#as a french who had to struggle with the administration in the past few months

[prelude-numero-2]

A french article about Melitina's situation which is very alarming.

English translation (made on Deepl sorry):

The grotesque situation of Staniouta, a Belarusian opponent exiled in France

At 28, the Belarusian Melitina Staniouta (14 world medals) had to leave her country for speaking out against the current government. She has found refuge in France and works in a club in Rueil-Malmaison, but is confronted with the administration and international sanctions against her country.

We meet her in Rueil-Malmaison (Hauts-de-Seine), where she teaches rhythmic gymnastics, the sport that made her a star in her country. Melitina Staniouta has been retired since 2016 and a 5th place at the Rio Olympic Games, but she remains first and foremost the granddaughter of a great Soviet actress who gave her native Belarus a whopping 14 world medals between 2009 and 2015 (5 silver, 9 bronze).

And it is unexpected to find her in this club in the Paris region, explaining the basics to very young gymnasts who obviously do not know what the constraints of top level are. But the young woman's situation is a terrible paradox. Forced to leave her country because she dared to speak out against the government, forced to flee Ukraine just before the invasion of Russia, supported by her Belarusian neighbour. Forced to survive in France because our administration is slow to issue her with papers and she is confronted with international sanctions against Minsk. A Kafkaesque situation, as absurd as it is oppressive.

"Sport is a school that teaches you to accept your mistakes so that you can correct them. But what mistake did I make?" Melitina Staniouta asks herself. Disillusioned. And goes back over her history. Her track record, the fact that she speaks five languages, has opened doors for her. Since 2016, she has been alternating between MasterClasses all over the world and a television programme dedicated to everything to do with outstanding sportsmen and women. I wanted to highlight everything that contributes to performance, she says. The coaches, the physiotherapists, the psychologists, but also those people behind the scenes like the caretaker of our gym who could offer me an apple from her garden just to get me to smile."

While she admits that her political consciousness has long been at half-mast, it was a rude awakening on the eve of Aleksander Lukashenko's fraudulent and disputed re-election in 2020. "If I didn't care about my country, I would have probably turned a blind eye. But I can't, I won't" she said. I have to share the violence, these horrible videos and what is happening in the 21st century in this tiny country in the centre of Europe"

At the time, the government's repression was terrible, even deadly, against the tens of thousands of Belarusians who took to the streets of Minsk. Major sportsmen and women were called to witness, the tennis player and former world number one, Victoria Azarenka, spoke of "heartbreak" but refused to say more. Other less silent voices were raised, with more than 400 athletes signing an open letter to declare the elections invalid.

Melitina Staniouta turns her Instagram account into a chronicle of police violence against civilians. "My boss saw it, and I was fired. I knew what I was risking by posting this kind of comment in Belarus. But I don't regret anything, I will never change my decision even if my parents were also punished: they lost their jobs because of me."

Of course, she first tried to find a job in Minsk. "People asked me why I didn't open a school. But it's impossible. Business is not welcome in Belarus, where almost everything is controlled by the government. There are no clubs." So Melitina Staniouta decided to leave the country. She went into exile in Kyiv, made friends there, and became sufficiently well known to start collaborating with the gym world, but also with magazines as a model.

"After 2020, the Belarusian diaspora spread to Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania. People used to say that there were more Belarusians in Kiev than in Minsk," she smiles sadly. Because in February, when war was in the air and Ukrainians were still only joking about it, wanting to believe that it would remain a threat, friends advised her to flee. "I couldn't go back to Belarus, I could have been imprisoned, killed. I booked a hotel in Barcelona until 1 March and left three days before the Russians invaded" says Melitina Staniouta.

The trouble is that she soon runs out of money, her credit card blocked. Unable to access her accounts because of international financial sanctions against Russian and Belarusian nationals. "It's a frustrating and intractable situation because I have a Belarusian passport. Everyone judges me on this passport, not on who I am, what I think, what I've done" the young woman exasperated. She decided to post a long message on her social networks to explain her situation and find a job. She received sixty offers from Australia, the United States and all over Europe. But then the administrative issue arose, as her tourist visa expired after 90 days.

"In Spain, where rhythmic gymnastics is very popular, I was able to tell my story to the media and two lawyers eventually contacted me to help me for free. They told me that I could apply for refugee status. But this application takes time, sometimes more than a year, and you are not allowed to work in the meantime for at least six months. To be honest, it sounds stupid to me, but it's the law" Melitina Staniouta agrees. Another option is explained to her, the "talent passport" that exists in the United States, the United Kingdom and… in France. A multi-annual residence permit issued in particular to artists or highly qualified people, valid for four years and renewable.

A still precarious situation

"I had written a long email to the French embassy in Spain to explain who I was, what I was going through, my wish to get this talent passport. At first they told me that I had to go back to Belarus, to the French embassy there, which I can't do. So I insisted and they finally told me that, yes, I was in the category of 'exceptional' people. That made me happy, because I wanted to find a legal opportunity. So I was given a temporary visa for three months while I applied for a residence permit at the prefecture. This is what I did when I arrived in Nanterre at the end of March. I provided the documents, all the diplomas… But I'm still waiting. For seven months now, I've had this pink paper, this provisional residence permit which proves that the process has started. And I can work. But that's all."

Hosted by a club official, Melitina Staniouta came up against the administration. She worries about the progress of her file and is systematically rebuffed by the Prefecture. "They tell me to wait until I receive a text message" she despairs. Worse still, she has scoured Paris looking for a bank that would accept her application, because she needs to open an account to receive her salary. But I don't have the right passport, nor the right residence permit" she says with exasperation. I only have cash, I can't rent a flat. But I have money, a flat, a car… But in Belarus. I feel so frustrated. I have never cried in my life, because a sportsman doesn't cry. But now… I don't ask for anything, just to be able to work and live decently"

Proudly, Melitina Staniouta intends to fend for herself, to find her own solutions. But she is aware on a daily basis of the infernal spiral that is damaging her. By choosing the talent passport, I thought I would speed things up, but I was probably wrong," she says bitterly. I feel like I'm wasting my time. The prefecture asks me not to apply so often, but it's my life. And I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel"

She hesitates for a moment, smiles sadly: "In Rio, the conditions were really rotten, we lived in our windowless rooms with cockroaches, huge Brazilian cockroaches. A real nightmare. I promised myself that I would do everything to never go through that again, to always have a choice. Six years later… I take care of myself, not to get sick, because I don't have social security. I'm not complaining, I'm adapting, I've learnt French, I'm doing my best for the club that took me in… But I don't see any prospects."

Article written by Céline Nony, 1/11/22

#as a french who had to struggle with the administration in the past few months #I know how our system are terrible #with her experience the ffsg would be so stupid not to keep her with her titles #melitina staniouta #rhythmic gymnastics #rg #belarus #upthebaguette #I just put the french tag

[wisdomrays]

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS: Are Muslims Guilty of Imperialism?

This charge continues to be leveled against the Muslim world. I would like to counter it by asking the following questions:

Given the existing circumstances of 1,400 years ago, how would any one living in Makka or Madina go about exploiting his own clan and tribe? If the supposedly exploited lands and people were those of the Hijaz, which were poor, unfruitful, and barren, who would have wished to invade or exploit them? It is ludicrous to level the charge of imperialist colonialism against the most noble-minded Muslims, who risked their lives to spread the message of Islam; who spent the greater part of their lives far from their children, families, homes, and native lands fighting armies ten or twenty times their size; and who felt deeply grieved when they did not die on the battlefield and join the earlier martyrs for Islam. We ask ourselves what worldly gain they obtained in return for such struggle, deprivation, and sacrifice!

Those who invaded, occupied, and exploited others with the worst intentions (and results) of imperialism are power-hungry individuals or nations. To mention a few: Alexander the "Great" and Napoleon, the Roman empire and Nazi Germany, the Mongol armies unleashed by Genghis Khan and the colonizing armies unleashed by western Europe, Russian dictatorship (whether czarist or communist) and the American empire (whether "manifest destiny" or "making the world safe for democracy"). Wherever such conquests came and went, they corrupted the morality of the conquerors and the conquered, causing chaos, conflict, tears, bloodshed, and devastation. Today their heirs, like bold thieves who bluff property owners to conceal their theft of that very property, turn to besmirching Islam, its Prophet, and his Companions.

True Muslims have never sought to exploit others. Nor have they let others do so where Muslim government had jurisdiction. At a time when Muslim armies were running from triumph to triumph, Caliph 'Umar said: "What befits me is to live at the level of the poorest Muslims," and he really did so. As he took only a few olives a day for his own sustenance, who was he exploiting?

After one battle, when a Muslim was asked to take the belongings of an enemy soldier whom he had fought and killed, he said: "I did not participate in the battle to take spoils." Pointing to his throat, he continued: "What I seek is an arrow here and to fall as a martyr." (His wish was granted.) While burning with the desire for martyrdom, who was he exploiting?

In another battle, a Muslim soldier fought and killed a leading enemy who had killed many Muslims. The Muslim commander saw him pass by his dead enemy. The commander went to the head of the dead soldier and asked who had killed him. The Muslim did not want to reply, but the commander called him back in the name of God. The Muslim felt himself obliged to do so, but concealed his face with a piece of cloth. The following conversation took place:

-Did you kill him for the sake of God?

-Yes.

-All right. But take this 1,000 dinar piece.

-But I did it for the sake of God!

-What is your name?

-What is my name to you? Perhaps you will tell this to everyone and cause me to lose the reward for this in the afterlife.

How could such people exploit others and establish colonies all over the world? To speak frankly, those who hate Islam and Muslims are blind to the historical truth of how Islam spread.

Let's look at what exploitation and imperialism are. Imperialism or colonization is a system of rule by which a rich and a powerful country controls other countries, their trade and policies, to enrich itself and gain more power at the other's expense. There are many kinds of exploitation. In today's world, they may take the following forms:

• Absolute sovereignty by dispossessing indigenous people in order to establish the invader's direct rule and sovereignty. Examples are western Europe's conquest of North and South America, as well as Australia and New Zealand, as well as the Zionists' conquest of Palestine.

• Military occupation so that the invaders can control the conquered nation's land and resources. One example is British colonial rule in India.

• Open or secret interference and intervention in a country's internal and foreign affairs, economy, and defense. Examples are those Third World countries who are manipulated and controlled by various developed countries.

• The transfer of intellectuals, which is currently the most common and dangerous type of imperialism. Young, intelligent, and gifted people of the countries to be exploited are chosen, given stipends, and educated abroad. There they are introduced to and made members of different groups. When they return to their country, they are given influential administrative and other posts so that they can influence their country's destiny. When native or foreign people linked to exploiters abroad are placed in crucial positions in the state mechanism, the country is conquered from inside. This immensely successful technique has enabled Western imperialists to achieve many of their goals smoothly and without overtly rousing the enmity of the people they wish to subjugate. Today, the Muslim world is caught in this trap and thus continues to suffer exploitation and abuse.

Whatever kind of imperialism they are subjected to, countries suffer a number of consequences:

• Various methods of assimilation alienate people from their own values, culture, and history. As a result, they suffer crises of identity and purpose, do not know their own past, and cannot freely imagine their own future.

• Any enthusiasm, effort, and zeal to support and develop their country is quenched. Industry is rendered dependent upon the (former) imperial masters, science and knowledge are not allowed to become productive and primary, and imitation is established firmly so that freedom of study and new research will gain no foothold.

• People remain in limbo, totally dependent upon foreigners. They are silenced and deluded by such empty phrases as progress, Westernization, civilization, and the like.

• All state institutions are penetrated by foreign aid, which is in reality no more than massive financial and cultural debt. Imports, exports, and development are wholly controlled by or conducted according to the exploiter's interests.

• While no effort is spared to keep the masses in poverty, the ruling classes become used to extravagant spending and luxury. The resulting communal dissatisfaction causes people to fight with each other, making them even more vulnerable to outside influence and intervention.

• Mental and spiritual activity is stifled, and so educational institutions tend to imitate foreign ways, ideas, and subjects. Industry is reduced to assembling prefabricated parts. The army tends to become a dumping ground for imperialist countries, for its purchases of expensive hardware ensure the continued well-being of the latter's industries.

We wonder if it is really rational to liken the Islamic conquest to imperialism, which brought disastrous consequences wherever it went.

The victory of Muslim armies never caused a great exodus of people from their homes and countries, nor has it prevented people from working by putting chains on their hands and feet. Muslims left the indigenous people free to follow their own way and beliefs, and protected them in exactly the same way it protected Muslims. Muslim governors and rulers were loved and respected for their justice and integrity. Equality, peace, and security were established between different communities.

If it had been otherwise, would the Christians of Damascus have gathered in their church and prayed for a Muslim victory against Christian Byzantium, which was seeking to regain control of the city? If Muslims had not been so respectful of non-Muslims' rights, could they have maintained security for centuries in a state so vast that it took more than 6 months to travel from one end to another?

One cannot help but admire those Muslim rulers and the dynamic energy that made them so, when we compare them to present-day rulers. Despite every modern means of transportation, telecommunications, and military back-up, they cannot maintain peace and security in even a small area of land.

Today, many scholars and intellectuals who realize the value of Islam's dynamics, which brought about Islam's global sovereignty and which will form the basis of our eternal existence in the Hereafter, expressly tell us that Muslims should reconsider and regain them. While conquering lands, the Muslims also were conquering their inhabitants' hearts. They were received with love, respect, and obedience. No people who accepted Islam ever complained that they were culturally prevented or ruined by the arrival of Muslims. The contrast with the reality of Christian Europe's conquests is stark and obvious.

Early Muslims evaluated the potential of knowledge and art in the conquered lands. They prepared and provided every opportunity for local scholars and scientists to pursue their work. Regardless of their religion, Muslims held the people in high regard and honored them in the community. They never did what the descendants of the British colonialists in America did to the American Indians or in Australia to the Aborigines, the French to the Algerians, or the Dutch to the Indonesians. On the contrary, they treated the conquered people as if they were from their own people and religion, as if they were brothers and sisters.

Caliph 'Umar once told a Coptic Egyptian who had been beaten by a Makkan noble to beat him just as he had been beaten. When 'Umar heard that 'Amr ibn al-'As had hurt the feelings of a native Egyptian, he rebuked him: "Human beings were born free. Why do you enslave them?" As he went to receive the keys to Masjid al-Aqsa, 'Umar visited and talked to priests in different churches in Palestine. Once he was in a church when it was time to pray. The priest repeatedly asked him to pray inside the church, but 'Umar refused, saying: "You may be harassed by other Christians later on because you let me pray in the church." He left the church's premises and prayed outside on the ground.

These are but a few examples to indicate how Muslims were sensitive, tolerant, just, and humane toward other people. Such an attitude of genuine tolerance has not been reached by any other people or society.

#allah #god #prophet #Muhammad #quran #ayah #sunnah #hadith #islam #muslim #muslimah #hijab #help #revert #convert #dua #salah #pray #prayer #welcome to islam #how to convert to islam #new convert #new revert #new muslim #revert help #convert help #islam help #muslim help #reminder #religion

[newstfionline]

Wednesday, August 11, 2021

Beating The Heat Is Out Of Reach (IPCC, AP News) The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a shocker of a report Monday summarizing the latest authoritative scientific information about global warming. 234 scientists contributed to the 3,000-plus-page report. Global temperatures have already risen by 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the 19th century, the highest in over 100,000 years. Further warming is already “locked in,” meaning even if emissions are drastically cut, some changes will be “irreversible” for centuries. Ice melt and sea-level rise are already accelerating, and wild weather events like heatwaves and storms are expected to worsen and become more frequent. Earth is warming so fast that by the 2030s, temperatures will probably exceed the Paris climate accord’s ideal goal of no more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit and 1.5 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. The report called it a “code red for humanity.”

Infrastructure bill approved in Senate (AP) With a robust vote after weeks of fits and starts, the Senate approved a $1 trillion infrastructure plan for states coast to coast on Tuesday, as a rare coalition of Democrats and Republicans joined together to overcome skeptics and deliver a cornerstone of President Joe Biden’s agenda. “Today, we proved that democracy can still work,” Biden declared at the White House, noting that the 69-30 vote included even Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. The overwhelming tally provided fresh momentum for the first phase of Biden’s “Build Back Better” priorities, now heading to the House. A sizable number of lawmakers showed they were willing to set aside partisan pressures, at least for a moment, eager to send billions to their states for rebuilding roads, broadband internet, water pipes and the public works systems that underpin much of American life. The measure proposes nearly $550 billion in new spending over five years in addition to current federal authorizations for public works that will reach virtually every corner of the country. There’s money to rebuild roads and bridges, and also to shore up coastlines against climate change, protect public utility systems from cyberattacks and modernize the electric grid. Public transit gets a boost, as do airports and freight rail. Most lead drinking water pipes in America could be replaced.

COVID vaccines to be required for military under new US plan (AP) Members of the U.S. military will be required to get the COVID-19 vaccine beginning next month under a plan laid out by the Pentagon Monday and endorsed by President Joe Biden. In memos distributed to all troops, top Pentagon leaders said the vaccine is a necessary step to maintain military readiness. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the mid-September deadline could be accelerated if the vaccine receives final FDA approval or infection rates continue to rise. “I will seek the president’s approval to make the vaccines mandatory no later than mid-September, or immediately upon” licensure by the Food and Drug Administration “whichever comes first,” Austin said in his memo, warning them to prepare for the requirement.

For first time, average pay for supermarket and restaurant workers tops $15 an hour (Washington Post) The U.S. labor market hit a new milestone recently: For the first time, average pay in restaurants and supermarkets climbed above $15 an hour. Wages have been rising rapidly as the economy reopens and businesses struggle to hire enough workers. Some of the biggest gains have gone to workers in some of the lowest-paying industries. Overall, nearly 80 percent of U.S. workers now earn at least $15 an hour, up from 60 percent in 2014. Job sites and recruiting firms say many job seekers won’t even consider jobs that pay less than $15 anymore. For years, low-paid workers fought to make at least that much. Now it has effectively become the new baseline. Economists caution that a higher average wage is not the same as a $15 minimum wage. Half of workers in these industries are still making below $15 an hour. Nonetheless, rising pay is still a game-changer for millions of workers.

Dry California tourist town to guests: ‘Please conserve’ (AP) Tourists flock by the thousands to the coastal town of Mendocino for its Victorian homes and cliff trails, but visitors this summer are also finding public portable toilets and signs on picket fences pleading: “Severe Drought. Please conserve water.” Hotels have closed their lobby bathrooms and residents have stopped watering their gardens in the foggy outpost about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of San Francisco after two years of little rain sapped many of the wells Mendocino depends on for potable water. Mendocino’s water woes were compounded in recent weeks when the city of Fort Bragg a few miles to the north—its main backup water supplier—informed officials that it, too, had a significant drop in its drinking water reserves after the Noyo River recorded its lowest flows in decades. “This is a real emergency,” said Ryan Rhoades, superintendent of the Mendocino City Community Services District, which helps manage the water in the town’s aquifer.

Nicaragua recalls four LatAm ambassadors in tit-for-tat move (Reuters) Nicaragua has recalled its ambassadors to Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Costa Rica for “consultations,” the government said on Monday, deepening the Central American country’s international isolation over its crackdowns on the opposition. Mexico, Argentina and Colombia recently recalled their ambassadors to protest against moves to clamp down on the opposition in Nicaragua, while Costa Rica a few weeks ago suspended the appointment of its ambassador to the country. On Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused Ortega of taking new “undemocratic, authoritarian actions.” Blinken also singled out Ortega’s wife, Nicaraguan Vice President Rosario Murillo, and said the two were seeking to hold on to power “at all costs” with a strategy of disqualifying potential opposition candidates. Nicaragua is due to hold presidential elections in November in which Ortega is seeking a fourth consecutive term.

