#i have some old ones from like...2017 that i refuse to unearth

[scarlct-vvitch]

scarlct-vvitch masterlist

it’s high time i got all my shit together

- what’s in here: spideypool, stony, spideytorch, superbat, spirk

- am i taking requests: yes, but no promises on any kind of time frame!

- what else can you send me - anything! drabbles, headcanons, opinions, please let me hear it all!

list of all oneshots, fics, and works-in-progress under the cut :)

for many of these, check out my ao3

full-length fics:

spideypool

Through the Lens

Forty-three Hours (orphaned)

oneshots:

spideypool*

The River

First Date

spideytorch

maybe don’t rush into it

just teasing

superbat

i confess i am lost

wide open skies

an act of desperation

four-letter word

stony

out of the blue

can i be close to you?

spirk

alter the course

works in progress (feel free to ask me >:) )

i know it’s bad, but we could be so good (full length superbat)

i’ll try to add as I go along :)

*there are many more spideypool oneshots, but they’re from when i had a different url so all of my links are broken :/ if you want to find them, try here!

[ginzburgjake]

Statement of Martin Blackwood, regarding his encounter with a ghost. Statement given January 25th, 2017.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Sasha says gently. Tim is beside her, wearing a worried expression, while Martin is sitting on the opposite end of the table with a running tape recorder placed in front of him. His hands are wrapped around a steaming cup of tea.

“Ooof,” he sighs, bracing himself. “Alright, I — alright.”

“So, the day started as normal, I think — maybe it was a bit more cloudy than usual, but nothing too out of the ordinary. I took the tube, arrived to the Institute on time, signed in with Rosie, all that stuff. I came in, and Sasha was there, already recording, so I decided not to interrupt her and busy myself with my own case. I sat at the table, laid my things out — because I had to bring them home, you know, what with the mysterious haunting of this place. Didn't want to lose track of any more pens than necessary, heh.

I did some follow-ups, called a couple of contacts to check the details for, er, for that, that 'uncanny students' report? Yeah. So, it was about eleven-ish when I heard something... weird from the document storage. It was like… a whisper, or a call. A very quiet one.

Now, the thing is, that was far from the first time I heard something like that in the Archives. Those whispers, and sudden brushes of cold wind, I suppose, have been following me since, um, the middle of September. I’m not the most superstitious person, but I can’t very well deny the uneasiness that flooded my mind with every such… incident. Still, there weren’t any words being said in an ominous voice, no blood oozing out of the walls, no foggy mirrors, or, or anything, to indicate that it wasn’t just me freaking out without reason, so I kind of — let it be? I mean, it’s not like I could do anything. There isn’t a, a ghost manual or whatever, and you guys never noticed the things I did.

I must admit that I… am sorta fan of Ghost Hunt UK. I’m not big on conspiracies and deep scary mysteries, but their channel is — it’s honestly really good. They conduct proper investigations and stuff, and I know we as academics are supposed to, to despise their work out of principle, but… I simply never saw them as rivals. They do a lot of what we do — breaking into places, unearthing evidence, recording their findings — even if they lack the resources we possess. I’ve watched some of their content regarding old haunted basements, a while back. You know, the Archives are actually unbelievably good-fitting for the ‘haunted basement’ profile; the Institute was built in the early 1800s, and its structure has remained the same since. Despite there being only one exit, at least two archival employees have managed to vanish without a trace from what is essentially a closed room. There was blood found on the desk, for god’s sake.

I’ve emailed to Melanie King — she’s the main host — asking for her opinion. That was back in December, and I didn’t hold much hope for a proper answer. She must be quite busy, after all. But, surprisingly, she replied, uh, two days later? She needed more details — were there signs of possession or compulsion; have I seen, heard or smelt anything else odd or unnatural; was there seemingly a problem with electricity, heating or pipes that refused to go away, yada, yada. Based on what I’ve told her, she said it might indicate a minor poltergeist, possibly an Archivist, trying to finish their mission on this plane. I didn’t know whether I believed it. Anyhow, true or not, it’s a terribly sad way to exist, don’t you think? Permanently tied to your place of work, bound to fill out papers until the end of time. Ugh.

Melanie said ghosts such as these are usually deemed harmless, and unless I cared to confront it and discover its goal, there’s, as I suspected, very little that could be done. I wasn’t worried, not then. A disgruntled workaholic ghost? Pshh, just another strange thing about this job, right? Hah. And, well, today… today the issue became a lot more real.

As I said, there was a whisper coming from the document storage. I registered it, which was almost routine at that point, and waited for the cold to pass. After five minutes or so, its presence lessened significantly — although it hadn’t gone away completely. I had two layers of clothing on, so I was fine.

