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rocketwerks · 5 years ago

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Belgrade

AKA Belvidere, Bellgrade, Alandale, Allandale, Ruth’s Chris Steak House

11500 West Huguenot Road

Built, 1732, 1824

February 2020

The centerpiece of one of Chesterfield’s most notorious murders. PG-13!

(Chesterfield County Public Library) — Jeffrey O’Dell Research Papers Collection — 1978

Belgrade, known in the late nineteenth century as "Belvidere" and renamed "Alandale" in the early part of this century, features an unusual plan and a unique medley of roof types. Situated off Robious Road southwest of Bon Air, the house occupies a large open tract surrounded by rapidly expanding residential and commercial development.

February 2020

Originally a one- or 1 1/2-story hall-parlor house, Belgrade was expanded to its present form in 1824. In that year, Edward Cox conveyed the property to Edward O. Friend, and assessed buildings rose in value from $482 to $1,939. This increase reflects a complete transformation of the original dwelling from a hall-parlor structure to a large dwelling composed of a two-story, side-passage-plan main block flanked by matching 1-story one-room-plan wings.

(Chesterfield County Public Library) — Jeffrey O’Dell Research Papers Collection — 1978

The hipped gambrel roof covering each of the two wings is unusual, and Belgrade provides the latest recorded example in Virginia of this rare roof type. Another unusual feature is the apparently original 1-story lean-to at the west end of the building. The primary purpose of this eight-foot wide unit appears to have been to house a stair (similar in form and coeval to that in the main block) permitting separate interior and exterior access to the upper chamber of the south wing.

February 2020

The present interior trim, varying only slightly among the various rooms on both floors, dates entirely to ca. 1824. The mantel in the main block consists of a simple architrave surround capped by a molded shelf with punch-and-dentil band. The mantels in each of the wings are nearly identical, featuring a raised-panel surround capped by a molded shelf. Upstairs mantels date from the same period, and feature plain architrave surrounds with simple molded shelves.

February 2020 — showing end of original construction at center-right, and the start of new construction at far-right

Two coeval staircases serve the house; both are of closed-string, straight-run form with rectangular balusters, square newel with molded cap, and molded rail. The stair in the main block is of unusual configuration: it divides at a narrow landing against the rear wall, where short flights lead respectively to chambers over the main block and north wing. The stair in the lean-to, which makes a turn about three-quarters of the way up, barely allows headroom at the upper landing.

(Chesterfield County Public Library) — Jeffrey O’Dell Research Papers Collection — 1978

Originally, matching dependencies flanked the house. A one-story, two-room-plan frame kitchen with center chimney stood seventy feet to the south of the house, while an office of similar form stood at an equal distance from the north end of the dwelling. Both were in a deteriorated state in the 1920s and were demolished. The only surviving early outbuilding is a frame gable-roofed smokehouse standing a few yards southwest of the house.

February 2020 — showing original construction at center, new construction at far left

The earliest traced owner of the property was Edward Cox, who in 1824 sold the house and 515 acres to Edward O. Friend for $5,000. Friend, the son of Joseph Friend and grandson of Edward Friend (d. 1806), lived there until his death in 1838, when the property passed to his widow, Matilda E. Burfoot Friend. She remarried and sold the farm two years later to Anthony T. Robiou, who lived there until his death in 1851.

(Old Stocks) — Richmond and Danville Railroad Company 100 share stock certificate

Robious Crossing, where the new Richmond and Danville Railroad line intersected Huguenot Road, was named for the then-current owner of the farm. Robiou is best remembered in Chesterfield County history, however, as the man whose murder precipitated one of the most publicized court trials in nineteenth century Virginia.

(Wikipedia) — Black Heath

The episode began when Robiou filed a divorce suit against his young wife (who was only fourteen at the time of her wedding) charging her with infidelity. [CCO]

Apparently, it wasn’t a “maybe-she-is” situation. Robiou caught them mid-schtupp, still cracking the plaster, and took offense.

John S. Wormley, the girl’s father, along with John Reid, her allegedly adulterous suitor, waylaid Robiou on the road to Black Heath Pits (today’s Robious Road) and gunned him down. [CCO]

(Fineart America) — Infidelity, 18th Century art print by Granger

Imagine Robiou’s last moments contemplating the unfairness of it all. At least he has a street named for him.

Both men were taken into custody shortly thereafter, and Wormley, a prosperous planter and lawyer, was found guilty at a trial held at Chesterfield Court House in October, 1851. A mistrial was later declared, however, on the grounds that the jurors had been treated to drinks beforehand by the deputy sheriff and county clerk. [CCO]

*hic... innnoshent, yer Honor...

(Executed Today) — scene of a 19th-century hanging

Over a year later, a jury summoned from Richmond and Petersburg because of the local notoriety of the case sentenced Wormley to death. A week later, a crowd of 4,000 persons watched the 42-year-old man hanged at Chesterfield Courthouse. Reid, meanwhile, had been tried and acquitted, and before the hanging married the young widow whose husband he had been accused of murdering. [CCO]

(Chesterfield County Public Library) — Jeffrey O’Dell Research Papers Collection — Belgrade Foyer, 1978

Of course, this all ends happily. Two weeks after her father’s hanging, Mrs. Emily Reid took a tumble down the front steps and perished. Poetic justice.

There are two accounts of how she died. One account is that she fell on a sewing basket and scissors punctured her heart. The other account is that she broke her neck. Since this tragedy, there have been hundreds of stories of sightings of the ghosts of Robiou and his young bride roaming the boxwood gardens behind the home. (Ruth’s Chris)

(Library of Congress) — Map of Chesterfield County, Va. — J. E. LaPrade, 1888 — Belgrade identified as Belvidere, right at the intersection of Robious and the Richmond and Danville Railroad

In 1851, the year of the first trial, Randolph Ammonett purchased the property from the trustees of Robiou’s estate for $2,025. Ammonett lived at Belgrade until his death in 1889. In his will, he directed that "an iron railing about 10 feet square be erected around the graves of myself and my deceased wife, J. J. Ammonett." This fence still stands in the back yard, although there are no inscribed stones to identify the graves of either Amonett or his wife. [CCO]

(Chesterfield Observer) — 2009

Since then the place has been called Belvidere, Alandale, Allandale, and Bellgrade, the nom-de-plume that Ruth’s Chris prefers. Jeff O’Dell calls it Belgrade, and who are we to argue with an architectural historian?

Mary Wingfield Scott would not have approved with Ruth’s Chris’s alterations, but the steak house did end up preserving the original structure, so even if it isn’t on the historic registry, the spirit of the plantation house was preserved.

(Belgrade is part of the Atlas RVA! Project)

Print Sources

[CCO] Chesterfield County, Early Architecture and Historic Sites Jeffrey M. O’Dell. 1983.

#mustseerva #rva #rvahistory #robiousroad #huguenotroad #chesterfieldcounty #atlasrva #cityatomic

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brookstonalmanac · 6 years ago

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Events 5.13

1373 – Julian of Norwich has visions which are later transcribed in her Revelations of Divine Love. 1515 – Mary Tudor, Queen of France, and Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk, are officially married at Greenwich. 1568 – Battle of Langside: The forces of Mary, Queen of Scots, are defeated by a confederacy of Scottish Protestants under James Stewart, Earl of Moray, her half-brother. 1619 – Dutch statesman Johan van Oldenbarnevelt is executed in The Hague after being convicted of treason. 1779 – War of the Bavarian Succession: Russian and French mediators at the Congress of Teschen negotiate an end to the war. In the agreement Austria receives the part of its territory that was taken from it (the Innviertel). 1780 – The Cumberland Compact is signed by leaders of the settlers in early Tennessee. 1787 – Captain Arthur Phillip leaves Portsmouth, England, with eleven ships full of convicts (the "First Fleet") to establish a penal colony in Australia. 1804 – Forces sent by Yusuf Karamanli of Tripoli to retake Derna from the Americans attack the city. 1830 – Ecuador gains its independence from Gran Colombia. 1846 – Mexican–American War: The United States declares war on Mexico. 1861 – American Civil War: Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom issues a "proclamation of neutrality" which recognizes the Confederacy as having belligerent rights. 1861 – The Great Comet of 1861 is discovered by John Tebbutt of Windsor, New South Wales, Australia. 1861 – Pakistan's (then a part of British India) first railway line opens, from Karachi to Kotri. 1862 – The USS Planter, a steamer and gunship, steals through Confederate lines and is passed to the Union, by a southern slave, Robert Smalls, who later was officially appointed as captain, becoming the first black man to command a United States ship. 1864 – American Civil War: Battle of Resaca: The battle begins with Union General Sherman fighting toward Atlanta. 1865 – American Civil War: Battle of Palmito Ranch: In far south Texas, the last land battle of the Civil War ends with a Confederate victory. 1880 – In Menlo Park, New Jersey, Thomas Edison performs the first test of his electric railway. 1888 – With the passage of the Lei Áurea ("Golden Law"), Empire of Brazil abolishes slavery. 1909 – The first Giro d'Italia starts from Milan. Italian cyclist Luigi Ganna will be the winner. 1912 – The Royal Flying Corps, the forerunner of the Royal Air Force, is established in the United Kingdom. 1917 – Three children report the first apparition of Our Lady of Fátima in Fátima, Portugal. 1939 – The first commercial FM radio station in the United States is launched in Bloomfield, Connecticut. The station later becomes WDRC-FM. 1940 – World War II: Germany's conquest of France begins as the German army crosses the Meuse. Winston Churchill makes his "blood, toil, tears, and sweat" speech to the House of Commons. 1940 – Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands flees her country to Great Britain after the German invasion. Princess Juliana takes her children to Canada for their safety. 1941 – World War II: Yugoslav royal colonel Dragoljub Mihailović starts fighting against German occupation troops, beginning the Serbian resistance. 1943 – World War II: Operations Vulcan and Strike force the surrender of the last Axis troops in Tunisia. 1948 – Arab–Israeli War: The Kfar Etzion massacre is committed by Arab irregulars, the day before the declaration of independence of the state of Israel on May 14. 1950 – The first round of the Formula One World Championship is held at Silverstone. 1951 – The 400th anniversary of the founding of the National University of San Marcos is commemorated by the opening of the first large-capacity stadium in Peru. 1952 – The Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Parliament of India, holds its first sitting. 1954 – The anti-National Service Riots, by Chinese middle school students in Singapore, take place. 1954 – The original Broadway production of The Pajama Game opens and runs for another 1,063 performances. Later received three Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical, and Best Choreography. 1958 – During a visit to Caracas, Venezuela, Vice President Richard Nixon's car is attacked by anti-American demonstrators. 1958 – May 1958 crisis: A group of French military officers lead a coup in Algiers demanding that a government of national unity be formed with Charles de Gaulle at its head in order to defend French control of Algeria. 1958 – Ben Carlin becomes the first (and only) person to circumnavigate the world by amphibious vehicle, having travelled over 17,000 kilometres (11,000 mi) by sea and 62,000 kilometres (39,000 mi) by land during a ten-year journey. 1960 – Hundreds of University of California, Berkeley students congregate for the first day of protest against a visit by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. 1967 – Dr. Zakir Husain becomes the third President of India. He is the first Muslim President of the Indian Union. He holds this position until August 24, 1969. 1969 – May 13 Incident involving sectarian violence in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. 1971 – Over 900 unarmed Bengali Hindus are murdered in the Demra massacre. 1972 – Faulty electrical wiring ignites a fire underneath the Playtown Cabaret in Osaka, Japan. Blocked exits and non-functional elevators lead to 118 fatalities, with many victims leaping to their deaths. 1972 – The Troubles: A car bombing outside a crowded pub in Belfast sparks a two-day gun battle involving the Provisional IRA, Ulster Volunteer Force and British Army. Seven people are killed and over 66 injured. 1980 – An F3 tornado hits Kalamazoo County, Michigan. President Jimmy Carter declares it a federal disaster area. 1981 – Mehmet Ali Ağca attempts to assassinate Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square in Rome. The Pope is rushed to the Agostino Gemelli University Polyclinic to undergo emergency surgery and survives. 1985 – Police bombed MOVE headquarters in Philadelphia to end a stand-off, killing six adults and five children, and destroying the homes of 250 city residents. 1989 – Large groups of students occupy Tiananmen Square and begin a hunger strike. 1990 – The Dinamo–Red Star riot took place at Maksimir Stadium in Zagreb, Croatia between the Bad Blue Boys (fans of Dinamo Zagreb) and the Delije (fans of Red Star Belgrade). 1992 – Li Hongzhi gives the first public lecture on Falun Gong in Changchun, People's Republic of China. 1995 – Alison Hargreaves, a 33-year-old British mother, becomes the first woman to conquer Everest without oxygen or the help of sherpas. 1996 – Severe thunderstorms and a tornado in Bangladesh kill 600 people. 1998 – Race riots break out in Jakarta, Indonesia, where shops owned by Indonesians of Chinese descent are looted and women raped. 1998 – India carries out two nuclear tests at Pokhran, following the three conducted on May 11. The United States and Japan impose economic sanctions on India. 2005 – Andijan uprising, Uzbekistan; Troops open fire on crowds of protestors after a prison break; at least 187 people were killed according to official estimates. 2006 – São Paulo violence: Rebellions occur in several prisons in Brazil. 2011 – Two bombs explode in the Charsadda District of Pakistan killing 98 people and wounding 140 others. 2012 – Forty-nine dismembered bodies are discovered by Mexican authorities on Mexican Federal Highway 40. 2013 – Kermit Gosnell, a U.S. abortion physician, is found guilty in Pennsylvania of three counts of murder of newborn infants, one count of involuntary manslaughter, and various other charges. In total, more than 100 babies were killed at Gosnell's abortion clinic. 2014 – An explosion at an underground coal mine in southwest Turkey kills 301 miners. 2018 – Nine people die after the suicide bombing of three Indonesian churches in Surabaya, Indonesia.

