On May 7, 1994, Norway's most famous painting, "The Scream" by Edvard Munch, was recovered almost three months after it was stolen from a museum in Oslo. The fragile painting was recovered undamaged at a hotel in Asgardstrand, about 40 miles south of Oslo, police said.

The iconic 1893 painting of a waiflike figure on a bridge was stolen in only 50 seconds during a break-in on February 12, the opening day of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. Two thieves broke through a window of the National Gallery, cut a wire holding the painting to the wall and left a note reading "Thousand thanks for the bad security!"

A few days after the theft, a Norwegian anti-abortion group said it could have the painting returned if Norwegian television showed an anti-abortion film. The claim turned out to be false. The government also received a $1 million ransom demand on March 3, but refused to pay it due to a lack of proof that the demand was genuine.

Eventually, police found four pieces of the painting's frame in Nittedal, a suburb north of Oslo, and what may have been a cryptic messages that the thieves wanted to discuss a ransom. Finally, in January 1996, four men were convicted and sentenced in connection with the theft. They included Paal Enger, who had been convicted in 1988 of stealing Munch's "The Vampire" in Oslo. Enger was sentenced this time to six-and-a-half-years in prison. He escaped while on a field trip in 1999, and was captured 12 days later in a blond wig and dark sunglasses trying to buy a train ticket to Copenhagen.

In August 2004, another version of The Scream was stolen along with Munch's The Madonna, this time from the Munch Museum in Oslo. Three men were convicted in connection with that theft in May 2006. Police recovered both works in August with minor marks and tears.

Munch developed an emotionally charged style that served as an important forerunner of the 20th century Expressionist movement. He painted "The Scream" as part of his "Frieze of Life" series, in which sickness, death, fear, love and melancholy are central themes. He died in January 1944 at the age of 81.

INDIANAPOLIS — A group of students from Bowling Green State University will take to the asphalt on Saturday at the iconic home of automotive racing to pit their all-electric go-kart against those from 29 other colleges and universities around the world. The eight BGSU students have spent months designing and building their lithium-ion, battery-powered No. 9 racer for a 100-lap race around a special 1,200-foot road course track at 2:30 p.m. Saturday on the grounds of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.The Collegiate evGrandPrix open-wheeled kart race is sponsored by Allison Transmission Inc., and is designed to advance electric powertrain development and increase enthusiasm among young engineers and motor sport enthusiasts.The privately funded BG kart, which reaches speeds of 45 mph or more, is being driven by sophomore Kenneth Heschel, a Port Clinton native and 14-year Kart racing veteran.The champion of the overall evGrandPrix competition is the team that best blends kart design and community outreach with race placement and optimal efficiency during 100 laps of racing.“We’re competitive. From what we’re showing, we’re in the upper third [of competing teams]. It’s not just about speed, though. We have to be able to finish the race,” said Anthony Palumbo, adviser to the BGSU Motorsports club and a BGSU professor emeritus who is accompanying the team.In addition to their electric vehicle, the team has been working with students at Penta Career Center on a second kart that students there hope to enter in follow-up races in September, said Mike Hall, an automotive technologies instructor at Penta.This is not the first time BGSU has been involved in electric-powered motor sports.The school fielded an electrified open-wheeled racer called the “Electric Falcon” between 1994 and 2003, racing other collegiate teams from across the country in an effort to develop some of the drivetrain technology now appearing on consumer electric vehicles.

In 2008, Old-Thinker News reported on a 1994 strategic paper published by the U.S. Army War College titled “Revolution In Military Affairs And Conflict Short Of War,” written by Dr. Steven Metz (who works for the RAND Corporation) and James Kievit. Recent events have made this paper even more precient than ever. The document outlines an eerily familiar scenario in which a group of revolutionaries within government hijack control of the levers of power and begin a program of pre-emptive war, psychological operations at home and abroad, and false flag attacks blamed on “…computer generated insurgent leader[s]“.

Nat Rothschild's stakes in mining groups and money from his investment funds have pushed his wealth up to the £1bn mark

As a scion of the world's most famous banking family, Nat Rothschild was never going to be a pauper. Even if he had continued to live the famed playboy lifestyle he enjoyed at university, the son of Lord Jacob Rothschild was always thought to be in line for a £500m inheritance.

But now the 39-year-old has joined his super-rich friends – such as Russian metals tycoon Oleg Deripaska and Ivan Glasenberg at soon-to-be-floated commodity trading house Glencore – having achieved billionaire billing in his own right.

Rothschild's stakes in mining group Vallar and Chateau Lafite are now valued at about £400m according to the latest Sunday Times Rich List, while his holdings in businesses of friends and family, such as Deripaska's Rusal, Glencore and investment trust RIT Capital Partners are worth £150m. Other wealth, including stakes in electrical group Volex and money made from his hedge fund, Atticus, have pushed the financier's wealth up to the £1bn mark.

It is an heroic number that only a few years ago appeared completely unobtainable. At school and university at Eton and Oxford, tales of Rothschild's social life were legion, with stories of a string of girlfriends as well as a fondness for extravagant parties. These tales continued after he left university and while travelling in India he met a model called Annabelle Neilson, who he swiftly married and almost as quickly divorced. However, since concentrating on his business career – and becoming close to the likes of Deripaska and former minister Lord Mandelson – stories of hedonism and girlfriends have decreased.

Of course, Rothschild's closeness to the Russian tycoon and one of the founders of New Labour still shapes the financier's reputation. In 2009 while in Corfu, he infamously invited George Osborne – the then shadow chancellor, an old university friend and co-member of the Bullingdon club – on board the Queen K, Deripaska's £80m yacht moored off the island. They were joined by Mandelson, then the EU trade commissioner, and the conversation proved politically explosive.

Back in Westminster, Osborne gossiped about Mandelson speaking "pure poison" about Gordon Brown which, among other things, provoked much speculation about the previously lower profile links between Mandelson, Rothschild and Deripaska.

The revenge was brutal: from his base in the Swiss ski resort of Klosters, Rothschild wrote to The Times accusing Osborne and Andrew Feldman, the Tories' fundraiser, of trying to solicit a donation for the Conservative party from Deripaska – an approach which would have breached party fundraising rules. It was swiftly denied by the Conservatives, but for months Osborne appeared politically emasculated.

Still, all seem to have moved on now, with Rothschild shaking off other setbacks, such as the closure of the flagship funds at Atticus, to create a business empire which has prompted the New York Times to predict that he may become "the richest Rothschild of them all".

The new fortune has been built on old-fashioned Rothschild contact-building, as well as business savvy: the financier's relationship with Deripaska is seen by many observers to be key, and the pair's closeness may provide the motivation behind the 2009 knifing of Osborne.

Certainly Rothschild's circle appears tight, with the same powerful names, who control large portions of the natural resources sector, always seeming to emerge. His friend Glasenberg sits on the board of Deripaska's Rusal, where Glencore and Rothschild are leading investors. Glencore, in which Rothschild's £25m convertible bond will soon yield a 50% return, is also a large shareholder in miner Bumi, in which Rothschild's Vallar owns a quarter stake. Meanwhile, Vallar's prospectus mentions Glencore 73 times, an indication of the importance of the trading group's long-term marketing deals with the group's assets.

The circular nature of Rothschild's business network does not end there. Tony Hayward, the former BP chief executive who is in talks about setting up a natural resources fund with Rothschild, has just been named a new director of Glencore. Meanwhile, during the trading group's search for a chairman, which ended with the farcical appointment of Simon Murray, Glasenberg called Rothschild to obtain Murray's mobile telephone number.

Elsewhere, Roland Rudd's City PR firm, Finsbury, spins for Vallar, Glencore and Deripaska. Rudd's close friend Mandelson has a new venture called Global Counsel, which is owned by marketing group WPP, Finsbury's owner. Rothschild is also thought to be close to Roman Abramovich, the billionaire oligarch who owns Chelsea, where Deripaska takes a box in which Rothschild is known to be a frequent guest.All of which is a long way from Lazards in 1994, when Rothschild began his financial career.

A year later he had moved to New York where he met Timothy Barakett, the founder of Atticus, which at its peak managed more than $20bn (£12bn) for wealthy investors.

After initially recording stellar returns, and earning Rothschild a small fortune for his contribution, the flagship funds made big losses, prompting Rothschild's father to redeem his £36.5m investment and the fund to subsequently return cash to investors.

From the hipster galleries of Williamsburg to a sculptor's zen garden in Queens, New York arts blogger Aneta Glinkowska points out the best draws in the boroughs

SculptureCenter

You are now in Queens, known for its creative street nomenclature and only a handful of galleries, but a variety of other art institutions such as SculptureCenter. Housed in a two-floor, brick, garage-like structure, it is an enormous exhibition space perfect for massive works of art. Recent examples include Ursula von Rydingsvard's monumental cedar reliefs and sculptures. In addition, if you visit on a summer weekend, you might find an art crowd mingling to the sound of music made on a small make-shift stage outdoors. This outdoor area is also an exhibition space. Don't miss the dark, humid, earthy basement often used for installations involving projections and new media.
• 44-19 Purves St, sculpture-center.org, open Thurs-Mon 11am-6pm, suggested donation $5 adults, $3 students

Brooklyn Museum

Manhattan is home to most of the renowned New York museums, but Brooklyn has one of its own. In a classical building, recently restored with a glass facade, adjacent to Prospect Park, architecturally it rivals the Metropolitan. Brooklyn Museum's collection and audacious shows attract critical attention or, in the case of Charles Saatchi's Sensation a decade ago, scandal. Such controversies attract crowds, which are harder to come by here than in Manhattan. The museum pays as much attention to maintaining its vast collection of western and non-western art as to curating contemporary shows, and its Elizabeth A Sackler Center for Feminist Art is also notable for showing and pushing for more women's art.
• 200 Eastern Parkway, brooklynmuseum.org, open Wed-Sun 11am-6pm; Thurs, Fri 11am-10pm, suggested donation adults $10, seniors, students $6, under-12s free

Smack Mellon

Until recently the neighbourhood of DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) was better known for its industry, but in the recent decade it's become home for many graphic design companies, galleries, publishing houses, booksellers and artists' studios. Smack Mellon is one such institution, an art venue which uses its industrial, brick building to show emerging contemporary art and lesser known, mid-career artists. Because of low light and the large open space, it is best suited to showing projections and it does so often. It favours site-specific installations, such as the recent Site 92 group exhibition for which artists were asked to respond to the gallery's industrial space. Smack Mellon is a not-for-profit organisation, with artists' studios which you can peek into under the exhibition space.
• 92 Plymouth Street, smackmellon.org, open Wed-Sun noon-6pm

Pierogi

Pierogi, founded in 1994, is not an Eastern European dumpling shop, but one of the first art spaces in Williamsburg and the longest lasting of dozens of galleries. The area is now known as a destination for twentysomethings to live and party, and Pierogi might be seen as a catalyst for both gallery and youth migration to this still heavily Eastern European neighbourhood. In its modest industrial building behind heavy metal doors, Pierogi shows a variety of media but is heavy on drawing, illustration and photography. It is also know for vast archives of works on paper from nearly 1,000 artists. Make sure to stop by The Boiler, a few blocks away at 191 North 14th Street, where 40-foot ceilings allow for truly large installations.
• 177 North 9th Street, pierogi2000.com, open Tues-Sun 11am-6pm

Like the Spice

Another Williamsburg gallery hinting at food in its name but with a slightly shorter history (established in 2006), this ground floor, white cube space shows emerging artists, and has a hippie feel to it in its preoccupation with the fantastic and sometimes difficult work. But there is also room for abstract art and realism, video and new media. Located in the Hispanic quarter of Williamsburg, on sunny days there is often a performance in front of the gallery. Another attraction are the monthly dinners – prepared by artists.
• 224 Roebling St, likethespice.com, open Wed-Sun 12pm-7pm

Fisher Landau Center For Art

Fisher Landau Center For Art has been known for hosting the enthusiastically anticipated Columbia MFA Thesis Show in the month of May. But it's really the collection that makes the space outstanding. The centre is a former parachute factory and it's one of the older private collections of contemporary art in the US. Heavy on American art dating back to 1960s, some of the big names include the legendary conceptual artists John Baldessari and Jenny Holzer, as well as many other household contemporary masters such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd and Robert Rauschenberg. The Whitney Museum is hosting part of the collection in early 2011 giving it deserved recognition and showing off what Fisher Landau has promised to donate to the Whitney.
• 38-27 30th St, flcart.org, open Thurs-Mon 12pm to 5pm

The Noguchi Museum

The Noguchi Museum is yet another factory building that has been converted into an art space – this time devoted to the life's work of one artist. It's the former studio of half-Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi. A great attraction of the museum is its garden and many half open spaces, so it's well suited to presenting the stone and metal sculptures he made; the ivy-clad walls and garden are dotted with Noguchi sculptures, and it's as if we're transported zen-like to Japan. As well as the stone and metal works, there are also lighter, paper sculptures and lanterns to admire and even buy. A bit of a long walk from the train station, but it's a great space to escape the noisy city.
• 9-01 33rd Road,noguchi.org, open Wed-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat-Sun 11am-6pm, adults $10, seniors and students $5, under-12s free

Queens Museum of Art

Queens Museum of Art is probably the most remote venue that New York art lovers have to travel to. It's also somewhat of a vintage sci-fi trip, as the building and the area surrounding it were originally developed for the 1939 World's Fair. The most prominent remnant of the 1939 (and 1964) fair is a giant sphere looming over the flat, massive building. Inside, the highlight of the permanent collection is a panorama of New York City built by Robert Moses for the 1964 fair – a 9,335 sq ft architectural model including every single building constructed before 1992 in all five boroughs. In a rotating show, the museum often puts on contemporary artists who reflect Queens's ethnic composition.
• Meridian Rd, Flushing, queensmuseum.org, open Wed-Sun 12pm-6pm, suggested donatiom adults $5, children and seniors $2.50

PS1 Contemporary Art Center

MoMA needs no introduction, but its younger sibling, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, is a bit more remote in Queens, and needs a boost. This former school building is a perfect art structure with three floors of small galleries to show multiple contemporary artists in solo exhibitions, such as Olafur Eliasson, as well as themed expos like the Greater New York exhibition every five years showcasing artists working in the metropolitan area. Another tradition is the bi-weekly Saturday Session of performances happening indoors from January to June. Over the summer, the school yard stages installations, performances and parties on weekends.
• 22-25 Jackson Ave, ps1.org, open thurs-Mon 12pm-6pm, suggested donation adults $10, seniors and students $5

Bose Pacia

One of the most established private galleries in Brooklyn's DUMBO neighbourhood Bose Pacia is multiple, small galleries squeezed into one building on Front Street. It features exclusively avant-garde contemporary art from South East Asia. The gallery, originally located in Chelsea, is an example of small reverse migration from the area, which on occasions has seen galleries such as this one moving away to more fitting neighborhoods as the Lower East Side or Brooklyn.
• 163 Plymouth St, bosepacia.com, open Tues-Sat 11am-6pm

• Aneta Glinkowska is cofounder of the website New York Art Beat and editor of its blog nyartbeat.com/nyablog

Chicago's Pride Films and Plays is celebrating Pride Month with Gay UK, a series of staged readings featuring five provocative works by British authors. Here is the performance schedule of the plays that will be presented:

Wednesday, June 1: My Night With Reg
Directed by Michael Ryczek

Kevin Elyot's play premiered in London's Royal Court Theater in 1994, and it won the Olivier Award for Best Comedy the following year. This affectionate and bittersweet work portrays a group of friends gathering for a flat-warming, and later after a funeral, as they share the various events and connections that brought them together, yet kept them apart.

Sunday, June 5: Maurice
Directed by John Nasca

Written in 1913, E.M. Forster's novel, Maurice, follows Maurice Hall from school days through University days and beyond. Roger Parsley and Andy Graham's stage adaptation brings all the contradictions of love in this period alive in a work about family, loyalty and love.

Wednesday, June 8: Blowing Whistles
Directed by Andrew Souders

In Matthew Todd's hilarious comedy, we meet Nigel and Jamie, who have been in a relationship for many years. When Nigel meets 17-year old Mark on Gaydar.com, the ensuing hilarity of Act 1 gives way to some powerful surprises in Act 2.

Wednesday, June 15: Pig
Directed by Derek Bertelsen

Tim Luscombe's provocative drama has not yet been produced. In this piece, three actors play 10 characters involved in complicated exchanges of drugs, sex, love and death. Dominic Cook, Artistic Director of London's Royal Court Theater, says, "I think it's a fierce, brave piece. It's incredibly inventive, formally and thematically, and holds its gaze with unusual tenacity and confidence."

Sunday, June 19: The Pride
Directed by Nick Bowling

Alexi Kaye Campbell's drama premiered to great success in London in 2008, and it was seen off-Broadway in 2010. Alternating between 1958 and 2008, the play examines changing attitudes about sexuality - as well as themes of love, lust and betrayal - as Campbell etches compelling portraits of our complicated relationships in two very different time frames.

All performances are at 7:30 pm at Theatre Wit (1229 West Belmont), and tickets are $12, with $6 tickets for students and film and theater industry members. You can also purchase a five-play pass for $50, which allows you to use your tickets any way you like. The pass can be purchased directly from PFP by clicking here. Individual tickets are available online at www.brownpapertickets.com or by phone at 1-800-838-3006.

Gay UK is part of Pride Films and Plays' continuing mission to develop and promote excellent writing for the stage and screen that not only speaks to the LGBT community, but is essential viewing for our friends, family and co-workers. For more information on Pride Films and Plays - and its annual contests for the next Great Gay Screenplay and Play - go to www.pridefilmsandplays.com.

 

INDEPENDENT FILM & TELEVISION ALLIANCE® APPOINTS

JENNIFER GARNICK VP, COMMUNICATIONS, AND ROBIN BURT AS VP, MARKETING & MEMBERSHIP

 

The Independent Film & Television Alliance® (IFTA®), the global trade association of the independent motion picture and television industry, and the voice and advocate for independents worldwide, today announced the appointment of Jennifer Garnick as Vice President, Communications, and the promotion of eight-year IFTA veteran Robin Burt to Vice President, Marketing and Membership.

In their new roles, Garnick and Burt will report to Jean Prewitt, IFTA President & CEO, and Jonathan Wolf, Executive Vice President of IFTA and Managing Director of the American Film Market® (AFM®). 

 

At IFTA, Garnick will develop and manage overall communications strategy, including the growth of the organization's online and social media presence. She will also work directly with members of the organization and the industry at large on a variety of new initiatives; create and oversee new digital marketing opportunities and programs; and be involved in the planning and execution of the AFM.

 

Burt, formerly IFTA's Director of Marketing, will continue to oversee all marketing and sponsorship activities for the AFM, as well as spearhead worldwide membership recruitment for IFTA. In addition, he will manage outreach for IFTA CollectionsTM, a non-profit service that collects secondary royalty income for its participants and to date has paid them more than $90 million in royalties and levies.

 

"Jennifer and Robin have proven themselves to be strong executives with a deep understanding of the independent film and television business, as well as a wealth of creativity and contacts," Prewitt said. "This marks a reunion of sorts with Jennifer, who impressed us previously when we worked closely with her as a key member of our outside communications team. Robin has played an integral role in the success of the AFM throughout much of the past decade and this promotion recognizes the increasing role he has assumed in representing IFTA to the industry."

Garnick joins IFTA from her previous role as VP, Publicity and Talent Relations, at Buzzmedia, which has more than 40 leading digital brands centered in pop culture, including Buzznet, Celebuzz, Idolator, Just Jared and Stereogum. During her four-year tenure there, Garnick helped turn Buzzmedia into the fastest-growing and largest independent entertainment publisher on the web. Previously, she served as Vice President of The Lippin Group, specializing in campaigns for feature film, music, television, entertainment web sites, corporate entertainment and a variety of entertainment-related events, including film festivals, trade shows, award shows, premieres and concerts.

 

Prior to joining IFTA in 2003, Burt held marketing and sales posts for a variety of entertainment organizations, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Special Olympics and the Organizing Committee for the 1994 Soccer World Cup.  

 

About The Independent Film & Television Alliance® (IFTA®)

The Independent Film & Television Alliance (IFTA) is the global trade association of the independent motion picture and television programming industry.  Headquartered in Los Angeles, the organization represents and provides significant entertainment industry services to more than 150 member companies from 23 countries, consisting of independent production and distribution companies, sales agents, television companies, studio-affiliated companies, and institutions engaged in content finance.

 

Collectively, the Independent Film & Television Alliance's members produce more than 400 independent films and countless hours of television programming each year and generate more than $4 billion in distribution revenues annually.  The organization is also widely recognized for producing the American Film Market® (AFM®), the world's largest motion picture trade event held in conjunction with AFI FEST each November in Santa Monica.

 

As the voice and advocate for the independent film and television industry worldwide, the Alliance speaks out on matters of critical importance and, where appropriate, actively lobbies governments around the world in regard to measures directly affecting the independent industry.  For more information on IFTA and the American Film Market, please visit IFTA-ONLINE.org

I am so pleased to announce a new content partnership between Better Health and Diario Médico (DM), Spain’s leading news outlet for physicians. We will now be featuring regular content from the DM bloggers, translated for our readers from Spanish to English. The medical blogging community is a global family, and we proudly embrace our Spanish innovators overseas.

I first met the DM team two years ago on Twitter. Their lead social media guru, Alain Ochoa-Torres (@alainochoa), was the first to reach out to me – eager to learn about social media trends in the United States. We arranged to do a live “Twitterview” to talk about how U.S. physicians are engaging in social media, especially blogging. That Twitterview (screen shot shown to the left) was translated into Spanish and became the beginning of an exciting international collaboration.

In the future, Better Health hopes to find ways to make Spanish health content available to our readers… and with DM’s help I’m sure that we will expand our understanding of global health, while making friends with our new Spanish blogging colleagues!

Please join me in welcoming our new blog contributors:

Sergio Minué, MD.

General Practitioner (GP). Management professor at Andalusian School of Public Health (Escuela Andaluza de Salud Pública, EASP) since July, 2000.

In the last eleven years Dr. Minué has been involved in several projects related to education, investigation and consulting both at national and international level. He has worked in projects for Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Morocco and El Salvador, and collaborated with Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) in other actions.

At the present he is Director of the Expertise in Healthcare Management program at University of Granada and coordinates healthcare management module in European Master 'Erasmus Mundus' Europubhealth.

Served as Director of Medical Care Management Department at EASP from February 2009 to May 2010.

Worked as Teaching and Investigation Director at EASP from 2003 to 2007.

From 1993 to 2000 held different management positions at Insalud (now-defunct Spanish national healthcare authority): Medical Director of Primary Care Team at Barajas (1991-1993), Assistant Medical Director of Primary Care of Madrid's Area 4 (1993-1994), Medical Director of the same regional area (1994-1996) and finally Medical Director of Primary Care for Madrid's Area 2 (1996-2000).

Quality Pilot in European Master 'Erasmus Mundus' Europubhealth (2006-2010). During that time he coordinated Quality Committee of Virtual Campus of Public Health in Latin America organized by PAHO.

Member of Patient Safety groups at Cochrane and Spanish Primary Care Association (Semfyc). At Semfyc he is also member of the Knowledge Management group and coordinates Project ARA, focused on MD re-certification.

Member of Internet and Healthcare investigation group at EASP, he is currently working in several investigation projects on how doctors can use new technologies, social media and Web 2.0. He is also involved in projects related to best practices in teaching, safety, clinical decision-making and Primary Care. He is the leading author of an ongoing investigation on decision-making and mistakes in diagnosis. Reviewer for 'Gaceta Sanitaria' magazine. Participates in expert groups in Spain, Europe and the Americas.

He authored articles published in scientific journals both in Spain and abroad, and is a frequent lecturer and speaker in scientific congresses all over the world and is still actively writing and publishing in his field of expertise. He writes in two personal blogs ('El Gerente de Mediado' and 'La Cara Ve') and is a regular contributor to other healthcare blogs and Diario Médico.

Miguel Ángel Máñez, Economist.

Miguel Ángel Máñez is an economist and currently holds the position of Finance and Human Resources Assistant Manager of the Health Department of Alicante-Sant Joan d’Alacant in Alicante, Spain. He is also the Coordinator of the '2.0 Office' for Valencia’s regional health authority, responsible for the implementation of Web 2.0 tools aimed at patients and healthcare professionals. He is the author of a well-known blog in Spain about healthcare management called 'Salud con Cosas'. He has taken an active part in courses and seminars about Internet and healthcare, marketing, and strategies of healthcare management. He is the author of several articles on healthcare and Web 2.0.

Vicente Baos, MD.

General Practitioner (GP) in Collado Villalba Pueblo (near Madrid), writes 'El supositorio' ('The Suppository') since 2007, one of Spain's most influential healthcare blogs.

Graduated in 1982 at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, completed his training at Puerta de Hierro Hospital (Madrid) in 1987. Member of Editorial Board at 'Therapeutiction in Spanish Healthcare System' ('Información Terapéutica del Sistema Nacional de Salud'), a journal published by Spain's Ministry of Health since 1994.

Dr. Baos also coordinates Prescription Drug Use group at Spanish Primary Care Association (Semfyc) since its creation in 2003. He is a consultant at Spain's Drug Agency ('Agencia Española de Medicamentos y Productos Sanitarios'). Author of several books on prescription drug use (some of them for MD's and others targeted at general public) and a long list of scientific articles.

His main areas of interest are Primary Care and the analysis and evaluation of pharmacological therapies.

Frederic Llordachs, MD.

MD with MBA, specialized in Healthcare Management and Marketing. Direct experience with healthcare insurance, and healthcare management, and interested in venture capital. Also involved in early-stage start-ups, like Doctoralia (http://www.doctoralia.com), the global platform for healthcare search, and also other pre-seed projects like Lexpertia (http://www.lexpertia.com), the search engine for lawyers in Spain.

Julio Mayol, MD, PhD.
Julio M. Mayol MD, PhD, graduated with honor from Universidad Complutense de Madrid Medical School in 1988. He received his training in General Surgery at Hospital Clinico San Carlos and Beth Israel Hospital, taking further postgraduate training as research fellow in Surgery at Harvard Medical School. Currently, he he has an appointment as Professor of Surgery at Universidad Complutense de Madrid Medical School. He serves as Chief Innovation Officer and Chief of the Division of Colorectal Surgery at Hospital Clinico San Carlos. He is a member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Medicine and European Expert on Cell Therapy at European Medicines Agency.

About Diario Medico:

Since 1992, Diario Médico has been Spain's leading news outlet for physicians. Part of one of Spain's most important publishing groups ( ), Diario Médico is both a website and a free newspaper distributed Monday to Friday in all hospitals and general practitioner offices across Spain.

The publication covers a wide range of subjects, from breaking scientific news to health policy, in-depth interviews, scientific meetings, clinical practice, legal issues, management, and health IT.
Diario Médico reaches 2.4 million paper readers and 450 thousand website visitors (more than 500 thousand pageviews/month).

The brand strives to be a cutting-edge reference tool for all healthcare professionals in Spain, and its website is constantly innovating. Diario Médico provides online courses as well as speciality-specific newsletters, video reports and Web 2.0 content such as Twitterrviews and a medical blogging platform (Médica Blogs).

By David Spero

Gastric banding is all the rage. Seems like everybody's banding. But how safe and how effective is this surgery? Does it "resolve diabetes," as surgeons claim? I used to think so. But I was wrong. As years go by, complications and failure become more and more common.

Internet, television, magazines, and billboards advertise surgeries with slogans like "$2500 down!" "Comprehensive, Safe Weight Loss Surgery Program," or "Let Your New Life Begin," as one center in Beverly Hills claims. This clinic was in the news in 2009 and 2010 because of the deaths of several people receiving gastric bands at the facility shortly after surgery.

Who is all this marketing aimed at? You. Some studies are claiming dramatic improvements in diabetes and hypertension with banding. A study by the Dalton Surgical Group in Georgia (a group that does banding surgeries) found that "Dramatic improvement in — and frequent resolution of — diabetes and hypertension have been observed as a result of weight loss after Lap-Band surgery." People with diabetes are now receiving gastric bands at body-mass index of 35 or below, not especially overweight.

But the Dalton study, and some others showing benefit, only followed people for 1 to 2 years. Other studies show that gastric band problems increase over time. Bands may erode into the stomach. They may cause the stomach to become infected. They may slip out of place.

Some countries, such as Finland, no longer allow gastric banding surgery after studies concluded that as many as 40% of people had to have follow-up operations to treat complications. One study found that "The failure rate increased from 13.2% after 18 months to 23.8% at 3 [years], 31.5% at 5, and 36.9% at 7 years." It may well go much higher after that.

A study published this year in Archives of Surgery reassessed about 80 people who had gastric bands inserted between 1994 and 1997. They reported that "because nearly 1 out of 3 patients experienced band erosion, and nearly 50% of the patients required removal of their bands (contributing to a reoperation rate of 60%), [banding] appears to result in relatively poor long-term outcomes."

Even in people who had no major complications, many suffered pain and other serious discomforts. Dr. David Urbach of Toronto Western Hospital told CTV News he has treated patients who were "left in severe pain when their bands caused their stomachs to twist." In other cases, the band's plastic material had eroded into the stomach. In others, they slip because of vomiting or overeating, so the pouch size and shape changes, causing problems.

How does the surgery work? A band made of silicone, gortex, marlex mesh, or some other inactive substance is wrapped around the stomach near the esophagus. According to the British pro-surgery Web site Gastric Band, "The placement of the band will create a small pouch at the upper part of the stomach that will hold about 3.88 to 7.76 ounces of food for each meal." So you will fill up faster and eat less.

Comedian Stephen Colbert had a funny but accurate take on this procedure, complete with video animation, which you can see here.

According to About.com, the new mini-stomach cannot handlemany foods. [A person may] "not be able to eat high fiber vegetables such as celery and sweet potatoes, meats like steaks and pork chops, spicy foods, fried foods, possibly citrus fruits, and certain spices including cinnamon, pepper, onion or garlic salt."

About.com also says, "[Your medicines] may need to be adjusted following Lap-Band surgery since you will not be able to swallow pills that are aspirin-size or larger, or capsules or irregular-shaped pills."

Surgeons say the studies finding high long-term failure rates are based on older bands and older techniques. They say more recent surgeries are less likely to have problems. But we won't know for ten years, will we? We do know many people will experience nausea, vomiting, and constipation; many also experience hair loss, and infections are fairly common.

According to About.com writer Tracee Cornforth, who had a gastric band applied in 2010, "Eating after Adjustable Gastric Lap-Band surgery means taking tiny bites, and eating very slowly. You should think of your new stomach as a "baby" stomach. You'll be drinking protein shakes and relearning eating skills much the same way as a new baby eats formula (or breast milk), and slowly adds new foods from blended baby foods to chunkier baby foods." You also have to maintain a high protein intake (over 50 grams a day), which must be hard if you can't eat meat. The band, in the words of one Canadian woman who lost 100 pounds, but suffered several infections and needed two replacement bands, is "quite unpleasant to live with."

I used to think gastric bands were worthwhile for some people. They are less invasive and less dangerous than the bypass surgeries that change your intestinal plumbing. They are reversible if they cause too many problems. But if nearly 50% of them need to be reversed, and almost everyone is uncomfortable for life, they no longer seem worth it to me. What do you think?

