Category: National

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret review – Judy Blume adaptation is a winner

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For all our snap-bracelet readiness to embrace girl power and its concomitant hashtags (#yougotthis!), depictions of preadolescents that are worthy of their subjects are thin on the ground. Perhaps because most tweens will just “watch up” anyway, big entertainment has slouched into a comfortable stance of pumping out cutesy kids’ content and edgy fare about high school, without bothering to give much thought to the beautifully messy middle ground.
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s entry to the woefully underserved category of period dramas (make of that what you will), is destined to become a classic. Based on – but not entirely wedded to – Judy Blume’s seminal 1970 novel of the same name, the film is an entertaining comedy that also happens to be a stunning evocation of the fear and yearning that come with standing on the precipice of adulthood.
Blume’s novel featured a half-Jewish, half-Christian protagonist who was questioning the existence of God while awaiting salvation via the arrival of her period, and eager to start wearing a bra. These preoccupations come to touchingly radical life in Fremon Craig’s funny-sad adaption, where entire minutes of footage are devoted to Margaret Simon (the remarkable Abby Ryder Fortson) trying on an absorbent pad or investigating different ways to sport a bra when her body does not require one.
There’s little of the derivative about this film, which is largely thanks to Fortson’s incandescent performance at Margaret. She doesn’t play it cheesy or glib as she navigates life as an almost-there. Her eyes brim with wonder and wariness but the body part she puts to greatest use is her shoulders, which tell epics with their slumps and herky jerks. Here is a girl caught between childhood and adulthood, caring and not caring.
The film opens with Margaret returning home from summer camp in New Hampshire only to learn that her family is moving from their New York City apartment to a New Jersey suburb. In the book, Margaret suspects that a large motivation for her parents’ decision to move is to separate from Sylvia, her overbearing yet fun Jewish grandmother. “She doesn’t have a car, hates buses, and she thinks trains are dirty,” Margaret tells us in the book. “So unless Grandma plans to walk, which is unlikely, I won’t be seeing much of her.”
This sour note is glossed over in the film, but for good reason; Sylvia, played with oomph by Kathy Bates, is a lodestar of love and conspiracy. Other members of Margaret’s family are pulled to the fore in the film version, too. Her father, who can seem like a cardboard cutout of a suburban newbie in the book, comes to nebbishy life as played by Benny Safdie. Her mother, rendered by Rachel McAdams, is a revelation, nothing like the cloying type-A or cartoonish out-to-lunch artists that teens’ mothers tend to become on screen. Here is an artist who is depicted as an empath. Margaret’s mother is afforded a storyline of her own, and her struggle to circumvent the cliquish PTA scene and find her footing in the art world feels less like a B story than a satisfying cherry on top that mirrors Margaret’s fraught relationship to her changing world. McAdams pulls off portraying an early 1970s mother without a hint of the airless quality that is so common to historical dramas. Her expressiveness and softness of feeling sometimes make it hard to remember that this film is set in the Nixon era.
World-building falls to production designer Steve Saklad and Ann Roth, the costume designer. While Margaret’s story is insular, it blooms to life thanks to their buzzy backgrounds and minty-fresh outfits. New York is a bustling retroscape that falls somewhere between the pulsating orbit of Mad Men and the sepulchral New York of The Squid and the Whale. Here is a safe cocoon of rotary phones, mushroom soup-reliant recipes and wood-paneled station wagons.

The greatest decor might be found in the room of Nancy (Elle Graham, who’s nailed the queen bee who isn’t a B-word). A peer and neighbor of Margaret, Nancy hosts the all-girls’ secret club meetings for a contingent of Margaret’s sixth-grade class. Members must forswear socks, wear bras and spill the beans on all the important issues – namely boys and periods.

