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Sunday, April 29, 2012
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Sunday, April 15, 2012
Did Caravaggio meet a grisly end - with the Vatican's complicity?
Citing documents from the Vatican Secret Archives, an Italian historian argues that 17th-century documents reveal Renaissance artist Caravaggio was assassinated by the Knights of Malta.
In one of his most graphic paintings, the rabble-rousing Renaissance artist Caravaggio?depicted his tortured face on the head of Goliath, slain and decapitated by the boy warrior David.
Skip to next paragraphAn Italian historian thinks that Caravaggio may have met just such a grisly end ? at the hands of the Knights of St. John of Malta, the chivalric order founded during the Crusades.
Vincenzo Pacelli, a Caravaggio expert from the University of Naples, has unearthed documents from the Vatican Secret Archives and state archives in Rome that suggest the Knights ordered the artist to be assassinated in revenge for him attacking and wounding on one of their members during a brawl.
They then dumped his body in the sea at Palo, north of Rome, which would explain why there are no documents recording his death.
Until now, conventional wisdom said Caravaggio died either from an illness or lead poisoning from the oil paints he used.
The murder was ?commissioned and organized? by the Knights of Malta and carried out with the complicity of the Vatican, Mr. Pacelli says in his forthcoming book, "Caravaggio ? Between Art and Science."
The historian found strange discrepancies in correspondence between Cardinal Scipione Borghese, a powerful Vatican secretary of state, and Deodato Gentile, a papal ambassador, in which the painter?s place of death was cited as the island of Procida near Naples, ?a place that Caravaggio had nothing to do with,? according to Pacelli.
A document written by Caravaggio?s doctor and first biographer claimed that the painter died at the age of 38 north of Rome, but the place name was later scrubbed out and replaced by the name of a town in Tuscany.?Pacelli also found an account written 20 years after Caravaggio?s death in which an Italian archivist wrote that the artist had been ?assassinated.?
He believes it all adds up to evidence of an assassination plot by the Knights of Malta which was then covered up.
Not all experts are convinced by the new theory.?John T. Spike, a Caravaggio expert at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., is skeptical of the idea that the painter was murdered on the Knights' orders.
?The problem with the theory is that the Knights had ample opportunities to kill him sooner ? either when he was living in Malta, or when he then went to Sicily, which is very close,? says Mr. Spike. ?Why did they wait so long??
The academic sparring will continue, but more than four centuries after his death in 1610, the true fate of Caravaggio remains an enigma.
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Saturday, April 14, 2012
Lingerie-Styled Diet Coke Bottles Designed by Jean Paul Gaultier Are Downright Bizarre [Design]
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Friday, April 13, 2012
Wrong turn grants glimpse behind N. Korean curtain
PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) ? The press bus took a wrong turn Thursday. And suddenly, everything changed in the official showcase of North Korean achievement.
A cloud of brown dust swirled down deeply potholed streets, past concrete apartment buildings crumbling at the edges. Old people trudged along the sidewalk, some with handmade backpacks crafted from canvas bags. Two men in wheelchairs waited at a bus stop. There were stores with no lights, and side roads so battered they were more dirt than pavement.
"Perhaps this is an incorrect road?" mumbled one of the North Korean minders, well-dressed government officials who restrict reporters to meticulously staged presentations that inevitably center on praise for the three generations of Kim family who have ruled this country since 1948.
So as cameras madly clicked, the drivers of the three buses quickly backed up in the narrow streets and headed back toward the intended destination: a spotlessly clean, brightly-lit, extensively marbled and nearly empty building that preserves digital music recordings and makes DVDs.
It was at the Hana Music Information Center, a guide told the reporters, where North Korea's longtime leader, Kim Jong Il, made one of his last public appearances before his December death.
"I hope that the journalists present here report only the absolute truth," said Ri Jinju, her voice trembling with emotion, her flowing hair frozen with hairspray. "The truth about how much our people miss our comrade Kim Jong Il, and how strong the unity is between the people and leadership, who are vigorously carrying out the leaders' instructions to build a great, prosperous and powerful nation."
In North Korea, it's hard to know what's real. Certainly, you can't go looking for it.
Anyone who leaves the press tour, or who walks from the few hotels where foreigners are allowed, can be detained by the police and even threatened with expulsion.
