Kapwani Kiwanga: Flowers for Africa

“I am a Third World artist”

says Doris Salcedo, “from that perspective—from the perspective of the victim, from the perspective of the defeated people—it’s where I’m looking at the world.”

Alondra de la Parra launches The Impossible Orchestra

Keen to play her part in supporting the women and children suffering abuse and hardship in her native Mexico – a situation greatly worsened during the pandemic – the conductor Alondra de la Parra has created The Impossible Orchestra.

Hollow denials exposed by the watchdog

When The Times first claimed in 2011 that a “culture of silence” had for years facilitated “the sexual exploitation of hundreds of young girls by criminal pimping gangs” in towns and cities across northern England and the Midlands, denial followed denial. We reported that most of the identified victims were white and most known offenders were of Pakistani heritage,

Evelyne Axell: Tiger Woman

The Greenland Ice Sheet is losing mass at accelerated rates in the 21st century

making it the largest single contributor to rising sea levels. Faster flow of outlet glaciers has substantially contributed to this loss, with the cause of speedup, and potential for future change,

The Amazon is burning: No to EU-MERCOSUR trade deal

The EU is about to sign a “new TTIP” with Mercosur -- aka Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. It is a deal to import cheap beef, soy, wood and other products grown from the Amazon’s ashes.

Russian opposition leader Navalny poisoned

Navalny, known for his anti-corruption campaigns against top officials and outspoken criticism of President Vladimir Putin, has suffered physical attacks in the past.

Lukashenko Doesn’t Want to Be Putin’s Deputy Tsar

No one anticipated such resounding success for the opposition and such failure for President Aleksandr Lukashenko in the presidential elections. The exact results are not known, but polling places that have reported undistorted results recorded 60 to 90 percent of the vote for the main opposition candidate, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, and no more than 17 percent for Lukashenko—more often around 10 percent.

Huge Garbage Patch Found in Atlantic Too

Akin to the Texas-size garbage patch in the Pacific, a massive trash vortex has formed from billion of bits of plastic congregating off North America's Atlantic coast

Do countries with female leaders truly fare better with Covid-19?

The analysis, which is now out as a working paper and has been submitted for consideration to a journal, found that the infection rate and death rate of Covid-19 were both lower in countries run by women compared to those in male-led countries. In an effort to isolate the specific effect of having a female leader, they compared female-led countries to male-led countries that are similar in population, geography, gender equality, health expenditures, and number of tourists. No matter how they sliced the data, female-led countries fared better.

COVID-19 will accelerate the arts’ ability to connect with audiences through technology

The pandemic strikes at the heart of why orchestras exist: to bring people together and build community through the power and emotion of live music. For many, that loss is an existential experience.

Tschabalala Self: Princess

Speculation on Black Artists Has Gotten So Intense That for Christie’s Latest Sale, Its Curator Is Asking Buyers to Sign a Special Contract

In February, a painting by Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo sold at Phillips in London for $881,432—more than 10 times its estimate and more than 3,000 percent what the seller had paid for it less than a year earlier. As usual, the artist did not see a penny from the transaction

Ex-cop’s video captures crowd’s horror during Floyd arrest

The video made available Thursday comes from fired Officer Tou Thao, one of four former Minneapolis police officers charged in the death of Floyd, a handcuffed Black man. Floyd died after a white officer, Derek Chauvin, pressed his knee against Floyd’s neck for nearly eight minutes on a south Minneapolis street May 25 as Floyd repeatedly said he could not breathe.

Picasso Y-Block Controversy

Viksjø and engineer Sverre Jystad designed the Y-Block using “Naturbetong”, or “natural concrete,” an experimental casting technique based on an aggregate of aluminum and silicon metal, which created a tactile surface receptive to sandblasting. Nesjar’s technique, called “Betograve,” entailed pouring concrete over a form—in this case, Picasso’s designs—tightly packed with gravel. The concrete was then sand-blasted with a high-pressure hose, exposing the gravel beneath. The final product was a singularity for the time and place: Brutalist architecture married with modernist figuration.

