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Ford to inject up to $4.76 billion into cash-strapped ******* business Ford to inject up to $4.76 billion into cash-strapped ******* business FRANKFURT (Reuters) -Ford Motor (F) will inject up to 4.4 billion euros ($4.76 billion) into its struggling ******* unit as it tries to revive its car business in Europe, the U.S. carmaker said on Monday. Shares in Ford slipped over 1% before the bell on Monday. NYSE – Delayed Quote • USD At close: March 7 at 4:00:02 PM EST The ******* arm, Ford-Werke, will continue its strategic transformation initiatives, focusing on reducing costs in Europe and increasing competitiveness, Ford said in a statement, after the Financial Times first reported the news. “By recapitalizing our ******* operations, we are supporting the transformation of our business in Europe and strengthening our ability to compete with a fresh product portfolio,” said John Lawler, vice chair of Ford Motor Company. “To build a sustainable business in Europe, we also need to continue to simplify our governance, reduce costs, and drive efficiencies.” He called on policymakers in Europe to come up with a clear agenda to promote the uptake of electric vehicles and bring emissions targets in line with consumer demand. Europe’s car industry has seen plant closures and falling demand as it battles with stiff competition from China. The sector is also bracing for U.S. tariffs. ($1 = 0.9249 euros) (Reporting by Shivansh Tiwary in Bengaluru and Christoph Steitz in Frankfurt; Writing by Rachel More, Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala and Miranda Murray) Source link #Ford #inject #billion #cashstrapped #******* #business Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

A post-earnings wipeout has created a buying opportunity in this connectivity stock, Piper Sandler says in upgrade A post-earnings wipeout has created a buying opportunity in this connectivity stock, Piper Sandler says in upgrade An attractive entry point has opened up in shares of Samsara , according to Piper Sandler. Analyst James Fish upgraded Samsara to overweight from neutral and assigned a price target of $50.That suggests 41.4% upside for the software maker of connectivity software used in dash cams and for GPS fleet tracking. Fish’s upgrade comes after a massive slide in Samsara shares, which dropped more than 16% on Friday after the company gave lackluster first-quarter revenue guidance. The stock is now down roughly 19% year to date. “Our thesis is relatively unchanged: Samsara is a high-quality, durable > 20% growth story that is gaining core fleet share, moving upmarket, and has lots of cross-sell opportunity across Video Safety & Equipment Monitoring/Asset Tags,” Fish wrote in a Sunday note to clients. “Expectations have been high for Samsara the last +6 months and, following FQ4’s print, have largely been reset as investors are realizing +30% is not likely to be sustained,” he continued, adding that “However, we think +20% is easily obtainable over the next few years.” IOT 1Y mountain Samsara stock performance. According to Fish, the overall lackluster momentum behind tech stocks can continue to weigh on Samsara. But the analyst finds the stock still looks attractive right now for several reasons, including: The exposure to company’s operating budgets over IT budgets provides better insulation in the current environment The company’s annual “Beyond” conference in June has historically served as a product announcement and share price catalyst Samsara’s valuation is more compelling and is back to trading at its typical premium to other growth assets “After much patience, we are finally at a more reasonable entry point as expectations have been reset, the model is poised for sales + FCF upside, and risk-reward is more attractive,” Fish said. “While valuation isn’t ‘pound the table’ cheap, we think this is an attractive entry-point for longs to ‘nibble-in.'” Fish added that Samsara faces no material competition, other than a few private telematics companies, as service providers and automakers have struggled to compete with Samsara’s more advanced technology. “While the space is highly fragmented, over the last few years, Samsara has outpaced the market and seen competitors exit or be consolidated,” he said, adding that it “leaves plenty of share gain opportunities” ahead. Source link #postearnings #wipeout #created #buying #opportunity #connectivity #stock #Piper #Sandler #upgrade Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Germany: Hundreds of flights cancelled as strikes hit airports – BBC.com Germany: Hundreds of flights cancelled as strikes hit airports – BBC.com Germany: Hundreds of flights cancelled as strikes hit airports BBC.comAirport strike to all but freeze ******* air travel on Monday ReutersGermany: Flights canceled as workers strike at 13 airports DW (English)******* Air Traffic Grinds to Halt as Airport Labor Unions Strike BloombergStrike action grounds thousands of flights in Germany Yahoo Source link #Germany #Hundreds #flights #cancelled #strikes #hit #airports #BBC.com Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

A new Lego Mario Kart set aimed at adults has appeared online ahead of an official announcement A new Lego Mario Kart set aimed at adults has appeared online ahead of an official announcement A listing for a new Lego Mario Kart set aimed at adults has appeared online, ahead of Lego’s official announcement. The set, which consist of 1,972 pieces, is called Lego Mario Kart: Mario & Standard Kart and is rated 18+ due to the complexity of the build. The set was spotted on an officially certified *********** Lego Store website, where it is currently priced at AU$249.99 ($158 / £122). According to the listing, the set has a release date of May 15. According to the official description on the store page, the set ” features a buildable Mario figure with a posable head and arms, sitting behind the wheel of the most iconic Mario Kart vehicle of all”. It also comes with a stand which enables users to place the kart at a dynamic angle, giving the impressing that it’s turning a corner. It’s assumed that the set will officially be announced later today, because Lego usually announces notable Super Mario themed sets on March 10, which is known as Mario Day (MAR10). Last year on Mario Day, Lego’s presentation ended with a teaser for the Lego Mario Kart series, which consists of smaller builds aimed at younger collectors. While there are numerous Super Mario and Animal Crossing Lego sets aimed at children, this new Mario Kart product is the latest in a series of video game themed Lego sets aimed at adult collectors, many of which have been officially licensed by Nintendo. Previous adult-themed Lego sets have included a Lego Nintendo Entertainment System, a 2.807-piece Bowser, a Piranha Plant, a Mario 64 Question Block, the Great Deku Tree from The Legend of Zelda and a Lego Super Mario World set which looks like pixel art. Other video game themed sets aimed at adults have included an Atari 2600, a Tallneck from Horizon Forbidden West, a Minecraft Crafting Table and the Green Hill Zone from Sonic the Hedgehog. In January, Lego announced that it was teaming up with Nintendo to release a Lego version of the Nintendo Game Boy in October 2025. Lego insiders later reported that the set will likely be released on October 1 at a price of $59.99, and will consist of 421 pieces. Source link #Lego #Mario #Kart #set #aimed #adults #appeared #online #ahead #official #announcement Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

WA election 2025: Liberal Party in turmoil as Zempilas waits to answer leadership question WA election 2025: Liberal Party in turmoil as Zempilas waits to answer leadership question Basil Zempilas is not ruling himself out as a leadership option when the new look Liberal party room meets, likely next week, but has denied ‘white-anting’ current Liberal leader Libby Mettam. Source link #election #Liberal #Party #turmoil #Zempilas #waits #answer #leadership #question Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Here’s the level that could be an attractive entry point for S&P: Morgan Stanley – MarketWatch Here’s the level that could be an attractive entry point for S&P: Morgan Stanley – MarketWatch Here’s the level that could be an attractive entry point for S&P: Morgan Stanley MarketWatchView Full Coverage on Google News Source link #Heres #level #attractive #entry #point #SampP #Morgan #Stanley #MarketWatch Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Atomfall Preview | Thumb Culture Atomfall Preview | Thumb Culture Unless you’ve been living under a large rock you will have heard of Atomfall, the latest game coming soon from Rebellion. The game is set five years after the Windscale nuclear disaster in Northern England. Inspired by the real-life event. You have to explore the quarantine zone, barter with people as well as survive to find out just what is going on. Source link #Atomfall #Preview #Thumb #Culture Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Travel Rewards Programs Now: Too Many Points, Not Enough Seats Travel Rewards Programs Now: Too Many Points, Not Enough Seats “Rely less on the airline to just offer you a good deal,” Mr. Leff said. “Often you want two cards: one that earns multiple points in the category where you spend the most, and one that pairs in the same ecosystem from the same bank that earns 1.5 or two points per dollar.” This means using two cards from the same bank — for example, pairing Chase’s Sapphire Preferred with its Freedom Unlimited card to pool their earned points. This flexibility proves crucial as sweet spots move between programs. Virgin Atlantic, for instance, charges just 90,000 miles for ANA first-class flights to Japan. That same seat would cost 220,000 United miles. Even Flying Blue, Air France-KLM’s program, still offers business class to Europe for 60,000 points — notably less than what many U.S. carriers charge. Premium Amex and Chase credit cards allow points transfers to multiple airline programs — meaning cardholders aren’t tethered to one airline’s availability. For families seeking multiple premium seats, timing becomes crucial. “If you’re going to Europe, you may be pleasantly surprised with Flying Blue because they offer multiseat availability even at their saver rates,” Mr. Qin said, referring to the lowest-priced award tickets airlines offer. Some carriers, like Japan Airlines, often release blocks of award seats within two weeks of departure. Mr. Leff recommends booking what’s available on your primary airline, and then watching for better options. Since most programs now waive change fees on award tickets, you can switch if partner space opens up. Just note that once you transfer flexible points to an airline, you can’t transfer them back. Perhaps most important: Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of good. “Remember, the best points are what’s best for you. If you need to book an economy-fare flight because that makes sense, do it,” Mr. Qin said. “Don’t always shoot for the perfect or the ideal, because you’ll just never use your points and they’re going to devalue.” Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2025. Source link #Travel #Rewards #Programs #Points #Seats Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

