Extremely Hard: The hardest language to learn is: Polish

Polish

Polish is a West Slavic language and the official language of Poland. Its written standard is the Polish alphabet which corresponds basically to the Latin alphabet with a few additions. Polish-speakers use the language in a uniform manner through most of Poland. It is also used as a second language in some parts of Russia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. This phenomenon is caused by migrations. There are only a few dialects that differ from the standard Polish language, however the differences among them are not significant and mostly based on regional pronunciation and vocabulary changes. The most distinguishable are the dialects of Silesia and Podhale (highlander’s dialect). Worth mentioning is Kashubian – a separate language used by the inhabitants living west of Gdansk near the Baltic Sea. The number of its users is estimated at somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000. Although it is gradually becoming extinct, a lot of effort is being put into saving it and it recently begun to be taught at local schools as a minority language. Polish, like other Indo-European languages, shares some Latin grammar and vocabulary. There are 3 tenses (past, present, future), 2 numbers (singular and plural), and 3 genders (masculine, feminine, neuter). There are no articles but Polish, like Latin, and is an inflectional language that distinguishes 7 cases, defining the noun usage in a sentence. This feature makes our mother tongue difficult to master and presents a lot of trouble to foreigners. The average Polish speaker is fluent in their language not until age 16.

Very Hard: Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian-These languages are hard because of the countless noun cases. However, the cases are more like English prepositions added to the end of the root.

Finnish

Finnish is one of the official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a Finnish dialect, are spoken. The Kven language, which is closely related to Finnish, is an official minority language in Norway. Finnish belongs to the Baltic-Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric languages, being most closely related to Estonian, Livonian, Votic, Karelian, Veps, and Ingrian. Characteristic phonological features include vowel harmony, in which vowels are divided into two contrasting classes such that vowels from opposing classes may not occur together in a word; and consonant gradation, in which stop consonants (such as p, t, k) are altered before closed syllables (e.g., p is replaced by v, pp by p). There are also two lengths distinguished in vowels and in consonants. Many words have been borrowed from Indo-European languages, particularly from the Baltic languages, German, and Russian. Finnish dialects are divided into two distinct groups, the Western dialects and the Eastern dialects.

Hungarian

Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language, distantly related to Finnish and Estonian. It is the largest member of the Finno-Ugric family of languages, spoken by about 10 million people in Hungary and 4.5 million in countries adjacent to Hungary and around the world. It is an “agglutinating” language, i.e., a language that uses large numbers of suffixes and post-positions. It belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family, which includes Finnish and Estonian, but its closest relatives are several obscure languages spoken in Siberia. Hungarian is not at all related to the Indo-European languages which surround it, and is very different both in vocabulary and in grammar. Hungarian is an agglutinative language, meaning that it relies heavily on suffixes and prefixes. The grammar is seemingly complex, yet there is no gender, a feature that most English speakers grapple with when learning other European languages. Hungarian is a highly inflected language in which nouns can have up to 238 possible forms. It is related to Mansi, an Ob-Ugric language with about 4,000 speakers who live in the eastern Urals, and Khanty or Ostyak, the other Ob-Ugric language which is spoken by about 15,000 people in the Ob valley of western Siberia.

Estonian

Estonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various émigré communities. It is an Uralic language and is closely related to Finnish. Even the most ordinary everyday Estonian language contains numerous ancient expressions, possibly going back as far as the Ice Age. The language occurs in two major dialectal forms, northern and southern; the northern dialect, Tallinn, is used in most of the country and forms the basis of the modern literary language. The southern dialect is found from Tartu southward. Typologically, Estonian represents a transitional form from an agglutinating language to an inflected language. In Estonian nouns and pronouns do not have grammatical gender, but nouns and adjectives are declined in fourteen cases: nominative, genitive, partitive, illative, inessive, elative, allative, adessive, ablative, translative, terminative, essive, abessive, and comitative, with the case and number of the adjective(s) always agreeing with that of the noun. Thus the illative for “a yellow house” (kollane maja) – “into a yellow house” is (kollasesse majasse). The verbal system is characterized by the absence of the future tense (the present tense is used) and by the existence of special forms to express an action performed by an undetermined subject (the “impersonal”).

