On a hot summer’s day, veterans of Iraqi cinema, government officials and their bodyguards join a clutch of diehard fans for a ”special evening” at Baghdad’s main theatre. The event is billed as the ”first Iraqi film festival” since the United States-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, but it is more like a tribute to the good old days.
The threats directed against gay Arabs for besmirching the family’s name reflect an old-fashioned concept of ”honour” found in the more traditionalist parts of the Middle East. Homosexuality tends to be viewed either as wilfully perverse behaviour or as a symptom of psychiatric disturbance, and dealt with accordingly.
People who hate women, or find us disgusting or terrifying, do not use ”vagina” casually, as an insult. People who think of themselves as post-feminists, who delight in the shock of an apparently unsisterly sound emitting from them conversationally, do not say ”vagina”. But it’s not the v-word that needs reclaiming, it’s the c-word — the rudest one in the English language.
The urgency of halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and moving toward their elimination, could hardly be greater. Failure to do so is almost certain to lead to grim consequences, even the end of biology’s only experiment with higher intelligence. As threatening as the crisis is, the means exist to defuse it.
American George Hincapie grabbed the first Tour de France yellow jersey of his career as Frenchman Jimmy Casper caused an upset on the race’s first big sprint rendezvous on Sunday. Hincapie, who lost out on the race lead by 0,73sec after he finished second in the prologue behind Thor Hushovd, found himself benefiting from the big Norwegian’s misfortune.
Spain’s Dani Pedrosa of Honda won the British Grand Prix at Donington on Sunday, finishing just under four seconds ahead of seven-time world champion Valentino Rossi and Italian Max Melandri. Pedrosa started on pole but was overtaken by Melandri at the start and sat behind the Italian for 11 laps.
A ”frightening” number of police officers have died in Gauteng so far this year, with almost as many slain in the first six months of 2006 as in the whole of last year, said the office of National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi. The deaths of four police officers in a bloody siege in Jeppestown last Sunday brought the tally to 19 since the start of the year.
The second week of Wimbledon will be a virtually American-free zone after Andy Roddick and Venus Williams joined Andre Agassi in crashing out before the halfway stage. The unexpectedly early demise of defending champion Williams and Roddick, a beaten finalist in the last two years, left the unheralded Shenay Perry to fly the Stars and Stripes on her own.
Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden accused Iraqi Shi’ites of waging ”genocide” against Sunnis and warned of retaliation, according to a new audiotape posted on the internet on Saturday. The message, the second in as many days purportedly from the Western world’s most-wanted man, came as yet another sectarian car bombing shook Baghdad.
Iran on Sunday rejected a deadline to respond to an international offer aimed at resolving a nuclear stand-off, saying it would answer during the next Iranian month which begins July 23. ”A deadline is not an issue. We think such statements are not constructive and they will not help resolve the problem,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters.