Recipe

Adapted from "Zuppe," by Mona Talbott (Little Bookroom, 2012)

Homemade Chicken Broth

Published: April 6, 2012

• Sign In to E-Mail
• Print
• Reprints

Related

• City Kitchen: Quiet Nourishment as Spring Settles In (April 11, 2012)

• Roman Egg Drop Soup (Stracciatella Alla Romana) (April 11, 2012)

Time: About 2 hours

3 pounds meaty chicken bones; a combination of wings, backs and necks

2 medium onions, peeled and quartered

2 carrots, peeled

2 celery stalks

1 bay leaf

2 thyme sprigs

2 parsley sprigs

5 black peppercorns.

1. Put chicken bones, onions, carrots, celery, bay leaf, thyme, parsley and peppercorns in a large soup pot. Add 6 quarts cold water, turn the heat to high and bring to a boil.

2. Turn the heat to a gentle simmer. Spoon off and discard any foam that rises to the surface.

3. Simmer, uncovered, for 2 hours. Strain broth through a fine-meshed sieve. Cool to room temperature and refrigerate for future use (chicken fat will rise to surface and congeal), or skim fat from surface and use immediately.

Yield : about 4 quarts.

Theo www.nytimes.com

Israel Critical of Iran Nuclear Talks

Israeli officials say European Union-led negotiations over Iran"s nuclear program are giving Tehran more time to develop nuclear weapons. U.S. officials are trying to reassure Israel there is still time for a diplomatic solution to the nuclear standoff.

U.N. and E.U. nuclear talks with Iran have settled on another round of negotiations next month in Baghdad.

And Israel is not happy about it.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says more time is just what Iran wants. "Well, my initial impression is that Iran has been given a [free chance]. It's got five weeks to continue enrichment without any limitation, any inhibition," he said.

U.S. President Barack Obama says Iran is not getting a free pass and must show it is serious about complying with its international obligations. "I've been very clear to Iran and to our negotiating partners that we're not going to have these talks just drag out in a stalling process. But so far at least we haven't given away anything other than the opportunity for us to negotiate and see if Iran comes to the table in good faith," he said.

With Israel openly considering a military strike to stop Iran's nuclear program...

Middle East analyst Malou Innocent says the Obama administration is pressing for more time. "The Israeli government believes that negotiations are worthless, that we should just immediately press forward with more pressure and possible military strikes. So there seems to be some tension between the Israeli and U.S. governments," she said.

The United States and European Union are tightening sanctions on Iran's oil and banking sectors.

President Obama says there will be no let up until the international community is satisfied that Iran's nuclear program is not for weapons. "Part of the reason we have been able to build a strong international coalition that isolates Iran around the nuclear issue is because the world has confidence that I've been sincere and my administration's been sincere about giving Iran an opportunity to pursue peaceful nuclear energy while foreclosing the pursuit of a nuclear weapon," he said.

With Iranian ally Bashar al-Assad under pressure in Damascus, analyst Malou Innocent says the Obama administration is telling Israel to be patient. "History is going in Israel's favor in terms of the international pressure being brought on the Iranian government and now the internal insurrection against Assad's regime. So many within Washington are trying to pressure Tel Aviv to back down on the pressure and allow events to carry forward," he said.

Iran insists that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

U.N. Secretary General Bank Ki-moon says Tehran deserves the chance to demonstrate that to the international community.

Theo www.voanews.com

Sarajevo, 20 Years Later The Baby In The Picture, All Grown Up

He's the subject of one of the most iconic images of this city's deadly four-year siege: a curly haired toddler crouched behind the iron bars of an open first-floor window, glancing with a mix of curiosity and caution at the sunny street below.

Photo: RFE/RL - Daisy Sindelar

"Sometimes, when the bombs weren't falling nonstop, there were times when we could go out," remembers Skender Basic, a native of Sarajevo who as a baby was the subject of an iconic photograph taken during the siege of Sarajevo.

But as Sarajevo marks 20 years since the start of the siege, the boy in the picture, Skender Basic, says he isn't all that interested in the anniversary, and that his few memories of the war are far from unhappy.

"Sometimes, when the bombs weren't falling nonstop, there were times when we could go out. There were some kids who were playing outside," he recalls. "Our street was a little bit isolated from the snipers. It was closed off, so we could play sometimes.

