To be French today means that you don't have to answer this question, or at least not having to provide his own answer. Is this a rhetorical response?. Rhetoric as a response? This would be the case if it wasn't anchored in a reality that all those who have had the opportunity to spend time with immigrants have learned. One doesn't have to go to the most deprived and the most difficult areas of our country, it will do to go to a single university or other institution of higher education hosting some students of foreign nationality, especially the extracommunitari as the Italians subtly say.

Only rarely do insiders, those who are established certain relationships, those who have legitimate status, have to explain why they are there and why they are legitimate. They usually just explain why others should not be there, why others should not join them, why they are illegitimate and unworthy to participate in the same activities and enjoy the same rights.

As you know, East Germany was formed in the Soviet occupation zone in eastern Germany. The early years of the DDR* coincided with the birth of rock and roll in the USA and this strange new music's appearance in Europe. At first, the East German state shunned this new music. Rock and roll was seen as the degenerate outpourings of late capitalism, a sure sign that the USA had fallen into decadence and was on the brink of socialist revolution.

Despite the best efforts of the regime, however, the youth of East Germany became more and more interested in the new American music. Rather than leave them to the tender mercies of West German broadcasting and the likes of Radio Free Europe, the DDR's rulers sought to co-opt rock and roll by allowing East German rock bands to come into being. Ideologues also discovered that rock and roll was not an alien import, but an authentic development of proletarian culture. They came close to implying that it was a development of East German proletarian culture, as though the first rock and rollers hailed from darkest Saxony rather than the American south.

sbisson

Deep in the Arizona desert, down a two mile dirt track, sits the nascent arcology. Arcosanti is a slow burn, with parts over 40 years old, and others raised just last month. It's a new cathedral, built by volunteers and a small group of residents. Concrete slabs are cast in silt, and raised up to create human-scale structures that blend into the earth and take advantage of the passive warming and cooling effects of sun and wind. Designed to be a town for thousands, it's a village for a hundred, reliant on the volunteers who pay for month-long courses on Soleri's ideas, on the passing tourist trade and the sale of Soleri's bronze and ceramic bells.

[. . .]

The society that's grown up around Arcosanti reminds me of the guilds that built the great cathedrals of Europe. It's not difficult to see the arcology as a secular cathedral, a project that will take generations to complete and that will never be what Soleri dreamt all those years ago. Perhaps that's not a bad thing.

One thing did seem clear: it's in the wrong place. If arcologies are to replace the urban sprawl of a city with a new, intentional community on a human scale, then the desert (as beautiful as it is) is the wrong place for Arcosanti. It should be in a city, in a Detroit, a LA, a New York, a London, a Moscow, a Hong Kong. It shouldn't be isolated, a new Taliesin for Soleri's architectural disciples. It should be a visible sign of a different way to live, of a new city. Make it La Sagrada Familia, big, vibrant and reaching in the heart of Barcelona, not a hermitage in the desert.

• First, Goble tackles the question of Belarus' name. In the English language after fall of the Soviet Union, the country names "the Ukraine" and "Byelorussia" changes, "the Ukraine" dropping its article and "Byelorussia" settling after "Byelarus" on "Belarus." In Russia, it seems, non-government experts have decided that the old Russian-language names won't change on grounds of their normativeness.


• Second, Belarusian identity seems to be strong, that half of a polled population identifying themselves as belonging to a Belarusian nation, 40% as belonging to a "triune" East Slavic nation also incorporating Russia and Ukraine, and a vanishingly small minority identifying themselves as Russian. Although Belarusian identity is somewhat stronger in less Russophile West Belarus and among educated people, it's fairly uniformly distrubted, with obvious consequences for relations with Russia.

When Dawood [Mumbai organized crime hotshot] skipped India for Dubai in 1984, few Westerners could have located the city-state on a map, let alone talk authoritatively about the place and its people. Arabs, Iranians, Baluchis, East Africans, Pakistanis and West Coast Indians, by contrast, had a deep historical acquaintance with Dubai. At the end of World War II, it was barely more than a coastal village that had survived largely on its wits, since its only indigenous industry, pearl fishing, had been wiped out by the war and by the Japanese development of cultured pearls.

