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.
On Feb 27, the frigate Hessen became the first German warship since 1945 to fire in anger as it engaged three unidentified drones it believed posed an immediate threat to Red Sea shipping.
The first salvo of two SM-2 interceptor missiles missed as a fortunate consequence of what German officials later said was human error – the first drone targeted, which the Germans said failed to transmit a standard identification signal, turned out to be a US MQ-9 Reaper operating separately to the US-led “Prosperity Guardian” shipping protection mission.
The next shots, however, successfully brought down two Iranian-made drones almost certainly operated by Houthi fighters in nearby Yemen who have wreaked havoc on international shipping routes in recent months.
Four days later, the Italian frigate Duilio brought down a similar unmanned aerial vehicle which officials said had approached the ship – all a reminder that Europe is being dragged ever deeper into a growing conflict that it is now racing to adapt to.
Last month, the European Union agreed to send its own task force to the Red Sea to protect shipping against drone missile strikes, a force that will work parallel to the US mission.
But it is the conflict in Ukraine, and the realisation that regardless of whether Donald Trump returns to the White House, the United States is refocusing on Asia and therefore less on Europe, that are truly forcing change.
The last few weeks have shown European leaders grappling with that new reality amid increasingly public rows over how the continent can best handle Ukraine, avoid catastrophic war and coordinate its own defence without always having to turn to the United States.
Since the founding of NATO in 1949, European nations have based their defence on a partnership with Washington – and have often struggled to find common ground beyond that, with talk of a joint European army unravelling several times.
The last two weeks have seen another spike in often highly public disagreements, particularly between Berlin and Paris.
On the surface, arguments tend to be over specific policies or statements – such as French President Emmanuel Macron’s suggestion European nations should not rule out sending combat troops to Ukraine, or whether Berlin should provide Taurus cruise missiles to Kyiv.
More broadly, however, they represent a resumption of a long-predictable tussle for control of European defence policy between Germany and France, one that may determine how the continent is defended in the coming decades.
The mounting violence in the Red Sea is now clearly part of that growing challenge. So far, US Navy vessels – alongside two British counterparts and one French warship – have shot down the vast majority of incoming drones and missiles. But there are mounting concerns in Washington that this is exhausting US stockpiles.
Ultimately, most of the ships passing through the Red Sea are en route to Europe, and it appears inevitable European nations will need to step up their defence despite the mounting risk.
Ukraine, however, is now proving a much more dramatic driver. With US military supplies to Ukraine blocked in Congress, Kyiv is much more dependent on Europe for weapons to survive the coming year – and is already complaining that EU nations managed to deliver fewer than a third of the million artillery shells they had promised by the end of March.
GERMANY FACES CRITICS
European leaders broadly agree that they must fix that problem fast. The last two weeks, however, have seen highly public rows on how to do so.
Macron’s suggestion of combat troops was roundly rejected by multiple Western nations, most particularly by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whom Macron had mocked for his attempts at the beginning of the war to limit German supplies to sleeping bags and helmets.
By most measures, Berlin has since then chalked out a slot as the leading military supporter of Ukraine in Europe, with think tank the Keil Institute reporting its contribution in the two years from January 2022 at 17.7 billion euros, more than twice Britain’s 7 billion pounds and much more than the 2.6 billion euros reported by France.
But Germany has been repeatedly pilloried for its initial reluctance to send each new tranche of arms, from Leopard tanks to its current refusal to send Taurus cruise missile.
President Joe Biden visited Pennsylvania on Friday to kick off a tour of battleground states and his reelection team will spend $30 million on an ad buy as he moves quickly into the U.S. general election campaign after his feisty State of the Union speech.
Campaign officials who briefed reporters said Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in March will rally Democrats in many of the states where the Nov. 5 election against Republican opponent Donald Trump is likely to be decided.
The 28-year-old painter has shot to the top of the art world thanks to her surging auction prices and her high-profile relationship with her gallerist, Larry Gagosian. Here she discusses her strategy for tuning out the circus that surrounds her—and creating new work that stands on its own.
In the days following his death the tributes to Mike Kelley flooded in from the art press, broadsheets and online alt.rock sites, many proclaiming him the greatest American artist of his generation. That Kelley was a significant figure is not in doubt, which is part of the problem.
Born in 1954 into a working class family in the suburbs of Detroit, Kelley was one of a number of American visual artists whose aesthetic was formed during the 70s comedown from the failure of the 60s counterculture to actually change anything. Like his fellow art students at Ann Arbor’s University of Michigan with whom he formed the performance/Noise group Destroy All Monsters, he was a blue collar freak rather than a Progressive hippy, and maybe it was the harsh realities in effect on Michigan’s city streets in the wake of civil rights, rapid industrialisation and the 70s economic and spiritual downturns which deepened his cynicism and meant he saw through the facade of the corporate Prog-hippy ideal, sensing how its supine cultural politics actually buttressed the status of middle America and its ruling elites, reinforcing by other means existing hierarchies of class, race, gender, sexuality and aesthetics. As with Frank Zappa’s recordings with The Mothers Of Invention a decade earlier, Destroy All Monsters seemed designed to confront apathetic hippy delusions head on, as much as it was an assault on bourgeois values, goading them from the sidelines via a series of guerilla art pranks.
In 1976 Kelley quit DAM and the boho Ann Arbor freak scene to study at CalArts, where he parlayed all his cynicism and disgust at the way the underground had been co-opted into a branch of Corporate Entertainment USA into an art world career which bowdlerised pop culture to such an extent that ironically (a double irony here) made it palatable to America’s cultural elite.
Art critics, museum curators, private gallerists and major institutions all promoted Kelley’s work for the way they thought it anatomised (by dissecting and rewiring pop cultural detritus) the uptight schizophrenia that reigned in America’s public, private and domestic spheres (an aesthetic which reinforced their own delusions of panoptican superiority because in their eyes it articulated a process which they thought they were above and beyond). That’s the macro view. At a much lower level, he was a symbol for all that could, and usually does, go wrong whenever the visual art world moves in on rock ‘n’ roll.
Kelley’s background may have been mid-West working class but his sensibilities became those of a sardonic West Coast conceptual artist. The first rule of conceptual art is that it should be universally understood, that everyone should be in on the joke. This imperative was recognised by both Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, conceptual art pioneers who also produced its two greatest works (perhaps its only great works), Fountain and 4’33”. As with Duchamp, Kelley’s art was full of references to vernacular culture, was in fact constructed entirely from them. He dissed Duchamp’s readymades for being ‘obscure’ relative to his own art of cultural appropriation and regurgitation. But despite this assertion, compared to Duchamp’s subversive celebrations of materials which to the art world of his time were abject and abhorrent, Kelley’s art constituted a series of bitter in-jokes and twisted asides executed on a grand scale, an aesthetic which made personal disjecta out of pop culture tropes in a way that would appeal directly to the class-based prejudices of detached art world snobs, who bought up the work in their droves.
Kelley’s admirers have claimed many things for his vast body of work, the most grandiose being that it performed a total psychoanalysis of the state of the human condition, its inner space and exterior landscapes, at the close of the American century. But ultimately it was too solipsistic to perform any function other than offering an explicit tour through the conflicted realms inside Kelley’s own head. Kelley had been abused by his father as a child, was an outsider lower class artist operating in an elitist establishment milieu, and he mistook the trauma and conflicts of his own personal experience for universal truths, resulting in an art which was like a perverted form of sexual and identity politics for sociopathic sick fucks (as in the entertainment industry, the more edgy and sensational art gets, the more the art establishment likes it, because it gives them something they can package and sell). It was no accident that Kelley became part of the cultural capital of Los Angeles, the most solipsistic and sick city on the planet, as well as one whose stratified topographies most thoroughly embodied and enacted the corrosive reality of the American dream that he was now living.
Destroy All Monsters proclaimed themselves ‘anti-rock’, which the cultural elite correctly interpreted as ‘pro-art’. Barely known during its mid-70s incarnation, the group has cast a long shadow across the last three decades of DIY underground rock, and has been indirectly instrumental in the process of its embourgeoisement, abetting the migration of its milieu from the basements and the clubs to artists’ studios and private gallery spaces. A conceptualised art school project, rather than a vernacular rock ‘n’ roll unit, DAM spewed out enough knowing references to cool underground scenes (avant garde jazz, post-Cagean experimental music, alternative theatre) to reassure the same freaks who had earlier mistook Zappa for a radical, because he namechecked Varèse and Eric Dolphy, of their superior taste to both the lumpen proles who still went out and partied hard with vernacular forms like black R&B, and the hippies, or heads, who were still zoning out to The Grateful Dead’s inert/inept appropriations of American folk musics. (Mid-70s heads were hippy intellectuals who had temporarily dropped out from the bourgeois culture they were born into with impunity because they knew they would eventually be able to return to it in order to fulfill their class destiny. Freaks were alienated lower class autodidacts who hated the vernacular culture they in turn were born into – the culture of their parents, essentially – but rather than attempting to change that culture from the inside à la punk, they denied class realities by enacting the illusion of social mobility. They identified with the likes of Kelley and Zappa for the same reason the cultural elites eventually bought into them, because the work presented a grotesque parody of the vernacular culture they hated, and then put it on a pedestal marked ‘art’.)
