nike sb shoesOver two months after she was badly beaten and sexually assaulted by a mob in Cairo's Tahrir Square, CBS's Lara Logan is recounting the ordeal for Sunday's 60 Minutes (I can't embed the CBS video in our blog template, but here's a link). She's also done an interview with the New York Times' Brian Stelter, now online, in which she details the attackFor an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands"but also the process of publicly acknowledging it and the stories of assault against other women in Cairo, and female journalists elsewhere. Maybe the most unsettling thing about the video linked above is the camera footage taken moments before the assault began, as the camera lights go out and Logan and crew realize that they're in danger. hermes birkinI would expect that CBS would not have used the footage had Logan not approved and felt it necessary. For her part, she tells the Times, she "decided almost immediately that she would speak out about sexual violence both on behalf of other journalists and on behalf of 'millions of voiceless women who are subjected to attacks like this and worse.' She also adds, understandably, that she does not plan to do further interviews about the rape after 60 Minutes airs: I don't want this to define me. Coach OutletThe 60 Minutes pieces airs Sunday night; Logan had her first day back at work yesterday.
The Most Misused Song in GOP Politics: Van Halenâs âRight Nowâ
nike dunk shoesIf Republicans are on the campaign trail, Van Halen is back in vogue. For years, Republican candidates and politicians have been using Van Halens song, Right Now, as the walk-in jingle at rallies and events. The first time I recorded its use was November 5, 2006, when then-President George W. Bush used the tune to enter a rally in Greeley, Colo., not far from the slaughterhouse in a hall that smelled of cow manure. McCain used it in 2008, and over the weekend, Sarah Palin used the song to enter a rally in Wisconsin over the weekend. Connoisseurs of early -1990s hair rock know this is funny, even if Palin, Bush, and McCain never seem to get the joke. The song was cut for Van Halens ninth studio album, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, which not only refers to criminal sodomy in its title, but also makes a snappy, not-so-Republican acronym. hermes birkin handbagsAs Sammy Hagar, the lead singer, explained at the time, I wanted to name the album just fk. The song also spawned one of the great rock videos in hey day of music television. As the band sings, phrases like Right now oil companies and old men are in control flash across the screen. During its 2004 reunion tour, Van Halen flashed phrases on a video screen as it played the song. One of them read,Right now, nothing is more expensive than regret, superimposed over visuals of President George W. Bush. Perhaps the greatest irony is that Van Halen has long tried to stop Republicans from using the song at events. Coach Outlet After McCain piped it in after announcing Palin as his running mate in Ohio, Van Halens management released a statement to TMZ saying, Permission was not sought or granted nor would it have been given.
Apocalypse Today: Visiting Chernobyl, 25 Years Later
nike sb shoesThe 18.5-mile (30 km) radius around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is known officially as the "zone of alienation." Abandoned cars, tractors, buildings and homes litter the landscape and are slowly being devoured by trees and shrubs. A classroom bulletin board not far from the central Lenin Street in the town where the plant workers used to live reads, "No return. Farewell, Prypyat, April 28, 1986." This eerie landscape about 50 miles (80 km) from Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, provides a snapshot in time of the frenzied evacuation following the meltdown 25 years ago today of reactor core No. 4, a meltdown that produced a radioactive plume across the northern hemisphere in the worst nuclear accident in history. It also presents a stark vision of the possible future thousands of miles away in Fukushima prefecture, Japan, where emergency workers are in the seventh week of a battle to cool several partially melted reactor cores. (See pictures of the Chernobyl zone, 25 years after the nuclear disaster.) Even now, the effort to contain the Chernobyl accident is far from over: workers in white suits and respirator masks show up for work every day, constructing a new concrete shield to replace a massive sarcophagus built in 1986. hermes birkin handbags The sarcophagus, which contains the molten core, is starting to crumble and could collapse, which could release another radioactive cloud into the air. Chernobyl offers many lessons about what Princeton University physics professor Robert Socolow calls the "afterheat" of a nuclear disaster but it's the generational lesson that's the most important one. Because the isotopes released during a nuclear accident remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years, cleanup is the work not just of first responders, but also of their descendants and their descendants' descendants. cheap coach handbags outletIt's messy, it's expensive, and it's the kind of job that forever denies the workers themselves the satisfaction of standing back and admiring the results of their efforts. Asked when the reactor site would again become inhabitable, Ihor Gramotkin, director of the Chernobyl power plant, replies "at least 20,000 years." (See pictures of the worst nuclear disasters.) That timescale makes things more than simply frustrating. Over the course of millennia, after all, how can safety measures be maintained? Already, the financing of cleanup and maintenance operations is proving difficult. On April 19, the Ukrainian government hosted an international donor conference in Kiev to raise money for the $1.1 billion concrete shelter. Coach Scarves The government fell some $300 million short of that goal and is holding out for further pledges. But even the gigantic concrete shield which is 360 ft. (110 meters) high and weighs 29,000 tons has a woefully brief life when measured in radiological time: it will need to be replaced in a century unless the extremely radioactive and molten core inside can be safely removed and stored somewhere else, itself an expensive and difficult operation. "Neither Ukraine nor the world community has the right to turn its back [on Chernobyl]," Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych said at the end of the conference. "The accident left a deep wound that we will have to cope with for many years." Everything to do with radiation moves at an insidiously slow pace. coach handbags outlet Exposure to radioactive particles increases the risk of cancer, but the level of the danger depends on the dose and the age and health of the affected population. When radiation does kill, it can still take years. Around Chernobyl, no accurate dose estimates on the most heavily affected population were made until after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and, as a result, Belarus, Russia and Ukraine all use different techniques for measuring exposure.
