New Delhi: India, as the Chair of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in 2023, will host the SCO Defence Ministers’ Meeting here on April 28, the Defence Ministry said on Tuesday.
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh is expected to hold bilateral talks with his Chinese counterpart Gen Li Shangfu. Before the SCO meet, the 18th round of India-China Corps Commander level talks held on Sunday, but it failed to make headway on the contentious issue of the Depsang Plains and de-escalation along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh.
The repeated attempts by China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to violate the LAC, leading to tension in Ladakh, spurred the institution of the Corps Commander-level meetings.
While the two sides agreed on mutual withdrawals from Pangong Tso, Gogra, and Hot Springs, the Depsang Plains and Demchok remain points of contention and tension.
Now all eyes are now on the visit of the Chinese Defence Minister.
Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), established in 2001, comprises Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan besides India. Apart from the member states, two observer countries – Belarus and Iran – will also be participating in the SCO Defence Ministers Meeting.
The Defence Ministers will discuss amongst other issues matters concerning regional peace and security, counter terrorism efforts within SCO and an effective multilateralism.
According to the Defence Ministry officials, the theme of India’s Chairmanship of SCO in 2023 is ‘SECURE-SCO’. India attaches special importance to SCO in promoting multilateral, political, security, economic and people-to-people interactions in the region. The ongoing engagement with SCO has helped India promote its relations with the countries in the region with which India has shared civilisational linkages, and is considered India’s extended neighbourhood.
SCO pursues its policy based on the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity of nations, non-interference in internal affairs, equality of all member states and mutual understanding and respect for opinions of each of them.
Rajnath Singh is likely to hold bilateral meetings with other Defence Ministers of participating countries on the sidelines of the meet, the officials added.
In the story of how Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the structure of DNA, the popular narrative is one of skullduggery and deceit. But now researchers say there is a twist in the tale of the double helix.
It has long been held that Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray diffraction image known as Photo 51 was illicitly shown to Watson, revealing to him that DNA has a double helix and allowing him and his colleague Crick to deduce the structure and claim the glory.
Now academics say the story should be rewritten, arguing that the image was far from the key to the puzzle and that Franklin appears to have expected her data to be shared – and was credited at the time.
“There’s no evidence that she thought she was robbed,” said Prof Matthew Cobb, of the University of Manchester.
Writing in a comment article in the journal Nature, Cobb and his co-author Nathaniel Comfort describe how their interpretation is backed up by documents unearthed from Franklin’s archive at Churchill College in Cambridge.
One, a draft article from 1953 meant for publication in Time magazine, clearly depicts the discovery as being a joint endeavour by two independent teams – Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, and Crick and Watson.
Another document from the archive, a letter to Crick from a colleague of Franklin, suggests the latter had not only discussed her various data with Crick’s supervisor but assumed he would share the knowledge with Crick.
“What it shows is that Franklin was apparently quite relaxed about this,” Cobb said.
Cobb and Comfort also obtained a programme from a Royal Society event in June 1953, revealing that an exhibit of the proposed structure of DNA was credited to both teams of researchers with Franklin listed first.
A key point, stressed Cobb, was that Photo 51 was never the key to determining the structure of DNA. Instead, the success of Watson and Crick was down to trial and error with calculations and cardboard models, with the importance of Photo 51 augmented by Watson in his 1968 book, The Double Helix, to add drama to the tale of the discovery.
“If you know what the double helix structure of DNA is, amazingly you can see it in [Photo 51] but the image doesn’t tell you that,” said Cobb.
That interpretation, he added, is backed up by the fact that Franklin was an experienced crystallographer – making it unlikely she would have missed a blatant clue.
However, Cobb noted that Crick and Watson still relied on data from Franklin, Wilkins and others that was informally shared with them in order to confirm their proposed structure. A clear acknowledgment of this was belatedly made by Watson and Crick in their full description of the structure of DNA published in 1954.
What’s more, Watson’s book – published after Franklin’s death in 1958 – did little to paint her in a positive light.
“In the different versions of The Double Helix, she becomes more and more caricatured, more and more like a harridan,” Cobb said.
Prof James Naismith, the director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, who was not involved in the article, said Franklin was not only a key player in the discovery of the double helix of DNA, but pioneered research into the structure of viruses.
“Her family often express the wish that her immense contribution to science is celebrated and that she is not portrayed solely as a woman cheated by men,” he said. “The tragedy of Rosalind Franklin is that [while] she died at 37 from cancer, her career was seen at the time as stellar.”
[ad_2]
#Academics #find #twist #tale #Rosalind #Franklin #DNA #double #helix
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
A Florida toddler who was found dead in the jaws of an alligator last month was drowned by his father before falling into the animal’s grasp, according to police.