In the barren years between pearls and petrodollars, Dubai quietly resurrected its trading links across the Strait of Hormuz with Iran and across the Arabian Sea to Bombay. Because of both Iran and India pursued policies of severe protectionism to build up their domestic industries, Dubai’s traders found they could exploit their own light taxation regime by importing all manners of material into Dubai and then exporting it to Iran and the subcontinent. “The bottomless pit that is Indian demand for gold funded many, many people here in those years,” explained Francis Matthew, an ex-pat for decades and editor of Dubai’s largest publishing company. “Almost every Indian woman needs it for her trousseau and her dowry; different kinds of gold, different kinds of plate for the various areas of India.”

[. . .]

In terms of influence, Dubai’s ruling Al-Maktoum family ranked second only to the Al-Nahyans of Abu Dhabi. The discovery of huge oil reserves on Abu Dhabi territory proved a godsend to Dubai and the other five emirates that formed the new state of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 1973 after the British decided to withdraw all its forces east of Suez. (…) Dubai itself has modest oil reserves, which even so account for 15% of the city-state’s income. But thse will dry up within the next decade. In the 1980s, the al-Maktoums decided to diversify (…). Thus they did conceive the plan to build the Jebel Ali port, its sixty-six berths making it the largest marine facility in the Middle East.

While critics scoffed at the grandiose project, the decision to create the new port was quickly vindicated. In 1979, Dubai had learned a valuable lesson from the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan: trouble has its bright side. Frightened by the instability of their own countries, Iranian and Afghan traders moved to Dubai, bringing with them their businesses, thereby bolstering the local economy. With neither income nor sales tax, Dubai steadily developed a reputation for being a safe place in the Middle East to stash your money. Since then Dubai has always boomed during a regional crisis.

A small, private company launched New Zealand’s first rocket into space to cheers from about 50 people gathered on a small island off the country’s coast.

As the noise of the blastoff sent sheep running, the 18-foot rocket raced into the sky, reaching beyond the Kármán line, 100 kilometers (62 miles) above the Earth’s surface, which is traditionally considered the dividing altitude between the upper atmosphere and real space.

The Atea-1, named after the Maori word for space, was built by Rocket Lab. It’s the first privately built rocket launched from the Southern Hemisphere to reach space.

“It’s not trivial sending something into space,” Mark Rocket, Rocket Lab director and former internet entrepreneur, told local media. “This is a huge technological leap for New Zealand.”

After the sub-orbital vehicle entered space, it turned back toward Earth and splashed down. The Rocket Lab team is currently trying to locate the rocket, which was expected to fall into the Pacific Ocean about 30 miles northeast of Great Mercury Island, a privately owned resort and the rocket’s takeoff point.

If you happen to be in the area and see the payload, don’t go scooping it up, Rocket Lab warned through its Twitter feed.

“IMPORTANT: Marine traffic in the Coromandel, do not recover payload, it contains delicate scientific instruments & is potentially hazardous,” the Lab wrote. “If found please mark the payload location, and relay the GPS coordinates to Rocket Lab ASAP.”

[I]t can often be the case that the more a writer adheres to autobiography, the more fantastical the narration becomes. Witness Huysmans and DeQuincey as obvious exmaples. One might also note that the division Shields draws between etoliated artifice and the crudity of raw experience is surely a false one; as John Bayley's The Uses of Division : Unity and Disharmony in Literature was at pains to point out, the most interesting work of many realist writers is often their more fragmented and inchoate. For me, writers like Lawrence, Eliot and Hardy are great precisely because of how untidy their novels often are. With all of that said though, in the end I probably sympathise more with Shields than with Smith. From Isherwood and Pessoa onwards to Coetzee and Sebald, writing that defies the division of reality and invention has become a hallmark of the age. Equally, it's difficult not to notice that if our age has any genre it has obsessively explored, it would have to be biography, even those of people who are still living and have done apparently little to merit the attention. Put simply, we live in an age where experience is a heavily circumsribed or heavily mediated concept.

