Sick dolphin calf improves with tube-fed milk, helping hands


RAYONG, Thailand (AP) — The Irrawaddy dolphin calf — sick and too weak to swim — was drowning in a tidal pool on Thailand’s shore when fishermen found him.


Sick dolphin calf improves with tube-fed milk, helping hands© Provided by The Canadian Press

The fishermen quickly alerted marine conservationists, who advised them how to provide emergency care until a rescue team could transport the baby to Thailand’s Marine and Coastal Resources Research and Development Center for veterinary attention.

The baby was nicknamed Paradon, roughly translated as “brotherly burden,” because those involved knew from day one that saving his life would be no easy task.

Irrawaddy dolphins, considered a vulnerable species by International Union for Conservation of Nature, are found in the shallow coastal waters of South and Southeast Asia and in three rivers in Myanmar, Cambodia and Indonesia. Their survival is threatened by habitat loss, pollution and fishing, when dolphins are caught unintentionally with other species.

Officials from the marine research center believe around 400 Irrawaddy dolphins remain along the country’s eastern coast, bordering Cambodia.

Since Paradon was found by the fishermen July 22, dozens of veterinarians and volunteers have helped care for him at the center in Rayong on the Gulf of Thailand.

“We said among ourselves that the chance of him surviving was quite low, judging from his condition,” Thanaphan Chomchuen, a veterinarian at the center, said Friday. “Normally, dolphins found stranded on the shore are usually in such a terrible condition. The chances that these dolphins would survive are normally very, very slim. But we gave him our best try on that day.”

Workers placed him in a seawater pool, treated the lung infection that made him so sick and weak, and enlisted volunteers to watch him round the clock. They have to hold him up in his tank to prevent him from drowning and feed him milk, initially done by tube, and later by bottle when he had recovered a bit of strength.

A staff veterinarian and one or two volunteers stay for each eight-hour shift, and other workers during the day handle the water pump and filter and making milk for the calf.

After a month, Paradon’s condition is improving. The calf believed to be between 4 and 6 months old can swim now and has no signs of infection. But the dolphin that was 138 centimeters long (4.5 feet) and around 27 kilograms (59 pounds) on July 22 is still weak and doesn't take enough milk despite the team's efforts to feed him every 20 minutes or so.

Thippunyar Thipjuntar, a 32-year-old financial adviser, is one of the many volunteers who come for a babysitting shift with Paradon.

Thippunya said with Paradon’s round baby face and curved mouth that looks like a smile, she couldn’t help but grow attached to him and be concerned about his development.

“He does not eat enough but rather just wants to play. I am worried that he does not receive enough nutrition,” she told The Associated Press on Friday as she fed the sleepy Paradon, cradled in her arm. “When you invest your time, physical effort, mental attention, and money to come here to be a volunteer, of course you wish that he would grow strong and survive.”

Sumana Kajonwattanakul, director of the marine center, said Paradon will need long-term care, perhaps as much as a year, until he is weaned from milk and is able to hunt for his own food.

“If we just release him when he gets better, the problem is that he he won’t be able to have milk. We will have to take care of him until he has his teeth, then we must train him to eat fish, and be part of a pod. This will take quite some time,” Sumana said.

Paradon's caregivers believe the extended tender loving care is worth it.

“If we can save one dolphin, this will help our knowledge, as there have not been many successful cases in treating this type of animal,” said veterinarian Thanaphan. “If we can save him and he survives, we will have learned so much from this."

“Secondly, I think by saving him, giving him a chance to live, we also raise awareness about the conservation of this species of animal, which are rare, with not many left.”

Tassanee Vejpongsa, The Associated Press

Should you put coffee grounds in your garden?

Rural Mom - Yesterday 
The simple idea of recycling spent coffee back to the earth stimulates green thumbs. But, is it smart to put coffee grounds in your garden? Should you join the java jolt and compost your brew?

Years ago Starbucks starting giving spent coffee grounds to local gardeners in Seattle on a first-come come, first-serve basis. The initiative was one way to fulfill the corporate mission of active environmental responsibility in communities in which they do business. The local stewardship spread quickly to all locations across North America.

Coffee grounds are typically wasted. To reduce waste, it’s tempting to add them directly to your the garden, worm bin, and compost pile. When gardeners, schools, parks, and nurseries use coffee grounds for compost and mulch, a valuable organic resource is returned to the earth.


Should you put coffee grounds in your garden?

© Provided by Rural Mom

The Language of Composting

In the language of composting, coffee grounds are ‘green’ nitrogen sources like grass clippings, vegetable scraps, and animal manures. The ‘brown’ components in compost are dead leaves, straw, sawdust, and hardwood ashes which contribute carbon.

Organic materials are composed of a carbon-nitrogen ratio. The carbon-nitrogen ratio in coffee grounds is 20:1 indicating the grounds are a good nitrogen source.

An analysis of the grounds reveals they contain the basic three nutrients of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, aka N-P-K, for plant growth. The elements magnesium, copper, calcium, and sulfur are also in coffee grounds.
Why Use Coffee Grounds in Your Garden?

