualidad", según Aranda. Al inicio de la película, Juan, cautivado por la belleza de la joven y por los instintos que le acechan, viola a la chica. "Es una mujer fría y a la vez caliente y potente", dijo la actriz, conocida gracias a su papel de Cris en la serie 'Sin tetas no hay paraíso'. Gutiérrez Caba también es una especie de "míster Hyde" en la película. Un médico contrario al régimen franquista que cambia cuando se emborracha. "La borrachera y la maldad también le hacen ser un monstruo", dijo el actor. La actriz Carla Sánchez (que da vida a la hermana activista de Juan), está muy vinculada con la política, pero "tiene un conflicto con su feminidad". Mientras que José Coronado da vida a un policía "casposo, frívolo, 'lameculos' y corrupto".

Artes. Noticias, vídeos y fotos de Artes en lainformacion.com

2010-02-02 14:35:49 GMT

MADRID, 2 (EUROPA PRESS)

Vicente Aranda estrena este viernes su última película, 'Luna caliente', una metáfora de la España "violada por la dictadura". Eduard Fernández y Thaïs Blume desatan sus instintos en esta cinta que el cineasta ha querido situar en el año 70, en pleno Proceso de Burgos. Emilio Gutiérrez Caba, José Coronado, Carla Sánchez y Héctor Colomé, completan el reparto.

Con guión de Aranda a partir de la novela homónima de Mempo Giardinelli (con la que ganó el Premio Nacional en México en 1983), 'Luna caliente' cuenta la historia de Juan (Fernández) un poeta que trabaja en la Unesco en París y regresa a Burgos a pasar unas vacaciones. Un viejo amigo, el doctor Muniente (Gutiérrez Caba), le invita a cenar en su casa. Allí conocerá a su hija Ramona (Blume), una sensual joven, que le hará brotar sus instintos más básicos.

Aranda habló con el autor de 'Luna caliente' quien le confesó que la historia era una metáfora de la Argentina de 1977. El director español quiso traer la historia a España y realizar su propia metáfora de una España "violada por la dictadura".

"Todo país ha intentado demostrar que ha sido de otra manera", consideró el también responsable de títulos como 'Amantes', 'Carmen', 'Juana la Loca' o 'La pasión turca'. "Me interesa que mi cine sea testimonial", argumentó el realizador, que fue uno de los 300 intelectuales encerrados en el Monasterio de Montserrat a finales del régimen franquista.

MENTIRAS QUE PARECEN VERDAD

Aranda estuvo encerrado allí tres días y las imágenes nunca vistas sobre el Proceso de Burgos, y contadas por otros, las ha querido recrear en este filme. "Me hacía gracia reconstruirlo", admitió el director, que en imágenes en blanco y negro muestra cómo los reos de ETA "armaron la marimorena" en el juicio y los militares llegaron a sacar sus sables. "El cine tiene la capacidad de que las mentiras sean verdad", apuntó.

Aparte del momento histórico, a Aranda le interesaba la historia apasionada que narra Giardinelli en su novela. "Cuando leí la novela me recordó al 'Doctor Jekyll y Míster Hyde', de Stevenson. La violencia engendra monstruos", anotó.

Pero aquí no hace falta brebaje para que los personajes cambien su comportamiento y falten a sus principios, como explicó, ya que el papel encarnado por Fernández muestra una dualidad. "Por lo menos, el hombre es cinco hombres a la vez", anotó citando a 'Los hermanos Karamazov'.

Eduard Fernández se preparó a fondo para encarnar a este personaje "dual". "Es un intelectual que no se moja ni en el agua, que vive fuera de España y, de repente, se desatan sus instintos y muestra su parte más animal".

"UNA MUJER FRÍA Y POTENTE"

Por su parte, Thaïs Blume es Ramona, una joven que se enfrenta "de forma valiente a su sexualidad", según Aranda. Al inicio de la película, Juan, cautivado por la belleza de la joven y por los instintos que le acechan, viola a la chica. "Es una mujer fría y a la vez caliente y potente", dijo la actriz, conocida gracias a su papel de Cris en la serie 'Sin tetas no hay paraíso'.

Gutiérrez Caba también es una especie de "míster Hyde" en la película. Un médico contrario al régimen franquista que cambia cuando se emborracha. "La borrachera y la maldad también le hacen ser un monstruo", dijo el actor.

La actriz Carla Sánchez (que da vida a la hermana activista de Juan), está muy vinculada con la política, pero "tiene un conflicto con su feminidad". Mientras que José Coronado da vida a un policía "casposo, frívolo, 'lameculos' y corrupto".

Artes. Noticias, vídeos y fotos de Artes en lainformacion.com

2010-02-02 13:26:37 GMT

Eduard Fernández y Thaïs Blume desatan sus instintos en la película, ambientada en el Proceso de Burgos, que se estrena el viernes

MADRID, 2 (EUROPA PRESS)

'Luna caliente', con guión de Aranda a partir de la novela homónima de Mempo Giardinelli (con la que ganó el Premio Nacional en México en 1983), cuenta la historia de Juan (Fernández) un poeta que trabaja en la Unesco en París y regresa a Burgos a pasar unas vacaciones. Un viejo amigo, el doctor Muniente (Gutiérrez Caba), le invita a cenar en su casa. Allí conocerá a su hija Ramona (Blume), una sensual joven, que le hará brotar sus instintos más básicos.

