Sony ? (alpha) NEX-5N 16.1 MP Digital Camera - Silver (Kit w/ 18-55mm ,16mm Lens)
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LENS 18-55mm - FILTER+HOOD
LENS 16mm f2.8 - Just Lens no filter, no Hood
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CAIRO (Reuters) ? Egyptian prosecutors seeking a conviction against Hosni Mubarak on charges of ordering the killing of protesters took the stand for the first time on Tuesday, criticizing his political record in a session brought to an abrupt end by the presiding judge.
The head of the five-member prosecution team said Mubarak, 83, had succumbed to family pressure to arrange a transfer of power to his youngest son, Gamal, who stood alongside his father in a courtroom cage reserved for the accused.
A lawyer for the defense, Ismail Sha'er, speaking after the session was adjourned until Wednesday, said the prosecution had offered statements with "no basis in evidence."
Mubarak, toppled by a mass uprising in February last year, was again wheeled on a hospital trolley into the Cairo court. Doctors say he has a heart condition that means he cannot stand for any length of time.
The former president, his two sons, the former interior minister and senior police officers face charges ranging from corruption to involvement in the deaths of around 850 protesters during the uprising that unseated him.
"He agreed to succession and succumbed to the demands of his family and spouse who wanted to be mother to the next president after having been the wife of one," said Mustafa Suleiman, head of the prosecution team, presenting a view widely held among Egyptians and which helped galvanize the opposition to Mubarak.
In the first of three sessions set aside for the prosecution to present their case, Suleiman did not deal with the charge that Mubarak had ordered the killing of the demonstrators who rose up against him. Prosecutors said they would get to that part of their case Wednesday.
Judge Ahmed Refaat adjourned the session when Suleiman sought to give the floor to another member of the prosecution team. The session lasted about 90 minutes. Previous sessions have lasted several hours.
Mubarak, who ruled for three decades, is the first leader toppled by the wave of protests in the Arab world to stand trial in person.
"GRAND STATEMENTS WITH NO EVIDENCE"
In a country still in political and economic disarray following Mubarak's ouster, many Egyptians believe national renewal will be impossible unless justice is achieved for those killed and their families.
No official has been convicted over the killing of protesters during the 18-day revolt. Mubarak and the other defendants deny any responsibility for the deaths.
Ashraf Sayyed, a civil rights lawyer attending the hearing, said the prosecution had made "grand statements with no evidence ... Judge Refaat is giving the prosecutors' team more time to offer better and more solid arguments."
Some legal experts have criticized the judge for not meeting lawyers' requests for a further chance to question Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, head of the military council which has governed Egypt since Mubarak stepped down.
Likewise, the judge did not meet their requests for the chance to question Tantawi's deputy, General Sami Enan.
"Unfortunately, the basis for this case is weak," said Essam Soltan, an independent legal expert.
"The judge could have demanded the testimony of Sami Enan before allowing the prosecutors to list their arguments. We have entered the next phase of the trial on the back of weak and insufficient evidence," he said.
"The reputation of Egypt's justice system is at stake. We are a year since the revolution erupted and not a single official has been convicted for the killing of Egyptians."
(Reporting by Marwa Awad; Editing by Tom Perry and Mark Heinrich)
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Seven Monitor correspondents reflect on the world's hot spots. In this installment, the Monitor's Peter Ford points out that many signs of unrest in China go unreported every year.
It would be a brave man who would predict real political change anytime soon in China.
Skip to next paragraphIn the sensitive run-up to next fall's Communist Party Congress, and its once-in-a-decade leadership handover, the authorities will be especially vigilant in their battle to keep China "harmonious." That means stifling dissonant voices through censorship, arrests, and other familiar tools.
And yet there are unmistakable signs of ferment in Chinese society as it digests the phenomenal economic achievements of the past 30 years. Whether that ferment results in flammable gases is one of the key questions surrounding China's future.
Many signs go unreported, such as the estimated 90,000 riots, protests, mass petitions, and other eruptions of unrest that happen every year, mostly in poor, rural areas. They are almost always localized affairs, targeted at unpopular municipal officials.
An unusually dramatic incident in December did attract national attention, however: The people of Wukan, in the southern province of Guangdong, angered by the threat that their farmland would be confiscated for construction, rose up and threw their local Communist Party rulers out of town.