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Julian Bell

Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a new documentary by Werner Herzog, is a striking and characterful work of art, framing another that is wholly extraordinary. In 1994 three experienced French speleologists, exploring the limestone gorges of the river Ardèche, crawled their way into a large cave system in which Palaeolithic imagery swung into view. Jean-Marie Chauvet, the team’s leader, has described how they were immediately awestruck by the “remarkable realism” and “aesthetic mastery” of the countless animal depictions that sprang out as their torch-beams roved the cave walls. But conscious that cave paintings such as those at Lascaux, discovered in 1940, had soon become infested with the mold carried on visitors’ breaths, Chauvet and his colleagues notified the regional authorities, and within a month, before publically announcing the discovery, a steel door was installed to seal off the opening in the rock-face. Only the scientifically qualified might pass inside, and those in very small numbers, confining their footsteps to a narrow raised walkway.

Illustrated surveys were published, edited first by Chauvet (after whom the cave got named), and then by Jean Clottes, the presiding archaeologist. Meanwhile lay inquirers such as Judith Thurman, writing about Chauvet for The New Yorker in 2008, had no choice but to report on the paintings at second hand. But Thurman’s piece fired up Erik Nelson, a Los Angeles producer who, having already worked on two documentaries with Herzog, saw fresh cinematic potential here for the veteran Bavarian-born auteur; and Nelson’s company had the smart idea of presenting Herzog to Frédéric Mitterrand, France’s new minister of culture. In Mitterrand (nephew to the late president) they encountered a dedicated cinephile who unhesitatingly made it his business to beat a path open for the filmmakers. For four days, then, during the spring of last year, Herzog and a minimal, three-man crew were granted access to that subterranean walkway.

The project had a powerful hook line. Radiocarbon analyses indicate that charcoal used by painters at Chauvet comes from pines that were alive some 32,000 years ago. It follows that these are easily the world’s oldest known paintings. Long before the eighteenth millennium BCE—the date assigned to Lascaux—a rock-fall had closed off Chauvet’s original entrance, stopping all further incursion into the cave and preserving the imagery within in pristine condition. The only figurative artifacts that we know to predate Chauvet are some slightly older carvings in stone and mammoth ivory dug up from cave floors in Swabia (in southern Germany) and Austria. Herzog brings these sculptures into his film, along with some flutes carved from bone found at the same sites. Looking at these remains, so it strikes him, we are looking at the very roots of art and of music. “It is as if,” he at one point muses, “the human soul had awakened here.” And he presses the archaeologists, as he interviews them outside the cave: “What constitutes humanness?”

This documentary, in other words, cleaves to the customary interests of Herzog’s cinema. As in his previous projects with Nelson he looks for a limit case on what it means to walk the face of the earth: In Grizzly Man, a nature-lover’s notion that he could commune with Alaska’s bears got fatally rebuked, and in Encounters at the End of the World, intruding researchers emerged equally as anomalies, silhouetted against the wilderness of Antarctica. Cave of Forgotten Dreams opens on cultivation: neat vine rows below cliffs bristling with Mediterranean scrub. But from them the camera zooms out and overhead to survey the Ardèche gorge and its staggering natural singularity, the Pont d’Arc, an arch cut through the limestone by the river half a million years ago. The sublime takes priority in Herzog’s world. It was that great spectacle, his commentary suggests, that catalyzed palaeolithic nomads into their burst of artistic expressiveness nearby.

Very soon humans are seen traversing the landscape, step by sweated step: a team of rucksacked archaeologists heading for the steel door. Walkers like these have passed through Herzog’s films ever since 1972’s Aguirre, but here no world-defying zany, Klaus Kinski-style, drives them on. Archaeology nowadays, a practitioner explains to Herzog, deals not in heroics but in high-tech, and his colleagues pass their days coolly among stratigraphic analyses and laser scans. At the same time, a member of the site team, the pony-tailed Julien Monney, turns away from his desktop screen to assert that “I am a scientist, but I am a human being also.” What were you doing before? Herzog asks him. “I was in the circus.” Lion-taming? “Unicycling.”

Prodding and delving like this, Herzog constantly touches on the quaintly ludicrous. The amateur enthusiasts are irresistible. He meets the bearded and reindeer skin-clad Wulf Hein, an investigator into Ice Age technologies, who coyly blows into a pentatonic Palaeolithic flute and comes up with the Star Spangled Banner. Meanwhile the elderly Maurice Maurin roves the Ardèche poking his nose into rockfaces, hoping to sniff vapors emitted by as yet undiscovered caves. Monsieur Maurin presents his olfactory credentials, explaining that he was formerly the president of the Société Française des Parfumeurs. The director, himself in his late sixties, passes a forbearing avuncular comment on Maurin’s “sense of wonder.” He relishes his role as a sage, a mellowed authoritarian: his way with English vowels, as he speculates over prehistoric “seeriemoanies,” (i.e., ceremonies) adds to the sweet-hearted comedy.

But Herzog has a new joke to deliver. Jean-Michel Geneste, Clottes’s successor as head of the research project, clowns to the camera, brandishing a Stone Age spear. It seems to lunge straight into you, for you have been supplied with Hollywood’s favorite gimmick of the past few seasons, 3-D specs. And then the projecting spear-end slips out of frame—presenting you with a bizarre perceptual paradox, Avatar colliding with M.C. Escher. Mocking art-house snootiness by employing the novel medium, Herzog also teases the notion that by this route, film gets to feel “more real.” His own aesthetic (National Geographic meets Theatre of the Absurd, you might say) has always spurned everyday notions of the factual and real in favor of loftier forms of truth—poetic, ecstatic. But it is not just those values that prompted him to jump technologies here, for it turns out that the poetry he is concerned with is crucially reliant on the nature of curving surfaces.

The sequencing takes us in through that cliff-face door, away from sunlit faces and landscapes and down the torchlit shaft leading to the cave’s long chambers. These stretch back some eight hundred feet. The cave’s miracles of geology—the extravagance of its glittering stalagmites and calcite curtains—surpass those of the Pont d’Arc outside. But the chambers also have undulating walls, and it was on these that the ancient artists chiefly worked. We are given a foretaste of their images: we exit; we return to this item, to that; we leave again. “It is a relief to go outside,” Herzog explains: inside the caves we get to feeling “as if we were disturbing,” as if our distant ancestors’ eyes were still upon us. But finally we surrender to the flow of their art, immersed at length in the interplay of torchlight, rippling cave flanks, scorings, charcoalings and red ochre.

It was here, paradoxically, that I felt least at ease with Herzog’s distinctive approach to documentary. As with many a serious artist, he yearns to let something excessive come through. Visual art might be a conduit for that sublime and so might music—which, many times formerly, has transformed the imaginative space of his movies. “There is never anything like ‘background music’ in my films,” he has said. Accordingly he wills miracles to well up from the players he has chosen. Fittingly enough, here we hear a flautist, alongside the haunting, earthy juddering of a violoncello played by the composer Ernst Reijseger. But those are not sufficient. Those putative Palaeolithic “seeriemoanies” must somehow be invoked: cue choirs, cooing high and low in attendance on the art. Their cod-liturgical scat had me muttering that one man’s poetic truth is another man’s gloopy bogosity.

If only Herzog had trusted to the silence that he tells us rules over the caverns! Yet there is no constraining the ravishing visual spectacle. The passages of imagery on which the 3-D camera chiefly feasts lie towards the back of the cave system. They would have been prefaced, had you entered during the Stone Age, by red handprints, then by drawings of bears and of panthers, as the final glimmers of daylight vanished and you took your torch into the deep interior. There, at a fork where two rear chambers head off, a great surge of beasts—reindeer, horses, bison, aurochs, rhinos, spread across some fifty feet—has been summoned from the rock’s convolutions. They spring and tumble across its folds, hurtling, hovering or hiding: across one concavity, two rhinos turn to fight it out, horn to horn. At some points rapid outlines seize beasts by their essences: at others they are colored, fleshly beings, rendered by fine modeling.

Is it right to treat this exultant phantasmagoria by unknown hands as a work of art, when there is so little external evidence to supply it with a socio-cultural context? It’s impossible not to, the more you keep looking. Everywhere a sure grasp of appearances and inspired graphic judgments serve a cohesive dramatic scheme: unlike many another cave wall elsewhere, this is no mere doodle-board. Besides, the researchers that Herzog interviews assure him that one of its climactic images—a group of four exquisitely modeled and individualized horse heads—is certainly the work of a single hand.

Still further in, down one of rear caverns, lies an array of lion heads, equally excessively alive: and beyond them, a dangling pinnacle that tantalizes Herzog. It shows the forequarters of a bison surmounting a woman’s sex. That is the lone glimpse of the human figure that Chauvet offers him, and in a hunt for correlatives he heads off to those Swabian caves, which recently yielded up the world’s oldest known sculpture: the “Hohle Fels Venus,” two-and-a-half inches of ivory carved 35,000 years ago. Her looming breasts, rotated in 3-D, tally with Herzog’s droll voiceover about “visual conventions which extend all the way beyond Baywatch.” Equally, the female-plus-bovine combination reminds him of Picasso. And are not the rolling, torchlit rock-waves of animals—one bison set in motion on eight legs—“almost a form of proto-cinema”? Such ever-present urges, such timelessly immediate techniques, place us in a long continuum: here is “the modern human soul,” as Herzog has repeatedly remarked when interviewed about the film, and on a certain deep level we are at one with these archaic dreamers, whose imaginations may have gained them an evolutionary advantage as they wrested the land from the artless Neanderthals.

Or is it that we understand nothing? A majestically bizarre coda, switching from that subterranean bestiary to a pair of albino crocodiles currently swimming the waters near an adjacent nuclear plant, lets go of the whole tension between Palaeolithic handiwork and twenty-first-century guesswork, poetically proposing that like the twinned freak reptiles, ancient and modern mirror one another, each a form of unreality. That long continuum of human culture ends up bracketed, in Herzog’s vision, within the mythic “dreamtime” of the Australian Aborigines—who, as the ponytailed Monney points out, are our most recent informants on Stone Age philosophy. After all, he and his fellow scientists are presented here, for all their inquisitive rigor, as little but airy and childlike romantics.

That soft agnostic dissolve frustrates me. It’s not that I see much reason to buy a skeptical argument making the archaeological rounds, whispering that the radiocarbon datings are somehow unreliable and that actually Chauvet is little older than Lascaux. All that seems to be behind this is a presumption that Chauvet’s artworks, with their stunning naturalism and graphic assurance, are far too sophisticated to stand at the head of a tradition. But then we have too little to go on—as yet—to know what the substance of that tradition was, or how it developed. All but the merest sliver of Palaeolithic creativity must long since have perished above ground. The heady visual surfeit offered by Herzog’s film leaves me with a nagging hunger for some further nugget that might illuminate the mystery of the art’s meanings. Find me more clues, find me more caves. Keep sniffing, Monsieur Maurin.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams, directed by Werner Herzog, is playing at theaters in London, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and is being shown at the IFC Center in New York through May 12.

Wisconsin marks the birthplace of a burgeoning Main Street Movement defending the economic livelihood of the middle class. The movement was spawned after Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) and his GOP allies passed new laws stripping public employees of their collective bargaining rights. Last night, Wisconsin Republicans suffered what was perhaps the first electoral defeat resulting from a backlash to their radical anti-labor policies as Democrats won a special election for an assembly seat held by the GOP for the past 16 years:

Democrat Steve Doyle defeated Republican John Lautz for the Wisconsin District 94 Assembly, flipping a seat held by Republicans for 16 years in a race that focused attention on Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to curtail collective bargaining right for most public employees. With 92% of precincts reporting, Doyle won 54% to 46%, based on unofficial results in Tuesday’s special election. The race flips a GOP Assembly seat for the Democrats, who remain in the minority.

The seat was previously held by Mike Huebsch, who Walker picked in January to serve as secretary of administration. Huebsch was first elected in 1994. The district covers rural La Crosse County and parts of Monroe County.

Doyle actually won despite “a barrage of television and radio attacks by third-party groups, along with mailings from the Jobs First Coalition, a Brookfield, Wis.-based group tied to Scott Jensen, the former Republican state Assembly speaker who left office in 2002 amid misconduct allegations.” “I look at it as a rejection of attack ads,” he told the La Crosse Tribune.

The death of Osama bin Laden offers a perfect opportunity to revisit the list of the World's Most Wanted. So who still makes it?

He wasn't the World's Most Wanted Man. Officially, at least, there's no such thing. But when Osama bin Laden died from a shot to the head and another to the chest sometime between midnight and 1.30am local time on Monday, the man who, in the popular western imagination, held arguably the best – and certainly the best-publicised – claim to be regarded as such left behind him something of a conundrum for those who compile such lists: who could replace him?

It's not such a straightforward question. Leaving aside such niceties as one man's evil terrorist mastermind being another man's blessed freedom fighter, attempting to place in order of importance crimes on the kind of scale that might warrant inclusion in a Top 10 of global iniquity is a task fraught with difficulties. How do you measure a Serbian ethnic cleanser against an American serial killer, dismemberer and necrophile; a Mexican drugs baron against a Rwandan genocide-merchant?

Most lists, sensibly, do not try. The first and perhaps the most famous of all, the FBI's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives – from which Bin Laden was summarily ejected on Monday, his photograph stamped with a blood-red banner and the single word "Deceased" – doesn't rank its members, who are confined to criminals indicted by a US federal grand jury. Bin Laden, indicted in absentia in New York in 1999 for his alleged part in the US embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi the previous year, was a bit of a misfit on that list.

His fellow fugitives were, for the most part, fraudsters, rapists, murderers and drug traffickers, with bounties on their heads ranging from $100,000 to $2m; the reward offered for Bin Laden's capture totalled $27m (£16m). Robert William Fisher, for example, is wanted for allegedly killing his wife and two young children and then blowing up the house in which they all lived in Scottsdale, Arizona in April 2001; Alexis Flores for his alleged involvement in the kidnapping and murder of a five-year-old girl in Philadelphia.

Heinous crimes, but hardly the equivalent of masterminding 9/11. Or indeed, as assorted warrants put it, of "organising a global network committed to bringing down the United States". That explains why the FBI created a separate list in 2001, in the wake of the September 11 attacks: Most Wanted Terrorists. The death of the al-Qaida figurehead leaves 29 people on that list, including his reported deputy, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and also indicted for the US embassy bombings; Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso, wanted in connection with the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 US sailors; Adam Yahihe Gadahn, sought for providing "material support, comfort and aid" to al-Qaida; and Abdul Rahman Yasin, indicted in the 1993 bombing of the New York World Trade Centre.

The FBI's hope, it seems, was that the terrorist list would have the same mobilising effect on the US public as the original 10 Most Wanted, first launched on 14 March 1950 after the FBI director, J Edgar Hoover, spotted the potential of the publicity generated by a news agency story profiling the "toughest guys" the bureau would like to capture. The first person placed on the list was Thomas James Holden, wanted for the murder of his wife, her brother and her stepbrother. Down the years it has also featured the likes of James Earl Ray, the prime suspect in the assassination of Martin Luther King; the infamous serial killer Ted Bundy; and (briefly) civil rights activist Angela Davis.

According to the FBI, 494 fugitives have figured on its 10 Most Wanted list, and 464 have been captured or at least or located, 152 of them with the help of the public. Priorities have changed over time, the agency says. In the 50s, the list was "primarily comprised of bank robbers, burglars, and car thieves". In the radical 60s, "the list reflected the revolutionaries of the times, with destruction of government property, sabotage, and kidnapping dominating". The 70s were overwhelmingly about organised crime, and in the 80s and 90s the 10 Most Wanted began to include suspected international terrorists as well. In more recent years, common crimes have included rape and other sexual abuse, crimes against children, white-collar crime, gang violence and drug trafficking.

Maintaining such a list on a global scale has obvious pitfalls. Interpol, the international police organisation, makes no attempt to prioritise. The 321 criminals who currently feature on its website range from an Australian kidnapper to an Argentinian counterfeiter.

(In Britain, rather more prosaically, Crimestoppers UK's 10 Most Wanted includes one John Levy, wanted for "driving off from a petrol station without paying for £51 worth of diesel".)

Since 2008, the US business magazine Forbes has published a list of The World's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives, compiled in consultation with law enforcement agencies internationally (see below). Its criteria, the magazine says, are that fugitives have been criminally indicted or charged in national jurisdictions or by an international tribunal, stand accused of "a long history of committing serious crimes", and are "still considered dangerous". In addition, each is said to represent "a type of criminal problem with which legal institutions in diverse jurisdictions are grappling". It also ranks its candidates from one to 10.

Described as "armed, dangerous and very tough to catch – the world's worst thieves and thugs who have eluded local police, armies and international organisations for years", Forbes's most recent list was topped by Bin Laden. It also includes Semion Mogilevich, "the face of Russian organised crime"; Joaquin Guzman, "Mexico's most notorious drug trafficker"; Dawood Ibrahim, "India's most wanted man"; Italian mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro; Rwandan businessman (and alleged genocide financier) Felicien Kabuga; Joseph Kony of the brutal Lord's Resistance Army; and James L Bulger, a Boston mobster wanted in connection with up to 19 murders.

But the list is disputable. Britain, for example, would probably quite like to see Andrei Lugovoi, the former KGB operative wanted for the murder by plutonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, somewhere on a list of this kind (although he hasn't been charged). Augustin Bizimana, likewise, is the most senior of the 12 or so people wanted for genocide by the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda not to have been apprehended; the former defence minister faces charges over the massacre of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994. Some might like to see the name of Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the Sudanese dictator seen as responsible for ethnic cleansing that has left 300,000 dead and 2.5 million homeless in Darfur and the first sitting head of state ever indicted by the International Criminal Court. And what of Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb army chief indicted for genocide in The Hague in 1995? He's still out there, laughing.

So who will replace Bin Laden for the list-makers? It seems logical he could make way on Forbes's list to last year's runner-up, Guzman. The FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist list will simply shrink; Bin Laden's name will not be substituted. But on the Top 10 Most Wanted, the jury's out. Some reckon Zawahiri is a shoo-in; other favour the Libyan, Anas al-Liby, or the Egyptian Saif al-Adel, both allegedly implicated in the east African embassy bombings. Adan el Shukrijumah, a Saudi citizen suspected of planning to attack the New York subway in 2009, and Yasin, wanted in the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, are also mentioned. But, some observers say, Bin Laden's replacement on America's 10 Most Wanted could be an altogether less rarefied species of lowlife: a white-collar criminal, say, or a bank robber. Ultimately, such lists are always going to be subjective.

The new 10 Most Wanted List

1 Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán Mexican drug lord

"El Chapo" or "Shorty" (he stands 5ft 6in tall) heads an international drug trafficking organisation, the Sinaloa Cartel, and became Mexico's top drug kingpin in 2003 after the arrest of his rival Osiel Cárdenas of the Gulf Cartel. Appears simultaneously on Forbes's lists of the world's most powerful, most wealthy and most wanted men. Ruthless and determined, Guzmán has succeeded in turning Ciudad Juárez, a strategic smuggling point that overlooks El Paso, Texas, into one of the murder capitals of the world through mind-numbingly brutal battles against both the Gulf and La Linea cartels, leaving thousands dead. A faction from La Linea has recently defected to Shorty's side; a local street gang, the Mexicles, has sub-contracted its services in killing, kidnapping, drug dealing and extorting; and even elements of the police and army seem to have thrown their lot in with him. Sinaloa smuggles many tonnes of cocaine from Colombia through Mexico into the United States, and is also heavily involved in Mexican methamphetamine, marijuana and heroin.

2 Dawood Ibrahim Head of Indian crime network

The most wanted man in India heads up a 5,000-strong organised crime network called the D-Company that is involved in everything from drugs trafficking to contract killing in Pakistan, India and the UAE. Currently on the Interpol wanted list for organised crime and counterfeiting, besides association with al-Qaida. According to Washington, Ibrahim uses the same smuggling routes as al-Qaida and has worked with both the mother organisation and its offshoot Lashkar-e-Taiba, responsible for the November 2008 Mumbai attacks. He is also suspected in the 1993 Mumbai bombings that killed 257 people and wounded 713. Like Bin Laden, Ibrahim may well be based in Pakistan.

3 Semion Mogilevich Russian 'boss of bosses'

Arrested in Russia for tax evasion in 2008, Ukrainian-born Mogilevich was released in 2009. Wanted in the US in connection with a $150m share fraud; believed by both European and US law enforcement agencies to be the "boss of bosses" of most Russian mafia syndicates in the world. Nicknames include "Don Semyon" and "The Brainy Don"; often described as "the most dangerous mobster in the world".

4 Matteo Messina Denaro Cosa Nostra kingpin

Sicilian mafioso who has effectively taken control of Italy's Cosa Nostra following the arrest of Bernardo Provenzano and other leading mobsters. Nicknamed "Diabolik", after an Italian comic-book character. Known for his fast lifestyle, Porsches and Rolex watches, he has been on the run since 1993.

5 Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov Uzbek mobster

Major Russian mobster originally from Uzbekistan and apparently known as "Taiwanchik" for his Asian appearance. Washington describes him as a "major figure in international Eurasian organised crime" engaged in "drug distribution, illegal arms sales and trafficking in stolen vehicles." He is even alleged to have bribed the figure skating judges in the 2002 Winter Olympics.

6 Felicien Kabuga Mastermind of genocide

Accused of bankrolling the Rwandan genocide, inciting bloodshed through his radio station and even supplying the machetes and hoes used in the massacres, Kabuga is wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for "serious offences under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, crimes against humanity and genocide" in connection with the massacre of more than 800,000 Rwandan men, women and children in 100 days of terror in 1994. Allegedly hiding in Kenya.

7 Joseph Kony Ugandan guerrilla leader

Head of the Lord's Resistance Army, a guerrilla group engaged in a violent campaign to establish theocratic government in Uganda. Has also operated in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan, abducting an estimated 66,000 children and displacing more than two million people since 1986. The International Criminal Court has indicted him on 33 charges including crimes against humanity and war crimes.

8 James 'Whitey' Bulger Old-school US mobster

The ever-so-slightly embarrassing older brother of William Michael Bulger, a former president of the Massachusetts state senate and the University of Massachusetts, Bulger was part of the Winter Hill Gang, a Boston-based Irish-American crime network that for many years ran illicit drugs and extortion rackets. Pursued by the FBI for more than a decade for racketeering, murder (his name has been linked to 19 killings from the early 70s up to the mid-80s), conspiracy to commit murder, extortion, conspiracy to commit extortion, money laundering and narcotics distribution. Bulger's wealth is estimated at between $30m and $50m (£18m-£30m), cash he is said to be using to evade arrest with his longtime girlfriend. Last confirmed sighting was in London in 2002. There is a reward of $2m for information leading to his arrest.

9 Omid 'Nino' Tahvili Head of Canadian crime group

Head of a Persian organised crime network in Canada linked to assorted Triads and other global criminal groups. Arrested on charges of torturing a relative of a man he suspected had stolen a chunk of his organisation's illicit drugs money, he walked out of a Canadian maximum security prison in a janitor's uniform in November 2007 after promising to pay a guard to let him out (he never forked up). US law enforcement wants to talk to him about a fraudulent telemarketing business that targeted people in the US, stealing some $3m from hundreds of victims, most of them elderly.

10 ? Ayman al-Zawahiri Al-Qaida number two

Born in June 1951 into a prominent upper-middle class family in Cairo, Zawahiri was the final "emir" of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which he merged into al-Qaida in 1998. Reportedly a qualified surgeon, he speaks Arabic, English and French. According to former al-Qaida members, Zawahiri has worked with al-Qaida since the organisation's earliest beginnings. He is often described as Bin Laden's right-hand man, and by some as the "real brains" of al-Qaida. The friendship between the two men supposedly began in the 80s when Zawahiri is said to have given medical treatment to Bin Laden in Afghanistan in the teeth of a Soviet attack. According to terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman, Bin Laden considered Zawahiri his mentor. Most experts believe 9/11 could not have happened without Zawahiri's controlling influence.

This was posted on Channel 9.  They got access to the Microsoft Home (I have been there several times) and got permission to post this video.  Enjoy!

http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/CampusTours/Microsoft-Campus-Tours-The-Microsoft-Home

 

 

Steve Clayton and Flora Goldthwaite give us an exclusive tour of The Microsoft Home.

The Microsoft Home, located on the Redmond campus in the Executive Briefing Center, is an envisioning of the family home in the very near future where connected experiences and devices take their next logical steps and beyond.

First opened in 1994, The Microsoft Home is maintained by a group of researchers under Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Craig Mundie, and is updated regularly.

Unfortunately The Microsoft Home is not open to the public but Channel 9 was given special permission to film a sneak-peak tour for this episode of Microsoft Campus Tours.

As the market struggled to find direction on the first trading day following the long bank holiday weekend, ITV was among the biggest fallers on concerns about a new dip in advertising spend.

Analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch said that after a stronger than expected start to the year, with advertising growth of 12% in the first quarter, there had been a sharp deterioration since then. Merrill's Daniel Kerven said he now expected growth of around 6% in April, compared to earlier predictions of 12%, followed by a 7% decline in May and a 20% drop in June. He said:

Drinks (tough comparisons into last year's World Cup), auto and retail appear to be areas of weakness versus initial expectations, while we believe regional advertising (around 15% of revenues) has also been a drag on growth.
While September and October may see some support from the Rugby World Cup [in New Zealand] this is likely to be limited by the time zone. and November and December face tough comparisons and could also see negative growth.

So Merrill has cut its 2011 earnings forecast by 8% and its price target from 83p to 76p:

Our advertising forecasts were already below consensus and we expect high double digit earnings downgrades from those at the top end of the range.

ITV closed 1.65p lower at 74.4p.

Overall the FTSE 100 finished 12.98 points higher at 6082.88 after drifting in a 50 point range during the day. Weakness in mining shares was offset by strength in defensive sectors such as pharmaceuticals and tobacco, with AstraZeneca adding 72p to £30.62 and Imperial Tobacco climbing 43p to £21.50. A worse than expected UK manufacturing survey for April and a downbeat retail outlook from the CBI proved negative factors for investors. Later this week come interest rate decisions from the Bank of England and ECB, while Friday sees the US non-farm payroll figures. Giles Watts, head of equities at City Index, said:

Traders made a somewhat slow return to the markets after consecutive bank holiday weekends...despite the news of Osama Bin Laden's death dominating television channels around the world. That said, there could be an eventful Thursday and Friday in the markets, with both the Bank of England and ECB interest rate decisions to come along with the usual first Friday of the month US jobs report. And so, with that in mind, it is of little surprise that traders have not shown a huge appetite for risk today.

As for the mining sector, it fell back as base metal and gold prices came under pressure following weaker than expected Chinese manufacturing numbers. Randgold Resources ended 244p lower at £49.76, Fresnillo fell 3p to £15.98p and Kazakhmys closed 47p lower at £13.32.

There was also a spot of takeover speculation. Rio Tinto lost 67.5p to 4292.5p on talk it could be lining up a bid for US aluminium group Alcoa. Traders were not convinced, but Alcoa shares added around 4% as the story did the rounds.

Elsewhere Smiths Group was the biggest faller in the leading index, down 76p to £12.56 after it warned that continuing order delays would hit second half revenues at its detection business. Smiths said the division's president Stephen Phipson would be leaving with immediate effect.

But Man added 8.3p to 258p as the world's largest listed hedge fund group announced it had raised $1.5bn at the launch of a Japanese fund, three times more than some City forecasts.

IMI closed 4p higher at £10.96 after UBS raised its price target from 950p to £12. The bank said:

2011 is shaping up to be a great year for IMI as its peers have shown no letup in momentum in the first quarter. We have therefore raised our growth rate for 2011, assuming that IMI can tag along with its competitors. Our projection of 9% group organic growth in 2011 would be the most IMI has generated since 1994, if not earlier.

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BLEECK HOUSE

Good news, readers: The Fiver's STOP FOOTBALL campaign, and equally prominent TORTURE METAPHORS - NOT ANIMALS campaign, will get more heavyweight backing tonight when Barcelona and Real Madrid meet in the latest instalment of El Fiasco and no doubt proceed to present further compelling evidence that football has jumped the shark, killed the golden goose and flogged the dead horse, while continuing to give far too comfy a living to a contemptible bunch of chicken-chokers.

These diving divas have done much in recent weeks to definitively replace football's Wow! Factor with the now-dominant Waaaaaaaaaaah! Factor, but tonight, like US Navy Seals storming an Abbottabad compound, they're going to take another shot at their target anyway just for the hell of it.

It is the negligence of the governing bodies, of course, that has done most to slay the sport; their refusal to take effective action against endemic in-game cheating and time-wasting allowing cads, cynics and cretins to hijack and snuff out the game. Perhaps as some kind of belated, typically feeble gesture. Uefa has named the referee of tonight's fiasco as Franck de Bleeckere, who is also a public relations manager, but if it thinks the Belgian can use any of his PR knowhow to restore football's image while the so-called best players on the planet jump and roll and jab and wail and scam all around him, figuratively and sometimes literally sticking two-fingers up at the swindled folk who'd paid to see them showcase their supposed skills, then Uefa's fat cats are as stupid as they look.

"I don't know what Madrid to expect," said Pep Guardiola to a journalist, presumably before hurling himself to the ground and tearfully claiming to have been maimed by the microphone. "They have such a strong team and so many players that they can play in several ways," insisted Guardiola, as - in the background - a Portuguese driver started backing up a large bus outside Camp Nou.

• Join Paul Doyle for live MBM coverage of Barcelona 0-1 Real Madrid (2-1 agg) from 7.30pm.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"Mathematically we are not there yet, we've got another game to go but we are in a good position" - with Southampton three points clear and 17 goals to the good over nearest League One automatic promotion rivals Huddersfield with one game to go, boss Nigel Adkins isn't counting his chickens. Still, given his previous with getting ahead of himself ...

PROMOTION FOR THE JILTED GENERATION

Gather up your Pogs, stick that Stiltskin CD in your Discman, pour yourself a refreshing glass of Tab Clear, and don that faded Global Hypercolor T-shirt. That's right – it's time to party like it's 1994, because Norwich City will be joining QPR in the Premier League (well, probably, but we'll come back to that). Yesterday afternoon, uber-chokers Cardiff crumbled to defeat against Middlesbrough, putting promotion on a plate for the Canaries, which they gobbled up like seed. A 1-0 win at Fratton Park was enough to take Norwich back into the top flight.

"It's a miracle. What has been achieved by the players, by that group of lads has been monumental," gasped City manager Paul Lambert before contradicting himself – "I don't think you can get a word to describe what has been achieved" – then rallying – "It's absolutely incredible what has happened here. Just to stay in the Championship would have been a great achievement but to actually go up beggars belief."

Having carefully put together a team with old bits of Coventry, Peterborough, Gillingham and Brighton, Lambert is now hotter property than a flaming bungalow in the Sahara. And he could yet have a title on his CV. QPR's FA hearing into the whos, whys, wheres and whatfors of Alejandro Faurlin's move to Loftus Road began today, with no one daring to bet on an outcome which could yet range from a oh-you-naughty-boys-what-are-you-like? slap on the wrists to a proper shoeing in the form of a hefty and potentially promotion-costing points deduction.

