A source tells The Associated Press that President Barack Obama has decided to oust Afghanistan commanding Gen. Stanley McChrystal over inflammatory remarks he made about Obama and other high administration officials.
McChrystal had apologized for several disparaging remarks he made in an interview about his civilian superiors.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.
WASHINGTON (AP) — His job in grave jeopardy, Afghanistan war commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal made his case to President Barack Obama on Wednesday, contrite over his blistering remarks about administration officials.
Obama huddled with his war advisers before telling the nation of the embattled general’s fate. He planned a 1:30 p.m. EDT statement in the Rose Garden about the controversy.
With Washington abuzz, there was an almost complete White House lockdown on information about the day’s developments and the president’s thinking. It wasn’t even known where McChrystal went after leaving the West Wing from his nearly half-hour showdown with Obama.
Summoned to Washington to explain himself, McChrystal had arrived from Kabul in the early morning and met first at the Pentagon with Defense Secretary Robert Gates. After his next face-to-face, with Obama, the general was not seen returning to the White House for a bigger, hourlong Afghanistan strategy session, as he has been expected.
Before the White House meeting, two military officials said McChrystal went in prepared to submit his resignation. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
“I think it’s clear that the article in which he and his team appeared … showed poor judgment,” Obama said Tuesday at the close of an unrelated Cabinet meeting. “But I also want to make sure that I talk to him directly before I make any final decisions.”
Obama summoned McChrystal to Washington from Afghanistan after learning of scathing, mocking comments from the general and his inner circle about administration officials, including the president. The White House rebuke of McChrystal on Tuesday suggested that it would be hard for him to give an explanation that would be enough to save his job.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai expressed his confidence in McChrystal during a video conference Tuesday night with Obama, Karzai spokesman Waheed Omar said Wednesday in Kabul. “We hope there is not a change of leadership of the international forces here in Afghanistan,” Omar told reporters.
In the article in Rolling Stone magazine, McChrystal didn’t criticize Obama himself but called the period last fall when the president was deciding whether to approve more troops “painful” and said Obama appeared ready to hand him an “unsellable” position.
McChrystal also said he was “betrayed” by Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, the man the White House chose to be his diplomatic partner in Afghanistan. He accused Eikenberry of raising doubts about Karzai only to give himself cover in case the U.S. effort failed. “Now, if we fail, they can say ‘I told you so,’” McChrystal told the magazine. And he was quoted mocking Vice President Joe Biden.
If not insubordination, the remarks — as well as even sharper commentary about Obama and his White House from several in McChrystal’s inner circle — were at least an indirect and extraordinary challenge. The capital hasn’t seen a similar public contretemps between a president and a top wartime commander since Harry Truman stripped Gen. Douglas MacArthur of his command more than a half-century ago after disagreements over Korean War strategy.
Notably, neither McChrystal nor his team questioned the accuracy of the story or the quotes in it. McChrystal issued an apology.
Military leaders rarely challenge their commanders in chief publicly. When they do, consequences tend to be more severe than a scolding.
Indeed, the presidential spokesman’s prepared reaction to the article was remarkably revealing, even for the normally coded language of Washington. Press secretary Robert Gibbs repeatedly declined to say McChrystal’s job was safe, and questioned whether McChrystal is “capable and mature enough” to lead the war.
Gates, one of McChrystal’s biggest backers, said in a statement that McChrystal had made “a significant mistake.”
A senior U.S. military official in Afghanistan told The Associated Press that McChrystal — who had not spoken with Obama on the matter before Wednesday — has been given no indication that he’ll be fired but no assurance he won’t be. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions between Washington and the general’s office in Kabul.
Obama raised the issue of McChrystal’s future in a phone call with British Prime Minister David Cameron on Tuesday night, Cameron’s office said Wednesday without disclosing what was said. Britain has about 10,000 troops in Afghanistan, the largest international force after the United States.
McChrystal was viewed as a visionary with the guts and smarts to turn around the beleaguered, 8-year-old Afghanistan war when he was chosen to take over last year.
But despite his military achievements, he has a history of making waves. This is not his first brush with Obama’s anger. Last fall, the president scolded McChrystal for speaking too bluntly about his desire for more troops.
Wisconsin Democratic Rep. David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, called for McChrystal to resign. Sen. John McCain, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, was among three prominent Republican senators to criticize the general and say a decision about his future should rest with Obama.
