UK
More rail workers to strike in growing dispute over jobs, pay and pensions

ALAN JONES, PA INDUSTRIAL CORRESPONDENT

8 June 2022

More railway workers are to go on strike in growing disputes over pay, jobs and pensions, threatening massive travel chaos later this month.

Members of Unite at Transport for London (TfL) and London Underground will join a walkout on June 21 which will cripple Tube services.

The Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union has already announced a Tube strike on that day, while its members at Network Rail and 13 train operators will walk out on June 21, 23 and 25.

The strikes will be the biggest outbreak of industrial action in the industry in a generation.

Commuters at Southfields station in south-west London (Joe Sene/PA)

The disputes are over pay, jobs and pensions, with the unions complaining that railway staff who worked through the pandemic are facing job cuts, a pay freeze and attacks on employment conditions.

Unite said 1,000 of its members in London will take action over pay and warnings of plans to cut pensions.

TfL insists no decisions or proposals have been made.

Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: “It is not acceptable that the dedicated workers at TfL and London Underground are being told to pay the price of the pandemic with their pensions, pay cuts and threats to their jobs.”

Talks between Network Rail (NR) and the union are expected to be held in the next few days, sources told the PA news agency.

NR is also drawing up contingency plans, with the strikes expected to cause disruption to services for six days, from the first walkout on Tuesday June 21 to the day after the third strike.

Fewer than one in five trains are likely to run, and only between 7am and 7pm, probably only on main lines.

No direct talks are planned between the union and train operators, although the RMT said it is open to “meaningful negotiations” to try to resolve the dispute and the Rail Delivery Group said it was willing to take part in negotiations.

The strikes threaten widespread travel disruption during a number of major events, including concerts, Test match cricket and the Glastonbury festival.

Glastonbury starts on June 22, while that week will also see England play New Zealand in a Test match in Leeds, the British Athletics Championships in Manchester, and gigs in London’s Hyde Park by Sir Elton John (June 24) and The Rolling Stones (June 25).

There will also be a Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in London on June 24 and 25 and it is Armed Forces Day on June 25.

RMT general secretary Mick Lynch said: “Railway workers have been treated appallingly and, despite our best efforts in negotiations, the rail industry, with the support of the Government, has failed to take their concerns seriously.

“We have a cost-of-living crisis, and it is unacceptable for railway workers to either lose their jobs or face another year of a pay freeze when inflation is at 11.1% and rising.

“Our union will now embark on a sustained campaign of industrial action which will shut down the railway system.”

Network Rail chief executive Andrew Haines said the organisation is “doing everything we can” to avoid the strike action.

“There are two weeks until the first strike is planned. We will use this time to keep talking to our unions and, through compromise and common sense on both sides, we hope to find a solution and avoid the damage that strike action would cause all involved,” he said.

Rail Delivery Group chairman Steve Montgomery said the strikes are “needless and damaging”.

A spokesman for London mayor Sadiq Khan said: “At the heart of this industrial action is the Government’s appalling approach to public transport across the country, not least its continued resistance to delivering the sustainable funding Transport for London desperately needs.

“These planned strikes are extremely frustrating and disappointing and will have a serious impact on London’s businesses and commuters right at the time when we’re working to get more passengers back on to the network, encourage tourists back to London, and support the capital’s economic recovery.

“In London, TfL has made clear that nobody has or will lose their jobs, and there are no proposed changes to pensions. That’s why the mayor urges the RMT to call off this action and to work with TfL to find a resolution.”

Andy Lord, TfL’s chief operating officer, said: “It is particularly disappointing that the RMT is threatening such disruption given that nobody has lost or will lose their jobs as part of the proposals that we have laid out, which amounts to a recruitment freeze rather than job losses, and that there have been no proposals to change pensions or conditions.

“We have been in regular talks with the RMT to try and resolve this dispute and would welcome further talks rather than strike action.”

A Department for Transport spokesman said: “After all our collaborative work over the past few weeks on the Elizabeth line, it is disappointing and unfair of the mayor to put the blame for these strikes on the Government rather than take responsibility and fulfil his promise of making TfL financially stable – especially as it was his own advisory panel who recommended pension reform.

“We’ve provided TfL with close to £5 billion during the pandemic and committed to exploring a long-term settlement to further support London’s transport network all while the mayor buries his head in the sand and continues to push for more bailouts.”

‘It’s a war on the people’: El Salvador’s mass arrests send thousands into despair

At least 38,000 people have been arrested under Nayib Bukele’s draconic state of exemption

Salvadoran gang members of the Mara Salvatrucha are seen during a search by security teams in the prisons of Quezaltepeque, in the department of La Libertad, in El Salvador on 28 March. 

Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

by Tom Phillips in Salcoatitán
THE GUARDIAN
Wed 8 Jun 2022

Only a few weeks ago, Sandra García was looking forward to the brighter future Nayib Bukele promised El Salvador’s opportunity-starved youth when he swept to power three years ago.

“I gave him my vote believing we’d have a better life,” said the 23-year-old, one of hundreds of thousands of young Salvadorans who chose the authoritarian-minded millennial as their president.

Those dreams imploded when the man she planned to marry, Juan José Ibáñez García, was seized during of one of the most ferocious security crackdowns in recent Latin American history.

Two days later Ibáñez – who friends and family say worked in a local pizzeria and had no links to crime – was moved to a maximum-security penitentiary housing many of the 38,000-plus people the government claims to have imprisoned since the offensive began in late March. A fortnight later the 21-year-old was dead – one of at least 35 prisoners who have reportedly died in mysterious circumstances since Bukele declared a draconian state of exception supposedly designed to annihilate his country’s gangs.

An undertaker appeared at García’s door in Salcoatitán, a bucolic tourist town in El Salvador’s coffee-growing heartlands, early one morning to break the news. “My world came crashing down,” she said later, as she stood by a coffin containing her lover’s remains.