#Events

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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Manchester United 0-0 Wolverhampton Wanderers

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/manchester-united-0-0-wolverhampton-wanderers/

Manchester United 0-0 Wolverhampton Wanderers

Fernandes (right) had five shots in the game – more than any other player

Bruno Fernandes was unable to inspire Manchester United to victory on his debut as the £47m new arrival had to settle for a goalless draw against Wolves at Old Trafford.

In a game of few chances, Fernandes did force a couple of routine saves from fellow countryman Rui Patricio, who also almost dropped another into his own net as he inexplicably fumbled his fellow Portuguese’s tame shot round the post.

The nearest United came to scoring was in the final minute of stoppage time when substitute Diogo Dalot headed Aaron Wan-Bissaka’s cross narrowly wide, and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s men have now taken just four points from five games.

Wolves worked hard but, despite introducing their debutant, Daniel Podence, near the end, also lacked a killer touch in front of goal.

Nuno Espirito Santo’s men have now won once in six games since their memorable comeback triumph against Manchester City on 27 December and, with 13 games of the campaign remaining, are, like United, six points off a Champions League place and behind Sheffield United.

A solid debut for Fernandes

While it could not be described as an explosive debut, Fernandes did enough to indicate he will improve United as an offensive threat.

The former Sporting Lisbon man was eager to get on the ball, took the initiative at set-pieces and was not afraid to shoot.

His first effort drifted wide as he shot from the angle. His second, from a central position, turned out to be the hosts’ only first-half shot on target, which went straight at Patricio.

Almost more noticeable was the ugly stuff. A hoofed clearance from the edge of United’s six-yard box brought chants of ‘Bruno, Bruno’ from the Stretford End behind him.

Then a thunderous challenge on fellow countryman Joao Moutinho eventually brought a cursory check to see if the Wolves midfielder was OK as he lay on the ground receiving treatment.

Another free-kick and the routine shot Patricio almost made a mess of were Fernandes’ second-half highlights, although he will not be able to raise the whole underperforming team on his own.

Familiar foes

This was the third meeting between these sides in the space of 29 days and their sixth encounter in less than a year.

As the previous five had resulted in a couple of 2-1 victories for Wolves, a 1-0 triumph for United and two draws, it was perhaps no surprise the latest encounter should be equally tight.

The visitors did have chances, with Raul Jimenez forcing an excellent second-half save from United keeper David de Gea and Romain Saiss heading over when he was well placed to do much better 11 minutes from time.

Podence had a shot on the turn blocked near the end, although Wolves’ marathon season appears to have caught up with them and they, more than most, will be thankful for the two-week break that lies ahead.

Munich remembered

Sixty-two years ago on Thursday, United suffered the biggest tragedy in their history when eight players were among the 23 passengers who died when the team plane crashed in Munich following a refuelling stop on the way back from a European Cup tie in Belgrade.

Two hours before kick-off on Saturday, fans from both sides gathered for the annual ceremony under the Munich memorial outside the stadium.

Just before the teams emerged from the tunnel, United’s Munich anthem, Flowers of Manchester, was played and as the teams emerged a massive banner proclaiming “We’ll Never Die” was dragged across the Stretford End. After 58 minutes, applause rang round the ground in honour of the victims.

Sir Bobby Charlton was the only survivor of the crash present at the game, although Jimmy Murphy, son of manager Sir Matt Busby’s assistant Jimmy, was also at Old Trafford.

No protest

There had been calls for a walkout by United fans after 68 minutes.

As it turned out, a handful of supporters left at the allotted time but it was hardly noticeable amid a capacity crowd.

Far more conspicuous was the absence of executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward.

Wolves fans sang “There’s only one Ed Woodward” at one point, although there was no repeat of the singing from United fans which has attracted such controversy in recent games.

Man of the match – Aaron Wan-Bissaka (Man Utd)

In a game of few chances, Wan Bissaka’s pace was a threat and he was defensively sound

What next?

Wolves’ next game is against Leicester at Molineux on Friday, 14 February (20:00 GMT). United travel to Chelsea on Monday, 17 February (20:00).

Goal-shy United – the stats

Manchester United have failed to score in three consecutive league games for the first time since October 2016.

United failed to score in back-to-back home league games for the first time since March 2014.

Wolves are without a win in their past 12 away games against United in all competitions (D3 L9), and have not led for a single minute in any of those games since a 1-0 win in February 1980.

Wolves are the first team to keep a Premier League clean sheet away against both Manchester clubs in a season since Chelsea in 2013-14.

This was Wolves’ first 0-0 draw in the Premier League since the opening weekend against Leicester, while it was just their third in total in 63 Premier League games under Nuno Espirito Santo.

Bruno Fernandes had more shots (5), more shots on target (3) and made more passes (88) than any other United player .

Eight Portuguese players featured, making Portugal only the third nation outside the UK to have at least eight players appear in a Premier League match, after France and Spain.

#Wanderers #Wolverhampton

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floresgavriil-blog · 5 years ago

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our referral linkTo get an Airbnb coupon code, follow this link here for your voucher code. The only Airbnb credits and coupons you can receive come in the form of a referral system. That means Airbnb users share their codes with new Airbnb guests. You can also buy gift cards of vouchers that make a great travel gift for frequent travelers too!

Get Your Airbnb Coupon Code

It’s pretty simple to get the Airbnb discount code. Follow our referral link and it will get you on average $40 off your first applicable Airbnb booking. Once you’re signed up, we recommend you read the rest of this post about using the Airbnb website and how to have the most enjoyable stay.

We’ve used the Airbnb website for five years and have stayed in hundreds of places. Over that time we’ve learned a lot of tips and tricks in order to find a good short term rental.

Here’s Your Airbnb Coupon Code

If You Want a $75 Airbnb Credit Read On

All of the first time codes vary in the rebate given from $25 USD to $40 USD. This is for a guest who intends to stay for the first time, it’s all in hopes people will try out Airbnb’s service.

However, if you sign up to be a host you’ll get an even greater Airbnb Coupon. This will provide a first time host with an equivalent of around $75 USD. To get the discount sign up as a host here using our referral code.

Of course, even $100 in travel credit on Airbnb does not sound like much in many countries. However, we’ve scored some fabulous places for all of $50 a night around the world. That could be a 50% discount on a three-night stay or more!

Airbnb Host Code

Our First Airbnb Coupon Code

All of this got started because I scored an Airbnb discount code years ago. I remember receiving our first Airbnb coupon code like it was yesterday, and since then our travels have never been the same.

I can’t count the number of places we have booked on Airbnb personally. However, if I had to guess it would probably range from 90-120 places around the world. We’ve found one-month apartment rentals in Cape Town, Belgrade, and Lagos when we wanted to slow down. We’ve also scored $15 apartments in Macedonia and Albania, stayed in old country cabins in Ireland, and overlooked the jungle in the Seychelles.

We realize that scoring that perfect Airbnb may not be as easy to first-time users, so we wanted to share a few of our Airbnb booking tips for you before you jump right into booking! Let’s talk about the sharing platform first.