Pretty Hard: Ukrainian and Russian complex grammar and different alphabet but easier pronunciation. Serbian-Also similar to other Slavic languages with a complex case and gender system, but it also has many tenses. alphabet

Ukrainian

Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses the Cyrillic alphabet. The alphabet comprises thirty-three letters, representing thirty-eight phonemes (meaningful units of sound), and an additional sign—the apostrophe. Ukrainian orthography is based on the phonemic principle, with one letter generally corresponding to one phoneme, although there are a number of exceptions. The orthography also has cases where the semantic, historical, and morphological principles are applied. The letter ? represents two consonants [?t?]. The combination of [j] with some of the vowels is also represented by a single letter ([ja]=?, [je]=?, [ji]=?, [ju]=?), while [jo]=?? and the rare regional [j?]=?? are written using two letters. These iotated vowel letters and a special soft sign change a preceding consonant from hard to soft. An apostrophe is used to indicate the hardness of the sound in the cases when normally the vowel would change the consonant to soft; in other words, it functions like the yer in the Russian alphabet. A consonant letter is doubled to indicate that the sound is doubled, or long. The phonemes [dz] and [d?] do not have dedicated letters in the alphabet and are rendered with the digraphs ?? and ??, respectively. [dz] is pronounced close to English dz in adze, [d?] is close to g in huge.

Russian

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of three living members of the East Slavic languages, the others being Belarusian and Ukrainian (and possibly Rusyn, normally considered a dialect of Ukrainian). Russian is written using a modified version of the Cyrillic (?????????) alphabet, consisting of 33 letters. Russian spelling is reasonably phonetic in practice. It is in fact a balance among phonetics, morphology, etymology, and grammar, and, like that of most living languages, has its share of inconsistencies and controversial points.  The Russian language possesses five vowels, which are written with different letters depending on whether or not the preceding consonant is palatalized. The consonants typically come in plain vs. palatalized pairs, which are traditionally called hard and soft. (The ‘hard’ consonants are often velarized, some dialects only velarize /l/ in such positions). The standard language, based on the Moscow dialect, possesses heavy stress and moderate variation in pitch. Stressed vowels are somewhat lengthened, while unstressed vowels (except /u/) tend to be reduced to an unclear schwa. Russian is notable for its distinction based on palatalization of most of the consonants. The spoken language has been influenced by the literary, but continues to preserve characteristic forms. The dialects show various non-standard grammatical features, some of which are archaisms or descendants of old forms since discarded by the literary language. The total number of words in Russian is difficult to reckon because of the ability to agglutinate and create manifold compounds, diminutives, etc.

Serbian

Serbian is a South Slavic language, spoken chiefly in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, and in the Serbian diaspora. Standard Serbian is based on the Shtokavian dialect, like the modern Croatian and Bosnian, with which it is mutually intelligible, and was previously unified with under the standard known as Serbo-Croatian. Uses primarily Cyrillic, but also the Latin alphabet as well. Serbian verbs are one of the most complicated parts of Serbian grammar (with noun cases, probably, being the hardest). They are inflected for person, number and sometimes gender. Serbian verbs are conjugated in 4 past tenses – perfect, aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, of which the last two have a very limited use (imperfect is still used in some dialects, but majority of native Serbian speakers consider it archaic); 1 future tense (aka 1st future tense – as opposed to the 2nd future tense or the future exact, which is considered a tense of the conditional mood by some contemporary linguists), and 1 present tense. These are the tenses of the indicative mood. Apart from the indicative mood, there is also the imperative mood. The conditional mood has two more tenses, the 1st conditional (commonly used in conditional clauses, both for possible and impossible conditional clauses), and the 2nd conditional (without use in spoken language – it should be used for impossible conditional clauses). Serbian language has active and passive voice. As for the non-finite verb forms, Serbian language has 1 infinitive, 2 adjectival participles (the active and the passive), and 2 adverbial participles (the present and the past).

