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Show Page 10 Nat'/Briefs Syrian official defects, calls regime a 'sinking ship' BEIRUT (AP) — Syria's deputy oil minister appeared tense as he looked at the camera and announced in a video that he has defected from President Bashar Assad's regime, acknowledging he expects government forces to "burn my home" and "persecute my family." Abdo Husameddine, a 58-year-old father of four, on Thursday became the highest-ranking civilian official to join the opposition, and he urged his countrymen to "abandon this sinking ship" as the nation spirals toward civil war. In the YouTube video, Husameddine seemed to address Assad directly, accusing him of vast crimes in the past year as government forces pummel the opposition with tanks and snipers. The U.N. estimates 7,500 people have been killed since the uprising began. "You have inflicted on those you claim are your people a full year of sorrow and sadness, denied them their basic rights to life and humanity and pushed the country to the edge of the abyss," said Husameddine, wearing a dark suit and tie. He appeared to be reading from a script, casting his eyes down to find the words. "I do not want to end my life servicing the crimes of this regime," he said. "I declare that I am joining the revolution of the dignified people." The authenticity of the video could not be verified, and he did not disclose his location. Damascus did not comment on the video. He was appointed by Assad in 2009. Assad's regime has suffered a steady stream of low-level army defectors, who have joined a group of dissidents known as the Free Syrian Army, now numbering in the thousands. Police say clinic shooting kills 2 PITTSBURGH (AP) — Gunfire at a psychiatric clinic at the University of Pittsburgh killed two people and injured seven others Thursday afternoon, the university's medical center said. Police reported one of the dead was the gunman, said University of Pittsburgh Medical Center spokesman Paul Wood. It was unclear whether the wounded people were patients, employees or visiting family members, Wood said. Neighboring buildings were placed on lockdown, police said. Wood said media reports about a possible second gunman and a hostage situation at the clinic or at UPMC Presbyterian hospital were unfounded. "There was no hostage situation ever," Wood said. "There was a rumor out there that there was a second gunman. That, we believe, was never true." Crash kills five near Ariz border KINGMAN, Ariz. (AP)— Mohave County authorities think an adult and four teens killed in a crash in rural Arizona were traveling at a high rate of speed when a Chevrolet Suburban they were in failed to negotiate a turn on a dirt road. The crash happened in far northwest Arizona near the Utah border, authorities said. The victims are identified as Carl Otto Nathaniel Holm, 22, of Hildale, Utah; Monica Joy Bistline, 17; of Apple Valley, Utah; Rachel Anne Kolgrove, 17, of Cane Beds, Ariz.; and Virgel Taylor Roundy, 15, and Jamison Holm Timpson, 19, both of Colorado City, Ariz., died at the scene, said the Mohave County Sheriff's Office. The lone survivor of the crash — Nakita Timpson, 18, of Colorado City— was taken to a Utah hospital. Sheriff's deputies responded to the scene Wednesday afternoon about 17 miles south of Centennial Park, Ariz., in a high desert area known as the Arizona Strip. The crash might have happened sometime late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning. It remained under investigation and the sheriff's office said alcohol might have been a factor. Sheriff's Office Chief Deputy Jim McCabe said the five may have been out celebrating Timpson's birthday when the crash happened. "What happened is they failed to negotiate a turn," McCabe said. "At that time of night, there was ungodly high winds and so visibility probably wasn't great out there in the middle of the desert on a dirt road." Cameron to attempt deep-sea solo exploration in Pacific LOS ANGELES (AP) — James Cameron has gone two and a half miles underwater dozens of times to view the wreck of the Titanic. Now the "Avatar" and "Titanic" filmmaker aims to go nearly three times as deep with his latest ocean dive. Cameron said Thursday he plans to take a submersible craft down seven miles to the world's deepest point, in the Mariana Trench of the Pacific Ocean, 200 miles southwest of Guam. The journey later this month reportedly would be the deepest solo dive ever, breaking Cameron's own record set this week, when he descended five miles off the coast of Papua, New Guinea, in the South Pacific. Cameron will be the first person to descend to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, known as the "Challenger Deep," since a two-man U.S. Navy expedition did it in 1960. Those explorers spent just 20 minutes on the ocean floor, according to the National Geographic Society, a partner in the Cameron expedition and for whom the filmmaker was named an explorer-in-residence in 2011. Cameron will spend six hours at the bottom of the trench, collecting scientific samples. "The deep trenches are the last unexplored frontier on our planet, with scientific riches enough to fill a hundred years of exploration," Cameron said in a statement. Cameron, who has been an oceanography enthusiast since childhood, has made 72 deep-sea submersible dives, including 33 to the Titanic, the subject of his 1997 blockbuster. A 3-D version of "Titanic" comes out April 4, timed to the 100th anniversary of the ship's sinking. SpecialFeatures Friday, March 9, 2012 `Man Without a Face': The rise of Putin stoked by violence and fear, author says BY LEON LAZAROFF (c) 2012, Bloomberg News. More than 300 hostages - half of them children - were killed in a Beslan