ISTANBUL, Turkey – A court-appointed panel of Turkish experts has ruled that the character Gollum from the literary and film classic Lord of the Rings is not evil but just an innocent victim.
The panel was appointed as part of a case against Bilgin Ciftci, a Turkish physician, who was accused of insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan when he posted a series of pictures of Erdogan alongside images of Gollum on his Facebook account.
The report said "it is not possible to state that the character Gollum is unequivocally negative or evil. As a result of reading the relevant literature and examining the film, it has to be stressed that the character Gollum rather than representing evil is portrayed as an innocent victim - and readers and viewers also see the character in that light.”
The report said its conclusion was based on reviewing both JRR Tolkien’s books and the film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, according to the Turkish Cumhuriyet newspaper.
It did not however agree with Jackson’s view at the time that the character used on Ciftci’s post was Smeagol and not Gollum. The report said it was up to the court to decide on those statements.
Jackson has pointed out, in a joint statement with filmmakers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens given to the Wrap entertainment site, that the character depicted in the photos was not even Gollum, but Smeagol, the other half of the character’s split personality.
"If the images below are in fact the ones forming the basis of this Turkish lawsuit, we can state categorically: none of them feature the character known as Gollum,” it read.
“All of them are images of the character called Smeagol, Smeagol is a joyful, sweet character. Smeagol does not lie, deceive, or attempt to manipulate others. He is not evil, conniving, or malicious — these personality traits belong to Gollum, who should never be confused with Smeagol."
Ciftci had posted three pictures of the character in various states such as in shock, surprised and while eating alongside pictures of Erdogan caught in similar poses:
The original offending comparison photos
As the spotlight on the case grew, Ciftci lost his job in October last year while facing up to two years in prison for violating Article 301 of the Turkish constitution, which punishes anyone who “publicly denigrates state officials, the Government of the Republic of Turkey and the judicial institutions of the state”.
The report was handed to the court on Wednesday and signed by Esra Bilgic, an academic at Bilgi University, Sercan Keceli, a psychologist, and Serhat Damar, a clinical psychologist.
Ciftci’s lawyer, Hicran Danisman, called for his client to be acquitted and for his post to be seen as within the scope of freedom of expression and not a case of defamation.
“Our defence from the very beginning was along these lines. The posted images should have been considered in the context of freedom of expression. We don’t want the court to acquit my client because ‘Gollum is not evil’ but within the scope of freedom of expression,” Cumhuriyet quoted him as saying.
A letter written on behalf of Erdogan, asking for most cases of defamation against him to be dropped in the wake of the 15 July coup attempt to promote national unity, has reached the court.
The court will take it into consideration during the next hearing scheduled for 25 October.
Meanwhile, Murat Saz, the judge hearing the case was arrested on 21 July after the botched coup attempt and is accused of being a member of Fethullah Gulen’s movement.
Turkish authorities accuse Gulen, a US-based Turkish preacher, and his followers who they say lie hidden in Turkey’s state apparatus, of being behind the coup attempt.
The court had previously rejected the expert report on Gollum because it was not jointly prepared by the three appointed experts.
Myanmar's Minister of Foreign Affairs Aung San Suu Kyi speaks during an event at the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York City, U.S. September 21, 2016. REUTERS/Bria Webb
UNITED NATIONS-By David Brunnstrom-Fri Sep 23, 2016
The European Union praised Myanmar's progress on human rights under the leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi on Friday and said that it would not be introducing a resolution at the United Nations condemning the country's record for the first time in 15 years.
Addressing the Partnership Group on Myanmar at the United Nations General Assembly, EU Foreign Policy chief Federica Mogherini called Suu Kyi's progress from political prisoner to government "powerful testimony to the incredible change Myanmar is going through."
"The government has taken bold measures to improve human rights and re-invigorate the peace process. Political prisoners have been released," she said.
Mogherini said steps had also "been taken against those who incite hatred" and a commission established under former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to address violence between majority Buddhists and Muslim Rohingyas in Myanmar's state of Rakhine.
"Today we mark another important step in our relationship," Mogherini said. "For the first time in fifteen years, the European Union will not table a human rights resolution on Myanmar in the Third Committee of the U.N. General Assembly."
Addressing Suu Kyi, she said: "Fifteen years is the measure of the incredible distance Myanmar has walked, the measure of how much your country has changed."
