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‘Housewife of the Year’: Contestants Look Back in Dismay ‘Housewife of the Year’: Contestants Look Back in Dismay There’s a temptation, when making a documentary about some obviously retrograde practice from the past, for filmmakers to treat their subject like something to gawk at. Can you believe how backward earlier generations were? Let’s all point and stare and wince. “Housewife of the Year” (in theaters), directed by Ciaran Cassidy, could very easily have gone in that direction. The film is about (and named after) a live, prime-time televised competition that took place from 1969 to 1995 in Ireland — and it’s pretty much what it sounds like. Women, generally married and raising a large family, were judged on qualities ranging from sense of humor and civic-mindedness to budgeting, preparing a simple meal and, of course, keeping up their appearance. All of this, the movie briefly explains via text onscreen, can be seen as an effort to prop up the social order in a deeply religious, deeply traditionalist country where it was virtually impossible for a married woman to maintain many kinds of employment. “The state shall endeavor to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home,” Article 41.2 of the Irish Constitution proclaims. The competition helped reinforce those values. As Irish society changed, especially with respect to women’s rights and reproductive freedoms, the competition eventually turned into “Homemaker of the Year,” open to all genders. But that’s not the focus of the documentary, nor is there ponderous narration explaining to us what happened. Instead, “Housewife of the Year” focuses on two main ways of telling its story. The first is archival footage from the competition, which reinforces how much of it focused on patronizing and even belittling the women as they participated, via the male host, Gay Byrne, interviewing them onstage. It’s remarkable to watch. But woven throughout are present-day interviews with many of the participants, now much older, who see things differently than they probably did back then. They tell stories of what was really going on in the background: alcoholic or deadbeat husbands, economic catastrophes, backbreaking labor. One woman, Ena, talks about having given birth to 14 children by the time she was 31, owing largely to the ban on contraception. The women ask questions of themselves in these interviews. “Why did we just go along with these things?” one asks, a sentiment that others echo. It was “like a dream world that people accepted all these things,” another muses. Only a couple look back at the time with anything other than incredulity and pain. The resulting movie is fascinating precisely because we’re hearing their voices. More important, there’s a kind of dignity afforded the subjects through this approach. They ask the questions, musing on the past, and surface what’s often lost when we look back at history. People “back then” weren’t different than they are now — they were just formed in a world with a set of assumptions that might vary from our own. There’s a compassion to this approach, reminding us that someday, we, too, will be making documentaries looking back, incredulous at what we lived through, what we allowed, what we assumed was normal. Source link #Housewife #Year #Contestants #Dismay Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Laurie Woolever Worked With Bourdain and Batali. Now She’s Written a Memoir. Laurie Woolever Worked With Bourdain and Batali. Now She’s Written a Memoir. Laurie Woolever has played many roles in the food world. She was Mario Batali’s assistant from 1999 to 2002, and Anthony Bourdain’s assistant, working closely on his books and television shows, from 2009 until his death in 2018. Her new memoir, “Care and Feeding,” which Ecco will publish on Tuesday, is a candid account of tending to high-wattage celebrities, and of working as a woman, wife and mother in a wildly male-dominated industry. It’s also a reckoning with the high-risk behaviors that tied the three together. Below is a condensed and edited version of our phone interview. You grew up in upstate New York and moved to the city after college with hopes of becoming a writer. How did you end up in culinary school? I was drawn to the industry because I had this very wrong idea that it would be fun. The sort of fuzzy notion that I had of everyone hanging out in the kitchen, cooking, listening to music — that was very wrong. I’m glad that I had that, because I think if I had really understood what professional cooking was, I would have been too scared. I would have probably changed my mind about even going to cooking school. What was it like to work at Babbo, the restaurant that was the white-hot center of the culinary world? When the restaurant was brand new, everyone there knew that we were someplace special. It was getting a lot of press, everybody wanted to get in, celebrities were there every night. Mario’s star was on the rise, and I think there was a real collective sense of pride, and we really cared about what we were doing. You occasionally worked in the kitchen at Babbo. What was it like to move between the front and back of the house? The dining room seemed like a really luxurious, wonderful place to be from the perspective of the kitchen. When you’re in the kitchen and you’re on your feet and it’s relentless and you’re making a fixed weekly salary, you’re not going to benefit from the generous whims of a customer that might leave a huge tip, or get the chance to sell a great big bottle of wine. I think it’s fair to say that led to some resentment. It’s always a competition between front and back of the house for who works the hardest, who is the most hard-core, who is doing the most for the restaurant. At the time, how did you reconcile the two Marios: the one who was a “brainy evangelist” for real Italian food, and the one who talked constantly about women’s bodies and bragged about his ****** size? I would push back on the concept of “two Marios” because I didn’t see two distinct personas at work. There’s no reason why a brainy evangelist can’t also be a funny, charismatic, fun person who makes dirty jokes and is a little too handsy at times and says really outrageous things. It’s not that he was presenting as a choirboy to the world and was a monster in private. It’s that he was a full, complicated person, with vices and blind spots and also some generous impulses and a lot to offer the world. He was able to present the best parts of himself in public and save the more risqué parts of himself for an audience that wasn’t in a position to push back on him or judge. In 2017, you went back to your journal from your time at Babbo, and read your own accounts of how Mario behaved toward you and other women, you asked yourself: Could I have done anything to stop it? When Mario grabbed me and I didn’t like it, I did privately, quietly go right to him and say, hey, please don’t do that again. And that was that was as much as I felt I could do. I was scared and he kind of made fun of me for it, but then it didn’t happen again for a long time. I wouldn’t fault anyone for not doing what I did because everyone has to make their own risk assessment in that situation. I stand by the idea that there was an enormous power differential between me and Mario and between most, if not all, of my colleagues and Mario. It was very clear that he was in charge, and it was very clear that loyalty was extremely important. And in the dominant culture of the late ’90s and early 2000s, there was no way to think: Let’s organize and push back. Let’s confront our boss en masse about behavior that makes us uncomfortable. There was no example to look to, and there was no sense that your job would be safe or that you would be OK. You were shocked by how casually you had written about his behavior, telling yourself, “You knew what you were getting into.” I knew from Day 1 working for Mario that he was going to be very flirtatious, that he was going to push boundaries and say outrageous things. That was the atmosphere. It wasn’t part of my job description. But I stayed because it was really hugely beneficial to be aligned with someone who had the power and the influence that he did. I knew what I was getting into and I was an at-will employee and I didn’t leave — until I did. When you started working with Tony in 2009 he was just starting to become a celebrity outside the food world. Were you surprised that he got as famous as he did? I already thought his writing was amazing, so it was not a surprise that it struck a nerve with so many people. But then the TV work made him popular and interesting and so valuable in the public sphere. The day that he died, to see both the sitting president and the former president both tweeting about him within hours of the announcement of his death, that took me by surprise, for sure. It was very comforting to see the whole world reacting to his death, to know that a lot of other people cared about him, too. You write very frankly about your own addictions and risky decisions. When did you realize that you were more similar to Mario and Tony than you may have thought? I think that is the through line. I don’t want to diagnose anyone else or talk about anyone else’s states of addiction. But it is a very common thing across the world of food and cooking, because there is a lot of adrenaline and a lot of excitement, a lot of status in pulling off a great service or getting through a rush or getting all your prep done before 4 o’clock. That’s a common thread, and that’s one of the really appealing, intoxicating things about working in kitchens. Batali got #MeToo’d in December 2017. Soon after that, your marriage ended, Tony became involved with the Italian actress Asia Argento and, very soon after that, ended his life in June 2018. How did you feel at that time, how did you get through it? It was an absolute turning point in my life in a lot of different ways. I felt overwhelmed in those weeks and months after my marriage ended, and I had moved out of the family home and then Tony wasn’t around anymore. And I didn’t have the job, which was very stabilizing and really gave me a center of gravity. I felt like I wasn’t sure who I was or what I was supposed to do. I remember saying to a friend, “I feel like I’m not even sure I exist anymore.” Did you feel any regret about having become so embedded in the restaurant business? I think I got really lucky ending up in these really interesting, dynamic, chaotic worlds. My bosses just happened to be these two guys who had extraordinary careers and extraordinary flameouts close to the same time. But you know, what an education. I can’t say that I regret any of it. Source link #Laurie #Woolever #Worked #Bourdain #Batali #Shes #Written #Memoir Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