Fairly Hard: Chinese and Japanese-No cases, no genders, no tenses, no verb changes, short words, very easy grammar, however, writing is hard. But to speak it is very easy. Also intonations make it harder but certainly not harder than Polish pronunciation. I know a Chinese language teacher that says people pick up Chinese very easy, but he speaks several languages and could not learn Polish. I am learning some Chinese, it is not the hardest language maybe even the easiest language to learn. Not the hardest language by any measure. Try to learn some Chinese and Polish your self and you will see which is the hardest language.

Chinese

Chinese languages – also called Sinitic languages – are a principal language group of eastern Asia which belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family. All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology—i.e., changes in form of a word—to indicate the word’s function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections—it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to “the, a, an” in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (? as “he” and ? as “she”), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le ?, hai ?, yijing ??, etc. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction, pronoun dropping and the related subject dropping.

Japanese

Japanese is believed to be linked to the Altaic language family, which includes Turkish, Mongolian and other languages, but also shows similarities to Austronesian languages like Polynesian. The Japanese writing system consists of three different character sets: Kanji (several thousands of Chinese characters) and Hiragana and Katakana (two syllabaries of 46 characters each; together called Kana). Japanese texts can be written in two ways: In Western style, i.e. in horizontal rows from the top to the bottom of the page, or in traditional Japanese style, i.e. in vertical columns from the right to the left side of the page. Both writing styles exist side by side today. Basic Japanese grammar is relatively simple. Complicating factors such as gender articles and distinctions between plural and singular are missing almost completely. Conjugation rules for verbs and adjectives are simple and almost free of exceptions. Nouns are not declinated at all, but appear always in the same form. The biggest difficulty are accents, which do exist, but to a much lower extent than in the Chinese language. In addition, there are relatively many homonyms, i.e. words that are pronounced the same way, but have different meanings.

Average: French-lots of tenses but not used and moderate grammar.

French

French is a Romance language globally spoken by about 77 million people as a first language (mother tongue), by 50 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant speakers in 57 countries. French is a moderately inflected language. Nouns and most pronouns are inflected for number (singular or plural); adjectives, for the number and gender (masculine or feminine) of their nouns; personal pronouns, for person, number, gender, and case; and verbs, for mood, tense, and the person and number of their subjects. French has a grammar similar to that of the other Romance languages. The French grammar provides definitions and links to further information about each of the French verb tenses, pronouns, and other grammatical structures.

Basic to hard: English, no cases or gender, you hear it everywhere, spelling can be hard and British tenses you can use the simple and continues tense instead of the perfect tenses and you will speak American English. English at the basic level is easy but to speak it like a native it’s hard because of the dynamic idiomatic nature.

English

English is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. English grammar has minimal inflection compared with most other Indo-European languages. For example, Modern English, unlike Modern German or Dutch and the Romance languages, lacks grammatical gender and adjectival agreement. Case marking has almost disappeared from the language and mainly survives in pronouns. At the same time, the language has become more analytic, and has developed features such as modal verbs and word order as resources for conveying meaning. Auxiliary verbs mark constructions such as questions, negative polarity, the passive voice and progressive aspect.

But not for Mr. Feibusch, a prewar refugee from Vienna who overcame not just the Nazis but also Velcro, and opened his business on Dec. 7, 1941, of all days. Yes, a Sunday. He is Jewish; he takes the Sabbath off and works Sundays. Today, he says, he is the last big New York zipper man standing, or at least the last to exclusively represent the Japanese-owned but made-in-America YKK zippers (slogan: “Little Parts. Big Difference”) — the best, to hear Mr. Feibusch tell it.

Why the best? That’s an easy one. “Nobody makes them better.”

So when a recalcitrant zipper threatened to be, or not to be, Queen Gertrude’s undoing in a Metropolitan Opera production of “Hamlet” last month, the Met dispatched a costumer, Michael Zacker, to Mr. Feibusch for a new zipper for Jennifer Larmore’s gown. “He really has great products,” Mr. Zacker said.

Retail, they go from 50 cents for a nylon dress zipper to $100 for a No. 10 brass zipper, 350 inches long, to wrap your hot-air balloon.

How great are zippers? Don’t even get Mr. Feibusch started. They are watertight for deep-sea divers, airtight for NASA. “Nothing replaces a zipper,” he said. Buttons? He made a face. “A button is unpleasant,” he said.

O.K., a quick history of the zipper. Elias Howe, inventor of the sewing machine, patented an “automatic, continuous clothing closure” in 1851. But then he dropped it. So that wasn’t the zipper. At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Whitcomb Judson and Col. Lewis Walker showed off their “clasp locker,” a hook-and-eye shoe closure that latched two rows of jagged facing teeth together. But it took their head designer, Gideon Sundback, an electrical engineer, to increase the number of teeth from 4 to up to 11 per inch, to join and separate them with a slider, and to build a machine to manufacture continuous chains of the “separable fastener,” patented in 1917. This was the zipper.

B. F. Goodrich registered the term in 1925 when it added the fastener to its rubber boots. French fashion designers were won over in 1937 after the zipper beat the button in “The Battle of the Fly.” And Esquire magazine said the new zippered fly promised to end “the possibility of unintentional and embarrassing disarray.”

Back to Mr. Feibusch. His parents, Isaac and Anna, owned a grocery store in Vienna, but after annexing Austria in 1938, the Nazis arrested Isaac and shut the business. Relatives in Brooklyn helped arrange the family’s emigration to America in 1939. Eddie, then 16, went to New Utrecht High School. For three weeks. He dropped out to become an errand boy in a grocery store, then a clerk in a garment shop. “And then, in April 1941,” he said, “I got into the zipper line.”

With Europe at war, zippers were hard to come by. He worked for a shop in Brooklyn that reclaimed zippers from used clothes. Then he had a revelation: “If my boss can do it, I can do it.” He quit in December to open his own shop at 111 Hester Street. “I had a cousin across the street who could fix me lunch,” he remembered. The rent was $20 a month. He was coming to open up the first day when he passed a candy store with big newspaper headlines: Pearl Harbor Bombed.

In May 1943 he was drafted into the infantry and joined the invasion of Italy. His mother took over the store. At Anzio he was shot in the stomach, groin and leg and spent a year in Europe recuperating and another year in a hospital in Atlantic City. “I was one of the first ever to have a colostomy bag,” Mr. Feibusch said. He pulled up his shirt to show scars.

One of his aunts had seen a pretty girl getting her hair done in a beauty parlor and impulsively asked if she wanted a blind date with her nephew. Which is how Mr. Feibusch met Susie Neugarten, who herself had fled the Nazis with her family. Her relatives checked him out. Susie’s grandmother came to the zipper shop and pulled out the bottom boxes, to make sure there were zippers there too, not just in the top boxes to look good. There were. They married in 1950.

In 1982, Mr. Feibusch lost his lease and moved around the corner to 30 Allen Street. In 1999, an upstairs tenant, irate over a lack of heat, sloshed gasoline over the floor and burned down the building, including all the zippers. Insurance covered the loss and Mr. Feibusch opened up across the street at 27 Allen.

He has a staff of 12, mostly Chinese, and his son, Jeff. (His daughter, Diane Resnick, lives in Florida.)

“I can count in Chinese; I know colors,” Mr. Feibusch said. “When they talk about zippers, I know what they’re talking about.”

From:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/nyregion/19zipperman.html?hp

But they needn’t fear. Log flumes, roller coasters and concrete castles are not on the agenda at Terra Botanica, a brand new environmental theme park near Angers, in the country’s north-west.

