• NYT:

    Mr. Ashykbayev denounced Mr. Cohen’s performance as host of the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon last fall, in which a skit mocked the imperial aura that surrounds Mr. Nazarbayev, the country’s president since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Mr. Ashykbayev suggested that Mr. Cohen was acting on behalf of “someone’s political order” to denigrate Kazakhstan and that the government “reserved the right to any legal action to prevent new pranks of this kind.”

    Mr. Cohen, who is Jewish, responded, as Borat, in a video posted on his Web site, citing Mr. Ashykbayev by name and declaring that he “fully supported my government’s decision to sue this Jew.”

    “Since the 2003 Tulyakov reforms, Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world,” he goes on in the video, citing fictional details in the absurdly stilted English that is central to his act. “Women can now travel inside of bus. Homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats. And age of consent has been raised to 8 years old.”

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  • Guardian:

    Kazakhstan: land of superstition, religious intolerance, political suppression and goats. Wrong. Kazakhstan is actually a country of metals and machinery, an outward-looking, modern nation with a stable economy that attracts foreign investors to its cosmopolitan capital.

    The Kazakh government took the unusual step yesterday of publishing a four-page colour supplement in the New York Times in what appeared to be in part an attempt to head off the fallout from a satirical film due out in November. Borat: Cultural Leanings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is the latest work from Ali G creator Sacha Baron Cohen. The film lampoons the central Asian nation through Borat Sagdiyev, a Kazakh journalist who travels to the US to report on local customs.

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  • Washington Post:

    “The militiamen, when they saw the American army, they fled at extraordinary speed,” said Abdul Sattar, who was too afraid to leave his house to go to work this day. “They jumped into houses. One woman saw one of them in her house and fainted.”

    Abu Mohammed described jumping into houses as a tactical move that the Mahdi Army often uses because its members know U.S. troops rarely remain long inside a neighborhood. “We didn’t want to confront them,” he said.

    When Abu Mohammed returned to his home, enraged, he fired at the houses of his Sunni neighbors, even though they were not Egheidat. A Sunni neighbor, on hearing the gunfire, came out clutching an AK-47 assault rifle.

    “I shot at him,” said Abu Mohammed. “He bent down, and the bullet struck his mother in the arm. Then I walked out into the neighborhood and shouted: ‘Any Sunni I see in the street is my enemy. No Sunni will stay in Tobji. The Sunnis are infidels.’ ” Egheidat tribal leaders denied any involvement in the attack on the checkpoint, blaming radical Sunni insurgents seeking to deepen the divisions in Tobji.

    “We’ll pay 10 times the amount — not four times, as tradition dictates — if what they are saying is true,” Egheidi said, referring to blood money. The reconciliation meeting was postponed. That night and the following day, the streets lay silent.

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  • NYT:

    Strange to think that the flamboyantly lethal nut job Idi Amin died in Saudi Arabia just three years ago. About 80 at the time, he had fled Uganda in 1979 after murdering upwards of 300,000 souls. Larger than life physically and metaphorically, he was a former heavyweight boxing champion with a brilliant sense of leadership as a performance: as a dictator, his methods were brutally antediluvian, but his public relations cunning was consummately 20th century. Smiling into cameras, he dropped provocations like bombs: “I don’t like human flesh. It’s too salty for me.”

    The queasily enjoyable new fiction film “The Last King of Scotland,” based on the novel by Giles Foden and directed by Kevin Macdonald, creates a portrait of this famous Ugandan dictator from inside the palace walls. Furiously paced, with excellent performances by Forest Whitaker as Amin and James McAvoy as the foolish Scotsman who becomes the leader’s personal physician, the film has texture, if not depth and enough intelligence to almost persuade you that it actually has something of note to say. It would make a terrific double bill with Barbet Schroeder’s mesmerizing 1974 documentary, “General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait,” of which Mr. Macdonald has obviously made a close and fruitful study.

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  • Moscow Times:

    The notices were posted around the capital of Soviet Ukraine: All Jews living in the city of Kiev and its vicinity must report by 8:00 on the morning of Sept. 29, 1941, to the corner of Melnyka and Dokterivska streets (near the cemetery).

    They were told to bring their ID cards, money and fresh clothes. Most thought the Nazi occupiers were deporting them to a Jewish ghetto. Some even arrived early in hope of getting a good seat on the train.

    What met them that morning was death.

