. Islamists glamorize the Caliphate as something "good," but in its last years, the Ottoman Caliphate was bloated and corrupt. It gave rise to the Armenian genocide under Sultan Abdul-Hamid II. From the early 16th Century onwards, the Sultan of the Ottomans was also the Caliph. On November 1, 1922 the Sultanate was officially abolished and the deposed Abdul-Hamid lost his title of Caliph. 18 days later Abdul-Hamid’s cousin was inaugurated as Abdulmecid II the very last Caliph.
, which had formerly been the seat of the Ottoman Sultans, had been turned into a museum. A color photograph taken for Albert Kahn’s "Archive of the Planet" project, using the Lumiere brothers’ autochrome process, was taken on November 24, 1922 in the palace. It features the gigantic throne upon which the Sultans had sat.
became a Turkish dependency after the Battle of Mohacs . Three years later, the Siege of Vienna took place. Suleiman’s forces failed to take the city, and apart from a second attempt to invade
and adopted the title "Caliph". Selim I assumed power by forcing his father to abdicate and he murdered his own brothers to secure his position. He saw potential in Suleiman and had assisted his claim to the throne by killing Suleiman’s brothers (his own sons) and other male relatives. Selim I was, understandably, called "The Grim."
Suleiman I inherited some of his father’s cruelty. When he saw rivalry between two of his sons, Bayezid and Selim, he ordered that Bayezid be killed. After Suleiman’s death, Selim II became ruler and Caliph, but he was a drunkard and a womanizer who was unable to harness the military gains made by his father and grandfather. He never led his army on a campaign, and left most of the governing of the empire to Pashas. Selim II died on December 5, 1574 in

familysecuritymatters.org

SINBAD TO HILLARY: ‘WHAT SNIPER FIRE?’: Comic says Clinton is exaggerating Bosnia trip.
*The last time Sinbad was suddenly deluged with phone calls from the media, he was the victim of an Internet death rumor. In this latest press attack, the comedian is being asked about a 1996 Bosnia trip that he took with then First Lady Hillary Clinton.
As part of her current White House run, Clinton spoke about the experience during a late December campaign appearance in Iowa, and again on March 17 at a speech at George Washington University.
Attempting to boost her claim that she has more overseas experience than her Democratic rival Barack Obama, she described her March 25, 1996 landing at Tuzla International Airport in the following manner: “I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
Sinbad, who was on the Bosnia trip along with singer Sheryl Crow, says Clinton is putting way too much on the situation. He says the trip was a USO tour to boost troop morale. In an interview with the Sleuth Monday, he said the “scariest” part of the trip was wondering where he’d eat next. “I think the only ‘red-phone’ moment was: ‘Do we eat here or at the next place.’”
As for Clinton’s claim of landing in “sniper fire,” Sinbad says he doesn’t remember that, either.
“I never felt that I was in a dangerous position. I never felt being in a sense of peril, or ‘Oh, God, I hope I’m going to be OK when I get out of this helicopter or when I get out of this tank.’”
In her Iowa stump speech, Clinton also said: “We used to say in the White House that if a place is too dangerous, too small or too poor, send the First Lady.”

eurweb.com

SAN FRANCISCO (Map, News)- Lainie Kazan vividly recalls her very first San Francisco gig. It was in 1967. She left the Broadway run of “Funny Girl,” where she was Barbra Streisand’s understudy, and boldly took the stage at the legendary nightclub the hungry i.
“My paycheck bounced,” Kazan recalls, laughing. “But it was the beginning of my new life and career. My very first home was on a houseboat in Sausalito and Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66 were there in the community. I loved San Francisco.”
The City loved her too; she played the Fairmont’s Venetian Room for many years. “I was there during all the walk-ins and sit-ins and all the ‘ins’,’” she says.
Kazan reclaims her local cabaret roots Tuesday with a six-night stint at the new Rrazz Room in Hotel Nikko.
Known for commanding, soul-stirring vocals, Kazan’s new show offers a wide breadth of material, including several songs from Harold Arlen (“It’s Only A Paper Moon,” “Stormy Weather”). “I love his music,” she says of the revered composer, who would have celebrated his 100th birthday in 2005. “I think he’s created some of the greatest contemporary music — very bluesy; very blues in the night.”
It’s hard to imagine Kazan doing anything other than singing, which is her first love, but she’s first to admit how quickly the show biz currents can move a career in different directions.
After overseeing cabaret lounges in New York and Los Angeles, memorable turns on “The Dean Martin Show” showcased Kazan’s comedic depth. Film and TV roles arrived, some of them from unconventional waters — “My Favorite Year, “Lust in the Dust,” “Delta Force,” “The Nanny.”
But it wasn’t until she portrayed the matriarch in the 2002 blockbuster “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” that Kazan found her celebrity soaring again.