The region, traditionally known as “The Garden of France” — thanks to a horticultural heritage stretching back centuries — is now home to an 11-hectare site devoted entirely to the enjoyment of the natural world.

First conceived 12 years ago, construction began a little over two years ago on a site formerly housing a golf course and an airport.

Its owners say that Terra Botanica is Europe’s first theme park devoted to plant life.

The park, which opened at the weekend, was designed by the French landscape architect Thierry Huau and incorporates four themes which address all aspects of plant life from historical and geographical to scientific and aesthetic.

Among the thousands of flowers, shrubs, vines and trees on show, visitors are also able to immerse themselves in dozens of interactive attractions designed educate and entertain.

Nicolas Moulin, director of Terra Botanica, is particularly proud of the botanical odyssey which takes visitors on a voyage across of the Atlantic in search of the New World, alongside Alexander von Humbolt, the famous 18th Century naturalist.

“Visitors start the journey in a theater with 4-D effects and finish their expedition exploring a real-life greenhouse,” Moulin told CNN.

The €83 million ($112 million) park needs to pull in around 250,000 visitors a year to turn a profit.

Professor John Lennon, a tourism expert from the UK’s Glasgow Caledonian University welcomed the park’s opening but also sounded a note of caution.

“It’s encouraging that a theme park is being developed with these messages. They kind of have the moral high ground of tourism development at the moment. But I think the jury is still out on environmental theme parks,” Lennon told CNN.

Lennon points to the financial failure of the UK’s Earth Center in Doncaster, which opened to great fanfare in 1999 but closed just five years later due to low visitor numbers.

He also questions why established amusement park operators like Disney and Merlin haven’t entered the environmental fray.

Furthermore Lennon is curious as to whether France needs an amusement park of this type.

“France is the number one tourist destination worldwide with fine foods, wine, heritage, Alps, coasts, great countryside — it’s a lifestyle we all want to buy into,” he said.

What, wonders Lennon, is it about Terra Botanica that makes it so different from the France tourists already experience?

Moulin would point to their dedication to telling the story of so many plants in a way that is entertaining, informative and structured.

After all, this hasn’t hurt one of the UK’s best known environmental visitor centers. The Eden Project in southwest England has attracted over 10 million visitors since it opened in 2000.

So what’s the secret of its success?

The center’s chief executive Tim Smit told CNN: “Our attitude is simple and infuses everything we do. Come here and remember our connection to nature and our dependence on it for all we need.

“Our work with communities across the country and abroad shows how quickly change can be made to happen when people work together and understand that ’sharing’ makes us more than the sum of our parts.”

No doubt, this is something that Moulin and his 30-strong team of staff at France’s newest attraction will hope to emulate over the coming months and years.

From:http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/04/12/green.theme.park.france/index.html?hpt=C2

Fast-forward a few decades and there I was again, on the shores of Sydney Harbor cleaning up a very different kind of litter. It was 1989 and I was leading the first ever Clean Up Day on Sydney Harbor and 40,000 other Sydneysiders were removing hundreds of tons of accumulated plastic, polystyrene, aluminum cans and glass bottles, dumped cars and shopping trolleys.This event led to Clean Up Australia, which then became the global Clean Up the World movement involving organizations and communities in 130 countries.The dramatic change in my life was due to rubbish. What I saw while sailing solo around the world in the late 1980s changed me forever. Instead of the stark beauty of the deep blue oceans, I sailed through nautical mile after mile of marine debris.Plastic of all types, discarded fishing nets and polystyrene buoys blanketing the surface of the ocean. This scene was repeated in all of the oceans I crossed and the remnants of an increasingly throwaway society greeted me at each port.An estimated 7 million tons of rubbish arrives in the world’s oceans every year.–Ian KiernanRELATED TOPICSNature and the EnvironmentEnvironmental ProtectionMarine AnimalsI resolved then and there to make a difference, to take action raise awareness about the damage our wasteful habits were having on our oceans. The rubbish in our oceans is not only ugly — it kills.Turtles with the rings of plastic bottles around their necks, choking to death. Dolphins caught in old fishing nets, drowning because they can’t break free. And seabirds drowning because of the fishing line wrapped around their wings. Between 700,000 and 1 million seabirds are killed each year by marine debris such as discarded fishing line and plastic bags. An estimated 100,000 marine mammals are killed each year by plastic in the ocean.

