Ebrahim Raisi killed in helicopter crash

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his foreign minister were killed in a helicopter crash in mountainous terrain and icy weather, an Iranian official said on Monday, after search teams located the wreckage in East Azerbaijan province.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, a hardliner long seen as a potential successor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in a helicopter crash in mountainous terrain near the Azerbaijan border, officials and state media said on Monday.

The charred wreckage of the helicopter which crashed on Sunday carrying Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian was found early on Monday after an overnight search in blizzard conditions.

“President Raisi, the foreign minister and all the passengers in the helicopter were killed in the crash,” a senior Iranian official told Reuters, asking not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Raisi’s death was later confirmed in a statement on social media by Vice President Mohsen Mansouri and on state television.

The crash comes as the Middle East remains unsettled by the Israel-Hamas war, during which Raisi under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei launched an unprecedented drone-and-missile attack on Israel just last month. Under Raisi, Iran enriched uranium closer than ever to weapons-grade levels, further escalating tensions with the West as Tehran also supplied bomb-carrying drones to Russia for its war in Ukraine and armed militia groups across the region.

Meanwhile, Iran has faced years of mass protests against its Shiite theocracy over its ailing economy and women’s rights — making the moment that much more sensitive for Tehran and the future of the country.

Khamenei himself had urged the public to pray Sunday night. 

“We hope that God the Almighty returns the dear president and his colleagues in full health to the arms of the nation,” Khamenei said, drawing an “amen” from the worshipers he was addressing. 

However, the supreme leader also stressed the business of Iran’s government would continue no matter what. Under the Iranian constitution, Iran’s vice first president takes over if the president dies, with Khamenei’s assent, and a new presidential election would be called within 50 days. 

First Vice President Mohammad Mokhber already had begun receiving calls from officials and foreign governments in Raisi’s absence, state media reported. An emergency meeting of Iran’s Cabinet was ongoing as state media made the announcement Monday morning. 

Raisi, 63, a hard-liner who formerly led the country’s judiciary, was viewed as a protégé of Khamenei and some analysts had suggested he could replace the 85-year-old leader after Khamenei’s death or resignation. 

With Raisi’s death, the only other person so far suggested has been Mojtaba Khameini, the 55-year-old son to the supreme leader. However, some have raised concerns over the position being taken only for the third time since 1979 to a family member, particularly after the Islamic Revolution overthrew the hereditary Pahlavi monarchy of the shah. 

Raisi won Iran’s 2021 presidential election, a vote that saw the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history. Raisi is sanctioned by the U.S. in part over his involvement in the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988 at the end of the bloody Iran-Iraq war.

Under Raisi, Iran now enriches uranium at nearly weapons-grade levels and hampers international inspections. Iran has armed Russia in its war on Ukraine, as well as launched a massive drone-and-missile attack on Israel amid its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It also has continued arming proxy groups in the Mideast, like Yemen’s Houthi rebels and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. 

Meanwhile, mass protests in the country have raged for years. The most recent involved the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, a woman who had been earlier detained over allegedly not wearing a hijab, or headscarf, to the liking of authorities. The monthslong security crackdown that followed the demonstrations killed more than 500 people and saw over 22,000 detained. 

In March, a United Nations investigative panel found that Iran was responsible for the “physical violence” that led to Amini’s death. 

Raisi is the second Iranian president to die in office. In 1981, a bomb blast killed President Mohammad Ali Rajai in the chaotic days after the revolution.

AP

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MP’s summoned by police , universities blocked… is freedom of expression threatened in France?

Mathilde Panot and Rima Hassan summoned by the police, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s press conferences cancelled, blocked universities where law enforcement intervene… Is freedom of expression threatened?

Since Hamas’ attack on Israel, the Paris prosecutor’s office has been the subject of 386 referrals for this offence included in the Criminal Code since 2014, and which, for example, has earned a CGT activist a few days ago to a one-year suspended prison sentence.

Willingness to silence or intimidate the defenders of the Palestinian cause?

Judicialization of political speech? French McCarthyism?

Many express their concern about the multiplication of these procedures and their consequences on freedom of expression.

Especially since these are added: the recent cancellation of a conference by Jean-Luc Mélenchon on Palestine, first by the University of Lille and then by the Prefecture of the North; and university occupations such as at Sciences Po or the Sorbonne, with sometimes evacuations, and again, the hindered possibility of serenely debating an eruptive subject.

Radio France

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Week 21

Cannes, Transmania, New Caledonia, Trump, Transports in the UE, French far right, Socialist in Catalonia, Jimmy energy, crook, Tunisia, Des chiffres et de lettres,

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Frenchman Vincent Faudemer is accused of NFT fraud by 200 people

With his chrome sculptures in the shape of Babar ( Babar, fictional character, a sartorially splendid elephant who is the hero of illustrated storybooks for young children by the French writer and illustrator Jean de Brunhoff (1899–1937) and his son Laurent de Brunhoff) declined in a myriad of more or less wacky projects, the French entrepreneur Vincent Faudemer, who presented himself as the “little prince of contemporary art”, knew how to surf the waves of the time: nostalgia, metavers, bitcoin… Until nearly 200 disappointed accused him of fraud.

https://www.liberation.fr/economie/economie-numerique/babolex-un-elephant-qui-trade-enormement-bling-bling-cryptos-et-nft-20240508_FMSG53VRAZHYTNEJDNXDGHPQ4E/

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Fear reigns in Tunisia as repression intensifies

 A protest, demanding the release of imprisoned journalists, activists, opposition figures and setting a date for fair presidential elections in Tunis, 

Arrests have stepped up since late April, affecting both anti-racist activists and media personalities. In his crusade against elites, President Kais Saied has even had the Tunisian Swimming Federation president and the anti-doping agency head arrested.

Repression has intensified in recent weeks in Tunisia, targeting sub-Saharan migrants, NGOs, journalists, civil servants and lawyers. The crackdown began at the end of April, with operations to dismantle temporary settlements of sub-Saharan migrants near Sfax, the country’s second-largest city. On May 3, security measures were extended to Tunis, where a migrant camp set up opposite the headquarters of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) was forcibly cleared.

President Kais Saied justified the operations at a security council meeting on Monday, May 6, saying that “400 people” – men, women and children – had been moved to the “eastern border,” which neighbors Libya. In the same speech, he criticized NGOs helping migrants, accusing them of receiving “huge sums of money from abroad” and calling their leaders “traitors” and “agents.”

After the speech, the repression was almost immediate. Saadia Mosbah, an anti-racist activist and president of the Mnemty association, which fights racial discrimination in Tunisia, was arrested the same day and placed in police custody under the country’s anti-terrorism and anti-money laundering act. 

The European Union said on Tuesday it was concerned about the wave of arrests of many civil society figures, journalists and political activists, and demanded clarifications from Tunisia as the North African country faces a growing political crisis.

“Freedoms of expression and association, as well as the independence of the judiciary, are guaranteed by the Tunisian Constitution and constitute the basis of our partnership,” the EU said in statement.

U.S. State Department spokesman Vedant Patel responded that the raids were “inconsistent with what we think are universal rights that are explicitly guaranteed in the Tunisian constitution and we have been clear about at all levels.”

Cannes Film Festival to arrive amid war, protests and a MeToo reckoning

Greta Gerwig

The Cannes Film Festival rarely passes without cacophony but this year’s edition may be more raucous and uneasy than any edition in recent memory.

When the red carpet is rolled out from the Palais des Festivals on Tuesday, the 77th Cannes will unfurl against a backdrop of war, protest, potential strikes and quickening MeToo upheaval in France, which for years largely resisted the movement.

Festival workers are threatening to strike. The Israel-Hamas war, acutely felt in France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish and Arab communities, is sure to spark protests. Russia’s war in Ukraine remains on the minds of many. Add in the kinds of anxieties that can be expected to percolate at Cannes — the ever-uncertain future of cinema, the rise of artificial intelligence — and this year’s festival shouldn’t lack for drama.

Being prepared for anything has long been a useful attitude in Cannes. Befitting such tumultuous times, the film lineup is full of intrigue, curiosity and question marks.

The Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, just days before his latest film, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” is to debut in competition in Cannes, was sentenced to eight years in prison by the Islamic Revolutionary Court. The film remains on Cannes’ schedule.

Arguably the most feverishly awaited entry is Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed opus “Megalopolis.” Coppola, is himself no stranger to high-drama at Cannes. An unfinished cut of “Apocalypse Now” won him (in a tie) his second Palme d’Or more than four decades ago.

Even the upcoming U.S. presidential election won’t be far off. Premiering in competition is Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice,” starring Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump. There will also be new films from Kevin Costner, Paolo Sorrentino, Sean Baker, Yorgos Lanthimos and Andrea Arnold. And for a potentially powder keg Cannes there’s also the firebomb of “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.” The film, a rolling apocalyptic dystopia, returns director George Miller to the festival he first became hooked on as a juror.

“I got addicted it to simply because it’s like film camp,” says Miller, who became enraptured to the global gathering of cinema at Cannes and the pristine film presentations. “It’s kind of optimal cinema, really. The moment that they said, `OK, we’re happy to show this film here,’ I jumped at it.”

Cannes’ official opener on Tuesday is “The Second Act,” a French comedy by Quentin Dupieux, starring Lea Seydoux, Louis Garrel and Vincent Lindon. During the opening ceremony, Meryl Streep will be awarded an honourary Palme d’Or. At the closing ceremony, George Lucas will get one, too.

But the spotlight at the start may fall on Judith Godreche. The French director and actor earlier this year said the filmmakers Benoit Jacquot and Jacques Doillon sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager, allegations that rocked French cinema. Jacquot and Doillon have denied the allegations.

Though much of the French film industry has previously been reluctant to embrace the .MeToo movement, Godreche has stoked a wider response. She’s spoken passionately about the need for changes at the Cesars, France’s equivalent of the Oscars, and before a French Senate commission.

In that same period, Godreche also made the short film “Moi Aussi” during a Paris gathering of hundreds who wrote her with their own stories of sexual abuse. On Wednesday, it opens Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section.

“I hope that I’m heard in the sense that I’m not interested in being some sort of representation of someone who just wants to go after everyone in this industry,” Godreche said ahead of the festival. “I’m just fighting for some sort of change. It is called a revolution.”

It’s the latest chapter in how .MeToo has reverberated at the world’s largest film gathering, following an 82-woman protest on the steps of the Palais in 2018 and a gender parity pledge in 2019. Cannes has often come under criticism for not inviting more female filmmakers into competition, but the festival is putting its full support behind Godreche while girding for the possibility of more .MeToo revelations during the festival.

“For me, having these faces, these people — everyone in this movie — gives them this place to be celebrated,” said Godreche. “There’s this thing about this place that has so much history. In a way, it mystifies movies forever. Once your film was in Cannes, it was in Cannes.”

Some of the filmmakers coming to the festival this year are already firmly lodged in Cannes lore. Paul Schrader was at the festival almost 50 years ago for Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” which he wrote. After a famously divisive response, it won the Palme in 1976.

It was a different place. It was much more collegial and lower key,” said Schrader during a break from packing his bags. “I remember quite well sitting on the terrasse at the Carlton with Marty and Sergio Leone and (Rainer Werner) Fassbender came by with his boyfriend and joined us. We were all talking and the sun was going down. I was thinking, ‘This is the greatest thing in the world.”‘

For the first time since his 1988 drama “Patty Hearst,” Schrader is back in what he calls “the main show” — in competition for the Palme d’Or — with “Oh, Canada.” The film, adapted from a Russell Banks novel, stars Richard Gere (reteaming with Schrader decades after “American Gigolo”) as a dying filmmaker who recounts his life story for a documentary. Jacob Elordi plays him in ’70s flashbacks.

After the Cannes lineup was announced, Schrader shared on Facebook an old photo of himself, Coppola and Lucas — all primary figures to what was then called New Hollywood — and the caption “Together again.”

“I’ll be there the same time as Francis. There’s a question of whether either of us get invited back for closing,” Schrader says, referring to when award-winners are asked to stay for the closing ceremony. “I would hope that either Francis or I could come back closing night for George’s thing.”

Who ultimately goes home with the Palme — the handicapping has already begun — will be decided by a jury led by Greta Gerwig, fresh off the mammoth success of “Barbie.” But this year’s slate will have a lot to live up to. Last year, three eventual best picture nominees premiered in Cannes: Justine Triet’s Palme-winner “Anatomy of a Fall,” Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” and Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

What tends to really define a Cannes, though, is emerging filmmakers. Among those likely to make an impression this year is Julien Colonna, the Corsican, Paris-based director and co-writer of “The Kingdom.” The film, an Un Certain Regard standout, is a brutal coming of age about a teenager girl (newcomer Ghjuvanna Benedetti) on the run with her father (Saveriu Santucci), a Corsican clan leader.

“We wanted to propose a kind of anti-mob film,” Colonna says, referencing the prevalence of “Godfather”-inspired gangster dramas. “As a viewer, I’m quite bored of this. I think we need to move to something else and propose a different prism.”

“The Kingdom,” Colonna’s debut feature film, arose out of his own anxieties around the birth of his child six years ago. It’s an entirely fictional movie but it has personal roots for Colonna, who was inspired by the memory of a camping trip that he realized years later was “an entirely different matter for my father.” He shot the most of the film in Corsica within a few miles of his hometown.

“This is where I grew up,” says Colonna, smiling. “This is where I learned to swim. The shower where her kiss takes place is the shower where I kissed for the first time.”

Jake Coyle

CTV news

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‘Shots fired’ at security forces in New Caledonia riots

New Caledonia’s high commissioner said Tuesday that shots had been fired at security forces during a night of riots in the French Pacific territory that saw vehicles torched and shops looted.

“There have been no deaths,” High Commissioner of the Republic Louis Le Franc told reporters, adding that “shots were fired at the gendarmes using high calibre weapons and hunting rifles”.

Authorities in the French-run archipelago announced a night-time curfew Tuesday and a ban on public gatherings after protests against proposed voting reforms that have angered separatists.

Yahoo news

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Notre Dame Cathedral could reopen at the end of 2024 as new spire emerges

One of France’s most popular tourist attractions is slowly being brought back to life following a devastating fire.

A blaze broke out at the historic Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in April 2019, leading to its roof and spire collapsing.

Since then it has been through a 5-year restoration, which has has many ups and downs from pandemic delays to the departure of the project’s leader.

But now it’s slated to be completed by the end of 2024, with fast progress being shown.

December 2023 – A golden rooster, reimagined as a phoenix, is returned to the top of the cathedral’s spire, symbolizing Notre Dame’s rebirth. Religious relics, including pieces of what is said to be Jesus Christ’s Crown of Thorns, are placed in a time capsule inside the golden bird.

February 2024 – Scaffolding is removed to unveil the cathedral’s new spire, adorned with the golden rooster and a cross. It offers a glimpse into the future as Notre Dame nears its grand reopening.

December 2024 – Restorers say they hope the Cathedral will be able to reopen by the end of the year.

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Womanizer: The success story of the revolutionary sex toy

The Womanizer, with its air technology, has been a best-selling sex toy in French sex shops since 2014. Where did it come about? Can we talk about a sex toy “revolution”? Are there long term use consequences ? Flore Cherry, sex journalist for sex-en-france.fr, talks us through the arrival of air technology in the bedroom.

The Womanizer, the art of timing and marketing

“At first, I thought it was ugly, it looked like a table brush“, admits Patrick Pruvot, head of Passage du Désir, the largest chain of sex stores in France. Yet, he recognizes its incredible success. “It is now number one in our sales.” Shifting the focus away from aesthetics (the early models adorned in leopard print and rhinestones were of questionable taste …) allowed for the rapid growth in popularity of the object. In 2012, Michael Lenke, a German genius with a passion for DIY hacks, discovered–with great shock– that the majority of women have difficulty achieving an orgasm. He then embarked on a crazy invention dedicated to lowering this statistic. He hijacked an aquarium pump, assembled his first prototypes, and conducted some tests with his wife, Brigitte. Despite her initial doubt, she predicted that this ultra-performing object would be “a worldwide success” (*1). Time proved them right.

For Virginie Girod (*2), doctor in history and sexuality specialist, the creation of the Womanizer marks the social recognition of clitoral pleasure: “It is the first time that an object technically dedicated to female pleasure has been created. The duck was based on a toy. The Magic Wand, or vibrating toys were were originally used for massages. Nothing had really been designed exclusively for clitoral pleasure.”

the womanizer is also in line with the times, with the rediscovery of clitoral representation, the promotion of sexual performance, new technologies, the advent of marketing around sexual health, and also, the empowerment of women regarding their sexuality. A partner is no longer need a partner to achieve an orgasm. Now it is just a click away and can sometimes be achieved in less than a minute. But is it really all that in terms of pleasure?

The Womanizer, fleeting pleasure or a revolutionary product? 

Has the Womanizer introduced a new way to achieve sexual pleasure? For Patrick Pruvot, it represents a brand new way of stimulating an orgasm, thanks to its “no contact” technology (i.e. only using air pressure). Today, it represents 40% of turnover, after vibrators and other vaginal sex toys. “More than a fad, its popularity is due to a design and trendy positioning – as well as the strong demand of having easy access to sexual pleasure.“

That said, for Virginie Girod, doctor in history, these accessories are to be used only after a classic masturbation: “These objects are not made for the beginners! One does not begin their journey for sexual pleasure with the Queen of all sex products. Otherwise, the body can lose its sensitivity that drives pleasure.“

An object be so powerful that it could become addictive?

For Aurore Malet-Karas, doctor in neurosciences and sexologist, the disadvantages are to be noted. “There can be a phenomenon of becoming accustomed t it. However, this is always this case when one gets used to masturbating the same way. And it is not irreversible, we can re-educate the nervous system.” On the other hand, as for the question of whether or not the clitoris can lose sensitivity, Aurore Malet-Karas considers the risk to be “rather low.“

Should we use it if we have difficulties climaxing? The sexologist explains that these “problems” can also be due to a low libido or to other psychological blockages. These blockages should be worked out before adopting the use of a sextoy. “Beware of false perceptions that push women to have a very active sexuality! If a woman says she doesn’t orgasm, we tell her ‘here, try a Womanizer, it will help you!’ But in reality, achieving an orgasm is more of a mental thing…“

Because even if this latest technology works miracles on our clitoris, it cannot reach our most developed sexual organ: the brain! Thankfully…

Flore Cherry

(*1) The story behind the invention of the Womanizer was shared with us by Johanna Rief, a spokesperson for the brand.

(*2) Virginie Girod is the author of “Ambitieuses – 40 femmes qui ont marqué l’histoire par leur volonté d’exister” (M6 Editions) –

Vogue

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Yen tumbles past 158 against dollar on stubborn U.S. inflation

From food to travel, it’s hard to find an aspect of life in Japan that hasn’t been affected by its sinking currency.

The yen has been on the skids for years and hit its weakest level since 1990 against the US dollar earlier this week, pressured by expectations of that the US Federal Reserve will have to keep interest rates higher for longer to tame American inflation.

For Hiroko Ishikawa, a second-generation fruit importer in Tokyo, the declining yen has delivered a big hit to her business, which was set up by her father in 1966.

er company, Japan Fraise, specializes in supplying strawberries, including imports of large berries from the United States. Local farmers also produce strawberries, but not enough to keep up with voracious demand for Japanese-style shortcakes: airy, creamy tiered treats that are considered must-haves at birthdays, holidays and other celebrations.

Ishikawa sells berries to 400 customers, mostly bakeries and confectionaries, across the country. The falling yen has made imported strawberries much more expensive.

Ishikawa estimates she has raised her wholesale prices for imported fruit by 20% over the past two years. To stay competitive, she hasn’t fully passed the cost of the currency swings to her customers, opting to absorb some of the pain herself.

“It’s been a really challenging couple of years,” Ishikawa told CNN. “It’s tough times, and we’re not anticipating any miracles for the next few months. We’re just trying to manage.”

She says her clients are trying to reduce their costs by using smaller or lower-grades of the fruit. Inevitably, some have raised prices, especially since the cost of other ingredients — flour, butter, milk and eggs — have also gone up. The rising cost of imports helped push inflation to 3.1% last year, a 41-year high, according to Nikkei.

After hovering around the 100 level against the greenback for years, the yen started its relentless decline in early 2021. That’s largely because the Bank of Japan (BOJ), the central bank, has maintained extremely low interest rates while the Fed and other central banks have raised borrowing costs to fight inflation.

Higher interest rates in the United States and other countries mean investors can make bigger returns on investments there than they can in Japan. This encourages carry trades, in which investors borrow money in yen to invest it in higher-yielding assets priced in other currencies. That weakens the Japanese currency.

On Monday, the yen briefly briefly weakened to 160 to the US dollar for the first time since 1990, before recovering some ground as the BOJ reportedly spent as much as $59 billion buying the Japanese currency.

“The effectiveness of such interventions is always subject to debate, as they often yield only temporary relief and may fail to address the underlying factors driving currency movements,” Nigel Green, CEO of deVere Group, a financial advisory and asset management firm said shortly after the market gyrations.

There are some benefits …

The yen has lost 10% of its value against the greenback so far this year, after sliding 8% in 2023, according to Refinitiv data. It’s the worst performing currency among the Group of 10 leading industrialized nations in 2024.

Even after the BOJ ended years of negative interest rates with its first hike in 17 years in March, a large gap remains between Japanese and US rates and is set to continue, which is expected to keep the yen weak.

This has yielded a number of benefits for Asia’s second largest economy. A weaker yen has enhanced Japan’s export competitiveness, boosting corporate profits and economic growth.

It also helps make Japan a cheaper destination for travelers. This week, Chinese tourists celebrating the Labor Day holiday are expected to visit Japan in large numbers.

“Tourism is the part of the economy where the yen’s cheapness is most visible, with Chinese tourists paying less for many things than they would at home,” Kit Juckes, a strategist at Societe Generale, wrote in a research note this week.

A Big Mac costs 50% more in the next cheapest G10 currency, the New Zealand dollar, than it does in yen, he added.

Japan was a bright spot for luxury companies such as LVMH. Sales in Japan were up 32% in the first quarter, largely thanks to Chinese tourists shopping there, it said last month.

Besides tourism, a weak yen has helped boostJapan’s stock market to levels not seen since the 1980s and improve its attractiveness as an investment destination for the likes of Warren Buffett.

 and lots of drawbacks

But the falling yen has caused much pain at homeand not just for small businesses like Japan Fraise. Many Japanese say foreign travel is no longer a priority, in part because their money doesn’t stretch as far as it once did overseas.

The number of Japanese people traveling abroad last year stood at just 9.62 million, according to a CNN calculation based on data from Japan’s National Tourism Organization. That was less than half of the 20.1 million travellers recorded in pre-pandemic 2019.

“The downsides of a soft currency have been growing over the past couple of years,” Sean Callow, an independent currency strategist based in Sydney, told CNN.

“Japanese consumers accustomed to price stability will also be hurting from rising prices of their favorite imported goods and the surging cost of almost any travel outside Japan,” he said.

At Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, Sato Hitomi, 66, is “bracing” herself for the high cost of traveling to Hawaii with her husband and two adult children. It’s the first, and possibly the last, such vacation for the quartet.

“I quit my nursing job, which I worked for 46 years, this March. I’ve been patient and held off on doing all of the things I wanted to do while also taking care of my parents,” she told CNN on Friday, shortly before flying.

“My son is married and has a new baby and my daughter will get married this fall. We are at a point where things are about to change a lot, and that’s why I wanted to travel. But this is the first and probably the last overseas vacation for us,” she added

CNN

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Chan Marshall

Chan Marshall, singer, composer, actress

Cat Power is American singer, songwriter, musician, occasional actress, and model. Charlyn Marie Marshall (also known as Chan, pronounced “Shawn”) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. on 21 January 1972. Cat Power was originally the name of Marshall’s first band, but has become her stage name as a solo artist.

After dropping out of high school, Marshall started performing under the name Cat Power, while in Atlanta, backed by musicians Glen Thrasher, Mark Moore, and others. She soon moved to New York City, New York, United States in 1992, then later opening for Liz Phair in 1994, she met Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth and Tim Foljahn of Two Dollar Guitar, who encouraged her to record, and played on her first two albums, 1995’s Dear Sir and 1996’s Myra Lee. In 1996 she was signed to Matador Records, and released her third album, What Would the Community Think, which spawned a single and music video, “Nude as the News”.

Shortly following the release of What Would the Community Think Marshall disappeared from the musical scene, initially working as a baby sitter in Portland, Oregon and then moving to a farmhouse in Prosperity, South Carolina with boyfriend Bill Callahan(who performs under the name Smog). The plan was to permanently retire from music but during a sleepless night resulting from a nightmare, Marshall wrote several new songs. These songs would make up the bulk of Moon Pix. The album was recorded at Sing Sing Studios in Melbourne in eleven days with backing musicians Mick Turner and Jim White of the Dirty Three. The album was well-received by critics, and gained her recognition in the indie rock scene. However, during the subsequent tours she grew tired of her own material. This resulted in a series of shows during 1999 involving Marshall providing musical accompaniment to a series of screenings of the silent movie The Passion of Joan of Arc. The shows combined original material and many covers, many of which would later see release on The Covers Record, a collection of cover songs recorded at various sessions in 1998 and 1999. A selection of covers that didn’t make it on to the album were recorded at Peel Acres, home of the highly influential and legendary British DJ John Peel. The session was broadcast on his BBC Radio 1 show and featured Marshall’s own interpretations of Bob Dylan’s “Hard Times in New York Town” amongst others.

In 2003 she resumed releasing original material with You Are Free, a diverse and critically acclaimed album that featured guest musicians such as Eddie Vedder, Dave Grohl, and the Dirty Three’s Warren Ellis.

2004 saw the release of Speaking for Trees, a critically polarizing DVD which featured a single two-hour static shot of Marshall performing in a woodland. It was accompanied by an audio CD containing the 18-minute song “Willie Deadwilder”, which featured M. Ward on guitar. 2005 found Cat Power out on the road again, touring the world and playing sold-out solo shows, including an Australian tour supporting Nick Cave. The shows largely consisted of material for her next album.

Cat Power’s seventh record, The Greatest, was released in January, 2006. This was not a “Greatest Hits” record but rather a collaboration with Al Green’s guitarist Teenie Hodges and many other well-known R&B musicians. A tour followed in the fall of 2006.

