Features

LOS ANGELES — Hollywood heartthrob George Clooney straps on a jet pack again for Disney’s new movie “Tomorrowland”, a retro-futuristic spectacle mixing environmental themes with sci-fi wizardry — and some good old-fashioned fun.

Clooney, who fired up his thrusters only two years ago in Oscar-winning space drama “Gravity”, stars as a burned-out engineering genius in the film to be released next week, just in time for the summer blockbuster season.

The actor said the movie, which is difficult to categorise, was a courageous gamble by the studio giant, going up against sure-fire box office hits like the latest “Avengers” sequel, “Age of Ultron”.

“It’s a really bold thing for Disney to be willing to do a film that isn’t a sequel and isn’t a comic book and truly invest in a summer film of this sort of ilk,” he said, presenting the film ahead of its US release on May 22.

The movie’s plot has been shrouded in secrecy and, without giving away spoilers, it certainly provides a rollercoaster cinematic ride worthy of Disney’s Tomorrowland theme parks whose name it shares.

It tells the story of teenage rebel Casey, played by Britt Robertson, who finds herself sucked into a mission to unearth the secrets of “Tomorrowland”, a future realm ruled by a despot played by British “House” star Hugh Laurie.

Clooney plays inventor Frank Walker, who found his way into Tomorrowland as a young boy but became cynical and was thrown out by Laurie’s character, David Nix.

Eiffel Tower spectacle

The climax comes after some spectacular scenes, including one featuring the Eiffel Tower, showcasing computer-generated imagery by director Brad Bird, who won an Oscar for animated film “The Incredibles” in 2005.

It is unclear what Tomorrowland represents — some kind of collective consciousness of the future might be a best bet — but the basic theme of the movie is that optimism should overcome cynicism.

“What I loved about the film was that it reminds you that young people [are] not... born and start out their lives cynical or angry or bigoted, you have to be taught all of those things,” said Clooney.

“I watch the world now and think I see really good signs from young people out there, and I feel as if the world will get better,” added the actor, whose previous sci-fi outings have included 2002’s “Solaris”.

Robertson said climate change was also a key theme.

“It’s us that’s creating that issue, it’s not anything other than the people and the environment and what we’re doing to the environment,” the 25-year-old actress told AFP.

“I do think it’s all of these issues that provoke the post-apocalyptic movies you see where the world is ending, whether it be environmental or technological,” she added.

The Disney film is also a tribute to the studio giant’s founder, Walt Disney.

“Walt was a futurist. He was very interested in space travel and what cities were going to look like and how transportation was going to work,” said Damon Lindelof, who co-wrote the movie with Bird.

“Walt’s thinking was that the future is not something that happens to us. It’s something we make happen. And we really wanted to take that baton and run with it,” he told industry publication Variety.

In Defence of a Liberal Education

Fareed Zakaria

W. W. Norton & Company, 2015

Pp. 204

As a young man in the 1970s, Fareed Zakaria — now a well-known columnist, TV analyst and author — made what appeared to be an odd, even risky, decision. He decided to attend college in the United States, rather than in India or England. 

That may not strike a reader today as unusual: the United States, after all, educates thousands of international students each year, and the excellence of its colleges and universities is well known. According to the “Chronicle of Higher Education”, US colleges and universities enrolled almost 900,000 students last year, the largest number in American history.

Yet at the time, Zakaria’s decision to study in the United States defied expectations. In the India of the 1970s the path to success was clear: a young person of promise studied science, took the national exams at the end of grade twelve (the Indian equivalent of the Tawjihi), and then, if he did well, went to the Indian Institutes of Technology, the most prestigious colleges in the country. For a young man of Zakaria’s ability to head off to the United States to study something as fuzzy as the “liberal arts” was quixotic at best, foolish at worst. 

Zakaria’s short and readable new book, “In Defence of a Liberal Education”, is an explanation of that seeming quixotic choice, as well as a personal and professional history, and an impassioned argument for the relevance and value of the liberal arts in the 21st century. 

The liberal arts have been around for a long time. Zakaria sees its antecedents in classical Greece and Rome, in the great Islamic madrasas of the Middle Ages, and in the European Universities of Padua, Paris and Oxford. But it is in the United States, beginning in the 19th century, that the liberal arts found its most profound expression and where it was most fully institutionalised. 

