Who are the 12 Catalan leaders facing years in prison?

Most of the politicians to stand trial come from two political parties: the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) and the centrist Catalan European Democratic Party (PDeCAT).

‘One country, two systems’

Raab spoke to Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, and stressed the need for “meaningful political dialogue and a fully independent investigation into recent events as a way to build trust” in the territory, 

Clashes with police were particularly intense on Sunday night compared with previous days, as riot police fired teargas into a railway station to disperse crowds and were captured on film beating protesters with batons as they fled down an escalator in another station.

Satellite photos show what appear to be armoured personnel carriers and other vehicles belonging to the China’s paramilitary People’s Armed police parked in a sports stadium in the city of Shenzhen, 

Quantum teleportation moves into the third dimension

Saudi Arabia's "justice"

SCC judges are pressured by the government to hand down the strongest sentence possible. In Saudi Arabia this means beheading or even crucifixion. Last year six judges from the SCC were arrested and interrogated when the outcome of cases they presided over did not meet the attorney general’s expectations. In one case, a judge who exonerated the accused was subsequently held under arrest for many months.

Saudi Arabia's crown prince said he bears responsibility for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi last year by Saudi operatives "because it happened under my watch," according to a PBS documentary

Sunni Muslim militants, including the Taliban and the Islamic State group, have repeatedly targeted Shia Hazara minorities in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

How China is set to dominate the next Industrial Revolution

Operating in niche markets with limited transparency and often in politically unstable countries, Chinese firms have locked up supplies of these minerals and metals with a combination of state-directed investment and state-backed capital, making long-term strategic plays, sometimes at a loss. 

“Humans kill about 100 million sharks per year and in contrast about five humans are killed by sharks per year”

Healthy oceans need sharks. Their presence maintains the balance of ocean ecosystems because as top predators, they dictate the population numbers of other sea creatures in reef food chains. Without them there’s a fundamental change in the balance.

Microplastics ‘significantly contaminating the air’

Snow captures particles from the air as it falls and samples from ice floes on the ocean between Greenland and Svalbard contained an average of 1,760 microplastic particles per litre, the research found. Even more – 24,600 per litre on average – were found at European locations. 

Chávez Bodyguard Moves out of the Shadows and into the Good Life

even as the Chavista government made a noisy show of condemning capitalism, Aguilera spent his post-government life quietly amassing a fortune. He participated in businesses in Venezuela and abroad that tapped into lucrative government contracts, registered companies in tax havens, opened an account in a Swiss bank, and took frequent trips via chartered jet.

The Bride (Hyman Bloom)

Brazil destroying Amazonia

Energy or no energy, Vale would still need environmental approval to prospect for minerals in the region, whether the electricity costs $0 per megawatt or $150. Electric power doesn't override a mining companies need to get environmental permits to operate.  Nevertheless, an abundance of minerals coupled with government interest in expanding their power supply in those areas is ample enough reason to believe that industrial concerns are more important than environmental ones. To groups like Xingu River Vivo, or Amazon Watch, it is clear which way this debate over Amazon protection is tipping.

Nowhere are the stakes higher than in the Amazon basin—and not just because it contains 40% of Earth’s rainforests and harbours 10-15% of the world’s terrestrial species. South America’s natural wonder may be perilously close to the tipping-point beyond which its gradual transformation into something closer to steppe cannot be stopped or reversed, even if people lay down their axes. Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, is hastening the process—in the name, he claims, of development.

Leak Reveals How Mauritius Siphons Tax From Poor Nations To Benefit Elites

Geldof’s investment firm won Mauritius government approval to take advantage of obscure international agreements that allow companies to pay rock-bottom tax rates on the island tax haven and less to the desperately poor African nations where the companies do business.

