Great Britain // Current TV

Flashback: 1957 CIA-MI6 Plot to Terrorise Syria, Spark Fake Revolution and Assassinate Leadership

Same as Iran 1979, same Libya 2011, same as it ever was ******* Ben Fenton The... more

maasanova
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Chris Hedges and Michael Moore on Unfettered Capitalism

"Sadly I agree, we are no longer worthwhile Americans, we are simply a... more

KB723
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26 days ago
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The Final Tragic Song of the Yellow Canary

An enormous clifftop, blue skies, multiple deaths and a yellow canary who... more

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1 month ago
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Poetic Moments: A Celebration of Young Masculine Beauty

The fleeting beauty of youth is captured in this spellbinding collection of raw,... more

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3 months ago
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Careful What You Ask For: The Wolf I Used To Be….

“The Wolf I Used To Be” is a magical animated short film, a collaborative... more

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4 months ago
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The Kills: The Last Goodbye

“The Last Goodbye” is a powerfully emotive music video portrait of the... more

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4 months ago
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Eve Arnold, Legendary Photographer of Illuminating Images, Dies at 99

Eve Arnold, who came to be regarded as a grande dame of postwar photojournalism for her bold, revealing images of subjects as diverse as Marilyn Monroe and migratory potato pickers, died on Wednesday in London at the age of 99. Born in Philadelphia on April 21, 1912, Ms. Arnold had lived in Great Britain since 1961.

Her death was announced by Magnum Photos, the photography cooperative to which she had belonged for more than a half-century. She was among the first women Magnum hired to make pictures. Ms. Arnold was a leading light in what is considered to be the golden age of news photography, when magazines like “Life” and “Look” commanded attention with big, arresting pictures provided by photographers who included Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, Robert Capa and Margaret Bourke-White.

Acclaimed for capturing celebrities in intimate moments after winning their trust, Ms. Arnold developed a particular rapport with Marilyn Monroe, the subject of a book of Arnold photographs. Foreshadowing the celebrity portfolios of photographers like Annie Leibovitz, Ms. Arnold captured Joan Crawford squirming into a girdle, Malcolm X collecting fistfuls of dollars at a rally in Washington and James Cagney and his wife doing an impromptu dance in a barn.

But other pictures, just as memorable, were of the unfamous. Among the more than 750,000 Ms. Arnold made were pictures in a South African shantytown, a Havana brothel and a Moscow psychiatric hospital. She documented a small Long Island town, Miller Place, and the first minutes of a baby’s life. She was an official photographer on 40 movie sets.

Her many honors include the Order of the British Empire and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Society of Magazine Photographers. She was a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and named a “Master Photographer” by the International Center of Photography in New York, considered by many to be the world’s most prestigious photographic honor.

This piece includes a number of high-resolution black-and-white photographs, as well as two documentary short films.

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/eve-arnold-legendary-photographer-of-illuminating-images-dies-at-99/Eve Arnold, who came to be regarded as a grande dame of postwar photojournalism for... more

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5 months ago
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Remembering Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

The death of Christopher Hitchens on Thursday night, of complications from esophageal cancer at the age of 62, ended one of the greater intellectual careers of the last 40 years. Born in Portsmouth, England, and educated at Balliol College, Oxford, Hitchens started his career as a Trotskyite at “The New Statesman,” working along with noted authors, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, who would become his lifelong friends. In the early 1980s, he moved to the United States, becoming a citizen in 2007, and began working for liberal magazine “The Nation,” writing some of his earliest attacks on the conservative government and American foreign policy.

A prolific author, Hitchens left behind a massive body of critical writing, with more than a dozen books and hundreds of essays targeting everyone from the British Monarchy to Bill Clinton to George Orwell to God, usually with wit and more often than not, vicious and cutting remarks. Even those who hated his politics could not help but admire his skill as a writer and ability to craft a sharp turn of phrase, and many called him a friend.

Perhaps his most famous book was “The Missionary Position,” a scathing attack on Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity church, an organization that he called a cult. Hitchens described Mother Teresa as a “fraud” and accused her of glorifying poverty to enrich herself and the Catholic church, rather than truly helping the poor. The book infuriated Roman Catholics around the world, as well as politicians and celebrities who he claimed had used the charity and her reputation to mask their own evil deeds.

