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21 February 2012 Last updated at 03:12 GMT Help
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Villains Become Victims in <cite>Clone Wars</cite>' 'Massacre'
Compelling female heroines and villains are comparatively few and far between in the Star Wars universe. But The Clone Wars’ complicated, vengeful Sith apprentice Asajj Ventress, as well as her supernaturally powerful Nightsisters of Dathomir, are some of its best.
Too bad they’re probably all getting killed in Friday’s night’s episode, “Massacre,” previewed in the clip above.
Well, perhaps: A scant few ever truly die in sci-fi franchises as expansive as Star Wars, which are always on the lookout for reboot opportunities. After all, Ventress herself was supposedly killed by Anakin in Genndy Tartakovksy’s stunning 2003 Clone Wars animated series, and the entire second Star Wars trilogy is based on the archetypal Darth Vader, whose sacrifice closed out Return of the Jedi.
What goes around eventually comes around.
That said, “Massacre” offers Count Dooku and General Grievous (below) chances to renew their deflated evils. The former uses the latter to claim his murderous payback against Ventress and her sisterhood of intergalactic witches, who attempted to assassinate Dooku after he threw her aside like another spent Star Wars pawn.
The knotted conflict of “Massacre” kicks off a four-episode arc that promises to darkly extinguish The Clone Wars‘ rewarding fourth season. Screen the clips above and below and let us know if you think The Clone Wars’ fifth season, due on Cartoon Network this fall, can cap the series before the inevitable syndication beckons.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars airs Friday at 8 p.m./7 p.m. Central on Cartoon Network.
Scott Thill covers pop, culture, tech, politics, econ, the environment and more for Wired, AlterNet, Filter, Huffington Post and others. You can sample his collected spiels at his site, Morphizm.Follow @morphizm on Twitter.
Feb. 27, 1812: Rage, Rage Against the Industrial Age
Despite his impassioned speech before the House of Lords, Lord Byron couldn't save the Luddites from the death penalty. Courtesy Project Gutenberg 1812: The poet Lord Byron makes an impassioned speech before the House of Lords in an attempt to convince Parliament not to enact the death penalty against the Luddites. He fails.
The Frame Breaking Act made it a capital offense for anyone convicted of “machine breaking,” the willful destruction of mechanized looms and cloth-finishing machinery and other new devices that were eliminating jobs.
The Luddites were a loose association of craft workers, especially croppers and weavers, who saw coming industrialization as a mortal threat to their livelihoods. They took their inspiration, and their name, from the folkloric figure of Ned Ludd, who was said to have smashed a couple of stocking frames (knitting machines) in the late 1770s.
The movement began in early 1811, with a series of letters sent to factory owners and craft employers in the Nottingham area, calling on them not to install the new machines.
When the letters were ignored, the movement spread across England. As the salaries of apprenticed workers were cut and jobs began to be lost, the violence began.
Early attacks were carried out at night, with bands of workers breaking into locked factories to smash the machines. In one three-week period, more than 200 stocking frames were destroyed.
Even with the imposition of capital punishment and the authorities providing increased police protection, the attacks continued and increased in ferocity. In 1812, as wheat prices soared and out-of-work craftsmen were unable to feed their families, they became desperate.
In clashes around the country, scores of Luddites were killed, as were a number of mill and factory owners. Other Luddites were arrested, convicted and executed, including Abraham Charlston, a 12-year-old boy.
By mid-1812, the Luddites had been effectively broken, although sporadic attacks continued in England for several more years.
The Man has pretty much been calling the shots ever since.
(Source: Spartacus.uk)
This article first appeared on Wired.com Feb. 27, 2008.
Wikileaks Pairs with Anonymous to Publish Intelligence Firm's Dirty Laundry
In an unprecedented collaboration between Anonymous and WikiLeaks, the secret spilling site began leaking Sunday night portions of a massive trove of e-mails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor that Anonymous obtained by hacking the company in December.
WikiLeaks did not mention the source of the reported five gigabytes of e-mails in its press release, but did say it has been working for months with 25 media outlets from around the world to analyze the documents.
The first batch of leaked e-mails purport to show that Stratfor monitored the political prankster group known as The Yes Men on behalf of Dow Chemical, which has been targeted by The Yes Men over the company’s handling of the Bhopal disaster. The e-mails also purport to show Stratfor’s attempt to set up an investment fund with a Goldman Sachs director to trade on the intelligence Stratfor collects, as well as give insight into how the private intelligence firm acquires, and sometimes pays for, information.
Stratfor, somewhat akin to a privatized CIA, sells its analyses of global politics to major corporations and government agencies.
Members of Anonymous with direct knowledge of the hack and transfer of data to WikiLeaks told Wired that the group decided to turn the information over to WikiLeaks because the site was more capable of analyzing and spreading the leaked information than Anonymous would be.
“WikiLeaks has great means to publish and disclose,” the anon told Wired. “Also, they work together with media in a way we don’t.”
“Basically, WL is the ideal partner for such stuff,” the anon continued. “Antisec acquires the shit, WL gets it released in a proper manner.” Antisec is the arm of Anonymous that is known for hacking into servers.
According to Antisec participants, Stratfor was targeted not just for its poor security, but also because of its client list, which includes major companies and government entities
“We believe police and employees who work for the most significant fortune 500 companies are the most responsible for perpetuating the machinery of capitalism and the state,” said one Antisec participant in December, “That there will be repercussions for when you choose to betray the people and side with the rich ruling classes.”
Anons also told Wired that future collaborations with WikiLeaks could involve a series of hacks that will be announced, one after another, every Friday for the foreseeable future. If that happens, the Stratfor e-mail release could be the first sign of a new, powerful alliance between the two groups, each of which has vexed and angered the world’s most powerful governments and corporations.
When WikiLeaks received the documents on a server it controlled, it acknowledged the successful transfer with a coded, public Tweet, according to an anon with direct knowledge of the collaboration.
A document provided to Wired that could not be authenticated indicated that the media partners of WikiLeaks agreed to parcel out stories on the leaks over the coming week and a half. Those media partners do not include previous partners such as the Guardian and U.S. partners The New York Times and the Washington Post.
According to the document, e-mails about WikiLeaks and Anonymous will be disclosed Wednesday, followed by separate disclosures on Italy, the Middle East and then Asian countries including Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, among others. The project, code-named Rock Guitar, is officially named “The Global Intelligence Files.”
Stratfor had been aware that the e-mails would likely be published in some form by Anonymous, but said in January that the e-mails should not embarrass the company.
The collaboration between WikiLeaks and Anonymous is an odd couple pairing. WikiLeaks has largely crumbled over the last 18 months, due to internal disagreements over the management style and legal problems of its outspoken leader Julian Assange. By contrast, Anonymous is an amorphous group with no leadership structure.
If Anonymous continues feeding WikiLeaks with documents, the secret spilling site could return to a prominence that seemed lost due to technical difficulties, legal troubles, in-fighting and public fallings out with media partners in the wake of the site’s publication of a massive trove of U.S. documents in 2010 and 2011.
WikiLeaks’s alleged source for those documents, Pfc. Bradley Manning, is facing a U.S. army court martial and a possible sentence of life imprisonment.
As for how the collaboration between the two groups went, an anon with direct knowledge of it indicated that the new relationship had some tough moments.
“There were some natural tensions as usually can happen inside partnership,” the anon said. ”I hope this was only the beginning of a beautiful relationship.”
Quinn Norton is a writer and photographer who peripatetically covers net culture, copyright, computer security, intellectual property, body modification, medicine, and biotech. Follow @quinnnorton on Twitter.
Comic life: Remembering India's master storyteller Anant Pai
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24 February 2012 Last updated at 15:13 GMT By Geeta Pandey BBC News, Delhi
Anant Pai launched the first Amar Chitra Katha in 1967 Indian children since the late 1960s have learnt their religion, mythology and history from brightly coloured comic books called the Amar Chitra Katha (Immortal Illustrated Stories). 
The comic on Anant Pai was launched by his widow, Lalita Pai 
Many Amar Chitra Katha comics told the story of India's Hindu epics 
Rohit Dhar says his knowledge of Indian mythology comes from Amar Chitra Kathas 
Uncle Pai was much loved by his young fans
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24 February 2012 Last updated at 15:13 GMT By Geeta Pandey BBC News, Delhi
Anant Pai launched the first Amar Chitra Katha in 1967 Indian children since the late 1960s have learnt their religion, mythology and history from brightly coloured comic books called the Amar Chitra Katha (Immortal Illustrated Stories). And now the creator of these hugely popular comics, Anant Pai, who died last year, has been immortalised in a comic-biography.
A master storyteller, he was affectionately called Uncle Pai by his young fans.
When he launched the first Amar Chitra Katha in 1967 with the story of the Hindu god Krishna, he did not know that he was starting something that would become a phenomenon.
Today, with nearly 600 titles and more than 100 million comics sold, Amar Chitra Katha is a household name in India.
Despite competition from 24-hour television, video games and international comics, Amar Chitra Katha still sells more than three million copies a year.The idea for the comics came to Mr Pai by chance.
During a visit to Delhi in 1967, in a television shop in Karol Bagh market, he saw a quiz contest on the state-run Doordarshan network.