John Casey, Novelist of Salty, Rough-Hewn Characters, Dies at 86 John Casey, Novelist of Salty, Rough-Hewn Characters, Dies at 86 John Casey, a writer of lyric yet taut prose in novels, essays and short stories who won the National Book Award in 1989 for “Spartina,” the story of a rough-hewn fisherman that reviewers called the best American story of nautical life since Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” died on Feb. 22 at his home in Charlottesville, Va. He was 86. His daughters Clare and Julia Casey said the cause was complications of dementia. Mr. Casey, who spent most of his literary career as a professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia, was best known for his pinpoint renderings of blue-collar characters, like ***** Pierce, the Rhode Island boatman at the center of “Spartina,” whom the author referred to as a “swamp Yankee.” The novel revolves around both Pierce’s romantic entanglements — long married, he starts an affair and gets his lover pregnant — and his struggles to build a boat. Spartina, a sea grass, becomes the unifying metaphor of the book. “Only the spartinas thrived in the salt flood, shut themselves against the salt but drank the water,” Mr. Casey wrote. “Smart grass. If he ever got his big boat built he might just call her Spartina, though he ought to call her after his wife.” The novelist Susan Kenney, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called the novel “splendidly conceived, flawlessly rendered and totally absorbing.” Mr. Casey’s National Book Award win was something of a surprise, beating out heavy hitters like “The Joy Luck Club,” by Amy Tan, and “Billy Bathgate,” by E.L. Doctorow. “Thank goodness these five judges were in the mood,” he said at the awards ceremony. “Because that’s what it is, they were in the mood for my book.” “Spartina” was Mr. Casey’s third book, following a novel, “An American Romance” (1977) and a book of stories, “Testimony and Demeanor” (1979). He also wrote magazine essays about his love for the outdoor life, especially running and rowing. “John was a charismatic raconteur who knew something about everything and everything about some things, particularly writing,” the actor and playwright Eric Bogosian, a close friend, said in an email. “I considered him a mentor.” At the University of Virginia, Mr. Casey developed a reputation for generosity with his time and talents in teaching creative writing, encouraging even non-students to submit material for him to critique. “If someone in the community showed up with a Chapter 1 that showed any promise, John would read it,” the novelist Ann Beattie, who taught alongside Mr. Casey, said in an interview. He continued to teach at Virginia until retiring in 2018. But he departed under a cloud. In 2017, several former students filed separate Title IX complaints against Mr. Casey, accusing him of ******* harassment, inappropriate touching and favoring male students in his classes. A university panel recommended he be dismissed, but he retired instead. John Dudley Casey was born on Jan. 18, 1939, in Worcester, Mass., where his father, Joseph, was a lawyer and a Democratic U.S. representative. His mother, Constance (Dudley) Casey, was a Democratic Party activist. John grew up mostly in Washington, D.C., though he spent a year at Institut Le Rosey, a boarding school in Switzerland. Intent on following his parents into public service, he studied Russian history and literature at Harvard. After he flunked out in his junior year, his father made him join the Army Reserve. He returned to Harvard and graduated in 1962, then from its law school in 1965. While in law school, he took a writing course with Peter Taylor, a novelist and short story writer, who saw promise in his work and encouraged him to pursue fiction. After practicing law for a year, Mr. Casey decided to follow Mr. Taylor’s advice. He received a fellowship to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and completed his master’s degree in 1968. Among his classmates were Gail Godwin and John Irving, and he found a close mentor and friend in Kurt Vonnegut, an instructor at the workshop. Despite Mr. Casey’s elite background, his friends said they could already see in him the writer he would become. “I can’t explain it, but — even in Iowa — there was something of the solitary, intrepid mariner about Casey,” Mr. Irving wrote in an email. Before graduating, Mr. Casey sold two stories to The New Yorker and another to Sports Illustrated. Rather than march triumphant into a literary hot spot like New York or Cambridge, Mass., he and his wife, Jane, whom he had married in 1967, bought land on an island in Narragansett Bay, in Rhode Island, where they lived without electricity or phone service. He and his wife later divorced. He married Rosamond Pittman in 1982; they also later divorced. He married Robin Fray in 2012. She died in 2015. Along with his daughters Clare and Julia, from his second marriage, he is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Nell and Maud Casey; his sisters, Constance and Caroline Casey; a brother, Joe; and two grandchildren. Mr. Casey moved to the University of Virginia in 1972 at the behest of Mr. Taylor, who was teaching there and wanted to build out its creative writing program. Among Mr. Casey’s early students was Breece D’J Pancake, a promising writer from West Virginia. Mr. Pancake, who almost immediately established himself as a rising literary star, published several stories in The Atlantic before dying by suicide in 1979. His death hit Mr. Casey hard. In 1983, he edited “The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake” and wrote an afterword. Mr. Casey published three more books of fiction after “Spartina,” a collection of his outdoor writing, a book about the art of fiction and two translations of novels originally written in Italian, which he had learned while in Rome on a fellowship. Source link #John #Casey #Novelist #Salty #RoughHewn #Characters #Dies Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Stop Doing ‘Arm Day.’ Here’s a Better Way to Grow Your Arms Stop Doing ‘Arm Day.’ Here’s a Better Way to Grow Your Arms Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what’s in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.Generate Key Takeaways Forget arm day. According to Mike Israetel, it may be time to retire the classic bicep and tricep workout. His argument? There are smarter ways to build your arms without dedicating a whole session to them. Israetel is an exercise scientist and co-founder of Renaissance Periodization, known for his evidence-based approach to training. With years of experience coaching—and a Ph.D.—he’s a respected authority on maximizing hypertrophy and performance. Everyone has their own workout splits to reach their goals, but according to Israetel, there are more effective ways to build big arms than dedicating a full day just to them. For one, getting a bicep pump during arm day actually impedes your range of motion for the triceps. “Biceps and triceps just don’t heal at the same rates,” he says. “Your triceps are roughly double the size of your biceps, so the triceps typically take longer to heal.” If you’re determined to keep arm days for the pump they provide, the key is ensuring you don’t disrupt the recovery of those larger muscle groups—and Israetel offers a couple of workout split suggestions. One option is to follow this five-day split: The other six-day split option involves organizing muscle groups based on their recovery times and ensuring they don’t interfere with each other: Chest, triceps, and side delts Back, biceps, and side delts Chest, triceps, legs, and biceps Ultimately, keeping an arm day in your program is fine, as long as it follows sufficient recovery from chest and back training, you’ve taken a rest day, or trained another muscle group before doing arms. Related: Top Natural Bodybuilder Swears By This Superset for ******* Arms Source link #Stop #Arm #Day #Heres #Grow #Arms Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in March The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in March Every month, Netflix adds movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of March’s most promising new titles for subscribers in the United States. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.) ‘The Leopard’ Starts streaming: March 5 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s posthumously published 1958 novel, “The Leopard,” is a rich reflection on the mid-19th century unification of Italy and how it affected the aristocrats who were reluctant to concede their land to the people. The book was adapted into a 1963 Luchino Visconti film, widely considered one of the best movies in cinematic history. Now it has been adapted again into a six-part mini-series. Kim Rossi Stuart plays Don Fabrizio Corbera, who is clinging to his prestige even as his ambitious, pragmatic nephew, Tancredi (Saul Nanni), sides with the revolutionaries. Like the novel, the series compares the larger sweep of history with the characters’ personal desires, including the question of who Tancredi will marry: Don Fabrizio’s daughter Concetta (Benedetta Porcaroli) or the more politically connected Angelica (Deva Cassel). ‘Chaos: The Manson Murders’ Starts streaming: March 7 The latest documentary from Errol Morris (“The Thin Blue Line,” “The Fog of War”) is partly a collaboration with the journalist Tom O’Neill, who spent decades investigating the crimes of the hippie guru Charles Manson and his “family” of followers. O’Neill turned his research into the 2019 book “Chaos: Charles Manson, the C.I.A., and the Secret History of the Sixties,” contending that the typical framing of the Manson Family’s murders — as would-be revolutionary acts by an evil counterculture cult — does not line up with evidence that suggests a criminal conspiracy involving gangsters and the government. Morris anchors his film with an extended interview between himself and O’Neill, intercut with clips from old news reports about Manson and his disciples. Like a lot of Morris’s work, “Chaos” examines the myths society supports and how the official versions of some stories break down under scrutiny. ‘Adolescence’ Starts streaming: March 13 In this opening minutes of this British mini-series, a teenage boy, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), is arrested on suspicion of murdering a classmate. Stephen Graham (who also wrote all four episodes of “Adolescence” with Jack Thorne) plays Jamie’s father, Eddie, who is named the boy’s “appropriate adult,” and watches helplessly as his son is swabbed, stripped, searched and questioned. Each episode of this procedural mystery takes place in real time and plays out entirely in one shot — an approach that the director Philip Barantini used previously in the 2021 film “Boiling Point,” starring Graham. The format may seem gimmicky, but the creative team does not treat it that way. Instead it focuses on the granular details of the arrest and its aftermath, shifting between the perspectives of the police, the suspect and the suspect’s family, all of whom are wondering not only what happened to the victim but also why. Source link #Movies #Shows #Coming #Netflix #March Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Old-School ******* Volume Training Still Offers Big Bodybuilding Results Old-School ******* Volume Training Still Offers Big Bodybuilding Results Bodybuilders first popularized the ******* Volume Training (GVT) method in the 1970s, when they realized they could gain lots of lean muscle mass by subjecting their muscle fibers to a tremendous amount of overload. ******* Volume Training was then re-popularized by legendary coach Charles Poliquin in the early 1990s, says strength coach Jim “Smitty” Smith, C.P.P.S. “While it is very efficient at building more muscle mass (hypertrophy) in a short amount of time, the key is the intensity (amount of weight used vs. amount of reps per set) used during the high-volume protocol.” Charles often recommended a load of around 60 percent of 1RM (a lifter’s greatest effort for 1 good repetition), says Smith. The goal is to perform 10 sets of 10 repetitions for one exercise per body part during a workout, so each workout may consist of only three or four exercises. Lifters should focus on one big exercise for each body part for the 10×10 approach and include some accessory lifts to wrap up the workout with 3 sets of 10 reps. As the name implies, ******* Volume Training forces muscle to endure a huge volume of work, so the tempo of the workout should be slow. Rest times between sets are relatively short—between 60 and 90 seconds. Because the volume is so high, lifters should start with a lighter weight than normal to combat fatigue on the later sets. “GVT is very demanding and should be cycled in and out of your training cycle on a periodic basis,” says Smith. “Too much volume, too often is the quick path to over-training and poor gains. In addition, when considering the volume, volume, the amount of weight on the bar, and perfect technique is important,” he says. A sample schedule would have lifters working out on the following schedule: Monday – Chest/BackTuesday – Legs/AbsThursday – Arms/Shoulders Benefits: Although it may seem simple, GVT can certainly stimulate big gains in lean muscle. The intense amount of volume will spur muscle growth in both beginner and advanced lifters. Before You Start, Though: Because the volume is so high, lifters should monitor their progress carefully and watch out for overtraining. Due to the difficulty of GVT-style workouts, you’ll probably recover much slower than normal. For that reason, each body part should only be hit once per week. Sample Upper Body Workout: 1A) Incline Bench Press – 10 sets of 10 reps1B) Chin-up – 10 sets of 10 reps2A) Tricep Extensions – 3 sets of 10 reps2B) Bicep Curls – 3 sets of 10 reps Source link #OldSchool #******* #Volume #Training #Offers #Big #Bodybuilding #Results Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Betty Bonney, 100, Dies; Her Paean to Joe DiMaggio Was a Big-Band Hit Betty Bonney, 100, Dies; Her Paean to Joe DiMaggio Was a Big-Band Hit Betty Bonney was already a veteran big-band vocalist at 17 when she joined Les Brown and His Orchestra in 1941 — in time to sing the praises of the New York Yankees star Joe DiMaggio as he was racking up his major-league-record 56-game hitting streak. While performing that summer at a club in Armonk, N.Y., in Westchester County, the band “got caught up in the streak,” Mr. Brown told Newsday