Mogherini said the European Union understood the "complexity" of the situation in Rakhine and told Suu Kyi: "I know that you area working hard to find a sustainable solution for both communities."
Suu Kyi has been criticized for doing too little to address the plight of the Rohingya Muslims.
In her first address to the General Assembly as national leader on Wednesday, she defended her government's efforts to resolve the crisis there and asked for "understanding" and "the constructive contribution" of other countries.
She said the government would persevere in its efforts to achieve peace in Rakhine and stand firm "against the forces of prejudice and intolerance."
Increased freedom of speech since the military stepped back from direct rule in Myanmar in 2011 has allowed for the unleashing of long-held anti-Muslim sentiment.
Around 125,000 Rohingya remain confined in temporary camps after waves of deadly violence in 2012 between Buddhists and Muslims, when more than 100 people were killed.
The Rohingya have been seen by much of the Buddhist population as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, even though many have lived in Myanmar for generations. Most were stripped of their ability to vote in last year's election, which brought Suu Kyi to power as de facto leader.
(Reporting by David Brunnstrom; editing by Grant McCool)
Malaysian National Police Chief Khalid Abu Bakar. Pic: AP.
POLICE in Malaysia have arrested a right-wing activist for allegedly making death threats against the organiser of a planned rally to call for Prime Minister Najib Razak’s resignation.
Inspector General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar said Mohd Ali Baharom – or “Ali Tinju” as he is more commonly known – was detained by police after allegedly threatening the life of the Coalition of Clean and Far Elections (Bersih 2.0) chairman Maria Chin Abdullah.
Khalid said Ali Tinju’s arrest was proof that the police did not practice double standards as various netizens and opposition leaders had earlier claimed.
Khalid was referring to the arrest of opposition lawmaker Jeff Ooi from the Democratic Action Party who was arrested recently over a Twitter posting for insulting religious sentiments following the death of prominent Islamic leader Haron Din, of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic party, over the weekend.
“We have already arrested Ali Tinju. He is currently free on bail now. Same like Jeff Ooi. There is no double standard,” Khalid said during a news conference, as quoted by the Malay Mail Online.
“He had surrendered himself and was investigated and has been released after,” he added.
Ali Tinju’s arrest came after a local online news portal reported him saying that he planned to “ambush” Chin.
“I will ambush her in the near future. Even if I have to spend 10 years in prison, I don’t mind.
“Wait and see. She won’t feel peace and even with 10 or 20 bodyguards, we will whip them,” he was quoted as saying by Free Malaysia Today on Sept 14.
“She has to remember. I’m worried she may no longer walk on this earth. These are the words of a former soldier.
“Don’t challenge us or we will make it so that her legs point upwards and her head points downward to the ground,” he went on to say.
Several opposition figures and civil society groups denounced Ali Tinju’s threats with some lodging police reports calling on authorities to take action.
Khalid said Ali Tinju, a former soldier, is being investigated for criminal intimidation.
Anti-government dissidents in Malaysia have been campaigning long and hard against Najib, who they believe is involved in the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) corruption scandal.
Chin is a main organiser of the mass anti-Najib demonstration, dubbed Bersih 5 to denote the fifth edition of the electoral watchdog’s street rally, which is expected to be held on Nov 19. Protestors of the Bersih protests typically don yellow shirts during the rallies.
One long marcher on the Left now working in Team Corbyn says they can’t thank Owen Smith and his team enough.
They have delivered “a shot in the arm” for Mr Corbyn’s leadership. The infighting has been damaging but the end result is dreamy: an increased mandate, enemies scattered and winded, clueless about the way ahead, more than a few contemplating a life away from politics.
Many Labour MPs were against the whole idea of a leadership challenge. They include some who supported the walkout from the frontbench and the vote of no confidence.
Those tactics, some MPs claim, looked at one point like they had very nearly pushed Jeremy Corbyn over the edge. Mr Corbyn’s aides deny it, but many Labour MPs insist that Mr Corbyn and some of his closest team members were ready to throw in the towel after the uprising against him in the wake of the referendum result.
Then came a challenge Mr Corbyn was bound to defeat. Some in the parliamentary party, mainly people we used to call Brownites, thought Angela Eagle had been lent on by Blairites including Margaret MacDonagh, former General Secretary of the Labour Party, to mount a challenge.
