position:actor

  • The Largest Ever Analysis of Film Dialogue by Gender: 2,000 scripts, 25,000 actors, 4 million lines
    http://polygraph.cool/films

    Lately, Hollywood has been taking so much shit for rampant sexism and racism. The prevailing theme: white men dominate movie roles.
    But it’s all rhetoric and no data, which gets us nowhere in terms of having an informed discussion. How many movies are actually about men? What changes by genre, era, or box-office revenue? What circumstances generate more diversity?
    To begin answering these questions, we Googled our way to 8,000 screenplays and matched each character’s lines to an actor. From there, we compiled the number of words spoken by male and female characters across roughly 2,000 films, arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever.
    Let’s begin by breaking down dialogue, by gender, for just Disney films.

    #cinéma #discrimination #dialogue #genre #Disney

  • It’s good for the future of cinema that Africa exists
    http://africasacountry.com/2016/04/movienight2-2

    It’s only April, but it’s already been a bad year for Hollywood. If you need a reminder: an all-white acting nominee list at The Oscars; a“swag bag” featuring a free trip to Israel; Chris Rock’s tone-deaf stereotypical jokes about Asian Americans; Leonardo DiCaprio wins Best Actor trophy for a role “celebrating the resilience of settler colonialism on land […]

    #MOVIE_NIGHT #African_film #Film

  • Édifiant. Quand un nazi devient un tueur du Mossad

    The Strange Case of a Nazi Who Became an Israeli Hitman
    Otto Skorzeny, one of the Mossad’s most valuable assets, was a former lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS and one of Adolf Hitler’s favorites.

    http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.711115

    On September 11, 1962, a German scientist vanished. The basic facts were simple: Heinz Krug had been at his office, and he never came home.

    The only other salient detail known to police in Munich was that Krug commuted to Cairo frequently. He was one of dozens of Nazi rocket experts who had been hired by Egypt to develop advanced weapons for that country.

    HaBoker, a now defunct Israeli newspaper, surprisingly claimed to have the explanation: The Egyptians kidnapped Krug to prevent him from doing business with Israel.

    But that somewhat clumsy leak was an attempt by Israel to divert investigators from digging too deeply into the case — not that they ever would have found the 49-year-old scientist.

    We can now report — based on interviews with former Mossad officers and with Israelis who have access to the Mossad’s archived secrets from half a century ago — that Krug was murdered as part of an Israeli espionage plot to intimidate the German scientists working for Egypt.
    Moreover, the most astounding revelation is the Mossad agent who fired the fatal gunshots: Otto Skorzeny, one of the Israeli spy agency’s most valuable assets, was a former lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS and one of Adolf Hitler’s personal favorites among the party’s commando leaders. The Führer, in fact, awarded Skorzeny the army’s most prestigious medal, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, for leading the rescue operation that plucked his friend Benito Mussolini out from the hands of his captors.
    But that was then. By 1962, according to our sources — who spoke only on the promise that they not be identified — Skorzeny had a different employer. The story of how that came to be is one of the most important untold tales in the archives of the Mossad, the agency whose full name, translated from Hebrew, is “The Institute for Intelligence and Special Missions.”
    Key to understanding the story is that the Mossad had made stopping German scientists then working on Egypt’s rocket program one of its top priorities. For several months before his death, in fact, Krug, along with other Germans who were working in Egypt’s rocket-building industry, had received threatening messages. When in Germany, they got phone calls in the middle of the night, telling them to quit the Egyptian program. When in Egypt, some were sent letter bombs — and several people were injured by the explosions.

    Krug, as it happens, was near the top of the Mossad’s target list.

    During the war that ended 17 years earlier, Krug was part of a team of superstars at Peenemünde, the military test range on the coast of the Baltic Sea, where top German scientists toiled in the service of Hitler and the Third Reich. The team, led by Wernher von Braun, was proud to have engineered the rockets for the Blitz that nearly defeated England. Its wider ambitions included missiles that could fly a lot farther, with greater accuracy and more destructive power.

    According to Mossad research, a decade after the war ended, von Braun invited Krug and other former colleagues to join him in America. Von Braun, his war record practically expunged, was leading a missile development program for the United States. He even became one of the fathers of the NASA space exploration program. Krug opted for another, seemingly more lucrative option: joining other scientists from the Peenemünde group — led by the German professor Wolfgang Pilz, whom he greatly admired — in Egypt. They would set up a secret strategic missile program for that Arab country.

    In the Israelis’ view, Krug had to know that Israel, the country where so many Holocaust survivors had found refuge, was the intended target of his new masters’ military capabilities. A committed Nazi would see this as an opportunity to continue the ghastly mission of exterminating the Jewish people.

    The threatening notes and phone calls, however, were driving Krug crazy. He and his colleagues knew that the threats were from Israelis. It was obvious. In 1960, Israeli agents had kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief administrators of the Holocaust, in far-off Argentina. The Israelis astonishingly smuggled the Nazi to Jerusalem, where he was put on trial. Eichmann was hanged on May 31, 1962.

    It was reasonable for Krug to feel that a Mossad noose might be tightening around his neck, too. That was why he summoned help: a Nazi hero who was considered the best of the best in Hitler’s heyday.
    On the day he vanished, according to our new information from reliable sources, Krug left his office to meet Skorzeny, the man he felt would be his savior.

    Skorzeny, then 54 years old, was quite simply a legend. A dashing, innovative military man who grew up in Austria — famous for a long scar on the left side of his face, the result of his overly exuberant swordplay while fencing as a youth— he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS. Thanks to Skorzeny’s exploits as a guerrilla commander, Hitler recognized that he had a man who would go above and beyond, and stop at nothing, to complete a mission.

    The colonel’s feats during the war inspired Germans and the grudging respect of Germany’s enemies. American and British military intelligence labeled Skorzeny “the most dangerous man in Europe.”

    Krug contacted Skorzeny in the hope that the great hero — then living in Spain — could create a strategy to keep the scientists safe.

    The two men were in Krug’s white Mercedes, driving north out of Munich, and Skorzeny said that as a first step he had arranged for three bodyguards. He said they were in a car directly behind and would accompany them to a safe place in a forest for a chat. Krug was murdered, then and there, without so much as a formal indictment or death sentence. The man who pulled the trigger was none other than the famous Nazi war hero. Israel’s espionage agency had managed to turn Otto Skorzeny into a secret agent for the Jewish state.

    After Krug was shot, the three Israelis poured acid on his body, waited awhile and then buried what was left in a hole they had dug beforehand. They covered the makeshift grave with lime, so that search dogs — and wild animals — would never pick up the scent of human remains.

    The troika that coordinated this extrajudicial execution was led by a future prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, who was then head of the Mossad’s special operations unit. One of the others was Zvi “Peter” Malkin, who had tackled Eichmann in Argentina and in later life would enter the art world as a New York-based painter. Supervising from a distance was Yosef “Joe” Raanan, who was the secret agency’s senior officer in Germany. All three had lost large numbers of family members among the 6 million Jews murdered by the cruel, continent-wide genocide that Eichmann had managed.
    Israel’s motivation in working with a man such as Skorzeny was clear: to get as close as possible to Nazis who were helping Egypt plot a new Holocaust.

    The Mossad’s playbook for protecting Israel and the Jewish people has no preordained rules or limits. The agency’s spies have evaded the legal systems in a host of countries for the purpose of liquidating Israel’s enemies: Palestinian terrorists, Iranian scientists, and even a Canadian arms inventor named Gerald Bull, who worked for Saddam Hussein until bullets ended his career in Brussels in 1990. Mossad agents in Lillehammer, Norway, even killed a Moroccan waiter in the mistaken belief that he was the mastermind behind the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by the terrorist group known as Black September. Ahmed Bouchikhi was shot down in 1973 as he left a movie theatre with his pregnant wife. The Israeli government later paid compensation to her without officially admitting wrongdoing. The botched mission delayed further Mossad assassinations, but it did not end them.

