Srinagar: John S Kunneth, General Manager Beeza Club House, Kottayam Kerala, will be attending the Valedictory Ceremony of National Child Development Council (NCDC) Free Zoom Online Spoken English Class as Chief Guest on Monday evening.
The Spoken English Class intiative of NCDC was earlier started by its Master Trainer Baba Alexandar, who is the founder of One Word One Language Movement.
While giving details about today’s programme, one of the NCDC officials has said that, “General Manager Beeza Club House, Kottayam Kerala, John S Kunneth will attend the valedictory ceremony of Batch F11-C of Free Online Spoken English Class, as Chief Guest, and will be sharing his views on the programme.”
As per the poster issued by the council, the programme will be held on 08th of May, 2023 (Saturday) at 8:30 PM (IST), via Zoom.
Notably, NCDC is a self-governing national child welfare organization established to promote women and child welfare and ensure child education in India.
Rajya Sabha member and CPI(M) leader John Brittas (File Photo)
A show-cause notice has been served to Communist Party of India (Marxist) MP John Brittas by the Vice President of India and Rajya Sabha chairperson Jagdeep Dhankar on Sunday over an article criticizing Union Home Minister Amit Shah for outbursts against Kerala.
Brittas’s critical article – Perils of Propaganda – on Shah was published by The Indian Express on February 20.
The summon was made based on a complaint by the general secretary of Kerala’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) P Sudheer.
Confirming the news, Brittas said it was the Centre’s tactics to silence dissent.
“Yes, I was called for a meeting over an article I wrote and I explained sufficiently my position on the issue. I told the Rajya Sabha chairman that writing the article was my fundamental right and part of my freedom of expression. If a cryptic remark can be made on Kerala, I am fully free to respond,” Brittas said.
Brittas had written over a remark by Shah while touring Karnataka in February that the saffron party is the only hope to keep the country safe. “There is Kerala near you. I don’t want to say much,” Shah had remarked.
“Shah’s periodic outbursts targeting Kerala are proof of his desperation as well as his attempt to turn India into a Hindu Rashtra and rewind this country to a past with the Manu Smriti replacing the Constitution. Kerala has tirelessly resisted his party’s designs,” Brittas mentioned in his article.
John Roberts, the US supreme court chief justice, has declined to testify at a forthcoming hearing before the Senate judiciary committee that is expected to focus on judicial ethics.
The committee’s Democratic chairman, Dick Durbin, had asked the chief justice to appear before the panel to address potential reforms to ethical rules governing the justices. The senator cited “a steady stream of revelations regarding justices falling short of the ethical standards”.
Roberts’ brief response, issued by a supreme court spokesperson, said he would “respectfully decline” the invitation. In a letter to Durbin, Roberts said such appearances by chief justices were exceedingly rare given concerns about the separation of powers between the branches of US government and the “importance of preserving judicial independence”.
Durbin had earlier asked Roberts to investigate ties between Justice Clarence Thomas and a wealthy Republican donor.
Thomas, the longest-serving of the court’s nine justices, has been under pressure after published reports by the news outlet ProPublica detailing his relationship with Harlan Crow, including real estate purchases and luxury travel paid for by the billionaire Dallas businessman.
In a statement on Tuesday, Durbin said: “I am surprised that the chief justice’s recounting of existing legal standards of ethics suggests current law is adequate and ignores the obvious. The actions of one justice, including trips on yachts and private jets, were not reported to the public. That same justice failed to disclose the sale of properties he partly owned to a party with interests before the supreme court.”
The Senate judiciary committee would proceed with a 2 May hearing as planned, according to Durbin.
“It is time for Congress to accept its responsibility to establish an enforceable code of ethics for the supreme court, the only agency of our government without it,” Durbin said.
[ad_2]
#Chief #Justice #John #Roberts #declines #Senate #judiciary #hearing
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Relying on technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is “dangerous” and a cause for “alarm”, John Kerry has warned.
The US special presidential envoy for climate said in an interview that new technologies may not prevent the world from passing “tipping points”, key temperature thresholds that, once passed, could trigger a cascade of unstoppable physical effects.
“Some scientists suggest that it’s possible there could be an overshoot [of global temperatures, beyond the limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels that governments are targeting] and you could clawback, so to speak – you have technologies and other things that allow you to come back,” Kerry told the Guardian.
“The danger with that, which alarms me the most and motivates me the most, is that according to the science, and the best scientists in the world, we may be at or past several tipping points that they have been warning us about for some time,” he said. “That’s the danger, the irreversibility.”
