Iranian actress told not to return home after nude photo

(EOZ From The Daily Mail) An actress who has starred with Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe has been banished from her home country of Iran - because she posed nude in a French news magazine.

Golshifteh Farahani says she has been contacted by the Iranian government, telling her that she is no longer welcome in the country and advising her not to return home. The offending photo - a black-and-white 'art shot' featuring the 28-year-old Farahani posing against a black backdrop with her hands strategically placed over her breasts - was first published in Madame Le Figaro.

maybe Iran would be happier if she married a Jew and moved to my woodshack?

(UPDATED) Still Not Dead - Jimmy Carter blames the Jooos for Christian exodus from "Palestine"

(EOZ) I wonder how he explains all the Christians leaving Egypt, Iraq, and every other Muslim-majority area? It's got to be Israel's fault somehow; I mean, what else could all those Christian populations have in common? And the fact that Israel's own Christian population is increasing is just more evidence for Israel's evil. You see, they are nice to some Christians in order to cover their seething hate for Christians. Call it "crosswashing." It is so obvious, once you know how the sickening Israeli mind works, right? Luckily Jimmy is an expert.(h/t jzaik)

(sarcasm) Yeah, he's an honest broker (/sarcasm) ...Jimmy Carter meets with his soul mates of the Muslim Brotherhood. More here. (blazingcatfur) h/t Carl

The Guardian, Khaled Diab and the Gilad Atzmon antisemitism test

The Israeli cultural is more then just one hacker. The Israeli culture is a culture of intelligence and the free exchange of information. Information can be bought, but it must be bought out of the incubating tech culture that it grew. A hacker who incubated in a Tech culture and then went rogue would be industrious to hide behind a third world regime so that the other hackers who share his knowledge can't get to him. It is not however a sign that Saudi Arabia is a place that is fertile for thinking.

(CIF) Khaled Diab’s essay at CiF, “Hacking away at Arab and Israeli stereotypes“, is quite misleading. His objective isn’t to tear down stereotypes about Israelis, but to highlight and promote them.
Diab, commenting on recent reports of Saudi hackers who “scaled up their cyber offensive against Israel byparalysing the websitesof El Al airline and the Tel Aviv stock exchange”, quoted an Israeli journalist observing that such Arab tech prowess shattered the “feeling that Israel is a technological ‘superpower’ and a hi-tech nation”. And, later, Diab saw Israeli surprise at the adeptness of the hackers as evidence that Israelis “apparently do regard their nearest [Arab] neighbours as being backward.”
While Diab, later in the essay, acknowledges (albeit in a perfunctory manner) Arab stereotypes of Israelis (which he suggests has nothing whatsoever to do with antisemitism), it’s in the following passage where his polemical veneer of ’peace and reconciliation’ vanishes.
Commenting further on the Israeli reaction to the apparent Saudi hacking, Diab writes.

Some commentators went even further. “The Jewish state is pretty devastated by the idea that a bunch of ‘indigenous Arabs’ are far more technologically advanced than its own chosen cyber pirates,” Israeli jazz musician Gilad Atzmonobserved wryly on his blog.

The “Israeli jazz musician”, Gilad Atzmon, whose blog Diab evidently reads, is the author of a book, The Wandering Who?, which the Community Security Trust characterized as “probably the most antisemitic book published in this country in recent years.”
But, as I noted in a previous post, merely characterizing Atzmon as antisemitic doesn’t do him justice. Atzmon advances crude, hateful, and demonizing rhetoric about Jews which is on par with the most vile Judeophobic charges ever leveled.
In that one video I linked to earlier, Atzmon leveled charges against Jews he has similarly advanced on the blog which Diab refers to.
They include:

• The explicit charge that Jews are indeed trying to take over the world, and an endorsement of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

• Questioning whether the Holocaust occurred, while simultaneously arguing that, if Hitler’s genocide did occur, it can partly be explained by Jews’ villainous behavior. He also claimed that Hitler’s views about Jews may one day be proven right.

• Judaism is a “supremacist” ideology.