schoolhouse in 2004, following a firefight between their Chechen captors and Russian troops. Ten days later, President Vladimir Putin announced a sweeping overhaul of Russia's political system. He declared that regional governors as well as the mayor of Moscow would be appointed by the president rather than elected. Members of the lower house of parliament would also be appointed. Political parties would have to re-register, making it all but impossible to get on a ballot without Kremlin approval. The upshot of the changes was to undermine - if not obliterate - the quasifunctioning democracy that had taken root in Russia since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, writes Moscow-based journalist Masha Gessen in her engrossing and insightful book, "The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin." From then on, the president would be the only directly elected federal-level public official. On Sunday, after consolidating his power through eight years as president and four as prime minister, Putin was returned to the presidency with about 64 percent of the vote. Having convinced his fellow lawmakers to increase the length of the presidential term to six years, Putin could head his country until 2024. Gessen sees Putin as a man driven by control and vengeance, not ideology. When he was first elected president in 2000, he said his aim was "strengthening vertical power," and Gessen shows that he has attained his goal. The heartbreaking massacre at the Beslan schoolhouse is only one of a series of ghastly and, Gessen argues, suspicious events that enabled Putin to use fear to consolidate his hold on Russian society. In 1999, just after Putin left the secret police to become prime minister, a series of explosions leveled entire apartment houses in several Russian cities. And in 2002, there was the three-day-long hostage-taking at Moscow's Dubrovka BOOKS PUTIN: Moscow-based journalist Masha Gessen reconstructs formerly opaque chapters in recent Russian history and shows how the changes instigated by Vladmir Putin undermined, if not obliterated, Russia's quasifunctioning democracy. theater, which left 129 dead. Gessen manages to reconstruct these formerly opaque chapters in recent Russian history. She is not so reckless as to allege that Putin was somehow behind these events. She does charge, however, that "once the hostage-takings occurred, the government task forces acting under Putin's direct supervision did everything to ensure that the crises ended as horrifyingly as possible - to justify continued warfare in Chechnya and further crackdowns on the media and the opposition in Russia." By imprisoning one-time oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky and harassing fund manager William Browder, founder of Hermitage Capital Management, Putin made crystal clear that independence and criticism had its limits. (Sergei Magnitsky, a Browder lawyer who alleged a government attempt to defraud Hermitage, died in prison in 2009. A Kremlin humanrights committee said last year that he was probably beaten to death.) Sprinkled through the book are other stories of intimidation and murder. The lawmaker Sergei Yushenkov was shot dead in broad daylight while investigating the theater siege, dissident agent Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London by radiation poisoning and Yuri Shchekochikhin, an outspoken politician who had also been investigating the theater siege, died after ingesting an "unknown toxin." Gessen doesn't see these events as random or unconnected. "Putin's Russia," she writes, "is a country where political rivals and vocal critics are often killed, and at least sometimes the order comes directly from the president's office." Gessen came of age in the late 1980s as Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost, or openness, spawned groups of "informals" where people would talk about politics and social issues. Those were heady times. While Russia was convulsing, Putin was a KGB functionary stationed in East Germany. In January 1990, he watched a crowd storm the Stasi building in Dresden. Putin told his biographer that he phoned the Russian military representatives, only to be told nothing could be done until they heard from Moscow, but that "Moscow is silent." "I realized that the Soviet Union was ill," he said. "It was a fatal illness called paralysis. A paralysis of power." He felt abandoned, Gessen says. When he returned to Leningrad, the people he "and his colleagues had kept in check and in fear - the dissidents, the almostdissidents and the friends of friends of dissidents - now acted as if they owned the city." Putin spent much of the 1990s as a rising government official, first in St. Petersburg and later in Moscow, resenting the surge of the new democrats almost as much Russia's loss of world power and prestige. Recalling the tone Putin set early in his presidency, Gessen observes that "Soviet instincts, it seemed, kicked in all over the country, and the Soviet Union was instantly restored in spirit." — "The Man Without a Face" is published by Riverhead in the U.S. and Granta in the U.K. ($2795, 20 pounds). Live opera broadcasts turn into moneymaker for Met LONDON - The Metropolitan Opera's high-definition live movie broadcasts started out with the modest aim of breaking even - or not losing much money, at any rate. Now, as Anna Netrebko, Renee Fleming and Joyce DiDonato boost the New York company's repertoire for the new season, its general manager is proclaiming bigger successes. Live HD transmissions began soon after Peter Gelb took over in 2006. The shows now make $11 million net profit, according to Gelb, 58. Another 12 broadcasts are planned, including Netrebko in "L'elisir d'amore," Fleming