“Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields,” which will be broadcast on Britain’s Channel 4 on June 14, zeroes in on human rights violations in the bloody civil war that finally wiped out the Tamil Tiger independence movement. The film based partly on “trophy” videos shot by government soldiers, raises critical questions about the United Nations and the extent to which the international community can permit itself to be paralyzed by concerns about the supposed inviolability of national sovereignty.
•Written by William T. Dowell• ••Friday•, 11 •February• 2011 22:13•
Forced retirement is a frequently traumatic, ever-present danger in politics. In ancient Egypt, the pharaoh ran a ritual foot race, part of the jubilee Heb Sed, to demonstrate his fitness to rule and imagined powers of rejuvenation. Failure by a ruler, who claimed god-like powers, could be fatal, not only to the ruler, but to those around him. Mubarak’s departure, after having lost all credibility with Egypt’s public, invites comparison to those ancient times, yet anyone who has spent time along the Nile knows that the problem is not the man. It is in the circumstances of Egypt itself and the system that has forced its population down the road towards a dead end with no easy exit.
Hors la loi (Outlaw), the film by French-born director Rachid Bouchareb that created a scandal at the Cannes Film Festival last May, is on for the next few days at the Pathé Cornavin Rialto next to the central train station in Geneva. The Rialto is the only theater in town to show it, and it assigned it to its smallest multiplex screen room with only 50 seats. That is a shame, because this film has a number of important insights that are crucial to understanding the motivations and strategy of today's extremist movements.
Carla, in her late 40s, is a big-boned woman locked in a man’s body, a sweet-natured figure on the streets of San Salvador, a fact of life which nearly got her killed. If it were not for a program to fight HIV/aids financed by the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight Aids, Malaria and Tuberculosis, she would have died long ago.
The phrase, "I'm as mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore!" actually comes not from Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin, but from Howard Beale, the alcoholic, washed-up newscaster played by Peter Finch in Paddy Chayefsky's 1976 film, "Network."