Title: Go Outside Artist: Cults Last night, while reading some recaps of this year’s South By Southwest Festival, I stumbled onto this song by Cults. In February of last year, the band of New York film students uploaded three songs to their Bandcamp page , and subsequently started and internet freakout that led to a record deal with Columbia Records. I’m digging on their simple, direct melodies and the child-like voice of singer Madeline Follin. What do y’all think?
Continue reading …Elizabeth Taylor, rest in peace. An unforgettable performer, and no one else championed AIDS activism as she did. Shown above, receiving the 1993 Jean Herscholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy. Open thread below…
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After Brian True-May’s comments on the all-white casting the programme now feels soiled, says Mark Lawson Viewers have always watched Midsomer Murders in a suspicious frame of mind, wondering which of the half dozen or so familiar British character actors contracted to look shifty in this episode will prove to be the latest English rural mass murderer sent to the presumably overcrowded Midsomer nick. But, following the suspension of producer Brian True-May for seemingly suggesting that the show benefits from an all-white casting policy, Wednesday night’s opening episode of the 14th series will have been watched with a different kind of suspicion – seeking evidence of acting apartheid. The background to this story, Death in the Slow Lane, was motor racing, a sport in which Britain has had a recent black world champion and so a promising opportunity to extend the facial palette. Characteristically though, the plot line involved events at a Silverstone Grand Prix in the 1960s and so the chance was missed. True-May will leave the show in the summer and this episode, completed before the furore, did suggest that the franchise could use a fresh overview. Although a sharp-eyed advance freeze-framer had spotted one black extra at the edge of a crowd scene, the programme’s traditional racial monotony soon prevailed and began at times to look wilful. For example, one suspect was a young urban DJ called Dave “Doggy” Day, speaking street patois (“Oh, my days, you still in school, innit?”), who had been hired to judge a vintage car contest at a local private school. Yet, although the departing producer has cited social realism as a reason for the series’ whiteness, even this representative of a notably multiracial profession was cast caucasian. Admittedly, there is a difficulty here. A black DJ could be viewed as a racial stereotype, an objection that might also have been raised if the “rough boy from the estate”, a crucial minor character, had been cast non-white. But, if this was the rationale behind these casting decisions, then Midsomer has moved to racial sensitivity without an intervening period of racial inclusivity. And it was striking that even though this episode required large school groups, another area of British life known for its range of races, these juvenile performers could have been recruited from a 1940s British stage school. Now that the row has opened eyes to this issue, it’s difficult to watch Midsomer innocently. The show feels soiled – a bit too like a South African Broadcasting Corporation programme circa 1980 – and True-May’s successor is surely going to have to change the colour scheme . Although how many future series there will be already depended, even before this fuss, on close inspection of the ratings for this run, as the focus of the episode was supposed to have been on a different casting decision. Following John Nettles’ retirement after 14 years, his DCI Tom Barnaby has been replaced by cousin DCI John Barnaby, played by Neil Dudgeon. The new top cop in Causton CID was introduced through a teasing camera angle, twice showing him in his kitchen speaking intimately to an unseen companion. In a useful rebuke to Midsomer’s current detractors, would the hidden listener turn out to be a black woman or a gay man? It proved to be his pet dog. Dudgeon, though, got through more facial expressions and vocal inflections in this one storyline than Nettles had managed in 81 – a positive note in an episode that will otherwise have done little to smooth the furrowed brows at ITV1 in relation to its crisis-stricken hit. Television ITV ITV1 Television industry Race issues Mark Lawson guardian.co.uk
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enlarge Modern Medicine circa 1940 – well, they were trying. Click here to view this media Since today marks the one year anniversary of the signing into law of our present comprehensive health-care system (the one sneeringly dubbed Obamacare by the ones standing the most to benefit from it), it’s always nice to remember this thing has a history and it goes back for decades. It goes back way before even this broadcast from January 18, 1940, part of the America’s Townhall Meeting Of The Air series to 1909. But for argument’s sake (and since radio didn’t really get started until the late 1920′s), here is a reminder the argument has been around and so have the detractors. On this program the debate is carried on between various members of the medical community and from Johns Hopkins University and from Yale. Dr. C.E.A. Winslow: “We need, in other words, a broad national health program employing various procedures in the sense in which it was formulated by the conference held in Washington during the summer of 1938. Progress must be gradual and evolutionary. But if any progress at all is to be made, it is essential that Federal grants should be made available to stimulate experimentation by the various states. We stand still and quarrel about details and about hypothetical damage to our vested interests, while men and women and children suffer and die for the lack of the resources of modern medical science, Let us forget slogans and avoid vague terminologies which arouse the secretion of the Endocrine glands instead of stimulating the higher nerve centers. Let us recognize that the situation is serious and calls for action. Let us remember that there is no single easy solution of the problem. But that what we need is a national health program so constructed as to enable the people of these United States to obtain and to pay for the medical care they need, whether they pay for it as individuals, as groups or as tax payers.” Depending on who you spoke to, Winslow was either revered as a pioneering member of the Medical profession or reviled as a self-serving Quack . Even in 1940, no one was above the smear, especially when it came to fixing a system that was broken. Much the same way it is now. There is a whole section of the electorate who would prefer things stayed broken, that any attempts to fix it are ploys by some conspiracy bent on subjugating the American people into a Socialistic society. They used that argument in the 1930′s and they continue to use that argument – it hasn’t changed in tone very much – the fear is still the same. And even now there is a well-funded movement afoot to repeal the health-care law signed last year. A law that, even though far from perfect, is still the first one of its kind since it was talked about in this broadcast. How ever shaky the ground is, the health-care law is still standing a year after it was signed.