There was resistance to Angela Eagle as candidate and Owen Smith became the eventual candidate. But by tomorrow lunchtime this will be exposed as more than just a doomed mission, more a massive strategic error that will cement in Mr Corbyn more strongly than ever.
A few hours after Mr Corbyn’s victory, expected to be bigger than his margin of victory last year, the National Executive Committee will sit. At its last meeting some of Mr Corbyn’s critics were pushing for Shadow Cabinet elections.
Some MPs who quit the front bench say they’re only willing to go back in to the team if they go back in decent numbers, voted in by their fellow Corbyn critics in Parliament.
That proposal didn’t get anywhere at Tuesday’s NEC. It could be discussed again tomorrow, but then it again it might not.
Mr Corbyn’s allies are acutely conscious that a Shadow Cabinet dominated by his critics could elect anti-Corbynites elected to the three places reserved for the Shadow Cabinet on the NEC.
The NEC has been the holy grail of Left campaigns since the 1970s. Control of that body means you control the party, the Left always felt. And having increased their power on the committee in a series of moves (that started with the removal of Hilary Benn at last year’s conference) they now feel they are on the brink of control.
The NEC this week may have been a setback for Team Corbyn when it was slightly blind-sided by the push to get Scottish Labour and Welsh Labour places on the NEC, places which the anti-Corbyn forces believe they will dominate. But Mr Corbyn’s critics think at best they have parity with his forces as things stand, at worst he’s got a very narrow majority.
As I write, I’m told that Jeremy Corbyn is meeting with Rosie Winterton, the Chief Whip. I understand Mr Corbyn’s team have made it clear they didn’t want a delegation from the Parliamentary Labour Party turning up – the meeting should be one-on-one.
I’m not clear whether people are now being patted down for weaponry when they meet, but you sense that’s the spirit in which people are meeting: wary rival gangs engaged in an existential battle which both sides believe could reach a definitive moment here in Liverpool.
What are the hopes of the anti-Corbynistas as Labour meets? Some talk of Round Three – taking on Corbyn again, preferably after an early General Election, which Theresa May doesn’t seem about to oblige them with.
Some talk of making a move on Unite’s national executive, pushing some Corbyn critics into elected office there – maybe, if he runs again, toppling Len McCluskey. “Slightly fanciful,” one senior Labour figure called that.
Then there’s the “just keep plugging away and something will turn up” view. One Labour figure said to me that he derives hope from episodes like the NEC on Tuesday: “Every time they (Team Corbyn – it’s always “them” and “us”) plunge the detonator they fail to make an explosion.” Errors by Team Corbyn could save the day, this theory runs.
But Team Corbyn have a lot of cards as of Saturday lunchtime. The party is also more flush with money than any time anyone can remember. That, many think, is a good moment to cull the ranks of party officials, starting with the General Secretary and working down to the regional officials and below.
selection threats hanging over many Labour MPs. selections, one close Corbyn aide said: “We’re not going to organise that … if that happens it will be spontaneous and it will happen in a number of cases.” Note the distancing and note the certainty.
On the bigger question of the political mission, the same Corbyn confidante said to me: “Failure in elections is not failure. We want to change the way the economy is run. You don’t win overnight.”
He went on: “We don’t want to win (the next general election) by becoming an alienating force. Blairism was excessively short-termist and made many of the (country’s) problems worse.”
They won’t worry about it, but a walk round the fringe stalls set up here already outside the Conference hall suggests corporate Britain is not here a-wooing.
Jeremy Corbyn’s troops are sick with the compromises sought with right-wing voters, “feeding the fires” over welfare and immigration, as one ally put it.
They want real change, and if that means missing out on the opportunity for a “Tory-lite” Labour administration, they’ll live with that.
This week in Liverpool could see their cause advanced considerably, many think irreversibly.
An estimated 5.6 percent of people self-identify as online trolls, according to a recent survey. Considering how many people use the internet daily, that's a ton of people. It explains why the internet seems lousy with trolls, and social media feeds feel positively glutted with their presence. The proliferation of trollery seems to raise the question, just who are these people, and what’s their deal? More importantly, what drives them to do what they do?
It can be tricky to talk about trolling, if only because the word has become a catchall for online behaviors that differ so wildly as to be wholly incomparable. Trolling used be playful but annoying, a sort of virtual, comedic performance art with the end goal of getting under the skin of a selected online audience. Today the word is more often used to describe some of the most despicable behaviors we see on the internet and social media apps, from stalking and harassment to violent threats and expressions of racism, homophobia and misogyny.