The cause of death for two-year-old Taylen Mosley was confirmed by the local coroner’s office, said a statement on Monday from police in St Petersburg.
News of Mosley’s death in early April sent shockwaves through Florida and drew national headlines. The toddler’s body was found in the mouth of an alligator shortly after a family member discovered the child’s mother, 20-year-old Pashun Jeffery, dead in the family’s apartment.
Police allege that Taylen’s father, Thomas Mosley, 21, stabbed Jeffery more than 100 times after a birthday party on 29 March, the Washington Post reported.
Later that night, Thomas Mosley arrived at his mother’s house with cuts to his arms and hands – which were consistent with injuries that commonly occur to attackers wielding knives – and became a suspect in Jeffrey’s killing, according to a police affidavit.
Meanwhile, after authorities found Jeffery’s body, Taylen was reported as missing, and detectives found his body on 31 March, NBC News reported.
Officers noticed the alligator in Lake Maggiore and spotted Taylen’s body in the animal’s mouth, according to the Associated Press. The autopsy whose results were announced on Monday made clear for the first time that the boy had died before the alligator encountered him.
Law enforcement officers shot the alligator to death and “were able to retrieve Taylen’s body intact”, the St Petersburg police chief, Anthony Holloway, said at a press conference in early April, the Associated Press noted.
“We are sorry it has had to end this way,” Holloway had told reporters.
Thomas Mosley has been booked on two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of both his son and the boy’s mother. He could face life imprisonment or the death penalty if convicted.
[ad_2]
#Florida #toddler #alligators #jaws #killed #father #police
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
He stands as the model and the epitome of the celebrity activist. Few kept up with Belafonte’s time and commitment and none his stature as a meeting point among Hollywood, Washington and the civil rights movement.
Belafonte not only participated in protest marches and benefit concerts, but helped organize and raise support for them. He worked closely with his friend and generational peer the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., often intervening on his behalf with both politicians and fellow entertainers and helping him financially. He risked his life and livelihood and set high standards for younger Black celebrities, scolding Jay Z and Beyonce for failing to meet their “social responsibilities,” and mentoring Usher, Common, Danny Glover and many others. In Spike Lee’s 2018 film “BlacKkKlansman,” he was fittingly cast as an elder statesman schooling young activists about the country’s past.
Belafonte’s friend, civil rights leader Andrew Young, would note that Belafonte was the rare person to grow more radical with age. He was ever engaged and unyielding, willing to take on Southern segregationists, Northern liberals, the billionaire Koch brothers and the country’s first Black president, Barack Obama, whom Belafonte would remember asking to cut him “some slack.”
Belafonte responded, “What makes you think that’s not what I’ve been doing?”
Belafonte had been a major artist since the 1950s. He won a Tony Award in 1954 for his starring role in John Murray Anderson’s “Almanac” and five years later became the first Black performer to win an Emmy for the TV special “Tonight with Harry Belafonte.”
In 1954, he co-starred with Dorothy Dandridge in the Otto Preminger-directed musical “Carmen Jones,” a popular breakthrough for an all-Black cast. The 1957 movie “Island in the Sun” was banned in several Southern cities, where theater owners were threatened by the Ku Klux Klan because of the film’s interracial romance between Belafonte and Joan Fontaine.
His “Calypso,” released in 1955, became the first officially certified million-selling album by a solo performer, and started a national infatuation with Caribbean rhythms (Belafonte was nicknamed, reluctantly, the “King of Calypso″). Admirers of Belafonte included a young Bob Dylan, who debuted on record in the early ’60s by playing harmonica on Belafonte’s “Midnight Special.”
“Harry was the best balladeer in the land and everybody knew it,” Dylan later wrote. “He was a fantastic artist, sang about lovers and slaves — chain gang workers, saints and sinners and children. … Harry was that rare type of character that radiates greatness, and you hope that some of it rubs off on you.”
Belafonte befriended King in the spring of 1956 after the young civil rights leader called and asked for a meeting. They spoke for hours, and Belafonte would remember feeling King raised him to the “higher plane of social protest.” Then at the peak of his singing career, Belafonte was soon producing a benefit concert for the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama that helped make King a national figure. By the early 1960s, he had decided to make civil rights his priority.
“I was having almost daily talks with Martin,” Belafonte wrote in his memoir “My Song,” published in 2011. “I realized that the movement was more important than anything else.”
The Kennedys were among the first politicians to seek his opinions, which he willingly shared. John F. Kennedy, at a time when Blacks were as likely to vote for Republicans as for Democrats, was so anxious for his support that during the 1960 election he visited Belafonte at his Manhattan home. Belafonte schooled Kennedy on the importance of King, and arranged for them to speak.