Helpful Rental Tips When Using Your First Airbnb Coupon Code

1. Check your settings

The first thing you to want to do after you score your Airbnb coupon code and begin your search for an Airbnb rental is to make sure your settings are correct. I know this sounds simple, but even we have messed up the settings on Airbnb’s platform and travel is our life (our job really). First, put in how many people you will be traveling with so you don’t book too many or too few beds. You may notice that the price may increase with the more people in your party.

The big thing here is determining if you want an entire place, private room, or shared room. We almost always want our own apartment. Entire places typically cost more than a private room, but we never feel comfortable staying in someones home. However, we have made the mistake before of booking an entire apartment based off a properties photos and description only to find out it was actually a private room in their home. So do your due diligence!

2. Set the dates

This is your chance to set the dates you need. Many hosts will offer discounts for stays longer than a week, and if you’re staying longer than a month you may also see a discount. Airbnb automatically includes this discount in the final price.

3. Set your price point

Airbnb gives you the option to set your price maximum with a line graph.

4. Check the location

Many times when you start playing with prices and getting pickier with your Airbnb rental Airbnb’s website will automatically widen your location search. So, pay special attention to the map and location details of the places you are looking at so your rental is exactly where you want it.

Not in Banff!

5. Turn off Instant Book

Airbnb has implemented a super annoying feature called “Instant book.” Meaning when selected you are only seeing places that you can instantly book greatly limiting your search results. Airbnb’s interface automatically switches this on for you so make sure to turn it off.

6. Decide if you’re okay with a cleaning fee

Many Airbnb hosts add a cleaning fee to their rental. I’ve seen cleaning fees range anywhere from $5 to $85 per stay. To me paying a $50 fee for a one to two night Airbnb rental is not okay, so I will disregard a property when I see this. Longer stays are easier to justify a cleaning fee, and it all depends on the total price a night.

Cameron and I have managed to receive glowing guest reviews over the years as we leave Airbnb’s clean when we leave. This actually has given us a bit of negotiating power and we sometimes ask hosts to knock off the cleaning fee if we promise to leave it the same way we found it. However, as a newbie Airbnb user, this may not be possible.

No matter if you are paying a cleaning fee or not you should still keep your place like you would want your home to be kept. These are private homes and apartments so treat them with respect.

7. Make sure there are reviews

The number one thing I look for when choosing an Airbnb is reviews and a plethora of them. Generally, we try to book Airbnb’s with at least 10 or more reviews, but even that is on the low end.

We have only booked one place before with no reviews before and it was a total gamble that turned out to be fantastic. The good thing is when a property is new and doesn’t have any reviews the host may lower the price for the first couple of guests. Everyone has to start somewhere!

8. Read the reviews

Now that you’ve found a place with a lot of reviews you need to actually read the reviews. Make sure they are positive and that good things are being said about both the host and the actual property. The longer we are staying at a place the more in-depth I will analyze.

The bad thing I’ve found about Airbnb is that the review system is a little manipulative. With Airbnb, you often have face to face interactions with the owner – which is great – but it means that people are less likely to leave bad reviews and notes when they should be made. It’s hard to meet a friendly person and then complain about things that should be noted.

Also, Airbnb gives the host the option to review guests it means that guests are less likely to complain when they feel they should. When you are reviewing a Marriott or Hyatt you are more likely to go into detail about complaints and negative experiences, since the receiving end isn’t an individual. Just keep that in mind when you’re looking at reviews.

9. Look for a Superhost

If you are super wary of booking an Airbnb then consider switching on the “Superhost” function when searching. Superhosts have to maintain a high response rating, be an active user, glowing reviews, and never cancel on guests. Super hosts generally charge more for their status but you get what you pay for.

10. Read the description properly

Read the description of the place you are considering. I always make sure there is internet as that is important to Cameron and me, but the description can tell you many other things. Also, pay attention to the check in and check out times since you’re arriving at a real person’s place. So checking at 2 am after a long flight may not really work for Airbnb and you should opt for a hotel that is open 24 hours.

11. Check the cancellation policy

If you think there is any chance your trip could fall through try to book a place with a flexible cancellation policy. Many hosts have a non-refundable cancellation policy and if you book one of these and have to cancel Airbnb will not be on your side when it comes to a refund.

12. Message the host before you book

I never, ever instant book a place. That’s because I like to message the host and tell them about us, why we are traveling there, and any details about the trip. This is my test to make sure the host is responsive and personable. It also helps answer any important questions regarding our trip.

13. Request a discount

If you are staying for a week or longer you may be in the position to contact the host and ask for a discount on the price. They don’t have to say yes, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. Good past reviews don’t hurt your chances of getting a discount either. We often request special rates from hosts – especially in the shoulder or off seasons. If it’s mid-summer and you’re booking a place at the beach you probably won’t be able to score a discount.

14. Consider the fees

It’s worth noting that Airbnb charges guests a whopping 12% “Service Fee” on top of the rental price for using their service. This is in addition to the 3% they are charging the host. The fee is unavoidable if you are booking through their platform.

Of course, you can message the host and try to take things into your own hands, but you’ll realize as soon as you try this that Airbnb’s platform blocks out all emails, social handles, and phone numbers to prevent this. It’s also worth noting that if you do take things off of Airbnb to reduce the fees you lose any right to contact Airbnb if there is a problem – this goes for both the guest and the host.

15. Call Airbnb as soon as there is a problem

If you realize there is a problem once you check in to your new place don’t hesitate to tell your host first. If the host doesn’t resolve it quickly then don’t wait to contact Airbnb. You have 24 hours to notify them of a problem and they should help you get it sorted.

16. Book Longer Stays

If you didn’t know longer stays give you an automatic discount. Each property owner is able to set their own custom rates if you book for a week or month. We’ve seen on average a 15% discount on stays a week or more all the way up 40% off the nightly rate on monthly stays.

Our last Airbnb even came out cheaper if we booked it for one week instead of the required five nights. That meant we were able to check out late the last day and let the host know we departed afterward.

Love or Hate Airbnb

We have a love/hate relationship with Airbnb.

We hate Airbnb because of damage the sharing economy has inflicted on the housing market. Five years ago, getting a one year lease may have been an easy and affordable affair. Now, it is common to purchase property as an investment to rent on Airbnb or even sign a lease.

With Airbnb, landlords are able to double or even triple what a monthly tenant would pay. So it’s easy to understand the appeal of renting short term. I mean if you were a homeowner would you rather get $800/week for your property or have a long-term tenant for $1200 a month?

It has resulted in rental prices around the world sky-rocketing. I recently found a one-month basic apartment rental in Nicaragua for $2000, in a country where the average salary is $400 a month. That doesn’t sound right to me. Airbnb also charges guests 12% to use their platform, and 3% to the host. For the hosts, I think this is a great deal because sites like Booking.com and Agoda charge 15-20%. As an Airbnb user, 12% can really tack a lot on to the total cost of a rental.

To top it all off, my Airbnb customer service experience has been horrendous. I can’t speak on behalf of a host, but again as a guest, you don’t have much authority when it comes to problems with your rental experience. What started out as two guys renting an air mattress in their living room, has turned into yet another impersonal company. Along the way, it seems they lost sight of the customer.

We stayed in Airbnb’s all around Ireland!

That being said, we have been in and out of dozens of Airbnb rentals. Almost all of them were tremendous experiences. Airbnb gives travelers like us an easy and viable hotel alternative. As long-term travelers, we actually prefer to stay in an apartment or house as it affords us all the amenities of a home. That means we can cook, watch TV, wash our clothes, sit at a comfortable desk, and feel at home. It is a more comfortable and personal way to travel.

When traveling with a family or group we can all fit into a home, rather than multiple hotel rooms. A massive plus as it now allows people to socialize and enjoy their trip together. Yes, it was possible to find rentals before Airbnb, but not with the ease and assurance that their website brought.

Airbnb places you in touch with locals, much more than a hotel has ever provided us. We’ve had drinks, lunches, and long chats with some of our Airbnb host. They also provide a local’s insight into their region and almost always share a small part of their home with us.

It’s those reasons that we recommend Airbnb on our site. To people like us, that value a “home” when they travel and want to integrate with the community it continues to draw us back. For now, we can not replace it. Which is why we encourage you to try out the Airbnb first time coupon so you can decide for yourself what you think.

Our home for a week in the Faroe Islands

Don’t Forget Your Airbnb Coupon Code

In case you didn’t sign up in at the start of the post. We’ve included the discount link to get your $40 off your first Airbnb booking. Create an account with the link provided from us.

The Airbnb coupon code is only good for your first time and gets you $20-$40 off your first booking over $70 or more. Airbnb frequently changes the amount they discount for first-time bookings so you will have to check to see how much they are offering off this month!

Hope you guys have an awesome travel experience whether you decide to go with Airbnb or not.

Airbnb Coupon Code

THANKS FOR READING!

Hey, we’re Cameron and Natasha — We’re the head writers and creators of The World Pursuit. Over the last five years, we’ve traveled around the world. Let us send you some great tips and inspiration straight to your inbox every month.

Join Our Email List!

Read Next:

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The Ultimate Iceland Travel Guide

How To Drive The Golden Circle in Iceland Yourself

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30 Unique Things to do in Namibia!

The post 2019 AIRBNB COUPON CODE • Get $100 in Credit + Tips on How to Use! appeared first on The World Pursuit.

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terabitweb · 5 years ago

Text

Original Post from McAfee Author: Jessica Saavedra-Morales

Episode 4: Crescendo

This is the final installment of the McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR) analysis of Sodinokibi and its connections to GandGrab, the most prolific Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) Campaign of 2018 and mid 2019.

In this final episode of our series we will zoom in on the operations, techniques and tools used by different affiliate groups spreading Sodinokibi ransomware.

Since May we have observed several different modus operandi by different affiliates, for example:

Distributing the ransomware using spear-phishing and weaponized documents

Bat-files downloading payloads from Pastebin and inject them into a process on the operating system

Compromising RDP and usage of script files and password cracking tools to distribute over the victim’s network

Compromise of Managed Service Providers and usage of their distribution software to spread the ransomware

To understand more about how this enemy operates, we in McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR) decided to operate a global network of honeypots. We were aware of the lively underground trade market of RDP credentials and were curious about what someone would do with a compromised machine. Would they distribute the Sodinokibi ransomware? Would they execute the DejaBlue or BlueKeep exploits? Our specially designed and built RDP honeypots would give us those insights.