He called on governments to deploy renewable energy faster, along with related technologies such as electric vehicles. These are already available for widespread deployment, and could prevent the world from reaching the high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that would cause temperatures to breach the 1.5C threshold.
“Part of the challenge we face right now is countries that have technologies available to them are not necessarily deploying them at the rate that they should be,” he said. “Fatih Birol [executive director of the International Energy Agency] has made it very clear for some time that all you need to meet the 2030 goal of 45% reduction [in greenhouse gas emissions] globally is to deploy renewables in the current state of technology, and that’s not happening.”
“There’s a resistance right now that I see from several quarters to doing what we know we need to do,” Kerry said. “I think there are things that are really quite simple that we could be doing, but it requires political will, it requires resources, allocation and a determination to get the job done.”
He pointed to the Inflation Reduction Act, the $369bn (£296bn) push by the US to invest in renewable energy and low-carbon technologies. EU governments have protested at aspects of the legislation, such as tax breaks for green companies to set up in the US, which they see as protectionist and a potential competitive threat.
Kerry countered that the US measures were good for all countries. “If we accelerate the pace of discovery, then the world benefits. This is not a US-centric thing,” he said. “If we can advance those technologies very rapidly, then we’re sworn to share them, and help people to develop similarly. That’s the way collectively we try to meet the challenge.”
He said the act, passed last summer, was already making an impact. “People are shifting and realising the best thing to do. There are a number of countries in Europe – Germany, and France, and others – that are hell-bent to do a similar kind of effort. They try to define it for themselves and go out and do it,” he said. “Given the trillions we need to be deploying to meet this challenge, to have something that excites investment is in everybody’s interest. We are seeing a tremendous amount of venture capital moving in the direction of some of these transition essentials.”
The UK must also pile efforts into net zero, he added. “Everybody in the world [needs a net zero strategy],” he said. “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made it crystal clear that we’re not on the track we need to be … everything needs to be increased exponentially in effort.”
The US president, Joe Biden, has come under severe criticism from climate activists, despite his green investment push, for pressing ahead with investment in fossil fuels.
In recent weeks, he approved an area of the Gulf of Mexico amounting to about 73m acres, roughly the size of Italy, for drilling for oil and gas wells. A fortnight before that, he approved the Willow project, a drilling site in Alaska that is expected to produce 600m barrels of oil over its lifetime. Further licences are also possible, and the US is looking to expand its shale gas production and export to Europe under Biden’s watch.
Kerry robustly defended these actions, on the grounds that more fossil fuels were needed temporarily because of the war in Ukraine, and said some oil and gas expansion could occur within climate limits, particularly if carbon capture and storage, or other ways of reducing the impact of the fossil fuels, could be used.
“Gas usage is an automatic 30-50% reduction over oil and coal. It’s not clean, it’s cleaner,” he said. “So now the question is, can carbon capture and storage be deployed at a scale that makes it possible to meet our goals?”
skip past newsletter promotion
after newsletter promotion
The expansion of drilling would “not have a deep impact. I’m not saying it’s impactless completely, but it’s not going to have a significant impact.” The US was still committed to its climate targets, of a 50-52% reduction in emissions by 2030, compared with 2005 levels, he added.
Kerry also pointed to the turmoil around the world, and high energy prices, caused by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. “We needed desperately to not allow Putin to make his gas cutoff a weapon. And because of Ukraine, and the urgency of calming the marketplace, making sure that economies are not suddenly crashing because prices are going so high that people can’t afford to live, you’ve got to have some supply. It’s transition. That’s why the goal was 2030 and then it’s 2050. It’s not tomorrow.”
He conceded that the expansion of fossil fuels in the US was difficult to explain to other countries, however. “It obviously has challenges of perception or messaging,” he said. “There’s a danger that somebody distorts it, and says ‘they did it, therefore we can do it’. That’s why I say you’ve got to understand it, you’ve got to put it in a real context of what it really means and what the impact of this is going to be.”
But he insisted that the US would still meet its climate targets. “President Biden has reiterated a full-fledged commitment to keep our target, we’re not moving on our target,” he said. “This one thing is not an aberration in terms of us walking back on our goals, or walking back on our expectations. I feel very confident about that.”
The appointment of Sultan Al Jaber as president of the next UN climate summit, Cop28, in the United Arab Emirates in November, has been condemned by activists who say his role as chief of the UAE national oil company Adnoc creates a conflict of interest.
Kerry defended Jaber, insisting that his background – which Jaber told the Guardian would help him bring a business focus to the role – would be an advantage. “Personally, I think that because he has an experience within the context of oil and gas production, and a leadership in that, he has the ability to pull some missing links to the table with respect to what we have to get done. I’m hopeful about that,” Kerry said.