Twelve Days In Office, and Crisis Swamps Peru’s Leftist President (Bloomberg) Peru’s new president is off to a rocky start, selecting contentious ministers, alienating allies and setting the stage for a brutal face-off with congress, all within days of taking office. A rural teacher and union activist, Pedro Castillo won the election after reassurances that he’s his own man, not beholden to his party’s Marxist ideology or chief. But when he named his cabinet—including a prime minister who’s under investigation for being an alleged apologist for terrorists—analysts, opposition figures and even some who’d backed him expressed alarm, so much so that the word “impeachment” was heard more than once. “His political capital went up in smoke in 24 hours,” said Rodolfo Rojas, a partner of the Lima-based Sequoia political advisory group. “If he doesn’t change course, there’s no future for him.” Impeachment isn’t imminent, Rojas said, but a clash with congress looks likely. And while Peru has made a habit of ousting presidents, it’s rare for such a discussion to take place within days of inauguration.

French wine production set for a 30-percent drop (Washington Post) A confluence of weather woes is hurting France’s wine harvest. First, there was severe frost in the spring, which laid the foundation for disaster by damaging 30 percent of the production. Then, torrential summer rains hit western Europe in July, leaving parts of Germany and Belgium ravaged by floods, and leading to fungal attacks on grapes and their leaves in France. All of this has set France up for a wine supply drop of 24 to 30 percent this year—the lowest output since 1970, France’s farm ministry said Friday. For champagne, harvest potential has been slashed in half, some producers warned. In Italy, the world’s largest wine producer, high temperatures in the south caused an early harvest, while heavy rains in the north caused a late harvest, according to farmers association Coldiretti. Output is estimated to fall by 5 to 10 percent.

'We fought a great battle': Greece defends wildfire response (AP) As Greece’s massive wildfires were being largely tamed Tuesday, the country’s civil protection chief defended the firefighting efforts, saying every resource was thrown into the battle against what he described as the fire service’s biggest-ever challenge. Nikos Hardalias said authorities “truly did what was humanly possible” against blazes that destroyed tens of thousands of hectares (acres) of forest and hundreds of homes, killed a volunteer firefighter and forced more than 60,000 people to flee. Two other firefighters were in intensive care with severe burns. “We handled an operationally unique situation, with 586 fires in eight days during the worst weather conditions we’ve seen in 40 years,” Hardalias told a news conference. “Never was there such a combination of adverse factors in the history of the fire service.” Greece had just experienced its worst heat wave since 1987, which left its forests tinder-dry. Other nearby nations such as Turkey and Italy also faced the same searing temperatures and quickly spreading fires.

Smoke from Siberia wildfires reaches north pole in historic first (Guardian) Smoke from raging forest fires in Siberia has reached the north pole for the first time in recorded history, as a Russian monitoring institute warned the blazes were worsening. Devastating wildfires have ripped across Siberia with increasing regularity over the past few years, which Russia’s weather officials and environmentalists have linked to climate change and an underfunded forest service. One of Siberia’s hardest-hit regions this year has been Yakutia – Russia’s largest and coldest region that sits atop permafrost – which has had record high temperatures and drought. On Saturday, the US space agency Nasa said its satellite images showed wildfire smoke travelling “more than 3,000km (1,800 miles) from Yakutia to reach the north pole”, calling it “a first in recorded history”. It added that on 6 August most of Russia was covered in smoke. According to Russia’s forestry agency, this year’s fires have ravaged more than 14m hectares, making it the second-worst fire season since the turn of the century.

Lockdowns In Manila (Guardian) The more aggressive Delta variant of COVID-19 has led to record case numbers in countries across Southeast Asia. Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam have reported record cases in recent weeks. The variant was detected in the Philippines in mid-July and has spread to 13 of 17 regions. On Friday, the national capital region of Manila, with a population of almost 14 million, was placed under strict lockdown until August 20 in an attempt to slow the spread. Only authorized people, including those buying food, traveling for medical reasons, or frontline workers are allowed to go outside. The day before the lockdown went into effect, thousands rushed to vaccination centers and waited for hours hoping to get a shot. Rumors had spread that unvaccinated people wouldn’t be allowed to claim government aid or go outside.

Taliban Capture Sixth Provincial Capital (Foreign Policy) The Taliban’s advance across Afghanistan continued on Monday with the capture of Aibak, the capital of Samangan province, marking the sixth provincial capital to fall to the group in less than a week. Monday’s seizure was hastened by the defection of Asif Azimi—a prominent warlord with ties to the now defunct Northern Alliance—a worrying sign of shifting allegiances due to a rapidly changing situation on the ground. As the fighting drags on, pressure is building on President Ashraf Ghani to get a handle on the situation or get out of the way. Reports in Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal paint a picture of an isolated leader whose best hope lies in rallying support from anti-Taliban groups ahead of an all-out civil war.

#headlines #news

[flannelpunkcalum]

The Devil Wears Kevlar - Part 1

Part 2  Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 

hiiiiiii i feel bad for making all these empty promises so here’s something i know i can update - I’m gonna publish a very long slow burn ceo!batman!cal AU that is so self indulgent and sexy and yes Liam is in it and yes I know Summer already has an Aspen who dates Calum and no I’m not changing it!!!! love you all very much hope you enjoy this first taste!!! I’m gonna be updating about every week so stay tuned!

This is how it starts, all of it; Aspen gets a job at Hood Enterprises on a team that is trying to use molecular mechanisms based on fish skins as a burn treatment, someday making it available in hospitals, and maybe even commercially. It was big in Brazil when supplies were in short supply, and if they can make it available for the military, well- it would be low cost, biodegradable, and more effective.

It’s almost boring, looking back on it, but back then she was thrilled. She was in a new city, with roommates she loved, with her dream job lined up. She makes work friends, like real adults do - Beth from advertising, Michael from sales, Liam the administrative coordinator on the top floor, Ashton on her research and development team. They sit together at lunch. She learns the ropes.

It felt too perfect. And it was.

After her first week, Liam doesn’t come down to lunch for three days. After a few days, he shows up so she finally asks why; apparently he’s been finding a new assistant for the CEO. It’s “the second toughest job in the place, second to mine because I have to keep finding the damn things. You’ve been through our interview process, right? You know how stupid extensive it is? Ugh. Please let’s talk about something else.”

They talk about the CEO of Sionis Investments, instead, until Liam complains about that, too. Nasty business; CEO was kidnapped, blackmailed, and the police are saying they have no leads. Aspen isn’t sure she believes that. She tells that to Ashton later over the centrifuge. She hopes she gets a hunky bodyguard out of it, though. “I’m an asset, Ashton.”

She falls into a routine while they research the new bandage. She’s taken to calling it Nurse Shark, while Ashton is calling it BAMF (Bandage And Medicine Fish). Beth says there’s a reason they’re kept in the lab and not in advertising; her money’s on Pisciform, from the Latin. Aspen says that she minored in English and she knows a good idea when she hears one. Liam says that Calum Hood’s new assistant is finally working out; maybe he’ll be able to go a month without having to fire him and take over. Michael wants to know if that’s the only thing he thinks about, Liam? Liam tells Michael to shut up or he’ll make Mikey a secretary. Michael throws a french fry at him, even though they’re all way too old for it.

Those are the good days.

She’s researching alternative biodegradable fibers to base the bandage on (partly just because they’re waiting for the shareholders meeting to pass and give them a direction) when she meets Calum Hood for the first time. She didn’t expect to see him until the Christmas party but he comes into her - well, Ashton’s - lab in a gust of expensive cologne. Liam is with him. They talk in hushed tones to Ashton while she pretends to read through the Canadian Journal of Botany. Liam sneaks peeks at her the whole time, but she doesn’t let herself guess why until the boys wave her over.

Calum Hood is tall and broad and he doesn’t smile very much. Ashton’s voice is warm when he talks about Aspen, the work she does, her history of project management, her research abilities. She’s up for the position as personal assistant, she realizes, and she doesn’t know how she feels about that. She loves Nurse Shark or BAMF or whatever you want to call it. She didn’t get two degrees in molecular biology to pick up dry cleaning. Liam is nervous, too, like nothing she’s ever seen. Aspen wants to take risks, though, and she agrees to be interviewed for the position later that afternoon.

It is casual Friday. She doesn’t even have a good cardigan. This is a bad idea.

Ha. Like that’s ever stopped her.

Calum Hood - Mr. Hood - had been quiet in the lab, and he was quiet at the interview. Liam asked her most of the questions. It’s weird to have her friend ask her about her experience in administrative duties. He doesn’t even flash her a reassuring smile when she says she doesn’t know how many words she can type a minute.

It’s the first time she wonders if something is wrong.

It’s not the only time, either, not even in the interview. Near the end Mr. Hood cuts in and asks her about her family, where she worked in the past, her plans for the future. He has a look in his eye that makes her feel like a specimen. Like he’d give anything to dissect her.

There’s only so much of it she can take. “I’m sorry, I don’t feel comfortable talking about that right now,” she says when he asks about her medical history. “I don’t think you’re allowed to ask me that,” she says when he asks her if she had a boyfriend or husband. She didn’t, but that’s not any of his fucking business and it shouldn’t affect his decisions in hiring her - she doesn’t want to be hired, anyway, she likes the lab. Doesn’t need some wunderkind in a fancy suit to invade her professional and private life. Doesn’t need overtime pay. Well, she does, but not that badly. She can always find some work on the weekends. It’ll figure itself out.

It’s only two hours before Liam pokes his head back in the lab. Aspen crosses her fingers behind her back, but it doesn’t change anything; Mr. Hood wants to talk to her. Liam’s face is like stone as he leads her to the elevator and takes her to the top floor, and she’s still trying to unbutton her lab coat as he leads her to the CEO’s office. She feels like she’s in trouble, but he can’t fire her for protecting her rights, can he? She moved to Gotham for this job, she can’t lose it now.

Calum Hood asks her to sit down.

Liam leaves and closes the door behind him.

“Before anything else, I’d like to apologize for the way I treated you in the interview.” He starts off, making Aspen struggle to hide her surprise. “It was disrespectful and invasive. I needed to make sure- the nature of this position is that you would be privy to a good amount of confidential information and I need a personal assistant who knows the boundaries. That is, if you want the job.”

He’s actually- she’s got the job? That’s- Aspen could have the job, if she wanted. She could work with a brilliant CEO on top of the heap. She could have that.

But.

Aspen takes a deep breath to steady herself and properly look at her boss. She’d been too scared to before, just barely brave enough to hold his gaze, but now she picks her head up and tries to analyze him. He’s big, even for a young man. He looks solid enough to carry a company, even if he also looks a little young for it. He’s handsome. He’s well-dressed. He’s… frankly, he’s terrifying. He looks tired. She doesn’t trust him, she realizes.

“I don’t know, Mr. Hood. With all due respect, I heard about when Cathy Potolsky got fired. It seems like a very high-stress position, and I don’t know if I’m qualified to meet your exacting standards.” Aspen says. She tries to be sweet about it, but she’s still a little mad about the questions he asked her. She hasn’t been able to focus on plant fibers all afternoon, either, and it was all his fault. Should she care if he can tell? Eh, probably.

That business with Cathy had been nasty, too. Liam had told them in low voices how Mr. Hood had thrown a vase across the room when Cathy left too many voicemails go unheard. Aspen didn’t know if she could put up with that. She was terrible at replying to texts.

Mr. Hood has eyes like a rifle’s scope. “You are if I say you are. You seem very capable, and Dr. Irwin showed me some of your writings.”

He wasn’t going to let this go easily. “I’m flattered.” She says, but it’s an attempt to get him to stop trying to persuade her. “To be perfectly frank, Mr. Hood, I really do like my work in the lab, and if it’s all the same to you I’d rather not put that position in jeopardy to work as your assistant.”

He’s quiet for a moment, and for a second she thinks she’s out of the woods.

“How about this, then; if we find that you working as my assistant isn’t working out, I’ll send you back down to work in the labs. I’ll guarantee you a position with your project, or, hell, any project you want.” His eyes search her. “The position comes with a promotion and a better holiday bonus. We both know Dr. Irwin can’t pay you the overtime you deserve.”

It stings, but he’s right. She sighs. “Can I think it over?”

“Of course.” Mr. Hood stands, shows her to the door. “Why don’t you take fifteen minutes to enjoy the top floor? I assure you it’s a far cry from the basement.”

“Fifteen-”

“I don’t think you understand how urgently I need this position filled.” Mr. Hood’s voice leaves no room for argument. Aspen swallows a scowl as she exits the office, where Liam’s leaning against the wall with his arms crossed.

“Well?” He asks as soon as the door closes behind her. Aspen doesn’t think she’s ever seen his brows creased like that.

“He offered me the job.”

Liam snorts. “Of course he did. You’re not taking it, though.”

It’s very clearly not a question, and all of Aspen’s anger makes her lightheaded for a second. How can Liam talk to her like that after her scumbag of a boss tries to manipulate her in a job interview she didn’t even want? He’s supposed to be her friend. She takes a deep breath before she answers, just to be safe. “I don’t know. I could really use the money, and - I mean, if I can look after a lab, I should be able to look after one man, right?”

Liam looks uncomfortable. “Aspen, you have to be kidding yourself.”

“Wow, thanks for the support.” Aspen says, but she can’t keep the sarcasm from steeping through.

“I’m serious. You’re not qualified, I’ve seen your people skills, and Calum Hood eats girls like you for breakfast. Take a look at yourself. You don’t belong up here.”

Aspen doesn’t break Liam’s gaze, but she does a mental check. She’s in her stained polyester lab coat and jeans from the Gap, while Liam - he’s in a shirt that probably cost more than her weekly food budget. The people humming quietly through reception are poised, polished, like chrome, and she’s suddenly all the more aware of her split ends and chipped nails. He’s not wrong.

But this isn’t right.

“What’s wrong with you? How can you - Liam.” She says, and it sounds like pleading. At least she’s not yelling yet, though. She’s tired and frustrated and it’s almost 4:30 and if she was back in the lab Ashton would be telling her to sneak out by now but she’s in this shitty situation instead. What the hell?

Liam’s sweet face looks mean, now, malice in the curve of his brows. Aspen might be going crazy. “I’m trying to protect you, Aspen, you wouldn’t last a day. You look like you’re going to cry, honestly. Save yourself the humiliation. I’ll tell Calum you refuse.” He reaches for the doorknob before she can say anything.

Aspen’s not even remotely close to tears, and she’s not about to let some jealous secretary fuck this up for her, either. As Liam turns the knob she grabs his wrist, trying to keep him from fucking with her career any more, but he grabs her arm to pull her back - is he trying to fight her, right here, right now? Is he actually- Aspen jerks in his grip, and when Liam pushes back he pushes her into the door and it swings open and -

In an instant they separate. Mr. Hood takes his sweet time looking up from his papers, where Aspen’s nervously pushing hair out of her eyes. “That was quick.” He says, all mild.

Liam acts first. “Aspen wants to say that she can’t-”

“-can’t turn down your offer.”

Was that her who just spoke? Aspen tries to keep herself calm, rock-steady as Calum Hood looks her over slowly. Liam is silent beside her, but the tension feels sharp and painful between them. They’re two ends of a capacitor, building up charge.

Mr. Hood’s voice breaks the silence. “Excellent. Everything Cathy left behind is in the office, that’s everything you’ll need. I arrive at the office at 8:30 every morning; I expect you to meet me Monday with my coffee and daily schedule ready.”

Aspen blinks. “I- great. Excellent. I’ll have that.”

Her new boss stands up and comes around the desk to shake her hand, and Aspen swears she catches the first real smile she’s seen from him. “I’m so glad to have you.” He says. He’s warm, is what he is, for the very first time. When he draws away, Aspen can see why he’s a leader and CEO, just for a second.

The second passes. “Liam will show you to your new office and make sure you’re set up. I’m sure he can help you with any questions you may have.” Calum nods to Liam and gives her another tiny, tiny smile, effectively dismissing them. Aspen says thank you one last time until the door closes behind them, and then it’s just her and Liam again.

He speaks first, after a very long second. “What the fuck did you do?”

“You tried to ruin my chances here, and you grabbed me -”

“You grabbed me first!”

“Yeah, because you were going to tell the CEO that I didn’t want the job. Which - what the hell is wrong with you?” Aspen hisses. She hopes Mr. Hood’s door is thick and soundproof.

“Me? You should have just listened to me. Fuck.” Liam swears again.

“You shouldn’t have treated me like that.” Aspen snaps, and then she makes herself take another deep breath. He looks… genuinely distressed. Aspen, against her better instincts, feels bad for the asshole. “That’s the second time I’ve ever heard you swear. You’re really wound up, huh?” She teases very gently. It’s mostly out of hope.

Liam doesn’t answer right away, just points to an office by a secretary. “That one’s yours. Good luck.” This man, who Aspen thought was her friend, has never sounded colder.

The office is dark when she steps in, and she has to fumble for the lightswitch. It takes longer than it should. Once she finds the lights she sees the planner lying open on the desk, weighed down with post-it notes. There’s a fancy computer monitor and a sad-looking African Violet on the corner of the desk. The space is nice, though; it’s airy. There are proper windows and everything, and there’s just glass dividing it from the main entryway so it feels secluded but still close enough to be useful. It is nicer than the basement labs, she’s not going to lie to herself. She’s seen Devil Wears Prada, she knows what this is supposed to do to her life and soul and all, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some perks.

That reminds her.

“Liam?” She asks, poking her head out of the doorway. His office is just across from hers, and his door is open, she knows he can hear her. He doesn’t answer, though, just keeps clicking at his computer. “Liam?”

“Mr. Payne?” She jokes, but his head turns and her heart sinks. That’s how he wants it, then?

He doesn’t answer her, just looks at her with this blank fucking look in his eyes all expectant. He’s got this look in his eyes like she’s already let him down. “How does Mr. Hood take his coffee?” Aspen asks. It sounds a bit like pleading, even to her, but she’s confused, and it’s Liam - he feels bad eating sushi because of the little baby fish eggs, for chrissakes, she doesn’t know why he’s acting this way.

He looks angry already. “God, it hasn’t been five minutes and you’re floundering.”

“I’m not- we’re on the same team-”

“Thought this was an opportunity you couldn’t pass up, hm? Act like it.” He turns away after that.

Aspen feels cold all fucking over. “Fine. Thank you.” She says, feeling too sad to spit back venom. She’s confused. She thought - nevermind.

It takes her exactly eighteen minutes to clear out her desk, stealing a box from Ashton so he’ll have to visit her to get it back. “It’s lonely at the top,” she jokes, although she already knows that it really fuckin’ is. At least Ashton hasn’t turned on her; he gives her a hug and a warm smile, and says he’ll keep her updated on the project “until Mr. Hood gets tired of you and you come back home”. For a moment, she wonders if it’s too late to back out.

Aspen bundles her lab coats into the box and doesn’t let herself turn back.

Once she gets back to her lofty prison, she starts typing up a template for Calum Hood’s day to day. This time, she notices that she’s got her very own printer, and she gets a little too excited about that but she doesn’t think anyone outside the glass walls notices. She takes a call from the Daily Gotham and manages to put the reporter on hold all by herself, and gets the secretary to teach her how to transfer calls. Janice also tells her Mr. Hood takes his coffee decaf with one cream and he’s partial to The Coffee Lab but also Cafe Reznikoff if she doesn’t want to go four blocks out of her way. Aspen could kiss Janice, she’s so thankful.

Aspen feels a little goofy but she prints out her brand new template and starts transcribing Mr. Hood’s plans in her neatest writing. It’s past 5:30 when she finishes, and she starts to pack up her things when she remembers that she’s not a researcher right now and she’s has to ask Mr. Hood if she can go home. Her hand hovers over the phone before she makes the decision to stand up and go talk to him face to face, like a grown up. Liam is still at his desk when she walks by, but she doesn’t pause to look at him as she knocks on the CEO’s door.

