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Activist Artist Goes on Trial in Beijing

November 17, 2010

By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — In a case that has galvanized the Chinese arts community, a prominent artist who helped lead a short-lived demonstration along the nation’s most politically hallowed thoroughfare went on trial Wednesday on assault charges that supporters say are aimed at punishing him for his political activism.

The defendant, Wu Yuren , 39, is accused of assaulting a group of police officers at a Beijing police station last May. He had gone to the stationhouse with a friend who was seeking to file a complaint against his landlord, but Mr. Wu ended up in a verbal confrontation with several officers after they grabbed his cell phone, the friend, Yang Licai, said.

The police say Mr. Wu attacked them. Mr. Wu claims it was he who was beaten, a contention supported by Mr. Yang, who heard his cries from an adjoining room after his friend was dragged away. “The screams were terrifying,” said Mr. Yang, who was released 10 days later.

But Mr. Wu’s supporters say they believe the beating, prosecution and six months he has already spent in jail are revenge for an audacious protest he helped organize on Chang’an Avenue, the ceremonial boulevard that runs past Tiananmen Square and the heavily guarded compound housing China’s top leaders.

Mr. Wu and about two dozen other artists briefly took to the streets last February after a group of men swinging iron rods tried to evict them from the studios they occupied in an arts district that was standing in the way of a redevelopment project. The protest apparently had the desired effect: several weeks later, the landlord seeking their eviction agreed to a fairly generous compensation package in exchange for their departure.

A provocative multi-media artist whose work is slyly political, Mr. Wu may have also angered the authorities by signing Charter ‘08, the manifesto calling for free elections that brought its main author, Liu Xiaobo, an 11-year jail sentence — and the Nobel Peace Prize.

“I have no doubt this is a case of revenge,” said his wife, Karen Patterson, who is a Canadian citizen. “You have to ask why five officers decided to beat up one guy just for wanting his cell phone back. It doesn’t make sense.”

Mr. Wu could receive up to three years in prison if convicted.

At the trial on Wednesday, prosecutors showed a three-minute video that supposedly depicts Mr. Wu’s offending behavior. But his lawyer, Li Fangping, said the footage, which was shot by the police and is obviously edited, only shows Mr. Wu demanding back his cell phone and then reciting the badge numbers of the officers he said were taunting him.

Mr. Li asked that the police produce an unedited version of the video, a motion that was granted by the judge.

Ms. Patterson said of the judge’s decision: “it’s a big relief to me that they’re actually considering the evidence.” Ms. Patterson said afterwards.

Nearly 100 supporters gathered outside the courthouse as did a large number of police, some of whom were videotaping the crowd. “I was scared to come out here today but you have to face your fears,” said Dou Bu, 38, a painter in bright red trousers whose hair was styled like that of a Samurai. “It’s not fair,” he said of his friend’s prosecution. “It’s like a game but the rules are already set and you can’t change them.”

Benjamin Hass and Li Bibo contributed research.

       It is Sigd 

Here's video shot yesterday by ADN reporter Richard Mauer after Alaska Dispatch editor Tony Hopfinger was handcuffed and detained by security guards working for Senate candidate Joe Miller at a campaign event yesterday. The video starts after Hopfinger was placed in handcuffs and before Anchorage police arrived (Mauer interviewed him for several minutes before starting the video). The voice in the video is Mauer.

Read more: http://community.adn.com/adn/node/153751#ixzz12lK38JQD

Poet With a Kodak and a Restless Eye

photo by D. Betz

September 12, 2010    NY Time  
By HOLLAND COTTER

WASHINGTON — The poet Allen Ginsberg, who died in 1997, adored life, feared death and craved fame. These obsessions seemed to have kept him, despite his practice of Buddhist meditation, from sitting still for long. He was constantly writing, teaching, traveling, networking, chasing lovers, sampling drugs, pushing political causes and promoting the work of writer friends.

In the early 1950s he began to photograph these friends in casual snapshots, meant to be little more than souvenirs of a shared time and ethos. Years later his picture taking — often of the same friends, now battered by life or approaching death — became more formal and artful, as if he were trying to freeze his subjects’ faces and energies, and to show off his photographic skills, for the history books.

