• From the BBC:

    “Many Tibetan people suggested we should have a statue of Chairman Mao to show our gratitude,” a local Communist Party official told Xinhua:

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  • From the New York Times:

    Why do bureaucrats insist on spending the taxpayers’ money to keep aging government paperwork from the taxpayers?

    The question has arisen anew because of the discovery that military and intelligence agencies have pulled some 55,000 pages of decades-old documents from public access at the National Archives. Some documents were photocopied long ago by researchers. In the case of the redacted 1946 memorandum, the State Department had already published it in the multivolume history “Foreign Relations of the United States.”

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  • Machael DeLong, from the New York Times:

    This is why the much-repeated claims that Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t “give us enough troops” in Iraq ring hollow. First, such criticisms ignore that the agreed-upon plan was for a lightning operation into Baghdad. In addition, logistically it would have been well nigh impossible to bring many more soldiers through the bottleneck in Kuwait. And doing so would have carried its own risk: you cannot sustain a fighting force of 300,000 or 500,000 men for long, and it would have left us with few reserves, putting our troops at risk in other parts of the world. Given our plan, we thought we had the right number of troops to accomplish our mission.

    The outcome and ramifications of a war, however, are impossible to predict. Saddam Hussein had twice opened his jails, flooding the streets with criminals. The Iraqi police walked out of their uniforms in the face of the invasion, compounding domestic chaos. We did not expect these developments.

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  • Love it or hate it, from Punknews:

    The first single from AFI’s upcoming full length has been posted on the band’s official website. The track comes from the band’s long-awaited (and delayed) sophomore album, Decemberunderground.

    The album is expected to contain both “hardcore moments” and more electronc leanings as well as feature backing vocals from Tiger Army’s Nick 13, Dan Smith from Day of Contempt, Bleeding Through’s Brandon Schieppati, Eighteen Visions’ Keith Barney, and Ronan Harris from VNV Nation, among others.

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  • From the New York Times:

    “You talk to people here and it’s literally the same conversations I heard in Bosnia,” Colonel Donahoe said. “I had a police colonel tell me the other day that all the people in Jurf,” a predominantly Sunni town, “are evil, including the children.”

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  • From the New York Times:

    Yet Mr. Kohn said he found the chorus of attacks disquieting. He was disturbed, he said, by an assertion made by Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, who retired from the Marines, in an essay for Time magazine, that he was writing “with the encouragement of some still in positions of military leadership.”

    “That’s a fairly chilling thought,” Mr. Kohn said. “Chilling because they’re not supposed to be undermining their civilian leadership.”

    “It’s not the military that holds the civilian leadership accountable,” he said. “It’s Congress, the voters, investigative journalists. Things have been turned upside down here.”

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  • From the Washington Post:

    “If the country was ever normal, I’d quit and return to teaching,” said Ali, 40, who guards her stash with an AK-47 and has a gold tooth that she says makes her appear “tough.” “What else can I do to survive?”

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  • From RobGalbraith:

    “You have to set a goal for yourself every year,” Dresling says, explaining what that experience taught him. “I do it partly because it’s fun, but also to keep myself on my toes because if you let everything roll over you, you’ll be out of business in a short period of time.”

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  • From Journal of a Photographer:

    “The work of Eugene Richards is a cornerstone of contemporary documentary photography and filmmaking. All of us at VII welcome Eugene and look forward to his comradeship and creative spirit.”, says James Nachtwey, president of VII. “I am very pleased to be a part of this very creative group of people,” says Eugene Richards.
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  • From Juxtapoz:

    Photos from the opening night of Headache, artwork by John Casey and Lucien Shapiro at Boontling Gallery in Oakland, CA.

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  • From the Guardian:

    Global temperatures will rise by an average of 3C due to climate change and cause catastrophic damage around the world unless governments take urgent action, according to the UK government’s chief scientist.

    In a stark warning issued yesterday Sir David King said that a rise of this magnitude would cause famine and drought and threaten millions of lives.

    It would also cause a worldwide drop in cereal crops of between 20 and 400m tonnes, put 400 million more people at risk of hunger, and put up to 3 billion people at risk of flooding and without access to fresh water supplies.

