Women's Struggles

Varias municipalidades en España han optado por esquivar los debates parlamenta-rios sobre la prostitución en sí, incluyendo la venta de sexo en las actividades prohibidas por ordenanzas cívicas sobre el uso del espacio público (la calle). Así el vender sexo parece ser solo una de una serie de comportamientos vistos como perjudiciales a la vida urbana, lo que se llama la convivencia.  Es curioso ver cuales son las ocupaciones que supuestamente afean la ciudad y molestan los demás. Mira las fotos e intenta apostar qué es lo que tienen en común. Look at the pictures and guess what these activities have in common that cause city ordinances to name them as making cities ugly and disturbing peaceful coexistence.

Aquí son las actividades a veces mencionadas como prohibidas, una mezcla de formas de entretenerse y de ganarse la vida:

pedir limosnas

relaciones sexuales en coches

vender cds pirateados

el botellón

los aparcacoches

lavarse en fuentes públicos

dormir en bancos

’ser gorilla’

Los grandes ayuntamientos apoyan la norma contra el sexo callejero y la mendicidad

Ramón Ferrando Valencia, 21 enero 2010, levante-emv.com

Comunitat Valenciana: Los grandes ayuntamientos de la Comunitat Valenciana están detrás de la normativa de la Federación Valenciana de Municipios y Provincias que persigue la prostitución, la mendicidad, la actividad de los gorrillas o cualquier otra que perturbe la tranquilidad de los vecinos. La norma, como ayer adelantó Levante-EMV, es muy restrictiva y prevé sanciones de hasta 3.000 euros por mantener relaciones sexuales en un coche dentro de la ciudad o de 400 euros para las personas que compren música pirateada.

Un portavoz de la Federación Valenciana de Municipios y Provincias (FVMP) explicó que una comisión mixta formada por juristas y los responsables de las policías locales de Valencia, Alicante, Castelló, Elx, Paterna y Vila-real han trabajado durante cuatro meses en la elaboración del documento que prohíbe la mendicidad, la venta callejera sin licencia, la prostitución en la vía pública o la actividad de los gorrillas. La comisión ha celebrado una quincena de reuniones desde el 17 de agosto en las que de manera exhaustiva han dado forma al soporte legislativo que necesitaban los ayuntamientos para luchar contra fenómenos como el botellón o el vandalismo.

El texto, denominado Ordenanza de Protección del Espacio Público, cuenta con una amplio respaldo político. El portavoz de la FVMP recordó que lo aprobó por unanimidad el pleno de la federación y cuenta con apoyos de municipios como “Polinyà del Xúquer de Esquerra Unida, Torrent del Partido Popular o Muro d’Alcoi del Bloc”. Jaume Bronchud, edil de Participación Ciudadana de Mislata, apuntó que “es un documento marco que acogemos con optimismo porque puede contribuir a mejorar la convivencia“. El Ayuntamiento de Torrent ya está trabajando para aplicar las normas.

La Federación Valencia de Municipios y Provincias ha trabajado a fondo el texto para que no fracase como otras iniciativas. Elena Bastidas, presidenta de la federación de municipios valencianos y alcaldesa de Alzira, señaló: “Lo hemos hecho con la máxima rigurosidad. Han participado intendentes de las policías municipales y especialistas del ámbito jurídico. Es una norma muy completa que intenta dar respuesta a algunas de las cuestiones que nos planteaban. Ha sido auspiciada por todos los partidos y enriquecida desde el punto de vista técnico. Tiene un plus de garantía que posiblemente otras normas no tienen”.

La federación de municipios ha analizado normativas similares puestas en marcha con éxito en Barcelona, Lleida, Granada o Sevilla. Además, ha estudiado iniciativas como las del Ayuntamiento de Castelló contra las conductas incívicas, las de Alicante contra el botellón y los aparcacoches o las de Burriana que fija sanciones de hasta 3.000.

Elena Bastidas añadió que han previsto una gran cantidad de multas porque es “una normativa ambiciosa. No nos hemos limitado a los gorrillas o al botellón. Hemos abordado otros fenómenos que se han agravado con la crisis como la prostitución callejera. Tratamos de proporcionar normas específicas como la prohibición de lavarse en fuentes públicas o dormir en un banco“.

LEE A. ARCHER, JR., TUSKEGEE FIGHTER PILOT

By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN Published: February 3, 2010 Lee A. Archer Jr., a pioneering black fighter pilot who was credited with shooting down four German planes, three in a single day, when he flew with the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, died Jan. 27 in Manhattan. He was 90 and lived in New Rochelle, N.Y. February 4, 2010    

Courtesy of the Archer Family

Lee A. Archer Jr. was credited with downing four German planes as a Tuskegee Airman in World War II.

Betsy Herzog

Later, in New York, he became an entrepreneur and investment manager.

His death was announced by his family.

For all his achievements as a military flier, Mr. Archer also forged a career in the business world as a prominent entrepreneur and investment manager.

As a combat pilot, he is best remembered for his exploits of Oct. 12, 1944, when he was in the midst of a furious series of dogfights over German-occupied Hungary. In a matter of minutes, flying a P-51 Mustang fighter with the distinctive red tail of the 332nd Fighter Group, known collectively as the Tuskegee Airmen, Lieutenant Archer shot down three German fighters.

At a time when the armed forces were segregated and the military brass was reluctant to give blacks combat responsibilities, the four squadrons of the Tuskegee unit proved time and time again that black pilots had the bravery and skills to escort American bombers to their targets and blow enemy planes out of the sky.

Lee Andrew Archer Jr. was born in Yonkers on Sept. 6, 1919. He became enthralled with aviation as a youngster in Harlem. Joining the Army out of New York University, hoping to become a pilot, he was assigned to a communications job at a post in Georgia because the Army did not want any black fliers. But when it began training black servicemen to fly at its Tuskegee airfield in Alabama, Mr. Archer joined the program and won his wings in the summer of 1943.

When he returned home in 1945, a recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross, he found that nothing seemed to have changed in American society.

“I flew 169 combat missions when most pilots were flying 50,” Mr. Archer told The Chicago Tribune in 2004. “When I came back to the U.S. and down that gangplank, there was a sign at the bottom: ‘Colored Troops to the Right, White Troops to the Left.’ ”

But he remained in the armed forces, which were desegregated by President Harry S. Truman in 1948, and retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1970.

In the business world, Mr. Archer worked at General Foods from 1970 to 1987, becoming chief executive of three of its investment arms, and in that role helped to finance dozens of companies, including Essence Communications and Black Enterprise magazine. He later founded the venture capital firm Archer Asset Management.

Mr. Archer ultimately maintained that he shot down five German planes — two on separate days in July 1944 in addition to the three in October 1944 — but said he had not been properly credited with one of those downings in July. Shooting down five planes would have brought him official designation as an ace, making him the only one among the Tuskegee Airmen.

In a 2008 review of wartime military records, Daniel L. Haulman of the Air Force Historical Research Agency found that Mr. Archer, while officially credited with four downings, was among the three leading Tuskegee pilots in shooting down enemy planes. His total was matched by Capt. Joseph D. Elsberry and Capt. Edward L. Toppins.

Mr. Archer is survived by his sons, Lee Archer III of Rome and Raymond and Roy, both of New Rochelle; a daughter, Ina, of Brooklyn; and four granddaughters. His wife, Ina, died in 1996.

In October 2005, Mr. Archer and two fellow Tuskegee veterans visited an air base at Balad, Iraq, to meet with 700 servicemen from a successor unit to his all-black outfit.

“This is the new Air Force,” he told The Associated Press. In the dining room, he said, he saw “black, white, Asian, Pacific Islanders, people from different parts of Europe.”

“This,” he said, “is what America is.”

SOURCE

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IMARI OBADELE, WHO FOUGHT FOR REPARATIONS

By DOUGLAS MARTIN Published: February 5, 2010 Imari Obadele, a teacher and writer whose commitment to black empowerment fired a militant, sometimes violent effort to win reparations for descendants of slaves and to carve out, however quixotically, an African-American republic in the Deep South, died on Jan. 18 in Atlanta. He was 79. February 6, 2010    

United Press International

Imari Obadele, center, in a 1971 Republic of Afrika news conference in Jackson, Miss.

