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Tuesday, January 26, 2010

The mystery of the location of a viewpoint used by English painter John Constable has been solved, after nearly 200 years. The Stour Valley and Dedham Church was painted in Suffolk, England, between 1814 and 1815, but changes to the landscape meant that the spot he chose was not known, despite the best efforts of historians and art experts.

Now the puzzle has been answered. Martin Atkinson, who works for the National Trust as property manager for East Suffolk, used clues from the painting and looked at old maps to track down the viewpoint. Trees had grown, a hedgerow had been planted and boundaries had moved or disappeared, but Atkinson eventually worked out where Constable had stood. He said, “When I discovered that I had worked out the location where Constable painted this particular masterpiece, I couldn’t believe it. All the pieces of the jigsaw finally fitted together.”

Atkinson used an 1817 map of East Bergholt, where Constable grew up, as a reference point, but found that the view would have changed not long after the painting was completed. “The foreground didn’t fit at all, it was quite unusual as we know Constable painted it in the open air so he would have been standing in the scene. The hedgerow in his work no longer exists and there’s another hedgerow that runs across the scene today which wasn’t there. When you stand on the road on which he would have stood, and use the oak tree as a reference point, you see the same view. It’s great to see where an old master stood – and be inspired by the same view,” he said.

Suffolk, where Constable painted many of his finest paintings, is often called “Constable country”. Most, but not all, of the locations that Constable depicted are known. The picture is now housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts.

Friday, June 11, 2010

Turkey’s Finance Ministry has given Google a tax demand of $18.6 million, and Transport and Communications Minister Binali Y?ld?r?m called on Google to register as a taxpayer in the country to “help accelerate” the lifting of a ban on YouTube and Google services.

As The Register reported, access to search engine Google had been limited due to a block imposed on its IP set, and most of Google’s online services had been inaccessible in Turkey since June 4. The IP addresses were shared between YouTube and other Google services. As International Business Times reports, YouTube has been banned in Turkey since 2008.

Accoring to HaberTurk, which is the Turkish version of Bloomberg, Yildirim said that “YouTube is a tax-payer in 20 countries, and we want them to do the same in Turkey.” Turkey’s Finance Ministry has given Google a tax demand of $18.6 million. Y?ld?r?m called on Google to register as a taxpayer in the country, and he said that it is a step that “would help accelerate the lifting of a ban on the company’s Youtube video-sharing website.”

Reporters Without Borders condemned “the growing repercussions of Turkey’s censorship of YouTube” and quoted Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul as saying “I do not want Turkey to be included among the countries that ban YouTube and prevent access to Google.”

Several internet sites have recently been banned in Turkey. The Register reports that 3,700 websites are “blocked for arbitrary and political reasons” in Turkey, including foreign websites, sites aimed at the country’s Kurdish minority, and gay sites according to The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Reporters Without Borders added Turkey to the list of “countries under surveillance” in its report on “Enemies of the Internet,” issued March 2010.

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Representatives from the British insurance industry have said that the cost of the earthquake which hit Britain early yesterday could be over 10 million GBP. The Association of British Insurers has said in a statement that the cost for the earthquake is “likely to run into the low tens of millions of pounds.”

The Senior claims manager at the UK bank Norwich Union has described the damage by saying that at the moment most insurance claims regarding the earthquake describe “minor damage such as tiles off roofs, breakages inside the homes and brick walls collapsing.” It has also been reported that approximately 1,200 insurance claims were made in the first twelve hours after the earthquake hit Britain.

These reports come one day after the United Kingdom was hit by a 5.2 earthquake. Tremors were reported as widespread as Edinburgh, Manchester, Sheffield, Middlesbrough, Cambridge, London, Birmingham and Southampton .

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Doctors at the regional burn center at St. Joseph Hospital in Fort Wayne, Indiana are treating a patient flown in from war-torn Afghanistan.

U.S. Army’s 113th Battalion, which is made up of Indiana National Guardsman, discovered five-year-old Zia after a propane explosion in suburban Kabul earlier this year destroyed homes and killed six of the boy’s family members.