Kerry also called for more private sector funding for climate finance, to help poor countries cut their emissions and cope with the impacts of extreme weather. “Climate finance is not just a challenge, it is the biggest single challenge right now,” he said. “Finance, and I mean big finance in the trillions of dollars. That requires a mobilisation of capital, using incentives and working with the private sector to bring them to the table, to create bankable projects that will excite deployment of capital.”
[ad_2]
#John #Kerry #relying #technology #remove #carbon #dioxide #dangerous
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Mumbai: Actor John Abraham was lauded for his performance in the mega blockbuster Hindi film Pathaan. The actor is now planning to give more hits to maintain the huge fandom and in a shock he has reportedly walked out of Sajid Khan’s comeback directorial, 100%.
Rumours suggest that John Abraham opted to move out of Sajid’s project because he wanted to focus on action packed roles only now. John’s role as Jim in Pathaan was widely appreciated and it seems that the actor wants to focus on action-packed roles only now. The project titled ‘100%’ is a comedy film.
Multiple reports also claim that the actor has left the Awara Pagal Deewana 2 too. Yes, it is said that Jim from Pathaan has walked out of the film which also stars Akshay Kumar and Vidyut Jamwal.
Sajid Khan’s 100% will star Riteish Deshmukh, Nora Fatehi and Shehnaaz Gill in lead roles. Reports suggest that makers of the 100 % are looking for another big name after John left the project.
On his front, Abraham will be seen in action entertainer Tehran. The winner of the Miss World 2017 pageant Manushi Chhillar will star as the female lead in Tehran.
That February, Buckley wrote a second editorial that called Welch’s “views on current affairs … far removed from common sense.” Goldwater affirmed Buckley’s attack and added that in his opinion, Welch’s views did not “represent the feelings of most members of the John Birch Society.” In other forums, Goldwater denounced Welch as “extremist,” called his ideas about Ike “stupid,” and said, “I don’t recall speaking to Bob Welch other than ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ over the last nine years or so.” (He claimed that Buckley, not Welch, had asked him to serve on the Committee Against Summit Entanglements, a Birch front group opposed to the Eisenhower-Nikita Khrushchev summit, in 1959.) In a surreal echo of 1950s liberals explaining their youthful flirtation with communism in the 1930s, Goldwater issued a roundabout mea culpa when he said, “All of us in public life sometimes lend our names to movements that later we wished we’d taken a little more time to find out about.”
When a Birch acolyte criticized National Review for its anti-Birch stands, Rusher responded by sending a copy of the February 1962 editorial and inviting him “to point out to me, anywhere in its first five pages, a single word of criticism of the John Birch Society.” Buckley sounded similarly defensive a few months later, when he wrote to Birch founder T. Coleman Andrews, “I don’t think in my life I have made a single unfavorable reference to any members of the John Birch Society.”
For decades, conservatives and liberals have praised Buckley for those two (and subsequent) editorials. They celebrated him as a model of sobriety and rationality for panning the Birch Society and expunging the far-right fringe from conservative ranks. Over the past decade, however, the legend has come under scrutiny. Historians now argue that Buckley’s vaunted excommunication of the fringe is a myth. They are not impressed by his supposedly Solomonic decision to repudiate the low-hanging fruit of Welch and his conspiracy theories while sparing the society’s rank and file. By welcoming them into the fold both before and after National Review’s supposed break with the society, Buckley and his magazine continued to benefit from Birchers’ political activism, funding, and engagement.
Ideologically, Buckley was not as far from the Birchers as has been claimed. He wrote a book defending McCarthy, supported massive resistance to civil rights in the late 1950s and gave the conspiracy theorist cranks intellectual cover. Moreover, there was significant overlap between his supporters and the Birchers: many National Review subscribers also subscribed to the John Birch Society’s magazine, American Opinion; Buckley’s 1965 Conservative Party campaign for mayor of New York drew Birch and fringe support; and Buckley maintained professional and personal relationships with some of the most extreme Birch leaders, such as Revilo Oliver, who promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Nevertheless, by late 1965, Buckley’s broadsides had infuriated some Birch leaders. Even though Buckley never excommunicated the Birch Society from the conservative movement, his criticisms of it didn’t exactly endear him to Birch leaders. One of the original 12 founding members of the society, Louis Ruthenburg, for example, excoriated Buckley for his “defamation of the John Birch Society.”