in 1990, and “would announce it from the bandstand every night if Joe had gotten another hit, or if he was coming to bat late in the game still without a hit.” As DiMaggio piled up hits — from mid-May to mid-July — a New York City disc jockey, Alan Courtney, and the band’s arranger, Ben Homer, wrote a jaunty tune, “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio,” which Ms. Bonney sang in her smooth, elegant style at the Armonk club while band members goofed around with baseball gloves, bats and caps, Mr. Brown said. The song was also heard regularly on the band’s radio show and released in September as a 78 r.p.m. record; according to Billboard magazine, it was the 93rd-best-selling single of 1941. The song starts off with Ms. Bonney asking, “Hello, Joe, whaddaya know?” to which the clarinetist Ben Most, playing the part of DiMaggio, replies, “We need a hit, so here I go.” She later sings: He started baseball’s famous streak That’s got us all aglow He’s just a man and not a freak Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio. Win Goulden, a columnist for The Central New Jersey Home News of New Brunswick, praised not only the song but also Ms. Bonney’s performance of it. “You should really see Miss Bonney do the number in person to appreciate it,” he wrote, “if you get what we’re driving at.” “It’s not just her voice that puts over a song,” he added. DiMaggio threatened to sue Mr. Courtney “for using his name,” Mr. Brown told Newsday, but relented when he learned that Mr. Courtney “didn’t have a cent.” Ms. Bonney died on Jan. 29 in Calabasas, Calif. She was 100. Her son Trevor Lindsey confirmed the death, in an assisted living facility. Betty Jane Bonney was born on March 8, 1924, in Bridgeport, Conn., and grew up mainly in Norfolk, Va. Her father, Albert, was a railroad purchasing clerk. Her mother, Doris (Anderson) Bonney, supported Betty’s musical career from an early age: She accompanied her to local radio gigs, starting when she was 6, and joined her on the road as a teenager with the Auburn Cavaliers, a band based in the South. In 1941, when she was still a teenager, Betty sang with the bands of Charlie Spivak and Jimmy James before joining Mr. Brown’s, where she replaced Doris Day. (Ms. Day would return in 1943.) “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio” was featured in an episode of Ken Burns’s documentary series “Baseball” in 1994. It became one of the enduring songs about baseball players, along with “Talkin’ Baseball (*******, Mickey and the Duke),” by Terry Cashman; “Say Hey (The ******* Mays Song),” by the Treniers; and “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?” by Count Basie and His Orchestra. Ms. Bonney recorded other songs with the Brown band, including “Lament to Love,” Fats Waller’s “All That Meat and No Potatoes” and “He’s 1-A in the Army (and He’s A-1 in My Heart).” She left Les Brown soon after marrying Douglas Broyles Jr., an Army officer, in June 1942. But after Mr. Broyles went overseas to serve in World War II, she resumed her singing career with the bands of Jan Savitt, Jerry Wald and Frankie Carle. Then, as a solo act, she recorded several songs for RCA, including “Ho Hum (Wish I Were Someone in Love),” which put her on the cover of Billboard in 1945. “She’s had all the breaks any thrush could ask for,” the magazine wrote, “crowded into the 13 years she’s been chirping in showbiz.” In 1949, Ms. Bonney toured in a national production of the hit Broadway musical comedy “High Button Shoes.” The next year, the bandleader Sammy Kaye hired her and gave her a new name: Judy Johnson, which she would use for the rest of her career. “Sammy had a thing about changing singers’ names for good luck,” she told Newsday. Her time as a vocalist with Mr. Kaye was brief. Under her new name, she sang on Sid Caesar’s landmark television sketch-comedy series, “Your Show of Shows,” from 1950 to 1953 and was the star of a nightclub act, “Judy Johnson and Her Dates,” in 1953. “Very few people knew her as Betty,” her son Trevor said in an interview. “She didn’t correct them because she was just as comfortable as Judy.” Privately, she was known as Judy Lindsey. In 1954, Ms. Bonney divorced Mr. Broyles and married Mort Lindsey, who went on to be the bandleader on Merv Griffin’s television talk show. She made occasional radio, TV, club and stage appearances, including replacing Helen Gallagher as Miss Adelaide in the revival of “Guys and Dolls” at New York City Center in 1955. She also worked on “The Judy Garland Show” — where Mr. Lindsey led the band — as Ms. Garland’s stand-in during studio rehearsals in 1963 and 1964. In the 1980s and ’90s, Ms. Bonney sang occasionally with Mr. Griffin and his band (conducted by Mr. Lindsey) in various venues, including Mr. Griffin’s Resorts Casino Hotel in Atlantic City, N.J., and the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif. In addition to her son Trevor, from her marriage to Mr. Lindsey, she is survived by another son, Steve, also from that marriage; a daughter, Bonney Dunn, from her marriage to Mr. Broyles; three stepchildren; seven grandchildren; and a number of great-grandchildren. Mort Lindsey died in 2012. Trevor Lindsey said that his mother’s father pushed her into singing for money when she was 5 because he was barely earning a living. “Mom would recount stories of him bringing her to a bar in the middle of the day and saying, ‘Do your little act,’” he said, “and people would throw money at her.” He added, “She never forgave him for that.” Source link #Betty #Bonney #Dies #Paean #Joe #DiMaggio #BigBand #Hit Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Review: A New York Philharmonic Evening of Small Epiphanies Review: A New York Philharmonic Evening of Small Epiphanies Near the end of the lullaby that gives way to the blazing finale of Stravinsky’s “Firebird” Suite, the music slows and thins to a whisper. In the ballet, this is the moment when an evil sorcerer and his minions fall into a deep sleep. In some renditions, it registers as little more than a pause. But at David Geffen Hall on Thursday, the New York Philharmonic, under the baton of Marin Alsop, restored fairy-tale mystery to that transition. Just moments earlier, she had coaxed some of the most opulently sensual playing of the evening from the ensemble, including a voluptuous bassoon solo and swooning strings. Then, as the texture tapered, she appeared to drain the music of its pulse with medicinal deliberation. An unnerving trance settled over the room. When the finale’s ***** solo emerged — noble, transcendent — it felt as if it arose from a place deep inside the subconscious. There were small epiphanies like that throughout the concert, which also included works by Beethoven and Brahms, and a new violin concerto by Nico Muhly. Alsop has an ability to manipulate time to expressive effect, and the sound she drew from the Philharmonic was cohesive and malleable, the playing poised between discipline and individual dazzle. In Beethoven’s “Leonore” Overture No. 3, she leaned into the uncertainty of the opening phrase, shaping each swelling chord with its own gradient from quiet to louder, its own testy relationship to the beat. When the music erupted and rushed onward, the release felt all the more liberating for having gone through such visceral hesitation. Brahms’s work Variations on a Theme by Haydn requires forensic attention to balance with ever new iterations that often need to be adjusted and contained in such a way that they just barely shine through the finicky business of the rest of the score. Alsop led a transparent reading that patiently marshaled its forces for a majestic finale. The violinist Renaud Capuçon joined the orchestra for the world premiere of Muhly’s brightly hued but emotionally aloof concerto. Capuçon’s performance felt tense at times, although that may have partly resulted more from the visual awkwardness of his stiff stance while reading from a music stand lowered to the height of his waist. He played with a gleaming, sweet sound and glassy clean intonation in double-stop passages where the solo violin seems to act like a prism refracting light from the orchestra. Muhly’s concerto leans heavily on traditional expressive devices including suspensions: temporary dissonances resulting from one voice moving a step out of sync with a second voice. In Baroque music, that push and pull typically lends a slow movement its sense of flow, but here, they hang in the air with throbbing ambivalence. A strength of Muhly’s is his meticulous attention to instrumentation and the distribution of sound in space, including a wonderfully subversive series of “solos” — really just bright dabs of single notes — written for players on the last desk of the first and the second violin sections. With Capuçon spinning high lines that tangled with resonant metallic percussion accents, it was easy to miss these solos on the periphery of the orchestra, and yet they were part of a fastidiously inventive sound world. New York Philharmonic This program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. Source link #Review #York #Philharmonic #Evening #Small #Epiphanies Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Russian forces walked inside a gas pipeline to strike Ukrainian troops from the rear in Kursk Russian forces walked inside a gas pipeline to strike Ukrainian troops from the rear in Kursk LONDON (AP) — Russian special forces walked inside a gas pipeline to strike Ukrainian units from the rear in the Kursk region, Ukraine’s military and Russian war bloggers reported, as Moscow moves to recapture parts of its border province that Kyiv seized in a shock offensive. Ukraine launched in August a daring cross-border incursion into Kursk, in what marked the largest attack on Russian territory since World War II. Within days, Ukrainian units had captured 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles) of territory, including the strategic border town of Sudzha, and taken hundreds of Russian prisoners of war. According to Kyiv, the operation aimed to gain a bargaining chip in future peace talks, and force Russia to divert troops away from its grinding offensive in eastern Ukraine. But months after Ukraine’s thunder run, its soldiers in Kursk are weary and bloodied by relentless assaults of more than 50,000 troops, including some from Russia’s ally North Korea. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers run the risk of being encircled, open source maps of the battlefield show. 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. According to Telegram posts by a Ukrainian-born, pro-Kremlin blogger, Russian operatives walked about 15 kilometers (9 miles) inside the pipeline, which Moscow had until recently used to send gas to Europe. Some Russian troops had spent several days in the pipe before striking Ukrainian units from the rear near the town of Sudzha, blogger Yuri Podolyaka claimed. The town had some 5,000 residents before the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and houses major gas transfer and measuring stations along the pipeline, once a major outlet for Russian natural gas exports through Ukrainian territory. Another war blogger, who uses the alias Two Majors, said fierce fighting was underway for Sudzha, and that Russian forces managed to enter the town through a gas pipeline. Russian Telegram channels showed photos of what they said were special forces operatives, wearing gas masks and moving along what looked like the inside of a large pipe. Ukraine’s General Staff confirmed on Saturday evening that Russian “sabotage and assault groups” used the pipeline in a bid to gain a foothold outside Sudzha. In a Telegram post, it said Russian troops were “detected in a timely manner” and that Ukraine responded with rockets and artillery. “At present, Russian special forces are being detected, blocked and destroyed. The enemy’s losses in Sudzha are very high,” the General Staff reported. The Associated Press could not independently verify these accounts. The Russian Defense Ministry on Sunday reported that its troops have taken the village of Lebedevka, some 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) northwest of Sudzha, and inflicted defeats on multiple Ukrainian units in and near the town. It did not specify when exactly these clashes took place. Ukraine did not immediately comment on the Russian ministry’s claims. France announces new aid package for Ukraine Meanwhile, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu said Sunday that France will use profits from frozen Russian assets to finance an additional 195 million euros package ($211 million) in arms for Ukraine, the latest in a series of military aid deliveries funded through the mechanism. In an interview with the La Tribune Dimanche newspaper, Lecornu said that Paris will send new 155 mm artillery shells and glide bombs for Mirage 2000 fighter jets it previously gave to Ukraine. The move prompted an angry response from the speaker of Russia’s parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin. A statement by the State Duma’s press service Sunday cited Volodin as saying that Paris “will answer for its actions” and eventually have to return what Volodin called “stolen” funds. Ukrainian drones said to target Russian oil infrastructure Elsewhere, Russian officials and Telegram channels reported that Ukrainian drones targeted oil infrastructure in south and central Russia overnight into early Sunday. One drone struck an oil depot in Cheboksary, a Russian city on the Volga River about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from the border, the local governor reported. According to Oleg Nikolaev, nobody was hurt but the depot needed reconstruction work. Footage circulated on Russian Telegram channels at what appeared to be a fire at or near one of Russia’s largest oil refineries, in the southern city of Ryazan. Shot, a news channel on Telegram, cited local residents as saying they heard several nighttime blasts near the refinery. Local Gov. Pavel Malkov said Ukrainian drones had been shot down nearby. He claimed there had been no casualties or damage. Ukraine did not immediately comment on either incident. ___ Associated Press writer Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report. ___ Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at Source link #Russian #forces #walked #gas #pipeline #strike #Ukrainian #troops #rear #Kursk Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