MENTIRAS QUE PARECEN VERDAD

"UNA MUJER FRÍA Y POTENTE"

Mahalo Answers

balbec — 2010-02-01 21:32:24 GMT

how many karamazov brother are there?

Permalink

RIA Novosti

2010-02-01 22:30:00 GMT

Russia’s first legal casino since laws clamping down on gambling were introduced in 2009 dubbed Orakul (Oracle) opened on January 30 in the Azov City special gambling zone bordering the Krasnodar territory and Rostov Region. Orakul was launched seven months after casinos across the country were shut down under a law confining all gambling activity to four specially designated areas.

Spero News

2010-02-01 17:22:15 GMT

Fugitive Kazakh businessman Mukhtar Ablyazov has urged Chinese authorities to investigate a Kazakh-Chinese oil and gas deal that he claims was corrupt, RFE/RL's Kazakh Service reports.

ATP Men's Tennis

noreply@blogger.com (WTA and ATP Tennis Blogs) — 2010-01-31 19:35:00 GMT

PBZ Zagreb Indoors Doubles Draw

(1)Cermak/Mertinak vs Fleming/Skupski
Istomin/Motti vs Melzer/Petzschner

(3)Damm/Polasek vs Levinsky/Zverev
Kohlmann/Peya vs J.Murray/Marray

Delgado/Moser vs Clement/Rochus
(WC)Skugor/Zovko (4)Hutchins/Kerr

Becker/Schuettler vs (WC)Draganja/Zovko
Kas/Korolev vs (2)Knowle/Lindstedt

russia source:news - Google News

2010-01-31 14:00:08 GMT

RIA Novosti

Business Watch
News-Leader.com
Azov City, Russia -- Half a year after Russia closed all of its gambling casinos and slot-machine halls, the first new casino opened Saturday under a plan ...
First new Russian casino opens under gambling planeTaiwan News

all 36 news articles »

RT

2010-01-31 01:30:00 GMT

After a ban on gambling outside special areas, the first legal casino opened Saturday in the southern Krasnodar region.

CNN iReport - Latest

scima123 — 2010-01-30 17:59:14 GMT

On Saturday January 30, Kazakhstan democratic opposition parties, Alga, National Social Democratic party Azat and Communist Party of Kazakhstan held a protest in response to President Nazarbaev's that China is interested in renting 1 million hectares of land in Kazakhstan for farming purposes. There were nearly 2000 people at today's protest

Earlier in the week Kazakh businessman and politician Mukhtar Ablyazov called Nazarbaev's statement "the second stage of a long-term deal between China and Kazakhstan." He said Nazarbaev's second son-in-law, Timur Kulibaev, had received a significant bribe from China's State Petroleum Corporation officials several years ago in exchange for control of part of Kazakhstan's oil and gas sector.

Latest Adobe News

AJLcom — 2010-01-29 10:23:33 GMT

Recently, while I was reading and enjoying Atlas Shrugged (by Ayn Rand), I came across a list of books somebody suggested everybody read. Unfortunately I have forgotten where I saw it... But, I took his list, massaged it a little, and came up with my own. Here is a list of the next 10 books coming up from my list: Title Author The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli Slaughter-house Five Kurt Vonnegut 1984 George Orwell The Republic of Plato: Second Edition Plato The Brotherrs Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger The Wealth

TrishaLyn

Trish — 2010-01-28 15:00:31 GMT

Tuesday January 19th

The final day of Affiliate Summit started bright and early with the Pinnacle Awards scheduled before the last day’s keynote by Brian Clark. This was a change for the conference agenda, which usually puts the Pinnacle Awards in the afternoon after other sessions. I like the change because it gets the awards out of the way, and didn’t interfere with any other sessions or independent parties planned in the evening. I seem to remember last year that some of the award winners had to jet quickly after the awards to get to a charity poker tournament, among other places.

The winners have been blogged all over, but here’s a quick recap just in case this is the only blog you read (unlikely): Affiliate of the Year – Nicholas Koscianski. Affiliate Manager of the Year – Matt McWilliams. Exceptional Merchant – eBay Partner Network. Affiliate Marketing Advocate – Angel Djambazov. Best Bloggger – Jeremy Schoemaker. Affiliate Marketing Legend – Scott Jangro.

Next up was Brian Clark’s keynote. He admitted at the beginning that it was his first keynote, so I guess he did pretty well all things considered. Of course, I have a whole post devoted to the keynote that I’ll go into later.

