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| Tuesday, May 23, 2000, Chandigarh, India  
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Von Trier wins Golden Palm Sorabjee: need to amend contempt law First turbaned
Sikh joins Canadian Air Force Story which
haunted Cartland Wanted: Pied Piper in Paris! Rebels release 54
more hostages
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 NASA: Astronaut Jim Voss carries the boom extension to the Russian cargo boom while attached to shuttle's robot arm in this view from television on Sunday. Voss and crewmate Jeffrey Williams participated in a six-hour spacewalk to repair the international space station.
— AP/PTI photo.
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Von Trier wins Golden Palm CANNES, (France), May 22 (Reuters) — Danish director Lars von Trier’s harrowing melodrama “Dancer in the Dark”, starring Icelandic pop singer Bjork, won the Golden Palm for best movie at the Cannes Film Festival awards ceremony yesterday. Von Trier, who has seen the prestigious Palm slip through his fingers twice before, raised his fist in the air in a sign of victory as he accepted the prize. “I’ve done my best to make a good film,” Von Trier told a press conference. “Dancer in the Dark”, Von Trier’s first musical, reduced the audience to tears at its festival screening and was widely expected to win. Bjork scooped up the Best Actress award for her acting debut in Von Trier’s film as a Czech immigrant in rural America who saves her paltry factory wages to pay for an operation for her son, who suffers the same disease that makes her go blind. Whenever things get too tough, she dreams that life is a musical comedy of which she is the star. “I felt like a fish out of water,” said the elfin performer, who wrote the film’s music. “I was too much in the world of words and not enough in the world of music.” “When Von Trier convinced me that the person who wrote the songs should be the person who played the role, I knew...This would be my first and last role,’’ Bjork added.” The shooting of “Dancer in the Dark” gave way to rumours that Von Trier and Bjork were at each other’s throats. “What I have done with Bjork was very painful and extremely intense. But it was remarkable,” Von Trier said. “It was as if we read each other’s minds.” The runner-up grand prize went to Chinese Director Jiang Wen’s “Devils on the Doorstep”, a black-and-white comedy-turned tragedy set in Japanese-occupied China. It tells the story of a Chinese villager who is saddled with hiding two prisoners - a Japanese soldier and his Chinese interpreter - and the bloody slaughter that results when he returns them to the imperial army. Edward Yang from Taiwan won the Best Director award for his poignant film, “A one and a Two”, about the crisis and misfortunes of a family in Taipei. The Best Actor award went to Hong Kong star Tony Leung for his role in “In the Mood for Love”, a 1960s romance directed by Chinese Director Wong Kar-Wai, whose film also won the Technical Prize for Cinematography and Editing. The entire cast of Pavel Lounguine’s “The Wedding”, a raucous and heart-warming film set amid the poverty and alcoholism of rural Russia, won a special mention for acting. The Best Screenplay award went to “Nurse Betty”, independent US director Neil Labute’s hilarious comedy starring Renee Zellweger as a coffee shop waitress obsessed with a daily soap opera. Iran emerged as a big winner of the evening with three prizes. Twenty-year-old Samira Makhmalbaf’s “Blackboards” shared the Jury prize with Swedish director Roy Andersson’s “Songs from the Second Floor”. Two other Iranian directors shared the Golden Camera award for their first films — Hassan Yektapanah for “Djomeh” and Bahman Ghobadi for “The Time for Drunken Horses”. |
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Sorabjee: need to amend contempt law MELBOURNE, May 22 (PTI) — Attorney-General Soli Sorabjee today said Indian media feared to expose judicial corruption as under the present law truth was no defence in contempt proceedings and suggested amendments to reverse the law. “Under the present law in India, truth is no defence to an action of contempt. This is a serious anomaly. It leads to self-censorship by the media and deters exposure of judicial corruption,” he said while delivering a lecture on “Freedom of Media - Constitution and Courts” at University of Melbourne. Mr Sorabjee, who is on an official visit to Australia for a week, said the law of contempt in India needed to be amended to provide the media with the defence of truth coupled with public interest. On the other hand, the law should provide for stiff civil and criminal penalties upon a person who failed to substantiate his allegations, he said. “The public function which belongs to the press makes it an obligation of honour to exercise press freedom with the fullest sense of responsibility,” Mr Sorabjee said but added an irresponsible press could be a scourge. Praising the role of media, the Attorney-General said: The “Press in India on the whole has been a good watchdog. It has played an important