From:http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/science/04/12/plastiki.kiernan.plastic/index.html?hpt=C1

Bangkok, Thailand (CNN) — Bangkok’s local government canceled major Thai holiday festivities that were to begin Monday, with officials citing the deadly anti-government protests as the reason.Festivities related to the three-day Thai New Year’s holiday Songkran were dropped, the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration announced.Clashes between anti-government protesters and Thai security forces intensified during the weekend, leaving 21 people dead.Of the dead, 17 are civilians and four were military, according to the Erawan Rescue Emergency Center.The clashes also left more than 850 people injured, the rescue center said.Gallery: Bangkok protestsRELATED TOPICSThailandThaksin ShinawatraAbhisit VejjajivaThe protesters, known as the “Red Shirts” for their clothing, have been demanding for days that Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva dissolve the parliamentary body and call new elections. In addition, Red Shirts leader Weng Tojirakarn said the group wants the prime minister to leave the country.Are you there? Send an iReport on what the scene is like there.The anti-government group is comprised of supporters of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a bloodless military coup in 2006.iReport: Watch an eyewitness video of protestsHe fled the country in 2008 while facing trial on corruption charges that he says were politically motivated. He remains hugely popular.

From:http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/04/12/thailand.protests/index.html?hpt=T1

Six Michigan residents, two residents of Ohio and an Indiana resident were indicted by a federal grand jury in Detroit, Michigan, on charges of seditious conspiracy, attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, teaching the use of explosive materials and possessing a firearm during a crime of violence, U.S. Attorney Barbara L. McQuade and FBI Special Agent in Charge Andrew Arena announced.

All but one of the suspects — Joshua Matthew Stone, the 21-year-old son of the militia’s leader — were in custody by Monday morning and seven of them made their initial appearances before U.S. Magistrate Judge Donald A. Scheer, prosecutors said.

Joshua Stone was arrested late Monday after he walked out of mobile home in southern Michigan’s Hillsdale County and surrendered without incident, FBI spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold told CNN. Five other adults and a child were also at the home, she said.

“We were negotiating with him all days from a staging location near a church,” Berchtold said, adding that authorities used a loudspeaker to draw Stone out.

Stone, who will be arraigned Tuesday morning, is the son of David Brian Stone — leader of what prosecutors say is a Lenawee County “Christian warrior” militia group called the Hutaree.

Read the indictment (PDF)

The five-count indictment unsealed Monday charges that between August 2008 and the present, the defendants, acting as a Lenawee County, Michigan, militia group, conspired to use force to oppose the authority of the U.S. government.

Attorney General Eric Holder called it “an insidious plan by anti-government extremists.”

The group says on its Web site that Hutaree means “Christian warrior” and proclaims on its home page, “Preparing for the end time battles to keep the testimony of Jesus Christ alive.”

Video: Militia aims at law enforcement

In the “About Us” section of the Hutaree Web site, the group says, “We believe that one day, as prophecy says, there will be an Anti-Christ. All Christians must know this and prepare, just as Christ commanded.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit organization that monitors hate groups and other fringe organizations, lists the Hutaree as a “Patriot” group militia.

“Generally, Patriot groups define themselves as opposed to the ‘New World Order,’ engage in groundless conspiracy theorizing or advocate or adhere to extreme anti-government doctrines,” the Southern Poverty Law Center said in a report, “Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism.”

The Law Center also defines Patriot groups as “militias and other organizations that see the federal government as part of a plot to impose ‘one-world government’ on liberty-loving Americans.”

Mention of the Hutaree comes in the Law Center’s list: “Active ‘Patriot’ Groups in the United States in 2009.”