Less violent symptoms of social change in China are more pervasive, though at first sight they have little to do with politics.
At the other end of the social spectrum from Wukan's villagers, many educated young people in the cities, for example, especially those in their 20s, are showing a much greater sense of independence and adventure than their parents ever allowed themselves.
They are quitting their jobs if they find them boring. They are traveling, they are shrugging off social traditions, and they are immersing themselves in foreign culture, whether that be Western music and fashion, South Korean soap operas, or Japanese anime.
Most important, they are putting personal fulfillment above any sense of duty to "serve the people," once the highest of Maoist values.
And these same young people ? still a small minority, but an elite, opinion-shaping minority nonetheless ? are losing their faith in the government, according to a study last year. The more a young person uses the Internet as a source of information, the more he or she thinks the government needs citizen supervision. And Internet penetration hit 500 million people this year, or a little over one-third of China's population.
It is anyone's guess how long it will be before social ferment bubbles up far enough to hit the leaden coffin lid of conformity imposed by China's political rulers. But as young consumers develop a hankering to become citizens, the pressure is building.
Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/BOXksttHYGw/2011-Reflections-China-rising
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PORTSMOUTH, N.H. ? Republican presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman on Friday urged New Hampshire voters to stand up to the status quo and reject Mitt Romney, while a group of his supporters prepared a new television ad calling Romney a chameleon willing to do anything to get elected.
The $300,000 ad campaign is expected to begin running across New Hampshire this weekend, according to an adviser for the organization known as Our Destiny PAC. The adviser was not authorized to comment publicly.
"Two serious candidates remain," a voice says in the ad, which flashes images of Huntsman, the former Utah governor, and Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and front-runner in New Hampshire. "One willing to say anything, be anything. One who can actually do the job."
It continues: "One state can stop the chameleon. Vote Jon Huntsman."
Huntsman, who served as ambassador to China in the Obama administration, has not been anywhere near that pointed in his criticism of Romney. Speaking to employees at a Portsmouth software company Friday, he said Romney would be unlikely to change the "trust deficit" in Washington given that Romney has "half of Congress supporting him."
"Who's going to want to change anything when you've got the status quo supporting you?" Huntsman said. "You can have a candidate who's going to fight for change who is not going to be in the hip pocket of special interest groups, or you're going to have the status quo choice."
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich also wouldn't do anything to restore trust in Washington, Huntsman said.
"Speaker Gingrich is not the kind of person who is going to be able to deal effectively with the trust issue because you can't deal effectively with the trust issue if you are a fixture of Washington, D.C., and have been for 40 years."
Huntsman, who is skipping Tuesday's Iowa caucuses, is betting his candidacy on a strong finish in New Hampshire's Jan. 10 Republican primary, which is open to independents as well as registered Republicans.
Huntsman entered the presidential contest with great expectations earlier in the year. But national polling suggests he's still largely unknown to many Republican voters. He's also struggled to raise enough money to pay for his own television advertising campaigns. On Wednesday, he told The Associated Press he's likely to leave the race unless he finishes in the top three in New Hampshire.
Pam Hicks, one of the software company workers, said she was 100 percent adamant before meeting Huntsman that she would not vote for him. After the event, Hicks said she was reconsidering although she doesn't like his anti-abortion views or his opposition to gay marriage, which is legal in New Hampshire.
"We believe nobody has the right to tell us how to live our lives," she said.
Still, Hicks said she planned to do more research on Huntsman.
"He needs a more serious look," she said.
In perhaps further proof that Huntsman's efforts in New Hampshire are paying off, voter Cynthia Ouellette echoed Hicks' sentiments hours later in Canterbury, where Huntsman attracted about 150 people to a town hall meeting. Like Hicks, Ouellette said she was sure she wasn't going to vote for Huntsman ? until she met him in person.
She described losing her teaching job because of budget cuts and grilled Huntsman about how he would be different from former President George W. Bush.
"He's the only one I've been able to meet, and I was impressed by his honesty and openness," she said.
Our Destiny PAC has now spent roughly $1.9 million on New Hampshire advertising to help Huntsman. That's more than any other outside group or other campaign has spent in the state, according to numbers obtained by The Associated Press.