Early in 2006, Marshall announced the cancellation of her upcoming United States tour, citing “health-related issues”. A few days later, Matador announced the cancellation of her two shows in London and Paris. She resumed touring in April 2006, playing some of the most well received shows of her career both with the Memphis Rhythm Band and as a solo performer. 

In 2007, she played live music for the spring/ summer Chanel Haute Couture collection in Paris and appeared in Wong Kar Wai’s film My Blueberry Nights as Katya. Also in 2007, she became the first female ever to win the Shortlist Music Prize when The Greatest was voted album of the year in June. Earlier in the year she was nominated in the Best International Female category at the annual Brit Awards, alongside more mainstream artists like Christina Aguilera and Nelly Furtado. 

On January 22, 2008, Cat Power released a second collection of covers called Jukebox–her eighth LP overall. It included versions of songs by artists such as Hank Williams, James Brown, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Patsy Cline and Janis Joplin.

Since then, she has released an EP called “The Dark End of the Street” on vinyl, only.

Cat Power released her first original song since 2008 just before Christmas 2011 when an MP3 of “King Rides By” was made available on her official site, in exchange for a donation of at least $0.99 to the Festival of Children Foundation and the Ali Forney Center charities. (King Rides By Songfacts). 

In 2012, Cat Power released her 9th studio album, Sun which received generally positive reviews from critics. The album was included in several year-end lists by music critics and publications. Rolling Stone magazine, in their list of the “50 Best Albums of 2012”, ranked it at sixteenth place, writing “the idea of the brilliantly morose Chan Marshall making a dance-rock record is almost absurd. Yet the groove-powered Sun is a perfect fit.” The A.V. Club placed the album at number twenty-two on their list of the “Best Albums of 2012.” Billboard also placed the album at number nine in their list of the “10 Best Albums of 2012.”The L.A. Times and Filter magazine both placed the album at number six in their lists of the best albums of 2012. Sun was also included on two separate “Best Music of 2012” lists compiled by NPR, appearing at number five on the list compiled by Bob Boilen,while topping the list compiled by Robin Hilton. The album was also listed twenty-eighth on Stereogum’s list of top 50 albums of 2012. Thus, becoming Cat Power’s most successful original album. 

In April 2015, Marshall announced that she recently had a baby.

In February 2016, Marshall had to cancel her New Zealand shows due to health reasons. According to an official press release, this is the first time in Marshall’s 18-year touring history she has been forced to postpone, but is “determined to make it back ASAP, and in good health”.

Last fm

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14 years ago : Zahia Dehar

The Zahia Affair is a series of legal proceedings that took place in France starting from 2010, involving several players of the French football team and Zahia Dehar, a former prostitute, who was a minor at the time she was solicited for sex. The affair played out prominently in the French media

The scandal first erupted in 2010, just before the World Cup opened in South Africa.

Ribéry, who plays midfield for German club Bayern Munich, and Benzema, a forward for Spanish club Real Madrid, made front-page news following allegations they paid to have sex with an underage prostitute named Zahia Dehar.

While Ribéry, 30, and Benzema, 26, have insisted that they did not know Dehar was under 18, they now each face a maximum sentence of three years in jail and a 45,000-euro fine if found guilty.

However, lawyers for both men have said their clients did not plan to be present for any of the trial, which ends on Thursday.

Under French law they are legally entitled to be represented by their lawyers instead, although their absence may make an unfavorable impression on the jury.

Ribéry is alleged to have had sex with Dehar three times, including at the home of Kamel Ramdani, 39. Ramdani is one of several people who are on trial after a probe into a suspected network of prostitutes operating out of a nightclub called Zaman Café on Paris’ Champs-Elysees, which first opened in 2010.

‘Cleared outright’

Although Ribéry has admitted to having sex with Dehar, he claims he did not pay her and that he did not know that she was either a prostitute or a minor. Prostitution is legal in France, but prostitutes must be over 18.

“As far as I’m concerned, I will do everything possible so that France and a leading football player will be cleared of everything,” Ribéry’s lawyer, Carlo Alberto Brusa, said on Monday.

Benzema has denied all the charges. He is alleged to have paid 500 euros to have sex with Dehar in May 2008, on the night he won the French player of the year award while at his former club Lyon. At the time Dehar was 16.

“From the outset, Karim Benzema has said that nothing happened on May 11, 2008. We are going to try to demonstrate that this is the truth and even prove it, and I hope that we are cleared — cleared outright, not just on the benefit of the doubt or on a technicality,” Benzema’s lawyer, Sylvain Cormier, said.

Dehar, who is known simply as Zahia, has said in the past that she lied to both men about her age. Since the scandal broke, she has capitalised on her celebrity to launch her own line of lingerie, becoming German designer Karl Lagerfeld’s muse and protégée.

France 24

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Philip Guston

CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ

A searchable listing of known Philip Guston paintings, the Catalogue Raisonné is a project of Guston CR LLC, a wholly owned, nonprofit subsidiary of The Guston Foundation. High-quality images accompany physical details, provenance, exhibition history and bibliography. Each exhibition and museum collection has its own linked page.

Philipguston.org

Guston was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1913. His Jewish parents had fled persecution in Ukraine nearly 10 years earlier. A few months before his ninth birthday, the family moved to Los Angeles, California.

By 1935, he went by Guston instead of Goldstein, possibly because he thought his girlfriend’s parents wouldn’t accept a Jewish boyfriend.

From a young age Guston was interested in art. He started with drawing and was inspired by cartoons like George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff. On his 13th birthday, he had a cartoon published in the kids’ section of the Los Angeles Times. His junior high school yearbook listed him as a “true artist.” 

While attending Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, Guston became friends with Jackson Pollock. The two budding artists remained friends for decades, and Guston moved to New York in 1936 at Pollock’s encouragement.

Soon after Pollock began to make his first “poured” paintings in 1947, Guston embraced abstraction. They became two of the most famous abstract painters working in the 1950s.

As a young artist, Guston made several murals. Living in Los Angeles, he knew the work of some of the most famous muralists at the time—Mexican artists José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. He may have even helped Siquieros paint one mural.

In 1932 Guston painted a mural of a Black man being whipped by a Ku Klux Klansman as part of a larger series on racism in America, which he was making with friends in the John Reed Club, a local outpost of a network of Communist clubs. Several months later, the Los Angeles Police Department’s Red Squad, a unit that went after Communists, destroyed the murals. Some Los Angeles police officers were known to be members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Several of Guston’s murals still exist today. One of the largest was made as part of the Federal Art Project for the Wilbur C. Cohen Federal Building in Washington, DC, just blocks from the National Gallery.

Guston didn’t make art in one style that he refined over time. He experimented with surrealism, an avant-garde movement, practiced by artists like Salvador Dalí, that began in Europe and took inspiration from dreams and the unconscious. Later, he found success with abstraction before returning again to figuration (in which the artist depicts things we recognize).

He often dropped subjects and styles and then revisited them. He constantly pushed himself in new directions and rarely did what was expected of him.

Speaking of the unexpected, in 1970 Guston presented a new group of paintings in an exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in New York City. Today, those works are considered some of his most significant contributions to modern art. But when he first showed them, most critics hated them. He even lost some friends over them. Some artists considered him a traitor for leaving behind the New York School style of abstract painting, which Guston had made popular along with artists including Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Joan Mitchell.

Why were the works so shocking? Guston’s new paintings were large horizontal canvases reminiscent of movie screens or billboards and filled with objects like books, bricks, and shoes painted in a flat and simplified way. They were completely different from the abstract canvases he had been exhibiting until then.

In some paintings, he revisited a subject from his earlier murals and drawings—the Ku Klux Klan. Painted as bulbous white, hooded figures with two vertical strokes to suggest eye slits, they appear riding in cars, smoking cigars, and even painting at the easel.

Guston considered them self-portraits of a sort, and sometimes depicted the Klansman in the act of painting or looking at paintings. With the upheavals of the 1960s all around him, Guston felt the need to interrogate bigotry and violence in his paintings. He asked, “What would it be like to be evil?”

From the beginning of his career, Guston made art that spoke to what was happening in the world around him. He created one of his earlier paintings, Bombardment, in response to the April 1937 Fascist bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica.

Art allowed Guston to process the seemingly endless series of cruelties and tragedies he witnessed. After seeing photographs of Nazi concentration camps, he painted haunted faces, body parts, and piles of legs.

In the late 1960s, the Vietnam War compelled Guston to return to a more representational style of painting. He reflected on this shift: “The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue? I thought there must be some way I could do something about it.”

Just as Piero della Francesca and Pablo Picasso influenced him, Guston has influenced many of today’s artists. In addition to being done with skill and style, his innovative and provocative paintings remain relevant because of their imaginative freedom and fearless address of social issues. Hear from artists Cecily Brown and Glenn Ligon, along with Guston’s daughter Musa Mayer, about why his paintings stand the test of time.