Several names circulated among Pentagon and Capitol Hill aides as potential successors, including Gen. James Mattis, Joint Forces Command chief; Lt. Gen. John Allen, the No. 2 at U.S. Central Command; Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, McChrystal’s No. 2 in Afghanistan; Gen. Martin Dempsey, commander of the Army Training and Doctrine Command; and Adm. James Stavridis, the top NATO commander in Europe.
Military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of the White House meeting, said the administration had not reached out to possible successors but might do so Wednesday.
Adolf Hitler enjoyed special treatment while jailed in 1924, being allowed hundreds of visitors — sometimes unsupervised — including some 30 to 40 to celebrate his 35th birthday, according to a treasure trove of documents that have surfaced from the prison near Munich where he was held.
The 500 documents from the Landsberg prison were recently found by a Nuremberg man among the possessions of his late father, who had purchased them at a flea market in the 1970s, according to Werner Behringer, whose auction house in the Bavarian city of Fuerth will offer them for sale next month.
Behringer said they were packed among a bundle of books on World War I that the man had bought, and his 55-year-old son, who has requested anonymity, never knew of their existence.
“His father probably didn’t know what he had there,” Behringer told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
Robert Bierschneider, an archivist with the Bavarian State Archives in Munich, said he had examined images of the documents that Behringer sent to him, and that they had stamps and notations that matched with others from the same prison at the time.
“The documents appear to be genuine, but to do a real examination we need to have the originals in our hands,” he told the AP.
The documents are to be auctioned on July 2, with a starting price of euro25,000 ($30,677).
Though only one document is signed by Hitler himself, and much of the information about his time in prison is otherwise available, they do provide an intriguing window into his early days as Nazi leader.
Hitler was imprisoned in Landsberg after the Nazi’s abortive bid to seize power in 1923 in the notorious “beer hall putsch” coup attempt in Munich. It wasn’t until a decade later, in 1933, that the Nazis would eventually come to power through parliamentary elections.
Despite being sentenced to five years in prison, Hitler was granted early release and ended up only serving about nine months of his sentence.
His right-wing politics and German nationalism won him some high-placed friends among the German establishment, including World War I hero Gen. Erich Ludendorff. Ludendorff came to visit Hitler several times during his imprisonment, and the Prussian general was allowed to see the former Austrian corporal unsupervised for as long as he wanted, the documents show.
The documents include some 300 to 400 original cards listing Hitler’s other visitors, including the 30 to 40 who were allowed in to celebrate his birthday with him on April 20, 1924 — only 19 days after he was put behind bars.
“His time in prison was more like a holiday,” Behringer said.
Prison director Otto Leybold gushed about Hitler in a memo about the inmates on Sept. 18, 1924, saying he was always “sensible, modest, humble and polite to everyone — especially to the officers of the facility.”
Hitler spent much of his time in prison writing his infamous manifesto “Mein Kampf,” or “My Struggle,” detailing his ideology and ambitions, but the documents also show he had time for more prosaic thoughts.
In a typed copy that prison authorities made of a letter Hitler wrote to a Munich car dealer, the future dictator says he is having a hard time making up his mind about whether to purchase a newer model Benz 11/40 or the older 16/50 because he had concerns that the higher RPM’s of the motor in the former might mean that it would have more mechanical problems.
“I can’t get a new car every two or three years,” he wrote.
He also noted that he had many court costs to pay once he was released and asked the dealer if he might arrange a discount for him, indicating that he had his eye on a particular 11/40 on the salesman’s lot.
“In any case, please reserve the gray car that you have in Munich until I have clarity about my fate (probation?),” Hitler wrote.
Prince Albert of Monaco is engaged to marry Charlene Wittstock, a former Olympic swimmer for South Africa, a union that will give this wealthy Mediterranean principality its first crown princess since American Grace Kelly died in 1982.
The palace announced the engagement of “His Serene Highness”, 52, and Wittstock, 32, who also worked as a school teacher before moving to Monaco. The statement Wednesday did not indicate a planned wedding date but put to rest months of speculation that the two longtime companions would tie the knot.