Gilad Atzmon’s antisemitism, quite simply, is as odious as anything you can find on a white supremacist or neo-Nazi website.
So, here’s a friendly suggestion to Guardian Readers’ Editor Chris Elliott, on how (per his mea culpa in Nov.) he can “avert accusations of antisemitism“, at his paper:
Don’t publish essays which approvingly cite the wisdom of one of the most notorious antisemites of our day!

I'm not really interested in arguing any point beyond the hack/tech/cultural issue. The fact that there is one lone hacker in Saudi Arabia is not a sign that the culture is advanced. It isn't like the Israelis can go and arrest a hacker working in Saudi Arabia... and it isn't like as if the Saudis don't have the money to pay for expertise.

Mercedes-Benz: The car for people who admire mass-murdering racist totalitarian thugs

(Volokh) Mercedes-Benz’s latest marketing ploy is to associate itself with Che Guevera. Over at the Huffington Post, Michael Gonzalez (Heritage Foundation) supplies the details.
It’s not surprising that a corporation which is currently pro-Che was pro-Hitler, far more so than many other German businesses during the Third Reich. As recounted in Cecil Adams’ “The Straight Dope”:

Daimler-Benz . . . avidly supported Nazism and in return received arms contracts and tax breaks that enabled it to become one of the world’s leading industrial concerns. (Between 1932 and 1940 production grew by 830 percent.) During the war the company used thousands of slaves and forced laborers including Jews, foreigners, and POWs. According to historian Bernard Bellon (Mercedes in Peace and War, 1990), at least eight Jews were murdered by DB managers or SS men at a plant in occupied Poland.

UPDATE: Regarding Eugene’s post, immediately above. My own view would be that a corporation is a collection of individuals (and, I agree with him, therefore entitled to free speech and other constitutional rights); in the same sense, a human body is a collection of cells. Over time, all of the individuals in a corporation may change; likewise, the collection of cells that constitute “David Kopel” is today very different from the collection that constituted “David Kopel” 45 years ago. Yet the corporate body, like the human body, has a continuing existence as the same entity. (That’s one of the benefits of incorporation.) Corporations sometimes have cultures or other enduring traits that distinguish them even while their individual members may be replaced. It would be accurate to say that Yale Law School is a corporation that places far higher value of scholarly prestige than on teaching ability, and this was true not only today, but also 40 years ago, even though the Yale faculty is now entirely different. (Yes, to be precise, Yale Law School is just a unit within the larger corporation of Yale University.) None of the original personnel at National Review magazine are still there, but one can find many similarities between the corporate culture and mission of NR in 1955 and 2011. That the various corporations of the Ivy League schools discriminated against Jews in the 1920s is, in my view, of some relevance in understanding their current discrimination against Asians. That Mercedes-Benz was, compared to other German corporations, unusually supportive to Hitler then, and is similarly unusual (compared to other German corporations) in its attitude towards Che today, suggests that the corporation may lack an internal self-regulator which recognizes the wrongfulness of extolling totalitarian thugs.

Supreme Court Backs Copyrights for Older Foreign Works

Keystone Pictures/Zuma Press

Picasso is among the foreign artists, writers and composers whose works get U.S. copyright protection
under a law upheld Wednesday.

how in the hell do you take works out of the public domain when they are already used fairly and then prosecute people for it?

(WSJ By BRENT KENDALL And JESS BRAVIN) WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a 1994 law granting copyright protection to a large number of foreign works that had been freely available in the public domain. The ruling was a victory for the movie, music and publishing industries, which argued that granting copyright protections for the foreign works was an important step in securing reciprocal overseas rights for U.S. works. The decision means some musicians and other artists will have to keep paying to use the now-copyrighted foreign works.

Previously Copyright Law Challenged: Justices Hear Case 10/6/2011

Congress enacted the measure to bring the U.S. in compliance with the Berne Convention, an 1886 treaty providing for international recognition of copyrights. The court, by a 6-2 vote, said Congress acted within its powers in granting the protections.
"Congress determined that U.S. interests were best served by our full participation in the dominant system of international copyright protection," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the court.
The ruling defeated a challenge by a group of orchestra conductors, performers, educators and others who argued that Congress exceeded its powers by restricting their ability to perform, share and build upon foreign works that once had been free for use.
The Constitution authorizes Congress to grant copyrights "for limited times." Challengers argued that authority didn't include the power to take works out of the public domain. They also said the law violated the First Amendment because removal of the works interfered with their freedom of expression.