NGA Washington

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French basilica displays rediscovered Raphael painting

Mary Magdalene

The small portrait of Mary Magdalene is being displayed for a month in the Sainte-Marie-Madeleine basilica, which houses relics of Mary Magdalene — making it Christianity’s third most important tomb. 

AFP saw around 50 visitors queuing Sunday afternoon to admire this forgotten painting by Raphael, known for painting “Three Graces” and “The School of Athens”. 

The painting is thought to date back to a meeting between the painter and Leonardo da Vinci in 1505.

Visitors were required to pay three euros to see the work, which will be used to support the restoration of the basilica. 

A French collector bought the portrait from a London gallery’s website for £30,000 ($37,000). 

He then called a UNESCO expert in Italy, who authenticated the work in September. 

After countless analyses — including infrared light to reveal the layers of carbon hidden by the paint pigments — they were able to attribute the painting to Raphael (1483-1520). 

Mary Magdalene, the first witness to the resurrection of Jesus, is an important figure in the Gospels.

Often presented as a repentant sinner, she is said to have spent the last 30 years of her life in a cave in the Sainte-Baume massif, some twenty kilometres (12 miles) from the basilica, which has become a major Christian pilgrimage site.

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France : more than 500 000 cars circulate without technical inspection

The regulatory vehicle ‘contrôle technique’ in France is one that must be carried out every two years at an accredited control centre – a centre de contrôle technique agréé. 

The EU have plans for a greater degree of harmonisation in the rules, to make them obligatory on an annual basis. These plans are still at a relatively early stage.

The test applies to all passenger and transport vehicles up to 3.5 tons gross weight. Vehicles above this weight are subject to a separate set of regulations.

For new vehicles, the first test must be undertaken within the 6 months that precede the fourth year of registration.

Between 500,000 and 700,000 vehicles will not have passed a technical inspection in 2023 when they should have.

Motorists do not shun technical inspections because of the price of the technical inspection, set at 70 euros every two years. It is above all “the price of repairs induced by a counter-visit that hinder motorists from passing a technical inspection,” she stresses.

Not carrying out your technical inspection can result in a fine of 135 euros, which can be increased up to 750 euros. For the moment, there will be no regulatory change planned for 2020.

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Juliette Binoche stars in a new chapter of French #MeToo

French actress

In an interview given to the newspaper Libération, the winner of the Oscar in 1997 for her supporting role in The English Patient, which won a Bafta, a Goya and a César, reviewed her career, and in particular the bad moments she experienced, including attacks sexual acts, humiliation and excessive nudity. 

She did not hesitate to mention names, such as the director Pascal Kané (1946-2020), whom she accused of attacking her when she was a young debutant. 

He invited me to dinner at the Nikko Hotel on the grounds of talking about a project, and while he was showing me the view of the Seine he threw himself towards me to kiss me, so I had to forcefully reject him, said the 60-year-old actress, known for being along with her American colleague Julianne Moore, the only ones to win an acting award at the Berlin, Cannes and Venice festivals. 

Binoche said she felt relieved for all the women and men who have dared to expose the abuses suffered, complaints in the spotlight since the emergence in 2017 on social networks of the #MeToo movement, following the accusations against the film producer and executive. American Harvey Weinstein. 

It is not easy to present your private life, for which we should all thank them, he stressed. 

At another point in her dialogue with Libération, the multifaceted artist, who also dances, writes poems and paints, recalled the difficult experience she suffered during the filming of Rendez-vous (1985), when a hand “suddenly appeared to touch my sex.” 

Nobody warned me, much less asked for my consent, I was stunned, but I was not able to say it, or understand what happened, she said. 

The French #MeToo already has numerous chapters, the most well-known, the complaints against the legend of French and world cinema Gérard Depardieu, who has accumulated several accusations before the courts for rape, abuse and sexual harassment, among them of the actresses Charlotte Arnould and Hélène Darras

https://euro.eseuro.com/lifestyle/2453834.html

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Bernard Pivot, the soul of French culture, dies at 89

Bernard Pivot, an essential figure in the French cultural landscape, has left us, leaving behind an invaluable legacy. As a journalist, presenter, and lover of words, he made an indelible mark on the worlds of literature and television. His passing is a tremendous loss for everyone who, like me, had the chance to cross paths with him.

Bernard Pivot was a giant. A giant of television who revolutionized our relationship with literature through his legendary show Apostrophes. Every Friday night, France gathered around him to dive into the flavorful Bouillon de culture, so nourishing for the mind and soul. He was our guide, our bridge into the infinite universe of letters. Thanks to him, literature entered our homes and hearts.

But Bernard Pivot was more than just a presenter. He was a lover of the French language, a staunch defender of its richness and beauty. His legendary dictations resonated with entire generations, constantly reminding us of the magic of words and the importance of choosing them carefully. He was a craftsman of language, a master who sculpted each sentence with love and respect.

His commitment to literature extended beyond the small screen. As the president of the Goncourt Academy, he rigorously and passionately oversaw this prestigious literary prize. His innovative spirit, coupled with unwavering standards, contributed to maintaining the excellence of this institution, which is over a century old.

Bernard Pivot was also a man of the land, deeply attached to his Beaujolais roots. His love for this wine region led him to create the Beaujolais Defense Committee, demonstrating his dedication to preserving a heritage so dear to his heart.

Beyond his multiple facets, Bernard Pivot was above all a humanist. His insatiable curiosity, empathetic listening, and respect for others made him a valuable interlocutor for all who had the privilege of meeting him. He had the rare gift of making culture accessible to everyone, without ever watering it down or oversimplifying it.

I had the immense privilege of meeting Bernard Pivot at the Beirut Francophone Book Fair in 2012. This moment will forever be etched in my memory. Having lunch with him at L’Oca Matta was an indescribable honor and joy. His conversation was a fireworks display of erudition, wit and humanity. Every word he spoke was a pearl that I eagerly collected, a treasure that I will always cherish.

Today, as Bernard Pivot leaves us, a part of our history goes with him. His passing leaves a huge void in the world of literature and culture. Farewell, Mr. Pivot. You were a giant among men, a beacon in the night. Your work is a treasure that we will continue to cherish, your spirit a light that we will strive to keep alive. Thank you for everything you have given us, with such generosity, passion and love. You will forever remain one of the greatest craftsmen of French culture.

Rest in peace, Bernard Pivot. Your memory is a blessing, your example an inspiration. You made the world more beautiful, richer, and brighter. And for that, we say thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

Belinda Ibrahim

This is Beirut

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14 years ago : The death of Lech Kaczynski

Funerals in Poland

Lech Kaczyński, the fourth President of the Republic of Poland, died on 10 April 2010, after a Polish Air Force Tu-154 crashed outside of Smolensk, Russia, killing all 96 aboard. His wife, economist and First Lady Maria Kaczyńska, was also among those killed.

After the death of Kaczyński was announced, a week of mourning was declared by the acting President of Poland, Bronisław Komorowski, spanning 11 to 18 April with a state funeral for the couple held on 18 April. Several countries observed a day of national mourning on the date of the funeral. The couple were buried together in a crypt in the Wawel Cathedral, Kraków, afterwards.

In December 2005, Lech Kaczyński was sworn in as President of Poland, having won 54% of the vote in a close-fought race against rival candidate Donald Tusk. This was the first major election for Kaczyński’s newly-created populist conservative party “Law and Justice,” which he founded in 2003 alongside his identical twin brother Jarosław, but the pair were hardly political newcomers. Kaczyński’s political career went back to the Solidarity movement in the late 1980s, when he participated in the strikes that led to the collapse of Poland’s Soviet-aligned government. During the 1990s and early 2000s, he bounced around between various positions, including parliament, where he served in both the Senate and the Sejm (the lower house), as well as in the government of president Lech Wałęsa, where he held the post of Security Minister before being fired in 1992, and later as Minister of Justice and Attorney General under Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek, a post from which he was again fired after less than two years. Nevertheless, his outspoken anti-corruption rhetoric made him popular with the public, and when he and his brother split from the Solidarity movement to found Law and Justice in 2003, he was well-poised to become a major political force. It came as no great surprise, then, that he won election to the Presidency in 2005. And six months after that, he appointed his brother to the post of Prime Minister, at last cementing the control of the Kaczyński twins over Polish politics.

In office, Kaczyński focused on educating Poles and the world about crimes committed against Poland by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. One of the most significant of these was the Katyn Massacre, a horrific atrocity carried out on the orders of Lavrentiy Beria, the chief of Stalin’s secret police (or NKVD), following the 1939 invasion of Poland. Seeking to eliminate an entire generation of Polish military expertise, the NKVD systematically executed around 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia throughout April of 1940, many of whom were subsequently buried in a mass grave in the Katyn Forest outside the city of Smolensk in western Russia. Soviet authorities would not admit their involvement in the massacre until 1989, when General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged that Beria and Stalin had ordered the killings and expressed “profound regret” for their actions.

