Saturday, October 9, 2010

Mid Day International News

Mid Day International News

Slumdog movie star turns defiant Palestinian girl

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The Indian actress who starred in Slumdog Millionaire has moved from the slums of Mumbai to the squalid refugee camps of the West Bank in a new film: the story of a defiant Palestinian girl who wants to fight against Israel in a coming of age story with a Mideast twists.

Miral, directed by award-winning artist Julian Schnabel and with cameos by Willem Dafoe and Vanessa Redgrave, stands apart for more than its star power. Due for US release in December, it's also likely to give Western audiences - some perhaps more used to movies depicting Arabs as violent Islamic militants - a compassionate view of the Palestinians.

For Mumbai-raised Freida Pinto, 25, who became a star after Slumdog shot from obscurity to box-office success and eight Academy Awards, it was a chance for a different setting.

Miral sweeps across decades of the Mideast conflict. The cinematography lays out beautiful Palestinian landscapes and Pinto glows in her scenes. But the dialogue comes across at times as preachy, and Schnabel seems to try pack in as much Palestinian history as possible in the 112-minute film. For the filmmakers, the message is the key.

"The ordinary American who knows nothing about Palestine and knows nothing about our cause - it will be the first time he will sit and watch this story," said Yasmine al-Massri, a 31-year-old Paris-based Palestinian actress who plays Pinto's mother.

At a news conference in Ramallah before the screening late Thursday, some Palestinian movie crew members said they hoped Pinto's star power would draw audiences into cinemas and that Schnabel's Jewish faith would deflect claims of bias.

"It's a Jewish American director who is telling a Palestinian story," said al-Massri. Schnabel was named best director at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007 and awarded him a top prize for his movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Pinto brings wide experience to the role despite her youth. She is currently appearing as a neighbour of a conflicted writer in the latest Woody Allen movie, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger and will co-star in the upcoming Greek mythology action tale Immortals and a Planet of the Apes prequel, Rise of the Apes.

In Miral, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last month, Pinto's title heroine is sent to a Palestinian children's institution in Jerusalem when her alcoholic mother commits suicide and her conservative Muslim father struggles to raise her.

Headstrong, Miral tumbles into the political storms lashing around her: it's the late 1980s and Palestinians are rebelling against Israel's military occupation. Miral tries to fight Israel and battle her father, at the same time as she falls for a handsome Palestinian fighter.

The movie was filmed over three months in 2009 with a crew of about 150 people and a budget of USD 15 million, according to local crew members.

Nobel laureate's wife forced to leave Beijing

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Chinese police have forced the wife of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo to leave Beijing and are believed to have taken her to the northeastern city of Jinzhou, where her husband is imprisoned, reports said on Saturday.

"(The police) are sitting there waiting for me to get my things together," US-based Radio Free Asia quoted Liu's wife, Liu Xia, as saying late Friday.

Liu Xia told the broadcaster that the police said they planned to take her to Jinzhou but she was worried that she could be held under house arrest at another place outside Beijing.

"They said I could see him (Liu Xiaobo) tomorrow," Liu Xia was quoted as saying.

Dissident Wang Jinbo also quoted Liu Xiaobo's brother as saying Liu Xia was en route to the prison in Jinzhou "in the company of the police".

Liu Xia was expected to arrive in Jinzhou on Saturday morning, accompanied by her brother, Wang reported on his Twitter feed.

Wang is a friend of Liu Xia and travelled with her in July on one of the four prison visits she made to Jinzhou since Liu Xiaobo was transferred there in May.

On her Twitter account late Thursday, Liu Xia said she had rejected police efforts to persuade her to travel to Jinzhou, which is about 500 km from Beijing, before Friday's announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize.

After the announcement, a group of up to 100 supporters gathered outside Liu's Beijing apartment compound while police prevented her from leaving.

Dozens of journalists also waited outside the compound, monitored by about 30 uniformed police and dozens of plain-clothes officers.

Liu Xiaobo, a prominent writer and one of China's leading dissidents, was arrested in December 2008, two days before he and 300 others released the Charter 08 for democratic reform.

He was sentenced in December to 11 years in prison for subversion.

International rights groups and politicians welcomed Friday's award of the Peace Prize to Liu, but China said it was angered by the decision and insisted that Liu was a 'criminal' convicted under Chinese law.

Cowell's 'small' 51st b'day

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Cheryl Cole got Simon Cowell laughing on his birthday yesterday by booking dwarfs to sing to him. The three-piece wearing grey T-shirts with the words Happy Birthday, Love Cheryl greeted the ex-Idol judge.

They played a violin, drum and accordion as they sang Happy Birthday.

And Cowell (51) was so impressed, he invited the trio to spend the day with him. Cheryl had booked actor Phil Holden and tiny pals Ray Griffiths and Darren Horan the night before.


New poem speaks of plath death

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In a final ode to one of literature's great doomed romances, a previously unseen poem by Ted Hughes was published in which he describes the dark last days leading up to Sylvia Plath's suicide.

Last Letter was unearthed in an archive of papers in the British Library belonging to Hughes, the late English poet laureate.

The poem has been printed for the first time by New Statesman magazine.

Hughes sheds new light on the three days in February, 1963, that ended with his American wife gassing herself at age 30 after they separated, beginning the poem with the words: "What happened that night? Your final night."

Hughes left her and their two children.

The love affair between Plath and Hughes, the trauma when he left her after six years of marriage for another woman and her eventual suicide have been an enduring source of fascination and spawned an industry of books and films.

Hughes stayed silent about his wife's death until 1998, when he published the acclaimed poetry collection Birthday Letters.

Hughes died of cancer just months later.


