Gaza & Egypt, NYC Theater, Afghan Blogger + OPEN Thread
By SusanUnPC on January 26, 2008 at 11:48 AM in Afghanistan, Current Affairs, Gaza, New Yorker
New report just in at the NYT today: “Tensions Grow at Egypt-Gaza Border: “Traffic over the border in Rafah remained heavy on Saturday, but Egyptians reported shortages of supplies and a growing fatigue with the Palestinian influx.”
An American woman — Sidney Misal, 49, “working for a nongovernmental organization, the Asian Rural Life Development Foundation” — has been kidnapped in Afghanistan along with her driver. Meanwhile, reports the Gulf Times, the “UN urges review of journalist’s death sentence.” Do any of you know if there’s an online effort to help this blogger? Details below, along with a fun story about David Mamet’s new play:
More from the Gulf Times:
KABUL: The death sentence handed down to a reporter in Afghanistan has prompted the United Nations and several press freedom organisations to call on the Afghan government to intervene in the case.
Sayed Parvez Kambakhsh, 23, a journalist for the daily Janan-e-Naw, and a student of Balkh University, was detained in October for downloading from the Internet and distributing to classmates an article written by an Iranian scholar that contained anti-Islamic sentiments.
The article allegedly questioned why men are allowed to have four spouses in Islam while women are denied the same right.
On Tuesday Kambakhsh was presented before a court of three judges in northern Mazar-e-Sharif and handed the death penalty in a closed session without any legal counsel.
The Afghan Independent Journalists Association was outraged that no lawyer, journalist, or human rights representatives were permitted entry to the court during Kambakhsh’s trail.
The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan on Thursday issued a statement saying the case is a “possible misuse of the judicial process” that does not “serve the cause of justice.”
Paris-based Reporters Without Borders and the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which has offices in Kabul, believe the real intent by the court is to intimidate Kambakhsh’s older brother, Ibrahimi, who recently published an article implicating an Afghan legislator in a series of killings and kidnappings. …
God, would I love to see this play. From the New Yorker:
Presidential Pratfalls
David Mamet’s Oval Office satire.
by John Lahr January 28, 2008A professional skeptic and an inspired word jockey, David Mamet can lay claim to the same connoisseurship of human folly as H. L. Mencken, who once observed that, in America, “only the man who was born with a petrifie diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night.” Mamet’s new Oval Office satire, “November” (well directed by Joe Mantello, at the Ethel Barrymore), is a hilarious demonstration of the fact that we live in an age of equality: all classes are criminal.
As the curtain rises on “November,” the President of the United States, Charles H. P. Smith (Nathan Lane), who is on the eve of losing his bid for a second term (his numbers are “lower than Gandhi’s cholesterol”), asks his trusted aide Archer Brown (the expert Dylan Baker) what has happened to his public support. “Why, why?” he moans. “You’ve fucked the country into a cocked hat,” Archer replies. (The guffaws from the audience acknowledge our outrage and disillusion with our own current leaders.) For farcical purposes, Mamet is quick to add financial desperation to Smith’s woes. In the last days of his election campaign, Smith has no money for TV ads. He has no money for a Presidential library or to guarantee his own future; even his security guards have gone walkabout.
At once a barbarian, a bully, and an idiot (“I always felt that I’d do something memorable—I just assumed it’d be getting impeached,” he says), Smith brings oxygen to Mamet’s rhetorical brilliance … DO read all!
What else is going on?
by Ronald Scott
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