J. M. Verville

This is pretty hilarious — North Korea does not even know how to make their fans appear as normal human beings as a group. I suspected this farce of fandom would occur before the report ever came out — I cannot imagine North Korea doing anything that is normal.

(I bet all of the male politburo members pee sitting down).

Reporting from Johannesburg, South Africa —

The North Koreans are back in the World Cup after a 44-year absence. But some may wonder why they bothered to come.

The Brazilians, who play in the tournament every four years, have more than 500 journalists following them here. The North Koreans, in only their second World Cup, brought two photographers, two TV reporters and one writer.

In the U.S., where soccer is still considered a minor sport, more than 136,000 World Cup tickets were sold. In North Korea, where the team is making history, the national soccer federation distributed 1,400 tickets.

In South Africa, a soccer game is a thinly disguised reason to sing, dance, scream and blow on a vuvuzela for hours. The North Korean fans handpicked to attend their country’s World Cup opener Tuesday displayed all the joy and spontaneity of accountants attending a seminar.

That the game — played in a wind chill of 24 degrees — ended in a 2-1 victory for Brazil was predictable. That several hundred North Korean fans were on hand to watch it was not.

China’s state-run news agency has reported that North Korea had offered tickets to sporting officials and tour agencies in China, which does not have a team here. Chinese journalists in South Africa had adopted the North Koreans as their own and, the news agency reported, about 1,000 Chinese dancers and musicians were recruited to cheer for the North Koreans.

But shortly before Tuesday’s game started, a five-row block of seats on the second level at Ellis Park Stadium filled up with more than 40 men and a woman, all dressed in identical red shirts, jackets and scarves, wearing identical red caps and waving small North Korean flags. Across the way there was another similarly sized red dot of fans in grandstands that were otherwise filled with the green and yellow of Brazil.

Kim Yong Chon, 43, one of the North Korean fans, said the group, which numbered 300, was not Chinese, but he admitted they had been carefully recruited by the North Korean government to make the trip. Speaking through an interpreter, he said the group had left Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, and traveled through Beijing the same day and they would stay in South Africa as long as their team does.

They sang the North Korean national anthem loudly but sat passively, almost expressionless, through most of the game, with one man sucking on a beer. They spoke only infrequently to one another — Chon said they didn’t know one another before coming to South Africa — and mainly reacted to the action on the field only when directed to do so by a man who stood before them like an orchestra conductor.

LA Times

In some odd way it brightens my day to hear about the dysfunctional North Korea who cannot even properly enjoy themselves. It makes my struggles seem all the less of a burden.

I never caught this story in the news but it is rather shocking seeing it revisited:

In Washington on Monday, Hillary Clinton unveiled the State Department’s 10th annual report on modern-day slavery, which evaluates the efforts of every nation to combat the crime. For the first time, State ranked the antislavery efforts of the U.S. alongside those of 174 other countries. The U.S. rated itself as being in full compliance with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA). But the report appears to have ignored a new congressional mandate to identify specific cases of countries whose diplomats allegedly harbored slaves within a few miles of Clinton’s remarks — even though it indicates that such cases exist.

The congressional mandate was prompted in part by the abuses of a Tanzanian diplomat named Alan Mzengi, who was Minister of Consular Affairs at his country’s embassy in Washington. In a January 2008 ruling, a U.S. district court judge found that Mzengi and his wife forced a 20-year-old woman named Zipora Mazengo into domestic slavery in their six-bedroom Bethesda, Md., home. In her April 2007 lawsuit against the couple, Mazengo, by then 27, said that as soon as she arrived from Tanzania in June 2000, the diplomat confiscated her passport and her employment contract. For the next four years, Mazengo said, the Mzengis forced her to perform domestic work 112 hours per week for no pay. At night she shared a room with the Mzengis’ infant, one of three children under her responsibility.
She claimed that the diplomat taunted her, his wife beat her, and both forbade her from leaving the home unaccompanied — even when her sister was dying in Tanzania. Mazengo’s ingrown toenails festered to the point where she could no longer wear shoes, yet the Mzengis denied her medical treatment for two years and forced her to shovel snow barefoot. When they finally allowed her emergency surgery, they ignored her doctor’s orders and put her back to work the same day. Finally, in August 2004, Mazengo escaped with help from a customer of the Mzengis’ side business, a catering service.