China says it will grow relations with Canada on basis of mutual respect China says it will grow relations with Canada on basis of mutual respect BEIJING (Reuters) -China will continue to grow bilateral relations with Canada on the basis of mutual respect and equality, the foreign ministry said after Mark Carney won the race to lead Canada’s ruling party and become the next prime minister. Carney, a two-time central banker who has never held elected office, won the leadership race with 86% of the votes cast on Sunday and will succeed Justin Trudeau who resigned in January. Speaking at a regular press conference on Monday, ******** foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning congratulated Carney on his win, while urging Canada to work with China to promote improvement and development of relations. Trusted news and daily delights, right in your inbox See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories. “We expect Canada to adhere to an objective and rational understanding of China and pursue a positive and pragmatic policy towards China,” Mao said on Monday. Carney’s victory came just a day after Beijing announced tariffs on over $2.6 billion worth of ********* agricultural and food products on Saturday, in retaliation against levies Ottawa introduced in October. The levies, scheduled to take effect on March 20, match the 100% and 25% import duties Canada imposed on China-made electric vehicles and steel and aluminium products. Mao defended China’s countermeasures as entirely “legitimate and reasonable,” telling the ********* side to correct its “wrong practices” to provide a fair, non-discriminatory and predictable environment for the two countries’ enterprises. (Reporting by Lewis Jackson and Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Jacqueline Wong and Bernadette Baum) Source link #China #grow #relations #Canada #basis #mutual #respect Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Canada Urges Its Travelers to Stay Home as Trade War With U.S. Continues Canada Urges Its Travelers to Stay Home as Trade War With U.S. Continues In a speech this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, clearly annoyed by import tariffs levied by President Trump and his threats of making Canada “the 51st state,” suggested that Canadians might act individually to respond to the affronts. “Now is also the time to choose Canada,” Mr. Trudeau said, adding, “It might mean changing your summer vacation plans to stay here in Canada and explore the many national and provincial parks, historical sites and tourist destinations our great country has to offer.” In the weeks since, it appears that at least some ********* citizens are taking his directive seriously. “I’ve decided that I will no longer be traveling to the U.S. unless it’s absolutely necessary to go,” said Harold White, 72, who lives in Quebec. Mr. White, a lawyer, said he had canceled an annual summer trip to Maine, one that he has made every year for 60 years. Over the decades, he made friends with local residents there, he said, whom he does not expect to see for the next four years. Instead, he and his wife plan to travel to Spain and in later years, make road trips across Canada. “It pains me to think that I’m not going to Maine or to Cape Cod or even to New York City for a vacation in the near term,” Mr. White said, noting that he continued to travel to the United States during President Trump’s first term. “But this time around, really, I feel like Canadians have been slapped across the face by Trump.” According to the U.S. Travel Association, a nonprofit group that represents the U.S. travel industry, Canadians made 20.4 million visits to the United States last year and were responsible for $20.5 billion in spending. A 10 percent decline in ********* visitors would amount to a $2.1 billion loss, the group said. “We have seen that people are starting to pivot away and avoid the U.S.,” said Alexis von Hoensbroech, the chief executive of WestJet, the second-largest airline in Canada. “We see also an increase of bookings into Mexico, into the Caribbean, into other non-U.S. destinations.” Mark Galardo, a vice president for Air Canada, the country’s largest airline, said that it would be adjusting its schedule from March onward in order to “derisk” the situation. “We are anticipating proactively that there could be a slowdown,” he said in a statement. Florida, California, Nevada, New York and Texas are the most visited U.S. states by Canadians. Those states could experience declines in revenue in their retail and hospitality sectors from a ********* travel boycott, according to U.S. Travel. However, in a statement, Geoff Freeman, the group’s chief executive, said that the United States received the largest number of international visitors ever in 2018, in the middle of the first Trump Administration, and that what travelers say and what they do are often different. “If we have a decline in travel from any specific destination, we will share that information where it needs to be shared and work with the administration to solve for that problem,” Mr. Freeman said. “We do want them coming to the United States. If that’s not happening, then we’ve got work to do.” In a statement, a spokeswoman for Flight Center Travel Group, an international travel agency, said that the company has seen a “softening in cross-border travel bookings” from Canada to the United States — a shift that has been gaining momentum since November. The ********* dollar is weak compared with the U.S. dollar, the statement said, and that existing reluctance was exacerbated by the announcement on import tariffs. (On Thursday, President Trump insisted that the tariffs would go into effect next week.) Amra Durakovic, the spokeswoman, said that Canadians’ “desire for travel” remained strong, with many prioritizing other destinations over the United States so that travelers could “make the most of their journeys.” “Looking ahead, we remain hopeful that travel and trade between Canada and the U.S. will soon resume with the confidence and ease both countries have long enjoyed,” Ms. Durakovic said in the statement. In the United States, state tourism boards are bracing for potential effects. Sara Otte Coleman, the tourism and marketing director for North Dakota’s department of commerce, said that the state, which borders Canada, had paused its paid marketing in Canada until officials could “better understand the sentiment about traveling to North Dakota.” Tim Chapman is the chief executive of the International Peace Garden, a park that extends across the border between the ********* province of Manitoba and North Dakota. He said he has been receiving emails from ********* visitors who said they no longer planned to visit the tourist attraction, which usually draws around 150,000 visitors a year. In one exchange, Mr. Chapman said, a ********* told him she could not visit because of the rhetoric out of Washington. He said that he explained that the garden was a nonprofit that needed support from visitors and that he felt she understood. “The Peace Garden has always stood for and advocated for the peace and cooperation of our two countries,” Mr. Chapman said. “Even though we don’t have a lot of control about what’s being said, we can still be a place where people can come together, because the vast majority of Americans and Canadians do really value that friendship and longstanding cooperation.” Mr. von Hoensbroech, the WestJet executive, said that he did expect cross-border travel to pick back up at some point. He noted that this was common in the travel industry — short-term reactions to current events that ultimately return to general stability. Still, he said, the response was unique. “I haven’t seen anything like this,” he said. Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2025. Source link #Canada #Urges #Travelers #Stay #Home #Trade #War #U.S #Continues Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Steelers acquire DK Metcalf from Seahawks, plan to sign him to $150M extension: Source – The Athletic Steelers acquire DK Metcalf from Seahawks, plan to sign him to $150M extension: Source – The Athletic Steelers acquire DK Metcalf from Seahawks, plan to sign him to $150M extension: Source The AthleticSources: Steelers trading for star WR Metcalf ESPNThe Steelers’ trade for DK Metcalf was a huge splash. The ripple effects might be big, too The New York TimesNFL free agency, offseason updates: DK Metcalf traded to Steelers, Josh Allen gets paid Yahoo SportsGrading DK Metcalf to Steelers, Davante Adams to Rams, and other splashy NFL signings, trades from Sunday CBS Sports Source link #Steelers #acquire #Metcalf #Seahawks #plan #sign #150M #extension #Source #Athletic Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Indiana Jones and The Great Circle Receives ESRB Rating for PS5 Indiana Jones and The Great Circle Receives ESRB Rating for PS5 ESRB has rated Indiana Jones and The Great Circle for the PS5. Spotted by Wario64, if you search for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on ESRB’s website, you will find two search results now, one for Windows PC and Xbox Series and one for the PS5. The game has been rated ‘T’ (Teen) with “Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Mild Language, Violence” highlighted on the listing. It was confirmed in August last year that the game would arrive on the platform in Spring 2025. However, an ESRB rating for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on the PS5 hints that things are well in motion and an official release date announcement could be around the corner. The ESRB rating summary describes the game as a first-person action adventure in which players uncover mysteries, solve puzzles, and defeat villains. The game includes different types of combat, such as hand-to-hand, stealth, whip use, and ranged combat with the help of machine guns and rifles. The summary also highlights some of the game’s sequences that aren’t for all audiences, such as a scene with a severed arm and another with a corpse impaled with a spike trap. It also mentions certain drug references and curse words that were heard in the game. In other news, more Indiana Jones games are reportedly in development. What are your thoughts on Indiana Jones and The Great Circle being rated by ESRB for PS5? Let us know in the comments or on our community forum! For more information from Insider Gaming, read about Killing Floor being delayed to later this year. Don’t forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. SUBSCRIBE to our newsletter to receive the latest news and exclusive leaks every week! No Spam. Source link #Indiana #Jones #Great #Circle #Receives #ESRB #Rating #PS5 Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Women’s Sports Events Worth Traveling to in 2025 Women’s Sports Events Worth Traveling to in 2025 The star power of women’s sports is shining brighter than ever. Last year, the basketball sensation Caitlin Clark helped lift the Indiana Fever to an astonishing 265 percent increase in attendance over the previous season. The international phenom Ilona Maher and her teammates electrified crowds at the Paris Olympics when they secured the first U.S. medal ever in rugby sevens. Women’s sports leagues like the N.W.S.L. and W.N.B.A. broke records for TV viewership and attendance. And this year, Nike chose to feature exclusively female athletes in its first Super Bowl ad in 27 years. Whether you are a longtime fan, or just exploring your sporting side, 2025 might be the year to travel to discover a new event, team or player. If you don’t have a local team — or even if you do — the abundance of women’s sports offerings provides plenty of inspiration. Expect compelling stories and plenty of thrills at these events. May 2 and 3 Pro Hockey Showdowns The nearly two-year old Professional Women’s Hockey League is setting its own attendance records, with more than 14,000 fans at a January match in Denver between the Minnesota Frost and Montreal Victoire. While the league’s six teams are still grinding away for a place in the championship series, you can catch some of the most thrilling regular-season matches in early May. These tickets guarantee a look at the tactical prowess, speed and intensity that are driving the league’s remarkable growth. Players in the 2025 W.N.B.A. All-Star Game, in Indianapolis on July 19, have yet to be announced, but the roster is a perennial Who’s Who of W powerhouses, Last year, participants included first-time faces like Clark and Angel Reese, along with stalwarts like A’ja Wilson, Diana Taurasi, and the game’s M.V.P., Arike Ogunbowale. The once-a-season event gives longtime fans and new followers alike a chance to catch their favorite players in one place. The game itself is a leaguewide showcase of the physical skills, basketball I.Q. and distinctive personalities that have supercharged the W’s fan base in recent years. Ticket prices and on-***** dates have not yet been released, but fans can register through the event website to receive information