• From Dexter Filkins, The New York Times:

    Even in a country beset by murder and death, the 16th Brigade represented a new frontier.

    The brigade, a 1,000-man force set up by Iraq’s Ministry of Defense in early 2005, was charged with guarding a stretch of oil pipeline that ran through the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Dawra. Heavily armed and lightly supervised, some members of the largely Sunni brigade transformed themselves into a death squad, cooperating with insurgents and executing government collaborators, Iraqi officials say.

    “They were killing innocent people, anyone who was affiliated with the government,” said Hassan Thuwaini, the director of the Iraqi Oil Ministry’s protection force.

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  • Deadline for submissions for the first issue of NoTxt Magazine is tomorrow night (May 25). Photography, art, stickers, graffiti, stencil, pranks, send us your work.

    Debut issue goes online in June.

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  • Blue Nude : A Novel

    Blue Nude, by Elizabeth Rosner.
    [rating:4/5]
    It’s about a painter and a woman who models nude for art classes. He’s German, she’s Jewish. He has a studio in Point Reyes. She lives in The City. San Francisco.

    I want to remember these passages:

    I was married for a while, she says. To a photographer.

    Danzig snorts at the idea. They always want to put frames around things, he says. They pretend they’re only telling you what they claim is out there in so-called real life, but really they’re getting in the way just as much as painters are.

    And this:

    His photos began getting smaller while the white linen mats around them kept getting larger, surrounding his images with more and more white space. Merav envisioned herself shrinking inside a vast blizzard and dreamed about Gabe building a house with empty rooms, windows too high to look out from. He said he framed things, people, so that he could make them more visible, believing even as he cut off its edges that he was making a thing more real, more seeable. She started wearing clothes in all the colors he couldn’t see to camouflage herself in his landscape, disappear in front of his eyes.

    The walls of their apartment showed a collection of Merav in parts, close-ups of her feet, hands, hip bones, shoulder blades. The one exception lay in a single photo that showed her entire, taken from behind her back. In a wide-open field stood a wooden picture frame the size of a doorway, balancing upright as if by magic in the middle of nothing. And Merav was walking through it, her arms held out to her sides, her fingertips just brushing the edges of the frame. She was stepping out of it and walking away.

    Blue Nude, by Elizabeth Rosner.
    [rating:4/5]

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  • From the Chicago Tribune, via Rob Galbraith:

    A real-time presentation of a photo-op in the Oval Office of the White House with President Bush and Australia Prime Minister John Howard. (30 seconds.)

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  • From the BBC:

    Congolese politicians have been warned that they should not have more than 25 bodyguards, amid pre-election tension.

    The warning was made by Defence Minister Adolphe Onusumba, amid reports that some politicians have hundreds of armed personal guards.

    Here.

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  • A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

    A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, by Marina Lewycka.
    [rating:5/5]

    Now I see his energy is all redirected towards this woman and her son- they will become his substitute family. He can speak with them in his own language. Such a beautiful language that anyone can be a poet. Such a landscape- it would make anyone an artist. Blue-painted wooden houses, golden wheat fields, forests of silver birch; slow wide sliding rivers. Instead of going home to Ukraina, Ukraina will come home to him.

    I have visited Ukraine. I have seen the concrete housing blocks and the fish dead in the rivers.

    Lewycka’s short novel is the story of a woman whose elderly father (an immigrant from Ukraine) who falls in love with a young woman, Valentina (also from Ukraine) and marries her. The narrator has her doubts all along about the young woman’s intentions. They fight:

    “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” I have slipped into the mongrel language, half English half Ukrainian, fluent and snappy.

    “Ah-shamed! Ah-shamed!” She snorts. “You shame. No me shame. Why you no visit you mamma grave? Why you no crying, bringin flower? Why you making trouble here?”

    The thought of my mother lying neglected in the cold ground while this usurper lords it in her kitchen drives me to a new pitch of fury.

    “Don’t you dare to talk about my mother. Don’t even say her name with your filthy-talking boil-in-the-baggage mouth!”

    “You mother die. Now you father marry me. You no like. You make trouble. I understand. I no stupid.”

