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12:29:48 PM Interesting. I’m watching CNN International, and the shots of long lines and happy voters are almost all coming from Iraqi Kurdistan where the voters are motivated and the environment is (relatively) safe. The rub is that CNNi is not identifying the images as coming from Kurdistan; the only way I knew it was from up north was the single shot of someone waving a Kurdish flag. But if you don’t know what the flag looks like (red, white and green bars with a yellow starburst in the center), as I suspect most Americans don’t, you wouldn’t know the context of these images. Shi’ites are also coming out in droves in the south. But Sunnis are staying home. I will be surprised if the Sunni vote hits double digits at this point.

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For months on end, these seven independent photographers and filmmakers have worked exclusively in Iraq documenting US troops and Iraqi civilians, resistance fighters and child laborers, imprisoned women and incarcerated youths. Using varied media and narrative styles ranging from photojournalism to first person narratives, cinema verite and found photography, Iraq Uncensored photographers present insights and subtleties beyond what daily news reporting can provide.

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Dat onze premier Balkenende gek is op zon zee en strand wisten we al. Ziek van de Nederlandse kwakkelwinter vertrekt Jan Peter daarom vandaag voor een midweekje naar de Antillen. Volgens de RVD voor een kennismakingsbezoek, volgens GeenStijl voor een snoepreisje. Jan Peter neemt namelijk vrouw Bianca en dochter Am�lie gezellig mee. Moet die kleine dan niet gewoon naar op school deze week? Ze heeft immers haar vijfde verjaardag alweer een tijdje terug gevierd en is dus net als al haar leeftijdsgenootjes leerplichtig. En daar de voorjaarsvakantie in Capelle aan den IJssel pas vrijdag begint, vragen wij ons af welk excuus Jan Peter heeft opgevoerd bij het schoolhoofd. De premier mag weliswaar dispensatie aanvragen voor de kleine, maar dat kan slechts indien het voor ��n van de ouders niet mogelijk is tijdens de schoolvakanties met vakantie te gaan, en aangezien het kabinet tijdens schoolvakanties toch altijd met reces is, is dat het probleem dus niet. Over normen en waarden gesproken…

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A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing “sexual services” at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners � who must pay tax and employee health insurance � were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.

The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her “profile” and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.

Under Germany’s welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job � including in the sex industry � or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.

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De Verkeersinformatiedienst (VID) en de Federatie Autorijschool Management (FAM) vinden dat er langs de wegen te veel informatie aan de automobilist wordt gegeven. Ze vinden dat de informatie eenvoudiger en ook minder kan.

Volgens VID-voorzitter Rob Kant moeten automobilisten veel te lang naar de borden kijken. “Vooral op snelwegen leiden ze enorm af”, vindt Kant.

Wel, begin ‘s met het weghalen van alle reclameborden…

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The U.S.-led provisional government in charge of Iraq until last summer was unable to properly account for nearly $9 billion in Iraqi funds it was charged with safeguarding, according to a scathing audit report.

The Coalition Provisional Authority may have paid salaries for thousands of nonexistent employees in Iraqi ministries, issued unauthorized multimillion-dollar contracts and provided little oversight of spending in possibly corrupt ministries, according to the report by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

“While acknowledging the extraordinarily challenging threat environment that confronted the CPA throughout its existence and the number of actions taken by CPA to improve the [interim Iraqi government's] budgeting and financial management, we believe the CPA management of Iraq’s national budget process and oversight of Iraqi funds was burdened by severe inefficiencies and poor management,” the report says in its conclusion. An advance copy of the report, scheduled for release today, was obtained by The Times.

In the mean time:

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Hundreds of soldiers on lockdown at this Army post searched Saturday for an expensive pair of night-vision goggles that disappeared two days ago.

About 400 soldiers with the 296th Brigade Support Battalion have not been allowed to leave the fort since Thursday, when the goggles were discovered missing during an inventory, base spokesman Jeff Young said.

