Women ( still ) banned from wearing trousers in Paris . By Henry Samuel in Paris
Published: 6:35AM GMT 17 Nov 2009Comments 33 | Comment on this article  The latest attempt to remove the outmoded rule was in 2003 Photo: GETTY IMAGES  The rule banning women from dressing like men – namely by wearing trousers - was first introduced in 1800 by Paris' police chief and has survived repeated attempts to repeal it. The 1800 rule stipulated than any Parisienne wishing to dress like a man "must present herself to Paris' main police station to obtain authorisation". In 1892 it was slightly relaxed thanks to an amendment which said trousers were permitted "as long as the woman is holding the reins of a horse". Then in 1909, the decree was further watered down when an extra clause was added to allow women in trousers on condition they were "on a bicycle or holding it by the handlebars". In 1969, amid a global movement towards gender equality, the Paris council asked the city's police chief to bin the decree. His response was: "It is unwise to change texts which foreseen or unforeseen variations in fashion can return to the fore." The latest attempt to remove the outmoded rule was in 2003, when a Right-wing MP from President Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP party wrote to the minister in charge of gender equality. The minister's response was: "Disuse is sometimes more efficient than (state) intervention in adapting the law to changing mores." As Evelyne Pisier, a law professor whose book Le Droit des Femmes (The Rights of Women) unearthed the curious decree points out, given that trousers are compulsory for Parisian policewoman, they are all breaking the law.   

  The internet at 40: how Arpanet laid the foundationsForty years ago, a simple message was sent between two Californian research labs and a net was born
A history of the internet: from Arpanet in 1969 to todayComments (31) Screengrab from guardian.co.uk's interactive people's history of the internetToday is the internet's 40th birthday. Well, not exactly the internet but Arpanet – the Pentagon-funded research project that is the predecessor to the internet. Forty years ago, a simple message "Lo" (it was supposed to "Login", but the system crashed) was sent between two computers at two Californian research labs and a net was born. What happened next – the development of the now global internet, the web that you are reading this on – has had an impact on all of us. Last week, the Guardian published an interactive people's history of the internet telling the story of how that happened and interviewing some of the people who made it so.Charley Kline and Bill Duvall – who made that first connection between the University of California and the Stanford Research Institute – are in there, as are pioneers of politics, social interaction and gaming online.Kline admits the importance was not recognised at the time. "It was neat that it was working ... but nobody recognised that it was the beginning of something," he says – but what would develop from that first connection has had a huge influence on how we live today.It is also worth remembering the perhaps unexpected nature of those who made this military-funded network. Oliver Burkeman spoke to Leonard Kleinrock, the UCLA professor who led the project, for a complementary piece on how the internet changed the world for ever, noting that the Arpanet's development into what we have today was never inevitable.It was a crucial idiosyncrasy of the Arpanet that its funding came from the American defence establishment – but that the millions ended up on university campuses, with researchers who embraced an anti-establishment ethic, and who in many cases were committedly leftwing; one computer scientist took great pleasure in wearing an anti-Vietnam badge to a briefing at the Pentagon. Instead of smothering their research in the utmost secrecy – as you might expect of a cold war project aimed at winning a technological battle against Moscow – they made public every step of their thinking, in documents known as Requests For Comments.That thinking followed through and the internet – open both for people and machines thanks to the run-anywhere systems at its heart – would eventually win out over attempts in the 1980s to create more tightly-controlled networks. It is also a spirit that informed Tim Berners-Lee's later World Wide Web (not the same as the internet) when the Cern European particle physics laboratory released it royalty-free for anyone to use.Lots more contributed…

  An Olympic Ego Trip
By George F. Will
Tuesday, October 6, 2009 In the Niagara of words spoken and written about the Obamas' trip to Copenhagen, too few have been devoted to the words they spoke there. Their separate speeches to the International Olympic Committee were so dreadful, and in such a characteristic way, that they might be symptomatic of something that has serious implications for American governance. Both Obamas gave heartfelt speeches about . . . themselves. Although the working of the committee's mind is murky, it could reasonably have rejected Chicago's bid for the 2016 Games on aesthetic grounds -- unless narcissism has suddenly become an Olympic sport. In the 41 sentences of her remarks, Michelle Obama used some form of the personal pronouns "I" or "me" 44 times. Her husband was, comparatively, a shrinking violet, using those pronouns only 26 times in 48 sentences. Still, 70 times in 89 sentences conveyed the message that somehow their fascinating selves were what made, or should have made, Chicago's case compelling. In 2008, Obama carried the three congressional districts that contain Northern California's Silicon Valley with 73.1, 69.6 and 68.4 percent of the vote. Surely the Valley could continue its service to him by designing software for his speechwriters' computers that would delete those personal pronouns, replacing them with the word "sauerkraut" to underscore the antic nature of their excessive appearances. And -- this will be trickier -- the software should delete the most egregious cliches sprinkled around by the tin-eared employees in the White House speechwriting shop. The president told the Olympic committee that: "At this defining moment," a moment "when the fate of each nation is inextricably linked to the fate of all nations" in "this ever-shrinking world," he aspires to "forge new partnerships with the nations and the peoples of the world." Good grief. The memory of man runneth not to a moment that escaped being declared "defining" -- declared such by someone seeking to inflate himself by inflating it. Also, enough already with the "shrinking" world, which has been so described at least since Magellan set sail, and probably before that. And by the way, the "fate" of -- to pick a nation at random -- Chile is not really in any meaningful sense "inextricably linked" to that of, say, Chad. But meaningful sense is often absent from the gaseous rhetoric that makes it past White House editors -- are there any? -- and onto the president's teleprompter. Consider one recent example: Nine days before speaking in Copenhagen, the president, addressing the United Nations General Assembly, intoned: "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation." What was the speechwriter thinking when he or she assembled that sentence? The "should" was empty moralizing; the "can" was nonsense redundantly refuted by history. Does our Cicero even glance at his speeches before reading them in public? Becoming solemn in Copenhagen, Obama said: "No one expects the Games to solve all our collective problems." That's right, no…