As Zakaria points out, American colleges and universities differ greatly from their counterparts elsewhere. In contrast to Europe, Asia and other parts of the world (including Jordan), the US system of higher education discourages students from early specialisation; instead, students in the United States are required to take a broad and balanced course of study that includes mandatory courses in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. The latter often includes the required study of art and literature, philosophy and ethics, and history. Students in the United States generally do not specialise until the third of their four years in college when they declare their “major” discipline of study. 

According to Zakaria there is great value in such a broad study of the disciplines and in separating out undergraduate from graduate study. As he notes, the emphasis of the liberal arts is on methods of study, modes of inquiry, and learning as an end unto itself, where students have freedom to select from among a wide range of courses, pursue their own intellectual interests, and cultivate curiosity (Zakaria notes that the “word liberal in its original Latin sense means ‘of or pertaining to free men’.”). Of his own experience, he writes: “I now realise that what I gained from college, far more lasting than any specific set of facts or piece of knowledge, has been the ability to acquire knowledge on my own… I learned that learning was a pleasure — a great adventure of exploration.”

Zakaria writes at a time when the liberal arts are under attack in the United States. He quotes a number of political leaders in the United States who have questioned the economic utility and value of the liberal arts. These critics often cite the underperformance of American students on internationally normed exams, particularly compared to their peers in Asia and Europe, and they play off fears of economic decline and joblessness. 

Zakaria answers these arguments with devastating effectiveness. According to Zakaria, the United States’ commitment to the liberal arts largely accounts for the creative genius of American industry and its entrepreneurial strength. 

For Zakaria, an education in the liberal arts provide young people with a lasting and flexible tool-kit of skills — including the ability to write and speak, to formulate questions and to think critically — that will enable them to move fluidly across a rapidly changing economic landscape and to seize new opportunities as they arise. “Learning and relearning,” he writes, “[and] tooling and retooling are at the heart of the modern economy.” 

Countries that rely on high stakes standardised tests, Zakaria reminds readers, risk creating a “testing elite”, skilled at taking tests, rather than an elite of talent, who can synthesise information, think creatively, and formulate new questions — qualities of mind that are more difficult to measure but that are essential for success in an age of rapid change and economic transformation. 

Zakaria’s book offers testimony in support of the liberal arts from range of economists and business leaders, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Jack Ma, the founder of China’s internet giant Alibaba. He notes that Mark Zuckerberg studied Greek in high school and (perhaps not surprisingly) majored in psychology in college. He quotes the late Steve Jobs, who, while introducing a new edition of the iPad shortly before his death, explained: “It is in Apple’s DNA that technology is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” None of their accomplishments, Zakaria suggests, would have been possible without broad exposure to the arts and humanities. 

Other countries have taken note. Even as the liberal arts are attacked in the United States, they have been embraced elsewhere in the world, particularly in India and Asia. Seoul National University and the University of Tokyo, as well Ashoka and Nalanda universities in India have established strong liberal arts programmes. Yale University has joined with the National University of Singapore to establish a new and innovative liberal arts college, Yale-NUS. And then there is the revolution in online education. Towards the end of his book Zakaria suggests that Massive Open Online Courses (known as MOOCs) — recently brought to the Arab world through Edraak, a pioneering partnership between edX and The Queen Rania Foundation — have the potential to make a liberal arts education available to millions of young people across the world. I hope he is right, but I am not sure that he is. It is not clear that the virtues of a liberal arts education that he identifies, particularly those of dialogue, discussion and debate, will translate well to online platforms. 

Of course the great downside to a four-year liberal arts degree is that it is time-consuming (four years, generally, rather than three, not including graduate school) and tremendously expensive. Yet for those who can afford it — or who can, like Zakaria, successfully compete for some of the millions of dollars in need-based financial aid that US colleges and universities offer to international students — a degree in the liberal arts is the best possible preparation for the 21st century.

John Austin

The writer is the headmaster of King’s Academy. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.

PARIS — Elderly men who do 30 minutes of physical activity six days a week are likely to have a 40-per cent lower risk of death compared to couch-potato counterparts, researchers recently said.

For men in this age group, just a small amount of regular exercise — regardless of intensity — is as beneficial as giving up smoking, they said.

The evidence comes from a major project in Norway called the Oslo Study.