and constructive role by exposing deception and secrecy in the working of the administration and public institutions.” Mr Sorabjee also highlighted the role played by the courts in India, saying they had “unflinchingly performed the role of enforcing accountability of the holders of power, checking the virus of corruption and by upholding the rule of law”. “Hopefully in the coming years, these two mighty institutions of democracy will perform their respective roles in harmony, remembering that the ultimate ears these two mighty institutions of democracy will perform their respective roles in harmony, remembering that the ultimate goal is of ensuring good governance and the good life for all citizens,” the Attorney-General said. Referring to press freedom, Mr Sorabjee said press freedom through judicial interpretation had been accorded the status of a fundamental right. “The Indian judiciary has placed a generous construction on the ambit of freedom of the press and held that it is not confined to the individual right of the proprietor or the editor or the journalist. It includes the right of the citizens to receive information and be informed,” he said. |
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First turbaned
Sikh joins Canadian Air Force
VANCOUVER, May 22 — The growing Indo-Canadian community has another cause to be proud with Jagdeep Singh Masoun becoming the first turbaned Sikh to be taken into the Canadian Air Force. Masoun, 24, whose family hails from the Jalandhar district of Punjab, has been conferred the Queen’s Commission as a Second Lieutenant by Major Swen Raun. Masoun is now posted at 637 Arrow Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Cadets, in Burnaby, British Columbia province. He told The Link newspaper that he joined the force as an officer’s cadet in 1997 and later received the commission. Born in Vancouver, Masoun is the son of Sukhdev Singh Dardi and Balwinder Kaur, editor and publisher of ‘Sangharsh’, a bi-weekly Punjabi newspaper. His father immigrated to Canada in 1974 from Dhirpur village near Jalandhar. Masoun is a trained pilot and a computer expert. He has taught at his alma mater Douglas College and also handles the computer aspects of publishing ‘Sangharsh’. — IANS |
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Story which
haunted Cartland IN the background to the lifelong role she played as the “Queen of Love”, there was one story which always haunted Barbara Cartland, who died at the of age 98. In telling it, she gave away much about herself. It was about a poor-born but dazzlingly beautiful woman, slightly older than herself, who married young into the aristocracy and went to Paris to buy clothes. There she fell in love with another man, ruinously for her marriage, social position and finances. “She was ecstatically, completely overwhelmed by it,” Cartland said, “as only a rather stupid woman can be.” Privately, Cartland was never stupid in that way. Although she claimed her books — more than 600 big-selling romantic novels — told the truth about love, her hearts-and-flowers, virginal romanticism was underlaid by a voracious, hard-working, hard-as-nails commonsense. This quality, more energising than her famous 60-a-day vitamin pills, gave her an active longevity. Long life, coupled with a virtuoso instinct for self-publicity, made her into an upper middle-class monstre sacree. In her mid-nineties, she was still producing books (outside of the novels she also wrote biographies, children’s stories, radio plays, beauty hints and domestic advice), replying to hundreds of letters by return of post and giving superb value in media interviews, during which she concealed her failing sight and turned her deafness into a fearsome defence against awkward questions. Her last book, a novel entitled “Love, Lies and Marriage”, was published in 1997. Behind her immensely willed facade was a pathos and perceptible loneliness, although she treated this as an impertinent intruder. In her eighties, she confessed that she had always tended to dislike being touched. The name of her game, begun in an embarrassing childhood of genteel poverty, was keeping up appearances. It was a gallant and – in the old-fashioned sense of the word — gay performance, a class act. Most endearingly, she was the soul of indiscretion. When her step-granddaughter Diana became engaged to Prince Charles, Cartland forecast that she would “reign forever as the Queen of love.” When, however, the marriage foundered, Dame Barbara said: “She has never really understood men.” Her Love stories, usually dictated in one-sentence paragraphs, were — though stereotyped — brisk, researched with historical fervour and seldom cloying. Their popularity was genuine and long. In 1995, Essex county libraries had more than 300 of her titles — nearly half of her 70-year output — in stock, compared with 208 for her romantic novelist contemporary, Ursula Bloom, and 27 for her own childhood mentor, Ethel M. Dell. Pre-eminent among her five autobiographies is “We Danced All Night”, shrewd and full of anecdotes. It deserves to stand high as a memoir