text:
The Interior Circuit by Francisco Goldman
I HAVE LIVED IN and traveled through some desolate places. Looked upon 100-mile vistas in West Texas with hardly a sign of human habitation. Lived in Northern New Mexico at the edge of a million acres of public lands without a single lamppost or match strike to reveal the landscape on a moonless night. But the loneliest moments I've ever experienced were in the heart of Mexico City, in the midst of the over 20 million souls that comprise the barely comprehensible human density of "el DF" (Federal District, akin to District of Columbia) and its greater metropolitan area.
True, my existential state was given to such barrenness when I experienced it in my early 30s. I had a book contract and all the time and support to write, yet I wound up broke and past deadline. But it wasn't just me; I swear it was also in the DNA of the place. El DF is tailor-made for its "reventón" (literally, explosion; slang for party) lifestyle: ecstatic, frenetic, and ultimately melancholic bouts fueled by food and drink and substances and dancing and flirtation consummated or not that last 'til the dawn, leaving one in an utterly helpless state of physical and existential "cruda," as the Mexicans say: hungover.
There were moments at night when my street would suddenly, strangely empty out and even the 24/7 howl of nearby Avenida Insurgentes, the city's main north-south artery, would seem to fade to the faint hiss of a distant river. I'd look out my fourth-floor grime-streaked windows onto the nocturne and, to underscore the forlornness of it all — so many people huddled together and still no way to stave off the feeling that we'd been abandoned by the gods — the steam whistle of the camotero cart that proffered steamed yams would pierce the gray air. One of those long, lonesome whistles, announcing nothing if not loss. In those moments I had no future, only the burning of an unrequited desire stuck in the past. And it felt as if the entire city were mourning along with me its losses great and small.
Perhaps el DF is the consummate party city because it is so haunted by inconsolable spirits. It embodies the deep history of ground zero of the Spanish Conquest (the fall of Tenochtitlan, the Mexican capital, 1521) and the slog through the colonial centuries that followed. In the 19th century there were the bloody struggles for independence from Spain and with the French and with the gringos, and decades of brutal dictatorship under Porfirio Díaz. The 20th century brought the upheaval of the Revolution, and ultimately the long "perfect dictatorship" of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) masked behind a jingoistic invocation of indigenous grandeur and an air of mestizo cosmopolitanism. Very little of this history has been erased. You stroll through colonial buildings built by indigenous labor, drive down thoroughfares underneath whose asphalt lies the grid of the pre-Columbian city, sit in the pews of churches teetering over the ruins of Nahuatl pyramids. You confront the textual vestiges of conquest and colonialism at every turn — particularly in the city's endless layers of bureaucracy, the symbolic weight of paperwork that controlled and still controls the population, what the late Uruguayan social theorist Angel Rama called "the lettered city." Most of all, you see the historical power dynamic in people's bodies as they collide like atoms in the super accelerator of chilango (as the city's natives call themselves) space. You get the sense that the New World caste system — unsustainable in the official sense by the 17th century because the permutations of race had become so complex — has somehow survived intact. The hierarchy is there for all to see in fashion billboards, telenovelas, or, as the extraordinary cronista (chronicler) Francisco Goldman points out, in the latest viral video of some light-skinned member of the upper castes meting out drunken vituperation and worse at hapless, dark-skinned, indigenous-featured service workers.
And yet the contact with difference — the carnal, spiritual, aesthetic dance between indigenous and European and African ancestry — also produces a city that affirms life. Official Mexico has long invoked a diluted version of this raza cósmica trope in an attempt to create a "center" that reels in and controls the periphery, the radically different native and mixed cultures of the north and south, the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. That center, both literally and symbolically, is el DF itself. The safe, branded version of this identity is akin to a tepid mariachi performance. The real thing on the streets is something else again — an indigenous punk band, religious rites for outlaw saints, street vendors out-vying each in radical appropriation for the most original treats or trinkets. It's the effusive mestizo spectacle amid the daredevil urban experiment that lures us. Even if, at 4:30 in the morning at that dive of a cantina you wound up in, you might end up twirling with "la más fea" as chilangos say, the ugliest one of all, Death.
I lived on Avenida Veracruz in Colonia Condesa, a neighborhood distinctive for its Art Deco style and for Parque México, one of the city's finest parks. La Condesa is also legendary for its longstanding status, along with adjacent Colonia Roma, as the capital's bohemian mecca. I was drawn to it because I was a young writer in search of my version of Paris. And because some family ghosts haunted La Roma; my father lived there as an adolescent at the same time as the Beats were carousing about, before their exotic party ended with William Burroughs shooting his wife Jane Vollmer in 1951 in an inscrutable and macabre drunken rite. The couple lived in an apartment on Calle Orizaba, just a few blocks away from my family's place on Calle Zacatecas. The Mexico City my father conjured for me with his memories was in keeping with the bohemian legend — he got kicked out of school for playing too much hooky and hitting the streets. Giftwrap the boho imaginary with the wanderings of generations of global artists (the Beats were in storied company: Lawrence, Eisenstein, Bréton, Welles, Jodorowsky, and, in the 1970s, a young, unknown Chilean named Roberto Bolaño), and you get a vibe that is sexy, volatile, decadent, inspiring, terrifying … irresistible. The qualifiers for the city are endless because that is precisely how the city imagines itself, as extreme corporeal and affective experience, urban hallucination, organic and orgasmic surrealism.
Expats receive the added zest of colonial and even indigenous difference, of course, but the allure can be just as intoxicating for Mexicans themselves through a class dialectic: the bohemian districts (which also include parts of Coyoacán, erstwhile home to Frida and Diego, and some newly hipsterized space in the Centro Histórico) are surrounded on all sides by a vast working-class sea, which edges up against — turns gently and insistently and with great ferocity — the shores of the upper caste island. The border between these realms is at once an abyss and negligible, and the gap in material wealth, as it does everywhere in the world today, grows ever greater. The source of el DF's extreme energy surges from the vast majority of its denizens, who are frantically working to survive, from the fire-eaters performing at eight-lane intersections to sex workers to santeros to the street market tianguis, vendors hawking everything pirated under the sun or moon. It is a city whose past is ever present, whose future is improvised on the spot, whose desire is scantily clad, whose violence is … ah there it is. We were going to hit it sooner or later. Whose violence is as public a spectacle as its desire.
Frank. (Forgive me, Francisco, I'm really not close enough to call you that, but I know many people who are closer, and I've never heard them call you anything but; and I've read your last two books in quick succession, meaning that I'm swimming-drowning in a literary representation of your subjectivity at the moment.) I have to tell you that I approach writing about the city and your book with a knot in my throat. I have been traveling to el DF most of my adult life, fell hard for it at the first brush with its elegant and searing melodrama, my relationship to the city a tortured affair. And of course I had a tortured love affair there, too, whose memory I was mercifully able to make peace with after many haunted years. And here I am in dialogue with your text about a loss that cuts so much deeper than mine, even as it picks at the scabs of my wounds. There is no way to read your book without wishing to accompany you somehow in your volatile combination of melancholy and passionate (and sometimes precarious) embrace of life in spite of death. My accompaniment will have to suffice with these words.
In this penetrating volume — an indispensable contribution to the growing body of artistic representations of Mexico's most recent years of darkness — the city is both a place of coruscating creative energy and hell-bent on spectacular self-destruction. It is by all accounts a great world capital producing all that cosmopolitans want in a 21st-century city: pedestrian bustle and park space, arts and culture high and low, and food, food, food, from the Zagat-rated to the wee-hours taco stand lit by a naked light bulb. It closes one of its most important boulevards every Sunday for cycling and walking. It was among one of the first global cities to legalize gay marriage. And it is an environmental disaster of apocalyptic proportions. On "días de contingencia," what we in Los Angeles call "smog alert" days, a zinc-colored pall bears down on the streets, your head pounds, you blow black snot into your hanky. Water scarcity means that your tap can stop flowing at any time, especially if you live on the margins. It can be an exhausting, exasperating place to live in, and for all its progressive veneer, it can be dangerous and deadly if you are a woman, if you are queer, if you are young and poor and brown-skinned.
Frank's DF accentuates the melancholic aspect of the reventón because he remains in mourning over the death of his wife, the young writer Aura Estrada. Interior Circuit is overtly an extension of his previous book, Say Her Name,a novel (fictionalized memoir, autobiographical fiction, etc.) that tells of the jagged, interminable road of grief that began with Aura's death at 30 in a bodysurfing accident on a Oaxacan beach. Yet Interior Circuit is also, crucially, Frank's journey beyond the borders of intimate lamentation into bearing witness to the wider circle of trauma and sorrow that Mexico finds itself in today as a result of the drug war — that is, when it allows itself to face it.
Interior Circuit is named for the Circuito Interior, the inner loop highway that encircles the three colonias at the heart of the narrative: La Condesa, La Roma, and La Zona Rosa, the latter once also boho, gay-friendly, and upscale but since fallen several rungs. The book opens with verses from DF poet Efraín Huerta: "Amor se llama / el circuito, el corto, el cortísimo / circuito interior en que ardemos." In which "corto" means "short," but also connotes "short circuit" — the brief, broken interior circuit in which our bodies burn, the human experience of time as space: the passage of our bodies through it. Frank begins the book marking the fifth anniversary of Aura's death, particularly significant because now he has known her longer in memory than in their physical time together. He knows there are no shortcuts around grief, but settles on a ritual that will ultimately affirm his experience of both life and death in chilangolandia: he will learn how to drive in el DF Which is, arguably, unlike driving anywhere else on earth:
The seemingly anarchic chaos and confusion of the city's traffic had always intimidated me: octopus intersections and roundabouts like wide Demolition Derby arenas, cars densely crisscrossing simultaneously from all directions and all somehow missing each other, streaming through each other like ghosts; busy cross streets without traffic lights or stop signs; one-way streets that change direction from one block to another; jammed multi-lane expressways and looping overpasses, where a missed exit invariably means a miscalculated turn onto another expressway or avenue heading off in some unknown direction, or a descent into a bewildering snarl of streets in some neighborhood you've never been to or even heard of before.