Mr. Hood sounds stressed when he says “come in,” but Aspen’s spent her whole afternoon in the belly of the beast so it barely phases her. When she enters he’s got a cell phone in his hand and a look on his face so she doesn’t waste time with pleasantries. “Is there anything else you need me for today, or…”

God, she feels underdressed standing near him. “There’s - no, there’s nothing. Go home, Aspen, I’ll see you on Monday.” He says, with a wave of his hand he’s perfected through countless assistants before her.

“Eight thirty, decaf, one cream.” She says, smiling. She finds she wants him to smile back.

She gets something stiff-lipped, but his lips curve in the right direction and really, that’s enough. It’s technically her first day. She’s content. She steps out of the office and closes the door, and breezes through her packing up. “Night, Janice. Goodnight, Mr. Payne.” She hums on her way past, so he knows at least she can conduct herself civilly.

The Aspen who steps out of the building doesn’t feel like the one who walked in for work a few hours ago. She knows this.

Anyway. That's how it starts. 

#calum hood series #calum hood blurb #ch blurb #my writing #ch series #tdwk1 #the devil wears kevlar #ceo!cal #batman!cal #i mean not yet #but he is #no spoilers or anything but

[mybarricades]

The Dangerous Art of Pyotr Pavlesnky

His spectacular acts of self-mutilation and vandalism have landed him in jail in both Russia and France — and blurred the lines among art, protest and crime.

By Fernanda Eberstadt (The New York Times Magazine) July 11, 2019

On a fall day in Paris, in the luminous courthouse built by Renzo Piano near the Porte de Clichy, the Russian artist Pyotr Pavlensky sat in the dock, listening to an interpreter’s translation of the proceedings against him. Pavlensky had spent the past 11 months in a French jail, primarily in solitary confinement, for what he considers an artwork and the French government considers a crime. 

In the early hours of Oct. 16, 2017, Pavlensky set fire to the ground-floor windows of a branch of the Banque de France on the Place de la Bastille. A video showed him standing in the doorway of the fortresslike building, a black-clad figure framed by wings of flame. The site had been carefully chosen. The Banque de France is the French equivalent of the Federal Reserve, and this particular outpost was erected where the Bastille prison, stormed by revolutionary mobs in 1789, once stood. In the text accompanying the work, titled “Lighting,” Pavlensky declared the bank a symbol of modern-day tyranny and central bankers the new despots. 

In an aftermath common to his artworks (which Pavlensky calls “actions”), he was arrested on the spot, hauled off for psychiatric examination and put in jail — this time with his longtime partner, Oksana Shalygina, who was assisting that night. The couple were charged with “property damage involving risk to others.” Shalygina, who is also the mother of their two young children, was released on probation after two months. But in September, almost a year after “Lighting,” Pavlensky was still in prison awaiting trial. 

Seated before the panel of judges hearing the arguments for his pretrial release, Pavlensky, a hollow-cheeked man with enormous yellow-green, tigerish eyes, was dressed in his customary outfit of black scoop-necked T-shirt, black cargo pants and black sandals. The courtroom was packed with his supporters. One, a red-bearded artist named Sébastien Layral, had chopped off his earlobe for the occasion — recalling Pavlensky’s 2014 performance piece “Segregation,” in which Pavlensky climbed naked onto the wall of Moscow’s most infamous psychiatric institute and cut off his right earlobe to protest the political abuse of psychiatry. Outside the courthouse, six young women from the feminist group FEMEN stood bare-breasted, their lips sewn shut, their chests and backs painted with the slogans “Free Pavlensky” and “Activism Is Not a Disease.” Policemen raised a curtain of gold-foil blankets to hide the women’s naked torsos from onlookers, but their silent fists pumped high above it. 

During his incarceration, Pavlensky held two dry hunger strikes (no food, no water); one was broken only, he says, when the prison authorities force-fed him. His right to daily exercise in the prison courtyard or to receive visitors was frequently denied. 

This harsh treatment, Ariane Mnouchkine, founder of the avant-garde company Théâtre du Soleil, contended in an open letter to the judge, was an “unheard-of practice” in a country that prides itself on its tradition of artistic freedom. Before his arrest, Pavlensky was widely praised by critics for being, as one British newspaper put it, “the patron saint of Russian dissidence.” He was showcased in a prestigious 2017 survey of Russian art at the Saatchi Gallery in London and granted asylum in France the same year. But once he shifted the object of his critique from Putin’s Russia to the Western democracy that gave him refuge, the French government — and even some of his art-world supporters — grew decidedly less enthusiastic. In a country rattled by terrorist attacks, Pavlensky’s “action” took on a sinister resonance. Just two weeks before “Lighting,” the French Parliament passed a sweeping counterterrorism bill, making permanent most of the government’s state-of-emergency powers.

In the courtroom, waiting to be questioned by the judge, Pavlensky’s co-defendant, Shalygina, a tall, lunar-pale woman with a peroxide semimohawk, was pessimistic about her partner’s release. She had sat through half a dozen hearings in this case, and each time the judge had prolonged Pavlensky’s detention another three, four months, with no trial date in sight. 

What made the case particularly uncertain was that the artist himself was not asking to be freed. For Pavlensky, the judicial process is an integral part of the artwork. “The government’s aim is to suppress or neutralize art, to reduce me to a vandal, a madman, a provocateur,” he told me earlier, “but the criminal case becomes one of the layers of the artwork, the portal through which you enter and see the mechanisms of power exposed.” 

The presiding judge that day was Président Jean-Marie Denieul. Balding, bespectacled, genial, Denieul flipped through Pavlensky’s hefty dossier, summarizing his career with the relish of a doctor presented with a particularly rare medical specimen. Here was an artist who thought nothing of chopping off body parts “to make a political point,” Denieul remarked. “A skeletal Homo sapiens, but pretty tough!” 

“This sounds like a homage!” said Pavlensky’s lawyer, Dominique Beyreuther-Minkov. 

“It is, in a way,” the judge replied. 

The prosecutor was not so well disposed. The defendant faced a prison sentence of 10 years, she pointed out. Since he had no job, no bank account, no legal home, she believed he posed a high flight risk. Moreover, since he refused to recognize the legitimacy of the French judiciary or that his act of arson was a crime, there was nothing to stop him from setting more buildings aflame. “He lives for his political acts,” she declared. If they released him “he will do it again.” Public safety, she concluded, demanded that Monsieur Pavlensky be kept in prison. 

I first encountered Pavlensky in the summer of 2017. He and his family arrived from Russia six months earlier and were living in a series of Paris squats and collective apartments. Their latest hosts didn’t allow journalists, so Pavlensky suggested a rendezvous in Père Lachaise, the French cemetery where such luminaries as Balzac and Jim Morrison are buried. 

Until “Lighting,” Pavlensky, who is 35, worked only in Russia. Most of his “actions” involved spectacular acts of self-mutilation or endurance. For the 2013 “Carcass,” he had himself deposited, naked and cocooned in barbed wire, outside the St. Petersburg Parliament, in response to a series of new laws restricting personal freedom. Later that year, in “Fixation,” he attached his scrotum with a Crucifixion-style nail to the paving stones of Red Square to symbolize the passivity of the Russian people. He was inspired, he told me, by “zeks,” imprisoned criminals in Russia who “sometimes do this to protest administrative decisions.” 

Unyielding in his public stances, Pavlensky in person is unexpectedly warm, a little shy. Perched on a graveyard bench under a pitiless sun, he kept his head ducked, smiling often as he spoke about his path to political art. Born in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) in 1984, he was 16 when Vladimir Putin first became president. Putin closed down independent TV stations, made regional governors his direct appointees and seized banks and industries, imprisoning their oligarch owners or driving them into exile. He embraced the Russian Orthodox Church as a power base, encouraging the traditionalists’ vision of Russia as a “holy nation” whose destiny owed nothing to liberal democracy; art became a pawn in this cultural struggle. In 2003, Orthodox extremists attacked and defaced a Moscow exhibition called “Caution, Religion!” The charges against the vandals were dismissed, but the show’s curators were convicted under Russia’s infamous Article 282, known as the “blasphemy law.” A few years later, one of the curators was again fined for an exhibition called “Forbidden Art.” To many, these high-profile art trials recalled the Soviet-era trials of dissidents like Joseph Brodsky.

In the fall of 2011, Putin and Dmitri Medvedev announced that they would swap jobs (Putin had been serving as Medvedev’s prime minister since 2008 because Russian law barred him from serving a third consecutive term) and Putin would once again assume the presidency. This announcement, followed by what were widely seen as rigged parliamentary elections, sparked a nationwide wave of demonstrations. Many were characterized by an “Occupy”-style exuberance. The punk feminist group Pussy Riot, whose members specialized in guerrilla actions, seemed to embody this spirit of revolt. Shortly before the presidential election, Pussy Riot performed a “Punk Prayer” in The Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. Clad like cartoon ninjas in lollipop-colored dresses and balaclavas, they pranced and kickboxed as they shouted a song whose refrain went, “Mother of God, chase Putin out!” The church was almost empty and the “prayer” lasted less than two minutes, but three of the performers were nonetheless arrested and charged with “inciting religious hatred.” 

At the time, Pavlensky was 27, an art student who hadn’t yet found a mobilizing subject for his work. “Even among my friends, there were few who understood Pussy Riot’s action,” Pavlensky told me. “I was shocked by the violence of people’s reactions. These women had touched nothing, but people wanted to burn them at the stake; even so-called dissidents condemned them.” 

When Pussy Riot went on trial that July, Pavlensky decided to stage his first “action.” He stood outside the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg, his mouth sewn shut, carrying a sign likening Pussy Riot’s performance to Jesus’ expulsion of the money-changers from the Temple. 

“At first, I just wanted to go out in the street with my poster, like a one-man strike,” Pavlensky recalled. “I’m an atheist, but I wanted to show that the Russian Orthodox Church was in conflict with its own teachings, that it was just another instrument of state power. But then I started thinking: What if the police question me? What will I say? I realized if my mouth were sewn shut, there would be no possibility of answering, then I’d be the one with the power. People helped me sew my mouth; I got in a taxi, my mouth covered with my hand. I was frightened, but I tried to understand, Is this an objective, a rational fear, or is it just because I’ve seen that normally people don’t do this? It was the moment of no return, when I managed to overcome my own fears and become the political artist I am today.” 

Titled “Seam,” the work was captured by several photojournalists, including Maxim Zmeyev, who cropped the photo to an iconic headshot. Pavlensky’s emaciated face, lips zigzagged in blood-red twine, radiates an almost Christlike suffering. By choosing this gesture, he also inscribed himself in a powerful lineage of artistic resistance, referencing a seminal 1989 work by David Wojnarowicz, “Silence=Death,” in which the artist sewed his lips shut to mark the Reagan administration’s refusal to address the AIDS epidemic.

The Pussy Riot trial ended with the conviction of three members. Two of them, Nadya Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, would spend nearly two years in a prison camp; the third, Yekaterina Samutsevich, received a suspended sentence on appeal. Tolokonnikova later expressed her joy that Pussy Riot had found a worthy successor. “Pavlensky,” she tweeted, “is the mind, honor and balls of our epoch.” 

Pavlensky’s work draws on a venerable tradition of performance art in which the body is used to interrogate cultural norms and power dynamics. In the 1960s, the Viennese Actionists staged performances using their own blood, urine and excrement to expose Austria’s willed amnesia about its Nazi past. In 1971, the American artist Chris Burden made a video of a friend shooting him with a .22 rifle in a kind of commentary on the Vietnam War. 

As an art student, Pavlensky encountered the work of the Moscow Actionists. One, Oleg Kulik, pretended to be a dog: naked, chained, he barked at passers-by in a reminder of the animality beneath our civilizational veneer. Another, Alexander Brener, stood in boxing shorts and gloves in Red Square, demanding that President Boris Yeltsin, who had just started the First Chechen War to prevent the republic from gaining independence, come out and fight him. 

The Moscow Actionists, with their guerrilla happenings in unsanctioned public spaces, insisted on a kind of art that couldn’t be bought. Pavlensky operates with a similar ethic, always choosing sites under high police surveillance. “If there is a scale of expression, with opera at one end and terrorism at the other,” he told me, “political art is closer on the scale to terrorism than to opera.” 

For Pavlensky, the initial action is just the beginning of a larger process. Even as every element is precisely calculated — “I have to practice each gesture carefully, where I’m going to put my foot, my hand, because once I’m there, everything moves very quickly and there are so many unforeseeables,” he told me — what interests him is the state’s involuntary collaboration in his work. A recent exhibition at Milan’s Galleria Pack included photos of his Russian police dossier: grainy close-ups of embossed lettering on a gas canister, CCTV shots of a hooded figure on a wintry street corner — images that, as he points out, anonymous Interior Ministry employees have cropped, edited and laid out with deliberate artistry. “What I’m doing is turning the tables, drawing the government into the process of making art,” he said. “The power relations shift, the state enters into the work of art and becomes an object, an actor.” 

In 2014, Pavlensky embarked on a more direct confrontation with the state. It was the year Putin began a war in Ukraine, cracking down on Ukrainian activists opposed to the invasion by imprisoning them on trumped-up terrorism charges. The filmmaker Oleg Sentsov was convicted of supposedly plotting to bomb a series of buildings and monuments and is now serving a 20-year sentence in the Russian Far North. 

Pavlensky was an active supporter of the protesters gathering in Ukraine’s Maidan, and in what now seems a precursor to his Banque de France action, he set ablaze the doors of the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the Russian security service, then waited for the police to arrive, gas canister in hand. The “action,” which Pavlensky titled “Threat,” referenced Sentsov’s supposed plot. Pavlensky was arrested, sent to a psychiatric ward for a few weeks and then imprisoned for seven months, awaiting trial. In solidarity with Sentsov and other incarcerated activists, he demanded to be charged with terrorism. Instead, he was convicted of vandalism and let off with a fine, which he refused to pay. 

The incident that would drive him into exile occurred just a few months after his release. An actress named Anastasia Slonina, associated with the Moscow theater group Teatr.doc, filed charges against Pavlensky and Shalygina. She claimed the couple assaulted her with a knife when she resisted their sexual advances. Pavlensky and Shalygina, who had an open relationship, denied the charges. “There was no violence, no knife,” Pavlensky says. (Anastasia Slonina did not respond to requests for comment.) 

The charges created bitter divisions in Russian intellectual circles, the writer Masha Gessen told me. “On the one hand, ‘If she says it happened, we have to assume it happened.’ On the other, ‘No one should ever go to the police’ — an unimpeachable argument in Russia, where whatever the court system doles out is a priori unjust.” Pavlensky and Shalygina’s supporters insisted the couple had been framed. Although Gessen says she has no opinion on the case, she notes that “Russia loves to put dissidents in jail on sexual charges, because who’s going to stand up for a sexual predator?” Gessen cites the case of Yuri Dmitriev, a historian uncovering Soviet-era mass graves who is currently imprisoned on charges of sexual abuse and child pornography, widely regarded as having been fabricated. After “Threat,” “it was inevitable they were going to get Pavlensky one way or another. I think they wanted to get him out of the country.” 

Pavlensky and Shalygina say they were warned that if convicted, they could each be sentenced to 10 years in prison, their two small children placed in a state orphanage. They decided to seek refuge in France, which Pavlensky chose because it was the “alma mater of revolution.” “I’m not scared of prison,” he said, “but I won’t go like a sheep to the slaughter for something I didn’t do.” 

Two months before “Lighting,” I visited Pavlensky and Shalygina at their latest home, the eighth in seven months. They said that the French state had offered them housing, but, as Shalygina explained to me with a laugh, they didn’t want to be “fed by the monster.” 

Pavlensky’s and Shalygina’s politics are loosely anarchist. They describe themselves as living by an alternative economy of foraging, donations from well-wishers and the occasional lecture fee. (French authorities were particularly irritated by Pavlensky’s telling German TV why Paris is a great place to live: When you’re hungry, you shoplift from supermarkets, and when you need to get somewhere, you jump the Metro turnstile.) None of Pavlensky’s art is for sale, and issues of Political Propaganda, an art magazine Shalygina began in Russia, are distributed free. 

The address they’d given me was fairy-tale unexpected: a cottage in a cobblestone alley festooned in climbing roses, tucked behind a boulevard of grim high-rises. Inside, Pavlensky and Shalygina greeted me beaming. How had they ended up here? I asked. 

The couple’s approach to house hunting, it turned out, was characteristically guerrilla. They’d fallen out with the inhabitants of their previous squat. One night, while on one of their regular family rambles around Paris, they came upon a bucolic alley and spotted a cottage that looked abandoned so they moved in. Twenty-four hours later, the owner showed up with the police, but evicting squatters from a Paris property that is not your primary residence can be a slow business in a legal system that favors tenants over landlords. 

When I arrived, handymen were hooking the house up to the electricity mains. We climbed the steep broken stairs and emerged on a balcony, with views across Paris. Their daughters — 6-year-old Lilya playing a joyous peekaboo; 9-year-old Alisa, grave, reserved — clambered along the balcony railings, then scampered off to their bedroom to draw pictures. In Russia, Pavlensky and Shalygina had home-schooled their daughters, teaching them kickboxing, poetry, chess. Now, reluctantly, they’d enrolled the girls in the local primaire so they could learn French. Alisa liked school; Lilya didn’t. 

Sitting on the balcony in the crisp sunlight, Pavlensky talked about his own upbringing in a high-rise complex on the western edge of St. Petersburg. His parents were “conformists shaped by the Soviet system, people who above all wanted a comfortable life.” His father was a geologist who spent his entire career at a government institute. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the elder Pavlensky fell into acute alcoholism. “My father died alone at 49, choking on a piece of raw meat. His example taught me how not to live. I saw how his reliance on the state for comfort, his disappointment at the state’s abandonment, led to this horrible death.” 

Pavlensky’s mother, a retired nurse, is still alive. In a book of interviews, Pavlensky described her exasperation with the life he and Shalygina had chosen. “My mother is someone who thinks you have to stay on good terms with the police and beware of the neighbors. She would unleash this stream of clichés on me: ‘The children have to go to school. If they’re sick, you send them to the doctor. Why don’t you have a job? How are you going to feed your family? Why don’t you have any money?’ The apotheosis of her arguments was, ‘If you don’t work, how are you going to save enough money to go on vacation?’ ” When he was first sent to a psychiatric hospital after one of his “actions,” Pavlensky had a flash of recognition. The nurses’ way of bullying patients into compliance was exactly how his mother had always treated him: Unless you were catatonic, you were considered dangerous. 

Now, looking out at the bluffs of the Buttes-Chaumont park, Pavlensky recalled how at art school, he came to regard culture as just another state institution, with its own levers of power. “When I dropped out, my true education continued,” he said. “I can honestly say my life was changed by art — by the example of artists like Caravaggio, Van Gogh, Duchamp, Malevich. I saw that art helps liberate — that real artists’ work was in constant collision with power.” 

A year later, Pavlensky sat impassive in the prisoners’ box in the Porte de Clichy courtroom, as the panel of judges returned from their deliberations. From his bench, Judge Denieul pronounced their decision. The trial date was set for January. In the meantime, the terms of Shalygina’s probation were to be eased — from now on, she would report to the police only once a week, and the sole area of Paris from which she was banned was the 11th arrondissement, where the Place de la Bastille is located. As for Pavlensky — Denieul paused — “the same.”

In slow motion, Pavlensky’s lawyer wheeled on her heels to face the audience. Pumping her fists high, she let loose an ecstatic, “Yes!” 