Albert met the willowy blonde Wittstock in 2000 when she traveled to Monaco for a swimming competition, said Laetitia Pierrat, a palace spokeswoman. Wittstock swam for South Africa at the Sydney Olympics in 2000, though won no medals. In the All Africa Games the year before, she won gold in the 100-meter freestyle.
Since 2006, Wittstock has lived in the principality, Pierrat said.
It will be the first marriage of a reigning prince since Hollywood actress Grace Kelly married Albert’s father, Prince Rainier III, to massive hoopla in 1956. Princess Grace died in a car accident in 1982, casting a pall of tragedy over the family, but remains a style icon to this day. London’s Victoria & Albert Museum for art and design has a current exhibition on her.
According to protocol, royal couples must wait at least six months between the announcement of the engagement and the wedding day, Pierrat said.
She demurred when asked whether Wittstock might be pregnant. “Honestly, I don’t think so,” she said, adding she wasn’t privy to such matters but if Wittstock were, a formal announcement would probably have been made.
Royal watchers reveled at the news.
“It’s been 30 years since Grace died, 30 years they’ve been waiting for a first lady, a princess, a dream beauty, glam. And voila!” said Colombe Pringle, executive editor of the French celebrity magazine “Point de Vue,” which often covers Albert’s private life.
Albert took the throne in July 2005 after the death of his straight-laced father, who built the sleepy Mediterranean port into a tax haven for the rich and a glittering financial center.
That same year, Albert acknowledged that he had fathered a boy, Alexandre, out of wedlock by a former flight attendant. The following year, he acknowledged an American daughter, Jazmin Grace Grimaldi, now a teenager, born to a California woman. Neither can assume the throne because they were born out of wedlock.
While his father’s reign was defined by his marriage to Princess Grace, Albert was known for being a longtime bachelor — so much so that Parliament in 2002 changed the constitution to allow one of his sisters’ sons to take the throne if he never produces a legitimate heir.
Pringle suggested that Albert’s advancing age, and the long time since his mother’s passing, meant that the time was right for him to give up bachelorhood.
“He’s 50-something. It’s time,” she said.
She said Wittstock has spent their years together preparing for the stress and responsibilities of being a princess.
“She has learned a lot, she has done a good personal job to fit with her job, there are many years of learning there behind her,” Pringle said. “Now it’s a question of involvement and engagement in her new role. We’ll see how she does.”
The couple attended Sweden’s royal wedding in Stockholm last weekend, which sparked new rumors of a possible union.
Still, Nancy Wilson, an editor at The Riviera Reporter based in nearby Nice, France, was not convinced that a wedding is “going to happen soon.”
Wilson said the announcement may have been designed to appease those losing patience with Albert’s bachelorhood or perhaps to boost his standing among entrenched interests in Monaco who had resisted his efforts to change tax and economic policies.
“He’s tried to move the principality in a direction different from his father. It’s not working,” she said. “There is negative economic press around him, this is something to take the spotlight away.”
Many subjects in Monaco want Albert, seen for years as a sort of freewheeling playboy, to settle down, get married and have children who can be heirs, said Wilson.
Wittstock “fits the bill, she is kind of a celebrity in her own right,” Wilson said. “They have really sculpted her image almost to be a younger Grace Kelly.”
“The Monegasques will be in excited. Who doesn’t like a wedding?” she added. “An event like that in Monaco would just be huge.”
A self-portrait by French painter Edouard Manet has sold for a record price of more than 22 million pounds ($33 million) at a London auction.
Sotheby’s says the portrait, painted between 1878 and 1879, was bought for 22.4 million pounds ($33.4 million) by an anonymous bidder.
It was the highest price paid for a picture by Manet. The previous record for a Manet was 16 million pounds at a sale in New York in 1989.
Sotheby’s says the painting, “Manet A La Palette,” sold Tuesday evening was one of only two self portraits by the artist and ranks among the greatest of the Impressionist movement.
Twitter is a hit in Japan, succeeding where other social networking imports like Facebook have foundered as millions “mumble” — the translation of tweet — and give mini-blogging a distinctly Japanese flavor.
The arrival of the Japanese language Twitter service in 2008 tapped into a greater sense of individuality in Japan, especially among younger people less accepting of the understatement and conformity their culture is usually associated with, analysts say.
A mobile version of Twitter started last October, further fueling the Twitter boom in a nation where Internet-connecting cell phones have been the rule for years.