Continue reading …SHORTER Lindsey Graham : “If we don’t use American military power to overthrow Qaddafi, then the Iranians will never take us seriously about our threats to bomb their nuclear weapons infrastructure.” Unbelievable. And I’m not even going to get into John McCain’s selective memory .
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• Fans to get chance to try new-style seating used in Germany • ‘We are not talking about bringing back old-style terraces’ The Football Supporters’ Federation plans to tour the country with an example of the “rail seating” widely used in German grounds in a bid to gain support for its campaign to reintroduce standing at top-level English matches. The Guardian revealed that the sports minister, Hugh Robertson , has agreed to consider reintroducing standing areas , which have been banned in the top two divisions since 1994, if the football authorities and police form a consensus in support. The FSF is determined to demonstrate the difference between modern standing accommodation and the old-style English football terraces in grounds at the time of the Hillsborough disaster. John Darch, an FSF member, is working with the UK manufacturer Ferco Seating Systems, a partner to Germany company Eheim-Möbel, which has built rail seating in Hoffenheim’s new stadium and the refurbished Stuttgart stadium. “We have to help people understand we are not talking about bringing back old-style terraces,” Darch said. “I will be inviting supporters at all clubs around the country to contact me asking me to visit with the mock-up. Then fans themselves, the chairmen and chief executives of clubs, safety officers and politicians can see we are talking about modern supporter accommodation, which fans and clubs enjoy, and which is passed as safe by the Bundesliga.” Most clubs in the Bundesliga, which has the highest crowds and is the world’s most profitable league, incorporate standing areas, including at newly-built or refurbished grounds. The German Football Federation decided in 1993 against introducing all-seat stadiums, as has been required here by law since the 1990 Taylor report following Hillsborough. The federation explained its reasoning by saying it is a “social function” of football to keep ticket prices affordable, thereby not excluding the “socially disadvantaged” from attending matches. Prices in Germany for standing areas, at around €12-14 (£10.50-£12.20), are around a quarter of standard prices for seats at top Premier League clubs. The German stadiums’ standing areas, some of them very large, some smaller, are made up of rail seating, called “vario” seats in Germany. Rails are spaced closely together, allowing just one or two rows of supporters in between. The Bundesliga and safety authorities which approve standing areas take the view that the closeness of the barriers makes a crush almost impossible. Fans’ tickets allocate a row and position, which the FSF argues should meet one of the police’s main concerns, that in standing areas, it is more difficult to identify people causing trouble. The rails have flip-up seats which are locked upright for Bundesliga matches at which fans stand, then brought down for Champions League matches at which fans sit. Uefa and Fifa both require stadiums used for their competitions to be all-seater, so the rail seating enables Bundesliga grounds to meet that requirement. Ferco Seating Systems’ managing director, Michael Burnett, said his company built and supplied the 60,000 seats for Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, and is making the seats for the London 2012 Olympics aquatic centre. “We would not be proposing the introduction of the vario seat for standing areas if we did not believe it is very safe indeed,” he said. “Germany has very stringent safety legislation and specifications, and the vario seat fulfils all of those. I would go further, and say it would be much safer here to have this accommodation designed specifically for modern safe standing, than to have supporters standing, as they currently do, in seated areas, where there is only a low seat in front of them to break a fall.” Research recently carried out for the Premier League by consultants Crowd Dynamics found that persistent standing in seating areas, which is becoming more common at top clubs, presents a significant safety risk. According to the Football Licensing Authority, fans standing up in seated areas could result in “progressive crowd collapse” – a crush. However, repeated efforts by clubs to ask fans to keep to their seats are failing, and fans are continuing to stand. Andy Holt, a spokesman on football policing for the Association of Chief Police Officers, acknowledged to the Guardian that standing areas can be safe. He said the police reluctance to see standing areas return to the top two divisions is more a question of crowd control, and policing disorder, than safety in terms of Hillsborough-style crushes. Holt said, however, that it would be “rewarding football supporters for breaking the rules” if safe standing areas were to be reintroduced at English grounds in response to fans standing now in seated areas. Bundesliga European football David Conn guardian.co.uk