Once again, I intended to go into more sessions on Tuesday, but got sidetracked with all the networking possibilities. As well, I was given a demo of a new affiliate network of sorts, Impact Radius. It gives merchants and affiliates a way to also reach out and work with more traditional media partners. I had an opportunity to interview one of the founders, Lisa Riolo, about the launch of the new network, which will also be another blog post coming up soon.

I made it a point to get to Jim Kukral’s session How To Get Motivated For Success!, which I’ll of course be posting a recap for. It was a great kick in the pants to get going with projects that have been stalled for awhile. I know Eric Nagel wrote an entire post about Jim’s kick in the ass.

While in Jim’s session, I heard via Twitter that Daniel M. Clark of Geek Dads Weekly was invited to speak on the GeekCast.fm Live panel. I was bummed since I wanted to participate with that panel/group like I did at Affiliate Summit East 2009, but happy for Daniel. I went into the session for a moment, but left in favor of running back up to my room for a few things. As I understand, the session was some industry talk followed up with a lot of “how to podcast” type questions, so it looks like I personally didn’t miss much information that I didn’t already know.

The evening ended with a fail on the part of the Rio. A BlogUp mixer was planned at the VooDoo Lounge, which was official and everything, not just 100 people crashing the lounge for a mixer. Unfortunately, it was raining and since the lounge has an indoor and an outdoor area, the lounge ended up double booked with another much larger group of people. So we tried cramming into the bar at the steakhouse for awhile, overwhelming the poor bartender on duty. Finally, the Rio moved the charade down to the iBar and served complimentary champagne as a mea culpa.

I stayed for awhile, the it was on to another Las Vegas tradition – the buffet! A large group of us went to the Carnival World Buffet at the Rio, one of my favorite buffets ever. Then again, I haven’t been to many. It was good times and good food with good people – one of my favorite activities! After dinner, I went and hung out with Heather Smith & Julie Vazquez, who were still at the iBar. Had a very pleasant last night of Affiliate Summit West 2010!

openDemocracy

openDemocracy — 2010-01-27 20:34:56 GMT

Author:

Oleg Pavlov

Summary:

Jobs are scarce, pension rises mediocre and the local authorities have even taken away the Christmas trees. But despite the disquiet, appetite for protest in Tatarstan remains low, says Oleg Pavlov

The snowstorm in Kazan began on New Year’s Eve. At the start, it was like a fairytale: midnight, a full blue moon seen through few clouds, stars twinkling here and there. Set against a sea of sparklers, the light snowfall created a truly magical picture. By the morning of January 1st, however, the picture had given way to something different — an unforgiving blizzard, which was to continue for almost four days. According to the meteorologists, the city saw some two months’ worth of snow dumped on it in that short space of time.

Following the snowfall, moving around the city became extremely difficult. The mayor’s office tried to convince locals that all services were on emergency stand-by, but I saw almost no snow-removal equipment on show. My friend, who works as a conductor on the longest bus route in town (around 60 km), confirmed there was almost no such equipment on the roads. What seemed to be missing were the special snowploughs. There were tractors and bulldozers, sure, and occasionally you could see machines for pushing the snow to one side of the road. But mechanical snow collectors — the ones which were which so widespread in Soviet times — were nowhere to be seen.

There were enormous traffic jams. On some four-lane roads, only two remained open to traffic. Pavements were heaped in snow for over ten days, including those right in the centre, alongside the city’s Kremlin. If you were further out in the new residential district of Azino, you would be walking amongst contemporary high-rises, but forced to navigate some narrow clearing, as if in some remote Siberian village! Naturally, on the other side of the road, a machine would be busy pushing the snow back from the road, making even this small clearing difficult to pass. And this was the situation for the lucky ones amongst us. Many other districts were left without any kind of pedestrian clearings at all. People were simply forced into walking along the centre of the road, risking their lives in the process.

What is surprising is that Kazan and Tatarstan are not Western Europe. Snowfalls like this are not rare here: indeed, they take place almost every year.

Many people are also unable to hide their disappointment that, for the second time in as many years, Kazan made no preparations at all for the New Year celebrations. There were almost no decorations or lights in the city, and many of the municipal Christmas trees simply vanished. In the past, the trees always acted as a focal point for children’s winter celebrations: alongside the trees authorities always put on snow slides, and wonderful fairytale towns. But not so now for entire districts in Kazan. For two years now, the 300,000 inhabitants of Azino and Gorki districts have been deprived of their usual (and very popular) New Year entertainment. No one forgets we are in the middle of a financial crisis, but they do remember that there were parties even in the poverty-stricken 1990s. Of course, none of this makes the current mayor of Kazan, Ilsur Metshin, any more popular. The public is willing to put up with difficulties, but is never well disposed towards politicians who intentionally deprive citizens of the few joys they used to have.

And the hard times are getting even worse for many. It’s still extremely difficult to find a job. My friend Ilmir has been looking for one since August. He found work as a driver twice: once towing cars for an insurance company, and later delivering goods to shops. On both occasions, his employers were in no hurry to register him officially, and were quite happy to exploit him mercilessly. He worked between twelve and fourteen hours a day, with virtually no days off. His monthly salary on the first job was some 2,500 rubles (£51), while the second job paid even less - just 1800 rubles (£37). This money was not even enough for bread and water.