In it, doctors enrolled thousands of men born between 1923 and 1932, who were given health checkups and volunteered information about their lifestyle and physical activity.

The initiative was launched in 1972-3 with a first survey among nearly 15,000 men.

In 2000, the survey was repeated among the same group, of whom 12,700 had survived.

Of these 5,700 were able or willing to continue in the research. By 2011, deaths reduced this total to just under 3,600.

The researchers were struck by the impact of regular physical exercise during the 2000-2011 period, when the volunteers were aged in their seventies or eighties.

“A mortality reduction of 40 per cent was associated with a moderate use of time [30 minutes, six days a week] irrespective of whether the activity was light or vigorous,” their study said.

Among those who exercised vigorously — defined as hard training several times a week — the lifespan was a whopping five years longer than among those who were sedentary.

The study, led by Ingar Holme, a professor at the Norwegian School of Sports Sciences, is published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

Volunteers who took part in the study after the relaunch in 2000 were the healthiest survivors of the original batch, which potentially skews some of the data.

But even when this is taken into account, the benefits of regular exercise were clear, the authors said.

“Physical activity should be targeted to the same extent as smoking with respect to public health prevention efforts in the elderly,” they said.

BANGKOK — In a cramped Bangkok room filled with statues of deities and plumes of incense smoke, a master is at work.

With expert precision Ajarn Neng repeatedly plunges a razor sharp needle dipped in black ink into the back of a disciple, each stab producing a perfectly placed pixel that forms a traditional Thai tattoo.

It is an ancient art carried out by ajarns (masters), steeped in superstition that Thais have prized for centuries. But increasingly it is foreigners beating a path to this Buddhist tattooist’s door.

“I’ve been dreaming of getting a tattoo like this for years,” says Silvia Falbo, from Rome, proudly showing five lines of Khmer script Neng recently inked onto her shoulder blade.

“I’m attracted to Buddhism and all the spirituality that goes with it. And the design is really beautiful and original,” she adds.

Ever since American GIs passed through Bangkok for their R&R during the Vietnam war foreigners have returned home sporting traditional Thai tattoos — known as “sak yant”.

But it was when Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie unveiled a Khmer inscription — traditionally used in the region for Buddhist scripture — on her left shoulder that sak yant hit the mainstream.

Now the faces patiently waiting for their turn in front of Neng are just as likely to be from outside Thailand than inside.

‘Lacks respect’

But foreign enthusiasm for exotic Thai ink is not without its controversies.

While tattoos in the West are largely an aesthetic decision, in Thailand they are imbued with both spirituality and superstition.

Those who wear sak yant often believe their tattoos genuinely lend them magical powers, bringing good luck or protection from evil spirits. Some are even convinced that their inking will make them bullet proof.

The designs — lines of script, geometric patterns and animal shapes — are also deeply interwoven with Buddhist and animist imagery that some Thais fear Westerners fail to appreciate.

Tattoos showing religious deities such as the Buddha or the Hindu god Ganesh — also popular in Thailand — are particularly problematic, especially if they are below the waist.

In Thai culture, the head is the most sacred part of the body. The further down the body, the less sacred, and foreigners with religious figures inked on their legs have caused upset.

On the main highway into Bangkok from the city’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, huge 15-metre wide billboards declare “It’s wrong to use Buddha as a decoration or tattoo”.

Some groups want a complete ban on any tattoos of religious figures.

“The Buddha was a person who was clean from inside to outside. His mind was free from illusion and all the impurities,” Manat Chareekote, a spokesman for the Knowing Buddha Organisation, told AFP.

“To tattoo the clean one like Buddha on the body is considered improper and lacks respect.”

Power of tattoos

Professor Sukanya Sujachaya, adviser and former director of the Centre of Folklore Research at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, believes foreigners should do more research before opting for such tattoos.

“Today it’s about fashion. But this type of tattoo cannot be sold just for their beauty. It also has to be for the belief,” she told AFP.

Thailand is not the only Buddhist country to experience a backlash against foreigners appropriating religious imagery.

In April 2014 a British nurse was thrown out of Sri Lanka for sporting a tattoo of Buddha on her arm despite her insistence she was a devout Buddhist who bore the tattoo as a mark of respect.