Four hours later, I was on my way with Oksana to pick Pavlensky up from prison. Stéphane Chatry, a tall black-bearded Frenchman who runs a program called Artivism Contemporary Art, was driving; riding shotgun was a young photojournalist, Flavien Moras. Our destination was Fleury-Mérogis prison, 12 miles outside Paris, where Oksana had also served her pretrial detention. The mood in the car was jubilant; Oksana blasted a tape of a Metro-busker singing an Arabic rendition of “Billie Jean.” 

Fleury-Mérogis, a ’60s-era polygonal complex that has held some of France’s most notorious bank robbers and accused terrorists, is the largest prison in Europe. At the entrance, a guard behind bulletproof glass told us that Pavlensky had not yet returned from his hearing. There were only two transfers a day, and the prison bus had to make the rounds of all the Paris courthouses. The waiting room was closed at night, so we sat outside in the floodlit cold. Periodically, we heard muffled roars of prisoners deep within the complex. A loudspeaker crackled intermittent orders at us: No photographs; no smoking. Every hour or so, there would be a carload of people who had come to meet a friend or relative who was also being released. Like us, these groups — invariably young and French-African or Arab — were loud, raucous with nervous excitement. 

Stéphane and Flavien drove off to a nearby fast-food chain for coffee and pizza; Oksana didn’t want to budge. She talked about her upbringing in Norilsk, a nickel-mining city in the Arctic Circle that is reportedly one of the most polluted cities in the world. Her father and brother were both miners; at 16, hungry “for light and joy,” she escaped to St. Petersburg. Twelve years later, she met Pyotr in a bar. The little finger on Oksana’s left hand is missing: Some years ago she chopped it off as an act of restorative truth for having concealed a sexual dalliance from Pyotr. (Though their relationship wasn’t monogamous, the deal was total transparency.) “In Russia, there’s this saying that a woman’s word means nothing,” she told me. “I wanted to show that I was good for my word.” 

Oksana described Pyotr as her “best friend.” She helped him plan and execute his “actions”; when he was in prison, she campaigned full time for his cause while looking after their children. Tonight — now that Pyotr was finally being released — she was wondering who she would be without him. “The only thing I know how to do is help artists get in trouble,” she laughed. 

At 11:30 p.m., the prison bus arrived from Paris, and Fleury’s metal maw opened to let it through. Two hours later, the doors opened once again, and three men walked out, their silhouettes backlit. One disappeared into the industrial wasteland. The other, a bearded youth carrying his belongings in plaid shopping bags, was greeted by his friends with whoops and fist-bumps. The third figure was Pavlensky. He looked chalky-gray, but happy. “Salut, le Russe,” the other shouted. 

On the drive back to Paris, Pavlensky spoke in an excited tumble of English, French and Russian, supplemented by pantomime. He told us stories about elderly Georgian inmates and TV remote controls as intramural currency and how much he’d enjoyed reading Voltaire and Madame de Sévigné and why he kept getting thrown into the punishment cell. He wanted us to know everything about prison and also to appreciate its fundamental unknowability — how you could spend 20 years in one prison and only be able to testify to what you’d witnessed in your particular block; how Building D3 at Fleury was a different universe from Building D5. 

When we reached downtown Paris, it was 2:30 a.m., and Pavlensky was looking for a bar in which to celebrate. He had a wad of bank notes, money that had been returned to him by prison authorities on his release, and though he usually doesn’t drink, he wanted to treat everyone to a few rounds of vodka shots. 

“Where to?” asked Stéphane. 

The Place de la Bastille, of course, Pavlensky said. It fit his philosophy of resistance that we go to the one place that he and Shalygina were forbidden from going. Stéphane parked on a side street. Even at that hour, the Place de la Bastille was lined with police cars. Stéphane wondered aloud how long Pavlensky would manage to stay out of prison — a month? 

“A happy month,” he replied. 

We stopped outside the Banque de France, so Oksana and Pyotr could examine the aftereffect of “Lighting.” It had cost 18,000 euros to repair the damage, the bank claimed in its civil suit. 

“Not bad — 18,000 euros for a work of art,” Pavlensky reflected. “It’s beautiful, the Place de la Bastille, one of the most beautiful places in Paris. But not a good place for a bank.” 

In January, Pavlensky returned to court and was given a three-year prison sentence. The 11 months he spent in pretrial detention were credited as time served; the remaining two years were suspended. The couple were fined roughly $25,000, for material and “moral” damage. Pavlensky says he has no plans to pay it. 

Since his release, he told me in an email, his personal life has been “catastrophic”: Shalygina ended their 12-year relationship, throwing him into what he termed a “double exile.” (She and their two daughters are fine, she reports in a Facebook message, but she doesn’t wish their current lives to be part of this article, or to comment on her breakup with Pavlensky.) His new partner is a Frenchwoman whom he describes as his “antithesis” — “an icon of bourgeois prudence” with “a big apartment in the prestigious 16th arrondissement.” It’s a “tragic love,” he said, doomed by contradiction. 

Pavlensky’s work, however, is thriving. He recently took part in half a dozen of the gilets jaunes protests, in which shops, newspaper kiosks and even a Rouen branch of the Banque de France were set ablaze — an act he regards as a tribute to “Lighting.” For Pavlensky, the French state’s response to his artwork confirmed his central thesis: Institutions of power are oppressive, yet they are also oddly vulnerable to someone who denies their legitimacy. He is now at work documenting the government’s contribution to “Lighting” — the CCTV images, court transcripts, letters from the prison authorities that constitute the larger artwork. All his work, Pavlensky says, reveals that society at large may be a prison, but it is still possible to exert a kind of negative liberty. “Everything in my art is done to make people think. It’s not enough just to have your own individual freedom; you need to help others free themselves.”

#Pyotr Pavlensky

[crimethinc]

Yellow Vests for May Day Can Macron Pacify France Before May Day 2019? Probably Not.

Last week, concluding a national initiative aimed at drawing the general population into “dialogue” with the authorities, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a handful of minor reforms intended to placate participants in the yellow vest movement. It’s far from certain that this strategy will succeed.

The situation in France is the culmination of years of strife between protest movements and the state. At the height of the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015, the French government used the opportunity provided by the November 13 terror attacks to declare a state of emergency intended to suppress all protest activity. Instead, a massive student revolt against the Loi Travail erupted in 2016, defying the state of emergency, and simmering unrest continued through the 2017 elections and the 2018 eviction of the ZAD. The clashes of May Day 2018 showed that the movement had reached an impasse: thousands of people were prepared to fight the police and engage in property destruction, but the authorities were still able to keep the contagion of rebellion quarantined inside a particular space.

Starting in November 2018, the Yellow Vest movement upended this precarious balance, drawing a much wider swathe of the population into the streets. In response, Macron organized a “National Debate” in a classic attempt at appeasement and pacification. The outcome of the National Debate and the May Day demonstrations will tell us a lot about the prospects of social movements elsewhere around the world: what forms of pressure mass movements can bring to bear on the authorities, what kind of demands neoliberal governments are (and are not) able to grant today, and what sort of longterm gains movements for revolutionary liberation can hope to make in the course of such waves of unrest.

Accordingly, in the following update, we explore the concessions Macron offered and conclude with the prospects for May Day 2019 in France.

Paris, April 20, inside the kettle at Place de la République.

Macron’s Intervention

Having postponed his announcement due to the fire that destroyed part of Notre-Dame cathedral on the evening of April 15, President Emmanuel Macron finally presented the results of the National Debate on Thursday, April 25, in a press conference broadcast live on French television.

The government launched this “democratic” political tool three months earlier, on January 15, 2019, to answer the thirst for a more “direct democracy” verbalized by a large part of yellow vest movement—especially through calls for a Citizens’ Initiative Referendum (RIC). Macron’s goal, of course, was to reestablish political stability in France while making as few changes as possible.

President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Edouard Philippe in front of Notre-Dame. This has not been a particularly easy time to head the French government.

In the days preceding the press conference, several elements of his plan were leaked to the press, which diminished the surprise effect that the government aimed to create with this event. But unlike members of the current government, Macron’s supporters, and some corporate journalists, none of us were waiting impatiently for the president’s intervention, nor expecting that anything positive or surprising would come out of this political spectacle.

For more than five months now, yellow vesters have learned the hard way that dialogue with the government is meaningless—the state is prepared to take ever more authoritarian measures in order to maintain its hegemony and preserve the status quo. In the outcome of the “National Debate,” we see again why democracy has not served as a bulwark against fascism, but rather as a means to legitimize state power. Those who control the state are always careful to make sure that while elections, referendums, and discussions can serve to create the impression that the government has a mandate to represent the general population, they never actually threaten the institutions of state power.

The Government Responds to the Yellow Vests

Those interested who wish to see two and half hours of political doublespeak can watch Macron’s press conference in full here. Our goal here is simply to analyze some of the major decisions taken by the French government.

In the opening statement, Macron explained that he had learned a lot from the National Debate and emerged “transformed.” According to him, this three-month political experience highlighted that there is a deeply rooted feeling of fiscal, territorial, and social injustice among the population, alongside a perceived lack of consideration on the part of the elite. Therefore, the government has decided to present “a more human and fair” political project.

However, after these conventional words intended to create the illusion of empathy from the government towards yellow vesters and everyone else struggling on a daily basis as a consequence of the policies implemented by successive governments, Macron lifted the veil, adding:

“Does this mean that everything that has been done in the past two years should be stopped? I believe quite the opposite. We must continue the transformations. The orientations taken have been good and fair. The fundamentals of the first two years must be preserved, pursued, and intensified. The economic growth is greater than that of our neighboring countries.”

President Macron at the official press conference to present the results of the National Debate.

If some people still hesitated to believe that the National Debate was just a political farce, here is the ultimate proof. For months, people expressed their frustrations in the streets and traffic circles. Facing this unprecedented and uncontrollable situation, the authorities answered by saying that in a democracy, dialogue must not be established through “violence,” therefore offering the National Debate as an alternative in order to pacify the situation—while increasing police repression against demonstrators in the meantime.

After three months of National Debate—which fortunately failed to stop the movement—those who trusted the good intentions of the government saw their efforts and demands dismissed. In effect, Macron was telling everyone, “Thanks a lot for taking part of this debate, we heard you, but in the end, we decided to pursue our political agenda and continue the liberalization of the capitalist economy.”

So the long-awaited conclusion of the National Debate was simply a mix of old promises, a few adjustments to show the goodwill of the government, and new reforms to accelerate the transformation and liberalization of society.

Over five months later, yellow vest protesters are still in the streets.

First, Macron rejected some of the biggest demands of the yellow vest movement. The government will not officially recognize “blank votes” as a form of opposition during elections (so far, those votes are counted but they are not taken into account in the final results and in the total number of vote cast). Then, he refused to reverse the decision to reduce taxes on the income of the super-rich—one of the issues that had provoked the emergence of the yellow vest movement in the first place.

Furthermore, the government also opposed the idea of creating the Citizens’ Initiative Referendum (RIC). Instead, they want to develop an already existing alternative¬—the Referendum of Shared Initiative—by simplifying its rules. From now on, instead of requiring 4.7 million signatures to be discussed at the Assemblée Nationale, a petition will only need one million signatures and the approval of at least a fifth of the total number of deputies. If the National Assembly refuses to discuss the issue, a referendum can be held. Macron also mentioned his desire to reinforce the right to petition at a local scale.

A yellow vest protester holding a sign calling for the Citizens’ Initiative Referendum, one of the most popular demands among the movement. From our perspective, efforts to make the French government more “directly democratic” will be ineffectual at best and at worst will legitimize reactionary and repressive state policies as “representing the will of the people.”

Even with the proposal to simplify this participatory political platform, it is easy to see that the government is taking very few risks with this alternative. The idea is to give people the impression that they have more leverage within the democratic system, as they can address petitions to their representatives. But in the end, who will have the final word on these issues? Politicians motivated by self-interest, power, and careerism. There is very little probability that the deputies will validate any petition that could threaten the status quo. As in any other political system, this democratic game is obviously rigged: even if you play by the rules, you always lose!

Then, Macron repeated and clarified some reforms that were already present in his electoral program of 2017: limiting the number of terms for politicians (though he did not specify how many would be allowed); reducing the number of parliamentarians by 25% or 30%; increasing the degree of proportional representation in legislative elections (which will likely give more power to the National Front in French political institutions).1

Members of the Anti-Criminality Brigade in action during Act 22 in Toulouse.

After presenting what the government is planning to do to include more elements of participatory democracy in the French political system, Macron expressed his desire to undertake a “profound reform of the French administration” and of its public service. To do so, the government intends to put an end to the National School of Administration (ENA)—symbol of republican elitism and opportunism—in order to create a new institution that “works better.” Moreover, in May, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe has been mandated to officially present a government plan to put more civil servants in the field so they can help the authorities find solutions to people’s problems at a local scale. Therefore, the government has abandoned its previous objective of abolishing 120,000 posts of civil servants—but this doesn’t mean that the government has abandoned the idea of cutting jobs.

To fight against the steady reduction of public services in the countryside and in some provinces—such as post offices and deliveries, health insurance, and unemployment agencies—the government aims to establish buildings that would concentrate all these rudimentary public services in one location. Such initiative already exists, in fact, but is suffering from critical underfunding.

Then, Macron stated that no further hospital or school will close until 2022—the end of his presidential term—without the agreement of the Mayor of the Commune they are located in. For years, successive governments have underfunded hospitals and schools, increasing the precarious aspect of working conditions. The main question is—what will happen after 2022? Regarding the education issue, Macron agreed to limit the number of students per class to 24 from kindergarten to second grade and to duplicate classes if necessary, as is already stipulated in some priority education areas—read poor districts. This is an interesting focus for Macron when in the meantime, government policies are worsening the educational system as a whole, especially via reforms targeting high schools and universities.

Concerning economic policies, Macron explained that he wants to “significantly reduce” the amount of income tax demanded from the middle class. However, to do so while balancing the loss of tax revenue, Macron is asking everyone to “work more.” The meaning behind this statement remains quite obscure, as Macron offered no further explanation. So far, we know that the government doesn’t want to change the legal age of retirement nor to cancel holidays. However, Macron is not opposed to the idea of increasing the number of working hours per week. The government also aims to reach its objective of “full employment” by 2025, without explaining how this might take place. In order to compensate for the tax cuts for the middle class, the government also aims to suppress some specific fiscal niches used by large companies, but Macron said nothing about the various strategies of tax evasion utilized by the super-rich.

Macron also explained his wish to increase the minimum amount of retirement pensions from today’s approximately €650 per month up to €1000. Moreover, Macron also reconsidered his previous policy regarding retirement and confirmed that pensions under €2000 would be re-indexed to account for inflation starting January 2020. Finally, the government wants to create some sort of mechanism to guarantee the payment of child support to families in need.

Starting in June, Macron wants to create a “citizen’s convention composed of one hundred and fifty people with the mission to work on significant measures for the planet.” In addition, he wants to establish a Council of Ecological Defense to address climate change. This council would involve the Prime Minister as well as the main Ministers in charge of this transition in order to take “strategic choices and to put this climate change at the very core of our policies.” This is not a measure to address the ecological crisis so much as yet another step in the development of the same French bureaucracy that sparked the yellow vest movement in the first place. Our governments and the systems that put them in power in the first place continue to lead us towards darker futures.

Riot police charging demonstrators at Place de la République on Saturday, April 20.

Finally, and most ominously, Macron presented his plan to “rebuild the immigration policy” of France. “Europe needs to rethink its cooperation with Africa in order to limit the endured immigration and has to reinforce its borders, even if this means having a Schengen area with less countries,” he proclaimed. “I deeply believe in asylum, but we must strengthen the fight against those who abuse it.” This will likely be the premise of a new step in the development of fortress Europe. And, of course, whatever authoritarian measures are developed to target migrants will also be used to target poor people and rebellious elements within France itself. In this regard, we can see that it has been self-destructive as well as racist and xenophobic that some yellow vesters have demanded more immigration controls.

As May Day Approaches

Following this press conference, the government hoped that its official announcements would finally take the life out of the yellow vest movement, defusing the social tension that has built up. However, in the hours following Macron’s speech, several well-known yellow vest figures expressed their dissatisfaction with his proposals, calling for further demonstrations. In the end, even if some yellow vesters were sidetracked by Macron’s announcement, it was difficult to predict whether people would massively take the streets for the 24th act of the yellow vest movement.

For Act 24 of the movement, yellow vest protesters made an international call to gather in the streets of Strasbourg. The banner reads “Coordination of the Yellow Vesters from the East.”

On Saturday, April 27, about 23,600 yellow vesters demonstrated in France. For this new day of action, the epicenter of the movement was the city of Strasbourg. As the European elections will occur in a month, an “international call” was made to gather and march towards the European Parliament. Some Belgians, Germans, Italians, Swiss, and Luxembourgers participated as well. About 3000 demonstrators walked through the streets of Strasbourg, confronting police and engaging in property destruction. In the end, 42 people were arrested and at least 7 injured—three police officers, three demonstrators, and one passerby.

At the same time, two demonstrations took place in Paris. The first, organized by trade unions, drew about 5500 demonstrators, among them 2000 in yellow vests, while the other, mostly composed of several hundreds of yellow vesters, did a tour of all the major corporate media headquarters to ask for “impartial media coverage.” Other gatherings also took place in Lyons, Toulouse, Cambrai, and elsewhere in France. (All of the figures provided here are from the French authorities.)

Street confrontations in Strasbourg on Saturday, April 27.

If we compare the total number of participants in this 24th act to the other national days of action, it is undeniable that it attracted fewer participants. Does that mean that the government has finally gained the upper hand over the movement? It’s unclear. It is possible that some yellow vesters stayed home from the 24th act in order to prepare for May Day.

Last year, the intensity of property destruction and confrontations with police during the May Day mobilization of anarchists and other autonomous rebels compelled the government to cancel the entire traditional trade union march. In view of the tense social and political situation in France today, who knows what May Day 2019 could bring?

If the government attempts to cancel or repress demonstrations in Paris this May Day, the situation could become explosive. Not only because the police have adopted aggressive new law enforcement strategies over the past few weeks, but also because several calls have been made for yellow vesters to join autonomous rebels at the front of the traditional Parisian afternoon procession for the “ultimate act.” The objective is set: Paris is to become the capital city of rioting.

The world on fire, Paris in the middle.

Here is an English adaptation of one of the calls, entitled Pour un 1er mai jaune et noir:

For a yellow and black May Day!

“When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.”

-Article 35 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1793)

Macron’s government has decided to crush the current social protest by force, reaching a level of repression never seen before: prohibitions of demonstrations, deployment of soldiers, the use of armored vehicles, the use of chemical markers and weapons of war against protesters, jail sentences in spades, hands torn off, blinded protesters…

During the demonstration of May Day 2018, the Prefecture of Police counted 14,500 demonstrators “on the sidelines of the trade union procession” (almost as much as in the traditional procession) including 1200 “radical individuals.” On March 16, at the time of act 18, it was 1500 “ultra violent” ones who were present among the 7000 demonstrators, according to the figures of this same police.

Today, what frightens the state is not the rioters themselves, but the adhesion and understanding they arouse among the rest of the population. And this despite the calls, week after week, for everyone to dissociate themselves from the “breakers.”

If there is one group that currently strikes France with all its violence, it is not the “Black Bloc,” nor the yellow vests; it is rather the government itself.

We are calling on all revolutionaries in France and elsewhere, all those who want this to change, to come and form a determined and combative march. Because if repression falls on everyone, our response must be common and united. Against Macron and his world, let’s take the street together to revive the convergence of anger and hope. Let’s get ready, let’s equip ourselves, lets organize ourselves to overthrow him and drag him through a day in hell.

War has been declared!

Let’s see that flag burn too.

For those who attend to join the May Day festivities in Paris, here are some important links and information:

List of different May Day actions

Information and contacts courtesy of the Legal Team in French, English, and Italian.