But even in such a controlled environment, reality asserts itself.
Is reality the cluster of tall buildings within view of the main foreigners' hotel, where long strings of bright, colored lights are switched on when the sun goes down, illuminating entire blocks like some gargantuan Christmas decoration? Or is it the vast stretches of Pyongyang, by far the most developed city in impoverished North Korea, that go deathly dark at night?
Is the reality along Pyongyang's drab-but-spotless main roads, the only streets that journalists normally see, with their revolutionary posters urging North Koreans to struggle toward a Stalinist paradise? Or is reality on the streets near the music center?
"They've left very few stones unturned in North Korea," said Anthony Brunello, a professor at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, who has studied totalitarian propaganda methods. He said officials will go to nearly any extreme to create a system that will keep the Kim family in power.
If that means using propaganda that seems insensible to outsiders, few of whom believe the official version of Pyongyang as a communist idyll, it is very logical in Pyongyang. After all, the Kims still hold power.
"They've managed to create a process of control that works," he said.
Most foreign visitors to Pyongyang never encounter a pothole, a traffic jam or a piece of litter larger than a cigarette butt. There see no people with physical disabilities, and no graffiti.
They normally see only the clean streets outside their bus windows, and the showcase buildings ? the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, the palace commemorating the Kims' "juche" philosophy of self-reliance, the computer labs at Kim Il Sung University ? filled with people that the minders insist are everyday North Koreans.
The students in the classrooms don't glance up as dozens of reporters rumble in, and the professor's lecture continues without pause. The young people in the university pool careen down the plastic slide, in front of TV cameras, as if they are completely alone.
Perhaps they are real students. But look straight into the eyes of these people, and their pupils dance around you like you're not there, as if they've been trained to pretend you are not. Only the official guides, always beautiful women in flowing polyester gowns in ice-cream colors, will talk readily.
Always, those talks center around the Kims: the Great Leader Kim Il Sung; the Great General Kim Jong Il and, since his father's death in December, the Respected General Kim Jong Un.
They speak in relentless, rote hyperbole.
"The more time passes by the more we miss our Dear Leader Kim Jong Il," said Ri, the music center guide. "I don't think we can ever find any person so great."
Behind that robotic facade, though, North Koreans want the same things as just about everyone else; at least, that's what defector after defector has said.
They fight with their wives and worry when their children get fevers. They wage office politics, dream of buying cars and, if they have enough clout, they hope to get away to the beach in the summer. When times are at their worst, as they were when famine savaged the country in the 1990s, they dream of enough food so their children won't starve to death.
It's not clear why the regime hides places like the dusty, potholed neighborhood, which is just a mile or so from the center of town, across the trolley tracks and just off Tongil Street.
It doesn't look like a war zone, or even like a particularly rough New York City neighborhood. Many streets in New Delhi, the capital of one of the world's fastest-growing economies, look far more battered and far poorer.
To most North Koreans, one-quarter of whom depend on international food aid, living in homes without electricity or running water, the neighborhood would look upper-middle-class. Special permits are required to live in the capital city, and life here is vastly better than it is for most people in the countryside.
There are predictable government jobs here, electricity at least a few hours a day, better-stocked stores, schools that have indoor bathrooms.
But the officials still hide the run-down neighborhoods. There's a certain view of North Korea they want visitors to have.
Maybe, though, the regime is opening up. In past years, media minders would order reporters to put down their cameras if they saw something they felt didn't reflect well on North Korea. At times, they would close the curtains on the buses.
But on Thursday, the minders said nothing as the cameras clicked away. The journalists stared. And outside the bus, the North Koreans who never expected to be seen stared back.
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Thursday, April 12, 2012
Support for Afghan war hits a new low
Support for the war in Afghanistan has dropped to a new low in ABC News/Washington Post polls, surpassing even the war in Iraq at its most unpopular. Six in 10 Americans believe most Afghans themselves oppose the U.S. mission. And after a shooting rampage allegedly by a U.S. soldier, eight in 10 say the military should improve mental-health monitoring and limit combat duty alike.
