#Crisis Deepens Over Who Succeeds

[the-corrugated-catalog]

Curators Statement:

I’ll admit, I’m obsessed with cardboard. It all started in January of 2021. I was having a hard time back then. Unemployed and dangerously disenchanted, I watched dust collect on my camera and paintbrushes as we muddled through our first pandemic winter. 

But then, scrolling through TikTok, artist Corrie Beth Hogg posted a video where she used cardboard to make decorative trays. The next day I sat down, determined to figure it out. I watched the video several dozen times until I understood what to do. My first tray was lumpy and misshapen, but when I held it in my hands, I was content. Satisfied to have made something sturdy and functional from cardboard, tape, newspaper and paint. 

My love for cardboard bloomed with all the flowers in the spring. Every box that crossed my front door was inspected for quality and if it passed, it was inducted into the stash growing in the back of my closet. That summer I worked with children, making swords, shields, robots, flowers and pumpkins from cardboard. My appreciation for the material deepened. I love how unpretentious cardboard is, its low price and high availability allows for artists to not be so beholden to perfection, giving space to experiment and create freely.

Nowadays as I walk through the world, I notice cardboard everywhere. In New York City on recycling days, mountains of bagged cardboard sit alongside giant cubes of flattened boxes. I’m haunted and enchanted by its presence, frightened by the volumes but captivated by the possibilities. 

Cardboard serves as a marker for our late-stage capitalist state and its ubiquity highlights that no material can be awarded absolute neutrality. It is intrinsic to our global food systems, the trade networks of consumer goods and our over-consumption of such goods. How would a business like Amazon succeed without the existence of cardboard? How would all of the food in our kitchens safely arrive at the grocery store or sit on the shelves without its cardboard packaging? 

Cardboard speaks to our housing crisis, as individuals facing housing insecurity make shelters from discarded boxes, using it to write messages and speak to the world. The architect Shigeru Ban constructs temporary housing following catastrophic events with cardboard. As climate change continues to alter meteorological patterns and cause extreme weather incidents, this form of architecture will increase in relevance. 

For those of you who have joined in on the-corrugated-catalog photo project, I hope you can see how pervasive this material is, how much it holds and brings to us. These artists saw the potential of cardboard, and unleashed its potential to make wearable clothing, decorative vases, soft sculptures and intricate wall hangings. I hope the work of these wonderful artists electrifies a creative spark, or at least motivates you to see cardboard as a dynamic, expansive material - perfect for your next artistic project. 

Thank you for coming to the show and considering cardboard. May you stay safe and always be inspired to think outside of the (cardboard) box. 

-Caroline Taylor Shehan

[cyarskj1899]

Karen Bass elected, becoming first woman as L.A. mayor

By Julia WickStaff Writer 

Karen Bass, speaking to supporters on election night, is the first woman and the second Black Angeleno to serve as mayor of Los Angeles, according to a projection by the Associated Press.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

Rep. Karen Bass has defeated businessman Rick Caruso in the Los Angeles mayor’s race, according to an Associated Press projection Wednesday, making her the first woman and second Black Angeleno elected to lead the city in its 241-year history.

The 69-year-old congresswoman achieved victory despite Caruso spending more than $100 million of his own fortune on his mayoral bid, shattering local spending records and pumping previously unprecedented sums into field outreach and TV advertising. 

“The results are in, and it is the honor of my life to be elected as your mayor,” Bass said in a Wednesday afternoon email to supporters. “It’s time to house people immediately, increase safety and opportunity in every neighborhood, and create a new standard of ethics and accountability at City Hall.”

Caruso, 63, outspent Bass more than 11 to 1 but was ultimately unable to prevail as a former Republican in a sapphire-blue California city. 

Preliminary results seesawed on election night, but by early the next morning Caruso had eked out a thin lead, buoyed by support from voters who marked ballots in person. Vote-by-mail ballots processed after election day strongly favored Bass, and her margin in the race steadily grew. As of Wednesday, she was leading by just over six points.

“I’m proud of the work we did to engage long-neglected communities, giving a voice to the unheard, and to the light we shined on the biggest challenges facing our great city,” Caruso said in a concession statement. “There will be more to come from the movement we built, but for now, as a city we need to unite around Mayor-elect Bass and give her the support she needs to tackle the many issues we face. Congratulations, Karen, and God-speed.”

Bass’ path to City Hall had begun to seem like a foregone conclusion in recent days, though more than a hundred thousand votes likely still remain to be counted. The L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office is expected to certify the results on Dec. 5. 

Born in South L.A., raised in the Venice-Fairfax area and now a longtime resident of Baldwin Hills, Bass has spent her life deeply rooted in Los Angeles. Her social justice ideals have taken her from a county emergency room to nonprofit leadership and, ultimately, the halls of power in Sacramento and Washington, D.C.

Her commute will grow far shorter on Dec. 12, when the Baldwin Hills resident is sworn in to succeed Eric Garcetti as Los Angeles’ 43rd mayor. 

“This moment is tremendously historic for two reasons,” said USC political science and international relations department chair Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro, citing Bass’ win, along with a broader transformation in local political leadership.

Five years ago, there were two women on Los Angeles City Council and none held citywide office. By the end of 2022, at least five women will be seated on the council and two will hold citywide office — Bass and incoming City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto. At the county level, women now hold all five seats on the powerful Board of Supervisors, which historically had been overwhelmingly male. 

“Los Angeles is really experiencing what I would call a moment in women’s leadership in history,” Hancock Alfaro said. 

Bass will take control of a city marred by corruption scandals, with a spiraling homelessness crisis and profound inequities deepened by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Confidence in local government is seemingly at a nadir after a series of City Hall indictments in recent years, and the release of a leaked audio recording less than a month before the election that revealed top officials making racist comments and scheming to maintain political power.

In the days before the election, Bass said her first priority upon taking office would be to declare a state of emergency on homelessness and work to get people housed in a city where as many as 41,000 people sleep in tents, RVs and other makeshift housing.

The city’s first competitive mayoral race in nearly a decade was a story of contrasts, with two candidates who symbolized divergent visions of the city.

Bass, a Black woman, has spent decades in public service, evolving from an activist organizer to pragmatic elected official as she fought for incremental gains in underserved L.A. communities. 

The former Assembly speaker and six-term member of Congress has a reputation as a decidedly low-key politician known for her skills as a coalition-builder.

Caruso, a white man, built a real estate empire on spectacle and spectacular attention to detail, creating highly controlled private spaces like the Grove shopping center that evoke an idealized version of urban life. 

His high-sheen candidacy — which largely focused on his easily digestible pledge to “clean up L.A.” — painted the former Police Commission president as a political outsider with the business chops to succeed where longtime politicians had failed.

Ultimately, however, it was the candidates’ disparate political histories that became the defining divide of the race. 

Bass, a lifelong Democrat, built up a virtual wall of support from the Democratic establishment in the general election. Those lockstep endorsements from Democratic elected officials and clubs helped buttress Bass’ frequent contention that she was “the only Democrat” in the race to lead an overwhelmingly blue city. 

The real estate developer registered as a Democrat for the first time in late January, less than three weeks before he declared his candidacy. Party history weighed less heavily during the early months of a primary defined by voter frustrations around homelessness and crime. 

But Caruso’s Republican past became an inescapable albatross in the summer and fall.

This race — the first modern L.A. mayoral election to be held in an even year, synced up with state and federal elections — advanced amid an encroaching backdrop of hyper-partisan national politics.

The rancorous battle for control of Congress was never far from view, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade two weeks after the June primary made abortion rights an unlikely but potent campaign issue. Caruso loudly touted his support for abortion rights throughout the race, but his past donations to antiabortion politicians and murky history on the issue lent Bass a formidable line of attack.

Caruso blanketed his campaign materials with the word “Democrat” and largely sought to avoid discussion of his partisan political evolution on the trail. But he shifted tactics in mid-October, airing a TV ad that addressed the subject head on and discussed how the Republican Party “shifted to a place that didn’t represent my values.”

His campaign hoped to replicate the success of Richard Riordan, a centrist Republican businessman whose victorious 1993 bid for mayor relied on his outsider bona fides and a then-record-breaking influx of the first-time candidate’s personal funds. 

Riordan succeeded Tom Bradley, the city’s first Black mayor, who was elected in 1973 and shepherded Los Angeles through a two-decade tenure as mayor. 

The 2022 race grew uglier in its final months, as both candidates fought fire with fire. Much of the bombardment centered around one of the most prominent private institutions in the city, with Bass and Caruso attacking their opponent’s relationships to scandals at USC. Caruso also hit Bass for a speech she gave praising Scientology. Bass and her supporters frequently hammered Caruso for his Republican past, with her allies branding him as a “liar” and a “phony.”

Bass became an immediate front-runner when she entered the race last fall, more than four months before Caruso.

The real estate developer built some of the region’s best-known retail centers but had little name recognition when he entered the field. Unprecedented spending and an onslaught of advertising helped Caruso surge propulsively into contention and finish second in the primary, but Bass retained her status as a robust front-runner through much of the months-long battle to succeed Garcetti.

It was only in the final weeks before the race that polling significantly tightened, as Caruso poured roughly $3 million to $4 million a week into his barrage of advertising.

Caruso aimed to run up his lead with San Fernando Valley voters, Latinos and moderates, but Bass maintained strong backing from women, liberals and registered Democrats.

Bass’ political consciousness took shape at the apex of the civil rights movement, as a young girl listening to the news before dawn each morning with her letter-carrier father.

She started her career as a nurse and physician’s assistant, working through the height of the crack cocaine epidemic as the crisis devastated South L.A. communities. Community Coalition — the politically influential nonprofit she founded — began with a living-room meeting Bass led in 1990.

Long before she became the first Black woman to lead a legislative body as California Assembly speaker, Bass’ community-based leadership frequently brought her to City Hall as an advocate pushing lawmakers from outside the system.

Now, amid fractious battles and frequent protests in council chambers, she will return to City Hall as the ultimate insider — the leader of the nation’s second-largest city. 

Sent from my iPhone

[truetellsnigeria1]

Crisis Deepens Over Who Succeeds Late Alaafin Of Oyo As Aspirants Demand Punishment For Prince Gbadegesin

Crisis Deepens Over Who Succeeds Late Alaafin Of Oyo As Aspirants Demand Punishment For Prince Gbadegesin

The struggle for who becomes the next Alaafin of Oyo in Oyo State has generated a crisis as aspirants from the Agunloye family jostle for the stool. SaharaReporters gathered that following the passing of the former Alaafin, Oba Lamidi Olayiwola Atanda Adeyemi 111, from Alowolodu Royal House, Prince Lukman Gbadegesin, from the Agunloye family declared himself the next Alaafin of Oyo. However, a…

[porgthespacepenguin]

2.10 sneak peek mini-meta (2/2)

All right, folks. It’s time for the second trailer madness post.

The trailer is literally 30 seconds long, and I’ve managed to squeeze two posts out of it. Imagine how crazy the episode itself is going to be!

Anyway, onwards!

(Major spoilers under the cut.)

Two Renees

So Queen Agnes told us:

“To succeed, there must be two Renees. One who lives, and one who dies.”

At first, I wondered if she meant it metaphorically: parallel timelines, for example.

But now from the look of the trailer’s, I think it may be more literal:

(By the way, I’ve been trying to figure out what this device is, or if I’ve seen it before, but no luck. If you know what it is, drop me a line and I’ll edit the post.)

But considering Estonia is wearing the same clothes as Renee, it may be that she intends to take Renee’s place, so the silver device could be meant to disguise her.

Edit: @ellewood117​ found it! It’s actually Renee’s sailboat pendant we see in 2.5 when we first learn about Renee:

I had been wondering about Estonia’s narrative purpose in season 2. Early on, like most people, I wondered if she was actually Laris. But looking at Laris’ canon life, it seems difficult, if not impossible.

According to canon, Laris was a Tal Shiar operative, along with her husband Zhaban:

After meeting Picard during the Romulan crisis, she and Zhabhan defected from the Tal Shiar around 20 years before season 2, and have been with Picard ever since. Estonia looks roughly the same age as Laris, so when, exactly, would she have been a Watcher? And given how much she loved Zhaban, he would be with her, unless she became one after his death. But then she would definitely know who Jean-Luc is.

Timeline-wise, it makes no sense.

Besides, the only practical purpose of bringing Laris herself into the story would be if they intended to pursue a Picard/Laris romance: but in that case, they would have used their time together in S2 to deepen their romantic connection.

Thankfully, they haven’t. In 2.9, they had a the perfect opportunity for deep longing looks, or even (god forbid) an attempted kiss. Anything to signal an “oh” moment from Picard, who, might I remind you, left Laris without a backward glance in 2.1 (more on that in the upcoming retrospective).

So if they intended to pursue Laris as serious LI, they would need to show Picard realizing her importance to him. Having Estonia be Laris, and showing them growing romantically closer, would work.

But no. Nothing.

Even their half-hug, while sweet, remains pointedly platonic, lacking intimacy:

She’s hugging him more than he’s hugging her, and they’re out of step, not fully facing each other. Estonia is seeking to comfort him but her narrative role confines her to the sidelines.

Now compare the above with Picard hugging Deanna and Will:

 (If we ever get a Qcard hug, I guarantee it will be a full hug like the above.)

And now it seems Renee may sacrifice herself for her Picard (or at the least strongly consider it) to save both her and the timeline.

Wait, what? Could Estonia be yet another Q mirror?

Let’s recap:

Estonia is a Watcher, "an agent who would protect the tapestry of history," although in her case, she’s protecting a single thread: the first Picard.

She’s been watching over Renee from afar. She admires her, knows her better than anyone. But she’s keenly aware of her struggles.

Since she’s met Picard in 2.4, she’s been walking him through her trauma, going into his mind to help him, encouraging him to follow his memories all the way to his mother’s death...

All things Q isn’t able to do himself for his own Picard, but almost certaintly desperately wishes he could.

(By the way, it will never stop being hilarious to me that what convinces Picard Estonia isn’t Laris is that she doesn’t know who Q is,

She doesn’t know his space husband, so she can’t be Laris, because you just know Picard has been talking everybody’s ears off about Q for years.)

And now, like Q, Estonia intends to save her Picard, ready to lay down her own life if need be (although it may not be necessary), choosing to be the “Renee who dies” so that the real Renee can live.

Interesting.

Also, if Estonia is yet another Q mirror, then Picard’s question in 2.6 hits much harder, doesn’t it,

Who is watching over Q?

Nobody, that’s who. 

And as we find out in 2.8, Q really needs Picard’s light to guide him home. He’s lost in the darkness, much like Renee, much like Maman. And he’s not expecting anybody to care, or to try to save him.

(Hey, who stuck a dagger in my heart?! That’s not supposed to be here.)

The path to the right future

In my time meta, I wrote two things:

They have to make sure the launch happens, because otherwise, they will find themselves in the wrong timeline: if they moved forward in time, it would just bring them right back to the dark future.

[But] no matter what they do, they can’t actually go back to where they have to be in order to fix the problem. Not on their own, at least.

Well, the latter part has come true: they don’t have a ship anymore. Not that it would have helped then anyway.

But at least, it seems they’ve realized that they need to be on the right track before even thinking about going home. So, progress.

So, with Agnes out of the way, stopping Soong is the priority on the agenda. And with about 12 hours to go before the launch, they’d better hope Estonia can beam them back to the US, otherwise, they’re screwed.

But look where Rios and Saffi find themselves:

Soong’s lab! Now that’s interesting. And as always, I have questions.

First, I have to wonder how they managed to get in at all. We know Soong has pretty tight security. So unless Q left them a backdoor when he hacked Soong’s network, I don’t see how they would manage to 1) get in, 2) access the systems at all.

Second, we also know from the trailer that Soong will be in his lab at some point:

And he’s not happy. At all. Whether that’s before or after Rios and Saffi break in is anybody’s guess at this point.

But look who’s also in the trailer, apparently still wearing what appears to be Soong’s VR glasses:

Is Kore talking to Q’s simulacra? And what’s her role in all this? After episode 2.8, I didn’t actually expect we would see her again, because we had so little time left and I can’t see yet how she ties in to the plot.

(What? 99% of my thought processes go to analyzing Qcard, the rest of the plot interests me only marginally.)

Back to La Barre

Another thing that I find exceedingly interesting in the trailer is that Q and Picard are both alone in La Barre, with the rest of the team ostensibly in the US trying to prevent the launch.

So did Picard not leave in the first place? Did Picard go to the US, and come back somehow?

Or did they encounter Q on the way to the airport, and Q just threw Picard over his shoulder, running away? (I’d pay good money to see that, but alas...)

And yes, they seem to be in the actual solarium, from what we can tell:

Although now that Q is here physically, the sun is shining radiantly.

Answering an ask yesterday, @celestialwarzone​ theorized that Q may have gotten some of his powers back as we near the apex of the time disturbance: the closer the launch, the more power.

Not unlike a supernova, actually,

“burning brighter as [he spins] towards extinction.”

That’s a fascinating theory, and one I agree with, for practical, narrative and symbolic reasons.

Let’s start with the practical: Picard and his ducklings need a way home. Specifically, they need to go back to the Stargazer at the right time to prevent disaster. Without Q and his powers, that seems impossible.

Narratively, it would also bring us closer to the Q-bayashi Maru. If Q has some of his powers back, he could conceiveably save himself, but at the cost of the timeline and Picard’s life. But if he saves Picard, he dooms himself. In other words, a no-win scenario the likes of which Jean-Luc has never faced before.

Finally, from a symbolic standpoint, just look at the sun. Following Q’s despair in 2.8, the sun sets, pluging team Picard into darkness: the dark night of the soul. Then, as the sun rises, everything takes a turn for the better. And now, the sun is shining, full of life again.

Not that I think Q’s well again. He isn’t. But a temporary improvement, just enough to save either him or Picard? I could see it.

Anyway, after digging through the trailer, it seems Picard spends a good chunk of the episode in La Barre:

He’s talking to Q here, by the way, when he says,

“There’s been so much loss. So much death.”

Aside from the obvious foreshadowing (the biggest loss of all coming straight at him like a freight train in a tunnel), I wonder what he means. In the 21st century, nobody has died yet. Except Soong’s soldiers, but they were Borg so nobody cares for some reason.

So I doubt Picard is talking about Q’s actions having horrible consequences. He could, however, mean the Borg, and his difficulty accepting that they could change. Since, you know, he’s going to be facing the Stargazer choice again soon. Very soon.

Anyway, there’s only one Picard scene in the trailer that’s not ostensibly set in La Barre:

They’ve kept the scenery exceptionally vague. He could be anywhere.

And we don’t seem him with Rios/Saffi infiltrating Soong’s lab, or with Estonia at the launch site. So maybe Picard does actually stay in France, and he’s saying goodbye to Estonia, Rios and Saffi in the scene above.

But why would he stay behind? He’d need an exceptionally good reason not go with them.

Like, Q?

Anyway, it seems we’ll have to wait until the episode is out to get our answers.

In the mean time, Part 1 is here if you missed it.

As always, thank you for reading! ❤️

Read more:

[Back to part 1]

[ghostsray]

kin assigned fenton

(’nother @phicphight entry for @darks-ink‘s prompt: "Fenton/Phantom AU where during the Portal accident, a ghost bonds to Danny Fenton's body, bringing him back to life but maintaining their own ghostly memories and none of Danny's. Meanwhile, Danny himself died and became a ghost, keeping his own human memories.")