Juan José Ibáñez García’s friends and family mourn his death at his funeral. 

Photograph: Ivan Manzano

Bukele declared his “war on gangs” on Sunday 27 March after an explosion of bloodshed shocking even for a country that until recently was considered the most violent on Earth. El Salvador’s murder rate has plummeted since the populist took power in 2019 – allegedly thanks to a secret pact with leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha gang. But on the eve of the crackdown – in a wave of attacks seemingly calculated to puncture one of Bukele’s key claims to success – 62 people were murdered in a single day.

“That Saturday was just horrifying … I told my kids not to go out because things were really messy,” said Jorge Beltrán, a crime reporter who has covered the gangs for more than two decades. “Once, on the most terrible day, there were something like 50 [murders]. But 60-something? This had never happened before.”


El Salvador accused of ‘massive’ human rights violations with 2% of adults in prison

One body was dumped at the entrance to Bukele’s pet project: a resort town nicknamed Surf City with which the former advertising executive hopes to boost the economy and rebrand El Salvador as a tropical paradise for sunseekers and cryptocurrency fans.

“It was a huge blow to the president’s public image – and image is so important to him, that he needed to come up with something that had never been done before,” said Tiziano Breda, a Central America analyst from Crisis Group.

Bukele’s “something” was a state of exception that was immediately approved by the parliament his party overwhelmingly controls.

The results have been jaw-dropping, with more people arrested during the last two months than in the whole of last year – most of them young and underprivileged men and women whose names and photographs are splashed across state media each day. “It is really, really stunning,” said Breda. “This is an all-out, nationwide operation to capture anyone who may have or has had any relationship to gangs.”

The spectre of Bukele’s security offensive is hard to escape in Central America’s smallest country.

Billboards urge citizens to denounce on potential “terrorists” on a telephone hotline. Radio stations churn out government propaganda in which authorities vow to fight to the end: “We will not stop until we have wiped out the gangs.”

Juan José Ibáñez García, 21, died soon after he was arrested

A poster outside one major prison, La Esperanza, shows a security agent towering over semi-naked suspects with a truncheon. “Want to be next? You decide!” it reads.

Many of El Salvador’s 6 million citizens are delighted at the assault on US-born gangs, which have wreaked havoc since taking root here after the 12-year civil war ended in 1992. “He’s been rounding up all these scoundrels … we feel so much safer,” said Sandra López, 61, a supporter who attended a recent pro-Bukele demo in downtown San Salvador. Polls show Bukele has become even more popular since the state of exception started, with approval ratings of more than 90%.

But the crackdown has been a nightmare for the hundreds of women who have been sleeping rough outside La Esperanza, desperately seeking information about loved ones arrested on vague charges.

Many of those women voted Bukele in 2019, but after weeks camping on filthy pavements are having second thoughts.

“This isn’t a war on gangs, it’s a war on the people,” seethed one woman from the city of Santa Ana who was looking for her brother and asked not to be named.

Further up the street sat a woman in even greater distress. Mari Hernández said her partner, Saul Gómez, had worked at a sugar-grinding plant until police arrested him at their home in late April.
The reality is that in El Salvador it is now a crime to be young. You’re not safe anywhereMari Hernández

“They said it was an order from the president that people should be brought in whether or not they were criminals … and that if they didn’t detain him they’d be arrested themselves for not following the law,” claimed the pregnant 24-year-old.

The officers told Hernández her 25-year-old partner would soon be free – but five weeks later he remained behind bars while she was two weeks away from giving birth.

To make matters worse, doctors had detected a murmur on the baby’s heart during a prenatal checkup. Before the arrest, Hernández had been undergoing treatment, but without Gómez’s income she could no longer afford to pay for it

“The reality is that in El Salvador it is now a crime to be young. You’re not safe anywhere,” said Hernández.

Beltrán, the crime reporter, said it was obvious that many prisoners genuinely had no gang ties and were apprehended “simply because the police didn’t like the look of them” or perhaps had a brush with the law years earlier.

A former soldier, Beltrán said he supported a surgical offensive against the murderous criminal groups. “But they haven’t done this. They’re just taking people indiscriminately,” he added. “And like in every war, it’s always the poor who suffer.”

The funeral of Juan José Ibáñez García, who was seized during a government security crackdown. Photograph: Ivan Manzano

The Bukele administration and its cheerleaders defend what they call a long-needed assault on dangerous “terrorists”, although the president and his security minister declined to be interviewed.

“This is a war between upstanding Salvadorans and the criminals who for years have condemned us to a life of anxiety, mourning and misery,” Bukele said last week in an address marking his three years in office. “We have God and the people of El Salvador on our side.”


Nayib Bukele calls himself the ‘world’s coolest dictator’ – but is he joking?

The tourism minister, Morena Valdez, celebrated the crackdown during a visit to Surf City, where an international surfing competition was taking place. “For the tourist sector it has been a boom,” Valdez said.

Yet critics see the state of exception as the latest phase in El Salvador’s march towards tyranny under a messianic leader who has already amassed huge power and sarcastically calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator”.

“I see this as one more step towards the construction of an authoritarian state in which power is concentrated around one person and one family – it’s very similar to what’s happening in Nicaragua,” said Jimmy Alvarado, an investigative journalist from El Faro, the combative news outlet that revealed the government’s secret pact with the gangs.

Johnny Wright Sol, one of the few opposition politicians in parliament, said: “History tells us that many of these populist governments end as authoritarian experiments and [what’s striking] is the speed at which [this is happening]. It took [Daniel] Ortega many more years in Nicaragua than it has taken Bukele.”

The funeral procession for Juan José Ibáñez García in the town of Juayúa. 

