The graphic novel “Le murmure de la mer”, by Hippolyte.
The graphic novel “Le murmure de la mer” is a tribute to the work of the Ocean Viking’s crew, the rescue ship belonging to the SOS Méditerranée group. Its mission is to rescue migrants leaving North Africa, particularly the Libyan inferno.
Those refugees find themselves overcrowded on makeshift boats, drifting endlessly in the middle of the sometimes raging Mediterranean Sea. Often, the rafts brush up against Libyan oil platforms. Day and night, the coast guards pursue the migrants and brutally drag them back to Libya.
After a first blocked attempt to participate in a rescue, the author climbs aboard the Ocean Viking in 2020 as a journalist, cartoonist and crew member. He’s directly involved in the salvage operations, and recounts his experience in a series of beautiful sketches and touching photos.
Readers appreciate the great discipline and preparation required to carry out salvage missions in an orderly and safe manner for all concerned. Sentimentality has no place when rescuing migrants in crisis. Not following procedures can result in further deaths, including those of crew members.
A page from the graphic novel “Le murmure de la mer”.
We bear witness to the crew’s successes and failures in their attempts to rescue as many people as possible. The sailors of the Ocean Viking face administrative blockades from Italy, which seeks to limit the considerable arrival of refugees.
First among these attempts to hinder rescue operations is the obligation for the ship to remain docked for long periods for different reasons.
Next is the requirement to transfer the new migrants to ports far from the Ocean Viking’s position. These ports are deliberately chosen by the Italian government to generate fuel costs and lengthy delays between each recovery mission. This drag prevents thousands of refugees from being salvaged.
We must, however, question the involvement of other states when it comes to admitting migrants. The misfortune of people living in countries disadvantaged by ruthless dictatorships, climate change or poverty accelerated by the plundering of wealth is everyone’s responsibility.
Once the refugees are on the boat, the crew still has to secure them, care for them and prepare them for transfer to their next land of welcome. We all know the story of those vessels which have picked up hundreds of Africans in difficulty, and which remain immobilized for weeks while awaiting clearance to transfer the survivors to a new territory. Yet the law of the sea states that any ship’s captain who learns that human beings are in peril on a body of water must render assistance.
In short, a fascinating and informative read. It increases our understanding of the challenges faced by crews helping humans in danger on the Mediterranean Sea.
In 2017, Quebec City has opted for a decentralization of the Carnival activities which where always organized on the Plains of Abraham. Part of Grande-Allée was blocked to traffic and other activities where also held in the parc de l’Amérique-Française, the parc de la Francophonie and at Place d’Youville, in the hearth of the touristic sector.
Quebec Carnival 2017 symbols
This new formula seems to be a success, according to the number of people met during my photography sessions on the different sites. Children, as usual, were not really bothered by the cold temperature et found a way to have fun. The picture below was taken while the wind chill factor was -20C.
Child playing at the parc de l’Amérique-Française during the 2017 Quebec Carnival
The parc de l’Amérique-Française was receiving the international snow sculpture contest. Many countries were present: Argentina, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, Peru and the United States. Italy won the first prize with an excellence award from the Quebec Carnival, added to an award from the public and the benevolent staff. The Italian sculptors were Pietro Germano, Samuel Bonapace and Gino Casagranda. The picture below represents one Italian sculptor at work.
An Italian sculptor at work during the 2017 Quebec Carnival.
The second prize, with a Government of Quebec award, was offered to the team from France, who was composed of Pascal Veuillet, André Marastoni and Éric Margery. The pictures below show the work in progress and a French sculptor taking a few minutes to talk with a citizen. He does not seem too annoyed by the cold weather…
French sculptor at the 2017 Quebec Carnival
A French sculptor at the 2017 Quebec Carnival
The team from Canada won the third prize, with an award from Quebec City. In the team were Jessy Armand, Michel Proulx and Mathieu Béchard. The pictures below represent two of the Canadian sculptors at work.
A Quebec sculptor at work on the Canada snow sculpture during the 2017 Quebec Carnival
French Canadian sculptor at the 2017 Quebec Carnival
Some sculptures had a really original look. Instead of capturing the whole creation, I decided to frame a section of one of the sculpture in order to emphasize the artwork.
Section of a snow sculpture at the 2017 Quebec Carnival.
All the pictures have been taken using a Canon 5DSR full-frame camera equipped with a Canon EF 85mm f/1.2 II USM lens, with or without tripod, depending on the amount of light available. The picture above was shot using a 1.2 aperture to maximize the blurred effect in the background. It was then reworked using two different image editing softwares.
For a better idea of all the activites organized by the Quebec Carnival, head towards the following official and bilingual site: Quebec Carnival official site
For other photos on the province of Quebec and also Quebec City, click on the following links from my blog:
There are seven very interesting articles, in the non-fiction category, in this anthology. Published between 2009 and 2013 in publications like The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Men’s Journal or Q2U.S, they allow the reader to catch-up on events that happened around the planet.
Those stories received a lot of attention from the medias since they covered popular topics like a mid-air collision between two jets, a jewel heist by the Pink Panthers, a botched covered operation by Mossad, wild animals freed by their owner near a small American city, the son of a wealthy American who suddenly leaves United States for Lybia to fight against Khadafi. The reader can also learn more about Apollo Robbins, the king of pickpockets and, finally, comes the weird story of a film making that started in 2006 in Ukraine and is still not ready today.
