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Team Tymoshenko

It seems that in every football pool, I pick near the bottom of the first round. Funny how that works, eh?
 
The big guns were all beyond my grasp – again. So in Euro Cup 2012, I picked Ukraine.
 
Yulia Tymoshenko in her signature braids.
 Photo from The Guardian.

They are the home team, after all. Who knows? Maybe their fans will boost them past powerhouse Spain. Ha!

 
I suppose I could have picked Russia. Then I’d be cheering along with Bad Vlad.
 
Not that Ukraineis without its political woes.
 
Several European leaders are boycotting the matches because of Ukraine’s treatment of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
 
A Kievcourt tossed her behind bars for signing a multi-million dollar energy contract with Russia. It found her guilty of abusing her powers in making the deal.
 
But many say all that was hogwash; that the charges against Tymoshenko were politically motivated.
 
Evgeniy Zakharov, the co-chair of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, a human rights organization that monitored Tymoshenko’s trial, told Human Rights Watch that his organization viewed the case against her as orchestrated by the authorities to remove a prominent opposition leader from the political scene. 
 
Tymoshenko rose to prominence as a heroine of the Orange Revolution that swept the Ukrainealmost a decade ago. But her government floundered from constant battles with her allies.
 
Her daughter Eugenia said her mother was badly beaten up in April when prison guards arrived in her cell to transfer her to hospital.
 
Tymoshenko, who has staged a hunger strike before, refuses to be seen by government doctors. Instead, she has asked for her own physician or German doctors, according to a story in The Guardian. Human Rights Watch has urged Ukrainian authorities to afford Tymoshenko proper medical care.
 
My fellow football poolers decided we should come up with names for our teams. My friend Chrys is pulling for the Czechmates.
 
And I decided I will be cheering for Team Tymoshenko.
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A master of words; a man of integrity


On that afternoon, I didn’t know what to expect inside Room No. 34.

I’d seen Ron several days before, at Piedmont Hospital. I hadn’t even fully stepped into his room when he looked up from his bed. “Ah, Moni Basu and Kevin Duffy!” He recognized us instantly and we had a delightful two-hour conversation about things past and present.

At one moment, after Alex showed up and we began talking about India, the talk veered to Varanasi, an ancient, holy city on the banks of the Ganges River. Many Hindus hope to have their last rites performed there; their ashes scattered in the murky waters; their souls dancing free.

“Perhaps we should talk about something else,” Alex finally said.


I realized then that I had never even thought that Ron might die. Even though he had cancer.

He was lucid that day, his spirits strong. He even laughed, the way he used to on the 6th floor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newsroom.

It was the kind of laugh that echoed through the hallways and was instantly recognizable. It was comforting, like a mother’s embrace. And reassuring —  it made me feel that everything would be all right.

Ron edited my stories occasionally when we both worked on the National Desk. I remember how he tightened up my prose, took out unnecessary words. Verbiage was baggage, he told me. It just weighed readers down.

Everyone knows what a master Ron was with words. At Piedmont, I meant to tell him what a mentor he had been to me. But the right moment never seemed to arise that afternoon.  Surely, I would have other opportunities.

Two weeks later, when I entered Room 34 at Hospice Atlanta, I knew I would probably not get to say much to him. He was weak and frail. And sleepy from the drugs.

His longtime friend and journalist Ann Woolner was there that afternoon, as was his sister, Angela, and niece Stephanie.


The family had brought a bunch of photos that showed Ron at various stages of his remarkable life. As a baby. A child. A teenager. A young reporter. A professor. A father and grandfather.

I sifted through the photos. Some were colour and some not. Some were indentified, others not. It didn’t really matter. I saw in them a man who was always true to himself and to those he loved.

Ron’s mother, Bertha, had saved all his early clips from the Summerville newspaper, the Red and Black and the AJC. Angela had painstakingly collected them in a scrapbook. I flipped through the pages and marveled at Ron’s ability to write with wit, with grace and always with clarity and honesty.

Again that day, the conversation turned uncomfortably to death. I suppose that’s what people talk about when the end of a life seems inevitable. So many arrangements to be made, loose ends that need sewing up.

Ron himself had recognized his circumstance and told Alex: “I don’t want all this to get too complicated… I’d prefer to just go out like an old Indian and walk off into the woods.”

Now, as we spoke of Ron and his life, we did so in the third person. Ron lay still on the bed, his eyes closed. Before I left, I held his hand and said goodbye. Ann told him she loved him.