(words: 8645) (AO3)

(part 2)

The first thing Phantom noticed when he woke up was that he felt heavy.

Gravity did not exist in the ghost zone. He never felt heavy unless he was being pinned by another ghost. As such, he was filled with fear, and his eys flew open.

He immediately regretted this action, because the harsh light that met his eyes made him wince and close them again. How could his eyes hurt? Ghosts shouldn't even be able to feel pain unless it was dull, but just looking at something bright made his head ache.

Now that he noticed it, he felt much more than just a headache. There was the cold floor underneath his arms, and when he tried to stir, a sharp ache flared throughout his whole body.

What, sincerely, the fuck was happening?

There was ringing in his ears, but that faded over time. When the ringing was no longer there, he was able to make out voices. They seemed to repeat the same name over and over: "Danny!"

"Who's Danny?" he managed to say. Ancients, even his tongue felt heavy.

The voices suddenly fell silent. "Um," said one of them, "you are."

Phantom hesitantly opened his eyes again, slowly this time. He found two people standing over him, but something about them looked odd. Their skins weren't like any shade of blue, green, or gray he had seen on other ghosts, and they lacked any sort of glow emanating from their bodies...

Phantom's eyes widened, and he blurted out, "Humans!"

The concern on both humans' faces immediately deepened. "...Yeah?" the darker one, which wore glasses and a ridiculous red hat, said. "Should we not be?"

The paler one, which looked like a girl with black hair and even blacker eyeliner, leaned over Phantom with knitted brows. She held up a hand with four fingers raised and asked, "Danny, how many fingers am I holding up?"

Phantom wanted to scramble away from these strangers, but his body was too tired and--ugh--heavy for him to move, so he frowned at the human girl and said, "Four. But why do you keep calling me Danny?"

The two humans exchanged a glance, then the girl asked, "Do you remember anything about yourself?"

"Yeah," Phantom said, a little (okay, a lot) confused. "My name's Phantom."

Another exchanged glance, and the human boy said, "No, it's not."

Phantom eyed the two of them in turn and said, "How do you know? I've never even met you before."

The girl grabbed his shoulder, which made him wince because he was still in a lot of pain (which shouldn't be possible, but he was). She stated sternly, "Yes, you have. We're your friends--I'm Sam, he's Tucker, remember? And you're Danny."

Despite his pain, Phantom managed to push her away and sit up against the awful pull of gravity. "No, I'm not! I--" He froze, because just then a strand of black hair fell over his eye. His hair wasn't black. If that wasn't enough to confuse him, he then noticed his own hands, which in fact were not his own. He was dressed in a white jumpsuit, except it looked like it had been blown apart--tears and holes riddled it, and through these, the skin underneath was visible. Pink skin, just like the paler human's. Phantom brought the hand up to his face. Hundreds of tiny grooves were etched into it.

Again, what the fuck? This was not a ghost hand. It didn't even have any claws! Realization dawned on him. He wasn't in a ghost body...he was in a human's.

"Uh, Danny?" the boy--Tucker--asked.

Danny. That must be the name of the human he was inside. Phantom didn't even remember overshadowing this guy, but that must be what was happening, right? He focused on leaving Danny's body so the human can talk to his friends and get them to leave him alone. Except, well, no matter how hard he tried...

"I'm stuck," he said.

"Stuck?" Sam repeated.

Phantom was really filled with fear now. This--yuck--human organ in his borrowed chest began to beat harder the more anxious he got, which wasn't helping. "I'm stuck inside this body! Why can't I leave?"

He glared at the two humans before him, who looked dumbfounded. "...Um," Tucker finally said, "are you saying...you're a ghost?"

"Yes, I'm a ghost!" Phantom snapped. Ouch, his head hurt. Phantom tried to push Danny's stupid body to its feet, which was enormously hard with this stupid gravity, but he managed to succeed. "I'm not Danny, whoever he is. I need to get out!"

"Er, Da--Phantom," Sam said. "How do we know you're really a ghost and not just, uh..."

"Off your bonkers?" Tucker completed.

Phantom raised an eyebrow. "Why? What's so hard to believe about your friend getting possessed?"

"Nothing much," Tucker answered, "except that ghosts don't exist."

Of fucking course he would say that. Why would humans ever believe in ghosts? The two species interact so rarely that Phantom himself would not have believed in humans if several ghosts didn't previously exist as them in life. Phantom opened his mouth, trying to find a valid argument, but he came up empty. Not that it mattered anyway, because the blood rushing from the chest organ was growing too heavy for his thought organ to handle, and he felt Danny's knees buckle and send him falling to the floor again while his vision filled with black.

He woke up. Again.

This time, the surface underneath him wasn't so cold. In fact, it was warm and soft. Likewise, the torn up hazmat suit he was wearing before was now replaced by soft cotton clothes.

Phantom hurriedly brought a hand to his face and was immediately disappointed. He was still in Danny's body. How? Why? Why was he stuck?

"Danny, you're awake!" a voice next to him said, making him jolt in surprise. He expected to see the same girl as before, but when he turned his head (Correction: Danny's head) to the side, he saw a different human. She had ginger hair and teal eyes.

"I'm not Danny," he told her.

The girl frowned. "Sam and Tucker told me about this. They say you think you are...a ghost?"

"I don't think I'm a ghost, I am a ghost," Phantom retorted.

"Really?" the girl replied skeptically. "Can you prove that?"

That should have been easy. Ghosts still kept a few of their powers even while they were possessing someone--at least, that's what he heard from the few ghosts who did interact with humans and managed to overshadow one. He focused on Danny's hand, willing it to turn invisible.

It did not turn invisible.

He frowned and tried to phase it through the soft surface he was lying on. The hand only pressed against it, but it did not phase through.

Invisibility and intangibility were a ghost's two simplest powers, so why was he unable to use them?

"You're not a ghost," the girl said when she sensed his failure. "You're Danny Fenton, a human."

"I'm pretty sure I just told you that I'm not."

The girl's gaze was intense as she continued, "You just went through a traumatizing experience. It would be normal for your brain to make up memories to..."

"Woah, woah, woah," Phantom said before she could finish. He rolled his borrowed eyes and grumbled, "Awesome. You're a psychologist."

"I'm your sister, Jazz," she stated simply. "And...are you saying you know what a psychologist is?"

"Of course I do! Do you think all ghosts are eighteenth century peasants or something? Psychologists can die, too, you know."

Jazz was undaunted by his comment. "As I was saying, though..."

"I'm not crazy--I mean, Danny isn't crazy," Phantom cut her off. "Like I told you, I'm a ghost."

All of a sudden, the door slammed open, causing Phantom to jump in his bed. A very large human man dressed in a vivid orange jumpsuit walked in, followed by a shorter human woman in a matching teal suit.

"He confesses! So he's guilty," the man said.

Jazz groaned. "Dad--"

"Your father is right, dear," the woman in teal said. "You said Danny might be having a psychological crisis, so we let you talk to him, but it's clear now that the ghost inside him is saying the truth."

"Yes, thank you!" Phantom said, spreading his arms out gladly. "Finally, someone who believes me!"

The woman gave him a smile. "We believe you, dear. And we'll get you out of my son."

"Really?" he asked hopefully.

"Oh, yes," she said, and then whatever happiness Phantom felt immediately plummeted as she pulled out a very large weapon and aimed it at him. "And the only way to do that is by exterminating you."

Phantom's eyes widened, and he chuckled nervously. "Um, sike?"

The gun powered up, and Phantom yelped and shut his eyes as a blast came out at him.

Silence fell over the room.

Phantom opened one eye, then the other. The weapon's nuzzle was smoking slightly, so it must have fired already, but he wasn't harmed. He scanned the room to see any sign of where the shot might have landed, and he found a scorch mark--right behind where he should have been hit.

"Huh," the large man said. "I guess Jazzy-pants was right."

Phantom snapped his attention to him. "What?"

"The weapon didn't affect you," the woman holding the gun said. "It only affects ghosts, which means you're a hundred percent human."

"Wait, hold up," Phantom said, growing a little nervous and extremely confused. "How do you even know it works against ghosts? Did you meet any?"

The woman sighed, like this was a topic she had to explain many times over. "I assure you, it works. We don't need any practical testing to know that the theory is correct."

"But it's not," he argued, then gestured down to himself. "It didn't shoot me."

"Trust me, I know what I'm talking about," the woman said. "You're human."

Phantom paled. "But..."

He felt a hand rest on his shoulder and saw Jazz looking at him pityingly. "It's okay, Danny. I know you're confused."

"I'm not Danny!" he shouted. He couldn't be. There was no way his memories could be fake. The Ghost Zone, the lairs he visited, Frostbite, Dora, Sidney, all those ghosts he befriended...he was certain those couldn't be fake. Right?

But the humans seemed sure about their conclusion. The woman put her weapon away, got close to Phantom, and actually kissed his forehead. "I'm sure youre tired, Danny. Why don't you go back to sleep?"

Phantom wanted to argue that he wasn't tired, that he was the opposite of tired, but unfortunately, she was right. After she lowered him back into the bed with an immensely strong grip, he felt his (Danny's?) eyelids grow heavy. Well, heavier than usual.

The other people in the room, Danny's family, filed out as Phantom reluctantly fell asleep.

He saw himself back in the Ghost Zone, where he should be. He was flying around lazily, doing loop de loops in the air and poking the clouds of swirling ectoplasm that littered the Zone. He was bored. The Ghost Zone was a neat place, but he felt hed done all the exploring he could, and he wished something new would happen.

Luckily or unluckily, something did. Not very far, a spark of light appeared. Phantom raised his eyebrows curiously and approached it, but it disappeared. Weird. He floated to the spot where it had been.

Big mistake. The spark reappeared, except it was less of a spark and more of an explosion this time. Electricity burst through Phantom's form and fried him from the inside out. He screamed. His surroundings melted into nothing, and at some point, he thought he heard his scream mix with someone else's. His molecules were split apart, and he felt his consciousness go somewhere else, some body that was not his own.

And then he felt heavy.

Phantom gasped and jolted awake. He blinked several times, his brain filled with confusion. He wasn't in the Ghost Zone. He was still trapped in the human realm, so what was up with that vision?

Oh, he thought, remembering what Nocturne had told him about visions that humans saw in their sleep. That was a dream.

From what hed heard about dreams, they rarely ever made sense. This one did, though. He was certain that was a memory of what brought him here.

A lot of good remembering did him, though.

Phantom looked over the room he was in, which he didn't get a chance to do previously. It was too dark to see clearly, which was frustrating, because darkness had never impeded his vision when he was a ghost. Although, the soft light coming through the window was enough to let him make out a few things in the room, like the various models of what he recognized had been described to him as spaceships, and posters of what he heard were called stars.

There was also a mirror in the room. Phantom rose from the bed, and he noticed that the pain had blessedly subsided, although he still felt heavy. Stupid gravity. He managed to stand on his own after a few minutes of nearly falling off balance, then shuffled his way to the mirror.

Shit, he thought, because even though he knew he was in someone else's body, he never had a chance to actually see it before now. The boy he was inside had black hair and blue eyes, which he remembered were the same colors as that large man in orange had. This body was smaller, though, more similar in structure to the woman. That damned black hair kept falling in front of his eyes. He looked around as young as those two humans who first greeted him, which was also around the age Phantom (as a ghost) usually appeared, although he never kept count of how many years exactly that was. Not like keeping count of years was easy inside a dimension where there was no sun.

While Phantom was busy despairing over the frail body he was trapped inside, an object in the room fell with a sudden crash. Phantom jumped a foot in the air. For Pariah's sake, why was he so jumpy in this body?

He turned around and jumped yet again as he noticed the green glow that had fallen all over the room. A few objects started floating on their own, including the bedside clock that was knocked onto the floor before.

If Phantom were a regular human, he probably would have shitted himself. But Phantom was not. Instead, his face split into a relieved smile, and he opened up his arms and exclaimed, "Thank Clockwork! A ghost! You have to help me."

The floating objects paused, as if they were put off by Phantom's weirdly positive outburst. Then they fell back to their original places, and the glow gathered into a certain spot in the room until they formed a person.

Phantom frowned and tilted his borrowed head. The ghost that appeared before him looked familiar. Just as he was wondering why, he realized: it was the same image he had just seen in the mirror, only with inverted colors, so that he had white hair instead of black, grayish-blue skin instead of pink, and ectoplasmic green eyes instead of blue.

"You're Danny," Phantom said. Then he slapped a fist on an open palm and said, "Ohhhh, so that's why I couldn't return control to you! You're dead."

The ghost, who was indeed dead Danny Fenton, stiffened and yelled, "I'm not dead!"

"You're a ghost," Phantom said, gesturing to Danny's floating, glowing form. "I'm pretty sure that means you're dead."

Danny pursed his lips. Then he grabbed Phantom by the collar and repeated, "I'm not dead, because my living body is right here, and I would kindly like you to give it back."

Phantom chuckled and slowly raised a finger. "Um, about that..."

Danny's glare was intense. Phantom didn't think he could be a very strong ghost, considering how recent his death was, but he didn't have any powers to protect himself anymore, so he shrunk warily under his eyes.

"What about that? Give me back my body."

"Yeah, um, I'm kind of, stuck?" Phantom informed him.

"Stuck?" He shook his head rapidly and said, "Quit joking around! Let me get back in my body, or I'll get my parents to beat your ghostly ass."

Phantom paused, because he heard Danny's voice falter at the end. The hands grapping him were shaking. He realized Danny must be afraid.

"It's okay," he spoke soothingly, trying to pat his shoulder reassuringly. "You just died, I'm sure that's--"

"I'm not dead!" Danny screamed and threw him to the ground. Ow, ow ow, stupid human body that feels pain.

Phantom tried to get up and reason with him again, but then the door opened. Danny's mom was there, holding the gun from before.

Danny turned around, and he widened his eyes and smiled. "Mom--"

But the woman didn't hear him. She crossed the room in a few bounds and formed a barrier with her body between Phantom and Danny, except, well...she was protecting the wrong one.

"Leave my son alone, you ghost," she spat at Danny, aiming her weapon at him while Phantom lay behind her back.

"What?" Danny's smile fell, and he stared at her and said, "But that's not--"

He didn't have a chance to complete his sentence before she shot him. A ray hit him right in the chest, pushing him back and slamming him against the wall. When he looked up again, her stern expression didn't change, and her weapon did not lower.

Fuck, thought Phantom, and he pulled himself up behind her. "Miss, um, Mom--"

"Don't worry, Danny," she said over her shoulder. "Mommy's gonna take care of this nasty specter."

She powered up the gun again, causing Danny (the real one) to flinch. "Please, listen to me..."

She did not. When she pulled the trigger once more, Phantom saw one last heartbroken look in the ghost's eyes before he phased through the wall and fled from his mother.

Danny's mom blew on the gun and flipped her hair. "See? That ghost was no problem."

Phantom picked his jaw up and looked at her. "Why did you shoot at him?"

She frowned. "Because he was a ghost, of course. You can never trust a ghost."

"Why not?"

She looked like he had just asked her the dumbest question on the planet. "Because they're evil. Malicious. Violent."

"That's not true," Phantom said, truthfully feeling a little offended.

Danny's mom only laughed and patted his head. "I'm sorry, who is the ghost expert here? Me or you?" She smiled at him and said, "Don't worry, I'll protect you from any ghost that tries to harm you."

Phantom would have argued further, but the resolution in her voice scared him a little. For the first time, he found himself grateful for being in Danny's body, because he wasn't sure what she would have done to him if she saw him as a ghost.

"Come on, go back to bed. There's still a couple of hours left before morning," she told him, guiding him back to Danny's bed. After he was settled in, she started to leave the room, but he stopped her by asking, "Wait...did you add anything to your gun?"

She smiled at him and said, "Nope. I told you it works on ghosts."

"Oh," he said, feeling his stomach organ churn.

Danny's mom left, only pausing at the doorway to tell him, "Good night, sleep tight, and don't let the bad ghosts bite."

Phantom lay in bed for a long time, but he didn't sleep. He stared down at Danny's hand...at his hand.

Danny was dead, and he was fully human, which meant this body was now his.

That thought burned in his mind until the light from out the window grew brighter, and the alarm clock beeped from its fallen spot on the floor.

Jazz knocked on his door. "Oh, good, you're awake," she said. She grumbled something inaudible then told him, "Mom and Dad want you to go to school."

Phantom hesitated. "...School?"

"I know," she said with a huff. She rolled her eyes and said in a mimicking tone, "It doesn't matter if you got into an accident that almost killed you and made you lose your memory! As long as you can walk, you can walk to school." She shook her head then asked, "Are you feeling better, at least?"

"Um," Phantom said, "define 'better'."

"Whatever. I'll drive you to school." And she left.

Phantom stayed in bed for several moments while the alarm continued to beep sadly. And then...he felt his bladder act up. He knew, from talking to ghosts who were humans, what this meant.

"Fuck," he muttered. "I have to pee."

.

After wandering around the top floor of the house, he finally found what he was pretty sure was called the bathroom. Figuring out the mechanics of the toilet and the faucet were easy enough, as well as the mehcanics of the actual peeing itself. He tried not to look at Danny's private parts while he did his business...even though he wasn't sure how long he would be spending in this body.

He went downstairs, which was difficult for someone who spent most of his existence flying, but he reached the bottom safely and found Danny's family sitting around a table with some stuff on it.

As he watched, Jazz scooped up a spoonful of the stuff inside her bowl, and she stuffed it into her mouth and chewed. Oh, so it was food.

Jazz caught him staring and asked, "Well? Are you going to eat?"

"Oh," he said. That's right, didn't humans need to eat to survive? He sat at the table, across from Jazz.

Phantom looked at the bowl in front of Jazz and noticed it was filled with a white liquid with pieces of multicolored circles swimming in it. He turned his attention to the jug that held the same white liquid, the box with a cartoon toucan on it that he guessed held the small circles, and the empty bowl in front of him. Well, he could put two and two together, and in no time he poured himself a bowl of milk and cereal and brought a spoonful to his mouth.

Holy Unworld! That tasted great. I mean, food did exist in the Ghost Zone for those who missed eating, but it all had the same acidic taste of ectoplasm. This was different. It was tooth-rottingly sweet.

Jazz raised an eyebrow at his dreamy expression. "You look like you're enjoying your Froot Loops."

"Froot Loops," he repeated the name. "We didn't have this in the Ghost Zone." Or maybe they did, but it wouldn't have tasted the same.

Jazz lowered her spoon and frowned. "Ghosts. Are you still going on about that?"

Phantom stopped chewing. He cast his eyes downward and twirled the spoon in his bowl. "I'm right," he said. "You were wrong about the fake memory stuff."

"Oh really?" she said, sounding like she didn't believe him. "Why is that?"

Phantom opened his mouth to speak, but his words died when he noticed Danny's mom. She had her back on them and was washing the dishes, but he thought he saw her tilt her ear toward them. Had she been listening?

"It's fine," Jazz sighed. "We'll talk about it after school. We're going to be late."

Phantom nodded and finished his Froot Loops, happy not to talk. Not with the ghost hunter in the room.

After the breakfast was drained, Jazz made for the door. Phantom followed her, but she blocked him with a hand and raised an eyebrow at his clothes. "You're not going to school in pyjamas, are you?"

Phantom glanced down at himself and saw that he was still wearing the same soft clothes he had slept in. "Uhh..."