Gardeners extol the many benefits of the grounds:


When mixed with brown materials in the compost bin, grounds generate heat to speed up decomposition.

Coffee grounds absorb and retain moisture enabling them to affect the soil’s texture.
The acidity of the grounds may be balanced with lime and /or hardwood ashes. However, many gardeners mulch acid loving plants like azaleas, camellias and blueberries with spent grounds. Acidic grounds keep your hydrangeas blue too.

Tomato growers sidedress their plants for the nitrogen boost, added calcium and to suppress late blight.

Grounds sprinkled on lawns contribute nitrogen, the greening nutrient for actively growing lawns.

Hosta and lily growers find that coffee grounds repel slugs and snails.

Earthworms enjoy a coffee klatch in a vermicompost bin and in no time their java castings perk-up the garden.

Outdoor container plants and indoor houseplants also respond favorably when you work grounds into the soil or use as a liquid plant fertilizer. Dilute the grounds in water to form an amber cordial. Similarly, rather than pouring leftover coffee down the drain, feed the elixir to your plants instead.

Precautions

Too much of anything is, well, too much. The old adage applies to coffee grounds in your garden.

A 2016 article in the Journal of Urban Forestry & Urban Greening study showed that coffee grounds may reduce plant growth when directly applied.

Applying coffee grounds directly to the soil may cause problems. Since coffee grounds are mildly acidic, composting the grounds with kitchen scraps, yard debris and wood ashes forms the best product.

If wet grounds are worked into the soil or placed directly on the surface, they may form an unwanted mildew mat. To avoid this, all the grounds to dry thoroughly before adding them to the soil.

In light of this, composting grounds may be the best course of action. The best way to assess what works in your garden? Experiment a little!

Take advantage of this free resource to brew a compost to energize your garden year-round.

West’s neoliberal ‘age of abundance’ is over, as war and sanctions boomerang home

France’s President Macron warned of the end of “an era of abundance.” Western wars and sanctions are boomeranging back at home. The neoliberal phase of capitalism is collapsing, having lost cheap Russian energy and cheap labor and consumer goods from China, and with regime-change ops failing.

By Benjamin Norton

The 2022 G7 summit in Germany

France’s President Emmanuel Macron, a former banker, warned that “we are living the end of what could have seemed an era of abundance,” calling it “a kind of major tipping point or a great upheaval.”

Western wars and sanctions are boomeranging back at home. The neoliberal phase of capitalism is collapsing.

Neoliberalism has lost the key pillars it was built on: cheap energy and raw materials from Russia, cheap labor and consumer goods from China, an unsustainable bubble of household debt, low to zero interest rates, and Washington’s ability to organize regime-change operations in any country where a government tried a socialistic or state-led economic model.

Sources

“Macron warns of ‘end of abundance’ as France faces difficult winter,” The Guardian
“A ‘Tsunami of Shutoffs’: 20 Million US Homes Are Behind on Energy Bills,” Bloomberg
Annual per capita disposable income of urban households in China from 1990 to 2021, via Statista
“New Study Confirms That American Workers Are Getting Ripped Off,” New York Magazine

Russian gas exports to Europe, by country, from 1970-2005, via ResearchGate


China’s GDP per capita from 1978–2017, via Unicef


US household debt from 1945 to 2018, via the New York Federal Reserve


US household debt from 2000 to 2021, via Statista

Russian general’s BMW is torched by anti-war protestor

A woman doused the BMW X6 of Yevgeny Sektarev with petrol before setting it alight.

James Kilner and Josie Ensor
August 28 2022 02:30 AM

An anti-war protester was arrested in central Moscow yesterday after torching the car of a Russian general in charge of military censorship.

The attack, reported by Russia’s Baza news agency, is among the most violent protests yet against the war in Ukraine and comes a week after a car bombing in the capital killed Darya Dugina, a rising pro-Kremlin journalist.

Police told Baza that a woman doused the BMW X6 of Yevgeny Sektarev with petrol before setting it alight.

Photos showed the mangled wreckage of the car’s boot parked outside a residential block.

Mr Sektarev is the deputy head of the 8th Directorate of the Russian General Staff, the department responsible for censoring soldiers and officers.

The woman told police she burnt the car as an anti-war protest, according to Baza.

Vladimir Putin’s regime has arrested thousands of people for merely expressing dissent against the war, an offence that now carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in jail.

Public protest has, as a result, been limited but saboteurs have fire-bombed army recruitment centres and hacked government websites. Before the assassination of Dugina, Moscow felt a long way from the war in Ukraine. But the attack in a wealthy neighbourhood, which Russia blamed on Ukraine, generated anxiety in the capital’s elite.

Kyiv says it had nothing to do with the killing, with officials pointing the finger at the Russian secret service.

The burning of Sektarev’s car came as Russian forces were increasing their attacks in east Ukraine, drawing Ukrainian units away from the southern front, where Kyiv is reportedly planning an offensive to retake the Kherson region.