“I was quite taken by the fact that he (Kennedy) knew so little about the Black community,” Belafonte told NBC in 2013. “He knew the headlines of the day, but he wasn’t really anywhere nuanced or detailed on the depth of Black anguish or what our struggle’s really about.”
Belafonte would often criticize the Kennedys for their reluctance to challenge the Southern segregationists who were then a substantial part of the Democratic Party. He argued with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother, over the government’s failure to protect the “Freedom Riders” trying to integrate bus stations. He was among the Black activists at a widely publicized meeting with the attorney general, when playwright Lorraine Hansberry and others stunned Kennedy by questioning whether the country even deserved Black allegiance.
“Bobby turned red at that. I had never seen him so shaken,” Belafonte later wrote.
In 1963, Belafonte was deeply involved with the March on Washington. He recruited his close friend Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman and other celebrities and persuaded the left-wing Marlon Brando to co-chair the Hollywood delegation with the more conservative Charlton Heston, a pairing designed to appeal to the broadest possible audience. In 1964, he and Poitier personally delivered tens of thousands of dollar to activists in Mississippi after three “Freedom Summer” volunteers were murdered — the two celebrities were chased by car at one point by members of the KKK. The following year, he brought in Tony Bennett, Joan Baez and other singers to perform for the marchers in Selma, Alabama.
When King was assassinated, in 1968, Belafonte helped pick out the suit he was buried in, sat next to his widow, Coretta, at the funeral, and continued to support his family, in part through an insurance policy he had taken out on King in his lifetime.
“Much of my political outlook was already in place when I encountered Dr. King,” Belafonte later wrote. “I was well on my way and utterly committed to the civil rights struggle. I came to him with expectations and he affirmed them.”
King’s death left Belafonte isolated from the civil rights community. He was turned off by the separatist beliefs of Stokely Carmichael and other “Black Power” activists and had little chemistry with King’s designated successor, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy. But the entertainer’s causes extended well beyond the U.S.
He mentored South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba and helped introduce her to American audiences, the two winning a Grammy in 1964 for the concert record “An Evening With Belafonte/Makeba.” He coordinated Nelson Mandela’s first visit to the U.S. since being released from prison in 1990. A few years earlier, he initiated the all-star, million-selling “We Are the World” recording, the Grammy-winning charity song for famine relief in Africa.
Belafonte’s early life and career paralleled those of Poitier, who died in 2022. Both spent part of their childhoods in the Caribbean and ended up in New York. Both served in the military during World War II, acted in the American Negro Theatre and then broke into film. Poitier shared his belief in civil rights, but still dedicated much of his time to acting, a source of some tension between them. While Poitier had a sustained and historic run in the 1960s as a leading man and box office success, Belafonte grew tired of acting and turned down parts he regarded as “neutered.″
“Sidney radiated a truly saintly dignity and calm. Not me,″ Belafonte wrote in his memoir. “I didn’t want to tone down my sexuality, either. Sidney did that in every role he took.″
Belafonte was very much a human being. He acknowledged extra-marital affairs, negligence as a parent and a frightening temper, driven by lifelong insecurity. “Woe to the musician who missed his cue, or the agent who fouled up a booking,″ he confided.
In his memoir, he chastised Poitier for a “radical breach″ by backing out on a commitment to star as Mandela in a TV miniseries Belafonte had conceived, then agreeing to play Mandela for a rival production. He became so estranged from King’s widow and children that he was not asked to speak at her funeral. In 2013, he sued three of King’s children over control of some of the civil rights leader’s personal papers. In his memoir, he would allege that the King children were more interested in “selling trinkets and memorabilia” than in serious thought.
He made news years earlier when he compared Colin Powell, the first Black secretary of state, to a slave “permitted to come into the house of the master” for his service in the George W. Bush administration. He was in Washington in January 2009 as Obama was inaugurated, officiating along with Baez and others at a gala called the Inaugural Peace Ball. But Belafonte would later criticize Obama for failing to live up to his promise and lacking “fundamental empathy with the dispossessed, be they white or Black.”
Belafonte did occasionally serve in government, as cultural adviser for the Peace Corps during the Kennedy administration and decades later as goodwill ambassador for UNICEF. For his film and music career, he received the motion picture academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, a National Medal of Arts, a Grammy for lifetime achievement and numerous other honorary prizes. He found special pleasure in winning a New York Film Critics Award in 1996 for his work as a gangster in Robert Altman’s “Kansas City.”