“Dad,” said Alex. “Your visitors are leaving.”

Ron opened his eyes for a moment and nodded his head.

The next morning he died. His close friend Joni was with him.

When I heard the news the next day, a dark cloud descended upon me in the midst of the CNN newsroom. I wanted to run home. Or at least, run to my car so I could cry without notice.

Someone asked me a question and I blurted out: ”Please give me a few minutes. I have just received some very sad news.” I told my friend Joyce that Ron had died. She did not know him but for me, it was matter of saying it out loud. I was not there when my father died. I had to mouth the words before it sank in.

Later, I read on the CarePages website, that in Irish tradition, a nurse opened the French doors to the patio outside his room to allow his spirit to leave.

It was as just as we had spoken that day about Varanasi. And it gave me great comfort to think that Ron’s soul will shimmer everywhere, like the eternal waters of the Ganges.


http://likethedew.com/?s=ron+taylor
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Of kings, queens and heroes

The earliest versions of chess originated in ancient India but it wasn’t until Viswanathan Anand did my homeland claim its first grandmaster. 

The 42-year-old just won another world championship this week in Moscow. No. 5, to be exact. His unmatched prowess on the board now undisputed.

Tied at six-six after 12 regular games, Anand and his challenger Boris Gelfand faced off in a tiebreaker, which Anand won 2.5-1.5. It’s not often that a chess match carries the same excitement as football. But Indians were on the edge of their seats, watching as though a win depended on last-minute penalty kicks.
Check mate: When is the last time a chess player
 commanded rock-star status?

Are we talking about chess here? Where all the battle is done on a checkered tabletop board? 

Yes, but Anand, or Vishy, as he is known, is a rock star in India. Even kids who don’t have the slightest idea how a knight or bishop moves were enthralled this week, cheering on their compatriot to victory. His name appeared next to that of cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, God in the world of Indian sport.

Indian reporters followed Anand around as though he were a Bollywood star. 

“His status in India, meanwhile, showed with the jostling posse of reporters who followed him to Moscow, hanging on to his every word and reporting it in breathless dispatches, the quiet man’s daily habits laid out before the nation,” said NDTV, a leading English-language television station in India.

Anand has won all sorts of accolades — in India and in Spain, where he keeps a home in Madrid. But his biggest honor isn’t in the form of a plaque or a trophy but in the adoration of Indians. 

India doesn’t always excel in global sporting events. Very few Indians stand on the podium at the Olympics. We don’t have a soccer team that makes it to the World Cup. We used to make a stand in field hockey but after the emergence of fake grass, the Indian team stopped faring well. 

Yes, we have cricket. But we are not always No. 1.

But now we have chess. And Anand has made India champion of the world.


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A voice in Vietnam

Ho Thi Bich Khuong.
Born: 1967
Activity: Writer
Date of arrest: November 15, 2011
Sentence: Sentenced December 29, 2011 to 5 years imprisonment followed by 3 years house arrest
Charge: Propaganda against the socialist state
Current location: Nghe An province

This is the information available on the Vietnam Reform Party’s page on blogger Ho Thi Bich Khuong. Few in America have probably heard of her. But this is her third arrest. She has been tortured in detention, according to Human Rights Watch.

She was found guilty of violating article 88 of Vietnam’s penal code, designed to deflect criticism of the Communist government. The state said she “blackened” Vietnam’s name and belonged to human rights groups led by “reactionaries.”

She publishes detailed accounts of the repression and harassment she and her family have faced, and writes about the suffering of poor rural farmers and of human rights defenders, said a statement from Human Rights Watch.

In November 2010, she visited the families of people killed by police in a land rights protest and questioned the authorities’ silence on the case. After that, she wrote about violence against Mennonites at Christmas. Three weeks later, she was arrested, said Human Rights Watch.

“Vietnam should be grateful that people like Ho Thi Bich Khuong call attention to local abuses,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of the global rights monitor.

“They give the government an opportunity to investigate and show commitment to the rule of law,” he said. “When the government instead clamps down on the media and locks up independent bloggers, it simply encourages further corruption and abuse of power.”

Human Rights Watch honored Ho Thi Bich Khuong with a Hellman/Hammett award in 2011. The group said it wanted to give an international platform to those who Vietnam will not allow to be heard.