Jazz rolled her eyes. "Go change clothes."

"Right," Phantom said and went back to Danny's room.

Honestly, he wasn't sure what he was supposed to wear. Ghosts didn't have different clothes for different occasions (most of them spent their entire existence in the same set of clothes--either whatever they had died in, or if they were born in the Zone like Phantom was, then whatever they thought made them look scarier), and the Fentons weren't exactly a good example of what humans normally wear.

As he rummaged through Danny's stuff, he came across a photograph. It showed Danny with those two friends of his--the ones who greeted Phantom when he first woke up. The trio stood in a grassy park, smiling, their arms linked together.

Phantom was filled with guilt as he thought back to Danny's ghost, begging him for his body back. If only he knew how to do that. He set the photo aside, but at least it helped him in one thing: the three teenagers were wearing regular clothes. He managed to find some clothes that matched the ones Danny wore in the picture, and when he returned downstairs, he was wearing jeans, sneakers, and a red-and-white T-shirt.

Jazz was waiting for him. The two teens walked outside and entered her car, a small convertible. He sat in the passenger seat and copied what Jazz did to strap her seatbelt, but his mind was still thinking about that photo of Danny he found. After a moment's hesitation, he said, "I saw him."

Jazz's hand stopped in the middle of turning the key in the ignition. "Saw who?"

"Danny," he told her.

Jazz pursed her lips. She started the car and drove. "If you saw him, then where is he now?"

"Your mom shot at him."

"What?"

"He's a ghost. I don't think she recognized him, but...well, he's dead."

Phantom finally learned what the seatbelt's function was when he lurched forward as Jazz suddenly stopped the car. She gripped the wheel in tight fists and breathed through flared nostrils. "Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Don't say that," she pleaded. "It was bad enough when I thought you... I thought you might die. But you didn't. You're alive."

Phantom felt guilt gnaw at him from hearing Jazz. What could he tell her other than Actually, your brother did die, oops haha, sorry?

Jazz took in a deep breath, then she kept driving like nothing happened. Phantom stayed quiet.

Eventually, the car stopped, and Jazz unbuckled her seatbelt and stepped out. Phantom looked at the building they arrived at. Numerous humans around his general age were either milling about or going inside.

School. He never went to one himself, but he heard some stories from Sidney. They weren't nice stories.

Phantom gulped and exited the car. No sooner had he done that than he noticed the two teens rushing toward him.

"Danny!" that girl from last night said. What was her name...Sam. She hesitated and asked, "Do you...remember us?"

"You mean to ask if Danny is back," Phantom told her. That gave her the answer she needed, and she deflated.

Tucker glanced between them, then hooked his arm around Phantom's shoulder and said, "Hey, if you're amnesiac, you need someone to guide you through school again, right?"

"I'm not..." He sighed. Then he eyed the building warily and asked, "Are there bullies?"

"Oh, definitely," Tucker answered, which made his stomach sink.

His time at school actually went by pretty smoothly. He had wondered if anyone would notice that he wasn't Danny, but nobody paid him much attention, not even the teachers. He managed to breeze by two subjects already--one was math, which was admittedly gibberish to him, but Tucker told him no one understood it anyway. The second one he knew better--English literature. He had visited Ghostwriter's library a bunch of times in the Zone and knew about Lord of the Flies when the teacher asked him about it.

Sam raised an eyebrow at him. "You don't remember your name, but you remember reading a class assignment?"

Phantom almost screamed out "I'm not Danny" again, but he held himself back. He knew they would never believe him, not unless...

"Look, Sam, Tucker," he said nervously. He wasn't sure if they would react the same way Jazz did, but considering how close friends they were, then they probably would. The two waited for him expectantly while he tried to pick out the right words. "Danny...your friend...he's--"

"Hey, Fentina!" a sharp voice interrupted him.

"Oh bother," Sam grumbled.

Confused, Phantom turned around to the source of the voice. What greeted him was a tall and muscular blonde human in a letterman's jacket, sneering down at him. "I didn't see you at the beginning of the school day. I think we have some beating to catch up on," he taunted and slammed a fist into his palm.

"Oh," Phantom said numbly. "You're a bully."

The blonde released a laugh that sounded like a pig getting choked. "Me, a bully? More like you're a loser who deserves to get bullied."

"That...makes no sense."

That was apparently the wrong thing to say, because blonde dude's face turned beet red, and he picked up Phantom by the collar and slammed him into a row of lockers. At this point, pain was becoming a constant in Phantom's new, stolen life.

"Lay off, Dash," Sam snapped at him.

"You lay off, Manson," Dash bit back. "I'm only interested in Fenturd here."

"I hear you mispronouncing Fenton a lot," Phantom said in spite of his nerves. "It's really not that hard a name to memorize."

Dash's face turned an even deeper shade of red, and he punched Phantom in the face. All Phantom could think was, Man, Danny would not be happy if he found out I broke his face. Then Dash opened a random locker and stuffed him inside.

"Have fun, FenTON," he yelled at him and slammed the locker door shut.

This was fine. Phantom could handle being trapped inside a tight space with no intangibility to bail him out. I mean, he was already trapped inside this body, wasn't he? Haha.

But after the first few minutes passed, he grew nervous. There was no way he would be left here forever, right? Oh, Ancients, he was going to die just like Sidney, alone in a school locker.

Apparently, that was not to be, because suddenly the air inside the locker grew colder. A soft green glow washed over it, and Phantom felt two cold hands grip his arms. A tingle ran across him. He recognized the sensation: intangibility. The arms pulled, and he was tugged through the locker wall and brought face to face with none other than Danny.

Phantom blinked. "You again."

Danny scowled. "You're still in my body."

"Well, yeah," Phantom said simply. "If I left, it would die."

Danny pulled him closer so he can feel his glare more intensely, probably. Phantom felt it all right, and he squinted his eyes because dear Clockwork, were ghost eyes always this bright?

"I asked you before, and I'm asking you again," Danny growled. "Give me back my body."

"And I already told you, I can't," Phantom retorted.

"Why not? It's mine!" His grip on Phantom's arms were tight now. "I can't live as a ghost!"

"I mean, technically you wouldn't really be living because--"

"I'm not dead!" Danny denied. "I can't...I can't be..."

His grip on Phantom felt weak now. His eyes were dimmer.

Phantom gulped and hesitantly patted Danny's arm in what he hoped was a reassuring way. "Hey, it's fine. Lots of ghosts I know went through a crisis when they died."

"Did they have parents who wanted to hunt them down?" Danny asked softly. Phantom paused and didn't know how to respond.

Well, they were alone, at least. The hallway was empty except for the two of them, and he had a feeling that whatever teacher he had would be wondering where Danny Fenton was. He wasn't sure if this fact was a good thing or a bad thing, because then Sam and Tucker would not see proof of their friend being dead, and he wasn't sure if that knowledge was good or bad.

"No," Danny said, snapping Phantom out of his thoughts. "No. I'm not going to stay like this while you live my life."

"But I already told you..." Phantom began, but Danny's eyes returned their brightness, and he stared directly at Phantom.

"I'm a ghost. I can possess stuff, right?"

Phantom's eyes widened, and that was all the answer Danny needed before he overshadowed him.

A minute later, the bell rung, and students filed out of classrooms. He heard footsteps approach him and turned around to see his friends.

"Thank god, you made it out!" Tucker said once he saw him. "I swear, I told Lancer that Dash stuffed you in a locker again, but he didn't believe me..." He trailed off and pointed out, "Your eyes are green."

"They are?" Danny asked. "Huh, that's weird. I'm not surprised about Mr. Lancer, though."

"Um, didn't you technically only meet him today or something?"

"Today? I wish," Danny said, rolling his green eyes. "That guy's been following our class since third grade."

Tucker gaped. "You remember?"

"Third grade? Unfortunately."

Sam was staring. She stepped forward. "Danny?" she slowly asked.

Danny grinned. "Hey, Sam."

She laughed and hugged him. "You're back! How?"

Danny shrugged. "Come on, you can't expect me to forget you forever, can you?"

Sam and Tucker smiled. Danny smiled. In the back of Danny's head, Phantom mentally frowned.

.

The day passed. Danny was back. He took his classes as always. He got bullied by Dash as always, but that didnt bother him much. Funny how small things become once you've literally died.

Not. Danny didn't die. He told himself that.

More than once, he felt a hand twitch on its own. He sent a mental frown to Phantom and told him, Why won't you leave already?

Dude, how many times do I have to explain to you that I can't?

But I'm in my own body now.

Temporarily. Overshadowing someone isn't the same as taking their body.

Danny tuned him out and continued with his day.

There was a price, however. Phantom tried to warn him, but he got ignored. As the day went by, Danny felt himself grow exhausted at an awfully quick pace.

Tucker noticed first. "Are you okay? You're breathing heavily, and it's not even P.E. yet."

"I'm fine," Danny panted, but he didn't look that way. His skin was pale and covered with sweat.

"No, you're not," Sam said with a frown. "It's the portal--you shouldn't be walking around school after a near-death accident like that."

"I'm not dead!" Danny snapped, shocking his friends with his sudden volume. He faltered. "I mean...I need to go use the bathroom."

They let him go, though their eyes followed his back as he left. He entered the nearest restroom he found and immediately splashed his face with water.

You should stop overshadowing me, Phantom suggested.

Danny scowled. He gripped the sink to steady his shaking hands. "I'm not overshadowing anyone. This is my body."

I'm not saying it's not, but right now, you're a ghost. Prolonged overshadowing isn't healthy.

Danny gritted his teeth. "So, what? I let you steal my life again?"

It's just until we can figure out how to switch us back, Phantom said, but Danny could tell when he lied.

"You don't think we can be switched back, can you?"

Phantom hesitated. Luckily for him, he didn't need to think of a reply--just then, Danny shivered, and a blue mist escaped from his mouth.

Danny frowned. "What was that?"

Oh no, Phantom thought.

Suddenly, a shrill voice cried out, "Trespasser!" Danny jumped and whipped around to face whoever spoke. He squinted his eyes and said, "Who the fuck?"

The speaker would have looked like a regular scrawny freshman, except his skin was gray and transparent, and his torso was sticking halfway through a closed bathroom stall. It was a ghost, obviously.

Truthfully, Danny was almost disappointed in how un-scary he seemed. As a child, he had nightmares about ghosts from the stories his parents told him, but the specter in front of him was far from intimidating. He looked like one of the geeks that Dash and his gang would have picked on if he were alive.

The ghost pointed a finger at Danny and repeated in his nasally voice, "Trespasser! This is my haunt."

Danny eyed the row of empty stalls and asked, "You mean the restroom?"

"Yes! I died in this place, and I chose to make it my haunt instead of going to the Ghost Zone. I don't need another ghost like you to take it from me!"

"Okay, Moaning Myrtle, calm down," Danny spoke. "Why would I even want to steal a restroom? Also, what do you mean by calling me a ghost?"

The ghost left his stall and floated over Danny with a scowl. "I'm not stupid. I can tell when a ghost is overshadowing someone. And if you would steal a body, then you would steal a haunt."

Danny bristled. "I didn't steal this body! It was mine in the first place."

"Oh, sure, and I bet you're going to say this haunt has always been yours!"

"I'm not interested in your fucking water closet!" Danny bit back. "And this body is mine! I was born in it. I lived in it. I...it can't belong to anyone else."

The ghost narrowed his eyes. Then he said, "You're a nasty ass liar, you know that?"

"I'm not lying!"

"Whatever! You're clearly overshadowing a human, and you're clearly still standing inside my haunt, so..."

Um, maybe you should leave the bathroom, Phantom suggested. But Danny stood his ground, glaring at the ghost with his fists by his side. He was tired of this--tired of his death being pointed out to him.

"What are you going to do about it, huh? Give me a swirly?" he gibed.

The ghost's expression darkened. He raised his arm, and several stalls began to rumble. Danny faltered, and his anger melted into apprehension.

Run, Phantom said. This time, Danny decided it was a good idea to listen.

He managed to make it halfway to the exit when all the stalls suddenly exploded. Jets of slightly glowing water burst forth and hit Danny in the back, pushing him the rest of the way out and also drenching him completely.

He sluggishly picked himself off the wet floor. When he glanced to his side, he saw Kwan pausing mid-step. "...I'll just use the restroom on the second floor," Kwan said, turned a 180 and left.

Danny flipped himself over and faced the ghost floating in the restroom's doorway. "I left your stupid washroom alone, so can you leave?" he barked.

"But how do I know you won't come back?" the ghost challenged. "And you're still overshadowing the poor human."

Danny laughed mirthlessly. "Poor human?"

The ghost didn't seem to understand the irony in that. He tackled Danny, phasing the both of them through the wall and into the adjacent hallway.

A few stragglers were still idling in the hallway when they burst in. At the sudden sight of the ghost, most of them screamed and scrambled away. Only a few stayed behind: some redheaded human in a basketball shirt, and Danny's friends, Sam and Tucker.

"Danny!" Sam called out and ran to his side. Tucker froze in place. He lifted a shaky finger at the toilet ghost and stammered, "That's a g-ghost."

The toilet ghost floated away from Danny and crossed his arms. "Yeah, duh," he replied. "I'm not the only one, though."

Tucker was about to ask him what he meant by that, but then Danny began to heave. Sam hovered over him worriedly, but even she had to step away when his coughing became intense. He lurched over--then coughed himself out of his body.

Ghost Danny popped out and landed on the floor. Behind him, Phantom sighed and fell onto his side.

Sam gaped and stared between them, her mouth forming wordless questions, before she gulped and said to Danny, "Phantom?"

Danny frowned and said, "No, I'm Danny! He's Phantom." He pointed at the person inside his human body.

Sam chuckled weakly. "I think you must be confused. He's Danny, because he's a human. And you're Phantom, because youre a g..."

"He's right," Phantom interrupted from his spot on the floor. He pushed himself up, still panting heavily, and said, "That's what I've been trying to tell you. I'm not Danny. He is."

Sam stared at him, then back at Danny. "But...but that would mean--" She trailed off, and her face turned pale.

Whatever heartfelt conversation might have followed was cut off by another splash of water aimed at Danny. He growled and turned on the toilet ghost. "Will you go already?"

The ghost's fists were surrounded by swirling water (which Danny really hoped was clean). He shook his head and barked at him, "Not until you leave this school."

"The school? I thought your haunt was only the restroom."

"It was! But then you made fun of it, so I've decided to make this entire building my territory!"

He shot another beam of water at Danny. Danny grinded his teeth and wished the water would stop in mid-air...and to his surprise, it did. A transparent green shield suddenly appeared in front of him, blocking the water and keeping him dry. Danny blinked and floated back in surprise, and the shield dissapeared.

Phantom was watching him with interest. When the shield disappeared, he called out to Danny and told him, "Use your ghost rays!"

"My what?" was Danny's response right before another jet of water came at him. This time, he didn't summon an ecto-shield in time, and he got slammed back against a row of lockers. As he picked himself up, he noticed that redhead from earlier, who had been staring, trembling, as the whole encounter went down. Ah, fuck, what was his name again? He was in Danny's P.E. class. The poor boy was shivering like a leaf, which made sense--Danny would have done the same if he saw a real ghost when he was still human.

The toilet ghost approached Danny, but stopped and scowled at the redhead. "Leave, human," he ordered. "This doesn't involve you."

The guy (His name started with a W, Danny remembered. Walt? Wes?) stared at the ghost for a moment, then hurriedly nodded and ran. That left the ghost flying in front of Danny.

"Your ghost ray!" Phantom repeated from behind the toilet ghost, as if that would make Danny understand what he was saying. "Just think about shooting him with your hands!"

Shooting him...with his hands? That made no sense, but Danny did as he was told. He made a finger gun and aimed it at the ghost, then imagined a pew! pew! come out.

Pew! came out the ray and shot the ghost right at his chest.

The opponent had only time to widen his eyes before he was slammed against the opposite wall and dissolved into (grossly) glowing water.

Danny slowly blinked. "...Functioning fingerguns," he said. "That's useful."

"What the actual fuck, dude?"

He turned and saw Tucker approach him, wearing a bewildered expression. He gestured wildly to Danny and said, "You're a ghost now? And your body is conscious on its own?"

"Actually, it's conscious because a ghost is inside," he replied, not-so-subtly glaring at Phantom as he said so.

Phantom threw his (or Danny's...whatever) arms up and said, "I didn't choose to be stuck in your body, okay? It was an accident."

Tucker rubbed his forehead. "I still don't understand. How is all this happenning?"

Before either Danny could speak, Sam's voice suddenly cut through and said, "I killed you."

Danny stared at Sam. She was hugging her arms, eyes downcast, and still looked pale as a sheet. "You're a ghost," she said softly. "That means you've died. And I killed you."

Danny felt that same tightness in his chest, not exactly squeezing any heart, but something similar. "I'm not dead," he tried again, but after repeating that sentence so many times, the lie sounded weak even to himself.

Phantom sent him a pitying gaze. Sam bit her lips and squeezed herself tighter. "Yes, you are. It was the portal accident. Somehow, you died and got replaced by...whoever this is." She gestured weakly to Phantom, then choked up and continued in a wavering voice, "It was my fault. I told you to go inside that portal. You're--you're dead, because of me. I killed you."

Seeing her like that, hearing her, made any sorry feelings Danny had for himself disappear. All he cared about was wiping that melancholy from his friend's eyes. "No," he told her firmly. "It wasn't your fault. I agreed. I--" A lump formed in his throat, and he swallowed it down before saying, "I'm dead because of my own fault."

He could feel Phantom's eyes boring into him. Probably, that ghost (ex-ghost?) was thinking something along the lines of Fucking finally! You admit it to yourself at last, but the emotional intensity of the situation was likely what prevented him from voicing that thought out loud.

Sam raised her eyes and met his sadly. Tucker stepped forward, his brows drawn together. "But...but that can't be it!" he protested. He grabbed Phantom's arm and pointed out, "Your body is still alive, isn't it? Can't we...I dont know...redo the accident so it gets you back in your body the same way Phantom got inside yours?"

Danny perked up and felt a sliver of hope grow inside him, but Phantom was quick to shake his head and say, "That won't be so easy. The Ghost Zone is always shifting. Whatever spot I was in when the portal thing happened, it won't be the same place for Danny."

"Oh," Tucker said, deflating. His eyes turned downcast, and his hands fell limply off Phantom's arm. "I guess it can be it, then."

Phantom looked at the trio of friends, their broken expressions. He honestly didn't see what the big fuss was about, but he hated seeing them so sad, so he hurriedly added in a forcefully positive tone, "That's okay, though! Difficult doesn't have to mean impossible! I'm sure we can...uh..."

He trailed off after spotting a person at the end of the hallway. Confused, Danny turned to see who he was looking at. He found his sister, slack-jawed, her eyes darting between him and Phantom.

"Jazz!" he said, then looked down and noticed his ghostly appearance. "Um, I can explain."

Jazz didn't leave him room to, because she promptly fainted.

Danny rushed forward to grab her, but of course, she fell right through his arms. He winced when she hit her face on the hard floor. Tucker came forward and checked her.

"She's fine," he said with a cross between a smile and a grimace.

.

Jazz's eyes fluttered awake. She groaned and turned her head to the side. On the wall next to her was a silly cartoon infographic of flu symptoms. It took her mind a minute to recognize it, but she was at the school infirmary.

