Daily Archives: March 12, 2017

That anyone still lives in the ruins is a measure of how desperate the situation has become. The Iraqi army says it has carried out 3,780 sorties against Isil in northern Iraq since the offensive to liberate Mosul began, which averages out to almost 30 a day. The US, which is supporting Iraqi forces, has conducted more than double that.

They dropped leaflets over the city telling us not to worry about the strikes, saying that they were extremely precise and would not hurt the civilians, says Mr Ahmed, 47. Now it feels like the coalition is killing more people than Isil.

He said he thought as many as 300 people had been killed in raids during the battle to liberate Samood and his late brothers neighbourhood al-Mansour. It was difficult to immediately verify the claim. A recent report by Airwars, a UK-based organisation which monitors international air strikes against Isil, suggested as many as 370 civilian deaths could be attributed to coalition raids in the first week of March alone.

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Just hours from freedom, Mosul's civilians die under the bombs of their liberators - Telegraph.co.uk

Memory is a great maker of fictions. Take the 1960s. The decade exists in the public imagination in a quite different way from the one most people actually lived through. The old line goes that if you can remember the 60s you werent there, but its probably more truthful to say you were there, only you didnt hang out in Carnaby Street, have your clothes made by Mr Fish or trip on acid while driving a Lotus Elan. You didnt swing. But there was something infectious in the air all the same, something in the decades high summer of 1967 that smacked irresistibly of a burgeoning freedom and revolt. Maybe it was the news that homosexuality had been decriminalised, or hearing the Beatles A Day in the Life for the first time, or the unprecedented glimpse of pubic hair in that film at the Odeon. What was its name again?

The film was Blow-Up, and 50 years after its UK release it reverberates way beyond the notoriety of Jane Birkin showing her bits on screen. Appropriately for a picture about perception and ambiguity, it plays very differently from the one I remember first seeing years ago I could have sworn it was in black and white, for a start. It marked a departure from director Michelangelo Antonionis previous studies in alienation, most notably La Notte, in which Jeanne Moreau wanders lonely about the streets of Milan while the beautiful people party on in listless defiance of boredom.

Blow-Up, his first English-language production, dives head-first into swinging London, seen from behind the wheel of a dandy photographers Rolls convertible already, younger readers will be thinking of Austin Powers as he bounces from slumming in a dosshouse to cavorting with dolly birds and models in his studio. There is a reason Antonioni has made the protagonist a photographer a man who looks but doesnt see just as there was for replacing his original actor, Terence Stamp, with the relatively unknown David Hemmings.

But the film has something else Antonioni had never deigned to include before: a story. An oblique and maddening one, for sure, but a story nonetheless. The photographer, fed up with the birds and the mod fashion shoots, goes off in search of fresh air and fresh mischief. He finds himself in a park, where the breeze sounds in the tops of the trees like the sea at low tide. In the distance, he sees a man and a woman, together, canoodling. He points his camera and takes a few snaps of them. On his way out, the woman (Vanessa Redgrave) chases after him and demands, urgently, that he hands over the film. He refuses. She tracks him back to his studio where they smooch, smoke a joint, play some music and he sends her away with the wrong roll.

And here is where the film unfolds its most brilliant and memorable sequence, the part you want to watch over and over again. Alone in his dark room, our hero blows up the photos from the park and discovers that he may have recorded something other than a tryst. Cutting between the photographer and his pictures, Antonioni nudges us ever closer until we see the blow-ups as arrangements of light and shadow, a pointillistic swarm of dots and blots that may reveal a gunman in the bushes, and a body lying on the ground. Has he accidentally photographed a murder?

Contemporary audiences watching the way Thomas, the photographer, storyboards his grainy images into evidence would surely have been reminded of Zapruders film of the Kennedy assassination in 1963: the same patient build-up, the same slow-motion shock. When Thomas returns to the park he does indeed find a corpse. Its the grassy knoll moment. We feel both his confusion and his excitement at turning detective hes involved in serious work at last instead of debauching his talent on advertising and fashion. But, abruptly, his investigative work goes up in smoke.

Next morning, the photographs and the body have disappeared. The woman has gone, too. This links to larger fears of conspiracy, a sense that shadowy organisations are hovering in the background, covering up their crimes and getting away with it.