As in Say Her Name, there is an urgent, raw beauty in Frank's prose, as if we are plugged into an only slightly edited version of his journals, and it is full of "cortos": journal gives way to reportage, reportage to lament, lament to polemic, polemic to erudite rumination. There is some progression to the narrative — we figuratively inch along the clogged circuito as Frank plumbs the sweeping inhabited Valle de México, as he finds new love, as Mexico reckons with its murderous shadows — but this is not a pop manual for how to "move on" after loss. There are no neat resolutions, no clearly defined beginnings or ends. We plunge into the narrative in the midst of grief and leave it grieving still. The book is, above all, as Frank highlights with his subtitle, a "chronicle," which sounds old fashioned in the American understanding of genre. The MFA world prefers the peculiar and annoying "creative non-fiction" label (fuzzy, clinical, too many syllables). In Latin America it's a "crónica," period. Three syllables and an implied ellipsis: merging the time of memory with the time of language to create a new present between writer and reader. In the context of el DF, the ellipses connote a darkness with no end in sight, a chronic city whose party is simultaneously a denial of and a close dance with death. It is also important to note that Frank is not easily categorized in either the American or Latin American contexts. His version of the crónica indulges more of the first person than Latin Americans generally allow (the influence of early gringo New Journalism, perhaps). And he's certainly no ahistorical, depoliticized gringo memoirist. Adding nuance and depth is his peculiar positioning as son of a Jewish father and Guatemalan Catholic mother, raised in Massachusetts. He was inexorably drawn to the South as a young writer during the time of the Central American civil wars and he's been shuttling between Brooklyn and el DF for decades. Call him a double-mestizo cronista.
Invoking Jorge Luis Borges's 1:1 scale map of empire from "The Exactitude of Science," Frank sets out to have his body encompass the endlessness of el D.F via car. He pores over the old-school hard-copy equivalent of the Thomas Guide, the Guía Roji, itself Borgesian: "My spiral-bound edition large-format 2012 edition presents Mexico City's streets and neighborhoods in 220 pages of zone-by-zone maps; at its front 178 additional pages of indexes list some 99,100 streets, and 6,400 colonias, or neighborhoods." He relates his friend the writer Álvaro Enrigue receiving the Guía as a gift from a relative with the fabulous inscription: "This book contains all roads." But first Frank must learn how to drive in the city, a process which he describes with comic anxiety, taking lessons from Metropolitan Driving School instructor Ricardo Torres, a classic chilango character ("leathery face ravaged […] sagging, bleary eyes, sad-looking"). The "driving project" has what amounts to a mystical goal. "To use the Guía Roji almost like the I Ching, open to any page, put my finger down, and try to drive wherever it landed. A game of chance and destination, if not destiny." It will take the better part of the book to get there.
Public personal note to Frank: cabrón, why did you, on the very first page of your crónica, have to invoke, of all the roundabouts in this roundabout-crazy city, the glorieta Citlaltepetl in La Condesa? It happens to be the site of one of my greatest personal telenovelas. My ex lived just a few doors down from it, on Culiacán. There is a photograph of us standing in that glorieta (both of us with deep circles under our eyes, recovering from the reventón). You triggered the sense memory of both the all-nighter and the breakup so powerfully, now two decades later. Thanks for the memories, Frank. (El DF never forgets, and it will always remind you.)
So Frank is mapping his city, perhaps truly meeting it for the first time, a relationship that grief, paradoxically, has allowed the potential for. There is no avoiding memory — one of the underlying themes of the book is that repressed memories invite existential and even social disaster. But there is some agency in whether one will continue to walk and drive and take the subway through the city of the present or completely succumb to the city of the past. So in fits and starts — during lessons where he engages the clutch badly, grinds gears — he ventures out, with a new perspective, onto the streets he was never really a stranger to. A self-described man-child, Frank is himself a veteran of the reventón: hard-living reporter in war zones, a man who's cheated death several more times than his allotted nine lives, a widower crushed by loss seeking succor and, at times, his own death from a bottle.
He becomes increasingly aware of his personal narrative as lodged within a momentous context, a crossroads in the history of the city and the country. A hotly contested presidential election in July 2012 brings the PRI, infamous for its decades of corrupt and autocratic rule, back to the presidency. The anarchist inspiration of the Arab Spring and Spain's indignados and Occupy and the Chilean student movement arrives in el DF through #YoSoy132, the unlikely uprising of students from the Universidad Iberoamericana, heretofore known as a conservative Catholic school for niños bien (spoiled brats), which sets off a series of effervescent political actions that ultimately unites students from dozens of schools and from radically divergent social stations, a brief but ultimately broken (corto) Mexican Spring.
But death remains at the heart of the story: Aura's death, and Mexico's. Frank keeps on encountering Aura's ghost. Chance encounters with people who knew her before he did offer up memories. Messages arrive via Facebook from some of her long lost relatives; her story keeps unfolding, even as its telling underscores her absence, a chronic crónica. Frank fuses his mourning with the barely emergent outlines of Mexico's contemporary ordeal, which has only begun to come into view in recent years because of official repression of even the representation of victimhood. During the violence unleashed by the administration of Felipe Calderón's strategy of confronting the drug cartels militarily (with a military not immune to collusion with the cartels), the government's position was that there were no innocent victims; the mantra was "en algo andaban," they were up to something. The truth is that many victims were indeed just in the wrong place at the wrong time. And there was also the question of whether those who were "up to something" — small time drug couriers, perhaps — deserved to be tortured, dismembered, and dissolved in acid or cremated in a barrel doused in diesel fuel, literally and irrevocably disappeared forever, no bodies for the family to mourn, a haunting without end.
The crucial narrative of the country's nascent reckoning with its loss is only lightly sketched here, perhaps because its energy surged from the provinces and not from el DF itself, which Frank is so tightly focused on. In March 2011, Juan Francisco Sicilia, the 24-year-old son of the well-regarded poet Javier Sicilia, was murdered, along with six of his friends, in a drug-related crime in Cuernavaca, only an hour and a half south of Mexico City by car but in terms of social geography a world away, insistently and in many ways still beautifully provincial. Sicilia and his friends paid with their lives for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The poet immediately made his grief public with an open letter to the cartels and the corrupt government alike, with the refrain of "estamos hasta la madre," (literally, we are up to our mother: we've had it). This public act of intimate mourning sparked a nationwide civil society movement that included thousands of mourners, bringing the faces of their missing into the public eye via placards with enlarged photographs, like las madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina a generation ago. Sicilia led a walking procession from Cuernavaca to Mexico City a few weeks after his son's death, which culminated with a huge rally in the Zócalo, el DF's grand public plaza. It was the first time the faces of the provincial dead had come "home" to the center of political — and some would even claim narco — power. This haunting destabilized a longheld chilango sense of exceptionalism, that the capital was immune to the narco-barbarism of the provinces. Frank writes: "'We live inside a bubble,' I'm always hearing people in the DF say. People sense the entire country collapsing, even vanishing, around them, becoming, as one friend put it, an 'anti-country.'"But in el DF the reventón went on.
Early in the book, Frank spends considerable time defending chilango pride, pointing to former Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard's progressive achievements. The fact that Ebrard is literally Frank's neighbor — they live in the same apartment building on the picturesque Plaza de Río de Janeiro in La Roma — unavoidably makes the props feel like the result of too much closeness to power. Largely unremarked upon is any 21st-century metropolitan progressive pol's central dilemma — their complicity in the promotion of gentrification-oriented development, which limits precisely the thing that made Mexico City (and Frank's other longtime home, New York) great: class rigidity had always been mitigated by a combination of populist transportation and parks projects and a tenacious working-class willingness to trespass beyond social borders.
But Frank understands the problem with power, his own position in the social matrix. He may not be rich by the standards of el DF's one percent (the gated communities of Las Lomas that float over the working city, the old money of Polanco, home to one of the most extravagant shopping malls on the planet), but his byline grants him access to the inner circles of the cultural and political elites. He knows he must venture beyond the bubble. In the summer of 2013, that means just a couple of miles from his apartment in La Roma.
Here Frank's DF is less than one degree separated from mine, and the two of ours are less than one degree separated — in the sense of physical proximity, at least — from the working class. During my time in el DF, I lived a few blocks away from Frank in La Condesa and we had several friends in common. He stayed on after I ran back to California with a broken heart and a nosebleed from the cocaine that fuels La Condesa's and La Roma's party scene. After almost a decade away from Mexico City I returned, this time with my wife and our young twin daughters. Our first trip was in 2010, when narco-violence was still mostly focused in the northern and border states, although the US State Department's travel advisory map was starting to show red patches in Michoacán, Jalisco, and other places that had until then largely been spared. Having healed enough to face the streets where I'd once fallen, I wanted to share something of the South with my family. We visited four summers in a row, and each year the State Department's map was redder. Suddenly, el Estado de México, Mexico State, which surrounds el DF on three sides and accounts for most of the "metropolitan area" population, was a hot spot, contested as a result of cartel territories altered by Calderón's — and, by extension, the United States's — war on drugs. A war, it must be said, and endlessly repeated, that is much like the US "war on terror," in that there is no pretense of an endgame, but rather what looks like a carefully crafted transnational scheme fusing legal and illegal markets, drugs and guns and addiction. The resulting toll in blood increases profit margins for the powerful on all sides. Truly, as far as capital is concerned, a war without end.