In that original incarnation, DAM dished up self-consciously inept rock noise designed to épater the very same bourgeoisie that would later commission and patronise Kelley’s massive installation works. It satirised the Total Rock ‘N’ Roll Theatre of Iggy Pop and The Stooges to such an extent that it made Alice Cooper’s cartoon take on the same material look like a profound expansion of it.
Where The Stooges presented America’s ruling elite with a defiant ‘fuck you!’ symbol of the trailer trash they so feared (because it confronted them with the reality their mendacious dealings made inevitable), Kelley and DAM reassured it that all was well with the world by offering them a curated version of revolutionary working class culture that one day they might safely invite into their white-walled galleries and empty loft spaces. The group rechannelled The Stooges’s raw power, via an ironic restaging of the feral energies of Dada and Fluxus, so it became a trash commodity the cultural wing of the ruling elite could accept and get behind, because they could contain and sell it.
It is for this reason that Kelley’s art has had the most ruinous effect on rock ‘n’ roll since Colonel Tom Parker first dressed Elvis up in a monkey suit.
DAM emerged at the same time as the first wave of New York punks, whose music expanded on the earlier breakthroughs of The Velvet Underground, Suicide and The New York Dolls, not to mention Johnny Burnette, Bo Diddley and The Shangri-Las. But Kelley rejected punk as being too ‘retro’, not realising it was part of a vital and ongoing continuum, the ‘changing same’ (to borrow Amiri Baraka’s phrase) of vernacular experimentalism and resistance that fought the system from the inside and on its own terms, rather than trying to provoke it from the sidelines via a series of impotent provocations. For a savvy and ambitious art school educated freak like Kelley, punk was simultaneously too volatile and sure of itself to be of any interest; as raw material it was too conscious, too historically right and exact to be moulded and manipulated to serve the kind of mutable aesthetic he wanted to pursue. But when the grass roots agitprop of punk gave way to the metropolitan radical chic of No Wave (just compare the existential rage of Patti Smith and Richard Hell to the solipsistic nihilism of Lydia Lunch and James Chance) the die was cast. The group that most fully absorbed Kelley’s and DAM’s sardonic sensibilities, then regurgitated them as PoMo gestures, started out as a No Wave tribute band, and they would go on to become the most influential outfit in alt.rock. The moment Sonic Youth signed to Blast First was the moment rock ‘n’ roll’s vanguard became fully annexed to a wing of the art world.
Kelley objected to other people’s subjective critical interpretations of his work so much that he attempted to control the debate around it by writing his own essays and critiques of it. Without irony he claimed this process was actually intended to advance discussion, and while Kelley was ferociously intelligent and a highly articulate writer, even for a conceptual artist, and knew his art history and critical theory as well as his pop culture, this was a classic piece of obfuscation. Subjective critical interpretations are the only ones human beings are able to make, and as Duchamp understood, it is via this process that art becomes universal, by bringing individual expression into dynamic contact with external reality. SY likewise shut down the discourse that had historically existed in rock ‘n’ roll by conceptualising the music in advance, rendering any further interpretation or discussion mute and moot.
Celebrated in the cosy ghettos of mid-80s indie thanks to their Blast First releases, SY only made a decent record after they signed to a major (one run by that ultimate corporate hippy-turned-head David Geffen). Suddenly, these Generation X pop artists were confronted with both the blue collar existentialism of Grunge, and the reality of the tensions that had historically animated vernacular culture’s relationship with Capital (thus replicating the experience of The Stooges before them, who, as soon as they signed to Elektra, sussed that their original Psychedelic Stooges incarnation, a Cage/Coltrane inspired Noise unit that was like a proto-DAM, was indulgent playing-to-the-plukes that would never change anything). Goo, SY’s first record for Geffen, immediately put a rocket under the oblique strategies of those Blast First albums, a niche UK indie with art world pretensions which instilled a smug slackness in the American groups that recorded for it and which they in turn mistook for punk rock insouciance. Suddenly, the songs were tauter, leaner, punchier, the sound more vivid, the arrangements more inventively compact, the delivery more direct and urgent. The exceptions were the contributions of Kim Gordon, a former conceptual artist herself and the SY member whose sensibility was most oriented towards the visual art world, as well as the cover, which was basically a Mike Kelley tribute trash-pop artwork.
Of course, SY’s fans regarded their Geffen records as sell outs, and to some extent they were, though not in the sense that the fans thought. Goo and Dirty (hyper-ironically packaged in an actual Mike Kelley artwork this time) animated SY music by injecting some of the vernacular discipline and shake appeal The Stooges had developed on Funhouse (and which they had learned from listening to James Brown), but the fans had originally embraced the group precisely because it offered them a simulacrum of rock ‘n’ roll, a Minstrelsy-like parody which allowed them to edge close to a distorted version of vernacular culture but whose self-conscious detachment was guaranteed to protect them from the vulgar stench of the real deal. The fact that SY now seemed to be playing rock ‘n’ roll at its own game was just too much for the fans who yearned for the detached longueurs of Daydream Nation.
(As Eric Lott explained in Love And Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy And The American Working Class, Minstrelsy’s practitioners enacted a double insult, embracing and appropriating a vernacular culture they loved but were distinct from then lampooning it by projecting a grotesque cartoon version of it. A similar process is in play right now in the realms of hipster House, many of whose practitioners came up through America’s DAM-via-SY-educated DIY underground.)
During the Geffen years, to placate the fans and simultaneously court the attentions of the art elite with their chic-trash pop avant eclecticism, Kelley’s and DAM’s baleful influence persisted in the multiple side projects undertaken by SY’s individual members, or which they issued on their own boutique label (whose releases were like a catalogue of historical avant garde gestures, all correctly labelled, framed and displayed, from New York School composition to structuralist film soundtracks), all of which paralleled the sardonic tone of SY’s most Kelley-like project, The Whitey Album. Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label even curated a three CD box set of DAM material. In fact SY were now functioning like fully fledged art curators, rather than a vernacular rock ‘n’ roll outfit which produced work out of sheer necessity, assembling records as art projects and putting them on display as if they were items in a SoHo gallery space. And of course, eventually that is what they would become, touring the world as part of Sensation Fix, the multimedia retrospective that was effectively a restaging of the Poetics Project, the mid-90s international touring installation which ‘represented’ Kelley’s ‘experience’ of being in a band, ie The Poetics, which he had formed at CalArts with Tony Oursler for the express purpose of generating new material for his work as a visual artist. Here the ironies twist around each other as if they were strapped to a Moebius strip: Sensation Fix was SY’s most explict homage to Kelley’s influence, and the ultimate expression of its art world pretensions; The Poetics were an SY-influenced pop art project, in which rock ‘n’ roll was subordinated to a conceptual art agenda, and the Poetics Project showed SY themselves exactly what they had to do in order to gain real art world credibility.
Compounding the example and affect of the Poetics Project, Sensation Fix once and for all pinned rock ‘n’ roll’s primal scream, its raw vernacular power, under glass for detached contemplation by the same metropolitan art tourists who meandered numb through the world’s major cultural institutions, staring blankly at the now inert relics of earlier avant garde movements with the same level of engagement they would display as they shopped for ‘vintage’ rock ‘n’ roll paraphernalia in the local branch of Urban Outfitters.
(The semiotic similarity between the title of that SY show and that of the exhibiton which launched the careers of a generation of solipsistic Brit Artists was surely no coincidence, and showed how SY had an insider’s knowledge of the art world’s junkie-like need for increasingly sensational, ie empty, pop cult gestures. And in yet another irony, the Poetics Project had initially been installed at Documenta, the international art show that would later make cultural capital out of the emerging ‘politicised’ art of globalisation and post-colonial theory, ie the very stuff that was supposed to sweep aside solipsistic Western-centric pop art but which merely restocked the world’s art fairs with new goods for sale.)
Mike Kelley’s sudden death is a tragedy for his colleagues and friends. His body of work is formidable, but his influence on the rock ‘n’ roll of the last 25 years via his impact on one of its most influential groups remains a pernicious one. Effectively, it helped to kill off rock ‘n’ roll as a vital force, compounding its cultural institutionalisation and social isolation. The only saving grace here is that this process paved the way for the emergence of other, less clubbable modes of opposition, hiphop, Jungle, Grime, to provide the context for vernacular culture’s most dynamic future moments of resistance to elitist hierarchies.