   Campaign Trail Leads to the Web DiggFacebook
Yahoo! BPermali By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

They figured out how to get New Mexico residents to vote for George W. Bush in 2004. Now, some of the nation’s top political strategists are creating an online-advertising company, hoping to apply to the Web what they know about aiming messages on the campaign trail.
Stefan Zaklin Sara Taylor is a co-founder of Resonate Networks.   Ron Edmonds/Associated Press Harold Ickes, left, former deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, is an investor in Resonate Networks.    The company, Resonate Networks, was co-founded by Sara Taylor, the White House political director under Mr. Bush. Its investors include Harold Ickes, the former deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, who runs the database that Democratic strategists rely on; Steve McMahon, the prominent Howard Dean consultant; and Alex Gage, who advised Karl Rove on Mr. Bush’s re-election in 2004.Resonate is an ad network, which that means it signs up advertisers, along with publishers like Frommers.com and BobVila .com, and matches advertisements with specific sites, taking a cut of what publishers charge the advertisers. More than 300 ad networks have similar models, though all have different recipes. Resonate differs in its political targeting. This is a strategy that has been used by politicians for years. In 2004, for instance, Mr. Gage’s analysis found a group of New Mexico mothers, Hispanic and lower- to middle-class, who largely voted for Democrats. But the data suggested that they were supportive of Mr. Bush’s No Child Left Behind public school legislation. The campaign sent those women messages about Mr. Bush’s policies on education. In part because of tactics like that, Mr. Bush won New Mexico.Resonate is trying to do the same thing online for both political issues and corporate ones. It researches sites the way a campaign adviser would research a battleground state, finding which sites have visitors who would be receptive to a certain message. “We can target an audience that supports a particular issue,” said Bryan Gernert, the chief executive of the company. Because the company can identify the makeup of a site —the percentage of site visitors who support, oppose or have mixed views on a certain issue — it can choose sites that, say, gay marriage opponents do not really visit for a strong advertisement supporting gay marriage. “You can have a pretty aggressive message that won’t inflame your opposition, but you’ll still mobilize your support base,” Mr. Gernert said. “We can also identify the middle, the persuadable, where you can do an education campaign and move them toward your position on an issue.” That leads to interesting pairings:…

  Israel cries wolf over 'blood libel' A Swedish report about supposed organ-harvesting by troops in the West Bank isn't antisemitic – it's just bad journalism Comments (75)     
Seth Freedman guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 August 2009 17.00 BST Article history
Last week's allegations in a Swedish newspaper sparked an inferno in diplomatic circles, the flames of which are being fanned higher with every passing day. Despite dealing specifically with the behaviour of Israeli troops in the West Bank, rather than being a broad-stroked attack against Judaism, the indictment against the Israeli army has been held up as a shining example of modern-day "blood libel", as though the forces of antisemitic darkness are amassing once more against the Jewish people in their entirety.Aftonbladet presented allegations that Israeli soldiers routinely harvested organs from dead Palestinians in their custody, establishing a link between the organ-theft allegations and the recent money-laundering scandal involving prominent members of the American Jewish community. The article was immediately condemned throughout the Israeli political and press arenas, with the deputy foreign minister decrying it as a "blood libel against Jews", and demanding that Swedish officials take action to rebuke the newspaper involved.Sweden's response was to fall back on principles of freedom of speech. While the Swedish ambassador to Israel expressed her dismay at the publication of the accusations, prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt told a Swedish news agency: "No one can demand that the Swedish government violate its own constitution. Freedom of speech is an indispensable part of Swedish society." Meanwhile, calls for heads to roll in Sweden still emanate from innumerable voices in the Israeli camp, from politicians to press to public. Feelings are running high now that the spat has turned into a full-blown diplomatic battle.On reading the original story, it is clear that the article's content is journalism of the worst kind: based on the flimsiest of evidence, making tenuous connections on little more than pure conjecture and relying on dubious testimony in the absence of hard fact and proof. However, bad journalism does not automatically an antisemite make, especially when the allegations were directed at the Israeli army, rather than at Judaism and its practices. Had the article claimed that Jewish teaching encouraged the killing of gentile children and the use of their blood for ritual purposes – the classic definition of blood libel, and the origin of the phrase – it would be another matter, but in this case the accusations are clearly…