Dancing is in, dissent is out as Saudi Arabia's crown prince transforms his country

Nabih Bulos
Sun, December 25, 2022 

Singers perform at a Soundstorm music festival in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (Tasneem Alsultan / For The Times)

Standing in a maelstrom of swirling smoke and spotlights, Nouf Sufyani, the 29-year-old Saudi DJ better known as Cosmicat, sang along to Fatboy Slim’s “Right Here, Right Now.” She looped a snippet of the melody, letting the tension build before grabbing the mic and shouting to the cheering, dancing crowd: “Right here, right now — we’re Jeddah!"

It was the second night of Balad Beast, a two-day rave held earlier this month in Saudi Arabia's second-largest city. The event was part of Soundstorm, a series of state-backed music festivals that began in 2019 and has since brought dozens of international artists to the country, including Bruno Mars and top-flight DJ Solomun.

Fawaz Utaibi, a 26-year-old English-language teacher, was excited to cut loose in Jeddah's Balad, or Old Town, where an animated image of a giant cat's head was projected onto the coral-stone buildings, nodding to the beat. Five years ago, "there was nothing to do here — the only reason you’d come was to buy traditional goods. Now you can celebrate,” he said.

Concertgoers at the Soundstorm music festival in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Dec. 9. (Tasneem Alsultan / For The Times)

“Look around you. It sounds crazy: We’re partying in Saudi."


Balad Beast is of a piece with Vision 2030, the all-out transformation of Saudi Arabia that the country's de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, launched soon after he became heir to the throne in 2017. Its aims include diversifying Saudi Arabia's oil-dependent economy and revamping its long-held image from a puritanically religious kingdom inaccessible to outsiders into a regional entertainment mecca.

The campaign's main target is the two-thirds of the Saudi populace who are under the age of 35. The crown prince — himself only 37 — wants his peers to live, work and play at home rather than leave for jobs abroad or spend billions of dollars every year seeking out fun in places such as Dubai or Manama, the capital of Bahrain.

Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, wants to diversify his country's economy, including by turning it into an entertainment hub. (Kay Nietfeld / DPA)

The swiftness of the changes in Saudi Arabia has residents long used to its sleepy social life blinking in shock, like Dorothy stepping out of her sepia-toned Kansas house into Technicolor Oz. December's calendar alone featured Balad Beast, the Red Sea International Film Festival, the Dakar Rally, the Riyadh Season — a monster lineup of concerts and sporting events — and the Boulevard Riyadh, a sort of world fair in the Saudi capital with pavilions showcasing foreign countries, including the U.S., which was represented by a chunk of interstate highway asphalt, a Magnolia Bakery and a police cruiser.

Supporters of the crown prince, who was recently named prime minister, praise him as the only leader with the chutzpah and authority to push through such a profound makeover of Saudi society. Here at Jeddah's Balad Beast, in a scene unthinkable only a few years ago, Utaibi stood sipping a mocktail alongside a female friend who wore no hijab; other revelers sported jeans, shorts, crop tops, even mesh shirts. Electronic music blasted from billboard-sized speakers as a female performer belted out tunes onstage. Men and women danced together.

“Unless you grew up here, you wouldn’t understand the magnitude of what we’re doing,” said Ahmad Ammary, 44, the DJ and music producer who developed Soundstorm.

Men dance with glow sticks at an outdoor rave in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (Tasneem Alsultan / For The Times)

But critics say the strides in social liberalization have been accompanied by the cementing of a politically illiberal climate with a single person in charge: the crown prince. They liken his rule to the more centralized Arab dictatorships in Egypt and Syria, in a break with the more consultative system the kingdom used to employ.

They also accuse the crown prince of using extreme measures to neutralize anyone opposed to or even insufficiently enthusiastic about his policies, such as Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed by a Saudi hit team at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. The U.S. has concluded that the crown prince ordered the brutal slaying, which he denies.

Last summer, two Saudi women were sentenced to 34 and 45 years in prison essentially for expressing dissent on social media, according to human rights organizations, which noted that the sentences were the longest ever handed to activists. Saudi officials said the cases go beyond social media activity but did not elaborate.

The political atmosphere is such that, in interviews, people willing to criticize government policies — saying that tourism revenue could never supplant oil proceeds, or that spending on flashy entertainment projects ignores more pressing infrastructure problems — refused to do so on the record. On Twitter, the social network of choice in Saudi Arabia, previously critical accounts have been suspended or deleted or now stick to safe topics.

Also cowed is the once-mighty clerical class whose support undergirded the ruling Saud family's power. Imams who have spoken out against the liberalization have been put in jail. Even the mutaween, the infamous religious police who ran patrols to ensure people behaved according to a strict moral code — smashing music equipment and castigating women for wearing makeup — now parrot the government line that they had overstepped their mandate and are content with encouraging rather than imposing their version of virtuous living.

That a political crackdown has accompanied a social opening up may seem contradictory, but analysts say the crown prince sees it as a necessary complement.

"The Saudi leadership thinks they have no choice because they can’t develop a post-hydrocarbon economy without these liberalizations and turning Saudis from dependent subjects to wealth-producing citizens," said Hussein Ibish, a resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. "But they also see it as dangerous to the regime" — as potentially setting in motion forces they cannot control.

Although the crown prince's harsh authoritarian streak is troubling, most of the changes he's effected are "incredibly important," Ibish said. "He’s truly transforming the country, mostly for the far better."

It's clear that many Saudis see the crown prince's policies as a long-overdue coming-out party for young people.

“From the outside, this is what people think of Saudi Arabia: Mecca, Medina, hajj, umrah, religion. It’s part of our fabric,” said Ammary, the Soundstorm organizer, referring to Islam's two holiest sites and the pilgrimages that Muslims undertake. Those associations, he said, brought an expectation of how Saudis behaved in public.

A light show illuminates the stage during the Soundstorm music festival in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Dec. 9. (Tasneem Alsultan / For The Times)

“Growing up, we were encouraged to not stand out. Whenever I would come home for a visit, I’d switch to the Saudi version of myself: Be calm, straightforward, proper. Don’t smile too much,” said Ammary, who spent time living in the U.S.

Though he's been a DJ since 1997, it wasn’t something he was “built to be proud of.” He played at private parties for a small community of friends. The first edition of the Soundstorm festival was “a social experiment," he said, during which he was surprised to find so many underground groups.

“This community went from paranoid tiny pockets to people that can do this with pride, with joy, with no fear. I’m proud of the Band-Aid we’re ripping off our culture,” he said, adding: “It's not a change. It was always there, but we were hiding."

