The world’s population is due to hit 7bn this October. Use our tool to find out the world’s population on your birth date, and how different countries were growing at that time Jonathan Richards Christine Oliver Martin Shuttleworth Mariana Santos
Continue reading …Michael Sheen: ‘There have been times when I would have loved to be more of a star’
October 24, 2011 No Comment
Famous for playing Tony Blair in three different films, as well as David Frost and Brian Clough, he is about to play Hamlet at the Young Vic. Yet the Welsh actor still remains practically anonymous It is a source of unending amazement to me that so many celebrities regard an interview as an opportunity to boast about their brilliance, in the belief that this will convince readers they are brilliant. This is not a mistake Michael Sheen is in any danger of making. The scruffy figure draws no stares or
Continue reading …Michael Sheen: ‘There have been times when I would have loved to be more of a star’
October 24, 2011 No Comment
Famous for playing Tony Blair in three different films, as well as David Frost and Brian Clough, he is about to play Hamlet at the Young Vic. Yet the Welsh actor still remains practically anonymous It is a source of unending amazement to me that so many celebrities regard an interview as an opportunity to boast about their brilliance, in the belief that this will convince readers they are brilliant. This is not a mistake Michael Sheen is in any danger of making. The scruffy figure draws no stares or
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Hundreds killed in cities of Van and Ercis by 7.2 magnitude quake, with many more feared trapped in rubble An earthquake in south-eastern Turkey has killed more than 200 people, with hundreds more casualties feared. Rescue teams worked through Sunday night trying to free survivors crying out for help from under the rubble. The Turkish interior minister, Idris Naim Sahin, said the 7.2 magnitude quake on Sunday killed 100 in the city of Van and 117 in the badly hit town of Ercis, 60 miles further north. The death toll was expected to rise. Overseeing emergency operations in Ercis, Sahin said 1,090 people were known to have been injured and hundreds were missing. Rescue efforts struggled to get into full swing following the quake, with electricity cut off as darkness fell on the towns and villages on the barren Anatolian steppe near the border with Iran. Survivors and emergency service workers searched frantically through broken concrete using hands, shovels and torches or working under floodlights powered by mobile generators. As dawn broke the scale of the devastation became clearer. At one crumpled four-storey building in Ercis a team of firemen from the largest south-eastern city of Diyarbakir were trying to reach four children believed trapped deep in an apartment block as concerned bystanders looked on. Nearby, aid teams handed out parcels of bread and food, while people wrapped in blankets huddled around open fires after spending a cold night on the streets. The prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said there were an unknown number of people unaccounted for under the collapsed buildings of the stricken towns and he feared the worst for villagers living in outlying rural areas who had still to be reached. “Because the buildings are made of adobe [mudbrick] they are more vulnerable to quakes. I must say that almost all buildings in such villages are destroyed,” Erdogan told a televised news conference in Van. “We don’t know how many people are in the ruins of collapsed buildings, it would be wrong to give a number.” There have been more than 100 aftershocks since the main quake, which lasted for about 25 seconds at 1.40pm local time on Sunday. In Van, a bustling and ancient city on a lake ringed by snow-capped mountains and with a population of 1 million, cranes shifted rubble off a collapsed six-storey apartment block where bystanders said 70 people were trapped. There was much more damage in Ercis with 55 buildings flattened, including a student dormitory, in a town of 100,000. The Red Crescent said about 100 expert personnel had arrived at the earthquake zone to co-ordinate operations. Four thousand tents and 11,000 blankets, stoves and food were being distributed. A tent city was being set up at the Ercis sports stadium. Access to the region was made more difficult as the earthquake caused the partial collapse of the main road between Van and Ercis, broadcaster CNN Turk reported. The military said two battalions had been sent to assist the relief operations. The Dogan news agency reported that 24 people were pulled from the rubble alive