After 106 days in coma, Alexandra Boulat passed away today

Friends, family and photography buffs are grieving at the loss of Alexandra Boulat, the sensitive and brave conflict photographer who shot the photo below in Afghanistan. (A young female burn patient undergoing treatment at Herat Hospital. Shahima, 25, whose face is covered with a veil to protect her from flying insects, set herself alight to escape domestic violence and complete submission to her new stepfamily.) Alex was not afraid to look at death, and she embraced the complexities of life.

Alexandra was an elegant and vibrant woman, who had an exacting eye for lighting and detail and a passion for the truth. Our deepest condolences go out to Issa Freij, her partner in Ramallah, and Annie and Antoinette Boulat, her mother and sister in Paris. After suffering her brain aneurysm last June, Alex never regained consciousness. She was strong physically and held on for more than three months, first in Israel's Haddasah hospital and then was medi-vaced to Lariboisière in Paris. She died at noon today, age 45.

Gaza became an obsession for this exceptional photojournalist, who co-founded the renowned photo agency VII, and her friends will go through Erez crossing and make a donation in Alex's memory for the women and families whose lives are blighted by that conflict. Alex used to record the border guards' commands and the whirrs and dehumanized inspections every time she crossed this checkpoint and use them for background in podcasts.
Rest in Peace, Alexandra.
(Will post more details about funeral service and obituaries as they become clearer.) It is indeed a sad day.

UPDATE: A memorial service will be held on Friday, 12 October in the chapel at Jacqueville, outside Paris. Alexandra will be laid to rest beside her photographer father, Pierre Boulat.

The family would like to announce that a Foundation to continue Alexandra's and Pierre's legacy will be established in the coming weeks. The Foundation will support the ideals and issues that Alexandra and Pierre were concerned with. If you would like to contribute to this Foundation please contact: boulat_foundation@viiphoto.com

If you prefer to send flowers please send them to:
Cimetière de Jacqueville
77 760 Amponville, France

Click here to see the VII archive portraits of (not by) Alexandra.

BIOGRAPHY OF ALEXANDRA BOULAT, from VII

Alexandra Boulat was born in Paris, France, in 1962. She trained in graphic art and art history, at the Beaux Arts in Paris. She was represented by Sipa Press for 10 years until 2000. In 2001 she co-founded VII photo agency. Her news and features stories are published in many international magazines, above all Time, Newsweek, National Geographic Magazine and Paris-Match. She has recieved many International Awards for the quality of her work.

Boulat covered news, conflicts and social issues as well as making extensive reportages on countries and people. Among her many varied assignments, she has reported on the wars in former Yugoslavia, the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, the war in Iraq, Afghanistan at the fall of the Taliban, and the Women condition in the Islamic world. Other large assignments published in National Geographic include country stories on Indonesia Albania, and Morroco.


AWARDS

Best Women Photographer, Bevento Oscars, Italy 2006
Overseas Press Club 2003 - Afghanistan
World Press Photo / Art 2003 - Yves Saint Laurent Last Show
Infinity Award, International Center of Photography, New York, 1999 - Kosovo
USA Photo Magazine's photographer of the year, 1998
Perpignan, Visa d'Or pour l'Image, 1998 - Kosovo
Prix Paris-Match 1998 - Kosovo
The Harry Chapin Media Awards 1994 - Besieged Sarajevo

BOOKS

PARIS -National Geographic France 2002
ECLATS DE GUERRE (lights of war).
Les Syrtes Image, 2002
EXHIBITIONS

Wars in Former Yugoslavia, Visa Pour l'Image, Perpignan 1995
Wars in Former Yugoslavia, Gallerie Debelleyme, Paris 2002




See also obituary in the Times of London, as well as the Independent, the Guardian, and a tribute in Time.

Hamsters on viagra, gay bombs, sword swallowers' sore throat cures win improbable prize

Real research, reported by the Beeb from Harvard Yard.

The Ig Nobel Prizes were created by the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), a science magazine.

The awards, now in their 17th year, are intended to "celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative - and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology".

Marc Abrahams, the editor of AIR, told the BBC News website: "When I became the editor of a science magazine, suddenly I was meeting all kinds of people who had done things that were hard to describe, and for the most part, nobody had ever heard of.

