Peter

The nation faces its sixth general election in three years. “I’ve done this so many times people have started to feel pity for me,” one legislator said about campaigning.

Proceedings were launched by the EU in 2017 over concerns that an overhaul of Poland's judiciary under the previous government represented a "clear risk" to rule of law.

The US, UK and Europe fall behind China in a supposed priority area, wind turbines.

The fashion is as important as the films at the glittering Hollywood award ceremony.

The former and the sitting presidents seem set to repeat the 2020 presidential race. A sizable Arab-American community in Michigan withdrew support from Biden, over his policies on the war in Gaza.

The opposition leader was famed for his dry wit which he often directed at Putin.

Lowitja O'Donoghue spent her life advocating for the rights and recognition of First Nations people.

The complete list of Academy Award nominees for 2024.

The singer says musicians are treated with suspicion if they discuss politics or literature.

Hurdles to making homes accessible mean older people must keep compromising

An in-depth yet lively debunking by Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson of Panglossian depictions of the state of the US economy and society.

Gibson Dunn is “playing both sides” of free speech, using it to defend Big Oil and silence the industry’s critics.

~ Today's Water Cooler ~

Christopher Nolan’s "Oppenheimer" scored five honors, while box office hit "Barbie" was left disappointed. Here are the other big wins from the night.

The court documents include unredacted names of the disgraced financier and sex-offender’s associates, most of which had been widely publicized already.

The moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn appear to have subsurface oceans which could support life beyond Earth. But it’s not clear why these seas exist at all.

Lumen Technologies Inc.'s "battered" bonds sport "tremendous upside potential" but also "too great" a risk, in the view of one analyst.

People (Check On Me) is poised to enter the UK Top 10 this week - a first for a Cameroonian artist.

Lots of interesting things to note.  Any modern viewer will be struck by the scarcity of vehicles, but I also was intrigued by the limited color palette for clothing, signs, and objects.  I suppose the chemical industries had not yet mass-manufactured synthetic dyes, and natural products would have been relatively expensive.  (Or perhaps the colorization process is limited in the degree to which it can saturate colors without distorting skin tones).  I liked the signs that hang at an angle over the street so that pedestrians can view them, and the young girls bouncing rubber balls.

Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, on April 4. | Di Yin/Getty Images

EU officials appear to have delayed and rewritten part of a report that worried Chinese diplomats.

China has reportedly successfully lobbied European Union officials to rewrite and soften language in a new report criticizing Beijing for spreading disinformation around coronavirus.

According to reports in the New York Times and Politico, Chinese diplomats managed to persuade EU officials to scrap a reference to China running a “global disinformation” campaign, and also remove reference to Beijing’s criticism of the French response to the pandemic.

The final version of the report reads mildly: “Official and state-backed sources from various governments, including Russia and — to a lesser extent — China, have continued to widely target conspiracy narratives and disinformation.”

The lobbying campaign represents the latest instance of the Chinese government attempting to control narratives in order to defend its reputation, after failing to keep coronavirus within its borders and to properly alert other countries of the threat the new virus poses.

Recently, Chinese officials and news outlets have deliberately spread false information — most notably the conspiracy theory that the US Army introduced the novel coronavirus to Wuhan and started the pandemic itself.

Despite this, Chinese officials have reportedly been keen on shielding themselves from criticism over spreading disinformation. Officials from the country even threatened to retaliate in some form against the EU if the bloc’s report language wasn’t softened, according to the New York Times.

“The Chinese are already threatening with reactions if the report comes out,” Lutz Güllner, an EU diplomat, wrote to colleagues in an email, the Times reported.

It’s unclear what those “reactions” would have been, and whether they would come in the form of diplomatic posturing or a policy move. But the Times noted that the EU is currently expecting to win trade concessions from China, an expectation that may have informed decision making around the report.

The report was eventually put out by the European External Action Service’s Strategic Communications division, which analyzes disinformation campaigns that affect the EU. A spokesman for the group denied the reports and claimed that they have “never bowed to any alleged external political pressure,” according to Politico.

China is desperate to control the narrative

Beijing has gone to great lengths to use information both defensively and offensively to protect its international reputation as a virus that originated within its borders has gone global.

As Vox’s Julia Belluz explained in February, Beijing downplayed or covered up many of the key facts of the early spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a bid to project an image of competence and control:

On December 31, when China first announced the outbreak of a mysterious pneumonia, officials there emphasized a few things. Most of the patients had been to a food market in Wuhan, the city that’s still the epicenter of the outbreak. They said there was “no clear evidence” of human-to-human transmission, meaning the virus wasn’t yet spreading from one person to another but instead, they suggested, from an animal to humans. And they said the earliest case had shown symptoms only recently — on December 12.

Yet, for weeks now, reports in both the scientific literature and local and international news have contradicted what Chinese authorities were telling the world. These reports show the outbreak started weeks or months sooner than China let on, and the virus was already spreading among people — and beyond the food market in Wuhan — in early January. Authorities also censored information and silenced the whistleblowers who tried to sound the alarm.

More recently, China has pushed conspiracy theories that the US spread the virus in China as a way of shifting any blame for the pandemic away from the Chinese government.

“There are a few Chinese officials who appear to have gone to the Donald J. Trump School of Diplomacy,” Julian Gewirtz, a scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, told the New York Times in March, in response to reports of conspiracy theories. “This small cadre of high-volume Chinese officials don’t seem to realize that peddling conspiracy theories is totally self-defeating for China, at a moment when it wants to be seen as a positive contributor around the world.”

China, of course, is not alone in pursuing this strategy. The US has also worked to exaggerate and spread inaccurate information about China’s handling of the coronavirus. Trump, for example, has spread the rumor that the virus originated in a Chinese lab, despite an absence of proof that this happened — and overwhelming skepticism from scientists that the virus originated in one.