NYT Strands hints and answers for Monday, March 10 (game #372) NYT Strands hints and answers for Monday, March 10 (game #372) Looking for a different day? A new NYT Strands puzzle appears at midnight each day for your time zone – which means that some people are always playing ‘today’s game’ while others are playing ‘yesterday’s’. If you’re looking for Sunday’s puzzle instead then click here: NYT Strands hints and answers for Sunday, March 9 (game #371). Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints. Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game. SPOILER WARNING: Information about NYT Strands today is below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know the answers. NYT Strands today (game #372) – hint #1 – today’s theme What is the theme of today’s NYT Strands? • Today’s NYT Strands theme is… You’re pushing my buttons NYT Strands today (game #372) – hint #2 – clue words Play any of these words to unlock the in-game hints system. VOTE MORE BIDE LEAN ROGUE POEM NYT Strands today (game #372) – hint #3 – spangram What is a hint for today’s spangram? • Works your TV NYT Strands today (game #372) – hint #4 – spangram position What are two sides of the board that today’s spangram touches? First side: bottom, 4th column Last side: top, 4th column Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THEM. NYT Strands today (game #372) – the answers (Image credit: New York Times) The answers to today’s Strands, game #372, are… VOLUME BACK POWER HOME MUTE GUIDE CHANNEL SPANGRAM: REMOTE CONTROL My rating: Easy My score: 1 hint Losing a REMOTE CONTROL is really frustrating. As a scatterbrained person it’s something I do a lot. It’s almost a superpower – well if superpowers were useless and annoying. Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more. Losing a remote is a great example of how powerless we are without technology – with the TV remaining on (or off) and stuck until the blessed “zapper” is located. I’ve found ours in the fridge before and I once took it to work, leaving my wife at home having to watch National Geographic all day (there are worse channels it could have been stuck on) or pull the plug. The worst remotes are the tiny ones. I’ve gone through three for my Amazon TV Fire Stick, all possibly eaten by the couch (or a cat) but vanished forever after lengthy hours-long searches. I could tape an AirTag to it, but this seems an extreme measure considering how it’s a housebound object. How did you do today? Let me know in the comments below. Yesterday’s NYT Strands answers (Sunday, 9 March, game #371) PURR HISS SNUGGLE STRETCH SWAT BLINK POUNCE SPANGRAM: CAT BEHAVIOR What is NYT Strands? Strands is the NYT’s not-so-new-any-more word game, following Wordle and Connections. It’s now a fully fledged member of the NYT’s games stable that has been running for a year and which can be played on the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile. I’ve got a full guide to how to play NYT Strands, complete with tips for solving it, so check that out if you’re struggling to beat it each day. Source link #NYT #Strands #hints #answers #Monday #March #game Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Nepal rally wants king back amid politics frustration Nepal rally wants king back amid politics frustration Thousands of supporters have greeted Nepal’s former king in the capital Kathmandu and demanded his abolished monarchy be reinstated and Hinduism brought back as a state religion. An estimated 10,000 supporters of Gyanendra Shah blocked the main entrance to Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport as he arrived from a tour of western Nepal. “Vacate the royal palace for the king. Come back king, save the country. Long live our beloved king. We want monarchy,” the crowds chanted. Passengers were forced to walk to and from the airport. Hundreds of riot police blocked the protesters from entering the airport and there was no violence. Massive street protests in 2006 forced Gyanendra to give up his authoritarian rule, and two years later the parliament voted to abolish the monarchy as Gyanendra left the royal palace to live the life of a commoner. But many Nepalis have grown frustrated with the republic, saying it has failed to bring about political stability and blaming it for a struggling economy and widespread corruption. Nepal has had 13 governments since the monarchy was abolished in 2008. Rally participants said they were hoping for a change in the political system to stop the country from further deteriorating. “We are here to give the king our full support and to rally behind him all the way to reinstating him in the royal throne,” said Thir Bahadur Bhandari, 72. Among the thousands was 50-year-old carpenter Kulraj Shrestha, who had taken part in the 2006 protests against the king but has changed his mind and now supports the monarchy. “The worst thing that is happening to the country is massive corruption and all politicians in power are not doing anything for the country,” Shrestha said. “I was in the protests that took away monarchy hoping it would help the country but I was mistaken and the country has further plunged so I have changed my mind.” Gyanendra has not commented on the calls for the return of monarchy. Despite growing support for the former king, Gyanendra has slim chances of immediately returning to power. He became the king in 2002 after his brother and family were massacred in the palace. He ruled as the constitutional head of state without executive or political powers until 2005, when he seized absolute power. He disbanded the government and parliament, jailed politicians and journalists and cut off communications, declaring a state of emergency and using the army to rule the country. Mass protests involving hundreds of thousands of people forced him to relinquish power to parliament in 2006. Nepal’s parliament voted to abolish the monarchy in June 2006, officially declaring the country a federal republic on May 28, 2008. On Thursday, while addressing a gathering in eastern Nepal, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli challenged the former king to contest elections and formally enter politics. “If you think you are popular, you can contest elections,” Oli said. “You are welcome to run, but stop this hide-and-seek game.” with EFE Source link #Nepal #rally #king #politics #frustration Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

This Chicken Curry Laksa Is Gorgeous This Chicken Curry Laksa Is Gorgeous Does anyone else find themselves happily tumbling into more project cooking lately? Maybe it’s because I’m clinging to the coziness winter provides. Maybe I’ve watched too many charming, ASMR-adjacent YouTube videos of people calmly assembling wonderful dinners in beautiful locations. Or maybe it’s because, if my hands are busy smashing garlic or deveining shrimp, I can’t doomscroll on my phone. Whatever the reason, I’ve really been enjoying my quality kitchen time as of late. So I’m very excited to make Lara Lee’s chicken curry laksa, a gorgeous, hearty noodle soup that’s kaleidoscopic in flavor: Sour tamarind and spicy dried chile punch through the sweet coconut milk; salty dried shrimp and gently bitter nuts balance umami-rich shrimp paste. Lara is a really thoughtful cook — as anyone who has read her “Coconut and Sambal” and “A Splash of Soy” cookbooks knows — so her recipe is full of tips and tricks for anyone needing ingredient substitution and shortcut advice, like how to boost store-bought laksa paste with lemongrass, garlic and ginger. Featured Recipe Chicken Curry Laksa View Recipe → This laksa also scratches a particular cooking itch of mine: making something at home that I’d normally order at a restaurant. I’ll bet that a lot of readers behind the five-star reviews for Hetty Lui McKinnon’s sweet and sour cauliflower — which rejects deep-frying those florets for a cornstarch-coated roast in a hot oven — are also happy for a fast, meat-free version of a takeout staple. If you add Hetty’s salt and pepper tofu, some sautéed baby bok choy and a pot of steamed rice, that’s a pretty epic Saturday night feast. Or, if it’s not Saturday night without some pizza, how about a Crazy Crust Pizza? “The no-yeast, no-knead recipe for Crazy Crust Pizza was first popularized decades ago when it was published by Pillsbury,” writes Cybelle Tondu, our recipe’s creator. The simple batter of flour, milk and eggs is poured into a cornmeal-dusted skillet and topped with crushed tomatoes, shredded mozzarella and your choice of toppings (Cybelle calls for the classic sausage, red onion and pepper combo). This pan pizza comes together in about an hour, which is less time than it takes for me and my husband to decide where to order pizza from. A while ago my colleague (and perfect blue sweater-wearer) Tanya Sichynsky wrote a “we have wine bar at home” Veggie newsletter, and I think that’s the perfect way to describe the sort of fancy-ish but not fussy dinners I aim to assemble. Mark Usewicz’s simple pan-roasted fish fillets with herb butter, a recipe adapted by Julia Moskin, is the exact sort of dish I’d want to serve alongside Ali Slagle’s new halloumi-flecked salad or Martha Rose Shulman’s chickpeas with baby spinach and some sort of chilled, skin-contact wine (with marinated olives for the table, naturally). And Ramadan Mubarak to all those observing! Zaynab Issa has two lovely new lassi recipes — a strawberry lassi and a salted lassi — as well as a helpful lassi how-to. “The drink’s origins can be traced back to the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent,” Zaynab writes, “and it’s been consumed for more than 1,000 years, with good reason. The simple yogurt-based refreshment, blended with sweet or savory ingredients, is versatile, easy to make and especially ideal for slaking thirst any time of year.” Source link #Chicken #Curry #Laksa #Gorgeous Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Book Review: ‘The Unworthy,’ by Agustina Bazterrica Book Review: ‘The Unworthy,’ by Agustina Bazterrica THE UNWORTHY, by Agustina Bazterrica; translated by Sarah Moses Writers have long been preoccupied with the end of the world, though perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the true preoccupation is with whatever new, tenuous social order struggles up from the rubble. What would starting over look like? And are human beings doomed to create dystopian conditions wherever they go? In the Argentine writer Agustina Bazterrica’s brilliant, chilling new novel, “The Unworthy,” the young, unnamed narrator enters a religious order called the House of the Sacred Sisterhood after spending an unspecified amount of time wandering a landscape ravaged by climate catastrophe. Is this place, overseen by the Superior Sister and an unseen, all-powerful He, a refuge or a nightmare? And what exactly happens when a member of the unworthy class is elevated to the rank of the Chosen? These are among the questions that propel this