"You're awake?" asked a voice nearby. She turned her head to the other side and saw her brother's face.

"Danny..." She frowned and sat up on the infirmary bed. Her face hurt. "What happened?"

"You don't remember?"

Jazz tried to recall what brought her here. She remembered seeing seeing Danny, and...ghost Danny? She shook her head. "Must have been a dream," she mumbled.

"What?"

She saw Danny watching her curiously. She sighed and ran a hand across her face, which still ached for some reason. "I remember seeing you standing next to your ghost. I think you might have...died. But that couldn't have been possible."

"You think that was a dream."

Danny's expression was unreadable. Jazz frowned. "It had to be. Ghosts aren't real." Mentally, she added, I hope not.

Danny averted his eyes from her. She wondered if she said something wrong, but then Danny stood up from his chair and said, "You slipped and hit your face, so we brought you to the school nurse. You need some rest...I'll leave you alone."

It sounded reasonable enough, but something nagged at her. Danny wouldn't meet her eyes, instead choosing to fidget with the hem of his shirt. She had a feeling he was lying.

"Danny," she called. "You know you can tell me anything, right?"

Her brother stiffened. It looked like he was about to say something, but he must have changed his mind at the last minute because he left the room wordlessly.

.

Phantom exited the school infirmary. "She's okay," he told the air.

Danny visualized in front of him, wearing a frown. "I heard what went down. She thinks it wasn't real."

Phantom shrugged. He felt a little bad, but he wasn't sure he could handle her reaction if he told her that her brother was really dead...again. The first time he tried didn't go so cheerfully.

"Where are your friends?" Phantom asked, choosing to change the subject.

"You mean Sam and Tuck? What do you think?" He chuckled humorlessly, then gazed at his boots and murmured, "They just discovered that ghosts exist and their friend is dead. Of course they needed some time to process that."

Phantom bit his lip. "We'll find some way to switch us back. Maybe."

That "maybe" didn't sound so reassuring, and Danny didn't look reassured. Phantom grimaced and tried to think of a better way to lift his spirits, but then he heard footsteps approach. Danny made himself invisible while Phantom turned around and saw a familiar couple in orange and teal come toward them.

"Danno!" Danny's dad greeted him. "The school called--is Jazzy-pants alright?"

"She's fine," Phantom said with a steady voice. "She just had some low blood sugar is all."

The man patted his shoulder, then entered the room where Jazz was held. His wife went to follow him, but Phantom stopped her by calling, "Uh...Mom."

She spun to him and smiled. "What is it, sweetie?"

Phantom hesitated. He fidgeted with his shirt and asked, "Did you really mean what you said last night--about all ghosts being bad?"

The woman frowned. "Of course I did. Was I wrong?"

"It's just, well..." He focused on a random locker and said, "What if your son...I mean, what if I became a ghost? What would you do to me then?"

He braved a glance at her and saw a shadow cross her expression. She hesitated for a moment before replying carefully, "I don't like to think about that. I choose to believe that when you die, it won't be violent. I'll make sure of that." She forced a smile, then ruffled Phantom's hair and added, "But that doesn't matter right now. You're still alive and human. As long as you're with me, then I know that any ghost who looks like you is an imposter."

Phantom's stomach sank, and he swallowed down a lump that formed in his throat. Danny's mom only smiled at him once more before she followed her husband to see Jazz.

Danny didn't reappear. Phantom didn't see him for the rest of the day. But in that moment, he thought he heard a choked sob come from the air behind him.

[astrox-style22]

X FILES  HOROSCOPE JANUARY 19TH - 25TH

ARIES

MONEY: This is a week, with the New Moon in Aquarius to act and think outside of the box.  Nothing conventional will do.    If you’re willing to take a risk with your hopes and wishes, the results could very unexpected and to your liking.  Also realizing it’s time to leave certain”friends”’ behind that you’ve outgrown and hold you back.   The Universe is ready and waiting to bring in new people to fill the void.

SEX:   You don’t always play by the rules when it comes to love, but this week, although you’ll sill act on impulse, do it in way that is a pleasant surprise for your partner.

POWER: If you want to succeed, separate yourself from the “pack’ and chart a more individual course on a path less trodden.

TAURUS

MONEY: Career and goals need to change and this could very well occur this week.   If you have any new ideas or insights that can be used to make this area of life better, you should go ahead and implement them.    However, you may find yourself taking a small step forward  because of being held back by old debts, disappointments and past mistakes.   Nonetheless,  one step is better than none at all , so you should continue to forge ahead, leaving as much as the old behind as possible.

SEX: Try to have a broader perspective of love and what can be achieved.   If you keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again without realizing what they are, it will be hard to find happiness.   The answer lies within your beliefs about love, passed down from parents.

POWER: Restructuring your life starting with career, goals and ambitions may seem to be a daunting task, but it can be done.   If you can be more determined, assertive and focused on what needs to be done, you’ll not only surprise yourself but everyone else too.

GEMINI

MONEY: This is a week of sudden cathartic changes which sooner or later prove to be positive or fortunate, depending on whether or not you’ve been operating on the right side of Natural Law.   If you’re careful not to take unreasonable gambles  with the aspect of the New Moon in Aquarius, outcomes will be positive, bearing in mind you can’t always trust the luck to be long -lasting.   If you’ve been doing things on the wrong side of Natural Law, you could experience a dramatic loss or upset, especially connected to legal matters and anything connected to other cultures/countries.

SEX: Putting a little bit more extra effort into your partner, paying attention to their needs will definitely have a positive affect and bring you both closer together.

POWER: If you’re lucky enough to experience the benefits of the New Moon in Aquarius this week, progressive actions will be rewarded and certain tensions you’ve been experiencing will ease.   The writing is on the wall, indicating a new job, home, life-style and friends is on the horizon.    Be prepared for unexpected surprises.

CANCER

MONEY: Somehow you have to find a way to transform unique ideas into symbolic gold.    There are a lot of things you want to accomplish, but need to organize them and pick the ones that will be the most viable, profitable and fulfilling - not necessarily in that order.   More independent thinking an action will get you further, taking a break from tradition that is holding you back.

SEX: If you or your partner’s needs are not being served in current relationships then you must discuss what you want to do about it.   It’s not too late to be more aware of what you both want, but the question is whether or not you care enough to change behavior.

POWER: Beware of individuals who are over-emotional  wanting to cause conflict.    This is a week to confront things that have been bothering you on a deep level, but gently.   Caution and patience will spare you disappointment later. Don’t try to change everything overnight.

LEO

MONEY Opportunities to be in front of the public should be well thought through, with a need to deepen and broaden mental horizons before saying anything,.  At least if you want to gain public support and attention in a positive way for projects/ideas you’re trying to promote.

SEX: You and your partner need to redefine boundaries so that you can each be more of your own person in the context of the relationship. If you want to get to know someone new, your significant other should know that you want to explore “greener pastures”.   Being honest will spare them the hurt and you from creating karma.

POWER: Thinking before you speak, realizing it’s not what you say, but how you say it that matters, will help to influence peoples support for your objectives.

VIRGO

MONEY: Genius moments connected to work and the implementation of fresh new ideas could catapult you into the forefront of the public, positively changing the way people perceive you.  At the same time, unexpected news could solve a current crisis/dilemma holding back prosperity in many ways.  If you’ve been planning and working on anew project, bear in mind, how you present Self and the project could arouse public attention and recognition.   This is the week to put words into action and make every word count.

SEX: As your foundation of life changes so will your love-life change for the better, assuming that you and your partner are on the same page of focus in terms where you want the relationship to go.

POWER: Wit so much going on in the area of work this week, there’s danger of scattering energies in too many directions.   This is where meditation will come in handy to keep you in peaceful balance and harmony with the Universe as you move forward.

LIBRA

MONEY: This is the week to reconsider the direction you’re moving towards with creative projects and sharing them with the world.    If the chance comes to try a new opportunity, think first before you leap forward, it may not be as positive as it appears on the surface and end up in misfortune.   At the same time change of job is written in the stars, if it hasn’t already happened.  You maybe thrust in the forefront of attention, but only for a short-time.  The question to ask, is whether or not the the opportunity is one that enables you to take three steps forward one backwards, because if this is the case, how far back are you going?

SEX: Your significant other may want to take a breather from the relationship or just spend less time together.   This isn’t a bad thing, but you should still talk to them about it, so you understand the reason behind this decision.

POWER: A great deal of what you’ve been working towards could come to fruition this week, while at the same time, it could be the opposite affect because at some point you took a detour that changed a positive outcome to your efforts.  Either way, the main thing is, lessons learned from events that take pace this week.  Taking note, it’s not too late to change course again, but this tine time with more discernment.

SCORPIO

MONEY: Changes to your foundation of life and living conditions will have an affect on your ability to expand horizons.  This shape-up, will in a way help to open the door for many opportunities to emerge, which wile positive as long as you don’t get involved with sudden emotional conflicts with others who don’t serve your hopes and wishes.  There could be success with pr, media and advertising.

SEX: Try to keep emotions evenly balanced and avoid sudden confrontations with your partner that are unnecessary.

POWER: Changes of diet, feeling mood and certain health issues could make you feel off-balance and unprepared to be prepared for opportunity when it knocks.    Therefore there is a need to be awake, alert and more focused than usual.

SAGITTARIUS

MONEY: Your restless, creative mind is always full of new ideas and this week will be no exception.   You can’t just talk about ideas this week, you have to be wiling to put your words to good use and get projects off the ground.  The more unique they are, the more successful they will be.  

SEX: Don’t make assumptions about your partner that are unfounded they won’t appreciate it.   Probably better to keep your opinions to yourself.

POWER: If you’re presenting anything to the public or involved with media, pr or advertising, make sure the people you’re working with are on the same page so disaster can be averted.   If they’re not able to have abrader perspective of how to present you and your ideas to the public, find someone else.  There are people out there.

CAPRICORN

MONEY: If you have been following the cycles of the stars in the last few months, you’ll realize and feel this is the week to start implanting new unique money-making ideas.  The more creative the better.  As a result you’ll have to restructure areas of life to suit this new influx of prosperity.  This is not a time to vacillate/procrastinate because this is a year of retrogrades with very little opportunity to start new things after January, not until the end of the year.   Time waits for no man, plus you have Jupiter in your sign, so there’s not excuse.

SEX: With so much going on in your life, there maybe little time for love this week, but this is only temporary.  if you explain things to your partner they’ll help you get things in order and streamlined, so you’ll still  have time for each other.

POWER: Don’t forget to dress for success, this is your secret weapon, not to be ignored.  As you start this successful new cycle, people will be watching, so you can’t afford to not be prepared and make your presence memorable.

AQUARIUS

MONEY: The New Moon in your sign this week gives a powerful boost of getting things done that have been outstanding for sometime.  It may seem as if there’s not enough time in the day to do what you have to do, causing stress, but the Universe is on your side.  New people that come into your life at this time, to help complete projects already started, will prove to be the catalyst for new partnerships and new beginnings to expand horizons.

SEX: Avoid allowing your partner to trigger emotions that end up in conflict, it’s not necessary at al. Listen and try a different approach of being more understanding and willing to support.

POWER: Intense persistence that you’ve exerted over the last few months will show signs of paying off and overcoming difficulties you’ve been faced with for sometime.   Ultimately, you’ll also realize there’s a need to change your manner of  of expression.

PISCES

MONEY: This is a week to overcome sorrow and self-undoing, if you’ve been paying attention to the way things have been going up to now.  Now is the time to be in action to start new ideas or business, especially if they’re of a visuall nature, this is the week to do it.   The stars are aligned in your favor to outdo everyone, including yourself, making drastic unexpected changes.  A chance to be a trendsetter.

SEX: You might be ready for a change but your partner may not.    This should not hold you back, because you have to move forward.   Perhaps by discussing things with your significant other they’ll understand and be supportive while you keep going.  However, there is the chance they may get left behind.  New relationships that cone into your life this week will challenge existing ones.

POWER: Pay attention and avoid wrong judgement this week.  Your creative awareness will be at tis peek, helping you to make tremendous strides forward. Opportunities that emerge may not pay-off right away, but will most definitely in the months ahead.  Find the courage to move into “uncharted waters”.

[babikerblog]

"Libya opened" a Sudanese saying that became famous recently after border trade activity between Sudanese merchants and the south of Libya, and despite the simplicity of this phrase, it describes the extent of the deepening of the common relations between the two brotherly peoples. The period of General Muammar Gaddafi’s rule in Libya was characterized by instability and volatility, especially in the file of foreign relations. The Libyan state was in permanent conflict and developed from the Cold War with its Arab and Western neighbors and allies, which cast a shadow over the nature of Sudanese-Libyan relations throughout history. Libya represents a strategic dimension for Sudan, politically, economically and securityly. Sudan’s stability and tension were affected by the regime’s trends in Libya, and vice versa. The former Libyan regime had a major role in the unrest and wars that Sudan witnessed during the decades of the seventies, eighties and nineties, and it is considered a major contributor to transforming the rebel groups in South Sudan into an organized army, and believes that it has a hand in the Darfur unrest. Also, the deposed Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir has appeared as a player in the Libyan political arena in his statements that Tripoli was entered with Sudanese weapons, and this was confirmed by Saleh Al-Gharyani, the Grand Mufti of Libya, praising the deposed efforts in military support. What witnessed the last days in Turkey's intervention with its support for the Alsaraaj and turned the balance of power at the head of Khalifa Haftar, and from the premise that the Sudanese people had removed a regime that presided over Bashir and was a strategic ally of Turkey in the region, he recalled the challenges of supporting armed opposition movements in Sudan And made them strong brigades, in which they fought the ousted regime and destabilized western and southern Sudan, and also restored questions and concerns about the impact of the Libyan tensions on the security and political scene in Sudan. Sudan has lived in the last ten years, great tensions, starting with the secession of the south, the loss of oil resources, and the grinding economic crisis that led to the overthrow of the regime in the previous year, and coincided with these crises, the volatility of Sudan's international position and its jump between alliances and axes, which inherited the transitional revolution government A destabilizing situation of international and regional relations stifling unfair US sanctions, and this tension was reflected in the position of the armed forces, especially the rapid support brigades led by General Hamidati, who initially expressed full support for the UAE - Saudi Arabia and Egypt Specially in the war in Yemen and support for General / Haftar with arms and The materiel, which is contrary to the goals of the revolution, which demanded neutral international relations, avoiding all international disputes and divisions, and unfortunately imposes on the entire country a racist position in its relations with brotherly and friendly countries, which led to marking the fragile state with a central dimension in the region. Sudan, which is passing through this period, trying to achieve the principle of transitional justice and preparing the state for the establishment of democracy and the obstacles and realities hidden by reality that prevent the fragile security hegemony from being transformed into a spiral of internal conflicts, and the Sudanese attempt to move away from any coming conflict in the field in order to contain internal crises, Will efforts to distance oneself from these problems succeed, or will we be a victim of international and regional repression? The question remains at this critical time, about Turkey's true role in North Africa? Should the neighboring countries of Libya fear this Turkish intervention? And to what extent the ambitions of France, Russia and Italy extend in an African depth rich in material and human resources? "The Italians are fools, because they occupied the state of its

[htstalybridge]

Thought for the day: 22nd June

“Wooooow!!”

It was a year ago that we hosted the first science Wonder Day at Holy Trinity. That exclamation of delight came from a small boy as he walked into our building and it has really stuck with me ever since. It was exactly the sort of reaction I was hoping for from the day and was repeated over and over again throughout the day by many of our visitors. It was a great day and if you missed it (or just want a refresher!) take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A5qMHq484E.

We gave something amazing and unique to our local community of which we can be very proud. It was a day of fun as well as a chance to help others learn about and celebrate the universe that God has placed us in. We will have sowed long lasting seeds that will inspire some to go on to become the next generation of scientists, medical workers and engineers. Not too shabby for a day’s work!

It would also be difficult to underestimate the importance of putting on such an event in a church. It is something very much unexpected and unusual enough that several science funders and organisations have been chatting to me about it over the last year. The combination of science and Christianity will also have spoken volumes to the 400+ visitors we had on the day.

Why would this be important? Well, there is an unfortunate fiction in our modern society that science and religion do not mix to the extent that actually they are rivals to one another. You cannot have both and must choose between the two. To put on a day where people can see Christians excited about and enthused for science runs completely counter-cultural to that and will lodge in people’s minds.

However, that fiction is still a popular idea that is difficult to shake off. We hear it in our media, celebrity scientists with a poor grasp of religion (and science actually) promote the idea either deliberately or by omission. And unfortunately there are many within the Christian community who have also bought into the idea and although well-meaning launch unnecessary attacks on science.

Science, like religion, is a powerful cultural influence in our society. Its stripes have been well earned. Christians should be cautious about attempting to undermine it, remembering that Christians where at the heart of its origins and many scientists today are themselves Christians too. Yes, there are sometimes challenges in reconciling parts of science with some interpretations of Scripture, but we do not throw the baby out with the bathwater. We must hold to the truth that both science and scripture come from the mind and will of God. Therefore, even if we can’t immediately see how the two go together they cannot ultimately be in conflict.

In fact we are better off when they two are allowed to partner each other. We only have to look at our current situation where we see both science and religion are involved in tackling the coronavirus crisis. As our doctors and scientists rush to find vaccines and treatments our churches have been on the frontline providing for more immediate physical needs while helping people to make some sort of sense of what is going on. A functioning society, one that does not turn in on itself and lose hope, needs a bit of both to succeed in the best way possible. If we dismiss one for the other we leave ourselves incomplete and vulnerable.

It is no different for the Church. We benefit from both as well, if not more so. God has placed us into a universe blessed with lavish possibilities. To begin to explore and bring those possibilities to fruition then is to understand the work and intentions of God. For the Christian science, the exploration of the universe, becomes a form of worship and even theological study.

We see this touched upon in Scripture. Although the Biblical writers wrote centuries before science as we understand it today began, they were no less interested in the world around them nor immune to how it can inspire worship, wonder and awe and point to the God responsible for it all. Try standing under a starry sky yourself and not having your soul sing! These are the same stars that the Psalmists speak of in such Psalms as Ps. 8, 19 and 148.  Knowing what those stars really are as we do today doesn’t diminish this sense of awe, it only deepens it (especially when you realise your eye can only see about 5000 stars, the smallest of a tiny fraction of the total number of stars that exist!). And if you think Scripture isn’t interested in asking questions about the universe then you need to really must read Job 38-39.

Although we are not able to run another Wonder Day this year I would encourage you to still engage with science in some way and learn a little bit more about God’s great universe. Watch a science documentary, read a science book from the library or even better do some science yourself. There is nothing like doing something to really start to appreciate it. There are many ‘citizen science’ projects available where professional scientists want to work with you on everything from classifying distant galaxies (look up online the Zooniverse), to looking after conker trees (search for Conker Tree Science) or to more traditional activities such as bird and wildlife surveys. If nothing else step outside on the next clear night, wait a few minutes for your eyes to adjust to the dark, and then look up at the stars… maybe even catch a glimpse of comet Neowise..? Delight in God’s creation!

Our Wonder Day will be back (and in fact there are three more on the books for other churches as well!), but in the meantime I would encourage you to make every day a wonder day.