Powering the 21st century by wind energy

The rotor diameter of offshore turbines in 2030 will reach an average of approximately 240 m and 160 m onshore. For adapting a turbine to the general wind conditions at the site, manufacturers equipped machines of one rotor size with electrical generators of different capacities

The notion of using wind power dates back centuries — Jay Lehr and Jack Keeley note in the Alternative Energy and Shale Gas Encyclopedia that the Egyptians were using wind to transport goods 5,000 years ago. Windmills used by the Babylonians in 700 BCE helped with irrigation, one of the first times they were used to replace human and animal labor. At the turn of the 20th century, windmills were being used to generate electricity locally. The first megawatt-class electrical wind turbine was added to a Vermont utility grid in 1941.

Milky Way’s twisted spiral revealed in 3D

Beatrice could power the future of energy

Supernova’s messy birth casts doubt on reliability of astronomical yardstick

The exploding stars known as type Ia supernovae are so consistently bright that astronomers refer to them as standard candles — beacons that are used to measure vast cosmological distances. But these cosmic mileposts may not be so uniform. A new study finds evidence that the supernovae can arise by two different processes, adding to lingering suspicions that standard candles aren't so standard after all.

1,800 firefighters battle wildfires in central Portugal

In recent years, the country has witnessed some of its deadliest fires on record, with 106 people killed in 2017. 

Concerns have been raised across all levels of society as it emerged that January was one of the worst months on record for domestic violence murders in Portugal.

How it is possible?!

Videos of children showing their exposed buttocks, underwear and genitals are racking up millions of views on YouTube – with the site displaying advertising from major cosmetics and car brands alongside the content.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity tested by star orbiting a black hole

Underwater surface of glacier is melting up to 100 times faster than previously thought

The submarine surface of Alaska’s LeConte glacier could be melting around 100 times faster than previously thought, direct observations have revealed.

Kepler clue to supernova puzzle

BBC Says We Only Have 18 Months To Save The Planet From Climate Change

Humanity has only 18 months left to take decisive political steps to avert the catastrophic effects of climate change, according to a report Wednesday by the BBC.

The Roman Warm Period, the Dark Ages Cold Period and the Little Ice Age are some of the better known excursions from global mean temperatures that have occurred in the last two millennia. 

This paper reviews a series of climate change adaptation and mitigation options that can support increased production, production efficiency and greater food security for 9 billion people by 2050

The 17 Most Bizarre and Completely Outlandish Art Restoration Fails of All Time

Archaeologists Believe They Have Identified the Unlikely Secret Ingredient Used to Build Stonehenge

The modern world had long marveled over the ancient site of Stonehenge, unable to figure out how prehistoric people erected the ring of monolithic standing stones. Now, archaeologists have finally solved the mystery of the Neolithic monument’s construction: the massive slabs may have been moved into place with the aid of lard.

Counting the Panama Papers money: how we reached $1.28 billion

More than $1.28 billion has been clawed back by governments around the world after the Panama Papers investigation in 2016.

Hong Kong outcry after masked thugs launch attack

Video footage showed dozens of men, most in masks, storming a mass transit station in Yuen Long, chasing passengers and beating them with rods. Among those hurt in the attack were demonstrators returning from a large anti-government rally, as well as a pregnant woman and a woman holding an infant, according to witnesses.

At the center of the public's fury is a proposed law that would allow China to extradite people from Hong Kong to the mainland. The bill has come to symbolize growing fear that the region, long-viewed as a separate entity from mainland China, is losing its autonomy under Beijing’s encroaching authoritarianism. They have reason to be concerned.

Marisa Merz, Key Arte Povera Figure and Relentlessly Inventive Sculptor, Is Dead at 93

Building assemblages from materials like unfired clay, tin, lead, and stone, or carefully stitching together wire, fabric, and thread, Merz made rough-hewn art that can look at once tough and precarious, vital and vulnerable. Her sculptures are as multivalent and complicated as people, as life.

Karina Canellakis makes Proms history with stirring First Night

The US musician led the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and BBC Singers in a stirring and dramatic programme culminating in Leos Janáček's utterly unique Glagolitic Mass.