as it becomes available. All-Star admission in 2024 ranged from around $150 to resales running into the tens of thousands. If game day seats are beyond your budget, the secondary events — including a three-point contest and skills challenge — were considerably less pricey, running closer to $30. Gymnastics fans have a few years to go until they can see their favorite stars tumble, vault and twist in the next Summer Olympics, but the road to Los Angeles 2028 is dotted with high-stakes competitions, like the 2025 U.S. Gymnastics Championships. The event, which features junior and senior women (as well as men), will take place at Smoothie King Center in New Orleans from Aug. 7 to 10, with women’s events on the second and final days. While other significant competitions will take place this year in Chicago and Providence, R.I., the outcome in New Orleans is critical to determining which athletes will advance to the 2025 World Championships in Jakarta, Indonesia, in October. In 2024, icons like Sunisa Lee, Jordan Chiles and Simone Biles all competed at the U.S. Gymnastics Championships, and while this year’s participants have yet to be named, competition is expected to be fierce. It’s also the first time in 30 years that the contest will take place in the Crescent City. While tickets are not yet available, admission to 2024 sessions started at $14, with passes to all sessions for $239. Keep an eye on the U.S. Gymnastics Championships website for details. U.S. women’s soccer has been winning fans with dominant performances for decades — a legacy continued with the U.S. Women’s National Team’s fifth Olympic gold medal in 2024. But that hasn’t stopped the 13-year-old N.W.S.L. from bringing fresh events to today’s world of women’s sports. This season it’s adding Rivalry Weekend, Aug. 8 to 10, in which you can get carried away by three fan-favorite matchups in three different cities. The rivalries, branded as SoCal, East Coast and Cascadia, have different levels of intensity and history. The newest, SoCal, pairs the San Diego Wave and Angel City F.C., of Los Angeles, at Snapdragon Stadium in San Diego. The East Coast rivalry pits Gotham F.C. against the Washington Spirit at Sports Illustrated Stadium in Harrison, N.J., just outside New York City. Probably the most intense and storied rivalry, Cascadia, will have the Portland Thorns hosting the Seattle Reign at Providence Park in Portland, Ore. Each game promises high-stakes clashes between dynamic rosters featuring experienced veterans like Lauren Barnes of Seattle, rising stars like Khyah Harper for Gotham and even talent from abroad, like the French national team’s Delphine Cascarino, who recently signed to San Diego. Tickets are now available for all matches, with East Coast seats ranging from $12 to $300, SoCal starting around $20 and topping out near $200, and Cascadia between $28 and $295. Aug. 22 to Sept. 27 Women’s Rugby World Cup Fans of the 2024 Olympic U.S. women’s rugby team will have to wait a little longer to see if Maher will bring her fancy footwork to the Women’s Rugby World Cup in various cities across England from Aug. 22 to Sept. 27, since rosters have yet to be announced. But regardless of who takes the field, spectators can expect a dynamic, fast-flowing sport with jaw-dropping physicality that combines precision, strategy, agility and the fierce competitive spirit of its players. Beyond the U.S. squad, fans can witness plenty of rugby powerhouses, including England, Australia and Samoa, in the tournament’s pool. Source link #Womens #Sports #Events #Worth #Traveling Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Explosive-laden caravan part of a ‘fake terror plot’ Explosive-laden caravan part of a ‘fake terror plot’ A caravan found packed with explosives in outer Sydney earlier this year was part of a “fabricated terrorism plot” concocted by criminals, *********** police have said. The caravan, which was found in northwestern Sydney on 19 January, contained enough explosives to produce a 40m-wide blast, along with a note displaying antisemitic messages and a list of Jewish synagogues. Its discovery, following a spate of antisemitic attacks in Australia, triggered widespread panic. But on Monday, *********** Federal Police (AFP) revealed that they knew “almost immediately” that the caravan was “essentially a criminal **** job”. AFP’s deputy commissioner of national security, Krissy Barrett, said investigators within the New South Wales Joint Counter Terrorism Team believed that the caravan was “part of a fabricated terrorism plot”. Authorities arrived at that belief based on information they already had, the ease with which they found the caravan and the visibility of the explosives contained inside – as well as the fact that there was no detonator. Yet police refrained from telling the public that they believed the plot was fake “out of an abundance of caution”, as they continued to receive tip-offs about other related terror plots. They are now confident that these tip-offs were also fabricated, Ms Barrett said. The fake caravan plot involved several people with different levels of involvement, according to police. Between them, they had planned to purchase a caravan, load it with explosives and antisemitic materials and leave it in a specific location, before informing law enforcement about “an impending terror attack against Jewish Australians”. Ms Barrett described it as “an elaborate scheme contrived by organised criminals, domestically and from offshore”, adding that the leader of the plot maintained a distance and hired alleged local criminals to carry out parts of the operation. Police confirmed that individual has not been arrested. “Too many criminals are accused of paying others to carry out antisemitic or terrorism incidents to get our attention or divert our resources,” Ms Barrett said. She also noted that police believe “the person pulling the strings wanted changes to their criminal status”. Ms Barrett cited the case of another individual who allegedly tried to procure high-powered weapons for a fake terror plot so he could provide information to authorities in exchange for a reduction to his sentence. BBC News has contacted AFP for more details on the suspected agenda of those behind the caravan hoax, but received no further comment. “Regardless of the motivation of those responsible for this fake plot, this has had a chilling effect on the Jewish community,” Ms Barrett said in her statement. “What organised crime has done to the Jewish community is reprehensible, and it won’t go without consequence. There was also unwarranted suspicion directed at other communities – and that is also reprehensible.” Separately, New South Wales police arrested 14 people on Monday morning as part of Strike Force Pearl: a police operation established in December 2024 to investigate antisemitic hate crimes across Sydney. The establishment of the Strike Force followed a string of antisemitic attacks in Australia in late-2024, including the vandalism of a Jewish school in Sydney’s eastern suburbs and the arson of a childcare centre, which was set alight and sprayed with antisemitic messages. Source link #Explosiveladen #caravan #part #fake #terror #plot Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Quantum Threshold Blasts onto Meta Quest Soon Quantum Threshold Blasts onto Meta Quest Soon Vaki Games has revealed Quantum Threshold for Meta Quest and PCVR headsets on Steam. This is an action shooter designed for seated play. Source link #Quantum #Threshold #Blasts #Meta #Quest Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

2025 Oscars Party: Inside the Governors Ball 2025 Oscars Party: Inside the Governors Ball Mikey Madison, Zoe Saldaña, Kieran Culkin and other winners celebrated at the official Academy Awards after-party. Mikey Madison, the best actress Oscar winner for “Anora,” and Fernanda Torres, a nominee. Mikey Madison, Zoe Saldaña, Kieran Culkin and other winners celebrated at the official Academy Awards after-party. Mikey Madison, the best actress Oscar winner for “Anora,” and Fernanda Torres, a nominee.Credit… Source link #Oscars #Party #Governors #Ball Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

How does the Canada general election work? A simple guide How does the Canada general election work? A simple guide BBC Mark Carney is due to be sworn in as Canada’s next prime minister in the coming days, having won the race to succeed Justin Trudeau. It means he will lead the governing Liberal Party of Canada in the next election – which is expected to be called soon. Several political leaders had called for a vote after Trudeau announced he was resigning as leader of the Liberals in January. But after US President Donald Trump imposed steep tariffs on the country, potentially sparking a trade war, opposition parties have suggested Canada should vote as soon as possible. When is the ********* federal election? By law, the maximum time between federal elections in Canada is five years. The next vote is officially scheduled for 20 October 2025. However, there are a couple of scenarios in which an early election can be triggered: When the governor general accepts the prime minister’s advice to dissolve government, orIf the governor general accepts the PM’s resignation after the government is defeated in a confidence vote in parliament When Trudeau resigned in January, he suspended parliament so that the Liberal Party, which currently controls government, could have a leadership race to find his replacement. Carney, announced as Trudeau’s replacement on Sunday, could call an election early. Pierre Poilievre, who leads the opposition Conservative Party, has already said he will call for a vote of no confidence once parliament returns, as has Jagmeet Singh, the leader of the New Democratic Party. Who could be prime minister? In the ********* federal election – as in the ***’s general election – voters do not cast a ballot directly for a prime minister. Instead, it is the leader of the party with the majority of members of parliament (MPs) who becomes PM. That means Carney will be in the running, along with Poilievre and Singh. What are the main parties running? Four main parties will contest the next election – the Liberals, the Conservatives, the New Democrats (NDP) and the Bloc Quebecois. The Liberals have been in power since 2015, when Trudeau was voted in. They currently hold 153 seats. The Conservatives are the official opposition with 120 seats. The Bloc Quebecois, which only runs candidates in the province of Quebec, has 33 seats, and the NDP has 24. The Green Party hold two seats. During the latter stages of Trudeau’s premiership, opinion polls consistently showed the Conservatives with a strong lead. But the numbers tightened after Trudeau stepped down. Trump has since taken office in the US and introduced steep tariffs against Canada, which has raised expectations of a closer vote. How does the ********* federal election work? There are 343 federal ridings – also called constituencies or electoral districts -across the country. Each has a corresponding seat in the House of Commons. All the seats in the lower chamber, the House of Commons, are up for grabs during an election. Members of the Senate, the upper chamber, are appointed and do not run for election. Like the ***, Canada has a “first-past-the-post” electoral system. The candidate who gets the most votes in each riding wins that seat and become an MP. They do not need to get the majority of all the votes cast in their area. Other parties win nothing in that area. The leader of the party with the largest number of elected MPs will normally form the government. The second-placed party usually forms the official opposition. If no party ends up with a majority seats – the result is known as a hung parliament or a ********* government. Practically, it means the party will not be able to pass legislation without the help of other parties. Who can vote? To vote in a ********* election, someone must be a ********* citizen, at least 18 years old, and have proof of identity and address. Source link #Canada #general #election #work #simple #guide Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Brian Boru