There remain, in the ever-crowded trollscape, those who practice the art in its old-school form. These people are generally hilarious and creative, operating in a way that would make Andy Kaufman proud. Ken M, often hailed as the world’s greatest internet troll, told Vox that he plays a “well-meaning moron” on the internet, leaving a trail of dunderheaded, obtuse statements in comment threads that infuriate people who don’t realize his idiocy is all part of an exceptionally clever ruse. He says he started trolling when he “tried to engage with people seriously” online and “slowly realized that it was such a futile effort to try to have a rational discourse. I suddenly decided to make it as irrational as possible.”
“Sites that have the most dysfunctional comment communities are the ones that I go to,” Ken M says, highlighting Yahoo News. “Some of these interactions that I have, it’s like Borscht Belt stuff. I say one thing, and somebody’s like, ‘Whaddaya mean?’ And then I drop the punchline. There’s something so pure about that, like, corny, old-timey joke structure that I love. And then I love the fact that these people don’t know that they’re part of it.”
Jon Hendren tweets as @fart from what may legitimately be the funniest Twitter in the world. (Really. Go read it.) He’s been behind notable stunts before, like sending rapper Pitbull to a Walmart in a remoteAlaska location and getting the lead singer from Smash Mouth to eat a “shit-ton of eggs.” Last year, Hendren became even more internet-famous when he accepted an invitation from cable news network HLN to take part in an ostensibly serious discussion about Edward Snowden, and spent the interview talking about Edward Scissorhands. The stunt effectively worked as a form of media criticism, pointing out how, in the chase for ratings in clickbait, the channel had failed to do the most basic due diligence in researching their guest.
“When the HLN folks emailed me, it was a very brief email. They just said, 'Hey, Jon. Do you have any thoughts on Edward Snowden on Twitter? We'll have you on and we'll talk about it,'" Hendren told me. “Some people thought that they were actually supposed to get [Al-Jazeera reporter John Hendren]. But, I mean, when they put @fart up on the screen there, it was pretty obvious that [I wasn’t him]. I think it was a cheap way to get a guest or a cheap way to find content, maybe a retweet out of somebody popular [on Twitter]. But I'm absolutely not an expert.”
“I do think Edward [Snowden] is a great guy and he should be pardoned in all these things, but I am not the person to talk about that on television,” Hendren continued. “It's just a bad decision. I decided to try to highlight how bad of a decision that was. They probably got yelled at by somebody, which is terrible. But also it's a flawed premise to begin with and I'm glad that show was canceled because it's not a great show. It was never going to be a great show.”
Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
Trolls whose agenda is less purely comedic and more political have also become a familiar breed. One example is the founder of Modern Liberals, who goes by the nom de internet Manny Schewitz. He told me he’s been “trolling conservatives for years on Facebook, even before the 2012 election,” going back to the days of “message forums and elsewhere online where right-wingers spewed lies and hateful rhetoric.”
“I use trolling because trying to get through to most right-wingers with logic is nearly impossible,”
Schewitz wrote me, via email. “I know, because I was raised in a very conservative household. If you troll them and get them off their script, you can then force them to do some really interesting mental gymnastics and maybe rethink their belief systems ever so slightly. You can't knock the wall down, but you can create dozens of little cracks in it. I'm not a nasty troll, although I can be utterly vicious when dealing with alt-right and white supremacist idiots.”
Schewitz's victories have included trolling a local woman who was making racist comments “until I had plenty of material I could send to her parish priest, which I threatened to do if she didn't knock it off. She did.”
“I like to have fun,” Schewitz told me, “but I have no problem screencapping someone's online comments and sending it to their employer, and yes, I have had people terminated from their jobs for things they've said online.” He’s also trolled Nigerian scammers, and succeeded in turning the con around on its perpetrator. He considers himself a white-hat troll, versus trolls of the nefarious, black-hat variety, and focuses on Facebook pages of targets from his local area. “I believe I'm doing it for good, and to protect others. Like the Nigerian scammers, I would prefer the bad trolls spend their time fighting with me, instead of someone who can't handle them. I sort of think of it as a guardian role, if that's the right term for it.”
“Trolling is also a form of therapy to me,” he added, when I asked why it was his method of choice. “It's fun to blow off steam at the end of a long day at work by making some conservative figure on Twitter lose their minds, or goad a racist on Reddit into saying things that get them banned by the mods.”
