Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on February 18, 2012
They foiled plots and cracked Nazi codes, but Britain’s spies were unable to solve the mystery of Charlie Chaplin’s birth.
Although the entertainer is celebrated as one of London’s most famous sons, newly declassified files reveal that Britain’s MI5 domestic intelligence service found no records to back up Chaplin’s claim that he was born in the city on April 16, 1889.
Uncertainty about Chaplin’s origins linger to this day — a mystery Chaplin himself may have helped to nurture.
The previously secret file, released Friday by Britain’s National Archives, shows that MI5 investigated the silent film star in the 1950s at the request of U.S. authorities, who had long suspected him of communist sympathies. MI5 historian Christopher Andrew said the FBI’s red-hating chief, J. Edgar Hoover, privately denounced Chaplin as “one of Hollywood’s parlor Bolsheviks.”
To the spies’ surprise, there was no record of the performer’s birth.
“It would seem that Chaplin was either not born in this country or that his name at birth was other than those mentioned,” MI5 concluded.
Chaplin’s life is a Dickensian rags-to-riches story. Raised in London in a family of music-hall entertainers, he moved to the United States in 1910 and became one of Hollywood’s first megastars with his shabby, bowler-hatted everyman persona, the Little Tramp.
He was a box office sensation in movies such as “The Gold Rush,” “City Lights” and “The Kid,” but his left-wing friends and activities alarmed the FBI, which began tracking the actor in the early 1920s.
In 1952, as fears of Soviet infiltration raged in the U.S., American authorities asked MI5 to investigate Chaplin’s political allegiances and personal background, including a long-standing rumor that Charlie Chaplin was an alias and the performer’s true name was Israel Thornstein.
But British spies could find no trace of him in the birth records at London’s Somerset House under Chaplin, Thornstein or Harley, his mother’s stage name.
The spies also checked French records amid rumors that he might have been born in the town of Fontainebleau – but that, too, drew a blank.
Elsewhere in the file, agents speculate that Chaplin might have Russian roots. There was an allegation that he had once spoken of “going back to Russia.”
“This might refer to paying another visit, or it might denote his origin as Russia,” noted senior MI5 officer W.M.T. Magan, speculating that Chaplin might have come from a Jewish family fleeing pogroms at the end of the 19th century.
Film historian Matthew Sweet said rumors about Chaplin’s roots had been swirling well before the 1950s. The French claim stemmed from a fan magazine article from the 1910s that suggested Chaplin was born while his performer mother was on tour. The idea he was Jewish appears to have been an assumption by some fans that came to be widely believed. Chaplin did little to correct the record.
“The borderline between fact and fiction about celebrities was much less clearly policed than it is today,” Sweet said.
MI5 seemed content to let the mystery of Chaplin’s birth remain. British agents were skeptical of American claims that the star was a communist threat, with John Marriott, the head of MI5’s counter-subversion branch, calling the U.S. allegations “unreliable.”
“It is curious that we can find no record of Chaplin’s birth, but I scarcely think that this is of any security significance,” he wrote in 1952.
The U.S. thought differently and Chaplin was refused re-entry to the United States in 1952. He settled in Switzerland and lived there until his death in 1977.
The dossier shows MI5 continued to track Chaplin for several years. It contains newspaper clippings about the actor, snatches of conversation from suspected radicals who knew him and letters sent from Russia to “Comrade Charly Chaplin” via the communist magazine Challenge.
But by 1958, MI5 had concluded Chaplin was not a threat.
“We have no substantial information of our own against Chaplin, and we are not satisfied that there are reliable grounds for regarding him as a security risk,” the agency noted. “It may be that Chaplin is a Communist sympathizer but on the information before us he would appear to be no more than a ‘progressive’ or radical.”
Nonetheless, a taint of impropriety lingered. Files released in 2002 showed that the British government blocked a knighthood for Chaplin for nearly 20 years because of American concerns about his politics and private life – he was married four times, twice to 16-year-old girls. He eventually became Sir Charles Chaplin in March 1975, two years before his death at age 88.
Chaplin’s origins remain cloudy, although the 1891 census records the then 2-year-old as living in south London with his mother and elder brother Sydney.