No one should doubt Mike Kelley’s sincerity. He wanted his art to expose and capsize established and oppressive value systems, to upend prevailing taxonomies and systems of classification, but ultimately, and just like the corporate hippies he hated back in the mid-70s, it ended up merely reinforcing them, by feeding the prejudices and sick appetites and desires of the privileged elite he had became a part of. Mike Kelley was not stupid nor complacent, and unlike his legions of laissez faire acolytes, couldn’t settle for being so co-opted, or for making the increasingly empty gestures that inevitably go hand in glove with an international art world career. And that is the lesson here, as well as the real tragedy.
Robert Carlton Breer (September 30, 1926 – August 11, 2011) was an American experimental filmmaker, painter, and sculptor.
Son of an inventor and automotive engineer, Breer is known for experimentation with a range of film and animation techniques. Breer was drawn to film through painting in the early 1950s while living in Paris. His interest in geometric abstraction is evident in his first films, which explored the role of movement in the understanding of form and space. He also created kinetic sculptures, which he called ‘floats’ in two separate periods of his career.
Breer has always been fascinated by the mechanics of film. Perhaps his father’s fascination with 3-D inspired Breer to tinker with early mechanical cinematic devices. His father was an engineer and designer of the legendary Chrysler Airflow automobile in 1934 and built a 3-D camera to film all the family vacations. After studying engineering at Stanford, Breer changed his focus toward hand crafted arts and began experimenting with flip books. These animations, done on ordinary 4″ by 6″ file cards have become the standard for all of Breer’s work, even to this day.
Like many of his generation, Breer’s early work was influenced by the various European modern art movements of the early 20th century, ranging from the abstract forms of the Russian Constructivists and the structuralist formulas of the Bauhaus, to the nonsensible universe of the Dadaists. Through his association with the Denise René Gallery, which specialized in geometric art, he saw the abstract films of such pioneers as Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Walter Ruttman and Fernand Léger. Breer acknowledges his respect for this purist, “cubist” cinema, which uses geometric shapes moving in time and space. In 1955, he helped organize and exhibited in a show in Paris entitled “Le Mouvement” (The Movement), which paved the way for new cinema aesthetics. During this period, Breer also met the poet Alan Ginsberg and introduced him to his film Recreation (1956), which made use of frame-by-frame experiments in a non-narrative structure. Although Breer disdains being labeled a beatnik, the film does capture some aspects of beat poetry and music.
When Breer returned to the United States in the late 1950s, the American avant-garde was thriving and films by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka and Maria Menken were creating a new visionary movement. Breer found kindred spirits within the New York experimental scene. As Pop Art emerged as a phenomenon in the 1960s, Breer befriended Claes Oldenburg and others. He worked on the TV show, David Brinkley’s Journal, filming pieces on art shows in Europe; at the same time, he made his debut documentary on the sculptor Jean Tinguely in 1961, Homage to Tinguely. Screened at the Museum of Modern Art, it reflects Breer’s interest in mechanical forms and the fine art of moving sculpture; techniques he used in his work, as his own kinetic sculpture was sparked by Tinguely’s keen interest in mechanical gadgets, kinetic movement and abstract forms.
Breer was influenced by the new performance art and “happenings” making waves in the avant-garde of Europe and New York. He worked briefly with Claes Oldenburg and his performance pieces resulting in a 13 minute film, Pat’s Birthday (1962). Breer also befriended artists like Nam June Paik, Charlotte Mormon and others exposed to the new trends in multimedia events.
While he was working on the film Fist Fight, he met Stockhausen, then working in Cologne on Originale, a performance piece. The composer’s work soon came into vogue in American circles and he was asked to perform his piece in New York’s Judson Hall in 1964. Breer presented Fist Fight as part of this performance, making the film a visual event in its own right.
Always whimsical, Breer soon developed a line technique related to the free form work of Swiss painter Paul Klee. Such short narrative pieces as A Man with his Dog Out for Air (1958) and Inner and Outer Space (1960) use the dynamics of drawing and line to capture the essence of humor and motion. Time and time again, he relies on the roots of simple techniques of pencils or 4 x 6 cards for inspiration. While Breer rarely uses conventional storytelling techniques, these films have a sense of the quick movements of a Tex Avery cartoon and the wit of an electric comic strip.
Historical Perspectives Breer continued to search for historical perspectives in his work and discovered the color theories of Chevreul and Rood. He also began a series of minimalist pieces based on number series, which were nonfigurative and based on geometry and formal issues. 66, 69 and 70 rely on formalist images from his early research into color paintings.
The 1970s brought Breer into a more commercial world of animation and he worked for the Children’s Television Workshop in 1971 doing animation for The Electric Company. His popular Gulls and Buoys relates back both to the poetry of William Carlos Williams and the early rotoscoping techniques devised by Max Fleischer back in 1916. Breer explored the latter method in order to give a live-action sense to the animated form. Disney and other commercial studios still use this method to animate reality-based scenes. With his new interest in technology, Breer was invited to Japan with other artists to work on the Pepsi Pavilion, making a set of mobile sculptures. While in Japan, he made Fuji, again using rotoscoping combined with Japanese textural imagery.
Returning to the United States, for his next work, LMNO (1978), he once again sought out historical references. A homage to one of the fathers of animation, Émile Cohl, it uses a simple French policeman as a main character. Cohl became famous for his Fantoche stick figure, which predated Mickey by 20 years. Using the simple technique of 4 x 6 index cards, this film used every imaginable technique from spray paint to pencils. His next film, TZ, continues this line of energetic experiments and is a portrait of his new living space then near the Tappan Zee bridge, in New York’s Hudson River Valley. Breer often uses domestic imagery in his work, incorporating objects surrounding the artist to fantasy sequences using Polaroid photographs reworked with erasable marker pens. The compositions, as always on 4 x 6 index cards, are enhanced by kitchen clatter in a free stream of conscious
Breer’s work continued his experiments with various techniques and materials with Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons (1980), which again includes live-action and line techniques.
Raising a family throughout the 1980s, Breer began to work with what he considers “children’s animation,” resulting in A Frog on a Swing(1988), which is dedicated to his daughter. He also experimented with associative spontaneity in Trial Balloons, a metaphor for anything experimental.
In recent years, Breer continued to make one film per year. His Sparkill Ave! (1993) is a homey study on his new neighborhood using hundreds of still photographs, combined with index card drawings. As always, he prefers animation “close to home.”
Today, Breer continues exploring animated forms while teaching animation at Cooper Union in New York City. When asked about his current work, he says that he still relies on the history of cinema and early “gadgets” as the source of his inspiration. His most recent work Now You See It (1996), now on exhibit at the American Museum of the Moving Image, in New York, uses a two sided panel which spins into an animated film much like a Thaumatrope, the first cinematic device that used persistence of vision back in 1826. Like two slides flipping back and forth, it is a continuous animation based on his explorations into the devices of cinema’s early history (and prehistory), which dazzled audiences by creating visual kinesis.
At the heart of his work is the imagination of the artist mixed with the inquisitive mind of the mad scientist, delving into lost archives of cinema to revive forgotten art forms and giving them new life for generations to come. This is the secret to Breer’s unique world.
By Jackie Leger : Santa Monica-based documentary filmmaker interested in the roots of American experimental film.
The Biden administration is responding to drone attacks by an Iran-backed militia that killed three U.S. soldiers. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a coalition of Iran-linked groups, claimed responsibility for the drone attack.
The United States military has launched dozens of airstrikes against targets in Syria and Iraq in the first retaliation for a drone attack that killed three soldiers at a remote US base in Jordan.
“US Central Command (CENTCOM) forces conducted airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force and affiliated militia groups,” CENTCOM said in a statement on Friday.
“US military forces struck more than 85 targets, with numerous aircraft to include long-range bombers flown from United States. The airstrikes employed more than 125 precision munitions,” it added.
CENTCOM said the facilities that were struck included command and control operations centres, intelligence centres, weapons storage sites and logistics and munition supply chain facilities of groups linked to attacks against US forces.
“The US had said since the moment that attack happened that there would be a military response and US officials like Joe Biden and Lloyd Austin said the response would come in multiple fashions. So this could very well be the first phase, but those retaliatory US airstrikes have now begun,” said Al Jazeera’s Rosiland Jordan, reporting from the Pentagon.
“This is the first step, I don’t think that it will be the last one,” she added.
President Biden and other top US leaders have been warning for days that the US would strike back, and they made it clear that it wouldn’t be just one hit, but would be a “tiered response” over time.
Kenneth Eugene Smith, convicted for a murder-for-hire committed in 1988, executed in the U.S. state of Alabama by asphyxiation using pure nitrogen, poses for an undated booking photo at Holman Prison in Atmore, Alabama, U.S. Alabama Department of Corrections
Alabama carried out the first known judicial execution of a prisoner using asphyxiation with nitrogen gas, a closely watched new method the state hopes to advance as a simpler alternative to lethal injections.
Smith, 58, was executed on Thursday 25th January 2024, and died from nitrogen hypoxia at 8.25pm CT, the state’s Republican Governor Kay Ivey confirmed.
