DUBLIN, Ireland – Lithuanian musicians, drum-beating Punjabis and West African dancers used Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Day parade on Saturday to celebrate their place in a booming Ireland that has become a land of immigrants.\nOne man dressed as St. Patrick in papal hat and sunglasses did the samba, while another float nearby featured “Miss Panty,” Dublin’s premier drag queen.\nDublin’s freewheeling parade drew a half-million spectators and included Christine Quinn, the first openly gay leader of the New York City Council. Quinn is boycotting the more conservative New York parade because the organizers refuse to let gay and lesbian groups march.\nThis year, she accepted an Irish government invitation to be part of the Dublin City Council contingent.\n“The fact I’m here in Dublin and able to march and participate in inclusive events should send a message of how backwards the New York parade is,” said Quinn.\nThe Irish economy has been booming for the past 13 years, drawing immigrants from around the world to the country – and its festivities.\n“Nowadays there’s far more color in the parade. It’s great to see all our new Irish from across the world dressed up in green,” said Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, who normally spends St. Patrick’s Day in the United States but returned overnight after visiting President Bush in the White House.\nThe parade also featured about a dozen U.S. high school and college bands.\nThe leader of Ireland’s 4 million Roman Catholics, Archbishop Sean Brady, appealed to Ireland to remember the religious roots of the holiday.\n“The challenge for all of us is to be consistent and coherent, not just in honoring Patrick with our lips and our parades, but with our hearts and lives – to honor what he really represents by earnestly trying to embody it in our own lives,” Brady said.\nMore than 1,000 police were on duty to deal with expected alcohol-fueled trouble in the evening, following widespread drunkenness that led to 700 arrests in 2005 and lesser trouble last year.\nDublin liquor stores were ordered closed until 4 p.m. to deter public drinking until well after the parade concluded.\nThis was the first St. Patrick’s Day period when police have been empowered to breathalyze drivers randomly on road checkpoints – a new law that resulted in 60 arrests in the hours before the parade.
\nBy Nasser Karimi\nThe Associated Press\nTEHRAN, Iran – The hit American movie “300” has angered Iranians who say the Greeks-vs.-Persians action flick insults their ancient culture and provokes animosity against Iran.\n“Hollywood declares war on Iranians,” blared a headline in Tuesday’s edition of the independent Ayende-No newspaper.\nThe movie, which raked in $70 million in its opening weekend, is based on a comic-book fantasy version of the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., in which a force of 300 Spartans held off a massive Persian army at a mountain pass in Greece for three days.\nEven some American reviewers noted the political overtones of the West-against-Iran story line – and the way Persians are depicted as decadent, sexually flamboyant and evil in contrast to the noble Greeks.\nIn Iran, the movie hasn’t opened and probably never will, given the government’s restrictions on Western films, though one paper said bootleg DVDs were already available.\nStill, it touched a sensitive nerve. Javad Shamghadri, cultural adviser to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said the United States tries to “humiliate” Iran in order to reverse historical reality and “compensate for its wrongdoings in order to provoke American soldiers and warmongers” against Iran.\nThe movie comes at a time of increased tensions between the United States and Iran over the Persian nation’s nuclear program and the Iraq war.\nBut aside from politics, the film was seen as an attack on Persian history, a source of pride for Iranians across the political spectrum, including critics of the current Islamic regime.\nState-run television has run several commentaries the past two days calling the film insulting and has brought on Iranian film directors to point out its historical inaccuracies.\n“The film depicts Iranians as demons, without culture, feeling or humanity, who think of nothing except attacking other nations and killing people,” Ayende-No said in its article Tuesday.\n“It is a new effort to slander the Iranian people and civilization before world public opinion at a time of increasing American threats against Iran,” it said.\nIran’s biggest circulation newspaper, Hamshahri, said “300” is “serving the policy of the U.S. leadership” and predicted it will “prompt a wave of protest in the world. ... Iranians living in the U.S. and Europe will not be indifferent about this obvious insult.”