By 2010, plenty of friction remained between Poland and Russia over the extent to which the wounds inflicted by the massacre had been, or should be, reconciled. That year, with the 70th anniversary of the massacre approaching, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made several overtures indicating that reconciliation was on the table, as a documentary about the massacre was aired in Russia for the first time, and Putin invited both Polish officials and opposition members to attend a memorial service at the site of the massacre. The planned ceremony promised to be a major event in the history of Polish-Russian relations, and the guest list was soon filled with entire strata of the Polish elite, including President Kaczyński, who was by now gearing up to run for a second term. However, due to political in-fighting over the upcoming election, Kaczyński and most of the government delegation ended up organizing their own event, making plans to attend a separate ceremony on April 10th, while Donald Tusk and members of his centrist Civic Platform party proceeded with the original event on April 7th, which was hosted by Vladimir Putin.

2022 / WARSAW, Poland (AP) — A Polish government special commission has reinforced its earlier allegations that the 2010 plane crash that killed President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others in Russia was the result of Moscow’s assassination plan. 

The latest of the commission’s reports, released Monday, alleges that an intentional detonation of planted explosives caused the April 10, 2010 crash of Soviet-made Tu-154M plane that killed Kaczynski, the First Lady and 94 other government and armed forces figures as well as many prominent Poles.

Their deaths were the result of an “act of unlawful interference by the Russian side,” the commission’s head Antoni Macierewicz told a news conference.

“The main and indisputable proof of the interference was an explosion in the left wing … followed by an explosion in the plane’s center,” said Macierewicz, who in 2015-2018 served as defense minister in Poland’s right-wing government. 

He denied that any mistakes were made by the Polish pilots or crew members, despite bad weather at the time of the crash. 

The report repeats many previous allegations made by the commission, appointed by the government whose key figure is the main ruling Law and Justice party leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the twin of the late president.

Theories that the plane was destroyed by a bomb are widespread on the internet and in certain segments of Polish society, and as time goes by they are increasing in popularity. As such, it is impossible to tell the story of the Smolensk Air Disaster without examining these theories, and the political and cultural forces which drive them.

Many Poles still believe the Smolensk air crash, in which President Lech Kaczyński died in 2010, was the result of Kremlin foul play. 

Considering that Russia and Poland have had a fraught relationship for centuries, which has included such crimes against humanity as the Katyn Massacre, the death of the Polish president on Russian soil was always certain to spawn speculation that the crash was no accident, and indeed it would have been foolish not to investigate the possibility of foul play. Jerzy Miller’s investigation pulled out all the usual stops to detect signs of sabotage, such as testing for explosive residue, searching for pitting damage associated with explosions, and looking for shrapnel in the bodies of victims. None of these areas of inquiry yielded any evidence that a bomb exploded on board the plane.

Nevertheless, skepticism of these findings was widespread. Although some opposition politicians were also on the plane, most of the victims were allied with President Kaczyński and many of them were openly anti-Russian. Polish commentators called Jerzy Miller “naïve” for cooperating with the MAK at all. The biggest purveyor of these criticisms was none other than Jarosław Kaczyński, twin brother of the late Lech Kaczyński and leader of the Law and Justice Party.

In office, Kaczyński focused on educating Poles and the world about crimes committed against Poland by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. One of the most significant of these was the Katyn Massacre, a horrific atrocity carried out on the orders of Lavrentiy Beria, the chief of Stalin’s secret police (or NKVD), following the 1939 invasion of Poland. Seeking to eliminate an entire generation of Polish military expertise, the NKVD systematically executed around 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia throughout April of 1940, many of whom were subsequently buried in a mass grave in the Katyn Forest outside the city of Smolensk in western Russia. Soviet authorities would not admit their involvement in the massacre until 1989, when General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged that Beria and Stalin had ordered the killings and expressed “profound regret” for their actions.

UK: Passing of Rwanda bill is a ‘national disgrace´

“My party cannot be registered. Three party members have been killed. Four are missing. And nine are in prison. There is literally no space for opposition in Rwanda.”

In response to the UK government’s controversial Rwanda bill passing through Parliament, Sacha Deshmukh, Amnesty International UK’s Chief Executive, said:

“Today will leave a stain on this country’s moral reputation.

“The UK parliament has passed a bill that takes a hatchet to international legal protections for some of the most vulnerable people in the world and it is a matter of national disgrace that our political establishment has let this bill pass.

“The bill is built on a deeply authoritarian notion attacking one of the most basic roles played by the courts – the ability to look at evidence, decide on the facts of a case and apply the law accordingly. It’s absurd that the courts are forced to treat Rwanda as a ‘safe country’ and forbidden from considering all evidence to the contrary.

“Switching off human rights protections for people who the Government thinks it can gain political capital from attacking sets an extremely dangerous precedent.

“A continued obsession with feeding the public misinformation about asylum issues – stoking resentment and division – has now led to one of the most shameful acts of any Parliament in this country’s history.

“It’s a new low to expel people seeking asylum to Rwanda – a country with its own large refugee population and a host of human rights issues.

“As with any other country, the UK has an obligation to provide safety to refugees – it’s now absolutely vital that flights to Rwanda do not leave the tarmac.”

Amnesty

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Could Tesla go bankrupt ?

Tesla accounted for 55% of all U.S. EV sales last year. Tesla’s closest competitor last year was Ford, which accounted for just 6% of the U.S. EV market, and as I noted in February, FoMoCo lost nearly $65,000 for each of the 72,000 EVs it sold last year. Meanwhile, EV maker Rivian lost a whopping $107,000 for every vehicle it sold. (Rivian’s stock has fallen by more than half this year.)

Put simply, Tesla is the bellwether for the EV business, and it’s in trouble. Last week, the company announced it was laying off more than 10%, or about 14,000, of its employees. The move comes after a quarter during which the company missed delivery expectations and just before it reveals its quarterly profits on Tuesday.  Here’s what Wired wrote last Thursday about Tesla’s situation: “Demand is dropping for electric cars in the U.S. and Europe, just as competition in Chinaintensifies and workers revolt in Europe. Investors are worried.” Wired continued, saying Tesla is contending with: 

Ongoing worker strikes in Sweden, and even sabotage by German climate activists. Earlier this month, the company warned investors to expect a lower rate of growth this year, blaming interest rate hikes for dampening demand… Shareholders will get a chance to give their blessing at a vote in June, when they will be asked to ratify Musk’s $50 billion pay package and approve the company’s move to Texas.

The bad news continued on Friday when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ordered the company to recall nearly all of the Edsels, oops, I mean all of the Cybertrucks, it has produced at its factory here in Austin. About 3,900 Cybertrucks must be repaired because an accelerator pedal could get stuck in the down position.

Tesla’s stock is down 41% so far this year. The company faces so many challenges that Brad Munchen, an auto analyst who writes the Motorhead column here on Substack, posted an excellent piece on Friday asking, “Could Tesla Go Bankrupt? The Odds Are Rising.” The money line: “Things crash hard and loud in the auto industry and I’ve never seen a carmaker in as dangerous of a position as Tesla currently is in.” 

Robert Bryce

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14 years ago : Cranach in his time

Lucas Cranach the Elder, allegory of justice, oil on wood panel, 72×50 cm

To mark the European opening of the Musée du Luxembourg’s programme dedicated to the Renaissance, the museum is reopening with an exhibition on Lucas Cranach (circa1472-1553), one of the major artists of the German Renaissance. This prolific, versatile painter whose career spanned the first half of the 16th century, is still somewhat unknown to the French public, who have not had an opportunity for some time to discover the breadth of his work. The Musée du Luxembourg’s exhibition, Cranach and his time, provides a better understanding of this artist’s place in the history of art and his involvement in the society of his time, a period marked by major political and religious upheavals.

The exhibition starts by showing the European dimension of Lucas Cranach’s art, which was not only influenced by the works of Dürer, whose engravings were widely disseminated, but also by Flemish and Italian artists. To highlight these influences, the exhibition compares paintings, drawings and engravings by Cranach with the works of other artists. It devotes a significant section to his travels, which were facilitated by his appointment in 1505 as official court painter to Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, in Wittenberg. In addition to the artistic commissions of his patron, Cranach was entrusted with diplomatic missions that played a crucial role in his rise to prominence.

At the behest of Frederick the Wise, Cranach went to Malines in Flanders in 1508, to the court of Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, where he met many artists and humanists from different countries. It was here in this dazzling society that he perfected his artistic style. He introduced a more refined elegance into his works, and turned his attention to new themes, like his half-length images of strong, virtuous women, which were immediately successful in this aristocratic milieu.

A further section of the exhibition is devoted to his representation of the nude – a subject that occupied a central place in Cranach’s work. His highly sensual, female figures, sometimes borrowed from classical antiquity (Venus, Diana, etc), sometimes from Christian culture (Eve), are endowed with a beauty that is at times quite disturbing. And he developed a canon of beauty that is clearly at odds with the classical ideal of the Renaissance.