Uncovering Indonesia’s Act of Killing

1965-1966 Indonesian massacre, one of the worst, yet least known, mass killings since World War II, in which an estimated half a million Indonesians suspected of being Communists were murdered by soldiers and paramilitary death squads.

How ‘Jakarta’ Became the Codeword for US-Backed Mass Killing

Operação Jacarta. Yakarta Viene. Plan Yakarta. In both Spanish and Portuguese, in all three ways it was used, it’s clear what “Jakarta” meant: anticommunist mass murder and the state-organized extermination of civilians who opposed the construction of capitalist authoritarian regimes loyal to the United States. It meant forced disappearances and unrepentant state terror. And it would be employed far and wide in Latin America over the two decades that followed.

How 5 People Survived Nagasaki’s Nuclear Hell

Truman and the Secretary of War, made a concerted effort to publish articles justifying the use of the bombs, excluding any information about what happened to the people beneath the atomic clouds.

August 9, 1945

At 11:02 A.M., their morning was broken by a blinding white flash in the sky. The plutonium bomb dropped by the United States unleashed more than 21 kilotons of firepower, ripping through Nagasaki and killing as many as 70,000 people almost instantly. Ikeda was only one of 47 survivors from his elementary school; 1,400 students were killed, and 50 others were missing.

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

A mushroom cloud is seen over Nagasaki, Japan, after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city on August 9, 1945

Covid-19 lockdown will have 'negligible' impact on climate crisis

putting the huge sums of post-Covid-19 government funding into a green recovery and shunning fossil fuels will give the world a good chance of keeping the rise in global temperatures below 1.5C. The scientists said we are now at a “make or break” moment in keeping under the limit – as compared with pre-industrial levels – agreed by the world’s governments to avoid the worst effects of global heating.

Beirut explosion: death toll rises to 137 as army takes control of site

Lebanese officials have started blaming each other for leaving the highly explosive substance sitting so close to residential neighbourhoods for six years. The ammonium nitrate was taken from a ship that docked in Beirut in 2013 and was apparently abandoned by its Russian owner and mostly Ukrainian crew.

The attack on Hiroshima: Remembering the dead, praying for peace

Bells have tolled in Japan's Hiroshima for the 75th anniversary of the world's first atomic bombing, with ceremonies downsized due to the coronavirus pandemic and the city's mayor urging nations to reject self-centred nationalism and commit to nuclear disarmament more seriously

Is humanity doomed because we can’t plan for the long term?

the bizarre surge in panic buying and stockpiling of everything from food to toilet rolls. A second was the abject failure of most states to be prepared when experts had been warning governments for years that a pandemic would happen sooner or later. The third has been the exposure of the fragility of globalised supply chains. All three of these are underpinned by the same phenomenon: a strong tendency to prioritise the short term at the expense of the future.

What the End of the Universe Will Really Be Like

The explosion of Earth due to shredded spacetime certainly makes for a cinematically exciting scene. But if we are fated for a Big Rip, it is not likely to happen for about 200 billion years. That’s a lot sooner than the standard Heat Death scenario, but it is well beyond the lifespan of our solar system, Earth, and (probably) humanity.

Ur-Fascism

Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority

བདེ་​བར་​གཤེགས་​པའི་​བསྟན་​པ་​ཐམས་​ཅད་​ཀྱི་​སྙིང་​པོ་​རིག་​པ་​འཛིན་​པའི་​སྡེ་​སྣོད་​རྡོ་​རྗེ་​ཐེག་​པ་​སྔ་​འགྱུར་​རྒྱུད་​འབུམ།

The Collected Tantras of the Ancients are organized with varying degrees of precision according to doxographical category. The three major rubrics under which the tantras of this collection are classified are Atiyoga, Anuyoga, and Mahāyoga. Each of these categories can be further divided into sub-categories, though the various editions differ as to whether they follow those sub-categories or not. This edition, the Degé, also contains a volume of supplemental tantric texts and a volume containing the index of titles by volume.