Photograph: Ivan Manzano

Wright feared the gang crackdown could trigger a human catastrophe, bringing further violence and disease to overcrowded jails and plunging poor families further into penury. “This could rapidly spiral into a very severe humanitarian crisis,” he said.

For Sandra García, the crisis has already arrived.

So many Salvadorans put our trust in [Bukele] – and we were cheated

Sandra García

She suffered a miscarriage, and told the police officer who took her partner who replied: “We don’t care – we have a quota of arrests we need to reach.”

Two weeks later, Ibáñez was taken from prison to a hospital for reasons that remain unclear. He died there in the early hours of 25 May. “Nobody has told me anything, nobody has explained to me why,” García said.

Hours after identifying his body, García stood beside his coffin in Juayúa, the town where Ibáñez was born, and pondered her loss. “We had so many dreams … to be parents; to build a business together; to study together … and it’s all gone. It all ended with his death,” she said. “So many Salvadorans put our trust in [Bukele] – and we were cheated.”

Juan José Ibáñez García’s partner and family are broken by his death.

 Photograph: Ivan Manzano

The next day mourners processed through the town centre to a red and white church where a priest read from the Book of John, urging shellshocked mourners to transform their sadness into joy. “You shall weep and lament, but the world shall rejoice.”

There was resignation and bitterness at the tranquil forested cemetery, where García passed out as the casket with Ibáñez’s remains was lowered into the earth.

Stunned mothers – several with sons languishing in jail – muttered words of indignation at what they called Bukele’s war on El Salvador’s youth.

“It is evil,” smoldered one woman, lamenting how so many ordinary Salvadorans still supported their populist leader because of the $300 (£27.35) benefit he gave them during the coronavirus pandemic.

The woman balked at the idea that Ibáñez had died of natural causes yet saw no chance of ever discovering the truth. “God will see that there is justice,” she said as mourners began to disperse, heading back to startled communities where the young now fear to leave their homes.

EVITA OF UKRAINE
Interview
Yulia Tymoshenko on war in Ukraine: ‘It’s a chance for the free world to kill this evil’

Exclusive: Former PM discusses ‘cold, cruel’ Vladimir Putin and the west’s response to the Russian invasion

Yulia Tymoshenko in Kyiv in early March, two weeks after the Russian invasion. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Luke Harding and Dan Sabbagh in Kyiv

THE GUARDIAN

Wed 8 Jun 2022 

Ukraine’s former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko has described Vladimir Putin as “absolutely rational, cold, cruel, black evil” and claimed he is determined to go down in Russian history alongside Stalin and Peter the Great.

In an exclusive interview, Tymoshenko dismissed the suggestion that the Russian president was “crazy”. “He acts according to his own dark logic,” she said. “He’s driven by this idea of historic mission and wants to create an empire. That’s his hyper-goal. It comes from a deep inner desire and belief.”


Tymoshenko, a leader of the 2004 Orange revolution and twice prime minister, had several one-on-one meetings with Putin. They held negotiations in 2009 after Putin, then prime minister, turned off the gas supply to Ukraine. Tymoshenko stood for president in 2010, 2014 and 2019, finishing second twice and then third.

Close up, Putin was “always cautious” in what he said and always suspicious that he might be being taped, she said. “He is from a KGB school,” she said. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February, he made no secret of his belief that there was “no such nation as Ukraine, and no such people as Ukrainians”, she said.

His ambitions went beyond seizing Ukrainian territory and toppling its pro-western, pro-Nato government, Tymoshenko suggested. His geopolitical aim was to take over Belarus, Georgia and Moldova as well, and to control central and eastern Europe including the Baltic states, just as Moscow did in Soviet times, she said.

Yulia Tymoshenko and Vladimir Putin in Yalta, Ukraine, in November 2009. 

Photograph: Aleksandr Prokopenko/EPA

Tymoshenko was in Kyiv on 24 February when Russia launched a multi-pronged attack in the early hours. She said peacetime political rivalries and grudges immediately vanished. That morning she went to the presidential administration together with other senior opposition figures and met Volodymyr Zelenskiy, whom she ran against in 2019.

“We hugged each other and shook hands. Everyone was shocked, pale and afraid. None of us planned to leave Kyiv,” she said. “Everyone knew we should stand until the last. We agreed to support our president and our army and to work for victory.” Zelenskiy’s decision to remain in the capital and to “overcome his fear” was important, she said.

As Russian bombs fell, Tymoshenko took refuge in the basement of the modern office building belonging to her Batkivshchyna political party in Kyiv’s Podil district, which was hit several times by missiles. Asked if she was ready to shoot Russian soldiers, she said: “Yes. I have legal weapons. The Kremlin put me on a kill list, according to sources. We were prepared.”

The Russian government had always considered her an enemy, Tymoshenko said. She pointed to her support for Ukraine’s membership of the EU and Nato. In the 2010 presidential election she stood against Viktor Yanukovych, who was backed by Moscow. She blamed her defeat on the outgoing president at the time, Viktor Yushchenko, a one-time Orange revolution ally.

The following year Yanukovych had Tymoshenko jailed in a case widely seen as politically motivated. “Putin and Yanukovych imprisoned me. Yanukovych was never an independent player. He was always Putin’s puppet,” she said. She got out of prison in 2014 when Yanukovych fled to Moscow after the Maidan anti-corruption protests. Weeks later Putin annexed Crimea and instigated a separatist uprising in the east of Ukraine.

Protesters in Maidan Square, Kyiv, in February 2014.

 Photograph: Emeric Fohlen/NurPhoto/REX

Tymoshenko spoke in her downtown office decorated with the Ukrainian flag and photos showing her with western leaders including Margaret Thatcher. She praised the “unbelievable unity” of the “anti-Putin coalition” and singled out the UK and Boris Johnson for special mention, as well as the US, Canada and Poland. “We see Britain as a part of the broader Ukrainian family,” she said.

