Nothing says “temporary stay” like the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, the U.S.’s largest diplomatic compound anywhere in the world, which is now ready.
“It’s been a difficult few weeks, rockets are bouncing off your buildings, and maintaining focus can be an occasional challenge,” (ambassador) Crocker said…
Read the CNN article here.
Read my previous entry here.
via [archinect]
“For Mr. Bush, Friday was an emotional day of tourism at sights special to Jews and Christians. He visited Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. At least twice, Mr. Bush had tears in his eyes, said Avner Shalev, the chairman of the museum.
At one point Mr. Bush stopped before aerial photos of the Auschwitz death camp taken by American planes during World War II, and asked Ms. Rice why the American military did not bomb the camp. “We should have bombed it,” he told her, Mr. Shalev told reporters later.” the NYT article reads (my emphasis).
Never mind the thousands of prisoners…
Read the NYT article here.
Workers at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have designed a game where the players play the part of a refugee. Among the challenges are escaping a war ridden town, getting asylum in foreign countries and starting a new life in a new place.
The White House declined to say whether the CIA currently had a detention and interrogation programme.
But it said that if it did, the agency had to adhere to the guidelines.
Read the BBC news article on Bush’s ‘banning’ of torture for prisoners here.
Just think of the thesis project that can be wrapped around this puppy!
This is not quite news anymore, but some plans and lousy renderings of the U.S. embassy in Iraq were placed online by the architecture firm in charge of the design, Berger Devine Yaeger. Needless to say, the Department of Justice wasn’t too thrilled about having them on the public domain so they pulled the images down, the website was shutdown, etc. The thing is, you can still find them all over the web.
The design, I’m not even going to comment on. Nor on what this 104-acre monster implies in terms of the ‘temporary’ occupation, but I have to say though, that the renderings just suck. (more…)
So among the horrors of war, an American tech company has somehow managed to add a nightmare right out of Akira. Cute helper BEAR-bots, there to assist you when the place you’re in is SO insanely dangerous, your higher-ups decide to send a droid. I’d rather have Cheerbear pick me up and take me over the rainbow.
Check out the interviews, conducted by Amy Goodman for Democracy Now, with “our country’s leading dissidents” Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.
I just came across this BBC interactive map of the violence in Baghdad.
It is both disturbing and fascinating to see the progression of violence linked to specific locations in the city. The statistics are from Iraqi Body Count and you can read more about their methodology in their website.
View the interactive map here.