These equivocal images, mixing eroticism with a moral message, often with a complex meaning, were highly acclaimed in their time, prompting the artist to reproduce them in a number of variants. His consummate business sense even pushed him to organise his studio more efficiently, in order to respond as quickly as possible to demand.

Above all, the exhibition emphasises the richness and originality of Cranach’s artistic career – a career punctuated by significant encounters with leading political and religious figures of the time – a period that was shaken by the turmoil of the Protestant Reformation. In Wittenberg he was in close contact most notably with Martin Luther who was protected by Frederick the Wise. Thanks to Cranach’s talents as a portrait painter, we have accurate representations of the leading figures of his time. A committed supporter of the Reformation within a very short time, he became very involved in helping to spread the new doctrine, using his artistic skills for visual propaganda, which was then widely circulated through engravings. Through this, he contributed to the development of a new Protestant iconography without, however, giving up his commissions from the Catholic church.

His fame as a painter, his position close to those in power, his proximity to intellectual circles, make Lucas Cranach one of the most unusual and astonishing figures in 16th century Europe.

This exhibition is organized by the RMN-Grand-Palais, in collaboration with Bozar who designed and made his first stage at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in autumn 2010.

Musée du Luxembourg

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France willing to buy key Atos assets to keep them French

Atos : Finance minister says government has interests in IT giant’s ‘sovereign activities’

The French information technology Atos said that it has received a non-binding letter of intent from the French state to acquire 100% of the advanced computing, mission-critical systems and cybersecurity products activities part of its BDS division for an indicative enterprise valuation between 700 million and 1 billion euros.

The businesses represent a turnover of circa 1 billion euros in 2023, out of a total of 1.5 billion for the BDS division as a whole.

Atos said that it “welcomes this letter of intent, which would protect the sovereign strategic imperatives of the French State.” Due diligence will start shortly in view of the issuance of a confirmatory non-binding offer by early June, it added.

Atos updated the parameters of its financial restructuring framework presented on April 9.

The company said that it now needs 1.1 billion euros to fund the business over the 2024-25 period compared with 600 million previously. The funds will be provided in the form of debt and/or equity by existing stakeholders or third-party investors, while 300 million euros will come from new revolving credit facility and 300 million from additional bank guarantee lines.

It added that the target of a BB credit profile by 2026 assumes a financial leverage below 2x by year-end 2026 and implies a gross debt reduction of 3.2 billion euros compared with 2.4 billion previously estimated.

The remaining debt maturities will be extended by five years.

It added that the submission of financing proposals including new money by existing stakeholders of Atos and third-party investors was extended to May 3.

“Given the group’s needs, a global financial restructuring agreement will trigger significant dilution of existing shareholders,” it added.

The company still expects to reach a financial restructuring agreement with financial creditors in July.

Borsa Italiana

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Gaza truce or Rafah assault? Netanyahu faces political dilemma

Qatar is re-evaluating its role as mediator in ceasefire talks between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, citing concerns that its efforts are being undermined by politicians seeking to score points, its prime minister said.

“There is a very strong proposal on the table right now,” said Blinken, in Israel on his seventh Middle East crisis tour since the war broke out in October. “Hamas needs to say yes and needs to get this done.”

Hamas said it would respond “within a very short period” to a plan proposed by mediators to halt the fighting for 40 days and to exchange a few dozen hostages for many more Palestinian prisoners.

But the group’s aim remains “an end to this war”, senior Hamas official Suhail al-Hindi told AFP by telephone — a goal at odds with the stated position of Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“We will enter Rafah and we will eliminate the Hamas battalions there with or without a deal,” Netanyahu told a group representing families of remaining hostages in Gaza.

UN chief Antonio Guterres warned that an Israeli assault on Rafah would “be an unbearable escalation, killing thousands more civilians and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee”.

Netanyahu made his threat shortly before the arrival of Blinken and at a time of tensions between the traditional allies as the Gaza war has sparked global anger and weeks of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on US university campuses.

Far-right allies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are raising pressure on the embattled leader to reject a new Gaza ceasefire, jeopardising his government’s stability if he backs away from an assault on Hamas in Rafah.

Hamas representatives were due in Cairo as mediators step up efforts toward a ceasefire deal ahead of a threatened Israeli storming of Rafah, an area by the Egyptian border, where around a million Palestinians displaced by Israel’s military campaign elsewhere in Gaza are sheltering.

But Israel says four remaining battalions of Palestinian Islamist group Hamas are entrenched there – after over six months of war triggered by Hamas’ cross-border strike on Oct. 7 – and that it will attack them after evacuating civilians.

However, if a ceasefire is agreed, the attack plans will be shelved in favour of a “period of sustained calm”, according to a source briefed on the talks, during which a few dozen hostages of Hamas will be released in return for Palestinian prisoners.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich urged Netanyahu not to back away from a ground offensive against Hamas in Rafah, even as the premier is grappling with pressure from international allies to scrap assault plans due to the risk of high civilian casualties and a humanitarian disaster.

But a ceasefire would be a humiliating defeat, Smotrich said in a video he released to the press and addressed to Netanyahu. If it fails to stamp out Hamas, “a government headed by you will have no right to exist,” he said.

Smotrich was swiftly followed by police minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who reposted on X a Jan. 30 remark made during a previous round of ceasefire talks: “Reminder: An irresponsible deal = the government’s dissolution.”

But Benny Gantz, a centrist former defence minister who joined Netanyahu’s emergency war cabinet in October, offered his own rebuke, saying that freeing hostages took precedence over an assault on Rafah.

The rejection of a responsible deal that would secure a hostage release, Gantz said in a statement, would strip the government of any legitimacy – given its Oct. 7 security failure and the clamour in Israel for the return of hostages.

Analysts voiced doubts whether Hamas would sign up to another temporary ceasefire like a week-long truce in November that saw more than 100 hostages released, knowing that Israeli troops could resume their onslaught as soon as it is over.

“I’m pessimistic about the option of Hamas agreeing to a deal that doesn’t have a permanent ceasefire baked into it,” said Mairav Zonszein, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group.

“The US and Egypt and Qatar all have very strong interests of their own, for various reasons, why they’re trying very hard now to pressure both sides into agreeing to a deal.”

RFI

Reuters

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Pro-Palestine college campus protests around the world

From the US to Australia, students are calling for their universities to divest and sever ties with Israel.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrations and sit-ins are spreading at universities across the United States and to campuses around the world.

Columbia University in New York, one of the most prestigious universities in the US, emerged as the centre for student activism since Israel’s war on Gaza began more than six months ago with protests both in support of the war and against it.

On Tuesday shortly after 9pm (01:00 GMT on Wednesday) after nearly two weeks of protests, hundreds of police officers entered the campus in upper Manhattan, removed protesters and arrested dozens.

More than 1,200 students have been arrested across universities in the United States as protesters continue to demand a ceasefire in Gaza and divestment from companies enabling Israel’s nearly seven-month war on Gaza.

In France, the Paris regional authority has temporarily suspending funding for Sciences Po, one of France’s most prestigious universities, after it was rocked by pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

“I have decided to suspend all regional funding for Sciences Po until calm and security have been restored at the school,” Valérie Pécresse, the rightwing head of the greater Paris Île-de-France region, said on social media on Monday.

She took aim at “a minority of radicalised people calling for antisemitic hatred” and accused hard-left politicians of seeking to exploit the tensions

In an echo of demonstrations at many top US universities, students at Sciences Po have staged a number of protests over the Israel-Hamas war and ensuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

France is home to the world’s largest Jewish population after Israel and the US, as well as Europe’s biggest Muslim community.

University officials called in police to clear a protest last week. On Monday police broke up a student protest at Sorbonne, another top French university, demanding an end to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

The war started after Hamas’s 7 October attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 34,535 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

Palestinian militants also took about 250 hostages on 7 October. Israel estimates that 129 remain in Gaza, including 34 believed to be dead.

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Paul Auster, American author of The New York Trilogy, dies aged 77

Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt

Paul Auster, the author of 34 books including the acclaimed New York Trilogy, has died aged 77.

The author died on Tuesday due to complications from lung cancer, his friend and fellow author Jacki Lyden confirmed to the Guardian.

Auster became known for his “highly stylised, quirkily riddlesome postmodernist fiction in which narrators are rarely other than unreliable and the bedrock of plot is continually shifting,” the novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote in 2010.

His stories often play with themes of coincidence, chance and fate. Many of his protagonists are writers themselves, and his body of work is self-referential, with characters from early novels appearing again in later ones.

“Auster has established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature,” wrote critic Michael Dirda in 2008. “His narrative voice is as hypnotic as that of the Ancient Mariner. Start one of his books and by page two you cannot choose but hear.”

The author was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947. According to Auster, his writing life began at the age of eight when he missed out on getting an autograph from his baseball hero, Willie Mays, because neither he nor his parents had carried a pencil to the game. From then on, he took a pencil everywhere. “If there’s a pencil in your pocket, there’s a good chance that one day you’ll feel tempted to start using it,” he wrote in a 1995 essay.