Ilmir’s 18-year-old stepson finds himself in a similar position. He finished a vocational high school last year, and has yet to find a job. He tried to register as unemployed to collect benefits, but he was turned down at the employment centre: they said that they had reached their “ceiling”. Perhaps this might explain why official statistics still claim a relatively low level of unemployment in Russia.

Comparatively, pensioners find themselves in a slightly better position. At the beginning of the year, the vast majority had their pension increased, albeit by much less than they might have expected. This was in line with the government carrying out a process of ‘valorisation’, i.e. taking into account service records from the Soviet period. These records are calculated from the moment that a person began to work. The longer the period of unbroken service, the higher the amount paid for pension and medical expenses.

The concept of the ‘unbroken service record’ means that if there is a gap of more than 2 months between leaving one job and starting another, the record is considered to have been interrupted and the reckoning, as it were, starts all over again from scratch. Given the unemployment in Russia, there is almost no one with an unbroken record, which provides another excuse for calculating the pension at a lower rate and paying almost no medical expenses.

In the Soviet Union everyone had to work. If you were not recorded as being in employment, you were considered to be parasite. For this reason, poet Joseph Brodsky, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature and the most famous of the regime’s “parasites”, would not have had single day of work service to his name. The government also played a further trick by excluding time spent studying at universities and professional institutions, time spent in the army for men, and time spent on maternity and childcare leave for women. Both my parents are pensioners: my father was deprived of 10 years of work service, and my mother of 3 years. Accordingly, the additions to their pensions came to just 1,000 (£20) and 800 (£16) rubles respectively. And they are among the lucky ones! Reports on local television suggested that some pensioners had an insulting 3 rubles (6p) added to their pensions.

Given that it has a history of trying to deceive them, it is hardly surprising that most Russians do not trust their government. Just take the government programme of co-financing pensions, for example, which was heavily trailed all throughout 2009. The offer was that for every 1000 rubles voluntarily invested in the pension fund, the state would add another 1000. A good offer, on the face of it. I chose not to take part, and it was an easy decision: I have 20 years before I get my pension and our state changes the rules of the game every year. There are no guarantees that in two decades I will get any of this money. I would be better off spending these 12,000 rubles every year on something useful, something that I need right now. It seems that the majority of my fellow citizens think the same way, if the miserable failure of the programme is anything to go by.

Five or ten years ago, pensioners might have taken to the streets to complain against the misery, just as they did during the monetisation protests. This time, however, they are not protesting: they’re tired and, besides, it’s pointless to complain. Today’s Russians have little energy for politics. You’ve got to agree with those historians who say that any given generation cannot endure more than one revolution. The current generation of Russians has already had its fair quota.

Political Change

Over the last few months, Tatar eyes have been firmly focused on Russian President Medvedev, and who he would nominate as the republic’s new president. Mintimer Shaimiev has occupied the post since 1991 (he was actually already in charge of the region earlier having, in 1989, been appointed first secretary of the Tatar Regional Committee of the Communist Party). Shaimiev’s political endurance is impressive. He has survived nearly twenty years of political turbulence. He clung on despite being associated with the failed 1991 coup. He has survived Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin. He even held out for two years under Medvedev.

This March, however, his term is due to run out and there were many rumours as to whether he would be re-appointed. Not that there was ever likely to be an open battle in Tatarstan, of course: it has been a long time since the region has witnessed one of those. But it is true to say that within the government apparatus, there was a great deal of tension.

Mintimer Shaimiev explains the reasons for his resignation at the press conference in Kazan

In the end, Shaimiev himself put an end to the intrigue by ruling himself out of the race. Undoubtedly, the federal centre had a hand in this move, and Medvedev was quick to announce that he would offer the post to the current Prime Minister of the region, Rustam Minnikhanov. This decision, it seemed, was itself somewhat of a compromise: on the one hand, Minnikhanov is clearly one of Shaimiev’s henchmen; on the other he is relatively young (52) and pro-active. All the same, one should remember that politics in Tatarstan are clan-based: it is unlikely that anyone outside the circle of relations and close friends would be appointed to any position of power. In this sense, the appointment of Minnikhanov is unlikely to change much. Indeed, Shamiev himself may very well retain his influence and be reincarnated in another position, for example, as speaker of the regional parliament.

For this very reason, it is also unlikely that we will see a change in the way the authorities will deal with so-called ‘Murtazin affair’. This was a controversial case involving a high-ranking government official, Irek Murtazin, who was put on trial just before the New Year. Murtazin was actually Shaimiev’s personal press secretary at the turn of this century, before being nominated head of the local state radio company. Murtazin’s fall from grace began when he was removed from this latter post, accused of sympathising with terrorists in his coverage of the autumn 2002 Nord-Ost hostage crisis. From that moment onwards, Murtazin became an opposition journalist and politician, registering as a candidate for elections to various parliaments.