Like Moths to a Flame

From June until September 2019, we observed several groups compromise our honey pots and conduct activities related to Sodinokibi; we were able to fully monitor attackers and their actions without their knowledge.

It is important to note the golden rule we operated under: the moment criminal actions were prepared or about to be executed, the actor would be disconnected and the machine would be restored to its original settings with a new IP address.

We noticed some of our honeypot RDP servers were attacked by Persian-speaking actors that were actively harvesting credentials. Our analysis of these attacks led us to various Persian underground channels offering the same tools we observed appearing in Sodinokibi intrusions. Some of these tools are closed source and custom made, originating from within the channels in our analysis.

In this blog we will highlight a few of the intrusions we observed.

Group 1 – Unknown Affiliate ID

McAfee ATR observed initial activity against our South American honey pot begin in late May 2019. We had full visibility as the actor loaded a number of tools, including Sodinokibi, during the initial intrusion period.

The following ransom note (uax291-readme.txt) was dropped onto the system on June 10th, 2019. The actor utilized Masscan and NLBrute to scan and target other assets over RDP which fits with the behavior we have seen in all other Sodinokibi intrusions tracked by McAfee ATR. The actor then created a user account ‘backup’ and proceeded to consistently connect from an IP address range in Belgrade, Serbia.

Group 2 – Affiliate ID 34

Campaign 295 (based on sub-ID in the malware configuration)

The following Sodinokibi variant appeared in our South American honey pot with the original file name of H.a.n.n.a.exe.

58C390FE5845E2BB88D1D22610B0CA61 (June 8th, 2019)

Extracting the configuration from the ransomware sample as we conducted during our affiliate research, the affiliate-id is nr 34.

Upon initial intrusion, the actor created several user accounts on the target system between June 10th and June 11th. The malware Sodinokibi and credential-harvesting tool Mimikatz were executed under the user account “ibm” that the actor created as part of the entry into the system

Further information revealed that the actor was connecting from two IP addresses in Poland and Finland via the ‘ibm’ account. These logins originated from these countries in a 24hr period between July 10th and 11th with the following two unique machine names WIN-S5N2M6EGS5J and TS11. Machine name WIN-S5N2M6EGS5J was observed to be used by another actor that created the account “asp” and originated from the same Polish IP address.

The actor deployed a variant of the Mimikatz credential harvester during the intrusion, with the following custom BAT file:

We have seen a consistent usage of various custom files used to interact with hacking tools that are shared among the underground communities.

Another tool, known as Everything.exe, was also executed during the same period. This tool was used to index the entire file system and what was on the target system. This tool is not considered malicious and was developed by a legitimate company but can be used for profiling purposes. The usage of reconnaissance tools to profile the machine is interesting as it indicates potential manual lateral movement attempts by the actor on the target system.

July 20th to 30th Intrusion

Activity observed during this period utilized tools similar to those used in other intrusions we have observed in multiple regions, including those by Affiliate ID 34.

In this activity McAfee ATR identified NLBrute being executed again to target victims over RDP; a pattern we have seen over and over again in intrusions involving Sodinokibi. A series of logins from Iran were observed between July 25th and July 30th, 2019.

We have also seen crypto currency mining apps deployed in most of the intrusions involving Sodinokibi, which may suggest some interesting side activity for these groups. In this incident we discovered a miner gate configuration file with a Gmail address.

Using Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) investigation techniques, we identified an individual that is most likely tied to the discovered Gmail address. Based on our analysis, this individual is likely part of some Persian-speaking credential cracking crew harvesting RDP credentials and other types of data. The individual is sharing information related to Masscan and Kport scan results for specific countries that can be used for brute force operations.

ACTOR PROFILE

Further, we observed this actor on a Telegram channel discussing operations which align to the behavior we observed during intrusions on our honey pot. The data shared appears to be results from tools such as Masscan or Kport-scan that would be used to compromise further assets.

DISCUSSION OF SCANNING IN FARSI, ON PRIVATE CHANNEL

Other tools were found to have been executed the same day as the activity documented include:

Mimikatz

Was executed manually from the command line with the following parameters:

mimikatz.exe “privilege::debug” “sekurlsa::logonPasswords full” “exit”

Slayer Leecher

MinerGate

Group 3 – Affiliate ID 19

We observed the following Sodinokibi ransom variants attributed to this affiliate appearing in the honey pot in the Middle East. The attacker downloaded a file, ابزار کرک.zip, which can be mostly found in Farsi language private channels. The tool is basically a VPS Checker (really an RDP cracker) as discussed on the channels in the underground.

Campaign 36

Activity from June 3rd to 26th indicates that the attacker present on the system was conducting operations involving the Sodinokibi ransomware. When linking back activity, we observed one notable tool the actor had used during the operation.

‘Hidden-User.bat’ was designed to create hidden users on the target system. This tool links back to some underground distribution on Farsi-speaking private channels.

The file being shared is identical to the one we found to be used actively in the Sodinokibi case in different instances in June 2019, in different cities in the Middle East. We found the following Farsi-speaking users sharing and discussing this tool specifically (Cryptor007 and MR Amir), and others active in these groups. McAfee ATR observed this tool being used on June 13th, 2019 and June 26th, 2019 by the same actors in different regions.

HIDDEN-USER.bat

POSTED IMAGE OF THE TOOL IN USE

These Sodinokibi variants are strictly appearing in Israel from our observations:

009666D97065E97FFDE7B1584DB802EB (June 3rd, 2019)

3746F1823A47B4AA4B520264D1CF4606 (June 11th, 2019)

We observed the actor dropping one of the above-mentioned variants of Sodinokibi. In this case, the login came from an IP address originating in Iran and with a machine with a female Persian name.

The attackers connecting are most likely Farsi-speaking, as is evident by the browsing history uncovered by McAfee ATR, which indicates where a number of the tools utilized originate from, including Farsi language file sharing sites, such as Picofile.com and Soft98.ir, that contain malicious tools such as NLBrute, etc.

FARSI LANGUAGE SITE FOUND IN BROWSING HISTORY

We observed the actor attempting to run an RDP brute force attack using NLBrute downloaded from the Iranian site Picofile.com. The target was several network blocks in Oman and the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East.

In our analysis we discovered an offer to install ransomware on servers posted in Farsi speaking on August 19th,. This posting date corresponds with the timing of attacks observed in the Middle East. The services mentioned are specifically targeting servers that have been obtained via RDP credential theft campaigns. It is possible that these actors are coming in after the fact and installing ransomware on behalf of the main organizer, according to actor chatter. One specific Farsi language message indicates these services for a list of countries where they could install ransomware for the potential client.

FARSI LANGUAGE MESSAGE FROM PERSIAN LANGUAGE CHANNEL

Tools and Methods of Group 1

The operators responsible for intrusions involving Sodinokibi variants with an unknown affiliate ID utilize a variety of methods:

Initial intrusions made over RDP protocol

Using Masscan to identify potential victims

Executing NLBrute with custom password lists

Tools and Methods of Group 2

The operators responsible for intrusions involving Sodinokibi variants with PID 34 utilize a variety of methods:

Intrusion via RDP protocol

Manual execution of subsequent stages of the operation

Deployment of Sodinokibi

Deployment of Mimikatz

Utilization of CryptoCurrency mining

Deployment of other brute force and checker tools

Running mass port scans and other reconnaissance activities to identify potential targets

Executing NLBrute with custom password lists

Some of the operators appear write in Farsi and are originating from Iranian IP address space when connecting to observed targets

Tools and Methods of Group 3

The operators responsible for intrusions involving Sodinokibi variants with PID 19 utilize a variety of methods:

Intrusion via RDP protocol

Manual execution of subsequent stages of the operation

Likely a cracking crew working on behalf of an affiliate

Deployment of Sodinokibi

Custom scripts to erase logs and create hidden users

Usage of Neshta to scan internal network shares within an organization in an effort to spread Sodinokibi

Running mass port scans and other reconnaissance activities to identify potential targets

Limited use of local exploits to gain administrative access

Executing NLBrute with custom password lists

Some of the operators appear to write in Farsi and are originating from Iranian IP address space when connecting to observed targets

Conclusion

In our blog series about Sodinokibi we began by analyzing the code. One of our observations was that like GandCrab, the Romanian and Persian languages are blacklisted. If these two languages, amongst others, are installed on a victim’s machine, the ransomware would not execute. We asked ourselves the question, “Why Persian?” With the information retrieved from our honeypot investigations, it might give us a hypothesis that the Persian language is present due to the involvement of Persian-speaking affiliates. Would that also count for the Romanian language? Time and evidence will tell.

We observed many affiliates using different sets of tools and skills to gain profit and, across the series, we highlighted different aspects of this massive ongoing operation.

To protect your organization against Sodinokibi, make sure your defense is layered. As demonstrated, the actors we are facing either buy, brute-force or spear-phish themselves into your company or use a trusted-third party that has access to your network. Some guidelines for organizations to protect themselves include employing sandboxing, backing up data, educating their users, and restricting access.

As long as we support the ransomware model, ransomware will exist as it has for the last four years. We cannot fight alone against ransomware and have to unite as public and private parties. McAfee is one of the founding partners of NoMoreRansom.org and are supporting Law Enforcement agencies around the globe in fighting ransomware.

We hope you enjoyed reading this series of blogs about Sodinokibi.

The post McAfee ATR Analyzes Sodinokibi aka REvil Ransomware-as-a-Service – Crescendo appeared first on McAfee Blogs.

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Go to Source Author: Jessica Saavedra-Morales McAfee ATR Analyzes Sodinokibi aka REvil Ransomware-as-a-Service – Crescendo Original Post from McAfee Author: Jessica Saavedra-Morales Episode 4: Crescendo This is the final installment of the McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR) analysis of Sodinokibi and its connections to GandGrab, the most prolific Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) Campaign of 2018 and mid 2019.

#McAfee Security

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newstfionline · 6 years ago

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Headlines

Snow storm wallops Seattle, people rescued in Sierra Nevada (AP) A winter storm pounded Washington state Friday, forcing the cancellation of 200 flights in Seattle as officials worked to get people off the streets and into shelters during the nation’s latest bout with winter weather.

Sacked Cardinal Issues Manifesto in Thinly Veiled Attack on Pope (Reuters) A cardinal who was sacked from a senior Vatican post by Pope Francis has written his own “Manifesto of Faith,” in the latest attack on the pontiff’s authority by a leading member of the Church’s conservative wing.