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NEW ORLEANS ? In the four-block radius where he painted and drank himself into frightening stupors, Noel Rockmore was known by the denizens of the French Quarter as an outrageous Pablo Picasso-like figure who combined the mythological and the real. He produced some 15,000 oil paintings, temperas, collages and sketches over his career and then died in obscurity.
His life was that of an American outsider and a throwback to Europe's great expressionistic and hedonistic masters.
In the 1950s, when he was still in his 20s, his paintings hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum. He was a bright young American artist who had a taste for Rembrandt and figurative paintings, with the outlook of an American social realist.
Then, the art world changed: Abstract expressionism ? typified by the paint throwing of Jackson Pollock ? became the rave. Rockmore, who admired draftsmanship in painting, detested it.
Rockmore changed: He left his wife and three children, changed his last name and headed to New Orleans in 1959, where he would eventually get lost to the New York art world.
The story of Noel Montgomery Davis (his real name) is getting a long-overdue audience outside New Orleans, a city that is enjoying something of an art renaissance itself six years after Hurricane Katrina. From now until the end of January, his works are on view at the LaGrange Art Museum in Georgia. The retrospective is called "Creative Obscurity: The Genius Noel Rockmore."
"He was kind of an art hobo," said Ethyl Ault, interim director of the LaGrange Art Museum.
She said Rockmore was an overlooked genius. "Was it politics? Did he offend people? Why was he so popular in New York when he was younger, and then he leaves, changes his name and then goes on into his fairy tale land?"
The show is based on nearly 1,500 Rockmore artworks retrieved from storage units in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. For 25 years, Shirley Marvin, an octogenarian Baton Rouge patron, had been saving Rockmore artworks and memorabilia with the intention of making him famous one day.
But she had forgotten about the collection due to short-term memory loss, her family said. Marvin was one of Rockmore's most devoted fans. She saw genius in him ? like many others in New Orleans. The extraordinary collection was gathering dust when her son, Rich Marvin, took her down to New Orleans in October 2006, a year after Katrina, to get "a few paintings," as her mother described it. Instead, they found the units packed with remnants of Rockmore's life.
In the wake of the collection's discovery, Rich and his wife, Tee Marvin, have become Rockmore's biggest impresarios ? the agents Rockmore famously refused to have throughout his life as he willfully lived on the edge of the art world. He was notorious among art galleries for his temper and fits of outrage. His friends say he suffered emotional problems for much of his life.
The Marvins ? working with Rockmore's family and art dealers, collectors and museum curators ? have begun cataloging his works and promoting him. They estimate he produced about 15,000 pieces of art and conservatively 750 to 1,000 of those are masterpieces.
"At first we thought my mom was crazy," Rich Marvin said. "When a museum or gallery lines up his top 200 exquisite works, people will be as stunned as we are."
Rockmore was born in 1928 in New York to a family of artists. He was supertalented. A child prodigy, he played the violin well by age 8. After suffering polio at age 10, he turned to painting. He studied briefly at The Juilliard School and had a studio at the Cooper Union. Family friends included Ernest Hemingway, George Gershwin and Thomas Mann.
His 20s were prolific as he painted the bums of the Bowery district, monkeys and elephants in the backstage of the Ringling Brothers Circus and parables of Central Park and Coney Island. He was a social realist, akin to Depression-era American painters such as John Steuart Curry, but these early works contained themes and artistic styles that would stay with him: death, violence, sex, the surreal and the allegorical.
In retrospect, it was the ghoulish and morbid in Rockmore that defined him, making him a kind of American Hieronymus Bosch.
In the 1950s, Rockmore became fed up with the wave of abstract expressionists then taking hold of New York ? the flat tones and humanless canvases of Willem De Kooning, Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. During this period he drank heavily and his wife kicked him out because of his wildness, his daughter, Emilie Heller-Rhys, said.
At age 31, he moved down to New Orleans and began working with Larry Borenstein, an art collector, and Allan Jaffe, a business school graduate and tuba player. In the 1960s, Borenstein employed Rockmore as a kind of resident painter for a new society he'd formed with Jaffe to preserve traditional New Orleans jazz music. The society would become Preservation Hall.
