President Zelensky & The Spirit of Ukraine

 

The Ruination of Britain

By Peter Oborne

The New York Times, 21 October, 2022 

LONDON — Until very recently the British Conservative Party was able to claim, with a great deal of credibility, that it was the most successful political party in the Western world.

The party of Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher has governed Britain for most of the last 200 years. Through much of that time the Conservatives have been synonymous with good sense, financial sobriety and cautious pragmatism. Despised by progressive elites, allergic to ideology, provincial rather than metropolitan, the Conservative Party rejoiced in being the stolid party of the boring middle ground. Not anymore. Today, the Conservatives are synonymous with chaos.

Liz Truss, the latest Tory prime minister to crash and burn, must bear her share of the blame. There are sound reasons for why she was forced to resign after just 44 days, the shortest term in history. It was a foolish notion to suppose that she could sack the most senior Treasury official, reinvent the laws of economic management and defy the collective wisdom of the financial markets. There was going to be only one result.

But the bigger truth is that the hapless Ms. Truss is a symptom rather than the cause of Britain’s chronic crisis of governance, which has reduced the country — once respected around the world — to a global laughingstock. The Conservative Party chose her, remember, even though she was obviously not up to the job. You didn’t need the foresight of Nostradamus to know she would fail. For the fiasco of her premiership and the disastrous state of the country, the Conservative Party must collectively take responsibility.

Oscar Wilde once wrote that to lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune, but to lose both looked like carelessness. For the Tories to lose two prime ministers in the space of three months shows, more than carelessness, that they are out of control. The government is already on its fourth finance minister this year; one of them, Kwasi Kwarteng, crashed the pound and ruined the party’s reputation for good financial management.

Like the Republicans in the United States, the Conservatives are detached from reality. In a generation, they have become a party of monomaniacs, incompetents and ideologues. Like a thoroughbred that has run one race too many, it needs putting out to grass. After a decade or two in the wilderness, perhaps the party can recover — though let’s not rule out the possibility it is finished once and for all.

That’s still a way off. In the wake of Ms. Truss’s resignation, the party announced plans to hold another leadership election, its second in three months. As with the contests that anointed Boris Johnson and Ms. Truss as prime minister, the choice will be made jointly by Tory lawmakers and party members. Even if, by some fluke, a half decent candidate won, it would not help their fortunes. The party is so riven by internal feuds, personal hatred and ideological disagreements that it has become ungovernable.

This is a perilous time. Britain is facing perhaps its biggest economic, political and even constitutional crisis since World War II. It’s daft to expect that the Conservative Party, which has done such damage over the past decade, might at last be about to govern sensibly. Two years could pass before the next general election. But Britain needs one now.

Admittedly Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour opposition, lacks charisma. Though far from brilliant, he conforms to a recent pattern of global leaders — Joe Biden in the United States and Anthony Albanese in Australia are two examples — who are reassuring even if they don’t set the world on fire. His frontline lawmakers, too, look more competent than the Tory shambles. Nor are they scarred by defeat or compromised by failure.

A growing number of Tory voters, let alone the rest of the country, are prepared to give them the time of day. That’s why a general election is in the national interest. It might seem foolhardy to expect the Conservative Party, staring down almost certain defeat, to call an election. But one of the glories of the traditional Conservative Party used to be its readiness to place country before party.

This doctrine was set out by — who else? — Winston Churchill in one of his last acts before standing down as prime minister in 1955. “The first duty of a member of Parliament,” he told an audience at his constituency of Woodford, “is to do what he thinks in his faithful and disinterested judgment is right and necessary for the honor and safety of Great Britain.”

This rhetoric may be orotund, but the argument is irrefutable. It would have been well understood by the patriotic and fair-minded Conservative Party that governed Britain with such wisdom 70 years ago. Today’s Conservatives, by contrast, cling to power for power’s sake. Besides doing further damage to the long-term reputation of their own party, their obstinacy is ensuring the ruination of Britain.

Mr. Oborne is a British journalist, broadcaster and former political commentator for The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail.

Quoting Groucho Marx :)

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception."

"Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms. Military justice is to justice what military music is to music."

"Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy."

"My mother loved children -- she would have given anything if I had been one."

"She got her looks from her father. He's a plastic surgeon."

"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."