stands as a reminder of Portland’s past. Is it time to move on? Brian Boru stands as a reminder of Portland’s past. Is it time to move on? Mar. 10—Whenever Russell Foster drives by the old Brian Boru building on Center Street in Portland, he stops to take a picture. A fan of Irish pubs, Foster, who moved to Maine in 2023, has wondered what it once was like and why it’s unoccupied. About a month ago, he decided to ask the hive mind. “Whats the story behind this Pub? Been empty for years, are there any plans to revive it? its a really cool building,” he posted on the Portland, Maine Facebook page with a photo of the distinctive red structure, its side painted with a mural of the toucan from Guinness ads, two pints of the stout atop its beak. Hundreds of people responded, reminiscing about meeting spouses and lifelong friends there, stopping by before a coencert or hockey game, enjoying cheap mimosas at brunch and, on some nights, imbibing more than they should have. It was also a prime location to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, on a circuit of Irish pubs in the Old Port with an all-day lineup of live music, free-flowing Guinness and shoulder-to-shoulder crowds. RiRa is the only one that’s still open. Many of the Facebook commenters lamented Brian Boru’s closure and some, more broadly, how Portland has changed. One of them said he avoids Center Street because it makes him too sad to see it empty. That’s the building’s double-edged sword. Unlike other beloved businesses that have turned into something different or been erased from sight by new development, it stands out: two stories tall, with its boldly painted brick, surrounded by empty lots — a reminder both of the good times had there and the fact that it’s gone. Nearby insurance company MEMIC bought the building (which dates back to the 1800s) when the pub closed in 2019 after 26 years in business and had planned to demolish it to make way for an employee parking lot, but put that process on hold when, in 2021, someone came forward with a proposal to relocate it. That never came to fruition, and as of now, MEMIC — which owns the entire block surrounded by Spring, Center, ***** and Cotton streets — has no immediate plans for the building, but will “continue to explore opportunities for our employees and Portland,” a spokesperson said in an email last week. One thing’s for sure: If the company does ever decide to tear down the building, it will be hearing from Portland residents. We saw it with the Greyhound mural outside the former St. John Street bus station, when it was being replaced with an objectively more attractive work of art, and we’re watching it play out right now with the former children’s museum on Free Street. While a judge will decide if there’s a legitimate reason not to tear down that building, I hardly doubt everyone who has rallied behind it is that concerned with the particulars of historic preservation. My guess? Many of them just want the streetscape to stay the same. I get it. The city has been whiplashed by change in the last decade or so, and it’s hard not to want to hold onto what’s left of the before times. Yes, there’s the real fear of the now-allegorical Union Station situation, where we don’t recognize the value of older structures or how quickly dated their replacements will become. And, as with the children’s museum, there’s the problem of setting precedent for future changes with fewer upsides than an expanded Portland Museum of Art. But neither applies to a standalone building, with no historic protections, on prime peninsula real estate. Foster, for one, envisions a scenario like in the beginning of the movie “Up,” where a single house gets surrounded by skyscrapers. “It would be really cool if they could sell off that building and reopen it. That would be my dream scenario,” he said, sounding a lot more like a longtime Mainer than someone who moved here recently. Despite being a Massachusetts transplant (maybe considered by some as part of the problem), Foster says he can relate to residents who are frustrated by the city becoming more expensive and losing its less pretentious establishments. That’s what happened in his hometown of Newburyport, and why he and his wife bought a house in Lewiston. They hope to move to Portland one day and to be able to go to places like Brian Boru. As much as I’d love another summer day out on that deck (with the window open to the bar, but without the dance club vibes that took over inside, thank you very much), I’m not as optimistic. Maybe the guy who avoids Center Street has the right idea: that leaving those memories to the mind’s eye makes it easier to move on. Thinking back on St. Patrick’s Days past, I can easily picture the scene inside Brian Boru without looking at the building, and I’m guessing, some day, that will have to be enough. Copy the Story Link Source link #Brian #Boru #stands #reminder #Portlands #time #move Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

French Cinema Celebrates Its Covid Recovery French Cinema Celebrates Its Covid Recovery Ronald Chammah, who owns a pair of small cinemas on the Left Bank of Paris, remembers well the grim days in 2022, when he wondered whether the French passion for moviegoing — a pastime that France invented 130 years ago — had been irreparably diminished by pandemic lockdowns. But that was then. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Chammah was sitting in a packed Parisian cafe happily describing the Sunday in late November when he sold out screenings from a roster of Armenian art-house directors — Inna Mkhitaryan, Artavazd Pelechian, Sergueï Paradjanov — known mostly to hard-core film buffs. “That day, we broke the record for our theaters,” Mr. Chammah said with a note of astonishment. “It was full, all day long — sold out, sold out, sold out.” The global movie business had a disappointing 2024, thanks in part to Hollywood strikes. At the Oscars on Sunday, Sean Baker, winner of best director for “Anora,” used his acceptance speech to lament the pandemic-era loss of hundreds of American movie screens. “And we continue to lose them regularly,” Mr. Baker said. “If we don’t reverse this trend, we’ll be losing a vital part of our culture.” But in France, there has been a more celebratory feeling of late, with fresh statistics suggesting that its audiences are leading the way in returning to what are lovingly known as “les salles obscures” — the “dark rooms” of their movie theaters. That celebration was infused with a very French idea about citizens’ moral obligation to support the arts and to do so somewhere other than at home. The Institut Lumière, a film society based in Lyon, declared that last year’s French admissions numbers amounted to a triumph over both the pandemic era and the “invasive digital civilization” of scrolling and swiping. “We know this more than ever: going to the cinema remains unique, singular, precious,” the institute wrote in an email to supporters. “Personal, physical, sentimental. It allows for a re-appropriation of a way of being in the world that nothing can ever prevent.” According to the data company Comscore, France was one of the few countries that saw an increase in movie theater attendance last year over 2023, with more than 181 million attendees, an uptick of nearly a million. Brazil, Britain and Turkey also saw an increase, said Eric Marti, a general manager of Comscore Movies France. But he said attendance numbers were down in every other European country, as well as in the United States. At the same time, however, worldwide box office revenues are up, according to a recent report on global media by PricewaterhouseCoopers, and are likely to surpass their prepandemic levels by next year. That is largely because people going to the movies in developed countries are paying more for a premium experience, even if they go less often, said David Hancock, an analyst at the research company Omdia. But Mr. Hancock said the French public’s relationship to movies and movie theaters was something different altogether. “It’s almost mystical,” he said. The idea of the French capital as a concentrated locus of obsessive cinephilia is one of those baguette-under-the-arm clichés that also has a basis in fact. Movie theaters have long contributed to the city’s urban landscape, and still do. The pandemic’s lockdowns shuttered French cinemas for 300 total days in 2020 and 2021. In Paris, the only comparable ******* may have been in 1940, when the advancing ******* Army led people to flee the city, prompting widespread temporary movie theater closures. In today’s Paris, it can feel as if the pandemic never happened. At Le Champo theater, fans turn out for retrospective series on Satyajit Ray and Frank Capra. At the art house theater chain mk2, they attend talks by sociologists, art historians and philosophers. In November, the Jeu de Paume, a museum dedicated to photography and contemporary art, inaugurated a cinema focused on art films and documentaries. Two months earlier, the movie company Pathé opened its seven-screen Pathé Palace in a Grands Boulevards building steeped in cinema history. The celebrated architect Renzo Piano handled the renovation. “Many people in the world have buried the movie theater and think that television has definitively eliminated it,” Jérôme Seydoux, the Pathé chairman, said at the time of the renovation. Mr. Seydoux called the project “a reasonable folly, a setting to welcome all the dreamers of this world.” Some of this sustained passion might be because many Parisian apartments are too small to accommodate large home-theater setups. The French movie industry likes to serve up another explanation, with a spritz of immodesty and a dollop of swagger. In a statement, the National Center for Film and Moving Images, or CNC, the French government film agency, chalked up the industry’s recovery from the pandemic to “the artistic and industrial excellence of our model of cultural exception,” a reference to national policies meant to promote and protect French culture. Olivier Henrard, who was until recently the CNC’s interim president, went deeper. “We haven’t forgotten,” he said in an interview, “that citizenship has been constructed in the theater, from the time of the Greeks.” Mr. Henrard noted that France’s “cultural exception” model supports the moviegoing habit, with an education curriculum that includes subsidized trips to the movies for millions of schoolchildren. The government supports tiny movie houses in smaller cities, while some of the most isolated villages regularly receive visits from associations that set up temporary screenings in schools and city halls. France requires first-run movies to screen exclusively in French theaters for four months before going to video, and the CNC oversees a complex system of taxes on tickets and fees from TV channels and video streaming services that filters back into movie production. That has created a sense that going to the movies fulfills a cherished sort of social contract. Mr. Chammah, the cinema owner — who is also a film producer and distributor, and the husband of the French film star Isabelle Huppert — argued that after the pandemic, Paris still offered the most impressive range of choice for cinephiles. “It is the best, because there is this choice,” he said. Still, the CNC noted that French cinema attendance was nearly 13 percent below pre-pandemic levels. And in recent years, Paris has seen the closure of a few cherished movie houses. But Axel Huyghe, an author and expert on French movie houses, sees hope, especially in the numerous restorations of iconic movie venues either recently completed or underway. “The cinema industry is in the process of renewal,” he said. La Pagode, a faux-Japanese fantasia of enameled stoneware and stained glass in the Seventh Arrondissement, manifests that hope. Once one of the city’s most storied cinemas, it closed in 2015 amid a bitter rent dispute. Now under renovation, it appears, on the narrow Rue de Babylone, like an audacious dream sequence spliced into an otherwise staid reel of buildings. Across the street, Yohann Lucian, who works in a local bistro, has been watching the renovation’s progress. When the theater finally reopens, Mr. Lucian said, he is certain that the moviegoers will come back. “For Parisians, it’s a way of life,” he said, with a hint of a shrug. “They like to go to the movies.” Source link #French #Cinema #Celebrates #Covid #Recovery Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