Rockmore was commissioned to paint the old-time musicians. He captured the mood, scent, touch and smoke of New Orleans jazz and its musicians ? Punch Miller, Percy Humphrey, Louis Nelson, Sweet Emma and Billie and DeDe Pierce, and scores of others.
His output was staggering. He'd become fixated by a subject ? New Orleans' Carnival traditions, the frenetic Port of New Orleans, the characters of the French Quarter, alien beings, ancient Egypt, voodoo ? and mined it artistically.
Some of his most cherished and memorable pieces are of the Quarter's Bohemians, fellow outsiders: Ruthie the Duck Girl; Gypsy Lou; O.M. (standing for "Old Man"); Mike Stark; Johnny White; and Sister Gertrude Morgan.
Yet, his life was pierced by that dark side.
"He was a brilliant artist, and I don't use those words lightly," said Stephen Clayton, a New Orleans art collector who did not know Rockmore and does not own any of his works. "He chose to come here, came to the Quarter, climbed in a bottle and never got out."
From his morning vodka, Rockmore kept going all day, muscling his way through sketches, wall-sized oils, nudes in charcoal, sculptures and mixed media and calling it quits at one of his favorite bars, often The Alpine, within shouting distance of the St. Louis cathedral and his bed.
There are stories of him trashing art galleries and studios. Handcuffing a woman to his stove. Sticking a mummified cat in one of his works. Going on lithium and alcohol binges that left him a wreck. Cursing at tourists viciously. Sitting in streets with his muddy tennis shoes and rumpled clothing, looking like a bum. Drawing on napkins, grocery bags and just about anything else he liked. Sitting in bars, drinking and trying to get women to go to bed with him.
One of Rockmore's closest friends, Andy Antippas, a former Tulane University poetry professor and art gallery owner, recalled going into Rockmore's apartment during one of his lithium binges and finding his studio in a state that resembled the home of Charles Manson.
"It was trashed," said Antippas, who found pages from Playboy magazine littering the floor and feces from his two dogs in the middle of his bed. "He'd obviously been sitting in one place and drinking and painting for hours."
"Noel was an autodidact of the highest order," Antippas said. "There was probably no artist more prolific than Noel ? except perhaps Picasso."
Antippas is like many Rockmore fans. He believes he was a genius, a master who ranks among the greatest.
In his home on St. Claude Avenue ? cluttered with books, paintings, decorated human skulls, African masks and paintings galore ? Antippas stood in front of a large subdued painting hanging on the wall near his desk. He looked at it and said he owned what he believed to be "one of the finest paintings, if not the best, painting in Western civilization, a nude portrait of his father. It's the only such painting ever done."
"He couldn't relate to the real world. He lived in his own world; he was driven by his own work," said Rita Posselt, a 59-year-old fine art photographer who lived with Rockmore between 1978 and 1984 and frequently posed for him. "He would wake up in the morning and go to bed at night, and in between those hours there was a lot of torment for him."
"He wanted somebody to recognize his talent, and he wanted important people in the art world, museums and such, to do so, but he didn't want to jump through hoops and parties to make it happen."
During his life, and still today, Rockmore was a kind of New Orleans project.
He is woven into the city. Anyone who has stepped into the gloom of Preservation Hall has seen Rockmores ? they're the haunting oil paintings of jazz greats on the walls. A Rockmore hangs in Johnny White's bar. It's a football scene, a token of appreciation for the bar owner, Johnny White, and typically Rockmore: There are three teams on the field. His paintings hang in the Old Mint, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and on the walls of galleries and homes throughout New Orleans. And who knows where else.
"My feeling was that Noel was the most democratic painter," Antippas said. "Every waiter, bartender, in the Quarter has a Rockmore. God knows how many Rockmores are hanging on walls throughout the city."
Rockmore died in 1995 at age 66 of an untreated infection. When he was taken to the hospital, according to friends, he was admitted as a "street person." According to his friends, he sat up on the gurney and declared, "I'm not a street person, I'm a great artist."
"I always say that he is America's Picasso," said Heller-Rhys, his daughter and an accomplished artist herself, as she stood during a recent visit outside the Skyscraper building, an 18th-century apartment building where Rockmore ? and many other artists, including Charles Bukowski ? stayed in the 1970s. "And America has to come to terms with that."
____
Online:
http://www.rightwaywrongway.com/
http://www.lagrangeartmuseum.org/
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