I hate the ICTY. I really, really hate them. I opened up my internet browser this morning and was greeted by this headline from the BBC: Court imposes lawyer on Karadzic.
The UN's Yugoslav war crimes court has appointed a lawyer for ex-Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and adjourned his genocide trial to 1 March....
The BBC does not deserve to call itself a news service. They are patently dishonest and do not report what happens but rather what they think should have happened. They blatantly falsify information and distort facts.
I base those accusations on the following story, whose headline I read with shock and disbelief: Karadzic defiant at Hague hearing.
Ex-Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has insisted he needs more time to prepare his defence, during his first appearance at his war crimes trial.
Mr Karadzic told a procedural hearing in The Hague that he had not been given the opportunity to go through vast amounts of prosecution documents.
He is representing himself and last week boycotted the start of his trial....
So, as far as I can tell, Dr. Karadzic was not in court today but will be appearing in court tomorrow for a procedural hearing. From the BBC: Karadzic 'will appear at trial'.
Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic says he will appear at his trial in The Hague on genocide and war crimes charges.
He boycotted the trial's start last week saying he needed more time to prepare his defence.
In a letter to the presiding judge, Mr Karadzic says he will attend a procedural hearing at the court on Tuesday to discuss his defence.
[...]
When he again failed to appear on Tuesday, presiding Judge O-Gon Kwon said he had chosen not to exercise his right to be present and "must therefore accept the consequences", announcing that the court would proceed in his absence.
He said the court would consider imposing a lawyer to represent Mr Karadzic if he continued to boycott proceedings.
The 64-year-old has decided to represent himself during the proceedings....
Dear Judge Kwon,
I wanted to give you the courtesy of letting you know that I will not be attending the trial on Monday, 2 November 2009 as I have not had adequate time to prepare for it.
I will, however, be pleased to attend the status conference on Tuesday, 3 November 2009. I hope we will be able to find a solution which will lead to not only an expeditious trial, but a fair one.
I assure you that I am continuing to work hard to prepare for my trial and look forward to making my own opening statement as soon as I am in a position to do so.
Respectfully submitted,
Radovan Karadzic
The man is absolutely amazing. He is one of the few people who truly gets Obama. He sees the narcissism, the inexperience, the lack of coherent strategy on Afghanistan, as well as much more. He also understands what a dire situation our country is in right now. He says that Joe Biden is a pompous windbag who's wrong about pretty much everything--I couldn't have said it better myself.
The man is absolutely brilliant. Here's an alternate place to watch the interview if the above video doesn't work. Watch the entire thing; it's amazing.
A book review of John McWhorter's Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English
I've always thought that English is a weird language. Seriously, nothing about it makes sense at all. As far as Indo-European languages go, it's just kind of odd. Verb conjugations are strange, lack of gender for nouns is strange, spelling is strange, and, as McWhorter points out, our use of the word do is strange.
McWhorter starts off his fascinating book focusing on what he calls the meaningless do. He points out how odd it is that we use the word do in phrasing questions or negative statements (such as Did you notice? or I did not listen).
Where is this odd usage come from? It's not present in any other Germanic languages or many languages in general, but is present in Celtic languages. And it is from Celtic languages that we have acquired this odd aspect of grammar, McWhorter argues. Linguists have often ignored the strong evidence that Celtic languages influenced English, attributing the similar usage of do in English and Celtic languages to pure chance. But there is strong evidence in this book that suggests just that it was not coincidence at all, but rather the intermingling of Celtic speakers with English speakers that caused this.
One of my random interests is psychology. I am currently taking an introductory psychology class at my university and it is very interesting. About a month ago, we started studying memory. We talked about a man named Clive Wearing and I did some more research on him a few weeks ago.
What I found out is rather depressing, actually. Wearing was an eminent musicologist who contracted a virus in 1985 that attacked his brain, causing sever retrograde amnesia and anterograde amnesia. Oliver Sacks wrote a beautiful essay in The New Yorker in 2007 about Clive Wearing:
In March of 1985, Clive Wearing, an eminent English musician and musicologist in his mid-forties, was struck by a brain infection—a herpes encephalitis—affecting especially the parts of his brain concerned with memory. He was left with a memory span of only seconds—the most devastating case of amnesia ever recorded. New events and experiences were effaced almost instantly....
In addition to this inability to preserve new memories, Clive had a retrograde amnesia, a deletion of virtually his entire past.
When he was filmed in 1986 for Jonathan Miller’s extraordinary documentary “Prisoner of Consciousness,” Clive showed a desperate aloneness, fear, and bewilderment. He was acutely, continually, agonizingly conscious that something bizarre, something awful, was the matter. His constantly repeated complaint, however, was not of a faulty memory but of being deprived, in some uncanny and terrible way, of all experience, deprived of consciousness and life itself....