But despite intensifying their attacks on Siversk and Bakhmut, which lie north of Donetsk city, the British ministry of defence said Russian forces had made little progress. “Overall, Russian forces have secured few territorial gains,” it said in its daily intelligence briefing.

Journalists reporting from Bakhmut, which had a pre-war population of 72,000, said that most residents had now fled the town. Video showed empty streets, populated by stray dogs, some of them household pets abandoned in hurried evacuations. The boom of artillery exchanges splices through videos from Bakhmut.

Many of its buildings are now in ruins. Ukrainian officials said that several civilians had died in the Russian bombardments.

As the Kremlin resumes its offensive in Donbas, Ukraine’s government ordered more civilians to evacuate from more regions. As well as ordering civilians in Donetsk to flee, the Ukrainian government also told people living in the eastern Kharkiv region, southern Zaporizhzhia and Mykolaiv to leave their home.

“I call on people to evacuate and not to hope that the enemy shows mercy,” said Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister.

The Ukrainian government has already told people to flee from Kherson city where it is planning an offensive.

Russia’s army captured Kherson city in the first few days of the war and its officials have since tried to turn it into an enviable model for life under their control. But residents have said the Russian occupiers rule by fear, arresting and torturing dissenters. They also said jobs and food are running low and that the economy is collapsing.

These complaints are not confined to Kherson. In Mariupol, destroyed in the first six weeks of the war by intense Russian bombing, a promised rebuild has failed to happen.

Instead, Russian news agencies have been reduced to reporting the installation of the city’s first working traffic lights last week.

Putin has also made an uncharacteristic omission that parts of Ukraine captured by Russia were not proving attractive places for families to live in.

He said the Kremlin would pay 10,000 roubles, roughly €166, to the parents of every child who enrols for school in these areas.

Meanwhile, in a rare interview, an FBI chief has said that a Russian official is expected to defect over the course of the war with Ukraine and work with Western intelligence.

Michael Driscoll, the head of the FBI’s New York office, said it was “very likely” that a disgruntled Kremlin apparatchik will part with the Russian president as the casualties of his invasion mount.

“In moments like this when you’re dealing with a significant conflict and there is apparently clear disagreement among Russian citizens, and you can see that from protests on the streets of Russia, then the possibility that somebody might be willing to have a conversation with us about that and seek to perhaps to do the right thing for the sake of the greater good I think is very likely,” Mr Driscoll said.

The FBI chief was speaking to journalist Richard Kerbaj for his new book The Secret History of the Five Eyes and this excerpt has been shared exclusively with The Sunday Telegraph.

“History has shown us that that kind of thing happens all of the time,” he said.

Mexico colonel blamed for killing several missing students

"Six of the 43 disappeared students were allegedly held during several days and alive in what they call the old warehouse and from there were turned over to then colonel Jose Rodriguez Perez," says official leading Truth Commission.

Families of disappeared students protest with signs proclaiming "it was the State". (AP)

Six of the 43 college students "disappeared" in 2014 have been allegedly kept alive in a warehouse for days then turned over to the local army commander who ordered them killed, the Mexican government official leading a Truth Commission has said.

Interior Undersecretary Alejandro Encinas made the shocking revelation directly tying the military to one of Mexico's worst human rights scandals, and it came with little fanfare as he made a lengthy defence of the commission's report released a week earlier.

"There is also information corroborated with emergency 089 telephone calls where allegedly six of the 43 disappeared students were held during several days and alive in what they call the old warehouse and from there were turned over to the colonel," Encinas said on Friday.

"Allegedly the six students were alive for as many as four days after the events and were killed and disappeared on orders of the colonel, allegedly the then colonel Jose Rodriguez Perez."

The students' parents demanded for years that they be allowed to search the army base in Iguala. It was not until 2019 that they were given access along with Encinas and the Truth Commission.

READ MORE: Mexico commission blames military over 43 disappeared students

'Report is not enough'

Through a driving rain later on Friday, the families of the 43 missing students marched in Mexico City with a couple hundred other people as they have on the 26th of every month for years.

Parents carried posters of their children's faces and rows of current students from the teachers' college marched, shouted calls for justice and counted off to 43. Their signs proclaimed that the fight for justice continued and asserted: "It was the State."

In a joint statement, the families said the Truth Commission’s confirmation that it was a "state crime" was significant after elements suggesting that over the years.

However, they said the report still did not satisfactorily answer their most important question.

"Mothers and fathers need indubitable scientific evidence as to the fate of our children," the statement said.

"We can’t go home with preliminary signs that don’t fully clear up where they are and what happened to them."

READ MORE: Mexico ex-top prosecutor to stand trial in disappeared students case

Last week, federal agents arrested former attorney general Jesus Murillo Karam, who oversaw the original investigation.

Prosecutors allege Murillo Karam created a false narrative about what happened to the students to quickly appear to resolve the case.