"I remember a friend called Mesa, and I also remember one friend Daco. You know the game Street Fighter? Everybody in the world knows that game – come on! We were collecting some stickers from that game. It was fun."

Too Young To Understand

Basic, who turns 22 later this month, acknowledges that he was too young to understand the horrors of the siege, which claimed the lives of more than 10,000 people, including 600 children.

It was more frustrating for his parents, he says, Bosnian Muslims who had to care for Basic and his older sister amid increasingly perilous circumstances. The family eventually fled for a year to Western Europe, returning only after the war's end in 1996.

Still, the war is there somewhere.

Basic, a devoted movie fan, says he found himself crying uncontrollably when he recently watched "Grave of the Fireflies," the 1988 animated film depicting the relationship between a Japanese boy and his younger sister as they succumb to starvation during World War II.

"I've never been so touched by a movie," he says. "My mother said, 'Skender, everything that happened during the war is inside your head, in your subconscious, and it's triggering those emotions.'"

Basic is decidedly less emotional, however, when it comes to his wartime portrait as a housebound baby placed in a window for a brief dose of sunlight.

_{The iconic photo of Skender Basic, taken by photographer Rikard Larma during the siege of Sarajevo. (Courtesy of Rikard Larma} )

The picture was shot by Sarajevo-born photographer Rikard Larma, who captured some of the most enduring images of the 1,425-day siege. But the idea, says Skender, belonged to his father – the well-known Bosnian actor Senad Basic.

"The true story about that picture is that my father was the one who said to Rikard, 'Hey, take this picture.' [Larma] didn't even recognize the picture in that. It was my father. And that's the only reason he took the picture," Basic says. "Believe me, it's a true story. I don't want to overexaggerate, but my father's a big artist. One of the best actors here. He's very educated."

Affection And Impatience

Basic has lost his childhood curls and is starting his first year of law school with an eye on a career in criminal law.

Despite his deep fascination with movies – even a short conversation is peppered with back-to-back film references -- he says he is slowly trying to extract himself from "brainwashing instruments" like computer games and social networking.

"I deleted myself from Facebook," he says, laughing. "It was only 20 days ago, but I'm very proud. They throw too much stuff at us, just to keep us distracted."

Twenty years after the start of the siege, Basic views his city with a mix of affection and impatience, saying it may be another 20 years before Sarajevo shrugs off its reputation for corruption and its crumbling infrastructure.

Nor does he rule out the possibility that war may once again return to the Balkans. But Sarajevo's most famous wartime baby says he will not abandon his city, even in such an instance.

"I plan to stay. When you succeed in Sarajevo, it's pretty good. And the war thing, it will come eventually, but I don't think soon. That's my opinion, my funny opinion," he says.

"When we're sitting at our grandfather's, when the family is together in the summer, and we ask about the war, they're always like, 'War will always be in the Balkans. We will always have war. It's in our genes.' If the Third World War happens, it will happen here."

Theo www.voanews.com

Auld Times

'City of Bohane,' by Kevin Barry

R. Kikuo Johnson

By PETE HAMILL

Published: March 29, 2012

• Sign In to E-Mail
• Print
• Single Page
• Reprints

"City of Bohane," the extraordinary first novel by the Irish writer Kevin Barry, is full of marvels. They are all literary marvels, of course: marvels of language, invention, surprise. Savage brutality is here, but so is laughter. And humanity. And the abiding ache of tragedy.

CITY OF BOHANE

By Kevin Barry

277 pp. Graywolf Press. $25.

Enlarge This Image

Hugh O'Conor

Kevin Barry

The form resembles an Icelandic saga welded to a ballad of the American West, although the location is in a place somewhere in Ireland, around the year 2053. In prose that is both dense and flowing, Barry takes us on a roaring journey, among human beings who are trapped in life its own damned self. Nostalgiagrips many of them, even when they slash angrily at sentimentality. None of it is real, yet all of it feels true. This powerful, exuberant fiction is as true as the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez, the Yoknapatawpha County of William Faulkner and, in a different way, even the Broadway of Damon Runyon. Those places were not real. The stories remain true.