These days, seminars teaching the tricks of the tweet, as the micro-blog postings are known, are popping up. Ending Japanese sentences with “nah-woo” — an adaptation of “now” in English — is hip, showing off the speaker’s versatility in pseudo-English Twitter-speak.
A TV show features characters that tweet. A Tokyo bar has screens showing tweets along with World Cup games. And pop idols, a former prime minister and plain regular people are all tweeting like crazy.
The proportion of Japanese Internet users who tweet is 16.3 percent and now surpasses the ratio among Americans at 9.8 percent. Twitter and Japan’s top social networking site, mixi, have been running neck-and-neck with monthly visitors between 9 million and 10 million but in April Twitter squeaked past mixi, according to ratings agency Nielsen Online.
In contrast, only 3 percent of Japanese Internet users are on Facebook compared with 62 percent in the U.S., according to Nielsen. MySpace has also failed to take off in Japan, at under 3 percent of Net users versus 35 percent in the U.S., according to comScore Inc.
Twitter estimates Japanese write nearly 8 million tweets a day, or about 12 percent of the global total. Data from Tweet Sentiments, a web site that analyzes tweets, show Japanese are sometimes tweeting more frequently than Americans.
“Japan is enjoying the richest and most varied form of Twitter usage as a communication tool,” says Daisuke Tsuda, 36, a writer with more than 65,000 “followers” for his tweets. “It’s playing out as a rediscovery of the Internet.”
One reason is language. It’s possible to say so much more in Japanese within Twitter’s 140 letter limit. The word “information” requires just two letters in Japanese. That allows academics and politicians to relay complex views, according to Tsuda, who believes Twitter could easily attract 20 million people in Japan soon.
Another is that people are owning up to their identities on Twitter. Anonymity tended to be the rule on popular Japanese Web sites, and horror stories abounded about people getting targeted in smear-campaigns that were launched under the shroud of anonymity.
In contrast, Twitter anecdotes are heartwarming. One well-known case is a woman who posted on Twitter the photo of a park her father sent in an e-mail attachment before he died. Twitter was immediately abuzz with people comparing parks.
So far, people are flocking to Twitter in positive ways, reaching out in direct, public and interactive communication, debunking the stereotype of Japanese as shy and insular, says Noriyuki Ikeda, chief executive of Tribal Media House, which consults on social media marketing.
“Twitter is turning out to be like a cocktail party,” he told The Associated Press. “Japanese see how fun it is to network and casually connect with other people.”
Twitter is also proving a good business tool. Companies are exploring Twitter as a way to reach consumers and get feedback, a function that holds potential in Japan where broadband connections are widespread and cheap, and mobile phones outnumber the population.
Retailer Tokyu Hands uses Twitter to answer queries from customers, while clothing-chain Uniqlo has used Twitter in marketing by setting up a virtual queue where people tweet with each other and get freebies.
Motohiko Tokuriki, chief executive of consultant Agile Media Network, who has nearly 200,000 followers, believes Twitter is on its way to be chosen the hit new word of the year, a coveted honor that draws great publicity here.
“It’s telling that Twitter was translated as ‘mumbling’ in Japanese,” he said. “They love the idea of talking to themselves,” he said.
Twitter may even offer Japan’s web entrepreneurs global opportunities that had so far eluded them because it’s the first digital “global-standard” outside of search engines like Google or Yahoo! to catch on here, says Toru Saito, chief executive of Loops Communications, which specializes in social networking businesses.
That means software applications Japanese develop for Twitter could win acceptance from a global market. Japanese mobile software products have tended to be for Japanese up to now.
“I’m getting so many queries, including those from abroad,” Saito said.
Rocky Eda, corporate communications manager for Digital Garage, which supports Twitter’s Japan operations, is thrilled people are embracing Twitter.
“In finding fulfillment in expressing what’s on your mind for the moment, Twitter is like haiku,” he said. “It is so Japanese.”
South Korea is backing the creation of a joint fan group to support its team and North Korea at next year’s World Cup.
Kim Choong-whan, a ruling party lawmaker leading a bipartisan delegation on a South Africa trip, said Thursday that lawmakers will pass a resolution on the formation of a joint fan group next month, according to Yonhap news agency.
“We need to take this as an opportunity to promote inter-Korean reconciliation and cooperation,” Yonhap quoted Kim as saying.