The cause was a stroke, said Johnita Scott, his former wife.

Mr. Obadele (pronounced oh-ba-DEL-ee) was president of what he called the Republic of New Afrika, a country that existed as an idea. His provocative proposal was to have Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina — the heart of the old Confederacy — removed from the union and given over to black Americans.

The demand drew the national news media’s attention. The New York Times called it “bizarre.”

The proposal emerged in 1968, the year the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Black separatism was on the rise, with some advocates resurrecting 19th-century proposals for blacks to return to Africa.

Mr. Obadele, who had despaired of integration into white society, demanded American land as payback for the centuries of abuse blacks had suffered. He also asked for billions of dollars and became a leader of the reparations movement.

His organization saw itself as fighting a war of national liberation. It had a uniformed militia and engaged in gun battles with the police in Detroit and Jackson, Miss.; a police officer died in each.

In the Jackson face-off — a raid on the group’s headquarters in 1971 — murder charges against Mr. Obadele were eventually dropped, though eight members of his group were convicted. A year later, Mr. Obadele was convicted of conspiring to assault an F.B.I. officer and served more than five years of a 12-year sentence.

Mr. Obadele and his supporters contended that they had become targets of the Federal Bureau of Investigation because of their political views, pointing to threats and raids by the police in the months before the Mississippi confrontation. Amnesty International in 1977 called Mr. Obadele a political prisoner, one of the first Americans so designated.

The F.B.I. was clearly watching the group, as internal agency documents showed when they later became public. A 1968 agency memorandum urged that Mr. Obadele “be kept off the streets”; another called him one of America’s “most violence-prone black extremists.”

In his critique of American race relations, Mr. Obadele, who had a doctorate in political science, argued that slaves should not have automatically been considered American citizens after their emancipation because they were offered no choice in the matter. If they had chosen not to become inferior members of a white society (the only possibility for them, as he saw it) or to move to another country, they should have been able to take land from the existing United States.

Mr. Obadele also started the advocacy group National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. Maulana Karenga, the black nationalist leader best known as the creator of Kwanzaa, the African-American celebration in December, wrote in 2008 in The Sentinel, a black newspaper in Los Angeles, that Mr. Obadele’s work for reparations was “essential.”

Mr. Obadele’s views fueled a debate that had started during Reconstruction. In recent years, the issue has re-emerged among black intellectuals with the publication in 2000 of Randall Robinson’s book “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks” and an effort by the Harvard law professor Charles J. Ogletree to assemble a top legal team to push for reparations.

Mr. Obadele was born Richard Bullock Henry in Philadelphia on May 2, 1930, one of 12 children. He was an avid Boy Scout and as a young man helped his brother Milton start a civil rights organization that had W. E. B. Du Bois as a speaker. When Milton moved to Detroit, Richard followed.

Richard worked there as a newspaper reporter and as a technical writer for the military. In 1963, he refused to let his son Freddy go to school and learn from textbooks he considered racist.

Richard’s brother was a close friend of Malcolm X, and after Malcolm’s murder in 1965, Richard and Milton Henry helped form the Malcolm X Society to promote his views. Malcolm, in the face of continuing bloodshed in the civil rights struggle, had become increasingly frustrated with the philosophy of nonviolent resistance espoused by Dr. King and others. The Henry brothers began to embrace black separatism.

In 1968, they and others formed the Republic of New Afrika and adopted African names; Milton became Gaidi Obadele. (Obadele is a Yoruba word meaning “the king arrives at home.”) At the group’s inaugural meeting in Detroit, about 200 delegates signed a declaration of independence and a “government in exile” was set up. Mr. Obadele was chosen information minister, and he published a handbook, “War in America.”

A paramilitary unit, the Black Legion, to be clad in black uniforms with leopard-skin epaulettes, was formed.

In March 1969, a gun battle erupted between police officers and the Black Legionnaires outside a Detroit church, leaving one officer dead. The militants were tried but not convicted in a trial that drew conflicting testimony about the confrontation.

The Republic of New Afrika splintered the next year, with Milton, or Gaidi Obadele, saying he now rejected violence. Imari, who had now been elected president, led about 100 followers to Mississippi to build a black nation. After a deal to buy 18 acres from a farmer collapsed, the group established a headquarters in a house in Jackson.

The local police and F.B.I. agents raided the house on Aug. 18, 1971. Some news reports said the purpose of the raid was to arrest a suspect in the Detroit killing. Others said the goal was to stop treasonous activities or to search for arms. Each side said the other fired first in a gun battle that left one officer dead.

Though indicted in the killing, Mr. Obadele was found to have been 10 blocks away during the raid and charges were dropped. But in a related proceeding, he was convicted of conspiracy to assault a federal agent and was sent to prison.

Mr. Obadele later earned a Ph.D. in political science from Temple University. He taught at several colleges, including Prairie View A&M University in Texas.

He is survived by his daughters Marilyn Obadele and Vivian Gafford; his sons Imari II and Freddy Sterling Young; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In 1983, Mr. Obadele was a defense witness in the trial of Cynthia Boston, a Republic of New Afrika member who was convicted in the holdup of a Brinks armored car in 1981. On the stand, he defended armed struggle.

“We cannot tell somebody who is underground what to do,” he said. “If people feel that they must attack people who have been attacking and destroying and harming our people, then that is a decision they have to make.”

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JACK BLOCK, WHO STUDIED YOUNG CHILDREN INTO ADULTHOOD

By MARGALIT FOX Published: February 6, 2010 Jack Block, a prominent psychologist of personality who in 1968 began studying a group of California preschoolers and for decades kept watch as they moved from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood, died on Jan. 13 at his home in El Cerrito, Calif. He was 85. University of California, Berkeley

Jack Block

The cause was complications of a spinal cord injury he suffered 10 years ago, his daughter Susan Block said.

At his death, Professor Block was an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he had taught from 1957 until his retirement in 1991.

Professor Block’s project began with more than 100 3-year-olds in the San Francisco area. He studied them again when they were 4, 5, 7, 11, 14, 18, 23 and, finally, 32, when the study ended. Much of the work was conducted with his wife, Jeanne Humphrey Block, a collaborator until her death in 1981.

While other longitudinal studies examined the effects of I.Q. or social class on later life, the one by the Blocks focused on psychological makeup. At bottom, the questions they asked were these: What makes people turn out as they do, and to what extent can adult personality be predicted by childhood temperament?

“It was probably the only one of its kind that started with such young children,” Per F. Gjerde, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said of the Blocks’ study. Nowadays, Professor Gjerde said, “you would start at birth, but in 1968, age 3 was a very, very early beginning.”

Investigating the ways in which subjects’ early lives informed their later ones, the Blocks looked at issues like childhood responses to parental divorce, adolescent drug use and adult political affiliation.

In a 1986 study, for instance, they examined members of the original group whose parents eventually divorced. Conducted with Professor Gjerde, the study upended the received wisdom that divorce in and of itself causes disruptive behavior in children.

Instead, the authors found, children from the divorced families — in particular the boys — had displayed antisocial behavior years before the divorce took place. In other words, the boys’ behavior, with the stresses on family life it entailed, could have been a cause of divorce as well as a consequence.

A 1990 study, by Professor Block and Jonathan Shedler, found that teenagers who experimented with drugs in a limited way tended to be better adjusted than those who either used drugs habitually or abstained entirely.

Jacob Block, always called Jack, was born in Brooklyn on April 28, 1924. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College and a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford in 1951.

Besides his daughter Susan, Professor Block is survived by two other daughters, Jody Block and Carol Block; a son, David; and four grandchildren.

His books include “Lives Through Time” (Bancroft, 1971; with Norma Haan).

One of Professor Block’s studies drew particular notice in the news media. Published in The Journal of Research in Personality in 2006, it found that subjects who at 3 years old had seemed thin-skinned, rigid, inhibited and vulnerable tended at 23 to be political conservatives. On the other hand, 3-year-olds characterized as self-reliant, energetic, somewhat dominating and resilient were inclined to become liberals.

Pundits’ responses to the study ranged from enthusiastic approval to caustic dismissal, depending on the politics of the critic.