Further Reading

We have been publishing updates and analysis on the Yellow Vest movement since it first got underway. You can view all our articles here.

“Proportional representation” would mean that if, for example, 30% of voters vote for the Green Party, then members of that party would receive 30% of the total number of seats. So far, legislative elections offer no proportional representation—even if a party receives a large percentage of votes, it might not gain many seats at the assembly. People have been complaining about this “unfair process,” so now the government is willing to increase proportional representation in elections. Unfortunately, for several years now, the National Front has usually received around 20-25% of votes but only currently holds 6 seats out of the 577 in the Assemblée Nationale. Increasing proportional representation will give them more power in the decision-making—although, of course, it’s not clear to what extent Macron will actually follow through on his promises.

Of course, there is no option for people who have grown disillusioned with government itself: that perspective will never be “proportionately represented.” This is why the government refused outright to recognized blank votes. ↩

[skriaki]

The best language no country uses: my first month learning Esperanto

Saluton! Mi lernas Esperanton. But a few weeks ago I’d have barely been able to guess what Esperanto was, and mainly knew it from a joke in the beloved sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf. Then one day a random YouTube recommendation led me to start learning a new language for the first time since I left school.

Esperanto isn’t your typical language, coming about as a collective cultural phenomenon over many years. Instead it was the passion project of Dr Ludwik Zamenhof, a Jewish-Polish linguist who, noticing the strict language barriers between different groups in his home town, formed the dream of an international second language which might help alleviate humanity’s long-standing issue of killing each other. He eventually called it Esperanto, which appropriately translates as “one who hopes”. As if creating a whole new fully-functioning language wasn’t impressive enough, Zamenhof’s baby enjoyed a fair bit of success after its 1887 release, to the extent that the League of Nations almost adopted it as an administrative language. Sadly, his idea might have come along at just about the worst possible time; the global surge of nationalism surrounding the world wars proved antithetical to the tolerant philosophy behind Esperanto, and the language has remained little more than a curiosity in the public eye ever since.

So why did I literally decide overnight to start teaching myself a language with no official government support and a speaking population scattered in small pockets across the globe? Well, quite simply because it’s a fascinating piece of work. Common knowledge states that a person can pick up a working comprehension of Esperanto in a fraction of the time it would take them to learn a traditional language, especially if they have at least one European tongue in their repertoire already, and I can honestly say that within a month I’m already more confident with Esperanto than I ever was with French after two years of schooling.

Zamenhof’s creation is remarkably efficient. For starters, it’s essentially a splicing of prominent European languages, meaning it’s common to recognise words from Spanish, Italian, English etc. More than that, though, the grammar is flexible, the pronunciation and spelling is downright utilitarian, and as a whole almost every possible step has been taken to make Esperanto as approachable as possible. There’s only one word for “the”, compared to the six I had to remember for German. Every noun ends in O, every adjective ends in A, and every present verb ends in AS, with the whole language using a consistent system of suffixes and prefixes that make it so much easier to guess at a word’s meaning based on its easily identifiable type, or even invent a new one. All in all, what quirks you might find with Esperanto are nothing in comparison to the minefield of half-rules and archaic logic you’ll find in a natural language. Especially the Anglo-Saxon clusterfuck that is English!

So yeah. It’s kind of a big deal. Even though a new language invented by one dude was always going to have an uphill struggle getting international recognition, Esperanto might have been ahead of its time and to date remains arguably the most well-known constructed language, with at least one popular language app featuring a course (which I passionately recommend if you’re remotely curious, since it’s free and low-effort), and a devoted global following who tend to be delighted to bump into a new Esperantisto. And while English may have stolen the spotlight as the likely candidate for a lingua franca, Esperanto remains shockingly easy to pick up and play, to the extent that some experts have argued the case for teaching kids Esperanto as a stepping stone to traditional languages, because it’s so much less punishing.

And on a personal note, I’ve found that the tangible sense of steady progress these past weeks has had a notable effect on my mental health after a rough few months marred by illness and the return of the dreaded warmer months. I enjoyed learning German back in the day too, but Esperanto’s flexibility and consistency makes it a satisfying puzzle to solve because it’s mostly just a matter of remembering the rules and assimilating new words. I’m also inspired by the philosophy and surprisingly eventful history that some research uncovers. From the Nazis cracking down on Esperanto as a supposed Jewish conspiracy (since fascists generally hate when people try to empathise with each other), to a pre-Star Trek William Shatner mispronouncing his lines in an Esperanto film, and even bands who exclusively perform as Esperantists. And while the language is politically neutral, it’s hard not to see it as a bit of a rebellious underdog after all it’s been through.

Esperanto might never be a serious cultural phenomenon but it’s certainly a subculture, and has practical benefits for anyone looking to understand how languages are put together. And while it might not be as weird as Klingon (which is an actual, functional language), or Solresol (which uses musical notes so you can talk through music), I sincerely believe it’s a beautiful and inspiring triumph in itself. A great book is still a great book even if nobody ever reads it, and Esperanto deserves to be known as a linguistic milestone even if its devotees will forever be an underground movement of friendly nerds.

Tre dankon, adiaŭ!

#esperanto #zamenhof #linguist #language #history #learning #education #school #pacifism #multilingual #duolingo #multil #ne krokodilu #english #german #french #italian #conlang #solresol #klingon

[shirleyooi]

Stepping Off from Lyon-Saint Exupéry Airport - Two Months Later

It's my first time journaling after 2 months living in Grenoble, France. Not Paris lol Paris is so expensive. Grenoble is a city nestled at the base of the French Alps. It is also considered as the heart of the French Alps since the city is literally surrounded by mountain ranges. (Okay, that’s enough geography class)

I still remember my first day here. It was so scary until I met my friend who helped me get to my residence (kudos to her). Since I had a friend with me, I was in awe when looking at my surroundings while having no need to worry about getting lost or having trouble with the language. Unfortunately, the awe was replaced by loneliness, fear, and anxiety when I was left alone.

One might think that I am someone who handles stress well because of my past records and experiences from high school to USM. I count how stressed and depressed I am by counting the frequency of me breaking down and crying, which used to be rare (at most twice every semester). However, I broke the record in my first 2 weeks as I battled the loneliness and depression with all my might. Then, the frequency went stronk 📈 in my third week in France as PMS came and destroyed my wall of defenses against the load of stress, even letting imposter syndrome slide in.

It was the lowest point of my life ever and I cried every day. 

Oh, what of the glory of studying abroad? Or the joy of living my teenage dream? When I lost my happiness and enthusiasm for life? Everyone back in Malaysia expected me to be thriving in France and living the best of my life, and here I am, two months later, slowly crawling out of my shell. 

Some say to not look back in the past, but I will write down what happened and look back at this a year or two in the future and think, Wow, I’ve gotten this far from where I started! And that is the type of self validation I wish for myself. 

In the first few weeks, I struggled with the unexpected culture shock, the expected language barrier, and the extreme difficulty and pace of getting administrative procedures done. The feeling of constantly being left out did not sit well for me, a former student leader (and some say I am an inspiration) in my last university. Two months. That was how long it took for me to be at peace with not being in the loop. 

I could not keep up with their class schedules of 8am-5pm every day and sometimes even until 6:30pm or 8:30pm. I am still struggling to absorb the amount of knowledge they throw at us every week, but I am slowly coming to terms with this situation by not giving too much damns. What is important is that I pass my exams and graduate with a Master’s degree. 

Being 24, it is harder to get close friends now than when we were younger. I guess that is just part of growth. 

Two months. I am okay with living here now. Although I miss Malaysia badly and wish that time moves faster so that I can go home, I am not crying every week anymore. Slowly, I am seeing the beauty of this place and I am finding my happiness for living. 

#movingtoanewcountry #studyabroad #depression #self care #college life

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to Secret Identity, our regular column on identity and its role in politics and policy.

Secret identity

The Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents as part of its border-enforcement strategy is generating widespread opposition, even from people who have traditionally been allies of the president. It has forced the administration to defend an approach that polls terribly1 and results in images of children in cages and accounts of breastfeeding kids being taken away from their mothers.

It seems like bad politics.

So why do it? The administration’s explanations aren’t much help here. President Trump said he hates the separations and falsely claimed that they’re the product of laws passed by Democrats. Other officials have denied that the policy exists at all. Attorney General Jeff Sessions invoked the Bible to defend the strategy, referring (unwittingly, I assume) to a passage from Romans that people used to defend slavery in the 19th century. And while the implementation and defense of this policy is perhaps the most jarring action the Trump administration has taken so far on immigration, other such policies, like ending the Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals program, have also been unpopular and defended in misleading ways.2

But there is a potential driving force behind many of the administration’s immigration policies, one that it largely avoids discussing in public but that ties all these disparate actions together: reducing or at least stopping a pre-Trump spike in the number of immigrants in America.

I don’t think it’s a secret that immigration policy is an issue that hits on identity, or that Team Trump is not wild about immigrants. But understanding Trump’s immigration policies as a full-scale revolt against rising numbers of foreign-born Americans helps explain what is happening: Controversial immigration policies that would limit both legal and illegal immigration, often combined with rhetoric designed to cast immigrants, usually falsely, as a criminal or national security threat.

America is in the midst of an immigrant boom, by historical standards. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 14 percent of Americans, about 44 million people, are foreign-born. Those numbers are up from 2000, when about 11 percent of the population (31 million Americans) were foreign-born. The foreign-born population had hit almost 15 percent at its peak around 1890, but it dipped below 5 percent by the 1970s. So it is quite high now (compared to the past 50 years), and the Census Bureau estimates it will hit 15 percent again over the next decade.

If you think of stopping the growth in the foreign-born population as the unifying goal — rather than strengthening national security or promoting law enforcement — then Trump’s immigration agenda hangs together more clearly. The steps taken or proposed by the administration, such ending DACA and sharply curtailing refugee admissions, are likely to result in: some foreign-born people currently in the U.S. being forced to return to their home countries, including highly skilled tech workers; those who remain here having a harder time helping relatives come to the country; fewer refugees ever entering in the first place; and some immigrants who got citizenship having it revoked.

Reducing the nation’s foreign-born population is also an issue the president’s allies talked about before they entered the government.

“It’s important to understand that historically speaking, that immigration is supposed to be interrupted with periods of assimilation and integration,” senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller said in a radio interview in 2016, according to Vox.

“We should follow America’s history, and the history of America is that an immigration-on period is followed by an immigration-off period,” he added.

The Center for Immigration Studies — a D.C.-based think tank that describes itself as “low-immigration, pro-immigrant” and has close ties to the Trump administration — and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have also long lamented the growth in the immigrant population overall.

And most Republican voters want less immigration. According to Gallup, most Republicans want the number of immigrants to go down, while Democrats are both less concerned about immigration overall and increasingly opposed to reducing the number of immigrants. Almost 80 percent of Democrats think immigrants strengthen the country, according to a 2016 Pew Research Center poll, compared to about a third of Republicans.

So why doesn’t Team Trump just say that it wants to limit the foreign-born population? Well, some members do, particularly Miller. But I suspect that you don’t hear that sort of justification more often because focusing on the raw number of immigrants would be viewed as racist. And it might be racist. The majority of immigrants in the U.S. today are from Asia and Latin America.

I simply don’t know if Miller or Sessions would be as concerned about an immigration boom if the people entering the U.S. were British, French or German. Trump reportedly suggested he would like more immigrants from Norway, a heavily white nation. So that’s a clue. And a 2016 poll from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution showed that a majority of Republicans thought immigration levels were too high for people from Central America and Mexico, the Middle East, and predominantly Muslim nations, but less than half of Republicans felt that way about Asia (despite high immigration levels from that region in recent years), Africa, Europe or mostly Christian areas.

In any case, not talking about the true roots of the administration’s immigration policy has costs. Some of those costs were clear when Sessions cited Romans to suggest that separating kids from their parents was supported by the Bible. Unable to say, “We want fewer foreign-born Americans, full stop,” the Trump administration is instead constantly making arguments that don’t withstand much scrutiny. White House chief of staff John Kelly suggested last month that recent immigrants are struggling to “assimilate” into U.S. society. A 2015 study, however, found that new immigrants are learning English and taking other steps to integrate into American culture just as quickly as past generations of immigrants did. But does Kelly really think new immigrants coming to the U.S. can’t assimilate, or does he oppose additional immigrants coming to the country and think that talking about assimilation is a more politically palatable way to defend this position?

The other problem with not having a debate about what really seems to be driving the administration’s immigration policies is that we don’t know whether Democrats (at least Democratic elites) are comfortable with growth in the foreign-born population and what, if any, new immigration limits they would back. Do they support the gradual increase in the number of immigrants that the Census Bureau projects we will see? Would they support a larger increase? Do they view the future U.S. as a more racially mixed place with no one group forming a majority — like California — or as a majority-white nation? How do they want immigration policy enforced, and should that change dramatically from now on, as some activists in the party call for the abolition of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency?

I doubt this debate over the foreign-born population will emerge publicly and directly. It’s a bit challenging for both sides — particularly the Republicans. But it would be ideal if we had an argument over what we are actually arguing about, instead of having Trump make misleading claims about immigration, which fact-checkers then criticize, while the president avoids mentioning the values and goals that I think are actually undergirding the administration’s immigration policies.

What else you should read

I can’t think of anyone who follows the day-to-day details of Trump’s immigration policy better than Vox’s Dara Lind does. She is particularly good at explaining exactly how Trump’s policies differ from those of former President Barack Obama (whose administration deported more than 2 million people) and when they actually aren’t all that different. Follow her on Twitter ( @DLind). She is one of my must-reads.

One more person to follow. Trump’s policy on separating children from parents is generating strong opposition across the religious community (leaders of Catholic, evangelical Christian, Jewish and Muslim organizations are among the critics), and Religion News Service’s Jack Jenkins (@jackmjenkins) is covering that story closely. And he’s great overall on the intersection of religion and politics.

California Sunday interviewed a variety of people in (from high school teachers to leaders at venture capital firms) about the under-representation of people of color and women in the tech industry. This is a very familiar issue for the tech industry (and many others), but this range of perspectives was unique.

This new data about Harvard’s admissions policies and how they appear to negatively affect Asian-Americans was compelling and is likely to lead to sharp criticism of the university.

By the numbers

Up to 50,000 people each week attend services at Houston’s Lakewood Church, according to a Houston Chronicle article. And unlike many American Christian churches, which are typically still dominated by one racial group or another, Lakewood (which is non-denominational) has substantial blocs of Asian, black, Latino and white congregants. Lakewood’s services are also broadcast nationally, drawing an estimated 10 million viewers each week. That reach — in Houston and nationally — has made Lakewood’s lead pastor, Joel Osteen, an influential figure in American Christianity. But Osteen is also controversial — because of another figure mentioned in that Chronicle story: $12 million, the value of the home Osteen lives in, according to the article. His critics view Osteen as a symbol of a vein of American Christianity too focused on material wealth. It’s worth checking out the Chronicle’s recent three-part series on Osteen and Lakewood.

If you have ideas for this column, you can reach me via e-mail ([email protected]) or Twitter (@perrybaconjr).

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

[orbemnews]

What Some Companies Are Saying About Back-to-Office Plans: Live Updates Here’s what you need to know: Some big employers are making plans to call employees back to the office, but others are waiting.Credit…Gregg Vigliotti for The New York Times At one point the target was the start of 2021. Then it was bumped to July. Now September is the new date that many companies have circled on the calendar for bringing back office workers who have been working remotely for the past year. Maybe. Companies are wary of setting hard deadlines, recent reporting by The New York Times found. Some corporations are reopening offices in the spring, and many are saying they will remain flexible, staging returns over several months and planning to allow some workers to continue to work from home. As nerve-racking as it was last year to be abruptly torn from their desks, many people find the prospect of returning distressing. Here is what some of the country’s biggest companies are telling their workers. IBM IBM, which employs about 346,000 people, hasn’t set a strict timeline for when its U.S. workers will return to the office. It expects about 80 percent of its employees to work with some combination of remote and office schedules, depending largely on role. JPMorgan Chase The bank, which has more than 20,000 office employees in New York City, has told employees that the five-day office workweek is a relic. The bank is considering a rotational work model, meaning employees would rotate between working remotely and in the office. PricewaterhouseCoopers The consulting firm, which has about 284,000 employees, is set to open one office in each of its major cities in May, and all of its offices in September. Even when the offices are formally reopened, PwC will allow some workers, depending on their job, to work remotely at least part time. Walmart Most of Walmart’s 1.5 million employees work at the retail giant’s stores, and a vast number have continued to go in to their workplace throughout the pandemic. It said on March 12 that it would start bringing workers back at its Bentonville, Ark., office campus no earlier than July. Its global technology employees will continue to work virtually “for the long term.” Wells Fargo At Wells Fargo, 60,000 employees have worked at bank branches and other facilities during the pandemic, but 200,000 more have worked remotely. The company told its staff in a memo last month that it had set a Sept. 6 return-to-office target and was “optimistic” that conditions surrounding Covid-19 vaccinations and case levels would allow it to keep it. GameStop said it would sell additional stock, up to 3.5 million shares, to finance its move online retailing and to support its finances.Credit…Carlo Allegri/Reuters Wall Street is poised to begin the week on an upswing, with futures pointing to a 0.3 percent rise in the S&P 500. Asian markets also gained in the wake of Friday’s U.S. jobs report, which marked a bigger-than-expected surge in hiring last month. The Nikkei index in Japan rose 0.8 percent, to its highest level since mid March, and the Kospi index in South Korea gained 0.3 percent. Stock markets were closed for holidays in China, Hong Kong and much of Europe. Digesting the jobs report The Labor Department on Friday reported U.S. employers added 916,000 jobs in March, the biggest jump since August, and the unemployment rate fell to 6 percent. The news exceeded expectations, and the gains were broad based, with hiring in the hospitality, retailing and transportation sectors all rising. Adding some uncertainty to the bullish numbers is a rise in coronavirus cases in the United States after weeks of decline. But as Ben Casselman reported in The New York Times: “Few economists expect a repeat of the winter, when a spike in Covid-19 cases pushed the recovery into reverse. More than a quarter of U.S. adults have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, and more than two million people a day are being inoculated.” Bonds and oil Yields on 10-year Treasury notes, which have been on an upward trajectory since October, have stabilized over the last few days. On Monday the yield was down slightly to 1.71 percent. Oil prices fell. Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell 1.9 percent to $63.40 a barrel, and West Texas Intermediate slipped 1.8 percent. Traders have been adjusting their positions since last Thursday’s decision by OPEC and its allies to slowly relax curbs on output. Those controls were put in place in response to the sharp decline in oil demand during the pandemic. Companies GameStop said Monday that it would sell up to 3.5 million additional shares to “further accelerate its transformation” and to strengthen its balance sheet. The struggling bricks-and-mortar retailer, which found itself at the center of a trading frenzy in January, is aiming to become more of an online operation. Additional shares would dilute the ownership of its existing investors — and GameStop’s shares fell more than 10 percent in premarket trading. Air France on Monday is expected to announce it has accepted a government-backed refinance package. Aid for the struggling carrier has been the subject of talks between French government and European Union officials, and on Sunday Bruno LeMaire, the French finance minister, said the basic terms of a deal had been reached, Reuters reported. Shaundell Newsome of Small Business for America’s Future said changes were needed throughout the banking industry to improve outcomes for Black owners.Credit…Bridget Bennett for The New York Times The government’s central small business relief effort, the Paycheck Protection Program, has made $734 billion in forgivable loans to nearly seven million businesses. But minority-owned businesses were disproportionately underserved by the program, a New York Times analysis found. “The focus at the outset was on speed, and it came at the expense of equity,” said Ashley Harrington, the federal advocacy director at the Center for Responsible Lending. The aid program’s rules were mostly written on the fly, and reaching harder-to-serve businesses was an afterthought. Structural barriers and complicated, shifting requirements contributed to a skewed outcome, The New York Times’s Stacy Cowley reports. In the program’s final weeks — it is scheduled to stop taking applications on May 31 — President Biden’s administration has tried to alter its trajectory with rule changes intended to funnel more money toward businesses led by women and minorities. But those revisions have run into their own obstacles, including the speed with which they were rushed through. Lenders, caught off guard, have struggled to carry them out. “Historically, access to capital has been the leading concern of women- and minority-owned businesses to survive, and during this pandemic it has been no different,” Jenell Ross, who owns an auto dealership, told a House committee. The United States is particularly important to the world economy because it has long spent more than it sells.Credit…Scott McIntyre for The New York Times The United States and its record-setting stimulus spending could help haul a weakened Europe and struggling developing countries out of their own economic morass. American buyers are spurring demand for German cars, Australian wine, Mexican auto parts and French fashions. And many Americans have spent their stimulus checks on video game consoles, exercise bicycles or other products made in China. The United States’ comparatively fast recovery involved a little bit of luck — new variants of the virus have just begun to push domestic infections higher — and a large policy response, including more than $5 trillion in debt-fueled pandemic relief, The New York Times’s Jeanna Smialek and Jack Ewing report. “When the U.S. economy is strong, that strength tends to support global activity as well,” said Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve. But some hazards lurk. The slow pace of the European Union’s vaccination campaign will probably hurt its economy. Poorer and smaller countries, facing severely limited vaccine supplies and fewer resources to support government spending, are likely to struggle to stage an economic turnaround even if the U.S. recovery increases demand for their exports. Chocolate is Britain’s second-largest food and drink export, after whiskey.Credit…Tom Jamieson for The New York Times Small British chocolate makers emphasizing ethically sourced ingredients and bespoke batches became big sellers in Europe in recent years but have been nearly impossible to find there since January, David Segal reports for The New York Times. “We have customers complain to us all the time, ‘Why can’t I buy my favorite British chocolate?’” said Hishem Ferjani, the founder of Choco Dealer in Bonn, Germany, which supplies grocery stores and sells through its own website. “We have store owners with empty shelves.” “We have to explain, it’s not our fault, it’s not the fault of the producer. It’s Brexit,” he said. Chocolate is Britain’s No. 2 food and drink export, after whiskey, according to the Food and Drink Federation. Chocolate exports to all countries hit $1.1 billion last year, and Europe accounts for about 70 percent of those sales. In January, exports of British chocolate to Europe fell 68 percent compared with the same period the year before. The trade deal struck late last year with the European Union has not saved British companies from a maddening, unpredictable array of time-consuming, morale-sapping procedures and from stacks of paperwork that have turned exporting to the E.U. into a sort of black-box mystery. Goods go in and there is no telling when they will come out. Source link Orbem News #BacktoOffice #Companies #Live #plans #Updates

