Thomas Burg kindly asked me to chair a panel at BlogTalk. It will now be my honor to introduce Jane Perrone, Horst Prillinger and Peter Praschl.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled today that banning Muslim headscarves in state schools and universities does not violate the freedom of religion and is a valid way to counter Islamic fundamentalism. In the unanimous judgment, the judges decided that headscarf bans are appropriate when issued to protect the secular nature of a country - in this case, Turkey.
Loic posted a nice picture
Smarter conversations equals better products. It’s so frickin’ obvious.
Prestigious German weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT announced the 2004 Blog Awards. My nominations:
Studio Hamburg is shooting parts of a TV series right above my head.
Used my digital zoom, so please excuse the noise.
Online registrations and discount registrations for bloggers and students end tomorrow.
Hamburg's Police Chief Werner Jantosch has a funny idea to fight street crimes: He wants to pose a limit on civil rights in order to allow police to search any individual or his or her personal belongings without probable cause. Now that's what I call creative.
Jason DeFillippo and Sean Bonner launched the London Metroblog, and it's looking neat.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that the so-called enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay may use the American legal system to challenge their detention. Says Michael Ratner, President at the Center for Constitutional Rights:
This is a major victory for the rule of law and affirms the right of every person, citizen or non-citizen, detained by the United States to test the legality of his or her detention in a U.S. Court.
Portraying cosmopolitan life in Germany. Online now.
The answer is a simple one. A recent survey named Germans the most disliked Europeans.
Why? Why don't they like us? Is it because Germans still wear white tennis socks with sandals? Is it because we temporarily invade other countries during holiday season? Is it because quality of German cars is decreasing? It's even simpler than that.
As an explanation, respondents cited the Germans' "loud and nationalistic" manner.Loud and nationalistic. That gives you something to chew on. But, hey, it goes on. Not ony are we annoying, we were also named Europe's "least friendly" citizens. Yes, I can see that. Germans don't smile a lot. Not in public at least. "Friendly service, served with a smile" are foreign concepts to most Germans. Everyone is either very busy or jobless. Plus our football team sucked at Euro 2004. No reason to smile. No reason to be friendly. Just loud. And miserable. That's us.
[via Chrenkoff]
Someone should tell Jörg Kantel that his banners are, well, .... read yourself.
Wow. COUP D'ETAT. Fascinating read. Certainly plenty of speculation. But just imagine. The CIA is engineering a coup against the Bush Administration? Both Bush and Cheney are to be removed? It would make a good book for sure. [via CamWorld]
Why is it that subscribing to a magazine in the U.S. is so cheap? As an example, take WIRED. The regular newsstand price is currently at around US$ 4. But sign-up for a subscription, and you'll pay less than U$ 1 an issue and save over 80% off the newsstand price.
And in Germany? The incentive for subscribing to a magazine is usually saving the time it would take you to buy the magazine at the newsstand or free shipping plus a (more-or-less) crappy gift that nobody wants or needs. Take the leading German news mag DER SPIEGEL. A subscription saves you a mere 6%. If I want to rule out that German consumers are just being ripped off (which might still be the case), I guess it has to do with German laws designed to "protect the consumer" by prohibiting businesses from offering too much discount (UWG).
Thanks for the protection, but actually I would prefer cheap. Thank you.
Oh Lord. (Oops, I should not start the post like this. Let me try again.) Oh boy. This was bound to happen. A German main court upholds a law banning teachers from wearing headscarves in public schools. Jeff Jarvis twists the story slightly by making a rather broad statement ("Germany's banning headscarves.") and we see gunfire erupt from both sides of the Atlantic ocean. For the fun of it, let's add some fuel to the discussion.
U.S. President George W. Bush, on his first visit to Turkey, said earlier today:
Turkey is a model for the Middle East.Bush also noted:
I appreciate so very much the example [Turkey] has set on how to be a Muslim country and at the same time a country which embraces democracy and rule of law and freedom.So why not take Turkey as model for the rest of Old Europe, too. Much of modern Turkey is based on the kemalist principle of secularism. Kemalist secularism does not just mean separation of state and religion but also the separation of religion from educational, cultural and legal affairs. Thus wearing headscarves is banned in Turkish public schools and even universities, to the best of my knowledge, for both students and teachers. (Someone please correct me if this only affects teachers.)
So if Turkey is to be the model, Germany is doing the right thing. As a matter of fact though, Germany would still need to go one step futher, even banning the display of Christian crosses in public schools (which still is a common practice in some German states).
The discussion doesn't stop here though. Having followed much of the public debate in the recent weeks and months, it does not seem to be clear whether or not the Muslim headscarve is merely a religious symbol but also a political statement.
But let's quote George W. Bush one more time. When asked for his position on school prayers he replied:
Religion is a personal, private matter and parents, not public school officials, should decide their children's religious training. We should not have teacher-led prayers in public schools, and school officials should never favor one religion over another, or favor religion over no religion (or vice versa).Religion is a personal, private matter. That pretty much sums up the German court's decision, arguing teachers wearing headscarves violated a state's religious neutrality.
Yes, it certainly is a tricky issue. One just should not jump to conclusions too easily.
Street Meme: a sticker, stencil, or poster that can spread a single image around the world.
Bloggers love to talk about their PageRank. A typical conversation might go like this:
"I have a PageRank of 6." "That's nothing, honey, I got a 7."
You know the game. In fact I think Google could make good business selling PageRank t-shirts but that is besides the point. PageRank on the web is like, well, the size of a men's love animal or what type of car you drive. It's status. It's relevance. It's fame. It's money. It's everything.
Then again, PageRank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. And Google isn't everythinig. Yet I haven't heard anyone mention their YahooRank. I don't even know if such a thing exists. What I do know from looking at my referrer stats is that my site seems to do even better at Yahoo! than it does at Google. Also Yahoo! seems to spider my site even more frequently than GoogleBot does. Part of my lack of detailed knowledge about Yahoo!'s magic is probably related to the fact that Google had been powering Yahoo's search for a long time. But that changed. So what is powering Yahoo!'s web search now? Some sort of massive AltaVista/Fast/Inktomi meta siper and index? And what's my MSNRank? So many questions...
What is Jennifer Ringley doing these days? Is Natacha Merrit still taking pictures?
Because sex does sell.
Untitled, 2003, was initiated in 2002 when Andrea Fraser approached Friedrich Petzel Gallery to arrange a commission with a private collector on her behalf. The requirements for the commission were to include a sexual encounter between Fraser and a collector, which would be recorded on videotape, with the first exemplar of the edition going to the participating collector. The resulting videotape is a silent, unedited, sixty-minute document shot in a hotel room with a stationary camera and existing lighting.