The blast left Zia with third degree burns on his arms, torso and legs. Guardsmen, familiar with the Fort Wayne burn center, worked with non-profit group, Northeast Indiana Burn Council to raised $18,500 to fly Zia, accompanied by his father Abdul Qahir, to Fort Wayne for treatment.

Upon arrival, he was rushed to the St. Joseph burn unit, where after a few days of recovery fromtravel, underwent his first surgery June 23. The second and final surgery was postponed ninedays from an original date of July 2 because the boy developed an infection in one of his wounds,which is common for burn patients.

The second surgery grafted skin onto burn wounds on Zia’s arm, chest and the second toe on hisright foot. Tuesday, doctors said Zia was recovering and appeared to be in good spirits. Inpreparation for their planned return trip to Afghanistan in September, doctors are teaching Zia’sfather physical therapy techniques needed for further recovery. “Without good therapy, he couldbe right back where we started,” Dr. John Mancoll, the lead surgeon on the case, said in aninterview with the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette newspaper.

Thursday, November 2, 2006

Winter Haven, Florida police chief Paul Goward was tired of seeing fat hanging out over the belts of some of his officers. So he posted a memo to encourage the so-called ‘jelly bellies’ to get in shape.

The memo, entitled ‘Are You A Jelly Belly?’ didn’t single anyone out, and, apart from the title, didn’t call anyone names.

Goward, a former deputy police chief in Wichita, wrote “If you are unfit, do yourself and everyone else a favor. See a professional about a proper diet and a fitness training program, quit smoking, limit alcohol intake…Don’t mean to offend, this is just straight talk. I owe it to you.”

It provided a list of 10 reasons cops should get fit. Goward said that overweight cops poorly represent the profession, are liable to ‘poop out’ when chasing suspects, and may have to use a higher degree of force.

In the end, Goward resigned from his position as police chief.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Lucian Freud, the painter and grandson of the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, died Wednesday at his London home following a short illness. He was 88 years old.

Freud, the elder brother of the late comedic writer and broadcaster Clement Freud, was born in Berlin in 1922 and moved with his family to Britain in 1933 to escape the Nazis. He became a British citizen in 1939. He studied at the Central School of Art, then at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing with Cedric Morris. He also attended Goldsmiths, University of London. After finishing art school, he spent some time in the merchant navy. In 1944, he started exhibiting with a solo showcase at the Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery.

In the 1950s, his style changed to exclusively paint portraits and nudes. The process of painting for models was intense: one nude painting took 16 months to complete and Freud demanded her turn up almost every day to pose. His work was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1989, and he was a member of the Order of Merit. Most controversially, he painted a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II which was described by The Sun newspaper as a “travesty”, and prompted Robin Simon, the editor of the British Art Journal to say that “It makes her look like one of the royal corgis who has suffered a stroke”. He also famously painted the glamour model Kate Moss nude, and was once named one of Britain’s best dressed men in the magazine GQ.

His work has sold for large amounts: Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, sold in 2008 at Christie’s in New York for $33.6 million dollars. In addition, he has had solo shows at some of the most prominent art galleries and museums in the world including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate in London, said of Freud: “The vitality of his nudes, the intensity of the still life paintings and the presence of his portraits of family and friends guarantee Lucian Freud a unique place in the pantheon of late twentieth century art. His early paintings redefined British art and his later works stand comparison with the great figurative painters of any period.”

Freud has at least thirteen children from a series of marriages and affairs: after an affair wth the Bloomsbury Group member Lorna Garman, Freud married her niece Kitty in 1948 and had two children (Annie and Annabel) before ending the marriage four years later. He had an affair with Lady Caroline Blackwood which turned into a marriage in 1953, although that was dissolved in 1957. He also had two children with Bernadine Coverly (Bella Freud, the fashion designer, and the writer Esther Freud), five children with Suzy Boyt, and four children with Katherine Margaret McAdam (Paul Freud, an artist, Lucy Freud, David Freud and Jane McAdam Freud, also an artist).