Kenneth Smith, convicted of a 1988 murder-for-hire, is a rare prisoner who has already survived one execution attempt. In November 2022, Alabama officials aborted his execution by lethal injection after struggling for hours to insert an intravenous line’s needle in his body.
Under the new protocol, which was announced in a heavily redacted form in September, officials will restrain Smith in a gurney and strap a commercial industrial-safety respirator mask to his face. A canister of pure nitrogen will be attached to the mask in a process intended to deprive him of inhaling oxygen.
Alabama has called it the “the most painless and humane method of execution known to man,” and says he should lose consciousness within a minute or two, and die soon after.
Opponents of capital punishment, including United Nations human-rights experts, have said the method amounts to experimenting on humans and could merely injure him without killing him, or lead to a torturous death.
“On March 18, 1988, 45-year-old Elizabeth Sennett’s life was brutally taken from her by Kenneth Eugene Smith. After more than 30 years and attempt after attempt to game the system, Mr. Smith has answered for his horrendous crimes,” Ms Ivey said in a written statement.
“The execution was lawfully carried out by nitrogen hypoxia, the method previously requested by Mr Smith as an alternative to lethal injection. At long last, Mr. Smith got what he asked for, and this case can finally be put to rest.
“I pray that Elizabeth Sennett’s family can receive closure after all these years dealing with that great loss.”
Media witnesses who saw correctional authorities administer the death penalty said the prisoner’s final words included, “Tonight Alabama causes humanity to take a step backwards… Thank you for supporting me. Love you all.
“I’m leaving with love, peace and light.” As officials began to administer the gas, Smith turned to his family and signed “I love you.” The witnesses reported seeing Smith shaking and writhing. The curtains to the execution closed at 8.15pm.
In the weeks leading up to his execution, his attorneys tried several last-ditch attempts to spare his life, including filing petitions with the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals and the US Supreme Court.
Nearly an hour after Smith’s scheduled execution time of 6pm, the Supreme Court issued its final decision in the case, allowing Alabama to proceed with the execution. Liberal Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson dissented.
Earlier in the day, Smith’s attorneys appealed a Wednesday federal court ruling.
The attorneys had asked the court to block the execution due to the risks associated with the method. In a separate appeal that also made its way to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, justices were asked whether attempting a second execution on Smith would constitute “cruel and unusual punishments” under the Eighth and 14th Amendments of the US Constitution.
Both courts decided against intervening the day before Smith was put to death. An order issued by the Supreme Court on Wednesday did not include additional comments or dissenting opinions.
But in Thursday’s order, Justice Sotomayor, who wrote a dissenting opinion, said she viewed the case similarly to Judge Jill Pryor, who dissented in the federal court ruling on Wednesday. In that decision, Judge Pryor wrote the execution could cost “Mr Smith’s human dignity, and ours.”
Justice Sotomayor went further to say she would stop Smith from being put to death using the experimental method.
“While I would grant the petition for a writ of certiorari and summarily reverse the Eleventh Circuit’s order affirming the denial of Smith’s preliminary-injunction motion, at a minimum, I would grant Smith’s request for a stay of execution,” she wrote.
Justice Sotomayor’s opinion stemmed from a federal court ruling issued by US District Judge Austin Huffaker weeks before Smith was put to death. He previously ruled that Smith’s concerns did not merit a stay of execution.
“Smith is not guaranteed a painless death,” Judge Huffaker wrote. “On this record, Smith has not shown and the court cannot conclude, the Protocol inflicts both cruel and unusual punishment rendering it constitutionally infirm under the prevailing legal framework.”
Earlier this month, a group of United Nations experts publicly stated they were alarmed at the thought of the state using the new method, which was the first time someone was put to death with gas in the US since 1999.
“We are concerned that nitrogen hypoxia would result in a painful and humiliating death,” the organisation said, citing how Alabama’s heavily redacted protocol does not call for prisoners to be sedated beforehand.
Another group of experts, the American Veterinary Medical Association, does not condone the use of certain gases to euthanise specific mammals because they create an “anoxic environment that is distressing for some species.”
Oklahoma first pioneered the idea of nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method after drugs for lethal injections became increasingly difficult to find. Alabama and Mississippi then followed suit and passed legislation allowing for the method’s use. However, Alabama became the first state to put nitrogen hypoxia into practice.
In 1988 Smith was convicted of murdering Ms Sennett, a 45-year-old pastor’s wife. He was part of a three-person murder-for-hire team that orchestrated the crime, believed to be at the direction of her husband, Charles Sennett, who’d sunk deep into debt, wanted to collect on her life insurance policy and was having an extramarital affair.
Mr Sennett died by suicide days after the murder once officials zeroed in on him as the main suspect.
Based on court documents, the husband recruited Billy Gray Williams to see the murder through. Williams then recruited John Forest Parker and Smith, who were each paid $1,000 to commit the crime on 18 March 1988.
According to a coroner’s report, Ms Sennett was stabbed “eight times in the chest and once on each side of the neck, and had suffered numerous abrasions and cuts. It’s believed that Forest Parker was the one to fatally stab the woman. He was executed via lethal injection in 2010, while Williams was sentenced to life in prison without parole and died in 2020.
Forest Parker and Smith encountered Sennett alone at home and said that her husband permitted them to inspect her land for hunting purposes. She called her husband to confirm and then let the men into her residence.
At Smith’s first trial in 1989, the jury recommended a death sentence by a vote of 10 to 2. However, the conviction was overturned in 1992 on grounds that the state purposely kept jurors from serving on the trial based on their race.
During the second trial, which took place in 1996 in Jefferson County, the jury voted 11 to 1 for life in prison without parole. That decision was overridden by Colbert County Circuit Judge Pride Tompkins, who subsequently condemned him to death by electrocution.
Up until 2017 Alabama judges could override a jury’s recommendation in favour of the death penalty.
Speaking to a reporter years later, Judge Tompkins said he believed Smith deserved the death penalty due to the nature of the crime. “Some people serving on juries, especially on these cases, have never been in court before and they don’t want the responsibility to sentence someone to death,” he told The Gadsden Times.
Charles Sennett Jr, the son of Ms Sennett, told WAAY-TV days before Smith was put to death that he’d been waiting over 35 years to see his mother’s killer executed.
A well-known Chinese dissident writer who has been frequently threatened with imprisonment says harassment has forced him to leave for the US, possibly for good.
China has become increasingly resolute in quashing critical voices, apparently fearful they could spark protests similar to those that unseated autocrats in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya last year. The crackdown has alarmed activists and outspoken intellectuals, with some resorting to exile.
The departure of Yu Jie comes as a prominent Chinese human rights activist who was released from prison last year said police seized two of his computers and warned him to tone down his activism and online comments or face detention.
Yu said late on Thursday he did not intend to return to China for at least a few years. He said he thought the Chinese authorities will not allow him back because he has accused them of torture. He intends to write books on jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo and the Chinese president, Hu Jintao.
He said he was warned by Chinese authorities that if he wrote the books he could be jailed for publishing subversive material and tainting the image of China’s Communist party leaders.
Yu claimed he was detained several times in the last year and beaten so badly that he passed out. He said he was also stopped from meeting friends and denied access to a computer.
“For a writer, being deprived of all freedom to communicate or express oneself is the worst thing that can happen, so I choose to live life in another way. Hopefully, here (in the US) I can have a normal life and at least finish my work,” he said.
Yu helped found the Independent PEN Centre in China, which fights for freedom of expression, and is a Christian who has angered authorities by outspokenly advocating religious freedom. He is also author of China’s Best Actor: Wen Jiabao, a critical appraisal of China’s premier that was published in Hong Kong in 2010 despite police threats that he could be put in prison.
Now in 2024, Yu Jie is a Christian, conservative Trump supporter.
“If Trump wins the first two states, it’s hard to see how he’s not the nominee” Trump supporter
Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley was set to campaign across New Hampshire this weekend in a final push against Republican rival Donald Trump ahead of Tuesday’s nominating contest, as the former U.S. president ramped up his verbal attacks and again targeted her Indian heritage.
Haley, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, has hit back at her former boss following his Iowa caucuses victory last Monday in a bid to thwart his momentum and pitch herself as the best alternative to face Democratic President Joe Biden in November’s general election.
New Hampshire boasts a more moderate brand of Republicanism with a semi-open primary that can attract more centrist voters, who may be turned off by Trump’s four criminal cases, authoritarian language and efforts to overturn his 2020 re-election loss.
One of two remaining candidates challenging Trump for the Republican nomination, Haley needs a strong showing after placing third narrowly behind Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as Trump handily won in Iowa, the first stop in the state-by-state battle to determine the party’s choice to face Biden.
The second Republican contest could help her build support as a viable alternative to Trump – or close her already-narrow path to the nomination even before reaching South Carolina’s contest next month.