Nearly 80 pictures, early and late, many with handwritten inscriptions, are on view through Thursday in “Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg” at the National Gallery of Art here. Some are familiar; others rarely seen. As arranged by Sarah Greenough, the senior curator in the museum’s department of photographs, they form a continuous narrative. In the space of two small galleries we watch legends take shape, beauties fade, an American era come and go.

Ginsberg began his photographic chronicle of what would become the Beat generation in earnest in 1953, when he was in his late 20s and living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He had known the group’s crucial personalities — William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac and their communal muse Neal Cassady — since his student days at Columbia. He regarded them collectively, himself very much included, as a new literary vanguard. The work they were doing in the early ’50s seemed to confirm his faith. And his early pictures, taken with a secondhand Kodak, project a buoyant confidence.

We see figures who would soon enough become cultural monuments still vital and mercurial. In one much-published picture Kerouac, smoking and brooding, is already a romantic hero, but in another he’s a mugging cut-up on an East Village street “making a Dostoyevsky mad-face,” to quote Ginsberg’s caption.

And we also see a surprisingly seductive version of Burroughs. The world would come to know him as a dour presence in business suits and Burberry raincoats, but Ginsberg photographed him lying in bed like a half-nude odalisque eyeing the camera. When the picture was taken, the two men were briefly living together as lovers, with Burroughs deeply smitten, and Ginsberg primarily focused on editing Burroughs’s new novel, “Queer.”

By December of 1953 there were major shifts. Burroughs left for Morocco. Ginsberg hit the road for adventures in Mexico and Cuba, eventually landing in San Francisco. There in 1954 he met the teenage Peter Orlovsky, who would become his life partner. The relationship proved extremely complicated, but Ginsberg’s initial photos of his new mate have a distinct glow of tenderness that extends to pictures of other San Francisco friends. It’s as if the Summer of Love had arrived a generation early.

When Ginsberg first read his lacerating anti-establishment poem “Howl,” to a San Francisco audience in 1955, he found himself instantly famous. After “Howl” appeared in book form, he was notorious. United States Customs officials seized a second printing of the book and charged its publisher, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, with selling obscene literature. Ferlinghetti was acquitted, but the 1957 trial put the Beat phenomenon squarely on the countercultural map. (A film titled “Howl,” which both documents and dramatizes the censorship incident, opens in New York this month with the promotional slogan: “The obscenity trial that started a revolution; the poem that rocked a generation.”)

Ginsberg was out of the country during the flap, wandering here and there, photographing wherever he went. We see his portraits of Burroughs and Paul Bowles in Tangier, then of Corso in Paris. By 1962 Ginsberg and Orlovsky were in India, taking drugs, chatting up holy men. With his full beard and long hair, Ginsberg looked like a proto-hippie at this point, but he was also still an avid sightseer, a kind of cultural tourist, snapping shots of erotic sculptures on Hindu temples.

After the mid-’60s the production of photographs drops off for almost two decades. There are some fine pictures still: one of Orlovsky doing a nude handstand on an old farm he and Ginsberg had bought in Cherry Valley, N.Y., and a final portrait of Kerouac in his early 40s, bloated, alcohol soaked, almost unrecognizable. But at some point Ginsberg lost a couple of cameras and was too busy to replace them. He let photography go.

Two decades later, though, he picked it up again in a serious way. In 1983 he came across pictures from the ’50s he had long forgotten about, many in the form of undeveloped negatives or cheap drugstore prints. He realized he was holding history in his hands. And, more aware than ever of the passing of time and of the increasing stature the Beat movement had earned, he wanted to preserve that past, and to extend it through photography.

So he bought a new camera. He consulted experts — Berenice Abbott, Robert Frank — about picture taking and printing. He reprinted old images in larger formats and with lots of blank marginal space for written annotation. (The captions on all his photos, however early, date from the 1980s onward.) Soon he was exhibiting and, not a minor consideration for a person who supported many old friends, selling work. Photography became a full-fledged second career.

Roughly half of the pictures in Washington date from the 1980s and 1990s. Most are conventional solo portraits, interesting because the sitters — a glum white-haired Corso, a tousled, tired Yevgeny Yevtushenko — are of interest, but also because of Ginsberg’s fine, avid eye, which was present from the start. Only Orlovsky is seen in a group shot. In a wrenching 1987 picture, he sits protectively with his mother and a haunted-looking brother and sister, all of whom suffered from mental illness.