Smoker chimp dies at age 52

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A chimpanzee famous for smoking cigarettes died at a South African zoo, after puffing until age 52, despite zookeepers' efforts to help him kick the habit.

Charlie the chimp started smoking after visitors to the zoo in central Bloemfontein tossed him a lit cigarette, which he picked up and stuck in his mouth, aping the human onlookers.

The trick earned laughs, encouraging more people to feed his habit. For years zookeepers tried in vain to convince people to stop abetting him.

Longer life

In the end, Charlie lived 10 years longer than the average chimp, so his addiction did not end his life prematurely, zoo spokesman Qondile Khedama said.

An autopsy would determine whether smoking had caused his death.

The zoo is looking for a new companion for his widow Judy, "although it will be almost impossible to replace a character like Charlie", he added.


Yoga bad for the soul, says Baptist Leader

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A feud over yoga and religion has left many Christians bent out of shape.

Southern Baptist Seminary President Albert Mohler unleashed a storm of controversy when he penned a critical essay titled Should Christians Practice Yoga?

In the piece, Mohler cautions Christians against the practice of yoga, saying that despite its evolution into a popular pastime, its spiritual basis violates the tenets of Christianity.

"Yoga begins and ends with an understanding of the body that is, to say the very least, at odds with the Christian understanding," he wrote.

"Christians are not called to empty the mind or to see the human body as a means of connecting to and coming to know the divine."

The evangelical leader found himself in the hot seat post his essay went public. "My email servers are exhausted," Mohler wrote on his website.

"Messages have been coming in at a rate of about a 100 an hour. The first lesson count the cost when you talk about yoga," he said.

Many yoga enthusiasts don't see their love for the practice as being in conflict with their belief in Christianity.
Stephanie Dillon, said that she credits yoga for reviving her connection with her faith.

"What I found is that it opened my spirit; it renewed my spirituality," she said.

Though Dillon feels she has integrated yoga and Christianity in her life, Mohler says the two are fundamentally incompatible.


'Canoodling' art show barred for minors

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Outcry as Paris City Hall bars under-Eighteens from seeing adolescents featuring in Risque pictures taken by an American photographer for an art exhibition

The French capital's reputation as a home of artistic liberation has taken a fresh blow with the banning of teenagers from a photographic exhibition about teen sexuality because of fears of legal action.

The exhibition, which opened yesterday, is a retrospective of the US photographer Larry Clark's 50-year career and chronicles the lives of American teenagers between 1960 and 2010.

Restricted

His photos, viewings of which have been restricted to minors at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, depict their subjects' everyday lives and subcultures, from skateboarding to punk rock, drugs and firearms. About one in 10 of the pictures portrays young people engaged in sexual activity.

In protest against the age restriction imposed by Paris City Hall, an explicit black-and-white shot from the collection was splashed on the front page of the newspaper Lib �ration yesterday.

The show's catalogue has also raised difficulties. The traditional publishing house for the capital's exhibitions, Paris Mus �es, refused to print the book because six images made it feel "uncomfortable".

The ban has, therefore, provoked controversy in the French media and complaints by Green Party politicians sitting on the Paris city council.

Are French teenagers more innocent than US teenagers, they asked, or is France, which used to have a reputation for being open-minded, becoming prudish?

The Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delano , replied that "what could be done 20 years ago raises problems today; the ideological and legal context regarding contemporary art has changed."

The Mayor pointed to legal action launched by associations against museums and curators in the recent past, and said this was not a risk he was willing to take.

'Nonsensical ban'

Clark claimed on Wednesday that the Paris museum's ban made no sense, saying that it was like telling teenagers to "go back to your rooms and watch all this s**t displayed on the internet, but we don't want you to see art that talks about you in museums".

He added, "Of course these photos are disturbing. Art is disturbing. And yes, it's showing sex and nudity, but it's part of life."

The 67-year-old Clark is also a film-maker best known for the 1995 movie Kids, which caused a scandal with its raw portrayal of teenagers, sex and drugs.

Age restriction or censorship of an exhibition by the courts is very uncommon in France, but the stereotype that the country is more artistically liberated than any other has been eroded in recent years.

As Clark pointed out, Parisian teenagers need not be too concerned about missing his exhibition: they will still be able to download his photographs from the internet.


'Blasphemy'

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That's what chinese officials call dissident's nobel peace prize

Beijing blasted a Chinese dissident's Nobel Peace Prize win on Friday, calling the decision to award Liu Xiaobo the honor "blasphemy."

Ma Zhaoxu, spokesman for China's foreign ministry, said the award is supposed to be given to those who "promote national harmony, international friendship" and work toward peace.

Liu is serving an 11-year prison term after being sentenced in 2009 for inciting subversion of state power.

He is the co-author of Charter 08, a call for political reform and human rights, and was an adviser to the student protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

"Liu Xiaobo is a convicted criminal sentenced to jail by the Chinese judiciary. His acts are in complete contradiction to the purpose of the Nobel Peace Prize," Ma said.

The selection of Liu was made by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, whose president said that Liu had won for his "long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China."

However, Ma said that while China and Norway have recently had "good relations," the committee's decision would harm future dealings between the two countries.

The Nobel Committee stood by its choice and said it had expected China to react strongly.

"We have a very strong tradition of awarding the prize to human rights activists of many different kinds," said Geir Lundestad, director of the Nobel Institute.

The institute assists the committee in selecting the prize winner each year.

Lundestad cited German pacifist and journalist Carl von Ossietzky in 1935, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel in 1986, Myanmar pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991 and Iranian campaigner Shirin Ebadi in 2003 as examples of human rights activists who have won the prize.


Posted by Harshad at 7:21 AM

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