Shooting for the Moon

Fifty years ago, on 20 July 1969, the first humans landed on the surface of another world, when the Apollo 11 lunar module touched down on the Moon. A few hours later, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the first steps onto an alien surface while Michael Collins orbited overhead in the command module.

Two businessmen have become millionaires through a Lithuanian lottery — without buying a single ticket

Antanas Muraska and Donatas Kazlauskas, the two directors of the Olifeja lottery, have diverted millions of euros into their own pockets, according to an investigation by OCCRP‘s Lithuanian member center, 15min.lt.

"Buddhist", "teacher", predator: dark secrets of the Triratna guru

Lingwood encouraged heterosexual followers to experiment with homosexuality as a means of expanding their minds; he was deeply critical of the nuclear family and of mixed-sex communities in general; he encouraged young men to break away from their families.

...

One Triratna retreat, in Norfolk, where Lingwood was resident for much of the 80s, was described by the member as “more reminiscent of a San Francisco gay bath-house than a Buddhist retreat”.

UNODC Warns of Rising Role of Organized Crime in Southeast Asia

study conducted by the UN Office On Drugs and Crime (UNODC) found that the methamphetamine market in the region has exploded in size and value, and is now estimated to be worth between roughly US$30 billion and $60 billion. 

Senegal’s Offshore Oil Reserves a Pricey Pawn in Covert Deal

A Romanian-Australian businessman with a history of fraud, corruption, and misleading investors appears to have received at least $650 million from a West African oil and gas deal carried out with the help of well-positioned relatives of two consecutive Senegalese presidents.

Indian/Portuguese names

the high court in Goa overturned a previous ruling, convicting Samson D’Souza of culpable homicide, criminal assault and outraging a woman’s modesty, providing narcotics to a person with knowledge that it could cause serious harm or death, and destruction of evidence.

He was also convicted under the Goa children’s code for not providing a safe environment for a child, according to MacKeown’s lawyer, Vikram Varma. A second man, Placido Carvalho, accused of abetting a crime, had his acquittal upheld

Europeans remember the 1980s

when the United States and Russia quickly built up a combined arsenal of nearly 3,500 nuclear-armed medium-range missiles, all aimed at Europe.

Portugal is the least compliant European country against corruption

Portugal ranks behind Turkey, Serbia, Romania, Belgium, and Croatia, with the Council of Europe criticising the Portuguese State for lacking measures against particularly serious crime.

Moscow braces for renewed protests after opposition politicians excluded from city elections

almost all of the independent candidates standing for election had been told they would not be allowed to run. In contrast, the vast majority of the 216 given the green light were supporters of Vladimir Putin. 

Facebook to be fined $5bn for Cambridge Analytica privacy violations

The (US) Federal Trade Commission has reportedly voted to approve fining Facebook roughly $5bn to settle an investigation into the company’s privacy violations

Tajikistan is one of the world’s most repressive countries

at least three occasions, Tajikistani dissidents have met terrible fates while working with Nikolaev — in two cases, very shortly after their last meetings with him. Several prominent members of the diaspora now accuse him of selling them out.

In mid February 2019, raw from torture, weary from sleep deprivation, and more alone than he’d ever been, Sharofiddin Gadoev waited in the dank basement of a government office in Dushanbe, the capital of his native Tajikistan. Just two weeks earlier he’d thought himself safe, well away from the dangerous politics of his homeland, living in the Netherlands and visiting Moscow

The Pentagon Looks to Virtual Reality to Prepare Troops for Nuclear War

In February, Microsoft employees wrote a letter to executives demanding the company pull out of the contract, saying they “refuse to create technology for warfare and oppression.” 

Horrendous crimes are not to be forgotten

Teresa Costa Macedo, a senior government official, said she informed the country's then president, General Ramalho Eanes, and provided photographic evidence. But the photographs were "lost" by police and Mrs Macedo said she was also intimidated by phone calls from anonymous callers

The Casa Pia affair, which has shaken the very foundations of the Portuguese state, finally goes to trial on Thursday. Former presidents have been accused of turning a blind eye to complaints about systematic abuse over more than a decade, while prosecutors have denied that President Jorge Sampaio was under investigation.