Other signs of that unveiling, both literal and figurative, are inescapable. At Balad Beast, three 21-year-old women without hijabs, law students Leen, Jood and Lujain, remarked how their childhood had been about keeping a segregated existence from males, who nonetheless controlled their lives — how they dressed, where they worked or went out, whether they stayed married. The last few years saw the ban on women driving lifted and the more onerous aspects of the male guardianship system dismantled, such as being forced to seek permission from a male relative to get a passport or travel.

“We’re the transitional generation,” said Lujain, adding that she was more confident about having a relationship (“divorce is easier now”) and was excited about her career options. All three friends, who declined to give their last names for reasons of privacy, were concerned about sexual harassment — “men see an event like this as an excuse to go nuts,” Jood said — but thought police would now help rather than shame them for their dress.

Before the crown prince's ascension, "this wouldn't have happened. The men would have got away with it,” Jood said.

Signs at the Balad Beast admonished people to “Look, don’t stare” and to “Be friendly, but don’t overdo it.” Supervising the proceedings were stern-faced male and female guards with the hawk-eyed looks of chaperones at a high school dance. They were helped by the absence of alcohol, which remains banned in the kingdom but is expected to be legalized under certain conditions in the coming year.

For women, the changes have opened up new opportunities. Sufyani, the DJ known as Cosmicat, was a dentist before she saw spinning tunes as a possibility. The percentage of women joining the Saudi workforce exceeds 35%, more than double the rate from five years ago, official statistics say.

The feared backlash from religious conservatives hasn't materialized in force, though whether their quiescence stems from fear or indifference, or both, is unclear. At the Boulevard Riyadh, the quasi-world fair, women in black niqabs joined more colorfully attired attendees in enjoying music acts that would have been deemed impossibly risque a few years ago.

A woman dances at the rave in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (Tasneem Alsultan / For The Times)

"Yes, it's great the kids have more options now," Mohammad Bukhari, a 43-year-old employee with the Saudi oil giant Aramco, said as he struggled with a giant inflatable banana while checking out the Japanese pavilion, his three children in tow. "But of course we have to be careful our children don't get negative influences."

International condemnation of the crown prince, which reached its apex after the Khashoggi killing, has also abated somewhat, despite the political suppression at home and state actions such as the biggest mass execution — 81 people on a single day in March — in the kingdom's history. The Red Sea Film Festival this month attracted stars including Sharon Stone, Guy Ritchie, Shah Rukh Khan and Michelle Rodriguez. Saudi sovereign funds have poured investment into Amazon, Walt Disney and Nintendo, among others.

Last year's Soundstorm had Human Rights Watch calling on performers and promoters to speak out against Saudi rights abuses "or refuse to participate in yet another one of Saudi’s reputation laundering schemes."

Organizer Ammary dismisses that characterization of his event, which is just one of 3,800 that the Saudi General Entertainment Authority, a vast government department that the crown prince created in 2016 and that occupies multiple floors of the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh, has spent billions of dollars organizing.

“This makes me roll my eyes. As if our only objective is to impress the world," Ammary said. "We have 30-million plus people we have to make happy. This is investing in that.”

Mashari Sultan, an unemployed 19-year-old, would certainly agree. Dressed in white pants, a leather jacket, sunglasses and mismatched finger-less gloves, he smiled as he sashayed down the cobblestone path of the Balad in Jeddah.

"This is the first time I've ever gone out the way I want to dress. I felt courageous enough to dye streaks in my hair," he said, giggling as he added that his parents didn't know he was at Balad Beast.

"It's everyone in their own way. My parents wouldn't understand. We're a different generation."

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

How nuclear waste will help spacecraft explore the Moon — and beyond

European researchers are developing batteries that use a radioactive isotope to power long missions in the Solar System.

Elizabeth Gibney
NEWS
06 December 2022


The European Space Agency hopes that its Argonaut Moon missions (artist’s impression) will be powered by batteries that use the radioactive element americium.

Credit: ESA

Europan scientists are developing a breed of battery for space missions that is powered by nuclear waste. The European Space Agency (ESA) hopes that the technology will, by the end of the decade, allow it to operate spacecraft that don’t rely on solar panels and can explore the Moon and far-off reaches of the Solar System without relying on equipment from international partners.

Lift off! Artemis Moon rocket launch kicks off new era of human exploration

Ministers at ESA’s ministerial council meeting in Paris on 22 and 23 November agreed to fund a €29-million (US$30-million) programme called European Devices Using Radioisotope Energy (ENDURE). This aims to develop long-lasting heat and electricity units powered by the radioactive element americium-241, in time for a series of ESA Moon missions in the early 2030s.

“If we want to have autonomy in exploration, we need these capabilities,” says Jason Hatton, a co-leader of ENDURE, based at the European Space Research and Technology Center (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. ESA’s growing space ambitions mean it needs its own source of long-lasting power, says Hatton.

Element 241

Americium, a by-product of plutonium decay, has never been used as a fuel. For missions in which solar power would not suffice — either because of shade or because of distance from the Sun — ESA has relied on US or Russian partners, which have used plutonium-238 batteries to power missions since the space race. NASA built plutonium batteries, for example, that warmed the Huygens probe during its descent to Saturn’s moon Titan in 2005. But plutonium-238 has been in short supply over the past decade and is expensive to produce.

And ESA severed ties with Russia after the country invaded Ukraine. “The current political situation demonstrates that you cannot always rely on partners”, says Athena Coustenis, an astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory in Meudon, France, who chairs an ESA advisory committee that backed the new programme.

Destination Uranus! Rare chance to reach ice giants excites scientists

The lack of a power source has long restricted the solo missions that European scientists propose, and limited others. The agency felt its lack of radioisotope power keenly in 2014, when its comet-landing Philae probe was operational for less than three days because it ended up in a shaded spot where its solar panels were useless. “For years, European scientists have been saying that if you want to go far, or to dark and cold places, there is no other way,” says Coustenis.

Better than plutonium?

Americium’s big advantage over plutonium is that it is cheaper and more abundant, repurposing waste that would otherwise be useless, says Véronique Ferlet-Cavrois, who co-leads the ENDURE initiative at ESTEC.

Plutonium-238 is made in a two-stage process that involves irradiating a neptunium target with neutrons. Researchers at the UK government’s National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) in Sellafield have shown that americium can be extracted from reprocessed nuclear fuel used in civil power plants and made into fuel pellets, which form the core of the batteries. Part of the ENDURE programme will include raising americium production capacity to what is needed for batteries, says Hatton.

