Iran's President Mohammad Khatami is such a sissy... And Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a sissy, too...

Iran's Khatami Denies Handshake with Israeli Leader
by Parisa Hafezi

TEHRAN, Iran (Reuters) - Iran's President Mohammad Khatami strongly denied that he shook hands with Israeli President Moshe Katsav at Pope John Paul's funeral, the official IRNA news agency said on Saturday.

Katsav earlier said he shook hands with Khatami and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at the funeral on Friday, when hundreds of international dignitaries gathered in the Vatican to pay homage to the late Pope.

But Khatami told IRNA after his return from Italy: "I strongly deny shaking hands, meeting and talking to the Israeli president."

"This claim is like other baseless claims made by the Zionist media in the past," he said.

Syria's official news agency on Friday confirmed that Assad shook hands with Katsav but said it was just a formality, adding that the two leaders did not exchange any words. Syria is formally at war with Israel.

The Pope has been praised by many as a force for peace and the Church invites people at its masses to offer each other a sign of peace such as a handshake. Catholics also often exchange words like "Peace be with you."

The Israeli and Syrian delegations were seated next to each other at the funeral.

"I told him 'Good morning' and he shook my hand," Katsav, whose post is largely ceremonial, told Israel's Channel 2 television of his encounter with Assad.

Israeli and Syrian negotiators last held peace talks in 2000 that foundered over the future of the Golan Heights occupied by Israel since the 1967 Middle East war.

Iranian-born Katsav said he spoke in his native Farsi to Khatami about their common city of birth.

"The president of Iran extended his hand to me, I shook it and told him in Farsi, 'May peace be upon you'," Katsav said.

Israel has accused Iran of supporting anti-Israeli militants and has been a fierce critic of its nuclear program.

Iran officially refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist and supports the Palestinian cause.

"Recognizing Israel means recognizing occupation and force ... it will be a blow to humanity," Khatami told IRNA. "Morally and logically we do not recognize the Zionist regime."

"A blow to humanity" is actually the fact that much of the world is ruled by the most pathetic sissies.

Taras Protsyuk, a Ukrainian cameraman for Reuters, was killed in Baghdad two years ago when a U.S. tank "fired one 120-millimeter tank round into the 17th floor of the Palestine Hotel, home base for nearly 100 journalists covering the battle in Baghdad."

April 8th marks the second anniversary of the United States attack on Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel, which at the time contained scores of reporters and media people reporting on the US invasion. Two journalists were killed and others wounded. On the same morning, a journalist was killed when the Baghdad offices of the Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera was attacked by US fighter planes. The [International Federation of Journalists] says there are another 11 other cases of unexplained killings in which US soldiers were involved that require answers.

[...]

The Federation accuses the US of carrying out “whitewash” reports of the killings – and in many instances cases there have been no reports at all.

“These reports follow the same unconvincing and incredible pattern: secrecy over the detail and nature of the report, a failure to examine all the evidence, paltry and cruelly insensitive shrugs of regret, and complete exoneration of responsibility of US personnel at all levels of command,” said [IFJ General Secretary Aidan] White. “It is denial of justice on a shocking scale.”

More on it from Abdymok...

I'm in the middle of rescuing one of my teeth right now - so I'm not feeling too talkative and will probably stay this way for a while...

"Miracles" in the Vatican!..

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli President Moshe Katsav and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have shaken hands at the funeral of Pope John Paul, Israel Radio says.

It was believed to be the first time the presidents of Israel and Syria, two countries officially at war for decades, have shaken hands.

The radio said on Friday the Iranian-born Katsav also spoke at the Vatican funeral in his native Farsi with Iran's president, Mohammad Khatami, about their common city of birth. Iran officially seeks Israel's destruction.

Katsav and Assad, sitting one row apart, said "good morning" to one another and shook hands as the funeral got under way, the radio said. The Syrian leader then approached Katsav and shook his hand again after the ceremony was over, the report added.

According to Jennifer Leonard, a black-and-white copy of this St. Pete photo should be somewhere in the Massive Change exhibition's Movement Economies room, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, Canada.



I took this evening rush hour photo on Oct. 18, 2004, from a bridge across the Neva (God, I don't remember the names of the bridges anymore... Feels like I've never even been to St. Pete... The bridge leading to the mosque on Petrogradka - which one is that?.. Oh boy...)

If any of you reading this happen to visit the Massive Change exhibition in Toronto (on view until May 29) - could you please check if that photo of mine is indeed there?

It may be very difficult to locate it - the exhibition seems huge and overwhelming and cool, and I wish I could see it myself, even if my photo's not there... But I cannot, and I do need your help - and I'd be very, very grateful if someone did let me know!.. And if my photo's there, I'd be so proud and happy!

Here's a photo album from the Toronto Massive Change exhibition: one picture (#4) seems to be of part of the wall of traffic images from all over the world, where my photo may be hiding - I can see an image from Moscow there, by Inna or Irina-something... This photo album belongs to Singer.to ~ Refreshing the daily grind, a very nice blog.

Jennifer Leonard is the co-author of a book on "the future of global design" - Massive Change (Phaidon Press, 2004). She spent six months of 80-hour work weeks doing all the research, editorial development, interviews with all the experts - and I ran into the book in one of the English-language bookstores here in Moscow, totally incidentally, a week or so after receiving an email from Jennifer. I bought the book, and both Mishah and I are enjoying it a lot. Jennifer will be a guest speaker at Berlin's annual design show, DesignMAI, in early May this year.