While hiking during a summer camp aged 14, Auster witnessed a boy inches away from him getting struck by lightning and dying instantly – an event that he said “absolutely changed” his life and that he thought about “every day”. Chance, “understandably, became a recurring theme in his fiction,” wrote the critic Laura Miller in 2017. A similar incident occurs in Auster’s 2017 Booker-shortlisted novel 4 3 2 1: one of the book’s four versions of protagonist Archie Ferguson runs under a tree at a summer camp and is killed by a falling branch when lightning strikes.

Auster studied at Columbia University before moving to Paris in the early 1970s, where he worked a variety of jobs, including translation, and lived with his “on-again off-again” girlfriend, the writer Lydia Davis, whom he had met while at college. In 1974, they returned to the US and married. In 1977, the couple had a son, Daniel, but separated shortly afterwards.

In January 1979, Auster’s father, Samuel, died, and the event became the seed for the writer’s first memoir, The Invention of Solitude, published in 1982. In it, Auster revealed that his paternal grandfather was shot and killed by his grandmother, who was acquitted on grounds of insanity. “A boy cannot live through this kind of thing without being affected by it as a man,” Auster wrote in reference to his father, with whom he described himself having an “un-movable relationship, cut off from each other on opposite sides of a wall”.

Auster’s breakthrough came with the 1985 publication of City of Glass, the first novel in his New York trilogy. While the books are ostensibly mystery stories, Auster wielded the form to ask existential questions about identity. “The more [Auster’s detectives] stalk their eccentric quarry, the more they seem actually to be stalking the Big Questions – the implications of authorship, the enigmas of epistemology, the veils and masks of language,” wrote the critic and screenwriter Stephen Schiff in 1987.

Auster published regularly throughout the 80s, 90s and 00s, writing more than a dozen novels including Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002) and Oracle Night (2003). He also became involved in film, writing the screenplay for Smoke, directed by Wayne Wang, for which he won the Independent Spirit award for best first screenplay in 1995.

In 1981, Auster met the writer Siri Hustvedt and they married the following year. In 1987 they had a daughter, Sophie, who became a singer and actor. Auster’s 1992 novel Leviathan, about a man who accidentally blows himself up, features a character called Iris Vegan, who is the heroine of Hustvedt’s first novel, The Blindfold.

Auster was better known in Europe than in his native United States: “Merely a bestselling author in these parts,” read a 2007 New York magazine article, “Auster is a rock star in Paris.” In 2006, he was awarded Spain’s Prince of Asturias prize for literature, and in 1993 he was given the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan. He was also a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

In April 2022, Auster and Davis’s son, Daniel, died from a drug overdose. In March 2023, Hustvedt revealed that Auster was being treated for cancer after having been diagnosed the previous December. His final novel, Baumgartner, about a widowed septuagenarian writer, was published in October.

Auster is survived by Hustvedt, their daughter Sophie Auster, his sister Janet Auster, and a grandson.

Ella Creamer

The Guardian

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24 years ago : rave, free parties, teufs, teknival …

Every year, France hosts several teknivals, but the teknival of May 1st remains emblematic. This historic event pushes us to revisit the most significant teknivals since 1994, the year these underground gatherings began.

1994-2000: The first sparks

From 1994 to 2000, teknivals grew rapidly in France. The very first teknival on May 1st was launched in 1994, near Fontainebleau, thanks to the initiative of the Spiral Tribe and other British soundsystems. This event brought together several hundred participants, marking the emergence of alternative festive gatherings. In the following years, especially in 1995, these collectives continued to ignite Fontainebleau with their energy.

1997: Commitment and Music

In 1997, the teknival took on a committed dimension with an edition focused on the fight against nuclear, organized on the Carnet site near Nantes. This action followed plans for the construction of nuclear power plants by the State on a natural territory. The group Noir Désir marked the event by going on stage to make their music resonate.

2001-2006: Evolutions and Recognitions

The period from 2001 to 2006 was marked by significant advances for teknivals. In 2003, the initiative of Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, opened a new era. The teknival became legal for the first time, thus establishing a formal dialogue between organizers and authorities. Under the name “Free Open Festival”, this event brought together nearly 70,000 participants at the Marigny-sur-Marne air base. This event marked the implementation of the 2001 Mariani amendment, a law that regulates the free parties movement.

In 2004, the edition on the disused Chambley air base exceeded 100,000 participants, marking a historic moment by its exceptional influx. The next edition in Marigny in 2005 was overshadowed by tragedies and troubles.

2007-2009: The Era of Contestation

From 2007 to 2009, a period of protest marked the history of teknivals. In response to the official “Sarkoval”, the Insoumis teknival was held on the sidelines of the event authorized in 2007, giving birth to the Insoumis collective. Although fewer participants joined, this event left a memorable mark by going back to the roots of the movement, with a warm and community atmosphere.

2009: The Test of the Contestation

In 2009, despite the supposed legality of teknivals, the State refused to authorize the event, breaking any dialogue with the collectives a few months before the scheduled date. Despite this, the gathering was organized illegally in the Eure, still bringing together 30,000 participants. However, after the festivities, a total of 27 soundsystems were seized for a period of 5 months. Only one collective was designated as responsible by the authorities, fined nearly €55,000, three years after the events.

2010-2017: Developments and Highlights In 2013, the teknival celebrated its 20th anniversary with the Twentytek, organized at the Cambrai-Epinoy air base. The Kraken Krew soundsystems coalition was born during this edition, while the Spiral Tribe met exceptionally for the occasion, around a quadriphony scene.

2016: An Act of Protest In 2016

The movement made a bold decision by declaring itself the 23rd teknival illegal, in protest. Despite the participation of only 30,000 people in soundsystems for this edition, the following year was marked by an enthusiastic and passionate response, with double the number of participants responding to the call. This signaled a revival of enthusiasm for the free party movement.

2018-2020: New Directions

After an illegal edition in 2018, the teknival returned to Marigny for the fourth time, becoming the place that hosted the most teknivals. In 2019, the event took a different turn. Faced with the repression of the State with prefectural decrees limiting the circulation of vehicles carrying sound equipment, the Frenchtek 26 was established in Creuse on the Millevaches plateau. Between 5,000 and 10,000 participants braved the snow to dance for three days, marking an unprecedented event in the history of the movement.

https://www.etilik-wear.com/blogs/le-magazine/les-teknivals-du-1er-mai-les-plus-memorables-de-lhistoire

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LFI’s Mathilde Panot summoned by police over alleged ‘apology of terrorism’

The head of  La France Insoumise Mathilde Panot, one of the leaders of La France Insoumise Party (LFI), was summoned by the police as part of an investigation into allegations of “apology of terrorism”

Mathilde Panot, one of the leaders of La France Insoumise Party (LFI), was summoned by the police for allegedly engaging in “apology of terrorism”.

The move on April 23 forms part of an ongoing investigation opened following a press release by the LFI published on October 7, the day of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel.

Following that, LFI was accused of justifying the Hamas atrocities by denouncing the Islamist movement and Israeli colonisation at the same time.

Panot responded to the police action, saying: “We will not be silent. No summons, no intimidation of any kind will prevent us from protesting against the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people.”

She also cautioned against what she described as the “serious misuse of the justice system to suppress political expression”.

This, Panot added, followed “a long series of other attempts to silence voices in favour of peace”.

She also referenced the recent cancellation of a conference featuring the LFI’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon and its European Parliament candidate Rima Hassan at the University of Lille by French authorities.

At the time, the event was stopped by authorities citing concerns over public safety concerns, sparking a broader discussion on freedom of speech in France.

Manon Aubry, a prominent LFI figure and MEP, echoed Panot’s sentiments, expressing her worries regarding the state of French democracy.

“Our democracy is hurtling towards authoritarianism at an alarming pace,” she said.

“We must all react.”

Panot is not the first hard-left politician to be summoned for “apology of terrorism”; Hassan was also called in a few days ago by the police for the same reason.

The French hard-left La France Insoumise Party has been accused of anti-Semitism after a poster for an upcoming conference, during which its leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon is due to speak, depicted a logo portraying the extinction of Israel.

— Brussels Signal

Mélenchon has responded publicly to the developments, criticising what he saw as politically motivated complaints against LFI.

“Just as the bans on conferences and convictions of trade unionists have been carried out without too much solidarity, the far-right is advancing,” he said.

Mélenchon accused “pro-Netanyahu associations” of being behind the complaints, reigniting allegations of anti-Semitism within the French Left.

Brussel signal

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Le journal du peintre

Les tableaux du peintre

Painting news project

Twitter

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Le journal du peintre

Les tableaux du peintre

Painting news project

Twitter

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

—

–

–

–

–

Le journal du peintre

Les tableaux du peintre

Painting news project

Twitter

–

–

–

–

—

–

–

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