    To get to unexpected places on these improbable missions, the Mossad has sometimes found itself working with unsavory partners. When short-term alliances could help, the Israelis were willing to dance with the proverbial devil, if that is what seemed necessary.

    But why did Skorzeny work with the Mossad?

    He was born in Vienna in June 1908, to a middle-class family proud of its military service for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From an early age he seemed fearless, bold and talented at weaving false, complex tales that deceived people in myriad ways. These were essential requirements for a commando officer at war, and certainly valuable qualities for the Mossad.

    He joined Austria’s branch of the Nazi Party in 1931, when he was 23, served in its armed militia, the SA, and enthusiastically worshipped Hitler. The führer was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933 and then seized Austria in 1938. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and World War II broke out, Skorzeny left his construction firm and volunteered — not for the regular army, the Wehrmacht, but for the Leibstandarte SS Panzer division that served as Hitler’s personal bodyguard force.

    Skorzeny, in a memoir written after the war was over, told of his years of SS service as though they were almost bloodless travels in occupied Poland, Holland and France. His activities could not have been as innocuous as his book made them seem. He took part in battles in Russia and Poland, and certainly the Israelis believed it was very likely that he was involved in exterminating Jews. The Waffen-SS, after all, was not the regular army; it was the military arm of the Nazi Party and its genocidal plan.
    His most famous and daring mission was in September 1943: leading commandos who flew engineless gliders to reach an Italian mountaintop resort to rescue Hitler’s friend and ally, the recently ousted Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and spirit him away under harrowing conditions.

    This was the escapade that earned Skorzeny his promotion to lieutenant colonel — and operational control of Hitler’s SS Special Forces. Hitler also rewarded him with several hours of face-to-face conversation, along with the coveted Knight’s Cross. But it was far from his only coup.

    In September 1944, when Hungary’s dictator, Admiral Miklos Horthy, a Nazi ally, was on the verge of suing for peace with Russia as Axis fortunes plunged, Skorzeny led a contingent of Special Forces into Budapest to kidnap Horthy and replace his government with the more hard-line Fascist Arrow Cross regime. That regime, in turn, went on to kill or to deport to concentration camps tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews who had managed to survive the war up to that point.

    Also in 1944, Skorzeny handpicked 150 soldiers, including some who spoke fair to excellent English in a bold plan to fend off the Allies after they landed in Normandy on D-Day in June. With the Allies advancing through France, Skorzeny dressed his men in captured U.S. uniforms, and procured captured American tanks for them to use in attacking and confusing Allied troops from behind their own lines.

    The bold deception — including the act of stealing U.S. soldiers’ property — plunged Skorzeny into two years of interrogation, imprisonment and trial after the war ended. Eventually, Allied military judges acquitted him in 1947. Once again, the world’s newspapers headlined him as Europe’s most dangerous man. He enjoyed the fame, and published his memoirs in various editions and many languages, including the 1957 book “Skorzeny’s Special Missions: The Autobiography of Hitler’s Commando Ace,” published by Greenhill Books. He spun some tall-tale hyperbole in the books, and definitely downplayed his contacts with the most bloodthirsty Nazi leaders. When telling of his many conversations with Hitler, he described the dictator as a caring and attentive military strategist.

    There was much that Skorzeny did not reveal, including how he escaped from the American military authorities who held him for a third year after his acquittal. Prosecutors were considering more charges against him in the Nuremberg tribunals, but during one transfer he was able to escape — reputedly with the help of former SS soldiers wearing American military police uniforms.

    Skorzeny’s escape was also rumored to have been assisted by the CIA’s predecessor agency, the Office of Special Services, for which he did some work after the war. It is certainly notable that he was allowed to settle in Spain — a paradise for Nazi war veterans, with protection from the pro-Western Fascist, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. In the years that followed he did some advisory work for President Juan Peron in Argentina and for Egypt’s government. It was during this period that Skorzeny became friendly with the Egyptian officers who were running the missile program and employing German experts.
    In Israel, a Mossad planning team started to work on where it could be best to find and kill Skorzeny. But the head of the agency, Isser Harel, had a bolder plan: Instead of killing him, snare him.

    Mossad officials had known for some time that to target the German scientists, they needed an inside man in the target group. In effect, the Mossad needed a Nazi.

    The Israelis would never find a Nazi they could trust, but they saw a Nazi they could count on: someone thorough and determined, with a record of success in executing innovative plans, and skilled at keeping secrets. The seemingly bizarre decision to recruit Skorzeny came with some personal pain, because the task was entrusted to Raanan, who was also born in Vienna and had barely escaped the Holocaust. As an Austrian Jew, his name was originally Kurt Weisman. After the Nazis took over in 1938, he was sent — at age 16 — to British-ruled Palestine. His mother and younger brother stayed in Europe and perished.

    Like many Jews in Palestine, Kurt Weisman joined the British military looking for a chance to strike back at Germany. He served in the Royal Air Force. After the creation of Israel in 1948, he followed the trend of taking on a Hebrew name, and as Joe Raanan he was among the first pilots in the new nation’s tiny air force. The young man rapidly became an airbase commander and later the air force’s intelligence chief.

    Raanan’s unique résumé, including some work he did for the RAF in psychological warfare, attracted the attention of Harel, who signed him up for the Mossad in 1957. A few years later, Raanan was sent to Germany to direct the secret agency’s operations there — with a special focus on the German scientists in Egypt. Thus it was Raanan who had to devise and command an operation to establish contact with Skorzeny, the famous Nazi commando.

    The Israeli spy found it difficult to get over his reluctance, but when ordered, he assembled a team that traveled to Spain for “pre-action intelligence.” Its members observed Skorzeny, his home, his workplace and his daily routines. The team included a German woman in her late 20s who was not a trained, full-time Mossad agent but a “helper.” Known by the Hebrew label “saayanit” (or “saayan” if a male), this team member was like an extra in a grandly theatrical movie, playing whatever role might be required. A saayanit would often pose as the girlfriend of an undercover Mossad combatant.

    Internal Mossad reports later gave her name as Anke and described her as pretty, vivacious and truly flirtatious. That would be perfect for the job at hand — a couples game.

    One evening in the early months of 1962, the affluent and ruggedly handsome — though scarred — Skorzeny was in a luxurious bar in Madrid with his significantly younger wife, Ilse von Finckenstein. Her own Nazi credentials were impeccable; she was the niece of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s talented finance minister.

    They had a few cocktails and were relaxing, when the bartender introduced them to a German-speaking couple he had been serving. The woman was pretty and in her late 20s, and her escort was a well-dressed man of around 40. They were German tourists, they said, but they also told a distressing story: that they had just survived a harrowing street robbery.

    They spoke perfect German, of course, the man with a bit of an Austrian accent, like Skorzeny’s. They gave their false names, but in reality they were, respectively, a Mossad agent whose name must still be kept secret and his “helper,” Anke.

    There were more drinks, then somewhat flamboyant flirting, and soon Skorzeny’s wife invited the young couple, who had lost everything — money, passports and luggage — to stay the night at their sumptuous villa. There was just something irresistible about the newcomers. A sense of sexual intimacy between the two couples was in the air. After the four entered the house, however, at a crucial moment when the playful flirting reached the point where it seemed time to pair off, Skorzeny — the charming host — pulled a gun on the young couple and declared: “I know who you are, and I know why you’re here. You are Mossad, and you’ve come to kill me.”