Google Inc. was the leading company challenging the law, in an echo of the separate battle in Washington over an Internet piracy bill that pits Google against movie studios. The search company, which didn't respond to a request for comment, said in court papers that the restored copyrights could affect more than a million books it has scanned through its Google Books Library Project.
The ruling followed others in recent years giving Congress broad discretion over the shape of copyright. In 1998, Congress bowed to entertainment industry wishes by extending existing copyrights by 20 years, so they would last 70 years after the author's death—to 2036, for instance, for Walt Disney. In a 2003 opinion, also by Justice Ginsburg, the court upheld that extension.
"Today's ruling demonstrates that the United States fulfills its international copyright obligations and will remain a world leader in protecting creative works," Fritz Attaway, chief policy adviser for the Motion Picture Association of America, said.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Among the foreign works removed from the public domain were symphonies by Russian composers Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, writings by J.R.R. Tolkien and George Orwell, and paintings by Pablo Picasso.
The number of works that qualified for copyright restoration probably numbered in the millions, the U.S. Copyright Office has estimated.
Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, dissented from the court's ruling, saying the law "inhibits an important pre-existing flow of information" and is at odds with the purpose of granting copyrights: to provide incentives for creators to produce new works. Instead, the law "bestows monetary rewards only on owners of old works," wrote Justice Breyer.
Orchestra conductor Lawrence Golan, the lead plaintiff in the case, said the law has limited the ability of smaller-budget orchestras to perform some popular foreign pieces, such as "Peter and the Wolf," that used to be free.
Now orchestras, on average, must pay about $800 per performance of Prokofiev's children's classic, Mr. Golan said in an interview. "The price of the licensing fees or rental fees for playing these pieces will be cost-prohibitive," he said.
The 1994 law granted copyrights to foreign works that never received American protection because they were published in countries that previously lacked copyright relations with the U.S. It also restored protections for foreign works that were in the public domain because they hadn't complied with technical requirements of U.S. copyright law.
Some foreign works were denied U.S. rights for 50 or 60 years, said Eric Schwartz, a former government copyright attorney who negotiated international copyright agreements. "Some of the families of the creators are trying to get back some of the money they were denied," he said.
Another copyright attorney, Lloyd Jassin, said that taking "a work out of the public domain in the U.S.—in this case a book published abroad between 1923 and 1989—will have an impact. It's in effect a tax for independent publishers who might have been seeking to publish a work formerly in the public domain. A rich public domain allows for greater access to older works—and at a much lower cost."
Justice Elena Kagan, who was a Justice Department official during earlier stages of the litigation, did not take part in the case.
The case is Golan v. Holder, 10-545.
—Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg contributed to this article.
Write to Brent Kendall at brent.kendall@dowjones.com and Jess Bravin at jess.bravin@wsj.com

Radioactive material said stolen from Egypt plant

(af.reuters.com h/t @ChallahHuAkbar) CAIRO Jan 19 - Radioactive material has been stolen from a nuclear power station on Egypt's Mediterranean coast that was the site of violent protests last week, state-run al-Ahram newspaper reported on Thursday.

A safe containing radioactive material at the Dabaa nuclear power plant was seized while another safe containing radioactive material was broken open and part of its contents taken, the newspaper said.

The government has alerted security authorities and asked that specialised teams help in the search for the stolen material, al-Ahram reported.

More than a dozen people were wounded last week when military police tried to disperse hundreds of Egyptian protesters demanding the relocation of the Dabaa plant, which is still under construction.

Plant staff have refused to go to the site because of the deterioration in the security situation there, al-Ahram said.

About 500 Egyptians rallied in front of the plant last week to demand that the project be terminated, with some saying they had lost their land on the plant's site.

Soldiers and the protesters hurled stones at each other and exchanged gunfire after the protesters demolished a wall surrounding the site, a security source and witnesses said. (Reporting by Patrick Werr; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

uh oh