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  • From The Moscow Times:

    The war on the Eastern Front remains largely “undiscovered country” for the Western reader despite the fact that the Red Army was responsible for nearly 75 percent of German military losses, including soldiers killed in battle, wounded, taken prisoner and otherwise unaccounted for. The best guide to this terrain is Vasily Grossman, who spent over 1,000 days at the front as a combat correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda, the Soviet Army newspaper. A decorated lieutenant colonel by the end of the war, he fell afoul of the Soviet authorities and died in 1964 a non-person, his works swept from library shelves and bookshops.

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  • From the Washington Post:

    “Even when local people are good and plan out water catchment systems, warlords just take it over. That’s why we have so many people drinking horrible water with worms and dirt and getting very ill,” said Abdul Rashid, a Somali nurse in Rabdore who works with the International Medical Corps, a nonprofit relief group. “It’s like the start of the water wars right here in Somalia.”

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  • From the Guardian:

    Today, he finds himself in the unlikely position of becoming the world’s leading heavy-metal cineaste. The first film he co-directed, wrote and produced, Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, has been touring the festivals to much acclaim. The editing suite has been hired to cut another documentary, this time about the life of Dennis “Piggy” d’Amour, the late guitarist of Canadian thrash metal band Voivod. Later this year, he will embark on a third documentary, this time about metal’s popularity in unlikely corners of the globe. There is, he claims, a burgeoning black-metal scene in Indonesia: apparently, they can’t get enough of bands called Abettor of Satan and Deformed Tartarus in Bandung. “The thing is,” Scot McFadyen sighs, “I’m not really into heavy metal.”

    He only loses his natural ebullience when confronted with the leading lights of the Norwegian death-metal scene, including the fragrant Gaahl, lead singer of Gargamel, practising Satanist, and, it quickly becomes apparent, raving anti-semite. “He was actually pretty nice to us, although he’s just been in prison for torturing a guy,” says McFadyen, carefully. “He told us it was self-defence. We’re not quite clear on how that works.”
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  • From the Wooster Collective:

    For quite some time, King Adz has been working with Blek Le Rat on a documentary which will be released on DVD in the coming weeks. The clip above comes from ‘Blek Le Rat – Original Stencil Pioneer’ There will also be a preview of the film tomorrow in Berlin at 16:00 at the “Eiszeit Kino”(cinema) Zeughofstrasse 20, Berlin

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  • Cool interview with photographer Cliett, from Cabinet Magazine:

    On November 1, 1977, Walter De Maria completed The Lightning Field, a monumental array of 400 polished stainless steel poles arranged in a rectangular grid roughly one mile by one kilometer in size. The following year, New York-based photographer John Cliett moved to site of the work, in the remote western New Mexico countryside near the town of Quemado, and spent the summer taking pictures of it. Over the next few months—and during another stay the next year—Cliett would shoot hundreds of pictures of The Lightning Field.
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  • From Dave Silva, Wooster Collective:

    “I have dedicated my miserable life to creating these 10 inch monstrosities. I have over 27 variations that continue to grow. I just recently finished a Sleestak Bob. They basically are resin casts of a Bob’s Big Boy restaurant bank that
    a friend bought for me a long time ago.(He said it looked like me when I was in Grade school). I cast them and customized them myself. Started of with all 4 band members of KISS and evolved into everything from DEVO-Bob to Osama Bob-Laden. I have a small showing of them here in Orange County ,Ca this month through June at the Kitsch Bar in Costa Mesa”

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  • From the Washington Post:

    It began with a muted series of thumps from a sharp knife or maybe clenched fists. The sounds were muffled but unmistakable, one body blow after another, ending with a squishy thud.

    “No, no, no, no, no. No,” came the high-pitched voice of a crew member or flight attendant being subdued. ” . . . Please, please don’t hurt me,” the person said later. ” . . . I don’t want to die.” The desperate plea, captured by the cockpit voice recorder of United Airlines Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001, was played to a transfixed jury yesterday at the death penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui.

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  • From the Washington Post:

    The retired commander of key forces in Iraq called yesterday for Donald H. Rumsfeld to step down, joining several other former top military commanders who have harshly criticized the defense secretary’s authoritarian style for making the military’s job more difficult.

    “I think we need a fresh start” at the top of the Pentagon, retired Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq in 2004-2005, said in an interview. “We need leadership up there that respects the military as they expect the military to respect them. And that leadership needs to understand teamwork.”

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  • Portfolio from Blueeyes Magazine:

    Amy Vitale.

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