It’s — hard to remember what exactly I wanted to do? I know I went in to retrieve a box of files, probably related to the reports of… uncanny… um, skin people. I entered the storage — I held a reference file in hands, I think — and… there it was. A hand. Transparent, floating, detached from anything that might have resembled a body, human hand. It — it was kind of positioned where a person’s hand would be if they, uh, reached for something above their height. Which sounds ridiculous, of course — ghosts can levitate, can’t they? Or maybe I’m thinking of the vampires…

Anyhow, the hand, it — it grabbed a, a file from an open box at my eye level, and it pulled — and, and the file moved, like there was real physical force behind that gesture. I think I screamed. It was just so… impossible. There’s scary movies and books, and spooky podcasts that you listen to while going to sleep to shake yourself up a little — and then there’s that. I didn’t expect to see it because it shouldn’t have been real. I didn’t… I didn’t.

The next thing I know — I’m sitting on the floor, breathing heavily, with a very concerned Sasha crouching down besides me. She — she asked me what happened, led me to the break room, offered some tea. I turned to look back when we were exiting the storage — and there was nothing. No hands, no chill, no levitating objects... Just a bunch of dusty old boxes lined up in rows. I’m not sure whether I felt relieved or not. And, well, then Tim arrived, apologising for oversleeping, so that pretty much wraps up my experience, I suppose.

S-statement ends.”

< part 2 part 4 >

[nerdythebard]

#13: Doctor Strange [Marvel]

By the Eternal Vishanti, I welcome you back!

Today we're making the Sorcerer Supreme of the Marvel Universe-616, Doctor Strange. This spell-slinging master of the mystic arts has been my favourite superhero for quite some time now, and I'm always excited whenever we get something related to him. Now, just a quick note – this build is going to be based on the comic book version of Strange, not the MCU one. We're having real spells and incantations, not some thinly-veiled Clarke's Third Law. #LetMagicBeMagic.

Next Time: The Gods call for us again. The Dragon King blesses us with his presence.

Now then, let's examine what we need to become the mightiest mystic of the Multiverse:

Arcane Artillery: Doctor Strange holds enough mystic knowledge to give Mind Flayers an indigestion. What he doesn't know, he can look up in his Sanctum Sanctorum's library. We need to be prepared to have a spell for almost any situation.

Mystic Fists of Fury: Before opening his Third Eye fully, Strange spent some time in Kamar-Taj under the tutelage of the Ancient One, practising his combat skills in case he was ever in a situation where magic would fail him.

The Old Favourites: Whatever incarnation of the character we encounter, Doctor Strange is almost always certain to have the following items on him: the Eye of Agamotto, the Cloak of Levitation, and occasionally the Book of the Vishanti. After the Last Days of Magic event, Strange found a likeness for weapons like shortswords, staffs, and axes.

---

Stephen Strange was an ordinary human, but due to the years of exposure to otherworldly mystic forces, his biology changed to not accept regular human food anymore. This sounds like a good excuse to make him Variant Human. We get a +1 to two abilities of our choice (Intelligence and Constitution), we know how to speak Common and one other language of our choice, we get to pick one skill to be proficient in (Investigation), and we get to pick a feat. The Medic feat gives us a +1 to Wisdom, proficiency with the Medicine skill, and the ability to tend to our party members' wounds on short rests (Medicine check [DC 15], if successful - the player can use the maximum value of their Hit Dice to regain Hit Points).

Although he started as a simple physician, the turning point of Strange's life was his training in Kamar-Taj. He gained skills and knowledge, vast enough to call himself a Sage. From this background, we gain proficiency in Arcana and History, we learn two more languages, and we gain the Researcher feature; when we're to recall a piece of lore, and we don't know it, we usually can figure out where to find the information (be it a library, a temple, or somebody's private collection).

ABILITY SCORES

Intelligence is our primary stat, serving as our casting ability and our pride. Next is Constitution, all casters need to keep it high. We follow that up with Wisdom, lessons of the Ancient One granted us both humility and broadened our horizons.

Dexterity is a little low, but we'll take care of that later. Charisma is next, even after his training was complete Stephen can be a bit of a jerk and refusing to hear anyone but himself. Finally, we'll dump Strength.