“It would be desirable for the South Korean government to finance the travel arrangements for about 300 North Korean cheerers to South Africa.”
Both South and North Korea have already qualified for South Africa 2010, marking the first time the fractious neighbors will play at the same World Cup.
Previously, athletes from North and South Korea have marched together during the opening ceremonies of the Olympics and Asian Games, but competed separately.
The 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, leaving the two countries still technically at war. Bilateral ties began deteriorating when a pro-U.S. conservative government took office early last year with a tougher stance on the North. But their ties showed signs of improvement in recent weeks as the North took conciliatory steps toward Seoul.
A little girl snatched on her way to school was kept hidden from the world behind a series of fences, sheds and tents for nearly two decades, even giving birth to her suspected abductor’s children in the suburban backyard compound less than 200 miles from the home where she was taken.
Jaycee Lee Dugard, who was 11 when she was abducted from a South Lake Tahoe street in 1991, was taken directly to the house and sheltered from the world in a secret, leafy backyard, investigators said Thursday.
Her abductor, investigators said, raped her and fathered two children with her, the first when Jaycee was about 14. Those children, both girls now 11 and 15, also were kept hidden away in the backyard compound behind the Antioch home.
“None of the children have ever been to school, they’ve never been to a doctor,” El Dorado County Undersheriff Fred Kollar said. “They were kept in complete isolation in this compound.”
Even a parole agent who visited 58-year-old Phillip Garrido’s home didn’t have an inkling about the hidden compound, Kollar said. Garrido is a registered sex offender on federal parole for rape and kidnapping convictions.
“The way the house is set up, the way the backyard is set up, you could walk through the backyard, walk through the house, and never know,” Kollar said.
But neighbors said there were clues even before a parole agent on Wednesday noticed Dugard, now 29, who accompanied Garrido, his wife and the children to a parole office.
Neighbor Diane Doty said she could see the tents and often heard children playing in the backyard, the corner of which abuts her own backyard. She said she even suspected the children lived in the tents, but her husband said she should leave the family alone.
“I asked my husband, ‘Why is he living in tents?’” she said. “And he said, ‘Maybe that is how they like to live.’”
Garrido, 58, is being held for investigation of various kidnapping and sex charges. Authorities said his 54-year-old wife, Nancy Garrido, was with him during the kidnapping in South Lake Tahoe and she also has been arrested.
The case broke after Garrido was spotted Tuesday with two children as he tried to enter the University of California, Berkeley, campus to hand out religious literature. Officers said he was acting suspiciously toward the children. They questioned him and did a background check, determined that he was a parolee and informed his parole officer.
Garrido was ordered to appear for a parole meeting and arrived Wednesday with Dugard, who identified herself as “Allissa,” his wife, and two children. During questioning, corrections officials said he admitted to kidnapping Dugard.
Investigators said he did not yet have an attorney.
Dugard was reunited Thursday with her mother as her family learned that their blue-eyed, blonde ponytailed little girl had spent most of her life in captivity. Police said they had no evidence that she had ever reached out to anyone beyond the compound walls.
“She was in good health, but living in a backyard for the past 18 years does take its toll,” Kollar said.
The backyard compound had electricity from extension cords and a rudimentary outhouse and shower, “as if you were camping,” Kollar said.
Authorities said they do not know if Garrido also abused his daughters, but they are investigating.
Dugard’s stepfather, who witnessed her abduction and was a longtime suspect in the case, said he was overwhelmed by the news after doing everything he could to help find her.
“It broke my marriage up. I’ve gone through hell, I mean I’m a suspect up until yesterday,” a tearful Carl Probyn, 60, told The Associated Press at his home in Orange, Calif.
Garrido’s compound was located in Antioch, a city of 100,000 about 170 miles from the Dugard family home in South Lake Tahoe.
People who knew Garrido said he became increasingly fanatic about his religious beliefs in recent years, sometimes breaking out into song and claiming that God spoke to him through a box.“In the last couple years he started getting into this strange religious stuff. We kind of felt sorry for him,” said Tim Allen, president of East County Glass and Window Inc. in Pittsburg, Calif., who bought business cards and letterhead from Garrido’s printing business for the last decade.
Three times in recent years, Garrido arrived at Allen’s showroom with two “cute little blond girls” in tow, he said.