Gavin Merrifield

[armeniaitn]

Armenia-Iran dialogue is of strategic importance: Nikol Pashinyan receives Iran’s Foreign Minister

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/politics/armenia-iran-dialogue-is-of-strategic-importance-nikol-pashinyan-receives-irans-foreign-minister-74059-26-05-2021/

Armenia-Iran dialogue is of strategic importance: Nikol Pashinyan receives Iran’s Foreign Minister

Acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan received Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran Mohammad Javad Zarif, who is in Armenia on a working visit.

Welcoming the Iranian Foreign Minister to Yerevan, Nikol Pashinyan said: “Our good-neighborly relations with Iran are of strategic importance. The common border with Iran has ensured the security of our country in a number of ways ever since the first years of Armenia’s independence. It is my pleasure to note that there is a similar perception in Iran about our relationship.

Our economic ties have developed over several decades, especially in Syunik region; there has always been a great interest in implementing joint projects. We have set up a free economic zone in Meghri with a view to deepening economic exchanges with friendly Iran.

A number of adverse factors, including COVID-19, prevented this free economic zone from gaining enough momentum, but we are convinced that it can become a strong fulcrum for our two countries’ economic development. We are indeed interested in it, and we have already discussed the possibility of deepening our high-level political dialogue. We are similarly holding discussions in the security sphere: there are specific issues high on the bilateral agenda. Armenia-Iran dialogue is of strategic importance, and therefore, we must make efforts to succeed.

You may be aware that some tensions have recently emerged on the border with Azerbaijan. Azerbaijani armed forces crossed into Armenia’s sovereign territory in several sections. Our position is unequivocal: all units of Azerbaijan’s Armed Forces must leave our territory. And we are making political-diplomatic efforts to this end, first of all, because our partners in the Collective Security Treaty Organization have been urging us from the very first days to try to settle the matter through diplomatic-political means.

You are aware that according to the Collective Security Treaty, aggression against our country implies that other CSTO-member nations should get involved in hostilities. Of course, it is our wish that the issue be resolved through diplomatic and political means. Unfortunately, we had a victim yesterday. A serviceman of the Armenian Armed Forces was killed with a gunshot fired by representatives of Azerbaijan’s Armed Forces. So, the situation is quite tense; this meeting is a good opportunity to learn Iran’s views on ways of addressing the crisis.”

Iran’s Foreign Minister stated, in turn: “Esteemed Prime Minister, let me thank you for providing this opportunity to my colleagues. And let me convey to you warm greetings on behalf of President Rouhani and Mr. Jahangiri. Armenia has always been our good friend; our relations are deeply rooted in centuries. Iran and Armenia are cooperating in several areas as vividly evidenced by the latest visit of the Iranian Minister of Urban Development and Roads, which proved quite successful. And I hope that after the end of this pandemic we will be able to further develop bilateral relations in the economic sphere.

The operations of the Meghri free economic zone, as well as the Iran-Nakhichevan-Armenia railway can be very effective for both countries. A good agreement has been reached. And I hope we will be able to step up the economic activity in Syunik region in the near future. This is the importance we give to bilateral relations.

I have had a very strategic dialogue with our Armenian partners; our representative, our negotiator will arrive in Armenia at the first opportunity as a follow-up to the ongoing dialogue. There are many important issues, both bilateral and regional, that need to be addressed. We want peace in this region. And we have always highlighted the principles of territorial integrity, sovereignty, and the peaceful resolution of crises. The Islamic Republic of Iran prioritizes respect for international law.

In order to resolve the recent escalation, three visits were paid from our country to Armenia. I was the first to pay a visit, then our special envoy came to Armenia, and now I am visiting Armenia again. I am sorry that you have been a victim of this new escalation. Yesterday I had a very detailed and meaningful conversation with the President of Azerbaijan. I hope that today’s meeting, like the one I had with my esteemed colleague, will help resolve the crisis. Thank you again.”

The interlocutors went on to discuss the steps aimed at resolving the situation on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. The Iranian Foreign Minister assured of his country’s keen interest in reinstating regional stability, preserving and ensuring Armenia’s territorial integrity.

Nikol Pashinyan and Mohammad Javad Zarif touched upon a number of issues related to the further development of cooperation between the two countries in the field of economy. Continued interaction in the frame of the gas / electricity swap program was discussed during the meeting. In particular, the parties considered it necessary to extend the term of the program, step up the volume of gas and electricity exchanged, implement joint infrastructure projects and expand relations in the fields of education and culture.

The Acting Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Iran exchanged views on the joint efforts aimed at addressing the current situation and achieving stability and lasting peace in the region.

Read original article here.

[orbemnews]

Big Business Takes on Anti-Asian Discrimination Corporate America takes on anti-Asian discrimination Top business leaders and corporate giants are pledging $250 million to a new initiative and an ambitious plan to stem a surge in anti-Asian violence and take on challenges that are often ignored by policymakers, Andrew and Ed Lee report in The Times. Donors are a who’s who of business leaders. Individuals who are collectively contributing $125 million to the newly created Asian American Foundation include Joe Bae of KKR, Sheila Lirio Marcelo of Care.com, Joe Tsai of Alibaba and Jerry Yang of Yahoo. Organizations adding another $125 million to the group include Walmart, Bank of America, the Ford Foundation and the N.B.A. The initiative has echoes of the recent effort by Black executives to round up corporate support to push back against bills that would restrict voting. Anti-Asian hate crimes jumped 169 percent over the past year; in New York City alone, they have risen 223 percent. And Asian-Americans face the challenge of the “model minority” myth, in which they’re often held up as success stories. This shows “a lack of understanding of the disparities that exist,” said Sonal Shah, the president of the newly formed foundation. For example, Asian-Americans comprise 12 percent of the U.S. work force, but just 1.5 percent of Fortune 500 corporate officers. The group’s mission is broad. It is aiming to reshape the American public’s understanding of the Asian-American experience by developing new school curriculums and collecting data to help influence public policy. But its political lobbying efforts may be challenged by the enormous political diversity among Asian-Americans, Andrew and Ed note. HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING India’s Covid-19 crisis deepens. The country recorded nearly 402,000 cases on Saturday, a global record, and another 392,000 on Sunday. A business trade group is calling for a new national lockdown, despite the economic cost of such a move. The C.E.O. of India’s biggest vaccine manufacturer warned that the country’s shortage of doses would last until at least July. Credit Suisse didn’t earn much for its Archegos troubles. The Swiss bank collected just $17.5 million in fees last year from the investment fund, despite losing $5.4 billion from the firm’s meltdown in March, according to The Financial Times. Verizon sold AOL and Yahoo. The telecom giant divested its internet media business to Apollo Global Management for $5 billion, and will retain a 10 percent stake. It’s a sign that Verizon is giving up on its digital advertising ambitions and focusing on its mobile business. A third of Basecamp employees quit after a ban on talking politics. At least 20 resigned after the software maker’s C.E.O., Jason Fried, announced a new policy preventing political discussions in the workplace. The company isn’t budging: “We’ve committed to a deeply controversial stance,” said David Hansson, Basecamp’s chief technology officer. Manchester United fans are still mad about the failed Super League. Supporters of the English soccer club stormed the field yesterday, forcing the postponement of its highly anticipated match against Liverpool. They called for the ouster of the Glazer family, United’s American owners, over their support for the new competition meant mostly for European soccer’s richest teams. Succession hints and other highlights from Berkshire’s meeting At the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway on Saturday, Warren Bufett and Charlie Munger spoke out on a typically broad range of topics, from investing regrets to politics to crypto. (They also picked fights with Robinhood and E.S.G. proponents, for good measure.) Buffett watchers also got their clearest hint yet as to who will succeed the Oracle of Omaha as Berkshire’s C.E.O. when the 90-year-old billionaire finally steps down. It’s Greg Abel. CNBC confirmed with Buffett that Abel, the 59-year-old who oversees Berkshire’s non-investing operations, would take over as C.E.O. “If something were to happen to me tonight it would be Greg who’d take over tomorrow morning,” Buffett said. Charlie Munger, Buffett’s top lieutenant, dropped a hint on Saturday, saying, “Greg will keep the culture.” Buffett took on Robinhood. The Berkshire chief said the trading app conditioned retail investors to treat stock trading like gambling. “There’s nothing illegal about it, there’s nothing immoral, but I don’t think you’d build a society around people doing it,” Buffett said. Robinhood pushed back. “There is an old guard that doesn’t want average Americans to have a seat at the Wall Street table so they will resort to insults,” tweeted Jacqueline Ortiz Ramsay, the company’s head of public policy communications. And Buffett got blowback on E.S.G. Berkshire shareholders followed his lead and rejected two shareholder proposals that would have forced the company to disclose more about climate change and work force diversity. But each proposal got support from a quarter of Berkshire shareholders, a relatively high percentage. And big investors spoke publicly about their backing for the initiatives: BlackRock, which owns a 5 percent stake in Berkshire, said the company hadn’t done enough on either front. Other highlights from the Berkshire meeting: Munger let loose on crypto. “Of course I hate the Bitcoin success and I don’t welcome a currency that’s so useful to kidnappers and extortionists,” he said. “I think the whole damn development is disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization.” Ajit Jain, who oversees Berkshire’s insurance operations, and Buffett traded quips about whether the company would insure Elon Musk’s trip to Mars. “This is an easy one: No, thank you, I’ll pass,” Jain said. Buffett said it would depend on the premium and added, “I would probably have a somewhat different rate if Elon was on board or not on board.” “We will not be anywhere near as focused on buybacks going forward as we have in the past.” — Intel C.E.O. Pat Gelsinger told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that in the future the semiconductor giant would focus less on buying its own shares and more on expanding production capacity to alleviate severe chip shortages. Ted Cruz rejects ‘woke’ corporate money Ted Cruz has sworn off corporate donations, and he used an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal to tell executives about it. The Republican senator from Texas criticized company chiefs for what he said were ill-informed criticisms of Georgia’s new voting laws. “For too long, woke C.E.O.s have been fair-weather friends to the Republican Party: They like us until the left’s digital pitchforks come out,” Cruz wrote. These companies “need to be called out, singled out and cut off,” he added. Cruz’s rejection may not make a big difference. After the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, many corporations pledged to withhold donations from lawmakers who voted against certifying the election results, at least for a period of time. Cruz, who is viewed as a key player in the efforts to reverse the vote, could be shut out for longer than others. But he’s not strapped for cash: He brought in more than $3 million in campaign funds in the three months after the riot, largely from individual donors. It highlights a new schism between Republicans and corporate America. Those ties were already fraying under President Trump’s unpredictable administration. President Biden’s proposed tax hikes and regulatory push would have typically driven companies into the arms of Republican allies, but Cruz, for his part, said he’s no longer interested in what the corporate donors and lobbyists have to say. “This time,” he wrote, “we won’t look the other way on Coca-Cola’s $12 billion in back taxes owed. This time, when Major League Baseball lobbies to preserve its multibillion-dollar antitrust exception, we’ll say no thank you. This time, when Boeing asks for billions in corporate welfare, we’ll simply let the Export-Import Bank expire.” An epic antitrust case begins Today, Apple and Epic Games meet in court for a trial that could have implications for the future of the App Store and the antitrust fight against Big Tech. DealBook spoke with Jack Nicas, a technology reporter for The Times, about what’s at stake. Why is Epic suing Apple? Many companies, including Spotify and Match Group, have complained loudly and publicly about the control that Apple has over the App Store, and the 30 percent commission it charges. Epic basically set some bait for Apple: It began using its own payment system in Fortnite, a very popular game, which meant Apple couldn’t collect its commission. It knew how Apple would react: Apple kicked Fortnite out of the App Store. Then Epic immediately sued Apple in federal court, and simultaneously launched a sophisticated PR campaign to paint Apple in a bad light. [Epic is suing Google for the same reason.] Why do businesses that aren’t Epic or Apple care about this case? If you’re a company that sells any digital goods or services, whether a game, music or a dating platform, you likely pay a large share of your revenues to Apple. If Epic wins here, that could eventually put an end to Apple’s commissions, or at least cause Apple to loosen its control over the App Store. So it really would upend the economics of the app industry. And beyond that, an Epic win would boost the push for antitrust charges against some of the biggest tech companies, including Apple. Now on the other side, if Apple wins, it’s really only going to bolster its already strong position. Who is expected to win? It’s certainly unclear at this point, but there is a thinking among legal experts that Apple has the upper hand, and that’s in large part because in antitrust fights, courts are more sympathetic to the defendants. But some legal experts think that Epic’s case could be strong. What will you be watching for? The C.E.O.s of both companies, Tim Sweeney and Tim Cook, will be testifying at the trial. Sweeney will likely have to explain why Epic is suing Apple and Google, but not Microsoft and Sony and Samsung and Nintendo, which charge very similar commissions and have similar rules. And Cook will have to answer some very pointed questions about how Apple does business, and how it potentially creates rules in its App Store to hurt rivals. I think there’s an opportunity for the lawyers on Epic’s side to elicit some interesting answers from him. Read the full report about the case from Jack and Erin Griffith. THE SPEED READ Deals Legendary Studios, the producer of movies like “Godzilla vs. Kong,” has reportedly held talks to either merge with a SPAC or buy another studio. (Bloomberg) Politics and policy Why investors have largely shrugged off President Biden’s proposal to raise capital gains taxes. (NYT) As the head of the nonprofit Venture for America, Andrew Yang pledged to create 100,000 jobs nationwide. The group created about 150. (NYT) Tech An internal Amazon report warned management that its sales team had gained unauthorized access to third-party seller data, which may have been used to help its own products. (Politico) Tesla is reportedly stepping up its engagement with Beijing officials as it faces greater pressure from the Chinese government. (Reuters) Best of the rest “Has Online Retail’s Biggest Bully Returned?” (NYT) How remote work is decimating Manhattan’s retail stores, in pictures. (NYT) Eli Broad, the billionaire businessman and art collector who reshaped Los Angeles, died on Friday. He was 87. (NYT) We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. Source link Orbem News #antiAsian #Big #Business #discrimination #Takes

[newstfionline]

Friday, April 2, 2021

Bumpy road ahead for Biden’s infrastructure plan (AP) Infrastructure was a road to nowhere for former presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama. But Joe Biden believes he can use it to drive America to the future after a dozen years of false starts. The trip is unlikely to be smooth. Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure package, released Wednesday, would go well beyond the usual commitments to roads and bridges to touch almost every part of the country. It’s a down payment on combating climate change, a chance to take on racial inequities, an expansion of broadband, an investment in manufacturing and a reorienting of corporate taxes to pay for everything. To succeed where his predecessors stalled, Biden will have to navigate a conflicting set of political forces with winners and losers all around. Even before Biden delivered his opening speech on the plan, Republicans had latched on to Reagan-era labeling, dismissing the package as tax-and-spend liberalism. Some Democratic lawmakers, on the other hand, fear Biden’s plan does too little over eight years. Others see it as a chance to tinker with tax laws. Business groups have long backed bold investment in infrastructure—just not through taxes on their members. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable both strongly oppose the tax hikes.

US hunger crisis persists, especially for kids, older adults (AP) America is starting to claw its way out of the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, but food insecurity persists, especially for children and older adults. Food banks around the U.S. continue giving away far more canned, packaged and fresh provisions than they did before the virus outbreak tossed millions of people out of work, forcing many to seek something to eat for the first time. For those who are now back at work, many are still struggling, paying back rent or trying to rebuild savings. “We have all been through an unimaginable year,” said Brian Greene, CEO of the Houston Food Bank, the network’s largest. It was distributing as much as 1 million pounds of groceries daily at various points during the pandemic last year. America’s yearlong food insecurity crisis has been felt especially sharply by children who lost easy access to free school meals, and older adults who struggled to get groceries or meals at senior centers because they worried about contracting the virus.

Making cities more livable (The Conversation) Across the country, municipalities have countered death during a respiratory pandemic by cutting loose on restrictions when it comes to outdoor dining and recreation, taking parking spaces and streets intended for vehicular use and giving them over to restaurants and repurposing them as areas to walk through programs designed to open up spaces for city dwellers. While many of these initial attempts were designed to be temporary, many have high approval and will likely stick around. A survey of 130 mayors of cities found that 92 percent had created new spaces for outdoor dining over the course of the pandemic, and 34 percent planned to make these changes permanent. About 40 percent of mayors said they pursued widening sidewalks and adding new bike lanes. Further, 76 percent said they think residents will visit parks and green spaces more frequently than they did before the pandemic, with 70 percent expecting residents to walk more than before and 62 percent to bike more.

Rise of the digital dollar? (WSJ) The first glimpse of research that could eventually lead to a Federal Reserve digital dollar should arrive this fall, according to people working on the effort. Some time in the third quarter, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, working with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will reveal the first stage of a project that could years down the road yield a Fed digital dollar, James Cunha, the Boston Fed’s senior vice president of Secure Payments and FinTech Research, said in an interview last week. The U.S. central bank is one of many around the world considering the introduction of a digital currency. Proponents of the idea say digital currencies would offer faster settlements, cut money-transfer costs or even eliminate them, and may even have benefits for monetary policy. But the Fed hasn’t offered details about what a digital dollar—which some have dubbed Fedcoin—would look like.

France to close schools, ban domestic travel as virus surges (AP) French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday announced a three-week nationwide school closure and a month-long domestic travel ban, as the rapid spread of the virus ramped up pressure on hospitals. It’s a departure from the government’s policy in recent months, which has focused on regionalized restrictions. School closures in particular had been seen as a very last resort. “We’re going to close nursery, elementary and high schools for three weeks,” Macron said, adding that a nationwide 7 p.m.- 6 a.m. curfew will be kept in place. Macron said restrictions already applying in the Paris region and elsewhere will be extended next week to the whole country, for at least one month. Under these restrictions, people are allowed to go outside for leisure, but within a 10-kilometer (6 miles) radius from their homes—and without socializing. Also, most non-essential shops are closed down.

Merkel appeals to Germans to stay home for Easter to stem pandemic third wave (Reuters) Chancellor Angela Merkel appealed to Germans on Thursday to stay at home over Easter and meet fewer people to help curb a third wave of the coronavirus pandemic, as the capital Berlin announced a nighttime ban on gatherings from Friday. “It should be a quiet Easter, with those closest to you, with very reduced contact. I urge you to refrain from all non-essential travel,” Merkel said in a video message, adding this was the only way to help doctors and nurses fight the virus.

Myanmar aid workers arrested, intimidated, hurt, Red Cross says (Reuters) Myanmar Red Cross workers have been arrested, intimidated and injured on the front lines as they tried to treat mounting civilian casualties, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said on Thursday. Myanmar Red Cross teams had provided care for over 2,000 people, a statement said. They have also been targeted. Videos on social media have shown members of the security forces assaulting and abusing medics and in at least one instance shooting up an ambulance. Reuters has not independently verified these videos. The unrest also threatened efforts to contain the COVID-19 epidemic, with testing, tracing and treatment sharply down. “We could be facing a perfect storm in Myanmar where another wave of COVID-19 infections collides with a deepening humanitarian crisis spreading across the entire country,” officials said.

Fake journalist (Foreign Policy/Le Monde) A French journalist who has recently defended the Chinese government’s policy toward the Uyghurs of Xinjiang and its approach to Taiwan does not exist, the French newspaper Le Monde reports. Laurène Beaumond claims to be a French expat who previously lived in Xinjiang in recent op-eds published on the Chinese international broadcaster CGTN’s French language site. In one post, dated March 28, Beaumond slammed a recent campaign by Western firms to boycott cotton from Xinjiang. Le Monde asserts the author is a fake, based on her name not appearing in any records kept by a French government commission that distributes identity cards to journalists, despite her claim to have worked in French newsrooms in the past. A cursory search by FP could unearth no record of the journalist either. If the author cannot be verified, it will provoke awkward questions for CGTN. The broadcaster only gained approval to operate in France in early March after being banned in the United Kingdom.