A later work, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” accused the former Secretary of State of “war crimes,” and argued that Kissinger should be prosecuted for “crimes against humanity, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture” for his involvement in atrocities in Southeast Asia and Central America. As a critic of the Bush administration’s use of torture, Hitchens filmed himself being waterboarded to demonstrate the cruelty of the practice. Hitchens claimed that, “The official lie about this treatment … is that it 'simulates' the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning.”

Hitchens had an enviable career arc that began with his own brand of fiery journalism at Britain’s “New Statesman” and then made its way to America, where he wrote for everyone from “The Atlantic” and “Harper’s” to “Slate and “The New York Times Book Review.” He was a legend on the speakers’ circuit, could debate just about anyone on anything and won innumerable awards.

Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, a troublemaker and was a gift, if it dare be said, from God.

This piece includes color photographs, a photo-gallery and two documentary short films.

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/remembering-christopher-hitchens-1949-2011/The death of Christopher Hitchens on Thursday night, of complications from... more

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6 months ago
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The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The Picture of Dorian Gray” is an innovative and gripping literary... more

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6 months ago
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All My Dreams on VHS: The Tragedy of Romantic Dreams

“All My Dreams on VHS” is an awkwardly funny, award-winning short film... more

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6 months ago
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George Orwell’s Guide to the Wartime Propaganda

The Western mainstream media falsifies the news resorting to euphemisms, half-truths... more

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6 months ago
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Confirmed – Los Zetas Use ‘Straw Purchasers’ to Buy South Texas Ranches

Last year, several reports surfaced about how Los Zetas were driving South Texas farmers out of their properties in order to purchase them for their drug running operations. But none of these reports were actually confirmed. The property owners were afraid to speak because they had been threatened by Los Zetas.

However, last week, there was a DEA seizure in Starr County, Texas that confirmed these allegations. Last October, Mexican authorities captured a Zeta ringleader responsible for the Mumbai-style attacks that killed 60 people at the Casino Royale in Monterrey, Mexico. The suspect’s name is Carlos Oliva Castillo, aka ‘La Rana’ (the frog).

During Oliva Castillo’s investigation, authorities were able to link him to a South Texas ranch purchase near Falcon Lake. The property was purchased by Castillo using someone else’s name. The actual name of the new ranch owner is Carlos Ricardo Tamez-Tirado, a doctor who lives across the border in the town of Diaz Ordaz, Mexico.

Prosecutors believe that La Rana’s uncle, Domingo Castillo was responsible for taking care of the ranch. The ranch was used by Los Zetas for drug and human smuggling operations.

Across the border from Starr County, in the Mexican towns of Miguel Aleman, Mier, and Guerrero, there is a bloody war between Los Zetas and the Gulf Drug Cartel. The situation with the drug war violence has gotten so out of control that it recently prompted the Mexican government to build another military base in the area.

In recent weeks, there have been countless reports of drug gangs crossing the Rio Grande into the U.S. as they run away from gun battles. Many of the cartel members hide in Zapata, Roma, and Rio Grande City. After a while, when they are no longer being chased, they go back to Mexico to either fight some more, or to escape. Castillo’s ranch, which is located in Rio Grande City, may have been a safe house for Los Zetas so they could hide from the Mexican military and the rival Gulf Cartel.

The Mexican drug war has devastated the farming and agricultural industry along the Texas-Mexico border. Many ranchers and property owners are either walking away or selling their properties because the area has become unsafe. As a result, the drug cartels are moving in, purchasing properties near the border and using them for their smuggling operations.

http://deadlinelive.info/2011/11/23/confirmed-%E2%80%93-los-zetas-use-%E2%80%98straw-purchasers%E2%80%99-to-buy-south-texas-ranches/Last year, several reports surfaced about how Los Zetas were driving South Texas... more

Anonmaly
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6 months ago
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Comment: Reefer madness in a final frenzy

As the Leveson Inquiry looks at media standards, we should investigate the lies written about cannabis in the British press.

By Peter Reynolds

In the mid 1930s, after the end of alcohol prohibition, Harry Anslinger, former assistant commissioner at the Bureau of Prohibition, was settling into his exciting new job as head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and working on his next campaign.

"This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with negroes, entertainers and any others," he wrote in one of Randolph Hearst's newspapers. Hearst was behind the organised campaign against cannabis hemp, then one of America's most successful crops, by timber, oil and paper interests. The strategy was to slur the plant with the racist term "marijuana", demonise it, outlaw it and wipe it out.

