Those Days, Years, Decades After

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there was grief, sorrow, anger, and a heightened awareness of the sacredness of life and connection. In tribute to the dead, many of us vowed we would never forget the perspective this tragedy gave us. Beliefnet's coverage explores the spiritual impact two years later--with comments, prayers & reflections by Beliefnet members, clergy, 9/11
· Survivors! Still Shaking as we are reading this... [Belief Net]

There are Few Flawless Victories
The Second World War in Europe began in defense of Poland's freedom against Nazi tyranny. It ended in a tremendous Allied victory, but left Poland subject to an alternate despotism.
· Victories [NYPost]
· 9/11 [TNR]

Pope heads to Slovakia to declare two martyrs
A frail Pope John Paul holds an outdoor mass Friday in the town of Banya Bystrica as he continues his four day trip to Slovakia.
He will speak to worshippers gathered in the Slovak National Uprising Square, named for a rebellion against the Nazi occupation of the former Czechoslovakia in World War II.
A bishop was imprisoned for 13 years and poisoned for years with arsenic. A nun was ensnared in a trap set by secret agents who tortured her. Both are symbols of the Communist-era cruelty that will figure prominently when Pope John Paul II visits Slovakia beginning today.
· Slovak National Uprising Square [Voice ofUSA]
· Bishop Vasil Hopko and Sister Zdenka Schelingova [NJ News]

How writing skills can be transformed through a shared personal tragedy

The journey of a PhD student can be a daunting and lonely experience. This is due to the lack of a classroom, fellow students and on-campus activities and research. As a supervisor is often the only link with the university world, the connection between student and supervisor is of great importance. Because of this unique relationship, if tragedy strikes, it needs to be handled with delicate sensibility.
· Supervisor and student [Onlineopinion ]
· Heaven forbid that the endless chatter of elite opinion should get its way
· Authoritariansim is inherently leftist, not the preserve of the right wing
· My List [Global Rich List]

Interview: Scott Wickstein

Founder & Blogger, The Eye of the Beholder & UberSportingPundit.com: 7th September 2003
· Blogging [MediaMan ]

World Trade Center

Some Czech guy named Pavel Havla unwittingly recorded both planes going into the World Trade Center and the New York Times is writing about it only now...
They did not even see the pale fleck of the airplane streak across the corner of the video camera's field of view at 8:46 a.m. But the camera, pointed at the twin towers from the passenger seat of an S.U.V. in Brooklyn near the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, kept rolling when the plane disappeared for an instant and then a silent, billowing cloud of smoke and dust slowly emerged from the north tower, as if it had sprung a mysterious kind of leak.
The S.U.V., carrying an immigrant worker from the Czech Republic who was making a video postcard to send home, then entered the mouth of the tunnel and emerged, to the shock of the three men inside the vehicle, nearly at the foot of the now burning tower.
The camera, pointed upward, zoomed in and out, and then, with a roar in the background that built to a piercing screech, it locked on the terrifying image of the second plane as it soared, like some awful bird of prey, almost straight overhead, banking steeply, and blasted into the south tower.
His boss, a Russian guy, told him if he ever sold the tape, he'd never work for him again.
· Tower Downstairs! [NYTimes via(http://nicmoc.crimsonblog.com/ NicMoc)]
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Fields of Selfinterest
Heros of the left & right.
· Midnight Oil [Webdiary]
· Free speech can bloom only if there are those prepared to defend it [SMH ]

Why the WTO Is Going Nowhere

Frankly, having described what I think ought to happen, I am most doubtful that it will. Deep, wrenching shifts in political thinking do not usually occur without lots of painful friction first. I expect US elites and others around the world will have to see some strong, bloody evidence that their system is broken before they'll act. We can be sure of this much.
· Grave matters [Nation ]

My father was Greek, my mother French; my grandfather was Danish, my grandmother Russian, and my other grandmother half Spanish