Margaret and a friend visit the drugstore and purchase Teenage Softies sanitary pads – just in case. And then members of their group start having news to share. These sequences could easily be played for jokes, but when an important member of the gang goes to the bathroom at a fancy steakhouse and discovers that her time has come, the camera lingers on her crying in fear, and her staid Lilly Pulitzer-wearing PTA mom is unable to offer much in the way of help or warmth when she eyes her daughter’s underwear. “Oh! All right!” she offers crisply, and no viewer in her right mind wouldn’t wish she could barge into the lavatory.
When Margaret and her mom eventually find themselves in a bathroom under similar circumstances, the crying is of a different variety. It’s all terribly scary, yes, but in Blume and Fremon Craig’s hands, growing up is also heart-stoppingly beautiful.
This adaptation is an answered prayer.
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#God #Margaret #review #Judy #Blume #adaptation #winner
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

April 25, 2023
Charles undermined late queen’s plan to sue News UK, Prince Harry tells court

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Queen Elizabeth II personally threatened Rupert Murdoch’s media company with legal proceedings over phone hacking only for her efforts to be undermined by the then Prince Charles, the high court has heard.
Prince Harry said his father intervened because he wanted to ensure the Sun supported his ascension to the throne and Camilla’s role as queen consort, and had a “specific long-term strategy to keep the media on side” for “when the time came”.
The Duke of Sussex made the claims on Tuesday as part of his ongoing legal action against News Group Newspapers. The legal case lays bare Harry’s allegations of the deals between senior members of the British royal family and tabloid newspapers.
The prince said his father, the king, had personally demanded he stop his legal cases against British newspaper outlets when they were filed in late 2019.
The court filings state: “I was summoned to Buckingham Palace and specifically told to drop the legal actions because they have an ‘effect on all the family’.” He added this was “a direct request (or rather demand) from my father” and senior royal aides.
Harry blamed tabloid press intrusion for collapses in his mental health, said journalists had destroyed many of his relationships with girlfriends, and said British tabloid journalists fuelled online trolls and drove people to suicide.
He said: “How much more blood will stain their typing fingers before someone can put a stop to this madness?”

The duke also suggested that press intrusion by the Sun and other newspapers led to his mother – Diana, Princess of Wales – choosing to travel without a police escort, ultimately leading to her death in 1997.

In 2017, Harry decided to seek an apology from Murdoch’s News UK for phone hacking, receiving the backing of Queen Elizabeth II and his brother. His submission said: “William was very understanding and supportive and agreed that we needed to do it. He therefore suggested that I seek permission from ‘granny’. I spoke to her shortly afterwards and said something along the lines of: ‘Are you happy for me to push this forward, do I have your permission?’ and she said: ‘Yes.’”
Having received the support of Queen Elizabeth II, Harry said he asked the royal family’s lawyers to write to the Murdoch executives Rebekah Brooks and Robert Thomson and seek a resolution. Yet the company refused to apologise and, out of desperation, Harry discussed banning reporters from Murdoch-owned outlets from attending his wedding to Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.
In 2018, Sally Osman, Queen Elizabeth II’s communications secretary, wrote an email to Harry explaining that she was willing to threaten legal action in the name of the monarch.
The email read: “The queen has given her consent to send a further note, by email, to Robert Thomson, CEO of News Corporation and Rebekah Brooks, CEO of News UK.
“Her Majesty has approved the wording, which essentially says there is increasing frustration at their lack of response and engagement and, while we’ve tried to settle without involving lawyers, we will need to reconsider our stance unless we receive a viable proposal.”
However, there was no apology, which Harry ascribes to a secret deal between the royal family and senior Murdoch executives to keep proceedings out of court. As part of the legal proceedings he alleged that his brother, Prince William, had secretly been paid a “huge sum of money” by Murdoch’s company in 2020 to settle a previously undisclosed phone-hacking claim.
Harry claimed that, shortly before his wedding, he was informed Murdoch’s company would not apologise to the queen and the rest of the royal family at that stage because “they would have to admit that not only was the News of the World involved in phone hacking but also the Sun”, which they “couldn’t afford to do” as it would undermine their continued denials that illegal activity took place at the Sun.
Murdoch’s company has always denied that any illegal behaviour took place at the Sun and that all phone hacking and illicit blagging of personal material was limited to its sister newspaper, the now-defunct News of the World.
Harry insists this is untrue and claims phone hacking was widespread at the Sun when it was edited by Brooks, now a senior Murdoch executive. He has said he is willing to go to trial in an attempt to prove this. Murdoch’s company denies any wrongdoing at the Sun, or that there was any secret deal between the newspaper group and the royal household over phone hacking.
The prince also said press intrusion into the life of his mother was “one of the reasons she insisted on not having any protection after the divorce” as she suspected those around her of selling stories to outlets such as the Sun. He claims: “If she’d had police protection with her in August 1997, she’d probably still be alive today. People who abuse their power like this need to face the consequences of their actions, otherwise it says that we can all behave like this.”
Harry now believes his father and royal courtiers were prioritising positive coverage of his father and Camilla in the Sun, rather than seeking to back his legal claims. He said: “[T]hey had a specific long-term strategy to keep the media (including [Sun publisher] NGN) onside in order to smooth the way for my stepmother (and father) to be accepted by the British public as queen consort (and king respectively) when the time came … anything that might upset the applecart in this regard (including the suggestion of resolution of our phone-hacking claims) was to be avoided at all costs.”
He said all of his girlfriends would find “they are not just in a relationship with me but with the entire tabloid press as a third party”, leading to bouts of depression and paranoia. He claimed the press was pushing him in the hope of “a total and very public breakdown”.
He made clear his personal loathing of Brooks, who was found not guilty of phone hacking by a jury in June 2014. He said: “Having met her once with my father when she was hosting the Sun military awards at the Imperial War Museum in London and having seen her essentially masquerading as someone that she wasn’t by using the military community to try and cover up all the appalling things that she and her newspapers had done, I felt this surprise at her acquittal even more personally, especially as I had been duped into thinking that she was OK at our meeting.”
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#Charles #undermined #late #queens #plan #sue #News #Prince #Harry #tells #court
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