Come forward about 80 years to the present day. In the US there is the White House drugs czar Gil Kerlikowske and the head of the DEA, Michelle Leonhart. In Britain we have James Brokenshire, the Home Office minister. These people are faithful in style and message to their role model Anslinger. They use arguments and propaganda of exactly the same type and value but adjusted to politically correct 2011 terms. Their weapon is deceit and their strategy is intransigence. The prejudice, discrimination and media scaremongering continues. As Anslinger had Randolph Hearst's media empire, so Brokenshire has the Daily Mail.
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The Mail came out all guns blazing last week in response to the Global Initiative on Drug Policy Reform and the ex-head of MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller, calling for legal regulation. Despite the furious propaganda war it has waged against cannabis and cannabis users the issue won't go away. Why? Because millions of British citizens regularly use and enjoy cannabis with no ill effects and many find it of enormous therapeutic benefit for conditions such as chronic pain, MS and Crohn's disease. Also, because this war on cannabis is just another war on people. It is futile, expensive and causes far more harm than it prevents. It has created the modern phenomenon of rented property being destroyed, electricity being stolen with human trafficked gardeners and intensive production of high potency cannabis.

(much more at link)As the Leveson Inquiry looks at media standards, we should investigate the lies... more

Vierotchka
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6 months ago
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The Cull: Pain and Beauty All Wrapped Into One

“The Cull” is an acclaimed, powerful short film, directed by English... more

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6 months ago
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November 11, 1941 - Armistice Day Almost Everywhere.

Seventy years ago this day . . .

Gordonskene
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7 months ago
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November 9, 1941 - The World (mostly) At War.

Another day - some more chaos.

Gordonskene
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7 months ago
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Adam Phillips: Thinking Aloud on Pleasure and Frustration

“Thinking Aloud on Pleasure and Frustration” is a six-minute documentary... more

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7 months ago
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October 28, 1941 - Inching Closer To World War.

Another day loaded with anxiety.

Gordonskene
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7 months ago
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Visions: Tim Hetherington’s Theater of War

ast week, an upcoming gallery show of work by the late photographer Tim Hetherington was announced, the inaugural exhibition of The Bronx Documentary Center that was founded earlier this year. The exhibition, titled “Visions,” is a collection of never-before-seen photos by Hetherington, a British-American photographer who lived in Brooklyn. He was a longtime Vanity Fair and CNN contributor who died in April while covering the conflict in Libya, along with fellow conflict photographer and Brooklyn resident Chris Hondros.

It is amazingly ironic that the announcement of the exhibition of Tim Hetherington’s work coincided precisely with published reports that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the erratic, provocative dictator who ruled Libya for 42 years, had finally met a violent and vengeful death in the hands of the Libyan forces that drove him from power.

Hetherington was most famous for his Academy Award-nominated 2010 documentary “Restrepo,” which he filmed with Sebastian Junger in 2007. The film follows the Army platoon assigned to what was then the most dangerous posting in Afghanistan, The Korengal Valley, to clear it of insurgents and gain the trust of the local populace. In the course of the film, the platoon builds a new outpost they name after Juan Sebastian Restrepo, a comrade who was killed during the early days of the 15-month assignment.

On April 20, Hetherington was trailing rebels in the besieged coastal city of Misurata in Libya, when he and Hondros were killed in an explosion from a rocket-propelled grenade. He left behind 40 rolls of undeveloped 220mm film. The negatives revealed a fascinating mix of what Tim called “the theater of war,” men strutting with their guns, as well as landscapes, graffiti, and men firing guns and rocket-propelled grenades in battle. And a vase of plastic flowers in a bullet-marked room. Seventeen of the prints will be on display in the Bronx Documentary Center show as 36- by 30-inch prints hanging from the ceiling on two large wood panels, beginning October 22nd.

This piece includes a number of high-resolution color photographs, a remarkable photo-gallery and five documentary short films.

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/visions-tim-hetheringtons-theater-of-war/ast week, an upcoming gallery show of work by the late photographer Tim Hetherington... more

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7 months ago
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Beware The Gawper: A Terrifying Horror Experience!

“The Gawper” is a terrifying, comedic horror-themed two-minute animated... more

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7 months ago
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