The Fiver has always been an all-or-nothing tea-time email, and we're too old in the tooth to change now. As such the only outcomes we want to see are either the removal of every point earned with the Argentinian in the side – a 77-point penalty that would, in the sort of ironic twist that would have Alanis Morissette warbling like a dying skylark, likely save Sheffield United from relegation – or a not-guilty verdict that would leave us to our early-90s-retro reminiscing on the sepia-tinged days of Trevor Sinclair, Les Ferdinand, Andy Sinton, Jeremy Goss, Ruel Fox and Ian Culverhouse.

DOUBLE YOUR MONEY WITH BLUE SQUARE!

Open an account with online bookies Blue Square, placing a bet of at least £5 and they'll give you a free £10 bet, win or lose! (Terms Apply) Register now.

FIVER LETTERS

"I can't tell you how happy I am that Stop Football has been officially resurrected (Thursday's Fiver). The players, management and fans of Swindon Town have kept the faith this season when others doubted" - Paul White.

"Re: the Stop Football campaign and last Wednesday's match being 'the most depressing event in the history of mankind'. I didn't get that impression from the atmosphere at Craven Cottage - although it may have been a different story for the Bolton fans" - Marisa Cardoni.

"Robbie Savage is retiring and we need a new hero. Can I nominate the Scottish version: Darren Fletcher. Someone who is one-paced (slow), runs about a lot, kicks people and thinks he is a great player. Nominations for the Robbie Savage big boot award sought" - Peter Lamprell.

Send your letters to the.boss@guardian.co.uk. And if you've nothing better to do you can also tweet the Fiver.

BITS AND BOBS

Ref's ref Pierluigi Collina will be dropped in like US Navy, etc and so on to observe tonight's Barcelona-Real Madrid Big Cup tie.

Pint-sized bongo baron and West Ham co-owner David Sullivan has admitted he didn't turn up to see his team at Man City because he is sick of watching them lose. "We are not £20,000 to £60,000-a-week footballers," sobbed multi-millionaire Sullivan (net worth £350m, according to the 2009 Sunday Times rich list). "Like us, the bulk of the West Ham United supporters preferred to watch it on TV."

A Madrid court has confirmed Bolton defender Marcos Alonso was involved in a fatal traffic accident on Monday and is being investigated for charges including drunk driving and reckless homicide.

And Wayne Rooney missed training today ahead of Manchester United's Big Cup meeting with Schalke. Having said that, given Schalke's performance last week United can probably do without him.

STILL WANT MORE?

Balkan housewives' favourite Jonathan Wilson throws his hat into the ring to become Norman Wisdom's successor with this piece on the ins and outs of Albanian football culture.

Scott Parker stars as Spider-Man, Leonardo DiCaprio and a mermaid in this week's Gallery

Real Madrid's feud with Barcelona has finally gone digital, says Paul Hayward, as a tittering Xavi tags a picture of a camel on Facebook as "Gonzalo Higuaín".

The failure of Manchester United to seize the initiative means the title run-in will be fraught, anxious and potentially entertaining, says Kevin McCarra pulling fraught, anxious and potentially entertaining faces, in that order.

Dominic Fifield has thought of five factors that will influence United v Chelsea on Sunday.

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For many of us, anger was the only way to break an unhealthy connection between our family and ourselves. It was the only way to keep us from being held captive—emotionally, mentally and sometime spiritually....

By Barbara Pursley
Alzheimer's Reading Room

Many of us have anger at members of our family for not pulling their weight as a caregiver. Some of us might even go to the extremes of having rage. For whatever reason, some families have been divided.

My mom was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1993 and passed away in 2003. Since that time, I have been an author, writer, speaker and advocate for Alzheimer’s. I came across a journal entry I wrote about Alzheimer’s support groups and family members. I would like to share what I learned and see how you might identify with this information and any solutions you have discovered in your family.


Written, Thursday, March 24, 1994

“At the Alzheimer’s Support Group tonight, we discussed the problems between siblings and family members who are making decisions for the care of their loved ones:

My sister escapes helping care for our father until money decisions arise and then she wants to be in control.

I care for my mother at home and it’s beginning to affect my health. My doctor is afraid that my cardiovascular problems could lead to a heart attack. I’d like to put mother in a nursing home, but my brother who lives 1,000 miles away disagrees. He cares for her by phone and tells me ‘we’ could never move her from home. He rarely comes to visit.

I have five siblings and two of us care for our father. The others tell us what we’re doing wrong.

I have four siblings and one brother-in-law who is a trouble maker. Every time our attorney has legal documents to sign on our mother’s behalf, my brother-in-law will find reason for my sister to disagree.

I have no siblings and I care for my father. It’s hard making decisions alone.

I’m married and have four siblings who live out of town. For the past ten years, I have cared for my mother at home and my siblings occasionally visit. Two years ago, my husband divorced me.

I’m a male caregiver to my mother. My sister doesn’t participate because she lives far away. My health is very poor and I would like to put her in a nursing home close to me, but my guilt won’t let me do it.

I come from a large Italian family of ten siblings. I never thought anything could divide us until our father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.”

For many of us, anger was the only way to break an unhealthy connection between our family and ourselves. It was the only way to keep us from being held captive—emotionally, mentally and sometime spiritually. It was necessary, but at some point we have to strive to be done with our anger so that it doesn’t zap our energy from being a healthy caregiver. We must take care of ourselves first!

What lessons have you learned from your family members? If you are angry or resentful towards your siblings, how are you dealing with your anger? Your experience may be just what a reader needs to hear for today.

Barbara Pursley was born in Galveston, Texas and is the author of EMBRACING THE MOMENT. Barabara attended Santa Monica College, studied photography, and worked as a commercial photographer before returning to Texas to care for her mother. Barbara also taught journal writing to women in Texas rehabilitation facilities. She put her God inspired journal entries and photographs into book form in 2009.

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Read More on the Alzheimer's Reading Room

• Communicating in Alzheimer's World
• What’s the Difference Between Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia
• How the Loss of Memory Works in Alzheimer’s Disease, and How Understanding This Could Help You
• Learning How to Communicate with Someone Suffering From Alzheimer's Disease
• What is Alzheimer's Disease?
• What is Dementia?
• Alzheimer's World -- Trying to Reconnect with Someone Suffering from Alzheimer's Disease
• Advice and Insight -- Alzheimer's Reading Room
• Dementia and the Eight Types of Dementia
• Does the Combination of Aricept and Namenda Help Slow the Rate of Decline in Alzheimer's Patients
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• Alzheimer's Disease, Urinary Tract Infections, Urinary Incontinence, Poop (8 Articles)
• 100 Good Reasons to Subscribe to the Alzheimer's Reading Room Now

The Alzheimer’s Action Plan: The Experts’ Guide to the Best Diag­no­sis and Treat­ment for Mem­ory Prob­lems

The 36-Hour Day A Family Guide to Caring for People with Alzheimer Disease

Original content Barbara Pursley, the Alzheimer's Reading Room

We are a community of people who love writing and Star Trek. We've been together as a group since June of 1994 and have enjoyed years of simming under a highly trained command staff. Our group offers an extensive and complete training course upon acceptance that will acclimatize you to our rules and ways of simming. We also offer a very active forum, an online database to organize your character's information, and of course, a ship to suit your simming style. Our group's minimum age requirement is 13, and we are rated PG-13 for content. We'd love to have you join our group. See you soon at http://www.starbase118.net/!

Statistics: Posted by milesunum — 2011-05-03 09:01

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Dates: May 24 - 26, 2011

Duration: 6 hours per session

Microsoft Productivity, Email, & Collaboration in the Cloud | Microsoft Office 365 brings together cloud versions of our most trusted email, communication and collaboration software – Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online – with our familiar Office Professional Plus desktop suite. This fast-paced, demo-rich online course features the best experts teaching the technical aspects of Office 365 for IT Professionals.

Day One — “Office 365 Platform” May 24, 2011 | 10am-4pm PDT | Live online training

• Microsoft Office 365 Overview for IT Pros
• Deploying Clients for Office 365
• Administration & Automation using PowerShell
• Identity and Access Solutions
• Directory Synchronization

Day Two — “Exchange Online” May 25, 2011 | 10am-4pm PDT | Live online training

• Exchange Online Overview for IT Pros
• Exchange Online Administration
• Staged Exchange Online Migration
• Hybrid Options with Exchange Server & Exchange Online
• Exchange Online Archiving & Compliance

Day Three — “Lync & SharePoint Online” May 26, 2011 | 10am-4pm PDT | Live online training

• Lync Online Overview & Configuration for IT Pros
• SharePoint Online Overview
• SharePoint Online Administration
• SharePoint Online Extensibility & Customization
• Office 365 Deployment Overview

What’s a “Jump Start” Course? | Training specifically designed for experienced technologists and IT leaders whose jobs demand they know how to best leverage new, emerging Microsoft technologies. These advanced courses assume a certain level of expertise and domain knowledge, so they move quickly and cover topics in a fashion that enables teams to effectively map new skills to real-world situations.

Adam Carter (Bomb) | Technical Evangelist | Microsoft

When not on the speaker circuit at conferences and Microsoft product launches, Adam can be found engaging IT Pros via his video series on TechNet Edge, where he has been a part of more than 220 interviews and product discussions (and counting). Adam has spent his entire career working with and on behalf of IT Pros. Check out the review of a recent presentation, “Office 365 Doesn’t Mean You’re Fired” on Infoworld.com.

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Mike Kostersitz | Principal Architect, BPOS Center of Excellence | Microsoft EMEA
Starting at Microsoft Austria in 1994, Mike has worked for Microsoft for over 17 years. He focused on architecting and deploying MCS hosting solutions until 2002 when he moved his family to Redmond, WA. At Microsoft headquarters, he worked on products like Exchange, HMC and Microsoft Online until 2008 when he returned to Austria. Currently, he is a Principal Architect in the BPOS Center of Excellence in Microsoft Services EMEA.

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Naomi Alpern | Senior Consultant, Exchange Online| Microsoft

Naomi J. Alpern is a Senior Consultant for Microsoft Consulting Services specializing in Unified Communications and IT Architecture and Planning. In addition to many Microsoft certifications, Naomi is a Citrix Certified Enterprise Administrator. Naomi lives in Charlotte, NC, where she spends her spare time along with her husband, Joey, chasing after their two young sons, Darien, 7 and Justin, 4.

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Mark Kashman | Senior Product Manager, SharePoint | Microsoft
Mark has worked at Microsoft since 2000 where he focused on internal training and readiness for the Microsoft Field. He then moved on to build a SharePoint 2007-powered digital asset management solution (including the Silverlight Rough Cut Editor (RCE)) before moving to the SharePoint team and his current role with SharePoint Online. Mark enjoys kayaking, biking, hiking, ballet/soccer/science club/swimming (all the Dad duties), and quiet-bird-chirping moments for reading books on his new WP7 Kindle app when not playing that darned addictive Bejeweled LIVE. @mkashman

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Matthew Burnett | Senior Application Developer, SharePoint | Microsoft
Matt is passionate about integrating Office 365 into Azure and on-premise enterprise projects to provide elegant cross-platform solutions. The past five years, Matt has built integrated data platforms with Fortune 10 customers and supported custom product development for Microsoft Global Partners through the SharePoint 2010 Beta program. Matt’s vast experience building and deploying customizations for the SharePoint 2010 product group is now focused on consulting, demonstrating, training customers and writing books about how to build custom solutions for Office365, SharePoint Online and Silverlight.

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Other members of the Office 365 Jump Start instructor team:
• Jeff James | Solutions Architect, Exchange Online | Microsoft
• Jerome Berniere | Senior Program Manager, Lync Online | Microsoft
• Zach Beers | Senior Deployment Consultant, Office 365 | Microsoft
• Many more will be online answering questions

Much of my career at Microsoft I had the role of program manager, and today I had lunch with another ex-Microsoft program manager and discussed data center/IT operations and what is needed to address the silos and fiefdoms that exist in IT.  After a bunch of discussions, I asked why isn't there program manager for data center systems?

GPS navigation has a system program manager which interesting enough sounds like it could describe an data center/IT system.

GPS World: What do you see as the
current priorities for the GPS Joint
Program Office?
Col. Ballenger: Our No. 1 priority
is mission success. How we accomplish
that is to make sure that our users, both
military and civil, receive their position,
navigation, and timing information —
with high availability and high assurance
— wherever they are around the globe. I
translate that into two key jobs that we do
here in the Joint Program Office.
Number 1: Sustain the capabilities
that we have on orbit today — and that
includes designing, launching, and replenishing satellites, and making sure that the
ground control system and network of
ground antennas stay properly maintained
and sustained and upgraded over time.
Job Number 2 is modernizing the GPS
capability to move us into the future. So,
really, mission success has two constituent parts: Sustain the constellation and
modernize the constellation, the constellation being a euphemism for the larger
system.

Program managers have different types of roles at different companies and over time the roles can change.  I remember once being in a meeting with Paul Maritz when he was a Microsoft VP, and he explained how program manager have different roles at Microsoft than other companies.  Here is what program managers used to be at Microsoft.

When I was hired 1994 there was a cult around the role. Program Managers had a reputation for being people worthy of being afraid of for one reason: they knew how to get things done. If you got in their way, they would smile. And then eat you. They drove, led, ran, persuaded, hunted, fought and stuck their necks out for their teams with an intensity most people couldn’t match. The sort of people who eliminated all bullshit within a 10 foot radius of their presence. How to be this way, and do it without being an asshole, was one of the things I tried to capture in my book, Making things happen. All teams need at least one leader who has this kind of passion and talent regardless of where you work or what you’re working on.

As this post continues it is difficult though to set up program managers for success when bureaucracy grows.

One change is the enormous growth of Microsoft since I was hired. I started in ’94 as employee #14,000 something, and now there are nearly 90,000. Bureaucracy, overhead and dead weight collect in big successful companies and Microsoft is no different. This makes it much harder to consolidate the kind of power a PM needs to behave the way I described above. The PM role has been stretched so thin there are PMs for everything, and if ever a position needs to be created that isn’t quite a marketing, programmer or tester position, but isn’t a leadership or management role, the PM label gets used anyway. Somehow it’s a crime for there to be more than 10 job titles at a company. I’m not sure why.

Changing data centers system is required to green the data center.  This requires a concentration of power into smaller group of individuals which is probably why data centers and IT don't have program managers the way that Microsoft used to. 

If the US military has figured out they need system program manager for complex systems like GPS, shouldn't the idea work for data centers?

Steve Clayton and Flora Goldthwaite give us an exclusive tour of The Microsoft Home.

The Microsoft Home, located on the Redmond campus in the Executive Briefing Center, is an envisioning of the family home in the very near future where connected experiences and devices take their next logical steps and beyond.

First opened in 1994, The Microsoft Home is maintained by a group of researchers under Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Craig Mundie, and is updated regularly.

Unfortunately The Microsoft Home is not open to the public but Channel 9 was given special permission to film a sneak-peak tour for this episode of Microsoft Campus Tours.

This is the next blog in the continuing series of interviews with top-echelon and renowned professionals. In this blog, I interview Eddie Boles, Microsoft Career Factor Idol Winner – The DIY IT Professional. Career Factor winners will be at TechEd.

Enjoy!
Stephen Ibaraki

Born and raised in Harlem, NY, Eddie had never traveled west of Ephrata, PA, until he attended UC Berkeley in the winter of 1987. While there, he developed a love for acting while performing in a handful of student theatrical productions. This passion led him into a career in the entertainment industry.

Eddie moved to Los Angeles in 1992, where he started as a Production Assistant on various video projects. These included commercials for Starter Hats, to feature films and TV sit-coms, including "In The House" and "The Steve Harvey Show." During this time, he co-founded Black Coffee Entertainment, which managed the Black Eyed Peas from 1994 until 2000. Eddie primarily managed the international tours for the group. Soon thereafter, he re-immersed himself into film and television at State Street Pictures as the assistant to director Tim Story, best known for the first "Barbershop" movie and the blockbuster hit franchise "Fantastic Four".

Eddie worked his way up from Assistant Director to Co-Producing, Writing, and Directing and has most recently directed films that have made their way through the festival circuit. His latest film, "Results," was named Best Short at the Martha's Vineyard African-American Film Festival and at the San Francisco Black Film Festival. He also received the prestigious Melvin Van Peebles Maverick Award at the San Francisco Black Film Festival which honored him as "an emerging filmmaker with unique vision, singular style, and an uncompromising point of view."

Although filmmaking will always remain a passion, he decided to pursue a career in Information Technology after being laid off from his Production Coordinator job in 2008 to develop his other passion: computers. Although it has been a difficult transition, he looks forward to excelling in his new field as he gains more experience and completes more training.

DISCUSSION:

Q:
Eddie, thank you for coming in today to share your insights and experiences with the audience.
A: "And thank you for affording me a platform to do so!"

Q:
You have this strong background in the Entertainment industry. Can you quickly profile this history and notable achievements?
A: "I became a part of the Entertainment Industry in 1992, and was fortunate to have some marginal success relatively early on. I am a co-founder of a company called, Black Coffee Entertainment, and back then we were primarily a music management company. Most notably, we were the Black Eyed Peas' first management company and helped them land their first album deal in 1998. Through that relationship, I got to travel much of the world as their tour manager, as well as our company gaining a little notoriety. Unfortunately, that relationship ended in late 2000 and we have yet to attain that level of success again. During the early years of managing the Peas, the years when they made no money, and consequently, neither did we, we stayed afloat by taking P.A. (Production Assistant) jobs on any production we could find. Through that work, I developed a pretty impressive contact list, so when things went awry with the Peas, I was able to reach out to those I knew in the film and television industry in order to find work.
That led to my stint at State Street Pictures, which led to assisting the director, Mr. Tim Story, on "Barbershop", which eventually led to me writing and directing my own films. I again had some marginal success, winning some film festivals, and landing a writing contract with a company. The company eventually folded, so I was kind of back at square one. In need of work, I eventually landed the job of Production Coordinator at Motion Theory Studios in Venice, CA in 2007. But due to the financial downturn, I was laid off in 2008. That is when I decided I needed a new career path, and the most logical one for me was computers, given my love of them and my strong math background. I started my education at New Horizons Computer Learning Centers in San Diego, CA in August of 2010, with the help of a grant from the Employment Development Department. I soon became Network+ and A+ certified, and have had the incredible fortune of being selected to participate in Microsoft's "Career Factor"! I haven't looked back since!"

Q:
Why are computers one of your passions and what ignited this passion?
A: "The passion was ignited back in Junior High School, around 1982, when I would spend many of my lunch periods learning programming in this new DOS language on this thing called an Apple. I went on to pursue other passions in my life, but have always stayed abreast of whatever was the latest and greatest in computing. Computers are such a magnificent tool! They are like the wheel of the new Millennium! They allow us to do so much, but I know that this is only the tip of the iceberg, and I want to go along for the ride!"

Q:
What was the catalyst in applying for Career Factor?
A: "Honestly, it was at the prodding of my Account Executive at New Horizons, Ms. Tiffany David. I had no intent on applying for Career Factor, mainly because I didn't feel I was qualified, but she insisted, saying that she thought I'd be perfect for it! She was right, as usual."

Q:
Can you describe your personal experiences for the challenges and process leading up, winning, and after winning Career Factor?
A: "The biggest challenge leading up to Career Factor was conveying my story well enough in a 2 minute audition video. I guess I hit the mark, because here I am! The biggest challenges I face now are balancing family (I have a wonderful wife and a rambunctious 2-year old son) and work (I just landed a full time position at Technology Integration Group), while still meeting all of my obligations with Career Factor. More importantly, it's been a challenge maximizing all of the great resources being offered to me by Microsoft as a participant in Career Factor. I hope to walk away from this experience with as many MS Certifications as possible, but again, it's been a challenge."

Q:
How does social media accentuate what you are doing in Career Factor?
A: "The ability to create somewhat of a fan base through social media has been a bit shocking to me! I have people following me on this journey from India, the Middle East, and even Australia! I don't think any of this would have happened without the leveraging of social media."

Q:
From your experiences with Career Factor, what tips would you provide to those transitioning to a career as IT professionals to help them in their journey?
A: "The tip I would offer has very little to do with Career Factor, only because this is like a once in a lifetime experience that unfortunately can't happen for everyone. What I would say is talk to people already in the industry, ask them, "what are employers looking for?", "What would make me most marketable?" And armed with that information, get the best education you can afford! And that doesn't necessarily mean studying at a 4-year university and achieving a BA. I discovered that certifications were most respected in the areas that most interested me, so that is what I went after. Do your research! Formulate a plan of attack! And then go for it!."

Q:
What are the most exciting opportunities you are working on with Career Factor?
A: "I very much look forward to achieving Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS). There are other certifications I hope to achieve before it's all said and done, but I'm going to focus on this one right now. I also really look forward to finally meeting all of my co-participants for the first time at TechEd in Atlanta this May!."

Q:
What are your future career aspirations? What are you most passionate about?
A: "Being new to the industry, I'm a little unsure about what I want to pursue in the future. So far, I really enjoy Networking. The idea of being able to make computers, devices, or any other types of nodes, communicate with one another over vast distances, or even just across the room, really intrigues me. I'm a natural communicator, so I guess it makes sense for me to have an interest in networking."

Q:
What drives your passion for Microsoft and Microsoft technology solutions?
A: "Microsoft is the King of the Hill, A Number One when it comes to the world of computers! There is no way to be a part of this world and not have an interest and a passion for Microsoft!"

Q:
What are your tips, lessons, and best resources for those wanting a career in computing?
A: "Again, being new to the industry, I feel a little unqualified to best answer this question. But what I will say is that your best resources are the people who are doing it. Be it your co-workers, your IT instructors, or the guy you met in an IT chat room, one of them is bound to know something you don't, so don't be afraid to ask."

Q:
Why or how does your entertainment industry background meld with your IT career plans (or will it)?
A: "Filmmaking is becoming more and more technology based. Be it 3-D, or just shooting everything digitally, no film at all. If I'm able to make a career from the melding of my ability to tell interesting stories through pictures, with my ever growing knowledge base of technology and all things computers, than I'd be the happiest person on the planet! I'm open to the possibilities."

Q:
In all that you do, what are the biggest challenges, and their solutions?
A: "As I mentioned before, balancing my family life with work and the pursuit of an IT career. Honestly, I'm not sure if I've found a solution for this dilemma. What I do know is that having an understanding and encouraging wife helps tremendously!"

Q:
Provide your predictions of future IT trends and their implications/opportunities?
A: "I predict that as we get closer to 100% of the world's population owning a computer, or at least a device that allows access to the internet, that the exchange of information between all cultures, all walks of life will be so transformative, and I believe transformative in a positive way, that it will be mind-blowing. And we will have technology to thank for it....the very thing that many predicted would destroy the world. How's that for irony?"

Q:
Please share 3 stories (something surprising, unexpected, amazing, or humorous) from your studies, work, or time with Career Factor?
A: "There aren't three that I can come up with, but one unexpected thing that has come from my experience with Career Factor is my even stronger interest in international affairs. There is a participant from Tunisia, Rabeb, who was in the midst of a revolution during the early days of Career Factor, and she shared much of it with her fellow participants via Facebook. Also, Steve, in Australia, was going through some of the worst flooding the country has seen in decades. Being able to communicate directly with these people who were experiencing major world events was a powerful and humbling experience. I hope to be in touch with all of the participants for many years to come."

Q:
If you were doing this interview, what 3 questions would you ask and then what would be your answers?
A: "Again, three are tough, given that you have asked so many good questions, but I do have one: "How would you use technology to better the lives of people?" And my answer to that would be by trying to come up with ways for people to help themselves through the use of technology. For example, I heard a great story on NPR's 'The World's Technology Podcast' discussing how some IT people, along with major companies, have come up with a way for people to use their mobile phones for all of their banking needs. This is having a profound effect on the survivors of the Haitian earthquake. Most of the banks in Haiti were destroyed so for people to be able to pay for things, make deposits and withdrawals, and most importantly receive money all through their mobile phones has literally changed their lives for the better. That's the kind of stuff that really interests me."

Q:
What three lessons have you learned from your life experiences?
A: "People are your greatest resource. Finish what you start, and don't start things you're not sure you can finish. Be the best person you can be, everything else will take care of itself."

Q:
Eddie, we will continue to follow your contributions with career factor and more broadly. We thank you for sharing your time, wisdom, and accumulated deep insights with our audience.
A: "Thank you again for the opportunity!"

This is the next blog in the continuing series of interviews with top-echelon and renowned professionals. In this blog, I interview Eddie Boles, Microsoft Career Factor Idol Winner – The DIY IT Professional. Career Factor winners will be at TechEd.

Enjoy!
Stephen Ibaraki

Born and raised in Harlem, NY, Eddie had never traveled west of Ephrata, PA, until he attended UC Berkeley in the winter of 1987. While there, he developed a love for acting while performing in a handful of student theatrical productions. This passion led him into a career in the entertainment industry.

Eddie moved to Los Angeles in 1992, where he started as a Production Assistant on various video projects. These included commercials for Starter Hats, to feature films and TV sit-coms, including "In The House" and "The Steve Harvey Show." During this time, he co-founded Black Coffee Entertainment, which managed the Black Eyed Peas from 1994 until 2000. Eddie primarily managed the international tours for the group. Soon thereafter, he re-immersed himself into film and television at State Street Pictures as the assistant to director Tim Story, best known for the first "Barbershop" movie and the blockbuster hit franchise "Fantastic Four".

Eddie worked his way up from Assistant Director to Co-Producing, Writing, and Directing and has most recently directed films that have made their way through the festival circuit. His latest film, "Results," was named Best Short at the Martha's Vineyard African-American Film Festival and at the San Francisco Black Film Festival. He also received the prestigious Melvin Van Peebles Maverick Award at the San Francisco Black Film Festival which honored him as "an emerging filmmaker with unique vision, singular style, and an uncompromising point of view."

Although filmmaking will always remain a passion, he decided to pursue a career in Information Technology after being laid off from his Production Coordinator job in 2008 to develop his other passion: computers. Although it has been a difficult transition, he looks forward to excelling in his new field as he gains more experience and completes more training.

DISCUSSION:

Q:
Eddie, thank you for coming in today to share your insights and experiences with the audience.
A: "And thank you for affording me a platform to do so!"

Q:
You have this strong background in the Entertainment industry. Can you quickly profile this history and notable achievements?
A: "I became a part of the Entertainment Industry in 1992, and was fortunate to have some marginal success relatively early on. I am a co-founder of a company called, Black Coffee Entertainment, and back then we were primarily a music management company. Most notably, we were the Black Eyed Peas' first management company and helped them land their first album deal in 1998. Through that relationship, I got to travel much of the world as their tour manager, as well as our company gaining a little notoriety. Unfortunately, that relationship ended in late 2000 and we have yet to attain that level of success again. During the early years of managing the Peas, the years when they made no money, and consequently, neither did we, we stayed afloat by taking P.A. (Production Assistant) jobs on any production we could find. Through that work, I developed a pretty impressive contact list, so when things went awry with the Peas, I was able to reach out to those I knew in the film and television industry in order to find work.
That led to my stint at State Street Pictures, which led to assisting the director, Mr. Tim Story, on "Barbershop", which eventually led to me writing and directing my own films. I again had some marginal success, winning some film festivals, and landing a writing contract with a company. The company eventually folded, so I was kind of back at square one. In need of work, I eventually landed the job of Production Coordinator at Motion Theory Studios in Venice, CA in 2007. But due to the financial downturn, I was laid off in 2008. That is when I decided I needed a new career path, and the most logical one for me was computers, given my love of them and my strong math background. I started my education at New Horizons Computer Learning Centers in San Diego, CA in August of 2010, with the help of a grant from the Employment Development Department. I soon became Network+ and A+ certified, and have had the incredible fortune of being selected to participate in Microsoft's "Career Factor"! I haven't looked back since!"

Q:
Why are computers one of your passions and what ignited this passion?
A: "The passion was ignited back in Junior High School, around 1982, when I would spend many of my lunch periods learning programming in this new DOS language on this thing called an Apple. I went on to pursue other passions in my life, but have always stayed abreast of whatever was the latest and greatest in computing. Computers are such a magnificent tool! They are like the wheel of the new Millennium! They allow us to do so much, but I know that this is only the tip of the iceberg, and I want to go along for the ride!"

Q:
What was the catalyst in applying for Career Factor?
A: "Honestly, it was at the prodding of my Account Executive at New Horizons, Ms. Tiffany David. I had no intent on applying for Career Factor, mainly because I didn't feel I was qualified, but she insisted, saying that she thought I'd be perfect for it! She was right, as usual."

Q:
Can you describe your personal experiences for the challenges and process leading up, winning, and after winning Career Factor?
A: "The biggest challenge leading up to Career Factor was conveying my story well enough in a 2 minute audition video. I guess I hit the mark, because here I am! The biggest challenges I face now are balancing family (I have a wonderful wife and a rambunctious 2-year old son) and work (I just landed a full time position at Technology Integration Group), while still meeting all of my obligations with Career Factor. More importantly, it's been a challenge maximizing all of the great resources being offered to me by Microsoft as a participant in Career Factor. I hope to walk away from this experience with as many MS Certifications as possible, but again, it's been a challenge."

Q:
How does social media accentuate what you are doing in Career Factor?
A: "The ability to create somewhat of a fan base through social media has been a bit shocking to me! I have people following me on this journey from India, the Middle East, and even Australia! I don't think any of this would have happened without the leveraging of social media."

Q:
From your experiences with Career Factor, what tips would you provide to those transitioning to a career as IT professionals to help them in their journey?
A: "The tip I would offer has very little to do with Career Factor, only because this is like a once in a lifetime experience that unfortunately can't happen for everyone. What I would say is talk to people already in the industry, ask them, "what are employers looking for?", "What would make me most marketable?" And armed with that information, get the best education you can afford! And that doesn't necessarily mean studying at a 4-year university and achieving a BA. I discovered that certifications were most respected in the areas that most interested me, so that is what I went after. Do your research! Formulate a plan of attack! And then go for it!."

Q:
What are the most exciting opportunities you are working on with Career Factor?
A: "I very much look forward to achieving Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS). There are other certifications I hope to achieve before it's all said and done, but I'm going to focus on this one right now. I also really look forward to finally meeting all of my co-participants for the first time at TechEd in Atlanta this May!."

Q:
What are your future career aspirations? What are you most passionate about?
A: "Being new to the industry, I'm a little unsure about what I want to pursue in the future. So far, I really enjoy Networking. The idea of being able to make computers, devices, or any other types of nodes, communicate with one another over vast distances, or even just across the room, really intrigues me. I'm a natural communicator, so I guess it makes sense for me to have an interest in networking."

Q:
What drives your passion for Microsoft and Microsoft technology solutions?
A: "Microsoft is the King of the Hill, A Number One when it comes to the world of computers! There is no way to be a part of this world and not have an interest and a passion for Microsoft!"

Q:
What are your tips, lessons, and best resources for those wanting a career in computing?
A: "Again, being new to the industry, I feel a little unqualified to best answer this question. But what I will say is that your best resources are the people who are doing it. Be it your co-workers, your IT instructors, or the guy you met in an IT chat room, one of them is bound to know something you don't, so don't be afraid to ask."