Americium has a longer half-life than plutonium-238, which means it lasts longer but packs less power per gram. But because americium is more readily available, producing one watt of power costs about one-fifth as much as it does using plutonium, says Markus Landgraf, who coordinates work on future lunar missions at ESTEC.

How to build a Moon base

Over the next three years, the ENDURE team will develop prototypes into models that can be tested in mission-like conditions, as precursors to usable devices. In a collaboration with NNL, a team at the University of Leicester, UK, has developed two types of device: a radioisotope heating unit, which warms instruments with heat produced in the decaying americium, and radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which use the heat to produce electricity by creating a temperature difference across metal plates.

The researchers designed both types of device to account for americium’s higher volume for a given power output, and cooler temperatures, compared with plutonium, says Richard Ambrosi, a physicist and specialist in space power systems, who leads the team at the University of Leicester.

Safety is also crucial, because of the use of radioactive materials. The units are encapsulated in layers including a platinum alloy, which seal in the americium while allowing heat to escape, he says. The programme’s next phase will focus on safety testing, so that the americium units can be certified for launch. Tests will include monitoring the behaviour of components at high temperatures and under impact — for example, during an explosion on the launch pad — to ensure that radioactive material would not leak. “We have to be able to survive a significant set of very extreme scenarios,” says Ambrosi.

The $93-billion plan to put astronauts back on the Moon

Batteries on the Moon

Once developed, the same basic power system could be reused on any missions for which solar energy is unavailable, says Ferlet-Cavrois. This is the case during nights on the Moon, which last 14 Earth days, and on expeditions to the Solar System beyond Jupiter. To survive the harsh lunar night, China’s active Moon rover, Chang’e-4, uses plutonium heating units built in collaboration with Russia.

ESA’s first target for launching americium power sources is its Argonaut Moon lander, scheduled to launch in the early 2030s. The Argonaut missions would conduct long studies on the lunar surface and support astronauts working there, says Landgraf. And in the 2040s, ESA hopes to power a mission to the ice giants Uranus and Neptune, says Ferlet-Cavrois. These planets have been studied only during fly-bys by NASA’s Voyager 2 probe in the 1980s.

Americium’s availability, and the challenges of producing plutonium-238, mean that NASA might want to use it too, says Landgraf. The agency is assessing its ability to produce enough RTGs for its coming missions. For its Artemis programme, which aims to establish a long-term presence on the Moon, “they consider our americium very interesting”, he says.

It has taken more than a decade of research to get the americium technology to the stage at which it can be developed for real missions, says Ambrosi. “The excitement is actually quite palpable at the moment. We’ve been working on this for a long time,” he says.

Nature 612, 385-386 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-04247-6

UK premier under fire after asking homeless man if he 'works in business'

'Excruciating,' deputy leader of main opposition Labour party describes viral exchange between Rishi Sunak, homeless man

Burak Bir |25.12.2022


LONDON

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak attracted widespread criticism after asking a homeless man in a shelter if he "works in business."

Video footage published on Saturday by ITV News showed Sunak serving food at a homeless shelter in London.

After asking Dean, the homeless man: "Do you work in business?" the British premier got the reply: "No, I'm homeless. I'm actually a homeless person."

The video clip went viral on social media, with many criticizing Sunak over the exchange.

Described as "awkward," the brief conversation began as Sunak was serving breakfast to Dean, who asked him: "Are you sorting the economy out?"

Dean said he was interested in business, followed by Sunak's question "What kind of business?"

When the homeless man replied finance, Sunak said he used to work in finance.

"Is that something you'd like to get into?" asked the prime minister, to which Dean replied: "Yeah I wouldn't mind. But, I don't know. I'd like to get through Christmas first."

Sharing the video clip on Twitter, Angela Rayner, deputy leader of the main opposition Labour, said it was "excruciating."

Monty Python: The Upper-Class Twit of the Year

Radical dialogue and open roads in 'Women Talking'


NEW YORK (AP) — When Sarah Polley has flown from her home in Toronto to the U.S. this year for the release of her film “Women Talking,” she’s had conversations with customs officials that usually go something like this:

“What are you here for?”

“I’m screening a film.”

“What’s the name of the film?”

“Women Talking.”

“Then I get either the biggest eyeroll you’ve ever seen or I get something openly confrontational like, ‘I’ve had enough of that in my life. I’m not going to see that movie,’ Polley says. “Then I have to decide whether to take the bait and risk not getting into the country.”

Sometimes, she does take the bait. The title, she notes, isn’t “Women Shouting” or “Women Berating.” And yet she’s found it’s often received like a confrontation.

“One guy I asked: ‘So if I told you there was this movie called “12 Angry Men,” would you feel the same way?’” Polley, the 43-year-old Canadian filmmaker and actor, said on a recent stop in New York. “He was like ‘I don’t know.’ And I was like, ‘Well, I think you should just sit with that then. I still want to get into the country, I’m just saying to sit with that.’”

Simple as its title may be, “Women Talking” is a radical work, in both its subject matter and execution. It’s adapted from Miriam Toews’ acclaimed 2018 novel, loosely based on real events, about an ultraconservative Mennonite colony in Bolivia where many of the village’s women gather in a hayloft to discuss a deeply alarming revelation: Men in their colony have been drugging and raping them in their sleep.

The conversation that unspools among the women (the ensemble includes Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara, Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy and Ben Wishaw as the lone man in the room) is riven with questions of justice, fate and spirituality. Should they stay or leave? Remake the community or start it anew?

Specific as the circumstances are, the dialogue — at turns furious, anguished, ruminative and hopeful — more properly takes place in a realm of fable. “Women Talking” could be anywhere, anytime. The conflicting points of view could even be one woman’s inner monologue. It’s a story that reverberates with the present realities of #MeToo yet it’s also archetypal, out of time.

“I’m really curious about a way forward,” says Polley. “I’m really curious about what it feels like to not judge myself if and when anger comes up, to just not live there. What healing looks like and what building something better looks like.”

It was that forward-looking nature in “Women Talking” that first struck Frances McDormand, a producer of the film who also plays a small role as a character named Scarface Janz. After reading Toews’ book, McDormand sent it to Dede Gardner, the Oscar-winning producer and president of Plan B Entertainment.