    The young couple did not even flinch. The man said: “You are half-right. We are from Mossad, but if we had come to kill you, you would have been dead weeks ago.”

    “Or maybe,” Skorzeny said, “I would rather just kill you.”

    Anke spoke up. “If you kill us, the ones who come next won’t bother to have a drink with you, You won’t even see their faces before they blow out your brains. Our offer to you is just for you to help us.”

    After a long minute that felt like an hour, Skorzeny did not lower his gun, but he asked: “What kind of help? You need something done?” The Mossad officer — who even now is not being named by colleagues — told Skorzeny that Israel needed information and would pay him handsomely.

    Hitler’s favorite commando paused for a few moments to think, and then surprised the Israeli by saying: “Money doesn’t interest me. I have enough.”

    The Mossad man was further surprised to hear Skorzeny name something that he did want: “I need for Wiesenthal to remove my name from his list.” Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Vienna-based Nazi-hunter, had Skorzeny listed as a war criminal, but now the accused was insisting he had not committed any crimes.

    The Israeli did not believe any senior Nazi officer’s claim of innocence, but recruiting an agent for an espionage mission calls for well-timed lies and deception. “Okay,” he said, “that will be done. We’ll take care of that.”

    Skorzeny finally lowered his weapon, and the two men shook hands. The Mossad man concealed his disgust.

    “I knew that the whole story about you being robbed was bogus,” Skorzeny said, with the boastful smile of a fellow intelligence professional. “Just a cover story.”

    The next step to draw him in was to bring him to Israel. His Mossad handler, Raanan, secretly arranged a flight to Tel Aviv, where Skorzeny was introduced to Harel. The Nazi was questioned and also received more specific instructions and guidelines. During this visit, Skorzeny was taken to Yad Vashem, the museum in Jerusalem dedicated to the memory of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The Nazi was silent and seemed respectful. There was a strange moment there when a war survivor pointed to Skorzeny and singled him out by name as “a war criminal.”

    Raanan, as skilled an actor as any spy must be, smiled at the Jewish man and softly said: “No, you’re mistaken. He’s a relative of mine and himself is a Holocaust survivor.”

    Naturally, many in Israeli intelligence wondered if the famous soldier for Germany had genuinely — and so easily — been recruited. Did he really care so much about his image that he demanded to be removed from a list of war criminals? Skorzeny indicated that being on the list meant he was a target for assassination. By cooperating with the Mossad, he was buying life insurance.

    The new agent seemed to prove his full reliability. As requested by the Israelis, he flew to Egypt and compiled a detailed list of German scientists and their addresses.

    Skorzeny also provided the names of many front companies in Europe that were procuring and shipping components for Egypt’s military projects. These included Heinz Krug’s company, Intra, in Munich.

    Raanan continued to be the project manager of the whole operation aimed against the German scientists. But he assigned the task of staying in contact with Skorzeny to two of his most effective operatives: Rafi Eitan and Avraham Ahituv.

    Eitan was one of the most amazing characters in Israeli intelligence. He earned the nickname “Mr. Kidnap” for his role in abducting Eichmann and other men wanted by Israeli security agencies. Eitan also helped Israel acquire materials for its secret nuclear program. He would go on to earn infamy in the 1980s by running Jonathan Pollard as an American Jewish spy in the United States government.

    Surprisingly flamboyant after a life in the shadows, in 2006, at age 79, Eitan became a Member of Parliament as head of a political party representing senior citizens.

    “Yes, I met and ran Skorzeny,” Eitan confirmed to us recently. Like other Mossad veterans, he refused to go on the record with more details.

    Ahituv, who was born in Germany in 1930, was similarly involved in a wide array of Israeli clandestine operations all around the globe. From 1974 to 1980 he was head of the domestic security service, Shin Bet, which also guarded many secrets and often conducted joint projects with the Mossad.

    The Mossad agents did try to persuade Wiesenthal to remove Skorzeny from his list of war criminals, but the Nazi hunter refused. The Mossad, with typical chutzpah, instead forged a letter — supposedly to Skorzeny from Wiesenthal— declaring that his name had been cleared.

    Skorzeny continued to surprise the Israelis with his level of cooperation. During a trip to Egypt, he even mailed exploding packages; one Israeli-made bomb killed five Egyptians in the military rocket site Factory 333, where German scientists worked.

    The campaign of intimidation was largely successful, with most of the Germans leaving Egypt. Israel stopped the violence and threats, however, when one team was arrested in Switzerland while putting verbal pressure on a scientist’s family. A Mossad man and an Austrian scientist who was working for Israel were put on trial. Luckily, the Swiss judge sympathized with Israel’s fear of Egypt’s rocket program. The two men were convicted of making threats, but they were immediately set free.

    Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, however, concluded that all of this being out in public was disastrous to Israel’s image — and specifically could upset a deal he had arranged with West Germany to sell weapons to Israel.

    Harel submitted a letter of resignation, and to his shock, Ben-Gurion accepted it. The new Mossad director, commander of military intelligence Gen. Meir Amit, moved the agency away from chasing or intimidating Nazis.

    Amit did activate Skorzeny at least once more, however. The spymaster wanted to explore the possibility of secret peace negotiations, so he asked Israel’s on-the-payroll Nazi to arrange a meeting with a senior Egyptian official. Nothing ever came of it.

    Skorzeny never explained his precise reasons for helping Israel. His autobiography does not contain the word “Israel,” or even “Jew.” It is true that he sought and got the life insurance. The Mossad did not assassinate him.

    He also had a very strong streak of adventurism, and the notion of doing secret work with fascinating spies — even if they were Jewish — must have been a magnet for the man whose innovative escapades had earned him the Iron Cross medal from Hitler. Skorzeny was the kind of man who would feel most youthful and alive through killing and fear.

    It is possible that regret and atonement also played a role. The Mossad’s psychological analysts doubted it, but Skorzeny may have genuinely felt sorry for his actions during World War II.

    He may have been motivated by a combination of all these factors, and perhaps even others. But Otto Skorzeny took this secret to his grave. He died of cancer, at age 67, in Madrid in July 1975.

    He had two funerals, one in a chapel in Spain’s capital and the other to bury his cremated remains in the Skorzeny family plot in Vienna. Both services were attended by dozens of German military veterans and wives, who did not hesitate to give the one-armed Nazi salute and sing some of Hitler’s favorite songs. Fourteen of Skorzeny’s medals, many featuring a boldly black swastika, were prominently paraded in the funeral processions.

    There was one man at the service in Madrid who was known to no one in the crowd, but out of habit he still made sure to hide his face as much as he could. That was Joe Raanan, who by then had become a successful businessman in Israel.

    The Mossad did not send Raanan to Skorzeny’s funeral; he decided to attend on his own, and at his own expense. This was a personal tribute from one Austrian-born warrior to another, and from an old spy handler to the best, but most loathsome, agent he ever ran.