Evidence unearthed last year added another layer of mystery.
In a locked drawer of a bureau left behind after Chaplin’s death, his family found a letter from a man in England named Jack Hill. It claimed Chaplin had been born “in a caravan (that) belonged to the Gypsy Queen, who was my auntie” in a Roma community near Birmingham in central England.
Chaplin had alluded to Roma roots in his autobiography, writing that “Grandma was half-Gypsy. This fact was the skeleton in our family cupboard.”
Sweet said the letter was not proof of Chaplin’s birthplace but evidence he cultivated the mystery of his origins.
“It is very widely accepted that he was born in London in 1889, but the piece of paper just isn’t there,” Sweet said.
“That letter is not proof that he was born in a Gypsy encampment. It is proof that he was terrifically attracted to the idea of that story, enough to keep the letter and lock it away and think of it as something important.
“The idea of the mystery of his own birth is something that he quite enjoyed, I think.”
Source: ctv.ca
Cell phone mystery in 1928 Chaplin film
A scene from Charlie Chaplin’s silent movie The Circus has sparked a time-travel mystery among fans after one extra appears to be chatting on a cell phone.
The clip from the 1928 film has been posted online by Irish filmmaker George Clarke and begs the question did someone travel back in time to appear outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, while Chaplin was shooting the movie?
The woman in the scene is holding a black object to her ear and appears to be talking into it.
Clarke insists the video has not been manipulated in any way and he has consulted with experts about his find, which he has posted on YouTube.com for fans to check out.
The filmmaker has concluded the woman walking through the scene is from another era.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on February 15, 2012
A fascinating study from the University of Twente (Netherlands) , UNESCO-IHE
by Arjen Hoekstra and Mesfin Mekonnen
Background
Since the Dublin Conference in 1992, there is consensus that the river basin is the appropriate unit for analyzing freshwater availability and use. An underlying hypothesis of the research programme at the University of Twente is that it is becoming increasingly important to put freshwater issues in a global context. Although other authors have already argued thus, we add a new dimension to the argument. Local water depletion and pollution are often closely tied to the structure of the global economy. With increasing trade between nations and continents, water is more frequently used to produce exported goods. International trade in commodities implies long-distance transfers of water in virtual form, where virtual water is understood as the volume of water that has been used to produce a commodity and that is thus virtually embedded in it. Knowledge about the virtual-water flows entering and leaving a country can cast a completely new light on the actual water scarcity of a country. For example, Jordan imports about 5 to 7 billion m3 of virtual water per year, which is in sharp contrast with the 1 billion m3 of water withdrawn annually from domestic water sources. This means that people in Jordan apparently survive owing to the import of water-intensive commodities from elsewhere, for example the USA.
A second hypothesis of the research programme is that it becomes increasingly relevant to consider the linkages between consumption of people and impacts on freshwater systems. This can improve our understanding of the processes that drive changes imposed on freshwater systems and help to develop policies of wise water governance. In 2002 Hoekstra introduced the water-footprint concept as an indicator that maps the impact of human consumption on global freshwater resources. The water footprint of an individual or community is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual or community. A water footprint can be calculated for any well-defined group of consumers, including a family, business, village, city, province, state or nation. The water footprint of a nation for example shows water use related to consumption within a nation. Traditionally, national water use has been measured as the total freshwater withdrawal for the various sectors of the economy. By contrast, the water footprint shows not only freshwater use within the country considered, but also freshwater use outside the country’s borders. It refers to all forms of freshwater use that contribute to the production of goods and services consumed by the inhabitants of a certain country. The water footprint of the Dutch community, for example, also refers to the use of water for rice production in Thailand (insofar as the rice is exported to the Netherlands for consumption there). Conversely, the water footprint of a nation excludes water that is used within the national territory for producing commodities for export, which are consumed elsewhere.
