USA: film maker tortured in Abu Ghraib sues Rumsfeld

This video is called Fernando Botero’s “Abu Ghraib” – A Conversation with the Artist.

From India eNews:

Los Angeles, July 8 (Xinhua) A Los Angeles filmmaker has sued US Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and many high-ranking military officials for wrongly imprisoning him for 55 days in Iraq last year.

Cyrus Kar, 45, filed his suit in a Los Angeles federal court Friday, alleging that his imprisonment violated his civil rights, international law, the Geneva Convention and fundamental principles of the due process of law.

The suit is the first civil action challenging the constitutionality of the detention and hearing policies of the US government in Iraq.

Kar, a US citizen and navy veteran, went to Iraq 14 months ago to make a documentary film about Cyrus the Great – the Persian king who issued the world’s first human rights charter.

On May 17, 2005, he was stopped at a Baghdad checkpoint in a taxi and was detained after security personnel found a common component for improvised explosive devices in the trunk.

The driver told military authorities that Kar and his cameraman were passengers and knew nothing about the devices, which the driver said were washing machine timers that he was taking to his brother-in-law.

The US military said they detained Kar as he posed ‘an imperative security threat’, noting that the washing machine timers found in the taxi were a ‘common component’ in the construction of improvised explosive devices.

The FBI later searched Kar’s house but found nothing incriminating.

However, Kar was held for many weeks in various prisons around Iraq, including the notorious facility at Abu Ghraib.

While in confinement, the suit states, Kar was at various times hooded, restrained ‘in painful flexi-cuffs,’ and ‘repeatedly threatened, taunted and insulted’ by US soldiers.

At one point, according to the suit, a soldier at Abu Ghraib slammed Kar’s head into a concrete wall.

Even after military judges found him to be an ‘innocent civilian’ under the Geneva Convention, Kar was held for another week.

Kar was freed after the American Civil Liberties Union, where he worked, sought his release.

Greece: statue of goddess Artemis found

From The Independent in South Africa:

July 10 2006

Athens – Greek archaeologists have unearthed the torso of a statue of the goddess Artemis dating back to the first century BC during a dig in central Greece, local archaeological services said on Monday.

“It is a very important find and the most beautiful feminine statue found in Thessalia,” Athanassios Tzafalias, the head of the search team in Larissa said.

The 80cm tall torso was found “intact and richly adorned” wearing a short tunic covered by a deer hide, Tzafalias said.

He said the original statue measured more than 1,60m.

He held out hopes of finding other parts of the statue as the dig goes on.

The daughter of Leto and Zeus, and the twin of Apollo, Artemis was the goddess of the wilderness, the hunt and wild animals, and fertility.

She was one of the Olympians and a virgin goddess.

Her main vocation was to roam mountain forests and uncultivated land with her nymphs in attendance hunting for lions, panthers, hinds and stags. – Sapa-AFP

Britain: control by the privileged of media

By Simon Whelan:

Study of British journalists confirms entrenchment of class privilege

10 July 2006

Recent research has shown that at least half of Britain’s leading news journalists were educated at private schools.

This compares to just seven percent of British children attending private schools.

The research by the Sutton Trust into the “Educational Backgrounds of Leading Journalists” also reveals that the number of private school attendees amongst newspaper editors and commentators has increased in recent years.

Some 54 percent of the top 100 newspaper editors, columnists, broadcasters and executives were educated privately.

They include such diverse figures as Rebekah Wade, editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper, and Channel 4 news anchor Jon Snow.

This is up from 49 percent in 1986, the last time similar research was conducted.

Only 14 percent of the top 100 attended a state comprehensive, as compared to nine in ten of all British school children.

The research also reveals that of the 81 percent of the leading journalists who attended university, at least half went to Oxford or Cambridge.