Related video: Sarah Polley had ‘endless options’ while directing Women Talking (cbc.ca)   Duration 2:14   View on Watch

“When I read it, I was really confused about the conversation around predatory abuse, predatory abuse of power, what hadn’t changed and what seemed to be literally in reversal from when I was an idealistic, broad-eyed, bushy-tailed feminist at 17,” McDormand says. “All the things I thought were possible seemed to be shifting.”

“Miriam framed the conversation about the future,” McDormand adds. “Not about the past or about the murky present, but a bright future where the rules can change.”

As the production took shape, with Polley writing the script, “Women Talking,” itself, became an opportunity to challenge and remake the largely male-written rules of the film industry. Polley, director of the Alice Munro adaptation “Away From Her” and the family investigation “Stories We Tell,” had had three children in the decade since directing her last film. She wanted to foster a more humane working environment, with child care, reasonable hours and open dialogue.

“We literally made a wish list: If it could be a utopian world, what would it look like?” says McDormand. “There is a difference between a matriarchal system of working and a patriarchal one. The whole process was different because it was women talking. I really love Dede’s answer for this. She says: It’s not that hard to do. You just bake it into the budget. I think it’s a really great phrase that we need to use in the industry more. You bake shorter days. You bake the idea that the entire crew should not be sacrificing their personal lives for the making of the film. It’s not cancer research.”

Foy, who movingly plays a woman named Salome, entered a film environment unlike any she had encountered before.

“It wasn’t like it was an all-female set or anything like that,” says Foy. “But it was the first time I had done anything from a female perspective and about something women experience as it is, as opposed to how it’s been in movies that are directed by people who aren’t women. There are basically three generations of actors on that set and all of them were doing it for the first time — which is, I don’t think, necessarily a glowing report of the film industry.”

A title card at the start of “Women Talking” describes it as “an act of female imagination.” Often, that imagination was inspired by real-life experience that filtered into the movie. A second or simultaneous dialogue transpired during the film’s making as the troupe shared stories with one another. A therapist specializing in trauma after sexual assault was present on set.

“These conversations would happen with people of all genders on our set, and we would come to a better place through everyone’s collective experience,” says Polley. “Those were, for me, the most magical moments."

Polley had experience to draw on, too. In her autobiographical essay collection, “Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations With a Body of Memory,” published earlier this year, Polley recounts an sexual encounter, when she was 16, with the former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi, who in 2016 was acquitted of five charges related to sexual assault. In the essay, Polley describes how she struggled with whether to come forward with her experience with him during the high-profile trial, and felt guilty after she didn’t. Ghomeshi maintained the allegations were inaccurate but acknowledged “emotionally thoughtless” behavior toward women. He didn't respond to messages.

“Inevitably and understandably at the beginning of this conversation that’s happened the last five years, there was a lot about naming and pointing out individuals, and that can be an important part of the process,” says Polley. “But I think a more important part of the process in my mind is looking at the systemic problems that lead to people being able to behave like that.”

Outside of the frequently fractious public #MeToo debates, “Women Talking" found a sustained conversation forged on togetherness, mutual respect and the possibility of creating a new path forward.

“It was magical, basically,” says Foy. “It was a magical, if not harrowing and sometimes very difficult, experience. But it was, like, the whole reason anyone does this for a living.”

The actors reached the hayloft by one of two staircases. It was, McDormand says, like entering a sacred space. For McDormand, the experience making “Women Talking” felt like forging something new in a film industry that has made strides in women behind the camera, but one where a film like “Women Talking” is still a clear exception.

“Speaking from a position as a 65-year-old person who’s been in the industry, it’s a really good time for all of us to sit still, keep our mouths closed and listen,” says McDormand. “That’s what I’ve been given the great good fortune to do with Sarah and Dede and watch them take the industry to the next place that it has to go. No more stasis. Not interested.”

Just getting “Women Talking,” shot during the pandemic after a one-year delay because of COVID-19 made was an accomplishment. To Polley, more heart rending was that it proved that such a conversation is possible to have, in a hayloft or anywhere else.

“It felt so utopian at so many points that I think it shifted my worldview,” says Polley. “I just feel so much less cynical after going through this experience.”

___

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

Jake Coyle, The Associated Press

Film review: Women Talking is a fabulous act of female imagination

Story by Chris Knight • Yesterday - National Post

From left, Judith Ivey and Claire Foy in a scene from Women Talking.

Forget the Bechdel test, that little three-part query about whether a movie contains two women talking to each other about something other than a man. More broadly, there are huge numbers of films with men and women talking, and a host of famous ones – Twelve Angry Men, Das Boot, The Shawshank Redemption , to name a few – with just men talking.

“What follows is an act of female imagination,” read the opening titles of Women Talking. It sure is, and it’s overdue, and it’s outstanding.

Writer/director Sarah Polley has adapted fellow Canadian Miriam Toews’s 2018 novel into a thoughtful, thought-provoking study of faith, forgiveness and fighting for what is right, and against what is wrong. The author took inspiration from the true story of a Mennonite community in Bolivia in which some of the men were drugging and raping the women and children of the colony.

“This story ends before you were born,” says the narrator (Kate Hallett) at the beginning of the tale, which finds the perpetrators briefly in protective custody after one of their victims (Claire Foy) attacked her own attacker with a scythe. With some of the men locked up and the rest gone to bail them out, the women are left alone, and convene a meeting to decide what action they will take: Stay and fight. Stay and do nothing. Or leave.

A hasty vote of scrawled Xs (the women can neither read nor write) produces a tie between fight and flight. And so a impromptu counsel convenes to choose a course. Taking the minutes is August (Ben Whishaw), the colony’s university-educated schoolteacher, who is demure and effeminate and don’t you dare think those are negative qualities!

The film is short, not even an hour and three quarters, its impact enhanced by that brevity. Occasionally, mercifully briefly, the camera will cut away to scenes of one of one of the women after an attack. So this is why Greta (Sheila McCarthy) has lost her teeth, and why Ona (Rooney Mara) is pregnant. In these scenes, the mournful score by Hildur Gudnadottir (Tár, Joker) becomes a quiet but unnerving jangle of percussion instruments, like a whirling thought that refuses to still its wings and settle.

The cast also includes Jessie Buckley as Mariche (injured, angry), Michelle McLeod as Mejal (quietly traumatized) and Judith Ivey as Agata, who says that staying cannot coexist with a desire for pacifism, since “by staying we will be knowingly placing ourselves on a collision course with violence, either by us or against us.”