Blow-Up looks back to Zapruder but also ahead to Watergate and a run of films that riffed in a similar manner to Antonioni, with his inquiring, cold-eyed lens: Gene Hackman, stealing privacy for a living as the surveillance genius in The Conversation (1974); witness elimination and the training of assassins by a corporation in The Parallax View (1974); later still, Brian de Palmas homage to the sequence via John Travoltas sound engineer in the near-namesake Blow Out (1981). But these sinister implications are not on the directors mind. Where we anticipate a murder mystery, Antonioni balks us by posing a philosophical conundrum. It is not about mans relationship with man, he said in an interview at the time, it is about mans relationship with reality.

Having created the suspense, he declines to see it through and sends Thomas off on an enigmatic nocturnal wander to a party where he gets stoned, to a nightclub full of zombified youth where, bafflingly, he makes off with a broken guitar. (The films other symbolic artefact is an aeroplane propeller he buys in an antique shop). Finally, and famously, he encounters a bunch of mime-faced rag-week students acting crazy and playing a game of imaginary tennis on an empty court. We even hear the thock of the tennis ball, though there isnt one in sight. Antonioni seems to offer only a shrug: reality, illusion, who can tell the difference? Whenever I watch Blow-Up, I feel a sense of anticlimax, of a road not just missed, but refused. Yet as much as it irritates, it still intrigues, and asks a question that relates not merely to cinema but to any work of art: can we enjoy something even if we dont get it?

Blow-Up has great things in it Hemmingss insolent gaze, how he throws himself across the floor to reach the phone

Its a question discussed by a mother and daughter in my new novel, Eureka, on seeing the film in the week of its Uk release, in March 1967. Eureka itself is about the making of a mystery film in London, not another Blow-Up, but an adaptation of Henry Jamess short story The Figure in the Carpet: two friends revere an ageing novelist, who tells one of them that no reader has ever located the elusive secret of his work, the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet. The friends efforts to discover what it is becomes an increasingly fraught and bitter contest. The screenplay is interspersed between the storys chapters.

Reviews of Blow-Up at the time gave it a guarded welcome. Penelope Houston in the Spectator called it a failure for which I would trade 10 successes. Dilys Powell reckoned Antonionis cinema beautiful and difficult, and suggested that his films might become even stranger and more exciting. Not many would agree that they did. What might have been a turning point led only to a cul-de-sac. Vagueness and obfuscation hardened into a style. Zabriskie Point (1970), his meditation on America, is a lowering, vacuous mess. The Passenger (1975), about another disappearing act, had its fans, though Kenneth Tynan wasnt one of them: Maria Schneider and Jack Nicholson are under-directed to the point of extinction. One doesnt mind (one can even tolerate) bad acting: but slow bad acting is insupportable. There is something terribly dismal in his vision of humankind, and terribly humourless. Few major filmmakers have shown so little faith in story.

But Blow-Up, flawed as it is, can still thrill us 50 years on. It has great things in it Hemmingss insolent blue gaze, and the daft way he throws himself across the floor to reach the phone; the wind soughing through the trees in the park; the busy jazz score by Herbie Hancock; the unsettling charm of those London streets. And, in the sequence from which it takes its title, that rapt attention to the photographers art really is something to behold.

Eureka by Anthony Quinn is published by Jonathan Cape on 6 July. To order a copy for 11.04 (RRP 12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

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Freedom, revolt and pubic hair: why Antonioni's Blow-Up thrills 50 years on - The Guardian

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Yet for the past dozen years, the right-wing populist has spent much of his time holed up in anonymous safe houses or in a heavily guarded wing of Parliament.

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Tight security surrounds Wilders night and day, and he hardly ventures outdoors. For his handful of campaign events ahead of a March 15 election, he traveled in convoys of armored cars.

Its a total lack of freedom. Thats how I would say it, Wilders, who leads the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, told The Associated Press in a recent interview.

The elaborate protection apparatus that surrounds him is a reaction to death threats from extremists enraged by his fierce criticism of Islam.

Wilders has made headlines and drawn condemnation for more than a decade for his anti-Islam rhetoric, which has included comparing the Quran with Adolf Hitlers Mein Kampf and calling for a tax on the veils some Muslim women wear.

At the same time, support for his party has grown in fits and starts, mirroring what he calls a Patriotic Spring sweeping Europe. Despite slipping in the polls recently, the Party for Freedom remains on track to become one of the biggest parties in the 150-seat lower house.

He also is regularly compared to President Donald Trump, for his policies and also his penchant for communicating via Twitter.

