The dark secrets of Roman Polanksi (Christopher Sandford, 25th August 2007, Daily Mail)
Just before he returned to Los Angeles, however, the director accepted another commission to take a series of photographs - again of adolescent girls - this time for French Vogue's associate magazine Vogue Homme.His idea was to "show them as they really are" - which meant "sexy, pert and thoroughly human" - and by adolescent, he meant girls of 13 or 14 years old.
When Polanski got to Los Angeles a friend suggested "the perfect candidate'" for these photographs - the younger daughter of an aspiring actress.
Samantha Jane Gailey was 13, but no innocent.
She would later explain that she'd had sex twice in the year before she met the director, that she'd drunk alcohol and that "once I was under the influence of Quaaludes [a sedative used as a recreational drug in the 70s] when I was real little".
But Gailey was also a schoolgirl who kept pet rats and had a Spiderman poster on her bedroom wall.
She was also four years under the age of sexual consent then required in the state of California - and 30 years younger than Polanski - but that didn't matter to him.
When a friend later asked about her age, he snapped: "She was about to turn 14."
Polanski set off to visit Gailey, and her mother, at their small, nondescript home in the western Los Angeles suburb of Woodland Hills on the afternoon of February 13, 1977.
The director was disappointed on first sight.
She was "a good looking girl, but nothing sensational", he said. Nevertheless he showed her the photographs he'd taken for French Vogue and she agreed to a shoot the following Sunday.
When Polanski arrived a week later he found Gailey waiting for him wearing a pair of jeans and a patchwork blouse.
The director proceeded to take the girl to an isolated spot half a mile away. Then, after a few shots, he asked her to remove her shirt.
The published photographs, he assured her, would be cropped so there would be no "boobies", as he called them. Polanski maintained later that Gailey was "entirely at ease".
The director didn't arrange to see Gailey again until Thursday, March 10.
This time Polanski first took her to actress Jacqueline Bisset's house and then to his friend Nicholson's mansion on Mulholland Drive.
The Oscar-winning actor wasn't there, but his then girlfriend, actress Anjelica Huston was.
On the way over Polanski was reported to have asked the girl whether she was "still a virgin" but the director insisted she said she started having sex "when I was eight".
When they reached Nicholson's house, Polanski gave the girl a glass of Cristal champagne and again asked her to pose topless, which he insisted she did "with great aplomb".
Shortly afterwards he also suggested she get into the Jacuzzi, and quickly produced a Quaalude, which she took.
"I can barely remember anything," Gailey told the Grand Jury later. "I was kind of dizzy, you know, like things were kind of blurry."
Polanski took more photographs, before taking off his own clothes and joining her in the Jacuzzi.
The girl asked to go home, and he told her "I'll take you home soon".
But when she repeated her request, he told her to lie down in a nearby guest house.
Polanski said afterwards that Gailey had quickly assured him she was feeling better - after which, he maintained, "very gently, I began to kiss and caress her".
But the 13-year-old girl's account was different.
She insisted that she told the director she wasn't feeling better, and when he kissed her she told him: "No" and "keep away".
In the next few minutes, according to the girl, Polanski raped and sodomised her.
He later described them as "making love" but Gailey violently disagreed.
When asked if she resisted, she said: "Not really - because I was afraid of him".
Eventually an unrepentant Polanski drove Gailey home.
When her mother and sister saw the topless shots, they were horrified.
But her mother was even angrier when she discovered that Polanski had actually had sex with her daughter - so angry that later that evening she made a formal complaint to the police.
The following evening Polanski was arrested in the foyer of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where he kept a suite.
Detective Philip Vannatter, a tenyear veteran, who 17 years later would go on to be lead investigator in the O.J. Simpson case, asked if Polanski had the slightest idea why he was being arrested. "I honestly don't know," the director replied.
Polanski's celebrity in Hollywood meant that he was never handcuffed.
Indeed one of the district attorneys called him a "great artist". Reality set in when the booking sergeant asked him: "What in hell do you think you're doing, going around raping kids?"
Moth study backs classic 'test case' for Darwin's theory (Steve Connor, 25 August 2007, INDEPENDENT)
Now a Cambridge professor has repeated the key predation experiments with the peppered moth, only this time he has taken into account the criticisms and apparent flaws in the original research conducted 50 years ago. Michael Majerus, a professor of genetics at Cambridge University, has spent the past seven years collecting data from a series of experiments he has carried out in his own rambling back garden. It has involved him getting up each day before dawn and then spending several hours looking out of his study window armed with a telescope and notepad.He wanted a definitive test of the idea that selective predation by birds really was responsible for the differences in the chances of survival among black and peppered varieties of B. betularia. His garden outside Cambridge is in an unpolluted area so in this setting it should be the typical or peppered variety of the moth that has a better chance of survival than that of the black or carbonaria form; it is unlikely to be seen by birds against the mottled background of the lichen-covered trees.