Overtly engaging with the Birchers remained an even thornier issue for a presidential candidate. By the time the campaign of 1964 was underway, Goldwater continued his awkward pas de deux with the society. While renouncing some of the views and incendiary rhetoric of Welch and other Birch leaders, as Buckley did, Goldwater gingerly tried to avoid alienating the membership. As numerous historians have recently argued, Goldwater and other prominent conservatives sometimes welcomed the society’s rank and file — and many of their ideas — into the fold. He lost to incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson by such a huge margin it set a record.
[ad_2]
#Truth #William #Buckley #John #Birch #Society
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
There’s an irony to this nod to video games, since they have been frequently (and inaccurately) blamed for the rise of violence in general and school shootings in particular. But it’s more than just these video game elements that makes the Wick world so familiar, one where death coats front pages and social media feeds but is quickly swept aside by the next tragedy.
As someone who’s been working as a culture critic since 2009, I’m always wary of talking about fictional violence in terms of real-life violence. It runs the risk of both cheapening real events and giving fiction more power than it actually possesses. Yet the past playbook of blaming acts of violence on violent pop culture seems to have lost its punch in recent years, if only because violent pop culture feels like it’s trying to keep up with reality, rather than the reverse. Certainly, there are no real-world John Wicks, but there’s plenty of violence in the world that many of us turn a blind eye to. When bad things are always happening, horror starts to become just another part of the background of day-to-day life.
It is fascinating to look at ultra-violent yet ultra-popular cultural artifacts like the Wick films and try to suss out what in them speaks to us subconsciously. After all, lots of John Wick imitators have popped up in the wake of the first film’s successful 2014 release, and none of them have come close to approaching Wick’s cultural footprint. So why did these movies take off so boldly and so bloodily?
To me, the answer lies in all of those scenes with innocent bystanders who don’t seem to realize they’re bystanders to begin with. Many action movies exist as a kind of wish-fulfillment for audience members. In some other world, they suggest, you might move as skillfully and as balletically as John Wick and, thus, murder people with tremendous efficiency. But the best action movies usually also add in an audience surrogate or two, a character who exists mostly to reflect the audience’s awe at seeing the action hero do their thing.
The many extras who populate an action movie’s world are audience surrogates too. The people running away from a monster’s foot as it stomps down on city streets, the cars swerving to avoid the big car chase, the people ducking for cover during a gun battle – those are all important characters in their own right. They help the audience think about how woefully unprepared we would be to enter a situation like this.
Yet in the John Wick films, what do these extras do? They just keep dancing. There is a whole world of death, destruction and mayhem erupting around them, and that world supposedly lives right next door to our world of mundane concerns. But not only do the extras not notice that world, we don’t either. There is death happening all over, but it feels like such an abstraction that a man can shoot multiple people right in front of you, and you might not even blink an eye. It will just keep happening, and so long as it doesn’t directly interrupt your fun, you might not even look at it.
It’s an eerie world to imagine living in, and yet every new mass shooting seems to be met with a cascading apathy. Some politicians have even given up the guise of caring enough to come up with faux solutions: “We’re not gonna fix it,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said on Tuesday after a school shooting in his home state left three children dead. “Criminals are gonna be criminals.” In a world that is indifferent to death, even the boilerplate pablum of “thoughts and prayers” starts to sound like too much effort. In our apathy, we become incapable or even uninterested in preventing tragedies.
These unaffected extras work as a metaphor for so many ways we’ve become increasingly numb to massive death in the modern world, from the Covid-19 pandemic to the ways in which climate change is already disproportionately affecting people who live in the global South. But in a series that so fetishizes guns and shooting them, to the degree that every film pauses the action for a character to lovingly describe the firearms they will be outfitting Wick with, and in a series produced in the United States, it’s not hard to see gun violence as sitting at the very center of the films’ uncanny valley.
The foremost political worldview of the Wick movies is still “It’s cool when cool things happen.” Yet, their evocation of a world in which death lurks around every corner and we don’t care so long as it’s not happening to us rings eerily true. Is it any wonder each film in the franchise is more popular than the one before it? Even if the world is ending, so many of us would rather keep dancing.
[ad_2]
#John #Wick #Nashville #Shooting #American #Numbness
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
WARSAW — War? Inflation? Corruption? Nope, the big subject dominating Poland’s politics ahead of this fall’s parliamentary election is the legacy of John Paul II.
Although the canonized Polish pontiff has been dead since 2005, he’s become the hottest subject in Poland following an explosive documentary aired by the U.S.-owned broadcaster TVN, alleging that when he was a cardinal in his home city of Kraków, he protected priests accused of sexually molesting children.