“I’m as proud of that film critics’ award as I am of all my gold records,” he wrote in his memoir.
He was married three times, most recently to photographer Pamela Frank, and had four children. Three of them — Shari, David and Gina — became actors.
Harry Belafonte was born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. in 1927, in a community of West Indians in Harlem. His father was a seaman and cook with Dutch and Jamaican ancestry and his mother, part Scottish, worked as a domestic. Both parents were undocumented immigrants and Belafonte recalled living “an underground life, as criminals of a sort, on the run.″
The household was violent: Belafonte sustained brutal beatings from his father, and he was sent to live for several years with relatives in Jamaica. Belafonte was a poor reader — he was probably dyslexic, he later realized — and dropped out of high school, soon joining the Navy. While in the service, he read “Color and Democracy” by the Black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois and was deeply affected, calling it the start of his political education.
After the war, he found a job in New York as an assistant janitor for some apartment buildings. One tenant liked him enough to give him free tickets to a play at the American Negro Theatre, a community repertory for black performers. Belafonte was so impressed that he joined as a volunteer, then as an actor. Poitier was a peer, both of them “skinny, brooding and vulnerable within our hard shells of self-protection,″ Belafonte later wrote.
Belafonte met Brando, Walter Matthau and other future stars while taking acting classes at the New School for Social Research. Brando was an inspiration as an actor, and he and Belafonte became close, sometimes riding on Brando’s motorcycle or double dating or playing congas together at parties. Over the years, Belafonte’s political and artistic lives would lead to friendships with everyone from Frank Sinatra and Lester Young to Eleanor Roosevelt and Fidel Castro.
His early stage credits included “Days of Our Youth″ and Sean O’Casey’s “Juno and the Peacock,″ a play Belafonte remembered less because of his own performance than because of a backstage visitor, Robeson, the actor, singer and activist.
“What I remember more than anything Robeson said, was the love he radiated, and the profound responsibility he felt, as an actor, to use his platform as a bully pulpit,″ Belafonte wrote in his memoir. His friendship with Robeson and support for left-wing causes eventually brought trouble from the government. FBI agents visited him at home and allegations of Communism nearly cost him an appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.″ Leftists suspected, and Belafonte emphatically denied, that he had named names of suspected Communists so he could perform on Sullivan’s show.
By the 1950s, Belafonte was also singing, finding gigs at the Blue Note, the Vanguard and other clubs — he was backed for one performance by Charlie Parker and Max Roach — and becoming immersed in folk, blues, jazz and the calypso he had heard while living in Jamaica. Starting in 1954, he released such top 10 albums as “Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites″ and “Belafonte,″ and his popular singles included “Mathilda,″ “Jamaica Farewell″ and “The Banana Boat Song,″ a reworked Caribbean ballad that was a late addition to his “Calypso″ record.
“We found ourselves one or two songs short, so we threw in `Day-O’ as filler,″ Belafonte wrote in his memoir.
He was a superstar, but one criticized, and occasionally sued, for taking traditional material and not sharing the profits. Belafonte expressed regret and also worried about being typecast as a calypso singer, declining for years to sing “Day-O″ live after he gave television performances against banana boat backdrops.
Belafonte was the rare young artist to think about the business side of show business. He started one of the first all-Black music publishing companies. He produced plays, movies and TV shows, including Off-Broadway’s “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” in 1969. He was the first Black person to produce for TV.
Belafonte made history in 1968 by filling in for Johnny Carson on the “Tonight” show for a full week. Later that year, a simple, spontaneous gesture led to another milestone. Appearing on a taped TV special starring Petula Clark, Belafonte joined the British singer on the anti-war song “On the Path of Glory.″ At one point, Clark placed a hand on Belafonte’s arm. The show’s sponsor, Chrysler, demanded the segment be reshot. Clark and Belafonte resisted, successfully, and for the first time a man and woman of different colors touched on national television.
In the 1970s, he returned to movie acting, co-starring with Poitier in “Buck and the Preacher,″ a commercial flop, the raucous and popular comedy “Uptown Saturday Night.” His other film credits include “Bobby,″ “White Man’s Burden,″ and cameos in Altman’s “The Player″ and “Ready to Wear.″ He also appeared in the Altman-directed TV series “Tanner on Tanner″ and was among those interviewed for “When the Levees Broke,″ Spike Lee’s HBO documentary about Hurricane Katrina. In 2011, HBO aired a documentary about Belafonte, “Sing Your Song.”
Mindful to the end that he grew up in poverty, Belafonte did not think of himself as an artist who became an activist, but an activist who happened to be an artist.
