Stephen Colbert explains that it's okay to call Sarah Palin a "fucking retard" because it's satire.
This video is from Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, broadcast Feb. 8, 2010.
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In a square in central Warsaw, a couple of people are bent over a huge sculpture of a blue egg, their heads turned and pressed against the shell.
As they listen to the soft sounds of a baby bird hatching, a hooded crow cocks his head and sips from a shallow pool of water installed nearby.
"This chick and the mini-pond next to it speak to a sensitivity to Warsaw's non-human residents," Warsaw deputy mayor Aldona Machnowska-Gora said at the unveiling.
"Don't hesitate to walk up to the egg and hug it. It makes for an incredible experience," she said.
Located at Five Corners Square -- once home to an arena where animals would fight to the death -- the acoustic installation titled The Hatchling is a call for empathy with other lifeforms in the era of climate change.
"The idea was to bend people's bodies over something other than themselves," said Joanna Rajkowska, the artist behind the sculpture.
"We care about our well-being so much. It's like a complete obsession... It's time to think about other species," she told AFP.
- 'The Hatchling speaks' -
At around two meters (6.6 feet) high and three meters long, The Hatchling is a larger than life version of a song thrush's blue spotted egg.
The color is more intense than the real blue because the sculpture will inevitably fade in the sun.
"Inside, instead of a bird, we have a lot of electronics, a lot of circuits and sound transducers... So The Hatchling speaks," said Rajkowska.
"Literally, like pecking the shell. But also the heartbeat, which is three times faster than the human heart. You can also hear all the movements and the chirping," she added.
"So it's a whole spectrum of sounds. Basically the desperate life that is trying to get out of the egg."
She teamed up with her musician partner for the recordings, though they do not come from a song thrush, as the stress of the process would have been enormous for a wild bird.
"An ornithologist told me that if I take an egg from the nest and then return it, the parents will not accept it... So I decided to find safe conditions," Rajkowska said.
They came across "this crazy guy who is trying to revive old species of chickens" who allowed them to record in his lab as long as they kept the eggs warm.
"So we had to really rush to do the recording and put it back in the incubator," Rajkowska said.
- 'Surreal, unexpected' -
The artist is also the creator of a massive fake palm tree that has for years added a tropical note to the Polish capital and even become a popular postcard landmark.
Similarly, the egg -- whose top is already speckled with bird droppings, to Rajkowska's amusement -- is meant to be "surreal, unexpected and slightly out of touch with reality".
Piotr Nowacki, a life-long Warsaw resident, is a fan of the project, which he has visited several times and calls "a break from routine, somewhat abstract, surprising".
"It also educates (and) draws your attention to nature... It's cool that it's dynamic, that it's alive, right?" the 36-year-old software engineer told AFP.
Rajkowska has also exhibited a series of collages juxtaposing old and new magazine clippings, old photographs of the plaza -- and birds, of course.
"I love that they evolved from the dinosaur and they have such a long, long history... And we make their habitats smaller and smaller and smaller. We concrete everything," Rajkowska said.
"The Hatchling is actually a sad project. It is tinged with disappointment but also with hope that we mature enough to see beyond ourselves."
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"Here it is women who command!" declared Rigopoula Pavlidis, as she sang the virtues of her remote village on the island of Karpathos, one of Greece's rare matriarchal societies.
Sitting at a desk across the room painting religious icons, her husband Giannis nodded silently.
"My husband can't do anything without me, not even his tax return," Pavlidis laughed as she embroidered a traditional dress inside her workshop.
In contrast to most of patriarchal Greece, the women of Olympos play a commanding role in village life.
Isolated from the rest of the Dodecanese island, the spectacular hillside village has safeguarded this centuries-old tradition, which has survived the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century and Italian rule in the 20th.
Until the 1980s, there was no asphalt road to Olympos.
Among the traditions that survive is a Byzantine-era inheritance system that gives a mother's property to the eldest daughter, said local historian Giorgos Tsampanakis.
Rigopoula, the seamstress, is one of the beneficiaries of the tradition. She inherited 700 olive trees from her mother.
"The families did not have enough property to divide among all the children... and if we had left the inheritance to the men, they would have squandered it," she said.
Greek women traditionally moved into their new husband's home upon marriage. In Olympos, the opposite takes place.
And women's prominence is also reflected in their names.
"The eldest daughter took the first name of the maternal grandmother, unlike the rest of Greece, where it was that of the paternal grandmother," said Tsampanakis.
"Many women still call themselves by their mother's surname and not their husband's," he added.
The role of women in Olympos was further strengthened in the 1950s when the village men began to emigrate for work -- mainly to the United States and European countries -- leaving their wives and daughters behind to manage families and farms on their own.
'We had no choice'
"We had no choice but to work in the absence of the men. It was our only way of surviving," recalled 67-year-old Anna Lentakis as she picked artichokes in the hamlet of Avlona near Olympos.
A few years ago, Lentakis ran the Olympos tavern. This has now passed into the hands of her eldest daughter Marina.
"I don't know if we were early feminists... but I like to say that the man is the head of the family, and the woman the neck," said Marina, who is in her 40s.
Marina's daughter Anna is only 13 years old, but she knows that one day she will take up the torch.