Just two days before our departure for our third DF sojourn in the summer of 2012, there was a shootout in Terminal 2 of the Mexico City Airport, glass shattering near kids eating McNuggets, bodies bleeding out on the immaculately polished floors of the hyper-modern building. The revelation that it was a narco turf battle in which both shooters and victims were federal agents underscored the reality of a "narco-state" in which government and organized crime were essentially one. My wife and I hesitated. We'd even heard rumors that families with kids in La Condesa were pooling money to rent bodyguards for their kids while they played on the monkey bars in Parque España. In the end, we decided to double down against the paranoia; we told ourselves that lightning wouldn't strike twice — now the airport would surely be the most secure place in the country. (The troubling thought being that that was what everyone thought before the gun battle.)
Then, last summer the violence arrived in our 'hood. Approaching noon on Sunday, May 26, a dozen people, between the ages of 16 and 34, went missing in a mass levantón (literally a "pickup," slang for kidnapping, sometimes cartel-related, even if the victims are often just in the wrong place at the wrong time). The crew had been partying at a Zona Rosa dive called Heavens (in English); they'd been there since the wee hours. (Sounded like a reventón.) Relatives reported the disappearances to authorities within hours; almost all the victims were residents of Barrio Tepito, a working-class district famous for its "fayuca" tianguis, where you can get a "Rolex" at a Timex price and the like. That 12 people could disappear in broad daylight in the Zona Rosa, which is just across Avenida Chapultepec from La Roma and La Condesa and only a couple of blocks from the headquarters of the Secretaría de Seguridad Pública (SSP, the city police chief's office), had an almost immediate and sensational impact on el DF (Almost immediate, that is, because the case wasn't made public until several days after the kidnapping, when families of the victims, convinced that the SSP was bungling or perhaps even implicated in the case, contacted the media themselves.)
It certainly had a devastating psychological effect on my family: Heavens was also only a couple of streets away from Fonda El Refugio, an old-fashioned, somewhat touristy restaurant that was a ritual destination for our kids. The paranoia struck deep, even if, once again, we convinced ourselves that we weren't in danger … it was "them," tepiteñospartying at a dicey after-hours. Most chilangos intuited early on that the case was somehow cartel-related, even if the administration of new mayor Miguel Mancera (like his predecessor Marcelo Ebrard, of the leftist Partido de la Revolución Democrática, PRD) kept issuing denials that the drug war had breached the gates of the city, that there was no evidence of the big cartels operating in el DF.
Frank throws himself into the Heavens case with tremendous journalistic energy, badgering officials, cultivating confidential sources, scouring what looks like just about every press account, and, most importantly and at some risk, by crossing the social border and stepping into the old barrio to interview the relatives of the disappeared. It is clear that this is both a political and existential — perhaps even spiritual — mission. Wracked with grief for years, in the midst of his "driving project" to map his body onto the city of life and death, Aura's ghost accompanies him every step of the way, even if she is largely absent from this impassioned chapter, a book unto itself, really, and which accounts for nearly half the overall volume.
Frank tracks the Heavens case for months. I actually ran into him outside his Plaza de Río de Janeiro apartment last summer and it was hard to overlook two things: that he didn't seem to have slept much, and that he was obsessed with the case. He begged off an invitation to coffee because, he said, he was going to meet with family members of the disappeared. Through his research he assembles something of a journalistic crusade, siding with the victims' families, who from the start convincingly complain that the SSP and the Mancera administration play Calderón's card, not so subtly implying that the victims were something less than innocent. In the early days of the case the city government leaked information "to exploit the stigma attached to Tepito, for the Barrio Bravo, or the Fierce Barrio, in the minds of many residents of the capital [i.e., the middle and upper and gentrifying castes, such as in La Roma and La Condesa], evokes practically congenital criminality."
Tepito reveals chilangos to themselves, pointing at the profound connections that unite them across all lines of caste. The blood stains everyone's hands. Drug gangs — local and national — are discovered to be at the heart of the levantón, after all. The book holds a mirror up to the upper castes, and asks them to take responsibility, even while revealing his own symbolic complicity, Roma-Condesa party animal that he's been over the years. End the madness of the war on drugs, he pleads, which, like most wars, is one whose victims are mostly poor in places like Tepito, while the party on the other side of Avenida Chapultepec never ends.
What stands in the way of that reckoning is class itself. Frank does a good job of revealing the depths of class prejudice among his own cohort. His close friend Juanca, who works in market research, tells of job-related expeditions to Mexico State, where there is nary a gentrification project underway, just an endless urban limbo where infrastructure is failing or non-existent. Juanca comments: "You won't believe that shit. The poverty, the filth […] How can these people vote for the PRI? Because, after 20 years, they finally have apincheMcDonald's?" Which goes to show why so many non-chilangos — the "provincials" — hate el DF
Connections. A killing in La Condesa a few days before the kidnapping is identified as a precipitating event — a smalltime drug dealer apparently doing business outside of his territory is shot dead outside of Bar Black (also in English, pointing not just at rampant Anglicization in Mexico, but also symbolizing transnational drug routes; yet another incident related to the Heavens case, a deadly shooting, took place at a Tepito gym called Body Extreme). Bar Black just happened to be two blocks up from one of the finest bookstores in the city, el Centro Cultural Bella Época, where our daughters spent many afternoons rolling around the floor with the best of Latin American children's books. The economics of the drug trade ties chilangos from Tepito and La Condesa together, a simple matter of supply and demand and el reventón. And this is, of course, what ties chilangos and Americans together, the bloody transnational market enabled by prohibition, kept in place behind a moralizing fig, whose real purpose is to increase the commercial value of illegal drugs.
Here Frank joins a growing crew of writers (among them Marcela Turati, Oscar Martínez, Cristina Rivera Garza, John Gibler, Magali Tercero, Sergio González Rodríguez, Diego Osorno, Daniel Hernández, Lydia Cacho, Anabel Hernández*) who undertake dogged investigative journalism — the kind there is precious little support for in the digital age, and which in the Latin American context can get you killed — and dedicate themselves to revealing the victims, itself an eminently political (and also spiritual) task that is the heart of Javier Sicilia's movement.
By crossing lines of caste into Tepito, Frank faces the privileged writer's eternal ethical problem: how to represent the margins, the poor, the already criminalized? That is, without re-victimizing them through a patronizing account or redoubling the distance between reader and subject? His answer is the literary equivalent of what the families themselves do, what victims of the disappeared do in Latin America. Sometimes, he literally presents us what the families present to the public:
Jerzy Ortíz Ponce
Sex: Male. Age: 16. Build: Robust. Height: 1.85. Skin: Light brown. Face: Round. Mouth: Small. Nose: Flat. Eyebrows: Full. Lips: Thin. Chin: Pointed. Type and color of eyes: Large, dark brown. Type and color of hair: Straight, black. Identifying characteristics: Tattoo in the form of a diamond on the outer part of right wrist. His name tattooed in Hebrew letters. On inside of right wrist a tattoo of the letter J, a heart, and the letter L. Both ears pierced with earrings, piercing on the top of one of his ears.
Bringing the body back — an informal, blurry photograph with textual dossier — first in the hope that someone who knows something might speak up, so that justice might be done and, ultimately, mourning can begin. In the intimate sense that is, for the Tepito families being able to bury their dead. (A mass grave is eventually discovered, and the families receive more or less intact bodies to bury, unlike tens of thousands of others who will never have even a scrap of clothing.) But also in the collective sense, since this tragedy is fundamentally different than the singular "freakishness and meaninglessness" of Aura's fatal accident. (The absurdity of which is what Frank writes against with such intensity by telling the story of his and Aura's love in Say Her Name.) This is death by state (or narco-state) policy and corruption and collusion within a transnational context. In the end, the biggest invisible figure in the book is us, on this side of the border, but then, the book is directly addressed to us: Frank is an American. The book will be read in Spanish as well, as it should be. It is, in the end, a story that underscores borderlessness, just not the kind imagined by cosmopolitans searching for the next vogue destination.
It is his personal grief that drives Frank to encounter and bear witness with others, and thus the personal is made political. A poignant epiphany occurs as he ponders his grief alongside that of the families in Tepito, which begins with Frank remembering Aura's last hours,
[…] when the hospital staff wouldn't let me into the emergency ward to see her. When I could be of no help, when I would never be able to be of any help to her ever again, when my love could not have been more futile.
What is it like, what has it been like for the Tepito families, as they ponder the fates of their missing? What are they going through, when they wake at three in the morning?
Interior Circuit confronts the corto, the short-circuit, as in too-brief-is-our-time, by recognizing the absurdity of both "freakish" and politicized death, and of the necessity of mourning both intimately and in community — of reconnecting the broken circuit with the language of pain itself.
As novelist and critic Cristina Rivera Garza writes:
[There is] a political necessity of saying you pain me and of taking stock of my history with you, you who are my country, from the singular — though generalized — perspective of we who are in pain. Hence the aesthetic urgency of saying, in the most basic and also the most disjointed language possible, this pains me. Because Edmond Jabès was right when he critiqued Adorno's dictum; it's not that after horror we should not or cannot write poetry. It's that, while we are integral witnesses to horror, we must write poetry in another way.
You pain me, Frank, and in your story I sense Mexico's pain in another way.
*For an online exhibit of such work, please visit KCET's Artbound project "The War on Both Sies/La guerra de los dos lados."
**Translation by Los Angeles-based writer, translator, and activist Jen Hofer.
Rubén Martínez is Fletcher Jones Chair of Literature and Writing at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author, most recently, of Desert America: A Journey Across Our Most Divided Landscape (Picador).