Q:
Why or how does your entertainment industry background meld with your IT career plans (or will it)?
A: "Filmmaking is becoming more and more technology based. Be it 3-D, or just shooting everything digitally, no film at all. If I'm able to make a career from the melding of my ability to tell interesting stories through pictures, with my ever growing knowledge base of technology and all things computers, than I'd be the happiest person on the planet! I'm open to the possibilities."

Q:
In all that you do, what are the biggest challenges, and their solutions?
A: "As I mentioned before, balancing my family life with work and the pursuit of an IT career. Honestly, I'm not sure if I've found a solution for this dilemma. What I do know is that having an understanding and encouraging wife helps tremendously!"

Q:
Provide your predictions of future IT trends and their implications/opportunities?
A: "I predict that as we get closer to 100% of the world's population owning a computer, or at least a device that allows access to the internet, that the exchange of information between all cultures, all walks of life will be so transformative, and I believe transformative in a positive way, that it will be mind-blowing. And we will have technology to thank for it....the very thing that many predicted would destroy the world. How's that for irony?"

Q:
Please share 3 stories (something surprising, unexpected, amazing, or humorous) from your studies, work, or time with Career Factor?
A: "There aren't three that I can come up with, but one unexpected thing that has come from my experience with Career Factor is my even stronger interest in international affairs. There is a participant from Tunisia, Rabeb, who was in the midst of a revolution during the early days of Career Factor, and she shared much of it with her fellow participants via Facebook. Also, Steve, in Australia, was going through some of the worst flooding the country has seen in decades. Being able to communicate directly with these people who were experiencing major world events was a powerful and humbling experience. I hope to be in touch with all of the participants for many years to come."

Q:
If you were doing this interview, what 3 questions would you ask and then what would be your answers?
A: "Again, three are tough, given that you have asked so many good questions, but I do have one: "How would you use technology to better the lives of people?" And my answer to that would be by trying to come up with ways for people to help themselves through the use of technology. For example, I heard a great story on NPR's 'The World's Technology Podcast' discussing how some IT people, along with major companies, have come up with a way for people to use their mobile phones for all of their banking needs. This is having a profound effect on the survivors of the Haitian earthquake. Most of the banks in Haiti were destroyed so for people to be able to pay for things, make deposits and withdrawals, and most importantly receive money all through their mobile phones has literally changed their lives for the better. That's the kind of stuff that really interests me."

Q:
What three lessons have you learned from your life experiences?
A: "People are your greatest resource. Finish what you start, and don't start things you're not sure you can finish. Be the best person you can be, everything else will take care of itself."

Q:
Eddie, we will continue to follow your contributions with career factor and more broadly. We thank you for sharing your time, wisdom, and accumulated deep insights with our audience.
A: "Thank you again for the opportunity!"

Join me on Facebook. Become a 'fan' of my Facebook page on Experimental Digital Photography. Click on the 'like' button at the top of the Facebook page.

THE BIGGEST MISTAKE
WITH DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY

Hey, I just shot 200 digital photos of musicians jamming last night at a local bar; do you want to see them all? No, of course you don't. 200 unculled, unselected shots is too many.
Well how about 100, after I get a chance to go through them and throw out the bad ones? The answer, for me, would still be no.
Well, how about I take a few days, go through them carefully and pick out 6-7 best photographs? Would you like to see them then? My answer now would be yes.

The biggest mistake with digital is to show too many photos without carefully culling the very best. And this lack of critical judgement is hurting photography.

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NOTE: In the film days, 'editing' meant selecting your best photos from all you shot. Now editing means processing the photo with software as in the term 'photo editor'. The current term for what used to be called editing is culling -- so I will use that term in this article -- but when Walker Evans says 'editing' in his quote, he means 'culling'.

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Photography has always been a percentage art; in the past photographers talked about the ratio of film shot to pictures shown, such as 10 to 1. Yet today with digital, I am seeing many more photos with very little selection of the best work. Under this avalanche of pictures, the really good important shots are getting buried.

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With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless.
Walker Evans (famous photographer best known for his work in the 1930s)

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Think that there aren't that many photos out there? From 1994 to 2010 five billion photos (that's B) have been uploaded to Flickr.com according to Wikipedia. Today on Flickr about a half a million a day or almost two billion a year are being uploaded and that's just one photo sharing site. The Yahoo Directory of Photo Album Sites lists over 80 other such sites and that does not include social networking sites such as Facebook.

Now, admittedly most of these shots are personal and not seen by the general public, yet consider the number of photos in a Flickr group. The Flickr self portrait group, which is available to the public and that I recommended in my article about self portraits has almost 450k photos. If you were to look at every self portrait for just 3 seconds, it would take you over 23 16-hour days (we'll let you sleep for 8 hours) to look at them all. Now lets say you wanted to spend a whopping 10 seconds looking at only the best ones, lets say 1 in 10 -- it would still take you about 8 full 16-hour days to see these best ones. And, obviously, no one is going to devote all their waking hours for 8 days to do this.

There are serious consequences to this mountain of digital photographs: Very little time is being spent looking at each photo as most are only viewed for a few seconds. As a result the very best photography is being missed. This is not good for the art of photography. The very best photos should be viewed for many minutes at a time -- as it often takes that long to catch the subtle aspects of good work.

Whose Fault Is This?

Is this the fault of photographers or the technology? My answer is both, but mainly it is the way that this technology is being used.

First: Digital is so easy and cheap it produces a lot more photographs than film. In addition they can be blown up quite large with no wait time -- unlike film that required a long lag time before blowups were processed plus an additional cost. So a direct result of the technology is that there are a ton of pictures.

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I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.
Walker Evans (famous photographer best known for his work in the 1930s)

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Second: Having said that, I believe it is the duty of each photographer to carefully look at their work and select only the best for display. This is a skill -- no doubt about that. And this is perhaps the one aspect of digital photographer that will take more time and work than film photography. But mastering this skill has many benefits. Photographers will learn to understand their visual strengths and weaknesses and thus be able to recognize and work on both. In fact one of the best ways to learn and grow as a photographer, is to understand your own best work and then to build on it.

---

As a photographer who shoots primarily candid photographs, my rule of thumb is that I should spend at least twice as long culling photos as I did shooting them.

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A Simple Method For Culling

A simple method for culling or selecting is as follows. Go quickly through everything you just took and mark any shot that strikes you. This simple process often eliminates two thirds of your shots. Next look at just those striking shots next to each other. When you look at good shots next to good shots, it becomes much easier to recognize the best imagery. Now go back to this second batch and select only the best of the best. In this process use whatever software you are comfortable with. You can copy these photos to a new folder, tag them or rate them -- depending on your software. I personally prefer to save my culled photos in a separate folder.

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I think that a ratio of 30 pictures shot to 1 shown in not unreasonable for digital photography and with beginning photographers that ratio should be even higher. And obviously this is only a rough rule of thumb -- as some days you will get fantastic pictures shot after shot.

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Lets say you took 200 shots. The first culling step will reduce the shots you are looking at to about 60. Then second step will knock down the number of shots to about 20. Next get some sleep. Don't look at them for a day or so. And when you review them days later, the very best will often jump out -- perhaps just 6 or 7. And these are what you should show others.

I also believe that groups, such as the Flickr groups, should restrict the number of photos that can be uploaded from an individual. I would suggest that no more than three be allowed per week.

Read What Other Photographers Have Said:

Read this detailed article about culling. I personally do not recommend deleting, as this author does, since you may discover things days or months later that you did not see initially. I do however, recommend that you copy your best work over to its own folder so that your selected work is clearly separated from all the 'raw' unculled photos you shot.

Or read this discussion where a long time photographer wrote, "We can now shoot 500 pics where we used to shoot 72 at the most." And another wrote, "people just page through the Smugmug gallery without really looking."

And this discussion on dpreview.

NOTE:See a list of my other articles here at PIXIQ. www.pixiq.com/contributors/rick-doble

For more about my approach to photography see my book: Experimental Digital Photography.

Join me on Facebook. Become a 'fan' of my Facebook page on Experimental Digital Photography. Click on the 'like' button at the top of the Facebook page.

Prashun Dutta has over 30 years of varied and rich corporate experience, initially as a management consultant and for the last 17 years as a
senior executive in the Reliance group of companies. As a consultant he has worked on multiple assignments in the areas of strategy, structure and systems. At Reliance he was initially responsible for business analysis, but went on to get involved in IT and several other management initiatives in different areas of operations. For about 10 years now, Prashun has been overseeing the IT function in various capacities including the position of Head IT.

In conversation with Shayonee from the developer Works team, Prashun Dutta gets candid about his interests, tells us about his business challenges and leaves IT leaders with a compelling thought.

 

Q1. What are the major business challenges your organization faces?

Reliance Infrastructure Ltd. (RInfra) as you may be aware has emerged as the largest infrastructure company in India operating across key segments of power, roads, metro rail, airports, etc. The electricity distribution business has been in existence for over 75 years while some other businesses (roads and metro for instance) are brand new. Additionally we have emerged from Energy Business into the Infra space in a short span of 3 years, which obviously complicates issues. Naturally challenges are different for each of these businesses. In the case of mature businesses achieving higher customer satisfaction, lowering both operating and capital expenditure, and reducing losses are the predominant challenges whereas for the new businesses the challenges will be in tackling teething problems, setting up sustainable systems, Integration and Seamless flow of information, robust and scalable IT platform to manage growth and work practices to suit their specific contents, institutionalizing best practices, etc.

Q2. How does I.T. in your company act as a business enabler?

What we have done in RInfra is we have comprehensively aligned I.T. with business. Our attempt has been to identify the basic characteristics of any businesses and design our I.T. architecture around these characteristics. For instance in the case of our Distribution business, the spatial component is very strong deriving from the geographical spread and our dispersed operations. Hence a system supporting this is required and in this case we have gone in for a Geographical Information System (GIS). When I.T. architecture and applications are aligned to the basic characteristics of any business its efficacy is greatly enhanced.

 

Q3. How does your I.T. deployment help you address your business challenges?

I.T. Systems in our businesses are conceived, designed and delivered around innate characteristics of the business. This alignment ensures that genuine business challenges are addressed. For instance, continuing with the earlier example of spread of our business. This spread characterized by highly dispersed (physically) asset base, work locations, offices, underground cables and customers is a predominant feature of our business. Several challenges in the distribution business arise out of this spread. For instance, if we have an outage, quickly locating the exact point in the network is a major challenge. Since our basic design is crafted around this characteristic, the I.T. systems aid in quickly identifying the location of the problem and initiating corrective measures subsequently.

 

Q4. What to you are the new focus areas over the next decade? Where is your company vis-à-vis this?

As someone said, it is always difficult to predict and more so about the future. Predicting for a decade looks nigh impossible. However, I feel that I.T. in the next few years is going to be focused upon:

a. Environment friendly technologies and practices

b. Overcoming problems associated with inadequate manpower, which I reckon is a concomitant of the high growth era we have/will be enjoying.

c. Costs (both Opex and Capex) management will probably be the third.item.

 Technologies that support one or more of these will flourish. We are already seeing movement in this direction and shall see more if it presently.

 

Q5. Which would you consider is one of your most significant investments in 2010 and its benefits?

As mentioned earlier, we have a medley of businesses at different stages in their life cycles. Our centralized I.T. department caters to all of these. Major investments are naturally made in those businesses which are in the earlier stages of their life cycle. In 2010 significant investments were made in the Metro and Roads businesses. Traditionally the extent of usage of I.T. in the Infrastructure business has been very limited, if at all. When we first commenced designing architecture for these two businesses we really had no particular model to emulate and hence started from scratch. The investments of 2010 were mainly in setting up I.T. systems in these two businesses.

 

Q6. What is your big bet in 2011?

There are two focus areas in 2011 viz., consolidation of the work done in 2010 and evolving and implementing the I.T. roadmap for any new business. First time implementation is always a difficult task but subsequent extraction of benefits and sustaining the same over time is even more difficult. Use of I.T. in those sectors where we operate, has been marginal and most employees are not familiar with computers. Therefore enhancing usage and extracting benefits is a formidable task. So the first focus area for 2011 is consolidation in those businesses where we have implemented IT systems in 2010..

The second area will be to support new businesses. At least two new businesses are expected to be taken up this year.

 

Q7. How do you define the success of an initiative?

Success of an I.T. initiative is obviously not a one-metric or yes/no evaluation. Success, in my opinion, should be measured in the short term and the long term, separately.  In this short term a project is deemed successful if it satisfactorily meets the ex-ante objectives such as quicker transactions, error free process, automatic, tighter control and so on. Often an ROI is computed, based on the amount invested in the project and the returns obtained and it deemed suitable, the project is declared a success. This measure appears to be adequate in the short run but for a long term verdict, several other factors need to be considered.

In the long run, from an I.T. initiative several benefits emerge. Second and third order benefits which may or may not have been envisaged at the beginning greatly enhance the value of the initiative. These (second and third order benefits) pro-facto are difficult to replicate and hence often render competitive advantage (at least temporarily).

Finally an I.T. system is, at times, the chief enabler in transforming a particular situation. An I.T. initiative in the long run can be declared as successful if it does facilitate a positive transformation.

Q8. Do you see IBM as part of your journey?

We are in the infrastructure business and this sector has a considerable engineering component in day-to-day operations. IBM, besides all its services in I.T. also offer engineering oriented interventions. I am expecting IBM to play an important role in this part of Rinfra.

 

Q9. Your expectations from IBM in your journey.
As mentioned earlier IBM brings new technologies. Given the predominance of the engineering component in our businesses these innovations are of utmost interest to us and this is where I trust IBM will contribute substantially.

 

Q10. What is your advice to I.T. leaders for the New Year?

2011 is no longer new. I thing the year holds a lot of promise as we shrug off the effects of the recession. Growth this year will impact the manpower situation and hence this year I.T leaders will need to figure out how to achieve more and more with less and less manpower.

A second bit of advice to I.T. leaders would be to grow into agents for transformation in their own businesses.

 

Q11. Keeping aside work, what are your other interests?

I have several interests besides work. The important ones are sports, reading and music. While I no longer participate in sporting events, I tend to follow several games closely. As far as reading is concerned I have now been concentrating on Management Literature and Holistic thinking. Old music of all genres in Bengali, Hindi and English still stir me and compel me to hum along.

 

Q.12. Your recipe for success?

I don’t think I have done anything spectacular in my life. I have just been fortunate to have the right opportunities at the right time.

Q13. Your source of inspiration?

The value system ingrained in me during my childhood, emphasized knowledge as a praiseworthy goal for the educated. Since then this indeed has been my goal and source of inspiration. Over the many years, I have maintained the healthy curiosity that this value system imbibed in me.

 

Q14. Can u elaborate on your personal journey to where you are today?

I did my schooling at Calcutta Boys’ School and then went on to Banaras Hindu University for my under graduation and thereafter my post graduation from Chennai. I worked for 3 years in the National Productivity Council as a consultant. Following this I went back to studies and enrolled for the Fellowship at IIM Cal. On completion I joined TCS and spent about10 years there before moving on to Reliance Industries in 1994. I moved into Reliance Energy in 2003 and continue to work here still. 

 

Q15.Do you know of the IBM Smarter Planet initiative? What according to you is Smarter Planet?

Yes, I am aware of the IBM Smarter Planet initiative. It is an excellent and positive step in the right direction as technology is one of the key enablers today. However, it is also important to understand that technology is one and not the only enabler to make our planet ‘Smart’. Just technology may not be sufficient in this context. I feel to achieve, even in small measure, the objectives of the “smart planet” movement a comprehensive view is called for and issues pertaining to factors, besides technology, need to be addressed.

 

 

 

Europe is trapped by complacency and an all too human desire for oblivious contentment, says a leading French philosopher. This helps ensure the success of the nihilistic terror and extremist ideology exemplified by al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. Nobody wants war – but genocide is worse than war.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: Why do you return to the work of Dostoevsky to explain the terrorism of the 20th and 21st centuries?

André Glucksmann: In Dostoïevski à Manhattan I pose a philosophical question: what is the ‘idea’, the characteristic form of modern terrorism? And my answer is: nihilism.

Socrates asked: what do a beautiful woman, a beautiful vase and a beautiful bed have in common? His answer: the idea of beauty. My question is: what do extremist ideologies like the communism or Nazism of yesteryear and the Islamism of today have in common? After all, they support ostensibly very different ideals – the superior race, mankind united in socialism, the community of Muslim believers (the Umma). Tomorrow, it could be altogether different ideals: some theological, some scientific, others racist. But the common characteristic is nihilism.

The root element is the attitude that anything goes, particularly when with regard to ordinary people: I can do whatever I want, without scruples. Goehring put it like this: my consciousness is Adolf Hitler. Bolsheviks said: man is made of iron. And the Islamists whom I visited in Algeria said that you have the right to kill little Muslim children, in order to save them.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: And this took you back to Dostoevsky?

André Glucksmann: It is the highest achievement of Russian literature in particular that it has revealed this kernel of human experience in which ‘everything is allowed’. In Dostoevsky’s The Possessed there are atheists and believers (a figure like Shatov for example) who have very different outlooks on the future. But they share one thing in common: the right to kill, to burn, to overturn, in order to achieve tabula rasa.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: When Dostoevsky talks about the devils, or the possessed, he still seems to be guided by the idea that evil is something which captures man from outside. The main protagonist Stavrogin, for example, even talks about the devil’s appearances.

André Glucksmann: Actually, the beautiful thing about Stavrogin is that you don’t really know him. You don’t know if he believes in God or not. In the end, what surprised me was to find that he is a little like bin Laden; he might be very cynical, or fanatical, nobody really knows.

The inner nature of this nihilistic terrorism is that everything is permissible, whether because God exists and I am his representative, or because God does not exist and I take his place. That is what I find so impressive about Dostoevsky: he is a secret, a riddle.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: The group of conspirators at the centre of The Possessed seems, from the outside, to have both a coherent programme and a great deal of charisma. From the inside, on the other hand, all that remains is a fascination with destruction. And this fascination develops its own dynamic, pulling everyone under its spell. Destruction takes over as the group’s raison d’etre, while some of those involved still believe it is about the content and messages it offers.

André Glucksmann: Yes, there are several different layers of nihilists. There are the ‘outer’ nihilists who follow and believe, and then there are the nihilists at the centre of the action, the activists who pursue the logic of destruction. Dostoevsky has shown this very well indeed, as has Turgenev, in the persona of Bazarov. Or take Fritz Lang’s Dr Mabuse figure. These destructive personalities have coherence precisely because they are not idealists. Their coherence derives from the logic of destruction. In a linguistic sense it is performative, and therefore self-endorsing.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: Surely Dostoevsky contradicts nihilism to the extent that he is still arguing for a religious solution, a renewal of belief – a point that would be a bit difficult to make today?

André Glucksmann: This is very arguable indeed, and would require a much longer examination of Dostoevsky’s work. I think you are right from the ideological point of view. Dostoevsky was conservative, he believed in Greater Russia, and he was also an anti-Semite. But in his literary work as opposed to his essays, he is much more subtle and complicated. Dostoevsky completely submerged himself in his writing. His literary work is more difficult, but less dogmatic.

Religion as such is surely not the ‘solution’ in this part of his oeuvre. Take the Grand Inquisitor who is a religious man but a catastrophe at the same time. And someone very much influenced by Dostoevsky, the great theologian Vladimir Soloviev, concludes in his Dialogue of 1900 that there is a strong connection between Orthodoxy, eastern theosophy and Catholicism, one that has been very irritating for all sides.

‘Long live death!’: religious shell, nihilist kernel

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: Let’s go back to nihilism as you have characterised it. If you include Islamic terrorism in nihilism as you have done in Dostoevsky in Manhattan then you must accept the objection that Islamism is peculiar in presenting itself in the cloth of religion, a spiritual mission.

André Glucksmann: Yes, but you can also find a missionary zeal driving those Russian nihilists who wanted Greater Russia, or at another time the Great Revolution. There are many missions; what is much more difficult to pin down is the actual practice, the approach. For it is in their approach as activists that religious nihilism, dialectical materialist nihilism or Nazi nihilism are the same.

Religion is only the cloth, the excuse and the justification. What is essential is the practice. For there is a direct connection between the Islamic suicide bomber and the general serving under Franco who shouted out in front of the University of Salamanca: “Long live death!” This is the connection that I was trying to grasp.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: “Long live death!”?

André Glucksmann: At the opening of the University of Salamanca, one General Millán Astray shouted Viva la Morte. Miguel de Unamuno, who was in charge of the occasion, was a conservative, the protégé of Franco’s wife, a philosopher of the right. He reproved the general for this impermissible, unacceptable statement, and added: “You, my general who has lost an eye in the war, are a handicapped man not because you have lost an eye but because you have shouted ‘Long live death’’’.

It is precisely this slogan which you hear from Islamic suicide bombers.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: Perhaps then, you think that during the course of the 20th and now the beginning of the 21st century, this destructive nihilism has manifested itself in different guises, but remains something like an anthropological constant throughout. Is that your belief – that man carries this trait in his very nature; that he is bound to recurrently submit to it?

André Glucksmann: I would put it the opposite way round. Man is human: therefore, he can be civilised, even if he can’t read or write, because he can master this hubris. Wherever you go, this belligerent hubris is considered lethal. In the huts of the Amazon, young men are taught to conquer this capacity for excessive violence. You can fight together, but you cannot fight in any way that comes to hand, and you don’t set out to fight just anyone. The same idea occurs in the teachings of the Greeks, the paidera. All European education is based on the same principle.

Indeed, all civilisations have two essential taboos in common: the taboo on ‘total sexuality’, the incest taboo, different in individual cases, but ubiquitous, and the taboo on violence. You are not allowed to succumb to ‘absolute violence’. You have to master that hubris in one way or another. In every civilisation you can find the mastering of these two absolute, destructive impulses. And the nature of modernity means that these fundamental taboos are vanishing.

The sleep of reason

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: Let’s go back to your opening statement on the essential values of Europe that have always been established in resistance to evil. The current threat from militant Islamism is not coming from Europe, and Europeans seem to have a problem in perceiving this threat as a threat to their own interests. Is that why it seems so difficult to summon up the necessary resistance?

André Glucksmann: It is not only Islamism: it is nihilism, in its practical manifestation of laying waste to the civilian population. The same approach was to be found in the case of the Russian army when it flattened Grozny, a city of 400,000, and the first capital to be razed to the ground since Hitler’s destruction of Warsaw in 1944. This destructive impulse is not in the nature of Islam; this impulse is integral to the nature of civilisation and it can destroy any civilisation.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: But these events are not perceived as being played out in central Europe, but in far away and strange locations.

André Glucksmann: It has happened in central Europe too – with Milosevic and his ethnic cleansing, which is also a nihilist activity.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: Nevertheless, for a long time now, Germany and France have shied away from taking on any responsibility in such situations. They have delayed it as long as possible. And even now, it seems that Europe only wants to safeguard the relative stability that we have achieved in the last fifty years. Everything which falls outside these boundaries, like Chechnya or the Middle East, really shouldn’t bother us.

André Glucksmann: Yes, exactly: but this is wrong. This is exactly the complacency, the crime of complacency, which once made Hitler possible. This complacency has cost us about 50 million lives. It also worked well for Stalin. ‘Better red than dead!’ Pacifism is a kind of complacency. And this complacency continues with Milosevic, with terrorism, with Saddam Hussein; people just want to sleep.

This is nowhere more beautifully invoked than in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, where the protagonists all live together on an old estate, and nobody cares at all about what might happen, even when they already hear the trees falling. (I had just read the play when they showed the twin towers in Manhattan collapsing on television). The equivalent today is the silence that greeted the odd intellectual who drew attention to Afghanistan, Chechnya, or Kosovo. Nobody wanted to listen; people turn away as from the bearers of ill tidings.

But in the end, the reality principle will catch up with us. We believe that we can live in a world where there are only little wars in the peripheries, the suburbs, ‘low-intensity conflicts’, as the political strategists like to call them. When Ahmed Shah Massoud, Afghan leader of the Northern Alliance and enemy of the Taliban, came to Paris four months before his assassination on 9 September 2001, only a small circle of perhaps five or six intellectuals met him. None of our ministers could find the time; only Nicole Fontaine, the president of the European Parliament, came.

When the twin towers fell the day after Massoud’s murder, I told myself, “Maybe now men will learn that what happens to women in distant Afghanistan should also be of interest to the people in New York. If Massoud and his troops had gone into Kabul earlier, the twin towers might not have been destroyed”.

But I misjudged mankind’s need to sleep. And now we are saying that this only happens to the Americans, not to Europe. But the first time it nearly happened was in Europe. In 1994, a plane was hijacked in North Africa and landed in Marseille. The hijackers had wanted to crash the plane above Paris. But these GIA hijackers (Groupe Islamiste Algérien), who were also in some kind of contact with bin Laden, did not know how to fly a plane. That is how the pilots managed to bring the plane to Marseille. For their part, the hijackers clearly learnt from this that they have to be able to fly planes themselves. They have learnt their lesson. But we, we have learnt nothing at all.

The reality principle

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: But there is a lot of resistance out there to combining anticipation with the use of force, even where it is necessary.

André Glucksmann: Yes, of course. This is simple enough to understand. If someone is ill then you are afraid of this illness: you feel sorry for the sick person but you tell yourself at the same time that this could only happen to him, not to yourself.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: What was your response to the French government’s thinking on the Gulf conflict and their strict ‘no’ to a forceful removal of Saddam Hussein?

André Glucksmann: I am in a minority on this, and not for the first time. When I spoke up in leftist circles about Solzhenitsyn I was regarded as some kind of devil. When I supported the boat people, it was scandalous. And when it came to Milosevic in 1991, just four of us in France said we have to finish with Milosevic; and if this is possible by peaceful means, good, if not, then by force. But they waited for another eight years before taking action and that cost 200,000 lives. In the beginning you are in the minority, but in the end there is the reality principle.

I have discussed these problems a lot with Joschka Fischer whom I have known since 1968. We became friends because when I supported Solzhenitsyn, he and Daniel Cohn-Bendit agreed with that position, and criticised Russia. Even though they didn’t endorse my criticism of Marxism, at least they understood it.

In these pacifist times, we have had long debates in Die Zeit. Joschka Fischer did not agree with me for a long time. In the end he conceded that after Srebrenica there is something worse than war, and that is Auschwitz. What I cannot now understand is how he has turned into a pacifist once again in the face of Saddam Hussein – who is much worse, bloodier and more dangerous than Milosevic, and who has gassed people, partly with German gas.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: Maybe Germany and France are so opposed to war because of the war-torn history they have shared. Can’t you accept that this is also part of the common inheritance of European humanism? The loathing of war is understandable after all, isn’t it?

André Glucksmann: Of course everything can be understood. Nobody wants war, me included. The question is, is there something worse than war?

I have been answering ‘yes’ for years. One thing that is worse than war is genocide – that is, the extinction of a whole people. Many people said this before Auschwitz. In Greek tragedy, it is revealed in the destruction of Troy. This is indeed the horizon of western history.

That is why I don’t believe that the refusal to take part in a war against Saddam should be seen as an expression of humanism, but of a blindness that exists not only in Europe, but in all civilisations. We all want to live peacefully, oblivious and happy. That wish already existed in ancient Athens, and there is nothing wrong with it as such, except that it is not very realistic.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: Do you think France will stick to its opposition against the US?

André Glucksmann: Longer than in Germany. Here in our country, the rivalry with America is more prominent. But at the moment, the people in the street are only asking themselves, how can we stand up against Bush? Saddam Hussein doesn’t come into the equation, and that is where my whole objection lies. Because the issue here is actually Saddam.

Bush is a challenge for American democracy; Aznar, the challenge for Spanish democracy. Why are there fewer protestors in France than in Spain, England or Italy? Because in Italy they fight Berlusconi, in Britain they fight Blair – and in France they fight nobody.

But the overriding question remains: what about Saddam Hussein? If I may be a little moralistic here: I could not look at myself in the mirror if Saddam Hussein were still in power because I have been to a demonstration against Bush, and as a result, the people in Iraq had to live in this totalitarian regime for another twenty years.

This interview by Liss Gehlen and Jens Heisterkamp originally appeared on Info 3 (http://www.info3.de/English/engl.html). It was translated by Michael Rebehn.

The criminal mastermind behind al-Qaida and the world's most sought-after terrorist since the attacks of 11 September 2001

To his enemies, whatever colour or creed, he was a religious fanatic, a terrorist with the blood of thousands on his hands, a man who had brought war and suffering to a broad swath of the Islamic world and come close to provoking a global conflagration on a scale not seen for decades. To his supporters, whose numbers peaked in the few years after the attacks of 11 September 2001 in America that he masterminded, he was a visionary leader fighting both western aggression against Muslims and his co-religionists' lack of faith and rigour. For both, Osama bin Laden, who has been killed by US special forces at the age of 54, was one of those rare figures whose actions changed the course of history.

His life was one of extremes and of contradictions. Born to great wealth, he lived in relative poverty. A graduate of civil engineering, he assumed the mantle of a religious scholar. A gifted propagandist who had little real experience of battle, he projected himself as a mujahid, a holy warrior. A man who called for a return to the values and social systems of the seventh century as a means of restoring a just order in today's world, he justified the use of advanced modern technology to kill thousands through a rigorous and anachronistic interpretation of Islamic law. One of the most notorious people on the planet, bin Laden lived for years in obscurity, his public presence limited to intermittent appearances in videos on the internet. A man who professed to have sacrificed all for others and to care nothing for himself, he was fiercely conscious of posterity.

Bin Laden's story started in the remote, poor, deeply conservative Hadhramawt region of south-east Yemen, from where his father, Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, set out for the Saudi city of Jeddah to seek his fortune around 1930. By the time Osama was born there, the 17th of 52 children, his father was a phenomenally rich construction magnate. His connections to Saudi Arabia's ruling family, the al-Sauds, won him lucrative contracts to build palaces in Riyadh and the highway from Medina to Jeddah. The crowning achievement of the family firm, Bin Laden Group, was reconstructing Islam's holiest mosque in Mecca.

Osama's father was an austere patriarch; his mother, a beautiful, educated young woman from Syria who shunned the veil in favour of Chanel suits. Because of her foreign origin and as the tenth wife, her prestige in the household was low. Raised in a palace in Jeddah, Osama grew up polite, courteous, diligent and, from an early age, pious. His father died in a helicopter crash when he was 11.

Stories of teenage revelry are unfounded. While his siblings studied and, often, partied overseas, the tall, painfully shy teenager chose to stay in Saudi Arabia. In 1974, he married the 14-year-old Najwa Ghanem, his mother's niece, and enrolled in the economics and management faculty of the King Abdul Aziz University, Jeddah. Though he eventually graduated in civil engineering and spent a short period in the family company, his true interests lay elsewhere.

The late 1970s saw universities across the Arab world torn by fierce ideological struggle. In Egypt, leftists battled, both physically and intellectually, against the increasing number of supporters of Islamist doctrines. Though circulating in the region since the 1930s, they had been re-energised by the failures of Arab armies against Israel in 1967 and 1973 and by the increasingly apparent inability of secular pan-Arab, nationalist or socialist ideas to bring any social or economic improvement to the lives of millions. At university, Bin Laden, who had been raised in the strict tradition of Saudi "Salafist" Islamic practice known outside the kingdom as Wahhabism , was exposed to newer, more politicised and often anti-clerical religious doctrines. It was the fusion of the two, particularly by charismatic preachers such as the Jordanian Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, that laid the foundation of the young man's own thinking.