ABSOLUTELY AWESOME photos of Russia and Russian interiors by Bee Flowers (link via Jane Keeler and Blogchik)!..

Some of it is too familiar in a sickening kind of way - I tend to ignore it in real life, I pretend to be escaping it by pretending not to notice. And some of it is too familiar in a long-forgotten kind of way - I miss it, I miss being a child... All photos are so wonderful I feel like entering every single one, touching things around me, recognizing the smells...

This one's from the Soviet Hotels page:




And this one is from a series on the apartment of a Soviet academicians' family, one of those ubiquitous Soviet lamps that I've almsot forgotten ever existed...

Yushchenko wants the Diaspora Ukrainians back in Ukraine (via AP via San Fransisco Chronicle):

In his speech in Chicago, Yushchenko thanked the Ukrainian-American community for their financial and political support during the election campaign. There are nearly 100,000 Ukrainian-Americans in the Chicago area.

He called on his compatriots to live, work and invest in Ukraine and assured his audience the country was already changing. "We will curb corruption, we will curb poverty and we will have freedom of speech," he said.

According to Gazeta.ru (in Russian), however, the reaction of the Diaspora Ukrainians wasn't too enthusiastic:

The president recommended the American Ukrainians to return home because everything's great in Ukraine and will only be getting better. The Ukrainians remained silent.

I wonder if Gazeta.ru is lying... Time will show, I guess...

- The runaway president Askar Akayev has signed his resignation papers in Moscow today.

- Yushchenko's meeting with Bush in D.C. - Ukrainska Pravda's reporter hasn't been allowed in because of a 20-Ukrainian-journalists quota or something; Ukrainska Pravda titled their piece on the incident "Za shcho borolysya?" ("What have we been fighting for?")...

- Tymoshenko plans to visit Russia in mid-April - but first, she'll go to Georgia, the country she considers "unusual and romantic" (via Korrespondent.net, in Russian).

- The New York Times has a very sweet piece about Kyiv (via Abdymok) - made me want to pack my backpack and head back over there right away... (I hope someone from the Times finds the time to go to Lviv and Odesa sometime and write about those places as well!..)

Rest in peace, Karol Jozef Wojtyla...

I love taking pictures of the graffiti here - but I'm way too sporadic at it, and I almost never remember where I saw what.

But - there's a wonderful new photoblog out there, Moscow Graffiti, by Lyndon Allin, who also does Scraps of Moscow.

When I was taking the pictures below, I kept thinking of Lyndon's wonderful - and growing - collection, and this has kept me from forgetting where I was at the moment: Malaya Bronnaya right next to Sadovoye Koltso, and Malaya Gruzinskaya very close to Krasnaya Presnya!

I was at the Catholic Cathedral at Malaya Gruzinskaya today. There were too many TV and photo people there, but too few of those who were actually attending the service. It was very distracting, all those cameras being moved around all the time, and contagious, too, and I ended up taking a few pictures myself... They are here...

April 24 is the 90th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Here's a schedule of the events to be held in Moscow on that day, from ArmeniaDiaspora.com (via Blogrel):

10:00 am: Mourning liturgy on victims of the Armenian genocide
Surb Arutyun Church
Moscow, Russia

1:00 pm: Putting on of wreaths in memory of victims of the Armenian genocide
Hachkara on Poklonnaya Gora 

2:00 pm: Meeting at the Turkish Embassy

6:00 pm: Memorial concert devoted to the 90th anniversary of the Armenian genocide
Moscow International House of Music

The Kyiv Post's Paul Miazga describes the Eurovision ticket situation in almost the same words as Dan McMinn...

“Well, here I am now sitting with three airplane tickets and three hotel reservations and NO tickets."

[...]

Unprofessional? Sadly but not surprisingly, yes. Strange? Not really. Embarrassing and shameful for Ukraine? Yes.

Eurovision, quite simply, is the biggest potential tourist windfall for Ukraine in history. Thousands of tourists and journalists will flock to Kyiv. Any fool can tell you the benefits of tourism: jobs, money, good PR, etc. The fact that Jan and many, many other non-Ukrainians might have no tickets before coming here, and might have to be subject to scalpers, is shameful. That the Eurovision organizers, especially those in control of ticket sales, did not ensure that tickets would be available to people living outside of Ukraine is ridiculous.

What damage will this do to Ukraine’s international image? Well, as any good marketer knows, if someone likes your product, they’ll tell 10 people, but if they don’t like it, they’ll tell 100. Let’s hope the country rallies on Eurovision, fast.

Abdymok has attended yet another one of Yushchenko's disappointing press conferences for the foreign media.

A while ago, he also translated Andrei Chernikov's LiveJournal account of a press conference for the Russian media that kind of sucked, too. Andrei is Kommersant's Ukraine correspondent; Kommersant is launching its Ukraine edition sometime in June.

Dan McMinn of Orange Ukraine is back to posting more often again, and here's his report on the impending Eurovision disaster...

[...] I don't care about Eurovision, but a heck of a lot of Europeans do, and ruining this tourist moment so thoroughly as this is just about the worst thing Ukraine could do to its tourist industry. How in the world did the Yushchenko government just miss when the entire stock of tickets to an event of this magnitude was bought up by a scalper organization? [...]