April 25, 2023
I am finally out of Sudan with my family, and safe – no thanks to the British government | Leila Latif

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I am writing this from Egypt, having completed a chaotic, two-day journey from Khartoum with my husband, children, sister, aunt, cousins and dozens of other people from across the world. The sound of gunfire and shelling is gone. We are safe. But this is no thanks to the UK government or British embassy in Sudan, both of which totally failed us. We are safe because we took matters into our own hands.
Nothing prepares you for the sound of war, which started echoing around us on the morning of Saturday 15 April, as fighting broke out between the Sudanese armed forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. We were based in the suburbs of Khartoum and had access to electricity, running water and wifi. Some of my friends and family were not so lucky; their homes were damaged or even destroyed. Heavy fighting at the main airport meant trying to escape that way was futile.
At first the plan was to look after those in the worst of it, grabbing whoever we could during the pockets of quiet around iftar at dusk, and bringing them to the safety of our home. Then we had to think about saving ourselves. Artillery was landing in the garden and none of the ceasefires seemed to be holding for more than a couple of minutes.
I am a dual-national, British and Sudanese, and my husband and children are British citizens – so we contacted the embassy. We were told it was not possible for the person we had reached out to in Sudan to pass on our details to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office for data protection reasons. So we were advised to ask someone do this on our behalf from the UK. A kind friend in London spent all day with copies of our passports and pins of our locations – and that seemed to work. Several days later we got an email confirming we had been registered, but that there was no plan: we were to just stay indoors and not to reply to the email as it was not monitored.
Slowly but surely it became apparent that the British response wasn’t working. News that the UK ambassador, his deputy and other senior staff were out of the country didn’t help: our lives were in the hands of a group of people who thought that during a period of rising tensions it would be fine for the embassy’s senior staff to have some R&R.
In the days that followed, friends texted me sounding thrilled, as the headlines were giving the impression that we would be rescued in hours. In reality we knew nothing, and were getting automated text messages asking us to fill out the same form that we’d already filled out. Some friends joined a UN convoy that was heading to Port Sudan where boats to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia were running. It was chaotic, but they made it. Meanwhile, those “remain indoors” texts were discouraging Britons from joining the convoy.
The final straw for us came on Saturday 22 April when Dutch, French, Italian and Greek citizens – not diplomats – were informed they would be flown back home from an airstrip in Khartoum (this happened on the Sunday and Monday, as the Eid ceasefire was coming to an end). We called the British consulate one last time, wondering if this meant we would be flown out too. We were told in no uncertain terms there were no plans for evacuation, despite what all these other countries were pulling off. Embassy staff and their families were the lucky beneficiaries of the UK’s “complex and rapid evacuation” – as Rishi Sunak put it on Twitter – while ordinary British nationals were left to fend for themselves.