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FRANCES REID, ACTRESS OF STAGE AND DAYTIME TV

By BRUCE WEBER Published: February 5, 2010 Frances Reid, one of daytime television’s most enduring performers, who played the family matriarch Alice Horton on the soap opera “Days of Our Lives” for more than 40 years, died Wednesday in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 95. February 5, 2010     NBC Universal

Frances Reid in 1965, in the first episode of the soap opera “Days of Our Lives.”

February 5, 2010    

Jeff Katz/NBC Universal

From left, the “Days of Our Lives” stars Melissa Reeves, Frances Reid and Kristian Alfonso, at an anniversary in 2005.

A spokeswoman for NBC, which broadcasts “Days of Our Lives,” confirmed the death.

Ms. Reid, who had a long history in the theater and on television behind her, took the role in “Days” somewhat reluctantly, she said in interviews, but agreed to it because roles of any kind for actresses in middle age were rare. She began with the show’s first episode in 1965 and stayed long enough in the role for Alice to become a great-great grandmother.

When the show was first broadcast on Nov. 8, 1965, Alice Horton was already a grandmother, and she and her husband, Tom, a doctor, were stellar citizens of the fictional town of Salem. They were lamenting the quietude in their home because all five of their children were grown and had moved out of the house.

But quietude was never a characteristic of the Horton family for long, nor of Salem. In the first episode, Alice’s granddaughter Julie was arrested for shoplifting.

Alice was known to “Days” aficionados for her spirited, loving nature, her sound counsel, her family values, her annual Christmas tree decorating party and her homemade doughnuts. Over the years she was a homemaker, a hospital volunteer and board member, a cosmetics company investor and the co-founder of a shelter for teenage runaways and destitute families.

This good-citizen résumé didn’t preclude her from taking part in some wacky plots, however. At one point she helped a man accused of a killing to escape from jail (her scheme involved drugged doughnuts) because she knew he was innocent. At another point she was presumed murdered by a serial killer — choked to death, also with doughnuts — only to be resurrected (along with a number of other victims) as a captive on a remote island that looked exactly like Salem.

Something of an anomaly in soap opera history, Alice was faithful to her husband, though in 1991 she learned that their marriage had never been legal, and she insisted he marry her again. Tom Horton died in 1994, when Macdonald Carey, the actor who played him, did.

Frances Reid was born on Dec. 9, 1914, in Wichita Falls, Tex., and she grew up mostly in Berkeley, Calif. Her father was a banker. Ms. Reid married a fellow actor, Philip Bourneuf, in 1940; he died in 1979. Information about survivors was not available.

She trained as an actress at the Pasadena Playhouse, and she appeared on Broadway more than a dozen times in the 1930s and 1940s, as Ophelia in “Hamlet,” Lady Anne in “Richard III,” Viola in “Twelfth Night” and Roxane in “Cyrano de Bergerac” opposite José Ferrer. Reviewing “Cyrano” in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson wrote, “Frances Reid plays an enchanting Roxane with a skimming touch and a daintiness of accent, as well as obvious enjoyment in the role.”

In the 1950s her career turned to television, and over a decade and a half she appeared in numerous shows. She played the title role in the soap opera “Portia Faces Life,” a short-lived adaptation from a radio serial about the trials and tribulations of a marriage, and had roles in other soaps like “As the World Turns” and “The Edge of Night.” She made appearances as well on dramatic anthology series like “Hallmark Hall of Fame” and prime-time dramas like “Wagon Train,” “Dr Kildare,” “Perry Mason” and “Mr. Novak.”

At her death Ms. Reid was still part of the “Days of Our Lives” cast, but she last appeared on the program in 2007. She was given a Daytime Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004.

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GEOFFREY BURBIDGE, WHO TRACED LIFE TO STARDUST

By DENNIS OVERBYE Published: February 6, 2010 Geoffrey Burbidge, an English physicist who became a towering figure in astronomy by helping to explain how people and everything else are made of stardust, died on Jan. 26 in San Diego. He was 84. February 7, 2010    

University of California, San Diego

Geoffrey Burbidge’s work in astronomy changed the field.

His death, at Scripps Memorial Hospital, came after a long illness, said the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Burbidge was a physics professor there for more than four decades and lived in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego.

A large man with an even larger voice, Dr. Burbidge was one of the last surviving giants of the postwar era of astronomy, when big telescopes were sprouting on mountain peaks in the Southwest and peeling back the sky, revealing a universe more diverse and violent than anybody had dreamed: radio galaxies and quasars erupting with gargantuan amounts of energy, pulsars and black holes pinpricking the cosmos, and lacy chains of galaxies rushing endlessly away into eternity.

As the director of Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, Dr. Burbidge pushed to open big telescopes to a larger community of astronomers. As a senior astronomer at the university in San Diego, he was, to the consternation of most of his colleagues, a witty and acerbic critic of the Big Bang theory.

In 1957, in a long, groundbreaking paper in The Reviews of Modern Physics, Dr. Burbidge; his wife, E. Margaret Burbidge; William Fowler of the California Institute of Technology; and Fred Hoyle of Cambridge University — a collaboration noted by their initials B2FH — laid out the way that thermonuclear reactions in stars could slowly seed a universe that was originally pure hydrogen, helium and lithium, the simplest elements in the periodic table, with heavier elements like oxygen, iron, carbon and others from which life is derived.

Stars like the Sun burn hydrogen into helium to generate heat and light for most of their lives, until they run out of fuel and fizzle, or so the story goes. But more massive stars can go on to ignite helium to produce carbon and oxygen and so forth. Eventually the star explodes, tossing the newly minted atoms into space, where they mix with gas and dust and are incorporated into future stars. Successive generations of stars that coalesce from cosmic dust, burn and then explode would thus make the universe ever richer in heavy elements.

Allan Sandage of Carnegie Observatories, an old friend of Dr. Burbidge’s, once explained it this way: “Every one of our chemical elements was once inside a star. The same star. You and I are brothers. We came from the same supernova.”

Or as the singer Joni Mitchell put it, “We are stardust.”

In a recent interview, Dr. Sandage described the B2FH collaboration’s work as “one of the major papers of the century.”

“It changed the whole landscape of the chemical evolution of the universe,” he said.

Geoffrey Ronald Burbidge was born in 1925 in Chipping Norton in England, in the Cotswolds hills halfway between Oxford and Stratford-on-Avon. His father, Leslie, was a builder. His mother, Evelyn, was a milliner. He was an only child and the first of his family to progress beyond grammar school.

He attended the University of Bristol intending to study history, but on discovering he could stay in college longer if he enrolled in physics, he did, and found he liked it. He furthered his studies at University College, London, from which he received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1951.

Another turning point for him came when he befriended a recent Ph.D., Margaret Peachey, in a lecture course in London. An assistant director of the university’s observatory at the time, she would become a prominent astronomer in her own right. They married in 1948.

She survives him, along with a daughter, Sarah Burbidge of San Francisco, and a grandson.

It was under his wife’s influence that Dr. Burbidge became interested in the physics of stars, tagging along on observing trips as her assistant. He always joked that he had become an astronomer by marrying one.

On occasion the roles switched. Margaret’s application to observe on Mount Wilson, the mountain overlooking Pasadena, Calif., where modern cosmology began, was turned down on the grounds that there was no separate women’s bathroom. Dr. Burbidge booked the telescope time himself and his wife posed as his assistant, but they had to stay in an unheated cabin on the mountain, away from a dormitory housing other astronomers.

After stops by the Burbidges at Harvard, the University of Chicago and Cambridge University, Dr. Fowler arranged for them and Dr. Hoyle to go to Pasadena to complete the stellar nucleosynthesis work, for which Dr. Fowler was later awarded a Nobel Prize. Margaret Burbidge obtained a post at the California Institute of Technology, while Geoffrey Burbidge got a job at the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories.

After yet another stop, this time at the University of Wisconsin, the Burbidges landed at the University of California, San Diego, in 1962.

By then astronomers had been riveted by the discovery of quasars: bright pointlike objects that were pouring out radio waves and whose visible light was severely shifted toward longer, redder wavelengths, like the sound of a siren going away, indicating that they were moving away at high velocity. According to the standard interpretation of life in an expanding universe, these redshifts, as they are called, meant that quasars were at great distance.