    Dan Raviv, a CBS News correspondent based in Washington, and Israeli journalist Yossi Melman are co-authors of five books about Israel’s espionage and security agencies, including “Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars” (Levant Books, 2014). Contact them at feedback@forward.com

    For more stories, go to www.forward.com. Sign up for the Forward’s daily newsletter at http://forward.com/newsletter/signup

    The Forward

    Haaretz Contributor

    #Israel #Mossad #Nazi #Egypte #Histoire #Allemagne #Hitman

  • This system instantly edits videos to make it look like you’re saying something you’re not | TechCrunch
    http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/18/this-system-instantly-edits-videos-to-make-it-look-like-youre-saying-som

    The video up top shows a work-in-progress system called Face2Face (research paper here) being built by researchers at Stanford, the Max Planck Institute and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

    The short version: take a YouTube video of someone speaking like, say, George W. Bush. Use a standard RGB webcam to capture a video of someone else emoting and saying something entirely different. Throw both videos into the Face2Face system and, bam, you’ve now got a relatively believable video of George W. Bush’s face — now almost entirely synthesized — doing whatever the actor in the second video wanted the target’s face to do. It even tries to work out what the interior of their mouth should look like as they’re speaking.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk

    #visage #fake #manipulation

  • How to make and find theaters to show your movie if you’re a black filmmaker in #South_Africa
    http://africasacountry.com/2016/02/movienight2

    It is telling that the four top-grossing South African movies of all time are all films in which the actor and director Leon Schuster (who made a career out of doing broad slapstick candid camera movies) wears blackface. Also telling is the fact that South African critics barely notice this as an offense (for example, […]

    #CULTURE_PAGE ##MovieNight #Film #Tell_me_sweet_something

  • Dynamic Maps and Graphs | ACLED
    http://www.acleddata.com/visuals/maps/dynamic-maps

    The dynamic maps below have been drawn from ACLED Version 6. They illustrate key dynamics in event types, reported fatalities, and actor categories. Clicking on the maps, and selecting or de-selecting options in the legends, allows users to interactively edit and manipulate the visualisations, and export or share the finished visuals. The maps are visualised using Tableau Public.

    #conflit #cartographie #Afrique

    • #ACLED #GDELT et d’autres bases d’événements : un résumé ici par « Georgine » :
      http://www.poliscirumors.com/topic/gdelt-suspended/page/8#post-95140

      ACLED is basically an incident database - each “event” codes a “happening” rather than a simple action, in the case of ACLED a day of violence in a location perpetrated by a group - it’s much more similar to Wikileaks data and/or the Global Terrorist Database. For each of their events, they extract a ton of information that is connected to the event - so basically one ACLED / GTD / UCDP-GED etc. etc. event can be 100 GDELT events. Don’t get me wrong, being curated and manually collected, it’s leaps and bounds better than GDELT in terms of data quality (the number of false positives and negatives is tons lower), but ACLED is one of the worse incident datasets out there, if not the worse (they did come first though). It’s simply not reliable across cases, the geocoding is pretty poor, and I’ve read an working paper (done by some guys in Berlin, comparing their independently collected benchmark data with some incident datasets), and ACLED was the “odd one there”.
      A far, far better choice is UCDP-GED, they are fairly close to ACLED in what they capture (also only Africa), but the quality and documentation is leaps and bounds better, plus they code far more information per event, plus they are compatible with other datasets (ACLED isn’t), i.e. UCDP-GED has reliable estimates of battle deaths, while ACLED doesn’t really (they’ve added them as an after-thought, and much of them are simply extracted from nowhere). Plus UCDP has the intention to (at least one day) be global with their UCDP-GED while ACLED seems to want to be regional forever. There are issues with UCDP-GED as well - their inclusion criteria is strict, and, like all Uppsala products, they are 1-2 years “behind” real time.
      You also have AID-DATA (Aid flows in Africa, by World Bank, I have no idea how far they’ve gone), SCAD (protests in Africa), MMAD (mass-movements in autocracies), GTD (terrorism), etc. etc. They all follow the “incident” pattern rather than the VRA-LEVANT-GDELT pattern.
      P.S. Note that I don’t work for any of these projects, but worked quite a bit with UCDP-GED, ACLED, GTD and GDELT. Good luck!

  • Honneur du Prolétariat---lundi 11 janvier 2016 18h
    http://blogs.radiocanut.org/honneurduproletariat/2016/01/11/lundi-11-janvier-2016-18h

    01 – octobre rouge (generik) 02 – doric – over mentality 03 – you love her coz shes dead – blood lust 04 – the actor – modern air 05 – linear movement – the game 06 – röyksopp – ice machine 07 – choeurs des travailleurs 08 – déficit budgétaire – blackened statement 09 (...)

  • The truth about TV’s rape obsession: How we struggle with the broken myths of masculinity, on screen and off - Salon.com
    http://www.salon.com/2015/06/25/the_truth_about_tvs_rape_obsession_how_we_struggle_with_the_broken_myths_of_m

    attention l’article spoile de nombreuses séries, GOT, MadMen, Downton Abbey...

    “The Sopranos” did it in 2001, when Lorraine Bracco’s Jennifer Melfi was suddenly and violently raped in a parking garage. “Veronica Mars” made it part of the titular protagonist’s backstory, in the 2004 pilot. In 2006, “The Wire” introduced and then never confirmed it, when it showed us the story of Randy (Maestro Harrell) keeping watch as a girl named Tiff “fooled around” with two boys in the bathroom. “Mad Men” did it in 2008, when Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) was raped by her fiancé, Greg (Sam Page) on the floor of Don’s office.

    A few shows were practically founded on it—“Law And Order: SVU,” which premiered in 1999, has dealt with rape in nearly every episode of its 16-season and counting run. “Oz,” the 1997 HBO show set in a prison, regularly featured male-on-male rape.

    But starting around the turn of the decade, rape on television morphed from a delicate topic to practically de rigueur. In the last two years alone, shows as vastly different as “Downton Abbey” and “Game Of Thrones” have graphically portrayed violent rape—typically, but not always, perpetrated by men onto women—to the point that depictions of sexual assault on television have become a regular part of the national discourse. “SVU,” “Outlander,” “Broad City,” “Inside Amy Schumer,” “Orange Is The New Black,” “Tyrant,” “Stalker,” “Shameless,” “Scandal,” and “House Of Cards” have all handled sexual assault, in their own way—either by depicting rape, exploring whether or not a sexual encounter is rape, or making jokes about how often rape happens. For a crime that has a dismal 2 percent conviction rate, it certainly is getting talked about an awful lot.

    I can identify that this is a phenomenon that is happening. It’s a little harder to explain why. Some of it is purely a numbers game: There’s more television than ever—and more and more of that television is not on broadcast networks, with their stricter censorship rules and mandates for reaching a mainstream audience. It’s certainly easier to depict and discuss sexual assault on television now than it ever was before.

    But that’s not the whole story. I joke, morbidly, that my job title has changed from television critic to “senior rape correspondent” because I cover televisual sexual assault with alarming frequency. The cases, on TV, run the gamut from 14-year-old girls drugging 18-year-old boys into having sex with them and plots attempting to reconstruct hazy memories of late-night drinking to men raping other men as an act of war and husbands raping wives in the bedroom. It’s a topic that engages, uncompromisingly, with our notions of gender, sexuality, power, and equality. And despite the barrage of sexual assaults on television, it’s a crime that occurs far, far more often in real life.

    #culture_du_viol #séries #virilité #masculinité #viol

    • Partie sur l’histoire du viol :

      What we call rape is an entirely new phenomenon—barely 50 years old. For most of human existence, rape was not a crime committed against women but instead against the men who supervised them—husbands, fathers, brothers, lords, kings. The word “rape” likely comes from the Latin “rapere,” meaning to seize or abduct—to kidnap, to rob, to deprive another of property. Rape sullied a bloodline and damaged goods and/or services; it was a crime against private property. The implication of that language is also that rape happens to women, not men. Men might be violated, abused, tortured, yes, but not seized; they were typically not someone else’s property.

      And though the Romans had their own word for sexual violation, “stuprare,” it was not necessarily immoral, criminal, or otherwise repugnant. Women were by and large not empowered enough to grant consent over their bodies, so the question of nonconsensual sex was rendered moot. Greek and Roman mythology is rife with gods raping maidens; in those stories, treated almost casually—an irritating fact of life, kind of like chicken pox.