So we felt we had no choice but to book seats on a private bus with friends and family, and make the long drive north to the Egyptian border. We set off late morning on Sunday. My husband, kids and I each carried a small backpack with food that quickly perished in the roasting heat.

We drove past tanks, fires and large groups of soldiers. Men with machine guns got on board the bus twice on our way out of the capital. Outside Khartoum things progressed more quickly and we zoomed up the road. For the first time in over a week, time passed without the sound of bullets and bombs. We went past everything I love about Sudan: palm orchards, sweeping rivers and thousands of people that deserve so much better than any of this.
We drove through the night and reached the Egyptian border on Monday. But crossing proved difficult. Visas had to be pre-approved and my sister in London frantically arranged ours from there. We ended up spending the night at the border, sleeping outside until the sun rose. Phone calls were coming from those still in Khartoum, Sudanese and British alike, saying the gunfire was getting worse. I felt intensely grateful to be lying on the pavement, surrounded by those I cared about, safe at last.
Many of our party were denied entry, including some British citizens – the British government again seemed to have made no effort to help its citizens get safe passage to Egypt despite its close ties with the country. On Tuesday morning we started heading for the city of Aswan, and hoped to be flying back to London soon.
You’re hearing a lot about the British government and the coherence of its evacuation plan. Don’t believe a word of it. At the time of writing, its people are stuck in Port Sudan, waiting for a ship. According to the latest headlines, amid a “fragile truce”, the government will finally begin evacuating British nationals from Khartoum today. I’ll believe it when I see it.
At the border, a final ping came from the FCDO telling me to stay indoors and asking me to fill out that form for the sixth time. This time I replied: “Fuck you.”
Leila Latif is a freelance writer and critic

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#finally #Sudan #family #safe #British #government #Leila #Latif
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

April 25, 2023
‘Expected drizzles, got thunderstorms..,’ say Hyderabad dwellers

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Hyderabad: After a cloudy afternoon, the city is experiencing intense storms coupled with gusty winds in several parts. Videos of bouts of rain are shared on social media from various places in the city.
Lakdikapul, Begumpet, Ameerpet, SR Nagar, Kukatpally, Miyapur areas among others are witnessing severe thunderstorms.
The rains are expected to continue for a few more hours.

Several city-dwellers shared videos of the bouts of rain saying that they were expecting a pleasant drizzle instead of the thunderstorm.
A few weeks earlier Hyderabad and parts of Telangana also witnessed similar weather which brought down the temperature to a considerable extent in the peak summer heat.
The current temperature in Hyderabad as of 6 PM is 32 degree celsius while the highest temperature of 38.5 degree celsius was recorded in Shaikpet on Monday.

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#Expected #drizzles #thunderstorms. #Hyderabad #dwellers
( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

April 25, 2023
Hyderabad: Sanathnagar crematorium to be revamped at Rs 10 cr cost

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Hyderabad: Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) is set to revamp the crematorium near Employees State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) Hospital in Sanathnagar.
According to the reports, the crematorium will have more features and facilities than Vaikunta Mahaprasthanam, Jubilee Hills.
GHMC will be developing the facility with Rs 10 crore to include funeral platforms, a building with seating arrangements, amenities like drinking water and wash areas, storage facilities for ashes, lockers, prayer hall, sufficient parking, and others.

Landscaping work will also be done along with the laying of pathways and plantations.
“As a part of the security measures CCTV cameras will be installed and security guards will be deployed. We are also planning to stream the last rites online for family members that are unable to attend the funeral,” said animal husbandry Minister, T Srinivas Yadav.
He said that the crematorium which is currently set in 7.5 acres will be developed with more facilities than the Vaikunta Mahaprasthanam. The facility will be made available for the city residents from Sanathnagar, Jubilee Hills, Kukatpally and Khairatabad areas.