She also delivers a beautiful, heartbreaking soliloquy in which someone suggests they ask the men to leave the colony and she replies that they have never asked the men for anything, reeling off a list that begins with “for the salt to be passed” and ends: “Or to put your hand on the small of my back while I try again for the 12th or 13th time to push a baby out of my body.”

Polley has shot this, her fourth feature, in a sweeping widescreen format, with a colour-drained palette that might have you briefly thinking it takes place in the last century, or even the one before that – and isn’t it a comfort to imagine that the sins of the past stay there? But shortly after August mentions one of his interesting book-learned facts about the Second World War, the film’s gentle pace is interrupted by the strains of Daydream Believer by the Monkees, blaring from a passing vehicle that is exhorting everyone to come out and be counted. It is the 2010 census. This is our world too.

Even those unfamiliar with the book are unlikely to be surprised by the film’s conclusion, but it is the journey here that matters more than the destination. Topics are debated, solemnly and at times heatedly, even angrily. “Sometimes I think people laugh as hard as they’d like to cry,” our narrator says at one point, as the room dissolves into near hysterical, tension-breaking glee. But it is her final words that resonate most deeply. “Your story will be different from ours.” Amen.

Women Talking opens Dec. 23 in Toronto, with other cities to follow.

5 stars out of 5

Chris Knight talks to Sarah Polley about her new film

Read Chris Knight's review of She Said

Film review: No Bears is a movie within a movie, within Iran

Story by Chris Knight • Friday

It may or may not surprise you to learn that there are no bears in No Bears, the latest provocative meta-fiction from profession nose-thumber Jafar Panahi.


Film review: No Bears is a movie within a movie, within Iran© Provided by National Post

Panahi is one of Iran’s most celebrated filmmakers, at least in the world at large. At home, he’s not at large – in July the regime reactivated an earlier suspended prison sentence, and he is now serving six years for “ assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security, and propaganda against the Islamic Republic.” You know, movies.

But before that happened, he completed this latest work, which opens with a Turkish couple discussing their plans to forge passports and flee their country for Western Europe. But just a few minutes into this drama, someone yells “cut!” and we realize that it is in fact a film being made within the film. The on-set director is taking his orders from Panahi himself, working remotely from a rented house in a small village near the Iranian-Turkish border, which he is not allowed to cross.

No Bears is not quite a farce, but Panahi makes no attempt to disguise his cynicism over the (to him) weird local customs of the region. Seems every time he turns around someone is admonishing his behaviour, telling him: “We have a tradition! An old tradition!” It culminates in his visit to a Swear Room, which is not as fun as it sounds; he’s there to swear to God that he did not take a picture of a couple in a forbidden relationship. It’s all he can do not to roll his eyes.

Panahi (the real Panahi) has crafted a fascinating, multi-layered fable in which the storytelling techniques of film butt up against the realities of the world. In one scene, Panahi (the one in the movie) visits an unguarded section of the border with his assistant director. He asks exactly where the border lies. “Right under your feet!” He jumps back sheepishly. Or did he jump forward?

The next day, his contact in the small town wants to know why he went to the border. Panahi asks how the guy even knew, and is told his car is dusty. “All the roads around here are dusty,” he replies, but it turns out the border road has different dust. Not sure if that qualifies as an old tradition, but it’s clearly a detail the city-dwelling filmmaker had not considered.

It’s easy (and more than a little appealing) to imagine that No Bears contained one additional layer of fiction, and that the filming of the story of a director who almost escapes Iran was cover for the story of a director who actually managed to escape Iran. Unfortunately, Panahi remains in jail for now. It’s simple to break the fourth wall in a movie. In real life, not so much.

No Bears opens Dec. 23 in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Sudbury, Saskstoon, Edmonton and Vancouver.

4 stars out of 5

Chris Knight reviews the Iranian film A Hero

Chris Knight reviews Bardo

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

US military families sue after French company pleads guilty to supporting terrorism

Families of U.S. servicemen killed by ISIS have sued Lafarge, the French conglomerate that pleaded guilty earlier this year to bribing the Islamic State group and the Al-Nusra Front to keep a cement plant running through the Syrian civil war.

The guilty plea and a nearly $800-million fine were part of the U.S. government's first-ever prosecution of a corporation for providing material support for terrorism.MORE: French company pleads guilty to paying millions to ISIS

The "economic self-interest" of Lafarge enabled the Islamic State group's slaughtering of innocent civilians, including Americans, their families said in a new lawsuit.


In this Oct. 19, 2022, file photo, the concrete plant of the French building materials company, Lafarge is seen in Issy-les-Moulineaux, France.

"Defendants' payments to and business partnership with ISIS provided ISIS the seed capital it needed to transform from a fledgling militia in the early 2010s into a brutal terroristic behemoth with the capability and intent to kill Americans," the lawsuit said.

The plaintiffs are the families of three U.S. servicemen killed in attacks blamed on ISIS.

Navy Chief Petty Officer Jason Finan of California was killed by an ISIS-planted IED in Iraq on Oct. 20, 2016. His widow and his parents said they have "experienced severe mental anguish, extreme emotional pain and suffering" since his death, according to the lawsuit.

Navy Senior Petty Officer Scott Cooper Dayton of Virginia was killed by an ISIS-planted IED in Ayn Issa, Syria, on Nov. 24, 2016. His widow and children are among the plaintiffs.

Former Marine David Berry was a 12-year combat veteran from Virginia, and was killed by an ISIS attack on the Corinthia Hotel in Libya on Jan. 27, 2015. At the time, Berry was working for a private contractor.MORE: US helicopter raid kills 2 ISIS members

"Defendants aided and abetted ISIS's and ANF's acts of international terrorism by knowingly providing substantial assistance, including by making cash and covert payments through foreign shell companies and intermediaries to, purchasing raw material from, and making anti-competitive agreements with, the foreign terrorist organizations, and by failing to safely shut down and evacuate the Cement Plant, thereby placing tons of valuable cement and raw materials in the hands of ISIS and ANF," the lawsuit said. "Defendants knew that this material support was paid to foreign terrorist organizations and would be used to commit acts of international terrorism."



In this Oct. 19, 2022, file photo the logo of the concrete plant of the French building materials company, Lafarge is seen in Issy-les-Moulineaux, France.

The lawsuit sought unspecified economic and compensatory damages.