LARB Contributor
Rubén Martínez is a professor of literature and writing at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author, most recently, of Desert America: A Journey Across Our Most Divided Landscape (Picador, 2013).
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Best Indie Game
Indie games, whether they be commercial or free, have always fought an uphill battle trying to gain some recognition within mainstream circles. Many have started planting roots at ModDB to kickstart their PR campaigns and gain some recognition. As a result of this, we're starting to see some impressive independent titles come out of the woodwork to share their development progress with ModDB's audience and build up strong communities around their games pre-launch. Here's the editors' best picks for the released indies that have graced us with their presence in 2008.
Mount & Blade
Taleworlds wrote: Mount&Blade is a 3D, open-ended, single-player, third- or first-person, computer role-playing game in beta stage of development, created and distributed by the Turkish development house TaleWorlds. Mount&Blade has a medieval setting, without any fantasy elements. Mount&Blade is notable for its emphasis on realistic cavalry combat, which was common in the era, but is largely absent in most RPG titles.
The player can directly control only one player character, which is created when a new game starts. A character class only serves as a template for future character development. Each "class" differs only in its starting attributes, skill points and equipment. There are no in-game restrictions on equipment or skill use based on class and gender. The maximum level of a skill and the use of certain equipment is linked to a related attribute. The player character's facial features are customizable. The face and hair can be changed at any time, should the player wish to do so. The player character may take sides with any one or none of the factions present in Calradia: The Swadian, Rhodok, Vaegir, Khergit, and Nord armies, or hunt down the various bandits and rogues that plague the region.
The gameplay is open, similar to games such as Elite or Darklands. The game currently has a skeleton plot and the player is free to do as he wishes. While combat is the main draw of the game, it is for the most part optional.
Celestial Impact
Celestial_Impact wrote: Celestial Impact is a team multiplayer FPS taking place on asteroids with spherical gravity. The game is unique in that the landscape can be deformed in every direction. Players can add or remove terrain during combat by aiming and firing a special tool called Dirtgun. Celestial Impact is a PC game developed in Sweden that started with a few university students having an idea of an unusual and fun game. The idea evolved into a larger spare-time project and has now reached a fully playable version.
Iron Grip: Warlord
Isotx wrote: In IRON GRIP: WARLORD, the first commercial game from Isotx, the player plays as an Atelian warrior from Warlord Sahrab's army. The nomadic state of Atelia is being invaded by the imperialistic Confederation and everything from their religion to their independence is being threatened. Due to its own internal weakness and fractured city-states, Atelia has struggled and largely failed to fight the movement. It is now up to you and a close-knit of rebels--either AI controlled or fellow players--to repel the invader and save Atelia. As a Warlord, you must use all of your skill to defend the city against the Confederate attacks. In an innovative blend of RTS and FPS gameplay, you will employ urban guerrilla tactics to fight off the hordes of soldiers. You must protect your city at all costs, by building defense structures, setting traps, and taking the enemy on yourself. Based on the Quake 3 engine, this project is the latest offering in the Iron Grip Universe.
Live for Speed S2
Live_for_Speed wrote: LFS S2 is a serious racing simulator. No arcade modes, no steering aids - YOU have to do the driving. It is therefore highly recommended to play the sim with a wheel, because even though you can use keyboard and/or mouse, a wheel is what you use in a real car, so a wheel should be used in a serious racing simulator. Especially when going online, where fast reactions are required.
In S2 you can race alone or against the AI, but the real fun is to be found online, in multiplayer mode. Racing against real people is simply the best thing and LFS makes it easy for you to do so. There are also several online racing leagues you can take part in, if you are looking for something with a more competitive edge.
A serious simulator obviously requires a very good physics simulation to provide the thrill and fun of real racing. This is done by simulating all aspects that are important to racing. LFS S2 is the second step towards our vision of what the sim must become and already does a very good job in simulating real racing. Many racing aspects are covered - comprehensive setup possibilities, fuel usage, tyre wear, a lot of different surface types, intriguing racing environments, different car classes, etc. All these aspects make sure you have enough to practise with and spend time on learning the flow of the tracks. Additionally, don't forget to plan your pitstops - find out how much fuel your car uses on a track and how are your tyres behaving on any track, with your driving style. All aspects you will have to think about in real racing and as such you need to think about them in S2 as well.
Savage 2: A Tortured Soul
S2_Games wrote: Savage 2 is a hybrid RTS-action game. Two teams--Beasts and Humans--square off in large-scale maps. On each team, one player is the "commander" and plays the game like an RTS, while every other player on the team plays it as an action game. Savage 2 adds upon the existing Savage formula by expanding the melee combat system, updating the RPG and stat-tracking elements, and adding an entirely new race--the Hellborne. The strong emphasis on teamwork, innovative merging of genres, and asymmetrical teams make Savage 2 a very unique gameplay experience.
All Editors Choice Categories
- Most Innovative Multiplayer
- Best Original Art Direction
- Best Upcoming Mod
- Best Upcoming Indie Game
- Best Indie Game
- Best Singleplayer Mod
- Best Multiplayer Mod

subset: commoncrawl


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Advanced Search
Emergency Notification | News
Southern California's Marymount College has replaced its legacy emergency notification with a cloud-based notification system. The college cited a major failure on the part of its previous system as the impetus for the change.
According to information released by the college, the decision to overhaul its system came when its emergency notification system failed to function during a tsunami scare in March 2011 and campus administrators were unable to get timely assistance from the system's provider. For the new system, the institution, located just six miles from the Port of Los Angeles, decided to go with e2Campus from Omnilert.
"We liked the simplicity [from an administrator's point of view], we liked the price, we liked the flexibility of the pricing structure, the ability to add and subtract users. It just seemed like a very simple product, but effective," said Denise Fessenbecker, director of general services at Marymount College, adding that the college has only needed to use the system once so far and that it functioned properly.
Fessenbecker added that another feature the college likes about e2Campus is that it deploys alerts to a variety of platforms that both students and parents can access.
Features of Omnilert's e2Campus 360 Safety Suite include:
Other higher education institutions that use e2Campus include University of Maryland Eastern Shore, Robert Morris University, Park University, Wartburg College, Greenville Technical College, San Diego Community College District, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and a number of University of Maryland branch campuses.
Marymount College is a Catholic institution with campuses in Palos Verdes and San Pedro. Marymount has approximately 900 students enrolled in associate's and bachelor's degree programs.
For more information on e2Campus 360 Safety Suite, visit e2Campus.com.
About the Author
Tim Sohn is a 10-year veteran of the news business, having served in capacities from reporter to editor-in-chief of a variety of publications including Web sites, daily and weekly newspapers, consumer and trade magazines, and wire services. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @editortim.
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We are talking art and motherhood with Chloe Fleury, an illustrator and set and prop stylist out of San Francisco. Chloe has a young daughter named Lula and another little one on the way, but that hasn't stopped the French artist from creating. Chloe has found a niche in creating magical sets, whimsical animals and décor out of paper.
When did you start creating?
I grew up in a very colorful home. My parents love art, my grandfather had a gallery, my grandmother was a painter and both of my parents draw very well. I have been making things (paper boxes, origami, paintings…) for as long as
I can remember. Very early, I think around the age of 5, one of my teachers told my mum that I had a talent for art and I should be taking classes. So I did, for about 10 years. I went to an art class every Wednesday.
I never tried music, which I regret. And I was never into sports. My interest was mostly in drawing. I would spend my weekends and holidays making cards to sell to the neighbors, making paper boxes, I was already obsessed with paper and textures. I don't know how many hours my mother and I spent at the art store. I had a little studio in our garage! Then, I graduated from high school and went to ECV, a visual communication school in Aix-en-Provence,
south of France for 4 years.
What does "Art" mean to you?
Expressing myself creatively and visually. Making pretty things using my hands.
What is your medium of choice?
Paper for the last 4-5 years. I love creating little worlds, working on set decors and props. I am more and more interested in trying new techniques and incorporating new medium into my work. I just need to find the
time to experiment!
Has motherhood altered your creative process? If so, in what ways?
I have never been as inspired as when I was pregnant with Lula (and now with my second). Lula sure inspires me a lot. Regarding the process, the most remarkable change is that now I have a studio outside of our home. Lula's bedroom was my studio, but I had to move because I needed more space and she needed her own space as well. When she is with the nanny, I have to be more organized and really focus on my work and productivity. That way, when I come home, I can focus on her. Before becoming a mum, I worked a lot at night and on the weekends. That isn't the case anymore as I like to enjoy our family time together. We like to be outside, explore nature, etc. This also inspires me. At night, I am too exhausted and just need to relax and have some quiet time for myself.
Do you involve Lula in your process, or is it a personal experience for you?
Not really. My work involves a cutter, scissors, glue and these are dangerous tools for her. That is also one of the reasons that I have a studio now. Otherwise, I would have to make sure the door is closed all of the time. She has so much energy and likes to touch and climb on everything, so I think it's a little too early for her to be with me in the studio. It would be very stressful for me. However, I definitely can't wait for her to be a little older so we can work on little craft projects together. For now, she is obsessed with stickers and drawing on her desk! Although she is currently not directly involved in the creative process, she serves as inspiration in creating new products for my shop. She has a few trophy animals in her bedroom and I loved creating her birth announcement, 1st birthday invitation and party décor. It is just amazing to be a mum and rediscover the little things in life with her. The colors, the words, the animals, the sounds…everything! She amazes me every day. I aspired to be a children's book illustrator when I was in art school and collected many books. I love reading them to Lula.
What do you do when you encounter a creative block?