[newstfionline]

Tuesday, February 9, 2021

Next stop Mars: 3 spacecraft arriving in quick succession (AP) After hurtling hundreds of millions of miles through space since last summer, three robotic explorers are ready to hit the brakes at Mars. The United Arab Emirates’ orbiter reaches Mars on Tuesday, followed less than 24 hours later by China’s orbiter-rover combo. NASA’s rover, the cosmic caboose, will arrive on the scene a week later, on Feb. 18, to collect rocks for return to Earth—a key step in determining whether life ever existed at Mars. Both the UAE and China are newcomers at Mars, where more than half of Earth’s emissaries have failed. China’s first Mars mission, a joint effort with Russia in 2011, never made it past Earth’s orbit. All three spacecraft rocketed away within days of one another last July, during an Earth-to-Mars launch window that occurs only every two years. That’s why their arrivals are also close together.

Around the globe, virus cancels spring travel for millions (AP) They are the annual journeys of late winter and early spring: Factory workers in China heading home for the Lunar New Year; American college students going on road trips and hitting the beach over spring break; Germans and Britons fleeing drab skies for some Mediterranean sun over Easter. All of it canceled, in doubt or under pressure because of the coronavirus. Amid fears of new variants of the virus, new restrictions on movement have hit just as people start to look ahead to what is usually a busy time of year for travel. It means more pain for airlines, hotels, restaurants and tourist destinations that were already struggling more than a year into the pandemic, and a slower recovery for countries where tourism is a big chunk of the economy.

AP-NORC poll: Few in US say democracy is working very well (AP) Only a fragment of Americans believe democracy is thriving in the U.S., even as broad majorities agree that representative government is one of the country’s bedrock principles, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Just 16% of Americans say democracy is working well or extremely well, a pessimism that spans the political spectrum. Nearly half of Americans, 45%, think democracy isn’t functioning properly, while another 38% say it’s working only somewhat well. The poll’s findings are broadly consistent with how Americans graded democracy before the election. But there are signs that Trump’s attacks on the democratic process, including his repeated argument that the election was “stolen” because of voter irregularities, resonated with Republicans.

Schools plan for potential of remote learning into the fall (AP) Parents of schoolchildren learning from home shouldn’t necessarily count on reclaiming the dining room table any time soon. After seeing two academic years thrown off course by the pandemic, school leaders around the country are planning for the possibility of more distance learning next fall at the start of yet another school year. “We have no illusions that COVID will be eradicated by the time the start of the school year comes up,” said William “Chip” Sudderth III, a spokesperson for Durham, North Carolina schools, whose students have been out of school buildings since March. President Joe Biden has made reopening schools a top priority, but administrators say there is much to consider as new strains of the coronavirus appear and teachers wait their turn for vaccinations. And while many parents are demanding that schools fully reopen, others say they won’t feel safe sending children back to classrooms until vaccines are available to even young students.

2nd major snowstorm in a week blankets Northeast (AP) A major snowstorm pushed through the Northeastern United States on Sunday, less than a week after a storm dumped more than 2 feet on parts of the region. By early afternoon, 5 to 7 inches had already fallen in parts of northwestern New Jersey and southwestern Connecticut. New York’s Central Park reported about 3 inches. The highest total was recorded in West Whiteland Township, west of Philadelphia, where about 9 inches had fallen. The National Weather Service predicted up to 8 inches of snow in New York City and 2 to 4 inches in Washington, D.C. Up to a foot was projected to fall on some areas along the Connecticut coastline.

Biden faces border challenge as migrant families arrive in greater numbers and large groups (Washington Post) President Biden’s more-welcoming message to immigrants is facing an immediate challenge along the Mexican border, where Central American families and children have been crossing in numbers that point to a building crisis. In recent days, U.S. authorities have seen the return of large groups of parents and children crossing the border in the darkness, a replay of scenes that occurred during the record influx of families who arrived in 2018 and 2019, overwhelming migrant shelters and Border Patrol stations. Republican critics of Biden say the new wave is the start of the crisis they have long predicted, invited by the new administration’s eager rejection of Trump’s deterrent approach. Yet Biden also inherited a highly improvised enforcement system from his predecessor that was already under strain and highly dependent on Trump’s diplomatic bullying of Mexico. Late last month, Mexican authorities in some areas of the border stopped taking back families returned by the United States under emergency pandemic health measures implemented last March. With the U.S. capacity to hold adults and children reduced by the pandemic and the temporary closure of the largest Border Patrol facility in South Texas, U.S. Customs and Border Protection began dropping families off at bus stations and shelters last week.

Ecuador’s election (Foreign Policy) Ecuador’s presidential election is set to go to a second round after early returns showed a split electorate. Leftist Andrés Arauz leads the count with 31.5 percent of the vote, while his closest challengers Guillermo Lasso and Yaku Pérez both received roughly 20 percent. As the margin between them is so tight, it’s not yet clear whether Lasso or Pérez will face Arauz in the April 11 runoff.

Brexit growing pains (Foreign Policy) Exports from the United Kingdom to the European Union fell by 68 percent in January, according to a trade group representing British truck drivers. The Road Haulage Association (RHA) attributed the drop to trade disruptions due to the end of the Brexit transition period, although the British government has said border friction has been “minimal.” The news comes as EU and U.K. representatives meet this week to discuss extending post-Brexit grace periods on the trade of certain goods.

‘Al desko’ (Foreign Policy) The French labor ministry says it will soon relax a ban on workers eating lunch at their desks in order to enforce social distancing regulations. France’s labor laws currently forbid employees from eating “al desko” and companies face financial penalties if inspectors catch them flouting the law. The country’s strict labor rights include a 2017 law that allows workers to ignore work e-mails outside of normal working hours. “We French and you Americans have totally different ideas about work,” Agnès Dutin, a retired Parisian, told the New York Times. “It’s a catastrophe to eat at your desk. You need a pause to refresh the mind. It’s good to move your body. When you return, you see things differently.”

Russia considering at least $6.7 billion spending package to ease discontent (Reuters) Russian authorities are considering a new social spending package worth at least $6.7 billion to address discontent over falling living standards before an autumn election, according to two government sources. The package, which one of the sources said President Vladimir Putin was likely to unveil in an annual speech to senior political figures in coming weeks, follows unsanctioned nationwide protests last month that hit the value of the rouble. The two government sources, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media, told Reuters the spending package was meant to make people feel the authorities are aware of their financial concerns and are doing something to help them.

Myanmar junta imposes curfew, meeting bans as protests swell (AP) Myanmar’s new military rulers on Monday signaled their intention to crack down on opponents of their takeover, issuing decrees that effectively banned peaceful public protests in the country’s two biggest cities. The restrictive measures were ordered after police fired water cannons at hundreds of protesters in the Myanmar capital, Naypyitaw, who were demanding the military hand power back to elected officials. It was just one of many demonstrations around the country. Rallies and gatherings of more than five people, along with motorized processions, were banned, and an 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. curfew was imposed for areas of Yangon and Mandalay, the country’s first- and second-biggest cities, where thousands of people have been demonstrating since Saturday. The growing wave of defiance—particularly in Naypyitaw, where such protests are unusual—was striking in a country where demonstrations have been met with severe force in the past.

Iran: US must lift sanctions before it lives up to nuke deal (AP) Iran’s supreme leader on Sunday urged the United States to lift all sanctions if it wants Iran to live up to commitments under its nuclear deal with world powers, state TV reported, but President Joe Biden says the U.S. won’t be making the first move. “If (the U.S.) wants Iran to return to its commitments, it must lift all sanctions in practice, then we will do verification … then we will return to our commitments,” state TV quoted Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as saying, in his first comments on the matter since Biden took office. Biden rejected the idea in a “CBS Evening News” interview taped Friday and airing Sunday. Former President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the U.S. in 2018 from the atomic deal, which saw Iran agree to limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Biden has said he will seek to revive the deal, but insisted that Iran must first reverse its nuclear steps, creating a contest of wills between the nations.

Israel’s Netanyahu walks out on his own corruption trial (Washington Post) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told judges in a Jerusalem court on Monday that he is innocent of corruption charges before abruptly standing, saying “thank you very much” and leaving with his motorcade. Netanyahu quit the courtroom some 20 minutes after the start of Monday morning’s hearing, which continued on without him. The sessions kick-started the second phase of a precedent-setting legal procedure, which, for the first time, involves the indictment of an Israeli prime minister while still in office and campaigning for elections in the coming weeks—the fourth in two years.

Congo working to stop new Ebola outbreak in country’s east (AP) Health officials in Congo confirmed another Ebola outbreak in the country’s east on Sunday, the fourth in less than three years. On February 3, a woman died in Butembo town in North Kivu province, Minister of Health Eteni Longondo announced. This is the 12th outbreak in conflict-ridden Congo since the virus was first discovered in the country in 1976, and comes less than three months after an outbreak in the western province of Equateur, officially ended in November. The 2018 outbreak in Eastern Congo was the second deadliest in the world, killing 2,299 people before it ended in June. That outbreak lasted for nearly two years and was fought amid unprecedented challenges, including entrenched conflict between armed groups, the world’s largest measles epidemic, and the spread of COVID-19.

#headlines #news

[nieuwsuitdejungle]

Blog Post Two

Sunday 19th November

“Just occasionally you find yourself in an odd situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural way but when you are right in the midst of it you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about.” – Thor Heyerdahl 

The Prologue

Let me first provide you with a little background story on the Grande Synthe Jungle (which is where our team mostly operates on the ground) and the role of the Refugee Women Centre, in the hope that my future blog posts will make a bit more sense.

In March 2016 France’s first ever refugee camp to meet international humanitarian standards opened near the northers port of Dunkirk called Linière. The medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) had built around 200-375 cabins at the Grande-Synthe site to house 2,500 people based there in the hope of reaching Britain. Most of those migrants – mainly Kurds from Iraq – had been living for months in atrocious conditions in the boggy, rat-infested camp of Grande-Synthe. Damien Careme, the local Green mayor, had fought for the right to build the new camp against the wishes of the French government, which had refused to pay a centime towards it.

Three Iraqi Kurd families were the first to be bussed to the new site, whose wooden cabins boasted proper lavatories, heating, a collective kitchen, public lighting and a field hospital but no fences. The camp also had no police controls to enter or exit, with authorities hoping this would make it easier to persuade migrants to move in.  

The Refugee Women Centre has been present in Grande Synthe even before this first official camp. In 2015, in the first camp of Grande Synthe, Baroch, women would rarely – if ever – leave their tents, because they were either felt uncomfortable with the conditions in the camp or were not allowed by their husbands to go to the social spaces that weren’t female-only. This led to the creation and opening of a first Women’s Centre in two parts: one tent for the distribution of women’s clothing and hygiene products and another to serve as a social space where activities would be organised.

Based on this idea, a Women’s Centre was officially integrated in the planning of the Linière camp in the spring of 2016. The Women’s Centre was a community kitchen reserved for women, and their children if they wanted, in which volunteers would organise material distributions, activities, an generally provide a space in which women could spend time.

The overall management of the camp was initially handed to Utopia 56, a French organization that ran the day-to-day activities of the camp overall and ensured the presence of volunteers in different areas. This included the Women’s Centre. At the end of the summer 2016, the management of the camp was given to a different organization called Afeji, who only did general management, but didn’t place their employees in specific sections of the camp.

This is when independent volunteers arrived, during the Autumn and Winter of 2016, to take care of the Women’s Centre, and to ensure the continuation of the activities and distributions that were taking place until then. Those volunteers redefined the workings of the centre, boosted the activities and interactions between the women living in the camp and the volunteers, developed its support network around Dunkirk and abroad, and officially created the Refugee Women’s Centre as an independent charity.

Since the fire that destroyed the camp in April 2017, the Women’s Centre has gone mobile. Using a van, blankets and sometimes a tarp to create temporary safe spaces, the team on the ground continues to provide close support to female refugees in Dunkirk, and has more recently started to do so in Calais as well.

Week One statistics

Number of days I’ve been here: 7

Number of showers I’ve had: 2

Number of times I’ve wondered why on earth I came to this place: 0

Number of therapy sessions I’ve been to: 2

Number of cats currently in the mobile home: 4

Number of truly amazing and inspiring people I’ve met: countless

Number of bonfire-on-the-beach-sessions: 1

My first week of being in Northern France is almost over. Time to try and tell you about my experiences so far. I say try, since I clearly underestimated writing a blog, or frankly writing anything. Getting my thoughts on paper feels like a diabolic task. I’ve been struggling with this post for well over a week now. In the end I’ve decided to stop editing and rewriting. Here is the raw version, that might well leave you in the same confused state of mind I was and to some extend still am.

Let me start by telling you about what my housing situation looks like. I live with 5 truly amazing young women (and four cats) in a teeny tiny mobile home on a camping site by a slightly muddy but gorgeous beach. It’s about 11 degrees Celsius during the day and 5 degrees Celsius by night. The mobile home is our cabin, our shelter. It’s where our team catches up on the day’s events, cooks dinner and share beers. It’s a warm, cosy, chaotic space lit by candles. There is very little room with food, boxes of children’s activities and personal paraphernalia littering every surface. Moving around feels like playing real life Tetris with human beings as the tiles. The shower was broken for the first five days of my time here which means we were using bottles of hot water from the kettle to wash ourselves whilst we waited for the campsite owner to come fix it. I took my second shower of the week this morning, and let me tell you, it was amazing. Not showering for five days after being outside in the cold basically all day is a true gift.

The thing about arriving in a new place, is that you need to figure out how everything works. It’s like being in a dark cave with only a lighter to help you see. You need to find patterns, familiar faces and structures. Last year I arrived in Hamburg after the summer to study there for a year. Which was a completely new city for me and I didn’t know anybody there. However, it was still a place where I knew the language and things soon felt familiar. This new place however, is next-level-new. I went here with a very open mind. Of course I did do some research on the situation, but that didn’t prepare me.

Writing a comprehensive blog post on my first week in this state of mind, where I’m still trying to figure out everything is thus also quite a task. So forgive me if this post is very much all over the place. It feels like I’m making a really big puzzle, but I don’t have all the pieces yet.

This place feels like dystopian novel, as someone here accurately described it. And I’m now living in it. A place where the biggest supermarket I’ve ever seen is only a couple of hundred meters away from the jungle. A place where children of only two years old are sleeping outside in the cold and rain. Where the police takes any blankets or sleeping bags they find or spray them with pepper spray to render them useless. From where you can literally see the white cliffs of Dover, that are so close for some, but almost unreachable for others. Where asking the question ‘can you check if we have more sleeping bags for children’ is now the most ordinary thing. Where hotels refuse to rent out a room to a couple with a two year old because they are migrants. A place where people as young as 18 years old volunteer to try to make a difference and show some humanity. A place where trench foot has returned to the front of Dunkirk, and scabies is the order of the day. Where days off are as holy and precious as they are difficult. Where contrasts are so big, it seems as if we are living in a parallel world, like none of this is actually real. A place that I’m falling both in and out of love with more and more every day.

I’m writing this post on my second day off. We take our days off very seriously here. I slept in which felt reenergizing, had a home-cooked lunch and then headed for the beach. Our cabin is only a few hundred meters from the sea which has basically been my lifelong dream. I went for a long walk by myself hoping that this would provide me some time to get my thoughts into order. The beach here is stunning, the sun was out and the only sound I heard was the waves crushing on the shore.

I ran through this first mind-boggling week in my head. Starting on Tuesday when I first encountered the jungle in Grande-Synthe, to Thursday when I got to know so many different life saving organisations working on the ground and Saturday when we did administration and coordinated a dentist session in the jungle.

Every morning I wake up to wrap myself up in fleecy layers, pull my trusty fanny pack a little closer round my waist, get some breakfast inside of me and head of to the jungle with the team. We mostly operate in the jungle of Grande Synthe which is located close to Dunkirk. We start by preparing the orders we took the previous day in the warehouse we share with other organizations. These orders mostly consist of clothes and hygiene products. After that we take our van into the jungle to see what the situation is like, hand out orders, take new orders and do activities with the kids and the women, creating a safe space for them. There are around 200 young men living in the jungle and about seven families with little children (however, the numbers change every day).

The situation in the jungle has been changing quite a bit over the past few weeks. The police are carrying out major evictions in the jungle lately. Most, but not all the families have been bussed out to reception centres. No one knows exactly where they’ve gone.The single men mostly remain. The State wants people gone, out of the jungle, they slash tents and take possessions, but many refugees return. While some will claim asylum in France many wish to reach family or friends in the UK. The evictions mean that our team now also visits families in accommodation to provide them with the things they need.

My first encounter with the jungle was on Tuesday. After driving our van through the misty fields of Northern France, just in time to see the breath-taking sunrise we arrived at the warehouse from where we operate. With the team we walked from the warehouse to the jungle. Since it was still fairly early, not that many people were around (most people try to make it to the UK at night and then try to sleep a bit after that, which means people won’t really be around until midday). The busses were already waiting to take people into accommodation centres. We asked around whether people were getting on the bus or not and tried to make sure the ones who wanted actually got on the bus. We also took some orders and then headed back to the warehouse to prepare them. After which we returned with our van to play with the kids and distribute.