Likely deal would give Trump fraction of desired wall money (AP) Congressional bargainers are working toward a border security deal amid indications that the White House is preparing to accept a bipartisan agreement that would give President Donald Trump a fraction of the money he’s demanded for his proposed southern border wall: around $1.6 billion.

Mexican Radio Journalist Shot Dead in Tabasco State (Reuters) A radio news host in Mexico’s Gulf Coast state of Tabasco was shot dead on Saturday, officials said, marking the second journalist murder this year as the country grapples with record violence that has claimed the lives of numerous reporters.

Protesters Stone Home of Haiti President, Clash With Police (AP) Protesters have stoned the Haitian president’s home and clashed with police, leaving at least one demonstrator dead in the third straight day of demonstrations against economic mismanagement and corruption.

Indigenous Pemon on Venezuela’s Border With Brazil Vow to Let Aid In (Reuters) Venezuela’s Pemon, an indigenous people living along the border with Brazil, are determined to allow into the embattled country any foreign aid that may arrive, even if that means a showdown with Venezuelan security forces and the government of President Nicolas Maduro.

Prince Philip, 97, gives up driver’s license after crash (AP) Prince Philip has decided to stop driving at the age of 97, less than a month after he was involved in a collision that left two women injured, Buckingham Palace said Saturday.

French yellow vest anti-govt protests turn violent in Paris (AP) A French yellow vest protester’s hand was ripped apart by a small explosive Saturday during violent clashes in Paris as demonstrators tried to storm the French National Assembly in a 13th consecutive week of unrest.

Serbs Protest Populist President Vucic for 10th Week (AP) Several thousand people have marched in Serbia’s capital of Belgrade to protest populist President Aleksandar Vucic, who is showing signs of nervousness after 10 consecutive weeks of anti-government demonstrations.

Ukrainian President Vows to Push for EU, NATO Membership (AP) Ukraine must join the European Union and NATO to protect itself from Russia’s expansionist actions, Ukraine’s president said Saturday as he officially launched his re-election campaign.

Pakistani Journalist Critical of Government Seized Outside Home (Reuters) A Pakistani journalist under scrutiny for anti-government social media posts was beaten and seized outside his home on Saturday, his son said, in the latest sign of pressure on media.

Woman acquitted of blasphemy still can’t leave Pakistan (AP) A Christian woman acquitted of blasphemy after spending eight years on death row in Pakistan has been transferred from a secret location near the capital to another in Karachi, but is still unable to leave the country to join her daughters in Canada, a friend said. He said Bibi, who faces death threats by radical Islamists, is frustrated and frightened, uncertain of when she will be able to leave Pakistan.

Anti-India Protests Erupt in Kashmir After 5 Rebels Killed (AP) Five rebels were killed in fighting with government forces in disputed Kashmir on Sunday, the Indian army said, triggering anti-India clashes in which at least 10 civilians were injured.

Afghan Lawmaker Says Airstrikes Kill 21 Civilians (AP) Airstrikes in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province have killed 21 civilians, including women and children, a lawmaker from the region said Sunday.

South Korea Signs Deal to Pay More for U.S. Troops After Trump Demand (Reuters) Officials signed a short-term agreement on Sunday to boost South Korea’s contribution toward the upkeep of U.S. troops on the peninsula, after a previous deal lapsed amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s call for the South to pay more.

13 Killed in Highway Accidents Amid China Travel Rush (AP) Accidents on icy highways in central China left at least 13 dead and dozens injured this weekend as millions of families were heading home from the Lunar New Year holiday.

Pilot Strike at Taiwan’s China Airlines Drags Into 3rd Day (AP) A strike among pilots at Taiwan’s flag carrier China Airlines dragged into a third day Sunday, resulting in further flight cancellations.

Thailand puzzles over political surprises from royals (AP) A Thai political party swore loyalty to the king Saturday, a day after its stunning decision to nominate the monarch’s sister as its candidate for prime minister backfired when the king called the move inappropriate and unconstitutional.

Australian Government Seeks to Block Bid to Relax Tough Law on Migrants (Reuters) Australia’s prime minister and top colleagues campaigned over the weekend to block a bid to allow asylum seekers in offshore camps to come to Australia for medical treatment, saying tough rules on migrants should not be eased.

New Zealand Wildfires Show No Sign of Easing, 3,000 Flee (Reuters) Strong winds on Sunday are expected to fan forest fires that have been burning for a week through New Zealand’s South Island, forcing thousands of people from their homes, with more residents expected to flee, officials said.

U.S.-Backed Syrian Force Launches ‘Final Battle’ Against Islamic State (Reuters) The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) began an assault against the final Islamic State enclave in eastern Syria on Saturday, aiming to wipe out the last vestige of the jihadist group’s “caliphate” in the SDF’s area of operations.

Scores of Chadian Rebels Held After French Air Strikes (Reuters) Scores of rebels are in army custody in northern Chad following air strikes this week to repel an incursion from Libya, Chad’s army and intelligence sources said on Saturday.

#headlines

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365footballorg-blog · 6 years ago

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Canada national team announce roster for November Nations League match

Canada Soccer

November 8, 201812:07PM EST

The Canadian national team have released their roster for November’s Concacaf Nations League Qualifying on the road against St. Kitts and Nevis on Sunday, Nov. 18.

Soon-to-be Bayern Munich attacker Alphonso Davies leads the way, while Vancouver Whitecaps duo Russell Teibert and Doneil Henry have been called in. Toronto FC are sending Liam Fraser and Jay Chapman. FC Barcelona B’s Ballou Jean-Yves Tabla, formerly of the Montreal Impact, has been selected as well.

Toronto’s Jonathan Osorio misses out due to an injury.

Both Canada and their opponent have won both of their qualifying matches thus far, each boasting a flattering goal difference without conceding a goal. Canada are +13 while St. Kitts and Nevis are +11.

“We are really looking forward to this challenge as St. Kitts and Nevis have performed well in Concacaf Nations League thus far,” head coach John Herdman said in a media release. “Given our history in this venue, we know it is a tough place to get a result, but we are clear on our approach and the players will be ready.”

Canada National Team Roster

Position Name Club GK Milan Borjan Red Star Belgrade/SRB GK Maxime Crepeau Ottawa Fury GK Simon Thomas Kongsvinger IL/NOR D Samuel Adekugbe Vålerenga Fotball/NOR D Zachary Brault-Guillard Olympique Lyonnais/FRA D Derek Cornelius FK Javor Ivanjica/SRB D David Edgar Ottawa Fury D Marcus Godinho Heart of Midlothian FC/SCO D Doneil Henry Vancouver Whitecaps D Manjrekar James FC Fredericia/DEN M Jay Chapman Toronto FC M Liam Fraser Toronto FC M Atiba Hutchinson Beşiktaş JK/TUR M Samuel Piette Montreal Impact M Russell Teibert Vancouver Whitecaps M David Wotherspoon St. Johnstone/SCO F Lucas Cavallini Puebla FC/MEX F Jonathan David KAA Gent/BEL F Alphonso Davies Vancouver Whitecaps F Junior Hoilett Cardiff City/WAL F Cyle Larin Besiktas/TUR F Liam Millar Liverpool FC U-23/ENG F Ballou Jean-Yves Tabla FC Barcelona B/ESP

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Canada national team announce roster for November Nations League match was originally published on 365 Football

#announce #Canada #League #match #national #nations #November #roster #team

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brookstonalmanac · 4 years ago

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Events 5.13

1373 – Julian of Norwich has visions of Jesus while suffering from a life-threatening illness, visions which are later described and interpreted in her book Revelations of Divine Love. 1619 – Dutch statesman Johan van Oldenbarnevelt is executed in The Hague after being convicted of treason. 1779 – War of the Bavarian Succession: Russian and French mediators at the Congress of Teschen negotiate an end to the war. In the agreement Austria receives the part of its territory that was taken from it (the Innviertel). 1780 – The Cumberland Compact is signed by leaders of the settlers in the Cumberland River area of what would become the U.S. state of Tennessee, providing for democratic government and a formal system of justice. 1804 – Forces sent by Yusuf Karamanli of Tripoli to retake Derna from the Americans attack the city. 1830 – Ecuador gains its independence from Gran Colombia. 1846 – Mexican–American War: The United States declares war on the Federal Republic of Mexico following a dispute over the American annexation of the Republic of Texas and a Mexican military incursion. 1861 – American Civil War: Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom issues a "proclamation of neutrality" which recognizes the Confederacy as having belligerent rights. 1861 – The Great Comet of 1861 is discovered by John Tebbutt of Windsor, New South Wales, Australia. 1861 – Pakistan's (then a part of British India) first railway line opens, from Karachi to Kotri. 1862 – The USS Planter, a steamer and gunship, steals through Confederate lines and is passed to the Union, by a southern slave, Robert Smalls, who later was officially appointed as captain, becoming the first black man to command a United States ship. 1888 – With the passage of the Lei Áurea ("Golden Law"), Empire of Brazil abolishes slavery. 1912 – The Royal Flying Corps, the forerunner of the Royal Air Force, is established in the United Kingdom. 1917 – Three children report the first apparition of Our Lady of Fátima in Fátima, Portugal. 1940 – World War II: Germany's conquest of France begins as the German army crosses the Meuse. Winston Churchill makes his "blood, toil, tears, and sweat" speech to the House of Commons. 1941 – World War II: Yugoslav royal colonel Dragoljub Mihailović starts fighting against German occupation troops, beginning the Serbian resistance. 1943 – World War II: Operations Vulcan and Strike force the surrender of the last Axis troops in Tunisia. 1948 – Arab–Israeli War: The Kfar Etzion massacre is committed by Arab irregulars, the day before the declaration of independence of the state of Israel on May 14. 1951 – The 400th anniversary of the founding of the National University of San Marcos is commemorated by the opening of the first large-capacity stadium in Peru. 1952 – The Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Parliament of India, holds its first sitting. 1954 – The anti-National Service Riots, by Chinese middle school students in Singapore, take place. 1958 – During a visit to Caracas, Venezuela, Vice President Richard Nixon's car is attacked by anti-American demonstrators. 1958 – May 1958 crisis: A group of French military officers lead a coup in Algiers demanding that a government of national unity be formed with Charles de Gaulle at its head in order to defend French control of Algeria. 1958 – Ben Carlin becomes the first (and only) person to circumnavigate the world by amphibious vehicle, having travelled over 17,000 kilometres (11,000 mi) by sea and 62,000 kilometres (39,000 mi) by land during a ten-year journey. 1960 – Hundreds of University of California, Berkeley students congregate for the first day of protest against a visit by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. 1967 – Dr. Zakir Husain becomes the third President of India. He is the first Muslim President of the Indian Union. He holds this position until August 24, 1969. 1969 – May 13 Incident involving sectarian violence in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. 1971 – Over 900 unarmed Bengali Hindus are murdered in the Demra massacre. 1972 – Faulty electrical wiring ignites a fire underneath the Playtown Cabaret in Osaka, Japan. Blocked exits and non-functional elevators lead to 118 fatalities, with many victims leaping to their deaths. 1972 – The Troubles: A car bombing outside a crowded pub in Belfast sparks a two-day gun battle involving the Provisional IRA, Ulster Volunteer Force and British Army. Seven people are killed and over 66 injured. 1980 – An F3 tornado hits Kalamazoo County, Michigan. President Jimmy Carter declares it a federal disaster area. 1981 – Mehmet Ali Ağca attempts to assassinate Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square in Rome. The Pope is rushed to the Agostino Gemelli University Polyclinic to undergo emergency surgery and survives. 1985 – Police bombed MOVE headquarters in Philadelphia, killing six adults and five children, and destroying the homes of 250 city residents. 1989 – Large groups of students occupy Tiananmen Square and begin a hunger strike. 1990 – The Dinamo–Red Star riot took place at Maksimir Stadium in Zagreb, Croatia between the Bad Blue Boys (fans of Dinamo Zagreb) and the Delije (fans of Red Star Belgrade). 1992 – Li Hongzhi gives the first public lecture on Falun Gong in Changchun, People's Republic of China. 1995 – Alison Hargreaves, a 33-year-old British mother, becomes the first woman to conquer Everest without oxygen or the help of sherpas. 1996 – Severe thunderstorms and a tornado in Bangladesh kill 600 people. 1998 – Race riots break out in Jakarta, Indonesia, where shops owned by Indonesians of Chinese descent are looted and women raped. 1998 – India carries out two nuclear weapon tests at Pokhran, following the three conducted on May 11. The United States and Japan impose economic sanctions on India. 2005 – Andijan uprising, Uzbekistan; Troops open fire on crowds of protestors after a prison break; at least 187 people were killed according to official estimates. 2006 – São Paulo violence: Rebellions occur in several prisons in Brazil. 2011 – Two bombs explode in the Charsadda District of Pakistan killing 98 people and wounding 140 others. 2012 – Forty-nine dismembered bodies are discovered by Mexican authorities on Mexican Federal Highway 40. 2013 – American physician Kermit Gosnell is found guilty in Pennsylvania of murdering three infants born alive during attempted abortions, involuntary manslaughter of a woman during an abortion procedure, and other charges. 2014 – An explosion at an underground coal mine in southwest Turkey kills 301 miners.