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A few weeks ago, the Washington Post interviewed Scott Z. Burns, who wrote the screenplay for Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s film about a bat-borne illness that starts a global pandemic. What’s most striking about the interview is how outlandish Burns finds certain aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic, so ridiculous in fact that people would find them implausible if this were a fictional story.

I would have never imagined that the movie needed a “bad guy” beyond the virus itself. It seems pretty basic that the plot should be humans united against the virus. If you were writing it now, you would have to take into account the blunders of a dishonest president and the political party that supports him. But any good studio executive would have probably told us that such a character was unbelievable and made the script more of a dark comedy than a thriller.

On Twitter, director Sarah Polley recently had a similar take.

This is the worst movie I have ever seen.

Unsurprising that this movie doesn’t work — the screenplay was a dog’s breakfast.

So much heavy handed foreshadowing. The apocalyptic footage from Wuhan, the super villain American president, the whistleblower dying, the Russia/China border closed while people still claimed it was just a flu, the warnings unheeded. Insulting to the audience’s intelligence.

And then — that most annoying of horror/disaster movie tropes — the hapless idiots walking into disaster after disaster, all of which the audience can see coming from a mile away.

The over the top details of world leaders and their wives falling ill, the far fetched idea that industrialized countries wouldn’t have proper protective gear for front line workers and ventilators. Pleeeeaaase. This movie needed a script doctor.

It’s interesting that there are certain boundaries in fiction related to the audience’s suspension of disbelief that are are routinely ignored by reality. I’m also reminded of how Margaret Atwood approached The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, using only elements that have historical precedent:

The television series has respected one of the axioms of the novel: no event is allowed into it that does not have a precedent in human history.

And yet some critics consider the events from the novels and TV show to be too much, over-the-top.

Update: Ted Chiang from a recent interview:

While there has been plenty of fiction written about pandemics, I think the biggest difference between those scenarios and our reality is how poorly our government has handled it. If your goal is to dramatize the threat posed by an unknown virus, there’s no advantage in depicting the officials responding as incompetent, because that minimizes the threat; it leads the reader to conclude that the virus wouldn’t be dangerous if competent people were on the job. A pandemic story like that would be similar to what’s known as an “idiot plot,” a plot that would be resolved very quickly if your protagonist weren’t an idiot. What we’re living through is only partly a disaster novel; it’s also — and perhaps mostly — a grotesque political satire.

I am currently blazing through Exhalation (Kindle), Chiang’s collection of science & technology fables. (via @jasondh)

Tags: COVID-19   Margaret Atwood   movies   Sarah Polley   Scott Z. Burns   Ted Chiang

Davis gained national notoriety for refusing to give marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk Kim Davis, who made headlines in 2015 for her protests against same-sex marriage, will lose her job after the midterm elections.

Davis, a Republican, lost to Democratic challenger Elwood Caudill. Caudill got 4,210 votes, or 54.1 percent, and Davis got 3,566, or 45.9 percent.

Davis received a lot of national attention in 2015 when, after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, citing her religious objections. After she was jailed for defying courts and refusing to do her job, some evangelicals, including Republican Mike Huckabee, rallied behind her. But ultimately, Davis agreed to let her deputies issue marriage licenses and was released from jail.

As Will Wright explained for the Lexington Herald Leader, Caudill previously lost by just 23 votes in the Republican primary for the seat in 2014. But he changed parties in 2015. Caudill then went on to beat David Ermold, one of the gay men Davis denied a marriage license, in the Democratic primary this year.

And on Tuesday, Caudill defeated Kim Davis.

A shop owner asked them to come back when he had more money - when they did, they were arrested.

If you want a coral reef, the Bahamas-based startup Coral Vita is the place to go. They'll grow you one 50 times faster than Mother Nature could. The first clients are already on board. We spoke to one of the founders.

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

In a stunt that should surprise absolutely no one who knows anything about Banksy, the elusive street artist’s iconic work Girl with Balloon literally self-destructed the moment it was sold at auction for more than £1 million on Friday. “It appears we just got Banksy-ed,” said a Sotheby’s official afterward. Yep, it appears you did.

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Artist Banksy destroys his own painting after selling for over one million dollars with shredder built into the frame #banksy #girlwithballoon #sothebys #contemporartauction #eveningauction #shreddedpaintings #london @sothebys @banksy

A post shared by Casterline | Goodman Gallery (@casterlinegoodmangallery) on Oct 5, 2018 at 1:14pm PDT

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Going, going, gone…

A post shared by Banksy (@banksy) on Oct 5, 2018 at 6:45pm PDT

The framed work, consisting of spray paint and acrylic on canvas, was the last piece to go up for sale that evening in London. The typical controlled chaos of the auction house was punctuated by the clap of the auctioneer’s gavel, and at that very second, the work slipped through its frame in shreds. Almost nobody noticed at first, but gasps from the crowd alerted the room to the situation.

Banksy himself released a video on Instagram that showed him building the shredder into the painting’s frame, “in case it ever sold at auction.” He deleted it soon afterward, but it had already circulated on the internet. The YouTube clip above edits this clip side-by-side with a video capturing the moment of the big reveal.

Ironically, the artwork might be worth even more now than it was at the moment it sold thanks to all the attention it got, but it seems likely that Banksy expected as much, and it’s part of the overall point. A perpetual critic of the commercialization of his own work, Banksy is no stranger to trolling the public. Even when he turns a profit from the sales, he often does so while essentially ridiculing the purchaser.

Learn more at WebUrbanist’s Banksy archive.

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[ By SA Rogers in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

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It was just like House of Cards. Or maybe Game of Thrones. Trump-Russia was the only drama that mattered.