Hong Kong court finds veteran pro-democracy activists guilty of unauthorized assembly (Washington Post) Several veteran Hong Kong pro-democracy activists, most over 60, were convicted Thursday for unlawful assembly and now face years in jail, as the dragnet closes around almost the entirety of the city’s opposition. The seven convicted include Martin Lee, an 82-year-old barrister who helped launch Hong Kong’s main opposition party in the 1990s, and Lee Cheuk-yan, 64, who backed the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and helped organize a yearly vigil for it in the city. Two others had already pleaded guilty. Their ability to live freely and continue their activism has for years been a bellwether of Hong Kong’s relative autonomy from mainland China, which Beijing has moved to crush with staggering speed and intensity. The activists, some of whom are former legislators, face up to five years in prison. Many are also defendants in other cases, including media tycoon Jimmy Lai, who has also been charged under Beijing’s new national security law and denied bail.

Imprisoned Palestinian leader’s entry shakes up planned vote (AP) A popular Palestinian leader imprisoned by Israel has registered his own parliamentary list in May elections, his supporters said Wednesday, in a last-minute shakeup that could severely weaken President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party and help its militant Hamas rivals. Marwan Barghouti’s wife, Fadwa, registered the list hours before the deadline set by the election commission. Polls indicate it would split the vote for Fatah, potentially paving the way for another major victory by Hamas. That increases the likelihood that Abbas will find a way to call off the first Palestinian elections in 15 years. Barghouti, 61, a former Fatah militant commander, is serving five life sentences in Israel following a 2004 terrorism conviction. But he remains a popular and charismatic leader, and by breaking with Abbas he could reshape Palestinian politics and potentially replace him as president. His entry reflects growing frustration with Abbas, who has presided over an increasingly authoritarian and unpopular Palestinian Authority that has failed to achieve national unity or advance Palestinian hopes for an independent state.

The Suez Canal ship is free, but the shipping industry’s ‘humanitarian crisis’ isn’t over (NYT) For nearly a week, the world was fixated on the spectacle of a mammoth cargo carrier blocking the Suez Canal, causing billions of dollars of damage to the global economy with every passing day. It was a surreal experience for advocates who have spent the past year desperately trying to draw attention to the hundreds of thousands of mariners who are stranded on container ships due to the pandemic, creating what has been described as a “humanitarian crisis at sea.” While more than 90 percent of all goods used worldwide are transported by ship, few consumers stop to think about the lengthy ocean voyage involved, or the plight of seafarers who go months or years without seeing their families to make that possible. The crisis in the canal forced the world’s attention on ships that despite their massive size are often all but invisible, suddenly making plain, and impossible to ignore, the extent to which global trade relies on vessels like the Ever Given and their crews, who predominantly come from developing nations. “Hero is a strong word, but they really have kept society moving for the past 13 months,” said Stephen Cotton, the general secretary of the International Transport Workers’ Federation, which represents seafarers worldwide.

Famine Stalks Yemen, as War Drags On and Foreign Aid Wanes (NYT) Six years into a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, shattered the country and battered much of its infrastructure, Yemen faces rising rates of hunger that have created pockets of famine that aid groups warn are likely to grow, leaving even more malnourished Yemenis vulnerable to disease and starvation. The war has led to chronic food shortages in what was already the Arab world’s poorest country. A widespread famine was averted in 2018 only by a large influx of foreign aid. But the threat is greater this time, aid groups say, as the war grinds on, families grow poorer and the coronavirus pandemic has left donor nations more focused on their own people. “The famine is on a worsening trajectory,” said David Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Program, in an interview after returning recently from Yemen. “Our biggest problem now is lack of money—and the war. Six years of war has completely devastated the people in every respect.” Nearly half of Yemen’s population, 13.5 million people, are struggling to get enough food, according to the United Nations. That number is expected to rise by nearly three million by the end of June, largely because funding shortfalls have reduced how many people aid agencies can feed.

Bees, landmines, and drones (BBC) There are an estimated 80,000 landmines in Bosnia and Herzegovina and another 30,000 in Croatia, and clearing them is an exhausting, long-term effort that will take decades. In the past, researchers have been able to train bees to detect landmines, accomplishing this by getting the bees to associate the smell of TNT with sugary food. The bees are trained to cluster near places where mines are buried, and the efforts have been active for years. A new process brings drones and video equipment into the mix, allowing computer analysis of digital test footage to track the locations of bees with something like 80 percent accuracy, according to a recently published paper describing the algorithm.

[billyagogo]

Hillary in Midair

New Post has been published on https://newsprofixpro.com/moxie/2021/02/11/hillary-in-midair/

Hillary in Midair

Photo: Douglas Friedman/Trunk Archive

For four years, Hillary Rodham Clinton flew around the world as President Barack Obama’s secretary of State, while her husband, the former president Bill Clinton, lived a parallel life of speeches and conferences in other hemispheres. They communicated almost entirely by phone. They were seldom on the same continent, let alone in the same house.

But this year, all that has changed: For the first time in decades, neither one is in elected office, or running for one. Both are working in the family business, in the newly renamed nonprofit that once bore only Bill’s name but is now called the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, which will hold its annual conference in New York next week.

“We get to be at home together a lot more now than we used to in the last few years,” says Hillary Clinton. “We have a great time; we laugh at our dogs; we watch stupid movies; we take long walks; we go for a swim.

“You know,” she says, “just ordinary, everyday pleasures.”

In the world of the Clintons, of course, what constitutes ordinary and everyday has never been either. So the question was inevitable: Given who he is, and who she is, does Bill, among their guffaws over the dogs and stupid movies, harangue her daily about running for president?

To this, Hillary Rodham Clinton lets loose one of her loud, head-tilted-back laughs. “I don’t think even he is, you know, focused on that right now,” she says. “Right now, we’re trying to just have the best time we can have doin’ what we’re doin’. ”

There’s a weightlessness about Hillary Clinton these days. She’s in midair, launched from the State Department toward … what? For the first time since 1992, unencumbered by the demands of a national political campaign or public office, she is saddled only with expectations about what she’s going to do next. And she is clearly enjoying it.

“It feels great,” she says, “because I have been on this high wire for twenty years, and I was really yearning to just have more control over my time and my life, spend a lot of that time with my family and my friends, do things that I find relaxing and enjoyable, and return to the work that I had done for most of my life.”

Relaxing, for a Clinton, especially one who, should she decide to run, is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in 2016, does not seem exactly restful. The day before we speak, she was awarded the Liberty Medal by the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia—presented by Jeb Bush, another politician weighted with dynastic expectations and family intrigue, who took the opportunity to jest that both he and Clinton cared deeply about Americans—especially those in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

Afterward, Clinton stepped backstage, a red-white-and-blue ribbon around her neck pulled taut by a saucer-size gold medal. “It is really heavy,” she said, with that plain-home midwestern tone she deploys when she wants to not appear the heavy herself. In the room with her were some of her close advisers—Nick Merrill, a communications staffer and acolyte of Hillary’s suffering top aide, Huma Abedin; and Dan Schwerin, the 31-year-old speechwriter who wrote all the words she had spoken moments ago. Local policemen with whom Clinton had posed for photos milled about behind her.

Outside was the usual chorus accompanying a Clinton appearance, befitting her status as the most popular Democrat in America: news helicopters buzzing overhead and protesters amassed across the street who raised signs that read benghazi in bloodred paint and chanted antiwar slogans directly at her as she spoke at the outdoor lectern.

Though she was officially out of the government, it was not as if she could leave it, even if she wanted to. That week Clinton had met with Obama in the White House to discuss the ongoing Syria crisis, and now Obama was on TV that very evening announcing a diplomatic reprieve from a missile attack on Syria—a series of decisions that Clinton had lent her support to every step of the way. “I’ve been down this road with them,” she tells me the next day. “I know how challenging it is to ever get [the Russians] to a ‘yes’ that they actually execute on, but it can be done. I think we have to push hard.”

Clinton has taken a press hiatus since she left the State Department in January—“I’ve been successful at avoiding you ­people for many months now!” she says, laughing. She is tentative and careful, tiptoeing into every question, keenly aware that the lines she speaks will be read between. In our interview, she emphasizes her “personal friendship” with Obama, with whom she had developed a kind of bond of pragmatism and respect—one based on shared goals, both political and strategic. “I feel comfortable raising issues with him,” she says. “I had a very positive set of interactions, even when I disagreed, which obviously occurred, because obviously I have my own opinions, my own views.”

Hillary Clinton receiving the Liberty Medal in Philadelphia, September 10. Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine

The killing of bin Laden, she says, was a bonding experience. Obama’s Cabinet had been split on whether to attempt the mission, but Clinton backed it and sweated out the decision with the commander-in-chief. “I’ve seen the president in a lot of intense and difficult settings,” she says, “and I’ve watched him make hard decisions. Obviously, talking to you on September 11 as we are, the bin Laden decision-making process is certainly at the forefront of my mind.”

The statement cuts two ways—praise for her president and evidence of her deep experience in and around the Oval Office—including the most successful military endeavor of the Obama presidency. As a Cabinet member, she says, “I’ve had a unique, close, and personal front-row seat. And I think these last four years have certainly deepened and broadened my understanding of the challenges and the opportunities that we face in the world today.”

Political campaigns are built of personal narratives—and it works much better if the stories are true. The current arc of Hillary’s story is one of transformation. Being secretary of State was more than a job. Her closest aides describe the experience as a kind of cleansing event, drawing a sharp line between the present and her multiple pasts—as First Lady, later as the Democratic front-runner in 2008, derailed by the transformative campaign of Barack Obama but also by a dysfunctional staff, the campaign-trail intrusions of her husband, and the inherent weaknesses of the fractious, bickering American institution that has become known as Clintonworld.

At State, she was the head of a smoothly running 70,000-person institution, and fully her own woman, whose marriage to a former president was, when it was mentioned, purely an asset. And now that she’s left State, Clintonworld is being refashioned along new lines, rationalized and harmonized. The signal event of this is the refurbishing of the Clinton Foundation, formerly Bill’s province, to accommodate all three Clintons, with Chelsea, newly elevated, playing a leading role. The move has ruffled certain Clintonworld feathers—a front-page article in the New York Times about the financial travails of the foundation as managed by Bill Clinton brought sharp pushback—but most of those close to the Clintons acknowledge that to succeed in the coming years, Hillary will have to absorb the lessons of 2008. Currently, it’s a topline talking point among her closest aides.

“She doesn’t repeat her mistakes,” says Melanne Verveer, an aide to the First Lady who then served in the State Department as Hillary’s ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues. “She really learns from her mistakes. It’s like, you want to grow a best practice and then always operate on that. She analyzes, ‘What went wrong here?’ ”

Of course, if Hillary’s future were to be an author, or a pundit, or a retiree, learning from mistakes wouldn’t be an issue. But other outcomes, where executive talents are prized, seem more likely. I ask Clinton the question that trails her like a thought bubble: Does she wrestle with running for president?

“I do,” she says, “but I’m both pragmatic and realistic. I think I have a pretty good idea of the political and governmental challenges that are facing our leaders, and I’ll do whatever I can from whatever position I find myself in to advocate for the values and the policies I think are right for the country. I will just continue to weigh what the factors are that would influence me making a decision one way or the other.”

Clintonworld, however, speaks with many voices­—albeit many of them not for attribution. Some of her close confidants, including many people with whom her own staff put me in touch, are far less circumspect than she is. “She’s running, but she doesn’t know it yet,” one such person put it to me. “It’s just like a force of history. It’s inexorable, it’s gravitational. I think she actually believes she has more say in it than she actually does.”

And a longtime friend concurs. “She’s doing a very Clintonian thing. In her mind, she’s running for it, and she’s also convinced herself she hasn’t made up her mind. She’s going to run for president. It’s a foregone conclusion.”

When president-elect Barack Obama asked Clinton to be secretary of State, they had a series of private conversations about her role for the next four years. What would the job entail? How much power would she have? How would it be managed?

Or to restate the questions as they were understood by everyone involved in the negotiation: What would Hillary Clinton get in return for supporting Obama after the brutal primary and helping him defeat John McCain?

Though she had ended her losing campaign on a triumphal note, gracefully accepting the role of secretary of State and agreeing to be a trouble-free team player in Obama’s Cabinet, the 2008 primary loss left deep wounds to her core staff—at least among those members who had not been excommunicated. They would discuss what happened during long trips to Asia and Europe, sounding like post-traumatic-stress victims. “The experience was very searing for them, and they would go through it with great detail,” says a former State Department colleague.

Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine

The problems of that campaign were crucial to how Clinton would decide to lead the State Department. In accepting the State job, Clinton insisted on hiring her own staff. In addition to her top aides, Huma Abedin and Philippe Reines, she enlisted stalwarts of campaigns and administrations past: Maggie Williams, Cheryl Mills, and Verveer, who have been with her since her days in Bill Clinton’s White House. Among Hillary’s inner circle, this is viewed as a returning lineup of all-stars who were iced out of her campaign by a five-person team led by Patti Solis-Doyle, a group who in their telling became the agents of the campaign’s troubles. “They’re the A-team,” says a top aide. “They weren’t the B-team that got elevated. They were the A-team that got deposed by [Solis-Doyle].”

The 2008 campaign was seen by many as an echo chamber, closed off from the best advice, and the lesson for Clinton was clear: “The takeaway is, ‘Don’t only listen to five people,’ ” says the aide.

When she arrived, Clinton did a kind of institutional listening tour at the State Department. “She felt like she was too closed off from what was happening across the expanse of the [2008] campaign,” says a close aide at the State Department, “and that became a hallmark with the leadership in the State Department, and it served her incredibly well.”

To keep things operating smoothly, she hired Tom Nides, the COO of Morgan Stanley, who’d contributed heavily to Clinton’s past campaigns. Even Nides was wary of the Clinton drama he might be stepping into. “I had heard all these stories about the Clinton world and what all that meant and ‘Did you really want to get wrapped up in that?’ ” he says. But he reports that “all of the stuff did not exist at the State Department for the last four years.

“The relationship between the State Department and the White House and the State Department and the Defense Department was probably the best it’s ever been in 50 years,” he adds. “That starts from the top. No drama. And that was started by her.”

Among Hillary Clinton’s greatest hits at State were the new focus on Asia, pushing for the overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, and building a coalition for strong sanctions against Iran. But she also saw the job as a kind of reformatting of the State Department itself to prepare for the longer-run issues. “I’d been told that it was a choice that had to be made: You could either do what had to be done around the world, or you could organize and focus the work that was done inside State and the Agency for International Development, but I rejected that,” says Clinton. “I thought it was essential that as we restore America’s standing in the world and strengthen our global leadership again, we needed what I took to calling ‘smart power’ to elevate American diplomacy and development and reposition them for the 21st century … That meant that we had to take a hard look at how both State and A.I.D. operated. I did work to increase their funding after a very difficult period when they were political footballs to some extent and they didn’t have the resources to do what was demanded of them.”

Clinton’s State team argues that Clinton was a great stateswoman, her ambition to touch down in as many countries as possible a meter of how much repair work she did to the nation’s image abroad. Along the way, she embraced with good humor a parody Tumblr account, Texts From Hillary, that featured a picture of her in the iconic sunglasses looking cool and queenly. “She insisted on having a personality,” says Jake Sullivan, her former deputy chief of staff and now the national-security adviser to Vice-President Joe Biden. “And on stating her opinion.”

For foreign-policy critics, some of this could look like wheel spinning. The major critique was that she didn’t take on any big issues, like brokering peace between Israel and the Palestinians, or negotiating the nuclear disarmament of North Korea. And the suspicion was that she didn’t want to be associated with any big failures as she prepared for 2016. She was, after all, under the tight grip of the Obama White House, which directed major foreign-policy decisions from the Oval Office.

“Whatever one says about how [Secretary of State] John Kerry is doing,” says the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, “he has nothing left to lose. You can see he takes risks. He’s plowing into the Middle East stuff when people are saying this isn’t going to get you anywhere. Hillary never would have done any of this stuff.”

Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine

Her former staffers argue that she managed a host of important, if underrecognized, global flare-ups along the way, from freeing a dissident in China to brokering the easing of sanctions against Burma. “She helped avert a second war in Gaza by going out and pulling off that cease-fire,” recalls Sullivan of the deal she hashed out between Israel and Hamas after a week of fighting, “which holds to this day. And you don’t get a lot of credit for preventing something. Those are things that you aren’t going to measure how successful they are for another ten or twenty years.”

At the same time, Hillary used her tenure at State for a more intimate purpose: to shift the balance of power in the most celebrated political marriage in American history. Bill Clinton was an overwhelming force in Hillary’s 2008 campaign, instrumental in vouching for Mark Penn, the strategist whose idea it was for Hillary to cling to her war vote on Iraq and to sell her as an iron-sided insider whose experience outweighed the need to project mere humanity. Bill also freelanced his own negative attacks, some of which backfired. Because his staff was not coordinating with Hillary’s, her staff came to regard him as a wild card who couldn’t be managed.

But not in the State Department. “Not a presence,” says a close State aide. “And I don’t mean that just literally. But not someone who was built into the system in any way. He had a very minimal presence in her time at the State Department.

“It’s kind of jarring when she says ‘Bill,’ ” this person adds, recalling meetings with Hillary Clinton. “Well, who’s Bill? And then you realize that she’s talking about her husband. It happened so infrequently that you were kind of like, Oh, the president.”

Part of it, of course, was logistical. Though they spoke frequently by phone, Bill and Hillary were rarely in the same country. By chance, their paths crossed in Bogotá, where they had dinner together—then, owing to their massive entourages, returned to their respective hotels. “Love conquers all except logistics,” says an aide.

“I could probably count on one hand the times she came to a meeting and either invoked his name or suggested something that Bill had said,” says Nides. “I probably did it more about my wife telling me what to do.”

Hillary might have left the State Department unsullied by controversy if not for the Benghazi episode, in which the ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and three other consulate staffers were killed in an attack on the U.S. consulate. The NATO intervention in Libya was the most important foreign intervention of her tenure, and a seemingly successful one, but the lack of security in Benghazi and the confusion over how the incident occurred set off a heated Republican attack on Clinton’s handling of the disaster, and she was roasted on the cable-news spit for weeks. In January, she took responsibility for the deaths of the four Americans before Congress—while also questioning her inquisition, snapping at a Republican congressman, “What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.”

Benghazi will be the go-to bludgeon for Republicans if and when Clinton tries using her experience at State to run for president. It is a reminder that Clinton, despite the cool, centrist façade she has developed in the past four years, is only a misstep away from being a target of partisan rage once again.

Regardless of the facts, Republicans are liable to use Benghazi as a wedge to pry back her stately exterior, goading her into an outburst, once again revealing the polarizing figure who saw vast right-wing conspiracies and tried ginning up government health care against the political tides of Newt Gingrich.