#Events

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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Novak Djokovic: Wimbledon champion says final was 'different level' mentally

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Novak Djokovic: Wimbledon champion says final was 'different level' mentally

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Novak Djokovic beats Roger Federer to win fifth Wimbledon title

Novak Djokovic says his epic Wimbledon final victory over Roger Federer was his most “mentally demanding” match – and he even had to tell himself the partisan crowd was cheering for him.

Djokovic, 32, retained his title with a 7-6 (7-5) 1-6 7-6 (7-4) 4-6 13-12 (7-3) win over the eight-time champion, 37.

Lasting four hours 57 minutes, it was the longest Wimbledon singles final.

“When the crowd is chanting ‘Roger’ I hear ‘Novak’,” said the Serb. “It sounds silly, but it is like that.”

Djokovic – now a five-time Wimbledon champion – added: “Mentally this was different level.

“It was probably the most demanding, mentally most demanding, match I was ever part of.

“It was a huge relief in the end. You work for, you live for these kind of matches.

“They give sense and they give value to every minute you spend on the court training and working to get yourself in this position and play the match with one of your greatest rivals of all time.”

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Djokovic saved two match points on his way to beating Federer in the first 12-12 final-set singles tie-break used at the All England Club.

He credited mental training and visualisation in helping him through the epic that unfolded on Centre Court, adding it was more difficult for him than the physical toll on his body.

“I always try to imagine myself as a winner. I think there is a power to that,” he said.

“Also there has to be, next to the willpower, strength that comes not just from your physical self, but from your mental and emotional self.

“For me, at least, it’s a constant battle within, more than what happens outside.

“It’s really not the situations that you experience that are affecting you, but how you internally experience those situations, how you accept them, how you live through them.”

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‘One of the most thrilling finals of my career’ – Djokovic reflects on fifth title

Federer fever was rife throughout the grounds of SW19 and on Centre Court itself, with the majority of the 15,000 in the stands supporting the Swiss.

That is a situation Djokovic has faced on numerous occasions and something he has been known to react negatively to, cupping his ear in response to chants supporting opponent Roberto Bautista Agut in the semi-finals.

In the final, many of the 52 unforced errors and nine double faults Djokovic made were cheered, and he was booed when he questioned a Hawk-Eye decision that had ruled in Federer’s favour.

His celebrations after winning the title were somewhat muted.

Asked if he was aware of the favouritism towards Federer, Djokovic said: “It’s hard to not be aware.

“You have that kind of electric atmosphere, that kind of noise, especially in some decisive moments where we’re quite even. It’s one way or another. The crowd gets into it.

“If you have the majority of the crowd on your side, it helps. It gives you motivation, it gives you strength, it gives you energy. When you don’t, then you have to find it within.”

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‘I don’t have any obligation to play’

With 16 Grand Slam titles to his name, Djokovic closed the gap to Federer (20) and Rafael Nadal (18) on the all-time records list.

Djokovic is five years Federer’s junior and one year younger than Nadal, and he says they are “one of the biggest reasons” he continues to compete.

“The fact they made history motivates me. It inspires me to try to do what they have done, what they’ve achieved, and even more,” he said.

“Whether I’m going to be able to do it or not, I don’t know. I’m not really looking at age as a restriction of any kind for me at least.

Djokovic refuses to set himself the target of catching – or surpassing – their records, because he has bigger priorities in his life.

“It depends not only on myself, it depends on circumstances in life,” he said. “I’m not just a tennis player, I’m a father and a husband.

“I don’t have any obligation to play. I really don’t have any commitment to play tennis. I play it because I really love it and I have support of the closest people in my life.”

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Wimbledon 2019: Blood, sweat & tears – the best Wimbledon final ever?

How the tennis world reacted

Six-time Wimbledon singles champion Billie Jean King:An epic men’s final. Congratulations to Novak Djokovic on his fifth singles title at Wimbledon. Roger Federer and Novak are two world-class players who left it all on the court.

Four-time Wimbledon singles champion Rod Laver:An incredible finale. Congratulations Novak Djokovic on your fifth Wimbledon title. You and Roger Federer reached the highest level. A thrilling match between two incomparable grasscourt champions. Thank you for the good fight, played fairly and ferociously.

Former Wimbledon champion Martina Hingis:STANDING OVATION for both players in this Wimbledon final! What a joy and privilege to watch.

2018 Wimbledon runner-up Kevin Anderson:I have such huge respect for both Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer. What a match… wouldn’t have minded to see it go on a little longer. Congrats Novak on another Wimbledon.

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how2to18 · 6 years ago

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LARB PRESENTS William T. Vollmann’s introduction to Ivo Andrić’s Omer Pasha Latas: Marshal to the Sultan, translated by Celia Hawkesworth and published by NYRB Classics today.

“If we all had the opportunity, courage and strength to transform just a part of our imaginings […] into reality […] it would be immediately clear to the whole world and to ourselves who we are […] and what we are capable of becoming. […] Fortunately, for most of us, that oppor-tunity never arises. […] But if, by some misfortune, it does happen to someone, that someone finds that we are all merciless judges.” This passage from Omer Pasha Latas is a pretty clear summation of the eponymous protagonist, who lives hated and isolated in the prison of his self-made greatness. It also bears, quite sadly, on various pre-and post-Yugoslav nationalisms.

“I once asked him, ‘What do you feel like, a Croat or a Serb?’ ‘You know,’ he replied, ‘I couldn’t tell you myself. I’ve always felt Yugoslav.’”

The questioner was Milovan Djilas, who had fought the Nazis alongside Tito and afterward became a vice president of Yugoslavia. The answerer he described as “lanky and bony […] the career diplomat […] fettered by convention and tact” — thus a certain Dr. Ivo Andrić. In this context, tact may be defined in terms of what we refrain from saying. As it happens, Omer Pasha Latas is a work of brilliant evasion, in which most identities become bafflingly problematic. Who is Omer Pasha? “I couldn’t tell you myself. I’ve always felt Yugoslav.”

“Right from the war’s end,” relates Djilas, “the government was well organized and firmly in the hands of the Communists. […] Yet though the nation’s younger generation was fired with enthusiasm, its working class loyal, and its party strong and self-confident, Yugoslavia remained a divided, grief-stricken land, materially and spiritually ravaged.” In Djilas’s day, these divisions were most conspicuously ideological — although even then questions of nationalism could break through. After Tito’s death, their ethnic character predominated. In 1994, a Serb explained to me how to express them practically: “It’s easy. In my town all you’d have to do would be to go to where some Serb lived and throw in a hand grenade, then shoot some Croats. A small group of professionally trained people could do it. Then you spread the news and arm the survivors.”

“What do you feel like, a Croat or a Serb?” Once upon a time, when there was a Yugoslavia, its language used to be called Serbo-Croatian. Let me simplify: the Serbs were mostly Orthodox, their script Cyrillic, and they felt what has been called “the mystical Russian bond”; the Croats were predominantly Catholic, used the Roman alphabet, and sometimes turned toward Germany. Both of them claimed Ivo Andrić. In the interests of federalism their differences were repressed, both psychologically and politically. (I remember a Dalmatian Croat from 1981 who in a low voice identified himself as “Christian.” He said that he could and did go to church, but that his career suffered accordingly.) At great cost, the Titoists had reconstructed and maintained some kind of Yugoslav identity. That Serbs, Croats, and most other Yugoslavs shared a common language, or at least were presumed to do so, may be readily verified by the titles of prewar dictionaries. Their successor nations have now elevated dialects into new languages — Serbian, Croatian, Bosniak, Slovenian — which remain more or less mutually intelligible, although during the war I once or twice witnessed the solemn charades of nationalists communicating to their ex-countrymen through interpreters. In Yugoslavia, there used to be highway signs in both alphabets; nowadays one frequently finds one orthography or the other spray-painted out by the zealots of ethnic correctness. For that matter, on the back cover of this publisher’s galley of Omer Pasha Latas, you could read a biographical note in evidence of this bifurcation: “Celia Hawkesworth has translated several books from the Serbo-Croatian. […] She taught Serbian and Croatian at University College London for many years…”

Yugoslavia, then, was a failed attempt to unify separate and sometimes conflicting identities. Its 1918 incarnation was the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. In 1945, it became the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. In both of those names, other Yugoslavs went unmentioned. But the civil war that destroyed the federation was fought in the name of Serbs, Croats, and a third group, whose anguish would haunt the news for years: Bosnian Muslims.