Last weekend France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, said it was important not to “humiliate” Putin – a phrase interpreted as meaning Ukraine should sacrifice some of its territory in exchange for a realpolitik deal with Moscow. Tymoshenko said France and Germany – criticised for slow-pedalling on arms deliveries – should not be ostracised as Europe grappled with its worst security crisis in decades.

But she said Ukraine’s international partners had to understand that the only way to end the war was to crush Russian forces on the battlefield. Without naming anybody, she said they should not become “co-conspirators with evil”. She added: “There is no such thing as a peace agreement with Putin because it doesn’t lead to peace. It would lead to a new war several years later.”

The stakes for her country were existential, she said. The Kremlin’s objective was to “depersonify” Ukraine, stripping it of its language and culture, and leaving it weak and “atomised”. The civilised world had a unique opportunity to stop Russia and to prevent it from spreading “war, corruption, blackmail, disinformation and unfreedom,” she said.
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Russia had largely given up on the pretence that it was only targeting Ukrainian military infrastructure, Tymoshenko said. The murder of civilians – in cities in the Kyiv region such as Bucha and Irpin, as well as in other areas – was cruel and deliberate, she said, with Russian soldiers following Moscow’s instructions.

“It’s an inseparable part of their genocide against the Ukrainian nation,” she said. “What happened in Mariupol was even worse than in Bucha, Irpin and Hostomel. I’m convinced we will be able to take back Mariupol and to uncover the scale of the horrible killings there. It was a tragedy, a human catastrophe of an unthinkable scale.”

Considering her words, the veteran politician concluded: “This is a great battle for our territory and our freedom. It’s a historic chance for the free world to kill this evil.”

REST IN POWER

‘She is dancing among the greats’: the dangerously honest, richly ambiguous Paula Rego

Paula Rego, pictured in her London studio in 2009. Photograph: Shutterstock

Art’s great storyteller has died at the age of 87. Our critic celebrates a woman of courage and freakish imagination


Jonathan Jones

Wed 8 Jun 2022

The wickedness of Paula Rego’s imagination shines like patent leather in her 1987 painting The Policeman’s Daughter. A young woman is polishing, as the title tells us, her father’s jackboot. He is nowhere to be seen, but the spectre of a man we take to be an authoritarian bully haunts the fetish object that is his boot. His daughter has her arm sunk into it, right down to the sole, as if she is being swallowed, or willingly immersing herself in a dubious sensual communion with an image of brutality. It is a painting of compromise, corruption and the squalor of power.

Rego refused to waste her life like this woman, lost in the dusty perversions of an authoritarian regime, or in the more polite claustrophobia of the English middle-class family.

Born in Portugal in 1935, she was encouraged by her parents to escape António de Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship by going to finishing school in Britain. She went on to study fine art at the Slade in the 1950s and started a relationship there with the Egyptian-born artist Victor Willing, whom she married. British figurative painting was in a golden age. Artists as diverse as Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach and David Hockney were interpreting the fragile, mortal stuff of human bodies and faces in daring, radical, enduring ways. Rego was to add a completely different and original dimension to this “school of London”, as some called it, by mixing a pummelling, unforgiving yet erotic eye for the physical with storytelling that was bigger, more free and more cinematic than her British realist contemporaries. And she has a distinct perspective on the games of power she paints: she is the daughter, not the policeman.

The Policeman’s Daughter, 1987. 

Photograph: _/Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

By the time Rego painted mature masterpieces such as The Policeman’s Daughter, Salazar was dead. It is not a realist depiction of the Portugal of her childhood, although Rego had kept a foot in her homeland, living between the two countries for many years. The Policeman’s Daughter looks to me like a surrealist film that has been turned into a painting. It also has a lot in common with the magic realist fiction of the late 20th century, from Gabriel García Márquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch to Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber.

Rego is a magic realist to the letter, mixing fact and fantasy, a connoisseur of fairytales. The cat in The Policeman’s Daughter seems to know something we don’t. In other paintings and prints Rego gives forceful life to classic stories, often with very harsh twists: in her 1995 painting Snow White and her Stepmother, a gawky, inelegant adolescent has her knickers forcefully pulled down by her stiletto-wearing custodian to check if she is a virgin who can be married to a prince.

The Family, 1988. Photograph: © Paula Rego

We are in a Neverland of time and place, somewhere between the present day, the repressive Portugal into which Rego was born and pure imagination. A world, anyway, where stepmothers scrutinise the sexuality of stepdaughters. And that strangeness seemed to surround Rego wherever she was, even in the most intimate moments of her own life. The first time I stood, stunned, before her 1988 painting The Family, I thought I was seeing a long overdue feminist revenge. The man of the family flops helplessly in the hands of his wife and daughter, who may be either dressing him or undressing him. The girl manhandles the creases in his trousers while his wife looks away dreamily, doing her cruel work absentmindedly. Because she does it every day.

I had no idea then of Rego’s personal history. In the year this and other powerfully timeless paintings of sex and power were first shown at the Serpentine Gallery, her husband, Willing, died after being ill for years with multiple sclerosis. So there is a reason the man in The Family appears so helpless: far from assailing him in a righteous gender rebellion, the Rego figure and her daughters are dressing someone with MS.

But of course, that doesn’t settle it. The sense of rage is real. It is the honestly confessed frustration of a woman who finds herself the helper of a paralysed husband. A straightforward portrayal of patriarchy under attack would be so much easier to explain. But like her peers, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, Rego is obsessively and dangerously honest. Her feminism comes with a true artist’s courage to show what shouldn’t be shown. She shares, in The Family, the complex and for most people unutterable feelings you may have in this awful situation. We know what the wife is thinking as her eyes drift off. She is thinking, despite herself: when will this be over?