That caused a collective meltdown in the ranks of the ruling nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, which is closely allied with the powerful Roman Catholic Church.
U.S. Ambassador Mark Brzezinski was even summoned (later toned down to “invited”) to appear at the foreign ministry.
In a statement, the ministry said it “recognizes that the potential outcome of these activities is in line with the goals of a hybrid war aimed at causing divisions and tensions within Polish society.”
PiS also pushed through a parliamentary resolution “in defense of the good name of Pope John Paul II.”
“The [parliament] strongly condemns the shameful campaign conducted by the media … against the Great Pope St. John Paul II, the greatest Pole in history,” the resolution said.
The government and its affiliated media have launched a wide-ranging campaign about John Paul II. A gigantic picture of the pope was projected on the façade of the presidential palace in Warsaw. Public broadcaster TVP is now airing a daily papal sermon.
Papal politics
It’s all a political play, as PiS has found what it hopes will be electoral rocket fuel ahead of the election, said Ben Stanley, an associate professor at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw.
“Defending John Paul II offers PiS an opportunity to show they’re on what they claim is the right side of a dispute that poses authentic Polish values against something inauthentic and suspicious,” Stanley said.
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki over the weekend accused the opposition of “being ashamed of the most important countryman in the history of the republic.”
POLAND NATIONAL PARLIAMENT ELECTION POLL OF POLLS
For more polling data from across Europe visit POLITICO Poll of Polls.
The party has a track record of finding wedge issues ahead of elections.
In 2015, during the refugee crisis, the party’s leader accused migrants of importing “all sorts of parasites and protozoa” into Europe.
In 2020, PiS-supported President Andrzej Duda helped galvanize his reelection campaign by launching attacks on LGBTQ+ activists as supporting an ideology that was inimical to Polish values.
In recent months, state-backed media has latched on to climate concerns from opposition politicians by accusing them of aiming to force Poles to drop their beloved pork cutlets and replace them with edible insects.
“You will notice that the debate about eating insects and living in 15-minute cities has all but disappeared now. John Paul II has a lot more potential,” Stanley said.
Although Poland is secularizing, with a steady fall in new priests, a decline in people attending Sunday mass, and large numbers of pupils abandoning religious education, the country is still one of the most Catholic in Europe. The Church still has an outsized influence among the elderly and those in smaller towns and villages — PiS’s electoral strongholds.
The JP2 gambit caught the opposition flat-footed; many of their supporters tend to be more secular, but the parties can’t risk offending religious voters if they hope to win power this fall.
Powerful pontiff
The late pope is often credited with helping cause the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe; his pilgrimages to his home country were seen as a key factor in the rise of the Solidarity labor union in 1980. He remains a revered figure across the country.
Civic Platform, Poland’s biggest opposition party, sat out the vote on the papal defense resolution. The party accused PiS of playing politics with the issue.
“You don’t want to defend John Paul II, you want to sign him up to PiS!” Paweł Kowal, an MP for Civic Platform, said during the parliamentary debate on the resolution.
While the opposition dithered, Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki, the head of the country’s conference of bishops, denounced the reports on John Paul II as “shocking attempts to discredit his person and work, made under the guise of concern for the truth and good.”
Uncomfortably for the Polish church, Pope Francis put out a pretty lukewarm defense of his predecessor | Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images
It’s not just TVN accusing John Paul II of turning a blind eye to clerical pedophiles.
Similar allegations are made in a new book by Dutch journalist Ekke Overbeek, “Maxima Culpa: John Paul II Knew,” which says when he was a bishop, John Paul II moved pedophile priests from parish to parish to keep them from being discovered.
Both the book and the TVN documentary are being attacked for relying on communist-era secret policy archives.
TVN, owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, responded by saying: “The role of free and reliable media is to report the facts, even if they are painful and difficult to accept.” It also stressed that the author of the documentary didn’t only rely on archived files, but also contacted people who had been abused by priests.
Uncomfortably for the Polish church, Pope Francis put out a pretty lukewarm defense of his predecessor.
“It is necessary to place things in their time … at that time, everything was covered up,” he told Argentina’s La Nacion newspaper.
With several months to go before the vote, PiS will now watch to see if John Paul II is gaining traction as an issue, Stanley said.
“Pushing it too hard is potentially risky because it’s no longer the early 2000s and it’s not so clear this time if that many people, especially the young people, will spring to John Paul II’s defense,” he said.
[ad_2]
#Pope #John #Paul #pedophile #priests #Polands #top #political #issue
( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
.jpg)
.jpg)