Among the many infamous metonyms — the fall of Vukovar, the massacre at Srebrenica, the rape camps — of this hideously personal conflict, in which neighbors violated each other’s daughters and cut their throats, the siege of Sarajevo remains prominent. When I think of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, I, who never got to see it before 1992, remember the double and triple thuds of shellfire, and then rushing down the almost empty streets, acutely conscious of my neck; tall blocks of buildings, so many broken windows; another row of apartments flecked with bullet holes; journalists paying 250 American dollars to fill a gas tank; soldiers laughing and ducking behind their sandbags, kept company by a woman who was grinding coffee by hand. Andrić’s secondary school was here, and most of Omer Pasha Latas is set either here or in other parts of Bosnia. How unquiet was it then? Remember that Sarajevo was the place where World War I began. But the windows were not always broken, and women ground coffee in peacetime as in war. Then as now, one would have felt the overwhelming influence of Bosnian Muslim tradition. And indeed, Omer Pasha Latas is set in the period of Ottoman rule, about which Andrić appears to have felt, to say the least, melancholy.

He did not live to see the civil war. But during World War II, while he novelized in seclusion, other ethnic massacres of comparably sadistic cruelty had stained Bosnia. [1] Did he take a side? “I couldn’t tell you myself. I’ve always felt Yugoslav.”

From 1463 until 1878, Bosnia was a conquered province of the Turkish Empire, during which time, according to the historian Noel Malcolm, “the main basis of hostility was not ethnic or religious but economic: the resentment felt by the members of a mainly (but not exclusively) Christian peasantry towards their Muslim landowners.” In any event, the previous sentence contains two terms that though not ethnic were in the context nonetheless opposed: Christians and Muslims. In the 1990s, I frequently heard Serbs and Croats harp back on what had become the bad old days, referring to Bosnian Muslims as “Turks.” But was that just war propaganda? Even in Andrić’s “A Letter from 1920” we read: “Bosnia is a country of hatred and fear.”

So. “What do you feel like, a Croat or a Serb?” Why did Djilas not ask “a Croat, a Serb, or a Bosnian”? Indeed, Lovett F. Edwards, the translator of Andrić’s most famous book, The Bridge on the Drina, into English, assures us in his foreword to it that the author is “himself a Serb and a Bosnian.” (Incidentally, the title page of my 1977 copy reads: “Translated from the Serbo-Croat.”)

Why was this third sort of Yugoslav so effaced yet so visible in Yugoslavia itself? (In 1992, a Croatian Muslim assured me: “It was only the Serbs trying to dominate us who forced us into one country.”) Why did the ostensibly progressive Djilas call his language Serbian, not Serbo-Croatian? If you ask a group of ex-Yugoslavs about these matters, you will receive a discouraging plenitude of answers. But as you read Omer Pasha Latas, I urge you to keep wondering and guessing, for this novel is a hoard of shining questions.

Ivo Andrić was born on October 10, 1892 — almost exactly a century before the civil war. At this point Bosnia’s overlords were the Austro-Hungarians, whose architecture still colors Sarajevo. His birthplace was Dolac, “now in Yugoslavia” (the latter according to the 1976 edition of my Encyclopaedia Britannica). Or, if you prefer a slightly different dateline, he was “born in Travnik, Bosnia, on 9th October 1892.” That place also figures in his novels. What that region was like during his childhood I, who was never there before 1992, cannot imagine, but an English observer from 1897 has left us the following highly significant remark on Christian-Muslim relations in Bosnia: “It is strange that they should bear so little hatred to their former oppressors, and the explanation lies probably in the fact that they were all of the same race.”

More necessary but insufficient desiderata: He went to school in Sarajevo, and also in Višegrad, the setting of The Bridge on the Drina. From 1919 until 1941, he was a diplomat. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961 and died on March 13, 1975, in Beograd, which was first the capital of Yugoslavia and then the capital of the Serbian Republic. As one post–civil war Serbian edition of his selected short stories complacently remarks, “his Belgrade funeral was attended by 10,000 people.” Back to the Britannica: “It was his native province, with its wealth of ethnic types, that provided the themes and psychological studies to be found in his works.”

In Malcolm’s history of Bosnia, we read that sometime around 1907 to 1910, the young man “presided over” a student group called “the Croat-Serb or Serb-Croat or Yugoslav Progressive Movement.” In name, at least, this hardly sounds Greater Serbian. But neither does it sound Bosniak. Nor does it have an Austro-Hungarian ring. The translator of The Bridge on the Drina writes: “As other gifted students of his race and time, and as his own students in The Bridge on the Drina, he belonged to the National Revolutionary Youth Organization, and experienced the customary cycle of persecution and arrest.” The Britannica works in this episode equally blandly: “His reputation was established with Ex Ponto (1918), a contemplative, lyrical prose work written during his internment by Austro-Hungarian authorities for nationalistic political activities during World War I.” Meanwhile, continuing to claim him as a native son, that Serbian edition of stories recounts the same event thus: “He was imprisoned for three years during World War I for his involvement in the Young Bosnia Movement which was implicated in the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand in Sarajevo.” I have been told that the archduke’s killer, Gavrilo Princip, yearned for Greater Serbia. Or did he? Princip has also been called a “Slav nationalist,” which may or may not be the same thing. In Sarajevo, the commemoration simply reads: “Here, in this historic spot, Gavrilo Princip was the initiator of Liberty on the day of St. Vitus, the 28th of June, 1914.”

At any rate, Andrić, along with many others, was arrested almost immediately after the assassination and kept on ice until the general amnesty of 1917. Two years later, as I said, he entered the diplomatic service.

In 1924, he received his doctorate in the Austrian city of Graz. (Per Lovett Edwards, “Of a poor artisan family, he made his way largely through his own ability.”) His thesis evaluated “The Development of the Spiritual Life of Bosnia Under the Influence of Turkish Sovereignty.” What conclusions did it come to? The introduction to that 1977 printing of The Bridge on the Drina contents itself by blandly asserting that “the solid and precise information that underlies” the novel “was thus systemically built up through academic study.” But Malcolm’s history of Bosnia (published in 1994) labels the work “an expression of blind prejudice,” in evidence of which we are given this unfortunate sentence: “The influence of Turkish rule in Bosnia was absolutely negative.”

The reporter Fouad Ajami, who visited Yugoslavia’s bleeding ground in the same year, quoted the same sentence in evidence of Andrić’s “great dread of Islam in the Balkans, his allergy to the four centuries of Ottoman rule in Bosnia.” (By then a commander of Sarajevo irregulars had assured me: “They’re only terrorists now. They were Serbs. Now they’re not Serbs. There are no more legitimate Serbs.”) Meanwhile, Ajami compounded the accusation: “He was anxious to cover up his tracks. […] [He] had been ambassador of (Royal) Yugoslavia to the Third Reich at the time of the signing of the Tripartite Pact; and he was there in Vienna in March 1941, when Yugoslavia capitulated and joined the Axis powers.”

The unfairness of blaming Andrić for being Yugoslavia’s representative to Berlin is obvious. Someone had to try, however vainly, to delay or mitigate the forthcoming oppression, when, as Drina’s translator puts it, “Yugoslavia was desperately playing for time, hoping to postpone the invasion of Hitler and at the same time consolidate her forces to resist it when it inevitably came. I recall waiting tensely in Belgrade for Dr. Andrić to return from Berlin, the one sure sign that an invasion was immediate. He came back only a few hours before the first bombs fell on Belgrade.”

I do grant that “he was anxious to cover up his tracks.” Not only had he treated with Berlin; he’d also stood in for the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, whose memory could not but be obnoxious to the Titoists. In 1951, when a certain government-sponsored historical exhibition was about to open, Andrić learned that among other items would be a photograph of the signing of the Tripartite Pact, in which he could be seen “straight and tall, in full dress, in all his majesty,” right behind the Third Reich’s bullying plenipotentiary Joachim von Ribbentrop, who would meet the noose at Nuremberg for his part in Nazi war crimes. (About the pact we read: “Hitler’s bribe [to Yugoslavia] was the offer of Salonika, and it was taken.”) And so the anxious Andrić of 1951 entreated Djilas, “with a bitter, even savage, twist to his lips,” to be cut out of the picture. Djilas picked up the phone, and the army obligingly excised the entire photo. Had the novelist been a fascist collaborator, the Titoists would surely have stood him against a wall. On the contrary, Djilas remarks that in 1945, “I admired Andrić’s steadfast refusal to deal on any terms with Nedrić’s Quisling regime.”

And so I would discount a footnoted rumor, which “may simply have been propaganda,” that in 1944 “several Serbian writers, including Ivo Andrić […] were ready to join the Chetniks in the mountains.” These latter were anticommunist insurgents, who soon decided that Tito’s bunch were worse than the Nazis, with whom they accordingly made local devil’s deals. The Allies withdrew support, and at the end of the war, the Chetniks’ leader was shot in Belgrade. These would not have been comfortable companions for our tactful, cautious, lanky diplomat.

Why those innuendoes against him? Given the complex antipathies of the Balkans, was it enough to be hated that he was a great writer? Did his comment that “the influence of Turkish rule in Bosnia was absolutely negative” sufficiently damn him? Did his novels bear a discernible anti-Muslim taint? Or was there more to criticize?

Some years after saving Andrić from his embarrassment about the Tripartite Pact, Djilas began openly disagreeing with Tito. Having resigned from the party, with prison and loss of civil rights on the horizon, he asked Andrić for a professional reading of his memoir of Montenegrin childhood, Land Without Justice (which, like his better-known Wartime, I strongly recommend). Andrić replied: “It’s awkward for me […] I’m a party member.” One may well infer a trace of ordinary human resentment in the rejected party’s summation: “As far as I know, he never harmed a soul, though I cannot boast of his having done anyone any good either…”

10.