      The language of this era is extremely familiar, even today: Women invite sexual assault through their behavior; men have carnal urges they can’t control; people have to continue the species somehow. It’s reasoning that all hinges on the same logic—female desire is necessarily subordinate to male desire.

      In 1975 Susan Brownmiller published her landmark work “Against Our Will,” which provided the foundation for the language of consent as a bulwark against the prevalence of rape. We rely on terms like “consent,” but consent can be silently or unconsciously given, and hard to prove after the fact. Intent is hard to prove in any context; the upside of a crime like murder is that at least there’s a dead body to point to. With sexual assault, it’s much harder to point to the aftereffects of trauma—either because the rape kit was mishandled or lost, as happens an awful lot, or because the aftereffects are more psychological than physical.

      But primarily, what Brownmiller’s work did was center rape as a crime committed against women, not against property. “Against Our Will” fit into the feminist movement’s aims to recognize sexual violence and redefine it—both socially and legally. Before rape reform legislation of the 1970s, marital rape was an oxymoron, rape against men wasn’t illegal (or even acknowledged), and a woman’s reputation could be used as evidence against her accusation of rape in court.

      It was a victory, but one with an upsetting aftertaste. A change in legislation cannot change social attitudes to sex and gender overnight. A prudent study of history asks us to not impose our own perspective of what people are like onto peoples throughout history, which could lead to the argument that because it so radically redefined the concept, before Brownmiller’s seminal work, rape as we know it didn’t exist. But that part of us that does identify with people from the past—that part of humanity that both spins tales and listens to them, rapt—is forced to acknowledge something much more upsetting: Perhaps, instead of there being no rape, there was only rape. Perhaps human existence is built entirely on intimate violence.

      #histoire

    • Dans les programmes à destination des hommes voici comment se présente le viol :

      Rapists are depicted as identifiably outside the mainstream through their language, clothing, habits, or attitudes. Each of these plot elements works to rein force sensitivity and desire for justice on the part of the male protagonist. In most episodes it is the male detective/ main character who provides the primary comfort and support for the victim. The stories end when the detective protagonist has completed his work, that is, when the rapist is caught or killed. The detective’s sense of morality, and often his need for revenge on the criminal, thus culminate in a successful triumph of the “good guy,” which is often accomplished through violence against the rapist. However, the further plight of the victim through the course of counseling or a trial are not included… In short, these plots are about the male avengers of rape rather than about the problem or crime of rape or the experiences and feelings of the victim.

      #violeur #sauveur #nice_guy #chevalier_servant #victimes

    • Dans les programmes à déstination des femmes voila comment se présente le viol :

      Daytime TV and made-for-TV movies such as those on Lifetime, in their low-budget, melodramatic glory, was far more likely to offer a woman-centric narrative of rape. Where mainstream TV ran away from topics like domestic violence, prostitution, abortion, and of course rape, soap operas and Lifetime films almost reveled in it; presumably there was some cathartic release in watching crimes suffered mostly by women in the real world play out in exaggerated glory on television. Lifetime’s films, then and now, were characterized by lurid titles and grim scenarios: “The Burning Bed” (1984), “She Fought Alone” (1995), “She Cried No” (1996), “She Woke Up Pregnant” (1996). On the abuse and rape survivor advocacy site The Road To Anaphe, the site’s creator includes an exhaustive list of Lifetime films, adding: “Lifetime Television may be a ‘women’s network,’ but it is one that shows a lot of good, informative movies on the subjects of child abuse, domestic violence, and missing children.” You could count on violence and exploitation in these films. The crucial difference is that you could also typically count on the point of view of the victim being central to the story.
      Soap operas, unlike TV movies or even primetime TV shows, are not just serialized but heavily serialized. The short production time for soap episodes means that the shows can respond on the fly to audience interests, making the medium a fascinating one for measuring audience sentiment. And, uncomfortably, when rape shows up on soap operas, often those stories end up redeeming the rapist—indeed, in response to popular affection for those characters.

      The best example of that might be the iconic Luke (Anthony Geary) and Laura (Genie Francis) on “General Hospital,” who have been one of that show’s foundational relationships. But their first sexual encounter, in 1979, was rape, when Luke drunkenly forced himself on Laura. She eventually fell in love with him and they were together for 37 years. Their wedding episode in 1981 remains to this day the highest rated soap opera episode in history. It was only in 1998, when their son learned of the rape, that the show really confronted the myth of “forced seduction” they had established nearly 20 years earlier, and reframed it as the assault it really was.

      “One Live To Live,” in 1993-1994, focused much of its storytelling on the gang rape and subsequent aftermath of a college student named Marty Saybrooke (Susan Haskell). The football jock who instigated the rape—a tall, handsome guy named Todd Manning (Roger Howarth)—was originally intended to be a serial rapist. The brutal honesty of the scene inspired both audience and critical praise; the series won Daytime Emmys for the plot arc, which unapologetically framed Todd as a sadistic villain.

      But then the story took a turn: Audiences loved Todd. Their enthusiasm spurred the writers to instead build a redemption arc for the character, even as Marty struggled to rebuild her life. Todd lingered as a flawed character on the margins as the writers of the show tried to reconcile their desire to maintain that the rape was reprehensible with audience enthusiasm for the character. The situation was settled (sort of) in 1998, when actor Howarth decided to walk away from the show. Unfortunately, I can only find this quote from Soap Opera Digest in Wikipedia, but it’s so compelling, I’m reproducing it:

      If the rape had been an unrealistic, soapy thing, then it wouldn’t matter. But because it was so in-depth and so brutal, to show Todd and Marty having drinks together in Rodi’s — to show Marty feeling safe and comfortable with Todd — is bizarre… People have come up to me and said, ‘My 7-year-old loves you.’ What do I say to that? I’m not going to tell them, ‘Don’t let your 7-year-old watch TV.’ But I have to say, it’s disturbing.

      Howarth’s departure from the show effectively scuttled any possibility of redeeming the character (though he did return for guest-stints on the show). Of course, this being soap operas, Todd was recast with Trevor St. John, who believed himself to be Todd but then turned out to be Todd’s twin brother, and in the meantime, Marty returned to the show with amnesia, and they had sex, which ended up getting dubbed “re-rape.” But it’s a plotline notable for never losing sight of the fact that what Todd did to Marty was unforgivable, in a landscape where, to quote the writer and unofficial soap expert Joe Reid, “The laundry list of incredibly popular soap characters who started off as rapists — or even just terrorizers of women — is uncomfortably long.”

      Interestingly, by 2003, when the rape of Bianca Montgomery on “All My Children” dominated national conversation, the audience’s desire to see the rapists forgiven seems to have fallen off. Bianca herself, as the first openly lesbian lead on a daytime drama, became the subject of redemption; where some audiences had hated her for coming out of the closet, her rape—a “punishment” or “corrective” for her sexuality—and her subsequent struggle to keep her baby became objects of such audience fervor that the New York Times covered it in 2004.

    • Pourquoi la TV aime le viol :

      The book “Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture” makes a stark observation that Cuklanz, includes in her own book I quote above. The authors state that rape is “a crime ideally suited to television. It is violent and therefore action packed. The sexual nature of the crime can easily be presented as the act of a violent, mentally unbalanced madman.” And after noting both a study on sexual assault finds rape to be “the only violent crime to be a matter of universal concern among women of all class and ethnic backgrounds” and the role that detective procedurals in primetime played in shaping socially acceptable performances of masculinity, Cuklanz comes to a conclusion that is, in its way, astounding: Rape on television is used to, more often than not, to redeem masculinity,

      by offering a subtle redefinition that frames masculinity as the means through which women are protected and avenged rather than brutalized and demeaned. At the same time, protagonist males can engage in violence within certain parameters, such as when they become so morally outraged at criminals that they can no longer contain their anger. Masculine volatility is harnessed for acceptable purposes and never used against women. … Rape provides a subject matter for which these stereotypes are easy to maintain. Not only are victims clearly deserving of protection and care, but the extreme evil and brutality of rape also serve as a clear contrast to the detective’s behavior and legitimize his use of force.