    Forced to undress, the Jews were herded in groups — men, women and children — to the edge of a ravine. For 48 hours, the Nazis gunned down the crowd until at least 33,771 Jews had been massacred — a number recorded by the German shock troops — their lifeless bodies toppling down the embankment. In the ensuing months, the ravine would fill with an estimated 100,000 bodies, including other Kiev residents and Red Army prisoners.

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  • Moscow Times:

    Prosecutors showed that Sivyakov forced Andrei Sychyov, a first-year conscript at the Chelyabinsk Armor Academy, to squat for several hours while beating him last New Year’s Eve. The incident led to the amputation of Sychyov’s legs and genitals.

    Sivyakov, who has consistently maintained his innocence, was convicted on five charges, including “exceeding authority, resulting in grave consequences,” and sentenced to four years, less time served, in a medium-security penal colony. He has been in jail since mid-January.

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  • BBC:

    The court heard that Momcilo Krajisnik helped arm Bosnian Serb civilians so that they could exterminate non-Serbs and drive them from large areas of Bosnia-Hercegovina.

    Krajisnik said he knew nothing of the war crimes. But former Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Biljana Plavsic testified that he was “very powerful” and at times he had even “dominated” the overall leader, Radovan Karadzic.

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  • Genres: Comedy, Horror

    Tagline: Things in New York are about to go down the toilet…
    Plot Synopsis: When a liquor store owner finds a case of “Viper” in his cellar, he decides to sell it to the local hobos at one dollar a bottle, unaware of its true properties. The drinks causes its consumers to melt, very messily. Two homeless lads find themselves up against the effects of the toxic brew, as well as going head to head with “Bronson” a Vietnam vet with sociopathic tendencies, and the owner of the junkyard they live in.
    Plot Keywords: Surreal | Disturbing | Female Frontal Nudity | Female Nudity | Breasts | Gross Out Comedy | Male Frontal Nudity | Close Up Scene | Homelessness | Gore | Insanity | Mutant

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  • BBC:

    The film, called Spring Break in Bosnia, tells the true story of a group of journalists who in 2000 went on the trail of Europe’s most wanted man, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

    In the course of their adventure, they got mistaken for a CIA hit team.

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  • Washington Post:

    Clinton said he authorized the CIA to kill bin Laden, and even “contracted with people to kill him.” He also said he had a plan to attack Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban and hunt for bin Laden after the attack on the USS Cole, but the CIA and FBI refused to certify that bin Laden was responsible, and Uzbekistan refused to allow the United States to set up a base. By contrast, Clinton said the Bush administration’s neoconservatives “had no meetings on bin Laden for nine months,” believing he had been “too obsessed with bin Laden.”

    “At least I tried,” Clinton said. “That’s the difference [between] me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried. So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, [Richard] Clarke, who got demoted.”

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  • Guardian:

    The report surfaced in a regional French newspaper which had obtained the leaked report claiming Saudi Arabian sources were ‘convinced’ the terror chief had been killed in August.

    It prompted a flurry of official statements. After a remarkable day of rumour and counter-rumour, it appears the answer is that no one really knows. French President Jacques Chirac told reporters bin Laden’s death ‘… has not been confirmed in any way whatsoever.’ While a US intelligence official said: ‘It’s quite possible there was some talk of this, but in terms of being able to confirm this, that I can’t do.’

    A Foreign Office spokeswoman said: ‘We continue to have no reason to believe that he is dead.’ Downing Street refused to comment on the reports. Privately, senior Whitehall sources said they had no evidence that the claims were true.

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  • NYT:

    But the darkest fears of a draconian Islam on Africa’s east coast have not come true, at least not yet. Boys are allowed to play soccer, and girls are allowed to go to school, despite rumors to the contrary. And businesses are not forced to close during prayer time, as has been widely reported outside of Mogadishu.

    In fact, people were selling bread, biscuits and watermelon right in front of the Islamic forces’ headquarters during the noon prayer earlier this week. The teenage militia members standing guard regressed to the boys that they were, giggling over giant slices of watermelon and spitting seeds at each other, the juice running down their chins and dripping onto their guns.

    “Nobody knows where we’re headed,” said Ahmed Mohammed Ali, chairman of a Mogadishu human rights organization. But, he added, the Islamists “pacified this place and brought the clans together.”

    “Whatever you think about them,” he said, “you can’t overlook that.”

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  • Alec Soth:

    Curious about my studio. Have a look here.

    *pictured are Phillip Carpenter, Eric William Carroll, Linda Dobosenski, Brian Lesteberg and Josh Grubbs.

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  • Little People.