"Lafarge has already pled guilty to federal crimes and admitted to paying millions of dollars to ISIS. This lawsuit is intended to hold it accountable to the military families devastated by its heinous and unlawful conduct. We expect more families to join the lawsuit and we look forward to bringing the case to trial before a jury of New Yorkers," said Lee Wolosky, Partner at Jenner & Block LLP, lawyer for the plaintiffs, in a statement.

There was no immediate reply from Lafarge.

IOC struggling to find home for 2030 Winter Olympics — and a Tokyo Games scandal is not helping

Story by Chris Corday • 

Sapporo seems like an ideal place to host the world's top athletes seven years from now.

The city has an Olympic legacy as the first in Asia to stage a Winter Games, in 1972.

Its location on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido is reliably snowy and cold, and packed with ski resorts famous for world-class powder.

And until recently, there appeared to be significant local support for the city's bid to host the Winter Games again in 2030, with polls last year suggesting more than half of residents were in favour of the idea.

But just as Sapporo started officially pushing for the Games, a bribery scandal involving Japan's most recent Olympics in Tokyo is casting a dark shadow on its plans.

In August, prosecutors arrested 78-year-old Haruyuki Takahashi, an executive board member of the Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee, eventually accusing him of accepting $1.4 million US in bribes from Japanese companies, in return for helping them to be selected as official Games sponsors.

The case has widened into a major corruption and bid-rigging investigation, and some key figures think it could sink Sapporo's shot at landing the Olympics.

"It seems very severe," said Seiko Hashimoto, the former president of Tokyo's organizing committee, responding to reporters' questions in December about the impact of the scandal on the bid.

"Unless it becomes clear that the 2030 Games are completely different from the 2020 Games, it'll be difficult to increase support," Hashimoto said, according to a report in the Yomiuri newspaper.

IOC indefinitely postpones decision on 2030 host

Things could have been so different for Sapporo.

Only a few months ago, it was up against solid candidates for 2030 in Vancouver and Salt Lake City.



Canadian lugers hurtle down the track. The IOC is having trouble securing a host city for 2030, and has cited climate change as one concern, although experts are skeptical that is the sole reason.© Daniel Mihailescu/AFP via Getty Images

But in October, B.C.'s government decided not to support Vancouver's bid, and organizers in Utah had already signalled they would rather host in 2034.

The path looked clear for Japan's northern capital to host the Games, but the International Olympic Committee has pushed the pause button instead.

It was expected to name the 2030 host city at the IOC's General Assembly meeting in October 2023, but it put off the decision without giving a new timeline.

Committee members had long operated on a fixed schedule for choosing host cities, making their pick seven years before the Games.

That won't happen this time, after IOC Olympic Games executive director Christophe Dubi announced a delay for choosing the 2030 host, suggesting the organization's Future Host Commission needs to further examine the challenges the Winter Olympics are facing.

"This will give the commission more time to have a clearer picture and make a sound decision for 2030," said Dubi at an online news conference in December.

The indefinite delay for a host is "simply unprecedented," said Robert Livingstone, a Canadian expert on the Olympic bidding process and founder of the news site

A view of the Sapporo Odori Park and city centre in Sapporo,

 Hokkaido, Japan, in February 2020.© Issei Kato/Reuters

"I call what happened a complete reset, because now they [the IOC] have opened it up, anyone could be in now," said Livingstone, who thinks the earliest a host city would be named is at a summit in the summer of 2024.

"It's a new race, and because of that, Sapporo, who potentially would have had it locked, now they're back in the fight."

The IOC has said it's considering a plan to award the 2030 and 2034 Winter Olympics at the same time.

Officials cite climate change concerns for delay

The IOC cited concerns about a changing climate and its impact on future hosts as the main reason for the delay.

The organization is struggling to deal with the inconvenient reality that a smaller pool of cities are bidding for the Winter Olympics, and the effects of a warming climate means fewer places will realistically be capable of hosting them.

Olympic officials say they will analyze the prospect of establishing a rotation between a few permanent host cities to help deal with the uncertainty.

A recent study from the University of Waterloo in Ontario analyzed 21 previous hosts of the Winter Games and suggested only Sapporo would be able to safely and viably stage the Olympics by the end of the century, if greenhouse gas emissions are not dramatically reduced.

But some Olympics-watchers doubt the IOC's move to put off its pick for 2030 is related to climate.

"We would do ourselves a favour to bring some healthy skepticism to that assertion, simply because they've been talking about the importance of environmental sustainability since the 1990s," said Jules Boykoff, a vocal critic of the IOC and a political science professor at Pacific University in Portland, Ore.


Officers of the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office enter to search the headquarters of publisher Kadokawa Corp in Tokyo, Japan, in this photo taken on Sept. 6, 2022.

© Kyodo via Reuters

Boykoff believes climate change has been "a secondary, if not tertiary concern" to the IOC, and thinks the delay is "a buying-time kind of endeavour" for Sapporo's bid, while the bribery scandal continues to generate negative headlines in Japan.

"Maybe if they wait it out long enough, then there might even be some convictions for some of these people. Then [the IOC] can just wag a finger at those particular individuals and not treat it like it's a structural problem with the Olympics," said Boykoff.

VIDEO: Audit reveals Tokyo Olympics cost 20% more than organisers reported | Watch (msn.com)

The IOC 'forgets' about scandals

The scandal could also renew opposition to the Olympics within Japan, which is less than two years removed from the much-maligned Tokyo Games, controversially held without spectators in the middle of the pandemic.

Some are now questioning whether Sapporo should ditch the plan to host another Games.

On Dec. 20, the City of Sapporo and the Japanese Olympic Committee bowed to the public pressure, announcing they are temporarily pausing the active promotion of the bid.

"The situation has changed drastically. We need to reaffirm the will of the people," Sapporo Mayor Katsuhiro Akimoto told a media conference, according to the Yomiuri newspaper.

The report said the mayor pledged to conduct another survey to determine if residents support hosting the Games.

Nao Masumoto, a visiting professor of Olympic studies at Tokyo Metropolitan University, thinks the IOC still wants to put the 2030 Games in Sapporo and is waiting until the problems "calm down."

He says local support for the plan has diminished since the scandal emerged, and thinks it was a "big mistake" that Sapporo's municipal government decided not to hold a public referendum on its bid.

"It's very important to have democratic decision-making [for Olympic bids]," said Masumoto.

But he believes things could still turn around, if another story replaces the corruption scandal in Japan's news cycle, and people start to forget.

"The IOC forgets, too," he laughed.

With files from The Associated Press and Reuters

Are winter sports threatened with extinction?