And in March Myanmar jailed a New Zealand bar manager for using an image of Buddha wearing headphones to advertise a cheap drinks night.

But while many foreign tourists have little idea about the spiritual significance attached to religious tattoos, others deny being insensitive and say their inkings are more than a fashion statement.

“When I see at my tattoos, it helps me and I think back to what my ajarn told me,” said Logan, an American living in Thailand. “I’ve finally found a perfect ajarn for me. He is really a big brother, he is like a mentor.”

When a follower of an ajarn receives a tattoo, they are often told by their master to follow a certain set of rules to improve their life, with the warning added that failure to do so invalidates the power of the tattoo.

Among the rules are the first five Buddhist precepts — do not harm living beings, do not steal, do not have inappropriate sexual behaviour, do not lie and do not consume drugs or intoxicating liquor.

Neng says many of those visiting him are thinking beyond the look of tattoos.

“Foreigners like the unique beauty of patterns,” he says. “But also, they have learnt that believing in the sacred letters of the tattoo might bring them strength.”

Sonya Baumstein lay in bed one sleepless night and wept softly as she pondered her upcoming attempt to cross the Pacific Ocean alone in a rowboat.

“I was just thinking about the fact that I’m going to be leaving everything that I love for a really long time,” Baumstein said of her planned 9,600km odyssey. “And I don’t know the consequences.”

The 30-year-old from Port Townsend, Washington, has undertaken endurance feats in the past but her journey from Japan to San Francisco, expected to start around May 18, is her most daunting adventure yet.

The four- to six-month trip is an endeavour no woman has ever accomplished solo.

Despite 16 attempts to row solo across the Pacific, only two men have successfully completed the journey — Frenchmen Gerard d’Aboville in 1991 and Emmanuel Coindre in 2005, according to Ocean Rowing Society records.

“Once she leaves Japan, the next person she’ll see will be in San Francisco,” said Andrew Cull, the journey’s operation manager. “Unless maybe someone in a fishing vessel stops by to say ‘Hi’ in the middle of the ocean.”

Baumstein will take off on her custom-made 7-metre, 350kg boat with 544kg of freeze-dried food, 180 high-carbohydrate drink supplements and a cache of olive oil that she will consume in hopes of retaining as much weight as possible.

The carbon and kevlar boat weighs in at a light 300kg and will have on board an electric water maker that desalinates seawater for drinking.

Baumstein, who was recruited as a rower by the University of Wisconsin-Madison before a car accident derailed her collegiate athletic career, expects to burn to up 10,000 calories a day and has gained 18kg for the trip. Her bathroom on board will be a bucket.

She has a team that will aid her from land via satellite phone, she will be tracked by GPS, and will have an emergency beacon in case of trouble, but there will be no support vessel. She will be rowing up to 16 hours a day in a boat without a motor or sail.

“Sonya’s not crazy,” said Cull. “She’s driven. Maybe a little bit bullheaded. She gets an idea in her head and will do anything necessary to get it done.”

Baumstein has a master’s degree in non-profit management, yet Cull said she has spent three years doing nothing but preparing for the trip, which is funded largely by commercial sponsors.

Wrong direction

The only other woman to attempt to row from Japan to San Francisco was a Briton named Sarah Outen. But she was blown northward and after 149 days ended her 2013 journey in the Aleutian Islands.

That was her second attempt. A tropical storm damaged her boat so severely during her first try a year earlier that she had to abandon the trek.

“It’s so tough,” Outen said. “You go to sleep and get blown in the wrong direction. The weather systems are relentless.”

The exact date of the start of Baumstein’s expedition depends on the weather, but she is expecting to push off from Choshi, Japan, on or around May 18.

Despite the risks, Baumstein says she is more anxious than scared.

But the same cannot be said about her father.

“I’m completely fearful and I think it’s kind of ridiculous,” Baumstein’s father, Darryl, said of his daughter’s upcoming trip. “But it’s her goal. Everything in life is about taking chances.”

“If she didn’t try it, for the rest of her life she’d regret it,” he said.

Baumstein was the only woman on a four-person team that rowed from Spain’s Canary Islands to Barbados in 2011. The following year, she biked from Mexico to Seattle and kayaked from Seattle to Juneau, Alaska. In 2013, she crossed the Bering Strait on a stand-up paddleboard.