Ginsberg was always eager to photograph pop stars, and there’s a portrait here of Bob Dylan, who was also a friend and collaborator. But the celebrity Ginsberg cared about most in the end was himself, and we get a couple of late-career images of him in this show. In one, a self-portrait from 1991, we see him, grizzled, paunchy and nude, reflected in a motel-room mirror. In a second, from 1996, taken — by Ginsberg himself? by someone else? — on his 70th birthday, he stands in front of his Lower East Side kitchen window, nattily dressed, self-possessed, fresh from a star turn at an exhibition devoted to Beat culture.

My favorites among the later photographs, though, are three of a different kitchen window in an earlier apartment, this time with no one in sight and Ginsberg present only behind the camera. He shot the pictures in different years in the 1980s, but apart from changes of season the view is the same: the window with a cluttered table in front of it, and outside a tenement backyard with scrappy trees, facing walls and patches of sky above.

Basically these are still lifes; undramatic, domestic, emblems of circling time. Or maybe you could think of them as images of everyday altars. In an inscription across the bottom of one he wrote, “I sat for decades at morning breakfast tea looking out my kitchen window” and “one day recognized my own world, the familiar background, the giant wet brick-walled Atlantis garden.” It’s a different world from the one we see in the rest of the show, plain, calm and unstriving. In art, Ginsberg sat still for a while.

“Beat Memories” continues through Thursday at the National Gallery of Art, Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington; (202) 737-4215, nga.gov.

A Chinese Advocate Is Freed, but Stays Under Surveillance

September 9, 2010    New York Times
By MICHAEL WINESBEIJING — A blind, self-taught lawyer imprisoned by the Chinese authorities in 2006 after years of exposing government abuses was freed Thursday and confined to his home in Shandong Province, surrounded by guards and watched through closed-circuit surveillance cameras.

The lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, earned global attention — and the government’s enmity — by challenging the legality of government policies that exploited farmers, discriminated against the disabled and brutally enforced China’s one-child policy.

That last crusade documented sterilizations and abortions forced on thousands of peasants in Mr. Chen’s native Linyi County despite national policies barring such practices. The class-action lawsuit he prepared also alleged that the authorities had beaten and tortured parents who sought to escape the procedures.

Security officials detained Mr. Chen in 2005, hours after he discussed the case in Beijing with journalists from Time magazine, and kept him under house arrest or in jail for a year before his trial. He was convicted in August 2006 on charges of destroying property and assembling a crowd to disrupt traffic, related to an incident in his village that year, and given a 51-month jail sentence.

His principal defense lawyer was accused shortly before the trial of stealing a wallet, and was released from custody only after the trial had ended.

Mr. Chen’s imprisonment became a global cause for human rights activists, and international protests led the government to retry him — but he was convicted on the same charges.

Mr. Chen had severe gastrointestinal problems in prison and was denied Braille reading material, his family has said. A Beijing lawyer and friend, Teng Biao, said by telephone on Thursday that Mr. Chen remained heavily guarded at his home in Dongshigu, a village near Linyi City.

“He said that he was escorted home early this morning at 6 a.m.,” he said. “There were about 30 people in the village and eight or nine guards in his courtyard to prevent his family from getting in touch with the outside.”

He continued: “He also told me that he suffered from chronic diarrhea in prison, and food poisoning happened very often there. He was using his relative’s cellphone, but later I heard that all of their cellphones are being blocked right now.”

Mr. Chen, who turns 39 in November, lost his sight as a child after a fever and was trained in acupressure, a Chinese medical technique that is one of the few professions available to the blind.

Although he never formally attended law school, he audited enough law classes to begin assisting local villagers with legal problems, and began filing cases in local courts seeking to force officials to abide by laws protecting the disabled and small farmers.

But it was his documentation of abuses of China’s one-child policy that led to his detention.

On Thursday, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch applauded his release in a written statement, adding that he should never have been imprisoned. A Hong Kong researcher for the organization, Nicholas Bequelin, said in an interview that Mr. Chen’s continued home confinement under guard, a practice known in China as “soft detention,” has no basis in Chinese law.