As a trained physicist, Dr. Burbidge was one of the first astronomers to investigate what could possibly be supplying the energy of such objects. At a meeting in Paris in 1958, he pointed out that the energy requirements for radio galaxies were already bumping up against the limits of known astrophysics.

“That was a very important development,” Dr. Sandage said. In time, that line of thinking would lead to the idea that quasars and radio galaxies were powered by the gravity of supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies, a widely held notion today.

Dr. Burbidge, however, soon parted ways with his colleagues on quasars and indeed on the Big Bang itself. The great energies required to produce them and their smallness led him to question whether quasars really were at cosmological distances. His doubts were buttressed by observations by Halton C. Arp, now of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich, suggesting that quasars were concentrated around nearby active galaxies and might have been shot out of them.

A debate ensued, and almost all astronomers agree that it was one that Dr. Burbidge and his friends finally lost. The overwhelming consensus among astronomers is that the redshifts are what they appear to be, said Peter Strittmatter, director of the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona.

Dr. Burbidge’s skepticism extended to cosmology. In 1990, he and four other astronomers, including Drs. Arp and Hoyle, published a broadside in the journal Nature listing arguments against the Big Bang.

Dr. Burbidge preferred instead a version of Dr. Hoyle’s Steady State theory of an eternal universe. In the new version, small, local big bangs originating in the nuclei of galaxies every 20 billion years or so kept the universe boiling. To his annoyance, most other astronomers ignored this view.

In a memoir in 2007, Dr. Burbidge wrote that this quasi-steady state theory was probably closer to the truth than the Big Bang. But he added that “there is such a heavy bias against any minority point of view in cosmology that it may take a very long time for this to occur.”

Despite his contrarian ways, Dr. Burbidge maintained his credibility in the astronomical establishment, serving as director of Kitt Peak from 1978 to 1984 and editing the prestigious Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics for more than 30 years. He was “a very clear-thinking heretic,” Dr. Strittmatter said.

Dr. Strittmatter recalled that as a young astronomer he was terrified of Dr. Burbidge. “Then I learned that what he liked was a good argument,” he said.

The Kitt Peak observatory had been built with support from the National Science Foundation as a sort of counterweight to the famous observatories in California like Mount Wilson and Palomar, whose giant telescopes were privately owned and available to only a few. Dr. Burbidge believed that Kitt Peak should act more as a service facility for all astronomers.

“His idea was to open up astronomy to all qualified astronomers,” Dr. Sandage said.

Dr. Burbidge never lost what Dr. Strittmatter called a “rebel’s instinct.” Dr. Sandage said Dr. Burbidge had called him up three times a week for 40 years to argue about the Big Bang.

“He delighted in bringing up all the details that didn’t quite fit,” Dr. Sandage said. In recent years, he added, as the evidence for the Big Bang mounted, Dr. Burbidge held his ground.

“I just didn’t understand that,” Dr. Sandage said. “I often wondered if he was just arguing with me to keep on the phone.”

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EARL A. BARTHE, A MASTER OF PLASTER

By DOUGLAS MARTIN Published: February 2, 2010 Earl A. Barthé said that plastering and music “sort of rhyme.” Perched on a scaffold, he would burst into arias from “Carmen” or growl like Muddy Waters when installing a ceiling medallion. February 2, 2010    

Nick Spitzer

Earl A. Barthé of New Orleans, was a fifth-generation plasterer.

“Curves,” Mr. Barthé said, “are conducive to the blues.”

A fifth-generation plasterer, the man known as Mr. B. epitomized the old-time craftsmen, from decorative masons to ironsmiths, who continue to provide a traditional flavor to the architectural jambalaya of New Orleans.

Mr. Barthé, who died on Jan. 11 at the age of 87, created cornices, friezes and ceiling medallions whose character and workmanship drew recognition from the Smithsonian and the National Endowment for the Arts. And when Hurricane Katrina flooded his home, shop and the city he loved, Mr. Barthé deployed his skills to help reassemble interiors, whether it was a Bourbon Street restaurant or a Ninth Ward shotgun shack.

Mr. Barthé (pronounced bar-THAY) died at his home in New Orleans, his son, Hurchail, said. At his funeral, Lionel Ferbos, who is 98 or 99 and a retired tinsmith, a fine trumpeter and a good friend of Mr. Barthé, led a traditional New Orleans ensemble in jazz versions of spirituals like “Just Over in the Gloryland.”

Mr. Barthé’s great-great-grandfather started the family plastering business in 1850 after arriving from Nice, France, via Haiti, and his son and a daughter will continue it.

Across the decades the family has made and refurbished the plaster and stucco of a city known for its distinctively vintage, eclectic look, from its louvered cypress shutters to its filigree iron.

In new construction like the Superdome to restoration of French Quarter architectural treasures, in working-class shotgun houses to the ornate tombs of the city’s cemeteries, Mr. Barthé did the plastering.

Along the way he became something of a cult hero to preservationists.

“He could do work in the 20th century that was modeled on practices of the 18th century,” John Michael Vlach, an anthropology and American studies professor at George Washington University in Washington, said in an interview.

In 2001, Mr. Barthé’s work was included in an exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art that traveled to the Smithsonian and elsewhere. He received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2005. He had to borrow a suit to collect that award, for which he received a grant of $20,000.

Nick Spitzer, a Tulane anthropology professor and host of the public radio show “American Routes,” has called Mr. Barthé “the Jelly Roll Morton of plasterers,” referring to the celebrated New Orleans jazz pianist.

Jazz, in fact, figured in Mr. Barthé’s work. Mr. Spitzer said in an interview that many early jazz players of the same Creole-African heritage as Mr. Barthé worked in building trades. Johnny St. Cyr, a jazz banjo and guitar musician who played with Morton and Louis Armstrong in the 1920s, was also a plasterer.

And Mr. Barthé liked using musical terms in talking about his craft, saying he saw clarinets in his moldings and bass fiddles at the bottom of his arches. “It all have to be in tune,” he said in a Louisiana patois sprinkled with French phrases and hearty laughs.

Mostly he was about both preserving and carrying on a tradition.

He spoke of the thrill he would get when working in the St. Louis Cathedral or a plantation mansion and coming across the initials of an ancestor on a wooden lath beneath plaster he was restoring with the same techniques as the ancestor.

“It’s some precious work,” he said in an oral history interview in 2000 for the University of New Orleans Building Arts Project. “It’s like a diamond, like a jewel, and it’s for you to preserve it.”

Earl Antoine Barthé was born in New Orleans on June 4, 1922, and there was never doubt about his parents’ plans for him. “Ninety-nine percent of my male family are plasterers,” he said in the oral history.

He was imbued with legends, going back to his great-great-grandfather Leon, who left France in the early 1800s and then stopped in Haiti, where he got married.

“My daddy told me that Old Man Leon could look at you and produce you in plaster as he was looking,” Mr. Barthé said. “No sketches. No drawings, anything. That’s the type of mechanic he was.”

The young Mr. Barthé did a four-year apprenticeship in New Orleans and then traveled around the country, to New York and California, among other places, to plaster when things were slow at home.

“If you said you was from New Orleans, you can bet you got a job,” he said in the oral history. For almost two decades Mr. Barthé was business agent for the plasterers’ union. He integrated the union and accepted its first woman.

In addition to his son, Mr. Barthé is survived by his wife, the former Louise Soublet; three daughters, Trudy Barthé Charles, Sheila Cousins and Terry Barthé; seven grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

After Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, Mr. Barthé fled to Texas with only a change of clothes. But he returned and resumed work and kept his family’s tradition alive. Though he lost his tools in the storm, he found his favorite in the back of his truck, a small trowel that had been his grandfather’s.