His Bollywood Spoofs Brought Joy to a Mill Town. Then Bollywood Came Calling. His Bollywood Spoofs Brought Joy to a Mill Town. Then Bollywood Came Calling. Nasir Shaikh, the sleeves of his suede jacket rolled up, used his phone camera as a pocket mirror to touch up his hair. Then he stepped onto the red carpet (it was blue, actually) and stood beneath banners dedicated to filmmaking giants like Chaplin, Scorsese and Spielberg. His own movies, exuberant do-it-yourself productions made with a simple camcorder and a ragtag cast, were about as far from big-budget blockbusters as could be. Yet here he was in Mumbai, the home of Bollywood, celebrated as a cinematic dreamer, attending the opening of a film based on his life. He put one foot forward, tucked a thumb into his jeans pocket and smiled for the cameras. “Here, sir, here!” the photographers shouted. “Nasir, sir! Nasir, sir!” Three decades ago, Mr. Shaikh was an attendant in his family’s “video parlor,” as the dingy little halls that showed pirated and unlicensed movies were called. He had an idea: Why couldn’t Malegaon, his small city of textile mills less than 200 miles from Mumbai, have a film industry of its own? His formula for “Mollywood” was shoestring ingenious. He and his friends would recreate popular movies but change them enough to avoid copyright troubles. Since there was already so much sadness in his blighted city, every film would be a comedy. Loom workers and restaurant waiters would play heroes and villains in plots that felt close to home, speaking the dialogue of their own streets. The VHS camera Mr. Shaikh, now 52, used to make his early movies was also used to record weddings. Costumes came from thrift stores. Actors were friends who got no pay, though Mr. Shaikh tried to find substitutes for their shifts at the mill or the restaurant. For a spoof of “Superman,” Mr. Shaikh cast a scrawny textile worker as the hero. At one turn, Malegaon’s Man of Steel fights a local tobacco don who is ruining people’s health; at another he dives into a canal to save children. (It mattered little for the edit that in real life he could not swim.) This Superman could fly, by tying him horizontally to a pole extending from a moving wagon, with an assistant flapping his cape to simulate wind, or by shooting him in front of a green screen that was a sheet hung from the side of a truck. This Superman could lip-sync and dance with the heroine in a field of yellow flowers. “Why not?” was Mr. Shaikh’s philosophy. “Why not?” was his attitude. His productions tapped into something universal: the dream of something more in a place where the routine is stifling and any mobility is out of reach. Mr. Shaikh’s entry into moviemaking — a daunting endeavor in the era before smartphones and easy digital creation — was in part a solution to a police crackdown on piracy that left the city’s video parlors struggling for content. His movies, most of them parodies of Bollywood hits, became wildly successful in Malegaon. When his first film ran in the parlors, it brought in four times the few hundred dollars in borrowed money that he and his friends had spent to make it. “For two months, continuously, the film ran ‘house full’ — three showings a day,” Mr. Shaikh said. National news channels rushed to the city to interview him. Varun Grover, who wrote the screenplay for the new movie about Mr. Shaikh, “Superboys of Malegaon,” said that most children in India grew up wanting to become either a cricket player or a movie star, even though the odds of either were impossibly small. The story of Malegaon “is not just inspiring for those who want to come to cinema, but for any person who dreams at night but moves on from it in the morning,” Mr. Grover said. “They turned their nights’ dreams into their days’ reality.” For his first project, Mr. Shaikh chose to parody the smash-hit film “Sholay,” from the “angry young man” era of Bollywood in the 1970s and 1980s, his formative years. To sidestep copyright issues, character names were tweaked just enough. Gabbar Singh, the villain from “Sholay” and one of the most recognizable characters of Indian cinema, became Rubber Singh. Basanti, the heroine he kidnaps, became Basmati. For actors to play them, he would look for some resemblance — in height, or eyes, or voice at least. “We couldn’t find the original heroes in these parts,” Mr. Shaikh said. “Duplicates would do.” In one of the most famous scenes of “Sholay,” Gabbar Singh’s thugs, on horseback, ambush a train carrying the movie’s protagonists. There was no way Mr. Shaikh could afford horses, or a train. So his heroes made do with a bus. And Rubber Singh’s thugs? “I said, ‘Let’s do one thing — we put the thugs on bicycles, all the thugs on bicycles,” Mr. Shaikh recalled. But as he achieved success, he found — as many do in India — a bureaucracy lying in wait. After his initial films, the police would not allow screenings unless Mr. Shaikh obtained certificates from the censor board. To get approval for one movie, he had to travel back and forth repeatedly to Mumbai for a whole year. The industry was also changing: Video parlors were shutting down with the rise of multiplex cinemas and online streaming. Eventually, Mr. Shaikh moved on from making movies. His family’s parlor is now a clothing store. But his legend persisted because of a 2008 documentary about the making of Malegaon’s “Superman.” At a film festival in New Delhi over a decade ago, Mr. Shaikh was approached by Zoya Akhtar, a filmmaker whose father was a co-writer of many major films of the angry young man era, including “Sholay.” She wanted to produce a biopic. “I know who you are,” Mr. Shaikh told her. “I have copied all of your father’s films.” The decade it took to bring the biopic to the screen tested Mr. Shaikh’s patience. But he stuck to the deal partly because of how full circle it felt. “It’s all quite meta,” said Adarsh Gourav, the actor who plays Mr. Shaikh. Mr. Gourav grew up in a place not unlike Malegaon. He remembers his first experiences at the only family cinema in Jamshedpur, his hometown. He would be on the shoulders of his older brother among the crowd outside the hall, waiting for the shutters to open. “There’s like this metal bar, which looks kind of like a prison, and people are like rattling the prison, like basically screaming at the guards to open the gate before the show,” he recalled. “And as soon as the gates are opened, everybody just runs inside like their life depends on it.” Reema Kagti, the biopic’s director, who grew up in a small town in northeastern India, said the passion of the Malegaon bunch allowed her to explore fundamental questions about what cinema means to places where there is little else. “This film needed to encapsulate a lot of things, starting from the magic of cinema. Why do we go to the cinema? Why do we need cinema?” Ms. Kagti said. “Why do we need to see ourselves represented in art?” Much has changed in Malegaon since Mr. Shaikh’s moviemaking days. But the passion for cinema, and the escape it provides, remains. In at least one busy alley, even the old video parlors are still operating. On a recent evening, men — and only men — trickled in. (Malegaon is a deeply patriarchal place, a fact reflected, too, in Mr. Shaikh’s productions.) In the parlors, the men found respite from 12 hours of jarring mechanical sounds at the loom mills. For 30 cents, they could lean back for a couple of hours, light a ********** and be carried away. “There is nothing else in these parts — just work, work and work,” said Shabaz Attar, 25, who stops by the parlors occasionally. The large posters dotting the alley were time capsules: dramatic collages of bloody and bruised faces, with hand-painted signs listing the showtimes and promising that the “double action” was worth the money. On one screen was a Hindi-dubbed version of the 2014 Hollywood film “Lucy,” a complicated metamorphosis story starring Scarlett Johansson and Morgan Freeman. (“Strange film,” one older man muttered to his companion as they exited.) In another hall was a 1995 Hindi film called “Jallaad,” about a police officer, played by Mithun Chakraborty, trying to learn the truth about his parents. “I bet even Mithun has forgotten that he did a film like this,” said Raes Dilawar, who runs the parlors. “But we keep it alive here.” His method for deciding which films to screen? “Whatever my heart desires,” he said with a smile. “If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, so what?” Last month, as he was promoting the biopic, Mr. Gourav returned to Malegaon, where he had spent weeks working to understand the world and the passion of Mr. Shaikh, the man he would play onscreen. Star and subject made their way around town. Whenever Mr. Gourav’s traveling makeup crew stepped in to fix his hair or touch up his forehead, Mr. Shaikh stepped away, pulled out his phone camera and fixed his own hair. He still thinks in frames, light and angle. Their last stop was Mr. Shaikh’s home: a small apartment with an open-roof courtyard above a row of shops on a crowded street. In anticipation of Mr. Gourav’s visit, Mr. Shaikh had gone out in the morning and bought plastic flowers for decoration. As the sunset call to prayer echoed around Malegaon, the uniformed bodyguards who had come with Mr. Gourav from Mumbai tried to control the small crowd outside the building. One by one, Mr. Shaikh ushered visitors to his rooftop for a photo with the star. These days, Mr. Shaikh is somewhere between lapping up the recognition for his work and thinking ahead to the projects that could be next, from YouTube shows to films for the big screen. He’s reflective yet fidgety, like a boxer in unsure retirement. But first, he wants to set up an electronics shop downstairs for his sons, 20-year-old twins who are finishing their studies. “Then, with a free mind, I can come back to this,” he said. Source link #Bollywood #Spoofs #Brought #Joy #Mill #Town #Bollywood #Calling Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

During Ramadan, the Yemeni Coffee Shop Is Jumping During Ramadan, the Yemeni Coffee Shop Is Jumping On a recent Saturday night, diners in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, took their rightful places at the natural wine bars, pizza shops and taquerias across the neighborhood. Good luck finding a seat at the Yemeni coffee chain. Qahwah House, a Yemeni coffeehouse with 26 locations in nine states, was standing room only just after 8 p.m. College students crowded around kettles of spiced coffee to study for exams and occasionally flirt. A group of fashionable women clinked tea glasses, having just come from a birthday dinner. Behind the counter, the floor manager took a phone call: He was needed at the Qahwah House across town in Bay Ridge — a line had wrapped throughout the cafe. Go ahead: Have that coffee after 2 p.m. Yemeni immigrants are making their mark on the U.S. coffee industry and shifting cafe culture late into the night. In the last decade, the number of Yemeni coffeehouses that stay open well after sundown has ballooned, beginning in Michigan and fanning out toward Texas, New York and California. Delah Coffee has opened four coffeehouses in the Bay Area since 2022. Haraz Coffee House, which first opened in Dearborn, Mich., in 2021, now counts 22 shops in its empire. And while Mokafé isn’t the largest of these growing chains — it has seven cafes in New York and New Jersey — but its Times Square location, which stays open until 2 a.m. on weekends, is impossible to miss. The expansion of these coffeehouses reflects increasing demand for late-night spaces that decenter alcohol. That is perhaps best on display during Ramadan, which began on Feb. 28. At Qahwah Houses across the country, the closing hours range from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. on weekends, said Ibrahim Alhasbani, its founder. This month, the coffee shops stay