examiner.com

The package that came in the mail to the Rev. Tom O’Neill in January was a long time coming.
He already had the sod.
The Rev. Tom O’Neill held Mass recently at San Damiano Chapel at Viterbo University. Dick Riniker photo
Taken from his ancestors’ land in County Mayo near the west coast of Ireland, the chunk of land hangs framed in his home.
And he had the kilt, which he might wear during an international dinner or a soccer match.
So O’Neill, vice president for ministry and mission at Viterbo University, was already Irish.
“Whenever I hear Irish music, the Celtic music, I feel an affinity to it as if there’s a little bit of me that has that in me,” O’Neill said. “It’s hard to explain, but if I hear the minuet or the waltz, I don’t feel my foot tapping or I don’t feel I’m connected to that music. But when I hear Irish music, I feel connected to it, kind of like it’s in my bloodstream.”
Which it is. Fifty percent of his blood is Irish, and 25 percent is Scottish, making him 75 percent Celtic, with 25 percent of French blood rounding him off.
He’s so Irish, he hardly celebrates St. Patrick’s Day. O’Neill, 60, said his cousins in Ireland say the holiday isn’t celebrated there like it is here, where Irish immigrants popularized the holiday like other immigrants have done with their cultural festivals.
“When you have a name like O’Neill, or Thomas Michael Patrick O’Neill,” he said, “you don’t need to be demonstrative about it. You don’t need to wear green or buttons.”
Once in a while, he noted, he does wear socks with shamrocks on them.
He also has taken bagpipe lessons in the past, has a collection of Irish films, has Celtic crosses and a book of Irish blessings in his office, and his birthday is 3/7, which is only a wee bit different from 3/17, St. Patrick’s Day.

lacrossetribune.com

Talk of the Nation, March 14, 2008 · On Friday, math enthusiasts celebrate pi, the infinite number representing the relationship between a circle’s diameter and its circumference. Represented by the Greek letter pi, the number is usually shortened to 3.14, so festivities take place on March 14 or 3/14.
Across the country, math aficionados trade pi recipes, hold pizza parties, and recite as many digits of the never-ending number as they can remember. (Listen to a recitation by Mark Umile, North American record-holder for memorizing pi.)
Physicist Ron Hipschman talks with host Ira Flatow about the all-day pi celebration taking place at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
A lot of people are excited about the power of pi. But not everyone knows it has an official celebration — Pi Day, on the fourteenth day of the third month, 3.14. Those are the first three digits of pi, that transcendental number, the icon with the digits after the decimal point that go on forever.
Strictly speaking, pi represents the constant ratio of a circle’s diameter to its circumference. There is no pattern to pi. But it’s a cool number with real-life applications. Today, as Dan Hellerich of PiDay.org reports, numbers geeks all over the world bake pies, write “pi-kus” and recite pi to as many decimal points as possible. “I know 15,” he says. “Some people know 10 times that, but you really only need about 10 to do accurate math in geometry or physics.”