As protests and riots unfolded this weekend in Rotterdam over a Dutch government decision to block the visits of two Turkish ministers, Wilders fired off regular incendiary tweets.

Go away and never come back and take all your Turkish fans from The Netherlands with you please. #byebye, he said in one as Turkeys family affairs minister was at the center of a tense standoff at the Turkish consulate.

His one-page election manifesto is light on economic policy and heavy on pledges to de-Islamize the Netherlands, a nation of 17 million where an estimated 5 percent of the adult population is Muslim.

Wilders calls Islam a threat to western democracy and vows to close all mosques and ban the Quran, if he wins power.

But he has alienated so much of the political mainstream that even if he wins the popular vote he is considered unlikely to be able to form a ruling coalition in a nation where no single party has ever ruled alone.

Crucially, Prime Minister Rutte has ruled out working together after the election. Polls show Ruttes center-right Peoples Party for Freedom and Democracy with the most voter support in the days leading up to Wednesdays election.

Rutte rejects Wilders polarizing rhetoric, but also harbors hard feelings over Wilders decision to effectively torpedo Ruttes first minority government in 2012.

After weeks of negotiations on a tough austerity package, Wilders, who pledged to prop up the government by marshaling party lawmakers for key votes, backed out, forcing fresh elections.

We know they walk away when the going gets tough, that they make problems bigger not smaller, Rutte said of the Party for Freedom.

Even so, Wilders message has found strong support in a nation known for its long history of religious tolerance and personal freedoms.

Wilders opposition to Islam dates back to the days when he could still move freely around the world. In his youth he lived in Israel, which he saw as a democratic oasis surrounded by oppressive regimes in the Middle East.

After working for a Dutch government welfare organization, Wilders gravitated into politics and joined the party now led by Rutte. But he quit in 2004 over his opposition bringing Turkey into the European Union.

Two years later, he formally established the PVV, the Dutch acronym for the Party for Freedom.

Wilders set up his party so that he is its only member, allowing him to keep a tight rein on its message and lawmakers.

Wilders rules his kingdom like an emperor, brother Paul Wilders said in a recent interview with Dutch broadcaster RTL. Whoever contradicts him is finished, family or not.

The extraordinary security measures that surround him were put in place after an Islamic extremist murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam street in November 2004.

Wilders, already an outspoken critic of Islam, was whisked with his wife, Krisztina, into a netherworld of heavily guarded safe houses due to fears that he could become the next victim.

He says he misses the routines of a conventional life.

Not being able to do all the things normal people can do from emptying your own mail box, to doing some shopping or walking freely or driving my own car, Wilders said. Its all impossible, and there is always that threat that people might do something.

The circumstances havent caused Wilders to hold his tongue.

He was acquitted of hate speech charges in 2011, but found guilty in a separate trial last year of insulting and inciting discrimination against Moroccans.

He is appealing the conviction. Just last month, he blamed what he called Moroccan scum for street crime.

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Geert Wilders' Security Detail Has Robbed Him Of His Freedom - Breitbart News

Julian Assange

Stanely Mushava Literature Today Vault 7, the Promethean stroke of guerilla intelligence by Wikileaks, has once again put the U.S global surveillance operations up for democratic scrutiny. WikiLeaks, on March 7, uploaded a cache of the Central Intelligence Agencys vastly intrusive hacking techniques into the public domain.

The data dump code-named Vault 7 details CIAs manipulation of technology products, including Android, Windows, iPhone and Samsung TVs, into hidden microphones.

Powered by the global penetration of these consumer electronics, CIA has squashed potentially billions of people across the world into its listening radius.

Vault 7 is a chilling disclosure of how closely the US has come to perfecting George Orwells prophecy of a post-privacy world.

Freedom looks under threat, inexorably depleted by the superpowers imperial tentacles.

Prefacing its latest dump, WikiLeaks readily gives a nod to Orwells prescient novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, whose Big Brother persona prefigures the surveillance states illiberal chokehold on individual freedom.

The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwells 1984, but Weeping Angel, developed by the CIAs Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones, is surely its most emblematic realisation, writes Wikileaks.

CIA devised its attack against Samsung smart TVs in collaboration with UK spy agency, MI5. The Weeping Angel programme infests a TV and covertly turns it into a bug so that it records conversations in your room and feeds them into a CIA server.

It appears the spy agencies took a page out of Orwells novel with literal precision. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the totalitarian, omnipresent government of Oceania uses two-way telescreens in homes, workstations and public spaces to monitor citizens around the clock.