    She speaks the mongrel language, too. We snarl at each other like mongrels.

    Another book I picked up in Canada. B.C. this time. The story weaves from discovery to discovery, her parents’ story in WW2 Ukraine, and the detective work involved in ridding Valentina (the other woman) from her father’s life:

    The detective thrusts the envelope into her hands. Valentina looks confused.

    “Divorce pepper? I no want divorce.”

    “No,” says the detective, “the petitioner is Mr. Nikolai Mayevskyj. He is divorcing you.”

    She stands for a moment in stunned silence. Then she explodes in a ball of fury. “Nikolai! Nikolai! What is this?” she screams at my father. “Nikolai, you crazy dog-eaten-brain graveyard-deadman!”

    My father has locked himself in his room and turned the radio on full volume. She swings round again to confront the private detective, but he is alreadly slamming the door of his black BMW and driving away with a screech of tyres. She turns on Vera. “You she-cat-dog-vixen flesh-eating witch!”

    A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, by Marina Lewycka.
    [rating:5/5]

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  • From Punknews:

    The full routing for the mostly U.S. tour featuring the recently reunited influential hardcore act Gorilla Biscuits has been announced. Victory Records’ Comeback Kid will be acting as direct support on all dates.

    Here.

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  • From The Washington Post:

    On June 21, neo-Nazi sympathizers are scheduled to hold a rally in the city of Leipzig before a match between Iran and Angola, to show support for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the destruction of Israel and denied the Holocaust happened.

    The rally sponsor, the far-right National Democratic Party, caused controversy this spring by publishing a glossy tournament schedule with a photo of a German soccer player and the headline, “White — Not Only a Color for Jersey!” Critics called it a thinly veiled insult to foreign-born players on Germany’s national team.

    Last week, a former German government spokesman warned World Cup fans from abroad “and anyone with a different skin color” to avoid towns and villages outside Berlin and other rural parts of eastern Germany. “They may not leave with their lives,” said Uwe-Karsten Heye, who served as chief spokesman under former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and now heads a civil rights group.

    Here.

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  • The Architecture of Moscow from the early 1930s to the early 1950s. Unrealised projects.

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  • From The New York Times:

    In 2000 Mr. Junger went with Mr. Scott Anderson to Bosnia, where they accidentally almost captured one of the world’s most-wanted war criminals. “The idea was to head to the Croatian coast, drink beer and look at girls,” recalled Mr. Junger. “Instead we detoured into some hell hole on the border of Montenegro when we heard that Radovan Karadzic had been spotted there.”

    Serb satraps mistook them for an American intelligence hit team and offered up Karadzic in exchange for bribes including visas to the United States. “We said, O.K., let’s see where this goes,” Mr. Junger said. “It was a stupid, dangerous game to be playing,” one that quickly put them in the sights of real C.I.A. officers, who were not amused.

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  • From Seymour Hersch, The New Yorker:

    A security consultant working with a major telecommunications carrier told me that his client set up a top-secret high-speed circuit between its main computer complex and Quantico, Virginia, the site of a government-intelligence computer center. This link provided direct access to the carrier’s network core—the critical area of its system, where all its data are stored. “What the companies are doing is worse than turning over records,” the consultant said. “They’re providing total access to all the data.”

    “This is not about getting a cardboard box of monthly phone bills in alphabetical order,” a former senior intelligence official said. The Administration’s goal after September 11th was to find suspected terrorists and target them for capture or, in some cases, air strikes. “The N.S.A. is getting real-time actionable intelligence,” the former official said.

    Here.

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  • From The Moscow Times:

    St. Petersburg police shot and killed a 21-year-old man wanted in several racist attacks after he lunged at arresting officers with a knife, prosecutors said Friday.

    A police officer shot Dmitry Borovikov, a founder of the extremist group Mad Crowd, once in the head at around 10 p.m. Thursday, St. Petersburg prosecutor’s office spokeswoman Yelena Ordynskaya said.

    “The officer fired a warning shot in the air, but [Borovikov] tried to stab him, and the officer was forced to take action,” Ordynskaya said.

    Here.