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#Hyderabad #Sanathnagar #crematorium #revamped #cost
( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

April 25, 2023
Proud Boys leaders: Trump caused Jan. 6 attack

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“It was not Enrique Tarrio. They want to use Enrique Tarrio as a scapegoat for Donald Trump and those in power,” Hassan said.
Trump has loomed in the background of Tarrio’s trial, the most significant to emerge from the Jan. 6 assault on Congress. He’s charged alongside four other Proud Boys leaders — Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola — with orchestrating a violent effort to derail the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden. The jury is expected to receive the case and begin deliberating Tuesday afternoon.
Prosecutors say the leaders, loyal to Trump and fearful of the Proud Boys’ survival in a post-Trump America, devised plans to keep Trump in office. And throughout the four-month trial, the Justice Department repeatedly emphasized how Tarrio and the Proud Boys keyed off and drew energy from Trump’s own bid to subvert the 2020 election. The group’s plan went into overdrive, prosecutors said, after Trump’s Dec. 19, 2020 tweet calling on supporters to descend on Washington on Jan. 6, 2021 to challenge the election results.
In tandem with their effort to support Trump, the Proud Boys also soured on their once close relationship with law enforcement, prosecutors say, becoming enraged at cops — particularly in Washington — after they failed to apprehend a man who stabbed four Proud Boys outside a bar on Dec. 12, 2020. That anger at police carried over into the Proud Boys’ posture toward law enforcement on Jan. 6, they say.
Hassan, though, said it was Trump pulling the strings and driving events ahead of Jan. 6 — not Tarrio. He was joined in that contention by Biggs’ lawyer Norm Pattis, who said Trump and his cadre of lawyers stoked the “stop the steal” fervor among millions of supporters.
“The leader of the free world sold this narrative, and many members of the Proud Boys believed it,” Pattis said. “People believe their president … He’s not on trial here, much though I wish he were.”
“If my president tells me my republic is being stolen, who do I listen to?” Pattis added. “The thief or the commander-in-chief? … A nation of strangers gathered together as their commander in chief sold a lie.”

Hassan noted that Trump contributed to a surge in Proud Boys recruitment after invoking the group — and urging members to “stand back and stand by” during a televised debate against Biden in September 2020. That membership boom harmed the group’s vetting and led to undisciplined members provoking unconstrained violence and street clashes in Washington in November and December 2020.

That led Tarrio to form a new Proud Boys chapter — dubbed the “Ministry of Self Defense” — to select Proud Boys who could be trusted to follow rules and obey orders. That chapter, which grew to hundreds nationwide, became the core of the group that Tarrio helped assemble in Washington on Jan. 6.
Prosecutors say the Ministry of Self Defense — or MOSD — was really a “fighting force” that Tarrio mobilized to attack the seat of government in service of keeping Trump in power. Hundreds of members joined Proud Boys leaders in Washington and were prominent parts of the crowd that breached the barricades in the first wave of the riot. In numerous cases, Proud Boys in this group were among those who helped topple barricades or tussled with police in ways that helped clear a path for the riot to advance closer to the Capitol.
But Hassan emphasized that Tarrio’s role in the entire sequence of events was tenuous. He was arrested in Washington on Jan. 4, 2021, for burning a Black Lives Matter flag after the Dec. 12, 2020 pro-Trump march. After he was released from police custody, he was ordered to leave Washington and went to a hotel in Baltimore, from where he observed the events of Jan. 6.
Prosecutors say Tarrio made public comments and social media posts that encouraged his men as they entered the Capitol, at one point saying “Don’t fucking leave,” as rioters occupied the Capitol. These comments, prosecutors say, prove the real purpose of the Proud Boys’ presence. As their handpicked members helped overwhelm police — and even after Pezzola used a stolen police riot shield to smash a Senate window and ignite the breach of the building — Tarrio and the other leaders never rebuked them or urged them to pull back.
“Make no mistake,” Tarrio told a group of national Proud Boys leaders in a private chat after the attack. “We did this.”
Hassan spent much of his closing argument urging jurors not to convict Tarrio because they disliked him. Tarrio was brash, said offensive things and often acted like an “entertainer,” Hassan said.
“Do not let your dislike for Henry Enrique Tarrio affect your judgment in that jury room,” Hassan said.
Dislike of the defendants was a theme in the Proud Boys’ closing arguments. Pezzola’s attorney, Steven Metcalf, urged jurors not to confuse their dislike for Pezzola with his potential guilt of the crimes he’s charged with.
“Even if you hate him … put that aside in judging these facts,” Metcalf said.
Metcalf agreed that Pezzola broke the law — as Pezzola largely did when he took the stand last week — but said he’s not guilty of seditious conspiracy, which he called a “fairy tale, fairy dust conspiracy created out of nowhere.”
Metcalf contended that Pezzola’s relationship with the other defendants was nearly nonexistent, even on Jan. 6. But he said prosecutors needed to link him to Tarrio and the other defendants to prove that violence, destruction and anger were part of the conspiracy.
“What did they need Dom for? You needed Dom to muddy up these guys. They needed dirt,” Metcalf said.
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#Proud #Boys #leaders #Trump #caused #Jan #attack
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 25, 2023
Austrians embroiled in row over Nazi roots of regional anthems