The battalion is responsible for equipment assigned to the first Stryker Brigade and its roughly 4,000 members. Brigade members began returning from Iraq in October when a second Fort Lewis Stryker Brigade relieved them after a year of duty.

“Sensitive items” such as weapons are inventoried frequently, Young said, but conceded that he didn’t know when the goggles were last accounted for or who had them.

The lockdown means battalion members must stay in the area until the missing goggles are found, or until enough evidence is gathered to allow officials to conclude what likely happened to them.

“The person who signed for them really wants to find them,” Young said.

Night-vision goggles have a base price of about $5,000, Young said, but the issue is less about cost than the importance of the gear.

I wonder how long the administrators who “lost” the $9 billion are going to be “locked-down”. Or how about 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units?

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I recently came across the picture above. It is located at a website run by artist and writer Linda Eddy. According to this site, it is their mission "[t]o hold the Democrat presidential candidates accountable for their comments & allegations against President George W. Bush, to make citizens aware of false statements or claims by the Democrat candidates, and to defend the Bush Administration and set the record straight when the Democrats make false or misleading statements about the Bush-Republican record."

When browsing Eddy’s site one inmediately notices the heavy pro-Republican stance of it. Now there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as it doesn’t distort reality. Unfortunately, that is exactly what Linda Eddy does.

Apart from the obvious fact that the picture has been photoshopped, also the familiarity of the scene depicted caught my eye. I did some Google-searches and soon came up with a non-photoshopped version of the picture:

The original picture taken by a Reuters photographer, is part of a series of pictures taken during a shooting incident in March 2003 in Central Iraq, and during which the mother of the child was killed while the sister was injured. The full series of photographs can been seen here (press Launch Showcase).

Apart from the original Reuters picture of the incident, I also came across the following picture made by another photographer who also was present during the incident.

The website where I found the photograph above included the following text below the picture: "Photo by Hayne Palmour/North County Times
Navy Corpsman Richard Barnett of Camarilo, Calif. checks the heart of a young Iraqi boy as other Navy medics treat the boy’s older sister, right, after the two children and their family were caught in a crossfire between US Marines and Iraqi soldiers just outside of a Marine encampment in central Iraq on Saturday, March 29, 2003. The boy was not injured. His sister, who received gunshot wounds, was expected to survive. The father was wounded and the mother was killed in the gun battle. If anything good comes from this nonsense, I haven’t seen it yet said Barnett after the two children and their father were taken away for a medivac helicopter."

It is really appalling that somebody would intentionally filter out the emotions of an originally already shocking picture, and to alter the image in such a way that it only serves one’s own cause. Unfortunately, that is exactly what Linda Kelly, whose essays have also appaered at Rushonline, has done.

It is really nice to see how Linda Eddy tries to bring back the ethics into the political campaigning of the Democrat presidential candidates, but perhaps she should start with herself first before blaming others. Distorting reality for one’s own cause by photoshopping pictures isn’t only extremely unethical, it is also extremely stupid to do so while the original photograph is widely available on the internet.

It reminds me of this:

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The doodles retrieved from the prime minister’s desk after last week’s Davos economic summit were said to be the mark of the man – unstable, under pressure and more like a vicar than a world leader.

But it turns out the jottings were not the work of Tony Blair but the man sitting alongside him, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft.

When the scribbles were found at the end of the summit, a gleeful press drafted in psychologists and graphologists to deconstruct the mind behind them. The author, presumed to be Mr Blair, was variously described as a spiritual person but not a natural leader, struggling to keep control of a confusing world, and a daydreamer who always hoped for the best.

But yesterday, Downing Street revealed that the doodles were not by Mr Blair but by Mr Gates, who had shared a debating platform with the prime minister and the U2 frontman, Bono.

A spokesman said the handwriting was quite different from Mr Blair’s. Officials were now waiting to hear how the comments about Mr Blair would be applied to Mr Gates.

“We look forward with amusement to explanations by a variety of psychologists and graphologists of how various characteristics ascribed to the PM on the basis of the doodles, such as ‘struggling to concentrate’, ‘not a natural leader’, ‘struggling to keep control of a confusing world’ and ‘an unstable man who is feeling under enormous pressure’, equally apply to Mr Gates,” said the spokesman.