And yes, yes it is striking to see how two year olds are sleeping outside with these temperatures, how a nine year old who speaks perfect English comes to pick up his mum’s order and hands us back a bag full of warm blankets because they already have some. It’s truly heart-breaking to see people living in these conditions. Every day new people amongst which many unaccompanied minors arrive at the jungle. A seventeen year old boy came up to me and asked me for a sleeping bag. He just arrived in the jungle and  the only thing that would provide him warmth that night was his thin jacket, he looked desperate, out of place and cold. I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that there are so many unaccompanied minors in the jungle. This is reality, this is happening in Europe, this is what is happening right here in Northern France.

In the afternoon we went to the warehouse of Help Refugees (one of the biggest organisations helping refugees in Northern France and other places in Europe) that is located in Calais, to pick up stuff for our afternoon distribution for women in the jungle Calais (about which I will tell you more about later). We returned to the warehouse in Calais in the evening for a training session with the amazing Dr. Lynne Jones who is a child and adolescent psychiatrist, writer, researcher, and relief worker. We did a ‘personal resilience and supporting others’ training session in which we learned a lot about our work on the ground and how we as volunteers can do it better. I feel like it’s so good to reflect on our work and take some time to understand why we are doing what we are doing and how this affects the people around us, but also how we can justify ourselves and to trust our ability to help others. About working with people who have lost so much and have no certainty considering their future whatsoever.

My other therapy session of the week was on Friday, where me and other members of the team met up with ‘the refugee resilience collective’. They support volunteers in the traumatic and stressful situations in which they are operating. It’s great to experience that also as a volunteer there are places you can go when you want to talk since this is clearly not your ordinary moonlight job. The thing that has actually struck me the most this week is the warmth and resilience of everyone I’ve met here. That is the refugee women, children and men I met, but also all the volunteers. People are so caring. From other volunteers bringing you a warm lunch during therapy, to unexpected smiles, hugs and encouragements. One of the men in Grande Synthe asked me if we get paid to do this work, and when I said we didn’t, he looked at me in surprise and told me he was so happy that humanity still exists.

The team of lovely ladies I work with are also an absolute dream. Going home to our cabin in the evenings feels so safe. Having these miraculously resilient and kind-hearted bundles of joy around me fills me with warmth. We share our highs and lows of the day, eat delicious home cooked meals, read, write, drink, watch documentaries and have conversations about both world problems and spirit animals. We make bonfires on the beach, look at the stars and dream of brighter futures for this planet and the humans that inhabit it.

I’ll leave it here for now, thank you for making it this far. Even though I deeply want to share more experiences, I feels as if I lack the vocabulary to express them and I’ve already used so many words to puzzle this together. In my next post I will write on difficult distributions, my one day trip to Dover and home cooked falafel dinners.

[orbemnews]

A Return to Wall Street’s Low-Rent District Penny stocks are back Of all the trading manias in recent months — Bitcoin, SPACs, meme stocks, nonfungible tokens — the latest has a long history of fraud and scandal. That’s right, penny stocks are booming, according to The Times’s Matt Phillips, who visited the “low-rent district of Wall Street.” There were 1.9 trillion transactions last month on the over-the-counter markets, where such stocks trade, according to the industry regulator Finra. That’s up more than 2,000 percent from a year earlier, driven in large part by the surge in retail trading — enabled by commission-free trading from online brokerages — that has also stoked the frenzy for shares in GameStop and other speculative assets. Penny stocks have always lent themselves to quick fortunes, given that small inflows to these low-priced, thinly traded shares can make prices go berserk. That also makes them prone to fraud like pump and dumps, updated for the modern age with schemes hatched on social media. “It’s all just a pool filled with sharks,” said Urska Velikonja, a law professor at Georgetown. “It’s where the unwary go to get eaten.” Penny-stock frenzies are common in raging bull markets. The current fervor among retail traders presents unnerving echoes from the past, according to Tyler Gellasch of the nonprofit Healthy Markets Association. Based on the scale of the recent mania, “the only relevant historical precedent seems to increasingly be the days before the Great Depression,” he said. Take it from Jordan Belfort, of “The Wolf of Wall Street.” “Everyone wants to get rich,” Mr. Belfort, a former “boiler-room” operator who pleaded guilty to market manipulation, told Matt, “and they want to get rich quick.” He added that an element of naïveté underpinned such trading: “We all want to believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and Bernie Madoff.” HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING The Fed keeps its policies steady. As expected, the central bank left interest rates at rock-bottom levels, despite improving economic growth forecasts. But the Upshot’s Neil Irwin notes that it may become harder for Jay Powell, the Fed chair, to wave away criticism of those who think monetary policy is too loose. The I.R.S. delays the tax filing deadline. Americans have until May 17 to file their federal income taxes, a delay meant to help people cope with the pandemic’s economic upheaval and account for changes from the rescue plan. Credit Suisse overhauls its business after the Greensill scandal. The Swiss bank will separate its asset-management division, replace its chief and suspend bonuses over the unit’s role in financing Greensill Capital, the supply-chain financing lender that collapsed this month. Gasoline may have hit its peak. Global demand may never return to pre-pandemic levels, the International Energy Agency said, as more electric vehicles hit the roads and transportation habits change. Use may rise for a bit in places like China and India, but overall consumption in industrialized economies will fall by 2023. Senate confirms President Biden’s top trade official. Katherine Tai will become the U.S. trade representative. She is a prominent critic of China’s trade practices, signaling that the White House won’t completely walk back the Trump administration’s tough stance. Top U.S. officials are to meet their Chinese counterparts for the first time today, at a summit meeting in Alaska. Google is doubling down on office space Google said today that it planned to invest $7 billion in offices and data centers in 19 U.S. states, making it the latest tech giant to expand its footprint while other companies retrench in a commercial real estate market roiled by the pandemic. Google’s C.E.O., Sundar Pichai, shared the plans in a blog post, saying that the move would create 10,000 jobs at the company this year. (Alphabet, Google’s parent company, employed around 135,000 people at the end of 2020.) Google is expanding across the country. The plan includes investments in data centers in places like Nebraska, South Carolina and Texas. The company recently opened its first office in Minnesota and an operations center in Mississippi. It will open its first office in Houston this year. “Coming together in person to collaborate and build community is core to Google’s culture,” Mr. Pichai wrote. Google was one of the first companies to tell employees to work from home, and it expects workers to begin returning to offices in September. When that happens, it will test a “flexible workweek,” with employees spending at least three days a week in the office. “Many have framed the GameStop mania as a David versus Goliath struggle. I believe it is more likely that, when we have full information about this episode, the story will more closely resemble Goliath vs. Goliath.” — Alexis Goldstein, a senior policy analyst for Americans for Financial Reform, at a Congressional hearing which focused on the relationship between brokers like Robinhood and market makers like Citadel Securities. Charting the blank-check boom SPACs have already raised more money this year than in all of 2020, setting a record for blank-check deal volume. More than $84 billion has been raised by 264 SPACs to date, according to Dealogic, compared with $83 billion raised by 256 acquisition vehicles last year. SPACs sitting on some $135 billion are currently seeking takeover targets, according to SPAC Research. Since they typically buy companies five times their size, that implies buying power of well over $600 billion, setting up a scramble for deals within the two-year window written into the rules of most SPACs. Lordstown Motors, an electric vehicle company that went public via SPAC last year, said yesterday that it was cooperating with an S.E.C. inquiry, after a short seller accused it of misleading investors about its business prospects. The S.E.C.’s crypto commissioner Hester Peirce is one of the few financial regulators with an online fan base and a nickname. Known to some as “Crypto Mom,” she’s been raising the profile of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology since being appointed an S.E.C. commissioner in 2018. On “Blockchain Policy Matters,” an online show by the Blockchain Association, a trade group, Ms. Peirce described her hopes for innovation and regulation of the crypto world. DealBook got a preview of the show, which posts today. “Everyone is getting smarter on this stuff,” Ms. Peirce said of regulators considering crypto issues. Engaging more with the private sector “can help us regulators sharpen our thinking,” she said, which could be “more nuanced.” “We’ve dug ourselves into a little bit of a hole,” Ms. Pierce said of the S.E.C.’s refusal thus far to approve a Bitcoin exchange traded fund. “A lot of people are looking for a way to access the asset class.” In the past month, three bitcoin E.T.F.s have begun trading in Canada. She welcomes Gary Gensler, the blockchain professor, as the agency’s next chief. President Biden’s pick to lead the S.E.C. has lectured on cryptocurrency and blockchain at M.I.T. since 2018. Ms. Peirce said she was “hopeful” that he will help the agency think “in a more sophisticated way.” She added that Mr. Gensler has “more inclination to regulate” than she does, but that she believes he’ can provide the regulatory clarity on crypto she has sought. Blockchain technology could address the issues raised by meme-stock mania. That includes “concerns around settlement times, tracking where shares are, and who owns what shares when,” Ms. Pierce said. Distributed ledger technology like blockchain could eliminate common failure points in the financial system, rather than centralizing them, Ms. Peirce said, adding: “I hope that a lot of that innovation happens in the private sector as opposed to us taking it over as a securities regulator.” THE SPEED READ Deals Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, said it had been valued at $68 billion in private markets before its direct listing next week. (Reuters) Talks to merge three companies owned by Vista Equity Partners and a SPAC backed by Apollo Global Management in a $15 billion deal have reportedly stalled over market volatility. (Bloomberg) HSBC is in talks to sell its French retail banking arm to an affiliate of Cerberus as it focuses on Asia. (FT) Politics and policy The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has created a team to assess the risks of climate change to futures and options markets. (WSJ) Democrats are betting on a corporate tax increase to pay for their infrastructure improvement bill. (Axios) British companies may face more restrictions on dividends and bonuses in a proposed overhaul of accounting rules. (FT) Tech Morgan Stanley is offering top wealth-management clients access to three investment funds linked to Bitcoin, a first by a U.S. bank. (CNBC) Amazon’s wage scale in Alabama may have left it vulnerable to a union. (NYT) On the “Sway” podcast, Brian Chesky of Airbnb speaks about trust, safety and being “completely speechless” on the day of the company’s I.P.O. (NYT Opinion) Best of the rest The pandemic has helped a 162-year-old German company that makes model trains discover a new audience. (NYT) An ancient mathematical pattern could predict the price of Bitcoin. (Fortune) This news article is a nonfungible token. (Quartz) We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected]. Source link Orbem News #District #LowRent #return #streets #Wall

[anastpaul]

Saint of the Day – 4 August – St Jean-Baptiste Marie Vianney T.O.S.F. – The Curé of Ars (Parish Priest of Ars) – Priest and Tertiary – (8 May 1786 at Dardilly, Lyons, France – 4 August 1859 at Ars, France of natural causes)   His body is interred in the basilica of Ars.   He was Canonised on 31 May 1925 by Pope Pius XI.  Patronages – confessors, priests (proclaimed on 23 April 1929 by Pope Pius XI), Personal Apostolic Administration of Saint John Mary Vianney, Dubuque, Iowa, archdiocese of, Kamloops, British Columbia, diocese of, Kansas City, Kansas, archdiocese of, Lafayette, Louisiana, diocese of, Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota, archdiocese of.  St John Vianney’s body is incorrupt.

Vianney was born on 8 May 1786, in the French town of Dardilly, France (near Lyon) and was baptised the same day. His parents, Matthieu Vianney and his wife Marie (Belize), had six children, of whom John was the fourth.   The Vianneys were devout Catholics, who helped the poor and gave hospitality to St Benedict Joseph Labre, the patron saint of tramps, who passed through Dardilly on his pilgrimage to Rome.

By 1790, the anticlerical Terror phase of the French Revolution forced many loyal priests to hide from the regime in order to carry out the sacraments in their parish.   Even though to do so had been declared illegal, the Vianneys traveled to distant farms to attend Masses celebrated by priests on the run.   Realising that such priests risked their lives day by day, Vianney began to look upon them as heroes.   He received his First Communion catechism instructions in a private home by two nuns whose communities had been dissolved during the Revolution.   He made his first communion at the age of 13 (normal in those times).   During the Mass, the windows were covered so that the light of the candles could not be seen from the outside.   His practice of the Faith continued in secret, especially during his preparation for confirmation.

The Catholic Church was re-established in France in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte, resulting in religious peace throughout the country, culminating in a Concordat.   By this time, Vianney was concerned about his future vocation and longed for an education.   He was 20 when his father allowed him to leave the farm to be taught at a “presbytery-school” in the neighboring village of Écully, conducted by the Abbé Balley.   The school taught arithmetic, history, geography and Latin.   Vianney struggled with school, especially with Latin, since his past education had been interrupted by the French Revolution.   Only because of Vianney’s deepest desire to be a priest—and Balley’s patience—did he persevere.

Vianney’s studies were interrupted in 1809 when he was drafted into Napoleon’s armies. He would have been exempt, as an ecclesiastical student but Napoleon had withdrawn the exemption in certain dioceses because of his need for soldiers in his fight against Spain.   Two days after he had to report at Lyons, he became ill and was hospitalised, during which time his draft left without him.   Once released from the hospital, on 5 January, he was sent to Roanne for another draft.   He went into a church to pray and fell behind the group.   He met a young man who volunteered to guide him back to his group but instead led him deep into the mountains of Le Forez, to the village of Les Noes, where deserters had gathered.   Vianney lived there for fourteen months, hidden in the byre attached to a farmhouse and under the care of Claudine Fayot, a widow with four children.   He assumed the name Jerome Vincent and under that name, he opened a school for village children.   Since the harsh weather isolated the town during the winter, the deserters were safe from gendarmes.   However, after the snow melted, gendarmes came to the town constantly, searching for deserters.   During these searches, Vianney hid inside stacks of fermenting hay in Fayot’s barn.

An imperial decree proclaimed in March 1810 granted amnesty to all deserters, which enabled Vianney to go back legally to Ecully, where he resumed his studies.   He was tonsured in 1811 and in 1812 he went to the minor seminary at Verrières-en-Forez.   In autumn of 1813, he was sent to the major seminary at Lyons.   Considered too slow, he was returned to Abbe Balley.   However, Balley persuaded the Vicar general that Vianney’s piety was great enough to compensate for his ignorance and the seminarian received minor orders and the subdiaconate on 2 July 1814, was ordained a deacon in June 1815 and was ordained priest on 12 August 1815 in the Couvent des Minimes de Grenoble.   He said his first Mass the next day and was appointed the assistant to Balley in Écully.

Curé of Ars In 1818, shortly after the death of Balley, Jean-Marie Vianney was appointed parish priest of the parish of Ars, a town of 230 inhabitants.    As parish priest, Vianney realised that the Revolution’s aftermath had resulted in religious ignorance and indifference, due to the devastation wrought on the Catholic Church in France.   At the time, Sundays in rural areas were spent working in the fields, or dancing and drinking in taverns.  Vianney spent time in the confessional and gave homilies against blasphemy and paganic dancing.   If his parishioners did not give up this dancing, he refused them absolution. Abbe Balley had been Vianney’s greatest inspiration, since he was a priest who remained loyal to his faith, despite the Revolution.   Vianney felt compelled to fulfill the duties of a curé, just as did Balley, even when it was illegal.   With Catherine Lassagne and Benedicta Lardet, he established La Providence, a home for girls. Only a man of vision could have such trust that God would provide for the spiritual and material needs of all those who came to make La Providence their home.

Later years Vianney came to be known internationally and people from distant places began traveling to consult him as early as 1827.   “By 1855, the number of pilgrims had reached 20,000 a year.   During the last ten years of his life, he spent 16 to 18 hours a day in the confessional.   Even the bishop forbade him to attend the annual retreats of the diocesan clergy because of the souls awaiting him yonder”.  His work as a confessor is John Vianney’s most remarkable accomplishment.   In the winter months he was to spend 11 to 12 hours daily reconciling people with God.   In the summer months this time was increased to 16 hours.   Unless a man was dedicated to his vision of a priestly vocation, he could not have endured this giving of self day after day.

Many people look forward to retirement and taking it easy, doing the things they always wanted to do but never had the time. But John Vianney had no thoughts of retirement.   As his fame spread, more hours were consumed in serving God’s people.   Even the few hours he would allow himself for sleep were disturbed frequently by the devil, who physically attacked and tormented St John and kept him from sleeping.

Vianney had a great devotion to St. Philomena.   He regarded her as his guardian and erected a chapel and shrine in honor of the saint.   During May 1843, Vianney fell so ill he thought that his life was coming to its end.   Vianney attributed his cure to her intercession.

Vianney yearned for the contemplative life of a monk and four times ran away from Ars, the last time in 1853.  St John Vianney read much and often the lives of the saints, and became so impressed by their holy lives that he wanted for himself and others to follow their wonderful examples.   The ideal of holiness enchanted him.   This was the theme which underlay his sermons.  “We must practice mortification. For this is the path which all the Saints have followed,” he said from the pulpit.   He placed himself in that great tradition which leads the way to holiness through personal sacrifice. “If we are not now saints, it is a great misfortune for us:  therefore we must be so.   As long as we have no love in our hearts, we shall never be Saints.”   The Saint, to him, was not an exceptional man before whom we should marvel but a possibility which was open to all Catholics.   Unmistakably did he declare in his sermons that “to be a Christian and to live in sin is a monstrous contradiction. A Christian must be holy.”   With his Christian simplicity he had clearly thought much on these things and understood them by divine inspiration, while they are usually denied to the understanding of educated men.   He was a champion of the poor as a Franciscan tertiary and was a recipient of the coveted French Legion of Honour.

On 4 August 1859, Vianney died at the age of 73.   The bishop presided over his funeral with 300 priests and more than 6,000 people in attendance.   Before he was buried, Vianney’s body was fitted with a wax mask.

On 3 October 1874 Pope Pius IX proclaimed him “venerable”;  on 8 January 1905, Pope Pius X declared him Blessed and proposed him as a model to the parochial clergy.   In 1925 John Mary Vianney was canonized by Pope Pius XI, who in 1929 made him patron saint of parish priests.

In 1959, to commemorate the centenary of John Vianney’s death, Pope John XXIII issued the encyclical letter Sacerdotii nostri primordia.   St Pope John Paul II visited Ars in person in 1986 in connection with the anniversary of Vianney’s birth and referred to the great saint as a “rare example of a pastor acutely aware of his responsibilities … and a sign of courage for those who today experience the grace of being called to the priesthood.”

In honour of the 150th anniversary of Vianney’s death, Pope Benedict XVI declared a Year of the Priest, running from the Feast of the Sacred Heart 2009–2010.   The Vatican Postal Service issued a set of stamps to commemorate the 150th Anniversary.   With the following words on 16 June 2009, Benedict XVI officially marked the beginning of the year dedicated to priests, “…On the forthcoming Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, Friday 19 June 2009 – a day traditionally devoted to prayer for the sanctification of the clergy –, I have decided to inaugurate a ‘Year of the Priest’ in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the dies natalis of John Mary Vianney, the Patron Saint of parish priests worldwide…” In the Holy Father’s words the Curé d’Ars is “a true example of a pastor at the service of Christ’s flock.”

There are statues and stained glass windows of St John Vianney in many French churches and in Catholic churches throughout the world.   Also, many parishes founded in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are named after him.   Some relics are kept in the Church of Notre-Dame de la Salette in Paris.

