With “Amanpour & Company,” a CNN veteran based in London brings a new sensibility to an hour that was once dark and clubby.
Geena Davis joins women in film to give Toronto a reality check

Thelma and Louise star was among the actors and directors who shared tactics at the Toronto film festival for overcoming gender inequality
On the third day of the Toronto film festival (Tiff), business appears to be booming. The queues for the press and industry screenings speak to that. But a few feet from the main venues, a section of John Street has been converted into what looks more like a music festival than a trade convention. There’s artificial grass covering the tarmac, and a stage where singer Shakura S’Aida is leading the crowd in a chant of “use your voice, use your voice”.
The event is a rally in support of women in film, part of Tiff’s Share Her Journey initiative, which was set up in 2017. The object of Share Her Journey, Tiff executive director Michele Maheux explained in her introduction, was not just to “celebrate and lift up women everywhere” but to find “solutions to the gender parity problems that are rampant in the film industry.” Well, she shrugs. “What a difference a year makes.”
‘Jail juvenile offenders until middle age’, Trump health secretary argued in 1991 memo
Paul Joseph Goebbels would love this guy!

Alex Azar rejected notion that juvenile who committed a crime was ‘salvageable human’
Donald Trump’s health secretary, who defended the administration’s child separation policy as “charity”, once argued in a private paper that repeat juvenile offenders cannot be rehabilitated and ought to be jailed until they reach middle age, according to a memo obtained by the Guardian.
A 1991 legal memo written by Alex Azar, a former drug industry executive who is now secretary of health and human services (HHS), rejected the notion that a juvenile who committed a crime was a “salvageable human” who could be treated rather than punished.
Trump attack on ICC is the unacceptable face of US exceptionalism

Under the guise of a battle for sovereignty, America aims to end international justice
The title of John Bolton’s speech in Washington – “Protecting American constitutionalism and sovereignty from international threats” – sounded innocuous enough, if a little pompous.
But its text represents the Trump administration’s most devastating and unrestrained attack to date on the global rules-based order and its legal flagship, the international criminal court.
Russian trolls’ tweets cited in more than 100 UK news articles

Posts from accounts identified in June add to those previously spotted in British media
UK news organisations have cited tweets from Russian trolls more than 100 times, a Guardian investigation has found, in stories about topics including Donald Trump, Donald Glover and Lena Dunham.
In June the US Congress released details of 1,000 accounts that Twitter believes were run by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a state-backed misinformation operation based in St Petersburg, adding to more than 2,000 accounts the company had already identified.
Serena Williams’s treatment shows how hard it is to be a black woman at work | Carys Afoko

The fact that the tennis player manages to overcome the discrimination she faces every day is an inspiration
When I have a bad day at work, I think of Serena Williams. I tell myself that if she can do her job then I can do mine. To be clear, I am not a professional athlete – I struggle to walk up more than one flight of stairs without losing my breath. And, no, I’m not the mother of a small and adorable child, I just about keep my houseplants alive most weeks. The thing Williams and I have in common is that we are black women who work for a living. And being a black woman at work comes with a specific set of challenges.
Related: Serena Williams was right about women’s treatment but wrong on Saturday | Kevin Mitchell
‘Affront to human rights’: top UN official slams Australia’s offshore detention
Michelle Bachelet says hardline migration policies offer ‘suffering and chaos’ and calls on world to cooperate
Australia’s offshore processing immigration regime is “an affront to the protection of human rights”, the new UN new human rights chief has said in an excoriating maiden speech reflecting on the state of rights globally.
In her first address to the human rights council, Michelle Bachelet, the former president of Chile, said the council had a responsibility to speak out against human rights violations without fear or favour, “regardless of sex, gender identity, race or ethnicity, religion, disability or migration status”.
Related: Australia needs a moral revolution | Behrouz Boochani
Related: Corruption, incompetence and a musical: Nauru’s cursed history
IOF attack elementary school, assault teachers
power corrupts the soul…
PNN/ Hebron/
Dozens of students and a schoolteacher on Monday were wounded after Israeli occupation forces stormed an elementary school in Hebron this morning.
Local sources said that the Israeli soldiers assaulted a number of school teachers, injuring teacher Shukri al-Zaru al-Tamimi, before they threw stunt and teargas grenades towards the students in the vicinity of the school and inside its walls.
The attack spread terror among the students where dozens suffered from teargas suffocation.
The school has some 370 students in elementary classes.
PA: Trump closing Washington PLO office is “vicious blackmail”
He also plans to threaten to impose sanctions against the International Criminal Court if it moves ahead with investigations of the U.S. and Israel, the paper said. Actions the U.S. could take include banning ICC judges and prosecutors from entering America.
“We will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system, and we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system,” the paper reported Bolton was planning to say. “We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans.”
This comes after a series of measurements against the Palestinian leadership and people, including moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and announcing Jerusalem the capital of Israel in May, in addition to the recent cut of funding to the UNRWA, which is responsible for aiding millions of Palestinian refugees in the Middle East.
Senior PLO official, Dr. Saeb Erekat described the decision as another affirmation of the Trump Administration’s policy to collectively punish the Palestinian people, including by cutting financial support for humanitarian services including health and education.
Erekat said that the leadership in response will take the necessary measures to protect the rights of Palestinian citizens living in the United States to access their consular services.
“This dangerous escalation shows that the US is willing to disband the international system in order to protect Israeli crimes and attacks against the land and people of Palestine as well as against peace and security in the rest of our region,” Erekat said in a statement.
“We reiterate that the rights of the Palestinian people are not for sale, that we will not succumb to US threats and bullying and that we will continue our legitimate struggle for freedom, justice, and independence, including by all political and legal means possible. Accordingly, we continue to call upon the International Criminal Court to open its immediate investigation into Israeli crimes.| he added.
Erekat concluded by saying that the international community has the responsibility to react.
“Lowering the flag of Palestine in Washington DC means much more than a new slap by the Trump Administration against peace and justice; it symbolizes the US attacks against the international system as a whole, including the Paris Convention, UNESCO and the Human Rights Council among others,” he added.
To her part, PLO Executive Committee Member Dr. Hanan Ashrawi said in a statement “It is ironic that the US is punishing the PLO, the national representative of the Palestinian people and the highest political body that made the commitment to reaching a political and legal settlement of the Palestinian question and that has engaged in negotiations with successive US administrations for decades.”
“This form of crude and vicious blackmail, as clearly articulated by officials including US President Trump, United States Special Envoy to the Middle East Jason Greenblatt, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, senior advisor to President Trump Jared Kushner, and National Security Advisor John Bolton, once again seeks to punish the Palestinian people as a whole who are already victims of the ruthless Israeli military occupation,” Ashrawi said.
Serena Williams gains support of WTA and USTA chiefs after umpire row

- WTA’s Steve Simon: double standards applied by Carlos Ramos
- USTA president hails Williams’s ‘class’ and ‘sportsmanship’
The Women’s Tennis Association has backed up Serena Williams’ claims of sexism regarding the way she was treated by umpire Carlos Ramos during Saturday’s US Open final.
Williams was given a warning for coaching, then docked a point for smashing a racket before being penalised a game by Ramos after she called him a “liar” and a “thief”. That left the 23-times grand slam singles champion one game from defeat and in tears, with Naomi Osaka clinching her first slam title shortly afterwards.
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