Russian Sledges

This is Omar Borkan Al Gala, an Emirati photographer supposed to be one of the three men who were deported from Saudi Arabia last week for being “too handsome.” Omg, just look at them cheekbones.

Chick-Fil-A, the disturbingly delicious fast food chicken chain and protector of traditional family values, does not approve of things like gay marriage. They do, apparently, approve of sons and their moms dressing up like knights and queens and then going out on dates together, because they just instituted the infinitely disturbing “Date Knight” promotion.

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Company owners and building engineers taken into police custody, but building owner, Sohel Rana, remains at large

Two owners of clothes factories based in the building that collapsed on the outskirts of Dhaka in Bangladesh have been arrested.

Mahbubur Rahman Tapas and Balzul Samad Adnan –the owner and managing director of New Wave Style, the largest of the five factories in the collapsed Rana Plaza building – surrendered overnight to the Bangladesh Garment Manufactures & Exporters Association and were handed to police.

They are accused of repeatedly ignoring warnings about the safety of the factory complex and forcing their employees to continue working.

Two engineers involved in designing the complex in the non-industrial Savar zone on the outskirts of the capital were also arrested at their homes early on Saturday for ignoring the same warnings after cracks were spotted in the building on Tuesday.

The arrests on Saturday came as the death toll rose to 352. Rescue workers pulled another 29 people to safety on Saturday after locating another 40 deep under rubble. More than 3,000 workers may have been inside the building when it collapsed and police believe as many as 900 are still missing.

Sohel Rana, the owner of the eight-storey building – which officials said had been built illegally – is still on the run. Police said several of his relatives had been detained to pressure him to hand himself in. An alert has also gone out to airport and border authorities to prevent him from fleeing the country.

The Rana Plaza complex housed factories that made clothes for western companies, including the British high street retail chains Primark and Matalan.

In London on Saturday, protesters demonstrated outside Primark's store in Oxford Street to demand compensation for the victims of the Dhaka building collapse.

Speaking outside Primark's Oxford Street store in central London, Murray Worthy, from the campaign group War on Want, said: "We're here to send a clear message to Primark that the 300 deaths in the Bangladesh building collapse were not an accident – they were entirely preventable deaths.

"If Primark had taken its responsibility to those workers seriously, no one need have died this week."

Shamshul Huq, junior internal affairs minister, said: "Everyone involved – including the designer, engineer, and builders – will be arrested for putting up this defective building."

Sohel Rana is a local politician connected to the ruling Awami League and reportedly used retainers to intimidate workers who refused to enter the ill-fated building on Wednesday morning.

An alliance of leftwing parties, which is part of the ruling coalition, said it would call a national strike on 2 May if all those responsible for the disaster were not arrested by Sunday.

Wednesday's collapse was the third major industrial incident in five months in Bangladesh, the second-largest exporter of garments in the world. In November, a fire at the Tazreen Fashion factory nearby the latest disaster killed 112 people.

Anger over the working conditions of Bangladesh's 3.6 million garment workers – most of whom are women – has grown since the disaster, triggering protests. Garments account for 78% of Bangladesh's exports.

Hundreds of people were on the streets again on Saturday, smashing and burning cars and sparking more battles with police, who responded with tear gas and rubber bullets. Eyewitnesses said dozens of people were injured in the latest clashes.

Marina Begum, 22, spoke from a hospital bed of her ordeal inside the broken building for three days.

"It felt like I was in hell," she told reporters. "It was so hot, I could hardly breathe, there was no food and water. When I regained my senses I found myself in this hospital bed."

Emdadul Islam, chief engineer of the state-run Capital Development Authority (CDA), said the owner of the building had not received the proper building consent, obtaining a permit for a five-storey building from the local municipality, which did not have the authority to grant it. Another three storeys had been added illegally to the complex, he said.

• Bangladesh
• Retail industry
• Fashion industry

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By Gary Kelly

A recent book on the essayist William Hazlitt calls him the ‘first modern man’. If he was, perhaps Mary Wollstonecraft was the first modern woman. By ‘modern’ I mean someone with ideas on how to cope with what sociologist Anthony Giddens calls ‘the consequences of modernity’. These include frighteningly accelerated, seemingly uncontrollable change; heightened risk of all kinds, from food supply through epidemics to weapons of mass destruction and ecological catastrophe; increased dependence on ‘abstract systems’ of unknowable complexity, from banking to government, medical science to the economy; greater migration, voluntary and involuntary, across countries and continents, classes and cultures; and, in meeting these challenges, increased dependence on ‘pure’, supposedly unselfish relationships in private and social life and on a flexible yet stable, self-reflexive and adaptable personal identity.