SOURCE

********************************************************************************************************** FROM THE ARCHIVES     Buster Keaton, Poker-Faced Comedian, Dies at 70

(Feb. 1, 1966)

Arthur Ashe, Tennis Star, Dies at 49

(Feb. 6, 1993)

Hussein, King Who Took Risks, Dies at 63

(Feb. 7, 1999)

Iris Murdoch, Novelist and Philosopher, Dies at 79

(Feb. 8, 1999)

Alex Haley, Author of ‘Roots,’ Dies at 70

(Feb. 10, 1992)

Charles Schulz, ‘Peanuts’ Creator, Dies at 77

(Feb. 12, 2000)

Ethel Merman, Queen of Musicals, Dies at 76

(Feb. 15, 1984)

Geronimo, Apache Chief, Dies

(Feb. 17, 1909)

Alfred P. Sloan Jr., G.M. Leader, Dies at 90

(Feb. 17, 1966)

Thelonious Monk, Jazz Composer, Dies at 64

(Feb. 17, 1982)

J. Robert Oppenheimer, Atom Bomb Pioneer, Dies at 62

(Feb. 18, 1967)

Deng Xiaoping, China’s Political Wizard, Dies at 92

(Feb. 19, 1997)

Frederick Douglass, Anti-Slavery Crusader, Dies

(Feb. 20, 1895)

Chester W. Nimitz, Who Built Pacific Fleet, Dies at 80

(Feb. 20, 1966)

George Ellery Hale, Astronomer, Dies at 69

(Feb. 21, 1938)

Elijah Muhammad, Black Muslim Leader, Dies at 77

(Feb. 25, 1975)

Mabel Cratty, Y.W.C.A. Leader, Dies at 60

(Feb. 27, 1928)

Henry R. Luce, Creator of Time-Life Empire, Dies at 68

(Feb. 28, 1967)

UNIVERSE OF VERSE
Read the official online version here.

One of the most daring and important voices of contemporary Indian poetry, Hoshang Merchant (b.1947) has published 20 books of poetry in 20 years from the Writer’s Workshop, Kolkota. Other notable books include Flower to Flame (Rupa, 1990), Yaraana: Gay Stories from India (Penguin, 1999), Forbidden Sex/Text (Routledge, 2009).

His translation of Jameela Nishat’s Urdu poems was published by Sahitya Akademi (2008). He is presently a Professor of Poetry and Gay Studies at the Hyderabad University where he has taught since 1987. He holds a Ph.D. (for his dissertation on Anais Nin) from Purdue University where he was one of the founders of Gay Liberation.

Travelling all over the world, he studied Buddhism at Dharmashala, and Sufism in Iran and Palestine. He was in Chennai recently to kick start the Poetry with Prakriti festival. Excerpts from an interview:

Can or should poets give interviews since the Buddha says there is no personality?

Yes, there is no personality. I’ll tell you my own example and of Miohaux (French). I thought to become a Buddhist; I danced instead but went back to poetry. Not Buddhist poetry, like the fourth Dalai Lama’s… I have few possessions, but I couldn’t be a Buddha because I thought too much to be some One.

Henri Michaux did not want his poetry canonised, he wouldn’t even allow himself to be photographed. He was happy the Dalai Lama saw his photo; “Now I am in the Dalai Lama’s mind.” As he lay dying, he talked to his nurse of travel. When she started to give him oxygen, “No! Let me keep travelling,” he said.

What is the aim of your poetry?

Even gay poetry’s aim is NOT to change legislation. “To come out into an objectless view/Which is the true aim of all poetry,” is a definition I use in my poems. “Objectless” does not mean “not objective,” because anyway the lyric is a subjective art.

It means that poets have no axes to grind. Their objective is the poem itself. However we poets have to ‘abstract’ our experience to fit it to the reader’s experience. We all share the same space/time. Some great poets make their own space and their times. It comes as a surprise to know Whitman, Melville and Dickinson were gay. We do not know them as gay poems but as Transcendentalists even after 150 years. This transcendence is a poem.

To paraphrase Dickinson “to make a prairie/It takes fancy, a clover and a bee/Fancy alone will do/If bees are few.”

Why do you equate Dalits with gays?

Because gays, like women, are gender-Dalits. Also, there are gay Dalits who refuse to be identified for social reasons. Both are oppressed groups. I understand forms of oppression differ. But oppression is oppression. For politics we need coalitions (not only LGBT but also women and Dalits). Gays have to stop oppressing women. Some women who oppress gays have to stop doing that. Ditto for Dalits. To divide minorities and prevent them from coming together in a common platform is just another male heterosexists’ ploy to preserve their power.

My struggle is unimportant unless it also opens up a possibility for generalised liberation and living.

Are you before your time for India?

No! The poet is always of his/her time. It is the others who are behind.

Is writing a political act?

No. But if you say you’re not political that means you side with the establishment. If you want to change your heart, mind and body then that’s politics.To say sex is a private matter is to pretend sex is about love only and not also an exploitative.

Why do you travel so much?

I travel to get new identities. And to write about them. It is how kids ‘enjoy getting lost’. It reminds me that personality is not solid. In a new land people don’t know you, you can become whatever you want!

What is the audience reaction to you? How does your audacity sit with them?

Mine is not a moral universe. But it is a formally beautiful universe of verse. If I affront them I also beg their indulgence. And, mostly, I get it!

After 2 years since the horrific death of Ms. Dorothy Dixon, justice for her and her unborn child is finally slouching towards reality.

Michelle Riley, one of the fiends who tortured and murdered Dorothy Dixon and her unborn child, received 45 years in prison.

Forty-five years.

Forty-five years is a slap on the wrist for what this lowlife and her accomplices did to Dorothy.

One down. . . .

. . . .four more to go.

   

From left to right: Judy E. Woods, Riley, Michael Elliot, Leshelle McBride and Benny Wilson. Riley’s 12-year-old son, a juvenile,  received probation for his part in the sadistic crime. (Mugshots courtesy of the Alton Police Department.)

*******************************************************************************************************

ILLINOIS WOMAN SENTENCED TO 45 YEARS IN TORTURE KILLING

 

By JIM SUHR

The Associated Press
Friday, February 5, 2010; 6:16 PM

EDWARDSVILLE, Ill. — An Illinois judge sentenced a woman to 45 years in prison Friday in the torture slaying of a pregnant, developmentally impaired mother, saying the beatings, scalds and gunshot wounds she suffered were beyond anything anyone should have to endure.

Madison County Circuit Judge Charles Romani Jr. was not swayed by convict Michelle Riley’s expressions of remorse.

“These were things done to this woman you don’t see done to human beings, let alone animals,” Romani said in handing down his punishment in the January 2008 death of 29-year-old Dorothy Dixon. “This woman suffered, and suffered greatly. No one deserves to be treated like that.”

What Riley and her cohorts inflicted on Dixon, who had been five or six months pregnant when she died, “was brutal and heinous to say the least,” he said.

Riley, 37, told the court, “I’m sorry that I can’t take it back.”

In exchange for Riley’s guilty plea last October to a first-degree murder charge, prosecutors agreed to not push for more than 45 years behind bars. Riley’s public defender, Jon Delaney, had argued that other defendants contributed to Dixon’s demise and pressed for 30 years – the lowest possible sentence under the deal.

Riley, who has three previous felony drug convictions, must serve all of the sentence except for the 700 days Romani credited her for the time she has already spent in jail.

Investigators have said Dixon was abused for weeks, at times beaten with a plunger handle, burned with a hot glue gun and used for target practice with a BB pistol. On Friday, pathologist Raj Nanduri testified that Dixon’s body revealed she had been scalded from head to toe with boiling water and had BB wounds “all over the body,” some infected and others in varying stages of healing.

Dixon also had a “branding-type” of injury on at least one arm, two of her front teeth were missing and presumedly knocked out, and she had cuts on her scalp that “were very deep, all the way to the bone.”

                  FILE – In this file photo released March 13, 2008, by the Alton (Ill.) Police Department is Michelle Riley. Riley, 37, was sentenced to 45 years in prison Friday, Feb. 5, 2010, for the murder of a pregnant, developmentally impaired mother. Police say the victim was beaten, burned and used for target practice.(AP Photo/Alton (Ill.) Police Department, File)

 

Nanduri said Dixon died of an accumulation of injuries over time.

“In short, her body just quit because of all the beatings, burnings and pellet wounds?” Mike Stewart, a prosecutor, asked the pathologist, who replied, “Yes.”

Dixon had been five or six months pregnant with a baby boy, Nanduri said.

Jennifer Tierney, a police detective in Alton, Ill., said police found Dixon’s body, clad only in a sweater and covered with towels, in the basement of a house in the city. Police have said Riley and her housemates had banished Dixon and her 1-year-old son to the basement with little more than a thin rug and a mattress on the chilly floor.