“Because his case has attracted international attention, Beijing authorities have given the instruction to local affiliates that he should not be able to cause embarrassment to China for his work, and local authorities should not do anything that raises his profile,” he said. “So in the end, what they do is to prevent him from doing anything without arresting him.”

Zhang Jing contributed research from Beijing.

Jethro Tull feat Shlomo Gronich - Bouree in Jerusalem, Israel

pictures

Linda Ronstadt - You're No Good

"Probably the greatest single performance in history!

She's at the Tennessee State Penetentiary outside Nashville, Baby-Dolled and Beautiful, singing ►You're No Good◄ to a self-concious crowd of Felons that want to do nothing but illicit unmentionables to her..."

 comment on youtube from nogoodchump

Leading Chinese artist Ai Weiwei claims police attacked him

Creator of Beijing's Bird Nest stadium says he was attacked while trying to report a previous assault by security forces

• Tania Branigan in Beijing
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 10 August 2010 11.31 BST

 

Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist commissioned to create an installation for the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, says police attacked him. Photograph: guardian.co.uk

Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist commissioned to create an installation for the Tate Modern Turbine Hall, says that plain-clothes police assaulted him and his assistant today as he attempted to file a complaint about a previous attack.
The artist who designed the Beijing national stadium, known as the Bird Nest, said that he was kicked and shoved outside a police station in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in south-west China.
"Some undercover police tore our shirts and tried to grab our cameras. There were maybe 10 of them. They pushed and kicked us," he said in a telephone interview. "Now we are being attacked because we complained about last time. It is so ironic."
Ai and several other activists were detained in Chengdu last year to prevent them attending the trial of a campaigner investigating schoolchildren's deaths in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008. The subject has become highly sensitive because of allegations that shoddy construction, linked to corruption, was to blame for the high death toll in schools.
Ai said a policeman punched him in the head in that incident, leaving him with painful headaches, and he underwent surgery in Germany weeks later after doctors spotted internal bleeding.
Today he went to Chengdu's city police department, but says it refused to take his complaint and referred him to the police station at Jinniu.
He said that as he arrived at that building he was surrounded by men who assaulted him and his assistant, and told him: "If you want justice, go back to the US."
Ai lived in America for several years but is still a Chinese citizen.
He said that he recognised one of the men from his detention last year and believes the group were plain-clothes officers.
He added: "I tried to go through the judicial system to make a report [about the earlier assault], but no one will give us any answers. They have pushed us from one place to another.
"China's judicial system is totally corrupt and paralysed. Even with a case that people internationally know, they don't give a shit."
Ai said he was now at the complaints office but that he had been refused a receipt for his report and feared they would simply drop it in the bin. He said: "We have to make the effort, but we can't really win.
"We know we can't really get [satisfaction] but we still have to go through the system – if you don't do it, that's your own fault for giving up your rights."
An employee at Jinniu police station said they was not aware of any incident there today. The propaganda department at Chengdu's city police department refused to comment.