Vietnam launched a crackdown on freedom of expression in 2009. Since then, dozens of political and human rights activists have been handed long jail terms, rights groups say. Vietnam now ranks 172 out of 179 countries on the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.

It’s a disturbing trend we don’t hear much about in the Western media. We ought to, especially when we are so focused on the Arab Spring and the great risks people take to get information out to the rest of the world from places like Syria, Yemen and Bahrain.

A Vietnamese court will hear Ho Thi Bich Khuong’s appeal tomorrow. It’s unlikely she will be released. She may be silenced for now, but her voice, I am sure, will resonate for as long as there is injustice in her homeland.

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Bobbie and Wallace

Bobbie and Wallace Edwards

Almost eight years ago on an early July morning, I got into my Honda CRV and raced like the wind towards Robbins, North Carolina.
It’s a small town east of Charlotte where John Edwards’ parents, Wallace and Bobbie, lived. I wanted to see firsthand the excitement about their son being named as John Kerry’s running mate.
They were simple folks and lived in a comfortable but modest house — considering that their son was a successful trial lawyer, a U.S. senator and now a vice-presidential candidate.
But despite his own success, John Edwards had always called himself a champion of regular people. He was the son of a mill worker who worked hard to support his family in the Deep South.
It all showed in Bobbie and Wallace.
They were simple, down-to-earth people who were fiercely proud of their son.
Bobbie opened the door for me and when she found out I had driven all the way from Atlanta, she welcomed me in.
They were sitting down to dinner and had the television set tuned to CNN to watch their Johnny. They graciously asked me to join them.
“We weren’t absolutely sure it would be him until this morning,” Bobbie said.
The morning announcement was emotionally overwhelming. After that, they had tried to go about their day as routinely as possible. But, of course, their emotions leaped out of their hearts
“It just doesn’t seem real, ” Wallace told me.
He said that when his son talked about the values instilled in him, he wasn’t just spewing rhetoric.
Last week, I looked a photographs of John Edwards escorting his parents into the federal courthouse in Greensboro, North Carolina. The man who’d been hailed once as a populist candidate had fallen so far from grace, accused of conspiring to secretly obtain thousands of dollars from wealthy supporters to hide his affair with videographer Rielle Hunter.
His wife of many years, Elizabeth, lost her battle with cancer and is no longer here to see John Edwards lowest moment before the public.
His daughter, Cate, who has been by his side all along had to leave the courtroom one day last week when a former aide described a moment when Elizabeth found out about the affair in the National Enquirer. She confronted her husband at an airport, ripping open her blouse in front of staff members.
Bobbie and Wallace stand by their son but I can imagine the agony inside being just as strong as was the excitement on that July day in 2004.
John Edwards proved to be more disappointing to me than any other politician, perhaps because I felt so betrayed. I had written countless stories about a man I once perceived as genuine. 
Now, I feel sorry. Not for him but for Bobbie and Wallace, who raised him to be a good man. Even if he is found not guilty, his name is marred forever and his parents will end their lives with that painful knowledge.
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Chaplain Turner’s War

Chaplain Darren Turner counsels a soldier at a combat outpost
in Arab Jabour, March, 2008. Photo by Curtis Compton/AJC
Four years ago, I spent time with an Army chaplain in Iraq because I wanted to write about how war affected American soldiers. His name is Darren Turner. He had only been a chaplain for a few months before he headed to Baghdad.
I discovered through him a world different than mine. In the midst of war, I learned about faith, specifically Christianity, and how it was vital to so many of Turner’s men in the 3rd Infantry Division.
Their battalion was part of the surge and had seen a lot of bad stuff in searing summer months and the rugged terrain of Arab Jabour. Turner had grown weary form memorializing so many of his men.
I met Turner at Fort Stewart, flew up with him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where Spc. David Battle was struggling for life. He had lost three limbs in a bombing and Turner recently told me he was the most injured soldier at the time.
A few weeks later, photographer Curtis Compton and I flew to Iraq. My plan was simply to follow Turner around and document everything he did. I did not know how the story would turn out. Every day brought a new tragedy, a new triumph.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published the story in June, 2008. Now it is out as a digital book. http://www.amazon.com/Chaplain-Turners-War-ebook/dp/B007XULHX4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335542515&sr=1-1