In a seminal description of his results to a scientific conference this week in Sweden, Professor Majerus gave a resounding vote of confidence in the peppered month story. He found unequivocal evidence that birds were indeed responsible for the lower numbers of the black carbonaria forms of the moth. It was a complete vindication of the peppered month story, he told the meeting.
"I conclude that differential bird predation here is a major factor responsible for the decline of carbonaria frequency in Cambridge between 2001 and 2007," Professor Majerus said.
"If the rise and fall of the peppered moth is one of the most visually impacting and easily understood examples of Darwinian evolution in action, it should be taught. It provides after all the proof of evolution," he said.
Criticisms of the 1950s experiments with the peppered month, carried out by the Oxford zoologist Bernard Kettlewell, came to the fore in a 2002 book by the American author Judith Hooper. Hooper's book, Of Moths and Men, suggested that the scientists at the centre of these experiments set out to prove the story irrespective of the evidence.
While the professor has also described drawbacks to Kettlewell's methodology, he was able to address all of these concerns and even tested an idea that Hooper had raised in her book - that it was bats rather than birds responsible for moth predation - a suggestion he dismissed altogether.
Professor Majerus compiled enough visual sightings of birds eating peppered moths in his garden over the seven years to show that the black form was significantly more likely to be eaten than the peppered.
Would a Bush Bailout Save the GOP? (James Pethokoukis, 8/24/07, US News)
The last politician who took advice from the bond market was Bill Clinton. When he pushed for a tax hike back in 1993 to cut the budget deficit, it was under the assumption that bond investors would respond by bringing down interest rates. (The theory here is that deficits are inflationary. Inflation is bad for bonds.) Yet long-term interest rates surged from 6.45 percent when Clinton signed his tax-hike bill on Aug. 10, 1993, to 8.16 percent on Nov. 7, 1994, the day before the midterm congressional election where Republicans won back the House and Senate.Now PIMCO's Bill Gross, perhaps the most well-known bond fund manager in the world, is giving President Bush and the GOP some advice. He wants the government to start cutting checks to struggling homeowners, as both good policy and smart politics. [...]
2) Talk about playing on someone else's home turf. Any Bush bailout idea, if he should propose one, would inevitably start a bidding war with Democrats. Hillary Clinton, for instance, has already proposed a billion-dollar fund to boost state programs that help at-risk borrowers avoid foreclosure. I don't see why the Republicans would get more credit than the Dems.
3) We're not talking about a very big constituency here. Research firm First American CoreLogic projects 1.1 million subprime-related foreclosures, spread out over a total period of six to seven years. And it's blue state California—which Democrat John Kerry won by 11 points in 2004—where most of the trouble is, with a reported 39,013 foreclosure filings in July, the most of any state for the seventh month in a row and up 289 percent from July 2006, according to RealtyTrac.
4) Not that politicians necessarily care, but the economics of a bailout are pretty iffy.
Early exposure to farm animals lowers IBD risk (Reuters Health, 8/24/07)
Infants who are regularly exposed to farm animals appear to be less likely than others to develop inflammatory bowel disease in childhood, according to the findings of a German study published in the journal Pediatrics.
U.S. teen unlocks the iPhone (The Associated Press, August 24, 2007)
A teenager in New Jersey has broken the lock that ties Apple's iPhone to AT&T's wireless network, freeing the most hyped cell phone ever for use on the networks of other carriers, including overseas ones.George Hotz, 17, confirmed Friday that he had unlocked an iPhone and was using it on T-Mobile's network, the only major U.S. carrier apart from AT&T that is compatible with the iPhone's cellular technology.
While the possibility of switching from AT&T to T-Mobile may not be a major development for U.S. consumers, it opens up the iPhone for use on the networks of overseas carriers.
Libya's Berber minority begins to come in from the cold (AFP, Aug 24, 2007)
After decades of even denying the existence of a Berber minority, Libya has been lavishing new attention on a community that makes up around a tenth of the mainly Arab country's population.A regime that since it took power in 1969 had derided Berber demands for recognition as a colonial plot to divide the Arab nation, this month allowed Berber activists to hold a congress in a Tripoli hotel for the first time.
Both Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi's son Seif al-Islam and Prime Minister Baghdadi Mahmudi have also made high-profile visits to the Berber heartland in the Jebel Nefusa mountains southwest of the capital to launch major projects to boost the local economy.
The sharp relaxation in official policy in a matter of months has impressed activists from the wider Berber community which stretches across north Africa from Egypt to Morocco and totals more than 25 million people.