Matt Saccaro wrote about his youthful exploits in trolling in a 2015 piece titled, “I Was a Libertarian Internet Troll—How I Turned My Mind Around.” He describes his adolescence as someone who frequented the OT (off topic; non-game related) subforum, mostly to troll it:
I posted threads sure to provoke hundreds of scathing responses. Perhaps my favorite was one examining whether America needed the “fascism” that liberal types accused George W. Bush of to triumph over its enemies at home and abroad (keep in mind, this was during the initial phases of Operation Iraqi Freedom). One poster asked me about the identities of the “enemies at home.” I said liberals. The thread went on for dozens of pages.
I asked him why he indulged in trolling, and he suggested attention, boredom and loneliness all played a factor.
“If I had to guess, I think I started trolling because I had no real outlet of any kind in real life, be it creative, emotional, or otherwise,” Saccaro wrote me. “I was, essentially, sad and miserable and didn't have many friends. But nobody knew that on the internet, so they took what I had to say seriously—at least for a time. Moments of success made me feel almost giddy, like I couldn't stop smiling. I felt a bizarre kind of power, too... I loved making them—the other forum posters—into my little action figures in that I was controlling by making them react to all these ridiculous posts. Bizarre, I know. Eventually I made a few friends but enjoyed trolling so much that I just kept doing it. Nothing made me feel the same way.”
Saccaro, who described the roots of his conservative thinking as a young adult in another article (“I Was a Teenaged Fox News Robot”), left trolling behind after he graduated from college. He says that while “getting banned from any forum I actually wanted to post on helped” with his decision, he also “realized how pointless it was.” He began writing, which filled the need for validation trolling had previously occupied. “Then, of course, there is the revelation that pissing people off on the internet accomplishes nothing. Why hurt someone? What does that do? I get that it's all 'for the lulz' [lols, or laughs] but there were no more lulz to be had for me.”
I asked him if, as a former libertarian troll, he has any insight into the thinking of the often-abusive alt-right trolls who now fill 4chan and 8chan messageboards.
“I'm no expert on any of this, particularly political philosophy and the psychology behind libertarianism, so take what I say with a grain of salt,” he wrote. “But I think some trolls are just people who don't have a lot going for them IRL [in real life] like I did: few if any friends, unpopular, suboptimal home life, etc. So perhaps some of this comes from people looking for any kind of validation/attention they can find. Any harassment these people do could perhaps be interpreted as lashing out, though I'm not a therapist! Though there are also people who seemingly have it together IRL but still resort to libertarian dogma....Libertarianism can be extremely appealing to white men as it absolves them of all guilt, and in their own minds, elevates them. Toxic masculinity is a part of this as well, at least recently. The slur 'cuck' wouldn't be as widely used if it wasn't.”
While trolls are overwhelmingly white and male, there are outliers. Jessica Moreno, formerly of Reddit, used to run Redditgifts, the site’s Secret Santa-style gift exchange. Personal information provided by those who took part in the program offered insights into their offline lives. Moreno says just because a user engaged in trolling didn’t always mean they fit the popular image of a troll.
“The idea of the basement dweller drinking Mountain Dew and eating Doritos isn’t accurate,” Moreno told Time Magazine contributor Joel Stein. “They would be a doctor, a lawyer, an inspirational speaker, a kindergarten teacher. They’d send lovely gifts and be a normal person.”
Isabella Tangherlini wrote about her trolling past, which started when she discovered troll wiki Encyclopædia Dramatica as a teen and ended with her uneventful trolling of Chris-Chan, “a 24-year-old, high-functioning autistic man who made videos... about his fan-made comics and figurine collections” who somehow became a primary target for 4channers back in 2010.
I asked what she got out of trolling during the years she participated in it.
“I feel like it was my fascination with 4chan, and that kind of culture, and my age, and the fact that I was depressed, and I was going through an abusive relationship, and I had all these internal problems,” Tangherlini told me. “I would definitely say that it's almost like a cliché that the bully online, or the bully in school, is actually having a tough home life, but I would also feel uncomfortable suggesting that everybody on 4chan, or everybody that does this kind of thing, is depressed or somehow neurodivergent.”