Wollstonecraft lived through the onset of modernity as Giddens defines it. She observed personally, analyzed incisively, and looked beyond one of modernity’s major initial crises, what many then saw as the greatest social and political cataclysm in history. She saw the blood of the guillotine on the Paris pavements and protested, at her peril. More, she understood this cataclysm from the situation of her sex, what she called ‘the wrongs of woman’, and protested, despite the peril.

Wollstonecraft certainly opposed unmodernity — the ‘Old Order’, the ancien régime — and promoted modernisation, but like her daughter Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, she understood its costs, especially to the marginalized and powerless. Among other things, Frankenstein gave powerful mythic form to a vision of modernity as human catastrophe. Wollstonecraft tried to envisage a modernity that would benefit all, from which women and other marginalized groups would not be excluded and by which they would not be victimized.

To this end, as a self-educated, militantly independent young woman, she set out to become what she called the ‘first of a new genus’, a ‘female philosopher’. Many at the time would have derided this phrase as an oxymoron, but by it she meant a comprehensive social, cultural, and political critic, what we now call a public intellectual, representing women in particular and thereby all of the exploited and oppressed.

As a ‘female philosopher’ Wollstonecraft communicated her vision of modernity, responding to the prolonged crisis of her time, in a wide range of writing including education manuals, novels, criticism and essays, political and social polemic, historiography of the present, and political travelogue. Part of this political and cultural work required both modernizing these forms, reinventing them better to serve her vision of modernity, and inventing a new form of discourse, that of the ‘female philosopher’ rather than of the intellectual woman as some kind of ‘honorary man’. So radical was her invention, so modern, that still today many find it confused and confusing rather than ahead of its time, and perhaps ahead of ours.

Hazlitt knew Wollstonecraft’s circle of radical reformers, intellectuals, artists, writers, and publishers and what they tried to achieve. He circulated among such a circle of his own, one that included Byron, Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Percy and Mary Shelley, as well as artists and intellectuals, modernizers of all kinds, in contending interests. Hazlitt’s liberal views, increasingly celebrated in recent years, owed much to those of Wollstonecraft’s circle, with their zeal for social justice, modernization of institutions, political reform, democratic access to the arts, and concern for human value in all aspects of life, of all forms of life.

Notoriously, however, Hazlitt did not attend to Wollstonecraft’s feminism; in fact, many today see him as a misogynist. Yet I think Hazlitt’s distinctive, celebrated, and modern-seeming style, with its sharp declarations, vivid illustrations, sudden turns, personal tone and reference, lyrical passages, sarcasm and satire, owed much to Wollstonecraft’s. At the least, it was a later correlative to hers.

Wollstonecraft, much more than Hazlitt, was relegated after her death to the margins of literature and public discourse, perhaps for similar reasons; perhaps the first modern woman and man were too ‘strong’ for what became an influential Victorian and early twentieth-century consensus. Wollstonecraft was rediscovered by successive feminist movements, most recently in the 1970s; Hazlitt has received renewed attention in the past decade as a public intellectual for what Giddens calls ‘late’ modernity, and others ‘post-modernity’, our age of crisis, of ‘recession’, and ‘austerity’, and worse. In this we need all the help we can get. We could do worse than renew a conversation with the first modern woman.

Gary Kelly is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. He has edited Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary and The Wrongs of Woman for Oxford World’s Classics, and published a book on her radically innovative style of thinking and writing, Revolutionary Feminism. He is General Editor of the ongoing multi-volume Oxford History of Popular Print Culture.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The post Mary Wollstonecraft: The first modern woman? appeared first on OUPblog.

doctorwho:

Meanwhile, on the set of the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special….

lumos5000:

Read the article here : [x]

How do you know if Dating Freedom Lovers is right for you? Well, you should probably adore Alex Jones, who makes Piers Morgan seem rational by comparison.

On their Twitter feed, The White House has just announced their new Tumblr blog, Whitehouse.Tumblr.com, which they promise will have GIFs.

We see some great things here at the White House every day, and sharing that stuff with you is one of the best parts of our jobs. That’s why we’re launching a Tumblr. We’ll post things like the best quotes from President Obama, or video of young scientists visiting the White House for the science fair, or photos of adorable moments with Bo. We’ve got some wonky charts, too. Because to us, those are actually kind of exciting.

But this is also about you. President Obama is committed to making this the most open and accessible administration in history, and our Tumblr is no exception.

