Новости за 19.07.2018

“Something wicked this way comes” is one of the many great lines that William Shakespeare wrote in his staggeringly bold play Macbeth, which just opened at Shakespeare & Co. in Lenox, Massachusetts. It should be re-written as “something very confusing this way comes” because this new, pared down and twisted version directed by Melia Bensussen has audiences shaking their heads.

For the first twenty years after Roe, Senate confirmation hearings on Supreme Court nominees were not polarizing conflicts over abortion rights, but now they are. How did this happen?

At the conclusion of Henrik Ibsen’s classic 1879 play A Doll’s House, heroine Nora Helmer turns her back on her husband and children and leaves home, penniless and jobless, slamming the door behind her.

It is early in the morning in a Florida retirement community and a naked Abigail, 58, is wrapped in a sheet, desperately looking for her clothes after spending the night with a man whom she met at his wife’s funeral. Ugh. Awful. Well, there are circumstances to the story. The late wife was cheating on the husband, Angus, and had been for quite a while. He wasn’t enamored by Abigail as much as he was angry at his wife and took out some revenge by sleeping with Abigail.

Exactly 50 years ago this spring, back when the Academy Awards mattered at least a little, five movies were in the running for the Oscar for Best Picture.  Several of them were obviously products of the late ‘60s zeitgeist, focused on race and violence.  The winner, “In the Heat of the Night” featured Rod Steiger as a racist Southern sheriff who grudgingly comes to some sort of enlightenment when his first suspect in a murder case, a visiting black Philadelphia detective played by Sidney Poitier, helps solves the crime with him. Читать дальше...

It was seventy years ago this summer when West Berlin faced starvation from a blockade by the Soviet Union. America's heroic response to that crisis gives us hope to feed the hungry in conflict zones across the globe today.Imagine if the roads, rails and waterways into your hometown were suddenly cut off by enemy troops. No supplies could move in under such a blockade. Soon there would be no food, gas, medicine, or anything else you need for daily life.  You would have an emergency within days. Читать дальше...

India is facing the worst water crisis it has ever encountered, as highlighted by a recent report by the Niti Aayog (a prominent Government of India policy think tank). A number of Indian cities likeSimla, Bangalore and Chennai are facing a future without assured water supply. Water shortages are not the only environmental challenge confronting Indian cities, affecting the daily lives of millions of people. Air pollution has reached stratospheric levels in many Indian cities. Data from the World... Читать дальше...

This year marks the centenary of one of the defining events of the early 20th century. In the early morning of July 17, 1918, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, his wife Tsarina Alexandra, their four daughters and son, along with their physician and three servants, were herded into the cellar of the merchant house in Yekaterinburg where they’d been held captive and executed. It was the final, fatal blow to three hundred years of Romanov rule. 

Caption: Woman looking at homeopathic medicine (Wikimedia Commons)

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky serves as the volunteer President of the nonprofit Intentional Insights and is a co-founder of the Pro-Truth Pledge. He authored a number of a number of books, most notably the #1 Amazon bestseller The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide, and is regularly featured in venues like CBS News, Time, Scientific American, Psychology Today, Newsweek, The Conversation, CNBC, and elsewhere.

At least... Читать дальше...

Recently, Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen, a small farm to table restaurant in Lexington, Virginia. After exiting quietly, Sanders unleashed a very uncivil right-wing outrage machine. She spread news of the incident via Twitter, leading Fox News and even the President to denounce the establishment. The restaurant had to shut down for more than a week in reaction to picketing and online harassment, ranging from death threats to hundreds of negative reviews on Yelp. 

A protest against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Philadelphia, June 2018. By Sarahmirk - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

Murray Polner, formerly HNN's senior book review editor, blogs at There's No There There. He is the author of No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran, Branch Rickey: A Biography, and co-editor of We Who Dared Say No To War.

In his recent interview with Rolling Stone, in which he renounced his membership in the Republican Party, Steven Schmidt concluded that the task before us resembles a fire. "A forest fire is part of a natural cycle of the forest. The forest burns, and through its burning and destruction, it is regenerated and made healthy again." Before political restoration, "there must be a season of burning."

"My American friends are asking me about President Trumps’s observation that the British ‘like him’;  I regret this is quite unfounded. The explanation for this canard is that Trump is pronoid. Pronoid is the opposite of paranoid. A paranoid person thinks, without any basis in reality, that everybody  is out to get them. A pronoid person is someone who thinks, without any basis in reality, that everybody likes them. The fact is that the British loathe Donald Trump. This is because he is the polar... Читать дальше...

Related Link The North Korean Nuclear Crisis in History (Interviews with Mitch Lerner and David Fields)

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It is Christmas Eve, 1956, and three fabled American songwriters, Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen and Jimmy Van Heusen, meet in Berlin’s New York City apartment. It is snowing heavily outside as carolers roam from block to block. The three composers are angry because Elvis Presley and rock and roll music is pushing them off the music charts. “Is this the end?” one asks.

Rarely in history has a country so blindly, maliciously and relentlessly turned against the memory of one of its national leaders in blatant defiance of the historical facts, as French historians have against Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon III. And they continue to do so to this day. The complete distortion and denial of Napoleon III’s true achievements began with his arch political opponent, Adolphe Thiers, in his undisguised strongly biased history of this period. Thiers reminds readers... Читать дальше...

Sunday morning, July 14th, 1918.

It’s Bastille Day—and, somewhere in France, a fledging, twenty-year old American aviator named Quentin Roosevelt is scampering into his single-seat French-made, wooden-and-canvas Nieuport-28 aeroplane for … nothing less than a rendezvous with death.

Quentin Roosevelt was, of course, Theodore Roosevelt’s youngest child. TR had argued mightily for American military preparedness in the lead-up to war in April 1917. Following our declaration of war, he... Читать дальше...

Hagia Sophia - By Arild Vågen - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

The sun was setting on the Roman Empire. After 2,000 years, the empire of Augustus, Constantine, and Justinian, whose annals were replete with conquests, wealth, and glory, was on its knees. John VI Kantakouzenos’ (r. 1347-1354) coronation in Constantinople in 1347 took place not in the grand Hagia Sophia, which lay in disrepair, but at the smaller Church of the Virgin at Blachernae. He was not crowned with the imperial jewels, which had been pawned off to Venice... Читать дальше...

Vel Phillips at March on Milwaukee - By Voces de la Frontera from Milwaukee, USA, 2007, CC BY 2.0

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, reacting to her victory

Recently, when 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an obscure, upfront democratic socialist from the Bronx, easily defeated one of the most powerful U.S. Congressmen in the Democratic primary, the story became an overnight sensation. How, the pundits wondered, could this upset have occurred?

Actually, it shouldn’t have been a total surprise for, in recent years, democratic socialism has been making a remarkable comeback in American life. Читать дальше...