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U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote :
Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror

by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967: p. 2)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3– United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam’s presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday.�Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.

Pending more detailed reports, neither the State Department nor the White House would comment on the balloting or the victory of the military candidates, Lieut. Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, who was running for president, and Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, the candidate for vice president.

A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson’s policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam.�The election was the culmination of a constitutional development that began in January, 1966, to which President Johnson gave his personal commitment when he met Premier Ky and General Thieu, the chief of state, in Honolulu in February.

The purpose of the voting was to give legitimacy to the Saigon Government, which has been founded only on coups and power plays since November, 1963, when President Ngo Dinh Deim was overthrown by a military junta.

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Amsterdam International Airport, Schiphol railway-station.
Now we know what’s causing the Dutch train-delay’s

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Up and down the icy spine of South America, the glaciers are melting, the white mantle of the Andes Mountains washing away at an ever faster rate. “Look. You can see. Chacaltaya has split in two,” scientist Edson Ramirez said as he led a visitor up toward a once-grand ice flow high in the thin air of the Bolivian cordillera.

In the distance below, beneath drifting clouds, sprawled 2-mile-high La Paz, a growing city that survives on the water running off the shoulders of these treeless peaks.

Chacaltaya, a frozen storehouse of such water, will be gone in seven to eight years, said Ramirez, a Bolivian glaciologist, or ice specialist.

“Some small glaciers like this have already disappeared,” he said as melting icicles dripped on nearby rock, exposed for the first time in millennia. “In the next 10 years, many more will.”

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Arabic media channel Al Jazeera has been voted the world’s fifth most influential brand in a poll of branding professionals that gave the top slot to U.S. iPod and computer icon Apple.

In the survey of almost 2,000 ad executives, brand managers and academics by online magazine Brandchannel, Apple ousted search engine Google from last year’s top spot, but the surprise to many will be Al Jazeera’s entry into the top five.

“With all the news from Iraq and Afghanistan and the ‘war on terror’, a lot of people are really tuned into the news, and the major news sources have a western bias,” Brandchannel Editor Robin Rusch said.

“I think people are tuning in to Al Jazeera and looking at its Web Site because it does offer another viewpoint. For the global community, it’s one of the few points of access we have to news from the region with a different perspective.”

The annual survey asks respondents to rate the impact of a particular brand on people’s lives, and does not attempt to quantify its financial value.

Coca-Cola, the U.S. soft drinks behemoth that regularly tops polls of brand equity value, is nowhere to be found in this year’s global or regional top five lists.

It’s good to hear actual impact in the lives of people is more important than advertising.

With tears rolling down her eyes, a veiled Iraqi woman shows off her finger stained with blue ink and a small card reading ‘Elect Iraq’ after she cast her vote in a polling station in Amman, January 30, 2005. Millions of Iraqis flocked to vote in a historic election on Sunday, defying insurgents who killed 25 people in bloody attacks aimed at wrecking the poll. REUTERS/Ali Jarekji

Two horses run through the deep snow on a meadow near Bayrischzell, Upper Bavaria, southern Germany, on Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2005. Heavy snowfalls added a thick layer of fresh snow to the Upper Bavaria region overnight. (AP Photo/Uwe Lein)

Pope John Paul II shoos away from the window of his studio white doves freed at the end of the Angelus prayer in St. Peter’s square, at the Vatican

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Mr. Poltrack of CBS said that according to his network’s research, a large number of viewers would welcome the chance to pay $1 to watch each television show, if they could do it on their own schedule and with the ability to skip commercials. With commercials, they’d be willing to pay 50 cents. And because the average viewer sees only half of a show’s episodes, he said, this on-demand viewing won’t hurt the regular showing.

Pretty much sums it up right there. Viewers want to watch it when they have time, and without advertising. Hence the success of MythTV (which is what the entire article is about..) and bittorrent.