The charges brought against Murtazin related to a blog entry he wrote in autumn 2008, in which he claimed the Tatar president had died while on holiday in Turkey, and a later book (The Last President of Tatarstan), in which he detailed several unflattering events supposed to have taken place behind the scenes in higher circles. He also described how Shaimiev became the First Secretary of the Regional Party Committee and then President in 1991. Mintimer Shaimiev wrote to the courts personally, accusing Murtazin of defamation. The case lasted six months and ended with Murtazin being found guilty on two counts — defamation and personal humiliation. He was sentenced to 9 months of corrective hard labour. It was the first trial where the head of a regional government personally observed proceedings as plaintiff.

On 15 January, Tatarstan’s Supreme Court upheld the sentence. There were many who hoped that it would not. Despite Murtazin’s far from straightforward character — Lev Zharzhevsky, an esteemed local journalist, believes “he and Shaimiev deserve each other” — the scandal united many people in Murtazin’s defence. Of course, there were few voices speaking out: even if someone is incensed by the sentence, he dare not show this openly. As a result, the local press limited itself to dry reporting from the courtroom. Just Vechernaia Kazan, the region’s lone independent newspaper, dared the following commentary: “Tatarstan has achieved yet another first for contemporary Russia. Mintimer Shaimier’s former press secretary has become the first person to receive a prison sentence for writing a book and blog that did the authorities didn’t agree with”.

Officials describe themselves as “servants of the people”, but it is the elected politicians that serve the people – the officials are only auxiliary staff. But at the moment they are ruling Russia…

But never mind about that. I wanted to talk about a white horse. On 3 January, during the blizzard, I was out with a friend, a cameraman called Khaidar. We had stayed too long with friends in a cottage settlement not far from Azino, where we live. When we went outside, we saw buses that were trapped in the snowdrifts right next to the house. We realized that we would have to walk the 4 kilometres home, and off we trudged through the knee-deep snow.

Things were slightly better in Azino, but the cars still skidded on the snow, and some policeman was drowning out the blizzard by shouting at a poor driver who could not let his car pass. We were struck watching this picture. And when we turned around, we found ourselves literally face to face with a white horse. The horse wished us a Happy New Year. When it trotted off, we noticed that there was a rider on it. They both calmly disappeared into the white fog. And we stood there in envy: in envy of the white horse that had appeared out of nowhere in the city and in envy of the rider. Neither was afraid of the blizzard.

Oleg Pavlov is a journalist based in Kazan

Editor's note:

Kazan is one of Russia's largest cities. It stands at the confluence of the Volga and Kazanka rivers and is the capital of the republic of Tatarstan. Under President Minitimer Shaimiyev the republic is proud of its ethnic diversity and the fact that Muslim Tatars and Orthodox Russians live peacefully side by side. Kazan is an important commercial, industrial, cultural and academic centre. Ivan the Terrible conquered it for Russia in 1552. During World War II the city became a centre of military production and many factories were evacuated there from parts of Russia occupied by Nazi troops. After the collapse of the USSR Tatarstan made no secret of its separatist aspirations, but Putin's Kremlin succeeded in reasserting its authority. In 2005 Kazan celebrated its Millenium. Qolsharif Mosque, the largest in the Russian Federation, was built for this occasion.

Sideboxes

'Read On' Sidebox:

Nationalism and the Drive For Sovereignty in Tatarstan, 1988-92. Origins and Development (Studies in Diplomacy), by Sergei Kondrashov, 1999, Palgrave Macmillan

Tatarstan is the Muslim girlfriend Putin locks up, by Venetia Thompson, The Spectator, 2nd April 2008:

More than a Cog in the Kremlin's Machine; A Political Portrait of Tatarstan, by Danielle N. Lussier, Berkeley, Russian Analytical Digest, 42/08, Research Center for East European Studies, University of Bremen, Center for Security Studies, ETH, Zurich

Religious Tolerance, Transitions online, by John Elliott and Amy Beavin, 13 November 2007,

Kazan City tourist website

Republic of Tatarstan, official website

Sidebox:

Russia is not only Moscow politics and St. Petersburg’s monuments.

Read other Letters from Provincial Russia:

Oryol: Fleeced, by Elena Godlevskaya

Orenburg: Perm blaze sets Russia alight, by Elena Strelnikova

Orenburg: Panicking about swine flu in Orenburg, by Elena Strelnikova

Oryol: Life with a Heart Complaint, by Elena Godlevskaya

Pskov: The Paratroopers’ Town, My Town, by Anna Lipina

Nizhny Novgorod: Life in Nizhny Novgorod doesn’t stand still, by Lira Valeyeva,

Samara: Notes from Samara, by Sergei Khazov,

Kazan: Life in Kazan: defying the crisis, by Oleg Pavlov

Sakhalin Island: The Island of Cyclones and Abundant Snows, by Ksenia Semenova.

Khabarovsk: Far East is still far away, by Alexei Minin.