Obama's Foreign Policy Reset (Michael Duffy, 8/23/07, TIME)
Once questions have been raised about your foreign policy judgment, it's not easy to put the genie back in the bottle.But try you must, which is why Barack Obama's latest foreign policy offering, regarding how to open doors with Cuba as the Castro era ends, is at least as much about repairing his image for Democrtic voters as it is about reshaping U.S. relations with Havana.
Icy, spicy, cool: Handmade paletas — Mexican ice pops — have traditional flavors and cutting-edge style (Betty Hallock, August 22, 2007, LA Times)
SUMMERTIME is paleta time. These Mexican ice pops -- chock-full of chunks of fresh fruit and available in a hypnotizing array of colors and clear, not-too-sweet flavors -- conjure images of hot afternoons in the park, time spent on a bench under a shady tree, clear blue skies dotted with red, white and green balloons.That's not just some idyllic Latino-Rockwellian fantasy. On a recent 80-degree-plus weekend in the courtyard of Plaza Mexico in Lynwood, a family of five took advantage of a park bench and a view of a replica of the Ángel de la Independencia, each of them holding fast to summer by his or her Popsicle stick. Customers at the nearby Paletería La Michoacana, a small, often crowded shop tucked into a corner of the plaza, lined up for paletas in flavors such as tamarindo, hibiscus flower and mango con chile. (If summer in L.A. had a flavor, it might be mango con chile.)
But if you haven't yet visited one of L.A.'s many neighborhood paleterías, you most likely haven't experienced fresh, handcrafted made-on-the-premises ice pops. Really, you've never had Popsicles or ice cream bars like these -- a treat so idolized that one city in Michoacán has even raised a statue of a paleta at the entrance to the town. [...]
Cucumber-chile paletas
Total Time: 30 minutes, plus freezing time
Servings: 9 (3-ounce) paletas
Note: From recipe tester Noelle Carter. Popsicle molds are available at select Bed, Bath & Beyond stores and online at target.com and amazon.com.
2 pounds (about 2 large) cucumbers, plus an additional half cucumber, divided
1/3 cup fresh lime juice
½ cup sugar
1 dried New Mexico chile pepper, slightly crushed
1 teaspoon New Mexico chile powder
1 teaspoon cayenne chile powder
1 teaspoon salt
1. Place empty ice-pop molds in the freezer to chill. Dice 2 pounds of the cucumber into 1-inch pieces; do not remove the skins. Place the pieces in a food processor or blender and purée until smooth. Strain into a medium bowl through a fine mesh strainer, pushing out the juice with some of the pulp. You should have 2 1/2 cups juice and pulp. Set aside.
2. Peel the remaining half-cucumber and cut it into half-inch-by-one-eighth-inch pieces. Set aside in a small bowl.
3. Add the lime juice, sugar and crushed chile pepper to a small sauce pan. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the sugar is dissolved. Remove the syrup from the heat and cool slightly.
4. In a small bowl, combine the chile powders. Strain the cooled syrup into the bowl with the cucumber juice, discarding the crushed pepper. Stir in the salt and one-fourth teaspoon of the combined chile powders.
5. Pour some of the mixture into each mold, leaving about a half-inch of space at the top. Stir several pieces of cucumber into each mold. Place lid on the molds and fit with the wooden stick. Place the molds in the freezer and freeze until solid, 2 to 4 hours.
6. Remove the molds from the freezer and run them briefly under warm water to loosen the paletas. Gently pull them from the molds and sprinkle the tops lightly with the remaining chile powder mixture to taste, if desired. Wrap the paletas in plastic wrap and return them to the freezer if not serving immediately. They will keep 1 to 2 weeks in the freezer.
Butch van Breda Kolff, 84, Fiery Coach, Dies (FRANK LITSKY, 8/24/07, NY Times)
Van Breda Kolff used to say that except for a chosen few, coaching basketball was a vagabond profession, and he was a prime example. He held 13 head-coaching jobs and for one season, when he was 61, he coached a high school team.“I’ve had some good jobs that I’ve left, or they fired me,” he once said. “At the time, I thought it was the right thing for me to do. Whether it turned out right later, who cares?”
He coached Bill Bradley as a collegian and Wilt Chamberlain as a professional and never seemed fully satisfied with either player. When Bradley played for him at Princeton, he said, “Bill is not hungry.” He felt the same way about Chamberlain, who played for him with the Los Angeles Lakers.
In the final minutes of the seventh and deciding game of the National Basketball Association’s 1969 championship playoffs, Chamberlain benched himself during the fourth quarter with what van Breda Kolff considered a minor knee injury. When Chamberlain asked to return to the game, van Breda Kolff refused, and the Lakers lost to the Boston Celtics by 2 points.