She is making no predictions on reaching San Francisco because “I only have 50 per cent control over what goes on out there.”

“I’ve learned from rowing over the years not to think too far ahead,” said Baumstein. “That’s because I know there’s going to be some pain followed by some more pain. I’m just hoping there’s going to be some happiness at the end of it.”

CANNES, France — There was a time when a new video game adaptation was enough to make film critics gag, but the big money involved is starting to attract a new level of talent.

Video game movies have an ignoble history in Hollywood, dating back to the dark days of the early 1990s when clangers like “Super Mario Bros.” starring Bob Hoskins and “Street Fighter” with Jean-Claude Van Damme were stinking up the screen.

But the lure of tapping into the world’s estimated 1.8 billion gamers has kept drawing filmmakers back for more, and the new projects seem determined to up the quality and match the success of superhero franchises.

Among the more promising projects is “Splinter Cell”, which has been gestating for some years but is thought to still have actor Tom Hardy attached, fresh from his hailed action turn in “Mad Max: Fury Road”.

The project also has director Doug Liman, the man behind smart blockbusters “The Bourne Identity” and “Edge of Tomorrow”, signed on, though rumours suggest he may have since departed.

Perhaps the most surprising video game project in the pipeline is a movie version of the wildly popular “Assassin’s Creed”.

It has the crew from — of all things — the new “Macbeth” movie that is competing for the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival under way, including stars Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, and Australian director Justin Kurzel.

There has been a lot of buzz at the festival around an animated film of PlayStation series “Ratchet and Clank”, with Sylvester Stallone and John Goodman providing voices.

Edward Noeltner, president of the Cinema Management Group touting the film at Cannes, said it was always a good idea to tap into existing markets, particularly for smaller independent companies.

“It’s difficult to build an audience from scratch unless you’re a big studio who can spend $80 million on production and another $80 million on promotion,” Noeltner told AFP.

“Ratchet and Clank” came with “a ready-made and really solid fan base”, he said, having sold 27 million copies of the game across seven releases.

A history of mediocrity

It is all a far cry from the first video game adaptations, which included nadirs of film-making like “Double Dragon” and the “Mortal Kombat” films. They have an average score of 14 per cent on the website Rotten Tomatoes, which gathers scores from critics.

Things started to look up a little in the new century, as bigger stars drew larger box office takings.

Angelina Jolie as “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” and Milla Jovovich’s repeated appearances in the “Resident Evil” series generated plenty of money, even if the critics remained unconvinced.

The most successful adaptation in the genre remains 2010’s “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” starring Jake Gyllenhaal, which grossed $335 million worldwide.

But that was still not enough to justify its $200 million outlay in the studio’s eyes, and Disney abandoned hopes of turning it into a franchise.

It was also critically panned, even if its 36 per cent “rotten” rating on Rotten Tomatoes is actually the highest ever achieved by a video game adaptation.

But the moviemakers can hardly be blamed for seeking a leg up from the video games industry, whose revenue is expected to surpass $100 billion by 2017, according to analysts Newzoo.

The big players in the movie industry are hoping they can recreate the giant financial success they have had with comic book adaptations, and think it will only take one success to get the ball rolling.

Former Marvel boss Avi Arad has said in the past he is convinced video games can be the next big thing, and is developing a series of cross-over projects, including “Metal Gear Solid”.

“I think that film studios are bankers and filmmakers are risk-takers and somewhere in-between we meet on the battlefield,” he told gaming website Kotaku in 2013.

“And the moment one video game movie goes through the roof... it’s the same thing that I’ve been through with comic books.”

NEW YORK — Joey Alexander’s favourite things include the Avengers, SpongeBob and Thelonious Monk. He’s a normal 11-year-old kid who just happens to be a jazz piano prodigy from Indonesia and has already impressed such jazz luminaries as Wynton Marsalis and Herbie Hancock.

Last week, Alexander released his debut CD, “My Favourite Things”, making a statement on the opening track with a 10-minute-plus version of John Coltrane’s harmonically challenging “Giant Steps”. He also displays a sensitive touch on ballads such as Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” and Monk’s “‘Round Midnight”.

Not only did he arrange all the tunes, but he also wrote an original composition, “Ma Blues,” inspired by Bobby Timmons’ jazz classic “Moanin’”.