READ MORE: Mexico arrests ex-top prosecutor over disappearance of 43 students

U.S. to name ambassador-at-large for the Arctic
CGTN

Polar bear walks on pack ice at sunset, Svalbard, Norway, August 27, 2014. /CFP

The United States has indicated its intention to appoint an ambassador at large for the Arctic, reflecting a growing interest in the region as its shrinking opens up new sea lanes and vast oil and mineral resources.

In a statement on Friday, the U.S. State Department said President Joe Biden planned to elevate the area's importance within the U.S. government by nominating an ambassador-at-large for the Arctic region, subject to the Senate's advice and consent.

It did not say who would be nominated.

"An Arctic region that is peaceful, stable, prosperous, and cooperative is of critical strategic importance to the United States," the Department said.

"As one of eight Arctic nations, the United States has long been committed to protecting our national security and economic interests in the region, combating climate change, fostering sustainable development and investment, and promoting cooperation with Arctic States, Allies, and partners," it said.

The eight Arctic nations are Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Russia and the United States.

(With input from Reuters)

 U.S. concerned about judicial harassment after Turkish pop star's arrest

By Reuters Staff

WASHINGTON/ISTANBUL (Reuters) -The United States said it remained concerned about Turkey’s censorship of free speech, and women’s groups protested in Istanbul on Saturday, after the arrest of pop star Gulsen over a past quip she made about religious schools.


Turkish pop star Gulsen performs during a concert in Aydin, Turkey March 27, 2022. 

Depo Photos via REUTERS/File Photo

The singer-songwriter was jailed on Thursday pending trial on a charge of incitement to hatred after a video of her on-stage remark in April was broadcast by a pro-government media outlet.

While several state ministers condemned Gulsen’s words, her arrest drew a fierce response from critics who see President Tayyip Erdogan’s government as bent on punishing those who oppose its conservative views.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson said it remains concerned about widespread efforts in Turkey to restrict expression via censorship and judicial harassment following Gulsen’s detention

Protesters in Istanbul criticised what they called inconsistency between the judiciary’s inaction towards violence against women and the artist’s speedy investigation and arrest. Many say Gulsen was targeted for her liberal views and support for LGBT+ rights.

“Hundreds of women would be alive today if men who assaulted other women were captured as fast as Gulsen was,” organizers of the Istanbul protest told demonstrators through a loudspeaker.

Her arrest is the latest injustice against “women who don’t fit the mold,” or are not “the type of woman the government wants,” they said

In the video of her performance in April, Gulsen refers to a musician in her band and says in a light-hearted manner: “He studied at an Imam Hatip (school) previously. That’s where his perversion comes from.”

Erdogan, whose Islamist-rooted party first came to power two decades ago, himself studied at one of Turkey’s first Imam Hatip schools, which were founded by the state to educate young men to be imams and preachers but have since exploded in number.

Gulsen on Thursday apologised to anyone offended by her remarks, saying they were seized upon by some who want to polarise society.

Reporting by Pete Schroeder in Washington and Azra Ceylan in Istanbul; Writing by Jonathan Spicer; Editing by Daniel Wallis, William Maclean

Turkish pop star jailed over joke about religious schools

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) – Turkish singer and songwriter Gulsen was arrested on Thursday on charges of “inciting hatred and enmity” for a joke she made at an Istanbul concert in April, sparking outrage on social media.

FILE - Turkish pop star Gulsen performs during a concert in Istanbul, on April 10, 2016. Gulsen, whose full name is Gulsen Colakoglu, has been arrested Thursday, Aug. 25, 2022, on charges of "inciting hatred and enmity" over a joke she made about Turkey's religious schools, the country's state-run news agency reported. The 46-year-old singer and songwriter was taken away for questioning from her home in Istanbul and was formally arrested late on Thursday before being taken to a prison pending her trial.(Depo Photos via AP, File)

August 26, 2022

By 

Associated Press

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Turkish pop star Gulsen has been arrested on charges of “inciting hatred and enmity” over a joke she made about Turkey’s religious schools, the country’s state-run news agency reported.

The 46-year-old singer and songwriter, whose full name is Gulsen Colakoglu, was taken away for questioning from her home in Istanbul and was formally arrested late on Thursday before being taken to a prison pending her trial.

The arrest sparked outrage on social media. Government critics said the move was an effort by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to consolidate his religious and conservative support base ahead of elections in 10 months’ time.

The charges were based on a joke Gulsen made during a concert in Istanbul back in April when she quipped that one of her musicians’ “perversion” stemmed from the fact that he went to a religious school. A video of the singer making the comments began circulating on social media recently, with a hashtag calling for her arrest.

Gulsen — who had already been the target of Islamic circles for her revealing stage outfits — issued an apology for the offense caused but said her comments were seized on by those wanting to deepen polarization in the country.

During her questioning, Gulsen rejected accusations that she incited hatred and enmity, telling court authorities that she had “endless respect for the values and sensitivities of my country,” the state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

A request that she be released from custody pending the outcome of a trial was rejected.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of Turkey’s main opposition party called on Turkey’s judges and prosecutors to release Gulsen.

