[LINK] Norwegian Day parade, Brooklyn

satyadasa has pictures of this year's Norwegian Day parade. This year, incidentally, marks the centennial of Norwegian independence.

[BRIEF NOTE] I Haven't Been Paying Attention . . .

. . . else I would have known that Natalie Portman appeared at Cannes with a shaved head because she is playing Evie in V for Vendetta ((V for Vendetta official site, V for Vendetta at IMDB).

I'm excited; I'm a fan. V for Vendetta is a fantastic graphic novel. Go visit V for Vendetta Shrine, or this annotated guide, if you don't believe me. Rich Johnston's essay "Why V for Vendetta Matters--Especially Now" does identify some reasons to be skeptical about the film: The original story was a very Cold War sort of story, and removing it from this original setting can be expected to damage it.

Even so. I know where I'll be in November.

[LINK] Australia and East Timor, Friends?

East Timor has apparently settled with Australia for less than its share of the revenues from oil and gas deposits in the Timor Sea. It seems that the new country's utter destitution made it amenable to the Australian proposals.

[BRIEF NOTE] How Many Armenians Died?

Yesterday, an article by Carl Bialik--the Wall Street Journal's Numbers Guy--appeared, examining the question of how many Armenians actually were killed in the genocide of the First World War era. Between competing claims about the accuracy of Ottoman and church statistics and the question of which dead should be included--should victims of starvation and disease be included?--there's a lot to wonder about, though the evidence seems to suggest a death toll in the range of one million. Bialik ends his article with an observation about the importance of figures.

Some advocates and scholars I contacted for this article said pinning down exact numbers isn't necessary. Dennis R. Papazian writes on the Web site of the Armenian Research Center at University of Michigan-Dearborn, where he serves as director: "Does it really make the actions of Turkey better if they succeeded in killing only 600,000 Armenians and not 1.5 million? . . . In any case, it was genocide."

Are death tolls from today's conflicts bound to be disputed a century hence? It's a question worth asking in light of the continued Armenian controversy. Les Roberts, a research associate at Johns Hopkins University who has worked on counting the dead in Congo, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, painted a dismaying picture of current efforts. In an e-mail from Afghanistan, he mentioned two key challenges. First, "No one can agree on how to define the death toll from a conflict, just the deaths from intentional violence or all those that died because the violence occurred." (The Armenian numbers include both.) And, secondly, "No one is charged or expected to count the deaths from conflict. The [International Committee of the Red Cross] avoids the topic so that they can work with all sides. The press is bad at it. The public health crowd is very adverse to being killed so they rarely estimate deaths until conflicts are over."

But Columbia's Dr. Garfield was more hopeful, saying that methods have improved markedly; researchers, for instance, survey refugees in camps during ongoing conflicts about mortality among friends and neighbors. "I am optimistic about our ability to provide people with a better base," Dr. Garfield says. "It makes it harder to lie."

[BRIEF NOTE] Canadian Politics, Exciting?

Belinda Stronach's defection, from the opposition Conservative Party to the ruling Liberal Party, is rather exciting.

This is not only because she's girlfriend of Peter Mackay, leader of the old Conservative Party before its merger with the Canadian Alliance, mind. Rather, it's because (as james_nicoll so ably notes) the Canadian federal parliament is evenly balanced between supporters of the minority government and opponents. The defection of a fairly prominent Conservative to the government's ranks is definitely destabilizing, to say nothing of the latent tensions between the old Tories and the former Reform Party (conservative right and radical right, respectively, in the Canadian political lexicon).

21st century Canadian politics looks rather interesting and exciting. At least, it looks this way so long as it doesn't destroy the country.

[LINK] Hirsi Ali in The Guardian

The Guardian has an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali up, her first in the British press since the murder of her collaborator Theo van Gogh.