Haley is scheduled to sprint across independent-leaning New Hampshire with three stops ahead of a rally on Saturday and four more events on Sunday and Monday.
Trump also returned to New Hampshire for evening rallies throughout the weekend.
DeSantis, who had largely written off New Hampshire, held a brief last-minute stop on Friday before three events Saturday in South Carolina.
Haley sharpened some barbs against Trump during her final campaign swing through New Hampshire even as she paired them with attacks on Biden and told CNN she would pardon Trump if he is convicted on criminal charges.
On Friday, however, she ruled out serving as his vice presidential running mate as he continued to slam her, including again targeting her given first name on his social media platform. Trump has also amplified false posts questioning her birthright U.S. citizenship.
Haley, the daughter of two immigrants from India, was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa but has long used her middle name Nikki and later took her husband’s surname.
US launches fourth round of strikes on Houthis in Yemen
The US military has fired another wave of missile strikes against Houthi-controlled sites, marking the fourth time in a week that it has directly targeted the group in Yemen.
The strikes were launched from the Red Sea, hitting more than a dozen sites – the officials told the AP news agency – and came after a drone launched from areas controlled by the Houthis hit a US-owned vessel in the Gulf of Aden.
The Houthi-controlled Saba news agency said that the areas targeted were Hodeidah, Taiz, Dhamar, al Bayda and Saada. The media group claimed that UK aircraft were also involved in the strikes but the Guardian was not able to verify those claims.
The US military said that its forces conducted strikes on 14 Houthi missiles that were loaded to be fired from Yemen, and that they presented an imminent threat to merchant vessels and US Navy ships in the region.
Since November, attacks by the Iran-backed Houthi militia on ships in the region have slowed trade between Asia and Europe and alarmed major powers. The Houthis, who control most of Yemen, say they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
Washington officials said they would design financial penalties against the Houthis to minimise harm to Yemen’s 32 million people.
Despite the sanctions and military strikes – including a large-scale operation last Friday carried out by US and British forces that hit more than 60 targets across Yemen – the Houthis are continuing their harassment campaign of ships in the Red Sea.
Houthi leaders have said their attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea will end as soon as the “Israeli aggression” in Gaza stops, and warned that they would view any sanctions by Britain or America as a declaration of war.
Fears of prolonged Red Sea shipping crisis fuel inflation fears, as oil, retail cargo delays rise
Japan’s coast guard said on Tuesday it had been informed that the trajectory of the rocket would take it in the direction of the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea. If carried out, it would probably mark a third attempt by the nuclear-armed state this year to put a spy satellite into orbit.
The launch would be the first since North Korean leader Kim Jong-un made a rare trip abroad in September and toured Russia’s most modern space launch centre, where President Vladimir Putin promised to help Pyongyang build satellites.
In response to Tuesday’s announcement, Kishida said his country’s defence systems, including the Aegis destroyers and PAC-3 air defence missiles, stood ready in case any “unexpected situation” arose.
“Even if the purpose is to launch a satellite, using ballistic missile technology is a violation of a series of UN security council resolutions,” Kishida told reporters. “It is also a matter that greatly affects national security.“
Japan will work with the US, South Korea and others to “strongly urge” North Korea not to go ahead with the launch, Kishida said.
North Korea had attempted to launch what it called spy satellites twice earlier this year but failed, and South Korean officials have said in recent days that it appeared set to try again soon.
The secretive country has notified Japan, as the coordinating authority for the International Maritime Organization for those waters, of its plans all three times.
North Korea’s notice also follows its denouncement on Monday of the potential US sale of hundreds of missiles to Japan and South Korea, calling it a dangerous act that raises tension in the region and brings a new arms race.
The launch, if carried out, would probably come just before South Korea’s own plan to launch its first reconnaissance satellite with aid from the US on 30 November by a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket from the US military’s Vandenberg base.
Catharine Alice MacKinnon (born October 7, 1946) is an American feminist legal scholar, activist, and author. She is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, where she has been tenured since 1990, and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. From 2008 to 2012, she was the special gender adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
Catharine A. MacKinnon explores and develops her original theories and practical proposals on sexual politics and law. These discourses, originally delivered as speeches, have been brilliantly woven into a book that retains all the spontaneity and accessibility of a live presentation. MacKinnon offers a unique retrospective on the law of sexual harassment, which she designed and has worked for a decade to establish, and a prospectus on the law of pornography, which she proposes to change in the next ten years. Authentic in voice, sweeping in scope, startling in clarity, urgent, never compromised and often visionary, these discourses advance a new theory of sex inequality and imagine new possibilities for social change.
Through these engaged works on issues such as rape, abortion, athletics, sexual harassment, and pornography, MacKinnon seeks feminism on its own terms, unconstrained by the limits of prior traditions. She argues that viewing gender as a matter of sameness and difference—as virtually all existing theory and law have done—covers up the reality of gender, which is a system of social hierarchy, an imposed inequality of power. She reveals a political system of male dominance and female subordination that sexualizes power for men and powerlessness for women. She analyzes the failure of organized feminism, particularly legal feminism, to alter this condition, exposing the way male supremacy gives women a survival stake in the system that destroys them.
Claudia Goldin Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
This year’s Laureate in the Economic Sciences, Claudia Goldin, provided the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market participation through the centuries. Her research reveals the causes of change, as well as the main sources of the remaining gender gap.
Goldin, who in 1990 became the first woman to be tenured at Harvard’s economics department, is only the third woman to win the Nobel economics prize, and the first to win it by herself rather than sharing it.
She hailed the decision as “an award for big ideas and for long-term change.”
“There are still large differences between women and men in terms of what they do, how they’re remunerated and so on,” Goldin told Reuters at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “And the question is, why is this the case? And that’s what the work is about.”
Goldin’s 1990 book “Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women” was a hugely influential examination of the roots of wage inequality over 200 years of history.
She has followed up with studies on the impact of the contraceptive pill on women’s career and marriage decisions, women’s surnames after marriage as a social indicator and the reasons why women are now the majority of undergraduates.
She said at a press conference at Harvard that women had throughout history often been “hidden from view and uncompensated” for doing the same labour that men were paid for.
“They have over time left that arena of home or family farm or family business and moved to the broader arena of market production,” she said. “They’ve become workers, they’ve begun earning a living for themselves and for their families. Their lives have greatly changed, but the labour market and the policies of governments are often slower to respond.”
Randi Hjalmarsson, a member of the Economic Prize committee, said Goldin’s discoveries “have vast societal implications.”
Hjalmarsson quoted Goldin’s own words: “By finally understanding the problem and calling it by the right name, we will be able to pave a better route forward.”
In a recording posted on the Nobel website, Goldin said the first thing she did on hearing she had won was to tell her husband, who asked her what he could do.
“I told him to take the dog out and make some tea and that I had to prepare for a press conference,” Goldin said.
Occupy Wall Street (OWS), extended protest against economic inequality and the corruption of corporate law that occurred from September 17 to November 15, 2011, centred in New York City. The demonstration marked the beginning of a new focus on wealth disparity in American politics.
New York itself played a key role in this protest, as it represented both the center for economic prosperity in the United States, but also a constant reminder of the financial inequality inherent within the city itself.
The protest was organized by members of Adbusters, a Canadian anti-consumerist publication, including founder Kalle Lasn and editor Micah White. Adbusters staff coordinated the time, place and marketing of the event. White sent out the first #OccupyWallStreet tweet which would be seen by thousands of people following the movement online. The occupy hashtag is largely responsible for the movement’s exposureand helped make it among the largest activist efforts to go viral on social media and spread around the world.
Organizers first planned to meet at Wall Street’s Charging Bull Statue and One Chase Plaza, but police erected barricades at both city-owned parks before the event on September 17. The nearby Zuccotti Park was left untouched; over the course of the next two months, thousands would come to occupy it. On November 15, 2011, members of the NYPD forcibly removed the protestors and arrested some 200 people. Later efforts to re-occupy the park were met with police resistance.
The terms 99 and 1 percenter, first coined by the Hells Angels motorcycle club, were popularized by the Occupy movement; the first refers to the majority of people living in the United States, and the second represents Wall Street and the wealthiest portion of the population. These terms—and Occupy Wall Street’s social media strategy—would be modeled by movements including #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter.
Thousands of U.S. auto workers stopped making vehicles and went on strike after their leaders couldn’t bridge a giant gap between union demands in contract talks and what Detroit’s three automakers are willing to pay.
DETROIT — Nearly one in 10 of America’s unionized auto workers went on strike Friday to pressure Detroit’s three automakers into raising wages in an era of big profits and as the industry begins a costly transition from gas guzzlers to electric vehicles.
By striking simultaneously at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler owner Stellantis for the first time in its history, the United Auto Workers union is trying to inflict a new kind of pain on the companies and claw back some pay and benefits workers gave up in recent decades.