Time

I think definitely the concept of diplomatic immunity ought to be taken with a grain of salt — we cannot have governments sending this sort of scum to represent them elsewhere.

It also makes one wonder about the Tanzanian government when such a human rights outrage is being done by their sanctioned representative.

This is just an interesting article — I am not sure what sort of statements can be attached to it, but it is rather funny hearing things like this:

French first lady Carla Bruni shocked Michelle Obama by trying to compare notes on their sex lives, Jonathan Alter reports in “The Promise: President Obama, Year One.” Bruni, the Italian wife of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, “delighted in telling friends that she shocked Michelle Obama at their first meeting” by informing her that “the press of state business prevented her husband from making love to her as much as she would like,” Alter writes.

He also says of Bruni that “in her telling, they once kept another foreign leader waiting while they finished having sex. Bruni wanted to know if, like the Sarkozys, Michelle and the president had ever kept anyone waiting that way.” According to Alter, “Michelle laughed nervously and said no.”

Alter describes Bruni as “a former model who released a CD in 2009 with songs about her ‘thirty lovers.’” He says Obama had a “soft spot” for her husband, “whose considerable ego he took in stride.”

Politics Daily

There is not much of a political statement here but there are several reasons for us to giggle like school children.

You cannot make this stuff up:

NEW YORK — Without fanfare, the United Nations this week elected Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women, handing a four-year seat on the influential human rights body to a theocratic state in which stoning is enshrined in law and lashings are required for women judged “immodest.”

Just days after Iran abandoned a high-profile bid for a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council, it began a covert campaign to claim a seat on the Commission on the Status of Women, which is “dedicated exclusively to gender equality and advancement of women,” according to its website.

Buried 2,000 words deep in a U.N. press release distributed Wednesday on the filling of “vacancies in subsidiary bodies,” was the stark announcement: Iran, along with representatives from 10 other nations, was “elected by acclamation,” meaning that no open vote was requested or required by any member states — including the United States.

The U.S. currently holds one of the 45 seats on the body, a position set to expire in 2012. The U.S. Mission to the U.N. did not return requests for comment on whether it actively opposed elevating Iran to the women’s commission.

Fox

Year after year the UN is able to one-up itself on self-parody.

This would be hilarious if it wasn’t such a serious position.

Some interesting accusations. I look forward to seeing the end of this mess:

His book Band of Brothers – which chronicled the exploits of one company of US airborne troops in second world war Europe – was turned into a highly praised TV series.

But now American historian Professor Stephen Ambrose, who was President Dwight D Eisenhower’s official biographer and wrote or edited more than a dozen books about him, is embroiled in a posthumous controversy. It is alleged that he invented many meetings he claimed to have had with Eisenhower, and even fabricated entire interviews with him. The revelations have sent shock waves through the scholarly community in the United States.

The books written by Ambrose, who died in 2002, brought him popular acclaim, and director Steven Spielberg used him as a military adviser on his 1998 Oscar-winning film Saving Private Ryan. Band of Brothers became a cultural milestone when it was turned into a TV series on which Ambrose was a producer. It was hailed for educating an entire generation about the sacrifices of their forefathers. But it appears that Ambrose indulged in some sort of fantasy about the extent of his relationship with Eisenhower. In TV interviews, he claimed to have spent “hundreds and hundreds of hours” with the former president. He even once said he would spend two days a week working with Eisenhower in his office.

The Guardian

I am not sure what to think but I always like a good scandal.

This was a very good discovery — it is very well pleasing to me:

Scientists claim to have the first persuasive evidence that Neanderthals wore “body paint” 50,000 years ago.

The team report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that shells containing pigment residues were Neanderthal make-up containers.