We want to see what you have to share: Questions you have for the White House, stories of what a policy like immigration reform means to you, or ways we can improve our Tumbling. We’re new here, and we’re all ears.

So give us a follow, send a post our way using the submission tool, and stick around to see some things you won’t want to miss.

And yes, of course there will be GIFs.

Breaking: The White House is now on @tumblr (and there will be GIFs). at.wh.gov/ksJHi, twitter.com/whitehouse/sta…

— The White House (@whitehouse) April 26, 2013

via The Verge

We all wish we could predict what every idiot is going to do, but if we're going to start profiling every douchebag in America, good luck. There'll be no problem filling your quota. That's the thing about these two jerkoffs, I can't help but think their Muslim-ness is less important than their mediocrity. That's why they weren't part of any terror cell and no group claimed their crime; no one wanted them there either. They were just two creepy deadbeats who pulled off an awful crime. That's where their story should end.

BBC Worldwide has announced details of a new DVD box set featuring a limited edition coffee table book-styled collectors’ album including six DVDs and over 1000 minutes of Doctor Who footage. Doctor Who: Regeneration will be released in the UK on June 24 with an RRP of £61.27, click on the images included for bigger versions and check out the details below:
The collection features each Doctor’s iconic regeneration episode; from the first Doctor played by William Hartnell, exhausted after battling the Cybermen to Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor suffering from radiation that had been unleashed by the Great One (a giant spider); and from the spectacular transformation of the Ninth Doctor to David Tennant’s emotional farewell as the Tenth.

The set is adorned with superb photography from across the era and features detailed and informative accounts of each regeneration. And if that wasn’t enough, new to DVD is The Tenth Planet featuring the Doctor’s first regeneration – beautifully restored with the missing fourth episode now brought to life with stunning animation. Utilising the original soundtrack, off-screen photographs and a short surviving sequence of the Doctor’s regeneration the episode has been now reconstructed in animated form, incorporating the restored version of the surviving sequence.
A full list of stories included on the DVD are:

    •    The Tenth Planet
    •    The War Games
    •    Planet of the Spiders
    •    Logopolis
    •    The Caves of Androzani
    •    Time and the Rani
    •    Doctor Who: The Movie
    •    Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways
    •    The End of Time



Thanks to BBC Worldwide

It turns out that Rand Paul is actually okay with drone strikes against US citizens within the United States as long as the strikes are on bad guys.

The U.S. Marshall's service announced on Friday morning that the Boston Marathon bombing suspect has left the hospital where he has been for the last week, and transfered to a prison hospital on a nearby military base. CNN reports that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is now at Federal Medical Center Devens, located at Fort Devens, which is an Army Reserve military instillation about 50 miles outside of Boston, in rural Massachusetts.

The fact that he is at military style hospital-prison should not be interpreted as a change in status or an admission that he is now a combatant under military jurisdiction. The hospital actually belongs to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. But the fort location will provide a extra layer of security for a very important prisoner who can't yet (or maybe ever) be put in a regular prison cell. He is also still receiving medical treatment at the Devens hospital, which is used to house prisoners in need of long-term or "specialized" care.

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Technically, Fort Devens is no longer an active military instillation since it was "closed" in 1996 and reopened as a training ground for the Army Reserves, with the rest of the site turned over the state of Massachusetts to develop. Much of the property has been converted to private land or sold to other groups like the National Guard and Federal Bureau of Prisons, which operates the medical center.

In other news, CNN is also reporting that Tsarnaev's parents will not be coming to the United States as planned, but have relocated to another town in Russia.

NEW YORK (AP) — Armed with a pressure-cooker explosive and five pipe bombs, the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing made a spur-of-the-moment decision last week to give the Big Apple a taste of their mayhem, New York officials say.

The FBI has indicted Adam Paul Savader for "sextortion," alleging that he hacked women's computers, plundered compromising photos of them, and then threatened them with public embarrassment unless they performed private sex shows for him over their webcams. Savader was Paul Ryan's sole campaign intern in the 2012 elections, and Gawker reports that he also served on the 2011 Gingrich campaign, dressing up as Ellis the Elephant, a mascot for the campaign.