      Rape on television is the theater through which both men and women grapple with masculinity—with the fact that in its most corrosive form, masculinity is a quality that wreaks violence on those closest to it. Destruction and power are built into our concept of maleness; rape plots on TV work desperately to allow men that access to power while also codifying when it’s acceptable to use.

      I’m reminded of one of the most shocking and iconic rape episodes on primetime television—“Sylvia,” a two-parter on the family-oriented “Little House On The Prairie,” in 1980. The episode is horrifying, drawing on slasher-film imagery to tell a story of a girl whose “bosoms” came in “too soon,” resulting in horrific violence at the hand of a man in town. Sylvia herself is a one-off character who is introduced at the beginning of the two episodes and dies by the end. The episode is not about her; it’s about the men around her—her father, her rapist, her boyfriend, and most importantly, Pa Ingalls (Michael Landon), the show’s continued figure of masculine righteousness. What would have happened if Pa hadn’t been around is a chilling possibility left unrealized.

      Underneath the archetype of the righteous man, the myth of the redeemed rapist, and the specter of the girl who was “asking for it,” in “Little House On The Prairie” or elsewhere, is a far greater fear, a far bigger problem. If good men don’t exist, if rapists can’t reform, if it’s not ultimately the woman’s fault, then something much scarier bubbles to the surface: This world, and masculinity in it, is very, very broken.

      cc @supergeante
      cc @mona

    • Cette partie spoile la saison 2 de « True Detective »

      In this long examination of rape on television, it is hard not to think of HBO’s “True Detective,” which both consciously borrows the bones of the detective procedural and its unsubtle discourse on righteous masculinity. In the first episode of the second season, we learn Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell) is a man tortured by the fact that his wife was raped; it is almost farcical, given the work we have done to center women in their own victimization. (I remain convinced, perhaps naively, that it is farcical, but that’s another story.) “True Detective” is a show with many faults, but it does attempt rather dramatically to tell a big story about masculinity in this world. And what it seems to tell is that the myth of masculinity we currently are all invested in is purely unsustainable. The men of “True Detective,” the ones consumed by the warring ideas of both destruction and violence but also righteous, proper violence, are erratic, addicted, and tortured; they fixate on violence done to the innocent because they know that on some level, they are responsible for that violence. The men of the first season of “True Detective” both have to confront their own monstrosity in order to come out the other side of a case that they could not solve; the confrontation leaves them both desolate and broken. If the mythos of masculinity is a beautiful, irresistible supernova, “True Detective” offers a vision of the collapsed, soul-sucking black hole it really is.

      And if men struggle with it, women struggle with it, too; the story of soap operas and Lifetime movies is overall the story of women attempting to come to terms with the fact that that which they love is always capable of violating them. Women’s television offers either redemption for the abuser or an open-and-shut justice, via Olivia Benson (Mariska Hartigay) in “SVU”; neither happens with any notable frequency in real life. Rapists keep raping, with premeditation and without recourse, and we can barely admit it to ourselves.

      There’s a point in Cuklanz’s work, which focuses on TV between 1976 and 1990, where she argues that as television is a more formulaic medium, it’s unsurprising how this standard detective-rape plot is produced and reproduced. It’s 2015 now, though, and we don’t live in a world of formulaic television. The past few years have yielded an incredible number of rape plots that often push the envelope in ways we’ve never seen before—exploring their violence, their frequency, the insidiousness of acquaintance rape, and the less-discussed phenomenon of male-on-male rape.

      My complaint with these plots, over and over, is that the stories—usually written and directed by men, despite progress in gender equity—is that so often they focus on the feelings of the men in the story, at the expense of the victims’. But I can see why they focus on the men; the men, as the overwhelmingly more likely perpetrators, present a greater puzzle for us. It would be simpler to dismiss all rapists as monsters, but when so many are fathers, brothers, friends, boyfriends, it becomes harder and harder to do. Sexual assault has only existed the way we think about it for a few decades, and we are still trying to figure out how to address it—how to change the way this world functioned for millennia, and still functions in pockets of untouched refuge all over the world. I don’t particularly have a solution for how to “fix” rape on television; it’s graphic, brutal, violent, and horrible, to the point that it is very difficult to watch, hard to explain, confusing to discuss.

      But one thing is clear: I’d rather we dealt with this than we didn’t. I’d rather discuss rape on every TV show than not discuss it all. I’d rather see the world convulsing with outrage over Sansa or Anna or Mellie or Claire or Pennsatucky— who are all, by the way, white women, suggesting an erasure of experience for women of color that has yet to be addressed —than pretend that this isn’t a crippling social problem, an epidemic that we appear to lack the political will or interest to fight. This is what we do with stories; we imagine not just what happened then, and what happened now—but what happens next.

      et pour la saison 2 de true detective, je suis d’accord avec le fait qu’elle soit ridicule aussi bien le perso de Colin Farrell que l’autre gangster est aussi incroyablement cliché. Il n’y a que le générique qui vaille la peine pour cette saison à mon avis.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJJfe1k9CeE

  • Generation of political priority for global #surgery: a qualitative policy analysis - The Lancet Global Health
    http://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(15)00098-4/fulltext?rss=yes

    Several factors hinder the acquisition of attention and resources for #global_surgery. With respect to actor power, the global surgery community is fragmented, does not have unifying leadership, and is missing guiding institutions. Regarding ideas, community members disagree on how to address and publicly position the problem. With respect to political contexts, the community has made insufficient efforts to capitalise on political opportunities such as the Millennium Development Goals. Regarding issue characteristics, data on the burden of surgical diseases are limited and public misperceptions surrounding the cost and complexity of surgery are widespread. However, the community has several strengths that portend well for the acquisition of political support. These include the existence of networks deeply committed to the cause, the potential to link with global health priorities, and emerging research on the cost-effectiveness of some procedures.

    #chirurgie #santé #santé_mondiale #politique_de_santé #inégalités #accès_aux_soins

  • Encounters with the Posthuman - Issue 26: Color
    http://nautil.us/issue/26/color/encounters-with-the-posthuman-rp

    On the second balmy day of the year in New York, Neil Harbisson, a Catalan artist, musician, and self-professed “cyborg,” walked into a café in the Nolita district of Manhattan. The actor Gabriel Byrne was sitting at a table in the corner. Harbisson approached. “May I do a sound portrait of you? It will just take one minute. For nine years, I’ve been listening to colors,” he explained.

    Byrne eyed his questioner from under raised eyebrows. On a slight frame, the 30-year-old Harbisson wore a white T-shirt, deep-pink jeans and black-and-white showman’s brogues. His face was angular, with an aquiline nose and a chin smudged with grown-out stubble. A small plastic oval floated in front of his forehead, attached to the end of a flexible stem that reached around from the back of his head and over a (...)