“We played better when he was out,” van Breda Kolff said. “I have no regrets because in my mind at the time I thought it was the right thing to do. The only regret I’ll have would be if I don’t have a team.”
Shortly after, van Breda Kolff resigned, but as usual he soon had another team.
Carril grew up as a no-car-garage guy in a $21-a-month apartment hard by Quinn's Coal Yard in the hills of eastern Pennsylvania. His father, an immigrant from Castile, Spain, spent long days, weeks and years shoveling coal into an open-hearth furnace run by Bethlehem Steel. What Pete remembers most clearly about this Depression-era environment was the ethnic bonding prevalent among the Spanish, Polish and Italian inhabitants. "We always had food to eat," he says. "Families stuck together." The absence of material possessions was an advantage, Carril believes. "It made us innovative, creative," he says. Sometimes there were no ball fields and few balls, which led Carril and his contemporaries to improvise games. One involved dodging thrown rubber balls in a narrow culvert. It was not for the slow of foot.More organized sports pointed the direction away from the furnaces. Too puny for his first love, football, Carril discovered hoops in the seventh grade. "It was the game I could play," he says. And how. Pete was a dervish guard at Liberty High School, leading the team to consecutive 24-3 records. That earned him a place at nearby Lafayette College, where a raffish free spirit named Willem van Breda Kolff came to coach and inherited Pete, then in his senior year. "I had my preconceived notions," says van Breda Kolff of his sawed-off, would-be star. "He threw up some weird shots." But van Breda Kolff, a former player in the National Basketball Association, recognized talent. "Pete was very, very quick," he says. And deceptive. Years later, when Princeton graduate Bill Bradley was a young player with the New York Knickerbockers, he came to Carril for mano-a-mano pointers. Carril, who had not coached Bradley in college, was then in his late 30s; Bradley was in his prime. "He was not bad at making you think he was going to take the shot, when what he was really going to do was drive past you," says Bradley. "I was a player," says Pete.
Too small for the pros by maybe 4 in. in van Breda Kolff's opinion, Carril embarked on a career as a high school government teacher and basketball coach. He won early and often. In 1966 he applied for the coaching job at Lehigh and got it by default. One year later, as van Breda Kolff was completing a five- year-long coaching tour de force at Princeton, he recommended Carril to succeed him. The incumbent thought his protege would be a hard sell. "Pete is not in Princeton's image," says van Breda Kolff. "He is not gray flannels and herringbone suits."
So much for the importance of image. But Carril actually did try, taking up orange-and-black bow ties at one point. That is Armond Hill's first memory of him, when Hill was a senior at Bishop Ford High School in Brooklyn. (Carrilism: Always recruit at schools whose names begin with Bishop or Monsignor.) "I saw this short guy with a bow tie and a big cigar lying down in the bleachers," Hill recalls. "After the game he came down and told me everything I did wrong and that he could make me a better player. It was that, more than the mystique of Princeton. I wanted to play for this guy." So he did, becoming the last great player Carril molded and then sent on to the N.B.A. Today Hill is surely the only alumnus of the N.B.A. who is a curator of an art museum.
Funk's Not Dead: Not while a former Riker's Island corrections officer named Sharon Jones and a backing band called the Dap-Kings are alive and kicking. (Scott Frampton, 8/22/07, Esquire)
[I]mprobably, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings are even better than the real thing.Improbably, because the elevator pitch is almost insulting: A former Rikers Island corrections officer joins the Dap-Kings, the house band of Daptone Records, to form a classic-soul-and-funk band. Improbably, because you can't re-create a sound just by playing the right notes in the right kind of order. To make people believe in your music, it has to have what wine enthusiasts call terroir, a taste of the earth it was planted in. This is especially true when your band's back story reads like the premise for a Wanda Sykes midseason-replacement sitcom. But that's what makes the new 100 Days, 100 Nights so sublime: The grit in the Dap-Kings' eerily perfect restoration of the sound and feel of various '60s soul styles -- they can, as necessary, sound like the house bands at Stax and Muscle Shoals or James Brown's J.B.'s -- is more than matched by the brewing squall in the 51-year-old Jones's voice.
Charlie Parker, Uptown and Down (NATE CHINEN, 8/24/07, NY Times)
On a fundamental level...the festival pays homage to Parker and his footprint in the city. In many ways he was the quintessential New York hero: a maverick and bon vivant, a subject of notoriety and myth. He loved the city, and he toasted it outright with a tune called “Scrapple From the Apple” that was recorded in a New York studio 60 years ago this fall and almost immediately became popular with musicians. (Along with a catchy melody, it had a familiar harmonic progression, with elements of Fats Waller’s “Honeysuckle Rose” and George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm.”)“Charlie Parker became a New Yorker,” said the jazz historian Phil Schaap, whose Parker-fixated weekday radio program, “Bird Flight,” has been heard in its current form on WKCR (89.9 FM) since 1981. “That was important to him, and he felt great about it, and he enjoyed New York nightlife as well as he dominated it for a while.”