“When you grow up, son,″ Belafonte remembered his mother telling him, “never go to bed at night knowing that there was something you could have done during the day to strike a blow against injustice and you didn’t do it.″
In addition to his wife, Belafonte is survived by his children Adrienne Belafonte Biesemeyer, Shari Belafonte, Gina Belafonte and David Belafonte; two stepchildren, Sarah Frank and Lindsey Frank; and eight grandchildren.
[ad_2]
#Harry #Belafonte #activist #entertainer #dies
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Hyderabad: A head constable named D Venkat Reddy of Miyapur police station was caught red-handed by the sleuths of the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) for allegedly demanding and accepting a bribe of Rs. 20,000 from a person on instructions of sub-inspector Yadagiri Rao.
A person T Ashok Kumar had approached the Anti-Corruption Bureau and filed a complaint against the policemen for demanding the bribe amount to settle a case. Prior to it, the head constable had demanded and accepted Rs. 30,000 from Ashok Kumar and his friend Leela Prabhu.
The ACB sleuths on Tuesday caught Venkat Reddy when he accepted the bribe amount. The fingers of the hand of Venkat Reddy tested positive in the chemical test. Venkat Reddy and Yadagiri Rao were arrested and will be produced before the First Additional Special Judge for SPE and ACB cases.
Ahmedabad: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has moved the Gujarat High Court challenging the Surat Sessions court verdict that rejected his plea seeking a stay on his conviction in the 2019 criminal defamation case over the ‘Modi surname’ remark.
The hearing in the case is likely this week.
A Surat court on April 20 rejected Rahul Gandhi’s plea seeking a stay on his conviction in the 2019 criminal defamation case.
The Congress had said that Rahul Gandhi will move the High Court against the verdict.
In his judgement, Additional sessions judge Robin P Mogera had cited Gandhi’s stature as an MP and former chief of the country’s second-largest political party and said he should have been more careful. He cited prima facie evidence and observations of the trial court and said it transpires that Gandhi made certain derogatory remarks against Prime Minister Narendra Modi apart from comparing people with the same surname with thieves.
Mogera said the surname of the complainant in the case, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lawmaker Purnesh Modi, is also Modi. “…the complainant is [also an] ex-minister and involved in public life and such defamatory remarks would have certainly harmed his reputation and caused him pain and agony in society,” he said.
Mogera cited the disqualification criteria under the Representation of the People Act and added that removal or disqualification as MP could not be termed irreversible or irreparable loss or damage to Gandhi.
Earlier on April 3, the Sessions Court granted bail to the Congress leader.
While granting bail to the former MP, the court had issued notices to Purnesh Modi and the state government.
It heard both parties and then reserved the order for April 20.
Rahul Gandhi was a Lok Sabha MP from Wayanad but was disqualified after a lower court in Surat sentenced him to two years in jail on March 23 under sections 499 and 500 (defamation) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) in a case filed by Purnesh Modi.
The case pertained to a remark Rahul Gandhi made using the surname ‘Modi’ while addressing a campaign event ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
At a rally in Karnataka’s Kolar in April 2019, Rahul, in a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, said, “How come all the thieves have Modi as the common surname?”.
Following his conviction, Rahul was disqualified as an MP on March 24, as per a Supreme Court ruling in 2013. Under the ruling, any MP or MLA is automatically disqualified if convicted and sentenced to two years or more. (ANI)
It’s not surprising, but now it’s official: Joe Biden is running for re-election. In a video on Tuesday launching his bid for a second term, Biden cast his administration as standing for personal freedom, democracy and pluralism in contrast to what he called “Maga extremists”. The video emphasized abortion rights and contrasted Biden and the Democrats with unsettling images of the Capitol insurrectionists. Echoing a repeated line from his most recent State of the Union address, the president implored Americans: “Let’s finish the job.”
There will be no primary. True, Biden has disaffected some members of the Democratic party’s precariously large coalition, and he has failed to capture the hearts and imaginations of Americans the way that, say, Barack Obama did. In 2020, a basketball team’s worth of Democrats entered the presidential primary – partly out of perceptions of then president Trump’s weakness, but also partly because Biden seemed like such a poor fit to be the party’s standard-bearer.
He’s an old white man in a party that is predominantly female, increasingly non-white and very young. He is a moderate in a party with a resurgent left. And he is a bone-deep believer in the merits of compromise and bipartisanship, in an era where the Republican party has become anathema to cooperation, hostile to Democratic governance and committed to racial and gender hierarchies that are not worth compromising with. He seemed like a man out of time, responding to the political conditions of a different era; it was unclear, then, that he could see the country as it really was, unclear that he could confront the true threat.