slim, suspenseful novel. Amid global hunger and drought the Sacred Sisterhood has managed to cultivate a steady food supply — even if it involves eating a lot of crickets — and drinkable water. But danger abounds. The hierarchy is at once enigmatic and brutally enforced. Sacrifices are demanded. The punishments for infractions, administered by the sadistic Superior Sister, include whipping, disfigurement and being buried or burned alive. The mind-bending violence crushes any possibility of fellowship between the women who have found their way to this place (in the opening chapter, the narrator recounts dropping cockroaches into the pillowcase of another sister and then sewing up the slip). The unworthy are quick to turn on one another, claws out and teeth bared, in the name of survival. The horror is made visceral by Bazterrica’s feverish, mythic prose, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses: “There’s something sick in the wind, a warm stupor of venom and insects. A curse creeping out of the devastated lands. We can feel the vibration of something destructive coming into being. … Something was throbbing in the air, silent and ********.” Some sentences break off midstream; others contain words crossed out. We witness the narrator’s struggle to wrest the unspeakable into language. The act of writing sustains her. She writes in the blue ink left behind by the monks who once tended this land; she writes with charcoal made from plants; she writes with her own blood. The writing is a mortal risk: She must hide these pages meticulously, so they’re not discovered by the Superior Sister. She creates a record of both her cloistered, terrorized life with the Sacred Sisterhood and the world she knew before. The memories of her mother and of Circe, her companion after the apocalypse, are especially vivid and anguishing. Like Lauren Oya Olamina in Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower,” this dystopian narrator feels compelled to make a record of the end times; for both women, to write is to preserve a drop of agency, of humanity, in a blasted world, where survival often demands a willingness to commit unfathomable violations. “Without mercy you survive,” Bazterrica’s narrator says. To write is to process the new reality that is taking shape, the new story that is unfolding, and that will no longer die with her. “Why put myself in danger with this book of the night?” the narrator writes. “Because if I write it, then it was real.” The scrap of humanity the narrator has preserved through the act of writing is awakened when a mysterious stranger, Lucía, appears inside the walls of the Sacred Sisterhood. She seems to be a wanderer, as the narrator once was, and is taken in. Before long, Lucía displays otherworldly powers and, perhaps even more shockingly, a sense of compassion. “The Unworthy” is a novel filled with secrets, and part of the thrill is cracking open one forbidden door at a time. Given that it’s populated almost entirely by women, it’s striking that patriarchal violence is at the center of the Sacred Sisterhood’s rotten core. Solidarity between the unworthy, then, becomes a way to fight back. A secret bond forms between Lucía and the narrator, one that reminds them both that communion with others will always generate more strength than remaining crouched in suspicious solitude. These glimmers of hopeful connection are, of course, radically fragile — at any moment the two could be discovered and killed — but they are nevertheless critical to the narrator’s emotional opening. In the novel’s final moments, she remembers what survival is really for. THE UNWORTHY | By Agustina Bazterrica | Translated by Sarah Moses | Scribner | 177 pp. | $28.99 Source link #Book #Review #Unworthy #Agustina #Bazterrica Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Something Mysterious Swept Over Our Entire Solar System, Scientists Say Something Mysterious Swept Over Our Entire Solar System, Scientists Say A giant wave of undulating gas and dust appears, per new research, to have engulfed our Solar System millions of years ago. As New Scientist reports, astrophysicists have discovered that the Radcliffe wave — a 9,000 light-year-long structure full of stars and the gas and dust needed to form new ones — seems to have swept over our entire Solar System around 14 million years ago. Previous research into this fantastic galactic wave suggested that Earth passed through it some 13 million years ago, plunging our planet into “a festival of supernovae going off,” as Harvard astrophysicist Catherine Zucker told the Washington Post last year. Now, University of Vienna doctoral student Efrem Maconi thinks that our whole Solar System may have passed through this incredible structure. Using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope, Maconi and his team identified recently-formed stars and the gases surrounding them within the Radcliffe wave to see how the structure itself appears to be moving. Comparing that data to estimates about our Solar System’s trajectory, the Vienna researchers found that the Sun and the Radcliffe wave were near each other between 12 and 15 million years ago. Ultimately, the scientists estimated that we moved through the wave roughly 14 million years ago. On a geological and even evolutionary scale, that’s incredibly recent; the dinosaurs are believed to have gone exstinct around 66 million years ago. Along with the finding, Maconi also told New Scientist that the sky would have looked very different to anyone looking out from Earth when our Solar System passed through the Radcliffe wave. “If we are in a denser region of the interstellar medium, that would mean that the light coming from the stars to you would be dimmed,” he explained. “It’s like being in a foggy day.” Extrapolating this finding even further, the scientists behind this discovery also think there’s a chance that the Radcliffe wave played a role in the climate cooling that occurred in the Middle Miocene epoch, when temperatures plunged and permanent ice sheets were established. According to Ralph Schoenrich, an associate climate and physics professor at University College London, that may be a stretch. “A rule of thumb is that geology trumps any cosmic influence,” Schoenrich, who was not involved in the research, told New Scientist. “If you shift continents or interrupt ocean currents, you get climate shifts from that, so I’m very skeptical you need anything in addition.” More on star stuff: James Webb Spots Mysterious Object Crossing Space Between Stars Source link #Mysterious #Swept #Entire #Solar #System #Scientists Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Frustrated Dems unleash the F-bombs Frustrated Dems unleash the F-bombs When Rep. Jasmine Crockett reacted to President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress on Tuesday evening, profanity leaped effortlessly from her lips: “Somebody slap me and wake me the ***** up because I’m ready to get on with it.” Just a few days earlier, when asked of her message to Elon Musk, she told him to “***** off.” Ken Martin, the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, took a more Midwestern approach: “Go to hell,” he said, adding later on X: “I said what I said.” Meanwhile, Senate Democrats launched coordinated social media videos fact checking Trump, each of them calling his claims “***** that ain’t true.” In the earliest weeks of Trump’s second term, Democrats have careened from strategy to strategy to respond to him, often ineffectually. But one unifying thread as they try to invigorate their connection to the American voter has been a reach for profanity. Democrats are cursing up a storm. “******** it, tell me who started that?” said Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a frequent purveyor of profanity. Cursing is, of course, not new in politics. Among operatives, principals and journalists, it is a familiar way to broker instant bonhomie. Nor is it new for the Democratic Party, particularly when confronting Trump: Former DNC Chair Tom Perez frequently deployed profanity in 2017 in stump speeches, saying, for example, that Trump didn’t “give a ***** about health care.” But the breadth of swearing is unmistakable, newly fashionable among members of a party in the wilderness who are looking for shortcuts to authenticity to channel voters’ rage. In recent days, Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona said he wanted the “intern” at the National Republican Campaign Congressional Committee who posted “racist *****” on X fired. And appraising the landscape of Trump’s America, Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii noted this week that the “stock market is down but at least everything is more expensive and services are getting shittier.” Politics, the late Andrew Breitbart once observed, is downstream of culture. And linguistically speaking, Democrats are up a certain creek. Trump beat them to it, using curses increasingly in his march back to the White House, though for some Democrats it is part of their native tongue. “I mean, I was swearing before Trump, so I can’t really blame it on him,” Gallego told POLITICO. “I’m gonna blame it more on being in the Marines for as long as I was.” Now, Democrats are seeking to bottle up their impolite words and serve them up the maw of an increasingly coarse and foul-tongued populace. “Some of it is genuine, some of it is people trying to seem faux-edgy authentic,” said Lis Smith, the Democratic adviser whose profanity is so legendary that her f-bombs played a hand in earning Amazon’s otherwise wholesome documentary on Pete Buttigieg in 2021 an “R” rating. “If the first time you’ve used a cuss word in public is reading off a script, it’s probably not authentic and not something you should do.” It’s also become part of Democrats’ increased social media strategy. After posting their “***** that ain’t true” videos on social media, Senate ********* Leader Chuck Schumer made one “breaking down the BS Trump told” during his joint address. (The top Senate Democrat didn’t go as far as saying ********* in the video though — opting instead for “bull.”) It is not always working. Last month, when Democrats joined federal workers at a rally of the American Federation of Government Employees to protest DOGE cuts, the profanities nearly rivaled those gathered. “I don’t swear in public very well, but we have to ***** Trump,” said Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.), adding, “Please don’t tell my children that I just did that.” The awkward formulation — which landed less like a diss and more like a proposition — was roundly mocked. “The key to doing it and doing it well is that you can’t overdo it and you can’t force it,” said Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic campaign veteran. “If elected officials are going to cuss, they have to mean it. If it’s authentic to who they are and how they’re feeling, voters will probably be fine with it and even relate to it. But if it’s not authentic, there’s nothing more cringeworthy.” But there is also something more guttural in Democrats’ appeal to a deeply unsettled base. “The truth is that we’re driven by the same things most people are — like anger at honest folks being denied a fair shot – and we need to prove it by showing fight,” said Andrew Bates, who worked for the famously foul-mouthed-in private Joe Biden. “One way to do that is to call out that Trump’s whole campaign was about lower costs right away – his words – but now he’s raising those costs with tariffs that will fund a tax handout for the rich; and yes, that is ********* and it shows his true colors and we should be eager to say it.” Democrats concede their party can’t just be all talk. “In this existential moment, the Democratic base does want to see their leaders fighting back. But at the end of the day, that means successful legislative and legal maneuvers — not just the occasional f-bomb on a podcast,” said one Democratic speechwriter, granted anonymity to assess the party’s rhetoric. This person, acknowledging “mad as hell” vibes in the party, added, “Some of it is an expression of authentic outrage at Trump smashing Democratic norms and institutions. Some of it is that — between Trump and his acolytes — the bar’s been lowered on how we expect public officials to comport themselves.” Deeper still, some Democrats see a core moral failing in the public profanities. “Democrats who think that vulgarity and dehumanization are reliable, appropriate or beneficial ways to advance their political interests profoundly misunderstand what has happened in our politics and what is required in this moment,” said Michael Wear, Barack Obama’s former faith outreach adviser and the founder, president and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life, and author of “The Spirit of Our Politics.” “These are not tools that can be used in the service of any political goals. These things promote the very distrust, estrangement and animosity which is the fuel for the reckless, antagonistic politics Democrats — and all of us — ought to reject.” Crockett’s f-bomb got some attention back in her district. She said at the Capitol on Thursday that people called the pastor at her church to “tattle” on her. (Though Crockett added her pastor said he approved her message: “He’s not going to be the one to try to reign me in.”) For now, she is unrepentant. She said her answer was “real” and reflected her frustration with Trump and Musk’s actions. “Like I have a potty mouth, especially when I’m mad,” she said. “We’re working on it. We’re going to pray about it.” Source link #Frustrated #Dems #unleash #Fbombs Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