nike sb shoesLast week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued that President Obama's order to cut $400 billion from national-security spending over the next 12 years will force the U.S. military to curtail some of its far-flung duties. "This needs to be a process that is driven by the analysis," he said, "as well as missions that our elected officials decide we should not have to perform, or can't perform anymore, because we don't have the resources." Well, even a blind pig finds an acorn once in awhile. While working on a recent piece on how to cut $1 trillion from the $7-trillion-plus U.S. defense budget over the coming decade, I stumbled upon a provocative analysis by Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Princeton University. He says the U.S. has "mis-allocated" -- others might say "wasted" -- $8 trillion since 1976 protecting the oil flow from the Persian Gulf that fuels much of the global economy. Especially since in 2010, when the U.S. was the destination of less than 10 percent of the oil flowing out of the Gulf. The U.S. has insisted, since the days of the Carter Administration, that the oil flowing out of the Persian Gulf is a vital national-security interest of the U.S. Beyond that, Presidents and the Pentagon have said, the narrow Strait of Hormuz is a vulnerable bottleneck for shipping headed out of the Gulf. cheap hermes birkinAny troublemaker -- especially Iran -- could bring the U.S. and world economies to their collective knees by shutting it down by sinking a couple of tankers as they pass through. Consequently, the U.S. has poured tons of money into the region since then, including three wars. It has bulked up its military forces in the neighborhood -- including the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, headquarters in Bahrain, smack dab in the middle of the gulf -- to keep the oil flowing. Balderdash, says Stern. He uses more technical terms, but his bottom line is the same: Iran and other nations in the region have just as much, if not more, need to keep the oil flowing than the U.S. Think of it as your right hand -- angry at your left hand for some casus belli -- pinching their shared aorta to punish the left hand. Both would quickly begin turning blue.cheap coach handbags More critically, Stern argues, the U.S. military's emphasis on the Gulf has diverted precious defense resources away from the western Pacific, where China poses a far graver long-term threat to American interests. "On an annual basis, the Persian Gulf mission now costs about as much as did the Cold War," Stern says in his paper, which appeared in Energy Policy, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, in April 2010 to scant notice. Coach Colette Handbags He also suggested it could be costly in more ways than one: "Without the extensive long-term US military presence in the Persian Gulf, it seems an open question whether anti-US suicide terrorism such as the USS Cole and 9/11 attacks would have taken place."
The Slap that Triggered the Arab Spring "Was Impossible"
nike dunk shoesIt was an injustice that led a 26-year-old Tunisian street trader called Mohammed Bouazizi to douse himself in petrol and strike a match. The resulting conflagration killed Bouazizi, crackled through Tunisia, chasing out its despised President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, and sparked uprisings across the region that are still burning fiercely. On December 17, Bouazizi, a fruit and vegetable seller, was quietly doing business on the street in his home town of Sidi Bouzid when a female municipal inspector confiscated his cart and his wares and, adding grave insult to financial injury, slapped him. Bouazizi wasn't killed instantly by the fire he set but clung on until Jan. cheap hermes birkin4. Ten days later Ben Ali fled the country. The rest is history in the makingexcept for Bouazizi's story, which appears to be history in the remaking. The municipal inspector Fedia Hamdi has broken her silence to contest this version of events. A British journalist Elizabeth Day tracked down Hamdi, 46, after a tribunal cleared her of the assault last Tuesday. The sole accuser claiming to have seen the slap had a grudge against Hamdi; four witnesses disputed his evidence. Hamdi herself claims when she asked Bouazizi to leavehe was hawking his wares without licencehe became angry and grabbed her hand, hurting her finger. cheap coach handbags"I would never have hit him. It was impossible because I am a woman, first of all, and I live in a traditionally Arab community which bans a woman from hitting a man. And, secondly, I was frightened," Hamdi told Day. Hamdi spent 111 days in detention awaiting the tribunal and says now she has been "a scapegoat." Coach Kristin HandbagsBouazizi's suffering triggered the Arab Spring, but it seems he may not have been the only victim that day last December.