Objective of the programme
The objective of the research programme is to examine the critical links between water management and international trade and between consumption and freshwater impacts. Questions posed are: Can trade enhance global water use efficiency, or does it simply shift the environmental burden to a distant location? Does import of water in virtual form offer a solution to water-scarce nations or does this result is undesired ‘water dependency’? How can quantitative analysis of expected or desirable trends in international or inter-regional virtual water flows contribute to water policy development at different levels of spatial scale? How can water footprint accounting become part of the regular practice of governments and businesses and how can it feed into better water policy making? How can water security of communities can be guaranteed by a combination of policies to bring along changes at local, basin and global level? How will the growing demand for bio-energy increase the global water footprint of humanity? Questions like these and others are being addressed in various sub-projects, involving MSc and PhD students from various parts of the world.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on February 14, 2012
These are some of the ethiopian rose types produced by the dutch company, SCHREURS.
The British retailer, Marks and Spencer plc (also known as M&S or YourM&S; colloquially known as Marks and Sparks or, simply, Marks) is headquartered in the City of Westminster, London, with over 700 stores in the United Kingdom and over 300 stores spread across more than 40 countries. It specialises in the selling of clothing and luxury food products. M&S was founded in 1884 by Michael Marks and Thomas Spencer in Leeds.
Here are the guidlines and aims of the M&S project:
This project is helping the Ethiopian Horticulture Produce & Exporters Association (EHPEA) access the UK fresh flower market through the development of its own standards that, through benchmarking against International standards become acceptable to the UK retail sector. EHPEA has developed a code of practice to drive environmental and good agricultural best practise for the industry. This will be benchmarked against international standards. However, Ethiopian horticulture also needs to develop ethical trading and labour standards due to weak labour laws and the project is working to achieve this.
The project is:
Developing a silver and bronze standard/ code for the Ethiopian Horticulture sector;
Developing the standards to include a collective bargaining agreement to improve labour standards for workers on the farms;
Putting together a multi-stakeholder working group to approve the standards;
Benchmarking the EHPEA Code of Practice at silver level with Global GAP;
Benchmarking the EHPEA Code of Practice at silver level with ETI / SMETA and GSCP; matching compliance criteria and development and benchmarking of the Code Rules and regulations;
Providing training in ETI standards;
Preparation of training materials relevant to ethical training initiative standards and
Supporting a pilot group of 4 farms working to achieve the silver standard;
Promoting the EPHEA standards at international conferences and with international working groups e.g. GSCP so that standards gain publicity;
Sharing experience with the sector and to discuss market opportunities for Silver labelled produce in the UK
Purchasing a minimum 500,000 roses from farms that meet the silver standards.
Highlighting Ethiopia as a sourcing country to customers through M&S website
The key aims of the project are to:
Raise labour standards in Ethiopian Flower Farms
Raise Technical standards in Ethiopian Flower Farms
Develop local training capacity
Increase sourcing of Ethiopian Roses to the UK
Promote Ethiopia as a reliable and robust sourcing county
Raise awareness of International Standards in the Ethiopian Horticulture Industry
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on February 12, 2012
“The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold, something greater than Solomon is here.” [Matthew 12:42]
A British excavation has struck archaeological gold with a discovery that may solve the mystery of where the Queen of Sheba derived her fabled treasures
A British excavation has struck archaeological gold with a discovery that may solve the mystery of where the Queen of Sheba of biblical legend derived her fabled treasures.
Almost 3,000 years ago, the ruler of Sheba, which spanned modern-day Ethiopia and Yemen, arrived in Jerusalem with vast quantities of gold to give to King Solomon. Now an enormous ancient goldmine, together with the ruins of a temple and the site of a battlefield, have been discovered in her former territory.
Louise Schofield, an archaeologist and former British Museum curator, who headed the excavation on the high Gheralta plateau in northern Ethiopia, said: “One of the things I’ve always loved about archaeology is the way it can tie up with legends and myths. The fact that we might have the Queen of Sheba’s mines is extraordinary.”
An initial clue lay in a 20ft stone stele (or slab) carved with a sun and crescent moon, the “calling card of the land of Sheba”, Schofield said. “I crawled beneath the stone – wary of a 9ft cobra I was warned lives here – and came face to face with an inscription in Sabaean, the language that the Queen of Sheba would have spoken.”
Addis Ethiopia Weblog 