In its entry on Yugoslavia, the 1976 Britannica concludes: “There are […] only two really major contemporary figures: Ivo Andrić, the Nobel Prize winner in 1961, is a prose master — best known for his Bridge on the Drina (1945) — whose works, as the Nobel committee noted, have been characterized by ‘epic force,’ great compassion, and clarity of style. The other is Miroslav Krleža, a satirist whose [works] […] foreshadow the themes of modern existentialism.”

Djilas again: “Andrić liked living and working in peace. […] His [official] greetings and toasts were far more flattering than Krleža’s, precisely because Andrić was an alien fitting himself into a new situation […] Andrić was simply an opportunist — but not a simple opportunist.”

11.

Yes, he must have been an alien, for his characters are conspicuous in their alienage. Consider, for instance, in Drina, the Christian boy from Višegrad who in 1516 was wrested from his parents for the Turkish “tribute of blood,” and thus “changed his way of life, his faith, his name and his country.” In short, he grew into an alien opportunist — and eventually became one of the sultan’s great viziers. All the while he never escaped a “black pain which cut into his breast with that special well-known childhood pang.” And so he brought into being the eponymous bridge on the Drina to serve his lost home at Višegrad.

To be an alien is to live between — and one longish pre–civil war (1974) history of the Habsburg Empire considers that Andrić “represents a bridge between imperial and royal Habsburg and future Yugoslav Bosnia. Although he portrayed the imperial administration of Bosnia with great sensitivity and knowledge, he […] [was] outwardly directed toward Serbia.” It might be equally appropriate to call him inwardly directed toward the Ottoman culture of his childhood. Let us temporarily set aside his hypothetical political sympathies and consider him as the great literary master that he is.

Faulkner could utter foolish provocations about race war, but only an ideologue would therefore dismiss his magnificent novels and stories about the tragically echoing ambiguities of race relations in the Deep South. Indeed, Andrić’s more slender corpus is as complex and subtle as Faulkner’s. To my mind, his supreme achievement is the understated Bosnian Chronicle, but the more crowd-pleasing Drina likewise veils his reductionist “absolutely negative” judgment of the Ottomans in a brilliant-colored web of nuance. Whatever one might think of the long Turkish occupation of Bosnia, with its gifts and cruelties, nuance positively shines in the novel’s central device: the vicissitudes of that vizier’s bridge and the generations it served. “This hard and long building process was for them [the Višegrad people] a foreign task undertaken at another’s expense. Only when, as the fruit of this effort, the great bridge arose, men began to remember details and to embroider the creation of a real, skillfully built and lasting bridge with fabulous tales which they well knew to weave and remember.” No “absolutely negative” here!

12.

But by now it should be clear that Omer Pasha Latas will be no paean to the Ottoman period. In the very first pages, when our eponymous protagonist comes to Sarajevo in 1850 to implement certain moderately progressive reforms at whatever cost to the local Muslim gentry, “The procession […] was truly impressive and intimidating, but somehow overdone. In front of it and behind it, to the right and left of it, stretched the deprivation of a poor harvest and a hungry spring, the bleakness of crooked, puddle-filled alleys, dilapidated eaves and long unpainted houses, the poorly dressed people and their anxious faces.”

But unlike the vizier of Drina, Omer Pasha, who began his life utterly beyond the Ottoman pale, voluntarily defects to the Turkish Empire. Almost right away “he found good, warmhearted people,” and upon their advice he converts to Islam.

As it happens, there was a real “Omer-paša Latas[,] [b]orn Michael Lattas,” whom Malcolm’s history describes as “one of the most effective and intelligent governors [Bosnia] ever had in this last century of Ottoman rule,” and who implemented certain reforms to the benefit of the Christian minority. In Andrić’s portrayal you will find little testimony of his effectiveness, and even less of his arguable benignity. He is, in a word, lost.

If warmhearted people are less in evidence in Omer Pasha than they might be (Andrić specializes in the envious, the jealous, the lovesick, and above all the disappointed), localism and syncretism remain his affectionate obsessions. One of this novel’s many briefly yet elegantly sketched characters is the eastern Bosnian village headman Knez Bogdan Zimonjić, whose massively silent obstinacy holds its own against Omer Pasha’s seduction and threats. The unpleasant Omer Pasha himself (“I will reduce your entire Bosnia to rubble, so no one will know who is a bey and who an aga”) contains multitudes: for instance, the failed father of his Austrian past, his unhappy wife (another former Christian), and the “traitors’ unit” of kindred converts, with whom he operates in exquisitely delineated uneasy dependence.

“Most were despairing vagrants who had lost one homeland and not found another, damaged by life among strangers, with burned bridges behind them […] condemned to being loyal soldiers because they had nowhere to go” — call them fragmentary fictive representations of a certain post-1945 Dr. Ivo Andrić.

And so let me now quote another war reporter, Aleksa Djilas, writing in the gruesome year 1992: “Though he came from a Croatian family in Bosnia” — I pause to remind you of the claim that “Dr. Ivo Andrić is himself a Serb and a Bosnian” — “Andrić considered himself a Yugoslav — a nationality that encompassed identities of all the different Yugoslav groups. […] [He] believed only a general acceptance of such a Yugoslav identity within a common state could put an end to the ancient conflicts among various Yugoslav groups.” Whether or not the last sentence is a stretch, I believe that Andrić’s literary project is indeed the noble one of encompassing all the identities he knew.

13.

Who and what, then, was an Ottoman, a Muslim, an occupier, a person of the third sort? “Knowing that to be a true Turk meant being naturally hard, haughty, basically cold and unyielding,” the fictive Omer Pasha does his best to live up to this stereotype, but one hallmark of Andrić’s genius is that as we read him we keep wondering about the problematic nature of all identities, let alone assumed ones. Consider this telling observation from the viewpoint of the procurer Ahmet Aga: Omer Pasha “was beginning to lose his sense of proportion, to forget not only what was permissible and natural and what was not, but also what he himself really wanted and could do and what he could not.” That goes for most of the novel’s characters, from the man who loses his sanity after a love-inflaming glimpse of a strange woman, to Omer Pasha’s irresolute and undistinguished brother, whom the great man advises to consider suicide.

And so we should read Andrić with due regard for ambiguity and irony. There are Turks and Turkish masks. When the Croatian-born, European-trained painter Karas, having received a commission to paint Omer Pasha, enters the empire, “the first Turkish junior officer who had examined his passport at the border, though barely able to read, had worn […] a cold, repellent mask. […] And it was the same everywhere.” If you like, take such passages as nail-in-the-coffin proofs of (requoting Ajami) this author’s “great dread of Islam in the Balkans.” But Omer Pasha, the strict cold Turk, is not a Turk. And Karas, a non-Muslim failure wherever he goes, takes comfort in bigoted resentment.

14.

In this strange novel there comes no resolution, if only because the book remained unfinished at the time of Andrić’s death; the bitter epiphanies of minor characters shed but glancing flickers upon the impermeable solitude of Omer Pasha himself, who at the end departs for unknown places with us none the wiser as to his mission’s practical accomplishments. How life will devolve for his raging wife, and whether Karas’s portrait ever turned out well, of these and other matters we are left ignorant.

Omer Pasha Latas consists less of sequential chapters than of vignettes, which in Drina would have transformed themselves into tales out of the folk tradition, and even here sometimes blossom into magical realism, as in the case of a certain Kostake Nenishanu, maître d’hotel of Omer Pasha’s entourage, who unavailingly pursues and finally murders a Christian prostitute: “the story of his crime […] spread in different directions and to a different rhythm, to grow and branch out, present everywhere but invisible as an underground stream,” serving the superficially opposed purposes of wish compensation and didactic morality tale — the more so as they diverge from actuality. Not only does this passage give a tolerable idea of Andrić’s art; it also stands in for alienation’s beautiful escapist dreams. The novel’s characters cannot understand each other or even themselves.

One might say, this is surely the human condition … but then new passages hammer away at the Turks, until it grows more difficult to reject Ajami’s interpretation of Andrić’s politics — difficult, but not impossible.

It is hardly unreasonable to see Bosnia, as Andrić did in Omer Pasha, as “a society where there have long been disorder, violence and abuse.” And at times, certainly in the 1990s and the 1940s, maybe in 1850–1851 when the novel is set, “people could be divided,” as he upliftingly put it, “into three groups, unequal in size, but sharing the same wretchedness: prisoners, those who pursued and guarded them and silent, impotent onlookers.” These observations ring true, but not eternal. And so readers must decide for themselves whether or not Omer Pasha Latas contains bigotry. Perhaps the best compliment they could pay it would be to delve into Bosnian history.

15.

As for “that Serb or Croat (take your pick) monstre sacré Ivo Andrić,” (in the words of Danilo Kiš, another great writer from the region) let me leave you with one last assessment from Djilas: “In Andrić’s cautious and quiet reserve there was something hard and unyielding, even bitter, which any threat to the deeper currents of his life would have encountered. […] In his deepest and most creative self, Andrić tried to live outside finite time.” Good communists could hardly approve of that! And indeed, Djilas went on to insist that “somehow, everyone must pay his debt to his times.” However, he ended the sentence as follows, either to soften the disparagement of Andrić or because he was now considering his own darkening situation: “But the wise man thinks his own thoughts and does things his own way.”

Andrić did pay his debt to his times. He wrote about what formed him. His bitterness was sincere, his descriptions beautiful. Meanwhile, like Omer Pasha, he thought his own thoughts, leaving us with haunting sentences and difficult questions.

William T. Vollmann is the author of three collections of stories, more than ten novels, and many more volumes of nonfiction. His novel Europe Central won the National Book Award in 2005, and he has won the Whiting Foundation Award and the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Award for his fiction. In 2018, he published a two-volume investigation into climate change, Carbon Ideologies.

[1] Readers should be warned that my attempt to express narrative continuity in regard to Bosnia’s multiple tragedies may be controversial or even offensive. Many accounts take the position that the Bosnian genocide of the 1990s was a unique event, like the Holocaust, and that it would not have happened without its Serbian instigators. “The biggest obstacle to all understanding of the conflict [in Bosnia of 1992–1993] is the assumption that what has happened […] is the product […] of forces lying within Bosnia’s own internal history. This is the myth which was carefully propagated by those who caused the conflict.” (Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History). All I can say is that books written in and about (for instance) the 1940s are sufficiently replete with gruesome slaughters for the greater glory of this creed or that ethnicity as to make me uncomfortable with this reductionist position. If my own conflation (or, if you like, misunderstanding) causes pain to anyone, I am sincerely sorry.

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