The strikes are limited for now to three assembly plants: a GM factory in Wentzville, Missouri, a Ford plant in Wayne, Michigan, near Detroit, and a Jeep plant run by Stellantis in Toledo, Ohio.
The workers received support from President Joe Biden, who dispatched aides to Detroit to help resolve the impasse and said the Big 3 automakers should share their “record profits.”
Director William Friedkin, best known for his Oscar-winning “The French Connection” and blockbuster “The Exorcist,” died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 87.
His death was confirmed by Chapman University dean Stephen Galloway, a friend of Friedkin’s wife Sherry Lansing.
His final film, “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” starring Kiefer Sutherland, is set to premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
Along with Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola and Hal Ashby, Friedkin rose to A-list status in the 1970s, part of a new generation of vibrant, risk-taking filmmakers. Combining his experience in television, particularly in documentary film, with a cutting-edge style of editing, Friedkin brought a great deal of energy to the horror and police thriller genres in which he specialized.
“The French Connection” was an incredibly fast-paced and morally ambiguous tale, shot in documentary style and containing one of cinema’s most justifiably famous car chase sequences. “Connection” won several Oscars including best picture, director and actor (Gene Hackman) and became a touchstone for the police genre in films and television for years to come.
After the critical glory of “The French Connection” came 1973’s “The Exorcist,” which grossed an astounding $500 million worldwide and, along with “The Godfather,” initiated the blockbuster era in motion pictures. Adapted from William Peter Blatty’s novel about the demonic possession of a young girl, “The Exorcist” was a heavily stylized thriller, as influential on the horror genre as “Connection” had been with cop thrillers. It brought him a second Oscar nomination as best director.
Friedkin started in the mailroom of the Chicago TV station WGN, where he quickly rose to directing television shows and documentaries. He said he directed about 2,000 TV shows during those early years, including 1962 documentary “The People vs. Paul Crump,” about the rehabilitation of a man on death row. It won him a Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco Film Festival and led him to a job leading the documentary division at WBKB and, subsequently, to a gig directing documentaries for producer David L. Wolper.
In the mid-’60s, he left documentaries behind, hoping to break into feature filmmaking. He directed an episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” before he got his break when producer Steve Broidy hired him to direct the pop music story “Good Times,” starring Sonny and Cher, in 1967.
Its cutting-edge style, like that of the films of contemporary Richard Lester, gave the movie some flash. On the strength of that movie Friedkin was hired for “The Night They Raided Minsky’s,” a nostalgic piece centered on the world of burlesque that Friedkin imbued with a fresh, modern look via the camerawork and editing. He segued into two rather stagebound vehicles, an adaptation of Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” and Matt Crowley’s “The Boys in the Band.”
Neither was a portent of what was to come in 1971 when he directed “The French Connection,” and 1973’s heavily stylized horror film “The Exorcist” was yet another departure for Friedkin.
But “The Exorcist” proved to be his last box office bonanza. He did not direct another movie until 1977’s “Sorcerer,” a challenging remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “The Wages of Fear.” It went well over budget and disappointed at the time, though it has since become appreciated. He followed those with thriller “The Brink’s Job,” the controversial “Cruising” and the 1983 comedy “Deal of the Century.”
During the early 1980s, Friedkin and Blatty partnered on an “Exorcist III” project, but Friedkin exited over creative differences.
In 1985, he demonstrated his ability as an interesting stylistic director with “To Live and Die in L.A.,” a handsome, well-received thriller that was only a moderate financial success.
Friedkin was spending most of his time working in television on series such as “Tales From the Crypt,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Space Quest” and “C.A.T. Squad.” In 2000 he directed the moderately successful military drama “Rules of Engagement.”
When he married studio head Sherry Lansing in 1991, he once again began directing feature films on a regular basis.
In between he directed a remake of “Twelve Angry Men” for cable that was well received, as well as the documentary “Howard Hawks: American Artist.” A re-release of “The Exorcist” with supplementary footage grossed $40 million in the U.S.
During the 2000s, Friedkin took to the bigscreen with 2003 thriller “The Hunted,” starring Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro, and 2007 horror movie “Bug,” starring Ashley Judd and Harry Connick Jr., with Tracy Letts’ adapting his own stage play, which Friedkin had seen in 2004.
In 2011 he finished “Killer Joe,” which Letts adapted from his own play, with Matthew McConaughey and Emile Hirsch in the lead. The controversial crime pic had a limited release in the U.S. in 2012. The film, estimated to have been budgeted at $11 million, grossed only $4 million worldwide. Friedkin also directed two episodes of “CSI.”
Born in Chicago, Friedkin attended Senn High School, where he was not much of a student but sought to develop his basketball prowess to pro level. Since he never grew taller than six feet, however, he changed his career path to journalism.
The director who had spent years working in the documentary form himself appeared in many documentaries over the years about films and filmmakers including 2003’s “A Decade Under the Influence” and “Pure Cinema: Through the Eyes of the Master.”
He was married to newscaster Kelly Lange and actors Lesley-Anne Down and Jeanne Moreau. He is survived by fourth wife Lansing and two sons
Hollywood top executives figured they could ride out a skirmish with screenwriters reeling from technology’s changes to the industry.
But few executives were prepared for — or wanted — a strike by the industry’s largest union, SAG-AFTRA, which represents 160,000 actors and other performers.
After talks over a new contract collapsed last week, throngs of performers joined writers on picket lines — plunging Los Angeles’ signature industry into chaos and further complicating what some fear could become a long and devastating strike.
Movie shoots have ground to a halt. A-list stars have bailed on film and TV marketing campaigns. Matt Damon, Cillian Murphy and other actors walked out during Thursday night’s London premiere of Universal Pictures’ highly anticipated “Oppenheimer.”
The upcoming fall TV season could sputter, devoid of new scripted episodes of “Abbott Elementary,” “Law & Order: SVU” and “NCIS.” And media companies that were already struggling to compete in the streaming era could see their fortunes further sink.
“There’s going to be a lot of blood in the water,” Jonathan Taplin, director emeritus of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, said. “This is not going to end well.”
Actors are seeking higher minimum pay, increased residuals and revenue sharing with the streamers. They’ve demanded protections against the use of artificial intelligence to simulate background actors, known as “extras.” Writers have made similar demands, saying since the rise of streaming, midlevel writers have struggled to make a living wage.
“The entire business model has been changed because of streaming, digital and AI,” Drescher said. “At some point, you have to say ‘no, we’re not going to take this anymore.’”
The AMPTP defended the offer the group had made to actors, including what it said was the highest percentage increase in pay minimums in 35 years and a “groundbreaking” proposal for AI protections.
“A strike is certainly not the outcome we hoped for as studios cannot operate without the performers that bring our TV shows and films to life,” the AMPTP said. “The union has regrettably chosen a path that will lead to financial hardship for countless thousands of people who depend on the industry.”
It’s not clear when bargaining sessions with the actors might resume. No talks are currently scheduled.
AMPTP negotiators haven’t met with the WGA in more than two months.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment and food insecurity soared. In 2021, 53 million people turned to food banks and community programs for help putting food on the table.
Facts about hunger in America :
According to the USDA, more than 34 million people, including 9 million children, in the United States are food insecure.
The pandemic has increased food insecurity among families with children and communities of color, who already faced hunger at much higher rates before the pandemic.
Every community in the country is home to families who face hunger. But rural communities are especially hard hit by hunger.
Many households that experience food insecurity do not qualify for federal nutrition programs and visit their local food banks and other food programs for extra support.
Mass shootings in the USA since 2014. Mass Shooting Tracker, a crowd-sourced data base, defines mass shooting as “a single outburst of violence in which four or more people are shot.”
Three weeks and 39 mass shootings. This is America in 2023.
39 mass shootings have taken place across the country in just the first three weeks of 2023, per the Gun Violence Archive.
Communities from Goshen, California, to Baltimore, Maryland, are reeling while others brace for the possibility of such violence in their own backyards.
“A time of a cultural celebration … and yet another community has been torn apart by senseless gun violence,” Vice President Kamala Harris told a crowd in Tallahassee, Florida, on Sunday. “All of us in this room and in our country understand this violence must stop.”
But how that happens with a divided Congress, vastly different policy prescriptions, and a deeply entrenched gun culture remains to be seen.
President Joe Biden urged Congress Monday to pass a pair of bills seeking to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and raise the purchasing age to 21, imploring lawmakers to “act quickly.”
“The majority of the American people agree with this common sense action. There can be no greater responsibility than to do all we can to ensure the safety of our children, our communities, and our nation,” he said in a statement.
Firearm injuries are now the leading cause of death among people younger than 24 in the United States, according to astudy published in the December 2022 edition of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
From 2015 through 2020, there were at least 2,070 unintentional shootings by children under 18 in the US, according to a report from Everytown. Those shootings resulted in 765 deaths and 1,366 injuries.