I take a break! Sometimes when I start on a project, if it doesn't work the way I want the first time, it feels like I will never make it right. That is so frustrating! I ask myself so many questions and doubt my work and talent. I'm like "Ok, I'm done, I am not good enough". At that point, I just take a little break for a few days or work on a different project. When I come back to it, I feel much more inspired and have a fresh perspective on it.
If you could give creative mothers any piece of advice, what would that
It is hard to find the balance between work and being a mother. If making art is your passion, I would say to never give up. It took a long time for me to find my own style and have my first client. However, all of
the questions and moments of doubt are so worth it when you finally are able to live from your passion.
Chloe Fleury|Website|Blog|Shop
Photo Credits//Photo of Chloe in workspace: Maria Del Rio| Photos of Chloe and Lula in Lula's bedroom: Sabrina Bot


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8 Biggest Mix-ups About Health Care Reform
As arrival time nears for major components of President Barack Obama's historic health care overhaul, polls continue to show a sharp divide in public sentiment about the law. Most people think they know whether they like or dislike it. But when it comes to knowing what's actually contained within this mammoth retooling of our health insurance system, most of us may not be smarter than a failing fifth grader.
Recent polls by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that more than two-thirds (67%) of uninsured Americans age 65 and younger and 57% of the overall population say they do not understand how the Affordable Care Act will affect their lives. And, 42% of us are still unaware that health care reform has been the law of the land since 2010.
It's understandable. The ambitious law runs to 2,700 pages and the benefits that have already taken effect have been overshadowed by a Supreme Court challenge and widespread uncertainty over the new online public health exchanges coming in 2014.
With early enrollment through those first-ever, federal-state health insurance marketplaces beginning Oct. 1, perhaps it's time to acquaint ourselves with the changes that have already occurred and those soon to come.
Here are the facts to dispel eight fictions that have grown up around the Affordable Care Act.
Mandate muddle
Fiction: Everyone must purchase health insurance beginning in 2014, no exceptions. Fact: While most uninsured Americans will be required to buy health insurance or pay a penalty (or tax, if you like) beginning in 2014, several groups are exempt from the so-called individual mandate.
They include those whose income is so low, they don't file federal tax returns; anyone who would have to spend more than 8% of their income on health insurance; undocumented immigrants; people who are incarcerated; members of Native American tribes; and those who qualify for a religious exemption.
There's also one other large set of people who won't need to buy health insurance.
"Everybody who is eligible for Medicaid or Medicare does not have to purchase additional coverage," notes Deborah Chollet, a senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research in Washington, D.C., who is helping states set up the new health exchanges.
"The Urban Institute and others have estimated that only about 3% of Americans will be subject to the penalty," says Kathleen Stoll, director of health policy for the health care consumer group Families USA. "The rest of Americans either will have insurance or will fall under an exemption."
Misplaced worker apathy
Fiction: If you're insured through your employer, health care reform won't affect you. Fact: On the contrary, many new consumer protections under the Affordable Care Act are already benefiting people with job-based health insurance.
For example, the health care reform law bars insurers from placing lifetime limits on what they will pay for a worker's medical care, plus there are new restrictions on annual benefit limits. Insurers are no longer able to arbitrarily cancel your insurance policy when you get sick, except in cases of fraud, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Other new features for job-based policies include: no more copayments or deductibles for preventive health services, including cancer screenings; the right to see obstetricians and gynecologists without a referral; better access to out-of-network services in an emergency; protections against unfair administrative fees; and the right to keep dependents younger than 26 on your policy.
"If you have employer coverage, health care reform will actually make your life a little better," says Chollet.
New government insurance?
Fiction: The Affordable Care Act creates a new government-run insurance plan. Fact: The health care reform law includes no such provision.
Rather than centralize health insurance into what's termed a "single-payer" system, health care reform accomplishes many of the same goals through its interwoven expansion of the existing Medicaid program, increased federal regulation of the health insurance industry and tax credits to make private insurance more affordable.
"There will be new insurance plans, but they're not government-run," explains Chollet. Instead, the federal Office of Personnel Management is required to contract with at least two private insurance companies, including at least one nonprofit, which can include the consumer-owned and operated health plans called co-ops, to offer coverage in every market nationwide.
"So new plans may come into your market," she says.
Business befuddlement
Fiction: All businesses will be required to provide employee health insurance. Fact: The Affordable Care Act does not require employers to provide health coverage.
However, it does impose a penalty on larger employers that either do not offer a federally qualified plan or offer unaffordable coverage and whose workers subsequently purchase plans through their state exchange.
According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Affordable Care Act specifically exempts firms with fewer than 50 employees -- 96% of all firms in the United States -- from any employer responsibility requirements. Since more than 96% of firms with 50 or more employees already offer health insurance to their workers, fewer than 0.2% are likely to face a penalty.
"Conversely, small businesses that offer health insurance to their employees may be eligible for tax credits," says Scott Holeman, spokesman for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.
The health care law features a variety of incentives meant to encourage small businesses to insure their employees. The combination of tax credits and access to more affordable plans through new Small Business Health Options Programs, or SHOPs, within the exchanges are designed to give small businesses the same clout as large employers when it comes to purchasing insurance.
Immigrant inaccuracy
Fiction: Undocumented immigrants will receive federal aid to purchase health insurance. Fact: Undocumented immigrants are excluded from health care reform.
Persons residing illegally in the United States have neither rights nor requirements to purchase health insurance under health care reform. Just as they are ineligible to receive Medicaid insurance for the poor, they are prohibited from purchasing health insurance on the new state exchanges, either with federal subsidies or with their own money.
"Undocumented immigrants are still in the same difficult situation they have always been in," says Chollet.
'Death panels' notion slow to die
Fiction: Health reform creates a "death panel" to make decisions about end-of-life care for seniors. Fact: Early drafts of health care reform would have allowed Medicare to reimburse physicians for time spent talking with older patients about advance care planning. But these provisions were eliminated in subsequent revisions.
"Advance care planning gives the patient more control over his or her health care," says Stoll. "Unfortunately, opponents distorted a provision that would have allowed Medicare to pay health care providers for the time they spend talking with a Medicare beneficiary about what kind of care he or she would like at the end of life."
Chollet says the "death panel" scare tactics accomplished their purpose. "It became so politicized so fast that it just threatened to sink the entire bill, so it was struck," she says.
Still, Stoll says savvy Medicare-eligible consumers were quick to discover a cost-free workaround provided by a previous president.
"In 2003, President George W. Bush signed into law the Medicare Modernization Act, which allows Medicare to cover advance care planning as part of the Welcome to Medicare physical exam," she explains. "Also, if you visit your doctor, for example, to check your diabetes and you also discuss your end-of-life care preferences during that visit, Medicare will cover the appointment."
Medicare scare
Fiction: Health care reform will reduce Medicare benefits to all seniors. Fact: Traditional Medicare benefits will be unaffected by the law, and some seniors will even enjoy better coverage.
In fact, seniors have been among the first to enjoy cost savings as a result of health reform.
"It improves prescription drug coverage for people with Medicare Part D by gradually closing the coverage gap, or 'doughnut hole,'" Stoll says. "Seniors with high drug costs who fall into the doughnut hole are now receiving 50% discounts on their brand-name drugs at the pharmacy and other discounts on generics. These discounts will increase each year until the gap is completely closed in 2020."
Health care reform does reduce payments to privately administered Medicare Advantage plans to bring them more in line with traditional Medicare. As a result, some plans may charge higher premiums and reduce add-ons such as eye and dental care while still meeting federal requirements to provide all benefits currently covered under traditional Medicare.
But Chollet says don't cry for these private insurers just yet.
"There is a reason that so many companies came in to offer Medicare Advantage: It is a huge moneymaker. But now that they have some experience, they should be expected to take some risk -- they are insurers after all -- and the ACA expects that of them."
States on the sidelines?
Fiction: States that don't set up health exchanges will be exempt from the Affordable Care Act. Fact: If states fail to establish a health exchange, the federal government will set up and run one for them.
On Oct. 1, the first-ever, state-based health insurance exchanges are scheduled to debut online, offering open enrollment to individuals and small businesses for health coverage to begin Jan. 1, 2014.
States face three exchange options: they can design and run their own exchange, partner with the federal government or pass entirely, in which case the feds will operate their exchange for them.
"Even if a state elects not to, the federal government will ensure that consumers in that state still have a place to obtain insurance with subsidies by setting up an exchange for that state," says Stoll.
"All of the other important protections in the Affordable Care Act, like the prohibition on discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, the option for young adults to stay on their parents' plans until they turn 26, and access to recommended preventive services with no copayments, will still apply to that state," she adds.


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Through my heart's palace Thoughts unnumbered throng;
And there, most quiet and, as a child, most wise,
High-throned you sit, and gracious. All day long
Great Hopes gold-armoured, jester Fantasies,
And pilgrim Dreams, and little beggar Sighs,
Bow to your benediction, go their way.
And the grave jewelled courtier Memories
Worship and love and tend you, all the day.
But when I sleep, and all my thoughts go straying,
When the high session of the day is ended,
And darkness comes; then, with the waning light,
By lilied maidens on your way attended,
Proud from the wonted throne, superbly swaying,
You, like a queen, pass out into the night.


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Continuing Support For Tsunami Relief
From our own experiences, we know that nothing can take away the grief of those affected by tragedy. We also know that Americans have a history of rising to meet great humanitarian challenges and of providing hope to suffering peoples. As men and women across the devastated region begin to rebuild, we offer our sustained compassion and our generosity, and our assurance that America will be there to help.
President George W. Bush, January 3, 2005
Presidential Action
- President Bush on February 9, 2005, announced that he is seeking $950 million as part of the supplemental request to support the rehabilitation and reconstruction of areas devastated by the Indian Ocean Tsunami and to cover the costs of the U.S. governments relief efforts to date. This amount, which is part of the supplemental appropriations request, is an expansion of his initial commitment of $350 million and is based on the information available and the assessments to date.