As he announces his re-election campaign, four years after he threw his hat into the ring for 2020, Biden has quieted these fears, if not disproved them. The left, leaderless after Bernie Sanders’s defeat in the 2020 primary, has not formed a cohesive bloc, and their pressures on the Biden administration have been noble but sporadic. Congressional Republicans hamstrung most of Biden’s agenda, causing him to abandon, in particular, promises he made to help Americans get affordable childcare; but he still managed to pass a large infrastructure bill, as well as Covid relief.
The pandemic has largely receded, and both deaths and new infections are down. Inflation is slowing, and jobs numbers are encouraging. The economy, while not perfect, seems to be benefiting from the stability of Democratic leadership, with stock prices no longer beholden to wild fluctuations in the aftermath of an errant comment or impulsive tweet from Trump.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, unleashing horrific humanitarian catastrophes on the people there and endangering other European allies, a trap was laid that could have easily drawn the United States into war. Biden and his administration have deftly kept us out of it. The president who once seemed like an out-of-touch old man has been successfully rebranded as an affable grandfather whose gaffes are thoughtless but aggressively well-meaning.
Even major missteps do not seem to have meaningfully injured Biden. The administration was shockingly tone-deaf and ill-prepared following the US supreme court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, having little in the way of policy proposals to reduce the humanitarian and dignity harms imposed on American women – and at one point, trying to appoint an anti-choice judge to a lifetime seat, before withdrawing the nomination under pressure.
Despite the primacy Tuesday’s campaign announcement gave abortion rights, Biden has generally seemed uncomfortable and incompetent on the issue, even as women face degradation and medical emergencies inflicted at the hands of conservative states; he has largely shied away from directly addressing abortion, and shunted it off to his unpopular, largely powerless vice-president, Kamala Harris – whose own marginalization within the administration is a signal of how little he values the issue.
Even since Dobbs, Biden has been entirely unwilling to confront the federal judiciary – a captured and unaccountable extremist rightwing body that will foil his whole agenda, and gradually eliminate both pluralist society and representative democracy, if it is not reformed. Yet the Republicans’ virulent misogyny and bald sadism on abortion seems poised to be a boon to Democrats anyway: it was mostly abortion that drove voters to give a worse-than-expected showing to Republicans in the 2022 midterms, and to allow Democrats to keep control of the Senate.
In that sense, the political fallout of the Dobbs decision may serve as a good model for the Democrats’ emerging 2024 strategy: they don’t need to be especially good, because the Republicans are so cruelly and chaotically worse. The Republican party is in shambles – internally divided; married to gruesome and unpopular policies, particularly on gender, that alienate voters; branded as violent, antisocial and creepy. There’s still a long way to go, but the Republican party seems only slightly less eager to anoint Trump as their nominee than the Democrats have been to appoint Biden.
It very well may wind up being a rematch of the 2020 election – only now, Trump is even weaker, even more marginal, even more disliked, linked forever the memory of the January 6 violence and devoid of what was once his novelty and comedy and reduced to a rambling catalogue of personal grievances. With an opponent like that, it might not matter much if all that Biden has to offer is a series of charming anachronisms, or grinning photo ops in his aviators.
All the Republicans have to offer is sex obsession and cheesy fraud, parading a series of candidates for state and federal office who talk like a collection of snake-oil salesmen and gun fetishists. Biden isn’t going into 2024 particularly strong. But right now, the Republicans are particularly weak.
[ad_2]
#Biden #isnt #strong #Republicans #weak #Moira #Donegan
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Adele broke down in tears while discussing her divorce as she joined James Corden for the final Carpool Karaoke in his last week as host of the The Late Late Show on the US network CBS.
Corden took over The Late Late Show in 2015, replacing the Scottish-American comedian Craig Ferguson. He announced last year that he would be leaving the show and returning to the UK, with Corden’s last episode airing on Thursday.
The Carpool Karaoke part of the show quickly became its breakout hit, and Corden’s first segment with Adele became a viral hit, amassing more than 260m views.
In the final Carpool Karaoke episode, released on Monday, the singer became visibly emotional over Corden’s decision to return to the UK.
“It’s been a crazy eight years,” said Corden. “In one sense it feels like it’s gone like that [clicks fingers] and in another I feel like I don’t remember what life was like before being here.”
Adele said: “I’ve never lived in LA without you guys so I’m a bit nervous about it, to be honest with you, and very, very sad.”
During their conversation, Corden revealed some of the difficulties he had faced in persuading celebrities to take part in Carpool Karaoke when he first came to the US.
He recalled how the team eventually managed to persuade Mariah Carey to agree, but that before she got in the car she told him she would only “do the chat” and would not sing.