“Don’t betray the law and justice; release the artist now!” he wrote on Twitter.

The spokesman for Erdogan ruling party, Omer Celik, appeared however, to defend the decision to arrest the singer, saying “inciting hatred is not an art form.”

“Targeting a segment of society with the allegation of “perversion” and trying to polarize Turkey is a hate crime and a disgrace to humanity,” Celik tweeted.

Erdogan and many members of his Islam-based ruling party are graduates of religious schools, which were originally established to train imams. The number of religious schools has increased under Erdogan, who has promised to raise a “pious generation.”

'The Invitation': Jessica M. Thompson is 'smashing the patriarchy' in Dracula bride horror movie

Elisabetta Bianchini

Fri, August 26, 2022 

Director Jessica M. Thompson is making her mark in horror filmmaking with The Invitation (now in theatres), starring Nathalie Emmanuel and Thomas Doherty, an eerie, feminist vampire tale that is fun and tense storytelling, but is ultimately hinged on the concept of exposing and “smashing” the patriarchy.

“Women filmmakers can tend to sometimes be really pigeonholed into certain things, so I didn't want to get pigeonholed into drama, even though I love drama,...I really want to get into genre, I really wanted to make a horror,” Thompson told Yahoo Canada.

“[Genre] reaches more people and has a broader audience, so therefore, you have the ability to kind of make social commentary without knocking people over the head with it.”

Essentially loneliness is what starts Evie (Nathalie Emmanuel) off on her path. After recently losing her mother, Evie takes a DNA test leading her to a long-lost, rich family in England. When she gets invited to a wedding by this newfound family, what seemed like a generous offer turns far more sinister, eventually being revealed that their intentions are based in continuing this prestigious bloodline.

“I was sent the script by Sony in January 2020 and I read it really quickly, it was a page turner,” Thompson said. “I was really drawn to this idea of the origin story of a bride of Dracula set in the modern world and I felt like that hadn't been told before.”

“I wanted to rewrite some of the things, I wanted to create a bit more of a blend of subverting the romance, so I kind of added more to the romance, I really love mashing genres... I kind of pitched them ideas and literally, it was March 15, 2020, just the day before the world shut down. I was the last meeting that Sony took, the last meeting I had in person with anybody.”

While the COVID-19 pandemic became a never-before-seen hurdle, Thompson says it allowed her to really, “spend time with the script” before production started in 2021.

Thomas Doherty, Jessica M. Thompson and Nathalie Emmanuel on set of "The Invitation"

'It's all about smashing the patriarchy in this film'

Aesthetically, The Invitation looks like everything you could want from a gothic, vampire movie, with the message of the film really focused on patriarchal issues.

“To me, it's all about smashing the patriarchy in this film and it's about the old world order, and how it's upheld not just by men, but by women who become complacent, and you could argue are victims of that, but also end up supporting it,” Jessica M. Thompson said. “That was really important to show because I think we all can point fingers at the bad men in the world, but there are also a lot of women that prop those men up.”

“I felt like exploring that in this kind of old [hierarchy], these bloodlines,...getting into the story through DNA, through blood, I think is a really unique motif. It just shows, what does blood mean? What does that heritage mean and can you break tradition? I argue, yes. Whenever somebody says, ‘well it's tradition,’ I'm like, ‘well that doesn't mean that it's good.’ That doesn't mean that it's healthy for society. Let's examine those old world orders. We've done it in vampires, but you could apply it to corporations, political structures.”

Thompson also is really exploring this idea of men using women for property, something she highlights audiences have really responded to already.

“There's that moment, which I love, that I've seen with a couple of audiences now, and when her great uncle...gives her a kiss on the cheek at the wedding, the whole audience goes ‘ew,’” Thompson said. “I just love that it's working, the audience understands this is men selling off their daughters, it's gross.”

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - AUGUST 08: (L-R) Director Jessica M. Thompson and actors Nathalie Emmanuel and Thomas Doherty attend THE INVITATION New York Friends & Family Screening at Crosby Hotel on August 08, 2022 in New York City. (Photo by Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for Sony Pictures Entertainment)

Finding 'The Invitation' leading cast

Of course, every great filmmaker needs great actors to collaborate with to bring the story to life, and Jessica M. Thompson had that in Game of Thrones actor Nathalie Emmanuel, leading the story as Evie.

“I always had Nathalie in mind,...originally the script was not for a woman of colour and I felt, because it's a story really about the patriarchy, the most disenfranchised people are largely women of colour,” Thompson said. “She's just such a gracious, incredible actor, throws herself into every moment, and horror films are particularly hard. You've got to put yourself through trauma, you've got to scream and cry, and she did all of that.”

“We watched the film together…and she was so moved, she was crying afterwards,...I'm glad she's just so proud.”

In order to balance that suave, aristocratic, but then deeply terrifying male aspect of the story, Thomas Doherty (Gossip Girl, High Fidelity) as Walter takes the lead in that respect in The Invitation.