Evidence suggested a pot of boiling water was left on the stove almost daily for quick use on Dixon, Tierney said.

Riley was “pretty much considered to be the ringleader,” directing other housemates to take part in the abuse, Tierney testified.

Four other defendants, including three teenagers, await trial on first-degree murder charges. Another defendant, Riley’s now-14-year-old son, has been sentenced as a juvenile to probation.

Tierney said Riley pocketed Dixon’s monthly Social Security checks. Authorities have said Dixon ate what she could forage from the refrigerator upstairs. Riley “basically treated Miss Dixon as a slave in the household,” Tierney testified.

Police say Dixon’s year-old boy weighed just 15 pounds when taken into state custody after his mother’s death.

In arguing for the 45-year sentence, prosecutor Stewart called Riley’s conduct “unconscionable” and pressed that Riley encouraged the torture instead of stopping it. Delaney countered that Riley acknowledges “she made a grave error” and accepts responsibility but didn’t act alone.

SOURCE

A COSMETIC CHANGE IN THE CLEAVAGE
(Read official version here)

At the start of the novel, 26-year-old B Damayanthi hasn’t done a single silly thing that she regrets. At the end of the novel, she has moved from the repressive atmosphere of her home in one of the many Amman Kovil Streets in Chennai to the fast-paced corporate world of a multinational company in Mumbai, and she still hasn’t done a single thing that my great-grandmother would regret. Narrated in epistolatory format, this is the story of a girl who loves to read Cosmopolitan and watch Sex and the City, but whose dreary existence offers no prospect of adventure.

The over-used trope of parents desperately bridegroom-hunting allows the author to portray Tam-Brahm society as though it is eternally freeze-framed in time. There is the typical mother who suspects the maid’s cleanliness levels; the manglik dosh, the 52 advertisements in newspaper matrimonials and the insistence on matching caste and vegetarianism and horoscopes; and of course, the stingy NRI maapillai from California. Her migration helps Damayanthi escape the monotony of girl-seeing ceremonies.

Moving to Mumbai, Damayanthi undergoes a total makeover. How much does this change on the outside change her as a person, I ask. Nirupama says the change in hairstyle-makeup-wardrobe comes from an effort to fit in. “She wants to be somebody she is not, and she thinks she can do that, but towards the end she realises that such change is pretty much cosmetic. So the real change is not external, but internal, when she finally becomes comfortable with who she really is.”

Damayanthi’s internal thought processes always seem to revolve around what other people think. Why has Nirupama made her protagonist so susceptible to the threat of social perception? “Damayanthi is still figuring what is right and wrong for her. There is a conflict within her because of this. For example, she feels stealing ideas is wrong, that is her value and inherent belief. When a colleague tells her that lifting a summer trainee’s ideas is practice-sharing, she is caught between what she knows is inherently wrong, and what is needed for success in the corporate world. She learns that compromising on her values and core beliefs doesn’t lead to anything good. So, even though she is externally driven, the change comes about when she seeks to find out what makes sense to her.”

Bittersweet in her snide asides, but demure in her answers, Damayanthi leads a parallel life in her head. Why? Nirupama says that it comes out of conditioning: being asked to remain quiet, being ordered not to laugh loudly in public. “Some girls learn to break out, to rebel. Some like Damayanthi are stuck in two places because mentally they are rebels but externally they are conformists. Only later on does she realise that it is okay to speak her mind.”

Damayanthi does more than speak her mind in those letters. Savour this description of a secretary: “Veronica looked like a pampered poodle on a bad fur day. She was wearing a tight little black skirt well about her knees and a low cut semi-transparent blouse in a curious lilac shade. I could almost see her lungs through it. She also wore matching plastic lilac earrings—Aiyo! I could see all the males come to life like a bunch of dogs on heat.”

As a consequence of such remarks, characters in the novel turn out to be crass caricatures: Balki is the Tamil Brahmin bachelor; Jimmy Daruwalla the platonic friend; CG. the morose and dismal intellectual; Sonya Sood the leggy size-zero Punjabi lass and Rahul, the charming rake with a girlfriend in every metro.

Quite expectedly, there is a love triangle (involving said Mr Rake and Ms Size-zero and Our Heroine). Of course, crossing the boundary (read: premarital sex) is something that good girls from good homes never dream of. Yet Our Heroine is just about to do it; she’s drunk and on the couch and the virile handsome hero is unbuttoning her blouse. Imagine the feverish anticipation. Phone rings. Amma tells her about Paati’s hospitalisation. Mood and scene and action ruined alright, but please remember to applaud for Damayanthi who retains her virginity because of such divine intervention.

Finally, something on the author’s attempts to sneak bits of Tamilish into the text: everyone gets married like this only, there’s talk of big-big qualifications and short-short clothes, and stuff being sooooo difficult. But even Tamil films no longer carry dialogues about a girl glowing like a 1000-watt bulb when a man says she looks pretty. Aiyo, when was the last time anybody heard that line?

This paper discusses various Rwandan cultural practices. Some support gender equality others do not. Those in contemporary Rwandan politics often reference indigenous practices in relation to empowering women. Modern references to gender-sensitive practices in Rwanda's pre-colonial era generate support for women's participation in politics by emphasizing continuity with traditional ways. That defuses opposition and opens a strategy for women and men to promote gender equality in political representation and elsewhere. DN

This coming February 15-16, 2010, is the 134TH annual running of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. The show airs on USA Network and CNBC, and is sponsored by Pedigree for the 27TH consecutive year in 2010. (Check your local cable listing for time.)

The WKC Show is the dog show world’s Super Bowl and Academy Awards all rolled into one.

Here are some bits of trivia on the WKC Show:

 

• Westminster pre-dates the invention of the light bulb and the automobile, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Washington Monument, the invention of basketball and the establishment of the World Series.
• Since Westminster held its first show 133 years ago, there have been 25 men elected president and 12 states have joined the union. The dog show has outlasted three previous versions of Madison Square Garden, and is currently being staged in MSG IV.
• Westminster’s annual dog show has survived power outages, snowstorms, a national depression, two World Wars and a tugboat strike that threatened to shut down the city.

SOURCE

 

The Westminster Kennel Club, in conjunction with the American Kennel Club,  stresses that people learn about the many different breeds of dogs before they buy a dog on impulse, because it is cute, or because it is this year’s rage.

Or, because it is this year’s winner.

People considering a particular breed of dog should be aware of the history of the type of breed (Working Group, Hound Group,  Toy/Non-Sporting Group, Herding Group, Terrier Group, Gundog/Sporting Group, etc.), they are interested in, and whether or not the breed the person has in mind is the right dog for them.

There are also mixed-breeds to be seen as well.

In addition to the various events scheduled, there are also going to be on hand breeds that have been rescued. When some breeds become too popular, there is often a surplus on the market for that breed which leads to many abandoned animals in need of good homes.

But what everyone waits on pins and needles for is the coveted “Best in Show”, where one dog out of hundreds of entries is crowned the best-of-the-best in the world of dog judging.

Last year’s winner was Houston, Texas’s very own, Stump.

The year before it was Uno, the first beagle ever to win.

