CHARLESTON, South Carolina (AP) -- IMAX theaters in several Southern cities have decided not to show a film on volcanoes out of concern that its references to evolution might offend those with fundamental religious beliefs.
"We've got to pick a film that's going to sell in our area. If it's not going to sell, we're not going to take it," said Lisa Buzzelli, director of an IMAX theater in Charleston that is not showing the movie. "Many people here believe in creationism, not evolution."
The film, "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea," makes a connection between human DNA and microbes inside undersea volcanoes.
Buzzelli doesn't rule out showing the movie in the future.
IMAX theaters in Texas, Georgia and the Carolinas have declined to show the film, said Pietro Serapiglia, who handles distribution for Stephen Low, the film's Montreal-based director and producer.
"I find it's only in the South," Serapiglia said.
Thanks, Ronald Reagan, for making stupidity a core American value. Stupid is as stupid does, and it's all getting quite repetitive and boring.
''When it's chartered [for extranational CIA torture renditions], it never has the logo of the Red Sox on it," [owner] Morse said. ''They cover it up."
The Enron documentary will have an invitation-only local premiere on April 20 at River Oaks Theatre, just a mile or so from the homes of its troubled two former top executives.
The film, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which has already been shown at film festivals, will be available to all Houston moviegoers April 22 and in the other top 20 markets around the country a week or so later.
"I think it's important to have the premiere in Houston for the most obvious reason: Houston served as the headquarters of Enron and was the city most affected by the company's rise and fall," said Alex Gibney, the film's Grammy and Emmy-winning director, producer and writer.
Of all the characters in the complex dramatic debacle, this 110-minute film focuses most heavily on two River Oaks-area denizens, ex-Chairman Ken Lay and ex-CEO Jeff Skilling.
Both men have pleaded not guilty to multiple felony charges in connection with the company's death spiral and are scheduled to be tried in January.
[...]
The movie, which was well received at the Sundance Film Festival in January, features many Houstonians, shots of downtown, and even a surprisingly beautiful night scene over East Texas oil refineries.
Although there's plenty of Texas, it also spends a lot of time in California, in part because of the delicious audio tapes of traders cashing in on the state's energy crisis.
The film is based on the book of the same name by Fortune magazine writers Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, who appear in the movie.
For Lay and Skilling (and Fastow, et al.) to be The Smartest Guys in the Room, we are talking about a pretty small room. "The Second-Most Mendacious Guys in the Country" doesn't scan as well, though.
The trailer looks fast-paced, thrillerish and good. I'll review it when it comes out.
Although this was said by architect Thom Mayne, winner of the Pritzker Prize, it neatly summarizes the problem of political polling. People want solutions that work, not false binary Red/Blue choices, and we will never find them in a poll-driven political culture. When you ask people what they want and you give them two lousy options, they will generally pick something. That act of selection doesn't represent desire so much as deprivation and resignation.
SPRINGFIELD, ILL. - Three months after leaving his job, a former Halliburton Co. procurement manager in Kuwait received a $1 million kickback from a subcontractor he had helped select for millions of dollars' worth of business, federal prosecutors say.
In the first criminal charges to emanate from Houston-based Halliburton's military-contract work in the Middle East, a Peoria, Ill., grand jury has charged both the one-time procurement manager and a Saudi businessman with defrauding the federal government out of more than $3.5 million.
The 10-count indictment made public Thursday accuses Jeff Alex Mazon, 36, and Ali Hijazi, a Saudi national and managing partner of Kuwait-based La Nouvelle General Trading and Contracting Co., of scheming to drive up subcontractors' bids for supplying fuel tanker trucks at a U.S. military airport in Kuwait.
Neither Halliburton nor its KBR subsidiary was named in the indictment.
Historians' future summaries of W's administration will consist of a single word: "fraud."
"The Ebbers trial is a bellwether for Lay," said David Berg, a Houston trial lawyer who has watched both cases. "Both are huge financial frauds at the heart of the businesses, both involve billions of hidden losses ... and both men claim to have been removed from the day-to-day business."