Scientists unearthed the shells at two archaeological sites in the Murcia province of southern Spain.

The team says its find buries “the view of Neanderthals as half-wits” and shows they were capable of symbolic thinking.

Professor Joao Zilhao, the archaeologist from Bristol University in the UK, who led the study, said that he and his team had examined shells that were used as containers to mix and store pigments. (more…)

I find it quite ironic that they are complaining their ship was rammed… After they boasted vandalizing other whaling ships and trying to prevent them from fulfilling their goals.

Perhaps your cause is right and just but at least take it like a man and not like a hypocrite:

Anti-whaling activists have accused a Japanese vessel of ramming their high-tech speed boat during a confrontation in the Southern Ocean.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society says its vessel was sliced in half, but all six crew were rescued.

Earlier the campaigners - who are trying to stop Japan’s whaling fleet - said they threw chemicals onto the whaling boat to prevent it being used.

Japan’s fisheries agency said the group had obstructed the whalers’ operations.

The agency said it was the fourth time this season that the anti-whaling activists had interfered with the whaling fleet’s operations, Kyodo news agency reported

BBC

Israel, you are despised this much by Iran:

The head of Iran’s soccer federation issued a public apology and a member of his staff resigned after the federation mistakenly sent a New Year’s greeting to its counterpart in Israel, Iranian officials announced Sunday.

“It was a big mistake sending an e-mail to Israel’s football federation,” Ali Kaffashian, president of the Iran Football Federation, said in a statement carried by the semi-official Mehrs News Agency. “However, I am sure the director of the foreign relations office didn’t do it on purpose.”

Kaffashian said Iran’s soccer league routinely sends New Year’s greetings to all members of FIFA, the sport’s global federation, except for Israel. Iran does not recognize Israel, which it dismisses as the “Zionist entity,” and the two countries’ teams do not meet in international competitions.

Mohammad-Mansour Azimzadeh Ardebili, the head of the league’s foreign relations office, resigned over the matter, Kaffashian said.

CNN

It is vaguely comical to think them retracting their New Years greeting from Israel, but seeing a person literally resign over the fact is quite remarkable. There seems to be not a single bone of Iran that does not harbor ill will to the ‘Zionist entity.’

We are still a long way off from anything resembling progress in the ME.

Old laws can get pretty crazy but…

 A Pakistani court has ordered that two men have their ears and noses cut off, as punishment for doing the same to a woman who refused to marry one of them.

The two brothers were found guilty of kidnapping 20-year-old Fazeelat Bibi, one of their cousins, in September.

The judge in Lahore also sentenced them to life in prison.

Sentence was passed on Monday under a rarely invoked Islamic law dating from the 1980s. In the past similar sentences have been revoked on appeal.

BBC

Oddly, there is a sense of justice in this whole case — the intense suffering that the woman went through, receiving such a lifelong mutilation, seems to almost justify this sort of action done unto them.

The men clearly knew what they were doing and then they acted barbarously upon another human, scarring them for life.

It seems just in its own way.

Quite a story. I guess I am fortunate I did not end up as this fellow’s driver:

CAMP CASEY, South Korea — A brief moment of sexual contact between a senior noncommissioned officer and a subordinate sent both soldiers down different roads of guilt and despair.

Command Sgt. Maj. Antonio Holder found himself ostracized by his peers, and his impressive 29-year military career tarnished as he faced a court-martial. His former driver, a specialist, said the May incident left him unable to eat or sleep normally and with scars on his arms that he attributed to self-inflicted wounds resulting from depression. He said he has repeatedly attempted suicide.

Ultimately, Holder pleaded guilty to fraternizing with a subordinate enlisted man and was sentenced to a reduction in rank to E-8 and a formal reprimand, but not before a daylong sentencing hearing Tuesday at Camp Casey that featured dramatic testimony from the two men about how their lives spiraled downward after an incident that began with a graphic sexual discussion.

…

“It was not done for any sexual gratification, but because I was tired of hearing about his penis,”

Stars & Stripes

…

I think there is not that much more commentary to make on this one.