Astudy published late last year in JAMA Network Open analyzed firearm deaths over the past three decades — a total of more than 1 million lives lost since 1990.
The researchers found that firearmmortalityrates increased for most demographic groups in recent years — especially during the Covid-19 pandemic — but vast disparities persisted. The homicide rate among young Black men — 142 homicide deaths for every 100,000 Black men ages 20 to 24 — was nearly 10 times higher than the overall firearm death rate in the US in 2021.
Gore Verbinski’s The Ring was a remake of 1998’s Ringu, Japanese horror movie which was based on the titular novel by Koji Suzuki.
Suzuki’s book revolves around a journalist named Kazuyuki Asakawa, who is investigating the deaths of four teenagers who mysteriously died one night at the same time. This leads him to the holiday resort they stayed at one week before their deaths, where he watches a videotape containing various disturbing sequences and concludes with a warning that he now has only seven days before his death.
Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) slimmed the novel’s story down slightly and crafted a visual identity that would be emulated in every subsequent film in the franchise. Choosing to set the movie in perpetually overcast locations to desaturate the colors, the movie has a dreariness that runs through it — a mood that is only broken in scenes where the characters are completely safe and the colors become vibrant, creating a moment of reprieve. The harsh shadows made by artificial light are turned into pools of inky blackness, wherein a character could be pulled into oblivion at a moment’s notice. Ringu also marks the first appearance of Sadako (Rie Ino’o) with the pale skin, white dress, and long black hair which has become synonymous with the character.
Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) only loosely follows the novel and film it’s based on.
The movie is visually strong, and the choice to set the film in Seattle, Washington was an excellent decision. It allows Verbinski to take a page from Ringu and use the city’s reputation for constant rain to paint it blue and teal, again only saturing the colors in moments of total safety. His decision to make the tape more of an extension of Samara’s powers than previous films also creates incredibly unnerving moments that find our main character, Rachel (Naomi Watts), walking under a precariously placed ladder, having an up-close encounter with a horse, and being able to pull a fly off a television screen and hold it between her fingers.
Tebowing : kneeling in prayer, with head resting on one hand, oblivious to surroundings, just as Tebow does after victories.
Tim Tebow, born on August 14, 1987, is an American football player, baseball player, executive producer, and entrepreneur, who got his start professionally when he played three seasons in the N.F.L. as a quarterback for the Denver Broncos and later, the New York Jets.
In 2011-2012, he has led the Denver Broncos to one improbable victory after another—defying his critics and revealing the deep-seated anxieties in American society about the intertwining of religion and sports.
Tebow tends to win in the closing minutes, against considerable odds and amid the persistent doubts about his ability by the football establishment. He often can seem like a regular guy suddenly thrust into the middle of a professional football game, only to win by summoning a superhuman will that we all wish we had.
Telbow is the son of Christian Baptist missionaries. Born in the Philippines after his mother rejected recommendations to end the life-threatening pregnancy with an abortion. Home-schooled in Florida. On to a public high school to play football. On to the University of Florida, where he placed Biblical citations — John 3:16 or Philippians 4:13 — on black bands beneath his eyes.
Tebow is a cultural icon with immense popularity, based on his personality and open devotion to faith. He is equally lauded for the work he does off the field. While still attending Florida, he worked on the “First and 15” program benefiting Uncle Dick’s Orphanage and later went on to create the Tim Tebow Foundation in 2010. The Foundation encompasses multiple philanthropic ventures that support children with life threatening illness, orphan outreach and general encouragement of citizens to volunteer.
Tim earned just under $10 million in total earnings as a football player during his NFL career. In addition, he was paid $4.1 million during his time with the Eagles.
Tim Tebow’s net worth has piqued the interest of the athlete’s fans. He began his professional career in 2010, but he did not achieve the full potential that analysts expected of him. His net worth has suffered as a result.
Tim Tebow’s net worth in 2022 is roughly $5-10 million, but those tallies and estimations are a bit behind. Tim Tebow’s net worth in 2021 does take a turn, though. Reputable outlets, it’s worth noting, like Celebrity Net Worth slot Tebow at the five million mark.
Other estimates — particularly from moneyinc.com — push Tebow’s worth closer to $10 million, as he landed considerable endorsement deals with EA Sports, Nike, Jockey, and Adidas during his first foray in the NFL and as the face of college football due to his two-time SEC “Player of the Year” status.
NBA great LeBron James described Wembanyama’s athleticism by saying “no one has ever seen anyone as tall as he is but as fluid”
Victor Wembanyama (born 4 January 2004) is a French professional basketball player for Metropolitans 92 of the LNB Pro A. Standing at 2.20 metres (7 ft 3 in) as a power forward, he is widely projected to be the first overall pick in the 2023 NBA draft.
The profile of the 18-year-old French player seems unique in the history of this sport. Despite his size (2.21 meters), which places him well above the average of his peers, the young man moves on the ground with agility; he dribbles and shoots with the ease of a full-back or winger. The United States discovered the phenomenon during two exhibition matches played in Las Vegas, on October 4 and 6, with his club, the Metropolitans 92 of Boulogne-Levallois. Results ? “He’s an alien, the talent of a generation”, praised the American LeBron James, one of the best players in the world of the last twenty years.
He is expected to lead the NBA draft in 2023, an annual selection process for young talents wishing to join the famous basketball league. Some clubs would also be ready to deliberately lose as many games as possible this season in order to be able to recover it (the teams with the worst results have priority in the choice of players).
The reaction from the US was unambiguous. The decision that of the petroleum exporting nations known as OPEC+ was “disappointing,” the White House said in a statement.
The decision meant that OPEC+ members’ oil production would be cut by 2 million barrels, or around 2% of global output, in November.
The decision by OPEC+ — which has 22 members and includes Saudi Arabia and Iraq as well as Russia — “shows there are problems” with the US’ relationships with traditional allies such as Saudi Arabia, US President Joe Biden said.
The OPEC+ decision, and Saudi Arabia’s part in it — the Gulf state is the second largest producer of oil in the world and plays a significant role within the organization — feels like even more of a betrayal to the US because of President Biden’s July visit to Saudi Arabia. It came after several years of diplomatic chilliness between the two nations, following the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, and was heavily criticized because the human rights situation inside Saudi Arabia has certainly not improved since then.
The OPEC + decision can also be seen as tacit support for Russia by Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states.
Because this decision by OPEC+ may negate the impact of the embargo on Russian oil that was agreed upon by the European Union in early June. The embargo is supposed to cut Russian budgets and thereby exhaust the country’s war funding. However the OPEC+ decision will see oil prices go up again, which means that Russia is going to make more money from selling its oil, even if it cannot sell as much.
But with crude oil prices off over 30 percent from their peak earlier this year, OPEC Plus is now worried about a recession reducing demand. And higher oil prices could increase the likelihood of such an economic downturn
Those prices are under pressure not only by a slowing economy but also by increased oil production in the United States, Guyana, Brazil and other countries. Kuwait and other OPEC Plus countries have been investing to expand production capacity.
Unable to prod the Saudis and its allies to produce more, the Biden administration has released about 160 million barrels of crude from the strategic reserve since March. It recently extended those releases by another month.
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear an unusual case involving copyright issues, a commissioned portrait of the late rock star Prince, and Pop art icon Andy Warhol. The decision may have big implications for artists who appropriate or remix existing images, an area of law that has long remained murky.
The court will rule on whether Andy Warhol sufficiently “transformed” an image of musician Prince taken by photographer Lynn Goldsmith when he used it to create his colorful “Prince Series.”
The dispute, which first came to light in 2017, has already taken enough twists and turns to give a fan or legal observer whiplash.
Goldsmith initially shot the image of Prince while on assignment for Newsweek in 1981, but it was never published. In 1984, Vanity Fair licensed one of her portraits of the singer for an illustration by Warhol. The artist ultimately made an entire series based on the photo (which he did not license himself). Goldsmith only learned about the works in 2016, when Vanity Fair republished them after Prince’s death without crediting her.
Trade tariffs, pandemic disruptions, rising labor costs, and technological nationalism have exposed vulnerabilities in the just-in-time production strategy and are driving major changes in the world’s supply chains. China, long the world’s chief manufacturer of all things from pencils and sneakers to electric vehicle batteries and pharmaceuticals, is at the center of this shift.
Foxconn recently made headlines for announcing it would be moving some iPhone assembly from China to India, in response to Apple’s decision to diversify production due in part to the COVID-19 restrictions in Shanghai. Samsung moved its personal computer production in China to Vietnam in 2020 reportedly to cut costs. And many other multinational corporations have made similar decisions, opting to either relocate all or part their manufacturing back home or to another country.
It’s clear the calculus has changed for firms when it comes to hosting their production base in China. Other markets in Asia are gaining competitiveness, and countries are offering vast incentives to shift sensitive technologies back home. But does this mean “Factory China” is in danger of losing its mantle as the world’s top manufacturer ?