"It's my grandmother's legacy and I'll be proud to take care of it!" she said.
But the "feminist" inheritance system only benefits the eldest children, said Alain Chabloz of the Geographical Society of Geneva, who has studied the subject.
"The youngest sons were forced into exile, and the youngest daughters had to stay on the island at the service of the elders. A kind of social caste was created," he said.
Giorgia Fourtina, the youngest of her family and unmarried, helps her older sister in the restaurant and in the fields.
Fourtina does not feel that Olympos society is particularly progressive: "It's a small society where a woman alone in a cafe is frowned upon," she said.
Women "are the ones who maintain the traditions," said Yannis Hatzivassilis, a local sculptor, who has crafted an iconic statue of an Olympos woman gazing at the sea, waiting for her husband to return.
The older women of Olympos traditionally wear embroidered costumes consisting of flowered aprons, a headscarf and leather boots.
Treasured heirlooms that are part of a girl's dowry, these costumes can cost up to 1,000 euros ($1,077) and require hours of work.
Irini Chatzipapa, a 50-year-old baker, is the youngest Olympos woman to still wear it every day.
"I taught my daughter to embroider, but except for the holidays, she does not wear it as it's not adapted to modern life," she said.
Chatzipapa's 70-year-old mother chimes in: "Our costume is becoming just folklore for the holidays... Our world is disappearing."
© 2023 AFP
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Four Indigenous children who had been missing for more than a month in the Colombian Amazon rainforest were found alive and flown to the capital Bogota early Saturday.
The children, who survived a small plane crash in the jungle, were transported by army medical plane to a military airport at around 00:30 am Saturday (0530 GMT).
They were taken off the plane on stretchers, wrapped in thermal blankets, with ambulances waiting to bring them to hospital, AFP journalists said.
General Pedro Sanchez, who led the search operation, credited Indigenous people involved in the rescue effort with finding the children.
"We found the children: miracle, miracle, miracle!" was the message he told reporters he received on Friday.
President Gustavo Petro announced their rescue and told the media: "Today we have had a magical day."
"They are weak. Let's let the doctors make their assessment," he said.
Petro had posted a photo on Twitter showing several adults, some dressed in military fatigues, tending to the children as they sat on tarps in the jungle. One rescuer held a bottle to the mouth of the smallest child, whom he held in his arms.
"A joy for the whole country! The 4 children who were lost 40 days ago in the Colombian jungle were found alive," he wrote on Twitter.
Video shared by the Defense Ministry late Friday showed the children being pulled up into a helicopter as it hovered over the tall trees in almost complete darkness.
Originally from the Huitoto Indigenous group, the children -- aged 13, nine, four and one -- had been wandering alone in the jungle since May 1, when the Cessna 206 in which they were traveling crashed.
The pilot had reported engine problems only minutes after taking off from a jungle area known as Araracuara on the 350-kilometer (217-mile) journey to the town of San Jose del Guaviare.
The bodies of the pilot, the children's mother and a local Indigenous leader were all found at the crash site, where the plane sat almost vertical in the trees.
Officials said the group had been fleeing threats from members of an armed group.
A massive search involving 160 soldiers and 70 Indigenous people with intimate knowledge of the jungle was launched after the crash, garnering global attention.
The area is home to jaguars, snakes and other predators, as well as armed drug smuggling groups, but clues such as footprints, a diaper, and half-eaten fruit led authorities to believe they were on the right track.
Worried that the children would continue wandering and become ever more difficult to locate, the air force dumped 10,000 flyers into the forest with instructions in Spanish and the children's own Indigenous language, telling them to stay put.
The leaflets also included survival tips, and the military dropped food parcels and bottled water.
Rescuers had also been broadcasting a message recorded by the children's grandmother, urging them not to move.
According to the military, rescuers found the children about five kilometers (three miles) west of the crash site.
'Absolute survival'
Huitoto children learn hunting, fishing and gathering, and the kids' grandfather, Fidencio Valencia, had told AFP the children are well acquainted with the jungle.
"I just want to see them, to touch them," he said early Saturday after learning of their rescue.
News came as Petro returned home from Cuba, where he signed a six-month truce with Colombia's last active guerrilla group, the ELN.
"Getting closer and attaining peace in the agreement that is moving forward with the ELN... And now I return and the first news is that indeed the Indigenous communities that were in the search and the military forces found the children 40 days later," he told reporters in Bogota.
"They were alone, they made it on their own. An example of absolute survival that will go down in history," he said.
With her "warrior" spirit, 13-year-old Lesly kept her younger siblings safe, the children's grandmother Fatima Valencia told AFP.
Seventeen days after the children went missing, Petro announced that they had been found alive but he retracted the statement a day later, saying he had been given false information.
On Friday, he praised "the effective coordination between the military and the Indigenous people" during the search, saying it was an "example of an alliance for the country to follow."
Fidencio Valencia told AFP that the children had been found by a native of Araracuara who had been participating in the search.
Defense Minister Ivan Velasquez paid tribute to the various army units' "unshakeable and tireless" work, as well as to the Indigenous people who took part in the search.
Army rescuers "immediately took charge of and stabilized" the four siblings, who were transferred to San Jose del Guaviare, according to the minister, and then later to Bogota.
(AFP)
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