"In a statement on Wednesday, Brazil condemned what it said was a 'disproportionate use of force' by Israel in its Gaza Strip offensive by pulling out its ambassador from Tel Aviv for 'consultation.' The country is the second country to recall its ambassador from Israel; Ecuador did so earlier in the week. At first, the official reaction from Israel appeared sanguine. "Brazil is a friend, but we think its position is not balanced," Israel's general consul in São Paulo, Yoel Barnea, said according to the Wall Street Journal, adding that Israel should have a right to defend itself from the thousands of missiles being fired at it by Hamas and other Palestinian groups. Things soon took a turn for the worse. “This is an unfortunate demonstration of why Brazil, an economic and cultural giant, remains a diplomatic dwarf,” Israeili Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said on Thursday, the Jerusalem Post reports. “The moral relativism behind this move makes Brazil an irrelevant diplomatic partner, one who creates problems rather than contributes to solutions.' That insult wasn't the worst that Israel had reserved for Brazil, however. In an interview with the Brazilian media, Palmor brought up the most humiliating moment in recent Brazilian history – this summer's stunning World Cup semifinal loss to Germany. 'Israel's response is perfectly proportioned in accordance with international law,' Palmor said in an interview with the Jornal Nacional TV show late Thursday. 'This is not football. In football, when a game ends in a draw, you think it is proportional, but when it finishes 7-1 it's disproportionate. Sorry to say, but not so in real life and under international law.'" (WashPo)
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| British-American writer, reporter, cartoonist, art critic, poet, and socialite Anthony Haden-Guest. |
"Anthony Haden-Guest, born 2 February 1937, is a British-American writer, reporter, cartoonist, art critic, poet, and socialite. He is a frequent contributor to major magazines and has had several books published.This is how Anthony is described in the short Wikipedia biography of him. It’s pretty much on the money despite the more interesting inferences. For example, Wikipedia includes a blurb, written by his half-brother Christopher Guest, the actor/director/writer, for Anthony’s book 'The Chronicles of Now, a book of Anthony’s cartoons: 'Boring, pompous and a complete and utter waste of time. I don’t know what my brother was thinking.' That quote cracked me up, and it would you, if you knew the man Anthony. I couldn’t help wondering if indeed Anthony had written it himself, because he is very good at the occasional poke at the self. If you don’t know about him, he’s like a character out of a book. In fact Tom Wolfe’s best-selling 'Bonfire at the Vanities' has a character in it named Peter Fallow, who is said to be modeled on Anthony. In some ways, the portrait-ish characterization rings true of aspects of the man’s personality. But in other ways, it's Wolfe's portrait of an idea for a character possibly inspired or enhanced by Anthony’s wild ways. We’ve known each other for a couple of decades. Not well, but knowing Anthony for any length of time is to know him. He’s one of those people who lives his life as he pleases and openly, is endlessly curious, brilliantly witty in a way that only the English can be, and potentially eccentric, or maybe not even potentially. When I used to see him back in the 90s – we’ve seen much less of each other in the past decade -- he was often in black tie and could be found at Mortimer’s late nights after the parties, imbibing and conversing with pleasure and sharing such with with whomever he was conversing. He’s very very smart and deeply sensitive despite the devil-may-care adventurous bent of his life." (NYSD)
"The new film based on John le Carré’s novel A Most Wanted Man features the last significant Philip Seymour Hoffman performance (there are still two Hunger Games movies in the pipeline), and part of me wishes I could report that he was at low ebb, at the end of his talent as well as his tether: It would make his loss easier to bear from an artistic (if not a human) standpoint. But what’s on display here is a great actor at his absolute peak — damn it all. Hoffman plays German spymaster Gunther Bachmann — a post–Cold War, post–9/11 George Smiley figure who understands espionage more deeply than his superiors or the hovering CIA agents. The setting is Hamburg, where an escaped Turkish prisoner named Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) — the devout Muslim son of a corrupt Russian general and a Chechen woman — arrives to secure a vast inheritance from a German bank for purposes unknown. Most everyone is in a hurry to whisk Issa off to some black site for interrogation, but Bachmann, a self-described 'cave-dweller' who smokes and drinks heavily and spends hours staring into monitors, has a deeper grasp of human complexity. He’s not sure Issa is a bad guy, and he suspects there are shades of gray in the probable recipient of Issa’s money, the moderate Muslim academic Dr. Faisal Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi), who might be giving a small part of what he collects for charity to terrorist organizations. Unlike his counterparts, Bachmann isn’t a hasty blunderer. He understands — like Smiley — that the better agent plays the long game." (NYMag)
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