“For me jazz is a calling. I love jazz because it’s about freedom to express yourself and being spontaneous, full of rhythm and full of improvisation,” said the mop-topped pianist, who barely tops 1.37 centimetres and weighs about 36kg, in a recent interview.

“Technique is important, but for me first when I play it’s from the heart and feeling the groove.”

Alexander made his US debut in May 2014 at Jazz at Lincoln Centre’s annual gala where he performed a solo version of “’Round Midnight”.

Marsalis, JALC’s artistic director, brought him over from Indonesia after a friend insisted that he watch a YouTube clip of the 10-year-old performing tunes by Coltrane, Monk and Chick Corea.

“There has never been anyone that you can think of who could play like that at his age,” Marsalis said. “I loved everything about his playing — his rhythm, his confidence, his understanding of the music.”

Alexander, whose parents are Christians, attributes his unique talent as being “a gift from God”.

Born in Bali, Josiah Alexander Sila began playing piano at the age of six when his father, an amateur pianist and guitarist, brought home a mini electric keyboard. Alexander immediately began picking out the melody of Monk’s “Well, You Needn’t” and other standards by ear from listening to his father’s jazz collection.

His father gave him some lessons, and he soon started jamming with local musicians. His parents gave up their adventure tour business and moved to Jakarta so he could play with Indonesia’s top jazz musicians.

At age 8, Alexander had the opportunity to play for his hero, Hancock, at a UNESCO event in Jakarta. Alexander says Hancock’s encouragement led him “to dedicate” himself to jazz.

His father, Denny Sila, said he never intended for his son to pursue a jazz career, but changed his mind after Alexander topped a field of more than 40 professional musicians to win the 2013 Master-Jam Fest competition for jazz improvisers in Ukraine.

In October, Alexander went into a studio for the first time to record “My Favourite Things”. He recently obtained an O-1 visa for “individuals with extraordinary ability” enabling him to stay with his family in New York to pursue his jazz dream.

“I want to develop by practising and playing, and challenging myself to get better every day,” said Alexander.

His upcoming plans include performances at the prestigious Montreal and Newport jazz festivals.

Newport producer George Wein says he’s always been reluctant to book so-called child prodigies, but he made an exception after Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, tennis legend Arthur Ashe’s widow, brought Alexander over to his Manhattan apartment to play for him.

“The thing that differs from most young players is the maturity of his harmonic approach,” said Wein. “His playing is very contemporary but he also has a sense of the history of the music.”

DHEISHE REFUGEE CAMP, Palestinian Territories — Hijar Hamdan Al Ayess picks off a few yellowing leaves, before pouring water into a hollowed-out pipe filled with soil where she has planted rows of aubergines, cucumbers and tomatoes.

This is her way of escaping the narrow streets of Dheishe refugee camp in the southern West Bank town of Bethlehem, which is home to some 15,000 people who once lived in 45 Palestinian villages that no longer exist.

“The Jews took our land, so to compensate and because we love the land, we decided to set up greenhouses on our rooftops,” says Ayess, whose parents came to Dheishe in 1952 after fleeing their village of Zakariyya near Hebron.

Ayess, who was born in the camp, would like to grow more plants but she has no space left on the roof, so she is making do with what she has while hoping for better days.

“The most important thing is for us to return to our lands, to find them again,” she says as the Palestinians prepare to formally mark 67 years since the Nakba, or “catastrophe” that befell them when Israel was established in 1948.

For the Palestinians, the right to return to homes they fled or were forced out of is a prerequisite for any peace agreement with Israel, but it is a demand the Jewish state has rejected out of hand.

Yasser Al Haj, director of Karama, a local camp-based NGO which works to create opportunities for its residents, says that creating these gardens is a way of keeping alive the spirit of lands which today belong to others.

“When we cultivate land, it creates an attachment; you become tied to this land and through that to this country,” he tells AFP in his office, a map of “Palestine before 1948” on the wall.

‘They were wrong’

“The Jews were wrong. They hoped that the generation which lived through the Nakbeh would die out and that their descendants would forget,” he said.

But that is not the case.

“The young people have not forgotten and they will never forget,” he says as he shows a group of children how to grow tomatoes that he has brought back from Holland: oxheart tomatoes, striped tomatoes and even varieties which are pink or yellow.

Abu Fuad, who will be 100 this year, is one of those forced into exile. 