Winslow Homer is an American Realist painter who confronted the leading issues facing the United States, and its relationship with both Europe and the Caribbean world, in the final decades of the 19th century.
Homer’s career spanned a turning point in North American history. He lived through the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery, so-called Reconstruction, and war with the last colonial European power in the Americas, Spain.
The ruling is expected to create a stark divide within the country, with residents of more liberal states retaining the right to abortion and those in conservative states largely losing it. Abortion will be immediately illegal or severely restricted in as many as twenty states, affecting an estimated twenty-five million women of childbearing age. Twenty states—along with the District of Columbia—where roughly twenty-six million women of reproductive age reside, will continue to protect abortion rights.
A leaked document indicates that the conservative-controlled court intends to overturn abortion rights provided nationally under the 1973 Roe vs Wade ruling.
Overturning the landmark ruling would allow states that have attempted to severely restrict women’s access to reproductive healthcare to ban abortion. The case before the court, brought by Mississippi, is expected to be officially decided in the summer.
Abortion has long been a contentious issue in the US, even though polling finds that a clear majority of the public believes it should be legal.
The supreme court, however, has a 6-3 majority of deeply conservative justices.
President Joe Biden blasted a “radical” Supreme Court draft opinion that would throw out the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights ruling that has stood for a half century. The court cautioned no final decision had been made, but Biden warned that other privacy rights including same-sex marriage and birth control are at risk if the justices follow through.
The Build Back Better bill, which passed the House of Representatives in November, offered sweeping funding to social and climate programs.
A Democratic senator, Joe Manchin, has said he will not support this major social spending plan, throwing the US president’s flagship legislation into jeopardy. All 50 Democrats are needed to pass the bill in the Senate, with opposition Republicans staunchly opposed.
Democratic leaders sought to get Manchin to support the bill. But he announced he would not vote in its support.
The trial began in earnest on 29 November. Maxwell, 60, is being tried on six counts for alleged involvement in her ex-boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of girls, some as young as 14. Maxwell has pleaded not guilty. Maxwell is accused of luring minors into Epstein’s orbit.
Epstein, a financier and convicted sex offender whose associates included Prince Andrew, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, was arrested in July 2019 for sex trafficking girls. He killed himself in a Manhattan federal jail, where he was awaiting his own trial, about a month after his arrest.
Jurors in Ghislaine Maxwell’s federal sex trafficking trial are now deliberating after three weeks of testimony in the closely-watched case.
She insisted that the fight for women’s rights had to take into account the diverse experiences of working-class and Black women.
She called for a new form of feminism, one that recognized differences and inequalities among women as a way of creating a new, more inclusive movement — one that, she later said, had largely been achieved.
Security and defence are increasingly grabbing the spotlight in European public debates. In just a few weeks, the withdrawal of Western forces from Afghanistan and the deal between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States (AUKUS) to share nuclear submarine technology and step up their security partnership in the Indo-Pacific have reinvigorated the debate on the EU’s strategic autonomy and shifting strategic alliances in global security.
The European Union has significant commercial and regulatory power, but it lacks security and defence capabilities – as well as the political will to improve them. EU security and defence capabilities remain fragmented among the member states and subordinate to NATO. The persistence of diverging interests, different threat perceptions and dissimilar historical experiences hinder the consolidation of an EU strategic culture that might act as a spur for a more geopolitical Europe.
Gabrielle Petito, 22, was reported missing after traveling with her boyfriend around the country in a van. The authorities said remains discovered on Sunday in Wyoming are believed to be hers
The travel influencer Gabby Petito set off in July 2021 with her fiancé, Brian Laundrie of North Port, Florida, to partake in an adventure of a lifetime: an intended four-month trek across the US in a refurbished van. They planned to explore national parks and preserves throughout their trip. It all seemed picture-perfect, especially on social media where the two documented their journey.
However, upon Laundrie’s return home to Florida on September 1, 2021—without Petito—no one was able to contact the influencer. Her mother, Nichole Schmidt, filed her as a missing person on September 11. On September 14, Laundrie—who is a person of interest in the case—set off for a hike through the Carlton Reserve in his hometown of North Port, and no one has heard from him since.
United Airlines Flight 175 is seen approaching the south tower of the World Trade Center as smoke billows from the north tower in lower Manhattan, New York on September 11, 2001
The 20th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks will be marked with the traditional reading of victims’ names – the 2,983 men, women, and children killed in the 9/11 attacks and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center – held at the memorial plaza. Six moments of silence mark the times when each of the World Trade Center towers was struck, when each tower fell, and the times corresponding to the attack at the Pentagon, and the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. Commemorations will also include the Tribute in Light, the art installation consisting of two beams of light evoking the twin towers destroyed in the attack.
Nearly 1,800 victims’ relatives, first responders and survivors are calling on Biden to refrain from attending any memorials over his refusal to release Sept. 11 documents.
In the US state of Oregon, the nation’s largest active wildfire has burned through more than 364,000 acres, prompting thousands of evacuations.
Heavy rainfall has triggered devastating flooding causing dozens of casualties in Western Europe. Parts of Scandinavia are enduring a lasting heatwave, and smoke plumes from Siberia have affected air quality across the international dateline in Alaska. The unprecedented heat in Western North America has also triggered devastating wildfires
The collapse of the 20-year western mission to Afghanistan took only a single day as Taliban gunmen entered the capital, Kabul, on Sunday, President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, and America abandoned its embassy in panic.
The fall of Kabul marks the final chapter of America’s longest war, which began after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. A US-led invasion dislodged the Taliban and beat them back.
The U.S. government on Friday released a landmark report, mandated by Congress, examining “unidentified aerial phenomena” witnessed by U.S. military personnel over recent years.
While the report found no evidence of aliens, it did find that UAPs could pose a threat to national security. The report issued by the intelligence community and the Department of Defense did not definitively determine what the military personnel saw.
“For years, the men and women we trust to defend our country reported encounters with unidentified aircraft that has superior capabilities, and for years their concerns were often ignored and ridiculed .The Defense Department and intelligence community have a lot of work to do before we can actually understand whether these aerial threats present a serious national security concern.” Marco Rubio
Donald Trump and his family are under mounting pressure after the New York state attorney general’s office said its investigation of the Trump Organization is now criminal as well as civil.
The investigation is “no longer purely civil in nature,” Fabien Levy, the spokesperson for New York Attorney General Letitia James, confirmed to POLITICO by email. “We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan D.A.
Asians are becoming the targets of a growing number of hate crimes in the U.S.
President Joe Biden has expressed strong concern about hate crimes against Asians. Biden said that Asian Americans have been attacked, harassed, blamed and scapegoated amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to Stop AAPI Hate, a private organization comprising Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, there were 3,795 hate crimes against Asians from March 19, 2020, to Feb. 28, 2021, with 503 of them in January and February.
A reset after four years of Donald Trump’s America First agenda, pledging to reinvest in alliances and diplomacy, and emphasising democratic values.
The president said that he would end support for Saudi Arabia in its intervention in Yemen and that the U.S. would no longer be “rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions.”
The Biden administration is scrambling to find a way to salvage the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal renounced by former U.S. President Donald Trump.
He described China as the “most serious competitor” to the United States and vowed to confront Beijing on various fronts, including human rights, intellectual property and economic
The incoming Biden administration will have to chart a new path for U.S. ties with India. That path will lie somewhere in the vast gulf between traditional strategic altruism, whereby Washington actively supported India’s rise in hopes it could help balance China, and the transactional “America first” policy followed by Trump. And Biden will have to find that path in the midst of tremendous global volatility and political instability at home.
There’s no doubt that most European leaders are relieved by the vision and commitments of the new U.S. administration. But that doesn’t mean they will follow Biden’s lead in lockstep on the world stage. The ultranationalism of former president Donald Trump and the bruising experience of Brexit further convinced officials in Berlin, Paris and Brussels of the need to pursue a more independent European approach and to build greater capacity for self-reliance after more than half a century of sheltering beneath the American security umbrella.
Mr. Biden, who spent decades in the Senate on the Foreign Relations Committee, made the headquarters of American diplomacy his first stop, telling its 70,000 employees that “I’m going to have your back.”
For months prior to November 3, researchers warned that a Trump defeat might spark violence from right-wing extremist groups, especially the antigovernment militias that had already become restive during quarantine
These extremist movements will outlast Trump’s presidency because the reason that they exist long predates it.
Newly minted President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., signed a flurry of executive orders, several of which included policy changes amid the surging Covid 19 pandemic.
In one of his first actions as president, Biden signed a mask mandate, requiring face mask be worn inside buildings and on land controlled by the federal government. That includes places like national parks and during interstate travel onboard trains , buses, and planes.
In an effort to mark a clean break from the Trump era, the president-elect plans to roll out dozens of executive orders in his first 10 days on top of a big stimulus plan and an expansive immigration bill.
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