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Austria is in the thick of a debate about the origins of the “homeland” anthems that celebrate its federal states after the Nazi allegiances of their composers were brought to light by a group of prominent authors.
The authors are calling on regional politicians to rewrite some of the anthems and to acknowledge the melodies’ Nazi-era roots.
According to the group, the anthems of four out of the countries’ nine Länder, or states, are tainted. It has written to the leaders of Upper Austria, Carinthia, Lower Austria and Salzburg, urging them to take action. In some cases it says that whole verses should be erased or that single lines identified as problematic should be dropped and that historical research is carried out on their origins and musical composers.
The authors, including Robert Menasse, Doron Rabinovici and Gerhard Ruiss, have been accused of “cancelling history” by two local leaders in Carinthia, from the Social Democrats and the far-right populist FPÖ, who are refusing to give in to their demands.
The authors deny the claims. “In all these cases this is not about cancelling history,” IG Autorinnen Autoren said. “It’s about dissociating ourselves from antisemitism, racism, nationalism and national socialism … ensuring historical political falsehoods are discontinued and ensuring, as would be a worst case, that they are not resurrected.”
Nazi troops march through Vienna, Austria, in 1938, the year in which the country was annexed to Germany. Photograph: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis/Getty Images
The anthem considered most flawed is that of Carinthia, the text of which was written by Agnes Millonig, considered a fully fledged Nazi, which contains the line: “Where we scribed our borders with blood.” The final line: “That is my beautiful homeland,” is a reference to Germany, to which Austria was annexed in 1938. The authors have called for the line to be scrapped.
According to historical researchers, the composer of Salzburg’s national anthem, Ernst Sompek, was also a Nazi enthusiast, joining the party when it was still illegal to do so, who composed music inspired by and in the name of the party.

Upper Austria’s so-called Hoamatgsang or Heimat (homeland) song, was penned in 1874 by Franz Stelzhamer, who was well-known for his antisemitic views, writing in an essay calling for the genocide of Jews, that he wished to “knock off the head of the Jewish tapeworm”. The authors have said the necessity to acknowledge Upper Austria anthem’s origins and the antisemitic diatribe of its author was all the more important because it was the state in which the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was born.