A random person from this website emailed me, asking me to embed the following video about Dr. Karadzic's trial. I'm embedding it for what it's worth, but it's all rather predictable, being that the vast majority of the media is extremely anti-Serb.
One of the few media sources that is not stridently anti-Karadzic is the Serbian website Glas Srbije (Voice of Serbia). I'd highly recommend their articles.
As an interesting side note, "glas" appears to be the word for voice in Serbian. In Russian, it's голос (golos) and since the second "o" is reduced, it sounds very similar to the Serbian word, just with an extra syllable.
Yesterday was the second day of Dr. Radovan Karadzic's trial. As was reported on Monday, the good doctor himself was not present in court. But the tribunal allowed the prosecution to begin their case against him.
They, of course, told their usual lies against Dr. Karadzic:
Prosecutors at the genocide and war crimes trial of ex-Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic have branded him the leader of an ethnic cleansing campaign.
The court ruled the trial in The Hague could resume despite Mr Karadzic boycotting it for a second day.
In opening remarks, prosecutors said Mr Karadzic had "harnessed the forces of nationalism, hatred and fear" to pursue his vision of a state without Muslims.
Mr Karadzic denies all charges, which relate to the Bosnian war of the 1990s.
The former Bosnian Serb leader, who is representing himself at the trial, says he still needs at least nine months to prepare his defence....
Dr. Karadzic's trial opened today and Dr. Karadzic, of course, was not present in court.
First, from the Associated Press: Karadzic boycotts opening of his war crimes trial.
His chair was empty, his headphones lay idle on the desk. In Courtroom One at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, outraged survivors of Bosnia's bloody war gasped in disbelief Monday as judges adjourned the opening day of Radovan Karadzic's trial after just 15 minutes.
The former Bosnian Serb leader boycotted his war crimes trial, claiming he did not have enough time to prepare his defense — even though he was indicted in 1995 and had known he would be tried since being captured in Belgrade over 15 months ago.
It's official: Viktor Yanukovych is running for president of Ukraine. Of course, everyone knew that he was going to run, but he has been officially nominated by his party now. From RIA Novosti:
Ukraine's opposition Party of Regions on Friday officially nominated as presidential candidate its leader Viktor Yanukovych, seen as a frontrunner in the upcoming elections.
Ukrainian pollsters say none of the candidates is likely to garner 50% plus one vote, required to avoid a runoff, in the January 17 polls.
Recent surveys give Yanukovych, a former prime minister widely seen as pro-Russian, a 10-12% lead over Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. She has about 15% and former parliamentary speaker Arseniy Yatsenyuk is placed third with some 9%. However, up to 25% of voters are uncertain about their vote in the second round, making the final result less predictable.
Tymoshenko is to formally announce her participation in the elections on Saturday, during a rally on Kiev's Independence Square, the main venue of street protests against alleged ballot rigging, which swept President Viktor Yushchenko to power five years ago....
One of many Karadzic trial updates. I know the title of this post sounds strange, but it'll make sense by the end, I promise.
First, a news story from October 15 from the BBC: Hague fixes Karadzic trial date.
Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic will go on trial at The Hague on Monday 26 October, the court says.
It is the second time in a week that the trial - originally due to start on 19 October - has been put back.
But Mr Karadzic's attempts to have the start delayed by 10 months have been rejected by the court.
Mr Karadzic is charged with 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide, dating back to the Bosnian war.
[...]
The latest delay to the start date is to allow Mr Karadzic, who is defending himself, time to review new prosecution documents.
The court has called on the prosecution to present an updated indictment - or charge sheet - complete with prosecution notes, by 19 October....
On Monday in Ukraine, election campaigning for the presidential elections on January 17, 2010 has started, according to the BBC:
Ukraine's presidential election campaign is being formally launched, amid hopes it could drag the country out of its political paralysis.
Opinion polls suggest the pro-Western President, Viktor Yushchenko, is unlikely even to make a run-off in the election, set for 17 January.
Since coming to power after the Orange Revolution in 2004, political arguments have crippled his attempts at reform.
His popularity levels have dipped into single figures.
The main challengers for the role of president are expected to be Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and opposition leader Viktor Yanukovych.
Former parliament speaker Arseniy Yatsenyuk is also expected to stand.
[...]
Mr Yanukovych draws strong support from Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east and is likely to seek to improve ties with Moscow.
From the blog Language Fixation I discovered the following article at The Linguist about input based language learning.
The way foreign languages are taught in schools is definitely not input based. Input based language learning is how we learn our native language. It's certainly the most effective way to learn languages, as evidenced by how effectively we learn to speak our native language, and how ineffectively, if at all, we learn languages from classes.
Sorry for the lack of posts, dear readers. I had a long weekend during which my mom came to visit me and now I have lots of studying to do. I hope to have a few posts up soon about recent world events.
