Pabi, Emi, Roary

When Emi and Pablo and I walked to campus, this happened.

Fine Dining at the Colorwheel!

We provide the bibs.

Aught Seven, Act One, Scene Two: Asia

In early March, Vladimir Putin installed Ramzan Kadyrov, a 30-year-old reputed warlord and torturer, as the acting president of Chechnya. He was sworn in on April 5th.

A little background: On September 13, 2004, following the Beslan school hostage crisis, Putin launched an initiative to replace the direct election of the governors of Russia with a system whereby they would be proposed by the President that is, Putin) and approved or disapproved by regional legislatures.

Born in 1976, Kadyrov is the son of former Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, a muslim imam, who was assassinated on May 9, 2004. In the early 1990s, the Kadyrovs--father and son--fought against the federal forces in the First Chechen War and then defected to the Moscow side in the beginning of the Second Chechen War in 1999.

In August 2005, Ramzan declared that Europe's largest mosque would be built in place of the demolished ruins of Grozny's shattered downtown (the photo at left shows the work in progress). When he became the acting prime minister in December 2005, he banned the use and production of alcohol and spoke in favor of polygamy. In March 2006, he decreed that women would be forced to wear headscarves.

The German human rights group the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) has alleged that up to 70% of recent murder, torture, rape and kidnapping incidents in Chechnya have been committed by Kadyrov's thousands-strong paramilitary forces. On November 13, 2006 Human Rights Watch published a briefing paper on torture in Chechnya that claimed that torture "in both official and secret detention facilities is widespread and systematic in Chechnya." In many cases the perpetrators were so confident that there would be no consequences for their abuses that they did not attempt to conceal their identity.

Today's Hero

Thanks , mostly, to the influence of Mari and Jack and Julie, I watch The Daily Show with John Stewart pretty much every day (the time-freezer captures it for us). I don't watch its time slot neighbor, The Colbert Report (which is, basically, a satire of The O'Reilly Report), but on my Slate-guided search for commentary about the "Day Without Immigrants" marches, I came across a transcript of the speech Mr. Colbert gave at the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner over the weekend, in which he mocked the man America voted into the Oval Office (said Warlord was at the head table beside him). Wow. All I can say is, Stephen Colbert: you da man. Apparently, Colbert, got the invite after John Stewart refused it. Blogger Jim Henley offers a compelling explanation of why the President was not the only one who didn't think Colbert was all that funny.