I don’t think such a brave and searching artist can be summed up, as she was by some fans in her last years, including the curators of her 2021 Tate retrospective, as a political warrior pure and simple. That would make her a much narrower artist than she is. And before she is anything else, she is a painter who mixed the British eye for sharp reality with a sense of fantasy and theatre that reflects her Catholic heritage. She has a raw appetite for the human body, muscled and powerful (I am speaking of the women), that has much in common with Freud. But unlike him, she loves a good story. She is a narrative artist or “history painter” in the tradition of Hogarth and Goya.

In her 1999 painting The Betrothal, she reworks Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode in her own uneasily timeless setting, which seems to be simultaneously north London and Portugal, where a woman with a massive shiny hairstyle, a resting dog, a hair salon and the deposition of Christ are among the normal and abnormal things all strangely juxtaposed. One of the questions that fascinate Rego as a painter is how a picture tells a story, how it differs from a film or novel. In a painting you can see a sequence of events all at the same time, by glancing through the panels of a series or maybe seeing them all compressed in one canvas. Cinema cannot do that, or a novel, or video art. But a painting can abolish time, or turn it into a multi-directional flow, or just leave a tale unfinished. This is why Rego’s storytelling is so ambiguous and rich.

The Cadet and His Sister, 1988. 

Photograph: © Paula Rego

The freakishness of her imagination had no limits. Her style may match Freud’s but she had read a lot more of his grandfather Sigmund. The Cadet and his Sister (1988) is another grand monument to the unjust and the perverse. In a park straight out of the cold surreal scenes of Giorgio de Chirico, a young woman kneels to do up her brother’s shoe. The severity of his uniform is matched by the repressed formality of her clothes and the kinky objects beside her: a cathedral-shaped handbag and gloves. This is a Freudian nightmare in which repressed emotions flow in the most perverse channels imaginable. Is Rego angry? Or is she amused by the antics of human sexuality? It makes Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie seem conventional.

When Rego painted her tragicomic, unsettling histories of power and violence in the 1980s, there was a vogue for big, bold paintings. But that vanished overnight. The cool way to tell stories in art became photography or video. Rego was in the wrong place at the wrong time: London was sold in the 1990s on the slightly naive belief that painting, which had lasted since the stone age, was suddenly “dead”.

Dog Woman, 1994. 

Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

Rego drifted out of the mainstream, but perhaps she always belonged in a musty, mysterious world of her own between past and present. Her later works have a caustic power. Taking up the medium of pastels, the oil crayons previously used by Degas, she depicted her enigmatic scenarios more intensely and sensually than ever. In her 1994 picture Dog Woman, a woman has been made to go down on all fours. She scrunches her face, as if barking. Who forced her to do this? It may be a policeman in a fascist regime. Or it may just be a man demanding sadomasochist thrills.

It is an image of oppression but also an artistic exploration of the body as a vehicle of emotion. This and the other mighty pastels in the same series all feature models adopting extreme, expressive poses. This is not a crude scream of a picture. It is a master’s exploration of the nude that consciously echoes the suffering bodies of Michelangelo’s prisoners or the classical Niobids. Does that seem a stretch? Rego was deeply aware of the history of art: one of her ambitious paintings is the mural she created in the National Gallery in 1990, full of erudite jokes on paintings in its collection. Her politics is always poetic, her art always literate.

Rego will, above all, be remembered as a brave artist. Even now, I sense there is a background of private stories, suffering and, yes, jokes in her art that we have yet to digest and understand. There is surely a great biography to be written. There is plenty of material to tease out. Knowing more of the relationships between her childhood and emigration, marriage and love life will change how we see her enigmatic art.

For now she is in her own painted world, somewhere in the Bay of Biscay, between cultures and times in an anachronistic magic reality. In her 1988 painting The Dance, people dressed in 1950s suits and folk skirts dance by moonlight on her beach. The faces include her husband and son. There is a fortress on the skyline but no soldiers are coming: the dancers are safe for now, in their formal, stately gentleness. No one is being tortured. No one is dying. This is where Rego must be dancing now, among the greats.

Dame Paula Rego obituary

Most of Paula Rego’s late and best work was done in pastel, such as this piece, Love, 1995. Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

Painter whose powerful images of women disrupted the male gaze

Michael McNay

Wed 8 Jun 2022 

The artist Paula Rego, who has died aged 87, once said that she liked “to work on the edge”, and her many series of paintings and drawings, about the subjugation of women, abortion and the marriage market, cut across social perceptions of the role of women, and disrupted the male view of women and their sexuality.

The anger that built up in her years of subjection to the men in her life – even her husband, Victor Willing, who took up years of her life as she nursed him – enabled her to deploy her art as a political weapon. One of her most famous paintings, The Policeman’s Daughter (1987), needs no interpretation: in it, a scowling young woman cleans her father’s jackboot with one hand while she shoves the other arm up inside it.

Paula Rego in 1987, just six years after her first London show, at the AIR gallery. 

Photograph: ITV/Rex/Shutterstock

Rego was remorselessly described as a storyteller, which was true, and which cuts across the thrust of the art of the past century (with the exception of surrealism). She claimed her favourite painting was Max Ernst’s depiction of the Virgin Mary spanking the child Jesus. And it helps to know what she thought she was about (her stories changed with each telling), but no more than it helps looking at certain Titians or Picassos to know the myths in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The bottom line was the sheer visual power of her work, in painting, in fluently wonderful drawings, and in etching and aquatints, carried by a magnificent technique.