This year, the Westminster Kennel Club recognizes three new breeds eligible to compete in this year’s show:

 

Three New Breeds at WKC in 2010

IRISH RED AND WHITE SETTER – Sporting Group
Despite its name, the Irish Red and White Setter is a distinct breed, not just a different colored version of the Irish Setter. Bred primarily for the field, they should be strong, powerful and athletic, with a keen and intelligent attitude. The coat’s base color is white with solid red patches. Known in Ireland since the 17th century, the Red and White is thought to be the older of the two Irish Setters. However, it was nearly extinct by the end of the 19th century. During the 1920s, efforts were made to revive the Irish Red and White Setter and by the 1940s, the breed began to reemerge in Ireland. (www.akc.org/breeds/irish_red_white_setter)

NORWEGIAN BUHUND – Herding Group
Once the cherished companion of Vikings, the Norwegian Buhund is a versatile farm dog from Norway that herds livestock, guards property, and has been used for hunting game. The name means farm-dog –”Bu” in Norwegian means homestead or farm and “hund” means dog. The Buhund is a double-coated, squarely-built spitz, a little under medium size, with mobile prick ears, a tightly-curled tail carried over the center of its back, and dark, almond-shaped eyes with an intelligent, friendly expression. This working breed has a lot of energy, strength, and stamina, but is also known to be independent. (www.buhund.org)

PYRENEAN SHEPHERD – Herding Group
The Pyrenean Shepherd is also known by its French name, Berger des Pyrénées, but fanciers of the breed in America often shorten his name to “pyr shep.” Herding has been and remains the mainstay of the economy of the High Pyrenees, and the Pyrenean Shepherd is the traditional working companion of the larger dog, the Great Pyrenees. Together they aid the shepherd in his everyday workings with his herd of sheep or other livestock. Outside his homeland of France the breed is rare, but in France his popularity as a wonderfully devoted family companion has grown considerably since the early 1970s. Although small in stature and weight, it is said, “pound for pound, he has few equals in both herding or guarding.” (www.pyrshep.com)

(PHOTO CREDITS:  John Ashby, Mary Bloom, Lisa Croft-Elliott, Charles Tatham, Westminster Archives, Breed Parent Clubs, Office of the Mayor of New York, Empire State Building Company LLC, Madison Square Garden LP

SOURCE

This year I will be able to see the show and enjoy all the high-stepping, prancing pooches strutting their canine stuff.

Tune in and enjoy one of the world’s most reknowned dog shows.

Arf!

 

News Observing Photo Gallery Magazine Archive Shop at Sky NASA Bulletin at a Glance

News
Observing
This Week’s Sky at a Glance
Community

New Plan for NASA

February 1, 2010 | The Obama administration abandons NASA’s Constellation Moon program, but sets its sights farther afield. > read more 

The New Face of Pluto

February 4, 2010 | Planetary scientists scratching their heads over the dramatic face-lift that this distant little world underwent sometime between 1994 and 2002. > read more 

A “Whodunit” in the Asteroid Belt

February 2, 2010 | Astronomers are still trying to piece together the story of an object that’s looking more and more like the aftermath of the collision between two small asteroids. > read more 

World’s Largest Solar Scope

February 1, 2010 | If one final permit can be obtained — and some Hawaiian preservationists won over — construction on the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope should begin later this year. > read more 

Observing

 

S&T: Lauren Darby

Tour February’s Sky by Eye and Ear!

January 30, 2010 | Say “goodbye” to Jupiter and “hello” to Mars, as the midwinter evening skies come alive with activity. Learn to identify what stargazers call the Winter Hexagon, and much more. Host: S&T’s Kelly Beatty. (3.9MB MP3 download: running time: 4m 8s) > read more 

Making the Most of Mars

January 25, 2010 | Mars is closer to Earth in late January and early February than it will be again for the next four years. > read more 

Vesta in 2010

January 1, 2010 | Vesta is a prime binocular target in the winter and spring of 2010. > read more 

Thar She Blows! U Scorpii Erupts As Predicted

January 28, 2010 | This famous recurrent nova has just leapt from 18th to 8th magnitude overnight. Astronomers worldwide were waiting. > read more 

This Week’s Sky at a Glance

 

Donald C. Parker

This Week’s Sky at a Glance

February 5, 2010 | Mars, just past opposition and still blazing brightly, rises higher in the east each evening. And Saturn is now up in the east by about 10 p.m. > read more 

 

PACIFIC GROVE MAN PLEADS GUILTY TO FIREBOMB ATTACKS

The Monterey County Herald
Herald Staff Reports Updated: 02/04/2010 09:17:37 AM PST

A Pacific Grove man Wednesday pleaded guilty to two counts of arson, Monterey County prosecutors said.

Nathan Augustine, 28, was accused of firebombing Creative Visions tattoo parlor in Monterey and Lattitudes Restaurant in Pacific Grove with Molotov cocktails in July.

Prosecutors said Augustine targeted the tattoo parlor because employees refused to give him a tattoo of a swastika and of President Barack Obama overlaid with crosshairs, and the restaurant because a black assistant manager turned him down for a job.

The vodka bottles used to make the Molotov cocktails each had the words “Russian Standard” written on them in red ink, a swastika and a symbol similar to a British Union Jack with diagonal lines, prosecutors said.

Police officers found lighter fluid, gloves and the symbol in Augustine’s home, prosecutors said.

Augustine, who is to be sentenced March 12, faces up to seven years in prison.

SOURCE

 

   February 4, 2010 ColorLines Direct. News and commentary from ColorLines magazine and RaceWire blog.

ColorLines: “Race and Economic Recovery” Airs Feb 12
President Obama says the stimulus saved or created two million jobs in 2009. But is the recovery really working? Watch this national broadcast on LinkTV and online, click for schedule and viewing options.

colorlines.com/recovery

 

 

 

 James Perry’s Run for Mayor of New Orleans
Can a social justice candidate win an election in the new New Orleans?

 

 Even Colin Powell Supports Repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’
Wouldn’t it have been so nice if Gen. Powell had this much guts and conviction when he was actually in office.‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Disproportionately Affecting Black Women
‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ has been used to kick Black women out of the military at a much higher rate than other groups.

When Numbers Lie: Prisoners of the Census in New York
Albany is currently weighing a proposal to change the way the 2010 census counts are weighed for people incarcerated in towns far away from their original communities.

Somali ‘Pirates’ Plan to Send Treasures Taken from Rich Countries to Haiti
We haven’t heard about the Somali pirates in months, but they’re back in the news cycle. This time around, it’s a more positive, Robin Hood-esque story.

Haiti: 3 Weeks Later, Are Your Dollars Helping?
It’s been three weeks now since the earthquake hit Haiti and the Associated Press has issued a grim picture of where recovery efforts stand: medical teams still need the basics like bandages and only 2,000 tents have been distributed for the 1 million who are homeless.

ARC has more important and urgent stories to share in the coming months, but we need your help to bring them to light. Please consider a donation of $10 toward our next ColorLines Direct email.

   

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São Paulo will stop on Sunday, 7th of February, for an evening of mass kissing. From 17:00, people will meet at the corner of Avenida Paulista and Rua Augusta to kiss each other in protest against resistance to the Brazilian government's recent third edition of the National Program for Human Rights (PNDH-3). Augusto Bazárov [pt], Twitter user @Guttto, explains the event:

Trata-se de um ato público, organizado por tuiteiros que usam o ciberativismo como ferramenta de mudança social. Dele, participam mulheres e homens; homo, hétero e bissexuais, travestis e transexuais. Pessoas preocupadas em defender medidas históricas contempladas no 3º Plano de Direitos Humanos, apresentado pela Secretária Nacional de Direitos Humanos do Governo Federal. Dentre estes direitos estão: a união civil entre pessoas do mesmo sexo, a criminalização da homofobia, a legalização do aborto e a adoção homoparental. Estas propostas foram duramente atacadas, sobretudo por setores da imprensa e por lideranças religiosas católicas (CNBB).

This is a public event, organized by twitter users who use cyberactivism as a tool for social change. It will be attended by women and men, homosexual, heterosexual and bisexual people, transvestites and transsexuals. All people concerned about defending the historical measures contemplated in the 3rd National Program for Human Rights, proposed by the National Secretary of Human Rights of the Federal Government. Among these rights are: same sex civil union, the criminalization of homophobia, the legalization of abortion and homo-parenting adoption. These proposals have been strongly attacked, especially by the press and Catholic religious leaders (CNBB, the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops).

@souminha, from the “Cultivando a Verdade” blog provides another post about the idea of the protest [pt]:

A ideia é mostrar, com muita alegria, que as pessoas são diferentes umas das outras, nascem, vivem, se beijam, amam, se relacionam com quem bem entendem, e independente de um ou outro grupo que torce o nariz, sua vida vai continuar acontecendo no anonimato de suas casas.

Não adianta um padre, um jornalista ou um senador achar que vai impedir os gays de constituir família, as mulheres de dispor de suas vidas ou o mundo de girar.

Isso acontece, e o PNDH, as militâncias e lutas sociais servem para reconhecer essa existência e garantir que o Estado não negligencie nenhum cidadão ou lhe tire o direito à dignidade.

