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| Syria Uprising |
 IN
an interview with The Wall Street Journal in January, Syria´s
president, Bashar al Assad, said that his main objective was
to address his people´s "closed-mindedness".
He made it clear that this alone impeded reform, and it might
be another generation before Syria is ready for real change.
Dictators (including Assad´s father, Hafez) have long
presented themselves as suppressors of extremism in the region
generally, and Syria in particular. They said democracy would
usher in fundamentalists inherently opposed to modernity, civil
dialogue, international community legitimacy and civilised human
political and economic relations. Perhaps because of this fear... |
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| THE POWER OF MOCKERY |
| THE juiciest story behind the Middle East
uprisings doesn´t concern Colonel Moamer Qadhafi´s
"voluptuous" Ukrainian nurse or CIA bags of cash.
Rather, it´s the tale of how a nonviolent revolutionary
strategy crafted by Serbian students and an octogenarian American
scholar came to challenge dictators in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain
and many other countries. This "uprising in a bottle"
blueprint was developed by the Serbian youth movement, Otpor,
to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. One of Otpor´s
insights was that the most effective weapon against dictators
isn´t bombs or fiery speeches. It´s mockery. Otpor
activists once put Milosevic´s picture on a barrel that
they rolled down the street, inviting people to hit it with
a bat. Otpor´s strategy mirrors... |
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 | 2011 Summer´s delight:
Wizards, pirates & superheroes PIRATE Jack Sparrow embarks on a new quest. Wizard Harry Potter comes to the end of his saga. And swarms of new superheroes come out swinging. Add in a third round of giant robots from space, the dawn of a planet of...
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| | SUPERCAR 12C:
PERFORMANCE WITHOUT PAIN |  AN enormous glass door slid open, and at the exact moment I stepped into the boldly technocentric headquarters of the McLaren Group, designed by the architectural firm of Sir Norman Foster, my morning´s guide descended from above in a cylindrical glass elevator. No one who has followed the overachieving McLaren Formula One racing team in recent decades would take this precision timing to be coincidence. McLaren´s painstakingly groomed reputation holds that little if anything in its operations – the racing team, the fledgling automaking division or even its electronics or catering subsidiaries – happens by chance. Here, technology has been advanced to... | | | The World According
to Paris Hilton |
 YOU´VE
seen her on the red carpet, famously
walking out of jail, and working on
a farm in The Simple Life. But now Paris
Hilton says she is showing a side of
herself on television that fans have
never seen before — the down to earth,
funny, relatable girl who nevertheless
has a multimillion business based on
being famous for being famous. "On The
Simple Life, I was playing a character.
Now people will get to see my real world,
my friends, my house, my business,"
Hilton said on Friday. "I would never
have done a show like this five, ten
years ago. I wasn´t really comfortable
with myself. I have been through so
much. I have nothing to hide. It´s like,
what else can happen? I was... |
| | Bare all idea
worked: Poonam |
 POONAM
Pandey became a household name, thanks
to her promise to bare all if India
won the World Cup. While she didn´t
quite get down to the act, the model
says she was fully aware of what she
was saying and enjoyed the public response.
"I took it as fun, but people made an
issue out of that because I was an Indian
girl and not allowed to do such things,"
Poonam, 20, said in an interview. "I
did many things like opening the fan
page on Facebook where I did an exclusive
photo shoot. But I was not satisfied,
so I came up with this idea, which worked
well. It was my own decision and I was
awake and fully aware of what I was
saying," said Poonam. Suddenly she became. |
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