In her writing, Tangherlini describes how one's internet personality and one's everyday personality ultimately meld, which had implications on her behavior away from her computer:
The thing about being an internet troll, though, is that eventually who you are online and who you are offline start to blur together. And when you post on places like 4chan, those two personalities meld into something uniquely unpleasant. To be short, I was a really mean high school sophomore. I would openly bash my Jewish classmates. Despite being [an out] member of the LGBT community myself, I freely used the word “faggot” in everyday speech... I saw nothing wrong with what I was doing or who I had become. For me, everyone was in on the joke. It wasn’t my fault if they couldn’t detect the sarcasm in my voice, or tell that I wasn’t really anti-Semitic or racist or homophobic. As far as I was concerned, the uninitiated were beneath my notice—4chan was like a secret club that only a few people could join, despite the millions of users worldwide who posted there.
“It starts with the language, but it doesn't really progress into a mentality for some. For me, it never really stuck, and today, after everything that I've done, everything I've gone through, everything I've learned in school, I guess my morals and my views align more with a social justice warrior, as they like to call it,” Tangherlini told me, referring to the supposed slur so-called men’s rights activists and like-minded types use against those who disagree with them. “It's kind of funny to me. I started off as one of these awful, awful trolls or awful 4chan-ers, and now I'm an SJW, and it's like, okay, call it what you want, but I'm still someone who spends too much time on the internet."
Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.
162 bodies retrieved after migrant boat capsizes off Egypt Egyptian coast guard and rescue workers bring ashore bodies recovered from a Europe-bound boat that capsized off Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, in Rosetta, Egypt, Thursday, Sept. 22, 2016. According to the Egyptian health ministry, at least 50 bodies have been recovered so far from the early Wednesday disaster and up to a 100 more migrants remain unaccounted for in what could potentially rank among the deadliest incidents in the migrant route across the Mediterranean. Thousands of illegal migrants have made the dangerous sea voyage in recent years, fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and elsewhere. (Eman Helal/Associated Press)
By Maggie Hyde and Maggie Michael | APSeptember 23 at 1:37 PM
ROSETTA, Egypt — The bodies of 162 people had been pulled from the waters off the Egyptian coast by Friday, two days after a boat carrying hundreds of migrants capsized in the Mediterranean while attempting to head to Europe.
Dozens more are feared dead, said Mohammed Sultan, the governor of Beheira, who provided The Associated Press with the latest figures. He also said that the search operation is still ongoing. Many of them are believed to be children and women who were unable to swim away when the boat sank.
Wahdan el-Sayyed, the spokesman of the Nile Delta province of Beheira, told The Associated Press that the search operation was ongoing.
An AP reporter near the Nile Delta city of Rosetta saw between 20 to 30 bodies brought in by coast guards in gray inflatable boats and fishermen in wooden boats early Friday morning and delivered to ambulances at the coast guard pier. Pictures posted on social networking sites showed dozens of bodies lined up in black plastic bags, and others floating near wooden fishing boats. Videos showed that some fishermen were using nets to bring up the bodies.
In one video, a fisherman was heard shouting into his mobile phone that, “the sea is littered with bodies.”
Many of those gathered at the shore where the bodies arrived appeared to be wearing surgical masks to protect them from the smell of decaying bodies. Some brought chunks of ice to be placed on the bodies to prevent them from decomposing.
Authorities have struggled to give accurate figures for the number of people on board the capsized vessel.
The U.N. Refugee Agency, UNHCR, estimated that the boat was packed with some 450 people, while the state news agency MENA said earlier that the number might be as high as 600.
The boat was located nearly 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) from the Nile Delta port city of Rosetta when it sank. It had waited at sea for many hours — perhaps days — for smaller wooden boats carrying migrants to arrive from different points along the Egyptian coastline.
Survivors said that overcrowding caused the boat to capsize.
Egyptian officials said that over 160 people were rescued and that the majority are Egyptians, while the others are Sudanese and other nationalities, including Somalians and Eritreans.
The head of the local council in the area, Ali Abdel-Sattar, said that the currents have carried the bodies of the victims many kilometers away from the site of the sinking. “Today, four bodies, including two Egyptian children, were found 20 kilometers to the east,” he told the AP.
He added that many of the migrants are believed to have been “stored in the bottom of the boat, in the fridge.”
“Those are the ones who drowned first, most probably stuck, and their bodies might not be retrieved anytime soon,” he said, adding, “those we found are the ones liberated from the boat. I believe many are stuck and now laying in the bottom of the sea.” He said the boat may now have sunk to 16 meters (yards) below sea level.