Every year, just before Labor Day, Press Clips reviews the latest magazine leads. It's a subject that never gets old. The point of writing a good lead (a/k/a lede, or first paragraph) for a feature story is to get the reader's attention. It's a difficult craft best learned by reading the masters, not me.
He is a man without a country, a family and a home. For more than a decade, Jozef Imrich has been living in X..., waiting. For what, he doesn't know anymore.
· The Lead-Meisters [VillageVoice ]

Till Digits Do Us Part
This past summer, I almost lost my husband, the man I love desperately. Not in a car crash. Not to SARS. Not to another woman, and no, not even to golf.
· Men [WashingtonPost ]

A Google's, World Wide Web WWW's and my BELL just went off -- it has been a 23 years since I arrived in Australia...

If you had told me that it is a truth universally acknowledged, that exiles faced with lucky new homeland will feel irresistable urge to introduce their children to live a bohemian swagman lifestyle, I would have said, 'Whoa! How True!'
Four years ago Lauren gave up her own dreams to pursue a safer life for our children. Having abandoned her good job in Sydney, we settled into the relaxed existence of a subtropical Queensland. Whether they like it or not my two daughters had to, for the first time in their schooling lives, struggle to establish their own identity (with a surname like Imrich) and pursue their own dreams (swimming) and reconcile both their mixed Antipodean/Bohemian heritage and ethnic identity with their desire to blend into Queensland society.
Today I feel a bit like Marlin who is an obsessive, over-protective and even slightly neurotic father who devotes his life to looking after Girlnemos after Sydney born and bred Lauren is hoping to return to working life in the New York of Australia .
The girls spent last weekend in Sydney where they went to see the movie FINDING NEMO. It was a huge hit with the girls. The reason may be that for the first time in their lives I am cooking, washing and taking them to swimming at 5 oclock in the morning every single day rather than once in a while. Nemo's father stroked a familiar chord.
On Father's day I really received a guernsey...(from my daughters) There's a whole level that pokes fun at the adult world – short-term memory loss, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, control freaks, you name it. Not only I have survivor guilt now Father guilt is gripping me too.

Fathers and Daughters: Happy Birthday Baby!

It was thirteen years ago today that Lauren said: this baby is overdue, overdue, we might have to try castor oil now! (This suggestion came from a respectable and experienced woman on 6 September 1990 at Lauren's birthday lunch.)
Not one to argue with highly pregnant women, whole thirteen days overdue to be exact, we took off for Double Bay Pharmacy and soon after our neighbours' car, driven by Rick rather than Tina, speeded for the DIY birth center attached to the Royal Hopital for Women with window overlooking Oxford Street at Paddington. The entire experience had caused my heart to beat faster as it took ages for Alex, a.k.a. Sasha, to arrive, thirteen hours to be exact, and not a second sooner. Our princess of Oz was born, to the sounds of the Antipodean TripleJ radio.
Ah, how radio is so much the soundtrack of our lives! Committing to memory the moment of bathing Alex for the first time to the sound of Throw Your Arms Around Me. There are no limits to the power of a good song.
Our first born is a child of the Velvet Revolution born exactly nine months after the intoxicating revolutionary moments, those rare evenings loaded with limitless celebrations and French champagne. Ah drinking with Alex's Polish godfather, Kristofer, at his Bondi Beach Bachelor pad (where the Swiss Hotel is standing today) was like drinking on board an ocean liner!
Meaningful Gural folk songs punctuated the midninght air. Fujara and Didgeridoo shared their dreams & Kulcha! If those primitive sounds did not move us, our hearts would be like the granites of the High Tatra Mountains.
My ears remember well the Hottest 13 played by the JJJ in 1990:;
1. Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart
2. Hunters And Collectors - Throw Your Arms Around Me
3. Smiths - How Soon Is Now?
4. The The - Uncertain Smile
5. New Order - Blue Monday
6. The Stone Roses - Fool's Gold
7. Smiths - This Charming Man
8. B52's - Rock Lobster
9. REM - It's The End Of The World
10. Jam - That's Entertainment
11. Cure - The Forest
12. Dead Kennedy's - Holiday In Cambodia
13. Sinead O'connor - Troy
As Lauren is not able to celebrate with Alex today her big birthday, we went through some of the top songs of the 1990 on Saturday. As we psychoanalysed names of bands, titles and lyrics of some of the songs played during 1989 and 1990, we filled the balcony with bellie laughs and sentimental tears. Some songs stroke a powerful chord with us:
Sonic Youth - Teenage Riot
Boys Next Door - Sivers
Sex Pistols - Anarchy In The UK
Cult - She Sells Sanctuary
Cure (Wran)- Boys Don't Cry
Public Enemy - Fight The Power
Hunters And Collectors - Talking To A Stranger
Prince - Kiss
Billy Bragg - Witing For The Great Leap Forward
Simple Minds - Love Song
New Order - Temptation
Sakamoto And Sylvian - Forbidden Colours
Jimi Hendrix - All Along The Watchtower
Tall Tales And True - Trust
The The - This Is The Day
Lou Reed - Walk On The Wild Side
Concrete Blonde - Happy Birthday
Happy birthday Alex, love Dad.