In April 2008, Garrido registered a corporation called Gods Desire at his home address, according to the California Secretary of State. During recent visits to the showroom, Garrido would talk about quitting the printing business to preach full time and gave the impression he was setting up a church, Allen said.
“He rambled. It made no sense,” he said.
In a blog that appears to have been maintained by Garrido, he wrote that he had hired a private investigator to verify his ability to speak to people using only his mind. In an “affadavit” posted there, he said he had the ability to “control sound with my mind and have developed a device for others to witness this phenomena.”
Garrido gave a rambling, sometimes incoherent phone interview to KCRA-TV from the El Dorado County jail Thursday in which he said he had not admitted to a kidnapping and that he had turned his life around since the birth of his first daughter 15 years ago.
“I tell you here’s the story of what took place at this house, and you’re going to be absolutely impressed. It’s a disgusting thing that took place from the end to the beginning. But I turned my life completely around,” he said.
In addition to kidnapping allegations, court records showed both Garridos were being held for investigation of rape by force, lewd and lascivious acts with a minor and kidnapping someone under 14 with intent to rape. Phillip Garrido also faces allegations of sexual penetration.
The AP, as a matter of policy, avoids identifying victims of alleged sexual abuse by name in its news reports. However, Dugard’s disappearance had been known and reported for nearly two decades, making impossible any effort to shield her identity now.
Garrido has a long rap sheet dating back to the 1970s.
He was convicted of kidnapping a 25-year-old woman whom he snatched from a South Lake Tahoe parking lot, handcuffed, tied down and held in a mini-warehouse in Reno, according to a November 1976 story in the Reno Gazette-Journal.
He also has a conviction for rape by force or fear stemming from the same incident, and was paroled from a Nevada state prison in 1988, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
In 1991, police believe he was trolling for victims in South Lake Tahoe in a Ford Granada when he snatched Dugard from a bus stop outside her home. The case attracted national attention and was featured on TV’s “America’s Most Wanted,” which broadcast a composite drawing of a suspect seen in the car.
Her stepfather said he saw someone reach out and grab her before the car sped away.
“As soon as I saw the door fly open, the driver’s door, I jumped on my mountain bike and I tried to get to the top of the hill but I had no energy,” Probyn recalled. “I rode back down and yelled at my neighbor, 911!”
Probyn said his wife, from whom he is separated, was devastated by the kidnapping. He said for 10 years after the crime, she would take a week off work at Christmas and on the anniversary of the abduction and spend the time crying at home.
Jaycee Lee Dugard has retained custody of her children and was staying at a Bay area motel, authorities said.
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Associated Press Writers Paul Elias and Terry Collins in San Francisco; Gillian Flaccus in Orange, Calif.; Brooke Donald in Antioch, Calif.; Don Thompson in Sacramento and Sandi Chereb in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., contributed to this report.
A tawny stuffed puppy bobs in cold sea water, his four stiff legs tangled in the green net of some nameless fisherman.
It’s one of the bigger pieces of trash in a sprawling mass of garbage-littered water, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where most of the plastic looks like snowy confetti against the deep blue of the north Pacific Ocean.
Most of the trash has broken into bite-sized plastic bits, and scientists want to know whether it’s sickening or killing the small fish, plankton and birds that ingest it.
During their August fact-finding expedition, a group of University of California scientists found much more debris than they expected. The team announced their observations at a San Diego press conference Thursday.
“It’s pretty shocking — it’s unusual to find exactly what you’re looking for,” said Miriam Goldstein, who led fellow researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego on the three-week voyage.
While scientists have documented trash’s harmful effects for coastal marine life, there’s little research on garbage patches, which were first explored extensively by self-trained ocean researcher Charles Moore just a decade ago. There’s also scant research on the marine life at the bottom of the food chain that inhabit the patch.
But even the weather-beaten, sunbleached plastic flakes that are smaller than a thumbnail can be alarming.
“They’re the right size to be interacting with the food chain out there,” Goldstein said.
The team also netted occasional water bottles with barnacles clinging to the side. Some of the trash had labels written in Chinese and English, hints of the long journeys garbage takes to arrive mid-ocean.
Plastic sea trash doesn’t biodegrade and often floats at the surface. Bottlecaps, bags and wrappers that end up in the ocean from the wind or through overflowing sewage systems can then drift thousands of miles.