open as late as 3 a.m. to host those convening after their fast-breaking meals. That’s the idea at least. “There is no location that closes on time,” Mr. Alhasbani said. “The customers keep coming. If we say 3, that means 4.” In Yemen, Mr. Alhasbani’s family has been cultivating coffee for more than 300 years. He opened his first coffeehouse in Dearborn in 2017, eager to create a late-night alternative for Muslims who do not drink. “If I wanted to hang out with my friends, where was I going to go?” said Mr. Alhasbani, who opened the Williamsburg location in 2020. “There was no place like that.” Other cafes in the area catering to **** owners, kombucha fans and kava users have come and gone over the last few years. Yemeni coffee stuck. “It’s not just a cup of coffee,” he said. “It’s a whole experience.” This wave of Yemeni American specialty coffeehouses began less than a decade ago near Dearborn, the first Arab-majority city in the country, said Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a coffee roaster and historian. They showcase the storied coffee tradition of Yemen, where Arabica beans were cultivated for centuries. Mr. Alkhanshali estimates that there are more than 100 Yemeni coffeehouses in the United States — and that the number is quickly growing. “It’s a pattern of immigrant cultures,” Mr. Alkhanshali said, pointing to Vietnamese nail salons and Cambodian doughnut shops. “When one person figures something out, other people jump on it.” Yemeni immigrants in the United States have often operated corner stores and smoke shops, he said — businesses they owned to survive. These coffeehouses represent a rare shift in the paradigm. “This isn’t a moment,” he said. “This is a movement.” Omar Jahamee watched these cafes take off in Michigan, where he lived for several years. When he moved to the Bay Area in 2022, he and his uncle opened one of their own. The timing couldn’t have been better: The Golden State Warriors had just trounced the Boston Celtics in the NBA Finals. They opened Delah Coffee, one of the first Yemeni coffeehouses in San Francisco, the morning of the championship parade. “I had a hundred customers in the shop,” said Mr. Jahamee, 21. When the festivities concluded, many customers returned to the cafe, surprised to find it was open until 10 p.m. “By closing late, we opened up a whole different world,” he said. At Arwa Yemeni Coffee, a cafe in Texas opening its fourth location this week, some of the busiest hours are right before closing time — as late as 1 a.m. on weekends. “In our culture, we drink coffee and tea late into the night,” said Faris Almatrahi, an owner. “It tends to be extremely packed and loud.” When Mr. Almatrahi, 47, and his partners opened Arwa in 2022, their customers were still catching on. “We had a huge non-******* demographic during the day” that cleared out as the afternoon wore on, he said. At night, the customer base was predominantly *******. As Yemeni cafes have expanded, the crowds have, too. “We’re starting to see other demographics socializing at night and sipping coffee,” Mr. Almatrahi said. On the second night of Ramadan, Mariam Elhabashy’s first stop after iftar was the Qahwah House in Bay Ridge, which had opened three days before, to order an iced strawberry juice. In the past, she celebrated Ramadan at the nearest Starbucks. “This is my second time here today,” she said. Mehraj Shafat and Azim Uddin beat her there. They were sharing a cloudy kettle of Adeni chai, a cardamom-spiced milk tea named after a port city in Yemen. “This is the perfect way to end your night,” said Mr. Shafat, 21. “Surrounded by your people.” Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. Source link #Ramadan #Yemeni #Coffee #Shop #Jumping Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

A Tour by Train of 5 Dazzling European Cities A Tour by Train of 5 Dazzling European Cities A century after the original golden era of railroads, trains are once again the talk of travel. In Europe, especially, train travel is surging as an environmental alternative to short-haul flights, with more night trains, high-speed routes and transnational collaboration between rail companies. Political ties between European countries may be jittery, but the cities are more linked than ever. Trains also return us to the romance of travel. The pacifying hours invite reading and contemplation as the landscapes reveal the geography between destinations — the Zen opposite of air travel’s frittered tedium. I travel to Sweden annually from my home in Florence, Italy. Seeking the contemporary culture of other cities and to cut down on flying, I devised a train odyssey from the Mediterranean south to the Scandinavian north. Could a trip with so many providers and legs actually work? Using a hodgepodge of rail sites, I booked a two-week itinerary of high-speed trains from Milan to Stockholm, with stopovers in Zurich, Berlin and Copenhagen: five cities in five countries. A word of advice: Book a month or two in advance to get the best prices; check if a Eurail or Interrail pass might benefit you; and pack meals — the food service on these routes is spotty and, when available, terrifyingly industrial. With tips from local friends rather than sightseeing checklists, I was ready to cross the continent. Milan Milan has recast itself as a vibrant city, full of high-polish people making things happen. An international flight hub, it’s a convenient starting point for travelers arriving from abroad. My first stop was the Prada Foundation, whose contemporary exhibitions give the city a measure of cool and cultural relevance. Heading to Corso Venezia, I promenaded through the park and surrounding streets filled with wild experiments in 20th-century architecture, then visited the Luigi Rovati Foundation, with its Etruscan antiquities and contemporary art in a 19th-century palazzo made modern by the architect Mario Cucinella. In the evening, a friend joined me in NoLo — the long-hyped neighborhood north of Piazzale Loreto. After an aperitivo at La Botte Fatale, a wine bar hosting occasional small concerts and exhibits, we reached the thrumming Piazza Morbegno, where we dined at Silvano, which has been packed ever since opening last year. “My dream was of a place with happy clients, not a Michelin star,” the chef Vladimiro Poma said of his “gastronomy for all,” with sharing plates like stewed peppers with peanuts and cilantro. While I crashed at a friend’s, travelers might try the new Casa Brivio hotel (from 300 euros, or about $315), in a pair of residential buildings with midcentury-inspired suites by the architect Matteo Thun. Departing from Centrale station, with its Art Deco and Rationalist architecture, its soaring halls and Roman-style mosaics, its Fascist-era megalomaniac scale and indiscriminately plastered ads and LED screens, always seizes me with both awe and anger. I boarded the line to Zurich. On a spotless Swiss train (3.5 hours; tickets from 34 Swiss francs, or about $38), I watched the soft slopes of Italy give way to Switzerland’s craggy cliff faces. Waterfalls burst from the rocks, with snow-capped Alpine peaks wreathed in clouds towering over valleys of wildflower meadows and ******-and-white cows — a fantasy landscape. A short walk from the station, I dropped my luggage at Locke am Platz (from 150 francs), which opened last year with apartment-style rooms inspired by Swiss design. Over a couple of days, I roamed from Nude, a riverfront cafe in Tanzhaus’s Brutalist headquarters; to the Löwenbräukunst art center, a beer factory converted into art spaces; to Josefwiese park with its pétanque crowds and Alpine chalet bar. From the Bürkliplatz flea market, I meandered into the galleries along Rämistrasse before reaching the Kunsthaus — Switzerland’s largest museum since doubling its spaces in 2020 with David Chipperfield’s graceful concrete-block monolith. Inside, the Impressionist paintings of the permanent collection were hung amid viewer surveys, with questions like: How to treat these works donated by a Nazi arms dealer? Zurich is built on the shores of a swimmable lake, and its picture-book streets are backdropped by saw-toothed mountains — an idyllic union of nature and an immaculate city. However, there’s a vibe shift at Rote Fabrik, a factory that has become a scruffy center for alternative culture, where a new generation is packing the calendar with concerts, parties and drag shows. In its graffiti-encrusted courtyard, D.J.s blasted house music at a day rave I attended, while a packed “****** Tango” class proceeded inside. For all of Zurich’s predictable orderliness, there’s also a thriving and unruly flip side. Across the lake, the Le Corbusier pavilion, a radical 1967 home-turned-museum, stood like a giant stack of rainbow toy blocks. Hopping on the ferry to the center, I stopped by Heisswein, an unpretentious natural wine bar serving small plates and its own pickled vegetables. Back at my hotel, I sat on the balcony and marveled at the city’s contentedness. Berlin The Deutsche Bahn train I boarded was bedraggled (from 70 euros), but the trip’s scenery made up for it with cornfields and vineyard hills, shifting to flatlands before a shock of skyscrapers in Frankfurt. We stalled for an hour outside Berlin, and as my journey’s longest leg stretched to over nine hours, I broke my cardinal rule of avoiding train refreshments with a red wine tasting of artificial oak and desperation. A 15-minute subway ride from the station, the Hoxton hotel (from 100 euros), opened last summer, hoping to become a hot spot in strait-laced Charlottenburg. The accommodation’s pastel charms seemed to be working — I spied the musician Devendra Banhart at breakfast. I biked around pretty Prenzlauer Berg with a friend who recalled the neighborhood when, until its recent yoga and ceramic studio years, it was full of war-pocked, coal-heated squats. I watched the evening come alive in Neukölln from a window seat at the new wine bar Sway, and found food love at Sathutu, an imaginative Berlin take on Sri Lankan flavors. Berlin is a muscular city, with epic postwar boulevards and pharaonic East-versus-West architecture. At Kulturforum, a monumental 1950s plaza, I meandered from one museum to the next — Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie building, the Gemäldegalerie of great masters, the airy Museum of Musical Instruments with its house-size old cinema organ and Saturday performances. Against Berlin’s staggering scale, the city’s tree-lined river and canals provided relief for groups of locals: goth punks, regular punks, barefoot neo-hippies and eccentrics — a citizenry nonchalantly indulging in weed but also hard drugs and one plein-air sex act I cannot unsee. Even with rents rising, the libertine spirit seemed irradicable. Copenhagen From Berlin, the nearly eight-hour journey (60 euros) took me through ******* cookie-cutter towns of A-frame houses, but when I awoke from a nap in the train’s oversize armchair, the view had changed to undulating fields of sheared golden wheat bordered by wildflowers: I’d arrived in Denmark. In Copenhagen, the rain came down in hard slants, yet bike lanes were busy as cyclists in popsicle-colored parkas cruised by, children poking out of Christiania cargo boxes. The well-preserved city, with centuries-old apartment buildings of brick or bright paint, was squeaky clean — so apparently wholesome and well-functioning that I might have been the only jaywalker in town. I headed to Cisternerne, an underground water reservoir transformed, with its open pools, into an unusual art space. In near-total darkness, I crossed a gangway over the cistern’s water, enveloped by a dirge-like sound piece by Taryn Simon. Emerging to parting rain clouds, I biked, stopping by the Rosenborg Castle gardens, then the Nørrebro neighborhood of vintage shops and local favorites like the wine bar Pompette. There were bike lanes on even the tiniest streets. The following day was the inauguration of Riviera, the third cafe from the talented baker Chiara Barla, whose recipes span Denmark and her native Italy. In the corner eatery furnished with spare designs by Copenhagen’s own Frama, I devoured buttered sourdough bread and apricot