The publisher thought it was as relevant as it was when it was written, now that the Iraq war has come to a close for America and in many places, it was has been swept under the rug, almost as though it never happened.
But it did happen. For more than eight long years. It changed lives here – and there – in the most disturbing ways.
Nearly 4,500 American troops died in the Iraq war. More than 30,000 others were physically wounded. Countless others live with scars that can’t be seen.
I want people to read this story and think about the costs borne by their fellow citizens. I want them to know that life will never be the same again for so many of them.
Darren and Heather Turner in Clarkesville, Kentucky, 
Feb. 2012. Turner tried to help his soldiers save their marriages 
but ran into trouble in his own.
A big thanks to Jan Winburn, who edited this story for the AJC – with a broken left arm to boot.
To Valerie Boyd, who had the wisdom to get me on this project and push it as a digital book.
Of course, to Agate Publishers for taking this on.
And to Darren Turner. I was glad to see you again this year and even more glad to know that you are happy again.
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Barnabas and Baba

Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins
in the 1960s “Dark Shadows.”

In the late 1960s, we lived for a while in a rented house on Adams Circle in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Every afternoon, I walked home from Whittier Elementary and plopped myself down on the living room couch, waiting anxiously for Baba to return home from university.

My father was a brilliant man, a mathematical thinker who has a statistical theorem named after him. But, like all of us, he had his guilty pleasures. One of them was “Dark Shadows,” the vampire soap opera starring Canadian actor Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins.

Baba sat on the couch with me and the two of us were mesmerized by the gothic, black and white images flashing before us on our Zenith television screen. Intrigue. Love. Lust. Death and, of course, life after death.

That was the part that I could not stand. Every time Barnabas got ready to sink his fangs into a young maiden’s juicy neck, I’d slither off the couch, get behind it for protection and watch sporadically. Or I’d announce to Baba that I had to go to the bathroom right then.

One time I was so frightened that Baba held me on his lap. “These scenes are not real,” he said. “They’re just make-believe on TV.”

But he’d go right on watching, transfixed on Barnabas’s ghostly white skin and the crimson streaming out of his mouth.

Jonathan Frid died in Hamilton, Ontario, last week. He was 87, a year younger than my father, who died in 2001.

He didn’t live to see his character resurrected in director Tim Burton’s remake of the classic vampire story. This time, Barnabas will appear to us in the handsome form of Johnny Depp.

I wish Baba were still here. I’d take him to the theater to see “Dark Shadows.” And when the lights went dim and no one could see, I’d hold his hand tight and wait for Barnabas to bite.

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Tallahassee

The place where you spend your formative years can draw you back with the pull of a magnet to metal. Or it can repel, the desire to divorce yourself from prickly memories trumping all else.


I have a difficult relationship with Tallahassee, the small north Florida city where my family landed in the mid-1970s. A place that was largely black and white then and had little room for shades of brown. “Is your mama black or your daddy black?” was the first question I heard at Amos P. Godby High School. 

Tree-lined Miccosukee Road
We felt lost, after living in places that were far more cosmopolitan, after Kolkata, our home. There wasn’t even an Indian restaurant in town then; just a handful of desi families who gathered, it seemed, almost every weekend to cook for each other and talk about the homeland.

I graduated from high school in Tallahassee. And earned both my degrees from Florida State University. Every hard lesson I learned about life was learned in the house off Chapel Drive and in apartments I rented along Pensacola Street. Or in late-night sessions at the Grand Finale and the Office Lounge. And in classrooms in the Bellamy Building and the newsroom of The Florida Flambeau.

My mother suffered a stroke there, an event that changed all our lives overnight. I was married and divorced there. And by the time the 1980s were coming to a close, I felt claustrophobic and yearned to pack up my red Toyota pickup and race out of town. 

That day came soon after and for the past two decades, Tallahassee has just been a place for me to visit occasionally, a place where I can never get lost on streets that remain familiar and yet, feel like a stranger every single time. 

Many of my close friends who left town returned to settle in Tallahassee. It was a good place, they said, to raise kids, to own a house, to live life.

Their claims were affirmed today with the survey results of the Coral Gables-based Washington Economics Group, which listed Tallahassee as the Number One spot for Baby Boomers to retire. Climate, cost of living, access to health care and other services and amenities. All that plus the benefits of living in the shadows of two state universities and a large community college. You get opera, theater, music and poetry — big city stuff with small town comfort.

Most of the other cities on the Top 10 list are also in the South. Atlanta was Number Five, which may seem amazing to many of my northern friends who often knock me for having lived here so long. I have always told them all the same things that surfaced in this survey: I get to live a big city life with the comfort of a small town. I could never own a house and garden so close to downtown in New York or Chicago. Or afford to keep a car and get to work in 10 minutes.