Ministerial staff: a need for transparency and accountability?

In this submission to the Senate inquiry into the staff of members of parliament, Anne Tiernan and Patrick Weller identify five core problems with the ministerial staff system as it has evolved. They argue that the system has outgrown the arrangements designed to support and control it; that it is premised on a number of myths and assumptions that have become redundant as the staffing institution has evolved; that the roles and responsibilities of ministerial staff and the public service are ill-defined, undermining the quality of advice and support to ministers; that there is too little public information about the operations of the staffing system.
· Ministerial staffing system lacks transparency [Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance, Griffith University: PDF via APO::http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/fapa_ctte/mops/submissions/sub04.doc]

More room for Canadian firms in Slovakia
Despite efforts to bring more vitality to business relations between Slovakia and Canada, experts admit that much potential still remains untapped.
Canadian firms do not display sufficient interest in Slovakia and Slovak entrepreneurs have a hard time being successful on the demanding Canadian market
· Canada/Slovakia [SlovakSpectator ]
· Enemies of the State? Named and shamed [SlovakSpectator ]

Mediocrity in Love Rejected
Thomas Carew
Give me more love or more disdain;
The torrid, or the frozen zone,
Bring equal ease unto my pain;
The temperate affords me none;
Either extreme, of love, or hate,
Is sweeter than a calm estate.
Give me a storm; if it be love,
Like Danae in that golden show'r
I swim in pleasure; if it prove
Disdain, that torrent will devour
My vulture-hopes; and he's possess'd
Of heaven, that's but from hell releas'd.
Then crown my joys, or cure my pain;
Give me more love, or more disdain.

THE COMING FIRST WORLD DEBT CRISIS
A mountain of debt makes America, not Argentina, the likely next candidate for a seismic crisis.
· The next big crash? [OpenDemocracy ]
· Can political protest transform itself into a force to change the world?

In the blogosphere, bloggers are more akin to pilot fish: the sharks tolerate them because they have a small role to play. Maybe a marine biologist can correct me on this, but it looks like the pilot fish needs the shark far more than the shark needs the pilot fish.

Online News Pioneers See Lots of Changes in the First 10 Years

Where Web journalism has been, and where it's likely to go. This is the first of a two-part series.
It seems like ancient history to think of getting online news only through proprietary providers like Prodigy, CompuServe and America Online. But that was life not so long ago during the gestation period for new media.
It's been 10 years since news started being produced for the nascent World Wide Web. In September 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released a beta version of Web browser Mosaic as the first e-zine to map the Web, and the White House launched a Web site.
· Mixing Reference and Reporting [OJR]
· Al-Jazeera launches English Web site [AP ]
Blogger Jason Soon admits he was wrong on Iraq (Jason is a big Pilot fish & deserves many links)