Global
With splendid sumptuous sets and sonorous singing, LA Opera’s risqué revival of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata is a veritable feast for the eyes, ears and senses. Translated from the Italian (the language this opera is sung in, although its action is set in France), the words “La Traviata” mean “The Fallen One,” and the title refers to the not-so-virginal Violetta Valèry (voluptuous soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen from Washington state), a highly successful Parisian prostitute (who is believed to have been based on an actual escort). The opera opens with a party Violetta is throwing for her exclusive circle of bourgeois pals at her elegant, exquisitely designed, capacious home, replete with chandeliers and wall-to-ceiling windows with excellent views of the City of Light (the dazzling sets and costumes are designed by Englishman Robert Innes Hopkins). The kinky courtesan’s opulent lair is the home that sex built – the world’s oldest profession can certainly be lucrative.
The New York Times coverage of the Israeli carnage in Gaza, like that of other mainstream US media, is a disgrace to journalism.
This assertion should not surprise anyone. US media is driven neither by facts nor morality, but by agendas, calculating and power-hungry. The humanity of 120 thousand dead and wounded Palestinians because of the Israeli genocide in Gaza is simply not part of that agenda.
In a report - based on a leaked memo from the New York Times - the Intercept found out that the so-called US newspaper of record has been feeding its journalists with frequently updated 'guidelines' on what words to use, or not use, when describing the horrific Israeli mass slaughter in the Gaza Strip, starting on October 7.
They explore the absurd $15 billion scam to bilk state and federal taxpayers and ratepayers to pay for re-starting Michigan’s Palisades reactor.
The plant is 50 years old and was shut two years ago for safety reasons.
Critical parts have already been stripped out.
The company designated to restart the reactor—Holtec—has never operated a reactor.
Roger and Kevin give us a complete tour of this atomic catastrophe in the making.
WENDI LEDERMAN reports on the attacks on women’s health care in Florida, Arizona and elsewhere.
The legendary CAMILLA REES then convenes a world-class panel on the impacts of Electro-Magnetic Frequencies.
“Mr. Netanyahu faces a delicate calculation — how to respond to Iran in order not to look weak, while trying to avoid alienating the Biden administration and other allies already impatient with Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.”
Yeah, this is virtually nothing: a random, utterly forgettable quote pulled from the New York Times — from the basic corporate coverage of our present-moment violence, as the world shimmies on brink of . . . uh, World War III.
The distance between Gaza and Namibia is measured in the thousands of kilometers. But the historical distance is much closer. This is precisely why Namibia was one of the first countries to take a strong stance against the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
In 1927 Sergei Eisenstein – the wunderkind of Soviet cinema, whose 1925 Potemkin swept the globe – was reportedly pressured to cut Leon Trotsky out of October, aka Ten Days that Shook the World, the film he was commissioned to make celebrating the tenth anniversary of the 1917 Revolution, by Joseph Stalin, who was then engaged in a faction fight with Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Almost 20 years later, after Stalin had butchered Lenin’s Central Committee, Eisenstein directed Ivan the Terrible to great acclaim, winning the State Prize of the Soviet Union – Stalinskaya Premia. However, Eisenstein’s sequel, Ivan the Terrible, Part II, was banned – the betrayer of the Russian Revolution realized that Eisenstein intended Ivan to be a not-so-subtle veiled reference to Stalin. Eisenstein never lived to see the release of his masterpiece in the late 1950s after Stalin’s death and Khruschev’s “thaw” opened the USSR up, because, it’s believed, that the Kremlin put so much pressure on the filmmaker that the 50-year-old suffered a heart attack and died in 1948.
