Snapler

March 6, 2010

Academy Awards: Live Action Shorts 2010

Filed under: News, Original Content — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — David Wallechinsky @ 2:24 pm
This year's crop of live action short nominees is made up of three serious, issue-oriented stories, a Coen Brothers knock-off and a funny Swedish entry about a would-be magician.

The Door (Ireland/Ukraine)

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February 23, 2010

The Shock of Dubai

I am shocked -- shocked! -- to learn that intelligence services use fraudulent passports and stolen identities.

Who would have imagined it? Nobody, certainly, had Israel's Mossad not been accused recently of subterfuge in order to assassinate in Dubai a leading figure of Hamas, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. I am heartened that the governments of Britain, Ireland, France, and Germany have demanded explanations. And I am buoyed to hear loud moral complaints from the usual political quarters that are always wise to Israeli behavior. They are outraged -- outraged! -- that such things take place. Intelligence services of European countries would never do the like. Their secret operatives, if they have any, that is, always travel on their own passports and always check into hotels using their own identities.

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February 2, 2010

John Spillane: From Cork to the Universal

Rory Fitzgerald meets Cork singer songwriter John Spillane and hears about his new album, the art of songwriting and his hopes for a changing Ireland.

John Spillane makes a good cup of tea. But that is not the most significant thing about him. The most notable thing about him is that he is one of the finest songwriters ever to emerge form Cork, or indeed anywhere in Ireland.

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New Irish Blasphemy Law Undermines Free Speech

On Jan. 1, a controversial blasphemy law came into force in Ireland and immediately became a matter of international concern.

Pakistan and the Organization of the Islamic Conference have referred to the example of the new Irish blasphemy law to encourage the United Nations to recognize "defamation of religion" as a principle of international law.

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January 22, 2010

Harold Evans and His “Rag and Bone Men of the Opinion Trade”

Harold Evans, doubtless the finest English newspaper editor of his time, could make you weep in his memoir of formative days in Manchester and glory years (1965 - 1981) with the Sunday Times of London. Weep, that is, not so much for the anemic papers so close to death today, but weep for those cheeky deadline artists, the newspaper writers and "subs" on the copy desk who are disappearing into memory and mythology, like the American cowboy.

My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times is the story of Harold Evans' addiction to printed news, and of the characters whose trade he lifted -- newspaper guys (and they were all guys, long before Evans met Tina Brown) with nicknames like Nifty, Bow Tie, "Big Tom" Henry, "Beachcomer" of the Daily Express, and "Mr. Will" on the Northern Echo, Evans' first paper. "Curiosity is the thing in journalism," Mr. Will said. "Ask questions, Evans." And then there are the giant by-lines of the Sunday Times, like Godfrey Hodgson in America, John Barry in Ireland, David Leitch in Vietnam, and the investigator Bruce Page, everywhere.

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January 20, 2010

Why FIFA Did Not Suspend Thierry Henry

Aside from breaking the hearts of millions of Irish soccer fans and catapulting France into the World Cup, Thierry Henry's infamous handball against Ireland in World Cup Qualifying raised two (slightly less significant) issues. First, should Roger Federer be worried about the Gillette jinx? And, second, should Henry be worried about a suspension for the handball? We'll have to wait and see on the first question, but the FIFA Disciplinary Committee answered the second question on Monday morning, announcing that Henry would not be suspended for doing everything short of handing the ball to William Gallas in front of Ireland's goal.

Why did FIFA decline to punish Henry? Before we answer that question, let's take a look at how these types of issues are handled in by professional sports leagues in the United States. The NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB rules give their commissioners a fair amount of discretion to discipline players for misconduct that takes place on the playing field or court. There is no list of punishable offenses and there are no guidelines that dictate a specific punishment for a particular offense. The rules are intentionally vague to allow the commissioner to be flexible and take into account all of the facts and circumstances of the case--how severe was the conduct, was this a first offense, was there provocation, etc.--and to allow the commissioner's decisions to be made on a case-by-case basis. More serious misconduct committed by repeat offenders can be treated more harshly than mild offenses committed by otherwise model citizens. Here is a quick look at the discipline meted out by commissioners for some of the more notable cases of on-the-field misconduct.

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January 19, 2010

Betting on the Next Presidential Election

If you're a sports fan, and you follow the betting odds, you've no doubt been amazed at how close the final score is to the point spread put up by the odds-makers. Of course there are exceptions (including a couple of last weekend's NFL playoff games) but on balance the ability of the odds-makers to pick not only the winners but by the correct margins is uncanny! So, enjoy the following predictions from Ireland's biggest and most successful bookmaker, Paddy Power.