The year of bin Laden's graduation, 1979, was a tumultuous one in the Islamic world. In February, Ayatollah Khomeini created the Islamic republic in Iran. Then in November, rebels took over the mosques in Mecca and demanded a return to true Islamic rule. When soldiers eventually broke their siege and killed the ringleaders, Bin Laden was seething. He saw the assault as an atrocity committed on the holiest soil in Islam. To him, the rebels were martyrs. A month later came the third defining event of the year: the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union.

Despite his later boasts, bin Laden did not immediately travel to Peshawar, the Pakistani frontier town 20 miles from Afghanistan that had been at the centre of activism, covert or otherwise, against the Afghan Marxist government for several years and had now acquired a new strategic significance as a key forward base in the cold war. Arriving in early 1981, he was to spend the next few years making trips between the city and Saudi Arabia before finally basing himself there from around 1986.

Bin Laden's role in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, like that of the international fighters more generally, has been grossly exaggerated. His – and their - military contribution was negligible. The "foreign legion" never numbered more than a few thousand, of whom most never saw combat but ran charities caring for refugees or wounded Afghan fighters. It was to the seven Afghan mujahideen groups, and only to them, that the Pakistanis disbursed American and Saudi aid. Likewise, it was only the Afghans who received training. Bin Laden was not, despite later claims, created by the CIA, who had no contact with such people.

He spent most of the first half of the 1980s as a fundraiser and aide to senior figures among the Arabs in Peshawar such as the Jordanian-Palestinian preacher, ideologue and organiser Abdullah Azzam. Bin Laden also utilised his own knowledge of construction techniques and the resources of his company, with the blessing of the Saudi royal family, to build roads, bunkers and encampments for the Afghan fighters. In 1987, now 30 years old, Bin Laden took part in a battle in the hills around the small Afghan town of Jaji. Though heavily mythologised subsequently, the action saw heavy fighting between Afghan mujahideen, backed by some units of Arabs, and Soviet troops. Now relatively well-known among the Peshawar-based militants, Bin Laden also began playing a role as a broker between competing Afghan and Arab factions as well as continuing to fund a radical newspaper and organising medical care for wounded fighters. It was during this period too that he began cooperating more closely with an older and more experienced Egyptian militant, a former doctor called Ayman al-Zawahiri. However, the two were not close. Together with Azzam, bin Laden also ran a logistical centre dealing with the volunteers arriving from the Arab world to take part in the "jihad".

Witnesses also remember seeing bin Laden at the battle of Jalalabad, an ill-fated and costly bid to capture the eastern Afghan city from from forces loyal to the communist Afghan government in 1989, six months after the Soviet withdrawal.

A year earlier, al-Qaida had been founded by Bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and 14 associates in a series of meetings at a rented house in a western suburb of Peshawar. The meetings had stretched into the small hours as discussions ranged over the aims of the group, its composition and hierarchy. Little thought appears to have been given to the name chosen for the group, but it was an appropriate and useful one nonetheless. "Al-Qaida" was a commonly used word in Arabic and, though often simply translated as "the base", has a range of other meanings too. This variety and consequent flexibility, itself a departure from the style of names adopted previously by militant groups, was to prove key in the coming years.

Al-Qaida also differed from the multitude of other militant groups active across the Islamic world at the time in its avowed internationalism. Its founders' aim was to unite the disparate groups of militants who were fighting against the Soviets to focus their collective energies on new targets. Its campaign would take two main forms: guerrilla wars such as that in Afghanistan and a series of spectacular and violent actions which would radicalise and mobilise all those who had hitherto shunned the call to arms, eventually provoking a mass uprising that would lead to a new era for the world's Muslims. The two strategies would be mutually reinforcing.

Azzam, who had been a huge influence on Bin Laden, was killed in a mysterious bomb blast in late 1989. With the Soviets leaving Afghanistan and the internecine squabbling between factions getting worse, Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia.

Expecting to be feted as a hero, he, like many other returning mujahideen, was shocked to find a frosty welcome from authorities in the kingdom. Though increasingly critical, however, Bin Laden had yet to turn fully against the rulers of his native land. In August 1990, when Iraq annexed Kuwait and threatened Saudi security, he offered to raise an army of Arab Afghan veterans to fight the "godless" Saddam. His offer was rejected and the house of al-Saud sought US help instead.

By January 1991, some 300,000 foreign troops were stationed on Saudi territory. Bin Laden accused the Americans of "desecrating holy Arab soil", and cited Qur'anic verses forbidding the presence of two religions in Arabia. He also criticised the Saudi grand mufti, Abdelaziz bin Baz, and other senior clerics for approving the decision. Placed under house arrest, Bin Laden slipped out of Saudi Arabia, eventually reaching the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, where the leading Islamist ideologue Hassan Turabi had recently taken power and was offering protection and facilities to a wide variety of Islamic militant groups.

For the next five years, bin Laden tried to make progress with the al-Qaida project. He cultivated contacts with militants in Yemen and was linked to a bomb explosion there in 1992. He sent observers, though no fighters, to Somalia during the ill-fated international intervention there in 1993. Other operations in the Balkans or the Caucasus brought limited success. Several attempts to reach out to other groups were rebuffed none too politely. There was a strong sense that bin Laden had lost his way.

Certainly the focus of the new militancy that the war in Afghanistan had spawned was elsewhere: in Algeria and in Egypt where local groups such as al-Zawahiri's Islamic Jihad were taking on governments and their security services in bloody insurgencies; in the Balkans; in America, where a bid to bring down the Twin Towers narrowly failed. In Sudan, Bin Laden set up a tannery, farmed, built a road as a goodwill gesture and rode horses, a favourite pastime, while followers amused themselves playing football or swimming in the Nile.

Nonetheless, Bin Laden was now on the radar of security services, albeit if his name was often mispelt and his role described as "financier". In April 1994, the Saudi government stripped Bin Laden of his citizenship and his family disowned his actions. Eventually, in 1996, Sudan succumbed to US pressure and expelled its controversial guest.

In need of a new sanctuary, Bin Laden accepted an offer of protection from three anti-Taliban Afghan warlords and flew to Jalalabad. The next years finally saw al-Qaida, already the vanguard, finally become the "base" or "foundation" too, as originally envisaged. Working with a growing group of experienced collaborators, Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri set up or appropriated dozens of training camps, guesthouses and other facilities which provided them with a pool of ready volunteers for various projects. At the same time they launched a sophisticated outreach programme, sending emissaries to groups throughout the Islamic world offering cash and technical help in return for a degree of fealty. Such bids were often unsuccessful, with groups in Algeria, Indonesia, Chechnya, Uzbekistan and elsewhere jealously guarding their independence, but they were accepted frequently enough for a "network of networks" to begin to emerge. The basic strategy remained the same: a series of spectacular violent actions to radicalise and mobilise potential recruits, to weaken the enemy economically and morally, and eventually to provoke a mass uprising that would lead to the establishment of a new caliphate.

Bin Laden's now keen eye for public relations – and an understanding of the potential of the still new technology of satellite television - led to exclusive interviews with select journalists. He also began to issue his own "fatwas" or religious opinions. The first, in August 1996, stuck to familiar themes: promising to drive US troops out of the Gulf, overthrow the Saudi government and liberate Muslim shrines in Palestine. In February 1998, as he announced an alliance between al-Qaida and four other groups from Bangladesh, Egypt and Pakistan called The World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders", Bin Laden issued a second fatwa, which called on all Muslims to "obey God's order" and kill Americans, including civilians, "wherever you find them".

Pursuing his strategy of propaganda by deed, Bin Laden organised a successful attack on US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 2008. These killed 224, all but 12 African staff or bystanders.

President Clinton retaliated with cruise missile raids on alleged Bin Laden facilities in Sudan and Afghanistan. Several Pakistani and Algerian allies were killed, although Bin Laden himself escaped unscathed.

In their aftermath a Saudi deal with the Taliban for the expulsion of bin Laden fell through. In July 1999, the US imposed sanctions on the Taliban.

The idea for the September 11 attacks came from Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, an experienced and capable Kuwait-born Pakistani militant who travelled to seek out bin Laden shortly after the latter's arrival in Afghanistan. Building on schemes he had tried to implement in the far east, Mohammed's ambitious plans for hijacking dozens of aircraft to strike US targets was initially rejected by bin Laden, but then dusted off, revised and finally accepted after a series of heated meetings of al-Qaida's leadership in the spring of 1999. They were controversial, with many militants fearing a backlash or an overwhelming American reaction. Bin Laden, convinced the US was a nation of decadent cowards, pressed ahead. The volunteers for the plan were found simply by scouring the various training camps, either those offering basic training for foreigners arriving to fight with the Taliban or those where more advanced candidates were being trained by al-Qaida instructors in techniques of urban terrorism.

The CIA, now running a bin Laden unit, placed a $5m bounty on the fugitive's head and worked up a series of plans to kill or capture him. These became more urgent in October 2000 when a dinghy charged with explosives was driven into an American warship off the Yemeni port of Aden killing its own crew and 17 sailors. But targeting Bin Laden was difficult. American agencies squabbled among themselves. The military distrusted the plans concocted by civilians or the CIA. The raw intelligence did not exist.

Though his relationship with the Taliban was complex with much suspicion and disdain on both sides, the Saudi had nonetheless been able to graft much of his own internationalised ideology onto that of Afghans like Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's leader. Bin Laden had been forced to implement a charm offensive after the Taliban expelled his previous protectors in the autumn of 1996, and over the years financial help and the military assistance provided by Bin Laden's Chechen, Arab, Pakistani and Uzbekistani recruits led to the formation of elite units attached mainly to the Pashtun Taliban forces, consolidating links. Bin Laden, aware of the constant threat to his life, moved often between Kabul and Kandahar as well as a base near the Tora Bora mountain range in eastern Afghanistan, south of Jalalabad. On 9 September, two men run by al-Zawahiri killed the legendary Afghan leader Ahmed Shah Massoud.

On 11 September 2001, bin Laden was in the hills of eastern Logar province, not far from where he had fought almost 15 years before, when, listening to a shortwave radio, he learned of the success of the attacks in the USA.

The co-ordination of four simultaneously hijacked airliners; the origins of the terrorists and their "martyrdom"; the choice of targets all pointed to one group: al-Qaida. Such an attack had been signalled, if vaguely, by intelligence over the summer.

Within hours, president George Bush had blamed bin Laden and begun planning a major campaign that aimed to make America safe by deterring what were seen to be the states that gave terrorists safe havens and rooting out the terrorists themselves through aggressive military action. This was to be the "Global War on Terror".

Faced with an ultimatum, the Taliban again refused to surrender bin Laden, who initially denied involvement, and an American-led aerial bombing campaign followed. When matched with action on the ground by anti-Taliban forces within Afghanistan aided by small groups of US special forces, the regime crumbled fast. In November,

Kabul's liberated residents expressed their loathing for "the foreigners" - not the British or Americans, but the Arab, Pakistani and Chechens.

The campaign of 2001 saw many leading al-Qaida figures were killed and the group's physical "base" that had been built up over the previous years destroyed. By mid-December, American planes were pounding the slopes above the valley known as Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan where bin Laden and al-Zawahiri were thought to be. They also released the "smoking gun" video, in which Bin Laden spoke of how he had planned the 11 September operation. This did little to allay the conspiracy theories that were already circulating widely.

The 2001 campaign was inconclusive, however, as al-Qaida's leaders escaped from Tora Bora. The venality of the Afghan auxiliaries hired by the Americans as "beaters" to flush out bin Laden, his local contacts, the half-hearted nature of Pakistani efforts and a sense of Islamic solidarity among local people was enough to allow them to slip away to the south. Bin Laden appeared gaunt and apparently wounded in a video. A new chapter began.

The word al-Qaida has various meanings in Arabic. It can mean a vanguard. Another meaning is a physical base. The third means a maxim or a methodology, something much more ephemeral.

If in the early 1990s, bin Laden's organisation had been a vanguard and in the latter part of the decade it had been a base, in the coming years it would be more the third: an ideology, a worldview, a way of doing things.

Bin Laden found a new base in the restive and semi-autonomous Pakistani tribal agencies, just across the border from Afghanistan.

Here he and his associates tried to rebuild what they had lost in terms of infrastructure. Using the cash they were still able to obtain from wealthy donors in the Gulf and elsewhere, they paid effective protection money to local Pashtun elders and, increasingly, militants.

A grassroots militant movement was setting the area afire and bin Laden, as he had done elsewhere, was able to graft his own global struggle onto the local one of the tribes of places like Waziristan.

Intermittent videos gave little clue as to his whereabouts but, broadcast by mainstream TV channels, repeated his call to arms to the Muslim masses.

For some years, though he himself was in much more physical danger that at any previous time, it appeared that al-Qaida, by triggering a global confrontation with the sest, might achieve its aims. Through 2002 and 2003, in part, but not only provoked by the invasion of Iraq a wave of radicalization surged through the Islamic world and there were major bomb attacks in Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, elsewhere in the Middle East, in Africa and in the far east. Many were perpetrated by individuals commissioned and trained in the al-Qaida camps in the late 1990s. But these men had often recruited new volunteers with little difficulty. In 2004 came an attack in Madrid, which, though it did not have a direct link with al-Qaida, appeared to indicate that their ideology was having an impact everywhere, provoking the kind of generalised violence that bin Laden had hoped for many years before.

Another dynamic which did implicate al-Qaida more directly was the training and direction of young British men who found their way to Pakistan in the period. These were responsible for a string of attacks – including those of 7 July 2005 in London. If the reasons that sent these volunteers to seek out al-Qaida were their own, the group played a significant role in turning individuals with diffuse desires to participate in "jihad" into focused terrorist operatives with some, though luckily frequently insufficient, technical skills.

Bin Laden's ability to exploit the media was also still very evident. His address to the American people on the eve of the November 2004 re-election of President Bush received massive coverage. In it, the Saudi ideologue and propagandist appeared in statesmanlike robes rather than the more customary combat vest. In Iraq, where American and British forces were in very great trouble, local Islamic militants had sworn allegiance to al-Qaida. In Saudi Arabia itself there was a storm of violence, again by people professing loyalty to bin Laden and undoubtedly influenced by him.

Yet the period of 2005 and 2006 in retrospect was a peak. One thing was still lacking: any evidence of mass radicalisation. The militants were still very much in a minority and evidence from polls proved the growing disgust that many in the Islamic world felt for the extremists, particularly when they could see first hand what their tactics meant in terms of shattered bodies and shattered lives. In Iraq, the globalised ideology of al-Qaida, stripped of any local cultural specificity other than the claim of Muslim solidarity, was increasingly rejected by the tribes in the western provinces that had led the insurgency hitherto. In the Maghreb, militants remained reviled. The wave of support of three or four years earlier in the Far East had fallen away, leaving radical groups isolated. Only in Pakistan and Afghanistan was headway being made in the great struggle against "crusader-Zionists". Criticism too had begun to come from within the militant movement, where key former associates spoke of how bin Laden's thinking, tactics and strategy were all wrong. The number of Muslim casualties in al-Qaida's attacks was raised repeatedly. Bin Laden's associates were being picked off by the now intense missile strikes from unmanned drones launched over the tribal areas and his communications were clearly difficult. One senior lieutenant made a plaintive call for funds.

Al-Qaida retained some capacity as a series of abortive attempts to strike in Europe and elsewhere made clear. The ideology remained strong enough to attract aspirant militants, misfits, the angry and the alienated in sufficient numbers for the group to survive – the basic aim of any clandestine extremist organisation. The hunt for bin Laden also suffered from huge structural problems, not least the need to rely on Pakistani assistance, and an inability to gather intelligence on the ground. Despite attempts to exploit new issues such as climate change or to deploy younger spokesmen there was a sense that bin Laden and al-Qaida was drifting away from the principle position he had once occupied in the landscape of contemporary Islamic militancy. The events of the Arab spring of 2011 merely emphasised that apparent marginalization.

His ideology had been a response to the failure of many previous utopic projects in the Islamic world. It had held a brief attraction for some, not least because of the actions taken in a bid to counter it. But most Muslims always knew something essential was missing: the notion of Allah al-rahman w'al-rakhim - God the merciful and beneficent. Bin Laden once claimed, "It is our duty to bring light to the world." Yet behind his rhetoric of righteousness, divine justice and retribution, there was nothing but darkness.

He is survived by four wives and 19 children.

• Osama bin Laden, terrorist, born 10 March 1957; died 1 May 2011

In 2001, Amr Moussa, the current Egyptian Secretary-General of the Arab League, briefly achieved pop-icon status. Serving at the time as Hosni Mubarak’s foreign minister, Moussa’s frequent anti-Israel pronouncements caught the attention of Egyptian pop singer Shaaban Abdel Rahim, who released a song with the line, “I hate Israel and I love Amr Moussa.” The song became a tremendous hit. Shortly thereafter, Mubarak, who had come to regard Moussa as a serious political rival, exiled him to the Arab League.

Ten years later, however, Moussa is back in the public eye. Despite having represented the combined interests of the Arab world’s 22 autocracies for the last decade, he is now the frontrunner to succeed Mubarak in what could be Egypt’s first-ever truly democratic presidential election. And Moussa owes his startling political ascendance primarily to one thing: his shameless exploitation of anti-Israel demagoguery for political gain. 

 

Moussa was born in 1936 to a family from al-Bahada, a Nile Delta village in the governorate of Qalyubia. Shortly after graduating from Cairo University’s Faculty of Law in 1957, he entered Egypt’s foreign service. “He told us that he was the future foreign minister of Egypt,” says former Egyptian Ambassador to Portugal Wahid Fawzi, who got to know Moussa as his colleague during the early 1960s. Moussa was prophetic: After working in various diplomatic posts, including ambassador to India, director of the Department of International Organizations in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and permanent representative of Egypt to the United Nations, he was appointed foreign minister in 1991.

As Egypt’s top diplomat, Moussa immediately projected an adversarial approach toward the United States and Israel. One of the first issues he handled was the Madrid Peace Conference, which the George H.W. Bush administration hoped would help shape a new regional order following the Persian Gulf War. When Israel insisted that the administration push for the repeal of a U.N. General Assembly Resolution that equated Zionism with racism as a precondition for joining the peace conference, Moussa demanded that the issue be tabled until after the conference, and Egypt was ultimately absent from the vote. Later, when Israel pursued improved ties with Arab states following the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, Moussa argued that full Arab normalization should occur only after the final exchange of territory. Then, prior to his first official trip to Israel in August 1994, Moussa gratuitously sparked outrage by indicating that he would refuse to visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. He eventually relented under intense diplomatic pressure but, even then, declined to enter the Hall of Remembrance, where he would have had to wear a yarmulke.

Yet Moussa’s image-making moment came in 1995, when he spearheaded a pan-Arab initiative against re-signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)—unless Israel signed it first. The standoff riled Washington because Moussa, in pushing back against the treaty and undercutting more pragmatic members of the Mubarak regime, was acting counter to Egypt’s promise to the Clinton administration that it would not actively campaign against the renewal of the NPT. Although the treaty was ultimately renewed without Israel’s participation, Moussa’s stance made him a local hero, with the state-run daily al-Akhbar portraying him as a bare-chested Pharaoh.

After the NPT episode, Moussa continued to be outspoken against Israel and, increasingly, the United States. He declared that U.S. support for Israel “poisoned” the peace process, and, after the U.S. presented evidence of a Libyan chemical weapons program to the Mubarak regime, Moussa publicly denied that such evidence existed. He backed Yasser Arafat’s refusal to compromise on Jerusalem during and after the failed Camp David summit in the summer of 2000; called on the Arab world to support the Palestinian Intifada in October of that same year; and declared the Palestinians’ “right of return” to Israel a “sacred right,” over strong U.S. objections. According to Fawzi, who was Secretary-General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during this time, Moussa tried to push Egyptian diplomacy even further against Israel, but Mubarak ultimately refused. “He had problems with Hosni Mubarak,” says Fawzi. “Mubarak had a completely different agenda. Mubarak had in mind to please certain powers because of his plan to put his son on the throne, so he was not willing to compromise on this.”

Moussa compensated for these formal limits on his power by intensifying his rhetoric against Israel. “It is almost impossible for members of Mubarak’s cabinet to adopt different positions from the one of Mubarak,” says former Egyptian Ambassador to Switzerland Nagi el-Ghatrifi. “But sometimes Moussa, in order to gain popularity—and he knows very well how to measure the nationalistic feelings of his audience—he’s taken by his enthusiasm and ambitions to attract the respect and admiration of the people, to go beyond the limits.” By 2001, however, Moussa had undercut Mubarak one too many times, and the pop song that paid tribute to him appeared in many ways to symbolize the final straw. In February, Mubarak figured he’d get rid of Moussa by nominating him to head the Arab League, which the other Arab states approved unanimously. 

Moussa’s appointment to the Arab League was intended to be a demotion, but the organization’s toothlessness ultimately gave him broader freedom to bolster his nationalist credentials. Though Moussa condemned the September 11 terrorist attacks, he immediately refused to participate in any anti-terror campaign that included Israel, which he accused of “slaughtering” Palestinians, and he later declared, “Launching strikes against any Arab country under any pretense would lead to severe complications.” In staking out these positions—along with his subsequent opposition to the Iraq war, the start of which he called “a sad day for all Arabs”—Moussa employed colorful, nationalist language while echoing the views that other Arab leaders broadly shared.

But as an ascendant Iran started pushing a bloc of pro-Western Arab states toward the U.S. during the second half of the last decade, Moussa’s anti-Westernism became more pronounced. During the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, when a number of Arab states quietly endorsed Israeli actions against the Iranian-backed terrorist group, Moussa immediately blasted Israel and later declared that Israeli forces were “targeting civilians.” Then, during the 2008-2009 Gaza war, Moussa lashed out at those Arab governments that backed Israel’s actions against Hamas, saying that intra-Arab divisions would mean “disregard of the Arabs” in international politics and arguing that “only our cohesion can save us.” He later tried to build this new Arab cohesion by, as usual, positioning Israel as the unqualified enemy, saying that any Arab country that pursued normalization with the Jewish state would face a “tough” reaction.

Moussa’s nationalistic broadsides against Israel strengthened his popularity back home in Egypt, where Mubarak was increasingly viewed as a western pawn, and Moussa’s clear divergence with Mubarak’s pro-Western tilt raised hopes that he would run for president in September 2011. In press statements before the revolution, however, Moussa was coy. “When he was asked if Gamal Mubarak will be a candidate for the presidency, he answered by praising the good qualities of Gamal Mubarak,” says al-Ghatrifi. “Then they asked him, will you vote for him? He said, I never answer questions using the word ‘will.’”

The popular demonstrations that erupted in Egypt on January 25, however, changed Moussa’s stance. Though he initially responded to the demonstrations with a general plea for “reform,” he soon called for a political transition on February 1, and, on February 6, he joined the protesters in Tahrir Square, declaring that he was “available to my country.”

Since Mubarak’s resignation on February 11, Moussa has held a sizable lead over other potential candidates. A poll commissioned in March by the New York-based International Peace Institute found that 37 percent of Egyptians preferred Moussa, while Field Marshall Hussein Tantawi, who currently leads the Supreme Military Council, was a distant second with 16 percent. Egyptians are even cooler on Moussa’s other potential rivals, mainly because they are seen as more pro-Western. For instance, many Egyptians believe—incorrectly—that former International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who will likely run for president, supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Meanwhile, a very effective character assassination campaign has tarred Ghad party leader Ayman Nour as an American agent, while Nobel laureate Ahmed Zewail’s American citizenship is likely to dampen his support. Moussa’s popularity has remained strong even in recent weeks, when youth activists have increasingly attacked him for “not turning out strongly during the events in Gaza, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Syria."

While it is tempting to believe that Moussa’s long diplomatic career would make for a relatively smooth post-Mubarak transition, the source of his popularity should be deeply concerning to the U.S. and its allies. Though war between Israel and Egypt seems highly unlikely, Moussa recently told a group of Egyptian youths that the Camp David Accords had “expired,” apparently backtracking from earlier statements in which he supported the maintenance of Egyptian-Israeli peace. He has also called for a “no-fly zone” over Gaza, thereby equating Israel with the Qaddafi regime. Moreover, Egypt under Moussa is likely to be less friendly towards U.S. interests: WikiLeaks documents suggest that Moussa does not view Iran as a threat and would seek to strengthen Arab-Iranian ties.

The Obama administration got a taste of Moussa’s anti-Western populism as it tried to build international support for intervening in Libya. Although the Arab League initially voted to back the no-fly zone on March 12, Moussa lambasted the attacks on Qaddafi’s forces a week later, telling Egypt’s state-run Middle East News Agency, “What we want is the protection of civilians and not the shelling of more civilians.” And though Moussa issued yet another reversal two days later—this time restating the Arab League’s support for action against Qaddafi—his inelegant 360 should be a reminder that he has made his bones bucking the West. So while the fall of Mubarak raises hopes that Egypt will enjoy a post-authoritarian future, the prominence of Moussa threatens to revive Egypt’s anti-Western, Nasser-era past. And, most alarmingly, this is apparently what many Egyptians want.

Eric Trager is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania and an associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He recently returned from research in Egypt, where he was living during the revolution.

 

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Benghazi, Libya—After the February 17 start of the revolution against longtime Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, rebels moved swiftly to capitalize on their success by establishing interim governing and administrative bodies: the National Transitional Council (NTC), Crisis Team (CT), and Military Council. But who, exactly, is in these groups? A basic taxonomy can help illuminate this important question, revealing the strengths and flaws of the rebels’ leadership and providing insight into how the anti-Qaddafi forces might fare going forward.

 

The NTC, which functions as the rebels’ broad political body, has 31 members, but only 13 names have been revealed. The rest remain secret for security reasons; they are believed to be dissidents living in the western part of the country under Qaddafi’s control. The CT, composed of technical experts in fields ranging from economics to foreign affairs, has less than half as many members as the NTC does. Though the members of each group are diverse, it is possible to categorize them into four distinct categories.

Former Qaddafi officials. The first circle includes those who occupied key positions under Qaddafi. The leader of this faction is former Justice Minister Mustafa Abd Al Jalil, who chairs the NTC. Though the soft-spoken Jalil is not charismatic, he is widely respected by Libyans in the east. During his four years as justice minister, he was often frustrated with Qaddafi’s policies. In January 2010, he announced his intention to resign over the continued incarceration of 300 political prisoners whom the courts declared innocent of all charges. The objections he raised before the Libyan parliament were highly unusual in an autocratic state, where criticism of Qaddafi and his policies were the exclusive domain of the military officers who brought him to power in 1969. Despite Al Jalil’s challenge to the regime over domestic political prisoners, however, he had earlier proved himself a docile Qaddafi accomplice in scapegoating foreign detainees. As president of the country’s court of appeals, he twice upheld death sentences for six Bulgarian medical personnel who were accused of infecting more than 400 Libyan children with the HIV virus.

Other members of this group include the CT’s International Affairs director Ali Al Essawi, who served as minister of economy, trade, and investment between 2007 and 2009, and the rebels’ military Chief of Staff Abd Al Fattah Yunis, who is also part of the Military Council. Yunis was interior minister until the revolution. This pair, as well as Al Jalil, assumed their ministerial positions during a January 2007 cabinet reshuffle.

Saif’s modernizers. Another group is composed of people associated with Qaddafi’s son, Saif Al Islam. Considered the driving force behind Libya’s modernization campaign   over the last decade, Saif wooed academics and technocrats back to Libya after spending years in the West. The chief figure in this group is CT leader Mahmoud Jibreel. After serving as professor at the University of Pittsburgh, he returned to Libya in 2007 to chair the National Economic Development Council, a government-funded think tank focused on privatizing state industry and fostering economic transparency. He won the respect of American embassy officials, who dubbed him “a serious interlocutor who ‘gets’ the U.S. perspective,” according to a diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks. The CT’s justice division leader, Muhammad Al Alaqi, also belongs to this group. A lawyer, he headed the human rights division of the Qaddafi Foundation, a Libyan organization established by Saif to fund international projects and enhance his family’s stature. Sayeed El Barghathi, a former political science professor who is now secretary of the NTC, was also affiliated with institutions run by Qaddafi’s son.

Out of exile. The third group in the NTC and CT includes Libyans who lived in exile for decades. Among them is Ali Tarhouni, the interim government’s economics and finance division chief. He was expelled from college in the 1970s for his political activities and compelled to complete his studies in the United States, where he remained until the revolution. The same is true for the rebels’ media and information boss Mahmud Shamman, who, until recently, worked with the Arab news channel Al Jazeera in Qatar.

Professors and activists. The final group is composed of academics and civil society activists. Their leader is NTC Spokesman Abdel-Hafidh Ghoga. A lawyer who chaired the Benghazi Lawyers Syndicate, he has a keen political sense and a clear vision of a new Libya. Other members of this group include Fathi Al Baja, a political science professor at Garyounis University in Benghazi; Salwa Al Dighayli, a member of the school’s law faculty; and Fathi Terbil, a lawyer who led a campaign demanding that the regime account for a 1996 massacre at the Abu Slim prison.

 

While the NTC and CT’s technocrats have proved themselves relatively capable of managing the nascent opposition’s political and economic affairs, the Military Council, which is subordinate to NTC, is the rebels’ weakest link. It follows Qaddafi’s guiding principle of staffing based on tribe and geography, rather than merit. All three of the rebels’ senior military leaders come from the eastern region of Tobruk, and their tribes were instrumental in either convincing them to join the revolt or placing them in their positions. These three men, however, have weaknesses that threaten the viability of the Military Council—and, thus, the rebels’ strength fighting on the ground.

Umar Hariri. The council is headed by this major who fell from political grace following his involvement in a failed 1975 coup attempt led by Major Umar Al Muhayshi. Hariri was imprisoned roughly between 1975 and 1988 and he was re-incarcerated in 1994. He was under house arrest until the revolution and thus has had very little contact with military and political officials for the last 36 years.

Khalifa Hiftar. A colonel, he directed Libya’s dismal campaign against neighboring Chad in the 1980s before being captured in March 1987 by Chadian fighters. While in captivity, he joined forces with the anti-Qaddafi Libyan National Salvation Front (LNSF), which was then using Chad as a launching pad for its operations in Libya. But, after a 1990 coup in Chad brought a Qaddafi protégé to power, American intelligence officials evacuated Hiftar first to Zaire and then to Virginia. There, he directed a LNSF military camp funded and equipped by the United States. He returned to his native Libya for the first time in 34 years just a few weeks ago.

Abd Al Fattah Yunis. With none of its military figures experienced in commanding roles, the NTC has been forced to look to officers with long ties to the Qaddafi regime. As a result, the council appointed Yunis, a general and  former interior minister, as its chief of staff. A Free Officer who helped Qaddafi plot the 1969 coup that brought him to power, Yunis understands the inner workings of the military and how the Libyan leader thinks. Yet his assets have proved to be liabilities as well. During a press conference in early April, a Benghazi civilian interrupted Yunis’s remarks, yelling, “You killed our children. You worked with Qaddafi for years!” Many others in rebel-held territory harbor similar doubts.