•  Limited 2010

Picture This, and Risk Arrest

By JIM DWYER -New York Times

Published: July 27, 2010

 One afternoon, Duane P. Kerzic was arrested by the Amtrak police while taking pictures of a train pulling into Pennsylvania Station. At first, the police asked him to delete the images from his camera, but he refused. He ended up handcuffed to the wall of a holding cell while an officer wrote a ticket for trespassing.
Mr. Kerzic, a semiprofessional photographer, proceeded to describe his detention on his Web site and included images of the summons. He also hired a lawyer to sue.
In due course, Stephen Colbert of “The Colbert Report” arrived to sound the gong. He turned the Kerzic story into a segment called “Nailed ’Em.” It mocked Amtrak without mercy.
“Finally,” Mr. Colbert reported, “Kerzic cracked and revealed the reason he was taking his terrifying photos.”
Mr. Kerzic appeared on the screen.
“The reason I was taking photos of trains is that every year Amtrak has a contest; it’s called ‘Picture Our Train,’ ” he explained.
Soon after the show was broadcast, a strange thing happened. The section of Mr. Kerzic’s Web site that dealt with Amtrak all but vanished. His lawsuit was settled, and as a condition of the deal, he had to remove his writings about the episode. Now his page on Amtrak — at duanek.name/Amtrak/ — contains two words: “No Comment!”
Mr. Kerzic and his lawyer, Gerald Cohen, both said they couldn’t talk about what had become of the Web pages describing the arrest and his commentary about it. Carlos Miller, a photographer and blogger who followed the case, reported that Mr. Kerzic received a “five-figure” settlement.
But how could Amtrak — the national railroad, whose preferred stock is owned by the American public and whose chief executive and board of directors are appointed by the president and confirmed by Congress — require that a Web site criticizing the railroad be shut down as a condition of settling a lawsuit for wrongful arrest?
What qualifications does Amtrak have to function as a censor?
“Our policy has been and continues to be that ‘Amtrak does not comment on civil case settlements,’ ”Clifford Cole, an Amtrak spokesman, said in an e-mail message. “We would not have any more to say on this matter.”
Since 9/11, a number of government bodies have sought to limit photography in railroad stations and other public buildings. One rationale is that pictures would help people planning acts of mayhem. It has been a largely futile effort. On a practical level, decent cameras now come in every size and shape, and controlling how people use them would require legions of police officers. Moreover, taking photographs and displaying them is speech protected by the First Amendment, no less than taking notes and writing them up.
LAST year, a man named Robert Taylor was arrested on a nearly empty subway platform in the Bronx, accused of illegally taking pictures. For good measure, the officer threw in a disorderly conduct charge, on the grounds that Mr. Taylor was blocking people’s movement, even though it was the middle of the afternoon, the platform was about 10,000 square feet and there was hardly anyone around. The charges were dismissed, and the city paid Mr. Taylor $30,000 for his trouble. The city had already paid $31,501 to a medical student who was arrested while he was shooting pictures of every train station in the city.
After Mr. Taylor’s case, the New York Police Department reminded officers that there was no ban on taking pictures in the subway system.
In November, Antonio Musumeci, a member of the Manhattan Libertarian Party, was given a ticket while videotaping a political protest in the plaza outside the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan. Citing a federal regulation that dates to 1957, agents of the Federal Protective Service gave Mr. Musumeci a summons as he recorded a man who was handing pamphlets to potential jurors. The New York Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit on Mr. Musumeci’s behalf, arguing that the rules that govern photography on federal property were vague and unconstitutional. The lawsuit says people routinely take pictures on the plaza after new citizens are sworn in at the courthouse.
Since Mr. Kerzic’s run-in with the police at Penn Station, Amtrak has dropped its Web page on the “Picture Our Trains” contest.
Mr. Colbert wasn’t standing for it.
“This photography contest,” he said, “is Amtrak’s cleverest ruse since their so-called timetable.”

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

The Jobless Effect: Is the Real Unemployment Rate 16.5%, 22%, or. . .?

by PALLAVI GOGOI Posted 12:00 PM 07/16/10 Economy, Careers
 

Raghavan Mayur, president at TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, follows unemployment data closely. So, when his survey for May revealed that 28% of the 1,000-odd households surveyed reported that at least one member was looking for a full-time job, he was flummoxed.

"Our numbers are always very accurate, so I was surprised at the discrepancy with the government's numbers," says Mayur, whose firm owns the TIPP polling unit, a polling partner for Investors' Business Daily and Christian Science Monitor. After all, the headline number shows the U.S. unemployment rate today is 9.5%, with a total of 14.6 million jobless people.

However, Mayur's polls continued to find much worse figures. The June poll turned up 27.8% of households with at least one member who's unemployed and looking for a job, while the latest poll conducted in the second week of July showed 28.6% in that situation. That translates to an unemployment rate of over 22%, says Mayur, who has started questioning the accuracy of the Labor Department's jobless numbers.

Even Austan Goolsbee Has Been Skeptical

Mayur isn't alone in harboring such doubts, nor is he the first to wonder about inaccuracies. For years, many economists have pointed to evidence that the government data undercounts the unemployed. Economist Helen Ginsburg, co-founder of advocacy group National Jobs For All Coalition, and John Williams of the newsletter Shadow Government Statistics have been questioning these numbers for years.

In fact, Austan Goolsbee, who is now part of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in a 2003 New York Times piece titled "The Unemployment Myth," that the government had "cooked the books" by not correctly counting all the people it should, thereby keeping the unemployment rate artificially low. At the time, Goolsbee was a professor at the University of Chicago. When asked whether Goolsbee still believes the government undercounts unemployment, a White House spokeswoman said Goolsbee wasn't available to comment.