"For some of them, it seemed a great shame that nobody would give them any kind of recognition, and that was what really led to the birth of the Ig Nobels."

Like their more sober counterpart, the Nobel Prizes, the Ig Nobels are split into several categories and all research is real and published.

2007 Ig Nobel Winners

Medicine - Brain Witcombe, of Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust, UK, and Dan Meyer for their probing work on the health consequences of swallowing a sword.

Physics - A US-Chile team who ironed out the problem of how sheets become wrinkled.

Biology - Dr Johanna van Bronswijk of the Netherlands for carrying out a creepy crawly census of all of the mites, insects, spiders, ferns and fungi that share our beds.

Chemistry - Mayu Yamamoto, from Japan, for developing a method to extract vanilla fragrance and flavouring from cow dung.

Linguistics - A University of Barcelona team for showing that rats are unable to tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and somebody speaking Dutch backwards.

Literature - Glenda Browne of Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word "the", and how it can flummox those trying to put things into alphabetical order.

Peace - The US Air Force Wright Laboratory for instigating research and development on a chemical weapon that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among enemy troops.

Nutrition - Brian Wansink of Cornell University for investigating the limits of human appetite by feeding volunteers a self-refilling, "bottomless" bowl of soup.

Economics - Kuo Cheng Hsieh of Taiwan for patenting a device that can catch bank robbers by dropping a net over them.

Aviation - A National University of Quilmes, Argentina, team for discovering that impotency drugs can help hamsters to recover from jet lag.

Meet Charlotte, her hack highness from the Sindy

This Princess of Monaco is not such a grim Grimaldi, even though she dared to enter the very lair of the feral beasts, working on a London Sunday paper.

Time was when the Independent was an insouciant but principled newspaper which refused to cover the shenanigans of royalty. That all changed during Queen Elizabeth's Annus horribilis, when the monarchy actually made news. But as recently as 2005, when Prince Charles wed Camilla Parker-Bowles, the newspaper (which styles itself a views-paper now) cocked a snook at the royals with a full front page splash about the fairytale nuptials of Thomas Crapper, and demoted the heir to the throne's Windsor wedding to a meager two sentences on the inside.
How things change. Tristan Davies, the editor of the Independent on Sunday, famously fawns over celebrities. He was beside himself when Bono signed on as a guest editor for a Red edition of the Indy which was not so widely read. George Clooney is tapped to be the next editor-for-the-day (a conceit from Vogue magazine, more suitable to the langours of a monthly.) But Tristan has outdone himself. He has hired a genuine pouting princess on as a work-experience intern. She is Charlotte Casiraghi,age 20, the daughter of Princess Caroline of Monaco and granddaughter of Princess Grace. Hello. She may possess Hermes Kelly bags of talent, but her main journalistic experience so far is being on the opposite side of the lens as paparazzi snap away. Nothing fazes her much.

The MediaGuardian opines: It can only be a matter of time, given editor Tristan Davies's love of posh celebrities, that he blows all the savings made through the paper's redundancy programme and gives Casiraghi her own column.

Burmese Junta pulls the plug on Cyber-Revolution

Silencing the protestors used to be easy: intimidation was all it took, just a shaking of the iron fist. And if it shields itself from the prying eyes of other countries, a hermit nation like Myanmar can oppress its people with impunity. To counter the biggest Burmese popular uprising in the past 20 years, when monks in blood-red robes took to the streets, the military junta finally got to grips with the 21st century and pulled the plug on the country's two internet servers and all mobile phone networks to silence the festering dissidence. The mobile video phone is the subversive which just may prove mightier than the sword. But, writes Seth Mydans in the IHT, the digital age brought new power to ordinary people:

a guerrilla army of citizen reporters was transmitting videos, photographs and news reports over the Internet even as events were unfolding.
The old technology of guns and clubs had been ensnared by the immediacy of electronic communication in a way the world had never seen.....
They sent SMS text messages and e-mails and posted daily blogs, according to some of the exile groups that received their messages. They posted notices on Facebook, the online social networking Web site. They sent tiny messages on e-cards. They updated the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

They also used Internet versions of "pigeons" - the couriers reporters used in the past to carry out film and news - handing their material to embassies or nongovernmental organizations that had access to satellite connections.