Similarly, the Weeping Angel bug manipulates an infested television so that it never actually switches off, continuously capturing the targeted users activities in a fake-off mode.

The discreet installation of microphones and interception of mail is a familiar Orwellian stratagem but CIA is taking business a bit further. By deploying zero-day bugs into smartphones, the spy agency is able to evade the end-to-end encryption built into instant messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal.

Vault 7 significantly shores up Wiki-Leaks public record on the secret life of the worlds most powerful nation, a trove that already monumentally features the War Logs and the Diplomatic Cables.

WikiLeaks has called its latest release the largest intelligence publication in history. Year Zero, the first part of Vault 7 comprising 8 761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network, already surpasses Edward Snowdens National Security Agency (NSA) leaks, which were first published in 2013.

Another strikingly Orwellian stratagem in the CIAs toolkit is the Umbrage programme. This allows the spy agency to stockpile other hackers methods and use them to muddy its own digital trail and so misdirect attribution when it hacks a target.

The agencys capacity to shroud a hack in fiction has played directly into the on-going controversy about Russia hacking the US presidential elections, to privilege Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.

An investigation by the US intelligence community said Russia created the Guccifer 2.0 persona and D.C Leaks website to hack the Democratic National Convention and subsequently supplied the information to WikiLeaks.

Sceptics suggests if the intelligence community can stage a hack, there is no basis for standing on its evidence.

The post-truth capabilities of the CIA are a throwback to Orwells Ministry of Truth, a department tasked with rewriting history in the interests of the power factions.

Functionaries at the ministry are routinely seized with rewriting newspaper articles, airbrushing public archives, willing automatons into existence and erasing fallen historical figures out of the public record. This seems to be an all too easy task for Americans deep state with revision-capable technology and dutiful media at its disposal.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says the Vault 7 disclosure is exceptional in political, legal and forensic respects. According to the website, the source of the documents wants to start public debate about the power of the surveillance state.

In a statement to WikiLeaks, the source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIAs hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency. The source wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyber-weapons, writes WikiLeaks.

Whether damaging or innocuous, the leaks are a pertinent site for discussing the future of freedom and power. The intelligence community cedes considerable ground in bringing increasingly soon-to-be fugitive hackers playground.

With the US accustomed to playing god, Assange is stealing fire from Olympus and giving it to the mortals. The empire is expected to maintain shock absorbers of some kind but politically the peanut butter is on its chin.

It looks equally bad for the technology companies to be exposed as Trojan horses for imperial interests. WikiLeaks has previously come out against discreet requests by US intelligence services for technology behemoths such us Google to give up users information.

Vault 7 builds on exiled whistle-blower Edward Snowdens disclosure of the PRISM programme which looked to secure potentially global shelf space for the surveillance state by commandeering the technology companies for its data needs.

Assange is not in doubt regarding the ethical grounds of his Promethean project.

In When Google Met WikiLeaks, he argues that human civilisation is built on the intellectual record, hence the obligation to make that record as large as possible, easily navigable, and resistant to censorship.

The guerrilla publisher presents the dilemna faced by misanthropic actors when leaks drag out for democratic scrutiny their secret engagement in acts which the public does not support.

Owing to the scale of their political ambitions, the organisations are bound to produce incriminating material if they wish to remain efficient. For example, a civilian leader cannot go down to whisper directives to the coalface in Baghdad. This necessitates putting things in writing and widely circulating it, a need that makes power factions susceptible to damaging leaks.

According to Assange in When Google Met WikiLeaks, the possibility of leaks forces power factions to relent from misanthropic activities, since the required documentation may open them up for public opposition. And without documentation, bureaucratic processes slow down and organisations are weakened by being rendered inefficient.

In the case of CIA, it is already being asked whether it is practical for the organisation to circulate sensitive information to thousands of workers and contractors and still remain secretive. On the other hand, can it scale down communication without scaling down efficiency?

WikiLeaks may claim credit for forcing such an operational dilemma, whatever the outcome

The online population is angry that CIA has stockpiled security holes in consumer electronics for use in its espionage activities instead of working with technology companies to patch them up, the commitment reached upon in the aftermath of the Snowden leaks.

Both Assange and Snowden have highlighted the irresponsibility of this approach. Once a single cyber weapon is loose, it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike, WikiLeaks notes.