"I don't have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They're upstairs in my socks."

"Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough."

"Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”

Sense8_series

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• Sense8 tells the story of eight strangers played by an impressive cast of international actors and actresses: Will (Smith), Riley (Middleton), Capheus (Ameen), Sun (Bae), Lito (Silvestre), Kala (Desai), Wolfgang (Riemelt), and Nomi (Clayton). Each individual is from a different culture and part of the world. In the aftermath of a tragic death which they all experience through what they perceive as dreams or visions, they suddenly find themselves growing mentally and emotionally connected. While trying to figure how and why this connection happened and what it means, a mysterious man named Jonas tries to help the eight. Meanwhile, another stranger called Whispers attempts to hunt them down, using the same sensate power to gain full access to a sensate's mind (thoughts/sight) after looking into their eyes. Each episode reflects the views of the characters interacting with each other while delving deeper into their backgrounds and what sets them apart and brings them together with the others.

  
  

  This group of strangers are suddenly linked mentally, and must find a way to survive being hunted by those who see them as a threat to the world's order. They all experience a rebirth which inexplicably links them intellectually, emotionally and sensually. We are taken along their journey to discover exactly what they are going through, witnessing their interactions from face-to-face conversations from opposite sides of the world without the use of any devices, simply using each other's skills and abilities, learning about each other, all the while being pursued by a secretive group that wish to lobotomize them in order to prevent an evolutionary path they do not wish to become humanity's future. Written and directed by the Wachowski sisters, this is an un unmissable science-fiction drama series! A total visual treat. I recommend watching it with English subtitles on.
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Difficulty levels and impact of climate-friendly decisions

 

We Stand With Salman Rushdie

Today, outside the New York Public Library, defending freedom of speech.

"Somebody To Love" / George Michael + Queen at Wembley Stadium 1992

Oh, those analogical times when singer and audiences would interact clapping hands together! No mobiles glued to their hands like synthetic prosthesis. What an emotional, unforgettable moment George Michael left for posterity with this electrifying rendition of "Somebody To Love". How well I remember showing my B2 students this video over the years! A musical jewel from the 90s, for sure.

New law in Spain could help families in their search for long lost relatives

Spain’s Law of Democratic Memory would condemn the regime of Francisco Franco and create a national DNA bank to help search for the disappeared.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY SANTI DONAIRE

TEXT BY JORDAN SALAMA

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, JULY 26, 2022

Well into her nineties, Rosa Coscollá still remembered with perfect clarity the day that two policemen entered her house and took away her father. The year was 1939, near the end of the Spanish Civil War. She was just 15 at the time, living in the rural town of Xeraco, south of the city of Valencia.

When she saw her father for the next and last time, he was in jail—badly wounded, malnourished, a political prisoner. Vicente Coscollá Ibáñez was soon executed, and Rosa spent the rest of her life hoping for the day when DNA samples would be obtained from the mass grave to confirm where her father was supposedly buried.

"In her final years, she was obsessed with her father's case," says Jaume Coscollá Ferrer, Rosa's nephew. "She wanted to bring her father back and bury him—even a piece of his body, a bone, anything—with her."

Rosa died last year at 98, but her family’s situation is far from unique. Thousands living in Spain today lost relatives between 1939 and 1975, when Francisco Franco’s brutal military dictatorship killed or disappeared more than 114,000 people.

This week, the country is expected to pass a new law: Ley de Memoria Democrática (Law of Democratic Memory). It will declare that the Franco regime and its politically-motivated criminal sentences were illegal, and make the Spanish government legally responsible for recovering the bodies of the disappeared.

In 1977, two years after Franco’s death, Spain’s parliament passed an amnesty law. It declared that members of the regime could not be prosecuted for crimes committed during the dictator’s rule—or during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), which saw more than half a million deaths and led to Franco’s rise to power. The law became known as El Pacto del Olvido — The Pact of Forgetting. Franco officials and allies reintegrated into public and private spheres of influence without much, if any, retribution for the human rights violations they committed.

The right-wing Franco regime targeted not only members of the political opposition, but also unionists, members of the LGBT community, Romani people, and anyone else deemed enemies of the state. Some 2,500 mass graves are now thought to be scattered throughout the country; of the tens of thousands of bodies, they may hold, only a fraction have been identified.