The idea is to show, joyfully, that people are different from each other, they are born, live, kiss, love, have relationships with whomever they please, regardless of some group or another turning up their nose at them, their lives go on in the privacy of their own homes. It is useless for priests, journalists or Senators to think they will be able to stop gays from starting a family, women from living their lives or the world going round.
This happens, though, and the PNDH, advocacy groups and social protest help to make this life style recognised and to ensure that the State does not neglect any citizen or take away anybody's rights to dignity.

Lourenço Cavalcanti in 23B [pt] is another blogger standing up  for the Beijaço [Kiss-in]. He adds his voice to the conversations:

A razão de ser do beijaço é atrair para nós a atenção da sociedade, e, aos olhos de todos, reclamar nossos direitos. É assim, de forma afetuosa e amorosa, que os gays marcam posição. Os grupos conservadores vão cair de pau em cima, dizendo que essa é mais uma prova do fim dos tempos, e tudo mais, mas deixem eles gritarem.

The raison d'être of Beijaço is to focus the attention of society on us, and, in front of everyone, to claim our rights. It is with affection and love that gays stand up for their position. Conservative groups will jump on us, by saying this is a proof of the end of the world, and so on, but let them scream.

The HTML code of the campaign's banner has been published on hundreds of blogs and websites and can be found here:

<a href="http://cultivandoaverdade.blogspot.com/2010/01/beijos-em-protesto-pelos-direitos.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://mnpv.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/beijaco.png?w=199" width="160" height="255" style="border-style:none;" title="Defenda o PNDH" alt="PNDH" /></a>

A Facebook event page has been created to support the “Beijaço” (the Kiss-in) on February 7th.

Many bloggers and Twitter users have been supporting the cause, using the banner or just spreading the date, locations and posting about the Kiss-in protest. The main organizers of the protest are: @souminha | @Guttto | @mariana_parra | @RadomileCarol | @djalepeixoto | @ticamoreno | @umberto_neto | @alineando | @cissablond | @aarles | @Tsavkko

I will admit right of the bat that I wish that when the president of the republic makes front page news almost weekly, it would be for more politically refreshing reasons. I have wished this about all presidents of a democratic South Africa, and while interesting news can also be infuriating news, I’d rather read about something Zuma did that involves more than his love and sex life. I am not so delusional that I expect a feminist president when none was really in the running (although I did vote nationally for the one person I do interpret as Pan-Africanist, feminist, humane, unbought, Patricia de Lille).

I do expect the President to demonstrate some modicum of respect for the ideals that the highest office (in the country I pay taxes in) stands for. I expect not to have my intelligence insulted every week by the president and his praise singers in the ANC Youth League. I expect to wake up to months of newspaper reading without powerful men in the SACP-ANC-COSATU alliance badgering us with opportunistic talk of ‘culture’ to do their dirty, dirty gender work. When the ANC was re-elected into power, all of us did not suddenly hand over the mantle of being African cultural spokespersons to these men. If most Africans of any ethnicity are women, why do these men deign to consider themselves sole custodians of a culture they plunder for personal gain? This is truly filthy business, even for politicians of the sort we are mostly saddled with.

I am exhausted by Zuma and his antics. I am embarassed by him even though I did not vote for him again (I voted for him when I put my X next to the ANC in my previous national ballot papers, but that was before the rape trial), held no high hopes for this presidency given all that had gone before, and even though I am no nationalist (I will choose ‘loyalty’/'allegiance’ to the continent’s people everytime over loyalty to the nation state). I am most exhabusted by news of Zuma’s sex life – I wish I could say leave the details out of the news because I’ve heard more than I would want to. It is stunning that he really seems to think that power comes with no responsibility. Let him get married to as many women as he likes – as long as they consent. Let him even have multiple sexual partners in and out of wedlock.

However, he is the President of the country and what he does in his private life can have relevance for all of us, for HIV/AIDS policy, for gender relations, for the rise of misogyny in varied guise. The personal is political, and privacy is a function of privilege, and Zuma has both some institutional and significant class priviedge as the man at the helm.

What the president does is a matter of national importance. The talk of his privacy is nonsense – he is not a private citizen. And if he wants to carry on like he is, so that we are all constantly invitated to think about his sex life, then he must deal with the consequences of seeming to embrace living recklessly while in the Presidency. He cannot have it both ways – speak about the dangers of HIV/AIDS, about gender equity (even if some of us know better than to trust him) and then choose a life that suggests the opposite.

We do have a right to require consistency in the President, whether we voted for him or not. We also do have a right to ask him to step down, again, whether we voted for him or not.

Melilla-Morocco fence

Fences and walls are still seen as a reasonable barrier to keep unwanted migrants out. Along the Mexico-US border, between Morocco and Spain’s colony of Melilla and now on two of Israel’s borders: a physical barrier to stop migrants identified as ‘economic’ from getting past. It seems strange that this adjective, referring to migrants’ desire to make money, should become a negative term, when all of life is suffused with the message that we must make lots of money and buy lots of stuff in order to be successful. Some people in Europe cite the fear that national characters will be lost and authentic cultures spoilt if too many outsiders get in. Those ideas are overt in the reasoning of Israel defending the building of fences to keep migrants out.

Israel orders new fence to keep out African migrants

12 january 2010

Ben Lynfield, The Independent

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the construction of two massive fences along his country’s southern border with Egypt in a bid to keep out African asylum seekers he claims are threatening the country’s Jewish character. The barrier will also thwart terrorists from infiltrating the porous border, according to Mr. Netanyahu. “We are talking about a strategic decision to guarantee the Jewish and democratic character of the state of Israel,” Mr. Netanyahu said. The prime minister insisted that the step will not stop refugees in dire need from reaching Israel, saying that the country would “remain open” to those with a genuine claim.

But critics dispute this. “This nationalist and racist rhetoric is divorced from reality,” said Dov Khenin, a left-wing member of the Knesset. He added that it was “intended to frighten the Israelis that ‘the Africans are coming’. Sudanese and Eritreans make up many of the about 20,000 asylum seekers to reach Israel via Egypt since 2005.

The project is expected to cost $270m, and will cover two parts of the border, near the city of Eilat and on the edge of the Gaza strip. Although the army began planning the fence in 2005, Mr. Netanyahu’s backing for it now is part of a wider crackdown against the influx, which refugee-rights activists say has dropped somewhat recently because of Israel’s policy of immediate returns of refugees to Egypt and shootings of refugees along the border by Egyptian troops.

The government insists the asylum seekers are economic migrants seeking a higher standard of living, but the refugees themselves often have harrowing tales of persecution in their home countries and Egypt. Egyptian police killed at least 28 Sudanese refugees during a protest in 2005, the year people began trickling to Israel. Egypt has also come under criticism for forcibly repatriating refugees to Eritrea and Sudan, where human-rights groups say they face imprisonment and even torture.

To justify its often harsh approach, the Israeli government has been repeatedly playing on the core fears of public opinion. Tzahi Hanegbi, the chairman of the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defence committee, told Israel Radio yesterday that there is no alternative to building the fence. “The infiltration of the migrants is threatening the very existence of Israel and its character,” he said. The country defines itself as both a Jewish and democratic state, something its leaders believe depends on maintaining the country’s present clear Jewish majority.

But critics of the government believe that it is contriving the threat. They note that the government itself issues visas each year to 120,000 non-Jewish migrant workers who arrive at Israel’s borders legally and that hundreds of thousands among the wave of immigrants from the former Soviet Union to reach the country during the 1990s were not Jewish.

“All of the discourse of danger to the nature of the state is empty rhetoric,” Dov Khenin said. “Every country has the right to build a fence but nothing will be solved by it, it is not a magic solution. Israel still has to respect international law. If a refugee comes to the fence, Israel as part of the international community still has an obligation to him … The sensitivities of our own history oblige us to be part of an international solution to the problem of refugees.”

The fence decision comes as the government readies to push through the Knesset draconian legislation specifying prison sentences of five to seven years for “infiltrators” and Israelis who assist them. It also follows revelations that Israeli troops have heightened their cooperation with Egyptian counterparts at the border. According to an army response submitted recently to the Israeli supreme court, at one sector of the frontier, Israeli troops fire flares to “draw attention” of Egyptian soldiers to border sites where refugees and asylum seekers are crossing. . .

The most vulnerable victims in a war, infants as young as five, can be cushioned from further death from diseases if they get milk from their mother. M.Makoni.

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