When the post-revolution Portuguese – of which Rego was one – ducked out of legalising abortion by simply not turning out to vote in the referendum, she created a series of paintings that exploded like a powder keg in her home country and in Spain. Her masterpiece in this series is the triptych of 1998 showing sordid back-street abortion parlours in rooms sparsely equipped with a bed and a plastic stacking chair, or an armchair with its cover worn into holes. In one canvas, a woman is curled up in foetal misery; in the second, a woman draws her legs up and braces herself as she grasps her thighs; in the third, a schoolgirl still wearing her blouse and tie draws up her skirt and straddles a plastic bucket as she glares out at the viewer.

A 1995 series of female ballet dancers of almost brutal appearance, utterly subverting the tradition of Pavlova and Sylvie Guillem, is curiously reminiscent of Degas. This is not merely because of the subject, nor because Degas, too, took a backstage view of dancers, though through the keyhole of male fascination rather than Rego’s gutsy and head-on truth-telling; but because by this time Rego too was working in pastel, an urgent medium that combines the swiftness of drawing with the completeness of painting.

Most of her late and best work was done in pastel, including the Buñuel-esque take on a bride in a white silk dress and veil lying submissively on her back (1994), and the series of the same year of women behaving like dogs, scavenging or ingratiating themselves, cowed but utterly aware of their own sexuality. There is nothing else in art like them.

Rego was born in Lisbon under the fascist Salazar dictatorship, which, with Roman Catholicism stirred into the mix, was an unholy brew. Women were expected to be seen and not heard. The Regos were middle class and anglophile.

Paula’s father, José, was an electrical engineer who worked for Marconi; her mother, Maria, ran the home, which had maids and a cook. When Paula was 18 months old her parents moved to London for a year for her father’s work, and she was looked after by her grandparents and an ageing aunt. After her parents’ return, Paula, aged three, was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and the family moved to the seaside town of Estoril, spending summers in the fishing village of Ericeira, for her health.

She attended St Julian’s school, an English foundation in Carcavelos, near Lisbon, then was sent to Britain to a finishing school, the Grove, in Kent. In 1952 she went to the Slade School of Fine Art, London, to study painting.

In 1954, Under Milk Wood was first broadcast on BBC radio, and it became as popular a talking point in offices and pubs as television’s EastEnders might now (which, incidentally, was one of the few things that regularly drew her away from the studio in later years).

The infection spread to the Slade, where the 19-year-old Rego made her own version of the play in oils on canvas. She brilliantly translated Dylan Thomas’s characters from the imaginary Welsh village into a Portuguese idiom of sunbaked peasants. With this painting she came joint first for the Slade summer composition prize. And then, full stop.

While at the Slade, Rego had met Willing, who was married, seven years older than her, and reckoned by many to be the best painter of his generation. In 1956, Rego’s final year at college, she became pregnant and went home to Portugal to have the baby. Willing left his wife, joined Rego in Portugal, and in 1959 they married, and went on to have two more children. He encouraged her to continue drawing to cope with depression, but though she had now developed a powerful line, effectively she disappeared from public view, even though she often visited and kept a studio in Charlotte Street, central London.

In 1966 Willing developed multiple sclerosis and 10 years later the family went back to London permanently. Apart from a couple of shows in Lisbon in the 1970s, Rego dropped out of sight. In 1981, at the age of 46, virtually out of nowhere, she had an eye-opening first London show, at the AIR Gallery, but – paralleling the career of Jackson Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, and who knows how many more – not until Willing died in 1988 did she feel fully able to compete in public.

Salazar Vomiting the Homeland, 1960, by Paula Rego. 

Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

Rego once said that she tried abstraction but was no good at it. On the contrary, her early work, abstract expressionist for want of a better term, was as disruptive as her later figuration: Birth (1959) or Salazar Vomiting the Homeland (1960), which, like most of her paintings of that period, fetched up in Portuguese collections, already had a disconcertingly raw power driven by anger.

Later, Willing told her that when he was a child his toys were rag dolls of animals from which he made a theatre. She took up this notion and created a theatre of her own, on canvas, of bears and red monkeys, not winsome bedroom teddies, but mutated and vicious human-like creatures: in one painting, the red monkey’s wife cuts his tail off while he vomits. Willing knew what was going on in this symbolism, and encouraged her. He was always her best critic and his writings are still the best authority on her work.

Early in the 90s Rego became the first artist-in-residence at the National Gallery in London, and while there she carried out a commission to paint a huge mural for the restaurant in the Sainsbury wing. She took her title, Crivelli’s Garden, from a portion of the background to a painting by the 15th-century Venetian Carlo Crivelli and, suppressing the acerbic aspect of her work, set down a gathering of female saints, all of whom figured in paintings in the gallery, all of them at humble daily tasks, all survivors, in an affecting homage to womankind.

Paula Rego in her London studio with some of her stuffed ‘mutated and human-like’ creatures. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

Tate Liverpool hung a Rego retrospective in 1996. Other major national and international shows followed, including two more retrospectives at Tate Britain, in 2004 and 2021. In 2005 she was commissioned by Royal Mail to create a set of postage stamps in celebration of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

Her son, Nick, directed a BBC documentary on his mother, Paula Rego: Secrets and Stories, in 2017. In 2010, she was made a dame, a curiously antique award for such a powerfully feminist artist.

For the last quarter of a century the writer and translator Anthony Rudolf was Rego’s companion and principal male model.

She is survived by her children, Nick, Caroline and Victoria.

Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego, artist, born 26 January 1935; died 8 June 2022

Egypt's tanoura puts kaleidoscopic spin on dervish tradition

Egypt's kaleidoscopic whirling dervish performance, known as 'tanoura', is a world away from those of Turkey, who trace their origins to the teachings of Sufi poet and mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi - (RUMI)

Khaled DESOUKI

by Sarah Benhaida
June 9, 2022 — Cairo (AFP)


In a 500-year-old stone theatre in the Egyptian capital, two young dervishes spin ceaselessly. Slowly, then all at once, they are consumed in a flurry of vivid fabrics.