in the two hours after midnight. One nurse told CNN Turk news channel the town’s hospital was so badly damaged that staff were treating the injured in the garden and bodies were being left outside the building. Turkey Natural disasters and extreme weather Middle East Europe guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Hundreds killed in cities of Van and Ercis by 7.2 magnitude quake, with many more feared trapped in rubble An earthquake in south-eastern Turkey has killed more than 200 people, with hundreds more casualties feared. Rescue teams worked through Sunday night trying to free survivors crying out for help from under the rubble. The Turkish interior minister, Idris Naim Sahin, said the 7.2 magnitude quake on Sunday killed 100 in the city of Van and 117 in the badly hit town of Ercis, 60 miles further north. The death toll was expected to rise. Overseeing emergency operations in Ercis, Sahin said 1,090 people were known to have been injured and hundreds were missing. Rescue efforts struggled to get into full swing following the quake, with electricity cut off as darkness fell on the towns and villages on the barren Anatolian steppe near the border with Iran. Survivors and emergency service workers searched frantically through broken concrete using hands, shovels and torches or working under floodlights powered by mobile generators. As dawn broke the scale of the devastation became clearer. At one crumpled four-storey building in Ercis a team of firemen from the largest south-eastern city of Diyarbakir were trying to reach four children believed trapped deep in an apartment block as concerned bystanders looked on. Nearby, aid teams handed out parcels of bread and food, while people wrapped in blankets huddled around open fires after spending a cold night on the streets. The prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said there were an unknown number of people unaccounted for under the collapsed buildings of the stricken towns and he feared the worst for villagers living in outlying rural areas who had still to be reached. “Because the buildings are made of adobe [mudbrick] they are more vulnerable to quakes. I must say that almost all buildings in such villages are destroyed,” Erdogan told a televised news conference in Van. “We don’t know how many people are in the ruins of collapsed buildings, it would be wrong to give a number.” There have been more than 100 aftershocks since the main quake, which lasted for about 25 seconds at 1.40pm local time on Sunday. In Van, a bustling and ancient city on a lake ringed by snow-capped mountains and with a population of 1 million, cranes shifted rubble off a collapsed six-storey apartment block where bystanders said 70 people were trapped. There was much more damage in Ercis with 55 buildings flattened, including a student dormitory, in a town of 100,000. The Red Crescent said about 100 expert personnel had arrived at the earthquake zone to co-ordinate operations. Four thousand tents and 11,000 blankets, stoves and food were being distributed. A tent city was being set up at the Ercis sports stadium. Access to the region was made more difficult as the earthquake caused the partial collapse of the main road between Van and Ercis, broadcaster CNN Turk reported. The military said two battalions had been sent to assist the relief operations. The Dogan news agency reported that 24 people were pulled from the rubble alive in the two hours after midnight. One nurse told CNN Turk news channel the town’s hospital was so badly damaged that staff were treating the injured in the garden and bodies were being left outside the building. Turkey Natural disasters and extreme weather Middle East Europe guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Previously Arrested NYT City Room Freelancer Seen On Video Leading ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Discussion
October 24, 2011 No Comment
Lee Stranahan at BigGoverment.com has a scoop which bears out suspicions expressed by Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters and blogger Jammie Wearing Fool earlier this month. How the Times and other peripherally affected press outlets respond will be telling. You see, Natasha Lennard, a freelancer at the Times's City Room blog, Politico , and Salon , who was arrested on October 1 during the Brooklyn Bridge “march,” escaping (in her words) “with only a disorderly conduct violation summons, in no small measure because of my editors’ contacting Police Headquarters to ensure my swift release,” has been seen on tape leading a discussion of Occupy Wall Street participants, leading to obvious questions about what business she has ever had reporting on developments in this ongoing story. Stranahan's opening paragraphs (bolds are mine): A newly-discovered video– filmed by Occupy Wall Street supporters themselves –reveals that