Like so many celebrated New Yorkers Parker came from somewhere else. He was born in Kansas City, Kan., on Aug. 29, 1920, and began his musical career across the state line in Kansas City, Mo., during the waning days of its biggest nightlife boom. The depth of that experience will be a principal subject of “Kansas City Lightning: The Life and Times of the Young Charlie Parker,” a long-gestating biography by the critic Stanley Crouch due out from Pantheon next year.
Parker made his first foray to New York in 1939, on the heels of Buster Smith, his fellow saxophonist and Kansas City mentor. While crashing at Mr. Smith’s apartment, he hit jam sessions at Harlem spots like Clark Monroe’s Uptown House on West 134th Street.
“The only place he could really meet musicians who were going to help him realize his goals would have been New York, and specifically Harlem at that time,” the saxophonist and historian Loren Schoenberg said recently by phone from the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, where he is executive director. The museum’s August programming has been pointedly Parker-centric; next Tuesday the final lecture of the month takes place at the Harlem School of the Arts.
Lore has it that Parker’s initial Harlem sojourn included toiling as a dishwasher at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, where the fearsome pianist Art Tatum held court. At another uptown spot, Dan Wall’s Chili House, Parker had what he later described as an epiphany, during one of many sessions with a guitarist named Biddy Fleet.
In an interview a decade later with Down Beat magazine, Parker recalled that he had tired of the stereotypical chord voicings then in use. “I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else,” he said. “I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn’t play it.” One night in 1939, improvising over the Ray Noble tune “Cherokee,” he brought his idea to life. “And bop was born,” Down Beat added, putting the kicker on a story so irresistible that Thomas Pynchon slipped it into his epic novel “Gravity’s Rainbow.”
Fossil find pushes human-ape split back millions of years (AFP, Aug 24, 2007)
Ten million-year-old fossils discovered in Ethiopia show that humans and apes probably split six or seven million years earlier than widely thought, according to landmark study released Wednesday. [...]The most startling implication of the find, the scientists agree, is that our human progenitors diverged from today's great apes -- including gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees -- several million years earlier than widely accepted research based on molecular genetics had previously asserted.
Smashing Capitalism! (Barbara Ehrenreich, 8/24/07, HuffingtonPost.com)
Somewhere in the Hamptons a high-roller is cursing his cleaning lady and shaking his fists at the lawn guys. The American poor, who are usually tactful enough to remain invisible to the multi-millionaire class, suddenly leaped onto the scene and started smashing the global financial system. Incredibly enough, this may be the first case in history in which the downtrodden manage to bring down an unfair economic system without going to the trouble of a revolution.First they stopped paying their mortgages, a move in which they were joined by many financially stretched middle class folks, though the poor definitely led the way. All right, these were trick mortgages, many of them designed to be unaffordable within two years of signing the contract. There were "NINJA" loans, for example, awarded to people with "no income, no job or assets." Conservative columnist Niall Fergusen laments the low levels of "economic literacy" that allowed people to be exploited by sub-prime loans. Why didn't these low-income folks get lawyers to go over the fine print? And don't they have personal financial advisors anyway?
Then, in a diabolically clever move, the poor - a category which now roughly coincides with the working class -- stopped shopping. Both Wal-Mart and Home Depot announced disappointing second quarter performances, plunging the market into another Arctic-style meltdown. H. Lee Scott, CEO of the low-wage Wal-Mart empire, admitted with admirable sensitivity, that "it's no secret that many customers are running out of money at the end of the month."
I wish I could report that the current attack on capitalism represents a deliberate strategy on the part of the poor, that there have been secret meetings in break rooms and parking lots around the country, where cell leaders issued instructions like, "You, Vinny -- don't make any mortgage payment this month. And Caroline, forget that back-to-school shopping, OK?" But all the evidence suggests that the current crisis is something the high-rollers brought down on themselves.
On AOL.com this week, the Internet-based loan company LendingTree offered "Bad credit options" and a $425,000 loan for only $1,376 a month. And Countrywide Financial, the nation's largest mortgage lender, declared, "Bad Credit? Call Today. Refinance or Tap into Your Home's Equity" in an online ad from its Full Spectrum Lending Division.No-money-down mortgages and subprime loans that cater to people with spotty credit are quickly disappearing as lenders tighten their standards in response to a rise in foreclosures. But you wouldn't know that if you looked at the ads that some banks and loan companies have placed on the Internet and in newspapers, including this one, often right next to the very stories chronicling the meltdown in the mortgage industry. So what's with the mixed messages?