Following the shame of the nation’s Casa Pia child sex abuse scandal which involved all manner of previously respected figures and personalities, stories of institutional child abuse are becoming commonplace in Portugal.

Figures released show that more than 36,000 children have been the victims of child abuse and neglect since 2008.

Twilight II

Ursula von der Leyen set for EU's top job

She studied economics at the universities of Göttingen and Münster before attending the London School of Economics where she used the pseudonym Rose Ladson because she was seen as a potential target for West German leftwing extremists.

Von der Leyen then read for a medical degree, becoming a gynaecologist, and only entered politics at 42. A mother of seven, she has held government positions as labour and family affairs minister, driving forward key policies on gender quotas for company boards and improved maternity and paternity pay and rights.

Rampant deforestation of Amazon driven by global greed for meat

Investigation exposes how Brazil’s huge beef sector continues to threaten health of world’s largest rainforest

Journalists Killed or Silenced for Environmental Reporting

OCCRP and Forbidden Stories – a consortium of 40 journalists in 15 countries – takes a look at examples from three continents, in Guatemala, Tanzania, and India.

Farmers must change to feed world up to 2050

Last summer Europe was abnormally hot, with temperatures topping 30°C in the Arctic Circle

Even the unrealistic best-case scenario of 1.5°C of warming by 2100 will see extreme temperatures in many regions and leave disadvantaged populations with food insecurity, lost incomes, and worse health. 

Poem from Princess Nunakawa to Okuninusho

Come in the dark, 

When the sun has disappeared

And the night emerges

Behind the green hills.

Come smiling, like the morning sun

In all its glory,

And take in your embrace

My arms white as 

Ropes of Taku fiber,

My breasts, young and soft,

In 1920, The Hogarth Press, founded by Virginia Woolf and her husband, published Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees

it seems an unlikely coincidence that one of the most striking lines of Paris refers to “The wicked April moon” and that Eliot’s Wasteland should commence in the “cruellest” month of April.

The Tibetan Buddhist Canon

The Tibetan canon is divided into two parts, called the Kangyur and the Tengyur. 

The Poetess

Apart from her fascination with the theme of love, Sappho contributed in other ways to the conventions of the lyric genre. Her emphasis on emotion, on subjective experience, and on the individual marks a stark contrast between her work and the epic, liturgical, or dramatic poetry of the period.

"The stars are sinking; the watch goes by; I lie alone."

Ruth Padel, prizewinning poet and former chair of the UK Poetry Society, chooses her favourite poets who happen to be women.

Big black holes can settle in the outskirts of small galaxies

Surprisingly, some of those potential black holes aren’t at their galaxy’s center, but instead appear to roam the outskirts, astronomer Amy Reines said 

Twilight I

Banned CFCs traced to China say scientists

it took many decades for scientists to discover that when CFCs break down in the atmosphere, they release chlorine atoms that are able to rapidly destroy the ozone layer which protects us from ultraviolet light. A gaping hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica was discovered in the mid 1980s.

The museum that hid art banned by Stalin

Savitsky risked everything for this collection. Some of these painters were tortured or murdered or spent long years in the gulags. The work collected is of both Russian and Uzbek artists who painted after the 30s, when all work that wasn’t socialist realism was banned by Stalin. Any other styles of the time – the emerging cubism, futurism, even impressionism – were deemed criminal. Formalism, as it was called, was punishable. 

Nightwithsculpture

"Église catholique: ça suffit!"

En matière de droits, il n’y a pas de complémentarité, pas de différence, il n’y a que l’égalité, une égalité originelle : « Dieu créa l’humain à son image, homme et femme, il les créa.»