Continue reading …Video Shows NYT Freelancer Speaking To Occupy Wall Street Strategy Meeting
October 23, 2011 No Comment
On October 2, NewsBusters reported the arrest of a New York Times freelancer at the Occupy Wall Street rally that shut down the Brooklyn Bridge. Big Government's Lee Stranahan on Sunday uncovered a video of Natasha Lennard speaking at an OWS strategy meeting on October 14 (video follows with transcript and commentary, vulgarity warning, relevant section at 1:30): NATASHA LENNARD, NEW YORK TIMES FREELANCER: Well, that’s what I don’t know. Let’s experiment. But I do think there are a few conditions that disallow for that that are at play now. So if we can address those, maybe it can be a more open possibility. The state of the square now, I know a lot of people who would be sitting on this side, if you want to call it a side which is problematic, and definitely not definitive, would not speak at the park because being an outright anti-authoritarian or an anarchist is not really something that people like to be live streamed across the world with a f–king police pen around you. So there is a silencing that’s sort of gone on without much addressing, because to address it would be to out oneself. So if you’re talking, and this also addresses the question of escalation. It’s like, yes, there are a lot of people talking about many different ideas. Do they all want all of those ideas live streamed to the entire world on the assumption that everything is permitted and legal, when it quite clearly isn’t? So there is already a tendency in the park that means backing away from anti-authoritarian tendencies that don’t fall into pre-existing permitted institutional structures, or that can’t be coded by them. So I think there’s a problem with the way the park operates now that doesn’t allow for this kind of coming together. This video was taken from a much larger one published by the far left Jacobin magazine on October 19. In that video and related article, Lennard is identified as one of the panelists: At Jacobin, our concerns are slightly different. We have lamented the absence of political debate within the movement. Preoccupied (ha ha) with the day-to-day tactic of running an occupation, stymied by an increasingly unwieldy General Assembly process, its participants have so far allowed the movement to drift along not just without a program but without even a sustained discussion of whether to have one, what it would mean to have one, and what a program would look like if they decided to adopt one. That’s why we organized a public debate and panel discussion in Manhattan last Friday about Occupy Wall Street and left politics and strategy. Held at Bluestockings, a radical bookstore on the Lower East Side, the event was packed, the audience overwhelmingly young, and the atmosphere electric: just that morning, thousands had gathered to lock arms and defend the occupiers from Bloomberg’s threat to evict them, and the mayor’s last minute decision to back down had been cause for jubilation. Natasha Lennard was formerly on staff at Salon.com and Politico. She currently freelances for The New York Times. She has covered OWS since before Sept. 17. Also on the panel: Doug Henwood is the editor of Left Business Observer, host of Behind The News, contributing editor at The Nation, and author of “Wall Street” and “After The New Economy.” So The Nation magazine also had a representative at this meeting. With NPR having fired one of its hosts last week for her involvement in OWS, one has to wonder what The Nation and the Times feel about Henwood and Lennard's participation in this event. This should be particularly concerning to both publications irrespective of their political leaning given something Lennard said that bears repeating: “And this also addresses the question of escalation. It’s like, yes, there are a lot of people talking about many different ideas. Do they all want all of those ideas live streamed to the entire world on the assumption that everything is permitted and legal, when it quite clearly isn’t ?” So Lennard admitted to having knowledge of proposed activities that might not be legal. Quite something for someone affiliated with one of the nation's largest newspapers, don't you think? Lennard's Twitter account shows her attending an OWS event at 38 Greene Street in Soho Saturday. Makes you wonder what kind of strategies to undermine America – legal and otherwise – were discussed there.