‘Daredevil: Born Again’ Review: Can You Fight City Hall? ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ Review: Can You Fight City Hall? None of this makes the story, with its simplistic dynamics of criminal violation and righteous retribution, come alive, though; for that, some of the straightforward comic-book energy of the original would have helped. The best that “Born Again” can do is to deploy familiar characters and plot points in the standard Marvel fashion, revealing them or alluding to them like surprise gifts. In this season we’re given the homicidal Dex Poindexter (Wilson Bethel); Fisk’s ruthless wife, Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer); and the particularly brutal vigilante the Punisher (Jon Bernthal). The show’s long, stuttering development process also needs to be taken into account. Matt Corman and Chris Ord, creators of the lightweight USA spy series “Covert Affairs,” took the first crack at “Born Again” in 2022; their version, reportedly episodic in structure, was well into production when they were dismissed and replaced by Dario Scardapane (“The Punisher”). That could explain the season’s herky-jerky nature, with a stand-alone bank-heist episode and a pair of short, flat arcs involving a minor costumed hero and a serial killer. The lack of narrative shaping takes away any force the themes of vigilantism might have had, reducing them to limp excuses for the sometimes stomach-turning violence. Among the cast, Bernthal is about the only performer who demonstrates a real pulse; his handful of appearances as the ultra-cynical, ultraviolent Punisher snap the show to life. Nikki M. James, as a colleague of Murdock’s, and Michael Gandolfini, as Fisk’s chief lackey, also make an impression. Other accomplished performers don’t have enough to do. Cox has always been a mild, slightly dull Daredevil; D’Onofrio’s hulking, stentorian presence as Fisk was entertaining in the early seasons but has settled into a rut. There is one noticeable thing that “Born Again” has picked up from the final season of the Netflix “Daredevil”: the propensity of its main characters, particularly Murdock, to indulge in primal screams. In the context of the story, it’s an irritating affectation, but in the context of the current moment, it may be the only thing that makes sense. Source link #Daredevil #Born #Review #Fight #City #Hall Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

ICC Champions Trophy 2025: Glenn Phillips produces a stunning catch to dismiss Shubman Gill ICC Champions Trophy 2025: Glenn Phillips produces a stunning catch to dismiss Shubman Gill Glenn Phillips produces yet another “incredible” piece of fielding, this time dismissing Shubman Gill for 31 runs with a leaping catch at cover to leave India on 105-1 in the Champions Trophy final against New Zealand in Dubai. FOLLOW LIVE: India v New Zealand – Champions Trophy Final Available to *** users only. Source link #ICC #Champions #Trophy #Glenn #Phillips #produces #stunning #catch #dismiss #Shubman #Gill Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Jason Isbell’s Bare-Bones Breakup Tune, and 7 More New Songs Jason Isbell’s Bare-Bones Breakup Tune, and 7 More New Songs Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs. Jason Isbell, ‘Eileen’ Jason Isbell’s new album, “Foxes in the Snow,” is decisively unadorned: just Isbell singing over his acoustic guitar. It arrives following his divorce from Amanda Shires, who has her own songwriting career and was a member of his band. Over bare-bones fingerpicking in “Eileen,” Isbell sings about separation, regrets, self-deception and how “It ended like it always ends / Somebody crying on the phone.” He contends, “Eileen, you should’ve seen this coming sooner,” but adds, almost fondly, “You thought the truth was just a rumor, but that’s your way.” It’s not about blame — it’s about getting through. I’m With Her, ‘Ancient Light’ The virtuoso string-band supergroup I’m With Her — Sarah Jarosz, Aiofe O’Donovan and Sara Watkins — has reconvened with the intimately ambitious “Ancient Light.” The verses are in a gently disorienting 7/4; the instruments mix acoustic and electric, juxtaposing fiddle tune and math-rock; the lyrics lean into the metaphysical. As the song begins, Jarosz sings, “Better get out of the way / Gonna figure out what I wanna say / I been a long time comin’,” and it only gets more cosmic from there. Car Seat Headrest, ‘Gethsemane’ Will Toledo’s band Car Seat Headrest has announced its first album since 2020, “The Scholars,” and it’s a full-scale rock opera. The first single, “Gethsemane,” is an 11-minute suite that ponders faith, morality, creativity, free will and love as the music unfurls with stretches of ******-rock keyboard minimalism and roaring power chords that echo the Who’s “Tommy.” Toledo sings, “A series of simple patterns slowly build themselves into another song / I don’t know how it happened,” but the structure is ironclad. Illuminati Hotties, ‘777’ Sarah Tudzin — the songwriter and producer behind Illuminati Hotties — cranks up distorted guitars and harnesses quiet-LOUD grunge dynamics in “777,” a song that nearly explodes with joyful anticipation. “I wanna figure you out,” she declares, but she’s already sure that she’s won any gamble: “You’re my spade / lucky 777.” All the noise doesn’t hide the pop song within. The Ophelias, ‘Salome’ ​​”I want your head on a stake / I want your head on a platter,” sing the Ophelias, an indie-rock band from Cincinnati, turning “I” into a peal of vocal harmony. “Salome” adapts an incident from the ****** into a seething, churning, implacable crescendo of guitars, drums and voices, calmly announcing, “The knife sways heavy in my hand.” Yaeji featuring E. Wata, ‘Pondeggi’ Yaeji, a New York City musician with Korean roots, and her co-producer E. Wata transmute a hand-clapping game into a mutating electronic beat in “Pondeggi.” She chant-sings cryptically about the truth versus disinformation: “Watch where you’re going, head distraction / Keep, keep scrolling till you’re rolling in passive.” There’s a warning under the nonchalant surface. Nathy Peluso, ‘Erotika’ “You make me erotic like 1990s salsa,” the Argentine songwriter Nathy Peluso exults in “Erotika,” and she revives the style to prove her point. Piano, percussion and a swaggering ***** session help her seduce a partner — and herself. Lyra Pramuk, ‘Vega’ The electronic composer Lyra Pramuk sets things swirling in “Vega,” an assemblage of electronic and vocal loops that gets more menacing as it goes. A pulse gathers into a fitful beat; wordless sounds float in stereo; glitches and bleeps slice through. And eventually, Pramuk intones, “Tell me your name” and “Tell me your story.” Is this an acquaintanceship or an interrogation? Source link #Jason #Isbells #BareBones #Breakup #Tune #Songs Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Canada’s Liberals will elect new leader to replace Trudeau as country deals with Trump’s trade war Canada’s Liberals will elect new leader to replace Trudeau as country deals with Trump’s trade war TORONTO (AP) — Canada’s governing Liberals will announce a replacement for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Sunday as the country deals with U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff threats and as a federal election looms. Liberal Party members look set to pick former central bank governor Mark Carney as the new party leader and Canada’s next prime minister in a vote to be announced on Sunday evening. Carney, 59, navigated crises when he was the head of the Bank of Canada and when in 2013 he became the first noncitizen to run the Bank of England since it was founded in 1694. His appointment won bipartisan praise in the U.K. after Canada recovered from the 2008 financial crisis faster than many other countries. The opposition Conservatives hoped to make the election about Trudeau, whose popularity declined as food and housing prices rose and immigration surged. Trudeau announced his resignation in January, but remains prime minister until a successor is chosen and sworn in. Election laws mandate a general election before the fall, but one is expected this spring. Trump’s trade war and his talk of making Canada the 51st U.S. state have infuriated Canadians, who are booing the American anthem at NHL and NBA games. Some are canceling trips south of the border, and many are avoiding buying American goods when they can. The surge in ********* nationalism has bolstered the Liberal Party’s chances in a parliamentary election expected within days or weeks, and Liberal showings have been improving steadily in opinion polls. After decades of bilateral stability, the vote on Canada’s next leader now is expected to focus on who is best equipped to deal with the United States. Carney, 59, has picked up one endorsement after another from Cabinet ministers and members of Parliament since declaring his candidacy in January. He is a highly educated economist with Wall Street experience who has long been interested in entering politics and becoming prime minister, but he lacks political experience. The other top Liberal leadership candidate is former Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. Trudeau told Freeland in December that he no longer wanted her as finance minister, but that she could remain deputy prime minister and the point person for U.S.-Canada relations. Freeland resigned shortly after, releasing a scathing letter about the government that proved to be the last straw for Trudeau. The new leader is expected to trigger an election shortly afterward. Either the new Liberal party leader will call one, or the opposition parties in Parliament could force one with a no-confidence vote later this month. Source link #Canadas #Liberals #elect #leader #replace #Trudeau #country #deals #Trumps #trade #war Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

French great Dupont reveals he’s suffered ACL injury French great Dupont reveals he’s suffered ACL injury Antoine Dupont is set for a lengthy spell on the sidelines after revealing he has ruptured the anterior cruciate ligaments in his knee. The injury rules the world’s best rugby player out of his side’s final Six Nations game against Scotland in a massive blow to their bid to claim a second title since 2010. Dupont limped off in the first half of France’s 42-27 victory over Ireland on Saturday after his knee buckled under pressure from the Irish defence at the back of a ruck. “My heart hurts even more than my knee when I have to abandon my friends before the last step,” Dupont wrote in a post on social media. “I’m proud of what we achieved yesterday and with all my strength with you, you’re going to do it. Rupture of the cruciate ligaments. This is the start of a new challenge, and I look forward to seeing you on the pitch in a few months’ time.” France moved to 16 points, two ahead of Ireland and six clear of England, and any win over Scotland will almost certainly help them secure the title, given their far superior points difference. Coach Fabien Galthie said France had recommended that the two Irish defenders who made contact with Dupont — Tadhg Beirne and Andrew Porter — should appear before the disciplinary commission. Speaking after the game, Galthie branded the incident “reprehensible” and said France had cited both Beirne and Porter in their post-match report. Dupont looks likely to miss the rest of the season, which is due to end in June. It’s also a huge blow for his club Toulouse, who lead the French Top 14 standings with 46 points after 13 games, one ahead of Bordeaux Begles. Source link #French #great #Dupont #reveals #hes #suffered #ACL #injury Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