- The President expressed the United States deep and ongoing commitment to the tsunami victims. The United States was working to help these nations before the tsunami struck, and we remain committed to helping those affected by this terrible disaster recover and rebuild.
The $950 million tsunami supplemental will include estimated allocations for the following activities:
- $339 million for reconstruction of infrastructure, such as the construction of roads, schools, and water distribution systems;
- $168 million to help victims transition back to their communities, including food aid, shelter, housing reconstruction, education, and programs that help victims recover and get back to work;
- A total of $35 million for early warning and disaster mitigation efforts -- $23 million to improve the international and U.S. tsunami early warning system, and $12 million to enhance tsunami early warning and disaster mitigation in the affected countries;
- $62 million for good governance and technical assistance for planning reconstruction activities and the costs of U.S. government agency operations in the region; and
- $346 million to replenish costs incurred by the United States Agencies for International Development (USAID) and the Defense Department for provision of immediate relief.
- The supplemental may fund debt deferment for tsunami affected countries, if necessary.
Relief Efforts To Date:
- To date, the United States has committed $350 million in emergency relief assistance which will be replenished in the supplemental to enable the United States to respond to future emergencies. This is in addition to operational costs incurred by the Department of Defense. Relief resources have been focused on emergency food assistance, provision of relief supplies, shelter, water and sanitation, health, education, cash for work, livelihoods recovery, psychological and social support, protecting women and children from human-trafficking, logistics and coordination, and debris clean-up.
- When the earthquake hit, USAID immediately worked to mobilize staff to respond to the humanitarian needs in the affected countries. At the height of the relief effort, more than 150 USAID personnel, including Disaster Assistance experts, were on the ground in Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Maldives, and the Seychelles conducting assessments of affected areas, managing U.S. civilian response, participating in the overall coordination of relief and reconstruction activities, apprising funding requests, and recommending appropriate U.S. Government relief efforts.
- The United States, through USAID, has funded debris clean-up and other community rehabilitation projects in the relief phase benefiting more than 344,000 people through cash-for-work projects and temporary shelter for more than 165,000 people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and India.
- USAID has also funded water and sanitation activities in the emergency phase benefiting more than 885,000 people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and the Maldives.
- USAID provided 21,220 metric tons for the first four months of World Food Program (WFP) operations, contributing to WFP's beneficiary total of 1.4 million tsunami victims.
- The Defense Department brought into action military assets to support relief operations in Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. The Defense Department has been providing vital supplies and logistics to the humanitarian effort since December 30.
- At the height of the DOD humanitarian support activities, there were nearly 16,000 U.S. military personnel in the region focused on this effort.
- There were 26 ships, 58 helicopters, and 43 fixed wing aircraft.
- DOD delivered over 10 million pounds of food and supplies and provided well over 400,000 gallons of fresh water.
- To date, DOD has treated almost 2,500 patients.
- Other agencies have also contributed to the effort including the State Department with diplomatic coordination, the Department of Health and Human Services by deploying technical health experts, the Department of Agriculture with food aid, and the Treasury Department through the efforts of the international financial institutions.
- Former Presidents Bush and Clinton will visit tsunami-affected countries of South and Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and the Maldives in February 2005.
- Estimates place the generous private-sector donations towards the tsunami relief efforts at more than $700 million.


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[Milapse] picked up a motorized telescope base a few years ago. He's using it to add motion to time-lapse photography. The base provides two-axis rotation controlled with a handheld keypad. Custom firmware and a bit of software allow for computer control. [Milapse] is pretty well-known in the time-lapse photography circles of the Inter-web. He's posted a ten minute video explaining his setup and programming work for the hardware.
His use of a quality camera produces some nice video.However cost at $200 for the base, if you just want to play around with the concept you might want to stick to a webcam and LEGO setup.
[Thanks Jack]


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Pastor Saeed Abedini ACLJ Campaign to Flood Iranian President With Weekly Letters
The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) has launched the largest campaign in its history with aims of sending thousands of letters each week to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, petitioning for U.S. Pastor Saeed Adedini, who has been imprisoned for 52 weeks.
"Using a brand-new website that raises awareness for the persecuted church and gives a voice to the voiceless, we're asking you to write a letter to President Hassan Rouhani asking that he free Pastor Saeed," ACLJ Executive Director Jordan Sekulow said in a letter to supporters on Monday.
"We've written text you can use, or you can customize to send your own message, but our goal is simple: 52,000 letters asking President Rouhani to save Saeed."
Abedini has been in Evin Prison in Tehran since his arrest last year, and was later sentenced to eight years in jail, supposedly for endangering national security. The ACLJ, which represents his wife, Naghmeh, and their two young children in the U.S., says that Iran has targeted the pastor for his Christian faith.
Despite a worldwide petition signed by close to 650,000 people, and top U.S. officials, such as Secretary of State John Kerry, calling on Iran to release the pastor, who has suffered beatings and been placed in solitary confinement, the Islamic republic has refused to listen to pleas for his release. What is more, Branch 36 of the Tehran Court of Appeals declined in August to reduce Abedini's 8-year sentence, which was seen as a big blow for the pastor and his family.
Last week, Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), co-chairman of the International Religious Freedom Caucus, issued a strong-worded statement directed at Iran warning that Abedini's treatment is a violation of human rights.
"Iran has once again demonstrated an utter disregard for fundamental human rights by continuing to insist that Pastor Saeed Abedini, an American citizen, be unjustly imprisoned in Iran," Franks declared. "I will continue to exhaust every available avenue to continue to advocate for Pastor Abedini's immediate and unconditional release."
Kerry, who has spoken out for the release of a number of US citizens being held in the Islamic country, said in a separate statement in August: "These men belong at home with those who love them and miss them."
The ACLJ letter, already signed by over 12,000 people, appeals respectfully and directly to Iranian President Rouhani, who won his country's general elections in June. At the time, ACLJ's International Legal Director Tiffany N. Barrans shared with The Christian Post that there is little hope that he can directly intervene in the case.
"Although one can hope that his promises of reform would include greater freedoms for the persecuted religious minorities in Iran, in reality, the man who controls the country and has set the harsh policy towards Christians remains unchanged – Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei remains at the helm and he has set course for utter destruction of the Christian faith in Iran," Barrans told CP.
Still, the new campaign from the legal group is determined to keep Abedini in the spotlight until he is finally returned to his family. The ACLJ says it plans to send Rouhani 1,000 letters every single week until the U.S. pastor is freed.


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<< [Back to News Release Archive]
Raytheon Announces Agreement to Purchase BBN Technologies
WALTHAM, Mass., Sept. 1, 2009 /PRNewswire/ -- Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN) has entered into an agreement to acquire BBN Technologies, a privately-held world leader in research and development, and provider of critical solutions for national defense and security missions. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2009 subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. The transaction is not expected to materially impact revenue or earnings per share for the fourth quarter of 2009, and is expected to be accretive in 2010. Terms of the agreement are not being disclosed.
BBN's diverse portfolio encompasses a range of technologies including advanced networking, speech and language technologies, information technologies, sensor systems, and cybersecurity. The company's deep scientific and engineering talent aligns well with Raytheon's expertise and commitment to excellence.
"BBN brings world class people, technologies and capabilities to Raytheon and our customers," said William H. Swanson, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Raytheon Company. "We expect all of our businesses to benefit from the application of BBN's research and development expertise and technologies across our product lines and programs. BBN's rich technology heritage makes this a natural fit."
BBN Technologies has a long history of innovative products and solutions including the ARPANET (forerunner of the Internet). Current offerings include the Boomerang acoustic-based shooter detection system currently deployed with U.S. forces, and a broad range of technology development programs, many considered mission-critical by defense and intelligence customers.
Following the acquisition, BBN Technologies will become part of Raytheon Network Centric Systems (NCS).
"BBN's products and technical capabilities will enhance NCS' ability to offer critically important solutions to our customers," said Colin Schottlaender, president, Network Centric Systems. "This acquisition will strengthen our positions in networking, communications, video surveillance and advanced sensing applications."
Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, BBN employs 700 employees in seven U.S. locations.
"BBN has extraordinary technical depth in the areas in which we work," said Robert G. Elmer, president and CEO of BBN Technologies. "Joining Raytheon, an organization with very strong technical expertise and significant resources, will help us to broaden our reach, acting as a multiplier on our proven ability to deliver advances to the market rapidly and profitably, and better serve our ultimate client, the U.S. warfighter."
Raytheon Company, with 2008 sales of $23.2 billion, is a technology and innovation leader specializing in defense, homeland security and other government markets throughout the world. With a history of innovation spanning 87 years, Raytheon provides state-of-the-art electronics, mission systems integration and other capabilities in the areas of sensing; effects; and command, control communications and intelligence systems; as well as a broad range of mission support services. With headquarters in Waltham, Mass., Raytheon employs 73,000 people worldwide.
Disclosure Regarding Forward-looking Statements
This release contains forward-looking statements regarding the expected closing of the acquisition and the performance of Raytheon following the completion of the acquisition. These forward-looking statements are based on Raytheon's current expectations and are necessarily subject to associated risks related to, among other things, the successful completion of the acquisition and the ability of Raytheon to successfully integrate BBN Technologies and to achieve expected benefits. Actual results may differ materially from what is expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. For information regarding other related risks, please see the "Risk Factors" section of Raytheon's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent filings on Form 10-K.