Saratov: Summer in Saratov, by Olga Bakutkina

Kirov: The Vyatlag Archipelago, by Ekaterina Lushnikova

Lipetsk: You can get a life – in spite of everything! By Oksana Zagrebnyeva

Izhevsk: A Sunny Mayday in Izhevsk, by Nadezhda Gladysh

oD-wide classification

Country:

Russia

City:

Kazan

Topics:

Democracy and government

Section style:

oD Russia

Sections to display in:

oD Russia

pfblogs.org: The Ad-Free Personal Finance Blogs Aggregator

Sellsius — 2010-01-27 16:19:25 GMT

Guest Post by Douglas Lazovick I am a real estate professional (Arizona RE license) and a social media enthusiast. I particularly love Twitter’s platform and how their open API encourages... Thanks for subscribing to our feed. If you want more, please click on the headline. Thank you! ...

Sellsius real estate marketing blog

Joseph Ferrara (2) — 2010-01-27 16:19:25 GMT

Guest Post by Douglas Lazovick I am a real estate professional (Arizona RE license) and a social media enthusiast. I particularly love Twitter’s platform and how their open API encourages people to make it even better. Recently, somebody posed the question to me “How can real estate professionals use twitter to get business.” And this is [...]

MSDN Blogs

Czech MSDN Team — 2010-01-27 14:40:33 GMT

Zajímá Vás IT? Troufáte si říci, že máte znalosti o technologiích Microsoft? Pokud jste odpověděli 2x “ANO”, a navíc jste student nebo studentka, využijte poslední příležitosti v tomto školním roce a dne 30.1., což je nadcházející sobota otestujte své znalosti. Jen mimochodem, pokud jsou Vaše znalosti stejně velké nebo ještě větší než Vaše ego, tak je pro Vás připravena hlavní cena 8000 USD :)

Co je třeba udělat?

1. Vyplňte krátký registrační formulář na https://imaginecup.com/Registration/Default.aspx (nezapomeňte zaškrtnout, že jste student).

2. Ve svém profilu https://imaginecup.com/UpdateProfile.aspx zaškrtněte kategorii IT Challenge.

3. 30.1.2010 se přihlaste na www.ImagineCup.com Vaším jménem a heslem a pro kategorii IT Challenge bude k dispozici již zmíněný ostrý kvíz. Přihlaste se vždy s předstihem abyste mohli využít celou hodinu, kterou budete mít k dispozici. Časová okna, ze kterých si můžete vybrat jsou uvedena na stránce kategorie IT Challenge. Časy jsou Greenwichské, tedy k nultému poledníku, což znamená, že v období zimního času je Česká Republika posunuta o hodinu napřed a časová okna pro Česko jsou následující: 1:00 – 2:00, 4:00 – 5:00, 7:00 – 8:00, 10:00 – 11:00, 13:00 – 14:00, 16:00 – 17:00, 19:00 – 20:00 a 22:00 – 23:00.

4. Po dokončení testu pošlete otisk závěrečné obrazovky kvízu z emailové adresy, kterou jste uvedli při registraci do Imagine Cup na adresu iccz@microsoft.com. V emailu uveďte velikost trička nebo konkrétní knihu z MSPress (budeme se snažit vyhovět) a poštovní adresu. Cenu je možné také vyzvednout přímo na naší pobočce.

5. Na základě ověření Vaší registrace a výsledku testu Vám pošleme tričko nebo knihu.

Hodně štěstí :)

Filip

Good Experience

Mark Hurst — 2010-01-27 03:01:03 GMT

I'm happy to announce the initial speaker list for the Gel 2010 conference, to be held on Thursday-Friday, April 29-30 in New York.

Speaker list (so far)

Here's a partial list of the speakers who will present on-stage at Gel 2010:

• Will Shortz, editor, New York Times crossword

• Randy Garutti, Chief Operating Officer, Shake Shack

• Olivia Fox Cabane, expert in persuasion

• David Bornstein, author, "How to Change the World" (great book on social entrepreneurship)

• Rachel Sussman, photographer of the oldest living things in the world

• The Ebony Hillbillies, African-American string band

• James Carse, author, "Finite and Infinite Games", "Breakfast at the Victory", and "The Religious Case Against Belief"

• John McWhorter, linguist

• Matt Haughey, founder, Metafilter.com

• Ysaye Barnwell, vocalist, composer, and teacher; and member of Sweet Honey in the Rock

• The winner of our first Gel Challenge (TBD soon by a vote of all Gel 2010 attendees - more info coming soon on the Challenge page)

...and several other speakers, to be announced on the Gel 2010 page.

Day 1 experiences

Day 1 (Thursday, April 29) will start in the theater with a welcome session and a morning icebreaker for all attendees. Then during the afternoon, Gel attendees will have a choice of tours, workshops, and seminars offering experiences all over New York City.

As always, the thinking behind Day 1 is that the best way to learn good experience is to have good experience. So the purpose of the experiences below is not just to have a great tour or workshop, but to think about why it's a good experience, and how you can bring that back to your own work.

Thursday activities include...