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NPR's Julie Rovner put the best liberal spin on the one-year anniversary of ObamaCare becoming law on Wednesday's Morning Edition. When an opponent of the legislation stated that supporters would try to “create constituencies that will fight to preserve it…[by] spending hundreds of billions of dollars on health insurance subsidies,” Rover added that “those are just a few of the law's benefits.” The correspondent led her report with sound bites from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who marveled over the “landmark law,” and Senator Orrin Hatch, who labeled it “one of the worst pieces of legislation in the history of this country.” She continued by focusing on the opponents of ObamaCare: ROVNER: In fact, sowing seeds of doubt about the law is all part of opponents' strategy , says Michael Cannon, head of health policy for the libertarian Cato Institute. That's because, at the moment, with Democrats still in control of the Senate and presidency, opponents know they can't actually do much to change the law. MICHAEL CANNON, CATO INSTITUTE: So, if you want a legislative fix to ObamaCare, if you want to repeal it, you have to keep it unpopular between now and January of 2013. ROVNER: That's the soonest Republicans could gain enough control to make the law go away. So what needs to happen between now and then? CANNON: You try to keep the law from taking root, and you try to educate the public about all its harmful effects. ROVNER: That's why all the defunding and repeal votes in Congress, not to mention the dozens of lawsuits challenging the law's constitutionality. Instead of noting that the majority of Americans are still opposed to ObamaCare, even a year after its passage, Rovner set up her spin about the law: ROVNER: Of course, if you're supporting the law, what you want is to sink those roots in so deep as to make the law, well, unrepealable. Cannon knows a little something about that too. CANNON: You want to create constituencies that will fight to preserve it, and by sending $250 checks to seniors, you may be creating constituencies; by giving tax credits and subsidies to employers, you may be creating constituencies; and, certainly, when the law begins spending hundreds of billions of dollars on health insurance subsidies to low and middle income Americans, you're going to be creating a huge constituency. ROVNER: And those are just a few of the law's benefits: things like starting to fill in the Medicare prescription drug donut hole for seniors . The NPR reporter then turned to one of the supporters of the legislation, Ron Pollack of the liberal organization Families USA. Unlike Cannon, who was identified as a libertarian, Rovner didn't give Pollack an ideological label: ROVNER: Ron Pollack of Families USA, who does support the law , says that as the public sees more of the law's benefits, support for it will grow. But he says it's about more than just buying off individual constituencies. It's about what the law actually does for people. RON POLLACK, FAMILIES USA: Those people who've got preexisting conditions, they don't want to be denied coverage by insurance companies. Those people who've got health conditions, they don't want to be charged an arm and a leg in discriminatory premiums. When people get sick, they don't want to lose the health coverage they've been paying for for many years. ROVNER: Pollack also says supporters of the law are still fighting to help the public understand the 2,000-page-plus measure. POLLACK: There are so many myths about this legislation, from death panels, government takeover, that this is adding to the deficit. None of those things are true. Pollack's denial that ObamacCare doesn't add to deficit doesn't square with an August 19, 2010 report by Ben Smith of Politico which points out that his own organization was among the “White House allies [that] are dramatically shifting their attempts to defend health care legislation, abandoning claims that it will reduce costs and the deficit and instead stressing a promise to 'improve it.'” The bipartisan deficit commission final report actually pointed out that these earlier claims about “count on large phantom savings.” Unsurprisingly, the NPR correspondent didn't fact-check any of the “supporter's” claims. Rovner gave one last hint of her views on the year-old law at the end of her report: “…On the law's first birthday, it's still one big race, a competition between supporters who hope the health law will have many more birthdays to celebrate, and opponents, who'd like to blow out the candles permanently .” — Matthew Balan is a news analyst at the Media Research Center. You can follow him on Twitter here .