Such undercounting of unemployment can be an enormously dangerous exercise today. It could lead to some lawmakers underestimate the gravity of the labor market's problems and base their policymaking on a far-less-grim picture than actually exists. Economically, and socially, that would make a bad situation much worse for America.

"The implications of such undercounting is that policymakers aren't going to be thinking as big as they should be," says Ginsburg, also a professor emeritus of economics at Brooklyn College. "It also means that [consumer] demand is not going to be there, because the income from people who are employed isn't going to be there."

Indeed, it will add additional stress to an already strained economy. Businesses that might start ramping up after seeing the jobless number drop could set themselves up for disappointment when customers don't appear or orders don't flow in.

College Grads Serving Fries

Plus, having a job today is quite different from what it was just a few years ago: Many Americans have had their hours cut and are working for less pay. A Pew Research survey found more than half of all adults in the labor force had either lost a job or suffered a reduction in income because of the recession.

Ginsburg says the biggest source of undercounting comes from people who can't find a full-time job that they're qualified to do, for instance recent college graduates who take part-time jobs at fast-food joints or retail stores. Today, the Labor Department estimates that 8.6 million people are in this category.

The federal government counts such people as employed. However, polls show that these folks actually consider themselves "unemployed" and "looking for a job," and probably accounted for a large chunk of TechnoMetrica's respondents.

Jobless Workers Who Disappear

Another major source of undercounting is the unemployed who've given up looking for jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics headline number counts as unemployed only people who have actively looked for a job in the previous four weeks. About 2.6 million people had pursued jobs in the past 12 months but, discouraged by the lack of opportunity, had stopped looking altogether.

"Isn't it interesting that if you stopped looking for a job, you evaporate as a jobless person and are just not counted," says Gerald Celente, director of Trends Research Institute in Kingston, N.Y. Celente believes this kind of undercounting has suited the government politically. "It's what government does: Downplay disasters and amplify success."

According to the Pew Research Center, a large number of people are out of jobs for a longer period during this economic downturn. The typical unemployed worker today has been out of work for nearly six months. That's almost double the previous post-World War II peak for this measure, which was 12.3 weeks in 1982-83.

Indeed, if all of the truly unemployed were counted, the rate would be significantly higher. The BLS, in a data point titled "U-6," says it counted the total unemployment rate in June at 16.5%.

Misreading Americans' Anxiety

However, John Williams, founder of Shadow Government Statistics, says when accounting for the long-term unemployed, the jobless rate runs up to as much as 22% currently. Williams's newsletter, which analyzes flaws in government economic data, points out that such a rate isn't that far from the 25% it hit during the Great Depression.

Both Celente and Ginsburg believe lawmakers' not-dire-enough view of unemployment is one reason why they didn't extend federal unemployment benefits. Of course, party politics is another deterrent. Ginsburg says the Administration's decision to tackle the health care reform over unemployment reflects its lack of priority.

By taking his eye off one of the most fundamental issues affecting the country, President Obama has seen his popularity sink. The most recent Public Policy Polling survey says 45% of voters approve of the job he's doing, while 52% disapprove -- the first time Obama's disapproval ratings have exceeded 50% in this survey.

It's obvious that Americans view unemployment more urgently than either lawmakers or the president. And if pollsters like Mayur or economists like Ginsburg and Williams are right, it will take longer to fix this hole because it's already bigger than Washington thinks.

Rep. Alan Grayson to Republicans: Stop Taking Food Out of the Mouths of Children

US consumer prices fall for third month in June

16 July 2010 Last updated at 09:44 ET From the BBC

 

Falling petrol prices weighed the inflation index down

The US consumer prices index fell for the third consecutive month in June, raising fears of deflation.

Prices fell 0.1% from the month before, adding to falls of 0.2% in May and 0.1% in April, the Labor Department said.
Falling energy prices were the biggest contributor, down 2.9%, while food prices remained unchanged.
"Core" inflation - a measure that strips out volatile energy and food prices, and used by economists to judge long-term inflation trends - rose 0.2%.
The US Federal Reserve has already pumped some $1.2 trillion (£780bn) into the US economy to try to promote recovery.
The continued fall in prices will add to pressure on the central bank to take further unconventional measures to push inflation into positive territory.
These measures may include increasing the money supply via further quantitative easing or intervening in the US government bond markets to hold down long-term interest rates.
In recently released minutes from the Fed's June meeting, policymakers raised the possibility of further action later this year, if the economy slows down further.