By Deutsche Welle
2022/12/23 


Winter sport disciplines like ski jumping face an uncertain future

"I believe it would be good for us to get away from the term winter sports."

This sentence was spoken by Alexander Stöckl, a ski-jumping coach, of all people. The Austrian, who has been in charge of the Norwegian national team since 2011, does not necessarily see the future of his sport on snow-covered hills and jumping slopes.

"I think it'd be good if we tried to bring in a year-round mindset," said Stöckl. "I believe that we are an extreme sport and that you can do it no matter where and no matter how."

The start of this season helped make the Austrian's point. There was no snow in Zakopane, Poland at the beginning of November, so the ski jumpers had to land on mats instead of powder.

"We are lucky that we can use mats, that it is feasible and that we don't need snow," said Stöckl, with a view to climate change.

Mat jumping: Just add water and electricity

In fact, jumpers have been using mats in preseason training for years. The mats can be used year-round with only water and electricity required. Water is constantly fed into the inrun track, which consists of two plastic or ceramic channels. It partially freezes there thanks to cooling units underneath.

The individual fibers of the mat resemble the very long bristles of a coarse broom and are constantly watered from the sides. The watering of the jump and the uphill slope form a closed circuit. The water is collected at the bottom, pumped upwards and reused. The mats remain on the slope even in winter and are covered with netting so that the snow sticks to them and does not slide off. The slope's gradient is 35 to 38 degrees at its steepest point.

Ski jumping in Africa or Australia?

The fact that you no longer need snow to hold a ski-jumping event has Alexander Stöckl thinking about new possibilities.

"What would it be like if in 10 years' time children all over the world dreamed of flying 250 meters on skis?” he asked. "And not just those who ski in Europe or maybe in North America. We can do that because we can install mat jumps anywhere."

So, ski jumping in Africa, Australia or South America? And possibly in completely new formats, away from traditional ski jumping with first and second rounds? A willingness to move away from winter sports and towards extreme sports is gathering pace among the athletes.

"Basically, I do believe that you always have to develop further – even in terms of formats," said Germany's top ski jumper, Karl Geiger. "I wouldn't dismiss the idea as completely absurd."

It’s more difficult to judge how quickly fans would accept snow-free competitions outside the usual season and venues. After all, there has been a World Cup since 1994, but it has not been a resounding success, even in traditional ski-jumping nations.

Alpine skiing struggles for future

Alpine skiing is facing much more difficulties than ski jumping. At the start of this World Cup winter, several entire weekends had to be canceled because the weather was too mild. An overcrowded World Cup calendar with races in areas that are no longer guaranteed to have snow as early as October is a problem. The national ski federations had raised this concern with the world governing body FIS, but their protests have fallen on deaf ears.

"Nobody wanted the season to start so early in October," Wolfgang Maier, Alpine director of the German Ski Association (DSV), told German broadcaster Sport1. Maier has called for the start of the season to be moved to November and for it to wrap up by mid-March at the latest.

At a time when glaciers are melting, alpine skiing is already having a hard time defending its raison d'être. Ski resorts take up a lot of land, and the effects on the environment are enormous. The lack of natural snow makes it necessary to make artificial snow,which uses up a lot of energy. This is particularly problematic during an energy crisis. The pistes, lifts, roads, parking lots and hotels require a lot of space, which is takes away from the natural habitat of plants and animals.

No hosts for Winter Games?

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is also worried about the future of winter sports, because as climate change progresses, the number of potential hosts for the Winter Olympics is declining.

IOC President Thomas Bach has described the impact of climate change on winter sports as "alarming." In 2026, the Winter Games are to be hosted by Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo, a region in which (so far) ample snow is almost a certainty. However, the awarding of the hosting rights for the 2030 Winter Games has been postponed for a year.

Apart from the problem of finding a venue that is more-or-less guaranteed to have enough snow in February, there is a growing lack of support for hosting Olympic Games among the general population and politicians. Who would want to spend billions in taxpayer money to build ski slopes, cross-country ski trails and a bobsleigh and luge track that will either not be used afterwards or can only be operated with great effort and at high costs?

Vancouver, 2010 host, and one of the promising candidates for 2030, seems to be out of the running, as the government of the province of British Columbia refused to spend billions in taxpayer money to support a bid. The Japanese winter sports resort of Sapporo, which hosted the 1972 Winter Games, has put its bid on hold. The local authorities want to conduct a nationwide survey in the spring to gauge how much enthusiasm the population still has for the Olympics after the corruption scandal surrounding the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo.

Rotation model?

Researchers recently determined that most of the previous hosts of the Winter Games would no longer be able to offer appropriate conditions for the Olympics by the end of this century anyway. There are reports that the IOC is considering moving to a system in which the Games would rotate among a fixed number of hosts – instead of the current bidding process for hosting rights.

This, of course, assumes that people in those regions even support hosting major winter sporting events in the first place.

This article was first published in German.

Paid-by-the-page ebook subscription model a boon for genre writers

NIN & MILLER GOT PAID THAT FOR WRITING PORN IN THE FORTIES IN PARIS

Though her knitwear patterns had previously been published in books and magazines, Reagan Davis was ready to spin a different kind of yarn.

A longtime fan of the cozy mystery — wholesome whodunits more in the vein of Agatha Christie than John Grisham — the Ontario-based Davis decided to self-publish the first three books in her "Knitorious Murder Mysteries" series.

Three years and 12 entries later, the series has found an audience, mostly through Kindle Unlimited (KU), a subscription service that offers readers access to hundreds of thousands of ebooks for $10 per month.

"Cozy mystery readers are enthusiastic readers. They read a lot," Davis, who writes under a pseudonym, said. "It's not at all a competitive community. My fellow cozy authors, we all support each other, we all promote each other's books, because we all appeal to the same people."

They're so enthusiastic that Davis has been able to set aside her pattern-making business and focus entirely on designing knitting-themed murders.

The subscription model works for reader and writer alike, she said. Readers can read as much as they want for a flat rate, and writers get paid by page read.

That new system is having an effect on how some writers approach their craft by encouraging them to write faster, longer and crazier. The longer a writer can keep a reader hooked, the more money they stand to make, Davis noted.

A portion of the monthly subscription fee gets funnelled into a pot, called the Kindle Direct Publishing Select Global Fund, which gets divvied among all the authors based on how many pages of their books were read.

Amazon said its fund was worth US$45.2 million last month alone. Representatives did not respond to a request for comment on how much of that went to Canadian writers.