Paul Ryan's Campaign Intern Indicted for Cyberstalking (via Super Punch)

“Beowulf” enthusiasts will help do that with their reading at Oberon, during which copies of the text will be projected on a screen in both Old and modern English. The approximately five-hour marathon begins at noon and will include brief breaks and question-and-answer sessions with some of Harvard’s medieval scholars. Interested attendees are encouraged to stay for as little or as long as they like, said Rozenski, and to take a stab at using Old English, or simply sit back and listen. “When you are hearing it, you focus on just its capacity to entertain. You are not trying to write brilliant thoughts about it, or write an article, or come up with great things to say. You are just enjoying it.” The free reading of “Beowulf” will take place at Oberon Thursday from noon to about 5 p.m.,  prior to the A.R.T.’s performance of the classic at 7:30 p.m.

[Photo: Litchi Bear]

The above photo of the seemingly finished exterior of imminent Union Square restaurant Bronwyn was just sent in by a tipster. Two words emblazon the side of this second restaurant by Tim and Bronwyn Wiechmann of T.W. Food in Cambridge: "wurst" and "weinstube," which confirms earlier reports that Bronwyn would serve in-house sausage and would feature a biergarten (Oxford Dictionaries defines "weinstube" as "a small German wine bar or tavern"). The restaurant also plans to serve rye bier bread, giant pretzels, honey-poppy challah, northern Italian noodles and dumplings, per a previous report. Stay tuned for more details including an opening timeframe and send any intel of your own to the tipline.

· All Coverage of Bronwyn on Eater [~EBOS~]

fraulein-brittanica:

Well, this is the best picture I’ll see today.

100327:

and she smokes and has two phones im so jealous

[Photo: Official Site]

Update: Chef-owner Paul O'Connell tells Eater that Chez Henri is in the process of being sold but has not yet been sold, as reported earlier. He says a deal "is in the works" and hopes to "pass the torch" to Dylan Black, who previously worked at Chez Henri.

The Cuban-ish Cambridge favorite Chez Henri is in the process of being sold to Green Street owner Dylan Black, says The Improper Bostonian. An article in the magazine's current issue shares that news - no link yet, but it will be added here when available - and says that Green Street executive chef Greg Reeves will "keep the Latin emphasis... with a stronger focus on steak." The article also says that Chez Henri is "slated to be taken over in mid-summer and renamed." Earlier this month, longtime Chez Henri bar manager Rob Kraemer left to work at Posto in Davis Square. Per its website, Chez Henri was opened by chef Paul O'Connell in 1994.

Correction: Rob Kraemer was the Chez Henri bar manager, not Paul Kraemer, as previously reported.

· Chez Henri [Official Site]
· All Coverage of Chez Henri on Eater [~EBOS~]
· All Coverage of Green Street on Eater [~EBOS~]

SALT LAKE CITY — A Samurai sword-wielding Mormon bishop helped a neighbor woman escape a Tuesday morning attack by a man who had been stalking her.

Kent Hendrix woke up Tuesday to his teenage son pounding on his bedroom door and telling him somebody was being mugged in front of their house. The 47-year-old father of six rushed out the door and grabbed the weapon closest to him — a 29-inch high carbon steel Samurai sword.

Expect an "early May" opening for The Just Crust in Harvard Square, says Cambridge Day. Previously, this was a location of The Upper Crust. Also, expect breakfast and dessert pizzas. [CD]

“

Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev managed to say just one word to a federal judge when charges were filed against him in a makeshift courtroom held at the side of his hospital bed, “No.”

No, he could not afford an attorney.

As a result, Tsarnaev, 19, who is facing the possibility of the death penalty for his alleged role in last week’s terror attack, will be represented by one of the most experienced and well respected public defenders in the country, Miriam Conrad.

Conrad heads the Federal Public Defender Office in Boston and her resume includes defending “shoe bomber” Richard Reid in 2001 for trying to blow up a Paris to Miami jetliner.

…

Conrad and her team have a difficult case ahead of them. They are trying to keep alive someone many would consider to be the most hated man in America. Their client is bedridden and barely able to communicate. Facing budget cuts as a result of the federal sequester, they are up against the U.S. Attorney and FBI that have made Tsarnaev’s prosecution a top priority.

”

- Suspected Boston Bomber Receives All-Star Defense Team - ABC News

“Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete. The existence of this policy, rumoured and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the “long leash” - arrangements similar in some ways to the indirect CIA backing of the journal Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender.”

- Modern art was CIA ‘weapon’ - World - News - The Independent

Ever since the recession hit in late 2007, Americans have been driving less and less.