Why isn't this news in America?

New Old Photos

I found some old negatives from 1997, these images were taken at Pooches Pub in Rochester, NY

Table Talk (by Eve Garrard)

From normblog

July 13, 2010

'Bloody Jews,' he said. 'Bloody Jews, bugger the Jews, I've no sympathy for them.'
I gazed at him, aghast. Where had this suddenly come from?
The encounter I'm here describing took place very recently, in the course of a large academic dinner at a University in another city, not my own one. It was a pleasant occasion, and the people at my table were innocuously and comfortably talking about sociological issues connected with the economic crisis, all completely harmless and (relatively) uncontentious. And then I heard the academic on my right hand side say to the person opposite him, 'Bloody Jews.'
When he saw my appalled stare, he said impatiently, 'Oh well, I'm sorry, but really...!'
'I'm glad you're sorry,' I replied politely, collecting myself together for a fight. But then he asked, 'Are you Jewish?' When I nodded, this academic - whom I'd met for the first time that day - put his arm around me and said, 'I'm sorry, but really Israel is terrible, the massacres, Plan Dalet, the ethnic cleansing, they're like the Nazis, they're the same as the Nazis...'
The encircling arm was offensive enough in its own right, but the Nazi reference was conclusive - it's so manifestly false, and when addressed to a Jew, it's designed to wound; no one makes that equivalence without malicious prejudice. And this, after all, was an academic talking, a professor, someone trained to resist casual stereotypes and easy equivalences. I wish I could say that I delivered on the spot a furious and crushing analysis of his various misdemeanours. However, because of the special circumstances surrounding this particular academic occasion, if I'd done that it would have caused distress to other people who were present, towards whom I felt nothing but good will, and who have shown me nothing but warmth and kindness. I thought - perhaps wrongly - that I was under an obligation to be restrained. (Somehow, there always seem to be reasons for not telling anti-Semites just what they are.) So all I did was say loudly, 'I don't have to put up with this crap,' and took myself off to join another table.
What did he expect, I wonder? Breathless deference, perhaps: 'Oh yes, I do agree, Israel is terrible; it doesn't speak in my name, no, no, not in the least, not at all; it's an imperialist colonialist fascistic genocidal apartheid settler state, how right you are to be disgusted at it.' Whatever he expected, I don't think it can have been such opposition as I offered him, tame though this was, since others told me that he shortly became full of remorse, and went around apologising alcoholically to those who were present at our interchange. They, of course, were paralysed with a very English embarrassment at the spectacle of someone dropping a social clanger. I was later informed that one (Muslim) academic told the professor that he should apologise to me, a suggestion which he rejected, saying that he never apologised to 'one of them'. Apart from that, the matter was allowed to drop.
I don't think this would have happened 10 years ago. There certainly was anti-Semitism (of a relatively mild kind) around the place, among academics as elsewhere, but they used to know that there was something wrong with it, and hence restrained themselves, at least in public. I haven't met anything quite as nakedly direct as this in the universities before now, not even in the UCU during the boycott debates: venomous though those debates were, the fig-leaf of anti-Zionism was usually kept more or less in place. Mark Gardner's wry and melancholy comments on the constant drip of criticism of Israel and Jews, the rising waters of this toxic hatred, seem especially resonant to me today.
As I look over what I've written about this encounter, it sounds oddly unreal, even contrived - it reads like an episode in a badly-written novel. But it did happen, a few days ago, here in the UK, exactly as I've described it. (As so often, life seems to imitate second-rate art). The incident wasn't in itself very important - the professor had liquor taken, and perhaps was having a Mel Gibson moment, so to speak. But he wasn't called out on it; no one - not even me - decided that the public expression of hatred towards Jews had to be publicly combated, even at the cost of some social discord. I'm very unsure that my restrained response was the right one, even in the special circumstances which obtained at the time.
People like Ken Livingstone keep telling us that criticism of Israel isn't anti-Semitic, and that those who play the anti-Semitism card (as they see it) are just trying to distract attention from Israel's crimes. The Guardian reviewer Nicholas Lezard seems to think something like this too; as does Caroline Lucas, the leader of the Green party; the UCU leadership has also peddled this line on more than one occasion. Attacks on Israel are nothing to do with anti-Semitism, they say; it's just honest political critique.
'Israel... massacres... Nazis... bloody Jews. Bloody Jews.' (Eve Garrard)