Contact: Jon Kasle 781.522.5110
SOURCE Raytheon Company
SOURCE: Raytheon Company
Web site: http://www.raytheon.com/
Company News On-Call: http://www.prnewswire.com/comp/149999.html
Company News On-Call: http://www.prnewswire.com/comp/742575 .html


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History of Resistance
As long as there have been militaries and war, soldiers around the world have resisted, deserted, and refused combat duty for both moral and political reasons, and civilians have supported them. The term "GI," meaning "Government Issue," came into use in World War One to refer to Army soldiers and their equipment. It emphasizes the service members' status as pieces of property belonging to the government, which GI resisters are all too aware of!
- 1781 - The Pennsylvania Militia mutinies against war profiteers and for food.
- The National Guard refusing to fire on strikers (and at times joining them) in the 1870s–1890s.
- GI-organized "Bring Us Home" committees throughout Japan and the Philippines in 1945-1946.
- During the Mexican–American War, 9,000 U.S. soldiers deserted. Among them were deserters from at least 12 regiments who switched sides to form a new battalion called St. Patrick's, as the majority were Irish immigrants who found they had more in common with the Mexicans they had been told to fight.
- 1914/1915 Christmas Truce - Soldiers from multiple armies (French, German, Australian, British, many others) refused to fight during Christmas 1914, and to a lesser extent a year later. Known as the Christmas Truce, soldiers played sports, drank and fraternized with each other for a few days until officers forced them to continue fighting, though some officers joined in.
- 1919 - U.S. soldiers sent to oppose Russian Revolution desert and rebel.
- 1932 - Bonus Army, thousands of veterans of World War One, march and camp-out in DC demanding back-pay from war. General Smedley Butler addresses troops with rousing speech of support. The Cavalry eventually repressed the veterans and ends the protests.
- 1964-75 - Huge GI movement rocks United States Military, both in Vietnam and at bases at home and around the world. Over 300 GI anti-war newspapers are printed on base or near base, 10 percent of the U.S. military deserts or goes AWOL, and major incidents of combat refusal, mass draft resistance, refusals to deploy, and on-base protests and sit-ins occur. Movement brings the draft to an end and is a major force in bringing the Vietnam War to an end. GIs sabotage ships and stories of GIs switching sides (the so-called White Cong and the "Salt & Pepper" duo of white and black GIs) and fighting alongside the Vietcong are numerous.
Resisting the draft and declaring conscientious objector status have also been significant strategies for people seeking to deny their labor to the military. Draft resisters and conscientious objectors, as well as people resisting from inside the service, have endured beatings, jail (including solitary confinement), and social discrimination—and their courage has helped to create more political and social space for increased questioning and dissent.
For most of this guide, our historical reference point is the powerful GI resistance movement to end the war in Vietnam. The combination of the unyielding determination of the Vietnamese people, and the fierce GI resistance that built to a boil during the course of the war, eventually forced the U.S. government to end that war—achieving a historic victory!
The visible acts of resistance—like the tens of thousands of soldiers attending rallies, protests, and sit-ins on U.S. bases around the world—are only the tip of the iceberg. Soldiers took great risks in everyday acts as well as with overt defiance. Some tactics were cribbed from workplace organizing, like slowdowns, strikes, and sabotage of equipment. Others, like the GI Coffeehouse movement, grew directly from the conditions that soldiers confronted. Over 300 newspapers, most distributed clandestinely, spread the word and provided a sense of how many GIs were resisting.
Individual acts of resistance gave way to more and more collective action, including rebellions on bases and riots in brigs (military jails). One in seven soldiers deserted or went AWOL, and a few switched sides and fought alongside the Vietcong. Soldiers built an alternative culture among themselves that supported a different set of values and actions.
The cumulative results of all this dissent and disobedience had three powerful effects:
- Greater public pressure on the U.S. government to withdraw
- An incapacitated military
- A new generation of politicized veterans
It is important to note that during Vietnam, the majority of GI resisters were not draftees. People who had enlisted, most of whom were working class, rebelled at a higher rate. Much of the public misunderstand Vietnam-era resistance as a result of the draft, but remembering that "volunteers" were the backbone of the resistance is hopeful for us in this moment. We look to this era for strategy and inspiration, and are lucky to have many active veteran organizers in the peace movement who were part of the resistance to the Vietnam War.
Over the last few years, recognition of how important GI resistance is to ending U.S. wars abroad has grown within the peace movement. Organizing within communities directly connected to the military—veterans, GIs/service members, and military families—has built strong organizations and commanded national attention for their infectious determination and courageous voices.
For the first years of the Bush Administration's "endless war," the peace movement in general made little effort to organize with veterans and GIs. GI resistance was largely off the radar of the peace movement, except for a handful of groups that worked to support war resisters.
In July of 2004, just months after the first units returned from deployment, Iraq Veterans Against the War was founded and quickly emerged as a significant political force. Veterans for Peace, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and some other long-time peace activists and groups supported IVAW in its growth. The founders were:
- Kelly Dougherty, USA
- Tim Goodrich, USAF
- Mike Hoffman, USMC
- Alex Ryabov, USMC
- Jimmy Massey, USMC
- Isaiah Pallos, USMC
- Diana Morrison, USA
From its inception, IVAW has been unified by three points:
- Immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces from Iraq,
- Reparations, and other compensation, for the destruction and corporate pillaging of Iraq so that the Iraqi people can rebuild their lives and control their future, and
- Full benefits, adequate healthcare, and other supports for returning service members
- IVAW has added to these points of unity resolutions against the continued occupation of Afghanistan, against the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy, and in support of GI resisters.
Veteran and GI leadership, a critical element of the domestic anti-Vietnam War movement, re-emerged to help shift national opinion away from supporting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
At first, the majority of the peace movement recognized IVAWs leadership mostly by asking them to speak at rallies and hold their banner at the front of marches. Beyond a few local and national organizations offering resources and political support, there was little strategic and collaborative organizing between IVAW and civilian groups. However, as the peace movement came to terms with its need for a deeper and more inclusive strategy, the understanding of GIs as the "work force" that makes the wars possible began to take root.
IVAW and other strategy-minded organizers helped centralize the strategic importance of organizing with antiwar veterans, conscientious objectors, and GI resisters, and the need for supportive allies. Strategic campaign-based organizing to build a GI movement is just now beginning to develop.
Resistance in the Military [Added 3/12/2009] Courage in the military does not always mean boldly facing the physical dangers of battle. The courage to stand up in the face of adversity to do the right thing and set the ethical example is a value every military member should have. Brave and courageous men and women have refused and challenged illegal and unlawful orders during numerous wars, even refusing unlawful orders to be part of illegal wars.
One famous example during the Vietnam war was Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, who stopped the infamous massacre at My Lai. Chief My Lai prosecutor William Eckhardt described how Thompson responded when confronted with evidence of atrocity: "He put his guns on Americans, said he would shoot them if they shot another Vietnamese, had his people wade in the ditch in gore to their knees, to their hips, took out children, took them to the hospital..flew back to headquarters, standing in front of people, tears rolling down his cheeks, pounding on the table saying 'Notice, notice, notice'...then had the courage to testify time after time." Like many other resistors challenging unjust, unethical, and illegal actions, Hugh Thompson was ignored at the time, largely hidden and generally dismissed by military history. However, his actions, much like those of many other resisters, were crucial to saving the lives of innocents.
Join IVAW
IVAW is open to Active Duty, National Guard and Reservists who have served since 09/11/2001. You are not alone.


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The first time that I had a slice of watermelon with salt on it, I was skeptical. At the time, an acquaintance of mine insisted that it would make the watermelon sweeter, better. I gave it a try and I was an instant convert to salting my melon. I'll eat watermelon (and other melons) without that pinch of salt, of course, but my friend was right: watermelon is better with salt.
Salt makes watermelon taste sweeter by creating a salty sweet contrast that allows the sweetness of the melon to stand out. Watermelon often has a subtle sweetness to it because so much of it is water, unlike a strawberry or other fruit where the flavor seems to be very concentrated and intense, so giving the sweetness a bit of salt to stand up against makes it seem much bolder. Salt also makes you salivate, which will make the watermelon seem even juicier than it is on its own. The trick to success is to only add a small pinch of salt and to evenly scatter it over the whole piece of melon. If you add too much salt, you'll drown out the melon's sweetness and you'll have to start over with a fresh piece.
So, what kind of salt should you use? You can use any kind of salt, including table salt, but I prefer to use a coarser sea salt or kosher salt. It is easy to over salt the melon with table salt, and you get a greater salty-sweet contrast with the coarser salt while using less salt overall. I typically use Maldon salt or something like the pink Himalayan salt pictured above. You can also pair watermelon with feta cheese for a similar salty-sweet effect and a delicious side dish or snack on a hot summer day.


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The International Olympic Committee loves to think of their event as a not just a sporting event, but as a tool for furthering peace and social justice around the world. Furthermore, The Olympic Committee's guidelines on sourcing are meant to place a high priority on environmental, social and ethical issues when contracting for the Games.
But how then can London's 2012 Olympic Games justify giving chemical giant Dow Chemical a high profile contract in light of Dow's failure to address one of the worst corporate related human rights disasters of the 20th century? You can tell the Olympics' leadership about the legacy of Bhopal that Dow Chemical refuses to address and ask them why they ignored this tragedy when giving this juicy contract to Dow Chemical.
Dow Chemical Company has been granted a contract to provide a decorative fabric wrap to encircle London's Olympic Stadium during the next year's Games.
Since 2001, Dow has been a 100% owner of Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), the company that owned the Indian subsidiary that operated the plant responsible for the 1984 Bhopal disaster (the anniversary was December 3). Thousands of people died and more than 100,000 continue to suffer from health problems as a result of the Bhopal leak. Even after 27 years, the site still awaits clean-up and a thorough investigation into the leak and its impact.