CLASS

Assigning a D&D class to Doctor Strange was a very (and I mean very) difficult task. Starting off, I had to disregard his Sorcerer Supreme title, because in D&D sorcerers are born with the ability to wield magic. Strange had to study and practice to get his powers, so that makes him a Wizard. Kamar-Taj is also dedicated to studying the teachings of the Vishanti, a trinity of god-like beings who give the Sorcerer Supreme their powers, so that would make Strange a Cleric. Finally, he also draws powers from deals he made with otherworldly entities (such as Cyttorak, the Faltine, Munnopor, Watoomb, sometimes even Dormammu himself), which screams 'Warlock', except there's no way to incorporate multiple patrons without homebrewing. It wasn't easy, but I am satisfied with what I've created. Hopefully, you'll be, too.

Level 1 - Monk: We start just as Strange started, by honing our body first. Monks get the d8 Hit Dice, [8 + Constitution modifier] initial Hit Points, proficiencies with simple weapons and shortswords, and proficiency in one set of artisan's tools or a musical instrument (I'd go with alchemist's supplies). Our saving throws are Strength and Dexterity, and we get to pick two class skills (Insight and Religion).

Monks start with Unarmoured Defence. When we're not wearing armour, or holding a shield, our AC equals [10 + our Dexterity modifier + our Wisdom modifier]. We also get Martial Arts, which gives our unarmed strikes some more power. We can now use Dexterity instead of Strength for our unarmed strikes attack and damage rolls, we replace our Strength modifier with a d4 for damage of our unarmed strikes, and if we use the unarmed strike (or a monk weapon) on our turn as an Attack, we can use a bonus action to make an extra unarmed strike.

Level 2 - Monk: We get more mobile with Unarmoured Movement. Our ground speed increases by 10 feet if we're not wearing armour or holding a shield.

We also get access to the Monk's signature feature, the Ki energy. We start with 2 Ki Points, which we can spend on the following abilities:

Flurry of Blows: Spending 1 Ki Point after making an attack, lets us make two unarmed strikes as a bonus action;

Patient Defence: Spending 1 Ki Point lets us take a Dodge action as a bonus action on our turn;

Step of the Wind: Spending 1 Ki Point doubles our jump distance for the turn, and we can take the Dash or Disengage actions as a bonus action.

Level 3 - Wizard: We finally begin our study of spells and arcane arts.

Unfortunately, multiclassing into Wizard does not give us any additional benefits. We do, however, get Arcane Recovery. Once per day, during a short rest, we can choose a number of expended spell slots and refill them. The number must be equal to half of our Wizard level (rounded up), and the recovered spell slots cannot be 6th-level or higher.

Wizards also start with Spellcasting at their 1st level, and they know both cantrips and ritual spells. Our spellcasting ability is Intelligence, but unlike many other casting classes we do not get a full access to our spell list. Instead, we start with six spells in our spellbook and get two more each time we level up. Then, we can only prepare and use [Our Intelligence modifier + our Wizard level] spells at once. Describing all of those spells we pick would make this post over a mile long, and I've made that mistake with Sypha. To not make this a chore for you guys, I decided that from now on whenever I make a Wizard (or, a build where Wizard is a majority), I will simply list the spells we pick without descriptions. Let's be honest, if not here, you'll certainly find those in a different build. Alright, let's begin! First, we get to pick three cantrips:

Fire Bolt

Mage Hand

Minor Illusion

When it comes to our starting spells, let's take these six. Remember, we can only prepare a certain number, and we start with only two 1st-level spell slots.

Alarm

Detect Magic

Fog Cloud (to represent the Mists of Munnopor from the comics)

Shield (of the Seraphim)

Magic Missile (as a stand-in for the Daggers of Daveroth)

Sleep

Level 4 - Wizard: We get to pick our subclass, our Arcane Tradition. For Strange, who can be any combination of Wizard, Cleric, and Warlock, the best choice is to pick Theurgy from 2017 Unearthed Arcana. Theurgists are religious magic-users, who focus more on the arcane research rather than prayer and worship.

With Divine Inspiration, we get to select a Cleric Domain and a deity we wish to follow. Ask your DM if it's possible for you to worship three gods as a collective, a magical triumvirate. For your own Vishanti I suggest Mystra, Mother of All Magic, Azuth, the Lord of Spells, and Savras, the All-Seeing. For a Wizard, I'd say there's no better choice than Knowledge Domain.

We also get Arcane Initiate, which lets us replace spells we learn as we level up with the cleric spells of our chosen domain. What's cool about that feature is, other wizards cannot copy those spells from our spellbook. If we get all of our chosen domain's spells, we can keep replacing spells we learn with spells from the Cleric spell list.

Finally, we gain the Cleric's unique skill - Channel Divinity - except in our case it becomes Channel Arcana. We start with two effects: Divine Arcana and the effect granted by the chosen domain. Unlike Clerics, we can use the Channel Arcana once per short or long rest.