  • Actor Depardieu banned from Ukraine for stance on Russia - Yahoo News India
    https://in.news.yahoo.com/actor-depardieu-banned-ukraine-stance-russia-082120764.html

    Ukraine has banned French actor Gerard Depardieu from entering the country for five years, its state security service said on Wednesday, apparently for making comments that suggested he supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea last year.
    Government spokeswoman Olena Hitlyanska said the 66-year-old, known for films such as Cyrano de Bergerac and Green Card, had been on a blacklist of public figures deemed to be unsympathetic towards Ukraine’s in its conflict with Russia.
    She did not cite any specific comments from Depardieu.
    This month Culture Minister Ivan Kirilenko said that Depardieu was on a list of 117 prominent figures in the arts and entertainment world “who have spoken out in support of the violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty”.
    Depardieu, who is notorious for riotous antics off-screen and scrapes with the law over drink-driving, motorbike accidents and his outspoken criticism of high taxes in France, was granted Russian citizenship by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2013.
    He has since defended Russia’s international policies in interviews with French and other media.

  • Prince Saud al-Faisal obituary
    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/10/prince-saud-al-faisal

    Al-Faisal had a grandiose vision of Saudi Arabia’s role in the Arab world. This vision clashed with the new, complex realities in the region that had resulted from America’s retreat, the Syrian civil war, the rise of Islamic State, the long-term ambitions of Iran and Turkey, and the return of Russia as an important actor.

    #irréaliste

  • The U.N. at 70: United Nations Disappoints on Its 70th Anniversary – Part One | Inter Press Service
    http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/06/the-u-n-at-70-united-nations-disappoints-on-its-seventieth-anniversary-part

    Most of the money and energy at the U.N. in recent years has poured into “peacekeeping,” which is typically a kind of military intervention outsourced by Washington and its allies. The organisation, dedicated in theory to ending war, is ironically now a big actor on the world’s battlefields. It has a giant logistics base in southern Italy, a military communications system, contracts with mercenaries, an intelligence operation, drones, armored vehicles and other accouterments of armed might. Meanwhile, the Department of Disarmament Affairs has seen its funding and status decline considerably.

    [...]

    The U.N. has weakened as its member states have grown weaker. The IMF, the World Bank and global financial interests have pushed neo-liberal reforms for three decades, undermining national tax systems and downsizing the role of public institutions in economic and social affairs. Governments have privatized banks, airlines and industries, of course, and they have also privatized schools, roads, postal services, prisons and health care.

    The vast new inequalities have led to more political #corruption, a plague of #lobbying, and frequent electoral malfeasance, even in the oldest democracies. [...]

    Tightening U.N. budgets have tilted the balance of power in the U.N. even more sharply towards the richest nations and the wealthiest outside players. Increasingly, faced with urgent needs and few resources, the U.N. holds out its beggar’s bowl for what amounts to charitable contributions, now totaling nearly half of the organization’s overall expenditures .

    This “extra-budgetary” funding, enables the donors to define the projects and set the priorities. The purpose of common policymaking among all member states has been all but forgotten.

    The U.N. at 70: United Nations Disappoints on Its 70th Anniversary – Part Two | Inter Press Service
    http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/06/the-u-n-at-70-united-nations-disappoints-on-its-70th-anniversary-part-two

    Unfortunately, many excellent U.N. intellectual initiatives have been shut down for transgressing powerful interests. In 1993, the Secretary-General closed the innovative Center on Transnational Corporations, which investigated corporate behaviour and economic malfeasance at the international level.

    Threats from the U.S. Congress forced the Office of Development Studies at UNDP to suddenly and ignominiously abandonment its project on global taxes. Financial and political pressures also have blunted the originality and vitality of the Human Development Report. Among the research institutions, budgets have regularly been cut and research outsourced. Creative thinkers have drifted away.

    Clearly, the U.N.’s seventieth anniversary does not justify self-congratulation or even a credible argument that the “glass is half full.” Though many U.N. agencies, funds and programmes like UNICEF and the World Health Organisation carry out important and indispensable work, the trajectory of the U.N. as a whole is not encouraging and the shrinking financial base is cause for great concern.

    #militarisation #ONU #donateurs #priorités

  • The smuggler : hero or felon ?

    The general public and the media have had fun fantasising about the motives and interests that push migrants to embark on dangerous journeys across the sea. Smuggling is often understood through a simplification of both the clandestine traveller and the smuggler: a process of abstraction that overlooks any ambiguities and nuances. While researchers have abundantly studied the profile of the migrant, they had been less interested in the other key actor of the clandestine migration: the smuggler. Who is the smuggler? How does s/he operate? Why do migrants place their lives in the smuggler’s hands? The goal of this paper is to attend to the complexity of the phenomenon by looking at human smuggling across the Adriatic Sea. In light of the need to elaborate an adequate policy response to this phenomenon, a better understanding of smuggling is pivotal in ensuring the security of the receiving state and that of the migrant. With this task in mind, this paper problematizes the figure of the smugglers beyond overly simplistic generalizations and representations. In so doing, this paper argues that a truly effective answer to human smuggling would require the EU and its state members to concentrate on reducing “demand” rather than curbing “supply.”

    http://www.migrationpolicycentre.eu/publication/smuggler-hero-felon
    #smuggler #passeur #asile #migration #réfugiés

    • Five misconceptions about migrant smuggling

      Migrant smugglers occupy a special place in the European ‘migration crisis’ discourse. They are depicted as the facilitators of irregular migrants’ journeys, and as criminals who take advantage of people’s vulnerability and naïveté. Stories of ruthless smugglers who abuse, abandon or even murder those who rely on their services are common in popular media, as well as in mainstream academic, policy and law enforcement narratives of migration.

      http://cadmus.eui.eu/handle/1814/54964
      #préjugés

  • Russian actor and Putin critic found dead in Moscow - Telegraph
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11212072/Russian-actor-and-Putin-critic-found-dead-in-Moscow.html

    A well-known Russian actor who was a vocal critic of the Kremlin has been found dead in suspicious circumstances at his home in Moscow.
    Alexei Devotchenko, 49, was discovered in his apartment in the north of the city, police told Russia news agencies.
    “There is reason to suppose that the artist’s death is of a criminal character,” said one law enforcement source.
    […]
    However, Mr Devotchenko’s outspoken criticism of the rule of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, is likely to provoke intense scrutiny over how and why he died.
    In 2011, the actor said he was renouncing two state acting prizes “received from Putin’s hands”, saying he was “ashamed”. “I’ve had enough of all this tsar-state stuff,” he wrote in a blog post. “With its lies, its cover-ups, its legalised theft, its bribe-taking and its other triumphs.
    A year earlier he had urged fellow actors, artists and musicians to boycott “ultra-patriotic, propagandistic, chauvinistic, anti-Semitic, or pro-Stalinist feature films and television projects” and “agitprop documentaries”.
    He also called on them not to talk to “lying and tendentious state media” or to take part in Kremlin-linked banquets.
    Money earned from such appearances, “smells of dank prison cells, of neglected hospitals and homeless shelters, of the acrid smoke of burnt-out architectural monuments and historical buildings and night clubs and homes for the elderly,” he said.
    It smells of the boots of the OMON riot police.

  • Here’s what Shakespeare’s plays sounded like with their original English accent | 22 Words
    http://twentytwowords.com/performing-shakespeares-plays-with-their-original-english-accent

    In this short documentary, linguist David Crystal and his son, actor Ben Crystal, look at the differences between English pronunciation now and how it was spoken 400 years ago. They answer the most basic question you probably have right now — How do you know what it sounded like back then? — and they discuss the value of performing Shakespeare’s plays in the original accent…

    #linguistique #rime #shakespeare

  • U.S. Arabs, Muslims concerned ’American Sniper’ provokes violent threats, hateful language
    The film is a box office hit and has been nominated for six Academy Awards, including best picture.
    By Mark Guarino Jan. 26, 2015 | Haaretz
    http://www.haaretz.com/news/world/1.638814

    REUTERS - An Arab-American civil rights organization has asked “American Sniper” director Clint Eastwood and actor Bradley Cooper to denounce hateful language directed at U.S. Arabs and Muslims after the release of the film about a Navy marksman.