The sheer quantity of plastic that accumulates in the North Pacific Gyre, a vortex formed by ocean and wind currents and located 1,000 miles off the California coast, has the scientists worried about how it might harm the sea creatures there.
A study released earlier this month estimated that thousands of tons of plastic debris wind up in the oceans every year, and some of that has ended up in the swirling currents of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Katsuhiko Saido, a chemist at Nihon University, Chiba, Japan, told the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society last week that plastic actually does decompose, releasing potentially toxic chemicals that can disrupt the functioning of hormones in animals and marine life.
The Scripps team hopes the samples they gathered during the trip nail down answers to questions of the trash’s environmental impact. Does eating plastic poison plankton? Is the ecosystem in trouble when new sea creatures hitchhike on the side of a water bottle?
Plastics have entangled birds and turned up in the bellies of fish, and one paper cited by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates 100,000 marine mammals die trash-related deaths each year.
The scientists hope their data gives clues as to the density and extent of marine debris, especially since the Great Pacific Garbage Patch may have company in the Southern Hemisphere, where scientists say the gyre is four times bigger.
“We’re afraid at what we’re going to find in the South Gyre, but we’ve got to go there,” said Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution.
Only humans are to blame for ocean debris, Goldstein said. In a blog entry posted a day before the science ship arrived in Newport, Ore., she wrote the research showed her the consequences of humanity’s footprint on nature.
“Seeing that influence just floating out here in the middle of nowhere makes our power painfully obvious, and the consequences of the industrial age plain,” she wrote. “It’s not a pretty sight.”
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On the Net:
— Scripps Institution of Oceanography, http://www.sio.ucsd.edu/
Andy Lau’s return to Hong Kong Wednesday with former Malaysian beauty contestant Carol Zhu Liqian after attending her father’s funeral in Malaysia was one of the summer’s most intensely photographed events in the city. It rekindled long-running speculations about Lau’s true relationship with Zhu, a woman he has been dating for 25 years.
The most recent speculation centered on a supposed April 6 wedding date based on the fact that the day was Zhu’s 43rd birthday and on a remark made by Zhu’s aunt to a neighbor. Lau refused to comment and the wedding apparently did not take place.
The press has breathlessly tracked every sighting that seemed to link Lau and Zhu. One story reported that they had watched the Olympics together. Another that they had been spotted dining with Zhu’s family in a Malaysian restaurant sporting matching white suits.
In May of 2008 Lau — one of Hong Kong’s top Cantopop stars as well as its most famous actor — helped stoke fevered speculation of their intentions by singing a couple of songs while attending the wedding of Zhu’s sister.
In 2005 reports surfaced that Lau had built a HK$20 mil. ($2.4 mil.) mansion on a large lot in Malaysia and uses it as the couple’s secret home. The mansion is said to be lavishly decorated, well guarded and planted with Zhu’s favorite flowers, among them peonies and morning glories. As rumors had it, Lau and Zhu had been secretly married years earlier on the strength of his fondness for her gentle, low-key personality.
In 2001 Lau reportedly invested HK$10 mil. ($1.2 mil) in a travel agency Zhu opened in Hong Kong. Lau is sometimes reported to have been Miss Malaysia, though some dispute that she was more than a runner up.
Through it all Lau has steadfastly refused to confirm the existence of any intimate relationship with Zhu.
One tragic consequence of the rabid fascination with Lau was the 2007 suicide of a 68-year-old man from Beijing who was desperate to get a second meeting with Lau for his lovestruck daughter.
In the Depression-era days of Gypsy Rose Lee, burlesque dancing was about as naughty, and as nude, as it got in public. The emphasis was on the tease more than the strip, until Playboy and harder-core pornography came along in the 1950s.
Now burlesque is back with festivals and club performances, from Amsterdam to Alabama. It’s seen as a chance for some bawdy fun and, some would say, even a little empowerment for the performers who are often amateurs with other day jobs.
But its growing visibility, in mainstream clubs and theaters, is also sparking a debate, and some confusion about what it is and whether it’s appropriate in those settings.
Is it performance art, as some contend? Or is it, as others say, just a (very) thinly veiled excuse to strip in public, even if most performers end a routine in pasties and G-strings?