When Anum Hussain heard about the Boston Marathon bombing, she immediately panicked, worried that the culprits would be like her. The 22-year-old Muslim was in the offices of Hubspot, the Cambridge marketing-software company she works for. As her coworkers frantically rushed to call loved ones who'd been out watching the marathon that day, she was glued to the TV, fearing what she might learn about potential suspects. “My heart was beating fast, just praying that this person didn't turn out to be Muslim,” she recalled. “I knew that if they were, all hell was going to break loose.”

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That same night, Hussain was commiserating with a half-Indian, half-German coworker—someone who isn’t Arab or Muslim, but had still been beat up after 9/11 for his looks and his exotic name—when they came up with the idea of making an ‘It Gets Better’-style video for people like them. “We just thought, ‘Something needs to be done.’” Immediately, Hussain sent an email to her 600 Hubspot colleagues, pitching their support with the video, and within 24 hours, she raised over $1,500 from their network, hired a production guy, and found three people who’d faced anti-Muslim discrimination and were willing to be filmed. One of those subjects is the Northeastern student, who, despite the stereotype of her headscarf, identifies as a die-hard Patriots fan. “That’s what we’re trying to get across,” confirmed Hussain. “Regardless of what our background is, we all are Bostonians—no more, no less than any other Bostonian. We all feel the pain that Boston feels, we all feel the love that Boston feels, we all feel the pride that Boston feels and our religious or ethnic background doesn’t keep us from feeling that joy, pride, or sadness.” And then, of course, the worst case scenario turned out to be true: the Tsarnaevs claimed to be Muslims. “We were incredibly disappointed,” said Hussain. “But it’s embedded in our faith and our teachings that killing is not permitted, so I personally do not consider these individuals to be actual followers of the Muslim faith, but rather some radical ideology that exists outside of Islam.”

A new local startup called Reputology says it has data to prove biases in online reviews, and on multiple levels. Reputology was founded by MIT grads and helps restaurants and other businesses monitor their reviews on social media sites like Yelp. Since their site when live four months ago, Reputology has attracted clients like Stone Hearth Pizza, which has locations in Cambridge, Allston and beyond. Meanwhile, the company decided to conduct broader, regional analysis now that they were "sitting on all this data," says co-founder Jack Yu.

One bias Reputology found from that research is a preference for the type of cuisine being reviewed. Though more restaurants serving American cuisine are reviewed overall, reviewers tend to be harder on those restaurants than, say, Italian ones. Then there appears to be an inherent bias among users of a particular site, with Yelpers giving higher scores on average than OpenTable users. Also, 48% of Massachusetts reviewers are passive-aggressive according to a count of conjunctions like "but", "although" and "however" that "suggest a critique was on its way after a compliment" says the Reputology blog. Also, non-Minnesotans apparently give lower ratings to Minnesota restaurants than Minnesotans do.

Reputology may soon have data specific to how Bostonians review local restaurants online: stay tuned for that.

· The Reputology Blog [Official Site]
· Reputology [Official Site]
[Photo: Official Site]

Alex Sáenz is in as the new chef de cuisine at Lineage, the Brookline restaurant run by chefs Jeremy and Lisa Sewall. Sáenz, who originally hails from Peru, recently served as the opening executive chef at the Provincetown outpost of Ten Tables, and he previously worked with Jeremy Sewall at the former Great Bay in Kenmore Square. Sáenz is a graduate of the L.A. campus of Le Cordon Blue College of Culinary Arts and has also worked in the kitchens of the former Alex in L.A, at the former Spire Restaurant in the Nine Zero Hotel on Tremont and at the Straight Wharf Restaurant on Nantucket. Lineage just announced the hire, though a representative for the company tells Eater that Sáenz started a few weeks ago. The menu for a private dinner in May shows Peruvian influences, as in a dish of fluke tiradito with puffed black quinoa, cilantro, aji amarillo and pickled shallots. Could more of a South American bent be in store here?

· All Coverage of Lineage on Eater [~EBOS~]
· All Chef Shuffles Coverage on Eater [~EBOS~]
[Photo: Official Site]

When Roger Ebert died earlier this month, the world mourned, remembering a great critic and a great person. Judging by the revelry at this past weekend’s EbertFest in Champaign, Illinois, the mourning period is over, and it’s time to celebrate life. Egged on by Ebert’s widow, Chaz, festival guest and Ebert pal Tilda Swinton led the crowd at the Virginia Theater in a rousing group dance-off set to Barry White’s “You’re The First, The Last, My Everything.” With enthusiastic crowds, a tear-inducing boogie by Chaz, and an effusive Swinton, it’s everything you could ask for in a memorial. Watch and cry.

Ebertfest 2013 Dance Along from Ebertfest on Vimeo.

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