• faking numbers of Iraqi security forces
• hiring inexperienced personnel, or personnel with experience and qualifications completely unrelated to the job they were hired to do (National Security and Tennis, anyone?)
• decision making that was often carried out on the go, or by only few individuals without consultation of further expert opinions (Big Decisions, Little Debate)

The whole report can be accessed and searched via the New York Times website, where you can read all the outrageous information for yourself.

The report concludes with a part on “Lessons Learned”, and one can only hope that those lessons will be absorbed by the people in charge of the USA’s other war, as the article points out:

“The United States could soon have reason to consult this cautionary tale of deception, waste and poor planning, as both troop levels and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan are likely to be stepped up under the new administration.”

See the trailer here and learn more about the movie and the screening at Bar25 after the jump.

This is the story of The Monks, one of the most radical and influential rock bands of the mid sixties. What’s transatlantic about them? They were a group of GIs stationed in Hamburg/Germany in the midst of the cold war and they made their mark in the history of rock music by releasing just one album.

Filmmakers Dietmar Post and Lucia Palacios dedicate their documentary “The Transatlantic Feedback” to this remarkable band.

Director Dietmar Post will be attending the screening.
All about the Awarded Summer on www.augezeichnetersommer.de (German).

By Semir (double post)

“Wer ist Barack Obama? Vortrag und Diskussion” featuring Christoph von Marschall, Washington correspondent for the Tagesspiegel

Time: Monday, 21. Januar, 2008 @ 18.30 Uhr
Place: Galerie der Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Rosenthaler Str. 40/41, Berlin-Mitte
Free Entry/Eintritt frei

Excerpt from the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung’s own description (in German):
Der Vorwahlkampf in den USA ist in vollem Gange und Barack Obama ist der Überraschungskandidat mit guten Chancen auf das Präsidentenamt.
Obama gilt als der “Kennedy seiner Generation”: ein Hoffnungsträger, der einen neuen Stil einführt und die Schranken des Establishments niederreißt.
Doch welche politischen Positionen und welche Werte vertritt er? Was hat die Welt zu erwarten, wenn er als erster Afroamerikaner ins Weiße Haus einziehen sollte? Und vor welchem gesellschaftlichen Hintergrund konnte er in so kurzer Zeit so erfolgreich werden?

Christoph von Marschall begleitet seit einem Jahr Barack Obama im Wahlkampf und verfolgt die Vorwahlen aus nächster Nähe.

Fachkontakt: Barbara Assheuer assheuer@boell.de

By Peter Dahl

Not any longer, the library has decided to make it’s photographic preciousness publicly available with the help of flickr, the popular photo community. The library’s flickr account now features all the vintage, back-in-the-day, sepia-toned photos you could ever wish for. The librarians hope that the flickr community will add tags to this huge collection, so that the photos can be found easily by a keyword search. Talk about crowdsourcing.

However, Pairing flickr’s demand for fresh photo supply and the library’s need for a publishing solution seems like the perfect match. So far, 1,500 photos have been selected by the library, which has over a million more of them in stock. Below are some samples from the gallery “1930s-40s in color.”

via De-Bug Blog

By Kolja Langnese

[Show as slideshow]

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