Because the jury convicted Ebbers on all charges, they must have searched hard for evidence against him on each charge, highlighting the difficulty of getting jurors to believe the "What's a poor boy to do?" defense, he said.
Ebbers, who grew up without much in Mississippi, testified that he was never made aware that accountants were falsifying books at the company. The defense claims former Chief Financial Officer Scott Sullivan masterminded the fraud.
Lay, who was raised on a Missouri farm, has said much the same thing in his own defense, down to blaming his former CFO for much of the trouble at Enron.
Farm, schmarm. In Lay's case, a simple comparison of what he did privately (sold Enron stock) to what he said publicly ("buy Enron stock") should help clarify his involvement in the Enron frauds.
Whenever leaders prophesy, profound things happen. When their prophesies turn out to be calculated lies, the fortunes and lives of their followers are lost.
Because society reacts to what leaders say, whenever they promote imaginary resources, false prospects, or non-existent threats (think WMDs), the proper response is to relieve them of their positions and send them to jail. Ebbers will likely spend the rest of his life in prison, and so should Ken Lay who squirreled away enough fraudulently-gained investments to guarantee himself an annual income of $912,000 for life.
Remember: the proposed Social Security private accounts will be invested in the enterprises of the Ebberses and Lays of the world. Doesn't that make you want to bet your life savings on their integrity?
ROME -- Italy will start the process of withdrawing troops from Iraq in September, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said Tuesday, marking the beginning of a pullback of a key member of the U.S.-led coalition forces there.
"Beginning in September we will begin a progressive reduction of the number of our soldiers in Iraq," Mr. Berlusconi said on a television talk show that was to be broadcast late Tuesday evening. The comments were confirmed on the government's official Web site.
Italy has maintained a force of around 3,000 soldiers in Iraq since 2003, one of the largest forces in the coalition. Despite persistent protests from the center-left opposition and public opinion polls which showed a majority of Italians opposed involvement, Mr. Berlusconi has remained a steadfast ally of the U.S., affirming his support for the mission even in the face of setbacks for Italian forces.
The most dramatic of those setbacks arose on March 4, when U.S. soldiers at a checkpoint outside the Baghdad airport opened fire on a vehicle containing an Italian intelligence officer and a recently released Italian hostage. The intelligence officer, who had secured the release of the hostage only hours before, was killed, further inflaming public opinion in Italy and drawing the ire even of some of Mr. Berlusconi's close political allies, who raised questions about whether Italy had become too subservient toward the U.S.
The only thing missing is the crucial context of the story.
In the article above, the carefully chosen generic word "hostage" is deflecting the much wider context of the story — namely, that this supposedly generic "hostage" was Giuliana Sgrena, the journalist who had reported on possible use of napalm by American forces:
«We buried them, but we could not identify them because they were charred from the napalm bombs used by the Americans». People from Saqlawiya village, near Falluja, told al Jazeera television, based in Qatar, that they helped bury 73 bodies of women and children completely charred, all in the same grave. The sad story of common graves, which started at Saddam’s times, is not yet finished. Nobody could confirm if napalm bombs have been used in Falluja, but other bodies found last year after the fierce battle at Baghdad airport were also completely charred and some thought of nuclear bombs. No independent source could verify the facts, since all the news arrived until now are those spread by journalists embedded with the American troops, who would only allow British and American media to enrol with them. But the villagers who fled in the last few days spoke of many bodies which had not been buried: it was too dangerous to collect the corpses during the battle.
When the hostage isn't a mere bystander but an active reporter of possible war crimes by the people who killed her countryman while he was trying to protect her, the word "hostage" just won't do.
For a newspaper as self-appointedly serious as the Wall Street Journal, omitting such salient details from a life-and-death story of international importance crosses the boundary from simple incompetence into calculated complicity.
After two wars where oil wells were torched, chemical factories bombed and radioactive ammunition fired, the first thing Iraqi women ask when giving birth is not if it is a boy or a girl, but if it is normal or deformed. The number of cancer cases and children born with deformities has skyrocketed after the two Gulf Wars.