Democratic Presidential Nominee

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December 22, 2009

Romania Since Ceausescu: The Ethnic Dog That Didn’t Bark in the Balkans

With December 22 being the anniversary of the overthrow of Romania's dictator Nicolae CeauÅŸescu, most Americans will likely focus on the violence that accompanied it and the thousands of ill-treated abandoned children whom the media discovered in the months after. If anyone pays attention to Romania's path since then, persistent corruption, roughhouse politics, and the current recession will dominate the snapshot.

But the big picture will be lost. The truth is that, since 1989, Romania has become a dynamic, if flawed, democracy, an economy which is increasingly prosperous and competitive in the 21st century, a member of the EU, and an ally of the US in NATO.

Even that leaves out its remarkable story of ethnic peace in the Balkans. Romania, with more than twenty million people, is the largest Balkan country and the fourth largest former Communist country. And its Hungarian minority in Transylvania is the arguably the largest ethnic minority in Europe.

But most Americans have no idea that almost a million and a half Hungarians live in Romania. They know about ethnic minorities in Iraq, Spain, Ireland, Bosnia, and Sudan, but not in Romania. There's a simple reason: In Romania, the large Hungarian minority lives in peace.

That doesn't mean there are no conflicts -in fact, there are serious ones, including use of the Hungarian language in public services, participation of Hungarians in the police force, and the re-creation of Hungarian universities. It doesn't mean they don't have a long, sometimes violent history. It's simply that today, ethnic Hungarians in Romania press their concerns in ways familiar to Americans-running for office, writing newspaper editorials, and debating in the Parliament. Because Romanians and Hungarians work hard at living together in peace, and because history has dealt them a little good luck, they manage their conflicts democratically.

As always in competing ethnic histories, especially those involving land, there is debate about who got to Transylvania first, the Hungarians or the Romanians. No one disputes that Hungary governed Transylvania until 1918. But to say "governed" understates what life was like for Hungarians and Romanians. In a world in which a person was officially labeled Hungarian, Romanian, German, or Jewish on his or her identity papers, which ethnic group controlled the government was more than a matter of politics. Across Transylvania, Hungarians were the top dogs. They, and German and Jewish minorities, lived in the cities.

Romanians lived overwhelmingly in the villages. For those visiting a Transylvanian city, even today, echoes of that history are alive in the statues of Hungarian nobility erected in city squares, in the public high school buildings converted from nineteenth-century Hungarian preparatory schools, and in the location of Romanian churches outside of city walls.

In 1918, the world of Transylvanian Hungarians and Romanians was turned upside down. Hungary had backed the losers in World War I, Romania had backed the winners, and the border of Hungary moved miles northeast. Transylvania was now part of Romania, where it remains today.

During the Communist period, the Romanian government periodically made efforts to strengthen Romanian domination of Transylvania, through education and by encouraging Romanians from Moldavia to move west across the mountains for jobs in the new industries CeauÅŸescu was building.

The result was that, by 1989, Romanians were a large majority in Transylvania. Today, most Hungarians live in cities with Romanian majorities. Their homes are in the same apartment blocks as their Romanian neighbors, not in Hungarian neighborhoods. They probably watch Hungarian television and read Hungarian newspapers, but they speak Romanian fluently. A smaller number of Hungarians live in their own villages.

And then there are the several hundred thousand who live in two counties, Harghita and Covasna, in the center of Romania, hundreds of miles from the Hungarian border, where Hungarians make up the majority.

Shortly after the fall of Communism, forces in Romania, not unlike some of those around Slobodan Milošević in Yugoslavia, tried to maintain power by creating violent divisions between Hungarians and Romanians. Indeed, in early 1990, there were a number of such conflicts in which people died.

What's striking is that, in contrast with the former Yugoslavia, Romania did not go down the road of violence and ethnic cleansing. Instead, it developed a democratic culture of ethnic relations in which the Hungarian minority is well-organized and active in local and national politics. The political party most supported by ethnic Hungarians has been a member of every Romanian government coalition since 1996.

In 1999, at the height of NATO's action in Kosovo to stop ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Yugoslavia , President Bill Clinton asked, "Who is going to define the future of this part of the world? Will it be Mr. Milošević .who tell(s) people to leave their country, their history, and their land behind, or die? Or will it be a nation like Romania, which is building democracy and respecting the right of its minorities?"

Clinton bet on Romania. Ten years after the war and twenty years after CeauÅŸescu, it's clear he picked the winner.


Jim Rosapepe, former US Ambassador to Romania, and Sheilah Kast, former ABC News Correspondent who reported on the post-communist transition from Moscow, Tbilisi, and eastern Europe, are co-authors of Dracula Is Dead: How Romanians Survived Communism, Ended It, and Emerged Since 1989 as the New Italy (Bancroft Press, 2009).

December 7, 2009

The Future of Mobile is Local — Look at Yelp

The future of mobile? Local, local, local -- and that's exactly what the Yelp-Android marriage unequivocally signals.