“In my mind he’s the next Leonardo DiCaprio, he's honestly fantastic,” Thompson said. “He's really playing multiple characters, first of all, he comes in playing the lord of the manor…and then he realizes that doesn't really win her over, she doesn't give two hoots about his money, and so he has to kind of adapt to what she sees as a leading man.”

“Once the penny drops, he's obviously the complete villain… When he has some of those sneaky grins or those kind of mischievous, all-knowing kind of looks, the audience…could be like, ‘Oh, that was his true nature shining through.’”

Jessica M. Thompson

'It's strange to me that we have been cut out of this world'

Jessica M. Thompson really dove into her love of horror in this film, studying the tensions in her favourite movies in the genre, but also putting in a ton of Easter eggs for the aficionados, including 90 references to Bram Stoker's Dracula and other nods to The Shining. There was actually a moment, that was ultimately cut from the film, where, after Evie has nightmares, a maid says, “I tend to get nightmares after I eat rich food too,” because Stoker said he wrote Dracula after eating too much dressed crab.

This deep dive into horror exemplified in Thompson’s film further establishes the illogical, rage-inducing nature of women historically feeling like they didn't have the support and the space to create this type of genre-based story.

“It's strange to me that we have been cut out of this world, up until recently, and I'm so glad that Jennifer Kent,…[other women] of the world have opened that door to allow people like me in,” Thompson said. “I'm so sick of horror films, and any genre film,...[where] we're just rehashing old material."

"As soon as you open the door to more diverse people, women, people of colour, LGBTQ+ people, you're just gonna get a fresh perspective that you haven't seen before and that's going to give you something brand new. Unfortunately, of course, we're judged a little bit more harshly,...I think the audiences are too smart now, they want something fresh, they want something unique... I think there's a lot of room to grow but I think we're also definitely making our mark.”

CONSPIRACY THEORY

A Putin Critic Fell from a Building in Washington. Was It Really a Suicide?

D.C. police say they don’t suspect foul play. Fellow activists are incensed. And the city where it happened is barely paying attention.

Police say they do not suspect foul play in the death of Putin critic Dan Rapoport, but some of his political allies aren’t so sure. | Wikimedia Commons

By MICHAEL SCHAFFER
08/26/2022 04:30 AM EDT

The mysterious death last week of a prominent critic of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in Washington’s West End neighborhood is drawing fury from some of the Kremlin’s best-known global detractors — but scant notice in Washington, where police say they don’t suspect foul play was behind Dan Rapoport’s fall from a luxury apartment building on the night of Aug. 14.

“I think the circumstances of his death are extremely suspicious,” says Bill Browder, the formerly Moscow-based American financier who became a crusader for sanctions after the killing of his Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. Browder got to know Rapoport in Moscow years ago, before they both fell out of favor with the Russian regime. “Whenever someone who is in a negative view of the Putin regime dies suspiciously, one should rule out foul play, not rule it in.”

According to a Metropolitan Police Department incident report, officers responding to a call about a jumper found the 52-year-old Rapoport’s body on the sidewalk. He was wearing orange flip flops and a black hat and had a cracked phone, headphones and $2,620 in cash on him, but no wallet or credit cards. The police say the case remains open, even without a suspicion of foul play. As is standard for suspected suicides, a medical examiner’s report — which would typically reference medical or other records, include a toxicology screen and incorporate X-rays and other posthumous forensics to determine if there was a struggle before the fall — is pending.

The deceased was no mere exile. A Latvian-born U.S. citizen, Rapoport moved back to the U.S. in 2012 after making a fortune in Moscow but running afoul of the Russian government. Settling in Washington, he rubbed elbows with mover and shakers, living in a Kalorama manse that his family later sold for $5.5 million in 2016, when it became the home of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. By then, Rapoport had relocated again, setting up shop in Kyiv, where he became a frequent contact of U.S. media.

In the eyes of Rapoport’s political allies, the history of untimely deaths of Kremlin critics makes the police’s initial no-foul-play conclusion seem naive. “He was a well-known critic of Putin in the West and had been an effective critic,” Browder says. “He was also an open supporter of [the jailed opposition leader] Alexei Navalny. And he had all these connections in the elite of Washington, D.C. The immediate response of the Washington, D.C. police, I think, is a premature and unhelpful conclusion.”

“Nothing adds up,” says David Satter, a longtime Moscow correspondent in Soviet and post-Soviet times who in 2013 became the first U.S. reporter booted from Russia since the Cold War. Satter, now a frequent Wall Street Journal contributor and the author of several books about Putin’s Russia, had stayed with Rapoport in Kyiv. “This is why it has to be investigated. But everything we do know is very, very strange.”

Rapoport’s death has been the subject of major coverage overseas, but is oddly off the radar in Washington, where there has been little major media attention. It’s a strange and possibly telling omission from our midterm-absorbed city’s water-cooler conversation: A number of high-profile figures are implying that a foreign government may have killed an American citizen in the capital of the United States. Even if their conjectures are overblown, it ought to be news.