ricotta cake. “People are faring well in Copenhagen,” Ms. Barla said, beaming. Taking the dazzlingly fast subway to Amager island, I left the center for an aperitivo at Josephine, a circus-colored wine bar, before retreating to the brand-new Hotel Bella Grande, where I’d dropped my luggage earlier — more Italian inspiration, with damask couches and space-age lamps, yet somehow still sharp and modern and uniquely Copenhagen. Stockholm Leaving Copenhagen’s castle-like station, the train (5.3 hours, from 35 euros) traversed the five-mile bridge connecting Denmark and Sweden, which opened in 2000 as a symbol of shared European Union optimism. Birds alighting from the marshes followed the train over the border, formed by the waters of the Oresund strait. From the windows of the tattered but mercifully silent train car, I watched the passing show: Falu red farmhouses, pastures of cows and horses, shimmering swaths of lakes. I spotted rabbits and deer among the slender birches and spruce pines before the train glided over the mouth of the Baltic Sea to the islands that form Stockholm. I walked to Östermalm for a cinnamon morning bun at Stora Bageriet inside the 17th-century industrial building that houses the Swedish Museum of Performing Arts. At nearby Nybroviken, a bay where boats depart for the archipelago, I opted for the ferry to Djurgården, an island of museums and woods that were once royal hunting grounds, to visit the contemporary art exhibitions and raw concrete new halls of Liljevalchs, then strolled the bridges to Moderna Museet’s stellar collection of 20th-century art on neighboring Skeppsholmen. One evening I stopped into Brutalisten, where I found the artist and owner, Carsten Höller, dining at a window table, and sampled a multi-mushroom concoction. Another night, friends and I nestled in the corner of Främmat, a French-inspired natural wine restaurant in a dim, cozy cellar in Vasastan. “In Stockholm, we’re obsessed with figuring out what’s next and what’s cool,” said one of my tablemates. I wanted to stay in Södermalm, the Stockholm island of eclectic bars, young creatives and squads of paternity-leave dads with their offspring in BabyBjörns, so I found a room at Hotel Frantz (from 140 euros), an antique inn turned design guesthouse, originally built by a tailor in 1647. Just across the street, I took an elevator to the refurbished Gondolen, a 1935 ********* lounge cantilevered 11 stories over Södermalm’s waterfront, with views of Stockholm’s harbors and Swedish Grace architecture. Intending to check out several spots, I met friends at the low-key Bar Ninja, but never left — the wine, music and easygoing atmosphere settled us in until closing time. My journey ended with a 5 a.m. departure from Arlanda Airport: I’d given in to the conveniences and hermetically sealed discomforts of budget air travel to head home to Italy. Yet even in my flight-mode zombie state, I was dreaming about my mostly seamless train odyssey, about the landscapes I’d seen and the illuminating cities I’d briefly been a part of. Source link #Tour #Train #Dazzling #European #Cities Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Book Review: ‘The Man Nobody Killed,’ by Elon Green Book Review: ‘The Man Nobody Killed,’ by Elon Green But it was his unlucky fate to enter posterity as the subject of other people’s art and protest rather than the creator of his own. A remarkable number of the luminaries of that watchful, jittery era were shocked into action by Stewart’s killing. The artist David Wojnarowicz designed a flier for a rally at Union Square while Stewart was still on life support. Basquiat, profoundly shaken by the incident (“It could have been me,” he observed), painted a spontaneous memorial on his friend Keith Haring’s studio wall. Haring, who had been arrested four times for graffiti but — as he acknowledged — was spared mistreatment because he was white, later fashioned an anguished tribute of his own. Andy Warhol, Toni Morrison and Spike Lee all drew on the event in various ways, while political reaction ranged from demonstrations to two separate bombings, one of which blew up the bathroom in the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association building, injuring two maintenance workers. New York at that time was in the throes of multiple crises: AIDS, crack, rampant violence, near bankruptcy. Its institutions were in disarray. The transit police closed ranks long before any serious attempt was made to investigate the assault. Backed by the P.B.A., they pursued a strategy of witness-smearing and victim-blaming. “Michael Stewart is dead,” a police lawyer brazenly asserted, “because of what he did to himself.” The medical examiner, whom Green presents as a study in craven evasiveness that would be funny if this were fiction, wouldn’t give a precise cause of death, making it almost impossible for prosecutors to bring charges. The district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, did finally get a grand jury to indict three officers, but a rogue juror’s investigative efforts (on Stewart’s behalf, ironically) shipwrecked the proceedings and Morgenthau had to start over. Even with the most serious charges downgraded from manslaughter to criminally negligent *********, jurors acquitted all three defendants. By then the public’s ambivalence over such matters had already been demonstrated in the case of Bernhard Goetz, who shot and injured four young ****** men on the subway in 1984 after one of them asked him for $5. Goetz was convicted of nothing more than unlawful gun possession. In 2019 the Guggenheim exhibited Basquiat’s painting, cut from Haring’s wall, along with Haring’s own tribute and some of Stewart’s work. With ****** Lives Matter and other social justice movements then on the rise, the relevance of the decades-old incident was self-evident, and the fact that New York could no longer plead ’80s levels of chaos and underfunding made the contemporary echoes of Stewart’s killing all the more appalling. But if the subdued reaction to the recent acquittal of Daniel Penny in the death of Jordan Neely is anything to go by, there’s a renewed tolerance for lethal violence against ****** men perceived as trouble. The events recounted in Green’s swift, unsparing book are as timely as ever; one can only hope they still have the power to shock. Source link #Book #Review #Man #Killed #Elon #Green Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Hospital gun-violence prevention programs may be caught in federal funding crossfire Hospital gun-violence prevention programs may be caught in federal funding crossfire Seven years ago, Erica Green learned through a Facebook post that her brother had been shot. She rushed to check on him at a hospital run by Denver Health, the city’s safety-net system, but she was unable to get information from emergency room workers, who complained that she was creating a disturbance. “I was distraught and outside, crying, and Jerry came out of the front doors,” she said. Jerry Morgan is a familiar face from Green’s Denver neighborhood. He had rushed to the hospital after his pager alerted him to the shooting. As a violence prevention professional with the At-Risk Intervention and Mentoring program, or AIM, Morgan supports gun-violence patients and their families at the hospital — as he did the day Green’s brother was shot. “It made the situation of that traumatic experience so much better. After that, I was, like, I want to do this work,” Green said. Today, Green works with Morgan as the program manager for AIM, a hospital-linked violence intervention program launched in 2010 as a partnership between Denver Health and the nonprofit Denver Youth Program. It since has expanded to include Children’s Hospital Colorado and the University of Colorado Hospital. Erica Green, who manages the At-Risk Intervention and Mentoring program, or AIM, sits on a couch in the new REACH Clinic in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood. Green came to this work after her family’s own experience with gun violence: “I feel very blessed to be able to show up for my community this way.” Stephanie Wolf for KFF Health News AIM is one of dozens of hospital-linked violence intervention programs around the country. The programs aim to uncover the social and economic factors that contributed to someone ending up in the ER with a bullet wound: inadequate housing, job loss, or feeling unsafe in one’s neighborhood, for example. Such programs that take a public health approach to stopping gun violence have had success — one in San Francisco reported a fourfold reduction in violent injury recidivism rates over six years. But President Trump’s executive orders calling for the review of the Biden administration’s gun policies and trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans have created uncertainty around the programs’ long-term federal funding. Some organizers believe their programs will be just fine, but others are looking to shore up alternative funding sources. “We’ve been worried about, if a domino does fall, how is it going to impact us? There’s a lot of unknowns,” said John Torres, associate director for Youth Alive, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit. Federal data shows that gun violence became a leading cause of death among children and young adults at the start of this decade and was tied to more than 48,000 deaths among people of all ages in 2022. New York-based pediatric trauma surgeon Chethan Sathya, a National Institutes of Health-funded firearms injury prevention researcher, believes those statistics show that gun violence can’t be ignored as a health care issue. “It’s killing so many people,” Sathya said. Research shows that a violent injury puts someone at heightened risk for future ones, and the risk of death goes up significantly by the third violent injury, according to a 2006 study published in The Journal of Trauma: Injury, Infection and Critical Care. Benjamin Li, an emergency medicine physician at Denver Health and the health system’s AIM medical director, said the ER is an ideal setting to intervene in gun violence by working to reverse-engineer what led to a patient’s injuries. “If you are just seeing the person, patching them up, and then sending them right back into the exact same circumstances, we know it’s going to lead to them being hurt again,” Li said. “It’s critical we address the social determinants of health and then try to change the equation.” That might mean providing alternative solutions to gunshot victims who might otherwise seek retaliation, said Paris Davis, the intervention programs director for Youth Alive. “If that’s helping them relocate out of the area, if that’s allowing them to gain housing, if that’s shifting that energy into education or job or, you know, family therapy, whatever the needs are for that particular case and individual, that is what we provide,” Davis said. AIM outreach workers meet gunshot wound victims at their hospital bedsides to have what Morgan, AIM’s lead outreach worker, calls a tough, nonjudgmental conversation on how the patients ended up there. Jerry Morgan, AIM’s lead outreach worker, stands outside the REACH Clinic in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood. He’s done the work for about nine years and says he’s seen an escalation of violence among young people during that time. Stephanie Wolf for KFF Health News AIM uses that information to help patients access the resources they need to navigate their biggest challenges after they’re discharged, Morgan said. Those challenges can include returning to school or work, or finding housing. AIM outreach workers might also attend court proceedings and assist with transportation to health care appointments. “We try to help in whatever capacity we can, but it’s interdependent on whatever the client needs,” Morgan said. Since 2010, AIM has grown from three full-time outreach workers to nine, and this year opened the REACH Clinic in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood. The community-based clinic provides wound-care kits; physical therapy; and behavioral, mental and occupational health care. In the coming months, it plans to add bullet removal to