Category Archives: Viva!

Critic’s Notebook: Roseanne Barr Crosses a Line, and ABC Draws One

The network’s decision to cancel “Roseanne” over a racist comment will cost it. But when people decide to let racism slide, it costs the rest of us.

Britain doesn’t just glorify its violent past: it gets high on it | Afua Hirsch

British racism, is still racism even if a tiny bit less brutal than the Belgians, Germans, Japanese. Most of the people transported into slavery from what is now thought of as Africa, were transported to North, Central and South America in British and French ships. That is not something to be candied over with “we were not as brutal as the Belgian king.” Tearing apart families and enslaving people is brutal enough and needs to be healed not by candy but by admitting the wrong!

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The defensive, patriotic narrative of empire has become a drug. Like all addicts, those hooked on it cannot stomach critique

It feels like I live in the middle of a culture war. On one side is a kind of state-sponsored amnesia. It’s pervasive. It’s an Oscar-winning movie perpetuating the idea that Winston Churchill stood alone, at the Darkest Hour, as Nazi fascism encroached, with Britain a small and vulnerable nation isolated in the north Atlantic. In reality the United Kingdom was at that moment an imperial power with the collective might of Indian, African, Canadian and Australian manpower, resources and wealth at its disposal.

It’s also Poland passing a law so that errant historians, survivors or Auschwitz guides who raise the inconvenient fact of Polish complicity in atrocities now risk up to three years’ imprisonment. It’s Tennessee in the US legislating against the removal of Confederate statues when, as the former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu puts it, they “purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitised Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for”.

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Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko shot dead in Kiev

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Police suspect murder related to prominent journalist’s professional activities

Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko has been shot in Kiev and has died of his wounds in an ambulance, according to Ukrainian police.

Babchenko’s wife found him bleeding at the apartment on Tuesday and called an ambulance, but he died on the way to a hospital, a spokesman said.

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Here’s How the FBI Investigation Into Russia and Trump Campaign Actually Started

No story is hotter across America this Memorial Day weekend than what the Federal Bureau of Investigation did—and did not do—in 2016 about Russian connections to Donald J. Trump. As the summer enjoys its unofficial kickoff, headlines and social media are overflowing with accusations, of varying degrees of veracity, regarding FBI counterintelligence operations around President Trump two years ago, as he was campaigning to take the White House.

Of late, the president has taken to Twitter even more manically than usual, hurling invective at the FBI for its alleged illegalities toward him and his entourage. Over the weekend, “executive time” has birthed batches of presidential rage-tweets about the alleged “Spygate,” complete with Trump’s trademark unusual capitalizations and quotations. “With Spies, or ‘Informants’ as the Democrats like to call them because it sounds less sinister (but it’s not), all over my campaign, even from a very early date, why didn’t the crooked highest levels of the FBI or ‘Justice’ contact me to tell me of the phony Russia problem?” the president asked on Saturday, adding that “This whole Russia Probe is Rigged.” Trump piled on three more angry tweets on Sunday, including the bizarre question, “Who’s going to give back the young and beautiful lives (and others) that have been devastated and destroyed by the phony Russia Collusion Witch Hunt?”

Although it’s now evident that in mid-2016 the FBI used one or more informants to sniff around the Trump campaign, inquiring discreetly about connections to the Kremlin—a major concern for the Bureau when people with documented and troubling ties to Russia and its spy agencies like Carter Page and Michael Flynn appeared in Trump’s orbit—there was nothing untoward or disturbing about this. This is the FBI’s standard operating procedure in counterintelligence cases. Although Trump and his defenders have frequently stated that employing informants was illegal and scandalously inappropriate, that’s just one more Trumpian falsehood.

Read the rest at The Observer …

New Zealand ‘marine heatwave’ brings tropical fish from 3,000km away

One time or the future?

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Out-of-place Queensland groper seen off New Zealand coast after water temperatures soared

Rare tropical fish from Australia have been spotted in New Zealand waters after a record-breaking hot summer and warm ocean temperatures lured the creatures across the Tasman sea.

The Queensland groper, also known as the giant grouper, is the aquatic emblem of the state and was spotted swimming around the wreck of the HMNZ Canterbury in the Bay of Islands on Sunday, more than 3,000 kilometres away from its usual cruising spots on the coral reefs and estuaries off the Queensland coast.

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Valencia village lays claim to original Coca-Cola recipe

The recipe for Kola-coca is languishing in a safe inside the office of 79-year-old Juan Juan Micó, who owns Destilerías Ayelo, in the village of of Aielo de Malferit, in Spain’s Valencia province. After ensuring no photos will be taken, the elderly gentleman unlocks the box and extracts the notebook in which the secret formula is inscribed.

Seguir leyendo.

The Cage on Tohono O’odham Nation — U.S. ‘Dog Kennels’ Imprison Migrants and Water Protectors

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This photo is of The Cage, the sweltering inhumane outside detention center used by the US Border Patrol on the Tohono O’odham Nation in the Sonoran Desert.  When Mohawks came here in 2007, they were joined by Lenny Foster, Dineh, who said this was no more than a “dog cage.” This cage was not operating the last time we were there, but these cages are still used, to cage migrants, as they were