The suspects were identified as militia leader David Brian Stone, 45; his wife, Tina Stone, 44; his son, Joshua Matthew Stone, 21, of Clayton, Michigan; another son, David Brian Stone Jr., 19, of Adrian, Michigan; Joshua Clough, 28, of Blissfield, Michigan; Michael Meeks, 40, of Manchester, Michigan; Thomas Piatek, 46, of Whiting, Indiana; Kristopher Sickles, 27, of Sandusky, Ohio; and Jacob Ward, 33, of Huron, Ohio.

A bond hearing was set for 1 p.m. Wednesday.

A court-appointed counsel will be assigned to the seven suspects who were in court Monday because none of them had lawyers.

According to the indictment, Hutaree members view local, state and federal law enforcement authorities as the enemy and have been preparing to engage them in armed conflict.

The indictment alleges that the Hutaree planned to kill an unidentified law enforcement officer in Michigan and then attack officers and others who would gather for the funeral. According to the plan, the indictment says, the Hutaree wanted to use improvised explosive devices to attack law enforcement vehicles during the funeral procession. The indictment says those explosive devices, commonly called IEDs, constitute weapons of mass destruction.

Subsequently, the indictment says, Hutaree leader David Brian Stone obtained information about IEDs over the Internet and e-mailed diagrams to a person he believed could manufacture them. He then had one of his sons, Joshua Matthew Stone, and others gather materials necessary to manufacture IEDs, the indictment alleges.

According to the indictment, David Brian Stone and David Brian Stone Jr. taught other Hutaree members in June how to make and use explosive devices.

In addition, the grand jury charged all nine defendants with carrying or possessing a firearm during a crime of violence on at least one occasion.

“Because the Hutaree had planned a covert reconnaissance operation for April which had the potential of placing an unsuspecting member of the public at risk, the safety of the public and of the law enforcement community demanded intervention at this time,” U.S. Attorney McQuade said.

From:http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/03/29/michigan.arrests/index.html?hpt=C1

But a full-scale Broadway show and a more intimate piece made for a ballet company (like “Nine Sinatra Songs,” which you much prefer to “Come Fly Away”) are vastly different animals and need to be considered as such. You would not expect Balanchine’s choreography for, say, “Song of Norway,” to equal or even have much in common with his most sophisticated ballets. Twyla Tharp is a smart woman, and she knew that to make this material work on a large-scaled, full-evening basis, some showmanship was necessary.

I just don’t agree that the dances in “Come Fly Away” are qualitatively so inferior to the pieces in “Nine Sinatra Songs”; at least one is essentially the same. Would I like a few less audience-devouring smiles from Karine Plantadit? Sure. A little less acrobatics here and there? Perhaps.

But I also think we disagree about the nature of the event. For me “Come Fly Away” is not intended to be about intimacy as much as it is about the performative aspects of romantic attachment, the roles that men and women play when they are courting each other in public. It takes place in a nightclub, after all. So in that sense I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what you call the show’s “exhibitionism.” It’s about the pas de deux as a public mating dance, and the male of the species is going to go in for a little showing off. The female, too.

From:http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/come-fly-away/

“Yes, hello,” he replies anxiously. “I want to talk about pirates. These guys aren’t being treated fairly.”

In a booth next door, news producers prepare the daily diet of mayhem and more: three bodies found in Bakaro market; President Sheik Sharif preaches reconciliation at a mosque; Islamic scholars speak out about the Shabab insurgent group cutting off hands; the livestock market is looking up and the price of goats, thank God, is steadily rising.

Good Morning. . .Mogadishu!

This is a typical day at Radio Mogadishu, the one and only relatively free radio station in south central Somalia where journalists can broadcast what they like — without worrying about being beheaded. The station’s 90-foot antennas, which rise above the rubble of the neighborhood, have literally become a beacon of freedom for reporters, editors, technicians and disc jockeys all across Somalia who have been chased away from their jobs by radical Islamist insurgents.