Lutz Bacher: Magic Mountain

Fragmentation, interruption and fog

Of course there are precise moments – the moment in Schoenberg's Second String Quartet when the music abandons tonality altogether and a soprano sings of 'the air of other planets'; or Picasso's Demoiselle's D'Avignon where the prettiness of the acrobats and lovers of his blue and pink periods is abandoned for something at once harsh, archaic and foreign. 

Sculpturebridgeriver

Harvard Thucydides’s Trap Project

the execution of King Louis XVI in January 1793 was the final straw, galvanizing the British to action and prompting Britain to “engineer a grand anti-French coalition.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In 2004 Ayaan gained international attention following the murder of Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh had directed her short film Submission, a film about the oppression of women under Islam. The assassin, a radical Muslim, left a death threat for her pinned to Van Gogh's chest.

Artists of the Tao Dance Theater

Installation by Anthea Hamilton

DUNE

DUNE will also help us work out whether neutrinos and their anti-matter equivalent, anti-neutrinos, behave identically, providing further evidence for matter’s dominance.

Shervone Neckles: Provenance 1

How a Chinese venture in Venezuela made millions while locals grew hungry

Venezuela and China agreed to hundreds of projects to kickstart growth in the South American country. After billions in investments, however, little materialized. A $200 million rice plant illustrates the graft and incompetence that opponents say crippled development by Venezuela's leftist regime.

Police investigating disappearance of Madeleine McCann unmask 'German paedophile and triple child killer

Ney was jailed for killing Stefan Jahr, 13, in 1992, Dennis Rostel, eight, in 1995, and Dennis Klein, nine, in 2001. 

Note: it is ethically and morally mandatory to reenacte the death penalty for monsters like that one.

No booths, no dealers

Perhaps even more radical is the absence of dealers and gallery representatives all together. Sales are facilitated by Object & Thing staff, who are stationed, iPads in hand, around the 15 “islands” at which works are displayed.

"He wants to be Velazquez so he paints stripes"

To our right was a copper painting by Frank Stella, its surface burnished by the light which flooded the room. A Harvard student who had entered the gallery approached us. With his left arm raised and his finger pointing to the Stella, he confronted Michael Fried. ‘What’s so good about that?’

Beijing’s deterrence fleet is up to six ballistic missile subs

China is becoming a rising power not only in consumer technology and artificial intelligence but also in Arctic military operations and nuclear submarine construction, 

Does poverty cause terrorism?

close inspection of recent terrorist attacks — including the Easter Sunday suicide bombings in Sri Lanka — finds that perpetrators often come from relatively affluent and well-resourced backgrounds, creating doubt over the credibility of the “poverty-terrorism nexus.” 

What might trigger the collapse of the EU?

“the expected success of the far-right and far-left in the European parliamentary election in May this year augurs the beginning of the end for the currency union”.

Note: I'm neither from the far-right nor from the far-left but I think that the EU must collapse. The sonner the better [the political correct aberrations must be stopped and any credit for the purchasing of German cars (submarines and so on) will go to a definitely end].

Artists are turning their attention to contemporary social and political issues that have global relevance

Ai made international headlines when he reported on the discrepancies in the official number of deaths caused by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China. After the quake, Ai visited the region, interviewed families, and began recording the actual number of people who were missing. He found that thousands of children had died in the collapse of poorly constructed public schools, a fact that the Chinese authorities had not wanted to make public. He documented his findings on his social media feeds for all the world to see and made artworks to commemorate the thousands of missing children. The Chinese government responded to Ai’s exposé with a beating, imprisonment, and charges of tax evasion

Njideka Akunyili Crosby: And We Begin To Let Go

How an Elaborate Plan to Topple Venezuela’s Dictator Went Wrong

if the campaign to dethrone Maduro fails, Venezuela could “sink into a dictatorship from which there are very few possible alternatives.”

As the Venezuelan opposition again struggles to topple Maduro, the few hundred soldiers here who have switched sides wonder why they’ve been ignored by Guaidó.