Chinese Artist Who Led Protest Has Been Jailed, His Wife Says

Du Bin for The New York Times

In February, Chinese artists, including Wu Yuren, center, protested a real estate developer's plan to demolish their Beijing studios. Published June 8, 2010 By EDWARD WONG

BEIJING — Wu Yuren, an artist who helped lead an unusually bold public protest last winter over a land dispute, has been languishing in a Beijing jail for almost six weeks after having been beaten by police officers, his wife said on Thursday. (more on Feburary 2010 protest)

Mr. Wu’s wife, Karen Patterson, a Canadian citizen, said in a telephone interview that the police were accusing her husband of assaulting an officer when he visited the police station on May 31. Ms. Patterson said she learned this only through their lawyer because the police had so far not formally told her that Mr. Wu had been arrested. She decided to publicly discuss the arrest in recent days, she said, because of what she called her frustration with China’s opaque legal system.
“You don’t realize how arcane this system is until you have to deal with it,” Ms. Patterson said. “It’s a nightmare.”
Ms. Patterson said she and friends of Mr. Wu, 39, believe that he had been arrested because of his recent activism, including his leadership of a group of artists from an artists’ district known as 008 in resisting the encroachment of a real estate developer. In February, those artists joined forces with artists from another Beijing neighborhood to march down Chang’an Jie, a wide ceremonial avenue that runs past the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. Chinese leaders are especially sensitive to protests in that area, and police officers stopped the protesters after they had walked about 500 yards.
The police detained Mr. Wu briefly in March. After he was released, he and the other artists successfully negotiated for compensation for the seizure of their studio space by the developer. Mr. Wu and some other artists then moved their studios to 798, Beijing’s largest arts district.
The land grab dispute had attracted lots of attention in the news media, in part because Ai Weiwei, a well-connected artist who is a vocal critic of the Communist Party, had joined the street protest and sent out Twitter feeds about it. Some of the artists in the protest, including Mr. Wu and Mr. Ai, had taken part in other kinds of activism, including signing Charter 08, a liberal manifesto calling for democratic changes that was signed by thousands of Chinese. Liu Xiaobo, an author of the manifesto, was sentenced to 11 years in prison last December.
Mr. Wu’s latest fracas with the police began on May 31, when Mr. Wu went with a friend, Yang Licai, to the Jiuxianqiao police station to discuss a dispute with a landlord at 798, Ms. Patterson said. The police argued with the two men and took away their cellphones, which then led to more insults, Ms. Patterson said, citing an account by Mr. Yang.
The two men were interrogated separately, and Mr. Wu was beaten by about five policemen, Ms. Patterson said. He has been held since then and was not allowed to see his lawyer until this week, she added. For reasons that remain unclear, Mr. Yang was released after 10 days.
A person answering the phone at the police station declined to comment and said senior officers were not available to talk.
Ms. Patterson and the couple’s 5-year-old daughter, Hannah, have not been allowed to see Mr. Wu. Ms. Patterson said she expected that Mr. Wu would be formally charged within a few months.
On Tuesday, she went to collect his personal belongings from the police station. His shirt, pants and shoes were in a plastic bag, she said, along with a letter he had written to the police telling them to call his wife.
Ms. Patterson said Mr. Ai, the prominent artist, had been lobbying on Mr. Wu’s behalf, but she had little hope that his case would be dropped.
“The police haven’t explained anything to me,” she said. “Trying to ask for accountability is very difficult.”
New York Times 

Charter 08

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Charter 08 (Língbā Xiànzhāng) is a manifesto initially signed by over 303 Chinese intellectuals and human rights activists to promote political reform and democratization in the People's Republic of China.^[1]
It was published on 10 December 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, named after Charter 77 issued by dissidents in Czechoslovakia.^[2]
Since its release, more than 8,100 people inside and outside of China have signed the charter.^[3][4]

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