read_more

SYLVESTER Stallone’s forgettable take on the Afghan revolt against Soviet occupiers, Rambo III, was made in the safety of Israel and Jordan. The big-budget Russian film 9th Company, filmed in the Crimea by Fyodor Bondarchuk, tells the story of the same war through the eyes of young Russian recruits. It was embraced by strong-arm Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The two films are on offer at the Cameo this Sunday, in what must be one of the strangest double-bills in art cinema history – what makes it all the stranger is that they are part of a festival earnestly aimed at building awareness of the real Afghanistan.
Reel Afghanistan launches tomorrow in Edinburgh, claiming to be the UK’s first ever festival of Afghan cinema and culture, including music and exhibitions. On Sunday night, on the heels of Rambo, Afghan musicians will stage a concert at the Queen’s Hall playing traditional music on instruments most of us have never heard of: the dilruba, the rubab, dolak and tanbour.
Their appearance comes amid warnings that in the wake of the Taleban’s crackdown, and with continuing fear and hostility, these instruments and their players are in danger of becoming extinct.
The Afghan music ensemble Kharabat play on Sunday alongside the Qawali Sham Sufi group. For Khabarat’s four Afghan players, simply getting to Britain was a task that made Amy Winehouse’s US travel troubles look trivial.
The British Embassy in Kabul doesn’t hand out travel visas, so they had to go to Pakistan to apply. They waited in a hotel nearly three weeks, running the gauntlet of suspicious local police. One, Mohamed Yassin, was arrested and relieved of his wallet; when he asked for the money back, he was simply slapped.
Yassin plays the dilruba, a sitar-like traditional instrument looking a lot more familiar than its name might imply, but with 15-18 strings and a similar number of frets, played with a bow. He is described as the only young dilruba player in Afghanistan. The Taleban’s religious zealotry aimed at stamping out music, dance and song saw instruments destroyed or burned if they were not hidden away. Their players fled to Pakistan or further afield.
From a family of musicians centred on the Kharabat music quarter of Kabul, Yassin is following in the footsteps of his father, playing, like him, at wedding parties and celebrations, and on the radio.
Even after the Taleban’s fall, he says, speaking through a translator, “it’s very difficult because there are still people left in Afghanistan whose mentality is like before, and they don’t like music. It’s a bit difficult and scary, so we don’t go far from town”. Musicians such as Yassin, who ply their trade in the cities, seldom go into rural areas, it is said. Stories proliferate of religious bans on wedding celebrations, and extremist bomb attacks aimed at music shops.
Other Kabul guests at Reel Afghanistan include Abdul Latif Ahmadi, now head of the state-run Afghan Film, where his staff hid film and tape from the national archive in ceilings and cellars rather than see it destroyed. One of the surviving films will be screened. When the Taleban burned two shipping containers of tapes outside the Afghan Film office, only prints of Hindi and Russian films were inside. Footage of the 2,000-year-old Bamiyan Buddhas, destroyed on the orders of the Mullahs, was among those saved.
The Afghan director Siddiq Barmak is also travelling from Kabul to present a screening of Osama, which won the Golden Globe for best foreign film in 2004. It tells the story of a 12-year-old girl dressed by her widowed mother as a boy so she can work. Instead the child is sent to an all-male Taleban training school, renamed Osama.
Also showing is Voice of the Moon, a film shot behind mujahideen lines in 1989, after the Soviet troops had pulled out of Afghanistan and the Communist government was under siege. The film’s cameraman, Immo Horn, was wounded when he and director Richard Stanley came under mortar fire with the mujahideen outside Jallalabad. The film is narrated with a poem.
“It was the story of the people we encountered, the way of life of people in the war zone,” says Horn, who was carried bodily away from the front line by a mujahideen commander. I’m a real fan of any films that have been made ethnically in other countries. They have a different vision from our Western materialist vision.”
The Reel Afghanistan festival is mostly funded by the British Council, Scottish Screen and the Edinburgh University Settlement charity. Organisers Dan Gorman and film-maker Zahra Qadir were inspired to pull it together after they went to Afghanistan to make a documentary of their own in 2006. “We were originally planning to do a festival in Kabul,” says Gorman, “but we thought it was equally valid to do it here, to spread more awareness of Afghanistan and its cultural history.”
“We met a lot of people who were desperate for alternative cinema in Afghanistan because everything they have there is Hollywood trash, and Bollywood trash,” adds Qadir. “We have set up this scheme for sending alternative films to Afghanistan, and this is part of that project.”
Yusuf Mahmoud is the music co-ordinator for Kharabat. He left Afghanistan in 1989, and lived in India for four years before moving to the UK, where he is now based, along with Kharabat’s vocalist. The four visiting players are living in his London flat and rehearsing nearby.
“We play the traditional music of Afghanistan, which is several different types of music,” he says. “We play Sufi music, popular music and we play classical Afghan music, which is similar to Indian classical.”
Like Yassin, Mohamed Khalid is following his father in playing the rubab. The instrument is like a short-necked lute made of mulberry wood, goatskin and goat-gut strings. Adil Shah plays the dolak and another traditional Afghan drum, the zirbaghali. Mir Afghan is called one of the “last surviving” Afghan players of the tanbour, a long-necked lute. “With this opportunity for Mir Afghan to play in the West, I hope to encourage him to continue his work,” says Mahmud, “but also bring some attention to his instrument in Afghanistan, to encourage more young people in Afghanistan to take it up, so the art is not lost.”
The Reel Afghanistan festival runs from today until 8 March, with film screenings at the
Filmhouse and Cameo, and exhibitions and other events at the GRV, Edinburgh College of Art, the Filmhouse, the Bongo Club, The Forest and the University of Edinburgh. For a full programme, visit www.reelafghanistan.org. Tickets are available from the festival office at the Saraswati Afghan shop, 35 Guthrie Street, Edinburgh; tel 0131-650 2570, or contact festival venues directly.
Calling all exhibitionists!
The Scotsman magazine wants to hear from you. We are planning a new photo/interview slot which spotlights unusual weekend activities (keep it clean!). For example, ‘I’m an accountant during the week, but at the weekend, I’m a cirucs performer’. We’d take pix of volunteers in their weekend gear.
Interested? Email Gaby Soutar, gsoutar@scotsman.com, with your contact details.

thescotsman.scotsman.com