The suspicions, Browder says, began when the news of Rapoport’s death first broke on the Telegram channel of a former editor of Russian Tattler, via a convoluted story that claimed Rapoport’s dog was let loose with a suicide note and cash attached to him. Because intelligence services often put out information through gossip sites, the location raised antennae. “How the hell did she [the ex-Tattler editor] learn about Dan’s alleged suicide?” asks Vlad Burlutsky, a Russian expat who met Rapoport through his work supporting Navalny.

In a Russian media interview, Rapoport’s wife denied the story about the note — and the suicide, saying her husband had been making plans and that she expected to be in Washington to see him. (The police report also makes no mention of a note or a dog.)

“I’ve talked several times to Alyona, his widow, and she says she is absolutely certain that it’s not a suicide,” says close friend Ilya Ponomarev, the only member of the Russian Duma to vote against the annexation of Crimea and now a strident Putin critic also living in Kyiv.

Ponomarev says he’s less certain. But he fears a repeat of what happened in 2015, when Putin’s former media czar died in odd circumstances in Washington and, in his view, U.S. authorities soft-pedaled the investigation. “I would not be surprised that it would be the same thing, that people don’t want to deal with some crazy Russians,” he says. (Alyona Rapoport did not respond to my messages, and has only been quoted in a single Russian media story since confirming his death on Facebook.)

The case for suspicion involves some more basic practical questions: What was up with the wad of cash? Why would Rapoport have been making plans for the next few days? Why was he wearing a hat?

But mainly the suspicion has to do with Russia. “There’s an old saying that anyone can commit a murder but it takes brains to commit a suicide,” says Satter. “The version of suicide is for the irrelevant people who will simply accept it and move on without raising questions.”

Born in the USSR, Rapoport came with his parents to the U.S. at age 11, settling in Texas. After graduating from college, he moved to Russia in the wild post-Soviet days, settling in Moscow after a stint in Siberia. He made his fortune there as a stockbroker, eventually opening Soho Rooms, one of the city’s top nightspots. But in 2012, he announced that he was leaving Russia, declaring on Facebook that life there had become “unbearable and disgusting.”

In Washington, Rapoport and his Russian-born wife settled into the exclusive Kalorama neighborhood, enrolling a child at Maret, a top local private school. Acquaintances here describe a frenetic, intense personality, someone with ups and downs. He dabbled in the dining industry here, too, says Winston Bao Lord, a tech entrepreneur whose investments are largely in the hospitality space. He met Rapoport, who at the time had some money invested in an Alexandria restaurant, to pitch an idea that never panned out. Lord says Rapoport was a jocular social presence. “He was a big partier when I knew him,” Lord says. “He was a confident guy that felt very strongly about his views.”

Rapoport appeared occasionally in the media with Kremlin-critical posts. In 2018, the open-source investigative platform Bellingcat reported that Rapoport was behind the Facebook page of David Jewberg, purported to be a senior Pentagon analyst. The entirely made-up Lieutenant Colonel Jewberg was frequently quoted in Russian and Ukrainian media (and by some of Rapoport’s Washington friends) as a real U.S. defense insider. Mostly in Russian, the posts were critical of the Obama administration’s insufficiently aggressive stances toward Russia and Facebook’s alleged pro-Russia bias.

“Dan is likely the most intelligent person I’ve ever met,” says Yuri Somov, who struck up a friendship with Rapoport in Washington. “And I’ve met people like Kissinger and Greenspan. I’m a professional interpreter. He was incredibly intense and very much larger than life, but in a good way.” Somov describes himself as apolitical, but says his friend was different: “He was a romantic. He believed things could be changed and he believed he could be a part of those changes.”

Washington, Somov says, was probably not Rapoport’s natural milieu. In 2016, after divorcing, he left town, moving to Kyiv, where the tumultuous scene might have represented an opportunity for someone whose first experience was in crisis-racked post-Soviet Moscow. His ex-wife and kids stayed here. “He was too different from the world of U.S. business,” Somov says. “He probably felt closer to home in Ukraine than in the U.S.”

Somov, who says he’s been devastated by Rapoport’s death, is among those who thinks the suicide story is completely plausible.

“Not every unexplained death in Russia is the KGB or the GRU bumping someone off,” says Fiona Hill, the former senior Russia specialist at the White House, who met Rapoport through Somov.

Rapoport had remarried in Kyiv to a Ukrainian virologist; they’d started a new family. After the war began, Rapoport relocated his wife and child to Denmark but stayed in Ukraine — and then came to Washington this summer, shipping his dog as well. Missing them, friends say, left him distraught.

“He was having to start over again for the third time in 10 years,” Somov says. “We did not meet up, which I will regret for the rest of my life because he probably needed me. When he asked me, ‘lunch tomorrow?’ after not seeing each other for several years, I should have read between the lines. I must have asked him something, but I remember the answer, which is still in my phone: ‘It has been a very difficult three months.’ From him, particularly, that’s saying a lot. More than notable, it was extraordinary. No matter how things worked, he kept up appearances.”