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  • From The New York Times:
    MOST musicians I know don’t just play music on Saturday night,” Henry Wessel explained. “They play music every day. They are always fiddling around, letting the notes lead them from one place to another. Taking still photographs is like that. It is a generative process. It pulls you along.”

    Here.

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  • From the Guardian:

    Adel says 10 Sunnis have been killed in his neighbourhood in the past month. In retaliation 20 Shia were kidnapped and killed by Sunni insurgents. During one week the Guardian spent in Yarmouk in May, a grocer, his two brothers and a cousin, a school guard, a generator operator, and four ministry of education employees, all Shia, were killed. Two Sunnis were killed in the same week.

    “Look, a full-scale civil war will break out in the next few months. The Kurds only care about their independence. We the Sunnis will be crushed – the Shia have more fighters and they are better organised, and have more than one leadership. They are supported by the Iranians. We are lost. We don’t have leadership and no one is more responsible for our disarray than [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi, may God curse him,” he said.

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  • From the Washington Post:

    When 18-year-old Hans Van Themsche was expelled from his boarding school dormitory for smoking, police officials here say, it pushed him over some existential edge. He shaved his head, bought a Winchester hunting rifle, put on a black leather trench coat and wrote a note saying he was going to kill foreigners. Then he went on a shooting rampage in the narrow cobblestone streets of this ancient port city.

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  • From the Daily Sun, Nigeria’s King of the Tabloids:

    “My father told me to accompany him to a certain place in the farm. On the way, he said he wanted to ease himself. He dropped his bag, entered the bush with his dane-gun and told me to move forward so that the smell of the excreta would not disturb me. It was at that point I suspected my father wanted to harm me.

    Before I could do anything, he shot me on the shoulder from the back. I shouted Jesus! Jesus!! I regain my balance and started running away and my father started pursuing me with a cutlass”.

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  • Photo Essay by Paolo Pellegrin, from MagnumPhotos:

    Since February 2006, Angola is going through its worst ever cholera epidemic, with 33,000 cases reported and more than 1,200 deaths. Over the 16,200 cases occurred in Luanda, Angolan capital city, more than 13,000 have been treated by the medical orgqnisqtion Médecins Sans Frontières. The outbreak has rapidly spread from Luanda to the provinces and to date, 11 of the 18 provinces are reporting cases. The outbreak erupted in Boa Vista, one of the poorest shantytown that surround the centre of Luanda.

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  • From Wooster Collective:

    Last week Matthew Rodriguez got picked up by the cops wearing a rooster costume while glueing up candycorn characters in new york during his art show at the show room gallery with scion. This week hes in newyork again for another art show at the mf gallery that opens this saturday.

    This time he’s wearing a snowmans costume and glueing up christmas tree monsters.

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  • From The Moscow Times:

    I am writing in response to the growing wave of racially motivated attacks across Russia. As we mourn the deaths of our brothers, I believe that abandoning our studies in fear should not be an option. “Skin terrorism” must not be allowed to win.

    However, each and every one of us must be vigilant and street smart. Here are some ways to avoid racist attacks:

    1. Stay six steps away from everyone in all directions. This measure won’t save anyone from gun attacks, but it is a sure way to fend off knife attacks.

    2. Avoid going to dangerous nightspots. It is stupid to go to a club where a dark-skinned foreigner was knifed a few weeks back.

    3. When invited by a stranger for a chat or a drink, thank him or her and walk away or pretend to be deaf.

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  • From Manowar:

    Heavy metal and outdoor adventuring may seem to be disparate entities, but in fact, they have one distinct quality in common: They are both lifestyles. It isn’t an easy task to find a “casual” metal fan, just as it is an enviable venture to dredge up an outdoorsman who doesn’t live and breathe his craft. There is a distinct sense of passion, devotion and intense involvement to be found within each field making each more than a hobby, but a way of life. Now, Eric Adams and Chester Moore – esteemed zoologist, outdoorsman, and wildlife journalist – have joined forces to create a unique and exciting look into the adventurous world of outdoor life in their upcoming hunting DVD “Wild Life & Wild Times.” This DVD release is scheduled for June 26, 2006.

    Here.

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