Continue reading …Having Called America Cowards After 9/11 for Using Cruise Missiles Bill Maher Now Loves Predator Drones
October 23, 2011 No Comment
There really is no limit to the hypocrisy of Bill Maher. Despite having gotten fired by ABC shortly after the 9/11 attacks for calling America cowards due to our use of long-range cruise missiles, the host of HBO's Real Time on Friday raved about President Obama's deployment of unmanned predator drones to kill people from thousands of miles away (video follows with transcript and commentary): BILL MAHER, HOST: Since 2005, I think, the number of drone missions has gone up by something like 1200 percent, and for good reason. You know, we can do it a lot cheaper. It’s cheaper, we can get closer to the target and therefore kill less civilians. They can stay up longer. I'm sold. I'm going down to the dealership tomorrow. I'm hoping they have a hybrid. JOSHUA GREEN, BLOOMBERG: It was apparently a drone that got Gaddafi, or got Gaddafi’s convoy and sent him scurrying, scurrying into a hole. MAHER: And I’ve heard people say, “Well, this is not good because, you know, this is like a video game.” Good. Why is that a bad thing that it’s like a video game? I don’t understand why it’s a bad thing. I know the argument is, “Well, you know, it makes us more likely to go to war if we don't have to, you know, risk our troops.” How could we be more likely to go to war than we've already been? So when a President that he likes is killing our enemies from thousands of miles away, that's just fine. But days after our nation was attacked on September 11, 2001, Maher thought we were cowards for using cruise missiles while our enemies were the courageous ones: MAHER DAYS AFTER 9/11: We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. Not cowardly. When he contradicts himself this way, do the heads of HBO and parent company Time Warner care? Or is all fair in love, war, and ratings? As for Maher, you have to wonder whether he actually remembers what he says from one day to the next. In a July installment of Real Time , he completely misrepresented this entire episode from 2001. And people like him say pot doesn't cause brain damage. Quite the contrary, he appears to be walking proof it most certainly does.
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Click here to view this media Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum claimed Sunday that by announcing the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq, President Barack Obama had “lost the war.” The candidate told CBS’ Bob Schieffer that the Republican reaction to the president’s announcement had been scathing because the Obama administration failed to convince Iraq to give U.S. troops immunity from prosecution. “We have a president that was not able to set conditions and actually have the kind of influence over the Iraqi government,” Santorum complained. “Now, three years the president has had to work with the Iraq government, to try to mold and shape that relationship. And to be in a position where really the Iranians now have more sway over the Iraqi government then the United States just shows the weakness of our diplomatic effort, the weakness of this president.” “I think that’s reason people are so upset, that, you know, we’ve lost — in many respects, we’ve lost control, lost the war in Iraq because we have Iran having broadened its sphere of influence.” At a meeting with the Senate Republican Conference in 2005, Santorum told American Digest’s George Vanderleun that victory in Iraq was possible even if U.S. troops were not based there. “[It] would be sufficient [for victory],” the then-Pennsylvania senator said. “It’s a democracy. We’ve got folks in Europe that don’t want our bases there. I’m not concerned about that as long as this government that may not want us there is in secure enough hands to make sure that it does not become a terrorist state or otherwise problematic. Whether we are there or not is of secondary importance.”
Continue reading …Click here to view this media Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum claimed Sunday that by announcing the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq, President Barack Obama had “lost the war.” The candidate told CBS’ Bob Schieffer that the Republican reaction to the president’s announcement had been scathing because the Obama administration failed to convince Iraq to give U.S. troops immunity from prosecution. “We have a president that was not able to set conditions and actually have the kind of influence over the Iraqi government,” Santorum complained. “Now, three years the president has had to work with the Iraq government, to try to mold and shape that relationship. And to be in a position where really the Iranians now have more sway over the Iraqi government then the United States just shows the weakness of our diplomatic effort, the weakness of this president.” “I think that’s reason people are so upset, that, you know, we’ve lost — in many respects, we’ve lost control, lost the war in Iraq because we have Iran having broadened its sphere of influence.” At a meeting with the Senate Republican Conference in 2005, Santorum told American Digest’s George Vanderleun that victory in Iraq was possible even if U.S. troops were not based there. “[It] would be sufficient [for victory],” the then-Pennsylvania senator said. “It’s a democracy. We’ve got folks in Europe that don’t want our bases there. I’m not concerned about that as long as this government that may not want us there is in secure enough hands to make sure that it does not become a terrorist state or otherwise problematic. Whether we are there or not is of secondary importance.”
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