Corden knew he had to convince her to change her mind to make a success of the feature, and he succeeded.
“There’s been some bloody brilliant ones, and a few [bleeped out] ones,” Adele laughed, asking Corden to name a favourite.
“Stevie Wonder changed it a lot,” he replied, “because when he did it, other artists were like, ‘Well, if Stevie Wonder’s done it, I’ll do it.’”
Adele revealed how Corden and his family had been “so integral in looking after” her and her son following her split from her former husband, Simon Konecki, in 2019.
The couple divorced in March 2021, and Adele revealed that she and her son Angelo, 10, had gone on a family trip with Corden, his wife, Julia Carey, and their three children.
“And we were on our way home and my mood had changed,” Adele said. “It was like the first year that I felt like I had to hold myself accountable, for just being an adult, whereas the year before that where I left Simon, you and Jules and the kids were so integral in looking after me and Angelo.”
“You were like an adult with me. You and Julia would always give me this advice.”
Adele’s Carpool Karaoke segment will also be broadcast on Thursday’s show, bookending a series that has also featured Elton John, Madonna, BTS, Blackpink, Britney Spears, Paul McCartney, Céline Dion, and Billie Eilish.
[ad_2]
#Adele #joins #James #Corden #emotional #Carpool #Karaoke #finale
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Frank Auerbach once said that London after the second world war was a “marvellous landscape with precipice and mountain and crags, full of drama”. It’s a description that could just as easily apply to his own aged face, judging by the works that have just gone on display at a new show in the city.
Entitled Twenty Self-Portraits and showing at the Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert gallery, the exhibition comprises paintings on boards and drawings on paper, all done since 2017. Here he is looking like a bird; there, like a tree; there, a boulder unmoved by a storm. The artist, just turning 92, still lives where he works, as he always has done – alone in a north London studio. I call him at 9am on Good Friday. He picks up on the first ring.For decades, writers have struggled to find the right words to describe Auerbach: a hermit, a recluse, a monk, an obsessive. His daily routine seemed like it would never change: up before 7am to draw in quiet streets, then work in the studio – every day of the year – with one of the handful of people who have sat for him over the decades. As one veteran sitter, the art historian Catherine Lampert, puts it: “He’s all by himself, every evening, by choice.”
“I don’t any longer do the daily drawing actually,” says Auerbach. “I’m doing what may be my last two little paintings in the studio, of a scene outside. But I have been working this morning. When I got up, I saw [in what I’d done yesterday] something that seemed perfectly adequate but totally unnecessary and I rubbed it all out. Of course, now it looks utterly different. But it still isn’t any good – and I shall go on with that process for as long as it takes.”
The critic Robert Hughes, who wrote an acclaimed Auerbach monograph in the 1990s, said that an “overriding sense of being alone in the world” was at the heart of the German-born British artist’s work. It would be tempting to link that summation to Auerbach finally arriving at self-portraiture. Yet, when seen in the round, it strikes me that his work is actually run through with steadfast relationships. The names of his sitters often make it into the titles: EOW (Auerbach’s erstwhile companion Estella Olive West), JYM (Julia Yardley Mills, a professional model who sat for 40 years), Julia (his wife since 1958), Jake (his son) and a trio of art writers, William Feaver, Lampert and David Landau. Their presences are captured by Auerbach’s exacting process of repeatedly trying, then erasing, then trying again to make an image that is true. And doing so, in most cases, for at least 20 years, sometimes well past 40.
When I suggest that his work speaks not of solitude but connection, he replies: “That is absolutely true. And it’s possibly true that our deepest experiences are other people. I do think subject matters. And it seems that the only thing worth using for one’s art is one’s deepest experiences. I think my drawings sometimes, in retrospect, tell me a lot about my relationship with people I’ve been drawing. People say they’re expressing themselves – but I’m not expressing myself at all. I’m trying to make an image.” Yet, years later, he might look at a work “and see how I felt at the time, but wasn’t aware of then”.
Auerbach has always rejected any notion that his work is expressionist. He speaks in formal terms, about needing to have or feel “the lump” of whatever he’s drawing in his mind. Feaver, the writer who has sat for him weekly since 2003, once described himself as “a useful lump”. I can’t resist asking Auerbach: “Are you a useful lump?”
“I’m an extremely useful lump!” he says brightly. “I don’t chat. I’m very well aware of the enormous sacrifice my saintly sitters are making when they come to sit for me. But if I feel I want to go next door for 20 minutes, to see the thing with a fresh eye on my return, I can do that.”