In addition, for the first time, all assets that were seized by the military during the dictatorship will be investigated, and any titles of nobility granted by Franco will be eliminated. The new law will also establish a State Prosecutors’ Office for Human Rights and Democratic Memory, to create a national DNA bank and to investigate cases of human rights violations during the war and the dictatorship.

Though it has faced steep political hurdles, the 2022 Law of Democratic Memory would not the first of its kind to be passed. It builds upon the country’s 2007 Law of Historical Memory, which expanded rights for victims of the war and the dictatorship but was largely criticized for falling short in its scope.

The new law brings renewed hope to families whose relatives’ disappearances have loomed over the past 80 years. “There are so many families who, disgracefully, still can’t find their relatives,” says Laura Martín, whose great-grandfather, a town mayor, was assassinated for his left-wing politics and recently exhumed from a mass grave in Paterna, Valencia.

In addition, Martín sees a need to revisit the legal cases surrounding the assassinations. Many were marred by corrupt trials, she says, and justice never was served. “This new law supports the reality of those trials, which were completely unjust.”

Spanish photographer Santi Donaire has spent the past six years documenting the exhumation of mass graves and visiting the homes of these families whose relatives were murdered during the dictatorship. His black-and-white photographs are poignant reminders of the long-lasting wounds of political violence. “This is a project about a society that tries to repair its wounds, seek justice and rediscover its past,” he says.

Donaire’s project began in 2016, when he joined a search for the still-missing remains of the Federico García Lorca. The renowned Spanish poet was executed near the city of Granada by Nationalist forces at the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936—allegedly for his socialist political beliefs and then-rumored identity as a gay man.

“What surprised me the most was the absence of any television or newspaper media, and the lack of institutional help in the search for one of the most important authors of Western literature,” Donaire says. If there was so little interest in the search for Lorca, Donaire thought, there would be even less effort to track down regular, anonymous people who had been disappeared.

But historical and societal trauma does not easily fade with the passage of time. Often this trauma is passed down through the generations, and many families resolve themselves to silence—out of shame or fear, or in order to shield younger members from the painful past. Some descendants, like Rosa, die waiting for closure.

Others have formed associations to continue the search for traces of their lost relatives. Even those who have succeeded in properly burying their relatives, such as Martín’s great-grandfather, say that the significance of the law stretches far beyond individual families, and requires a national reckoning of memory and justice.

“The country needs this reparation, this revelation, this realization that the Spanish government committed a very large error and we cannot forget it,” Martín says. “In 80 years, time has cured absolutely nothing. We need to recognize this history in order to bury it as it deserves.”

Photojournalist Santi Donaire began documenting the excavation of mass graves in 2016, during several months as a freelancer with the ArqueoAntro Scientific Association, which was investigating the disappearance of people during the Francisco Franco regime. Donaire has continued to document cases of the disappeared on his own. Follow him on Instagram @esedonaire.

Welcome to California

 

Published in 2018 by the Guttmacher Institute in New York, Abortion Worldwide: Uneven Progress and Unequal Access provides the most current information on the incidence of abortion and unintended pregnancy worldwide, as well as trends since 1990, as women and couples increasingly want smaller families. It examines laws that regulate abortion and how they have evolved, and the current safety of abortion provision. It documents the barriers women face to preventing unintended pregnancies and obtaining safe abortions, and the impacts of unsafe abortion on women’s well-being. This study provides a comprehensive update to findings from the 2009 Abortion Worldwide: A Decade of Uneven Progress.

The situation of induced abortion has changed markedly over the past few decades. This report provides updated information on the incidence of abortion worldwide, the laws that regulate abortion and the safety of its provision. It also looks at unintended pregnancy, its relationship to abortion, and the impact that both have on women and couples who increasingly want smaller families and more control over the timing of their births.

JUBILANT. Pictures of a Career in Education

After a jubilant teaching career of 42 years, I feel it's time to look back with joy and gratefulness upon retirement by sharing these photographs of alumni and colleagues, taken over the last two decades, to celebrate the transforming power of education and the privilege of teaching.