Survivors have not received fair compensation or access to the medical care they need. Survivors and human rights groups have been campaigning for Dow to address the ongoing health and environmental impacts of the disaster. But Dow has consistently rejected any responsibility for UCC's liabilities in Bhopal.
Dow's bottom line will grow ever richer while Bhopal's victims suffer. How's that for the Olympic spirit? You can do something about it by writing to the Olympics' leadership now.


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This page has been archived and is being provided for reference purposes only. The page is no longer being updated, and therefore, links on the page may be invalid.
Read the magazine story to find out more. |
New Reference Book Lists Uses and Origins of Important Plants
By Dennis O'Brien
March 17, 2014
A new reference book written by a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientist and his university colleague should prove to be an invaluable resource for researchers, plant breeders, librarians or anyone who wants basic, accurate information about important plants.
World Economic Plants: A Standard Reference took more than two years to complete and was reviewed by more than 150 experts. At 1,336 pages, it is more for professionals and scientists than for casual readers. It was written by John Wiersema, a botanist with USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS), and Blanca León, a University of Texas taxonomist.
The authors link the list of scientific names of 12,235 plants with their geographic origins and uses. They also provide more than 50,000 common names for those plants in 27 languages, including Arabic, Chinese and Russian. Plants often have different names and uses in different countries.
The book is an update of an edition published ikn 1999 that inventoried 9,500 plants, according to Wiersema, who works in ARS' National Germplasm Resources Laboratory in Beltsville, Md. ARS is USDA's principal intramural scientific research agency, and this research supports the USDA priority of promoting international food security.
The updated version was requested by the publisher CRC Press. Along with including 25 percent more plants, the new version indicates more "use classes," such as whether a plant is a food source or has been used medicinally. Some of the most common use categories are ornamentals (5,361), medicines (2,997), food and food additives (2,212), and weeds (2,136).
Information in the book and its sources can also be found in the ARS Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN), which is part of the ARS National Plant Germplasm System and is publicly available online.
Read more about this research in the March 2014 issue of Agricultural Research magazine.


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Troy Larson, the senior forensic-y dude from Microsoft, has been talking about Volume Shadow Copies for quite some time. In his presentations, Troy has talked about accessing and acquiring VSCs on live systems, using George M. Garner, Jr's FAU dd.exe; however, this requires considerable available disk space.
Troy's SANS Forensic Summit 2010 presentation can be found here. In his presentation, Troy demonstrates (among other things) how to access VSCs remotely on live systems, using freely available tools.
ProDiscover - Chris Brown has a presentation available online (from TechnoSecurity 2010) in which he discusses using ProDiscover to access and mount Volume Shadow Copies on live systems...remotely. Pretty cool.
I ran across a QCCIS whitepaper recently that discusses mounting an acquired image using EnCase with the PDE module, accessing the VSCs using the same method Troy pointed out, and then copying files from the VSCs using robocopy. There are also a number of posts over at the Forensics from the sausage factory blog that address VSCs, and a couple that include the use of robocopy. As I often work with acquired images, being able to access VSCs within those images is something I'm very interested in being able to do. However, most of my online research points to folks using EnCase with the PDE module to mount their acquired images when demonstrating how to access VSCs within those images...and I don't have EnCase.
So...what if you don't have access to EnCase or the PDE module? How could you then access Volume Shadow Copies within an acquired image?
I started out with a host system that is a fresh install of Windows 7 Professional, 64-bit. The acquired image I started with is of a physical disk of from a 32-bit Vista system; as it's an image from the physical disk, it has several partitions, including a maintenance partition. The acquired image is called "disk0.001". I also extracted the active Vista partition as a separate raw/dd image, calling it "system.001". I verified the file systems of both of these images using FTK Imager to ensure that I could 'see' the files.
So here are the tools I installed/used:
FTK Imager 126.96.36.1993
ImDisk 1.3.1
Mount Image Pro 126.96.36.1993 (14 day trial)
Shadow Explorer 0.8.430.0
So the first thing I did was mount the image using FTK Imager 3.0, and noted the drive letter for the third partition...in this case, I:\. I opened a command prompt and used the 'dir' command to verify that I could access the volume. I then typed the following command:
vssadmin list shadows /for=i:
This got me an error message:
Error: Either the specified volume was not found or it is not a local volume.
Okay. I fired up ShadowExplorer, but the I:\ drive was not one of the options available for viewing.
I tried mounting the system.001 file, and then tried both image files again using ImDisk, and each time got the same result...running the vssadmin command I got the above error message. I also tried using the "Logical Only" option in FTK Imager 3.0's "Mount Type" option, and that didn't work, either. So, at this point, I was failing to even identify the VSCs, so I could forget accessing them.
I reached out the QCCIS guys and John responded that FTK Imager 3.0 seems to mount images so that they appear as remote/network drives to the host OS; as such, vssadmin doesn't 'see' VSCs on these drives. This also explains why ShadowExplorer doesn't 'see' the volumes, and why I get the same error message when using ImDisk. I also got in touch with Olof, the creator of ImDisk, and he said that ImDisk was written using the method for creating drive letters available in NT 4.0, prior to the Volume Mount Manger being included in Windows; as such, getting ImDisk to mount the volumes as local disks would require a re-write. Thanks to Olof for ImDisk, and thanks to Olof and the QCCIS guys for responding!
I then installed the VMWare VDDK 1.2 in order to get a version of vmware-mount that would run on Windows 7. I had booted the acquired image using LiveView, so I had a .vmdk file on my drive for this image. After installing the VDDK, I ran "vmware-mount /p", and clearly saw the 4 volumes within the image...I knew that I wanted to access volume 3. I then ran the following command:
vmware-mount /v:3 x: f:\vista\disk0.001.vmdk
This resulted in an error message stating that vmware-mount could not mount the virtual disk. Checking the log file that was produced, the first message I see is that the image file, disk0.001, "failed to open (38): AIOMgr_Open failed." I'm still researching this one...
Getting It To Work
So, at this point, I'm stuck...I want to access files within the VSCs in an acquired image, and I don't have EnCase/PDE. So far, my attempts to just see the VSCs have failed. So, I grabbed a copy of vhdtool.exe, which is available from MSDN (it is described as "unmanaged code"). Originally, I wanted to get a copy of this as I have XPMode installed on my Windows 7 Professional system, which means I have Virtual PC...but I don't want to boot the vhd file at this point, so that's not a required component. So I made a copy of system.001 to another storage location and ran the vhdtool.exe with the "/convert" switch. This apparently adds a footer to the file...which I'd read about during my research and is the reason I made a copy of system.001 to work with (don't want to muck up my original in case all of this doesn't work...know what I mean?). I should note here that running the tool adds the VHD footer to the file without changing the file name...so even though I apparently now have a VHD file, I can still see only "system.001".
Next, I opened the Computer Management interface in Windows 7 and fired up the Disk Manager. I then chose Action -> Attach VHD, and browsed to my new VHD file. Before clicking "OK", I made sure to check the "Read-only" box. I then had Disk2 added to Disk Manager, and the Volume listing included a new G:\ volume. In both instances, the drive icon was light blue, as opposed to the grey drive icon for the other drives on my system. When I ran the vssadmin command against the G:\ drive, I could see the VSCs! Oddly enough, the G:\ drive is NOT a visible option in ShadowExplorer.
Next, I ran the mklink command against the last VSC identified on the G:\ drive. To do this, I selected everything on the line following "Shadow Copy Name:"...the stuff that says "\\?\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy40".
mklink /d c:\vista \\?\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy40\
Note: The final trailing "\" is EXTREMELY important!
From here, I could now access the files within the VSC. Several folks have mentioned using robocopy to get copies of files from within the VSCs, using something as simple as a batch file. See the QCCIS whitepaper for some good examples of the batch file. This is a great way to achieve data reduction...rather than acquiring an image of the VSC, simply mount it and access the files you need. Another idea would be to use RegRipper (include RegRipper's rip.exe in a batch file) or a forensic scanner to access and retrieve only the data you want. For example, when you access a user's UserAssist key and parse the information, if they've taken an action before (launched an application, etc.), you only see the date/time that they last took that action, and how many times they've done this. By accessing VSCs and running RegRipper, you could get historical information including the previous dates that they took those actions. Let's say that you use something similar to the batch file outlined in the QCCIS whitepaper, and include a command similar to the following (you may need to modify this to meet your environment):
rip.exe -p userassist -r D:\vsc%n\
Now, this assumes that your VSCs are mounted with mklink under D:\vsc; %n refers to the VSC number.
Something similar would also be true with respect to MRU lists within the Registry...we know that the LastWrite time for the key tells us when the most recently accessed file (for example) was accessed; accessing VSCs, we can see when the other files in the MRU list were accessed.
When you're done accessing the mounted VSC, simply remove the directory using rd or rmdir. Then go back to your Disk Manager, right-click the box to the left in the lower right pane, and select "Detach VHD".
If you need a command line method for doing this, take a look at diskpart...you can even include the list of commands you want to run in a script file (similar to ftp.exe) and run the script using:
diskpart /s
This, of course, leads to other questions. For example, we've seen how, if you have a full image, you can use vhdtool to convert the image file to a vhd file, or extract the pertinent partition (using FTK Imager) and convert that raw/dd image to a vhd file. But, what if you have a vmdk file from a virtual environment? One option would be to use FTK Imager to re-acquire the file to raw/dd format; FTK Imager opens vmdk files, as well as EnCase format images, just fine.
There's a tool available from the VMToolkit (produced by the VMWare folks) that will reportedly convert vmdk files to vhd format. Apparently, Starwind has a free converter, and some have mentioned that WinImage should work, as well. I haven't tried any of these, so YMMV.