The US geo-political and military mettle gains on its technological proficiency. When the tools are constantly uploaded into public domain, NSA yesterday, CIA today, the superpower has its own security to patch.

Back to Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Newspeak of the media-intelligence complex in response to the WikiLeaks thread from 2010 to present implies given concepts such as global security and American exceptionalism.

A cop-out Western media echo chambers have fastened on to is that the CIAs controversially intrusive toolkit is not being used on American citizens. In the eyes of mainstream editors, this othering puts paid to the ethical implications of the surveillance states activities.

Wars in which the poor die chanting patriotic, cultural and ideological banalities not for their honour but for the profit of the superstate override the demands of conscience on the back of the media-intelligence complex.

A subversive persona in Nineteen Eighty-Four says war must be fought inconclusively and perpetually because its object is to consume human labour and maintain the class disparities of the superstate.

Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma hinted as much at the World Economic Forum when he said more than foreigners taking its jobs, America had squandered its fortune on war. That is, of course, only half the story since there are oligarchs to mop new fortune from the endless wars.

It is interesting to imagine whether this drama will have a sunny ending or if it will advance Nineteen Eighty-Fours strong case for pessimism. Assange currently nurses a headache over the uncertainty of his Ecuadorian asylum.

A presidential frontrunner has promised to kick him out of the London embassy where he is currently holed up. Assange has alleged that he might be slapped with a death penalty if he is given up to the US.

But it is too early to speculate whether Big Brother or the foremost bogeyman of guerrilla intelligence will have the last laugh. The latest data dump is a perfect occasion to think about the future of freedom, power and democracy.

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Vault 7 and the future of freedom - The Herald

Commemorating its 10th anniversary on its website in 2013, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement noted that it comprises more than 20,000 peoplewith a presence in all 50 states and 48 foreign countries.

Even for a federal agency, thats a lot of people to havesitting around forthe duration of the Obama administration doing nothing. Whats that? There were deportations under President Obama? Well confess, we had a totally different impression when reading up on the ACLUs People Power kickoff Saturday and the launch of its Freedom Cities campaign.

Whatever hes doing, do the opposite that approach will certain speed things, up as it bypasses any need to discern between good and bad policies.

Its a minor detail that doesnt get enough attention, but ICE agents shall now be known as henchmen; for example:

[Trump]has outlined, through executive orders issued his first week in office, a blueprint for a mass deportation machine, which will pull families apart and uproot hard-working, law-abiding individuals who have lived here for decades. The impact of this agenda is plastered in our newspapers daily, whether through the detention of a father of five U.S. citizen children who has only worked hard and obeyed the law since his arrival 15 years ago, or a domestic violence victim in Texas, who sought protection through our judicial system, but fell prey to Trumps henchmen apparently based on a tip provided by her abuser.

The Freedom Cities campaign will allow us to make American communities welcoming again.

The ACLU isnt lying about one thing: suddenly, deportations are plastered in our newspapers daily.

Poor Chelsea Clinton, for one, was sickened and horrified reading about theunconscionably terrible arrest of that hard working, law-abiding domestic violence victim, whom the feds said had been removed from the United States six times andhad previously been arrested for possession of stolen mail and illegal re-entry into the United States. But then TRUMPS HENCHMEN struck.

Did Trump issue new TRUMPS HENCHMEN uniforms yet? It shouldnt be difficult, seeing as the administration already has everyones sizes; theyre just henchmen now.

Heres some of what you missed if People Power Saturday passed you by:

Nothing happened to the poem, which is, by the way, a poem, not a founding document. As far as the American dream, it really hasnt changed much, despite the attempt at a fundamental transformation of the country itself.

Ever notice how an electoral map dominated by red is the only thing progressives seem to point to without saying, Thats what democracy looks like?

Cant wait.

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ACLU rolls out Freedom Cities campaign, recasts existing ICE agents as 'Trump's henchmen' - Twitchy

Mashable

Word of the Day: Cory Booker explains 'freedom' to Bert Mashable Two of your favorite SXSW attendees, Senator Cory Booker and Sesame Street's Bert, just shared a touching moment live on Twitter. After his eventful panel, Booker stopped by Day Two of "The Mashable Show" an exclusive 90-minute Twitter live stream of ... Newly woke Muppet blown away by Sen. Cory Booker's linkage of freedom and health care coverageTwitchy all 45 news articles »

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Word of the Day: Cory Booker explains 'freedom' to Bert - Mashable