The binding story here is about love. Two men, one woman, a shared place. Bohane itself is separated by class, tribe, vision. One of the men is Logan Hartnett, who runs the Fancy, the most fearsome gang in the city. He's also called the Albino or the Long Fella (though not because he writes poetry, which he doesn't) or simply Mr. H. The obscure, nameless, occasional narrator points out one detail: "Mouth of teeth on him like a vandalized graveyard but we all have our crosses."

Logan is married to a woman now 43, tall, with a touch of Iberian beauty, made oddly more seductive by a cocked eye. Her name is Macu, from Immaculata. She and Logan are childless. They live in a "manse" in a comparatively well-off neighborhood, not far from the hotel that houses Logan's mother, a manipulative schemer who, as she nears 90, is still called "Girly." She is great nasty fun.

The other man is Gant Broderick. He's powerfully built in a movie macho style, and was once called "the big unit" by some residents of Bohane. We meet him in the second chapter, riding into the scary city on the El train. This is where the Western ballad usually begins. Gant is heading for the crime-drowned Bohane district called Smoketown, where he had once been boss. Boss of shebeens (Irish speakeasies), "hoor stables," joints that sold hemp and other drugs through the sleepless nights. But now he has been away for 25 years. And still exudes physical strength. "He had a pair of hands on him the size of Belfast sinks," Barry writes.

But Gant is struggling with his emotions. He is, after all, riding into his own past. "The tang of stolen youth seeped up in his throat with the rasping burn of nausea and on the El train in yellow light the Gant trembled." He is also very happy to be home, hearing familiar slangy accents, the cawing of sea gulls, classical music playing in tender counterpoint from a kiosk, while inhaling the stink of decayed blood from a riverside slaughterhouse. This prodigal son knows where he is. One sentence sets up most of the rest of the novel: "He looked for her in every woman he passed, in every girl."

Gant is looking for Macu, the girl he lost (along with his street power) to Logan. He hopes it is not too late to repair what happened when they were both a quarter of a century younger. Ludicrous. But for almost everybody in this novel, such hopes are just other types of drugs. Even the younger characters are afflicted with the presence of the "lost time" in Bohane, the collective memory of a period without dates, when something calamitous happened that is never spelled out.

Then again, in this Irish novel Ireland isn't spelled out either. Bohane's main street is named for the long-dominant Irish political leader Eamon De Valera. Three housing projects are named for Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney. The residents never mention any of them. Each project is ruled by a separate gang that bears the name of one of the great poets. In Bohane, there are no computers, no cellphones, no digital cameras (a photographer for the town's newspaper uses "a medieval Leica"). The "lost time" never refers either to the rise, or the fall, of the Celtic Tiger. All of the rest of Ireland is offstage. And Bohane lives an insular saga of recurring violence. The individuals seem trapped by biography, not by history. There are no texts of "the lost time," only songs. Calypso, the blues, scraps of rock. Heard at the midnight hour in bordellos and shebeens. No rousing Irish rebel songs. No tri­color flags.

• 1
• 2

Next Page »

Theo www.nytimes.com

National Briefing | Plains

Oklahoma: Ultrasound Law Struck Down

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: March 29, 2012

• Sign In to E-Mail
• Print
• Reprints

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow @NYTNational for breaking news and headlines.

Twitter List: Reporters and Editors

District Judge Bryan Dixon on Wednesday struck down the state's law requiring women seeking abortions to have an ultrasound image placed in front of them and to listen to a detailed description of the fetus before the procedure. Judge Dixon the statute cannot be enforced because it addresses only patients and people dealing with abortions without addressing other medical care.

Theo www.nytimes.com

Soldiers Oust Mali President, Seize Control

Malian soldiers angered over the government"s mishandling of the two-month-old Tuareg rebellion in the North say they have overthrown President Amadou Toumani Toure - just weeks before the election that would have marked an end to his mandate.  The president"s location is unknown.  Frustration had long been brewing in the military in what had been one of the region"s few stable democracies.

Residents told VOA that sporadic gunfire continued in Bamako Thursday just hours after renegade soldiers - calling themselves the National Committee for the Restoration of Democracy and State - or CNRDR, seized control of the state.

Appearing on state TV early Thursday, the CNRDR spokesman, Amadou Konare, says the armed forces decided to put an end to the "incompetent regime" of President Amadou Toumani Toure.  He says the constitution is suspended until further notice and all government institutions have been dissolved.  He says an inclusive government will be created after consultation with the nation's representatives.