Two-thirds of Americans now say the war in Afghanistan has not been worth fighting, a new high that matches peak opposition to the Iraq war almost exactly five years ago. Support for the Afghanistan war, at just 30 percent, is 3 points lower than the lowest on record for Iraq.
Views on the war were virtually as negative last spring, then improved after the killing of Osama bin Laden. The subsequent erosion follows the U.S. military's inadvertent burning of the Koran and other Muslim holy texts at Bagram Air Base in February, violent protests that followed and, separately, the massacre of 17 Afghan civilians in Kandahar in March, allegedly by a U.S. service member.
In an ABC/Post poll last month, after the Koran burning and related protests, opposition to the war increased from 54 percent to 60 percent, with just three in 10 believing Afghans themselves supported U.S. efforts in their country. Now, after the civilian massacre, opposition to the war has risen by another 6 points, to 66 percent, and the belief that Afghans support the war has dropped by 8 points, to 22 percent.
The drop in views that Afghans themselves support U.S. efforts makes a difference. This poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, finds that among those who think most Afghans back the war, a majority - 53 percent - think it's been worth fighting. Among those who think Afghans are opposed to what the U.S. is trying to accomplish, however, just 22 percent think the nation's longest war has been worth it.
KANDAHAR SHOOTING - While there's been speculation about the possible role of post-traumatic stress disorder or battlefield fatigue in the attack on Afghan civilians, the public divides, 44-43 percent, on whether this was an isolated incident or indicative of broader problems with the way the U.S. military monitors the mental health of service members.
Still, apart from the specific incident, there is a broad sense that the military should be doing more to track mental health - 79 percent say so - and to limit the amount of time active duty service members are deployed to combat areas, favored by an almost identical 80 percent. Just 14 and 15 percent, respectively, think the military already is doing enough mental health monitoring and that time limits on deployments are not needed.?
Views of the civilian massacre are intertwined with broader views about military mental health screening. Among those who see the attack on civilians as indicative of broader problems, a near unanimous 93 percent think the military should be doing more to track the mental health of its members. Among those who view the attack as an isolated incident, the belief that the military should be doing more is 25 points lower, but a still broad 68 percent.
PARTISANSHIP and GROUPS - Support for the war in Afghanistan, views of the attack on civilians and support for greater mental health screening divide along partisan lines. A quarter of Democrats, three in 10 independents and 44 percent of Republicans think the war has been worth fighting. While still the most supportive of the war, Republican backing is at an all-time low. But independents and Democrats just are 2 and 6 points from their lows, respectively.
Republicans also are more apt to think Afghans themselves support U.S. efforts in their country - but still just 31 percent think so, compared to 21 percent of Democrats and independents.
Democrats are most likely to think the civilian massacre is indicative of a wider problem (51 percent), and to think the military should be making greater efforts in monitoring mental health (90 percent). Republicans are the least likely to share these views (33 and 70 percent, respectively), and as is customary, independents fall in between the two.
The pattern is similar among ideological groups, with liberals more likely than conservatives to view the shooting incident as indicative of a broader problem and to back more stringent mental health screening, while moderates fall in between.
Among other groups, women are 15 points more likely than men to see the shooting incident as part of a broader problem in the military, 51 to 36 percent. They're also 16 points more likely to think the military should be doing more to monitor mental health (87 vs. 71 percent) and 13 points more apt to want limits on the amount of time service members can spend in combat zones (86 to 73 percent).
OBAMA - Although the war in Afghanistan now rivals the Iraq war in unpopularity, President Obama, so far, has escaped much damage. While support for the war has dropped by 13 points since July, approval of his handling of it is down a scant 5 points to 48 percent. His overall approval, moreover, has risen from a low of 42 in October to 50 percent now.
Yet political risks remain, especially in an election year. Broad discontent with the war in Iraq had severe consequences for George W. Bush's presidency, helping to push his overall approval rating below 25 percent. The question for Obama is the extent to which his withdrawal strategy can continue to hold greater criticism at bay.
METHODOLOGY - This ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted by telephone April 5-8, 2012, among a random national sample of 1,003 adults, including landline and cell-phone-only respondents. Results have a margin of sampling error of 4 points for the full sample. The survey was produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates of New York, N.Y., with sampling, data collection and tabulation by Abt-SRBI of New York, N.Y.
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