(via AnaStpaul – Breathing Catholic)

#stjohnvianney #august4stjohnvianney #catholic #caholicism

[newstfionline]

Headlines

Riot declared as fire burns in Portland police union offices (AP) A fire inside a police union building led authorities in Portland, Oregon, to declare a riot and force protesters away from the offices as violent demonstrations continue in the city that had hoped for calm after federal agents withdrew more than a week ago. A group of demonstrators broke into the Portland Police Association building, set the fire and were adding to it when officers made the riot declaration late Saturday, police tweeted. Video shot by a journalist shows smoke and flames arising from inside the building. Several hundred people had gathered outside the offices, which are located about 5 miles (8 kilometers) north of the federal courthouse that had been the target of nightly violence earlier this summer. The Portland Police Association is a labor union that represents members of the Portland Police Bureau.

For pandemic jobless, the only real certainty is uncertainty (AP) For three decades, Kelly Flint flourished as a corporate travel agent, sending everyone from business titans to oil riggers around the planet. Then came the worst pandemic in a century, leaving her jobless and marooned in an uncertain economy. Furloughed since March, Flint has dipped into her retirement account to pay her bills, frustrated that her $600 weekly emergency federal aid payments have expired. She yearns, too, for an end to the twin disasters that now dominate her life: recession and pandemic. “I don’t deal well with the unknowns,” she says. “I never have.” Across America are legions of Kelly Flints, women and men who don’t know when they’ll receive another paycheck — or if. The coronavirus outbreak and resulting economic upheaval have thrown millions of lives into disarray. Industries have collapsed, businesses closed, jobs disappeared. Compounding the misery is a question no one can answer: When will this all be over? In recent congressional testimony, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell repeated his earlier warning: The strength of any recovery will rely on the nation’s ability to contain the virus. The outlook for the U.S. economy, he said, is “extraordinarily uncertain.” Uncertain. If 2020 had to be condensed into a single word — and there are many, many words to describe it — uncertainty would hover at the top of the list. Uncertainty about health. About the future. About the country itself. And uncertainty about livelihoods and jobs and economic security in a historical moment where each day seems to bring a fresh wave of unwanted developments.

Bolivia Under Blockade as Protesters Choke Access to Cities (NYT) Antigovernment protesters in Bolivia blockaded some of the country’s main roads this past week to challenge the delay of general elections and rebuke the government’s poor response to the coronavirus pandemic. The protesters—who support Bolivia’s former president, Evo Morales—say they have set up 70 roadblocks, marooning about six million residents of three highland regions, including Bolivia’s most important metropolis, La Paz. Already, the blockade has raised fears of food and gasoline shortages, pushing throngs of La Paz residents into the streets to line up outside food markets and gasoline stations. Bolivia’s unrest could be a harbinger of what’s to come elsewhere in Latin America, where citizens are losing faith in their countries’ ability to contain the pandemic, and to mitigate the economic crisis brought on by measures to combat the virus. The pandemic has killed more than 210,000 people in Latin America and plunged its economy into the deepest recession in at least a century, according to the United Nations. Bolivia is suffering one of the biggest outbreaks in the region, when adjusted for population; the virus has killed 3,000, sickened top government officials and overwhelmed hospitals.

When Covid-19 Hit, Many Elderly Were Left to Die (NYT) Of all the missteps by governments during the coronavirus pandemic, few have had such an immediate and devastating impact as the failure to protect nursing homes. Tens of thousands of older people died—casualties not only of the virus, but of more than a decade of ignored warnings that nursing homes were vulnerable. In recent months, the coronavirus outbreak in the United States has dominated global attention, as the world’s richest nation blundered its way into the world’s largest death toll. Some 40 percent of those fatalities have been linked to long-term-care facilities. But even now, European countries lead the world in per capita deaths, in part because of what happened inside their nursing homes. Spanish prosecutors are investigating cases in which residents were abandoned to die. In Sweden, overwhelmed emergency doctors have acknowledged turning away elderly patients. In Britain, the government ordered thousands of older hospital patients—including some with Covid-19—sent back to nursing homes to make room for an expected crush of virus cases. (Similar policies were in effect in some American states.) Few countries embody this lethally ineffective pandemic response more than Belgium, where government officials excluded nursing-home patients from the testing policy until thousands were already dead. Nursing homes were left waiting for proper masks and gowns. When masks did arrive from the government, they came late and were sometimes defective.

Paris makes masks mandatory as virus toll crosses 722,000 (AFP) Paris on Saturday made face masks compulsory outdoors in crowded areas and tourist hotspots, as infections in and around the French capital rose and the global death toll crept past 722,000. The mask will be obligatory for all those aged 11 and over “in certain very crowded zones”, said a police statement. Several French towns and cities have already introduced similar measures, as well as parts of Belgium, the Netherlands, Romania and Spain.

Masks in class? Many questions as Germans go back to school (AP) Masks during class, masks only in the halls, no masks at all. Distance when possible, no distance within same-grade groups, no distance at all. As Germany’s 16 states start sending millions of children back to school in the middle of the global coronavirus pandemic, the country’s famous sense of “Ordnung” has given way to uncertainty, with a hodgepodge of regional regulations that officials acknowledge may or may not work. Germany has won plaudits for managing to slow the spread of the coronavirus quickly, efficiently and early, but the opening of schools is proving a new challenge as the country struggles to balance the concerns of anxious parents and children, skeptical scientists, worried teachers and overtaxed administrators. With U.S. President Donald Trump pushing for American schools to reopen in person and on time even as the country nears 5 million confirmed coronavirus cases, and other countries moving ahead with plans to resume classes despite rising infections, many eyes are on the real-life experiment offered in Germany to see what works and what doesn’t.

Hard-hit Italy cautiously embraces new normal in coronavirus era (LA Times) With tourists still absent and office workers continuing to toil from home more than two months after Italy’s strict coronavirus lockdown ended, few were out and about on Rome’s central Via del Corso last week. But in the Farmacrimi drug store, one product was being briskly traded. “Masks keep on selling,” said manager Federica Faragali. “People buy them like cappuccinos.” Among the places where face coverings are widely on display is the Circus Maximus, where socially distanced spectators—including women in gowns with matching masks—are back watching open-air performances of Verdi’s opera “Rigoletto.” Five months after Italy was wracked by the West’s first major outbreak of the coronavirus, the nation continues to move cautiously toward a semblance of normality and has thus far not seen a major secondary flare-up of COVID-19 deaths. New daily cases inched up on Friday to 552, but that was less than 1/10 of the 6,500 daily cases reported at the peak March 21 and 1/100 of the new cases in the U.S., where more than 50,000 are being reported each day.

Afghanistan to release 400 ‘hard-core’ Taliban to start peace talks (Reuters) Afghanistan agreed on Sunday to release 400 “hard-core” Taliban prisoners, paving the way for the beginning of peace talks aimed at ending more than 19 years of war. Under election-year pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump for a deal allowing him to bring home American troops, the war-torn country’s grand assembly, or Loya Jirga, on Sunday approved the release, a controversial condition raised by the Taliban militants to join peace talks.Deliberation over the release of last batch of Taliban prisoners, accused of conducting some of the bloodiest attacks across Afghanistan, had triggered outrage among civilians and rights groups who questioned the morality of the peace process. In 2019 alone, more than 10,000 civilians were killed or injured in the conflict in Afghanistan, putting total casualties in the past decade over 100,000, a United Nations report said last year.

Clashes Erupt in Beirut at Blast Protest as Lebanon’s Anger Boils Over (NYT) Violent clashes between demonstrators and security forces transformed much of central Beirut into a battle zone of flying rocks, swinging batons and clouds of tear gas on Saturday, as the fury over a huge explosion in Beirut’s port this week fueled attacks on government buildings. By nightfall, angry protesters demanding the ouster of the country’s political elite had stormed three government ministries, a handful of legislators had resigned, and the prime minister had called for early elections, the first major signs that the blast could shake up the country’s political system, widely derided as dysfunctional. Many Lebanese considered the blast, which sent a shock wave through the capital that destroyed entire neighborhoods and killed at least 154 people, as only the latest and most dangerous manifestation of the corruption and negligence of the country’s leaders. The clashes on Saturday erupted across broad swaths of the city’s center, with demonstrators yanking down barricades blocking access to the Parliament, chanting “Revolution! Revolution!,” and throwing rocks at the security forces, who flooded the area with tear gas and fired rubber bullets. Fires burned in nearby buildings, filling the sky with smoke, and sirens screamed as ambulances rushed the scores of people injured in the clashes to hospitals.

Saudi Aramco half-year profits plunge 50% from virus impact (AP) Saudi Aramco’s net income plunged by 50% in the first half of the year, according to figures published Sunday, offering a revealing glimpse into the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on one of the world’s biggest oil producers. Profits for the first six months of the year plunged to $23.2 billion, half of last year’s $46.9 billion for the same time period. The results were announced as Aramco’s second quarter earnings dipped to $6.6 billion compared to $24.7 billion during the same time last year, reflecting a staggering 73% drop. The majority state-owned company’s financial health is crucial to Saudi Arabia’s stability. Despite massive efforts by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to diversify the economy, Saudi Arabia still depends heavily on oil exports to fuel government spending.

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10 Essential Episodes of Anthony Bourdain’s ‘Parts Unknown’

Over the last five years, Anthony Bourdain brought TV viewers to the most interesting places around the world on his award-winning, game-changing CNN show Parts Unknown. And now, following Bourdain’s death last June, the show is sadly coming to a close. The final season of Parts Unknown will wrap up at Bourdain’s old stomping grounds — the Lower East Side of New York City — this Sunday, November 11, in an episode that will explore the people and places that shaped Bourdain as a young adult.

Parts Unknown had a monumental impact on food and travel TV, most notably because it eschewed coverage of tourist attractions, and focused, instead, on artists, thinkers, and doers around the world, with special attention paid to disenfranchised communities and their hopes for the future. Some episodes were intense, others lighthearted, but the show was always essential viewing.

Here’s a look back at 10 episodes that defined the series, in chronological order:

“Peru”

(Season 1, Episode 7; original air date June 2, 2013): Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert let their bromance blossom on camera throughout the filming of Parts Unknown, and, tragically, they were actually shooting a new episode together when the Kitchen Confidential author died in France over the summer.

The Peru episode from Season 1 sets the tone for future adventures to come: The friends eat amazing meals while discussing the great mysteries of the human experience, all the while pushing each other outside of their respective comfort zones. In this case, Bourdain brings his gentlemanly pal to an ancient erotica museum, while the chef coaxes his sarcastic friend into participating in a ceremonial blessing from a local shaman. Along the way, the friends eat Amazon-inspired cuisine at Amaz, sizzling beef hearts on the streets of Lima, and a rustic hen soup at a market in the mountains.

Bourdain and Ripert actually have a bit of business to accomplish on this trip: They hike up to the Andes to meet farmers who are harvesting the cocoa that’s used in the duo’s gourmet chocolate bars. The friends are clearly inspired by working with the farmers, but this experience only leads to more questions. “Do I wanna be in the chocolate business?” Bourdain remarks at the end. “That’s something I’m gonna have to figure out.”

“Lyon”

(Season 3, Episode 3; original air date April 27, 2014): While visiting France’s second largest city, Bourdain and his pal, New York City chef Daniel Boulud, eat their way through tiny bistros, learn the art of sausage-making from a charcuterie expert, and spend a weekend in the company of a proper culinary legend.

The duo’s visit to Paul Bocuse’s eponymous restaurant, where Bourdain, Boulud, and the late Bocuse dine on the legendary French chef’s greatest creations, is arguably the best food sequence in the entire series. Tony refers to this feast as “the meal of my life,” emphasized by his reactions on camera. Later, Bourdain and his chef friends go duck hunting and enjoy a hearty lunch in Bocuse’s lodge out in the country. The episode ends with another rustic family meal, this time with Boulud’s parents at their home just south of the city.

The Lyon episode shows Tony fully enjoying himself in the company of a great friend, while also offering a concise history of the last century of French cuisine.

Read Eater’s full recap here.

“Iran”

(Season 4, Episode 6; original air date November 2, 2014): Throughout its 12 seasons, Parts Unknown often showed audiences what life was like in places that aren’t often featured on Western television: The Iran episode is arguably the most important one in that regard. “All I can tell you is, the Iran I’ve seen on TV and read about in the papers, it’s a much bigger picture,” Bourdain remarks. “Let’s put it this way: It’s complicated.”

Bourdain is immediately surprised by the warm welcome he receives everywhere he goes, and he’s delighted by the hospitality that his hosts extend toward him, especially in their homes. He visits bustling markets, centuries-old places of worship, and parts of Tehran where the locals unwind. Tony also memorably chats with married journalists Jason Rezaian and Yeganeh Salehi about the local way of life. As noted at the end of the show, Rezaian and Yeganeh were both imprisoned shortly after filming this episode in 2014; Salehi was released after a few months, but Rezaian was kept in an Iranian prison until 2016. Bourdain remained a vocal advocate for Rezaian until his release.

After the TV host died, Rezaian told CNN: “The show actually had nothing to do with us being arrested, and if anything I think our appearance there — with really one of the most beloved television personalities, and people, of our generation — raised awareness in a different kind of way that nothing else could have.”

Read Eater’s full recap here.

“Massachusetts”

(Season 4, Episode 7; original air date November 9, 2014): A large chunk of this episode features Bourdain visiting his old haunts from when he was a young, aimless chef bumming around Provincetown. “[I] pretty much had my first everything on the beach,” he says while standing outside of a boarded-up seaside apartment in P-Town. But the real heart of this episode is its second half, when Tony heads west to learn about the opioid epidemic devastating small towns throughout the state.

Tony meets with an undercover narcotics division cop and one of his anonymous sources, as well as a young woman who has stepped back from the brink of heroin addiction and is constantly looking out for addicts in need of help. Tony knows these struggles all too well: One of the episode’s last scenes shows Bourdain talking to a group of recovering addicts about his own past drug use. “I’ll tell you something really shameful about myself,” Bourdain remarks. “The first time I shot up I looked at myself in the mirror with a big grin.”

Read Eater’s full recap here.

“Hanoi”

(Season 8, Episode 1; original air date September 25, 2016): Bourdain clearly loves the capitol of Vietnam, a city he says “grabs you and doesn’t let you go.”

On this very special episode, Tony gets to introduce President Barack Obama to one of his favorite Hanoi activities: eating the pork and noodle dish bun cha and drinking local beer from the bottle. During their convivial meal at a small noodle shop outfitted with stools and tiny tables, Bourdain and Obama discuss the sensory elements of travel, the dining habits of their children, and whether or not it’s ever acceptable to put ketchup on hot dogs (Obama deems that it’s “not acceptable past the age of eight”).

Elsewhere in the episode, Bourdain eats streetside snails in the Old Quarter, and freshly caught squid aboard a steamer ship. The host also chats with a family in a floating fishing village about how the culture and economy in Vietnam are always changing.

Read Eater’s full recap here.

“Houston”

(Season 8, Episode 5; original air date October 30, 2016): Bourdain enters Houston with a goal of ripping up the white-washed image of the city that often finds its way on TV — the one that leans into cowboy hats, the oil industry, NASA, and football. “Close minded, prejudicial, quick to make assumptions about places different than where we grew up,” Bourdain says in the episode’s intro. “I’m talking about me and people like me who are way too comfortable thinking of Texas as a big space filled with intolerant and variably right-wing white people waddling between the fast-food outlet and the gun store.”

During his stay, Bourdain meets with the owners of the Acapulco Ballroom, a popular quinceañera venue for the local Mexican-American community. He visits high school principal and Vietnamese refugee Jonathan N. Trinh, who oversees a student body that hails from 70 different countries. He hangs out with local hip-hop star Slim Thug and learns about local “slab” car culture. And he ends his trip by visiting the Houston Indian Cricket Club, where the game day snacks involve tandoori chicken and “some spicy, tender, and totally delicious curried goat, and made-to-order potato masala dosas.”

Read Eater’s full recap here.

“Rome”

(Season 8, episode 9; original air date December 4, 2016): In a clear homage to filmmaker Pier Pasolini, the Rome episode showcases the working-class neighborhoods of the Eternal City. “This is about people, often extraordinary ones, living their lives in the Rome you don’t see much in the travel guides or TV shows,” Bourdain says at the start of the show.

It’s here, on camera, that Bourdain meets his future girlfriend, filmmaker/actress/activist Asia Argento. They go to a boxing arena where spaghetti is served to attendees during the match. Argento brings him to her home, where they enjoy a rustic meal with her family. And later, they go ambling among the Brutalist ruins of the Mussolini area. Like many of the best episodes of Parts Unknown, Bourdain seems creatively charged by the people and places he meets along the way.

“Rome is a city where you find the most extraordinary pleasures in the most ordinary things,” Bourdain says while dining in a trattoria, “like this place which I’m not ever going to tell you the name of.”

Read Eater’s full recap here.

“Los Angeles”

(Season 9, Episode 1; original air date April 30, 2017): The first Parts Unknown episode to air during the Trump administration is a passionate celebration of LA’s Latinx community, and the immigrant workers who drive so many of the city’s industries. “Los Angeles, like much of California, used to be part of Mexico,” Bourdain says in the intro. “Now Mexico, or a whole lot of Mexicans, are a vital part of us.”

Bourdain meets with community activist Elisa Sol Garcia, tattoo artist Mister Cartoon, actor Danny Trejo, and MMA fighters Nick and Nate Diaz. Throughout his LA sojourn, the host samples some of the city’s myriad Mexican specialties, from tongue tacos to traditional Oaxacan moles to Ray Garcia’s modern cuisine at Broken Spanish, all the while emphasizing the importance of Latinx chefs in the American food scene.

“I worked in French and Italian restaurants my whole career, but really, if I think about it, they were Mexican restaurants and Ecuadorian restaurants, because the majority of the cooks and the people working with me were from those countries,” Bourdain remarks. “That’s who, you know, picked me up when I fell down; who showed me what to do when I walked in and didn’t know anything and nobody knew my name.”

Read Eater’s full recap here.

“Laos”

(Season 9, Episode 4; original air date May 14, 2017): Although he eats some terrific local delicacies in this episode — including steaming bowls of khao soi and charcoal-grilled squid skewers — the majority of Bourdain’s visit focuses on the tragic story of how Laos became “the most heavily bombed country per capita in the history of the world.”

Tony spends a lot of time in Hmong villages discussing the bomb clean-up from the war, and sees, first-hand, why it’s so difficult to remove the unexploded ordnances. Bourdain also explores the country’s complicated relationship with the United States, and meets the aid workers trying to help the country bounce back. “Here, on one hand, we have Americans dropping bombs that at the time blow this child up, and then there are American doctors to put them back together,” Bourdain says.

Read Eater’s full recap here.

“Kenya”

(Season 12, Episode 1; original air date September 23, 2018): A big part of Bourdain’s appeal on Parts Unknown is that he seemingly lived an enviable life, bouncing around the world, surrounded by fascinating people and delectable things to eat. And the joy of this episode is seeing a bona fide Bourdain fan — fellow CNN host W. Kamau Bell — join him on one of his adventures for the very first time.

Tony is a benevolent traveling companion, imparting various bits of wisdom to Bell on his first trip to Africa, and the United Shades of America host seems thrilled to be rolling with Bourdain and experiencing the local culture for the first time. While sitting atop a mountain on safari, with a drink in hand, Bell turns to Bourdain and says, “The idea that I’m sitting here with you doing this now, knowing where my life and career have come, it’s pretty cool.”

The Kenya episode was the first to air since Bourdain’s death, and the last to feature his full participation. It’s a great way to remember this TV legend, particularly because Bell’s commentary highlights the reason why audiences loved Bourdain so much throughout his career: He kept exploring, never talked down to anyone, and always brought us along for the ride.

Read Eater’s Full recap here.

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Source: https://www.eater.com/2018/11/10/18079924/anthony-bourdain-parts-unknown-cnn-best-episodes

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