I met some very special people in this bizarre parallel world of Oxford we all inhabited. We know of Philip Pullman’s parallel world of the Northern Lights but this was – and is – another parallel world there of ordinary people to whom an extraordinary thing had happened – an HIV diagnosis – which had changed our lives forever and which we dared not share with anyone. If we had survived a train crash or a bomb attack, God forbid, all arms of support would have been there for us. But we hadn’t. We had HIV. Of course, the human spirit being what it is, extraordinary resilience emerged and I was touched by so many whom I met. There were the wonderful team at OXAIDS, for a start, and the Bishop of Oxford and Mrs Harries, who opened up their home for us for a retreat day each summer. There was the lovely Kim, an elf-like creature, a young former drug user from Scotland, who had moved South, with the huge courage to break away from her friends and the drugs, to kick her habit and start a new life working with horses, which she loved. But then she realised that a legacy of those days had come with her, in the form of HIV. She soon slipped away and died and I found myself in a lonely cemetery somewhere in the West Country questioning the senselessness of her loss. There was a lovely African couple, highly able students in Oxford, full of life and laughter. Then AIDS caught up with them. He died suddenly first, and a year later she too was gone and I found myself at her funeral also, full of devastated mourners, not sure again who knew what and daring therefore to say nothing. There were wonderful gay young men who had grown up struggling with their sexual identity, who had faced the rejection of their families through being gay, now having the double rejection of HIV to deal with. They too just wasted away and died. There was Dave, of Body Positive. He died too and I just couldn’t manage to go to his funeral – we all kept wondering which of us would be next.

These events forced me to address and deal seriously with the really big questions facing all of us in our lives, no matter who we are or where we come from. These questions included: who am I? who are we? what is life about? what is death about? what are gender, sex, our belief systems, our values, our relationships with those around us about? But then slowly I began to rebuild my life, realising that I needed to be there for my older children, that maybe I wasn’t meant to give up just yet, that maybe there was something very important to be learnt from all these experiences. Even though those years were so deeply painful, with all our otherwise perhaps unlikely friendships across new overlapping circles quickly getting torn up by the roots through sickness, rapid deaths, and just too many funerals, there was still a shared sense of wonder amongst us of this unreal journey into reality that we were all making together, deeply aware as we were of our shared borrowed time, our shared mortality, our shared humanity.

[. . .]

All of us in the world are dying, from the day that we arrive in this world. But most of us spend most of our lives imagining that death will never happen to us. We fear death and dying and the suffering that they will bring. Those of us with children especially quite naturally weave all the magic that we can into our lives, to protect ourselves from death before they have grown up, and to protect them from death also.

But I think many of us agree that this diagnosis, maybe especially because it is one which we have experienced in secret, gives us a sudden and immense new perspective on reality. It has made me realise how fragile life is and to try to treat each day and each relationship with far more care.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) gave its thumbs-up to the Qatar-based international news service Al-Jazeera English, which is headed by former Canadian Broadcasting Corporation senior executive Tony Burman as managing director.

The CRTC slapped no conditions on the approval for Al-Jazeera English, in contrast to 2003 when it green-lit the Arabic-language al-Jazeera service for Canadian carriage, but ordered cablers and other content carriers to edit out violence or potential hate messages.

No Canadian content carrier has yet taken up the expense, or bother, of editing the Arabic Al-Jazeera service as a condition of carriage.

"Despite concerns expressed by certain parties, there is nothing on the record of the current proceeding that leads the commission to conclude that AJE would violate Canadian regulations, such as those regarding abusive comment," the CRTC said in its Thursday ruling on Al-Jazeera English.

The CRTC received around 2,600 public comments in support of the carriage application by Al-Jazeera English, with only 40 parties expressing opposition, the regulator said.