"It's been a common feature of advertising," said Allen Fishbein, director of housing and credit policy at the Consumer Federation of America. "They offer their products not around interest rates but among monthly payments, ease of access, among 'you're more likely to get a yes with us than with others.' I don't think that has changed in this environment."
New orders for long-lasting U.S.-made manufactured goods surged a much bigger-than-expected 5.9 percent in July, the biggest gain since September, and a business investment gauge posted the first gain in three months, a Commerce Department report showed on Friday. [...]U.S. stock index futures and the dollar rose on the strong economic news, while government debt prices pared gains.
Sales of new homes perked up, while factories orders took off in July, raising hopes that the economy can safely make its way through financial turmoil that has shaken Wall Street.The Commerce Department reported Friday that new-home sales rose 2.8 percent in July, after falling 4 percent in June. The increase in July lifted sales to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 870,000 units. A second report showed that orders to factories for big-ticket goods jumped 5.9 percent in July, the most in 10 months.
Both reports were better than analysts expected. They were forecasting home sales to fall and were calling for a much smaller, 1 percent gain in factory orders.
'Confluence of the two seas' (Purnendra Jain, 8/24/07, Asia Times)
Once characterized by a low-key bilateral relationship with India, Japan today shows an extraordinary interest in the South Asian country, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's three-day visit to New Delhi this week signifies this most strongly. [...]In Indonesia, he signed a bilateral free-trade agreement, making it the sixth Southeast Asian country after Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Brunei to have an FTA with Japan. Indonesia is the largest supplier of liquefied natural gas to Japan, and in an environment where there is a strategic race for energy security, Japan has secured supplies through this agreement. In return, Japan will provide liberal access to a range of Indonesian products, including farm produce - rice exempted - into its market. After India, Abe was scheduled to visit Malaysia, where he is to meet with his Malaysian counterpart and is expected to sign a joint statement promoting bilateral cooperation in areas ranging from security to environmental issues.
The most important visit on his Asian tour was that to India, a country that for long remained on the periphery of Japan's Asia vision. But the old vision has changed significantly and swiftly, and further change is on its way as Tokyo is keen to engage India in a comprehensive way. Calling it a "paradigm shift", Japanese Ambassador to India Yasukuni Enoki stated that within the framework of Japan's Asian diplomacy, now "the Japan-India partnership is the most important".
Two Horns Against the World (WILL FRIEDWALD, August 24, 2007, NY Sun)
The legendary Gerry Mulligan-Chet Baker Quartet of the early 1950s wasn't just a great band; it was a great idea for a band. The idea of allowing trumpet and saxophone to improvise freely and interact without the harmonic constraints of a piano gave the foursome both a playful quality and a seriousness not found in other modern jazz combos. The absence of a dominant chordal instrument motivated the four players to work harder, to avoid the clichés and familiar patterns that were already settling into bebop. Everything that the quartet did sounded fresh and original, and it still does more than 50 years later.Since Mulligan and Baker played together for only two years, they hardly had the chance to grow stale. Both men tried to keep the idea going with different partners and slightly different instruments — Mulligan with Bob Brookmeyer and Baker with Stan Getz — but it wasn't the same. Remarkably, no other regularly working ensemble picked up the slack, and the two-horn, two-rhythm concept had to wait until Ornette Coleman (a mere six years later) to give it new life.
For the last few years, the Brooklyn-based trumpeter John McNeil has been exploring the possibilities of Mulligan's original concept: trumpet and sax with bass and drums and no piano or guitar, playing essentially a bop-based music based on traditional chord sequences. On his most recent album, last year's "East Coast Cool" (the title of which refers to how the West Coast Cool School sound of the '50s was largely invented by New Yorkers like Mulligan and Miles Davis), Mr. McNeil worked with the baritone saxophonist Allan Chase. This week, between Tuesday and Sunday, at the Village Vanguard, the other half of the frontline is the tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry.
