Amusement park planned for Osama bin Laden’s hideout

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 22:07:00 +0000

Pakistan is planning to build an amusement park in the town of Abbottabad, notorious for being the site of Osama bin Laden's death.

The amusement park and outdoor activity center is planned for the edge of the northwestern town and will begin construction in the next two weeks.

"This project has nothing to do with Osama bin Laden," said Syed Aqil Shah, the provincial minister for tourism and sports, adding that the 50-acre development would also include restaurants, a heritage center and manmade waterfalls.

"The amusement city will be built on 50 acres in the first phase but later will be extended to 500 acres," he told Agence France-Presse.

"We are working to promote tourism and amusement facilities in the whole province and this project is one of those facilities."

How true is “ZD30″?

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 16:06:00 +0000

A number of film critics have already described "Zero Dark Thirty" as opening to a black screen and the haunting soundtrack of recorded phone calls from the World Trade Center towers as they collapsed on 9/11. It doesn't. The movie opens to white text against a black background: "Based on first hand accounts of actual events," it reads.

Debate over what the film does — the politics and ethics it might expound — are already fraught, not least because the project's pitch is steeped in truth claims about "actual events." "Zero Dark Thirty" (ZDT) director Kathryn Bigelow told the New Yorker's Dexter Filkins, “What we were attempting is almost a journalistic approach to film.’’ The text that opens the movie is carefully worded in line with this idea of a journalistic attempt. It doesn't present itself as "a true story" or a totalizing narrative. And in this much we can endeavor to hold "Zero Dark Thirty" to account; we can ask, at least, do the events it depicts have such a basis?

Salon.com > Abbottabad

Amusement park planned for Osama bin Laden’s hideout

How true is “ZD30″?