He even took part in the fighting in 1948 “with a gun bought from an Egyptian who was selling weapons dating back to World War I” in order to fight and save his village, Beit Aatab some 40 kilometres from Bethlehem.

More than 760,000 Palestinians — estimated today to number around 5.5 million with their descendants — fled or were driven from their homes in 1948, with the Nakbeh marked every May 15.

Abu Fuad was one of them, leaving his home with everything inside it “because people thought they would come back”.

Moving from place to place, he finally found a single room measuring just over six square metres which had to provide shelter for 12 people.

With no work and no money, they were forced to rely on the support of the Red Cross and the UN, with the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) today still helping more than five million refugees spread across Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and the occupied territories.

A sacred key

When Abu Fuad left his house, he locked it with a heavy iron key which he still guards closely.

“It is sacred,” he says, kissing it and touching it to his forehead.

Over decades of exile this young man wrote poems about his now destroyed home, eventually becoming a great-grandfather, still bright-eyed but going slightly deaf.

Before Israel built the separation barrier which now surrounds Bethlehem, he went back to Beit Aatab.

“I found the place where my school was,” he says, his eyes glistening as he recites one of his poems.

“Oh Muslims, Oh Christians, you have too easily abandoned Palestine!” he says, still bitter over the Arab armies who were defeated more than six decades ago.

WASHINGTON — Facebook pushed deeper into the media business Wednesday by crafting a deal with news publishers which allows the social network to deliver articles directly to readers and could reshape the news landscape.

The long-anticipated move by Facebook means it will host news items on its servers to give readers faster access.

The plan has been hotly debated in the news industry — by those who argue it can help struggling media groups, and others who say news organisations will lose control of their content to the social network.

The new feature called Instant Articles “makes the reading experience as much as ten times faster than standard mobile web articles”, Facebook said.

Sharing on Facebook’s mobile app is growing but the average article takes about eight seconds to load.

Partners in the launch are The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild, Facebook said.

Facebook France chief Laurent Solly said that French media groups would also join the effort.

“It will be mostly dailies at the start, but we are open to all news organisations,” Solly said in a radio interview.

Facebook said publishers may sell ads in the articles and keep the revenue or use Facebook’s ad network. Publishers will also be able to track traffic and other data of their content hosted by the social network.

Instant Articles will initially be available on the Facebook app for iPhone, but Facebook is working to expand the platform.

News juggernaut

A recent Pew Research Centre report found some 30 per cent of Americans get at least some of their news from Facebook.

But media groups have been struggling with the shift to digital from print, both in terms of delivering relevant articles to readers and in getting ad revenue from online services.

Some in the news industry argue the plan gives Facebook too much control of the news.

“Overall I don’t think it is a good idea,” said Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University.

Kennedy said Facebook is not transparent about how it shows users news and the site can make changes that promote or demote content, with a major impact on news organisations.

“When news organisations turn over a key part of their publishing platform to large corporation with its own agenda there are some real risks,” Kennedy said.

New York Times media critic David Carr, who died in February, said last year that media outlets “would essentially be serfs in a kingdom that Facebook owns” under such a plan.

“I can see why these news sites are tempted by the offer, but I think they’re going to regret it,” said John Gruber who writes the “Daring Fireball” news blog.

Facebook’s formula for structuring its news feed has long been a source of controversy, with some arguing it creates an “information bubble” that segregates readers into like-minded groups.

A study published last week by Facebook found this was not the case — that the site’s members were exposed to considerable “cross-cutting” content — but some analysts said the conclusions were debatable.

The future of news

Danny Sullivan, founding editor at the Search Engine Land blog, said the move opens the door for Google to make a similar news partnership that could have a major impact on the news industry.

“I worry what it means when the free and independent web is mirrored within the walled gardens of two giants, Facebook and Google,” Sullivan said in a blog post.

Joshua Benton of the Neiman Journalism Lab at Harvard University said a risk for publishers is losing control of ad revenue to Facebook.

“Premium publishers charge premium advertising rates,” Benton said in a blog post.

“So what happens if brands realise they can reach a Times [or Atlantic or Spiegel] audience more efficiently and more cheaply without dealing with the publisher directly?”

Benton said the deal may “give publishers a wakeup call to invest more time and resources into being faster on the Web.”