and source-book of the twenties. She interviewed Marconi, lunched as an ingenue with Churchill, Beaverbrook and the scientist FE Smith, bickered with Noel Coward at Deauville and Mountbatten at Broadlands. She lived in interesting times with her ears, eyes and mind open but she never, as her mother had hoped, became an aristocrat except by proxy through her daughter Raine, who achieved it thrice by marriage. Her paternal grandfather, James Cartland, who had a pseudo-Gothic villa in Edgbaston, made his money with a Birmingham brass factory. Her mother’s family were Gloucestershire minor landed gentry. The two quarrelling grandfathers failed to agree to a marriage settlement, with disastrous consequences. In 1902, James over-extended himself with a railway investment, went bankrupt and blew his brains out. The newly-weds’ lifestyle collapsed from a country house with 12 servants to a glorified cottage with two. Cartland’s amiable but indigent father Bertie had to travel to shoots by bicycle. But her determined mother, Polly, took as her
motto: "Poor I may be, common I am not”. Through thrift and personality, she managed to maintain some of their social cachet. Cartland never forgot that; she modelled herself on her mother, who also lived until the age of 98. When Bertie was killed in the trenches in 1917, they could not afford to buy mourning. “I have had my coat and skirt dyed black,” she wrote to her mother, “Would you like me to get my coat-frock done too?”. This bouncy spirit of make-do-and-mend enabled her to have a London season. Through teaching at a Knightsbridge Sunday school — where she was popular because she cliff-hangingly serialised Bible stories — she gained entry to the tea dance circuit. She got an art student, Norman Hartnell, later the Queen’s couturier, to make her dresses free. She was, as she acknowledged, no beauty. Her assets were irrepressible gaiety and “rather large, surprised eyes.” She made her first money drawing menu cards for parties and selling paragraphs to gossip columns. In 1923 came the first of her romances, “Jigsaw” — Guardian News Service |
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Wanted: Pied Piper in Paris! PARIS, May 21 (Reuters) — Wanted: Pied Piper in Paris! Hordes of mice are leaving their underground strongholds in search of fine food in one of the most well-heeled areas of the world gourmet capital. Chased from their usual haunts by rats, which have in turn been disturbed by work on a new metro underground train line, the mice have been causing consternation among restaurateurs and shopkeepers in Paris’s chic eighth district. The scandal of the mice hit the headlines when The Parisien newspaper caught two small rodents red-handed on camera. The furry intruders were tucking into an after-hours snack in the windows of the Fauchon foodstore, one of oldest and most prestigious gastronomic houses in town. “It is indeed stunning, and believe me we’re stunned too,” Mr Jean-Claude Crochard, Fauchon’s highly distressed director, told Reuters after spending most of Friday with veterinary inspectors in the wake of the photo’s publication. Mr Crochard’s concern is not confined to the two celebrity mice digging into a “purely decorative” window food display. He says the entire area has been hit since building work began several years ago on the new metro line, although he insists he has been largely successful in keeping mice away. The mice in the window was an extremely rare occurrence and his store systematically cleaned and treated its premises, he said, stressing that no fresh food was ever left exposed after staff went home in the evening. “We can’t afford error. We’ve been around for over 100 years and we are very vigilant. But you can’t pretend that a mouse never gets in. They can pass through a keyhole,” he said. One of the city’s most renowned ratcatchers agrees. |
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Rebels release 54
more hostages
FREETOWN, May 22 (Reuters) — Rebels in Sierra Leone have released another 54 United Nations peacekeepers, three of them wounded, and more are expected to be freed, UN officials said. Mr Felix Downes-Thomas, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s special representative in Liberia, said yesterday that the peacekeepers were brought to Monrovia by helicopter on Sunday and then left for Freetown on a UN plane. UN officials said the group comprised 42 Zambian and 10 Kenyan soldiers plus two military observers, one Malaysian and one Norwegian. A UN spokesman in Freetown, David Wimhurst, said: “Three of the Kenyans are injured, but we don’t know how seriously.” A Reuters correspondent saw the three wounded troops board the plane in Monrovia, two of them on stretchers, a third walking. It was unclear under what circumstances the group was handed over by the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). They are the first to be freed since May 17 and bring the total released via Liberia to 204, leaving about 280 more unaccounted for, according to the UN’s own imprecise figures. |
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