Born into a lineage of whirling dervishes, Mohamed Adel, 20, takes great pride in the uniquely Egyptian interpretation of the centuries-old ritual known colloquially as "tanoura", or skirt in Arabic.

"I choose the colours and the shapes that are sewn into the skirts," Adel said, pointing to the folds of his purple skirt with green and yellow appliques moments before stepping on stage to perform at a folk art festival.

The kaleidoscopic performance is a world away from the UNESCO-listed whirling dervishes of Turkey, who trace their origins to the teachings of Sufi poet and mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi.


Distinguished by their white robes, camel-wool hats and fealty to ascetic Sufi spiritualism, the ceremonies in Turkey bear only a fleeting resemblance to the psychedelic performances popular in Egypt.

Sufis in Egypt, who number more than 15 million, with nearly 80 different orders, adopted the ritual, progressively adding colours and rhythms, turning the spiritual practice into a folkloric art in its own right.

- 'Escape' -

Every time it is the same: Adel steps into a counter-clockwise twirl. As his skirts bloom, he raises his right arm to the sky, to receive divine blessing, and reaches his left arm to the ground, delivering the blessing to the public.


Then he picks up the pace.

His steps grow faster, and he unties the cords that hold his different skirts together, raising one high above his head.

The topmost tanoura represents the sky, the one below the earth.

As he spins the first above his head while the other forms an undulating disc around his waist, he recounts the story of genesis, and how the sky and Earth were separated.

This rendition is no small feat, with each skirt weighing nearly 10 kilograms. If Adel deviates from his axis or loses the rhythm of his feet, he can fall and drop them.


"At the beginning, of course I would get dizzy and even fall sometimes," he told AFP. "But training every single day, either on stage or at home, I escape somewhere else with the music."

To the sound of Sufi chants, percussion beats, or the haunting melodies of the traditional flute or rababa -- a lute-like string instrument -- the revolutions of the dervishes of the Giza Troupe for Folkloric Arts seem as unstoppable as the planets.

- 'Like flying' -

Side by side, but without their skirts ever coming in contact, they perform acrobatics as they spin.

They throw their skirts above their heads, catch them midair, fold and unfold the flag of their Sufi order, their spirals never ceasing.

For Ali Morsi, 25, it is a labour inspired by "the love of God and the Prophet Mohammed".


Though the Egyptian version of the art has become a festive occasion, most practitioners hold to the roots of the ritual in the mystical tradition of the Muslim Mevlevi Order, founded in the 13th century by Rumi in Konya, present-day Turkey.

Today, it is a staple of Egyptian tourism, with some dancers, particularly in hotels and entertainment venues, attaching lights to their skirts for an added surprise factor, to the delight of tourists and spectators.

Both spectacle and ritual, tanoura is indispensable for artists like Adel and Morsi, who cannot imagine making their living any other way.

"It's like I'm flying, I can no longer feel my body, I am no longer on earth," said Morsi, who has been a dervish for 11 years.

"I only think of God and nothing else."

SEE http://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2006/02/my-favorite-muslim.html

EU Parliament approves ban on new fossil-fueled cars by 2035

Issued on: 09/06/2022 - 

01:40A woman holds a cable to charge a Renault electric utility vehicle at a dealership in Cagnes-Sur-Mer, France, October 22, 2020. © Eric Gaillard, Reuters

Text by: FRANCE 24

Video by: Camille NEDELEC


In the face of strong conservative opposition, European Parliament lawmakers on Wednesday narrowly voted to back a European Commission proposal for a total ban on new CO2-emitting vehicles by 2035.

The Commission last year unveiled plans to stop the sale of vehicles using internal combustion engines as part of an ambitious climate target to cut emissions by more than half over this decade and 90 percent by 2035.

The measure passed by 339 votes to 249 with 24 abstentions at a session in Strasbourg – in practice limiting future sales to emissions-free all-electric models.

Cars currently account for 12 percent of all CO2 emissions in the 27-member EU bloc, while transportation overall accounts for around a quarter.

The conservative European People’s Party (EPP), the parliament’s biggest group of lawmakers, had sought to push a compromise that would have diluted the proposals and allowed sales of hybrid vehicles to continue.

Their amendment was narrowly defeated while an ambitious attempt by the Greens to bring the measure deadline forward to 2030 also failed.

Conservatives were also unable to push through amendments on having a car’s production-related carbon footprint taken into consideration as well – potentially allowing carmakers credits for synthetic, so-called e-fuels, made with captured carbon dioxide and hydrogen produced from renewable sources.

After the vote, EU environmental committee chair Pascal Canfin triumphantly tweeted: “100 percent zero emission cars in 2035! I strongly welcome the vote on CO2 standards in the @Europarl_EN. This position of the European Parliament is an important victory and consistent with our objective of climate neutrality.”

German Green EU legislator Michael Bloss also hailed the vote as a move that would simultaneously protect the climate and jobs in the sector.

French EPP lawmaker Agnes Evren was less impressed, however, with a decision she said would “condemn industrial activity and strongly penalise consumers”.

She said the legislation would prevent the commercialisation of high-performance hybrid vehicles or vehicles using biofuels, whose production she said could potentially prove less expensive and less polluting than electric vehicles.
Blow to carbon market reform

Earlier Wednesday, EU lawmakers rejected a proposal to upgrade the bloc’s carbon market, an unexpected move that exposed divisions over the bloc’s core climate policy and could delay negotiations to finish the measure.

A committee of lawmakers must now try to forge a new compromise after chaotic scenes and a blame game erupted in Parliament.

Green and Socialist lawmakers rejected the proposal because of conservative groups’ amendments they said weakened it too much, while right-wing groups considered it too ambitious, especially in the light of inflationary pressures.