MORE:
No Coasting—an Iron-Lipped Trumpeter Bridges East and West: John McNeil's East Coast Cool (Francis Davis, March 3rd, 2006, Village Voice)
-BIT TORRENT: Gerry Mulligan Quartet - The Best Of The Gerry Mulligan Quartet With Chet Baker (Mininova)
Making Digital Books Into Page Turners: Despite tepid response to its Reader, Sony sees potential in the market--and Amazon may agree (Business Week, 9/03/07)
Nearly 10 Months After its debut, the Sony Reader is hardly a game changer. Reviews of the tiny handheld book-reading device have been tepid at best, and Sony Corp. (SNE ) has consistently declined to release sales figures, which just might tell you something. But Sony isn't backing away. In fact, as speculation continues in publishing circles that book e-tailing giant Amazon.com (AMZN ) is planning to come out with its own portable reader, Sony is launching a number of initiatives to give its Reader more sizzle.The market for digital books is nascent, and Sony, despite the Reader's less-than-splashy debut, still sees its potential, believing people will eventually warm to reading on a flat screen everything from books to the magazine you're holding now. The half-inch-thick Sony Reader, which can store about 80 electronic books, allows readers to flip pages and adjust the type size. It sells for about $300, and digital book downloads range from $2 to $20 apiece.
The Reader, however, has not drawn the wows that, say, a new version of the iPod (AAPL ) can still elicit. Many users say they are unhappy with the interface (too many buttons and not intuitive) and complain that books for the Reader can only be purchased at Sony's online service, Connect. Less than a tenth of the titles on the shelves of your average Barnes & Noble (BKS ) or Borders (BGP ) are available at Connect. Lisa Phillips, a vice-president at Random House Direct who received her Sony Reader as a gift last December, is turned off by Sony's closed system. "An open format where you could go to different places and not just use their system would be helpful," she says.
Japan, US, Australia consider first summit (Aug 24, 2007)
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, his Australian counterpart John Howard and US President George W. Bush will discuss North Korea's nuclear disarmament and China's military build-up, it said, citing unnamed government sources.Japan will propose holding the trilateral summit talks regularly, the Yomiuri said.
In March, Abe signed a security accord with Australia, Japan's first such agreement with any country besides the United States, its main ally.
Japan and Australia are both close US allies and supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The ultimate global battle: a review of Boeing Versus Airbus by John Newhouse (Benjamin A Shobert, 8/24/07, Asia Times)
[B]y outsourcing large portions of the 787, Boeing sent a strong message to its workforce about what the company was prepared to do in case it had labor problems on its hands again.Newhouse expands on this second point when he writes, "There is no evidence, however, that Boeing is saving much money by outsourcing the 787's wing or sections of the fuselage. Japan is not a cheap labor market. To the contrary. Neither is Italy. But the outsourcing does send a message to the unions that Boeing deals with. It says: 'If you mess too hard with us, we can always outsource your job to another place'" (p 169).
Third, the 787's systems-integrator model is an attempt by Boeing to break internal paradigms, the incestuous influence of years of success that set too many people's feet in concrete and made them resistant to change, even as Airbus became increasingly successful. Says Newhouse, "Boeing's engineers are in the main hostile to 'farming out tribal knowledge', as some of them put it" (p 28).
It would be hard to imagine how Airbus's now much-publicized and seemingly plagued A380 super-jumbo could be more different from the 787. Unlike Boeing's reduced-hub model, Airbus believes that the largest unserved market potential lies within Asia, and that the demand here is going to be for aircraft with capacities beyond those of the current generation of 747s. As Airbus officials shared with Newhouse, one out of every 10 flights into London's Heathrow is a 747 jumbo; using the A380, many more passengers could go through the airport with no increase in flights.
It remains a very subjective question, and one Newhouse leaves largely unexplored, how such a change would impact already congested destinations like Heathrow. We are left to wonder, at this early stage of the plane's introduction, how much of a joy it will bring the average traveler. Thoughts of these planes disgorging additional hundreds of people into already strained secondary security checkpoints, customs lanes and baggage claims leaves one less than enthused.
Similarly, the A380 does nothing to rekindle the glamour airplanes once had. Newhouse quotes Adam Brown, former vice president for consumer affairs at Airbus: "The A380 is ugly. [It has a bloated, snub-nosed look.] I concede that," he said. "It has to be, though. To be compatible with the parameters of airports, it is required to sit in an 80-meter-square box. "
AP Poll: God vital to young Amercians: Among America's young people, godliness contributes to happiness. (ERIC GORSKI and TREVOR TOMPSON, 8/24/07, Miami Herald)
An extensive survey by The Associated Press and MTV found that people aged 13 to 24 who describe themselves as very spiritual or religious tend to be happier than those who don't. [...]Forty-four percent say religion and spirituality is at least very important to them, 21 percent responded it is somewhat important, 20 percent say it plays a small part in their lives and 14 percent say it doesn't play any role.
Among races, African-Americans are most likely to describe religion as being the single most important thing in their lives. Females are slightly more religious than males, and the South is the most religious region, the survey said.