The EU border agency, Frontex, recently said more than 12,000 migrants arrived in Italy from Egypt between January and September this year, compared to 7,000 in the same period last year. Yet UNHCR says that since 2014 there has been a steady increase in the number of people intercepted while trying to leave Egypt, with 4,600 people arrested this year, a 28-percent increase compared to the previous year.
On Thursday, four people described as members of the vessel’s crew were arrested over charges of human trafficking and manslaughter.
At a small pier called el-Borg, hundreds of families had gathered Friday, hoping to identify the bodies of their loved ones. Women screamed and relatives pushed and shoved while swarming the ambulances heading to the hospital.
Fishermen said that they had difficulty collecting the badly decomposed bodies, with one saying, “we didn’t know how to pull them out.”
Survivors and relatives told the AP earlier that the boat sank around 5:30 a.m. on Wednesday, and that it took coast guards around six hours to come to the rescue. Fishing boats in the vicinity were the first to provide help.
“I have never seen such a large number of people drowning in the waters as I saw that day,” a 42-year-old fisherman told AP.
He said he arrived at 11 a.m. in the morning and helped the survivors. “We threw the ropes, we pulled them in, and many were unconscious. The strong majority are youngsters,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of security fears.
Many of the survivors were briefly detained by police. Some of those rescued were taken to hospitals, where they lay handcuffed to beds and under police guard.
The Egyptian news portal, Al-Youm al-Sabei, published interviews with several survivors who said that before their journey the migrants had been “stored” for several days in chicken farms by the traffickers to evade police. Some of the interviewees said the traffickers asked for $6250 per family, to be given on arrival in Italy.
After his release, survivor Ahmed Darwish said, “my advice is that no one should undertake this risk, and especially anyone who saw these things, they will never do it again.”
The International Organization for Migration has said that this year over 3,500 have died while attempting to cross the Mediterranean to Europe, with this number “rapidly approaching” the record death toll set last year.
Those who chose to risk the dangerous journey are often fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and elsewhere.
___
Michael contributed to this story from Cairo, Egypt
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Wearing an activity device that counts how many steps you have taken does not appear to improve the chances of losing weight, research suggests.
The two-year long study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) included nearly 500 overweight volunteers who were asked to diet and take more exercise.
Half were given a fitness tracker to help them keep tabs.
This group had lost less weight than the other one by the end of the trial.
The study authors say this does not mean people should ditch the technology altogether, but neither should they put too much faith in them, at least as a slimming aid.
Manufacturers say that the technology has moved on since the study, and that their own research suggests activity trackers can help with weight loss alongside diet and exercise regimes.
Gimmick?
Despite the popularity of activity trackers, there have been very few studies to see what actual impact they have on weight and fitness levels.
The University of Pittsburgh research is one of the first randomised trials to gather such evidence.
The investigators found that over the course of the study, the volunteers who wore the fitness trackers had lost, on average, about 8lb (3.6kg).
In comparison, the control group that were not given these devices lost about 13lb (5.9kg).
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGHImage captionDr Jakicic says he had expected the devices would boost weight loss
The study authors say there are many possible explanations for this surprising finding but, as yet, no proof.
Lead researcher Dr John Jakicic said: "People have a tendency to use gadgets like these for a while and then lose interest with time as the novelty wears off.
"And we did see a drop off in the usage data as the study went on."
Perhaps people who use fitness trackers became fixated on exercise goals and forgot to follow the diet advice, Dr Jakicic suggested.
"You might think to yourself, 'I'm being so active I can eat a cupcake now,'" he said.
Dr Jakicic said he would like to explore if certain people were more likely than others to benefit from using the technology.
For example, a person who was very goal-driven might find tracking their exercise regime very motivating. - but others might just find it depressing.
"It might be very discouraging if you can see that you are not hitting your target all the time," he said.
He acknowledged that technology had moved on since the study began, but he did not think that would alter the findings.
"What these devices tell us and how we use the information has not changed," he said.
According to research company CCS Insight, UK sales of wearable devices - activity trackers and smart watches - are expected to reach five million, with 10 million devices expected to be in use before the end of 2016.
Dr David Ellis, a psychologist at Lancaster University, who has been researching the rise of consumer health wearables said the JAMA study was helpful because it focused on people who might not normally go out and buy an activity tracker.