A Peeling 17th-Century Palazzo and the Man Who Was ‘Crazy Enough’ to Buy It A Peeling 17th-Century Palazzo and the Man Who Was ‘Crazy Enough’ to Buy It WHEN RAFFAELE FABRIZIO was growing up, he lived in a small village close to Lake Como called Fino Mornasco that was near the headquarters of Dedar, the Italian fabric house that his parents, Nicola and Elda, founded in 1976. Fabrizio, 55, and his sister, Caterina, 56, have spent their careers at Dedar, bringing the firm into a new era by introducing novel combinations of color, pattern and texture, attracting clients like Hermès and the movie director Luca Guadagnino. As a younger man, though, Fabrizio had wanted to be an architect — he would study the field in college and practice in his 20s — since taking an interest in a desolate 17th-century villa around the corner from his family’s home that had been occupied, and then deserted, by a countess who’d lost her fortune. “It’s always that same story,” he says, laughing a little, “but I was fascinated by this forbidden place.” Most days after school, while his parents were running their company, he’d wriggle past the locked gate and wander through rooms decorated with faded frescoes. When friends came over, he forced them to visit “this beautiful world,” as he describes it, “hidden and abandoned.” He recalls this on a gray September afternoon while crossing a grassy courtyard in Valmorea, another village west of Como with its own haunted character. On the street, barren of the few thousand people who live here, a ****** cat creeps from under a bright yellow Mustang. When church bells toll the hour three minutes early, Fabrizio jokes that the lag is “the right time to make a *******.” As he remembers his youth, he mentions the emotion required to create interesting textiles — not nostalgia, per se, but the “feeling of something that was a memory … the atmosphere.” But given that he’s now standing outside his own tumbledown 17th-century palace on seven acres that he purchased three years ago, and has since kept in glorious disarray, it’s clear he’s not just talking about work: As someone who’s planning to move soon from his Milanese apartment (where he lives by himself) to be closer to the family business he helps oversee, he knows that his history is also his destiny. “Your desires are formed when you’re younger,” he says. “And then we live to satisfy that ancient desire.” IF IT’S TRUE that all houses choose their owners, then this one has been discerning: In nearly 350 years, it has been passed between only four different hands, about once per century. Around 1690, some of the valley in which it sits was acquired by the Sala family, who, according to municipal records, combined a few extant buildings (a noble manor, a farmer’s house) to create the structure’s oldest, central core. In the early 20th century, the Sassi family bought it in several phases and purportedly rented part of the estate to a professor who’d tutored the children of the 19th-century painter Giovanni Segantini. The Sassi clan, descendants of two brothers who ran home-building companies in nearby Switzerland, divided the C-shaped property in half for their respective families, Fabrizio says, and decided to sell to him after the pandemic. There are more than 50 rooms, many of them with busted-through floors and ceilings that make traversing sections of the three levels treacherous. But Fabrizio was particularly drawn to the grandeur hidden behind the classic Lombardian facade, with its three-arched portico, yellow stone walls and green painted shutters. In finalizing the deal over two years, he told the sellers that they would never recruit someone else “crazy enough” to undertake such a sprawling renovation. Parts of the 22,000-square-foot palazzo may have been built by the same family of architects, the Quadrios, who worked on Milan’s Gothic duomo in the 17th and 18th centuries. Yet Fabrizio has found little historical documentation for the building, which was listed by the Italian cultural heritage commission only after its ***** to him; while he has peeled back paint on wooden ceilings and excavated stone floors in the downstairs common areas and upstairs bedrooms, it’s impossible to tell when something was added or removed — every room is its own palimpsest. The lower level’s ballroom, for instance, has a cathedral ceiling with trompe l’oeil windows and coffers, painted at some point to balance out the symmetry of the architecture, above a swirly red-and-white terra-cotta floor that’s likely original. Its walls are more than 20 feet high because in the 1700s art was displayed in vertical stacks. The home has no heat and needs new wiring and, so far, the only real furniture Fabrizio has added is a bed, a clothing rack and some tables with sawhorse legs in the few rooms he’s “colonized,” as he says, while he goes back and forth to the city and figures out what to do here. There’s no rush, however: “I want to keep this feeling of living in a place that doesn’t belong to me.” Once he starts renovating, he knows, he’ll forever change the ambience that first enticed him — not that he’s aiming to restore the house to its 17th-century glory or any thereafter. Instead, he wants to add his own modern layer on top of all the ******* details; why not, for example, consider lacquered ceilings? For him — for any good designer, in fact — the project’s true success won’t rest in its physical manifestations but in the mood it provokes and the behavior it encourages. And this house, just as the countess’s was, is somewhere he likes to come to be alone, to consider the world before and beyond him. Last summer, he was awakened one morning by a storm that had torn down 20 of his cypress trees. He’d never experienced such intense winds in Italy, nor was he aware that his country had small scorpions, which he’s caught scurrying about the wide, empty halls. Fabrizio shares this fact while roaming from undone room to undone room, latching the shutters. “I don’t want the ghosts to get in,” he says. “Sometimes there’s a need to close the door — to keep everything out. This is the place to do that.” Source link #Peeling #17thCentury #Palazzo #Man #Crazy #Buy Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

terrified Alawites in Syria flee attacks terrified Alawites in Syria flee attacks For two days, Rihab Kamel and her family hid terrified in their bathroom in the city of Baniyas as armed men stormed the neighbourhood, pursuing members of Syria’s Alawite *********. The coastal city is part of Syria’s Alawite heartland that has been gripped by the fiercest violence since former president Bashar al-Assad was toppled in December. “We turned off the lights and hid. When we were able to flee our neighbourhood of Al-Qusour, we found the roads full of corpses,” Kamel, a 35-year-old mother, told AFP. A Christian family sheltered them and then helped them reach the frontier with Lebanon, she said, adding that they planned to flee across the border. “What crime did the children commit? Are they also supporters of the (toppled) regime?” she said. “We as Alawites are innocent.” The violence erupted on Thursday after gunmen loyal to Assad attacked Syria’s new security forces. The ensuing clashes resulted in dozens of deaths on both sides. War monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights later reported that security forces and allied groups killed at least 745 Alawite civilians in Latakia and Tartus provinces. Interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who led the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham that spearheaded the lightning offensive that toppled Assad, on Sunday called for “national unity (and) civil peace” to be preserved. “God willing, we will be able to live together in this country,” he said at a mosque in Damascus. But in villages and towns on the coast, people spoke of systematic killings. – ‘Minutes’ from death – Assad, himself an Alawite, sought to present himself as protector of Syria’s minorities. The new authorities have repeatedly promised an inclusive transition that protects the rights of religious minorities. The Alawite heartland has nonetheless been gripped by a fear of reprisals over the Assad clan’s decades of brutal rule. Baniyas resident Samir Haidar, 67, told AFP two of his brothers and his nephew were killed by “armed groups” that entered people’s homes. Though an Alawite himself, Haidar belonged to the leftist opposition under the Assads and was imprisoned for more than a decade. He said he began hearing explosions and gunfire on Friday morning with the arrival of forces deployed to the city, adding that there were “foreigners among them”. “They entered the building and killed my only neighbour,” he said. He managed to escape with his wife and two children to a Sunni neighbourhood, but said: “If I had been five minutes late, I would have been killed.” That same day, armed men entered his brother’s building 100 metres (yards) away. “They gathered all the men on the roof and opened fire on them,” Haidar said. “My nephew survived because he hid, but my brother was killed along with all the men in the building.” He added that another brother, who was 74, and nephew were killed along with all the men in their building. “There are houses with four or five dead bodies in them,” Haidar said. “We have appealed to be able to bury our dead,” he said, adding that he has so far been unable to bury his brothers. – ‘Bodies in the sea’ – In the port city of Latakia, AFP heard testimonies from residents who said armed groups abducted a number of Alawites who were killed. Among them was the head of a state-run cultural centre, Yasser Sabbouh, who was kidnapped and whose corpse was dumped outside his home, an AFP reporter said. In Jableh further south, a resident spoke to AFP in tears, saying they were being terrorised by armed groups who had taken control of the town. “There are six of us in the house, with my parents and my brothers. There’s been no electricity for four days, no water. We have nothing to eat and we do not dare go out,” he said on condition of anonymity, fearing for his safety. “More than 50 people from among my family and friends have been killed,” he added. “They gathered bodies with bulldozers and buried them in mass graves.” Jaafar Ali, a 32-year-old Alawite from the region, fled to neighbouring Lebanon with his brother. “I don’t think I’m going back soon,” he said. “We are refugees without a homeland. We want countries to open up (channels for) humanitarian migration for Alawites.” lk-at/jsa/srm Source link #terrified #Alawites #Syria #flee #attacks Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Interview: Abdulrazak Gurnah on ‘Theft’ and His Reading Life Interview: Abdulrazak Gurnah on ‘Theft’ and His Reading Life In an email interview, the 2021 Nobel laureate talked about the pleasure of meeting new readers and why he writes about “unexpected kindnesses.” SCOTT HELLER What books are on your night stand? Mircea Cartarescu, “Solenoid”; Beata Umubyeyi Mairisse, “The Convoy”; Juan Gabriel Vásquez, “Retrospective.” How do you organize your books? I cluster together books by the same author. Which books end up as their neighbor is sometimes a matter of chance, although generally nearby books are on nodding terms with each other. Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how). Usually in the afternoon, after having spent the earlier part of the day writing or dealing with the chores life throws up. Then for a few hours it is possible to read with pleasure, most of the time, and without distraction. What kind of reader were you as a child? My parents were not readers, so my early reading was what was provided at school. As we grew older, we found ways to get hold of other kinds of books, and these circulated among us, sometimes causing great excitement. I remember when “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” was doing the rounds, although I suspect most of us did not make much of it. When I read it later as a student, it was all new to me. Most of the books we read were unmemorable, although a handful stand out — “And Quiet Flows the Don,” “Crime and Punishment” and “Far From the Madding Crowd,” which was the first Hardy novel I read, prompted by the beautiful film with Julie Christie, Alan Bates and Terence Stamp. Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book? No, never. What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift? I was given a book as a school prize when I was about 12 years old. It was a big, **** book, a kind of illustrated encyclopedia, with stories about various peoples of the world, what they looked like, what they wore, what houses they lived in, what uniform the police wore. I remember that in particular, the police uniforms. I read that book endlessly. What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently? The life history and the cultural significance of the Andean condor. Do you prefer books that reach you emotionally or intellectually? I prefer books that engage me intelligently, whatever the content. Was there added pressure writing a new novel in the wake of the Nobel Prize? No, the pressure was in making the time. I was a little way into the work that has become “Theft” when the award was announced, and for a good while it was not possible to find the time and the silence to continue with it. I prefer to write with a good stretch of time in front of me, so I had to wait awhile. Then it was possible to create space and resume, and I did so without any sense of pressure. Is this a book you might have written before that? I think so. What have you learned about all the new readers who found your work thanks to the Nobel? It has been a great delight to meet and hear from new readers. It has been great also to meet readers who have been with me for some time but about whom I did not know. The generosity and pleasure of both has been wonderful and unexpected. With some work now translated into Swahili, what have you heard from East African readers? They seem pleased, and so am I, of course. You’ve said in interviews that capturing “unexpected kindnesses,” even in grim circumstances, is important to you. Why? Because it reassures us about our shared humanity, and of course because it may result in some relief from whatever troubles we may be struggling under. Because it is unexpected is all the sweeter. Your American publisher is featuring paintings by Lubaina Himid on your book covers. Did you know her work? What do you like about the covers? I knew of her work beforehand, and a little about her experience of Zanzibar and her reconnection with it. I like her colors and the wit with which her figures mingle and recline. What’s the last book you read that made you laugh? Percival Everett’s “James.” The last book that made you furious? I would rather not say. Source link #Interview #Abdulrazak #Gurnah #Theft #Reading #Life Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Johnson says Zelensky has done ‘about face’ on mineral deal Johnson says Zelensky has done ‘about face’ on mineral deal House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said during a radio interview that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has done a complete “about face” on the U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal that was not signed after the heated meeting between the two delegations late last month. “I’m really grateful and glad that Zelensky, in the last several days, has done an about face. He’s effectively apologized for all that. And he said, ‘Oh no, no, we would like that deal after all.’ I think he had a rude awakening,” Johnson said during his Saturday appearance on John Catsimatidis’s radio show “Cats Roundtable” on WABC 770 AM. “I think a lot of the people in his country were upset with the way that was handled. Certainly we all were, but we’ve got to get him back to the table,” Johnson told Catsimatidis. The minerals deal, which President Trump said would allow Washington to regain some of the assistance it had given to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion started three years ago while bolstering Kyiv’s economy, was slated to be signed by Zelensky during his Feb. 28 visit to the White House. The agreement was not signed as Zelensky, Trump and Vice President Vance had several contentious exchanges over peace agreement negotiations. Zelensky argued that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin could not be a trustworthy negotiator during peace talks as he has gone back on previous ceasefires in Eastern Europe. Trump and Vance contended that Zelensky was not grateful enough for the military assistance the U.S. has given to Ukraine and that Ukraine’s leader does not have very much leverage if negotiations ensue. “You’re gambling with World War III. And what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country,” Trump said. Zelensky said the U.S. has not experienced the consequences of the three-year conflict since it is far removed from the war-torn region, but that could be different in the future, prompting a forceful response from Trump. “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel,” the commander-in-chief said. “We’re trying to solve a problem. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.” Shortly after the heated meeting, Zelensky said he would not apologize. Days later, he described it as a “regrettable” gathering. Ukraine’s leader also wrote that he is ready to sign the minerals deal, arguing it would be a “step toward greater security and solid security guarantees.” Johnson said during the radio interview that Trump was “excited” for Zelensky to sign the deal during the Feb. 28 meeting. Since then, the U.S. halted aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, moves seen as a way to bring Zelensky back to the negotiating table. Despite the late February back-and-forth, Washington is still optimistic that a deal for the minerals will be struck. “The mineral deal is an important part of the president’s policy. No. 1, the American people have got to get some payback for the incredible financial investment we’ve made in this country,” Vance told reporters while on Capitol Hill Tuesday. Backers of the deal said the agreement would provide Washington with a strong argument to defend Ukraine against potential future aggression from the Kremlin. Those who are critical of the bilateral agreement argue it equates to Washington extorting Kiev while also sidelining Zelensky from talks between Putin and Trump. Johnson reiterated his view that if Zelensky cannot deliver the “deal for this country,” then Ukraine needs to “send a leader who can.” Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. Source link #Johnson #Zelensky #face #mineral #deal Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

After Trump’s berating of Zelensky, Ukraine’s tennis players find support on American soil After Trump’s berating of Zelensky, Ukraine’s tennis players find support on American soil INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — Marta Kostyuk, the top-ranked Ukrainian tennis player in the world, drew home-crowd favorite Robin Montgomery for her first match at the BNP Paribas Open Friday. Listening to the crowd at Stadium 4, the match could have been in Kyiv, not California: they were there for Kostyuk, the world No. 24, from the first ball to the last as she beat Montgomery 6-1, 6-3. That was no small thing for a Ukrainian player enduring one of the more tumultuous weeks in her country’s war against Russia, since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in early 2022. Last Friday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine endured a withering attack from U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice-President J.D. Vance in the Oval Office. With television cameras rolling, they criticized Zelensky for not being sufficiently “thankful” for American aid and ridiculed him for trying to use leverage that they said he did not possess. “You don’t have the cards. You’re either going to make a deal, or we’re out,” Trump told Zelensky. He then announced a pause in U.S. military aid to Ukraine. Sudden cutbacks at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had already affected the flow of humanitarian aid, after Trump directed Elon Musk, an unelected “special government employee”, and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is named for an internet meme featuring a dog, to shut that agency down. After that White House confrontation, Kostyuk said her phone was flooded by American friends and acquaintances — some in tennis, many outside it — expressing empathy. “A lot of messages and a lot of apologies, which is amazing,” she said in her news conference after beating Montgomery. “It’s incredible to see this, that people still support us.” Three years into the war back home, Ukraine’s tennis players have felt just about every emotion they could possibly feel. The concern is never far from them. In the late afternoon Friday at Indian Wells, after she had upset three-time Grand Slam finalist Ons Jabeur 6-3, 6-1, Dayana Yastremska opened her phone to demonstrate how she keeps up with developments. She thumbed through a series of apps including the messaging service Telegram, which keeps her up to date on the latest missile attacks, and the alarms that warn the citizens of her home city, Odesa, to head for the bomb shelters. Her sister, father and grandparents still live there, so Yastremska checks the alerts as soon as she wakes each day before she calls home. She repeats the process once her matches are over. The news has been especially bad the past week, as the growing split between the Trump administration and Zelensky has emboldened Russia’s forces. GO DEEPER Trump and Zelensky’s confrontation sends Ukrainian tennis players to Sunshine Double under a cloud “After what happened on this day, the attack on Ukraine got higher than it was before, and on my city it is the same,” she says. “It’s very intense. So many days, we don’t have light and water.” Yastremska was in Ukraine just a few weeks ago. She travelled there following the WTA tournament in Linz, Austria, to celebrate her younger sister Ivanna’s 18th birthday. Ivanna used to be a professional tennis player too but is now at university studying journalism while also pursuing a singing career. Dayana had to fly from Austria to Chișinău, capital of Moldova, before driving about five hours across the border to reach Odesa. If Odesa were easier to get to, she would move home in a heartbeat, she says, war or no war. “I love my city,” she stresses. Last Friday was an especially trying one for Yastremska, who landed in San Francisco from Europe to the news of the disastrous Trump/Zelensky meeting. Then, immigration officials told her that someone had reported her passport to Interpol as stolen. That invalidated her 10-year visa to enter the U.S., and she was nearly sent back to Europe during four hours of wrangling to sort through the issue. Ultimately, she received a six-month visa to tide her over; she will need to extend that if she wants to return to the States to play the U.S. Open in August. “Crazy, crazy day. I thought I would explode,” she says. She didn’t, of course. And a week later she was beating a three-time major finalist in straight sets, to set up a match Sunday against five-time Grand Slam champion Iga Swiatek, who has won two out of the past three BNP Paribas Opens. Yastremska in focus mode at the *********** Open in January. (Ng Han Guan / Associated Press) She, Kostyuk and Elina Svitolina, who also won here Friday, have had three years of learning to cope with these kinds of hazards. “We are Ukrainians, we have this kind of character that we are able to get through difficult situations,” Yastremska says. Or at the very least manage them, and even sometimes find a silver lining. Kostyuk was heartbroken when that meeting of the presidents went so poorly. But she has since come to embrace the idea that so many people in the U.S. wanted to help early on after Russia’s attack, and still do. “It’s important to remember that that was not one person deciding to help Ukraine and to be an ally of Ukraine, but a lot of people,” she said. “And I’m very thankful for all these people.” There’s a saying Kostyuk keeps coming back to, on and off the court. “Everything will be fine, and if it’s not fine, it means it’s not the end,” she said. She also does not forget that everyone in tennis has their own problems and has to figure out how to leave those on the side of the court and approach their jobs professionally. Chances are, she said, your opponent is spending very little time worrying about your mental state, or the traumas of your life. “Everyone is going through something in their lives,” she says. “Whether it’s war or some of their relatives are not feeling well or dying or some problems in the family. It’s very important to kind of put everything that’s outside of the court aside and just go out there and do the job that you are doing.” With that, Kostyuk was off to prepare for another day at the office — Sunday’s round-of-32 date with another American opponent, Caroline Dolehide. There’s a good chance she will get plenty of support in that one, too. (Top photo of Marta Kostyuk: Robert Prange / Getty Images) Source link #Trumps #berating #Zelensky #Ukraines #tennis #players #find #support #American #soil Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]