When Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech for the U.S. Democratic nomination on Thursday, it came on the 45th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s legendary "I have a dream" speech on the Washington Mall.

A black scholar looks at some of what has been lost.

From NYT film critic A.O. Scott's review of Babylon A.D.:

The only explicable thing about “Babylon A.D.” is that it was not screened in advance for critics. Our judgments, in any case, may be superfluous, since the director, Mathieu Kassovitz, has already publicly described it as “pure violence and stupidity.”

He did not mean that in a good way, and while I hate to contradict an artist’s assessment of his own work — Mr. Kassovitz blames 20th Century Fox for compromising his political and metaphysical vision — a purely violent and stupid film might have been kind of fun. This one, while it has some nice futuristic design touches (including grubby East Bloc housing projects and a splendidly renovated Harlem brownstone), combines badly executed action sequences with mystic mumbo-jumbo that I suspect not even a two-disc director’s cut DVD could make comprehensible.

From AP via CTV.ca:

A Pakistani legislator defended a decision by southwestern tribesmen to bury five women alive because they wanted to choose their own husbands, telling stunned members of parliament this week to spare him their outrage.

"These are centuries-old traditions and I will continue to defend them," Israr Ullah Zehri, who represents Baluchistan province, said Saturday. "Only those who indulge in immoral acts should be afraid."

The women, three of whom were teenagers, were first shot and then thrown into a ditch.

They were still breathing as their bodies were covered with rocks and mud, according media reports and human rights activists, who said their only "crime" was that they wished to marry men of their own choosing

Zehri told a packed and flabbergasted parliament Friday that Baluch tribal traditions helped stop obscenity and then asked fellow legislators not to make a big fuss about it.