Indian stories"The participants could easily answer questions about Greek mythology, but they couldn't answer a question about who was Lord Ram's mother," he would later say.
It upset him and he set out to correct it by creating comics based on Indian stories.
"He brought into the limelight stories of our country which needed to be shared and told," says Reena Puri who worked for over 20 years with Mr Pai and succeeded him as the editor of Amar Chitra Katha.
The comics drew heavily from religious parables, scriptures and folk tales.
The comic on Anant Pai was launched by his widow, Lalita Pai Based on stories from the Hindu epics of Ramayan and Mahabharat, they were tales of gods and goddesses and fascinating historical figures.
The stories were simply told and easy to read and understand. And they were beautifully illustrated.
There were gods and warriors with rippling muscles, beautiful goddesses and queens dressed in colourful robes and exquisite jewels and demons and scheming villains with their scary rages.
And in the battle between the good and the evil, the former almost always triumphed.
The comics proved a winner from the moment they were launched and in no time grabbed the attention of young readers.
To honour the master storyteller, publishers ACK Media have come out with an Amar Chitra Katha on the life of Mr Pai. The creator of India's most loved comic books now has his own comic.
'Big fan'"What can be the best way to pay tribute to a storyteller? Tell his story," says Ms Puri.
The 32-page comic-biography - "Anant Pai: Master Storyteller" - took 11 months to produce and was launched by his widow, Lalita Pai, at the recent Comic Con, a three-day festival of Indian and international comics in Delhi.
MS Varadarajan, a visitor from Bangalore, immediately purchased a copy for his seven-year-old son.
Many Amar Chitra Katha comics told the story of India's Hindu epics "I have been a big fan of Uncle Pai and Amar Chitra Katha. I started reading them when I was 10 or 11. And my son is very fond of Krishna tales."
Mr Varadarajan gets the comic signed by its illustrator, Dilip Kadam.
Mr Kadam, the artist behind more than 100 Amar Chitra Kathas, including the 42-part best-selling series on the mythological epic, Mahabharat, worked with Mr Pai over many years.
"Mr Pai was involved in the entire creative process, from the beginning to the end. He would look at the script and the sketches and suggest changes," he says.
Born in a Karnataka village and orphaned at two, Mr Pai was raised initially by his grandparents and then an uncle.
"He studied chemical engineering, but he didn't want to get bogged down by a job," says Mrs Pai.
"He only wanted to learn and teach. He gave up his job to work on his idea. We had tough times, we even went without food sometime, but he was focussed on what he wanted to do."
'Story for every occasion'Ms Puri says Uncle Pai was like a walking encyclopaedia.
"His memory was huge. He would quote from the scriptures and poetry. He had a story for every occasion. Even when I would do something wrong, he would make me sit down and tell me a story."
Rohit Dhar says his knowledge of Indian mythology comes from Amar Chitra Kathas At the Comic Con, the Amar Chitra Katha stall is busy with browsers and shoppers. Among them are Rohit Dhar and his 14-year-old son Ahaan.
Mr Dhar who spent his childhood and early teenage years in Kenya, says the Amar Chitra Kathas were his "only way to connect with the Indian culture in a foreign land".
He has read approximately 200 titles and says all his knowledge of Indian mythology comes from them.
"They were interesting and fun to read. And the sheer volume of information they provided in a fun way really attracted me."
Ahaan reads these comics "to learn about figures I study in history. They help with my history lessons".
Overwhelming responseThe Amar Chitra Kathas cemented Uncle Pai's connection with his young fans.
Uncle Pai was much loved by his young fans Ms Puri says they receive 5,000 letters every month and during school vacations, the numbers go up to 10,000.
"Children write to us with their stories and experiences. They even write about their problems. Sometimes they also write saying that so and so story was stupid."
In 1994, the Amar Chitra Katha office caught fire and all the artwork and books were destroyed.
"We were devastated," says Ms Puri.
"We published an appeal in the latest issue of Tinkle - a monthly comic digest launched by Uncle Pai in 1980 - asking children to send us any spare copies they had of the comics."
The response they received was overwhelming.
"We recovered every single copy of Amar Chitra Katha," she says.
In pictures: Uttar Pradesh polls
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8 February 2012 Last updated at 07:37 GMT
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8 February 2012 Last updated at 07:37 GMT
24 hours of news photos: 27 February 2012
Dresses and fashions on the Oscar red carpet
Remarkable images of Auschwitz then and now
News photos from around the world
24 hours of news photos: 24 February 2012
Large-scale acquisitions of farmland in Africa
On show for the first time in the UK
24 hours of news photos: 23 February 2012
Readers' pictures on the theme games
Photographer Simon Annand's latest work
VIDEO: Gujarat new transport destination
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