its services. It’s part of a growing movement of community-based clinics focused on violent injuries, including the Bullet Related Injury Clinic in St. Louis. Ginny McCarthy, an assistant professor in the Department of Surgery at the University of Colorado, described REACH as an extension of the hospital-based work, providing holistic treatment in a single location and building trust between health care providers and communities of color that have historically experienced racial biases in medical care. Ginny McCarthy, an assistant professor in the Department of Surgery at the University of Colorado, who works closely with the Denver Youth Program, opens up a take-home wound-care kit, which is offered at the REACH Clinic. Stephanie Wolf for KFF Health News Caught in the Crossfire, created in 1994 and run by Youth Alive in Oakland, is cited as the nation’s first hospital-linked violence intervention program and has since inspired others. The Health Alliance for Violence Intervention, a national network initiated by Youth ALIVE to advance public health solutions to gun violence, counted 74 hospital-linked violence intervention programs among its membership as of January. The alliance’s executive director, Fatimah Loren Dreier, compared medicine’s role in addressing gun violence to that of preventing an infectious disease, like cholera. “That disease spreads if you don’t have good sanitation in places where people aggregate,” she said. Dreier, who also serves as executive director of the Kaiser Permanente Center for Gun Violence Research and Education, said medicine identifies and tracks patterns that lead to the spread of a disease or, in this case, the spread of violence. “That is what health care can do really well to shift society. When we deploy this, we get better outcomes for everybody,” Dreier said. The alliance, of which AIM is a member, offers technical assistance and training for hospital-linked violence intervention programs and successfully petitioned to make their services eligible for traditional insurance reimbursement. In 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive action that opened the door for states to use Medicaid for violence prevention. Several states, including California, New York, and Colorado, have passed legislation establishing a Medicaid benefit for hospital-linked violence intervention programs. Last summer, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared gun violence a public health crisis, and the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act earmarked $1.4 billion in funding for a wide array of violence-prevention programs through next year. But in early February, Mr. Trump issued an executive order instructing the U.S. attorney general to conduct a 30-day review of a number of Biden’s policies on gun violence. The White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention now appears to be defunct, and recent moves to freeze federal grants created uncertainty among the gun-violence prevention programs that receive federal funding. AIM receives 30% of its funding from its operating agreement with Denver’s Office of Community Violence Solutions, according to Li. The rest is from grants, including Victims of Crime Act funding, through the Department of Justice. As of mid-February, Mr. Trump’s executive orders had not affected AIM’s current funding. Some who work with the hospital-linked violence prevention programs in Colorado are hoping a new voter-approved firearms and ammunition excise tax in the state, expected to generate about $39 million annually and support victim services, could be a new source of funding. But the tax’s revenues aren’t expected to fully flow until 2026, and it’s not clear how that money will be allocated. Trauma surgeon and public health researcher Catherine Velopulos, who is the AIM medical director at the University of Colorado hospital in Aurora, said any interruption in federal funding, even for a few months, would be “very difficult for us.” But Velopulos said she was reassured by the bipartisan support for the kind of work AIM does. “People want to oversimplify the problem and just say, ‘If we get rid of guns, it’s all going to stop,’ or ‘It doesn’t matter what we do, because they’re going to get guns, anyway,'” she said. “What we really have to address is why people feel so scared that they have to arm themselves.” KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism. Source link #Hospital #gunviolence #prevention #programs #caught #federal #funding #crossfire Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Trump Looms Over Greenland’s Election, but Voters Have Other Concerns Trump Looms Over Greenland’s Election, but Voters Have Other Concerns The air inside the community hall in Greenland’s capital was thick with warmth, a welcome contrast to the icy streets outside. As voters brushed snow from their coats, candidates from most of Greenland’s major parties sat down in the front of the room, ready for questions. Every seat was filled, two dozen international journalists lined the walls and a man in a ****** and gray sweater stepped forward to the mic. “Why is running a small business still so difficult?” he asked, his voice steady but impatient. Cameras clicked and so did the strap-on spikes that several journalists wore on their boots to keep from slipping on the ice. “You need to take those off,” the moderator said. “They’re ruining the floor.” With some grumbles, the spikes came off. On Tuesday, Greenlanders will cast their votes in what has to be the most closely watched election this island has ever held, as President Trump asserts again and again that he wants the United States to take over Greenland. He has refused to rule out force, and in his recent speech to Congress, he made a direct plea to the Greenlanders themselves, promising, “We will make you rich.” All the attention he has paid has drawn a wave of journalists, diplomats, social media influencers and investors to the Arctic. Greenland’s leading political parties are presenting different visions for the future and some are pushing for a new relationship with the United States and quick independence from Denmark, which colonized Greenland hundreds of years ago and still controls some of its affairs. But for many of Greenland’s 56,000 residents — a tiny population on the world’s biggest island — geopolitics is not a priority. At the recent town hall debate and in interviews with voters, Greenlanders expressed much more prosaic worries, often about living costs, unemployment, schools and health care. “The election is shaped by what I would call a ‘cross-pressure’ — two competing narratives pulling in different directions,” said Rasmus Leander Nielsen, a political scientist at Ilisimatusarfik University in the capital, Nuuk. “The geopolitical debates might dominate headlines, but for the average voter, daily life matters more.” President Trump floated the idea of the United States buying Greenland from Denmark during his first term. After Denmark said no, the idea seemed to die. But this time around, Mr. Trump seems determined to “get” Greenland, as he puts it. His refusal to rule out force has sent jitters across Europe, where relations with his administration are already hitting new lows over a number of issues, including tariffs and Mr. Trump’s stunning pivot toward Russia. European diplomats and American investors have been streaming into snowbound Nuuk, drawn by the island’s resources and its strategic location. Greenland’s position along Arctic sea lanes, which are opening up as the planet warms, have attracted the attention of the United States, Russia, China and European powers. The island also possesses vast mineral deposits, though many are hard to access. In contrast to those sweeping ambitions, people on the island say they’re worried about higher housing costs and economic uncertainty. “This election is a test of where Greenlanders see their future — both in their everyday lives and on the global stage,” Mr. Leander Nielsen said. “The question is whether voters will prioritize immediate economic concerns or the ******* geopolitical picture. It’s a tough call.” At the heart of the election is the question of control. For more than 200 years, Greenland was ruled as a distant colony of Denmark, its Inuit population largely sidelined as Danish officials controlled its land and resources. Over time, pressure for self-rule grew, leading to greater autonomy and eventually a government of its own. Today, Greenland controls most domestic affairs, while Denmark still oversees defense, foreign policy and monetary matters. But full independence remains a challenge. Denmark’s financial support covers more than half of Greenland’s budget, making economic stability a key hurdle to sovereignty. The coming election will decide the makeup of the Inatsisartut, the island’s 31-seat parliament. Nearly all major parties agree that Greenland should become independent — it’s just a question of when and how. They also differ on what the island’s ultimate relationship should be with the United States and Denmark. No major politicians have expressed a desire to become an American state, and polls show that 85 percent of Greenlanders don’t want that. But some candidates, like Kuno Fencker, a member of the Naleraq party, believe that Greenland should establish close ties with the United States. He says Washington could best protect Greenland and such an alliance would deliver more investment and development. Mr. Fencker is part of a small pro-Trump camp in Greenland and went to Washington for Mr. Trump’s inauguration. He says the first step is breaking off from Denmark. “It’s about us gaining full authority over our land,” he said. “From there, we will cooperate with international organizations and other countries.” The United States has maintained a military presence on Greenland since World War II, with a small missile defense base at the top of the island. “The U.S. is here to stay,” Mr. Fencker said. “They will always be part of the negotiating equation.” Other parties, including the Demokraatit, are more cautious about sovereignty and relations with Washington. “We must be smart and not push for independence at the expense of our people,” said Bo Martinsen, a Demokraatit candidate. “Right now, immediate independence is not feasible.” Mr. Trump’s attention has intensified the conversation about independence and what Greenland should do if it breaks off from Denmark. “The most important thing for me in this election is that there’s so much talk about independence, but I really want to know: How?” said Runa Sværd, a municipal planning chief in Nuuk. “I need a road map.” On an island where harsh weather can shut down entire towns and 80 percent of the land mass is covered by a glacier ice cap, ensuring a smooth election isn’t so simple. Ballots are flown by helicopter, ferried by boats through Arctic waters and sped to remote settlements by snowmobile. Once cast, each vote is counted by hand, with results relayed by email or, in the most isolated regions, by satellite phone. The results are expected to be announced late Tuesday, weather permitting. “If a storm comes in and delays transport, we have to improvise,” said Klaus Georg Hansen, a former election official. But storms aren’t the only threat. Danish intelligence officials have warned of foreign interference, with fake social media profiles posing as Greenlandic politicians and statements twisted to sow division. With each passing day, the election buzz grows louder in Nuuk. As travelers drive away from the new international airport, two massive banners, one for Naleraq and another for Inuit Ataqatigiit, the governing party, hang on opposite sides of a rock-cut mountainside. Further along, campaign posters sway from lampposts. On Thursday, as John Nathansen, a 66-year-old pensioner, made his way to a supermarket, the election was on his mind. “The conditions we live under don’t get enough attention. Instead, it’s all about that orange guy — Trump,” he said. “In my view, independence should be at the back of the line.” Source link #Trump #Looms #Greenlands #Election #Voters #Concerns Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]