Kobo Plus, a similar subscription service from the Toronto-founded, Rakuten-owned e-reading company, pays writers based on time spent reading.

And unlike libraries, which can only lend out as many copies of an ebook as they own the rights to, there's no limit to the number of KU or Kobo Plus readers who can download a book at any given time.

The payment model works for writers like Davis, who said she makes 60 per cent of her income from KU and the other 40 per cent from ebook and print sales. But she said it's also affected the way some people write.

"A lot of KU writers try to write long because we get paid per page read," she said. "But I mean, you can't force a story to be longer than it is and keep someone's interest."


Speed is also of the essence for KU writers, Davis said. The more books she publishes, the faster her community of readers grows and the more pages there are for that community to read.

Technology affecting content isn't anything new in publishing, said Hannah McGregor, an author and assistant professor of publishing at Simon Fraser University.

"The internet is doing things to writing very fast, because the internet works very fast," she said. "And the book was developed and was normalized very slowly, and so it did things to writing more slowly. But that relative speed doesn't change the fact that literature is always framed by technologies."

She gave the example of Charles Dickens, whose novels penned in the 19th century were published in instalments.

"That was a response to the evolution of print and the way that newspapers and magazines were becoming cheaper and cheaper to produce and easier to get out to a really wide audience," McGregor said.

"This literature that's treated as unquestionably canonical and serious was itself influenced by technological shifts interested in building an audience."

Self-published ebook authors don't tend to get the same sort of respect as Dickens and his ilk, she said, because they're largely writing genre fiction: mysteries, romances, fantasies, sci-fi and even fan fiction.

"Traditional publishing has really turned up its nose at that," McGregor said.

"I think the huge success of Kindle Unlimited stems from the fact that Amazon as an organization is fundamentally indifferent to literature, publishing, cultural capital, prestige, elitism. They don't care, because they're just there to make money.

"So while other publishers ignored the growth of this community of fan fiction writers and romance writers, Amazon was like, 'Oh, cool, you guys like that. We'll build you a tool to do that.'"

Rae Knightly said she didn't even consider going with a traditional publisher after writing "Ben Archer and the Cosmic Fall," the first book in her middle-grade science fiction series about a 12-year-old boy gifted with an alien superpower.

"I had no idea if my story was any good," she said from her home in Port Coquitlam, B.C. "I had no idea if it had any value or if anyone would read it. And since I knew that traditional publishing could take years, I didn't want to wait that long."

Like Davis, Knightly opted to write a series of books in an effort to garner more attention in the crowded market of self-published books.

"Amazon pushes authors who publish series and who publish consistently and who publish often. So it's not enough to just have one book," Knightly said.

Initially, she planned on writing three books about Ben Archer. But after establishing an audience — not an easy feat — she decided to keep going.

"I think the turning point came after Book 3," she said. "I think readers are more likely to try you out when they see that you have several books out.

"The other thing is, things changed for me the day that I realized that I needed to treat my writing as a business, which is a big mind switch for a creative person."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 18, 2022.

Nicole Thompson, The Canadian Press

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Even if out of office, Hansard the cat connecting Albertans to the legislature

Story by Lisa Johnson • Friday DEC. 23,2022 - Edmonton Journal   

If you cross paths with a black cat in Alberta’s legislature building, consider yourself lucky.


House Speaker Nathan Cooper with Hansard the cat, in his office on Thursday, Dec. 1, 2022 in Edmonton. Hansard is a rescue cat the House Speaker got and named after the official legislature record.

When Hansard was rescued at just a few days old, she needed round-the-clock care in Speaker Nathan Cooper’s office, but nowadays the more independent five-month-old cat doesn’t come to work with him every day.

Still, being out of the office most of the time hasn’t stopped Hansard from doing an important job. She’s helping Cooper tell Albertans about the history, and function, of the legislature.

On an early December morning, before Cooper would don his speaker’s robe and tricorn hat to oversee proceedings in the legislature, he sat down with Postmedia to herd a few facts, and help get his cat to sit still for some photographs.


Hansard is a rescue cat the House Speaker got

Cooper said the cat has given his public engagement efforts a big boost, including getting people thinking about the work of the legislature, and how democracy works in the province.

Thanks to her, he said, thousands more people know there is a detailed transcript of everything said on a daily basis in the assembly by elected members who represent every corner of the province — also known as the Hansard .

“It makes me super happy because we’ve tried a lot of different ways to engage people … and of all of the efforts, the winner, for sure, hands down, has been Hansard the cat,” he said.



Meanwhile, Hansard the cat was making non-partisan inroads, drawing the attention of Opposition NDP MLA Janis Irwin, whose cat Oregano is perhaps the most notorious of an elected lawmaker in Alberta. In a recent tweet, Irwin posed for a photo with Hansard and Cooper, saying she had finally met the Alberta legislature cat.

The house pet has sparked the creation of a Twitter account, written from the cat’s perspective , dedicated to “using my cuteness to make sure the Alberta UCP and NDP stay civil.”

Cooper said he had no idea who is behind it, but he gave the account kudos. Postmedia reached out to the account through a direct message, but the mysterious tweeter didn’t pounce as of press time.

Speaking in the speaker’s suite, an apartment now used mostly as a meeting and reception space, Cooper highlighted how important it is to him to help everyone, especially new Canadians, feel connected to Alberta’s democratic institutions. He also said part of his role, as the head of the legislative branch, is to build trust.

“My jam, if you will, is around these educational pieces,” said Cooper.

The Speaker’s cat sometimes visits Cooper’s office, which on a normal weekday, is full of staffers, and a few small cat toys to bat around. The cat, when she’s there, can hop onto Cooper’s desk or wander into the giant walk-in bank safe once used to hold payday cash, before cheques or automatic transfers existed.

In 2022, that safe is a coffee room with a photocopier, where Hansard can lurk below the assembly’s mace, a ceremonial gold-plated staff that symbolizes the Crown’s authority in Alberta, and an object the assembly can’t conduct business without.


Speaker Nathan Cooper poses with a shirt given to him by staff in the department of Hansard, on Dec. 1, 2022.© Greg Southam/Postmedia

If you take a public tour of the 109-year-old building, you’re more likely to catch a glimpse of the mace, often on display in a glass case, than the face of Hansard the cat, who is not allowed to roam the hallways.

Your best bet to see the speaker’s pet is to follow Cooper’s social media accounts, like on Twitter , Facebook and Instagram , where he posts photos of Hansard, always with an eye on teaching followers a thing or two about the legislature.

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