Le diable à 37,000 pieds (The Devil at 37,000 feet)
This story presents all the elements that contributed to create a mid-air collision: a new crew recently trained on an aircraft loaded with a modern technology that makes flight management more complicated than anything else; air traffic controllers letting their expectations impear their judgment; tired and under pressure careless pilots; passengers disturbing the flying crew by visiting the cockpit on multiple occasions.
It is paradoxal to realize that the extreme precision offered by modern flight navigation equipment also increases the possibility that two aircrafts hit each other in flight.
Pink Panthers
A popular name that sends the reader back to the movies where Peter Sellers played a distracted police inspector. But the article is about the real thing: What circumstances favored the creation and international development of the multiple groups of thiefs that came to be known as the Pink Panthers.
The different Pink Panthers groups have robbed more than 152 jewelry stores since 2002 and pocketed around 250 million dollars. The reader learns that most Pink Panthers members come from the Balkan region and that they operate from Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Switzerland.
The author uses the opportunity to explain how the Milosevic’s gangster regime was put in place in Serbia, a State transformed into a criminal business: “In March 2001, soon after the fall of Milosevic, we discovered, in a safe rented by municipal civil servants from a Belgrade bank, more than 660 kilos of a 93% pure heroin, valued at approximately 100 million dollars on the street”.
Montenegro is also associated with significant banditry and the author tells us about a meeting he had in that region with a former Pink Panthers. In order for criminal groups to survive and develop, there is an essential collaboration with politicians and the border services staff.
Opération Dubaï (Dubaï Operation)
In January 2010, a Mossad team lands in Dubaï with the intention of killing Mahmoud al-mabhouh. The agents are part of an ultra-secret section called “Césarée”. Although they reached their goal, the mission was somewhat a failure since it was possible to determine very rapidly who were the killers, which embarrassed Israël.
The article recounts the general progress of the operation in Dubaï and enhances the important mistakes that eventually damaged the Mossad’s reputation for efficiency.
Here are some of those mistakes:
1. Agents are sitting for hours in a hotel lobby, thus attracting the staff’s attention.
2. Two members of the team head towards the hotel washrooms, where they change their appearance by using a wig and sunglasses, all this while their physical transformation is filmed by an hotel camera positioned near the toilet’s door.
3. The man in charge of planning the covert operation has a huge ego and does not tolerate criticism or a difference of opinion.
4. Carelessness is shown when the team members are equipped with Payoneer prepaid calling cards. Those cards are mostly used in United States and the Payoneer’s director, Yuval Tal, is a veteran of the Israel’s Defence Force elite commando. While they were at it, why not give a Mossad colored business card directly?
5. The person in charge of the operation greatly underestimates the capacity and will of Dubaï’s police force to find the culprits behind Mahmoud al-mabhouh’s death.
6. Every phone call made by the team transit through the same system located in Austria.
An increase in the number of operations lead by Mossad certainly contributed to the non-compliance with respect to the security protocol. Meir Dagan eventually had to step down and the relations between the Mossad and other occidental intelligence services were impacted.
La désertion des animaux du zoo (Animals)
This is a very interesting account of an incident that made the news around the world. At the end of 2011, in Zanesville, Ohio, the owner of about fifty wild animals killed himself, not without having precedently opened the cages of all the wild animals he was keeping on his private property.
The story allows us to share a bit of the emotions lived by the inhabitants living close to the private zoo. We witness the quick reaction and organization needed to face the lions, tigers and bears that are now free to go where they want in the fields near Zanesville. It’s a very well written story.
Vacances de printemps arabe (Arab Spring Break)
This is the story of a rich American who abandons his wealthy neighborhood to go fight against Khadafi in Lybia. This type of story, told with a humoristic approach, was possibly quite amusing in 2012. But with the departure of numerous young kids gone to join ISIS during the past few years, the tone used in the article is now kind of awkward.
Le roi des pickpockets (A Pickpocket’s Tale)
The article is about the life of Apollo Robbins, a now internationally famous pickpocket that has appeared on multiple TV programs around the world, among them National Geographic’s “Brain Games”.
Un tournage pris dans l’engrenage (The Movie Set That Ate Itself)
Through the account of a movie director’s eccentric behaviour in Kharkov, Ukraine, the reader is made aware of the exaggerated control that a human can impose on other persons. It also shows the easiness with which people are ready to accept a totalitarian control in their life. All this while the movie itself is about the dictatorship lived in Russia, more precisely in Moscow, during the fifties and sixties.
View from our hotel room in Schwanden, Switzerland 2013
Here are some of the pictures recently added to the Europe photo gallery. Schwanden, in Switzerland, was a superb discovery as the hotel was in the countryside but at a very reasonable distance from a big city like Bernes. This is an HDR picture, as the contrasts were just too important between the shadows under the balcony and the natural light of the sky. The Schwanden picture represents in fact five shots each taken with a different exposure. Photomatix is the software used to mix together all the pictures. Have a good visit in the photo galleries!