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Some were killed when security forces opened fire on protesters surrounding the Omari mosque; others were shot at a funeral Violence escalated in the southern Syrian city of Deraa as protests entered a sixth day. At least 15 protesters are known to have been shot dead on Wednesday and scores more injured. In a sign that the Syrian regime is using a brutal crackdown rather than concessions to quell protests, security forces opened fire on people in three separate incidents, according to human rights activists. At 1am on Wednesday morning, at least six people were killed when security forces opened fire on protesters surrounding the Omari mosque, after cutting electricity and communications to the site that has become the focus of demonstrations. During the day, several were reported shot as they attended funerals of victims of the mosque shooting. Syrian security forces later opened fire on scores of young people from surrounding towns as they marched towards Deraa, offering support to the protests, activists said. “The government promised it would consider its citizen’s demands, and then it decided to attack them,” said Mohammed al-Abdullah, a prominent activist in exile in the US who is in close contact with the Deraa protesters. “These were fully prepared and full-scale attacks.” According to human rights organisations, the government has also rounded up scores of demonstrators, activists and journalists. Yesterday, Mazen Darwish, the head of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression , which was officially closed down by the authorities in 2009, was arrested. Darwish, who has been commenting on the protests in the media, was briefly detained after a protest on Wednesday last week calling for the release of political prisoners. Amnesty International said it knows of 93 people who were arrested between 8 and 23 March who remain detained in unknown locations. It said the real number of arrests was likely to be “considerably higher”. France, which has led efforts in the past four years to bring Damascus back into the international fold, became the latest in a string of governments and organisations to condemn the violence. It called for political reforms “without delay”. But observers said the window for negotiations and reforms is quickly closing. Leaders in Deraa had issued a range of demands to the government, including the release of political prisoners from the area, the freedom to buy and sell property without permission of local security forces and the dismissal of the governor of Deraa. So far, only the last demand has been met. “By using such disproportionate violence against its own citizens, neither the government nor the people can be expected to negotiate,” said Abdullah, adding that without talks there was no clear solution to the violence. “I am scared because I don’t know how this will end. I fear escalating anger will lead to an evermore brutal crackdown.” Syria’s government has continued to blame the violence on outside perpetrators. it called the shootings at the Omari mosque the work of “armed gangs”. Activists dispute the claims. Despite protesters not yet calling for President Bashar al-Assad to step down, the unrest is the biggest domestic challenge to the regime since the 1970s. There are calls for a mass protests tomorrow in solidarity with the Deraa activists. • Katherine Marsh is a pseudonym for a journalist who lives in Damascus Syria Arab and Middle East unrest Middle East guardian.co.uk
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Jeremy Morlock, 23, tells US military court he was part of a ‘kill team’ that faked combat situations to murder Afghan civilians An American soldier has pleaded guilty to being part of a “kill team” who deliberately murdered Afghan civilians for sport last year. Army Specialist Jeremy Morlock, 23, told a military court he had helped to kill three unarmed Afghans. “The plan was to kill people, sir,” he told an army judge in Fort Lea, near Seattle, after his plea. The case has caused outraged headlines around the world. In a series of videotaped confessions to investigators, some of which have been broadcast on American television, Morlock detailed how he and other members of his Stryker brigade set up and faked combat situations so that they could kill civilians who posed no threat to them. Four other soldiers are still to come to trial over the incidents. The case is a PR disaster for America’s military and has been compared to the notorious incidents of torture that emerged from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. This week the German magazine Der Spiegel published three pictures that showed American soldiers, including Morlock, posing with the corpse of a young Afghan boy as if it were a hunting trophy. Some soldiers apparently kept body parts of their victims, including a skull, as souvenirs. In a statement issued in response to the publication of the photos the US army apologised to the families of the dead. “[The photos are] repugnant to us as human beings and contrary to the standards and values of the United States army,” the statement said. Morlock has told investigators that the murders took place between January and May last year and were instigated by an officer in his unit, Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs. He described how elaborate plans were made to pick out civilian targets, kill them and then make their deaths look like they were insurgents. In his confession Morlock described shooting a victim as Gibbs tossed a grenade at him. “We identify a guy. Gibbs makes a comment, like, you know, you guys wanna wax this guy or not,” Morlock said in the confession. Morlock now stands to be sentenced to at least 24 years in jail but with eligibility for parole after seven years. That has come about because Morlock struck a plea bargain that will see a lighter sentence in return for testifying against his fellow soldiers. US military United States Afghanistan Paul Harris guardian.co.uk
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