Just as important, these images and reports were broadcast back into Myanmar by foreign radio and television stations, informing and connecting a public that receives only propaganda reports from its government.

"Iran so Far"...a gay theme tune for Mahmoud

After all the kerfuffle over the Columbia University speech, the Saturday Night Live skit mocks Mahmoud with real verve, especially his "no gays inside Iran" assertion. Ahmadinejad looks particularly fetching stretched out atop the grand piano, dontcha think?

New York Sun set in its ways: stylebook spells out Israeli coverage

Sure, perhaps this newspaper "shines for all," but Ne Plus Ultra-orthodox, apparently, is a motto for scribes on the New York Sun.
Ms Heidi Bruggink, of the NY Observer's Media Mob column, shares some inside info from the editorial room of a newspaper "known for its pugnacious coverage of Jewish-related issues--particularly a strong proponent of Israel's right to defend itself."

The in-house style guide of The New York Sun can be taken to offer some insight into the editorial positioning of the publication. We found, among the many entries, the following:

"aliya, not aliyah. Jewish immigration to Israel. Literally 'going up.' Opposite is yerida, the 'going down' of Israeli Jews to live in other countries, like America.

"Avery Fisher Hall: At Lincoln Center."

"Charedi. Literally, trembling. Prefer 'fervently Orthodox' or 'black-hat' to this Hebrew word. Avoid the term 'ultra-Orthodox.'"

"Decter, Midge. The Cold War heroine. Note the spelling of her last name."

"Ethnic. Means not Jewish or Christian."

"Gentile. Not Jewish or genteel."

"Jerusalem. Avoid the phrase 'Arab East Jerusalem.'"

"Matzo. Unleavened bread eaten at Passover, also called the bread of affliction."

"Peace process. Confine use to quoted material. Use the Oslo negotiations or the Arab-Israeli negotiations or the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs."

"Prime ministers of Israel. Our readers can be counted on to know of which country Prime Minister Sharon heads the government. Likewise with the American president."

"Reveal, revelation. Use only in quoted matter or when referring to what happened at Mount Sinai…"

"West Bank and Gaza Strip. Territories under Israeli control from 1967 onward. 'The territories' is acceptable on second reference, as are Judea or Samaria for the Southern and Northern regions of the West Bank. Avoid the phrase 'occupied territories.'"

UPDATE: This one was too good to leave out...

"communist, socialist. See AP stylebook. Any favorable reference to a communist must be shown to either the editor or the managing editor of the Sun before publication."

Junket Journos, corporate gifting, and unbiased reporting

Quality Street Digest is a sounding board for freelancers who contribute to "London newspapers formerly known as broadsheets." The odd name may bring to mind those tins of British wrapped toffees once handed out by PR firms, but it refers specifically to "quality" daily newspapers in London which eschew tabloid values, except for the shape of the paper. This exchange recently appeared there:

C: I was shocked recently when a journalist becoming newly established asked at a meeting how she could get free trips abroad etc, & I think this sort of 'chase the jollies' approach damages our trade and needs discouraging.

W: I am less worried about it, having had it as part of my life since
starting work. But in my first job, there was a shrine to the
crappiest corporate gift given to journalists. That attitude towards
the freebies has been evident in every job I have ever done. I have
found most hacks can still annihilate a company that deserves
annihilating no matter how much corporate hospitality and freebie
trips they have received from that company.

At the entrance to the Delhi Foreign Correspondents' Club, everyone steps on a pricey Oriental rug given by a Pakistani general as a welcome present to an incoming South Asia Bureau Chief from Washington, who only accepted it because her translator insisted; otherwise great offense would be taken. As soon as she crossed the border, she quickly donated it to the Delhi hacks' clubhouse-- as if it might be radioactive. "We must refuse to accept anything that could be construed as a bribe," she intoned. At a Bombay press conference for a satellite channel launch the same year, all reporters were given new television sets in their goodie bags, but by this time she did not even blink. (Nor did she take the TV home.)

What's the most blatant corporate gift you've come across as a reporter on the job?