    The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) said in a letter to Eastwood and Cooper that its members had become targets of “violent threats” since early last week, before “American Sniper” went into general release. The letter said Eastwood and Cooper, the film’s producer and star, could bolster the ADC’s message of tolerance.

    “It is our opinion that you could play a significant role in assisting us in alleviating the danger we are facing,” said the letter, dated Jan. 21. Reuters was provided a copy on Saturday.

    The film is a box office hit and has been nominated for six Academy Awards, including best picture.

    The ADC said it was working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and police to assess the threats.

    The film tells the story of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL sniper. His 160 kills in Iraq is considered the highest count in U.S. military history. Some critics have said the film glorifies war and sanitizes Kyle, who called Muslims “savages” in his memoir.

    Kyle was killed by a disgruntled U.S. veteran at a Texas gun range in 2013.

    ADC President Samer Khalaf said on Saturday that it did not make sense to call for a boycott given the film’s box office success.

    “If we boycott it, it will only cause people to want to see it more,” he said.

    The Washington-based ADC asked Arabs and Muslims to send them copies of threatening messages they had received. More than 100 have been collected, all from social media.

    “Nice to see a movie where the Arabs are portrayed for who they really are - vermin scum intent on destroying us,” said one Twitter post collected by the ADC.

    Jack Horner, a spokesman for Warner Bros., the studio releasing the film, said in a statement that the company, a unit of Time Warner Co, “denounces any violent, anti-Muslim rhetoric, including that which has been attributed to viewers” of the film.

    He added, “Hate and bigotry have no place in the important dialogue that this picture has generated about the veteran experience.”

    Spokesmen for Eastwood and Cooper had no immediate response to requests for comment.

  • #Chespirito: The Latin American Idol
    http://africasacountry.com/chespirito-the-latin-american-idol

    Mexican actor Roberto Gómez Bolaños died last week, aged 85. Chespirito (which means “little Shakespeare” in Mexican Spanish), as he was known, created, scripted and starred on many successful #TV.....

    #LATIN_AMERICA_IS_A_COUNTRY #culture #Mexico #Obituary #POLITICS #Roberto_Gomez_Bolanos

  • Female Actors Fight Back: “Some Lady Parts” Tumblr Documents Sexist Casting Calls
    http://www.thefrisky.com/2014-11-07/female-actors-fight-back-some-lady-parts-tumblr-documents-sexist-casting-

    Actor Katrina Day has collected a series of sexist casting breakdowns for her not-haha-funny new Tumblr Some Lady Parts. Some of these notices read like Craigslist personal ads: “Seeking: Hot Blonde girl … Blonde hair …. classic hot girl.” Others aim for highbrow, but end up unrealistic and porn-y: “Seeking: Ultimate fantasy woman of a sexually frustrated college graduate. Sophisticated, stylish, sexy, intoxicating.” Reading the Tumblr all at once is jarring, a reminder that there are many ways to be sexist — from styling a character as “a typical prostitute” to the many female characters that are not given names.

    via @xmolenat sur Twitter

    #actrices #sexisme

  • Le Daily Mail publie un commentaire erronné à l’occasion du 80ème anniversaire d’une militante pour les droits des animaux

    Brigitte Bardot : The woman who invented sex | Daily Mail Online
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2773048/Brigitte-Bardot-The-woman-invented-sex.html

    By Michael Thornton for the Daily Mail, Published : 23:22 GMT, 28 September 2014 | Updated : 02:13 GMT, 29 September 2014

    The first time I glimpsed Brigitte Bardot in the flesh - and those words are apt, as it turned out - I was still at school. I had been invited by an actor friend to visit Pinewood Studios, where Dirk Bogarde was filming the comedy Doctor At Sea.

    For several minutes I was allowed to stand at the back of the set watching rehearsals for a shower scene. A young girl of devastating physical attraction, with provocatively pouting lips and large, inviting and smouldering brown eyes, emerged into view, clutching a bath towel which failed to conceal the fact she was naked underneath.

    You could have heard a pin drop on that set. The attention of every man there was riveted on that sinuous figure, who raised and lowered the towel mischievously while a stills photographer attempted to get shots that could be decently published.

    As she romped with gazelle-like grace across the set, revealing more and more of her amazing body, it became apparent that she had strips of flesh-coloured sticking plaster concealing her nipples and her pubic hair.

    In a gesture that would have seemed brazen but for her uninhibited merriment, she dropped the towel, ripped off the sticking plasters, and stood before us all as nature had made her, throwing her head back with explosive laughter, a free spirit, utterly defying convention.

    As the film studio erupted with male wolf-whistles, a publicity man frogmarched me off the set at the speed of light, insisting: ‘That was simply... um... improvisation. It will not be appearing in the film.’

    Such was my astonished introduction to the 20-year-old Brigitte Bardot, described by Time magazine as ‘France’s most ogled export’, who was to become the most incandescent and liberated screen sex symbol of her age. Yesterday, at her secluded home in Saint-Tropez, this legendary and increasingly reclusive figure, a grandmother twice over, arrived at the age of 80.

    Voici pourquoi l’auteur se trompe, ce ne sont ni Brigitte Bardot ni l’expression corporelle qui font la révolution sexuelle, au contraire c’est la langue, ce sont les textes élaborés et la réflexion approfondie qui sont à l’origine de la libération des mœurs.

    Gonzai : JEAN-JACQUES PAUVERT [1926-2014] Ma vie en texte
    http://gonzai.com/jean-jacques-pauvert-ma-vie-en-texte
    A propos des 120 Jours de Sodome

    Je pense en tous cas, que c’est un texte qui n’aurait pu exister dans aucune autre langue que le français, parce qu’il n’y a pas de littérature érotique dans les autres langues, à part l’Italie. Parce que dans les autres langues, en anglais notamment, il n’y a pas de vocabulaire. Ils ont tout un vocabulaire obscène mais c’est argotique, ce n’est pas de la langue courante. Quand ils voulaient parler de choses érotiques, ils employaient le français.

    Pourtant j’aime bien la déscription du plateau de tournage anglais.

    #cinema #sex #littérature

  • Samantha Morton reveals sexual abuse as child in residential care | The Guardian
    http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/12/samantha-morton-reveals-sexual-abuse-child-residential-care

    The Bafta- and Golden Globe-winning actor Samantha Morton, who spent much of her childhood in a succession of children’s homes in Nottingham, has revealed for the first time that she was sexually abused by residential care workers and said she believes abuse was “rife” within the city’s children’s services.
    ...
    The actor, 37, who has twice been nominated for an Oscar,and starred in the blockbuster Minority Report alongside Tom Cruise, was first taken into care as a baby and spent the rest of her childhood in and out of foster care and children’s homes. She had told social workers about “all sorts of sexual abuse that happened to me from a very, very young age”, she said, but no action had ever been taken. She described one incident when she was 13 when two male members of staff at the Redtiles home came into her bedroom at night, removed her nightclothes and abused her. She was initially embarrassed but eventually told social workers, who did nothing. “There was no support, no offer of counselling, no wanting to delve deeper ... Maybe they just assumed I had been abused already, or was being, anyway.” She estimates that 90% of her friends in the home had been sexually abused, though not all by staff.

    A few weeks later Morton told her mother, who took her to a local police station. Again, no further action was taken.
    ...
    Asked what she believed should change, Morton called for an end to the privatisation of children’s services, higher standards for residential care workers , a reversal of cuts to the care system and a legal requirement for people in authority to report abuse when they suspect it.