The Political Perils of Targeting Immigrants (Kimberley Strassel, 8/24/07, Real Clear Politics)
History students call it a teaching moment: A week before the general election in 1884, fiery Protestant minister Samuel D. Burchard warned about the perils of allowing his party to identify with "Romanism." Standing by his side in New York was Republican presidential candidate James G. Blaine. Catholic voters were furious.Mr. Blaine lost the state by 1,149 votes, and the election to Grover Cleveland. It then took Catholics 100 years to get over it, when Ronald Reagan finally convinced them to trust his party again.
Today's question is whether Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani are providing future scholars with their own teaching moment. Their spitting row over illegal immigration continues to lead the news, given how little else there has been to fill the newspapers in these dreary August days. At its current momentum, it also threatens to become a case study in how nativism can drive a political party off a cliff.
CBO Projects Lower Fiscal 2007 Deficit (Richard Rubin, 8/23/07, CQ)
Surging individual income tax revenue is helping narrow the federal budget deficit this year, as lawmakers and the White House continue the long-running debate over the country’s fiscal future.The budget deficit for fiscal year 2007 is expected to be $158 billion, the Congressional Budget Office announced Thursday. That’s $19 billion less than what the CBO projected in March, $47 billion less than the administration’s estimate and $90 billion less than the fiscal 2006 deficit. [...]
By 2012, CBO projects, the government will be running a $62 billion surplus, growing to $109 billion by 2017.
Clashes Break Out in the Caucasus (C. J. CHIVERS, 8/24/07, NY Times)
The shootout followed an outbreak of violence on Thursday in the mountains of Dagestan. Two officers were killed in an ambush, and two other attacks in Ingushetia left a Russian soldier dead. A total of at least 16 police officers and soldiers were wounded, the authorities said.The attacks in Dagestan were the latest in a series this summer in the republics, which are adjacent to Chechnya. They underscored the degree to which the insurgency, weakened since 2004, has managed to survive and conduct operations against Russia’s numerically superior police and military forces.
They also raise questions about Russia’s official assertions that Chechnya and its neighboring republics, a few hundred miles east of Sochi, where Russia is to stage the Winter Olympics in 2014, are secure and under control.
Niekro to keep testing his knuckleball in Fresno (Andrew Baggarly, 8/24/07, Contra Costa Times)
For years, the Giants wouldn't let first baseman Lance Niekro throw his knuckleball, which was like telling one of the Wallendas that he couldn't touch a trapeze.Now Niekro's family parlor trick might be the one thing that keeps him in the organization. His experimentation with the knuckler will continue at Triple-A Fresno, and if it's successful, the Giants could have a potent two-way player at the end of their bench next season.
"We know he's got a good one," Giants general manager Brian Sabean said. "It's just a matter of throwing it to hitters. It's a big bridge to cross. It's a lot different from playing catch with it. You've got to be competitive, throw it in the strike zone."
Niekro's late father, Joe, was an accomplished knuckleball pitcher for more than two decades; his uncle, Phil, rode his knuckler to the Hall of Fame.
NPD Leader Charged with Inciting Race Hate: The leader of Germany's far-right NPD party has been charged with inciting race hate after proposing Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess for a Nobel Peace Prize. If convicted, he could face three years in jail. (Der Spiegel, 8/24/07)
NPD leader Udo Voigt could face three years in jail after being charged with inciting race hate.
For an award with such laudable intentions, the Nobel Peace Prize has certainly had its fair share of controversy over the last century. As well as no-brainer winners such as Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama, there have been more contentious laureates such as Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.But Adolf Hitler's secretary and deputy Rudolf Hess? The fact that the head of the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), Udo Voigt, proposed Hess for the peace prize during a speech last Saturday to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Hess's death only confirms how twisted the worldview of right-wing extremists is. Apart from the fact that a leading Nazi was never a likely contender for a peace prize, nominations to the Nobel Peace Prize are by invitation only and nominees must be alive.
Rankin sorry JK joke 'got out of hand' (The Scotsman, 8/24/07)
CRIME writer Ian Rankin was joking when he said his wife had seen fellow city author JK Rowling sitting in a cafe writing a new book. [...]"This was a joke that got out of hand," he said. "I made the comments at the Book Festival purely as a joke. There were 600 people in the audience and only one person didn't laugh."
The Mendoza Line's 30 Year Low: Torn-apart lovers shoot out the lights, each other (Jason Gross, August 21st, 2007, Village Voice)
Artists usually dis fans who pick apart their "break-up albums," but denial's pointless with this Brooklyn band's powerful ninth (and final) record: It's the gruesome aftermath of a contact-sport affair. If singers and ex-partners Tim Bracy and Shannon McArdle matched their music to their emotions, they'd be grinding out ear-pounding death metal instead of 30 Year Low's country rock to match the cruelty they unleash.