Writer/director Michel Franco’s moving Memory is one of AFI FEST 2023’s most memorable movies. Jessica Chastain plays Sylvia, who works at an adult daycare facility and is first glimpsed in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where the recovering ex-drinker participates in a 12-step program in Brooklyn. At a subsequent high school reunion, Sylvia has a strange encounter with Saul (Peter Sarsgaard), who she goes on to (wrongly) accuse of having sexually abused her when they were students. As it turns out, Sylvia has a history of incestuous sexual molestation, which likely triggered her substance abuse. Saul, too, has his own afflictions.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Thailand has been negotiating directly with representatives of Hamas in Iran to release 23 Thai hostages from Gaza, the largest nationality among kidnapped foreigners.

Thailand also expressed "outrage" against Israel's U.N. ambassador for showing the General Assembly a "horrific" video of Hamas purportedly trying to decapitate a Thai laborer.

The 1,400 Israelis and foreigners killed by Hamas' Oct. 7 cross-border attack include at least 32 impoverished Thai agricultural workers slain near the Israel-Gaza frontier, officials said.

Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thaivisin talked by telephone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the 23 Thai hostages and said on November 1:

"If there there is any progress, he'll phone me.  And if there are any demands involved he will also inform us," Mr. Srettha said, according to November 2's Bangkok Post.

In Iran's capital Tehran, meanwhile, representatives of Hamas held direct negotiations with Buddhist-majority Thailand's Muslim Sunni and Shia officials.

On Tuesday, October 31, 2023, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bombed a Palestinian refugee camp with 100,000 inhabitants, producing a hellscape of casualties, 50 dead, 150 injured, with buildings in collapse at the periphery of  massive bomb crater.   The stated public intention was to kill a single Hamas commander.

There are two million Palestinians warehoused in the sliver of land 26 miles long and between 2-7 miles wide, a containment camp holding indigenous peoples of the region hostage, known as the Gaza Strip. 

Mr. Netanyahu has vowed to wipe out Hamas, which is estimated to have at least 40,000 members.  If the ration of 50 -1 holds up, that is 50 Palestinians will die for every Hamas member killed -- then every single Palestinian in Gaza would be killed.  This is not without possibility, perhaps the colonizers’ plan.

The Free Press is honoring Cynthia Brown of the Ohio Coalition To End Qualified Immunity with our annual “Libby” Award at a ceremony Thursday, November 9. Cynthia Brown is a regular speaker at the Free Press salons and championed as a Free Press Hero online. The Free Press honors community activists annually with a "Libby" Award for Community Activism, named for a former Free Press editor, Libby Gregory, who lost her life in 1991 in an airplane accident. 

A Youngstown native, she studied criminal justice and political science at Columbus State Community College, media and communications and African American studies at Youngstown State University, and public policy and African American studies at Mesa Community College.

She is the founder and CEO of Heartbeat Movement Inc, a multiracial, nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit social justice organization directed solely by Ohioans. Heartbeat Movement focuses on legislative and policy change to end systemic racism, institutionalism, injustice, and inequality.