“The performers are interested in being sexy, but not being pornographic,” says Rachel Shteir, a DePaul University professor who’s written books about burlesque. “They’re trying to strike this middle ground. But that’s very difficult to do in our culture.”
A few recent cases highlight that point.
Earlier this year in New York, burlesque performer Tara Lee Heffner filed a lawsuit against the Learning Annex for referring to her as a “porn star” in an online ad for classes she was teaching. She claimed the label damaged her reputation.
This summer in London, one club owner also shut down long-standing burlesque shows after being told he’d have to purchase an adult entertainment license, something generally reserved for more traditional strip clubs with dancers who make use of laps and poles.
“There’s no doubt that some men watch burlesque and find it as sexy as other forms of entertainment,” says Alex Proud, whose club in the city’s Camden borough bears his last name. “But at the end of the day, the naked bit lasts about three seconds.”
And many audiences of burlesque shows are filled with women, who often focus as much on the costumes, glamour and dancing as anything.
“True burlesque is more of a kitschy Vaudeville act than anything else. It’s all about the art of the striptease, a cheeky and titillating performance that can induce chuckles, cheers and longing sighs all at once,” says Katie Laird, a burlesque fan in Houston.
“Performance is the key word here, not naked gyrations for dirty dollar bills.”
At recent shows produced in Chicago by burlesque dancer Michelle L’amour, performers donned large feathered fans, in the tradition of Depression-era starlet Sally Rand, and costumes that ranged from a scantily clad secretary to a 1950s housewife. The midnight performances at the city’s historic Music Box Theatre also included slapstick comedy acts and a campy magic show, as well as a couple of male “boylesque” performers.
“Even my super-conservative grandmother is totally OK with it,” one performer, Cherokee Rose, said of her work with L’amour’s troupe, the Chicago Starlets. Still, the 28-year-old Chicagoan preferred to use her stage name, rather than her real name, because she’s looking for a job in the psychology field. “I wish people in my field were more accepting of this,” she says. “But sadly, they’re not.”
Most of L’amour’s troupe are professionals or students who started by taking classes with L’amour and moved onto the big stage when she considered them ready. For them, burlesque is a hobby.
The 29-year-old L’amour is, in fact, one of a few dancers who’s made a living at burlesque since its comeback in the last decade. Other professionals include Jo Weldon, a.k.a. “Jo Boobs,” and Dita Von Teese, who regularly makes red-carpet appearances and who’s become a bit of a fashion icon.
Theirs is a style that is more “classic” burlesque, focussed more on subtlety, artfulness and humor. But, L’amour says, it’s no wonder people are confused about what burlesque is when you have harder-core strip clubs featuring burlesque performances or even pop music acts, such as the Pussycat Dolls, referring to themselves as a “burlesque troupes.” Singers Cher and Christina Aguilera also are set to star in a movie titled “Burlesque.”
“It’s become a bit of a pitch word to hook people’s interest,” L’amour says.
In this latest rebirth, even many women can’t decide what they think of burlesque.
“Is it porn? Is it feminist? I would hesitate to say either,” says Shteir, the DePaul professor, whose books include “Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show” and “Gypsy: The Art of the Tease.”
Others say it depends on the context.
“As a feminist, I do not assume that, when women engage in performances that highlight their bodies or sexuality, this is necessarily degrading,” says Barbara Scott Winkler, head of the women’s studies department at Southern Oregon University.
For their part, performers talk about the camaraderie they feel with one another. Often, they create and oversee the shows themselves and make their own costumes.
“It’s about embracing the female form, no matter its size,” says Ruby Rose, founding member of London’s Burlesque Women’s Institute. She led a street protest of the Camden Council’s adult entertainment license requirement and is in talks to get them to reconsider.
In a statement, the council said its only concern was nudity. And that’s an issue that’s not likely to disappear anytime soon, says Molly Crabapple, a New York artist with ties to the burlesque community.
“When you do anything that involves nudity, even performance art, many people want to stigmatize it,” says Crabapple, who founded a group of burlesque-influenced drawing clubs called Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School.
However it’s defined or maligned, Proud, the club owner in London, says he thinks burlesque makes life more interesting — though he has no plan to buy an adult entertainment license.
“Nightclubs should still be a little risque or on the edge. If they’re not, you can just stay home and drink a bottle of wine,” he says.