"Since 1991 the number of children born with birth deformities has quadrupled," said Dr. Janan Hassan, who runs a children's clinic at a hospital in Basra in southern Iraq. "The same is the case for the number of children under 15 who are diagnosed with cancer. Mostly, it is leukemia. Almost 80 percent of the children die because we neither have medicine nor the possibility to give them chemotherapy."
Doctors have also recorded an extreme rise in cancer cases among adults. "In 2004 we diagnosed 25 percent more cancer cases than the year before and the mortality rate increased eight-fold between 1988 and 1991," said Dr. Jawad al-Ali of the Sadr Hospital in Basra.
Hassan and al-Ali are two of 15 Iraqi specialists who have joined forces with German scientists in a project to research diseases provoked by acts of war, financed by the German Academic Exchange Service.
In Iraq, burning oil wells, bombed chemical factories, demolished production sites for chemical weapons and even the use of radioactive ammunition are just a few of the things which may have triggered diseases there.
"As epidemiologists, we are quite sure that other diseases than cancer and birth deformities also have to be considered," said project leader Wolfgang Hoffmann from the University of Greifswald.
The scientists involved in the project met through the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). All have a special interest in the consequences of using depleted-uranium (DU) ammunition, the German project's main focus.
In the two US-led wars on Iraq, missile warheads containing the depleted uranium-238 were used. While it is only lightly radioactive, it is an extremely tough waste-product to contain because the uranium pulverizes and contaminates the whole surrounding area with radioactivity at the moment of the explosion.
"Naturally, the nations leading the war refuse to acknowldege that this type of uranium can be harmful. But as an epidemiologist, I have to say that every bit of radiation can give rise to cancer. It's just a question if what was fired in this case led to an increase in the number of cancer cases," said Professor Eberhard Greiser from the University of Bremen.
As with many of the questions arising from the project so far, there is no definite answer. But al-Ali tried to give a partial answer.
"In Basra in 1991, the Americans and the British dropped at least 300 tons of this kind of ammunition in one battle. That was the battle where they destroyed all the tanks of the then Republican Army. After the war, the population was urged to gather all weapons and sell them to the government. Also if people had guns or bazookas or whatever they found in the desert, they were told to bring it with them," he said.
According to al-Ali's calculations, approximately 750,000 people in Basra and the surrounding areas were exposed to radiation as a result.
The doctors say the connection between the contamination of hundred of thousands of people on one side and the rising number of cancer cases on the other is beyond doubt, but proving it is not easy.
"To prove it, we would have to demonstrate that there was uranium 238 on the patients' clothes or in their body fluid. And besides, cancer is a multi-causal disease. How would we be able to give 100 percent proof?" al-Ali asked.
Despite the resigned attitudes among many of her colleagues, Hassan firmly believes that the radioactive missiles used by the Americans and the British are responsible for the increased incidence of cancer in Iraq since the early 1990s. She hopes a future independent Iraqi government will seek compensation from Washington and London. "We have to demand it. That is the price of the war," she said.
What evil policymakers could have devised a such pointlessly cruel strategy as to bomb with radioactivity, with the full expectation that civilians would be recruited for gathering up the weapons that remain?
What executives and policymakers did the two Gulf Wars have in common? Hmmm, it'll come to me...
Likewise, Jenna won't remember her father or the people he works for saying to her, you better worry about Social Security. She's busy getting plastered.
Militiamen and renegade soldiers have raped and beaten tens of thousands of women and young girls in eastern Congo, and nearly all the crimes have gone unpunished by the country's broken judicial system, an international human rights group said Monday.
Hundreds of new rapes are reported every week, but only 10 soldiers and militants have been convicted of rape in relatively lawless eastern Congo since the end of the country's devastating war in 2002, New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a report.
"Perpetrators of sexual violence are members of virtually all the armed forces and armed groups that operate in eastern Congo," according to the 52-page report.