Barak Barfi is a research fellow with the New America Foundation.

every fans dream come to life, your favorite bands plays a small private show at your house... http://www.insidehalton.com/community/haltonhills/article/994794 Foo Fighters play Georgetown....garage! Hornby man wins contest for garage concert Foo Fighters play Georgetown....garage!. Foo Fighters front man David Grohl gives a playful hug to Nick Perry while drummer Taylor Hawkins looks on. The multi-million record selling U.S. group visited Perry’s parents’ Hornby home last Thursday night after the local man won a contest to have the group play a gig in his garage. For more photos visit www.edge.ca/ConcertsAndEvents/FooFighters/Index.aspx. Pina the Inside Edge chick One of the world’s most popular rock bands paid a visit to Halton Hills last Thursday for an exclusive concert that only about 100 people were able to witness. Hornby resident Nick Perry, a 29-year-old musician and aspiring firefighter, won a contest sponsored by BlackBerry that scored him a 90-minute concert in the garage of his parents’ farm by the chart-topping American group Foo Fighters. Perry was invited on stage to play a few songs with the band in front of 50 family members and friends as part of the Foo Fighters’ Garage Tour. “I’m still on cloud nine. Actually it feels like cloud 50 and I haven’t started to come down yet,” said Perry, a member of the Milton-based punk rock band Dead Celebrity. “All around, it was the best day of my life and I don’t know if anything will be able to top it. It was like winning the lottery, except it was my favourite band that was the prize. If I did win the lottery, I’d pay the Foo Fighters $50 million to play here in my garage. But they did it for nothing.” Proclaiming himself the Foo Fighters’ biggest fan, Perry has all of the band’s releases and never misses attending their concerts or public appearances when they visit Toronto, and several times he’s gone on road trips to places such as London, Ont. and Ottawa to see them play live. To win the contest, Perry “went completely overboard” and sent in pictures in a collage of the 2,000-square-foot garage and had to submit a 25-word essay about why he deserved to host frontman Dave Grohl and his crew for an afternoon of music and socializing. Perry also had to call on a few friends to do some spring cleaning of the garage in order to get it ready for the production. “I found out I won on April Fools’ Day and at first I thought someone was joking with me, that my friends were busting on me,” added Perry, a volunteer for St. John Ambulance. A private security firm and Halton Police made sure that non-invitees weren’t able to crash the party, although Perry doubts that many people would have even heard the fully plugged-in show, given the rural location of his parents’ farm. Perry admits he lost his composure a couple of times, especially after the way the concert finished. When it appeared the band had played its final encore, he began playing the first few notes of their hit Big Me and the band dutifully followed along. “Two weeks ago I was working on the farm, dreaming about playing in front of 80,000 people. Then for two-and-a-half minutes, I was the lead singer for the best band in the world. It’s still unreal to me even though it happened a few days ago now.” Others at the concert included staffers from Waterloo-based Research In Motion, which put on the BlackBerry contest, contest winners from Toronto radio station 102.1 The Edge and the band’s road crew. “It was pretty crazy to say the least,” said Pina Crispo, the Edge’s promotions director. “I can’t imagine any other band of their magnitude doing something like this, the way they interact with the fans is just amazing. They’re really down-to-earth people and this was the perfect setting.” Founded by former Nirvana drummer Grohl in 1994, the Foo Fighters have sold over 20 million records. Their latest release, Wasting Light, was recorded in Grohl’s garage and rocketed to the top of the Billboard charts last week. The stop in Hornby was the third on the band’s Garage Tour after visits to Washington, D.C. and Yonkers, N.Y. last week as they ready for a tour of Europe this summer.

Bloomberg News - (Bloomberg) - Blackstone Group and Carlyle Group are leading a record number of private-equity managers aiming to raise real estate funds as the world's top buyout firms accelerate an expansion beyond corporate takeovers.

Blackstone, the biggest private-equity firm, is planning to raise its next real estate fund, with a target of about $10 billion, later this year. Carlyle is in the process of raising a new fund for U.S. property deals, said a person briefed on the plan, who asked not to be named because the fund is private.

The two are among 439 private-equity real estate funds seeking a combined $160 billion, the largest number on record, according to London-based researcher Preqin. KKR & Co. last month hired its first head of real estate, naming former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive Ralph Rosenberg to the post. The firms are betting they can produce profits in a still choppy market because their capital is locked up for long periods, usually a decade, allowing them to make improvements and wait out short-term price swings.

“There's a whole world of problems out there and properties need capital to be maintained and to grow,” KKR's Mr. Rosenberg said in an interview. “New capital is going to have to solve these problems, because there's not a broad liquid market to restructure real estate like there was in corporate debt.”

The 35-year-old partnership has no immediate plans to raise a standalone real estate fund, instead planning to use capital available through its existing buyout and debt businesses, according to a person familiar with the firm's strategy.

Blackstone, created in 1987 by Stephen Schwarzman and Peter G. Peterson, has the largest real estate business of the big private-equity houses, with $33.2 billion under management at the end of 2010. Real estate last year surpassed the New York- based firm's private-equity business, which has $29.3 billion under management.

The company in February agreed to pay $9.4 billion to buy the U.S. malls of Australia's Centro Properties Group in its biggest acquisition since 2007. Its deals last year included the purchase of 180 warehouse properties from Denver-based ProLogis and investments in hotel chain Extended Stay Inc. and mall owner General Growth Properties Inc.

Carlyle, based in Washington, had $10.2 billion in real estate assets under management as of the end of last year, with funds dedicated to investing in Asia, Europe and the U.S. Carlyle's fifth U.S. real estate fund, started in 2006, totaled $3 billion, according to its website.

“A lot of the private-equity guys and real estate guys are looking at this and realizing there's a lot of distress out there,” said Steve Coyle, chief investment officer of Global Realty Partners, the unit of New York-based Cohen & Steers Inc. that invests in private real estate funds.

Some Wall Street funds have revamped or exited their real estate businesses in the wake of losses incurred during the global credit crisis. Those businesses, some of which got established in the early 1990s with the Resolution Trust Corp.'s sale of distressed loans from the savings and loan crisis, also face a new regulatory environment that limits some riskier investments.

Goldman Sachs's leveraged Whitehall real estate funds suffered losses when the credit crisis halted the flow of cheap debt financing and depressed property values starting in 2007. Stuart Rothenberg, the former head of property investment, left at the end of 2008 after 21 years. In October, Goldman hired Jeffrey Barclay from ING Clarion Partners to lead a new business within asset management that will focus on lower-risk commercial real estate, mainly in the U.S.

Goldman, also based in New York, additionally has a mezzanine lending fund for real estate, which has gathered $2.6 billion in commitments since 2009, according to the firm's website.

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the largest underwriter of mortgage-backed securities at the market's peak in 2007, filed for bankruptcy in 2008 and is liquidating its assets. In June 2010, it sold the management contract for its real estate funds to a group of former executives.

Morgan Stanley's top real estate fund executives, including Jay Mantz, Sonny Kalsi and John Carrafiell, left during the past three years. John Klopp and Olivier de Poulpiquet were named last September to run the real-estate investing business.

Greg Fleming, who runs the asset-management business, told employees in January that the firm “remains fully committed to the real estate investing business.”

The New York firm raised $4.7 billion for its newest global real estate fund last June, the biggest real estate fund to close since 2008. The amount is less than half what Morgan Stanley had targeted initially. The fund was among bidders for the U.S. malls of Centro Properties.

The diminished competition has helped public real estate funds, so-called real estate investment trusts, attract $47.5 billion in capital in 2010, the second-highest amount on record. The largest amount raised was $49 billion in 2006, according to the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts.

Private-equity backed real estate funds will have to convince investors that they can top returns of REITS, after the sizeable fees the firms charge investors, usually around 1.5% of assets and 20% of profits above a certain threshold. REITs typically charge between 0.5% and 1% of assets. They are also more transparent and more liquid.

The Bloomberg BI NA REITs index, which tracks 124 members, gained 30% in 2009 and 29% in 2010. Private-equity real estate funds had an average annual loss of 16% for the three years ended in September 2010, according to Preqin. They gained 0.1% in the 12 months ended in September.

“Anyone who's invested in REITs has done very well,” said Jerome Gates, who in March joined Hamilton Lane, the Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania-based firm that helps institutional investors pick managers. “For long-term investors, now is a good time for private equity to put money to work, but investors need to be prepared to bounce along the bottom for a while before seeing significant improvement.”

Blackstone's first stand-alone real estate fund, Blackstone Real Estate Partners I, made investments from September 1994 to October 1996. That fund returned investors 2.8 times their invested capital, giving an annual rate of return of 40%, according to Blackstone's most recent annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Subsequent funds haven't been able to match those returns, with the second, third and fourth funds delivering an annual 19%, 21% and 16%, respectively. The fifth and sixth funds, which include high-profile investments such as Equity Office Properties Trust and Hilton Worldwide, have average annual returns of 7% and 6% so far.

Hilton may file for an initial public offering as soon as this year, according to people familiar with the matter, a sign that returns for the funds may improve. After a 35% loss in 2009, Blackstone's unrealized value in real estate funds gained 61% in 2010.

“We are extremely well positioned to play a major role in this, and we expect to continue to aggressively deploy capital,” Mr. Schwarzman said March 8 on a conference call with investors. “I think from just talking with people in the marketplace on a regular basis that a lot of investors are looking for a way to take advantage of this asset class.”

Values of apartment complexes, office buildings, hotels and other commercial properties are rebounding as the economy recovers and investors look for higher yields than assets such as corporate bonds offer. U.S. commercial property prices rose 4.2% from an eight-year low during the five months ended January, according to the Moody's/Real Commercial Property Price Index released March 22.

“We're well into the recovery in the prime markets in the U.S. and that recovery has started to expand into secondary markets around the country,” said Dan Fasulo, managing director at Real Capital Analytics Inc., a New York-based real estate research firm. “Real estate is looking good versus other asset classes.”

Some smaller, more specialized real estate investors are shying away from raising new pools for equity real estate investments. Santa Monica, Calif.-based Colony Capital has no immediate plans to raise a new equity fund, Chairman Thomas Barrack said in an interview last month. Colony has a publicly traded real estate debt fund called Colony Financial Inc., which has returned 1.8% in the past 12 months.

Private-equity's forays into real estate may be less lucrative and more difficult in coming years for a number of reasons, Mr. Barrack said. For one, institutional investors are pressing for more opportunities to co-invest, circumventing fees private-equity funds charge. Some pensions, including several Canadian groups, have their own teams dedicated to making direct real estate investments.

“The next couple of years will be a period of more modest returns, harder work and more attention paid to ‘value added,'” Mr. Barrack said.

The larger firms, all of which have either gone public recently or are planning to do so, say real estate is an important area of growth as they seek to diversify their sources of income in a bid to win over public shareholders.

Blackstone went public in 2007, just before the financial crisis brought buyouts to a halt. KKR last year gained a listing in New York, and Apollo Global Management, the private-equity firm run by Leon Black, last month raised $565.4 million in an initial public offering. Carlyle may pursue an IPO this year.

TPG, the private-equity firm run by David Bonderman and Jim Coulter, handles its real estate investing from its broader buyout fund, a $19.8 billion pool raised in 2008. It may weigh raising discrete real estate funds in the future, according to two people familiar with TPG's plans who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. The firm, whose real estate efforts are managed by Colony Co-founder Kelvin Davis, has made deals including the $955 million purchase of homebuilder Taylor Morrison Inc. announced March 31.

Apollo, based in New York, has created a group devoted to real estate investing and had assets of $6.5 billion in that unit as of the end of last year, according to filings related to the public offering. The firm in November bought the real estate management group of Citigroup Inc., adding $3.6 billion in assets.

Raymond Mikulich, former co-head of Lehman's real estate investments, joined Apollo to run its North American property business. Joseph Azrack, Apollo's global head of real estate, has been expanding the business since he joined the buyout firm from Citigroup in 2008. Apollo also has a REIT with about $1 billion under management called Apollo Commercial Real Estate Finance Inc.

Even with some of the competition diminished, raising new funds won't be easy after the credit crisis and plummeting property values soured pension funds and other investors on putting more money into real estate, particularly higher-risk vehicles.

“I think the only one who has the shot at it is us,” Blackstone President Tony James said Feb. 3, when being asked if a competitor could raise a similar-sized fund as the $10 billion pool Blackstone is seeking. “But I don't think even for us it's going to be easy, frankly.”

Lone Star Funds, a Dallas firm that buys nonperforming loans backed by real estate and mortgage lenders, has had to scale back its fundraising ambitions. The firm, led by John Grayken, in November asked investors for six more months to raise two new funds.

Originally, Lone Star had hoped to gather $20 billion of capital commitments for the two funds. Now, the firm probably will raise about $6 billion, said Cohen & Steers' Mr. Coyle.

Jed Repko, a spokesman for Lone Star, declined to comment.

“It's tough raising capital but it's starting to open up,” Mr. Coyle said in an interview. “Everyone out there will tell you it's tough.”

'I'd love to do a big West End musical. I was never into them before, but they're a dirty pleasure now'

How did you get into directing?

Running a community drama group at Norwich Arts Centre. Until then, I'd been training to work with people with autism. But I did a panto about Winnie the Pooh, some cabaret slots in the bar, some verbatim projects – and I discovered that I loved directing.

What was your big breakthrough?

I did a play called Two Horsemen by Biyi Bandele at the Gate theatre in London as part of a new-writing festival [in 1994]. We had a budget of £60, which we spent on a dead bird in a cage and a sandy floor with a hole in it. It won a load of awards.

If you could direct any play, which would it be?

The next new play that's going to change our theatrical legacy. Something like Sarah Kane's Blasted, which broke away from kitchen-sink drama, and ushered in a whole new generation of writers interested in how cruel the world is.

Is it more difficult for women to succeed in theatre than it is for men?

It's changed enormously in the last few years. I'm on the board of the JMK trust, which supports young directors and allows them to create a show. When we started 11 years ago, barely any women applied, but over the last four or five years, it's become 50-50.

Complete this sentence: At heart I'm just a frustrated ...

Ballerina.

What's the best advice anyone ever gave you?

My dad said: "If you can cover the bread and butter, the jam is just a nice extra."

Is there an art form you don't relate to?

Grunge. I just don't know what it's for.

What's the worst thing anyone ever said about you?

Reviewing my first ever production, at the Finborough theatre, Bonnie Greer said that I couldn't direct traffic, let alone a play. I still resent her.

Where do you want to be in five years' time?

I'd love to do a big West End musical, like Legally Blonde. I was never into them before, but I've spent the last year going to see a load of musicals – and I find myself enjoying them. A dirty pleasure.

What work of art would you most like to own?

A Matisse collage, because his art is full of joy. A lot of my early work was full of blood and guts, but as you get older you realise that life is very short and very precious.

In short

Born: La Plata, Argentina, 1964.

Career: Has worked at the Traverse, the Royal Court, and as artistic director of Paines Plough. Now associate director at the RSC, for which she directs Little Eagles at Hampstead theatre, London NW3 (020-7722 9301), until 7 May.

Low point: "For a year after I left the Royal Court to go freelance, I practically killed myself working."

My mother, Hannah Kodicek, who has died aged 63 of pancreatic cancer, was a film-maker, actor, writer, educator and creator of children's television classics, who blended artistic vision with erudition and a childlike humour.

Born Zuzana Oprsalova in Czechoslovakia and trained as a pianist at the Prague Conservatoire, she emigrated to Britain in 1968, after the Russian invasion, with her husband, Michal, and young son, Peter. They were lucky enough to be taken under the wing of an English family in Blackheath, south-east London, which enabled Hannah to get on her feet through a succession of low-paid jobs, until she learned the language.

The cold war meant that there were opportunities for a beautiful young woman with an exotic accent and she found a number of acting roles, under the name Susan Kodicek, mostly as some kind of spy. Her most celebrated role was as Irina in the widely acclaimed 1979 TV adaptation of John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

At the same time, she and another Czech emigre, Rosta Cerny, put together a small group of puppeteers working as the Black Theatre Group of Prague, first on stage in variety acts, with performers such as Mike Yarwood and Paul Daniels, then eventually on television, where their work with the children's series Vision On led to their creating three series of their own: Once Upon a Time, Pullover and Fox Tales.

In the mid-80s, this work began to dry up as regional broadcasters stopped commissioning new children's TV. But Hannah had developed an interest in psychology, alchemy and symbolism, and became a respected member of the Jungian community in London. Then her life changed again with the fall of communism and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. After 20 years, she was able to return to her home country and found that she still had a vast, unexpected love for it.

This love was given expression in her semi-autobiographical feature film A Pin for the Butterfly (1994), featuring Hugh Laurie, Joan Plowright and a young Florence Hoath. The film never found a cinema release in Britain but it led to other work. Hannah taught story structure for screenwriters for many years, and went on to be the story editor on films including the Oscar-winning The Counterfeiters (2007).

In 2001 she moved back to the Czech Republic, where she lived in the beautiful town of Cesky Krumlov. She continued to innovate, acting as artistic director on the treasure hunt website TimeHunt, but mostly she filled her time between story editing and teaching with walks in the woods, picking mushrooms.

Hannah and Michal divorced. She is survived by her long-term partner, Connie; two sons, Peter and me; her mother, Olga, and stepfather, Mirko; and four grandchildren, Anna, Matthew, Harper and Milla.

• Almost 75% of universities have opted for maximum fees
• David Willetts says measures will empower students
• New NUS president concedes defeat in battle to oppose policy

Almost three-quarters of universities that have announced their tuition fee plans have opted to charge the maximum £9,000 for at least some of their degree courses from 2012.

English universities hoping to charge more than £6,000 a year have until Tuesday to submit their plans to the government's access watchdog, the Office for Fair Access (Offa). The average fee of those that have made their plans public currently stands at £8,679.20.

It comes as universities minister David Willetts argues that the coalition's decision to slash the teaching grant will remove the "privileged inner circle" of institutions backed by direct state funding and open up higher education to competition.

Willetts says the shift from the teaching grant to tuition fees will empower students as well as enabling private universities to enter the higher education market on a level footing.

In an article for the Guardian's Comment is free site, Willetts writes: "This … shift, by removing the privileged inner circle that gets teaching grant and instead allocating money via fees and loans, opens up HE to a wider range of providers doing things differently.

" And universities will get their money by focusing on the teaching experience for students, which has been their greatest weakness."

The teaching grant will be cut from £4.6bn to £2bn by 2014. Newer universities say they are worst affected by the reduction in funding as they are less able to offset their teaching losses with research income. Many have cited the loss of teaching income in their rationale for charging the maximum £9,000 fee.

Willetts argues that behind the "sticker price", many students will be charged much less than the maximum. "If you look behind the headlines, the reality is that lots of students will not face fees anything close to £9,000 a year – including at the most prestigious universities."

The minister gives the example of Warwick's £9,000 fee, which is reduced by half with the fee waiver or bursary offered by the institution to students whose families have incomes below £25,000.

Willetts says the "fixation" with the maximum figure conceals the diversity within universities and across the sector, citing Derby's decision to cap prices at £7,995, and Portsmouth and Leeds Met at £8,500.

The government has said fees of more than £6,000 will be allowed only in "exceptional circumstances". Willetts initially predicted that the average fee would be £7,500. He later revised that to £7,500-8,000.

A total of 60 universities or university colleges have now declared their tuition fees, with at least 70 yet to do so. Of the 60, 41 said they wanted to charge £9,000 for all their courses. They range from Oxbridge to the University of East London, which came second from bottom in the Guardian's latest university league table.

Several universities are charging a range of fees. These include London Metropolitan, where charges range from £4,500 to £9,000, and Coventry (£4,600-9,000). A fee of £9,000 for at least one of their courses will be imposed by 45 of the 60 universities.

Every university in the Russell group, which represents large, research-intensive universities, intends to charge £9,000, bar two that have not yet announced their fee levels: Bristol and the London School of Economics.

Every university Three universities in the 1994 group, which represents small, research-intensive universities, have yet to announce how much they want to charge – York, the University of East Anglia and Goldsmiths. But every other member of the group wants to charge £9,000.

Birkbeck College, University of London, specialises in part-time courses and will charge £4,500-6,750.

Many of the newest universities have not yet announced their proposed fees. However, Coventry is one of several institutions to offer a range of fees. It will charge £4,500 for part-time degrees that are taught in the workplace, while its business studies and English degrees will cost £7,500. Degrees that require studio space or field trips, such as fine art, music and geography, will cost £7,900, while courses that require hi-tech equipment, such as media production, will cost £8,300. The university's most specialist courses, such as fashion, will cost £9,000.

The latest universities to declare their fees include Bradford, which plans to charge £9,000, and Northumbria, which is proposing £8,500.

Willetts' defence of the fees strategy comes as the newly elected president of the NUS, Liam Burns, concedes that the battle over tuition fees has – for now – been lost. Also writing for Cif, Burns says "the debate on how to fund education is sadly largely irrelevant until the wholesale removal of public funding is reversed".

Instead, the "first challenge" for the NUS will be to fight the prospect of a cut in student places. Business secretary Vince Cable warned recently that institutions regarded by ministers as overpriced could have places withdrawn.

Burns, who takes over from current president Aaron Porter in July, expressed regret over what he described as "significant mistakes" in the campaign against fees. The student movement split after the NUS leadership took several days to endorse direct action, such as occupations of university premises.

Burns writes that the NUS "made the wrong call".

"When students peacefully occupied their university buildings, NUS was not clear enough how and if we could support that action; when protests were being organised outside the structures of NUS itself, a certain arrogance implied that the national union had a monopoly over any campaigning relating to education funding; and when the police were baton charging and kettling our members, NUS was too slow to criticise those tactics publicly," he writes.

Burns describes the new fees system as being in "complete chaos" as universities flock towards the maximum fee.

Offa will announce which universities' plans it has approved by 11 July.

The Entertainment Software Ratings Board, a group that rates the age-appropriateness of video games, has created a new automated system for rating downloadable game content available on the consoles’ online stores.

The effort — aided by automatic appraisals from a computer program — reduces the amount of manual labor involved in evaluating whether a game is appropriate for young audiences. And it promises a way for a small industry-funded ratings board to keep up with flood of new online game content pouring into our living rooms. That curation model is necessary because of concerns about children’s exposure to excessive violence in video games, but the automation is necessary to keep up with the flood.

The new ratings apply to games submitted to Microsoft’s Xbox Live online game service as well as the Nintendo Wii Shop and DS Shop and the Sony PlayStation Network store. The issue is an important one, as objections to game content could slow down the growth of the industry, and because the video game industry has a big case on game violence before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The ESRB rates games with labels such as “everyone,” “everyone 10+,” “teens,” “mature,” or “adults only.” The agency decides whether games have too much gore, sex, or foul language. To screen a higher volume of submissions for online content, the ESRB will rely on game makers to fill out questionnaires with lots of details on the nuances of violence, sexuality, profanity, drug use, gambling and bodily functions that could potentially offend players.

The ESRB will then use its program to automatically assign a rating to the online game, taking into account the voluntary submission. It will still have a human in the loop. Game companies have to submit a final version to the ESRB, and the human screener will check it to make sure the rating is appropriate. If the game maker leaves out anything important, the game will be pulled from the online store and go through a resubmission process.

Game companies will have to fill out the form carefully, since they don’t want to get caught with the costly process of resubmission, which would throw their marketing plans off schedule. The U.S. Supreme Court is due to issue a ruling soon on a California law that makes it a crime to sell mature-rated video games to minors.

The ESRB is an industry trade group with funding from game makers. It was set up in 1994 to avoid Congressional action on video game violence. While the new rating system extends to the online versions of consoles and handheld game systems, it does not cover the huge number of games on smartphones, tablets and the web. The ESRB rated 1,600 games last year and only 30 percent were online.

Patricia Vance, president of the ESRB, said the new rating process considers the same elements reviewed by human raters. She said the benefit is that the ESRB will be able to scale the system while keeping its services affordable and accessible.

Tags: Entertainment Software Ratings board, ESRB, game ratings, game violence

Companies: Microsoft, nintendo, Sony

People: Patricia Vance

Yes. Marshmallows can cry tears of blood.
The Indiana Pacers: When Tyler Hansbrough's three-point play (see below) gave Indy a 98-88 lead with 3:38 remaining, my buddy Statbuster, a lifelong Pacers fan, immediately said: "They're going to lose."

He knows his team.

Over that final 3:38, the Bulls ripped off a 16-1 run. Game over.

Said Danny Granger: "We put forth a good effort, but who cares. It's 0-1."

Added Roy Hibbert: "This one hurts bad."

It should.

See, I tend to think the Pacers played as well as they possibly could and won't have a better chance of winning a game. As I wrote at By The Horns, Darren Collison, Danny Granger and Hansbrough were crazy-hot from the outside. Those guys combined to shoot 12-for-22 from 16-23 feet (Hansbrough was 7-for-10), plus Collison and Granger went 6-for-10 from downtown. Furthermore, Brandon Rush and A.J. Price combined to go 4-for-5 from beyond the arc.

That's some unusually accurate long-distance shooting. And several of those shots were contested.

I concede that the Bulls can clean up their defense a little bit. But I think the Pacers were converting long field goal attempts at a much higher rate than usual -- the Hoopdata numbers back this up -- and there's no way they're going to shoot that well in Game 2.

Or ever again.

Carlos Boozer's defense: Had the Pacers actually won this game, I would have expected Boozer to rip off his Bulls jersey to reveal a hidden Pacers jersey right after the final buzzer sounded. Seriously, the way he was (not) defending Psycho T, I was sure he'd been paid off to throw the game.

After trailing for the entire game, the Bulls had pulled to within 91-88 with 4:52 left in the fourth. Hansbrough then his back-to-back long jumpers over what looked like a Boozer statue. After the second jumper, Hansbrough stripped Carlos and then converted a breakaway dunk as Boozer fouled him.


Notice how Boozer didn't go for the ball? He pushed Hansbrough in the back while he was up in the air. That was a dirty foul and, had Hansbrough let himself fall, Boozer probably would have been tagged with a flagrant. Turrible.

Kurt Thomas' elbow: The most dangerous Bulls elbow since Bill Cartwright.



Derrick Rose's three-point shooting: Rose scored 39 points on 23 shot attempts, thanks to the fact that he went 19-for-21 from the foul line. He also had 9 points and 2 assists in the final five minutes of the game. The flipside of his amazing performance is the fact that he went 0-for-9 from three-point range.

Freaking 0-for-9. Look, Derrick. I know you added the three-point shot this season, and it's great that you can knock them down occasionally, but there is not nor will their ever be any good reason for you to chuck up nine triples in a game. Ever. Please stop.

The next best example of such critically flawed long-distance shooting? John Starks in Game 7 of the 1994 NBA Finals. Fortunately for the Bulls, Hibbert is now Hakeem Olajuwon.

Danny Granger, quote machine: On whether the Pacers ever felt safe with their lead: "With Derrick Rose on the other team? No. With Derrick Rose on the other team, no. It's like a crazy stalker ex-girlfriend. Every time you tell her you don't want to talk to her, she'll show up at your door again."

The Philadelphia 76ers: Honestly, I almost feel bad putting Philly in WotW. I mean, they played tough. Took an early 14-point lead. Fell behind by 16. Came back. Had a chance to steal the game in the final minutes. Ultimately, they couldn't overcome Miami's 2.5 superstar system or some mildly head-scratching officiating, that gave the cHeat a 39-15 advantage in free throw attempts.

In fact, Miami got 15 freebies in the second quarter alone.

When asked whether he could explain the foul shooting differential, Sixers coach Doug Collins said: "I could. My grandkids would lose their college fund. So I'll have to dance around that one. I can't respond to that."

Added Jrue Holiday: "It's kind of discouraging. But at the same time, we know we just have to keep at it. ... Calls are made and we have to fight through that."

Still, Chris Bosh (25 points, 12 rebounds), LeBron James (21 points, 14 rebounds, 5 assists, 3 blocked shots) and Dwyane Wade (17 points, 7 rebounds, 5 assists, and some clutch hoops) had to do pretty much everything (they also combined for 33 of Miami's 39 free throw attempts). At this point, if the Sixers can hold down just one of those guys (I'm thinking Boshmallow), they stand a chance.

If not...

Dwyane Wade, quote machine: "The only number that matters right now is 1-0. That's all it's about."

The number 42 still matters, right?

The Orlando Magic: This one goes out to Dwight Howard:


Over the years, I've been hard on Dwight, and I could give him a little grief for the missed free throws (8) and the turnovers (8). But when a guy scores 46 points on 23 shot attempts while earning 22 trips to the foul line and ripping down 19 rebounds...

...what more is he supposed to do? I mean, you know, other than not brick eight free throws or turn the ball over eight times.

This loss was not on Dwight. It was a straight up failure of his supporting cast: Hedo Turkododo (6 points on 2-for-9 shooting), Brandon Bass (0 points on 0-for-4 shooting), Jason Richardson (4 points on 2-for-8 shooting) and a combined 10 points from reserves Quentin Richardson (0-for-0), Gilbert Arenas (2-for-5), J.J. Redick (2-for-6) and Ryan Anderson (0-for-2).

I actually found myself thinking the Magicians would have been better off keeping Rashard Lewis and Vince Carter. It was that bad.

And, yeah, Jameer Nelson finished with 27 points on 10-for-18 shooting, but he had exactly one point in the first half when the Hawks were taking control of the game. Nelson didn't start lighting it up until the Magic were down big, which gets filed in the "Too Little Too Late" folder in the Basketbawful Supercomputer.

The Magic won the battle of the boards (40-29) and scored more points in the paint (48-36), but they gave up 21 points off 18 turnovers versus only 8 on 10 for the Hawks. What's more, Orlando's interior defense wasn't exactly an iron wall, as Atlanta was 8-for-14 at the rim (57 percent) and 7-for-10 inside 10 feet.

Said Joe Johnson: "I think we just had to be excited about where we were. We understood that we played this team four times this year and we won three of them. We're a confident group. I think the last six games of the season people kinda looked down on us because we lost all six. But now we have a plan. It's coming to fruition and we just have to go out and play together."

Huh. I think the Hawks will lose Game 2 based on that quote alone.

The Portland Frail Blazers: I can't be too hard on the Blazers. How could they have prepared for Dirk Nowitzki to ravage them for 18 points in the fourth quarter. Dirk scored 12 straight points in one stretch and went 13-for-13 from the line over those final 12 minutes. By comparison, Portland had 13 foul shots in 48 minutes. As always, I'm just sayin'.

Another shocker was Jason Kidd hitting six three-pointers. Six!

Said Kidd: "They want me to be aggressive. We all know that Dirk and Jet [Jason Terry] are offensive guys and they put the ball up. But in the playoffs you have to have other guys step up and score and I know that our opponents are going to give me that jump shot and I have to be able to knock it down."

Added Dallas coach Rich Carlisle: "Spectacular. We had some guys that didn't play their best games, but Jason Kidd played the game of the year to this point. Every shot he made, every play he made was absolutely essential for us. His leadership is something you can't quantify."

I'm sure as long as Kidd keeps draining threes and Dirk keeps dropping 18-point fourth quarters, the Mavericks will win this series easy.

The San Antonio Spurs: Oh my...

>
What a major fail. As LotharBot pointed out: "The San Antonio Sterns got 47 FTA in a home playoff game. They also had 5 more steals, 6 fewer turnovers, a +2 rebounding differential (+6 on offense)... and lost." I should also point out that San Antonio got 21 points off 16 Memphis turnovers (while giving up only 10 points off 10 turnovers themselves). And lost.