in "Otello" and DiDonato in the title role of Donizetti's "Maria Stuarda." "We faced a challenge to find new audiences," Gelb said. "Labor costs and material costs were rising, it was impossible to match those expenses with rising ticket costs. Something had to be done." Radio broadcasts from the Met began in 1931, and the company has the longest continuous transmission history of any opera house. "That was the reason I was able to take the risk," Gelb said. "If only a small percentage of Saturday radio listeners would walk over to their local cinema, I knew we would have an audience." Gelb was visiting Europe to spread the HD gospel to interested opera houses. We spoke over a crackly telephone line while he was in Stockholm waiting to hear his wife, Keri-Lynn Wilson, conduct Tchaikovsky at the local opera house. At first, just three countries outside the U.S. were taking the broadcasts, he said. Now the shows go to 1,700 movie theaters in 54 countries, with Russia and China among recent additions. "Those are clearly large potential audiences for us, especially Russia," Gelb said. "We've only just dipped our toes in the water. At first, we hoped just to break even. The idea was simply to strengthen the bond between opera fans and the Met." Now the transmissions, and subsequent TV broadcasts and DVD sales, bring in about $11 million net to Met coffers. "That's the figure after we've covered all of the incremental production costs, including cameras and satellite, and payments to artists and unions," Gelb said. The total budget of the nonprofit Met, a non-profit organization, is around $300 million annually. "This is also a burgeoning new sector of the movie theater industry too," he said. "Our HD audiences are primarily opera fans, so theaters are delighted that it's bringing new footfall for them, and bringing audiences they don't usually see. It's somewhat ironic that opera is leading the way in the 'alternative content' sector." The company will sell 3 million tickets globally this year, Gelb forecasts. One of those, sometime this season, will be the 10-millionth ticket since the project began. Advertising agencies are also in discussion with the Met. Still, HD doesn't influence how operas are staged, Gelb said. "Important as HD is, we don't design our productions around it," he said. "It's always a servant to the artistic design of the stage production." Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, is a global sponsor for the HD project. — Information: www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/liveinhd/ LiveinHD.aspx 'John Carter' is a blockbuster that self-destructs "John Carter" is being hyped as the first blockbuster of the year, but it's really the first big flop. Budgeted at a reported $250 million, this dreary slog of a mess (or is that mess of a slog?) seems to exist primarily to remind viewers of older, better movies. Audiences ancient enough to remember Ray Harryhausen will pine for the days of that animator's great 1950s stop- motion epics. Anyone who came of age with "Star Wars" will inwardly sigh and forgive Jar Jar Binks. Heck, compared with "John Carter," even "Cowboys and Aliens" looks good. What's "John Carter" about? That's not a rhetorical question: Seriously, what the heck is going on in this movie? Based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' story "A Princess of Mars," this adaptation gets off to such an incoherent start that it takes almost the entire, interminable two-hour-plus running time to catch up. And the trip isn't worth it: Narratively stilted, visually ugly and imaginatively bankrupt, "John Carter" just sits there, and sits there, and sits there, forcing the audience to sit right along with it. But, okay, if it's a synopsis you want: "John Carter" is nominally about a Civil War veteran who, while searching for gold in the Arizona territory, happens upon a dingus that transports him to Mars, which the natives call Barsoom, where he can jump really high and is taken prisoner by tall, skinny four-armed creatures and meets a beautiful princess named Dejah Thoris. Carter is played by Taylor Kitsch ("Friday Night Lights"), who spends a great deal of time with his shirt off; Dejah is played by the gorgeous actress Lynn Collins, who spends a great deal of time showing off her tat- toos and tossing smoldering looks at Carter with her ice-blue eyes. At least that seems to be what's going on in "John Carter," which was adapted for 3-D presentation after it was filmed, resulting in images as murky and difficult to decipher as the story itself. Directed by Andrew Stanton ("WALL-E," "Finding Nemo") in his liveaction debut, what's supposed to be a fanciful journey in time and space is unforgivably awful-looking, from the fusty, dusty earth tones of the story that frames most of the action to the sulfurous light that bathes Mars - er, Barsoom - in a monotonous yellow haze. The creatures that Carter befriends - a rebellious tall-and-skinny (known as a Thark) named Sola and a doglike pet with an enormous black tongue - look like they were conceived after consulting the wadded up sketches in George Lucas' wastebasket. If you look carefully, you can detect some real acting going on in "John Carter" - that's Ciaran Hinds, dressed in a ridiculous toga, as the embattled leader of the Barsoomian city of Helium. And that's Mark Strong in the film's most potent role of a shapeshifting baddie named Matai Shang. But even Strong's best efforts can't save "John Carter" from collapsing in on itself like a dead star. With any luck, the sequel this movie so strenuously sets us up for will meet the same fate before it gets to the screen. By Ann Hornaday. PG-13. Contains intense sequences of violence and action. 137 minutes. |