Stirrings of the coup began Wednesday morning with a mutiny by soldiers at a military camp near the capital and then spread to a military base in Gao, in the northeast.

Complaints

Soldiers say they lack adequate weapons, ammunition and food as they confront Tuareg separatists in the north of the country.  Since the rebellion began in January, numerous Malian soldiers have died or been captured, though the government has not released exact numbers.

The situation quickly spiralled Wednesday evening as soldiers stormed the state radio and television stations in Bamako and attacked the presidential palace with heavy weapons.

A number of government ministers have been arrested.

The soldiers have set up checkpoints around the capital, imposed a curfew and closed the country's land and air borders.

On state television, coup spokesman, Konare, said the CNRDR's objective is under no circumstances the seizure of power.  He says they promise to hand power back to a democratically elected president as soon as the country is reunified and its integrity no longer threatened.

Mali was set to hold a presidential election on April 29.  President Toure, a former army officer and coup leader himself, was not seeking another term.  He has served his legal limit of two mandates.

It is not clear how pre-meditated the events of the last 24 hours were; however, frustration has long been brewing in the chronically under-resourced military.

Rumors

West Africa Director for the International Crisis Group, Gilles Yabi, says that frustration has been increasingly apparent since January as the military suffered defeats by the Tuaregs in the north.  However, he says there were rumors of a coup even before the Tuareg rebellion began.

In February, the widows and families of soldiers killed in the north took to the streets to protest government mismanagement of the rebellion.

The renewal of conflict in the north marked the collapse of a 2007 amnesty agreement.  The rebels include former pro-Gadhafi fighters who have returned to Mali with arms acquired from the conflict in Libya.  They are demanding the creation of an independent, Islamic state in the country's northern deserts, the ancestral homeland to tribes of nomadic Tuareg traders.

The United Nations Refugee Agency says fighting has displaced more than 180,000 Malians since January.

West Africa is no stranger to military coups.  Mali is sandwiched between two countries, Mauritania and Niger, that have both, in the past four years, seen soldiers oust elected leaders, rewrite constitutions and organize fresh elections.  Mali, however, was considered an exception.

Yabi says in Mali there were concerns that the government would try to push back or cancel the elections because of the insecurity in the north.  He says the coup is unfortunate, as Mali has a strong tradition of political dialogue and likely could have arrived at a peaceful solution to both the grievances of the army in the north and the election.

Mixed response

The coup has sparked a mixed response from Malians.

Boubacar Ibrahim says the population shares the military's frustration but was not ready for an overthrow of the government.  He says given more time, the government could have found a solution to the military's grievances.  He says the suspension of the constitution and the curfew are worrying for the future of the democracy.

Others, however, see the coup as a necessary evil.

President of the Women's Movement for the Protection of Peace and National Unity, Mariam Djibrilla Maiga, says many people tried to get President Toure to take the rebellion more seriously.  She says he wouldn't, so he had to be pushed aside.  She says the government's handling of the situation was disastrous.  She says the Tuaregs are better armed than the soldiers, and the army was humiliated.  She says this coup was necessary to preserve national unity.

However, she and others say they hope the military will soon return power to civilians.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the head of the African Union commission, Jean Ping, both expressed concern in the early hours of the coup and called for grievances to be resolved in a peaceful and democratic manner.

Theo www.voanews.com

Tibetan Man Sets Himself on Fire in Protest Over China

A Tibetan man has set himself on fire in eastern Tibet, in the latest gesture of defiance used by Tibetans to protest Chinese government policies.

Witnesses told VOA Tibetan Service that 44-year-old Sonam Dhargyal set himself on fire early Saturday in the Rebkong region of Tibet. The incident follows another self-immolation protest earlier in the week by a monk in southwestern China's Sichuan province, where many Tibetans live.

March has long been a tense time for China and its Tibetan areas, as the month marks key anniversaries in the Tibetan struggle for more freedom.

The last year has been especially problematic for Chinese authorities, as dozens of monks, nuns and ordinary people have set themselves on fire in protest. More than half of those self-immolations have occurred since January, despite beefed up security in parts of China where there are large Tibetan populations.

China blames overseas groups and Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, for inciting separatism. It has also portrayed those who have set themselves on fire as outcasts and criminals.

Some information for this report was provided by AFP.

Theo www.voanews.com