What went wrong? Well, it didn't help that they bricked 11 foul shots and converted only 40 percent of their field goal attempts. And their defense, which had looked so pillowy soft at various times during the regular season, allowed the Griz to shoot 55 percent from the field and 60 percent from downtown. And Z-Bo (25 points, 10-for-15, 14 rebounds) and Marc Gasol (24 points, 9-for-10, 9 rebounds) did everything short of coating the Spurs with BBQ sauce and eating them alive.

Then there was Shane Battier's three.

Said San Antonio coach Gregg Popovich: "What do you want to know about it? It counted for three. He caught it. He shot it. And he made it."

And regarding his decision to hold Manu Ginobili out of the game: "You know [darn] well he's not happy with me. And you know [darn] well he wants to be on that court. But I made my decision."

Still, Richard Jefferson could have tied the game on couldn't-have-been-any-more-open three at the buzzer. But I'm sure you've guessed how that turned out.

Said Jefferson: "I was wide open."

Before anybody starts writing obits for the Spurs, ask yourself whether Memphis is going to shoot 55 percent again, or whether Z-Bo and The Younger Spanish Marshmallow can continue to scorch the earth.

Gregg Popovich, quote machine: Video from an anonymous commenter:


The Los Angeles Lakers: The Lakers -- seemingly -- got the best possible first round matchup: A Hornets team missing its leading scorer and rebounder (David West) and utterly reliant on a gimpy-legged superstar (Chris Paul). Few people questioned whether this series would be a sweep...and some were wondering whether the slaughter rule might have to be invoked.

Surprise.

Turns out Chris Paul was feelin' way, way better than "just fine" (33 points, 14 assists, 7 rebounds, 4 steals and three ultra-clutch jumpers) and the Hornets played a nearly perfect road game: 52 percent shooting, 24 assists on 41 made field goals and only 3 turnovers. Reread that last part. Only 3 turnovers in 48 minutes of intense playoff action. You may now join me in saying: Holy shit.

Meanwhile, Arron Gray -- a.k.a. The White Flag -- stepped up and outplayed Pau Gasol. I'm not kidding. Gasol finished with 8 points on 2-for-9 shooting and got heckled by the Staples Center crowd. Gray went 5-for-5 from the field and finished with 12 points and a plus-minus score of +25 in 20 minutes of PT.

Let's put it this way: Pau would make the perfect addition to the world's largest mug of hot chocolate.


Said Gasol: "I'm disappointed, yeah. Stunned, surprised. But we were the ones responsible for that to happen, so we have to own up to that and come back to work in the next couple of days and get the series where we want it to be."

Meanwhile, Lamar Odom continued the Lakers' season-long quest to rationalize away their mystifying no-shows: "It's always good for us, when I think about the personality of our team, to be humbled a little bit. Sometimes that's the best thing for us, to be humbled. To lose on our home court in the playoffs, probably against a team that people think we should handle easy, I think it's good for us."

You've heard of must-wins. Now, apparently, there are must-loses.

And suddenly the Hornets have life.

Said Carl Landry: "A lot of people counted us out from the beginning. A lot of people probably still count us out. That's cool. A lot of people might think this game might have been lucky, but we play as a team. We play as a collective unit. We're without David West, but we've still got dudes on this team that can step up."

My prediciton for Game 2: Pain. And a Lakers blowout win.

Fate: Gray seemed destined to be the NBA's top feel-good story of the first playoff weekend...right up until the final minute of the game.


Bummer.

The New York Knicks: Ladies and gentlemen: Ray Allen.


That was just one example of clutch defensive fails by the Knicks down the stretch. Here's another:


Said New York coach Mike 'Antoni: "We can compete with them, obviously. They made big shots at the end. That's why they are who they are."

And giving up big shots at the end. That's who the Knicks are.

Speaking of the Defense That Does Not Exist...Jermaine "The Drain" O'Neal scored 12 points on 6-for-6 shooting. Remember: Last season, he went 9-for-44 over five playoff games. Although if it makes anybody feel any better, The Drain had a game-worst plus-minus score of -11. And he got posterized (with KG) by STAT:


Said Amar''''''e: "We've got to find a way to win down the stretch. We had a great chance to win. We played well throughout the full 48 minutes. We just didn't quite close it out."

Yeah. About that...

Carmelo Anthony: From ESPN Stats and Information (via TrueHoop):

Carmelo Anthony has made five go-ahead or game-tying field goals in the final ten second of either the fourth quarter or overtime this season (two for Denver and three for New York), the most by any NBA player.

Essentially Anthony was the most clutch player in the NBA this season, however he was certainly not the most clutch Knicks player today.

That honor belonged to Amar'e Stoudemire, who led the Knicks with 28 points while grabbing 11 rebounds. He went 6-for-7 from the field in the fourth quarter, but didn’t even get a touch on any of the Knicks final seven plays.

Instead Carmelo Anthony used four of the final seven possessions without recording a point (two turnovers, two missed shots).

As for his final try...is this really the best shot the Knicks could've gotten?


By the way, that offensive foul -- you know the one I'm talking about -- was a correct call. By the book and the letter of the law. Admittedly, you don't see it getting called down the stretch of too many intense Eastern Conference playoff games. You can argue a lot of things. But you can't really argue that it wasn't a foul.

Said Doc Rivers: "I don't know if [Pierce] drew it, but he took it. And it was the right call. Heck of a call to make, but it was the right call. I mean, it was clear. And I give Paul a lot of credit. I give Paul credit in the second half -- Billy Walker and Carmelo in the first half, they got every shot, everything they wanted. In the second half, it went away. And I thought it was due to Paul."

Countered 'Antoni: "Well, in my eyes, obviously I'm biased, but I thought it was a tough call. And I thought the [no] call [when] Toney [Douglas] went flying trying to chase Ray Allen was a tough no-call. Those things happen. I'm not happy about it, but it happens."

Added Anthony: "As far as that offensive foul goes, what I thought and what they called were two different things. So it is what it is, he called it and it's over with."

Boston's bench: 8 points on 4-for-15 shooting. Ugh.

The Denver Nuggets (I guess): Man, it's hard to fault the Nuggets for this loss. Great game. Both teams gave it everything they had. Ultimately, this loss came down to two things: Denver's 12 missed free throws and Kendrick Perkins' go-ahead tip-in with just over a minute left...

...which shouldn't have counted because it was an obvious goaltend.

Said Nuggets coach George Karl: "Obviously it was goaltending. The ball doesn't get outside the cylinder. It's not even outside the cylinder. So, how can't you see that? But that's part of the NBA."

Countered Perkins: "There's a lot of calls that would have probably got questioned tonight, so it ain't just that one. So, we're going to keep playing. It happens. The game, that's how it is. At the end of the day, we've just got to move on."

Heh. Perk knows.

Bad officiating aside, Kenyon Martin pointed to his team's inability to do anything with Kevin Durant (41 points, 13-for-22, 12-for-15 from the line) and Russell Westbrook (31 points, 12-for-23, 7 assists).

Said Martin: "We have to limit one of them. They can't go for 30 or 40. I think our concepts of paying attention to everyone else was great. Everything we needed to do, we did -- except for limit Durant and Westbrook."

Everything you needed to do, Kenyon? Again I point to those 12 missed free throws. And, as LotharBot pointed out: "Nuggets-Thunder second quarter, about 6 min left, the Nuggets missed 4 free throws on one possession. Nene drew a foul and shot 2, and bricked both. KMart with the offensive rebound and got fouled, with the Thunder over the limit. He bricked both as well."

I mean...you know?

Speaking of Mr. Bot, here's his weekend wrapup from the BAD comments, some of which is covered in this post and some of which is not:

Nuggets missing 4 free throws on one possession.

Blown call on offensive basket interference (that resulted in a lead change) late in the Nuggets-Thunder game.

Kendrick Perkins got absolutely schooled by Nene (22 points on 11 shots, 8 rebounds vs 4 points and 5 rebounds). Isn't Perkins supposed to be a good defender? On the other end, Kevin Durant scored 41 points on 22 shots. The Nuggets couldn't figure out any defenders who were good on him.

Carmelo Anthony committing an offensive foul with the Knicks up by 1 and about 20 seconds left, then failing to stay with Ray Allen (yes, that was Melo's guy) as he hit the game winner, then bricking a potential game winner of his own.

One of the TV guys commented that Amare was ballin early in the fourth and then didn't touch the ball again. Actually, he did twice. The first was an offensive foul. The second was a defensive rebound that he failed to secure, giving up a key offensive rebound and JO layup that tied the game. He probably also should've defended the rim on the inbounds lob to KG.

The Spurs losing a home game despite getting 47 fta, because their defense sucked and their offense sucked more.

Okafor with 4 points, 2 boards, and 6 fouls -- yet even with the Hornets' best interior defender being totally unproductive and fouling out in only 22 minutes, Bynum-Gasol-Odom combined for fewer total shots than Kobe (22 vs 26). The Lakers bigs are supposed to be a huge strength, so why is that team so afraid of the paint?

Speaking of the Lakers, they forced only 3 turnovers from the Hornets; this ties an NBA playoff record.

I'd say that's plenty of bawful, and that's just today's games.

Chris' Weekend Lacktion Ledger -- Playoff Edition:

Sixers-Heat: Tony Battie scavenged for a working Super Nintendo in 58 seconds to give Philly a Mario.

Hawks-Magic: As the dirty birds pulled off a shocker in Florida, Jason Collins started the celebratory mediocrity by countering a free throw in 17:39 as starting big man with a lost rock and a foulout for a 7:1 Voskuhl. Zaza Pachulia married a board and two free throws with 3 fouls and a turnover in 8:55 for a 4:3 Voskuhl. And Josh Powell provided 100% from the field (in one attempt in 7:56) and a board, only to foul four times for a 4:3 Voskuhl.

Frail Blazers-Mavs: Brian Cardinal had a 12 second sprint F1 Race for a Mario.

Grizzlies-Spurs: Hamed Haddadi turned over a mushroom in just 52 seconds for a +1, a 1:0 Madsen-level Voskuhl, and a Mario! Fellow baby cub Ishmael Smith celebrated the shocking victory with a 1.4 trillion (83 seconds).

Meanwhile, for the not-so-happy home team, starting center Antonio McDyess dashed a made field goal and free throw and board in 13:08 with two turnovers and five fouls for a 7:4 Voskuhl, and Danny Green painted a plumber's outfit in 29 seconds for a Mario.

Hornets-Lakers: Joe Smith and Theo Ratliff each suited up Tanooki-style in 54 seconds as MARIO BROTHERS (Ratliff going non-lacktive with a board).

Two weeks ago, a new martyr was created. Juliano Mer-Khamis, who ran a drama club and theater for the youth of Jenin, was murdered by the very people he was said to be trying to help.

Condolences came from all over the world talking about how Mer Khamis and his mother, Arna, who created the theater were a ray of hope in Jenin, where they were teaching the young people there about how peace is better than bullets.

In reality, the theater was not only a failure, but its original members spawned an almost unbelievable amount of terror.

From The Globe and Mail, April 20, 2009 in an article that is sympathetic to the theater (no longer online, a copy is here):

The scene is 1989, the second year of the Palestinian intifada. Stone- throwing protests against Israeli occupation have spread throughout Gaza and the West Bank. In Jenin, the youthful protesters are joined by older militants who carry out armed attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers. The Jenin camp´s schools are closed; its children have nowhere to turn.

Enter Arna Mer, a 59-year-old Jewish peace activist who had been born in a northern collective farm, fought as an 18-year-old to create the state of Israel, joined the Israeli Communist Party and married an Arab-Israeli activist. Since 1967 she had protested against the Israeli occupation and, by 1989, was determined to help the children of Jenin.

On the top floor of a house owned by a local widow name Samira Zubeidi, Ms. Mer opens a children´s drama school. Aided by her actor son, Juliano Mer Khamis, she forms a small troupe and provides an artistic and educational outlet for dozens of children, including Ms. Zubeidi´s sons, Zakariya and Daoud. For her efforts, Ms. Mer was awarded an alternative Nobel prize in 1993 and the prize money went to create a proper school facility.

The school would survive Ms. Mer´s death from cancer in 1996, and Mr. Mer Khamis´s departure – until 2002, that is, and the violence of the second intifada. It was destroyed when Israeli bulldozers levelled a section of the camp.

That´s when Mr. Mer Khamis would return and make an extraordinary film called Arna´s Children, using old and new video footage to show what had happened to those original young children his mother had nurtured.

Thirteen years after joining Ms. Mer´s company of children, all but one of the original troupe were dead: One had been so affected by the killing of a young girl, he launched a suicide attack on the Israeli town of Hadera; two had perished in the Battle of Jenin, killed in the theatre school´s rehearsal hall from where they had fired on advancing Israeli forces. One had become the Jenin leader of the al- Aqsa Martyrs´ Brigades militant group and was hunted down and killed.

Only Zakariya Zubeidi had survived. Imprisoned for throwing rocks, and again for throwing Molotov cocktails, he had been released after the 1993 Oslo Accords and joined the Palestinian police. He left the force, as a sergeant, disillusioned, he said, by the corruption he encountered.

In 2002, his mother and brother were killed when Israeli forces moved into Jenin camp. Once again, Mr. Zubeidi picked up a weapon.

He survived the intense battle in Jenin and, somewhat reluctantly, succeeded his friend as the leader of the al-Aqsa militants.

Mr. Zubeidi, his face still badly marked by a bomb of his own making, said in an interview last week that he did not approve of suicide missions, only military attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers. High on Israel´s most wanted list, however, he somehow survived several assassination attempts.

In 2006, Mr. Zubeidi approached Juliano Mer Khamis, his old drama tutor and, by that time, an award-winning filmmaker, and urged him to reopen the theatre school.

Mr. Zubeidi, by this time a husband and father, said he wanted the next generation to find a better way to express itself.

“I was fed up with the fighting,” he said. “It didn´t get us [Palestinians] anywhere.”

Arna's school had not resulted in a single original student supporting pacifism. Every single one of the original kids there became a militant.

It is hard to imagine that any random classroom of Palestinian Arab kids in the West Bank, or even in Gaza, would have such a stunning record of churning out terrorists.

Juliano's film, instead of castigating what was by any measure a catastrophic failure of the vision of his mother, romanticized it by claiming that Israeli measures are so bad that every single child was driven into terror, despite his mother's efforts.

From Mother Jones' tribute to Juliano and description of his film:

The film, shot over almost two decades, is set in the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin, a place where Israeli bombs and tanks are inescapable realities of childhood. In the first half of the film, we are introduced to Juliano's mother, Arna, a Jewish Israeli who set up the theater group in Jenin in the late 1980s. Arna is bald from chemotherapy, yet devotes her dying days to her playful and talented little actors, helping them express their anger and grief through art and drama.

Years pass. Arna succumbs to cancer, the 1994 Oslo peace accords unravel, the theater program shuts down, the Israeli occupation hardens, and the 2000 second intifada erupts. On April 3, 2002, the Israeli army invades Jenin, killing more than 50 Palestinians and destroying hundreds of homes.

And many of "Arna's children" have now become militiamen and suicide fighters.

In the second half of the film, Juliano returns to Jenin to find out how and why this has happened. We see that it's not mainly about anti-Semitic brainwashing—Jenin residents adore Arna and Juliano despite their Jewish background and Israeli nationality. Rather, Arna's children have chosen "martyrdom" because of the searing horrors they've witnessed with their own eyes.

How can a youth program, supposedly meant to foster "peace" but that has a 0% success rate of creating peaceful people, be considered so wonderful?

Arna Mer-Chamis, if she really was trying to teach peace, was a spectacular failure. It is not possible for her to have been more of a failure. The last person alive from her kids, who now claims to want peace, didn't say he learned the idea from the Mer-Chamises - he just says that he was simply "fed up with fighting."

Which brings up the question: did the theater really promote peace in any sense at all?

Now Juliano Mer-Chamis, who created an entire movie trying to soft-pedal the terrorism of his mother's proteges, has become victim to something the leftists pretend doesn't exist - Palestinian Arab hate. His film, rather than showing the inherent culture of violence and hate that laughs at the idea of words replacing bullets, was a prophetic view of what his own end would look like.

No one is asking the question - if Mer Chamis was murdered by Palestinian Arabs for no good reason, then perhaps the terrorism that he justified in his movie is also for no reason, and not because of anything Israel does?

Too bad that those who watch the film have no capacity to look beyond the rosy, romantic notion of Palestinian Arab peacefulness and see the simple facts: the Palestinian Arab kids who were exposed to Western values became terrorists anyway. The same kind of terrorists that killed Juliano himself.

(h/t Silke, Giulio Meotti)

What does agility look like, and how do we measure it?

Agility is about changing rapidly and therefore a truly agile project or organization should accommodate changes more easily. Consequently, improvements in agility are best measured by gauging the cost-of-change trends in software baselines. Improvements in these change trends are best achieved when integration testing largely precedes unit testing.

A well-accepted tenet of software engineering governance states, “The later you are in the life cycle, the more expensive things are to fix.” This iron law, an artifact of a waterfall culture, should not apply if you have transformed to agile software delivery with a well-architected system. Economic governance, a steering leadership style and “integration-first” priorities can realize breakthrough economic outcomes. You can release your teams from playing defense, mired in late scrap and rework, and unleash them to play offense, through more content, quality or timeliness. Measurably improving agility translates into economic advantage.

These bold assertions are the subject of my keynote on Day 1 of Innovate 2011. A provocative treatment of these topics is available in a paper published by the International Journal of Software Informatica in April 2011.

About the author:

Walker Royce is the Chief Software Economist in IBM Software Group. He is the author of three books: Eureka! Discover and enjoy the hidden power of the English language (Morgan James, 2011), The Economics of Software Development (Addison Wesley, 2009) and Software Project Management, A Unified Framework (Addison Wesley, 1998). He worked his first 16 years at TRW as a system engineer, architect, project manager and TRW Technical fellow. In 1994 Walker joined Rational and built the Rational services organization: a worldwide team of senior subject matter experts in software engineering and productivity improvement. Learn more about Walker on his Rational thought leadership page.

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A paper published in the February 2010 issue of Gastroenterology, from researchers at Baylor University Medical Center and Baylor Regional Transplant Institute in Dallas, Texas found;

The prevalence of hepatitis C cirrhosis and its complications will continue to increase through the next decade and will mostly affect those older than 60 years of age. The study noted HCC (liver cancer)  in people over the age of 65 with HCV infection had doubled during the last several years. This researchers suggested the chronic hepatitis C that we have become familiar with during the last 30 years, is much different than the hepatitis C we will come to know during the next decade or 2.

If only we knew then what we know now, the importance of treating this disease early is at the forefront, prior treatment was often unsuccessful in this population, as mentioned, with many patients not being diagnosed until after complications were present. With improved new agents showing better responses this will significantly reduce the impact of disease progression in the future. Quoted from the study;

"It is in the immediate best interest of patients, providers, insurers, and governments to promote guidelines and encourage better screening for infection and early antiviral treatment. Without such a proactive policy, it is likely that we will spend a considerable amount of resources during the next 2 or 3 decades dealing with liver failure in our elderly population."

View The Full Data at NATAP

Recently the EASL issued clinical practice guidelines on the management of hepatitis C infection, with the importance on detecting and treating  HCV before disease progression leads to complications, such as cirrhosis and possibly liver cancer.

Hepatitis C in the Elderly: Epidemiology, Natural History, and Treatment

In a 2009 study from the University of Maryland School of Medicine pubilshed at Medscape, entitled Hepatitis C in the Elderly: Natural History, concluded;

Elderly patients with chronic HCV infection have been an understudied population owing to several factors. These factors include exclusion of subjects older than 65 years of age in several clinical trials, reluctance to treat HCV infection in the elderly because of fear of dealing with more HCV therapy-related adverse effects, comorbidities and risk factors of aging such as decreased glomerular filtration rate that might cause more severe hemolytic anemia with ribavirin, and interactions of interferon and ribavirin with several potential geriatric drugs.^[34-37] Despite these challenges, previous studies have shown that HCV treatment generally was well tolerated by the elderly and there was little or no significant difference in SVR as well as therapy discontinuation rates secondary to adverse effects compared with younger age groups. However, there is a need for prospective randomized controlled trials to be conducted in HCV patients older than 65 years of age to better evaluate the safety and efficacy of HCV treatment in this age group. In addition, more epidemiologic studies are needed to better assess the prevalence as well as the risk factors of chronic HCV infection in elderly subjects.

View The Full Data Here

When the results started coming out of the telaprevir trials the "baby boomers" knew this was something big. Here is the latest from the EASL;

Also See; EASL Telaprevir Improved SVR Rates in People Whose Prior Treatment For Hepatitis C Was Unsuccessful

EASL: Telaprevir Helps in Prior HCV Tx Failures

By Walter Alexander, Contributing Writer, MedPage Today

Published: April 01, 2011

http://www.medpagetoday.com/Gastroenterology/Hepatitis/25668

Reviewed by Dori F. Zaleznik, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston.

Action Points
------------------------------------------------------------
Note that this study was published as an abstract and presented at a conference. These data and conclusions should be considered to be preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Explain that in this study, adding telaprevir to peginterferon alfa-2a plus ribavirin significantly increased sustained response rates for patients with genotype 1 hepatitis C virus infection who had previously failed the standard regimen.

Note that response rates were best for those who had relapsed following the two-drug standard therapy and better for those who had been partial responders compared with nonresponders.

BERLIN -- Adding telaprevir, an investigational oral protease inhibitor, to peginterferon alfa-2a and ribavirin substantially increased sustained response rates in patients with genotype 1 hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection who had previously failed the standard therapy, a researcher said here.

Results from the phase III REALIZE trial indicated that, among prior relapsers, sustained response rates with two telaprevir-containing regimens were 83% and 88%, compared with 24% for peginterferon alfa-2a and ribavirin plus placebo (both P<0.001), reported Stefan Zeuzem, MD, of Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Medical Center in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Lower sustained viral response rates were seen in patients who previously showed partial or no response to the two standard drugs, but they were still significantly better than in the placebo group (41% in both telaprevir arms versus 9% in the control group, P<0.001).

Zeuzem presented the findings here at the European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL) annual meeting.

"T plus P plus R was superior to P plus R alone in treatment-experienced populations including prior relapsers, partial responders, and null responders," he told attendees.

The findings confirm those of earlier studies, including one reported last year in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The current standard of care for HCV is the combination of peginterferon alfa-2a and ribavirin, Zeuzem explained, but it fails to achieved sustained viral responses in 60% of patients with HCV genotype 1.

REALIZE assigned 662 patients to three treatment arms in a 2:2:1 ratio:

T12/PR48: Telaprevir, peginterferon, and ribavirin for 12 weeks followed by placebo plus peginterferon and ribavirin for four weeks and then the two standard drugs alone for 32 weeks

LIT12/PR48: Placebo plus peginterferon and ribavirin for four weeks, followed by telaprevir and the standard drugs for 12 weeks, and then the standard drugs alone for 32 weeks

Pbo/PR48: 48 weeks of peginterferon plus ribavirin, with placebo for the first 16 weeks

The REALIZE primary endpoint was the proportion of these patients achieving sustained viral responses, defined as undetectable plasma HCV RNA at 24 weeks after the last planned intake of study medication. Whether the four-week lead-in with standard therapy alone made a difference in responses was a secondary objective.

Telaprevir was given at 750 mg every eight hours. Standard doses of the other drugs were used (180 mcg/week for peginterferon, 1,000 to 1,200 mg/day for ribavirin).

Null responders, partial respondersders, partial responders, and relapsers to previous peginterferon plus ribavirin constituted about 28%, 19%, and 54%, respectively, of the cohort. Nearly half of patients were in advanced stages of disease; 89% had a baseline HCV viral load of >800,000 IU/mL. Median age was about 51 and more than two-thirds were men.

Sustained viral responses were seen in 83% of the T12/PR48 group and 88% of the LIT12/PR48 patients versus 24% of the Pbo/PR48 group.

These results, Zeuzem pointed out, indicated that the four-week lead-in with standard therapy did not improve response rates compared with including telaprevir from the outset.

Responses rates of 41% were seen in the previous null or partial responders in both the T12/PR48 and LIT12/PR48 groups, compared with just 9% of the previously unresponsive Pbo/PR48 patients.

Zeuzem said that sustained response rates were higher for prior partial responders than for prior null responders.

Relapse rates were 10% each for the two telaprevir-containing arms and 23% for the Pbo/PR48 arm.

Among the most common adverse events during any treatment phase, fatigue occurred in 55% of the T12/PR48 patients, 50% of the LIT12/PR48 group, and 40% of the Pbo/PR48 group. Frequencies of pruritus were similar.

Anorectal symptoms (anal pruritus, anorectal discomfort, hemorrhoids) were reported in 28%, 22%, and 8% of the T12/PR48, LIT12/PR48, and Pbo/PR48 groups, respectively.

For each of these adverse events, and for anemia, rash, nausea and diarrhea, the incidence was more than 10% greater in the T12/PR48 arm than in the Pbo/PR48 arm.

Discontinuations of any study drug during telaprevir treatment occurred in 29% of patients. Rash and anemia were the most common adverse effects associated with drug stoppage.

"These are really exciting results for this particularly difficult-to-treat group of patients," commented Mark Thursz, MD, a hepatologist at Imperial College in London and vice-secretary of the EASL.

"Over 60% achieved an SVR. Compared with patients who previously relapsed after P-plus-R treatment, those who are partial responders did less well, and the null group was disappointing, but that was not entirely surprising."

A marketing application for telaprevir has been filed with the FDA, which is giving it priority review. The agency's deadline for a decision is May 23.

Zeuzem disclosed relationships with Abbott, Achillion, Anadys, BMS, Gilead, iTherX, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, Pharmasset, Roche, Santaris, Tibotec, and Vertex.

Thursz declared he had no relevant industry relationships.

Primary source: European Association for the Study of the Liver

Source reference:
Zeuzem S, et al "REALIZE trial final results: telaprevir-based regimen for genotype 1 hepatitis C virus infection in patients with prior null response, partial response or relapse to peginterferon/ribavirin" EASL 2011; Abstract 192.

As for boceprevir, from HIV and Hepatitis

Boceprevir Helps Hepatitis C Patients with Cirrhosis

SUMMARY: Chronic hepatitis C patients with advanced liver fibrosis or cirrhosis were more likely to achieve a cure when they added boceprevir to standard therapy, according to a report this week at EASL 2011.

Of interest;

Prevalence and Challenges of Liver Diseases in Patients with Chronic Hepatitis C Virus Infection :
Discusses disease progression, fibrosis, cirrhosis and liver cancer in the HCV population.

In closing I wish you all a safe journey, trust your instincts, find a specialist, and seek out your option's.

In the wake of continuing debate between publishers and authors regarding the establishment of fair and reasonable royalty rates for the emerging E-Book platforms, Hannover House (http://hannoverhouse.com/index.php ) has announced a new standard rate of thirty percent of E-Book net revenues for authors. This new rate for all Hannover House authors surpasses the current industry standard of twenty-five percent E-Book royalties being offered by most major publishers.

Initial E-Book releases from Hannover House will launch in June, and include two non-fiction titles from author Barr McClellan, and two fiction thrillers from author Vivian Schilling. McClellan's "Made in the USA" was published in hardcover format in March of 2010, and his New York Times Bestseller, "Blood, Money and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK," was originally published in September 2003. Schilling's acclaimed thriller "Quietus" was originally released in hardcover format in January 2002, and her debut thriller "Sacred Prey" was originally published in September 1994. Both "Blood, Money and Power" and "Quietus" have sold more than 100,000 units each in various print formats, and are expected to be significant sellers again once released on the various E-Book platforms.

"It was important for Hannover House to make a statement that we stand with our authors in support of fair and reasonable royalties for new media formats," said Eric Parkinson, C.E.O. of Hannover House. "E-Books provide publishers with greater efficiencies and lower costs of production, freight and storage, so it only makes sense that the author's share should increase, not decrease as other publishers have claimed. If we don't compensate the authors fairly for these emerging formats, the publishing industry will jeopardize the supply of quality material by removing the financial incentives for authors."

The launch of Hannover's initial E-Book titles will be promoted with ads in the New York Times Book Review, Publisher's Weekly and multiple internet sites targeted to reach avid readers.

"These royalty rates will not jeopardize the profitability of our publishing division," said Parkinson. "We believe that paying a fair royalty will build author loyalty as well as encourage other, established authors to consider Hannover House for their future publishing needs."

In other news, Hannover House announced the creation of the new position of "Publisher - Editor" to administer all acquisition and release activities for the company's book division. A search for qualified candidates has commenced, with the goal of having this key managerial post in place prior to the Book Expo America convention in late May. Hannover House book titles are available through most major book retailers, including Barnes and Noble, Borders Group, Hudson Group, Books-A-Million, Hastings and all major internet book selling sites.

Thanks to Colin Percival you can try FreeBSD on Amazon EC2! According to Colin's blog more is to come, but for now you can try FreeBSD 8.2-RC1 and FreeBSD 9.0-CURRENT.

I decided to try spinning up 8.2-RC1. I used the command line tools for Ubuntu rather than the Web interface.

richard@neely:~$ sudo apt-get install ec2-api-tools

richard@neely:~$ export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=$HOME/.ec2/pk-GO7RNG3LZTNPOUD5TH4YRCA4LFNGP5SB.pem

richard@neely:~$ export EC2_CERT=$HOME/.ec2/cert-GO7RNG3LZTNPOUD5TH4YRCA4LFNGP5SB.pem

richard@neely:~$ export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/

Now I check my security settings and authorize my IP.

richard@neely:~$ ec2-authorize default -p 22 -s [MYIP]/32
GROUP  default 
PERMISSION  default ALLOWS tcp 22 22 FROM CIDR [MYIP]/32

richard@neely:~$ ec2-describe-group default

GROUP 162896439853 default default group

PERMISSION 162896439853 default ALLOWS all   FROM USER 162896439853 GRPNAME default

PERMISSION 162896439853 default ALLOWS tcp 22 22 FROM CIDR [MYIP]/32

Next I start the 8.2-RC1 AMI.

richard@neely:~$ ec2-run-instances ami-d29b6abb -k taosecuritykey -t t1.micro

RESERVATION r-a54c17cf 162896439853 default
INSTANCE i-44bda629 ami-d29b6abb   pending taosecuritykey
 0  t1.micro 2010-12-28T15:21:41+0000 us-east-1b
 aki-407d9529monitoring-disabled     ebs 

After a few seconds I check to see if it is running.

 
richard@neely:~$ ec2-describe-instances i-44bda629
RESERVATION r-a54c17cf 162896439853 default
INSTANCE i-44bda629 ami-d29b6abb ec2-50-16-108-39.compute-1.amazonaws.com
 ip-10-243-6-109.ec2.internal running taosecuritykey 0  t1.micro
 2010-12-28T15:21:41+0000
 us-east-1b aki-407d9529   monitoring-disabled 50.16.108.39
 10.243.6.109   ebs  

BLOCKDEVICE /dev/sda1 vol-200caa48 2010-12-28T15:21:44.000Z 
BLOCKDEVICE /dev/sdb vol-220caa4a 2010-12-28T15:21:44.000Z 

Now I connect to it.

richard@neely:~$ ssh -i .ssh/taosecuritykey.pem root@ec2-50-16-108-39.compute-1.amazonaws.com

Copyright (c) 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994
 The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.