The catalogue for Twenty Self-Portraits features an article by Michael Roemer, the US film director and writer, who was among the very first to buy an Auerbach. It was 1950 and the painter was just 19. Roemer paid 10 guineas. He couldn’t explain why, but he needed the piece. And he went on to collect more and live surrounded by them for 40 years. Speaking by phone from Florida, he describes his favourite charcoal: the one with the paper completely worn away, and backed up with another piece of paper, also worn away and patched. I know what he’s referring to: one of the heads of EOW from the late 1950s.
The two men met as boys, aged 11 and 8. It was 1939 and they were at Bunce Court, a Kentish boarding school for orphans, mostly sent by their families from Berlin via the Kindertransport. Roemer, now 95, last met Auerbach three years ago. They said their goodbyes. But, adds Roemer, when they speak on the phone, they just pick up where they left off. “It’s as though there were no years.”
Roemer left the UK for the US at the age of 17. He remembers Auerbach, three years his junior, doing a watercolour of some boots, shortly before. “It wasn’t a finished thing but it wasn’t sketchy. It was just very different from everything the other children were doing and much better than anything I could do.”
Auerbach has described some of the lines in earlier self-portraits as being “an old man’s marks”. But these new works feel really fresh. They’re small with a markedly vertical emphasis, the brush and charcoallines running downwards like spines or trunks. They’re sparser than previous works, too.
Auerbach used to work for longer periods. “It was a physical affair,” he says – a performance described by sitters in terms one might use for a boxing match, all shuffle and stomp. But his balance isn’t so good now. “It’s still physical, but I find I’m holding on to the easel with one hand and working with the other. Possibly the marks become slightly more summary and reduced.”
It’s also the distillation of a lifetime of, as he puts it, teaching himself how to draw. Even now, a work is only deemed finished and valid if it passes the final test: a black and white photograph is taken of it, to check the graphic structure. When drawing himself, I suggest, he must also feel his own structure, his actual bones. Does this feed into his understanding? Almost everything does, he says. “Sometimes I keep on drawing in my sleep. Before, I was hardly conscious of my dreams, but I now find myself working things out, thinking I should be doing this with that.”
skip past newsletter promotion
after newsletter promotion
Summer Building Site, a work from 1952 in which two yellowstepladders stand amid bold shapes in orange and green, has become essential to Auerbach’s origin story: this was the first time he felt he had done his own painting – and he didn’t know if he’d ever manage another. “I remember it all exactly,” he says. “I felt I was breaking the sound barrier. I was crossing through and making something new.”
As we talk, there is – as there always is – a book open on the studio floor. This time, it’s one about his old tutor David Bomberg. Auerbach can still hear the things – uncensored, impatient – that Bomberg would say. Auerbach once traced his painting lineage back, from Bomberg (“who attended Walter Sickert’s evening classes”) to Whistler to Degas to Ingres and all the way back to Raphael. These days he thinks about Picasso a lot, as well as Rembrandt and Michelangelo. He talks of these greats as being in the room with him: they’re his community, he says, his conversation.
In London’s Tate Britain hangs Auerbach’s EOW Nude from from 1953-4, a painting about the length of an arm, but utterly confounding. I go back to see it. Up close, I gauge the paint’s thickness then, from a distance, I see the prone figure emerging like cleft marble from a lava field. Nearly seven decades on, it is pure punk, obdurate, still Hughesian in its shocking newness. “My vision of painting,” Auerbach once said, “was of an explosion.”
Roemer tells me he is writing a book. He just hopes he’ll live long enough to finish it. Auerbach hopes so too. “As long as I can put on my painting trousers and have a brush in my hand, or a stick of graphite, I feel active. I wish for both of us that we fall over while still trying to work.”
Frank Auerbach, Twenty Self-Portraits ispresented by Frankie Rossi Art Projects, at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, London, until 14 July.
[ad_2]
#paintings #Frank #Auerbach #selfportraits #turning
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Price: [price_with_discount] (as of [price_update_date] – Details)
[ad_1] Syutm Unisex Bell Classic Mini Backpack Trending for College Office Travel Purse Travel Bag Product Dimensions : 50 x 39 x 13 cm; 250 Grams Date First Available : 7 July 2022 Manufacturer : Syutm ASIN : B0B5ZP8QKF Item model number : SY22-1MB-C Country of Origin : India Department : Unisex-adult Manufacturer : Syutm, Syutm Packer : Syutm Item Weight : 250 g Item Dimensions LxWxH : 50 x 39 x 13 Centimeters Net Quantity : 1 Count Generic Name : Backpack
Lining Description: Polyester; Material Type: Polyester; Warranty Description: No Warranty; Age Range Description: Adult; Pattern Name: Solid