City University of New York journalism professor Jeff Jarvis said the Facebook move is a watershed event for news.

“This is good news for news,” Jarvis said. “If news and technology can come to terms, we can begin to reinvent journalism in a distributed world with new business models.”

Jarvis said Facebook’s move along with Google’s efforts to partner with news organisations show a path for the future of the industry.

“We in media can’t do it all by ourselves anymore,” he said in a blog post. 

“We are no longer monopolies in control of content and distribution from top to bottom. We now live in ecosystems where we must work with others. Get used to it. Find the opportunity in it.”

Los Angeles Times (TNS)

If finned swimming animals evolved in an ocean on an alien world, what would they look like? Quite possibly a lot like the ones on Earth, a team of researchers says.

A new study that examined certain swimming species’ motion in the ocean found a surprising and elegant ratio embedded in the way they move. This ratio, described in the journal PLOS Biology, reveals a surprising case of convergent evolution over a diverse array of unrelated animals — and could help engineers build better swimming robots.

Previous work has found that there are striking similarities in the way that animals move through fluids (whether water or air). It’s part of a trend toward understanding the detailed physics of how animals move — perhaps with the intent to use these rules of movement to design more agile robots, said Jack Costello, a marine biologist at Providence College in Rhode Island who was not involved in the paper.

“I do think it’s part of a growing wave of understanding biological motion. ... For many years people have been satisfied with generalities about thrust production,” said Costello, who has researched shared patterns of movement across swimming and flying species.

A team of researchers at Northwestern University first began to wonder about common rules of movement after studying the black ghost knifefish. The black ghost knifefish lives in freshwater streams in South America and it moves around primarily using an undulating fin attached to its underside. This is unlike more well-known fish like trout or salmon, which sweep a tail (and the rear portion of their bodies) back and forth. Instead, the knifefish causes a wave to undulate down its thin fin, which runs most of the length of its body.

There’s a whole host of sea critters who move like this, called fin swimmers; some have a single fin running along the length of their bodies, while others have a pair, one on each side. Sometimes (in the case of the cuttlefish, a relative of the squid) it makes them look like they’re wearing a fluttering tutu.

During their previous work on the ghost black knifefish, the scientists noticed that the fish’s maximum speed occurred when a total of two waves of motion could fit across the length of its fin, and they wondered whether there might be a common rule across different species.

The scientists studied 22 very different species of finned swimmers, using video recordings, lab studies and computer modelling to determine what pattern, if any, might exist. They even trimmed the fin on a fin-swimming robot — which looks something like a torpedo with a ribbon strung underneath — to see whether that made any difference.

They found that there was indeed a pattern in their motion — though it wasn’t quite what they expected. As it moved, each animal seemed to follow a specific pattern: the ratio between the length of each undulating wavelength and the amplitude (or height) of each wavelength was about 20 to 1. That is, every full back-and-forth wiggle of the fish’s fin was 20 times as long as the wiggle was wide. For each species they studied, including skates, rays, the black ghost knifefish, the cuttlefish and the Persian carpet flatworm — that ratio remained 20 to 1.

“We found in every animal for which data are available, our prediction was correct,” said Neelesh Patankar, a mechanical engineer at Northwestern and one of the lead authors on the work.

This pattern persisted through three different phyla, and included invertebrates and invertebrate animals. The researchers think that this pattern of movement has independently arisen at least eight times, because it’s the pattern that maximises the swimmer’s ability to move efficiently with speed. There could be a thousand more finned-swimming species that have the same ratio, the authors said.

“Physics puts constraints on the kinds of solutions nature can have and survive,” Patankar said.

And if complex alien life were ever to be found on another planet using a fin to swim, this same ratio would probably emerge, said Patankar’s co-lead author, Malcolm MacIver, a bioengineer at Northwestern.

“There’s only a certain number of ways in which animals can move effectively,” MacIver pointed out. If those alien animals were moving through liquid water on another planet, then the same fluid constraints apply. “Water’s water,” he said.

The findings could help scientists learn how to better build underwater robots that swim quickly and efficiently, the researchers added. Such skills are critical, for example, when sending underwater vehicles to deal with oil spills — and they can’t yet swim with the level of precision that these animals can.

“There’s a real need for underwater robots that can move with more agility,” MacIver said.