Love was in the air. Two of them met in that class and have been together 

ever since. School of Physics, Seville University. 19.05.2004

The enthusiasm of beginners. Engineering School. 23.05.2005

A passion for education. B2 students at the ETSI. 13.05.2005

Relax and enjoy. End of term smiles. ETSI, 14.05.2009

Out for a drink at the Alameda on the last day of classes.14.05.2009

A bit of staging at the foot of the flag-inspired Expo 92
European Union Pavilion. 13.05.2010

Learning English with films in English. 26.11.2010

Posing by the Lucca poster, at ETSI Room 202. 20.05.2011

After watching the film THE HELP at the Avenida Cinema, 8.12.2011

Self-explanatory. Classroom at UNC Chapel Hill. 24.04.2012

LDOC at UNC-Chapel Hill. 25.04.2012

Pair Work in B1. ETSI Room 203. 26.05.2012

The Human Factor at the Teatro Central terrace. 9.05.2013 

B2 Students behind the windows of Room 201 at ETSI. 20.02.2014

After Bonus Class for Keen B2 Students with Baby Child at ETSI. 14.07.2014

   Running into students at Seville Pride. 28.06.2015

With students and colleagues to see film THE MARTIAN. 28.10.2015

Volunteering for Europe. Giving a talk to secondary school students from the 

IES Triana, on behalf of the European Commission and the idea of a united 

Europe.  An unforgettable professional experience. 12.05.2017

My colleague Laura's gorgeous home-made cupcakes at the end of term. 

Already missing you.12.07.2017

Three Techies. Thanks for posing, guys. 24.05.2018

Thumbs up! Great B2 group and best classroom ever. Taken just weeks 

before the Covid-19 pandemic and social distancing. 14th, November 2019

The Power of Cinema: Taking students and alumni to see 

Jane Campion's masterpiece The Power of the Dog. 23.03.2022

Having drinks with my last students at the Alameda to celebrate 

the end of classes and of my teaching career. 26.05.2022

Co-workers from different languages and departments at the farewell do. 

I shall proudly remember that day! Aula Verde, Instituto de Idiomas, 11.07.2022 

Jubilate, don't hesitate. Cake, flowers and more. Darling colleagues
Laura and Felicia, Masters of my Retirement Ceremony. 11.07.2022

Normal People_series

Normal People is an Irish drama television series of twelve 30-minute episodes produced by Element Pictures for BBC Three. Based on the novel of the same name by Sally Rooney, and stunningly directed by Hettie Macdonald, the series follows the relationship between Marianne Sheridan (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Connell Waldron (Paul Mescal), as they navigate adulthood from their final days in secondary school in County Sligo, on Ireland's Atlantic coast, to their undergraduate years in Trinity College, Dublin. 

The focus is mainly on Connell's and Marianne's weaving in and out of each other's romantic lives. Among her peers at secondary school Marianne is regarded as an oddball, though she rejects having any care for social standing. Her home life is complicated by her irritable mother Denise and resentful brother Alan in the face of her high academic standing. Her father is deceased and is revealed to have been a domestic abuser—something her family avoids in conversation. Connell is a handsome, high-achieving athletic student living with his single mother Lorraine, who is employed by Denise as a cleaner. He is popular in the school community, though he is diminished by his remaining silent during the bullying of Marianne. This creates complexity as their relationship develops. 

Beautifully shot, in the best BBC tradition, both leading actors give a mesmerizing, outstanding performance. Mescal and Edgar-Jones simply have chemistry on camera, mostly in those long close-ups. A captivating minimalist score giving structure to the story line. Twelve bingeable episodes. A must-see series.

Tunnel 29

The Tunnel is a 77-minute black-and-white documentary film that chronicled how three West Berlin university students organized the escape of 29 friends and family members by digging a tunnel underneath the Berlin Wall from a former factory in West Berlin into the Communist East. It was shot by NBC cameramen and first aired in the US on December 10th, 1962. It was produced by Reuven Frank and narrated by Piers Anderson. Breathtaking to watch 60 years later! Mind-blowing viewing!

I also recommend the BBC Radio 4's Tunnel 29 podcast series by Helena Merriman, released in October 2019, and her book Tunnel 29 (Hodder and Stoughton, 2021), where the whole story is told amazingly, and which is being turned into a mini TV series by the producers of Chernobyl. Unputdownable!

FCKH8 on Gay Pride Day

HAPPY PRIDE

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