• Brooklyn Brewery Tour with a Tasting of Artisanal Beers and Cheeses

• Central Park Sound Walk

• Generating Creative Energy with Noah Scalin

• Original Greenwich Village Food and Culture Walking Tour

• Interactive Improv Session

• Concrete Picture Safari

• Experience Retail Tour

• Juggling with the Flying Karamazovs

• Transportation Alternatives Bike tour

• Underground Tunnel Tour

• Trip to Dead Horse Bay

• Zentangle Workshop

• Subway Music Tour with Zina Saunders

• Speaking workshop with Erin McKean

• Werewolf with Charlie Todd

See more info on the Gel 2009 Day 1 list.

More info about Gel

For a quick intro to Gel, watch the montage from Gel 2009, below:

There are many other videos from past presenters at Gel Videos.

Hope you'll join us! Sign up for Gel 2010.

Kiva Loans

2010-01-26 19:20:12 GMT

$300 of $400 raised.

Started raising funds on Jan 26, 2010

Born in 1973 in Dassa-Zoumé, in the Collines department in Bénin, ADJOVI Clarisse Nadine has been living for 6 years in the Hlacomey district in Cotonou, economic capital of Bénin. Married to and living with HOUNNOU K. Pascal, Clarisse Nadine is the mother of four children, all enrolled in school. The couple share responsibility for supporting the household.

In order to help with family expenses, Clarisse Nadine sells manioc flour at Tokpa kpodji, international market of Bénin. She buys her inventory at Azovè and Ikpinle, two marketplaces where foodstuffs are sold in Bénin. Clarisse Nadine already has 15 years' experience in her business but has not yet received a loan from ALIDé. She is requesting her first loan from ALIDé with a view to growing her working capital and expanding her business.

Translated from French by Teresa Kramer, Kiva Volunteer

360 Cities

2010-01-23 19:16:12 GMT

Panoramic photo by Andrey Litvinov.

360 Cities

2010-01-23 19:16:15 GMT

Panoramic photo by Andrey Litvinov.

About.com Asian History

2010-01-23 05:16:19 GMT

President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has ordered the removal of a huge arch and golden statue of his predecessor, which currently graces the middle of Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan.

The statue of Saparmurat Niyazov, also known as "Turkmenbashi" (leader of all the Turkmen), stands on an arch almost 250 feet tall, and rotates to face the towards the sun throughout the day.

It is just one of a number of monuments to Turkmenbashi's cult of personality. The former leader died in December of 2006. President Berdymukhamedov has been gradually dismantling the cult... though whether he will replace it with one of his own is still in question.

Photo by giladr on Flickr.com.

Gold-plated Turkmenbashi to be Removed originally appeared on About.com Asian History on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 05:16:19.

Permalink | Comment | Email this

FriendFeed - pkedrosky

2010-01-23 00:21:46 GMT

Paul Kedrosky

@HLMorgan As I say regularly, and as your Karamazov tweet just reminded me, I want to be your for a week.

1 hour ago from Twitter - Comment - Like

Required Elements

LauraS — 2010-01-22 07:18:40 GMT

Well, Sasha Cohen made her comeback, and what a show it was! She was clean and fabulous and is in second place by the teensiest of margins. The winner of the night was 2008 national champion and most adorable girl in the world, Mirai Nagasu. Nagasu was absolute magic tonight! What a joy. Rachael Flatt completed a clean triple/triple combo and is juuuust in third. Sadly, Ashley Wagner fell on her triple lutz and lies in fourth place, but that's not bad considering she had a fall. Still, it's a long way to climb...she is now quite a longshot for the Olympic slot.

It was a roller coaster night...some Olympic dreams that may not make it out of the short program are Alissa Czisny's (seventh place), Emily Hughes (eighth), Bebe Liang's (tenth) and Caroline Zhang's (eleventh). But Saturday's free skate is going to be exciting. Only two spots and right now, and it will be a fight to the finish!

Full results after the jump:

Place	Name	TSS =	TES +	PCS +	SS	TR	PE	CH	IN	Deduction -	Start #
1	Mirai Nagasu, Pasadena FSC	70.06	40.20	29.86	7.43	7.07	7.75	7.57	7.50	0.00	#7
2	Sasha Cohen, Orange County FSC	69.63	39.26	30.37	7.61	7.14	7.96	7.57	7.68	0.00	#15
3	Rachael Flatt, Broadmoor SC	69.35	39.39	29.96	7.39	7.18	7.68	7.57	7.64	0.00	#3
4	Ashley Wagner, SC of Wilmington Inc	62.55	34.68	28.87	7.39	6.96	7.14	7.39	7.21	1.00	#23
5	Christina Gao, Northern Kentucky SC	56.26	32.71	23.55	6.04	5.61	5.96	6.04	5.79	0.00	#6
6	Amanda Dobbs, Peninsula SC	56.11	31.83	24.28	6.29	5.64	6.18	6.14	6.11	0.00	#12
7	Alissa Czisny, Detroit SC	54.18	27.34	27.84	7.29	6.61	6.71	7.11	7.07	1.00	#4
8	Emily Hughes, SC of New York Inc	53.75	28.75	25.00	6.61	5.75	6.50	6.18	6.21	0.00	#18
9	Alexe Gilles, Broadmoor SC	53.54	29.97	23.57	5.96	5.54	5.96	6.07	5.93	0.00	#9
10	Beatrisa Liang, All Year FSC	51.98	27.68	25.30	6.39	5.89	6.39	6.43	6.54	1.00	#17
11	Caroline Zhang, All Year FSC	49.94	25.74	25.20	6.39	6.00	6.25	6.61	6.25	1.00	#11
12	Kristiene Gong, All Year FSC	48.11	27.02	21.09	5.64	5.00	5.32	5.29	5.11	0.00	#22
13	Chelsea Morrow, Greater Grand Rapids FSC	46.35	26.60	19.75	5.11	4.71	5.04	5.11	4.71	0.00	#8
14	Melissa Bulanhagui, University of Delaware FSC	45.60	23.96	21.64	5.25	5.14	5.39	5.64	5.64	0.00	#14
15	Becky Bereswill, Houston FSC	44.60	21.18	23.42	5.93	5.64	5.82	5.93	5.96	0.00	#19
16	Samantha Cesario, SC of New York Inc	44.33	24.51	20.82	5.43	4.89	5.25	5.29	5.18	1.00	#5
17	Blake Rosenthal, SC of Wilmington Inc	43.43	22.95	21.48	5.64	5.14	5.61	5.29	5.18	1.00	#20
18	Laney Diggs, All Year FSC	42.87	23.21	20.66	5.39	4.79	5.29	5.25	5.11	1.00	#13
19	Tatyana Khazova, Broadmoor SC	41.63	22.85	18.78	4.82	4.29	4.75	4.79	4.82	0.00	#1
20	Kayla Howey, DuPage FSC	35.59	16.06	19.53	5.14	4.68	4.79	4.89	4.93	0.00	#21
21	Ellie Kawamura, All Year FSC	33.51	16.06	19.45	5.18	4.57	4.71	4.89	4.96	2.00	#10
22	Rebecca Stern, University of Delaware FSC	32.49	17.43	17.06	4.54	4.07	4.04	4.43	4.25	2.00	#2
23	Christina-Maria Sperduto, St Paul FSC	31.62	12.59	19.03	4.86	4.46	4.68	4.96	4.82	0.00	#16

Spero News

2010-01-20 22:20:23 GMT

Fugitive Kazakh banker and politician Mukhtar Ablyazov says President Nursultan Nazarbaev's son-in-law, Timur Kulibaev, received enormous bribes from Chinese oil companies seven years ago, RFE/RL's Kazakh Service reports.

Playbill.com : News

2010-01-20 20:52:00 GMT

The Flying Karamazov Brothers will jump into Off-Broadway's Minetta Lane Theatre for a limited four-week engagement of their new show 4PLAY, beginning Feb. 8.

TheaterMania.com

2010-01-20 18:23:42 GMT

The Flying Karamazov Brothers will bring their new show 4PLAY to the Minetta Lane Theatre for a limited run, February 8 - March 7. Paul Magid will direct the production, which uses a script he's created with the company and features choreography by Doug Elkins and musical...

The Daily Beast - Cheat Sheet

2010-01-20 10:57:00 GMT

Turkmenistan's late president, Saparmurat Niyazov, the self-styled Turkmenbashi or "Father of All Turkmen" was a bizarre man. He renamed the months of the year after members of his family, banned opera, ballet and circus performances, made playing...

L.A. NOW

Martin Beck — 2010-01-20 06:30:58 GMT

Michael Lazovsky, a 14-year-old videographer from Los Angeles, captured compelling footage of a twister Tuesday afternoon over Long Beach. Returning home after a visit to Orange County, the Lazovsky family pulled off the 405 freeway near Belmont Heights to get...

Netgazete.com

2010-01-19 23:20:00 GMT

Türkmenistan'ın başkenti Aşkabat'ta tepesi eski lider "Türkmenbaşı" Saparmurat Niyazov'un altın heykeliyle süslü dev anıt yerinden kaldırılacak. Dev anıtın kaldırılması, ülkeyi 20 yıl yöneten ve "Türkmenbaşı" olarak bilinen Niyazov çevresindeki kişisel kültün ortadan kaldırılmasına yönelik yeni bir adım olarak görülüyor.

BBCTurkce.com | Haberler

2010-01-19 14:15:51 GMT

Türkmenistan Cumhurbaşkanı Kurbankulu Berdimuhammedov, ülkenin eski lideri Saparmurat Niyazov'un heykelinin süslediği dev kemerin başkent Aşkabat'tan kaldırılması talimatını verdi.

The Independent - Frontpage RSS Feed

2010-01-19 00:00:01 GMT

Turkmenistan's president has ordered the removal of a rotating golden statue of former dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, his most decisive move yet to dismantle one of the world's most eccentric personality cults.

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