The survey’s findings were not surprising to me. But Tallahassee’s top ranking bopped me over the head; made me think about my own past.

I  am guilty, perhaps, of subconsciously blocking out all the good that I had there as though to justify my own decisions. But that’s not fair. 

So here’s to Tallahassee. And to all my dear friends who chose to live there. Good on you. You won’t have to move again for retirement heaven.
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Wendy


Wendy at Cafe 640

Last September, my friend Wendy was diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma. Breast cancer.

Her mammogram nine months earlier was clear.

“That’s how fast it can happen,” she wrote on her blog, “which is why I’ve already been pretty open and honest about my story.”

I saw Wendy Thursday at a gathering to celebrate her last day of radiation. She announced that her doctor had declared her “cancer free.”

She looked beautiful as always when I saw her. A big smile on her face, her positive energy filling the entire cafe.

If only everyone dealing with illness could see her, I thought. How inspired they would all be.

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MRAP

I intended to write this for my blog Saturday. CNN decided to publish it as an opinion piece.  You can also read it on CNN.com.
The last of America’s mine resistant vehicles out of Iraq boarded a ship in Kuwait on Saturday, bound for Fort Hood, Texas. There, it will be displayed at the 1st Cavalry Division Museum, forever a symbol of the Iraq war.
The Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle – known simply by its acronym MRAP in typical military fashion – was in a long convoy of vehicles that crossed the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border December 18 when the last U.S. troops exited Iraq.
I remember when the MRAPs were newly introduced in Iraq. They were a fresh hope of survival for American men and women.
Photographer Curtis Compton and me
in the back of an MRAP. Arab Jabour, Iraq. 2008
Staff Sgt. Jamie Linen used to transport soldiers and run supplies every day from Baghdad’s Forward Operating Base Falcon to nearby patrol bases where surge troops of the 3rd Infantry Division were based. Linen, like all other soldiers, thought about the risks of bombs hidden along the roads every time he rolled out the gate. They were, after all, the No. 1 killer of American troops in Iraq. The first MRAP arrived for Linen’s unit in November 2007, months after President Bush ordered a “surge” in troops to defeat a raging insurgency. The shiny trucks were the new stars of the military then.
The soldiers were glad to get out of the backs of hot, uncomfortable Bradley Fighting Vehicles or the less-protected Humvees and step up high into the cab of a sophisticated MRAP. Made by International, the $658,000 trucks sat high on the road – 36 inches off the ground – and came with a V-shaped hull that helped deflect the impact of an improvised explosive device.
The walls of the truck were thick. The design was state of the art. The only thing they were missing, a soldier joked, were cup holders.
The MRAPs were loaded with safety features, including a fire suppression system that protected every part of the truck and a pressurized cab built to withstand a nuclear or biological attack. The seats had shoulder harnesses, and the doors operated on a hydraulic system so that in a rollover, soldiers didn’t have to push their way out of armored doors that could weigh up to 1,000 pounds. That was always something that gave me pause when I rode around in an up-armored Humvee. How would I get that door open if something bad happened?
Linen had to take a weeklong course on MRAP operation and maintenance. He told me the trucks boosted his confidence to get the mission done. I could see why after riding with him a few times. I felt the kind of protection a frightened child feels in a mother’s arms.
Just weeks before, I had met Linen’s platoon leader, 1st Lt. Mark Little, who was recuperating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. A bomb had blown both his legs off.
No one could say for sure, of course, but Linen thought that perhaps Little wouldn’t have to wear prosthetics had he been in an MRAP.
“Nothing is invincible here,” he said. “You got tanks with 3 feet of armor getting blown up. But the MRAPs give us a sense of security.”
Linen’s driver, Spc. Robert Nowlin, was sure the enemy feared the Americans more when they were riding in MRAPs.
Why would they not?
In late 2007, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters that “these armored trucks … have been the military’s top acquisition priority for months now, and with good reason.”
The MRAPs had their drawbacks. They were not suited for narrow roads because of their size and weight and were susceptible to rollovers. They weren’t good for Afghanistan’s mountainous terrain. And American soldiers did die in MRAP incidents. But back then in Iraq, they were a godsend.
Apt, I thought, that one should find a home in a military museum, a testament to the American men and women who fought in the war.
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