Parliament’s rejection meant votes on two related climate policies were postponed. They are the EU’s world-first plan to place a CO2 levy on imports of goods such as steel and cement, and a fund that would use emissions trading revenues to support low-income citizens.

The rare rejection could set back the timeframe for finishing the law – which the EU is racing to do this year, so it can apply in 2023.

The proposal was meant to confirm parliament’s position for negotiations on a new proposed law to reform the Emissions Trading System (ETS).

The EU’s main policy tool for cutting emissions, the ETS requires power plants and industry to buy CO2 permits when they pollute.

Along with other new climate policies, the ETS upgrade would put the EU, the world’s third biggest polluter, on track to cut net planet-warming emissions by 55% by 2030, from 1990 levels.

Canfin, whose committee will redraft the proposal, said negotiators will attempt to reach a new deal by June 23.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and REUTERS)

Prosecute looted antiquities dealers for war crimes: Clooney Foundation

Wed, June 8, 2022,

Dealers who trade looted antiquities with armed groups should be prosecuted for complicity in war crimes or financing terrorism, the Clooney Foundation for Justice said Wednesday.

"The looting of antiquities is not a victimless crime," said Anya Neistat, legal director of The Docket, a project of the foundation launched by actor George Clooney and his wife, Amal, a human rights lawyer.

"The pillage of cultural artifacts is destructive physically and socially, and the sale of conflict antiquities enables armed groups to fund conflict and terrorism and other crimes against civilians," Neistat said.

"The Docket calls on law enforcement agencies in market countries to launch investigations and prosecutions of antiquities dealers when there is evidence of their complicity in war crimes and financing of terrorism," she added.

Neistat unveiled the results in Washington on Wednesday of a two-year investigation into the theft of antiquities in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen and their sale in the United States and Europe.

Antiquities trafficking has been linked to armed groups such as the Islamic State organization and the former Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, allowing them to purchase arms and finance violent attacks, Neistat said.

According to The Docket, IS made "tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars" from looting antiquities, which was a key source of its financing.

IS, which controlled a wide swathe of Syria and Iraq between 2011 and 2016, had a sub-department for antiquities with a system of taxation and licenses, Neistat said.

Stolen antiquities often transit through Turkey, Lebanon, Eastern Europe or Thailand before being offered up by dealers or in private sales.

Recovered items have been returned to their countries of origin but dealers tend to receive little more than a slap on the wrist, according to The Docket.

"Prosecution for serious crimes are a critical element to break the cycle and to make sure that the market is dismantled," Neistat said.

The report comes shortly after a former director of the Louvre Museum in Paris was charged with conspiring to hide the origin of archaeological treasures that investigators suspect were smuggled out of Egypt.

cyj/cl/des

ECUADOR

Tackling gender violence at Quito's 'Men's Club'

Paola LÓPEZ

Wed, June 8, 2022, 

In a hall in the Ecuadoran capital, a group of men raise their arms up high, draw a deep breath, and release it in tandem with a resounding "aaah!"

This is no ordinary relaxation class: most in the room are convicted domestic abusers attending court-ordered therapy, others are here voluntarily.

In a country where 65 percent of girls and women aged 15 to 49 experience violence, according to official data, the "Men's Club for Good Treatment" seeks to give men tools, other than aggression, to deal with conflict.

The 20-day course -- one session a week -- focuses on changes in behavior and attitude to improve the men's self esteem and relationships.

Among them is Jorge Sanchez, a 34-year-old food deliveryman sentenced to therapy and 60 hours of community service for having violently shoved his ex-girlfriend.

It was either that or jail.

Sanchez attacked his ex after he saw her out with another man.

"I got very angry and that was when I exploded, I exploded with jealousy...," he told AFP.

"I used to give in to my anger, but I have overcome that" thanks to the sessions, he said, adding he was "ashamed" of how he behaved at the time.

- Shortcomings, fears -

After a series of breathing and stretching exercises, Sanchez and the others settle down for the rest of the day's three-hour program, which includes an exchange on personal shortcomings, virtues, and fears.

Together, they draw up a list for discussion; with impatience, laziness and irritability under the first heading, respectfulness, honesty, patience and loyalty under the second, and discrimination, loneliness and loss of one's children under the third.

The men are aged 30 to 60, with their jobs ranging from office clerks to factory workers.

Violence against women is rampant in Latin America and the Caribbean, with some 27 percent suffering at the hands of a romantic partner at least once in their lifetime, according to the OECD.

In Ecuador, the prosecutor's office says 551 "femicides" were committed in the country from 2014 to May 2022 this year -- with a third committed by intimate partners.

According to the UN, femicide is generally understood as the intentional murder of women because they are women.

When all recorded killings of women in Ecuador are listed, the figure rises to 1,432 for the same period, according to the prosecutor's office.

Women's rights bodies say the number of femicides is vastly underreported.

According to the UN, reducing violence against women -- a phenomenon that increased in many countries during coronavirus lockdown -- is a key step towards reducing femicides.

- Lessons in 'patience' -

Coordinator Roberto Moncayo said the club has helped 545 men since it was established in 2010.

To date, there have been no repeat offenders.

"The methodology with which we work is to think, to feel, to act," Moncayo explained.

"So we force ourselves to think about how we are playing our roles as men in the family environment, in the workplace, in the social sphere, but above all, becoming aware of how violence, aggression, forms part of our relationships."

In 2021, the ECU911 emergency number received 117,400 calls for domestic violence in a country of 17.7 million -- up from 113,400 calls in 2020.

Mechanic Jose Padilla, 39, joined the club after his former partner accused him of harassment, a charge he denies.

"At first, I was frustrated, I was even embarrassed," and attended the sessions unwillingly, he told AFP.

Since then, he said he had learnt valuable lessons in "patience" and "control of emotions."

pld/sp/mlr/des