Lower Austria’s anthem was written by the Nazi party member Franz Karl Ginzkey. There, the state government has called for a historical study to be carried out on the song, but has insisted no changes need to be made to the text.
The authors criticised the style of the lyrics for encouraging a “subservient mentality” and for being “kitschy-pathetic pomposity”.
The authors have signalled their readiness to collaborate with any rewriting.
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#Austrians #embroiled #row #Nazi #roots #regional #anthems
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

April 25, 2023
Italian tourism video mocked for using footage of Slovenia

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Italy’s tourism ministry has faced ridicule after an official video to attract tourists to Italy used footage of people in Slovenia drinking Slovenian wine.
The video, part of a €9m ($9.91m) campaign produced by the Armando Testa communications group, was widely mocked by critics and on social media even before it emerged that part of it had been shot abroad.
Titled “Open to Meraviglia” (Open to Wonder), the video features a computerised “influencer” version of Venus, a symbol of Italian art, as depicted by Sandro Botticelli in his renaissance masterpiece The Birth of Venus.
The very modern “Venus” dons a mini-skirt and is shown eating pizza and presenting some of Italy’s main tourist attractions such as the Coliseum in Rome or Florence’s cathedral.
The art historian Tomaso Montanari called the advertising campaign “grotesque”, and an “obscene” waste of money, while the video was lampooned by users of Italian social media platforms.
The most controversial footage shows a group of young people smiling on a sunlit patio drinking wine in what is presented as a typical Italian scene. However, eagle-eyed viewers spotted that the patio in question is actually in the Cotar region of Slovenia, close to the Italian border, and the bottle on the table has a Cotar wine label.
The Armando Testa communications group was not immediately available to comment.

The Italian tourism minister, Daniela Santanche, a member of prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party, called critics of the video “snobs” and said the depiction of Venus as an influencer was aimed at attracting young people.

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#Italian #tourism #video #mocked #footage #Slovenia
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

April 25, 2023
Saudi Arabia: Permits for performing Umrah to continue post Ramzan

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Riyadh: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s ministry of Hajj and Umrah confirmed that the condition for obtaining a permit to perform Umrah “continues” after the month of Ramzan.
This came in response to an inquiry on the ministry’s Twitter account, asking if an Umrah permit is still required after Ramzan.
In response, the ministry of Hajj and Umrah stated that in order to perform the rituals of Umrah, a permit must be obtained from the Nusuk or Tawakkalna platforms, provided that the applicant is not infected with or has been in contact with a person infected with the COVID-19 virus.

The ministry also indicated that pilgrims and visitors can move between Makkah and Al-Madinah and all cities of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) during the period of their stay and the period of its validity.
It is worth noting that the ministry had set the tenth of Shawwal as the last date for domestic pilgrims to pay the third and final instalment of their Haj ritual reservation.
The final instalment is 40 percent of the set fee for packages approved during this pilgrimage season.
This year, the issuance of official permits will start on May 5, which is the 15th of Shawwal.

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#Saudi #Arabia #Permits #performing #Umrah #continue #post #Ramzan
( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

April 25, 2023
Watch: How UAE astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi will perform his first spacewalk

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Abu Dhabi: US space agency NASA has released an animated video that shows how United Arab Emirates (UAE) astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi will perform on his first spacewalk on Friday, April 28.
Sultan Al Neyadi, is due to venture outside the International Space Station (ISS) with NASA colleague Stephen Bowen on a six-and-a-half-hour maintenance mission.
On Monday night, NASA released an animated video detailing how the duo will perform the EVA (extravehicular activity).

They will begin their spacewalks around 5:15 pm GST and will be streamed live on NASA’s website, with Bowen referred to as ‘EV-1’ and Al Neyadi as ‘EV-2’.
“We’re super excited about the crew’s spacewalk,” said Dina Contella, Operations Integration Manager, International Space Station Programme.
“Steve Bowen — an extreme veteran. This will be his eighth spacewalk,” she adds.
“And also Sultan Al Neyadi. Excited about his first EVA and also the first for the UAE in general,” she added.

What would a spacewalk involve?
Al Neyadi and Bowen will perform many tasks during their 6.5 hours spacewalks.

Their first major task will be to restore the foot restraints that are scattered over various parts of the station’s exterior.
These restraints will be stored away or placed in other parts of the station so that astronauts can use them on future spacewalks.
They will also complete a series of preparatory tasks for the installation of solar panels, as these panels will be installed during a subsequent mission in June.
Al Neyadi will also retrieve an radio frequency unit that will eventually be sent back to Earth for repair.
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#Watch #UAE #astronaut #Sultan #Neyadi #perform #spacewalk
( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

April 25, 2023