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  • Work by the great Bruce McCall, appearing in NYT:

    Should the developers scale back the proposed — and mammoth — Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn by 6 percent to 8 percent, as recent reports suggest they might be considering, the decision would hardly be novel. Indeed, history teems with myriad similar, if less subtle, downsizings.

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  • NYT Magazine:

    What happened next was the strangest encounter of Lemming’s 28-year career as a football scout. Michael Oher sat down at the table across from him. . .and refused to speak. “He shook my hand and then didn’t say a word,” Lemming recalled. (“His hands — they were huge!”) Lemming asked a few questions; Michael Oher just kept staring right through him. And soon enough Lemming decided further interaction was pointless. Michael Oher left, and he left behind blank forms and unanswered questions. Every other high-school football player in America was dying for Lemming to invite him to play in the U.S. Army All-American Bowl. Michael Oher had left his invitation on the table.

    What never crossed Tom Lemming’s mind was that the player he would soon rank the No. 1 offensive lineman in the nation, and perhaps the finest left-tackle prospect since Orlando Pace, hadn’t the faintest notion of who Lemming was or why he was asking him all these questions. For that matter, he didn’t even think of himself as a football player. And he had never played left tackle in his life.

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  • Fantagraphics:

    The 1999 Nato bombing of Serbia. A grenade shell from a Sarajevo souvenir shop. A refrigerator with the frozen mummy of Tito… These serve as the starting point for a journey further and further down the collective unconscious of the Balkans, where the borders between dream and reality are erased and redrawn until they form a tale as exciting as it is fantastic, a tale which could be about our times and a war-torn Europe but just as well might be a deep dive into the psyches of its authors or a discussion about the essence of drawing. Bosnian Flat Dog is the result of a unique collaboration between two of Sweden’s most internationally renowned cartoonists, Death and Cand and Pixy creator Max Andersson and Lars Sjunnesson. Each of them contributed to every single drawing to the extent that they no longer can tell themselves exactly who did what. This has lead to the emergence of an independent artistic entity which is neither of the two, but something else, at once familiar and unknown and perhaps a little bit scary.

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  • NYT:

    If this sounds confusing, that’s the nature of chaos, which can be as hard to photograph as it is to describe. Fortunately, Robert Polidori is a connoisseur of chaos, and the beauty of his pictures — they have a languid, almost underwater beauty — entails locating order in bedlam.

    The X of wires and the diagonal thrust of that green house, extending horizontally across the photograph, are vertically anchored by the telephone pole, creating a tranquillity in the composition that belies the actual pandemonium. Given bearings by this geometry, a viewer is set free to find details like the teetering stop sign on the street corner where the green house landed: a black-humored punch line.

    All artists, as best they can, make sense of a world that is often senseless. Mr. Polidori’s work, from Chernobyl to Havana — in sometimes dangerous, topsy-turvy, out-of-time places — generally bears witness to profound neglect. A photojournalist’s compulsion and problem is always to contrive beauty from misery, and it is only human to feel uneasy about admiring pictures like these from New Orleans, whose sumptuousness can be disorienting. But the works also express an archaeologist’s aspiration to document plain-spoken truth, and they are without most of the tricks of the trade that photographers exploit to turn victims into objects and pictures of pain into tributes to themselves.

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  • NYT:

    “I was fortunate to work with Ingmar,” he said in 1995. “One of the things we believed was that a picture shouldn’t look lit. Whenever possible, I lit with one source and avoided creating double shadows, because that pointed to the photography.”

    In his films, especially those with Mr. Bergman, light assumed a metaphysical dimension that went beyond mood. It distilled and deepened the feelings of torment and spiritual separation that afflicted Bergman characters. But in scenes of tranquillity filmed outdoors, the light might also evoke glimpses of transcendence. The sumptuous scenes of a Scandinavian Christmas in “Fanny and Alexander” burst with warmth and a magical, childlike joy.

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  • He severed head of a corpse and claimed he pitied it and decided to do it a favour.

    Daily Sun, Nigeria’s King of the Tabloids:

    Azubuike, a native of Aguata in Anambra State, said: “I went to look for my friend at Alakuko on that fateful day. On getting there, I met his absence and decided to look for him at the motor park. On my way to the park, I saw three corpses on the road. They were all decayed and their skeletons were sticking out. I felt sorry for one of them and decided to cut off the skull.

    I saw a machete by the roadside, which I used to sever the head. I put the head into a nylon bag and was going back to my friend’s house when I was intercepted by the police. I explained to them that I only took pity on the corpse. I would have even carried the whole corpse, but it was too heavy. My intention was to help the corpse by burying its head. I had no ulterior motive.”

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