Whoever controls Mogadishu, controls Radio Mogadishu, and since the station opened in 1951 that has meant nattily dressed Italian administrators, a short-lived democratic government, a military dictator, various warlords and assorted thugs, Islamist sheiks and now a weak but internationally recognized transitional government that does not have a grip on the capital but is ensconced in the hilltop neighborhood where the station is.

Radio Mogadishu’s 100 or so employees are marked men and women, because the insurgents associate them with the government. The journalists eat and sleep here, rarely venturing out. Most get paid a few hundred dollars a month. Some, like the station’s senior political correspondent, Abdi Aziz Mahamoud Africa, strut around the compound in baggy jeans and Western-style jerseys that could get them killed in other parts of town.

A platoon of Ugandan soldiers, part of the African Union peacekeeping mission here, is hunkered down behind sandbags at the station’s gate, the business end of their rifles trained on the warren of shot-up streets and blasted-out homes outside. Few people even live here anymore. Somalia has become one of the most dangerous places in the world to practice journalism, with more than 20 journalists assassinated in the past four years. “We miss them,” Mr. Africa said about his fallen colleagues.

He cracked an embarrassed smile when asked about his name. “It’s because I’m dark, really dark,” he said.

Mr. Africa used to work at one of the city’s other radio stations (the city has more than 10) but decided to move on after fighters with the Shabab dropped by and threatened to kill the reporters if they did not broadcast pro-Shabab news. Mr. Africa called the Shabab meddlers “secret editors” and now he carries a gun.

“I tried to get the other journalists to buy pistols,” Mr. Africa remembered. “But nobody listened to me.”

Another reporter, Musa Osman, said that his real home was only about a mile away.

“But I haven’t seen my kids for months,” he said.

He drew his finger across his throat and laughed a sharp, bitter laugh when asked what would happen if he went home.

The digs here are hardly plush. Most of the journalists sleep on thin foam mattresses in bald concrete rooms. The station itself is a crumbling, bullet-scarred reflection of this entire nation, which has been essentially governmentless for nearly two decades.

One of the buildings on the compound is a heap of pulverized rubble with a blown-out ceiling. “Black Hawk Down,” one young journalist explained, almost proudly. The building was apparently bombed in 1993, when the station was run by Gen. Mohammed Farah Aideed, a notorious Somali warlord whose militiamen fought against American troops in a vicious street battle later immortalized by the book and film, “Black Hawk Down.”

Mr. Aideed’s mustachioed, almost goofy-looking visage still gazes from a wall, along with sepia-toned photographs of Somalia’s last dictator, Gen. Mohammed Siad Barre. Nearby is an old dog-eared timetable for Somali airlines titled, “The White Star Service.” The White Star has not flown for years.

In a city where relentless small-caliber gunfire has reduced just about every monument, library and place of note to a pile of sun-bleached concrete block, Radio Mogadishu may be one of the last surviving repositories of Somali history. In a shadowy back room, past ancient turntables and gutted speakers with wires shooting out, are miles and miles of reel-to-reel tapes stacked floor to ceiling in 10-foot-high racks. They are carefully labeled in fading ink: old speeches, cultural songs, patriotic songs, interviews with nomads and other mementos of a vanishing culture. Every week, some of the tapes are dusted off and played on a show called “Reminisces.”

“This place is a cultural treasure, believe it or not,” said Mukhtar Ainashe, a presidential adviser.

The United Nations is trying to help the Somalis convert the vintage tapes to compact discs before humidity and time overtake them. The fledging Somali government is also pouring in resources, like a new transmitter that will expand coverage from a few miles to more than 60, because Radio Mogadishu is seen as a key piece of its hearts-and-minds strategy to pull the public over to the government’s side.

But the journalists here insist they are not merely public relations agents.

They air the speeches of insurgent leaders, they say, and stories about government soldiers robbing citizens.

From:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/world/africa/30mogadishu.html?hp