Yelp, the growing Zagat guide-meets-social networking hub, introduced its Android app today. Users can search for nearby businesses, browse and read reviews and access a move-able Google map -- you can easily zoom in and out of locations and refine your searches according to desired geographic areas. Like all of Yelp's apps, it's available in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Ireland, and reviews can be filtered by "Price," "Open Now" and "Special Offers." The Android app is the 5th member of Yelp's mobile family, which includes WAP, the iPhone, Palm Pre and BlackBerry.

"We've released a lot of apps in the past year -- the BlackBerry app, updates of our iPhone app. This is just the next logical step," Eric Singley, Yelp's Mobile Product Manager, told HuffPostTech. There's so much overlap between Web and mobile users of Yelp that it's hard to pin down the exact number of Yelp's mobile users, Singley explained, but traffic on the mobile site usually increases during the weekend. Last month, 1 million unique visitors logged on to Yelp's iPhone app, he said.

Singley added: "We'll be making an even bigger push next year on our mobile apps."

As will everyone else.

Increasingly, as mobile products become more sophisticated, everything we do revolves around our phones: where we shop, what restaurants we go to, what bars are worth checking out, etc. And popular sites such as Yelp will keep figuring out how to capitalize on the localization of all that data.

December 1, 2009

World Aids Day: You Can Make A Difference

The novelist David Rhodes once wrote that life's fundamental narrative begins with "I" and ends with "you." Everything in between is conveyance from one person to another. What we convey is what matters.

The basic idea of (RED)â„¢ is transactional conveyance; I buy a (RED)-branded product, be it an Apple iPod, a Nike shoelace or a Gap tee-shirt, and a percentage of the profit from that sale goes to the Global Fund. The Global Fund administers a well-managed network of health care projects in sub-Saharan Africa to help stem the spread of AIDS. Somewhere in Ghana or Rwanda or Botswana, someone gets antiretroviral medication which keeps them alive or reduces the likelihood that they will transmit HIV to their unborn or just-born child. And so that someone, who otherwise might die or be destined to die, lives or bequeaths a more promising life instead. It's a good deal.

On World AIDS Day, we don't celebrate with fireworks or champagne. We take note of what has been accomplished and we resolve to keep at it. We are proud of what our partners have accomplished. We like to say that they have gained market share for life (and for themselves) and in so doing they have changed the course of a part of human history.

In 2006, it was estimated that only 8% of HIV-positive pregnant women in Ghana received the antiretroviral medicine necessary to reduce the chance of transmitting HIV to their unborn children. Without the medicine, the chances of HIV transmission were (and are) roughly 50-50. With the medicine, the chances of HIV transmission drop to between 1 and 2%. By the end of 2008, nearly 40% of Ghanaian women in need received the medicine that will transform the lives of their children. That is market share for life. And it is growing year-over-year.

On this World AIDS Day, there is improvement in HIV detection across sub-Saharan Africa. The percentage of pregnant women who were able to take an HIV test increased from 17% in 2007 to 28% in 2008. We have every reason to believe that the percentage figure will increase substantially again this year (the final data are not yet available). The goal obviously is to keep ramping up testing until the chain of HIV transmission from mother to child is one day broken altogether. That day is coming, if we keep after it.

AIDS is not just an African disease, of course. World AIDS Day is testament to the fact that AIDS is a global problem. (RED) focuses on AIDS in Africa because that is where the need is most acute. Nearly 14 million children in Africa have been orphaned because of AIDS. There are an estimated 2 million children living with HIV around the globe, 90% of them are in Africa. More than 90% of the children living with HIV are infected through mother-to-child transmission during pregnancy, around the time of birth or through breast-feeding. This is a fixable catastrophe ($26 covers the cost of providing medication to a pregnant woman to sharply reduce the risk of HIV transmission to her child). And that is where your (RED) dollars go, $26 at a time.

All around the world tonight, from San Francisco to Chicago to Pittsburgh to Los Angeles to Salt Lake City to Dublin, Ireland and London, England, cities will bathe their municipal buildings and town halls and key landmarks and architectural masterpieces in (RED) lights. All across the Internet, on the pages of Facebook and Twitter and Google, there will be links to (RED) and its partners. An ocean and a world away, in the pre-dawn hours of sub-Saharan Africa, men and women will begin their daily work of doing battle with a viral killer, a battle financed in part by the purchases of (RED)-branded products by people like you.

As the CEO of (RED), I have the privilege of working with great partners at the Global Fund and at some of the world's most iconic brands. Every day, I get to work with a dedicated group of professionals who have devoted themselves to a great conveyance. On behalf of all of them, I thank you for your support of (RED) branded products and the work that it enables.

World AIDS Day this year is better than it was a year ago. It will be better still a year from now. We just have to keep after it.
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