“Not everyone is rich enough to escape to Europe and to eat pain au chocolat in the morning,” she wrote. “For many people, a Lada is essential, as is the fact that they can get to the cemetery to talk to their son.”
The tone is college admissions essay. Typical sentence: “In an environment of maximum pressure, I learned to ignore the noise and distractions and instead to push for results that would improve lives.”
What is called corruption in Russia would be more correctly called a system of incitement and blackmail. If you are loyal and if the president is pleased with you, you have the right to steal — but if you are disloyal, you’ll be thrown in prison for theft. It’s no surprise that in recent decades only a few individuals inside Mr. Putin’s system have spoken out publicly against it. Terror is always more persuasive than anything else.
Between thirty and fifty per cent of all food produced in developing countries is lost—discarded, unsold and uneaten, thanks to weak or nonexistent cold chains. For farmers surviving on less than a couple of dollars a day, the effect of these losses is substantial; for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, they are estimated to add up to hundreds of billions of dollars each year
Britain’s summer has been baking and listless in the main, weeks of bright, wan sunshine, unbroken by rain or any particular hope. In July, southern England received a thimble’s worth of rain—a shade over a centimetre—the least since records began, in 1836. On August 12th, a drought was declared in eight regions, and people were banned from washing their cars. There has been a monotony to the heat, an uncanny continuance, which has seemed to connect to a deeper apathy toward the country’s frightening immediate future. Britain’s economy is failing. The Bank of England has predicted that inflation will reach thirteen per cent in October, its highest level since the early eighties. A recession may be coming. People’s heating and electricity bills are rising at a speed that no one can quite believe. The nights are hot; the children can’t sleep.
One day, Ricky was annoyed because I hadn’t changed a broken string on the guitar. I said, “You should play it like that.” He scoffed it off. But the next time I went to his house, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, playing and laughing. He said, “I’ve just written the most stupid guitar riff you’ve ever heard.” And it was the “Rock Lobster” riff, played on five strings in an open tuning.
The former president once asked his chief of staff why his military leadership couldn’t be more like the German generals who had reported to Adolf Hitler, according to an excerpt.
General Milley’s frustration with the president peaked on June 1, 2020, when Black Lives Matter protesters filled Lafayette Square, near the White House. Mr. Trump demanded to send in the military to clear the protesters, but General Milley and other top aides refused. In response, Mr. Trump shouted, “You are all losers!” according to the excerpt. “Turning to Milley, Trump said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?’” the authors write.
The San Francisco skate crew GX1000 is a loosely organized gang of misfit skateboarders who are bound together mostly by a shared appetite for positive vibes, high speeds, and copious amounts of Northern California’s famous high-potency marijuana. Some of the crew, whose online video releases have made them a sensation, are pro skaters. Others are amateurs. All of them are unflinchingly confident and freakishly physically gifted.
skinhead carrying a guitar takes his place in front of the microphone in a Budapest park. A few hundred metres away, a police cordon and steel fence buffers the crowd of about 600 people, mostly men dressed in black, from shouting protesters. Flanked by the flag of the Hammerskins — an international white supremacist gang — the man performs a cover of ‘The Snow Fell’, a song by a notorious British neo-Nazi band.
Across much of northern India, where more than a billion people live, temperatures have regularly soared past a hundred and ten degrees, and slightly lower temperatures have often combined with very high humidity—a dangerous combination
“You have to wonder if people are thinking very deeply about what they’re doing. Do they realize what the alternatives are to a functioning democracy?”
Nobody pretends that a superyacht is a productive place to stash your wealth. In a column this spring headlined “a superyacht is a terrible asset,” the Financial Times observed, “Owning a superyacht is like owning a stack of 10 Van Goghs, only you are holding them over your head as you tread water, trying to keep them dry.”
A veteran war reporter in Afghanistan was told she would go to jail if she didn’t tweet an apology for her reporting. She has since safely left the country.
In one of the coerced tweets, posted on Tuesday, Ms. O’Donnell wrote: “l apologize for 3 or 4 reports written by me accusing the present authorities of forcefully marrying teenage girls and using teenage girls as sexual slaves by Taliban commanders. This was a premeditated attempt at character assassination and an affront to Afghan culture.”
Singh is the creator of hate5six, an extensive video library of punk and hardcore shows, mostly from cities across the Northeast. Singh is bafflingly prolific, often uploading videos from different cities in a twenty-four-hour period. In a subculture that thrives on spontaneity and obscurity, his collection stands out as a lovingly curated record, one that elevates shabby local bands to filmic heroes. Hardcore fans often report on social media their sightings of him at shows, as if he were a U.F.O. “It seems like he’s just always been there,” said Daniel Fang, who drums for the Baltimore punk band Turnstile and has spent many hours “drenched in sweat” with Singh at hardcore festivals. “It’s the stuff of Shaolin-monk movies, both in terms of physical endurance and a tenacious adherence to principle.”
Yeah, of course. So I’ve been cancelled, basically, by the Chilmark Library. That has resulted in lots of people in Chilmark calling me and calling the library and saying, “We’re being deprived of Alan’s annual speech.” [Ebba Hierta, the Chilmark’s director, disputed Dershowitz’s characterization, and said, “Not one single person has contacted me to complain that they haven’t had a chance to hear Alan speak.”]
Across the room, Elliott, Hiscock, Garofalo and a college friend, and Mark McKinney are crammed into a banquette. Jim Downey, jocular, the pressure off for a minute, stops by on his way to the men’s room. “Ah,” he says with a smile, “the malcontents’ table!”
He spent a couple of weeks parading through rubble and Chechen refugee camps, playing the part of the self-aggrandizing misery tourist, asking local women what they thought of him—was he handsome?—and filming their puzzled reactions
Throughout the evening, far-right youth—some with shaved heads, others with the feathery mullets still fashionable in the Eastern Bloc’s dying days—gathered in nearby bars and outside the boarded-up Faun Palace porn cinema, just down the street from the brothel. From behind the wheel of a parked car, Sonntag waited to give the signal to attack. The Sex Shopping Center was run by a Greek pimp named Nicolas Simeonidis and his business partner, Ronny Matz.
“You don’t get as specific as a particular company so they can’t come back and sue you,” said Jerry Del Colliano, a professor at New York University and publisher of Inside Music Media. He added that the shift in strategy toward vaguer cheating claims “allows them to continue with this misinformation that their audience just loves” without risking serious consequences from companies or their syndicators.