Ponomarev also says Rapoport didn’t seem great when they barbecued in Washington during a visit this summer. He said Rapoport had cut way back on drinking after his second marriage, but was drinking heavily when they met up. “It was very clear he was depressed that he was not with his family,” he says. Still, it didn’t seem desperate. “I cannot exclude that it was a suicide, but in general nothing pointed in this direction when we met. If I would feel like something like this could happen, I would talk to him more.”

But for a number of people in Rapoport’s anxious political circles, it’s hard to put stock in coincidences. “He was making plans for the future. He had plans for the next week and the week after,” says Jason Jay Smart, a Kyiv-based American political consultant who says he spoke weekly with Rapoport over the past half-decade. “It’s not something someone who was planning on jumping off a building would do.”

And there’s history to make Russian skeptics suspicious of Washington authorities’ investigative chops. In 2015, Mikhail Lesin, a former media aide to the Russian president, died in Washington’s Dupont Circle Hotel. Initially reported as a heart attack, the medical examiner later determined that he had died of blunt force trauma. But the report was later amended to say that the death had been an accident, the injuries sustained possibly from falling off a bed after he returned to his hotel room extremely drunk. Prosecutors closed the case. “That was outrageous,” Ponomarev says.

Closer to Rapoport — but further from politics — his partner in Soho Rooms died in an apparent suicide after his own fall from a building, in Moscow in 2017. One Rapoport friend speculated that foul play could be business-related rather than political, though Satter says the two aren’t so easily separated. “Even if it was just business interests, that doesn’t mean the Russian intelligence service wasn’t involved,” he says. “They often use these disputes.”

The Russian embassy did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.

The FBI says it does not comment about whether it is investigating alongside the locals. And the medical examiner’s report, alas, may not be here to clear things up anytime soon: All “unnatural” deaths, even open-and-shut suicides, get sent for a report. They can take up to 90 days.

In the meantime, people who find the death fishy — as well as people who merely find it heartbreaking — can probably see evidence in Rapoport’s final Facebook post, three days before his death. It was a photo of Marlon Brando’s Apocalypse Now character, accompanied by the character’s haunting last words: “The horror, the horror.”

Commentary: No rules for USA

(Xinhua) 16:22, August 26, 2022

BEIJING, Aug. 26 (Xinhua) -- Some U.S. politicians keep preaching "upholding the rules-based international order." But in reality, the country proves to be the biggest destroyer of rules and order, and their repeated reference means nothing but their preference for U.S. hegemony.

As a founding member of the United Nations and the world's only superpower, the United States constantly places its domestic law above international law and observes international rules only as it sees fit. This is the biggest damage being done to the international order.

While asking other countries to uphold the international order, the United States has been obstructing negotiations for a verification protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention, and refusing to ratify multiple international conventions including the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The United States has withdrawn from the UN Human Rights Council, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and other organizations, even the Trans-Pacific Partnership it had advocated.

The United States' so-called "rules-based international order" is actually a bunch of rules made by a handful of countries to serve the selfish interests of the United States in seeking hegemony.

John Bolton, former White House national security adviser, said earlier in an interview unashamedly that he had helped plan coups in foreign countries. Bolton's admission is so revealing.

Leading U.S. politicians trumpet the so-called "rules-based international order" for one purpose: to ensure that the United States can easily interfere in other countries' affairs and overthrow their governments at its own will. This is exactly the kind of "rules" and "order" that they want to defend.

For years, the United States has created political unrest in Latin America, played a part in the "Arab Spring", and instigated color revolutions in Europe and Asia. The United States has wantonly invaded and interfered militarily in other countries, killing over 800,000 people and turning more than 20 million into refugees in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. The United States says little, however, about how many innocent lives have been lost and how many families torn apart as a steep price for this order it championed.

The Taiwan question has always been the most important and the most sensitive issue at the heart of China-U.S. relations. The China-U.S. Joint Communique on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations, published in December 1978, states: "The Government of the United States of America acknowledges the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China."

However, the United States has substantially eased restrictions on official relations with Taiwan and increased military contacts with the region, as evidenced by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan earlier this month. The United States' deviation from the one-China principle will surely take a huge toll on the mutual trust between the two countries.

The one-China principle, reaffirmed by United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 2758, is an integral part of the post-WWII international order, an established international consensus and a widely-accepted basic norm in international relations.

By breaching the one-China principle, the United States is also challenging the post-war international order, which will surely be met with wide opposition from the international community.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed in June that they've sought to build an imperfect but liberal order. But judging from the U.S. deeds, it is neither liberal nor order; it is hegemony, highhandedness and bullying, and an attempt of the United States and a small number of other countries to make rules that suit themselves.

People across the world will not want the kind of "imperfect" but "liberal" order peddled by the United States. What they want is an equal and shared right to security, development and prosperity for all. It is high time that the United States reflects on itself and takes real responsibilities for world peace and development. 

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Hongyu)