"Fitness trackers are more likely to be bought by people who already lead a healthy lifestyle and want to monitor their progress. So it's hard to say if they are useful for everybody," he said.
"In real life, obviously, most people won't get the level of support to lose weight that the people in this study did.
"They would have to do it on their own, so wearing a device might be better than nothing. We just don't know."
Together with Pasumai Thaayagam and United States Tamil Political Action Council (USTPAC), British Tamils Forum (BTF) is holding a side event on “Militarisation and Land grab in Sri Lanka” at the 33rd session of the Human Rights Council from 3 PM to 4 PM, Thursday 22nd September at Room XXVII in Palais des Nations.
Panellists: Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director, The Oakland Institute, USA www.oaklandinstitute.org Wes Streeting, Member of Parliament (UK), Vice Chair of All Party Parliamentary Group for Tamils Paul Scully, Member of Parliament (UK), Vice Chair of All Party Parliamentary Group for Tamils Objective of this event is to reveal the current field situation in the North and East of Sri Lanka, which has been craftily masked from the international community by the present Sri Lankan Government. We hope to enlighten the audience with research based analysis, which will reveal the extent of planning and coordination involved in effecting a long term and permanent demographic change in the Tamil homeland. This in the long term will have far reaching consequence for the Tamil people’s political and economic rights in Sri Lanka. If not stopped now, this could revive resentment and may lead to the re-ignition of the conflict. The present Sri Lankan regime which has morphed itself into a ‘good governance’ government at its core has the same ‘Mahavamsa’ – ideology engrained in its state apparatuses. This is the reason that through its use of land grab and intense militarisation, it is continuing on the process of colonising the strategic land and natural economic resources in the Tamil homeland. By promising a constitutional change to the Tamil political leadership and promising improvements in human rights and accountability to the international community it has bought time to effect these permanent demographic changes in the Tamil homeland. This is the reason that the Sri Lankan president and the government continuously request time to effect very minimal changes.
“A hero is not coz someone puts on a uniform and picked up a weapon… but because he put it down and stood up for the truth” – Dahlia Wasfi, M.D.
Dear Sir,
Having gone through a period of self-induced hibernation for almost a year, let me first thank you for being that person who made me pick up my ‘pen’ again. Though I have chosen not to read your book due to your stoic silence in the last 7 years and assuming it was your solo effort, let me also congratulate you on your first attempt in the literary world. But before I delve deeper, let me start with the following questions:
1. Why did you even bother writing a book if you are not willing to tell the truth and nothing but the truth?
2. Based on your claim that you will never betray the SL Army under any circumstances, does it mean even if they had committed war crimes?
3. Based on your claim that you will take war secrets to your grave, being a military officer, can you please give a definition to the two words – ‘war secrets’? And do ‘rules of engagement’ have anything to do with this ‘war secrets’ that you talk of?
4. What were the real reason behind narrating a story about FM Sarath Fonseka berating you over your ‘failure to capture’ LTTE Supremo Prabhakaran a day earlier? Was it to spice up the contents and to sell more books?
5. On an interview a couple of days ago, you talked about doing a service for ‘Ratata & Jaathiyata’ while wearing Army uniforms for 35 years. Does it mean in addition to fighting for the country, were you fighting for the Sinhalese race as well? And if so, did it ever impair your judgement when on killing sprees against people belonging to a different race?
6. If the well documented killing of tens of thousands innocent Tamil civilians (Sri Lankans) has not been acknowledged by you, do you really think you have the right to talk about patriotism (love for the country and its people)? Or were you just being patriotic to the Sinhalese race only?
7. Were you in a coma or in a deep slumber when unnamed forces (allegedly linked to SL Army) abducted and killed many civilians extra-judicially under the Rajapaksa government and even before?
8. Did you not think of your poorly-thought-of decision to invite Mr. Mahinda Rajapaksa to grace your book launching occasion being considered as an insult to millions of law abiding citizens who made their case against multi-million theft of public funds and murderous leaders on January 08, 2015? Or is it that you consider Mr. Mahinda Rajapaksa to be the most patriotic leader Sri Lanka ever produced?
9. Having watched a recent interview of yours where you distanced yourself from politics while castigating negative remarks about army officials getting into politics on retirement, were the remarks intended at Field Marshal Sarath Fonseka as an indication of your deep-rooted resentment towards him?