According to neocon rhetoric, Congo should be next up for liberating. After all, the Inaugural Address made clear the Bush administration's global advocacy of liberty as a human right.
Tens of thousands of women and girls have been raped. Where are the moral values in Bush's foreign policy? How can the pro-life party tolerate such a situation of nationwide, institutionalized sexual abuse?
Easy. "Democracy" and "liberty" are on the march only wherever there is oil underfoot — or Ariel Sharon nearby.
I guess my erratic behavior deserves some kind of explanation. (On the other hand, maybe it doesn't.) Here goes: I still mean every word of my self-proclaimed demise. I hate what's happening to America. But there are a lot of hours in the day. I can work, I can save money, I can prepare to expatriate, and there is still a little time left over to bitch and moan, to wave my cyberfist at the self-inflicted tragedy that is GOP America.
It's an addiction, this thing we call blog. The odd reality is that at some point over the past three years the habit took hold of me and acts like it doesn't want to let go. Throughout these last eight weeks that followed my pompous announcement of retirement I have been jonesing to return. I come upon a fact about Ken Lay that deserves repetition and I know it will go ignored not only by the mainstream media but most of the blogosphere as well. So I post it anyway. God help me, I cannot control myself.
So fuck it, I'm back. At least partially. Maybe not as often as before or as prolific as the Greater Bloggers Among Us, but not exactly dead, either.
It was a fun funeral but a nerve-wracking burial. I'll return all your flowers and gifts as soon as I can, I swear.
(Please also help me in re-welcoming the recently resurrected No More Mister Nice Blog to the re-blogosphere.)
I just had an email from some folks who have been away and don't know how this all got started. For those who are playing catch-up on the news, I am providing a link to my column about "The Question", Touching American Journalism's Third Rail.
Tom Bevan has an [sic] great piece at Real Clear Politics, PLAYING HARDBALL WITH MAUREEN DOWD, in which he makes some good points about this gal who probably needs a bit of the old Jeff Gannon to relieve some of that pent up whatever.(1) He also describes the media bubble that protected John Kerry from pesky questions like those about releasing his entire military record until after the election.(2) This is the same bubble that keeps Sen. Hillary Clinton from having to reconcile her statements about the economy and Social Security that I so elegantly framed in "The Question."(3)
12:54pm
(1) The old Jeff Gannon was known to have relieved some of that "pent up whatever" except he didn't do it on behalf of female clients, or is Jeff confessing here to something we didn't know about before? That there was a little AC in DC too?
(2) Jeff Gannon is perhaps the last person on earth with credibility to talk about media bubbles, having been outed as a (barely) functioning part of the worst one yet.
(3) Jeff Gannon, whose maiden name was James Guckert, and whose piss was digitally shared with thousands of potential clients, is unqualified to refer to anything he ever did as "elegant."
Sorry, Jeff. You're looking increasingly desperate. Turn the tables on them and tell us all the details of how you managed to get into the White House briefing room to shill for a party that will let you do its dirtiest work — in public and in private — but never accept you as a human being.
A former high school teacher faces the possibility of up to 20 years in prison after a jury determined Monday she had sex with an underage special-education student.
Jurors found Adrianne Hockett, 26, guilty of one count of sexual assault of a child, agreeing with prosecutors that she had sex with a student, then 15, in the summer and fall of 2003 while she was a teacher at Hastings High School in the Alief school district. Hockett had been charged with three counts.
Hockett acknowledged giving her student special attention but has denied having sex with the teen, who prosecutors say reads at a first-grade level.
[...]
The teen testified during the trial he told his mother he was going to Hockett's southwest Houston apartment for tutoring to help with his reading skills. But he said he and Hockett had sex, drank beer and smoked marijuana.
Reads at first-grade level? Had sex? Drank beer? Smoked marijuana?
What stellar qualifications! America loves a fallen man. Once he publicly renounces the beer and pot, he should become a viable candidate for governor of Texas. No, let's think bigger — make that president of the United States.