When asked for her prescription for partisan gridlock, Clinton sees an opportunity not unlike what Obama saw in 2008. ­“People are stereotypes, they are caricaturized,” says Clinton. “It comes from both sides of the political aisle, it comes from the press. It’s all about conflict, it’s all about personality, and there are huge stakes in the policies that are being debated, and I think there’s a hunger amongst a very significant, maybe even a critical mass of Americans, clustered on the left, right, and center, to have an adult conversation about how we’re going to solve these problems … but it’s not for the fainthearted.” For now, Hillary’s strategy is to sail above these conflicts, mostly by saying nothing to inflame them. “I have a lot of reason to believe, as we saw in the 2012 election, most Americans don’t agree with the extremists on any side of an issue,” says Clinton, “but there needs to continue to be an effort to find common ground, or even take it to higher ground on behalf of the future.”

At the Sheraton Ballroom in Chicago last spring, Bill Clinton appeared before an eager crowd of Clinton groupies at the Clinton Global Initiative America, a special conference focused on domestic issues and set in Hillary’s hometown. Onstage, the former president looked older than in the past—thinner, stooped, more subdued, his hands trembling while he held his notes at the podium. Haloed in blue light, he spoke about the “still embattled American Dream” and then introduced his wife as his new partner in the foundation, the woman who “taught me everything I know about NGOs.”

Her appearance made for a stark contrast. When she emerged from behind the curtain, she appeared much more youthful—smiling, upright, beaming in a turquoise pantsuit; she received huge applause and a standing ovation that dwarfed the response to Bill.

On her first major public stage since leaving the State Department, Hillary told the crowd that the foundation will be a “full partnership between the three of us,” including her daughter, Chelsea. But this was clearly Hillary Clinton’s show. That week, she had launched her Twitter account, complete with a tongue-in-cheek description of her as a “glass ceiling cracker,” her future “TBD.” Clearly, her foundation work, as important as it is to her, wasn’t everything. And Chicago was a perfect site for the start of this new chapter. It was where she was from, the launchpad for her career in politics and early-childhood education and women’s empowerment, what she called the “great unfinished business of this century.” “When women participate in politics,” she said, “it ripples out to the entire society … Women are the world’s most underused resource.”

If you wanted to read her speech as an opening salvo for a 2016 run for the presidency, it wasn’t hard to do as she talked about all that she’d learned as she traveled the globe. Whatever country or situation they found themselves in, “what people wanted was a good job.”

The rechristening of the foundation marked the first time the Clintons had come under the same institutional roof since the nineties. For Hillary, it made sense, because she didn’t have to compete with her husband for donors at her own foundation. It would also allow her to warm up donors for future initiatives—like, just for instance, a 2016 campaign. Two days later, the family would appear together onstage, a picture-perfect photo op of what Bill Clinton called “our little family.”

The Clinton Global Initiative, in addition to its work combating poverty and aids, is a kind of unofficial Clinton-alumni reunion, with friends and donors dating back to the early years in Arkansas. Sprinkled around the ballroom in Chicago were the old hands, from Bruce Lindsey, the former deputy White House counsel and CEO of the foundation, to newer faces like J. B. Pritzker, the Chicago hotel scion who was national co-chair of Hillary’s 2008 campaign and was now raising $20 million for an early-childhood-education initiative.

The Clinton network has always been both an asset and a burden. Terry ­McAuliffe, the longtime Clinton ally now running for governor of Virginia, has raised millions for the Clintons at every juncture of their careers. Then again, he’s Terry McAuliffe, the guy who left his weeping wife and newborn child in the car while he collected $1 million at a fund-raiser, then wrote about it in a memoir. “You can’t change who these people are,” says one former Hillary adviser. “It’s like any other trade. You’ve got the good, and there’s a lot of good. And you’ve got the noise.”

To harness some of the noise—what some Clinton people called “the energy”—a faction has converged around the Ready for Hillary super-PAC started by a former 2008 campaign aide named Adam Parkhomenko. Launched early this year, it has appeared to many observers to be an informal satellite of Hillary’s larger designs for the White House, but her aides say it’s a rogue operation of questionable benefit. “There is nothing they are doing that couldn’t have waited a year,” says one. “Not a single fucking thing.”

Regardless, Clinton veterans like former campaign strategist James Carville have come out supporting the super-PAC, as has former White House political director Craig Smith, Bill’s old Arkansas pal. Supporters argue that the super-PAC has Hillary’s tacit approval, especially given the involvement of Susie Tompkins Buell, a prominent Democratic donor who is among her oldest and closest friends. “It offers supporters the all-important link to click on, plus places to convene in both the digital and physical worlds,” says Tracy Sefl, an adviser to the super-PAC. “And although some perhaps just can’t quite believe it, Ready for Hillary’s name really does convey the totality of its purpose.”

One supporter of the super-PAC, who didn’t want to be identified, acknowledges that “there’s a danger there of her again becoming the front-runner. And, too, the existence of it raises her profile and puts more pressure on her to make a decision earlier than she might otherwise want to make.”

On some level, the network is almost impossible to control—Clintonworld is bigger than just the Clintons. “People do things in their name, or say they just talked to Hillary or to Bill, and the next thing you know, they’re doing something stupid,” says a former aide of Hillary’s whose interview she sanctioned. “You take the good with the bad. Hopefully, the good outweighs the bad.”

The biggest question among Hillary’s circle concerns Huma Abedin, currently chief of Hillary’s “transition office” and formerly her deputy chief of staff in the State Department. Abedin began as an intern for the First Lady in 1996, when she was 20 years old, and is, of course, married to former congressman and mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, of sexting infamy.

In the midst of her husband’s scandal, Abedin stepped down from her full-time job for a consulting contract and moved back to New York to take work with Teneo Holdings, a consulting firm and investment bank run by Bill Clinton’s longtime consigliere, Doug Band. This gave Hillary cover while also keeping Abedin plugged in. “It’s business as usual,” says a Clinton insider. “Keep your circle of advisers small, and then you structure things in a way that makes it economically possible for your close advisers to sustain themselves.”

But business as usual can be a giant target for enemies: Abedin has since become the subject of an inquiry, by a Republican congressman, into her dual consulting roles, looking for potential conflicts of interest while she served in a sensitive role in the administration. Then came a second episode of Weiner’s sexting this summer, blindsiding the Clintons, obliterating Weiner’s mayoral ambitions, and greatly complicating Abedin’s future with the Clintons. With Weiner’s ignominious loss and parting bird-flip, “Huma has a choice to make,” says a close associate of hers. “Does she go with Anthony, or does she go with Hillary?”

Leaving the Clinton bubble is almost unimaginable for those who’ve grown up in it. According to a person familiar with the conversations, Abedin has struggled to reconcile her marriage to Weiner with her role as Clinton’s top aide, traumatized by the prospect of leaving her boss’s inner circle.

In a sense, the Weiner scandal is a ghost of Clintonworld past, summoning sordid images of unruly appetites and bimbo eruptions, exactly the sort of thing that needs to be walled off and excised in a 2016 campaign. Former advisers from State say any future campaign will take a page from Clinton’s relatively peaceful past four years. “In contrast with reports of disunity in the 2008 campaign,” says Kurt Campbell, “the State Department was operated with a high degree of harmony and collegiality.”

The secret to realigning Clintonworld has been there all along. Since she received her master’s from Oxford in 2003, Chelsea Clinton had tried out different career paths, first in business consulting at McKinsey & Co., then at a hedge fund run by donors to her parents, and finally as a correspondent on NBC, with a few university postings sprinkled in. Chelsea has grown up in the Clinton bubble, the princess of Clintonworld, and getting outside of it has sometimes been difficult. She tried her hand at developing her “brand” on TV, but then, two years ago, stepped in and took over her father’s foundation, a return to the fold that portended a lot of changes. She became vice-chairman of the board. The foundation hired white-shoe law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett to perform an audit and review of the foundation’s finances and operations. And this summer, she installed a friend from McKinsey, Eric Braverman, as CEO.

Chelsea’s arrival was a clear if unspoken critique of Doug Band, who’d long been Bill Clinton’s gatekeeper in his post-presidential life. In Chelsea’s view, the foundation started by Band had become sprawling and inefficient, threatened by unchecked spending and conflicts of interest, an extension of her father’s woolly style. In 2012, a New York Post story suggested impropriety in Band’s dual role, forcing Clinton to put a bit of distance between himself and Teneo.

In a report this summer, the Times claimed the foundation operated at a deficit and was vulnerable to conflicts of interest related to Teneo Holdings—which telegraphed the message that there was a new sheriff. Chelsea, says a Hillary loyalist, “has taken a chain saw to that organization. She has not allowed these old bubbas to deal with this.”

Naturally, some of Bill Clinton’s staff at the foundation were unhappy with Chelsea’s arrival, especially the decision to include Hillary and Chelsea in the name of it. In a move that suggested intrafamily conflict, Bill Clinton stepped out to defend his comrades, insisting that Bruce Lindsey, the former CEO, who had suffered a stroke in 2011, would continue to be “intimately involved” in the foundation and that he couldn’t have accomplished “half of what I have in my post-presidency without Doug Band.”

Hillary Clinton says her daughter’s entrance into the foundation was an organic extension of everything the Clintons have ever done. “It sort of is in the DNA, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that,” she says. “She’s an incredibly able—obviously I’m biased—but extremely well-organized, results-oriented person, so rather than joining a lot of other groups, on which she could pursue her interests, she thought, I want to be part of continuing to build something I have worked on off and on over the years, and I really believe in it. I was thrilled to hear that.

“She comes by it naturally, don’t you think?” she adds cheerfully.

Chelsea is now the chief Bill Clinton gatekeeper. At HBO, where Martin Scorsese is making a documentary about him, Chelsea has been involved from the start and is weighing in on the production.

As the various staffs of the three Clintons come under one roof, in a headquarters in the Time-Life Building in midtown Manhattan, there are dangers of internecine conflict. “It’s all people jockeying for position,” says a person with close ties to the foundation. “This is an operation that runs on proximity to people. Now there are three people. How does all that work?”

For Bill Clinton to acknowledge flaws in his institute and relinquish control to his daughter and wife was a new twist in the family relationship. People in both Bill’s and Hillary’s camp are quick to emphasize that Bill Clinton is still the lifeblood of the foundation and its social mission. Chelsea’s arrival is ultimately about preserving the foundation for the long term as he gets older and winds down some of his activities. But the subtext of the cleanup operation is no mystery among Clinton people. Bill’s loosey-goosey world had to be straightened out if Hillary was going to run for president. “She doesn’t operate that way,” says one of her former State Department advisers. “I mean, she has all sorts of creative ideas, but that’s not how she operates. She is much more systematic.”

As part of the shifting landscape in Clintonworld, Bill Clinton got a new chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, one of the group of African-American women—including Maggie Williams and Donna Brazile—who have been close advisers to the Clintons over the years. A former policy aide at the American Federation of Teachers, Flournoy’s arrival last January was viewed by insiders as Hillary’s planting a sentinel at the office of her husband.

Bill Clinton is also a legendary politician, a brilliant tactician who won two presidential elections and reigned over the most prosperous years in America in recent memory. Some make the argument that he single-handedly won Obama reelection with his extraordinary takedown of Mitt Romney at the Democratic National Convention last year. The trick, say Clinton advocates, is to manage him effectively on behalf of his wife. “To the discredit of whoever is running a campaign, if that happens and they don’t use Bill Clinton—use his strategy, use his thoughts, take his dumb ideas and his great ideas and make sure they’re used effectively—they’re a moron,” says a person close to Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps this is where Chelsea comes in. After years of expectation, she has emerged from her chrysalis, a new power center, her father’s keeper and, maybe for Hillary … a shadow campaign manager.

In Clintonworld, wheels are turning, but no one wants them to turn too fast. Last spring, in a panel discussion at the Peterson Institute, Bill Clinton blew up, telling people to stop speculating on her presidential aspirations. It was too soon. Says Nides, “If you have every person you know say to you the following: ‘You should run for president, Madam Secretary, I love you, Madam Secretary, you’d be a great president, Madam Secretary,’ she nods. And she understands the context of that.”

Hillary is well aware of these dynamics. “I’m not in any hurry,” she tells me. “I think it’s a serious decision, not to be made lightly, but it’s also not one that has to be made soon.

“This election is more than three years away, and I just don’t think it’s good for the country,” she says. “It’s like when you meet somebody at a party and they look over your shoulder to see who else is there, and you want to talk to them about something that’s really important; in fact, maybe you came to the party to talk to that particular person, and they just want to know what’s next,” she says. “I feel like that’s our political process right now. I just don’t think it is good.”

So all the activity and planning and obsessive calculation that go into a presidential campaign take place behind a pleasant midwestern smile. Her time at State indeed transformed her—as did her 2008 campaign, and her time as a senator, and as First Lady, and on and on. Now she contains multitudes, a million contradictions. She’s a polarizing liberal with lots of Republican friends, the coolest of customers constantly at the center of swirling drama. She’s hung up on a decision over whether to run for an office she (not to mention her husband) has coveted for her entire adult life. She’s a Clinton. And what a candidate she’d make in 2016. But if that’s where she’s going, she’s not saying. “I’m somebody who gets up every day and says, ‘What am I going to do today, and how am I going to do it?’ ” she says. “I think it moves me toward some outcome I’m hoping for and also has some, you know, some joy attached to it. And I think it would be great if everybody else [took the same approach], for the foreseeable future.”

Of Hillary’s dreams, that one seems unlikely to come true.

Hillary in Midair

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[freenewstoday]

New Post has been published on https://freenews.today/2021/02/07/haiti-braces-for-unrest-as-president-refuses-to-step-down/

Haiti Braces for Unrest as President Refuses to Step Down

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The poor now target the poor in Haiti. Many fear leaving their homes, buying groceries or paying a bus fare — acts that can draw the attention of gangs out to kidnap anyone with cash, no matter how little.

Many schools shut their doors this month, not over Covid-19, but to protect students and teachers against a kidnapping-for-ransom epidemic that began haunting the nation a year ago. No one is spared: not nuns, priests or the children of struggling street vendors. Students now organize fund-raisers to collect ransoms to free classmates.

Their hardship may only worsen as Haiti hurtles toward a constitutional crisis. The opposition is demanding that President Jovenel Moïse step down on Sunday in a political showdown likely only to deepen the country’s paralysis and unrest.

After years enduring hunger, poverty and daily power cuts, Haitians say their country, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, is in the worst state it has ever seen, with the government unable to provide the most basic services.

Haiti is “on the verge of explosion,” a collection of the country’s Episcopal bishops said in a statement last weekend.

Mr. Moïse’s five-year presidential term ends on Sunday, which is why the opposition is demanding that he step down. But the president is refusing to vacate office before February 2022, arguing that an interim government occupied the first year of his five-year term.

On Friday, the United States government weighed in — an important opinion for many Haitians, who often look to their larger neighbor for guidance on the direction the political winds are blowing.

A State Department spokesman, Ned Price, supported Mr. Moïse’s argument that his term ends next February and added that only then “a new elected president should succeed President Moïse.”

But Mr. Price also sent a warning to Mr. Moïse about delaying elections and ruling by decree.

“The Haitian people deserve the opportunity to elect their leaders and restore Haiti’s democratic institutions,” Mr. Price added.

Mr. Moïse has led by presidential decree since last year, after suspending two-thirds of the Senate, the entire lower Chamber of Deputies and every mayor throughout the country. Haiti now has only 11 elected officials in office to represent its 11 million people, with Mr. Moïse having refused to hold any elections over the last four years.

Mr. Moïse is seeking to expand his presidential powers in the coming months by changing the country’s Constitution. A referendum on the new Constitution is set for April, and the opposition fears the vote will not be free or fair and will only embolden his budding authoritarian tendencies, assertions Mr. Moïse denies.

André Michel, 44, a leader of the opposition coalition, the Democratic and Popular Sector, vowed that if the president did not step down, the opposition would stage more protests and engage in civil disobedience.

“There is no debate,” he said. “His mandate is over.”

The opposition hopes to tap into the discontent of the millions of unemployed Haitians — more than 60 percent of the country lives in poverty — to fuel the protests, which in the past have often turned violent and shut down large parts of the country.

Although the president has never been weaker — holed up inside the presidential palace, he is unable to move freely even in the capital — observers say he has a good chance of staying on the job. A weak and feeble opposition is plagued by infighting and cannot agree on how to remove Mr. Moïse from power or whom to replace him with.

The political uncertainty has sowed feelings of dread, with fears that street demonstrations in coming days will turn violent and that a refusal by Mr. Moïse to leave office will plunge the country into a long period of unrest.

Zamor, a 57-year-old driver who would give only his middle name because of fears of retribution, said his daughter was snatched off the street in Port-au-Prince, the capital, last month. He now keeps his three children at home and prevents them from attending school.

“People need to have confidence in the state,” Zamor said, adding the government “is filled with kidnappers and gang members.”

Before the kidnapping epidemic, Haitians could listen to music with their neighbors on the street, play dominoes, go to the beach and commiserate with friends and neighbors about their economic despair. But now the fear of being abducted pervades the streets, hindering routine daily activities.

“The regime has delegated power to the bandits,” said Pierre Espérance, 57, a leading human rights activist.

“The country is now gangsterized — what we are living is worse than during the dictatorship,” he said, referring to the brutal autocratic rule of the Duvalier family that lasted nearly 30 years, until 1986.

Haitians suspect that the proliferation of gangs over the last two years has been supported by Mr. Moïse to stifle any dissent. At first, the gangs targeted opposition neighborhoods and attacked protests demanding better living conditions. But the gangs may have grown too big to be tamed and now seem to operate everywhere.

In December, the United States Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Mr. Moïse’s close allies — including the former director general of the interior ministry — for providing political protection and weapons to gangs that targeted opposition areas.

The sanctions highlighted a five-day attack last May that terrorized neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince. The Treasury Department said that gang members, with the cover and support of government officials, raped women and set houses on fire.

The government denies providing support to any gangs.

Tourism has ground to a halt, and the vast Haitian diaspora in the United States and elsewhere is staying away from the country.

“Things have gotten more and more difficult since the arrival of Jovenel Moïse,” said Marvens Pierre, 28, a craftsman trying to sell souvenirs in a public square in the capital.

He had entrusted his two young children to his mother because she was receiving remittances from abroad and could afford to feed them. He said he was finding it difficult to sell his products.

“I can easily spend two weeks without being able to sell my stuff,” Mr. Pierre lamented. “This morning I had to ask a neighbor for her soap to bathe.”

Harold Isaac and Andre Paultre reported from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and Maria Abi-Habib from Mexico City. Kirk Semple contributed reporting from Mexico City.

Source

[northamptoncouplestherapy]

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's this - humans need each other. Even those of us who enjoy alone time and appreciate life's current slower-paced version will agree, being confined to a mere handful of face-to-face connections 24 hours a day, seven days a week, is not optimal.

Our prevailing human need to connect during a global crisis has launched the innovative concept of a Pod –– doing life with a select group of people (without masks and social-distancing). The Pod has undoubtedly been a saving grace for many neighborhoods and communities worldwide these past several months.

But with summer's departure and the weather growing colder, we must navigate a myriad of new (and unknown) variables, including flu season, school reopenings, and an increased need to be indoors. Collectively, these challenges have the potential to influence both our health and hearts. How do we measure the risks and gains in each potential scenario? How do we negotiate and have honest communication with friends and family concerning social distancing ––find the sweet spot between connected and safe?