FreeBSD 8.2-RC1 (XEN) #1: Fri Dec 24 05:49:26 UTC 2010

Welcome to FreeBSD!

Before seeking technical support, please use the following resources:

o  Security advisories and updated errata information for all releases are
   at http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/ - always consult the ERRATA section
   for your release first as it's updated frequently.

o  The Handbook and FAQ documents are at http://www.FreeBSD.org/ and,
   along with the mailing lists, can be searched by going to
   http://www.FreeBSD.org/search/.  If the doc distribution has
   been installed, they're also available formatted in /usr/share/doc.

If you still have a question or problem, please take the output of
`uname -a', along with any relevant error messages, and email it
as a question to the questions@FreeBSD.org mailing list.  If you are
unfamiliar with FreeBSD's directory layout, please refer to the hier(7)
manual page.  If you are not familiar with manual pages, type `man man'.

You may also use sysinstall(8) to re-enter the installation and
configuration utility.  Edit /etc/motd to change this login announcement.

ip-10-243-6-109# uname -a

FreeBSD ip-10-243-6-109 8.2-RC1 FreeBSD 8.2-RC1 #1: Fri Dec 24 05:49:26 UTC 2010    
 root@chch.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/i386/usr/src/sys/XEN  i386

ip-10-243-6-109# df -h
Filesystem    Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/da1s1    4.8G    193M    4.3G     4%    /
devfs         1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
/dev/da0      1.0G     20M    945M     2%    /boot/grub

When done I disconnect and terminate the instance. I could have also just shut down the machine within SSH if I wanted to use the instance in the future.

richard@neely:~$ ec2-terminate-instances i-44bda629
INSTANCE i-44bda629 running shutting-down

That's really cool! Many thanks to Colin for his work on this. If you want to support development on this sort of project, consider donating to the FreeBSD Foundation as Colin suggests in his blog.
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Move follows outrage over Belfast killing in May with 'critical friend' expecting statement in new year

The Ulster Volunteer Force is to make a statement in the new year that it will no longer be a paramilitary force. A negotiator who has been asked to help the UVF dissolve has told the Guardian he expects the loyalist terror group to announce "very soon" that it is no longer an underground army.

The group is a proscribed organisation in the Republic of Ireland and a designated terrorist organisation in the United Kingdom.

This year has been a PR disaster for the UVF, with the leader of its political allies in the Progressive Unionist Party resigning. Dawn Purvis stood down from the PUP after the UVF murdered Belfast man Bobby Moffett on the Shankill Road in May.

There was public outrage over the killing and hundreds turned up at Moffett's funeral in a mass act of defiance against the UVF.

Since then the UVF leadership has contacted a number of individuals known as "critical friends" whom the organisation has sought to help them wind down the paramilitary group for good.

At the centre of this process is a Dublin-born peace activist turned non-subscribing Presbyterian minister who is also the unofficial Christian chaplain for Ulster's gay community.

The Rev Chris Hudson told the Guardian that he now believed the UVF leadership was serious about dismantling its paramilitary structures, seven months after the Moffett murder.

"I am confident that something major will happen. I would be very surprised if something tangible doesn't take place very soon. Because it can't just be said, it has to be done as proof that they are going out of existence as a military organisation."

On his role in helping the UVF disband as a terror group, Hudson said: "They want some people whom they call their 'critical friends' to help them. It may be a bizarre term but they see people like me as someone they have known since 1993 who they think has never tried to spin anything they have said.

"I have listened carefully to them and I have been honest with them. My instinct tells me that they are going to do it. I am worried, I am worried because I did stop believing them, but in my recent dealings with them I saw a cohesiveness and a determination across their ranks to get to this endgame."

Hudson said that he was taken to one meeting in Belfast recently where there were dozens of UVF members engaged in workshop-style meetings all discussing a single agenda – what they will do after the organisation is entirely disbanded.

He admitted, however, that the organisation's leaders may not be able to bring everyone with them. Many living in working class loyalist areas are sceptical about the UVF dissolving and suspect that some of its members cling on to the organisation to shore up their power in their communities.

"When you are moving forward waving a white flag for peace it would be better if everyone in your ranks were following you.

"But you have to realise there will be some who for reasons of selfish interests, or even being unable to deal with a world beyond the UVF, will not want to let go.

"Those people will simply have to be left behind and they know this; the UVF leadership know there is no logical reason why they should be still in any way active."

He also revealed that during his latest discussions with the UVF, its leadership accepted that the dissident republicans do not want to attack Ulster loyalists at this stage. However, he said there was a residual fear that the anti-ceasefire republicans might in future go on the offensive against loyalists.

Hudson has a track record in his secret talks with the UVF from the early 1990s.

In 1993 he became a clandestine link between the UVF and the Irish government.

Through Hudson the loyalists got assurances from Dublin that the Irish state had no interest in "ganging up" on unionism in a pan-nationalist front with Sinn Fein and the SDLP in the north.

The former trade unionist was later given an MBE for his work in campaigning against IRA attacks on the Dublin to Belfast railway and his role in opening a dialogue between the UVF and the Irish government.

Despite an upsurge in dissident republican violence in 2010 both the UVF and the larger Ulster Defence Association have insisted they will not be provoked into going back to armed campaigns.

Past atrocities

• Several car bombs in Dublin and Monaghan bombs in 1974, which killed 33 civilians and wounded almost 300.

• The Shankill Butchers, a unit of the UVF on Belfast's Shankill Road tortured and killed innocent Catholics picked up at night in the city. The reign of terror ended in 1979 with the capture of most of the gang; its leader, Lenny Murphy, was shot dead three years later by the IRA, having been set up for assassination by a rival loyalist, UDA extortionist Jim Craig.

• Loughinisland massacre in 1994, when the UVF shot dead six men in a bar while watching Ireland's opening World Cup game; one was aged 87, the oldest victim of the Troubles.

The go-between

Chris Hudson has been an unusual choice as secret go-between to the Irish government and the Ulster Volunteer Force. Although from a republican family with links to the old IRA, he made it his mission to understand and explain the Ulster loyalist perspective while remaining opposed to its violent campaigns.

A former Dublin trade unionist, he was introduced to the late David Ervine, an advocate of the peace process and one of the key thinkers in the loyalist terror group, in 1993. They established a strong personal relationship and agreed to open up a clandestine dialogue with the Irish government, to assure the loyalists that there would be no ganging up on Unionists in any pan-nationalist front.

Hudson won the trust and respect of the UVF and a number of key Irish government officials through that process.

Perhaps, however, the most unusual aspect of Hudson's work with the UVF is the fact that the organisation was responsible for the death of one of his friends. In the 1970s Hudson was close to Fran O'Toole, an Irish pop star with the Miami Showband. O'Toole and other band members were murdered by a UVF unit in 1975 after their van was stopped on the way back from a gig in Northern Ireland.

Hudson often reminds his UVF contacts that among the hundreds they killed during the Troubles was one of his closest friends. And he has also often made it clear that his work is intended to prevent a repetition of the past killing.

Yifan Hou is Women World Chess Champion! (UPDATE)
By Chessdom

Yifan Hou is Women World Chess Champion 2010! The Chinese prodigy defeated her teammate Ruan Lufei after 4 classical and 4 tiebreak games of exciting chess. In the classical games Yifan Hou took early advantage by winning game 2 with black, but Ruan Lufei came back in the last moment to equalize the score. The tiebreak started with a draw which Yifan Hou could turn into a win with precise play, but that did not affect her play afterwards, as she won tiebreak games 2 and 4 to claim the World Champion Title.

Congratulations!

Hou Yifan became the youngest ever World Chess Champion in history (men's or women's) by winning the Women's World Championship in Hatay, Turkey at the age of 16.

Turkey is a country that brings particular luck and energy to Hou Yifan. She won the Ataturk Chess tournament a full point ahead of competition there. In October 2007, she competed at the 12th European Club Cup in Kemer, Turkey on board two for team Southern Ural Cheliabinsk.

In August 2008 she competed in the World Junior Chess Championship held at Gazientep, Turkey where she competed as the only female in the boy's section for the first time in her career and was the 16th seed on the entrant's list. Hou finished joint 3rd-7th on 9/13 (+6 =6 -1) achieving a performance rating of 2661, in the process obtaining her second confirmed GM norm.

At the age of 12, she became and still holds the record for being the youngest ever player to participate at the FIDE Women's World Championship (Yekaterinburg 2006), and at the Chess Olympiad (Torino 2006).

She achieved the titles of Woman FIDE Master in January 2004, Woman Grandmaster in January 2007, International Master in September 2008, for reaching the final of the Women's World Championship.

Earlier, in June 2007, she became China's youngest ever National Women's Champion, and in September 2008 she became the youngest ever finalist for the Women's World Championship title.

Hou Yifan became the youngest ever female in history (at the age of 14 years 6 months) to qualify for the title of Grandmaster. This happened in 2008 and ever since her chess star is shining on the horizon and all women top lists.

In the most recent (November 2010) FIDE rating list her world rankings are: the no. 1 girl player, the no. 3 female player, and the no. 2 player of either sex born in 1994 or later.

Despite having full 45 articles on Chessdom.com dedicated to Yifan Hou and her success at multiple events, it would have never been possible to follow her career without the hard work of multiple chess enthusiasts updating her Wikipedia page on a regular basis.

Career of Hou Yifan

Hou started playing chess regularly at the age of 6, but became fascinated with the game when she was 3 years old. "I took up chess because I was fascinated by the pieces - I just liked it. In the future, I want to be a professional chess player or maybe study to be a doctor", she said in 2007.

Hou's father, Hou Xuejian, a magistrate, often took his young daughter to a bookstore after dinner. He noticed that the little girl liked to stare at glass chess pieces behind the window. He later bought his daughter her first chess set. Only weeks later, the 3-year-old was able to beat her father and grandmother. In 1999, her father found a chess mentor for his 5-year-old daughter.

The teacher, IM Tong Yuanming, was a member of China's national chess team. Two weeks later, Tong told Hou Xuejian that his girl was an unusual talent, showing "strong confidence, distinguished memory, calculating ability and fast reaction." The young girl's talent impressed many people.

Ye Jiangchuan, chief coach of the Chinese National Chess Teams (men's and women's teams), believes that Hou has a bright future. When she played against Ye for the first time in 2003, the chess master was surprised that the 9-year-old could identify almost all of his weak moves. "Then I knew she was an exceptional genius", Ye said. That year, Hou became the youngest member of the national team and won first place at the World Youth Championship for girls under age 10. In June 2007, she became China's youngest ever national champion.

She was admitted to the National Chess Center, an academy for young talented players from all over the country, in Beijing when she was 10, and has leading Chinese grandmasters Ye Jiangchuan and Yu Shaoteng as her trainers.

In order to better support her chess career, her family relocated to Beijing in 2003, leaving a small town about 12 hours by train from the capital. Hou's mother, a former nurse, accompanies her daughter on the international tournament circuit.

She is homeschooled and lists her interests as reading and studying, and her favorite chess player as Bobby Fischer.

Chess writer Leonard Barden has said that she could rival Judit Polgar as the best ever female player.

Hou Yifan in 2003

Hou Yifan's first major tournament was on August 31 - September 12, 2003 at the Chinese Team Chess Championship (Men's) in Tianjin. She scored 3/7 and had a 2246 performance rating.

Her first international tournament brought early success when she came first (9½/11; +8 =3 -0) in the girl's under-10 section of the World Youth Championship in Halkidiki, Greece in 23 October-2 November 2003.

In November (15th-26th), she made her debut in the National Women's Chess Championship, held at Shanwei, Guangdong. She finished in 14th place with 3½/9. Her performance rating was 2202.

Hou Yifan in 2004

On 1 January 2004, she received her first International FIDE rating of 2168, which automatically qualified her for the title of Woman FIDE Master (>2100 Elo points).

In April, she competed at the Chinese Team Chess Championship (Women's) in Jinan, Shandong. She scored 1½/7 having faced an average opposition rating (Rc) of 2316.

In 3–14 November, she came in third place (9/11; +8 =2 -1, tied for first on points) and won bronze this time in the boy's under-10 section of the World Youth Championship, held in Heraklio, Crete.

At the 11th Asian Women's Championship that took place in Beirut, Lebanon 4–11 December 2004, she came 11th with a score of 4½/9 (+4 =1 -4; TPR 2278). Wang Yu of China won the event with 6½/9.

Hou Yifan in 2005

In February, she competed at the 4th Aeroflot Open (Group C) in Moscow, where she scored 2/5.

In April, she came to the notice of the international chess community for her fifth place and a score of 7/11 (+6 =2 -3) (tied for fourth) at the 3 Arrows Cup 2005 ladies tournament in Jinan, China. In that tournament, she defeated international master Almira Skripchenko and achieved a performance rating of 2393.

From 28 June - 6 July at the 2nd China-France Youth Match, which took place in Shenzhen, Guangdong, Hou Yifan scored 3/8 (+2 =2 -4). The Chinese team (Zhou Jianchao, Zhao Jun, Zhao Xue and Hou) won the match 19-13.

In 18–29 July at the World Youth Chess Championship in Belfort, France, Hou Yifan came 5th in the Boy's Under-12 Section with 8/11. Earlier in the month at the Festival Open International des Jeunes in Saint-Lo, France she came second out of 75 players with 6/8, behind Wen Yang.

In October, she managed to qualify for the World Women's Chess Championship to be held in March 2006. Only rated 2220 and ranked women's number 28 in her own country, she did so by winning the Chinese Women's Zonal (3.5) tournament, ahead of a group of well known Chinese players. She scored 6/9 points with a performance rating of 2401.

The sixth World Team Chess Championship was staged in Beersheva, Israel in 31 October-11 November. China fielded two teams - the men's and women's, which was only the second time in the championship history where a women's team competed in what has traditionally been a male team event. This was Hou Yifan's first major team tournament and she was the youngest participant there at 11 years of age. She played as second reserve and finished with 0/3. The Chinese women's team drew one match and lost all their others (+0 =1 -7) finishing last. The tournament was won by Russia, with China (men's) coming in second and Armenia third.

In December Hou came second at the China Women Selective Tournament in Beijing for the 37th Chess Olympiad to be held in May–June 2006 in Turin, Italy. She scored 16½/28 and gained a whopping 121 elo-points. She made the Olympiad team with Wang Yu and Shen Yang, the other top three finishers.

Hou Yifan in 2006

Hou proved that her performance at the 3 Arrows Cup 2005 was not a fluke by reaching the third round (the last 16) of the Women's World Chess Championship in March 2006. Despite being rated 2269 and seeded 56th out of 64 players, she defeated IM Nadezhda Kosintseva (rated 2480) of Russia 1½-½ in the first round, then the former 2000 European champion WGM Natalia Zhukova (2432) of Ukraine 2-0 in the 2nd round, but lost to IM Nino Khurtsidze (2430) of Georgia 0-2 in the third to post a decent performance rating of 2504.

In May–June 2006, China came third winning bronze at the 37th Chess Olympiad in Turin, Italy. Hou Yifan at her Olympiad debut confirmed her talent with a score of 11/13 (+10, =2, -1), all played on the third board, and finished with a performance rating of 2596.For her winning percentage of 84.6%, she won a silver medal for fourth (reserve) board performance, and her performance rating of 2596 was the third highest overall.

The Chinese Championships for men and women took place in Wuxi, Jiangsu 25 June - 6 July 2006. Ni Hua took the men's title and Li Ruofan the women's. Hou Yifan came fourth in the women's category V (2369) event with a score of 7/11 (+5 =4 -2) and a performance rating of 2477.

In July–August, she had a lacklustre performance at what has been traditionally the strongest women's tournament - the North Urals Cup in Krasnoturinsk, Russia. Although seeded third, she failed to win a game scoring 3/9 (+0 =6 -3) with a performance rating of 2357. She finished 8th out of 10 players.

The China-Russia Summit Match saw two double round robin Scheveningen format events, one for men and one for women (cat. VIII (2444)), taking place in Ergun, Mongolia 10–20 August 2006. Russia won the men's event 26½-23½ but China won the women's section 28-22, therefore in the combined standings China beat Russia 51½-48½. Hou Yifan was the highest scoring female player on tiebreak with 6½/10 (+5 =3 -2).

China and France played for the Trophée MULTICOMS in Paris 4–9 September 2006. This was also a Scheveningen team match with six men and three women in the teams. France edged out China 20-16 in the men's event. The women's section was a complete mismatch in terms of Elo ratings in favour of the Chinese and they confirmed this over the board winning 12½-5½. The overall result was China 28½ France 25½. Hou Yifan was again the highest scoring female player with 5/6 and a performance rating of 2498.

In October in Yerevan, Armenia at the World Junior Chess Championship (Girl's section) she went on to take second place on tiebreak with a score of 9/12 (+7 =4 -2; tied for first on points) behind her compatriot Shen Yang. Her rating performance was 2469.

At the start of 2007 in January, Hou achieved a respectable fifth place in Group C (Cat. 10, 2486) of the Corus Chess Tournament. She scored 7/13 (+4 =6 -3) with a performance rating of 2513. It was at this tournament when she earned her WGM title, formally conferred by FIDE in late January 2007. She achieved her WGM norms at the following tournaments:

* 2005 Zonal 3.5 Women's Championship in Beijing (October 20–25, 2005); score 6/9
* 2006 37th Chess Olympiad in Turin (May 21-June 4, 2006); score 7/9
* 2006 Chinese Championship (Women's) in Wuxi (June 25-July 6, 2006); score 7/11

In her first A1 Group event at the Aeroflot Open in February 2007 a few weeks before her 13th birthday, she started well with two wins out of two defeating first Russian IM, Nikita Vitiugov rated 2604, and then the former (2001) European Champion, GM Emil Sutovsky of Israel rated 2629. However in the third round she was defeated by the Russian Championship runnerup, Dmitry Jakovenko, and managed only one draw in her next five games. She rallied in the final round with a victory against the strong Greek grandmaster, Vasilios Kotronias and finished with a respectable 3½/9.

In March, at the 1st Ruy Lopez International Festival (cat. XV (2607)) in Zafra, the birth place of Ruy López de Segura, Hou suffered a bad performance finishing in last place with 2/7 (+1 =2 -4). Her performance rating was 2462.

In April Hou Yifan came second at the China Women Selective Tournament in Ningbo for the 2007 Asian Indoor Games to be held in October. She scored 8/14 (+6 =4 -4).

In 1–11 May 2007, in Dagomys at the 8th Russian Team Chess Championship (Women's), she played for Southern Ural Chelyabinsk on board one and scored 6½/10 (+5 =3 -2). In 19–30 May 2007 in Ekaterinburg, the 1st World Women's Team Chess Championship was held. Hou Yifan was part of the winning China national team that also included Zhao Xue, Ruan Lufei, Shen Yang, and Huang Qian. Hou Yifan played in every round on board two and scored 7½/9 (+7 =1 -1) winning the gold medal for that board. Her performance rating was 2559.

In June 2007, she won her first Chinese Women's Chess Championship in Chongqing, breaking WGM Qin Kanying's—who won her first title at the age of 14 in 1988—record as the youngest champion with a score of 9/11 (+7 =4 -0). Second and third place went to Zhao Xue and Shen Yang, respectively.

In July, she improved on the previous year's performance at the North Urals Cup in Krasnoturinsk, finishing in 7th place out of 10 players. She scored 4/9 (+3 =2 -4) with a performance rating of 2436. The tournament was won by Zhu Chen and second placed was Zhao Xue.

In 4–15 August, she competed in what was then her strongest closed tournament - the 5th Győrgy Marx Memorial (Cat. 14, 2582) in Paks, Hungary. Being the lowest rated player and the only non-Grandmaster (out of Pentala Harikrishna, Peter Acs, Csaba Balogh, Ferenc Berkes and Viktor Korchnoi), she finished in last place in the double round robin event with 3/10 (+1 =4 -5; TPR 2444).

At the UK-China Match in Liverpool 3–9 September 2007, China had a comfortable 28-20 win against the UK team. Hou Yifan competed in the men's team and scored 2½/6 (+1 =3 -2) with a performance rating of 2540. The average rating of her opposition (Rc) was 2598.

In late September, she came first at the 2007 Chinese Women's Zonal (3.5) tournament in Tianjin with a score of 8/9 (+7 =2 -0).

In October 2007, she competed at the 12th European Club Cup in Kemer, Turkey on board two for team Southern Ural Cheliabinsk, which came in at fourth place in the women's tournament. She came 5th in the individual women's standings with a score of 5/7 (+3 =4 -0) and a performance rating of 2547.

From October 26 to November 3, she competed for Team China at the 2nd Asian Indoor Games in Macau. The national team won team gold in the classic chess mixed team event with 11 match points (18½ game points out of 24) The Chinese team were Zhao Xue, Xu Yuhua, Hou Yifan, Wang Hao, Ni Hua and Bu Xiangzhi. Hou Yifan also won an individual gold medal for her board two display with a score of 5½/6 (+5 =1 -0; 91.7%) and a performance rating of 2596.

Hou Yifan in 2007

This year she began a concerted attempt to become a grandmaster (GM).

In the January Corus 2008 chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee, Hou competed in Group B where she finished in a tie for 7-10th place (9th by tiebreak) achieving 6/13 (+3 -4 =6) with a performance rating of 2598 and victories over three grandmasters, including a 23 move win over Nigel Short.

In February 2008, Hou gained her first Grandmaster norm (GM norm) with a performance rating of 2605 at the Aeroflot Open in Moscow by finishing in 31st place with a score of 4½/9 (+2 =5 -2).

This was followed in March 2008 with a victory at the 1st Atatürk International Women Masters Chess Tournament (cat. IX (2461)) in Istanbul, Turkey where she finished a point ahead of the rest of the field on 7/9 with a tournament performance rating of 2674. She did not lose a single game having won 5 games and drawn 4. Her victory in this tournament also provided her a GM norm that was not used in her official grandmaster title application. This GM norm was conditional on FIDE ratifying then WGM Zhao Xue's attainment of her GM title.

In April 2008, she competed in Mérida, Spain at the 2nd Ruy Lopez Chess Festival tournament. In the category XV (2616) round robin event she failed to gain a GM norm after finishing in 7th place out of 8 players with 2/7 (+1, =2, -4) and a rating performance of 2467.

In May–June 2008, she became the Chinese Women's Champion for the second time running with 9/11 points (+7 =4 -0) in Beijing and having a performance of 2599.

At the July 2008 First Saturday GM Tournament in Budapest, Hou Yifan was the top seed but came in second place with 9/12 narrowly missing a GM norm by half a point. Her performance rating was 2574.

In August 2008 she competed in the World Junior Chess Championship held at Gazientep, Turkey where she competed as the only female in the boy's section for the first time in her career and was the 16th seed on the entrant's list. Hou finished joint 3rd-7th on 9/13 (+6 =6 -1) achieving a performance rating of 2661, in the process obtaining her second confirmed GM norm.

In September 2008, FIDE referred to her as a "GM-elect", indicating that her Atatürk norm had been confirmed. This means Hou Yifan qualified for the title of grandmaster in August at the age of 14 years 6 months 2 days, making her one of the youngest grandmasters in history, and the youngest female. She is also one of the very few players to achieve the Grandmaster title without first gaining the International Master title, and the first female player to do so.

She competed in her second Women's World Chess Championship in August - September 2008 where she finished as runner-up. She qualified by being one of the six highest rated players from the average of the July 2006-January 2007 period. In this 2008 Championship knockout tournament held in Nalchik, Russia, she was seeded no. 3 out of 64 players. She defeated WGM Mona Khaled (Egypt) 2-0 in the first round, and WGM Bathuyang Mongontuul (Mongolia) 2-0 in the second. In third round, she had to go to rapid playoffs to eventually beat IM Elena Sedina (Italy) 3-1 (1-1, 2-0). In the quarterfinals she won against Armenian IM Lilit Mkrtchian by 1½-½. In the semifinals she defeated Indian GM Humpy Koneru, the no. 2 seed, by 4-2 (1-1, 1-1, 2-0). She lost the final to Alexandra Kosteniuk by 2½-1½. In this tournament she became the youngest ever finalist for the Women's World Championship title. By reaching the final, she automatically gained the International Master (IM) title and a "runner-up 9-game grandmaster norm", her fourth GM norm overall.

As a member of the Chinese team at the 1st World Mind Sports Games in Beijing on 3–18 October, she won the bronze medal in the Women's Individual Blitz event, the gold medal in the Mixed Pairs Rapid event (with Ni Hua), the silver medal in the Women's Teams Blitz event, and the gold medal in the Women's Teams Rapid event.

She played in the Cap d'Agde Rapid tournament that was held from October 24 to November 1, losing to former world champion Anatoly Karpov in a tiebreaker match at the end of the qualifying stage, despite winning the second tiebreak game.

At the 38th Chess Olympiad in Dresden from 12 to 25 November, she played at no. 1 board in the Chinese women's team. Although her team did not win a prize, she had some consolation in winning an individual board prize of third place. She played in every round and her final result was 7½/11 (+5, =5, -1), performance rating of 2563.

At the 79th FIDE Congress, held on 16–26 November 2008 in Dresden, Germany, her GM title was approved making her the 27th Grandmaster of China. Her three approved GM norms were:

* Aeroflot Open Tournament A1 in Moscow, February 2008; score 4½/9 (requirement=4½ pts)
* World Junior Chess Championship in Gaziantep, August 2008; score 9/13 (requirement=8 pts)
* World Women's Chess Championship in Nalchik, September 2008; reached the final round (equivalent to a 9-game GM norm)

Hou Yifan in 2009

Hou Yifan competed in the Grandmaster Group B of the 71st Corus chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee, from January 16 to February 1, 2009. She was seeded 12th out of 14 players and finished in 9th to 10th place with a performance rating of 2620.

On March 7–19, she competed at the FIDE Women's Grand Prix Tournament in Istanbul, scoring 8/11 (+6=4-1) with a 2648 performance and finishing third.

From May 12–23, she competed at the 8th Asia Continental Chess Championship at the Subic Exhibition and Convention Center, Subic Bay Freeport Zone in Olongapo City, Philippines.She scored 7½/11 with a 2640 performance and finished 7th out of 86 on tiebreak. By finishing in the top 10 she qualified for the 2009 World Cup.

In 9–15 August at the Jubilee Open, Zürich, she won the "best female prize" by coming joint 17th with 6½/9.

In 19 August-1 September at the NH Hotels Risings Stars vs Experienced, Amsterdam, she finished with a score of 3½/10.

Hou Yifan in 2010

In January, she finished with 4½/9 at the Moscow Open.

In February, she finished with 4/9 at the Aeroflot Open.

In April, she won the third Kuala Lumpur Open.

In August she won the 2010 Women's Grand Prix in Mongolia.

In November, she won the women's individual gold medal in the 16th Asian Games in Guangzhou, China. She finished with 8½/9 and with a performance rating of 2798. She won another gold medal from the women's team event, representing China as the first board, along with her team mates Ju Wenjun, Zhao Xue, Huang Qian and Wang Yu, beating Uzbekistan 2½-1½ in the final.

In December she won the Women's World Chess Championship 2010 in Hatay, Turkey, making her the youngest women's world champion in history. Her compatriot Ruan Lufei was her opponent in the finals, where the score was tied 2-2. Hou won the title by beating Ruan 3-1 during the rapid playoffs.

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Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Rednod, GigaOM, Human 2.0, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (The Book Oven, LibriVox, iambik, Media Hacks) and I decided that every week or so the three of us are going to share one link for each other (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person "must see".

Check out these six links that we're recommending to one another:

1. The Things He Carried - The Atlantic. "It's the holidays, which means travel for many of us. In Europe, vacationers are frozen to their respective runways and train tracks; here in North America, we're wringing our hands about the TSA and travel delays. In this 2008 exposé in The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg (helped by Bruce Schneier, a rare voice of sanity in the security world) pranks airport security. His mischief is boundless: waving Hezbollah flags under the noses of guards, making fake boarding passes, and mimicking TSA squiggles to clear security. Yikes. Safe travels indeed." (Alistair for Hugh).
2. A New 'Miracle on 34th St.,' This Time Without Macy's - The New York Times. "It's time for some holiday spirit. Here's some stuff I learned this week. First, the 1947 Christmas classic, Miracle on 34th Street, may be the all-time best product placement, with actors vowing loyalty to the store on the silver screen. In the original, Macy's role was purely to make the story seem real, but the company bowed out of the 1994 remake -- possibly because a sub-plot involving the store's hard times was too close to the truth. This forced filmmakers to invent a fake store ("Coles") and even a fake parade." (Alistair for Mitch).
3. How to create a startup country - Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence. "I read a post recently about a lack of utopian vision. Well here is one, coming from Patri Friedman, grandson of free-market theorist, Milton Friedman. The idea goes something like this: government innovation isn't keeping up with the needs of society. Could the solution come from competition from innovative start-ups? That is, government start-ups? Friedman calls for a movement of Seasteading... building floating, autonomous city-states, that create societies from scratch. What could possibly go wrong? (And those of you who are novelists and screenwriters: start your engines. The plotline possibilities are endless)." (Hugh for Alistair).
4. Who Writes Wikipedia? - Raw Thought. "This is an old article, but it was fascinating. The general theory of Wikipedia is that a small group does the majority of the work. But this article, written in 2006 (!), analyzed some data on Wikipedia articles and found something quite different: while the majority of *edits* are done by a small number (about a thousand dedicated people), the majority of *content* comes from infrequent users who tend to contribute a significant amount to one article. Not sure if that is surprising, but it's always fun reading about Wikipedia." (Hugh for Mitch).
5. Data Visualization to Make Your Media Social - Search Engine Watch. "We tend to think of data as bits and bytes or zeroes and ones or something that might look halfway decent when displayed on either an Excel file or in some kind of chart. Infographics was one big deal this past year, but the lesson is deeper: if you're really looking to make an impression, stop thinking about your data in terms of text and start thinking about your data in terms of how to best display the information so anyone looking at it can understand what the data is 'saying.'" (Mitch for Alistair).
6. Why Blogs (Still) Aren't Dead...No Matter What You've Heard - The Regator. "Just because Mashable runs with a story, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's one hundred percent accurate. It's also important to know that they can (and have) changed the title of Blog posts when the facts of their stories have been called into question. That's only half of the story in this very interesting Blog post about what is really happening in the Blogosphere. The net result: Blogs still matter (no kidding) and - if you just dig a little bit - you'll also start uncovering that the content and interactions is getting better and better from a context and quality standpoint." (Mitch for Hugh).

Now it's your turn: in the comment section below pick one thing that you saw this week that inspired you and share it.

Tags: alistair croll bitcurrent bite-sized edits blog blogosphere bruce schneier complete web monitoring data visualization excel free-market theory gigaom great links hugh mcguire human 20 infographic jeffrey goldberg kurzweil accelerating intelligence librivox link linkbait macys managing bandwidth mashable media hacks milton friedman miracle on 34th street patri friedman raw thought rednod search engine watch seasteading security social media startup the atlantic the book oven the new york times the regator travel tsa wikipedia