For guidance on how to do the Pod-life well, we'll invite some leading couple therapy models and researchers to be our mentors. As a couples therapist who utilizes these methods regularly, I'm confident we can apply segments of these approaches to foster a viable and indispensable Pod experience. Which may be the exact antidote we need in this ever-changing world.

A Step-by-Step Guide to mastering life within the Pod

1. Create a Contract

Many people fail to explicitly discuss what constitutes the bulk of everyday relational life with friends and family. How often do we do things like getting together for coffee or texting or merely checking-in? How do we best communicate our news or accomplishments or plain-old, regular days - phone, Instagram, or in-person? And, how do we reach out for support when we're really struggling?

Stan Tatkin, a relationship guru, encourages us to get things out in the open by creating a contract or a list of agreements with the people closest to us. This approach ensures clarity, understanding, and genuineness in the exchange if we are honest about what we need and want.

The brilliant result of both making agreements with one another and keeping our end of the bargain is secure functioning ––feeling seen and known in a mutually supportive way. Secure functioning in the Pod characterizes a safe environment - a refuge - where we live as an interdependent system. From this vantage point, the Pod relationships exist within the governance of our agreements with one another.

Examples of making agreements or a contract with fellow Pod members might include:

Who we agree to spend face-to-face time with

How we commit to wearing masks with anyone other than our agreed-upon individuals

When we will distance ourselves from other Pod-members if we are feeling ill or experiencing problematic symptoms.

Beyond COVID safety and protocols, our contracts might also include how often we gather, where we do so, and what we do when that happens - Games? Gossip? Netflix-binging? We might agree to weekly potlucks (Pod-lucks!) or sharing babysitting with fellow Pod-members so that we can get a break from these days of relentless responsibilities.

Lastly, since your agreement(s) are essential, we encourage you to make it formal. Set a date to meet with your pod-to-be, grab some pens and paper, write up your contract, and have everyone sign it ––even the kids!

Getting clear and keeping agreements will begin the necessary and critical process of building trust within the Pod.

2. Build Trust

Couples therapists assess trust from the start because we know how critical it is to human relationships' sustainability and success. This sentiment also rings true for the Pod concept. Without trust, engagement and collaboration quickly disintegrate ––taking the Pod and its inhabitants down with it.

In John Gottman's Sound Relationship House, we encounter two load-bearing walls essential to a relationship's long-term stability. These walls are commitment and trust.

But how do we cultivate trust within the Pod? According to Gottman, we do this with small things often. Small and incremental steps marked by consistently showing up, keeping your word, and displaying genuine interest in other Pod-members are the ticket to ensuring trust's constructive evolution. The result of this will be a deepened sense of togetherness and collective goodwill.

Gottman terms these occasions of trust-building, sliding door moments - seemingly insignificant flashes of time, pivotal to any relationship's well-being. When we make the deliberate choice to connect, understand, and appreciate one another consistently, we encourage and champion an essential ingredient for any authentic community to thrive.

My all-time favorite job was the role of counselor at an overnight camp in magnificent Alaska (yes, it gets warm there in Summertime!). I worked at this camp for three consecutive years during my late adolescence and fell in love with the people and experiences. I was far from home and didn't see my friends or family for the entirety of my summers. But the camaraderie I encountered with my fellow camp counselors was unforgettable.

People I'd never met and would likely never see again became like family in a very brief time. We spent days together and relied on one another because we were all each other had. Being a camp counselor is fun, but it's also exhausting - working with kids all day and night and being responsible for them 24/7 is no small task. Each of us required unwavering support from our fellow counselors.

We did life together. We were there for each other on our good and bad days. Ultimately, we built trust with one another in a million little ways, and it paid off.

I remember a particularly tricky cabin of campers one summer week. These campers were cute, but they were also loud, pranky, and not good listeners - a perfect formula for counselor burnout. What got me through that week was my "camp family" who listened to me, wrote me encouraging notes, and cheered me on (and cheered with me when the parents picked up those little rascals that long-awaited Saturday morning!).

3. Sign up for vulnerability

Bréne Brown, a prominent researcher in gutsy topics like vulnerability, shame, and courage, describes an anatomy of trust that must be recognized and refined for relationships to succeed. With trust in mind, she handily breaks things down into the acronym, BRAVING.

Boundaries: we respect others boundaries and are clear about our own

Reliability: we can count on each other

Accountability: we take responsibility to make things right when things go awry

The Vault: we only communicate our own experiences and feelings and let others speak for themselves; we keep things confidential for others

Integrity: we are who we say we are; we live according to our values

Non-judgment: we honor our needs and the needs of others without judgment

Generosity: we believe that each member of the Pod is doing the best they can; we give one another the benefit of the doubt

If we value BRAVING within the Pod, we have to choose our foxhole inhabitants wisely from the start. Ask yourself if the Pod-members you're considering are BRAVE people who won't back down when Pod-life goes sideways, or someone gets sick or stops keeping their agreements. Read this list - a recipe for trust - and decide if YOU will be that person, too.

BRAVING is not a task for the faint of heart. This type of commitment requires mega buy-in and an ability to see things through when times get tough. Because let's face it, conflict will arise and when it does, we're going to want to know what to do about it.

4. Prepare for bumps in the road

The final step to getting the hang of Pod-life involves understanding the role of conflict, not eradicating or avoiding it, but to manage it in a beneficial and connective way. Brent Atkinson, the founder of the Pragmatic-Experiential Model (PEX) of couple therapy, prescribes a set of skills needed to react effectively when disagreements arise.

He divides these skills into two parts: the "Openness and Flexibility" Skills and the "Standing Up" Skills.

Within the Openness and Flexibility skills, Atkinson invites us to:

Not jump to conclusions,

Look for something in the other's viewpoint that makes sense,

Identify what needs, values, and worries might be lurking under the surface,

And, assure the person you conflict with that you are keeping a flexible and open mind while asking them to do the same.

And, when the Openness and Flexibility skills don't cut the mustard, we can utilize Atkinson's Standing Up skills, which include:

A non-judgmental stance,

Asking for more open-mindedness and flexibility,

Considering other reasons why the person is upset,

Temporarily distancing yourself,

Not making a big deal that you had to,

Trying again later,

And, if all else fails, refusing to continue "business as usual" until the other is willing to find common ground.

I've had lots of experiences with conflict within community life - both successful and disastrous. The time's conflict has been constructive, and generative has always included all parties' willingness to be open, flexible and gracious collectively. I don't think there's a way around this for authentic connection.

*****

In this COVID climate, we live out our values, and our beliefs differ from one another in a myriad of ways. Some of us haven't been inside a restaurant in over eight months or hugged our mom ––not even once. We haven't gone to a single person's house for a visit. Others have attended indoor weddings, traveled to Disneyworld, and continued life as usual.

To do the Pod-life well, we have to find like-minded people with whom we can build trust, create agreements, practice vulnerability, and effectively manage conflict for the long-haul. Because there isn't an end in sight, now might be the perfect time to consider such a venture.

Couple therapy and relationship models teach us a great deal about how to coexist within a community. Knowing how to generate trust and how to cultivate it once you have it are crucial. Taking the time to discern and create agreements will bypass stress down the road. Moreover, choosing vulnerability with one another will produce the qualities needed to face the inevitable trials and experience the sure-fire joys that life within the Pod will provide even when it's tough.

Click Here for your Discussion Guide - How to form a Pod and keep it going strong

Like what you’ve read? Sign up to receive my musings filled with heart, concrete tools, and cutting edge resources via my blog: Loving Well.

[khalilhumam]

The never-ending political game of Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/the-never-ending-political-game-of-malaysias-mahathir-mohamad/

The never-ending political game of Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad

By Sophie Lemière Former autocrat and self-reinvented democrat Mahathir Mohamad won the 2018 general elections, but less than two years later, the democratic fairy tales ended. In January 2020, under pressure from internal dissenters in his coalition, Mahathir resigned from the government. The old ruling party (United Malay National Organisation, or UMNO) then came back to power in a new political formation. By the end of May 2020, as Mahathir’s political descent continued, he was expelled from the party that he had founded in 2016. Yet the political genius, who turned 95 in July, has not given up and is continuing to mastermind his way back to power. On October 5, in the midst of a continuing drama among political elites, Mahathir made another U-turn, announcing that he might be (again) running for the next general elections. An election due in 2023 could in fact be called as early as 2021. Could Mahathir come back for a 25th year of rule?

A long career in politics

Mahathir ruled over Malaysia for 22 years and resigned in 2003, promising he would never return to politics. Yet the country’s longest serving prime minister never truly left the political scene and continued to express strong opinions through his blog Chedet (a nickname from his school days). He also kept an important role in UMNO, the party he presided over for years and that ruled over Malaysia for 61 years. Mahathir was, and still is, a controversial leader, perceived in the West as an autocrat famous for his anti-Semitic and anti-Western speeches, most recently by fiercely attacking French President Macron and critics of Islam; he is celebrated in other parts of the world for the same reasons. In Malaysia and beyond, Mahathir is a symbol of the country’s economic successes and its rapid development in the 1980s and 1990s. Despite the contentious politics of his time in office, from his criticism of human rights to his extensive use of patronage, Mahathir has kept a very particular place in Malaysia’s history and in the minds of Malaysians. The younger generation of voters not born during his rule see the man as a wise and experienced leader, and they are drawn to his old patriarchal figure. Older generations have changed their mind over his controversial legacy and, by lack of alternatives, praised his comeback. In 2016, in an unexpected turn, Mahathir resigned from UMNO and founded a new party (Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia, or Bersatu) with his son Mukhriz and current Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin. He also allied with the opposition he had repressed under his rule, led by Anwar Ibrahim. Anwar is the leader of the Reformasi movement, which he created in 1998 after having been sacked from Mahathir’s government. He was then imprisoned on charges of corruption and sodomy until 2004. In 2016, the alliance of the two archenemies came as a surprise to most, in a context where Malaysia’s government was under attack for the involvement of its top leaders, including then-Prime Minister Najib Razak, in the world’s largest financial scandal: the 1MDB scandal. Taking advantage of a dramatic political scenario, Mahathir reinvented his narrative to present himself as a political messiah with a democratic agenda, to save Malaysia from “Najib’s kleptocracy.” He promised that, if victorious, he would release the leader of the opposition, Anwar, who had been in jail on new sodomy charges since 2015. A pact was sealed between the two rivals, and Mahathir also agreed to hand over power to Anwar within a few years.

Drama in 2020

In January 2020, power struggles within the ruling coalition — due to Anwar’s eagerness to take over, and Mahathir’s reluctance to let him do so — precipitated what Mahathir coined the “New Malaysia” era to end. The ruling coalition and the entire government collapsed, and with them, Malaysia’s supposed hopes for democracy under Mahathir. His phenomenal narrative did not translate into an effective mode of democratic governance. His political pragmatism did not compensate for his old-fashioned way of rule; nor for the weaknesses of a politically dysmorphic government built on a disparate coalition lacking a clear ideology. While the context of 2018 — characterized by the chaos of the opposition, the pragmatism of desperate leaders, and the frustration of voters — had created a golden opportunity for Mahathir to win that year, these exact same factors (compounded with severe miscalculations and overconfidence) led him to lose power in 2020. In February 2020, after less than two years in power, Mahathir resigned. While Anwar hoped his time had come to take over, the Malaysian king decided otherwise. In March 2020, to end the feud between Anwar and Mahathir, the king unexpectedly appointed a third man to succeed Mahathir: Muhyiddin Yassin. (Malaysia is a parliamentary monarchy, and the king has the constitutional power to appoint the prime minister from within the parliament majority.) Muhyiddin, then the vice president of Bersatu, became prime minister. In early June, Mahathir was sacked from Bersatu, along with four other leaders, including his son Mukhriz. Muhyiddin, co-founder of Bersatu, could not afford another rivalry from within.

What’s next for Malaysia?

Mahathir’s sacking, and the return of UMNO to the government, created new political shifts. After seven months in power, tested by one of the largest pandemics in recent history, Muhyiddin is now in a difficult position, and Malaysia is in a continuing political crisis. Despite relatively sound management of the crisis, Muhyiddin is probably on his way out. His position in the new government coalition (Perikatan Nasional) is relatively weak vis-à-vis the weight and popularity of UMNO, the old ruling party he allied with. Many in the opposition and in his own party are pushing for his resignation and fresh polls. On September 23, Anwar announced he had the parliament majority to unseat Muhyiddin. Mahathir, who created a new party in August — Pejuang, or the Homeland Fighter’s Party — did not support Anwar’s claim. Anwar declared he intended to create a Malay-Muslim government allied with his former enemies UMNO and the Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), despite tensions between these parties and Anwar’s major ally the Chinese Democratic Action Party (DAP). While Anwar’s move created even further instability, Mahathir and other members of parliament took this opportunity to call for a no-confidence vote to be tabled at the next parliamentary session (due November 6). In response, Muyhiddin attempted to declare a state of emergency as a way to block the next parliament session. The Malaysian king opposed Muyhiddin’s demands, calling the shots for the second time this year. Muyhiddin’s fate is now in the hands of his allies, and specifically UMNO leadership. Without UMNO’s support, the government will fall. Muyhiddin has no other choice but to resign before being pushed out; in this climate, an early general election seems unavoidable. As personality politics continue to take center stage, the emergence of a new generation of leaders seems difficult. Former Minister of Sports and Youth Syed Saddiq created his own political entity last month, Muda, the party of youth; but its popularity has yet to materialize. However, Syed is a fervent supporter of Mahathir, and at age 28 he is not prime minister material (at least in the Malaysian context). With his new party, Pejuang, Mahathir hopes to build an alternative to the Anwar-led opposition. However, the multiplication of Malay-based parties risks further splitting the Malay votes; another possibility is a major return to the mothership: UMNO. In an overconfident move, Anwar recently announced he had the support to switch the parliamentary majority in his favor to unseat Muhyiddin, which has deepened the fractures in the opposition. In what looks like political desertion, Anwar’s image as a reformist is cracking, and the democratic mirage of Mahathir is the sole alternative. While some observers have questioned the authenticity of Mahathir’s democratic agenda, Anwar’s new alliances and attempt to overtake the government have proven he is no longer the democrat he once was. Mahathir’s image of wisdom has been reinforced by the distance he took from Anwar’s attempt to bring Muhyiddin down. At the same time, it’s possible that the opposition’s divisions between the eternal rivals Anwar and Mahathir could mean the return of the old party. At 95, Mahathir is keeping up the fight. Though his chances of returning to power are thin, it is not impossible. In some sense, he has already won against the odds by both masterminding a long and twisted political plot, and by re-writing his legacy as a victorious democrat. Like all people, Malaysians have been hit by the pandemic. The economic as well as political recovery will take some time, time that all sides are taking to regroup, strategize, and plot their next political steps. If Mahathir were to be elected again, it would mean a 25th year in power. Mahathir’s political destiny is uncertain, but he still has a few cards in his hands to keep playing this never-ending political game.

[orbemnews]

Why the Suez Canal Is So Important The 120-mile-long artificial waterway known as the Suez Canal has been a potential flash point for geopolitical conflict since it opened in 1869. Now the canal, a vital international shipping passage, is in the news for a different reason: A quarter-mile-long, Japanese-owned container ship en route from China to Europe has been grounded in the canal for days, blocking more than 100 vessels and sending tremors through the world of maritime commerce. Here are some basics on the history of the canal, how it operates, how the vessel got stuck and what it means. Where is the Suez Canal? The canal is in Egypt, connecting Port Said on the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean via the southern Egyptian city of Suez on the Red Sea. The passage enables more direct shipping between Europe and Asia, eliminating the need to circumnavigate Africa and cutting voyage times by days or weeks. The canal is the world’s longest without locks, which connect bodies of water at differing altitudes. With no locks to interrupt traffic, the transit time from end to end averages about 13 to 15 hours, according to a description of the canal by GlobalSecurity.org. Who built the Suez Canal and when? The canal, originally owned by French investors, was conceived when Egypt was under the control of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-19th century. Construction began at the Port Said end in early 1859, the excavation took 10 years, and the project required an estimated 1.5 million workers. According to the Suez Canal Authority, the Egyptian government agency that operates the waterway, 20,000 peasants were drafted every 10 months to help construct the project with “excruciating and poorly compensated labor.” Many workers died of cholera and other diseases. Political tumult in Egypt against the colonial powers of Britain and France slowed progress on the canal, and the final cost was roughly double the initial $50 million projected. Which country controls the canal now? The British powers that controlled the canal through the first two world wars withdrew forces there in 1956 after years of negotiations with Egypt, effectively relinquishing authority to the Egyptian government led by President Gamal Abdel Nasser. What was the ‘Suez Crisis’ that nearly led to war? The crisis began in 1956 when Egypt’s president nationalized the canal after the British had departed. He took other steps that were deemed security threats by Israel and its Western allies, leading to a military intervention by Israeli, British and French forces. The crisis briefly closed the canal and raised the risk of entangling the Soviet Union and the United States. It ended in early 1957 under an agreement supervised by the United Nations, which sent its first-ever peacekeeping force to the area. The outcome was seen as a triumph for Egyptian nationalism, but its legacy was an undercurrent in the Cold War. The Suez crisis was also a theme in Season 2, Episode 1 of “The Crown,” the acclaimed Netflix series about Britain’s royals, as the British prime minister at the time, Anthony Eden, struggled over how to respond. Has the canal ever been closed since then? Egypt closed the canal for nearly a decade after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, when the waterway was basically a front line between Israeli and Egyptian military forces. Fifteen cargo ships, which became known as the “Yellow Fleet,” were trapped in the canal until it was reopened in 1975 by Mr. Nasser’s successor, Anwar el-Sadat. A few accidental groundings of vessels have closed the canal since then. The most notable, until this week, was a three-day shutdown in 2004 when a Russian oil tanker ran aground. Was the Suez Canal designed to handle the huge vessel that grounded? The beached vessel, the Ever Given, which is operated by the Evergreen Shipping line, is one of the world’s largest container ships, about the length of the Empire State Building. Although the canal was originally engineered to handle much smaller vessels, its channels have been widened and deepened several times, most recently six years ago at a cost of more than $8 billion. What led to the vessel’s grounding, and what’s being done about it now? Poor visibility and high winds, which made the Ever Given’s stacked containers act like sails, are believed to have pushed it off course and led to its grounding. Salvagers have tried a number of remedies: pulling it with tugboats, dredging underneath the hull and using a front-end loader to excavate the eastern embankment, where the bow is stuck. But the vessel’s size and weight, 200,000 metric tons, had frustrated salvagers as of Thursday night. Some marine salvage experts have said nature might succeed where tugs and dredgers have failed. A seasonal high tide on Sunday or Monday could add roughly 18 inches of depth to the canal, perhaps floating the ship. What are the ramifications if the Ever Given remains stuck? That depends on how long the canal, which is believed to handle about 10 percent of global maritime commercial traffic, is closed. TradeWinds, a maritime industry news publication, said that with more than 100 ships waiting to traverse the canal, it could take more than a week just for that backlog to clear. A prolonged closure could be hugely expensive for the owners of ships waiting to transit the canal. Some may decide to cut their losses and reroute their vessels around Africa. The owner of the Ever Given is already facing millions of dollars in insurance claims and the cost of emergency salvage services. Egypt’s government, which received $5.61 billion in revenue from canal tolls in 2020, also has a vital interest in refloating the Ever Given and reopening the waterway. Source link Orbem News #canal #important #Suez