Divine Arcana lets us use a bonus action to control the flow of magic in the area. The next spell we cast gets a +2 to its attack roll or saving throw DC.

Knowledge of the Ages grants us quick insight into a skill we're not familiar with. For the next 10 minutes, we're proficient with one tool set of our choice or proficient in one skill we choose.

We gain one more 1st-level spell slot, and for this level's two spells let's get Feather Fall, and Command from the domain list.

Level 5 - Wizard: At this level we unlock 2nd-level spell slots, and we can access 2nd-level spells. Let's get Hold Person (for Strange's famous Crimson Bands of Cyttorak) and Icingdeath's Frost from 2021 Unearthed Arcana: Draconic Options (for the Icy Tendrils of Ikthalon).

Level 6 - Wizard: Time for our first Ability Score Improvement! As is the rule of thumb with all Wizards, boosting our Intelligence is a priority. That's what we shall put the 2 points into.

For this level's spells, we get another cantrip (Light), and let's take Locate Object and Mirror Image (to represent the Images of Ikonn).

Level 7 - Wizard: We unlock 3rd-level spell slots. Let's get Dispel Magic, and we can get Fly to finally get a representation for our Cloak of Levitation.

Level 8 - Wizard: We get our first subclass upgrade. Arcane Acolyte grants us the 1st-level benefits of our chosen domain. For Knowledge domain, it's Blessings of Knowledge; we learn two languages of our choice and get proficiency in two skills... which we pretty much are proficient in already. To not waste a feature, ask your DM if you can double your proficiency bonus for those two skills instead. If you get a 'yes', pick Arcana and Insight.

For this level's spells, let's get Counterspell and Magic Circle.

Level 9 - Wizard: From here, we get access to 4th-level spell slots. Banishment and Dimension Door seems like exactly what we need to keep enemies at bay and have fun with portals.

Level 10 - Wizard: Halfway through the build, and we get an ASI. Let's cap our Intelligence at 20, with those two points.

For this level's spells, let's grab Arcane Eye and turn back a little and get Speak with Dead from our domain list, as it is one of few spells not available to Wizards.

Level 11 - Wizard: We get access to 5th-level spells. With Contact Other Plane and Legend Lore, we become an even bigger magical know-it-all to aid our party.

Level 12 - Wizard: For our subclass upgrade, we get Arcane Priest, which grants us the Knowledge Domain's 6th-level benefit - Channel Divinity: Read Thoughts. One creature within 60 feet of us must make a Wisdom saving throw, or grant us access to its surface thoughts (emotions and active thoughts, no deep secrets or hidden motives) for 1 minute. During that time, we can also use our action to cast the Suggestion spell on the target; they fail their saving throw automatically.

We also get our final cantrip for this build (Sword Burst), and we get two more 5th-level spells: Planar Binding and Wall of Force.

Level 13 - Wizard: We unlock 6th-level spells. With Globe of Invulnerability and True Seeing, we upgrade our Shield of the Seraphim and give our Eye of Agamotto even more mystic abilities (as it should have had!)

Level 14 - Wizard: Time for another ASI! Let's put one point into Constitution for better HP chance, and one into Dexterity.

Arcane Gate finally gives us a proper yellow sparkly portal thingy, and let's get Chain Lightning for some much needed offensive capabilities.

Level 15 - Wizard: We're getting into 7th-level spells at this level. Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion allows us to recreate our very own Sanctum Sanctorum, and with Project Image we can get Strange's Astral Projection.

Level 16 - Wizard: At this level, we get our final subclass upgrade (and we cross the 100 HP mark, yay!). Arcane High Priest grants us the Knowledge Domain's 17th-level benefits. Visions of the Past lets us spend at least 1 minute of meditation to receive information about a specific object we're holding, or our immediate surroundings:

Object Reading - we learn of the object's previous owner. We know how the person came into contact with the object, how they lost it, and a significant even in their life tied to the object.

Area Reading - we see the events that transpired in the specific location (up to 50-foot cube), going back a number of days equal to our Wisdom modifier.

For this level's spells, let's get Plane Shift and Teleport to double-down on Strange's interdimensional travels.

Level 17 - Wizard: Time for 8th-level spells.

Illusory Dragon is a nice nod to the great "Doctor Strange and the Sorcerers Supreme" series (go check it out, it's awesome!), and Maze is another good banishment-type spell to have. Just don't use it on minotaurs.

Level 18 - Wizard: For our final ASI, let's put two points into Dexterity, leaving us unfortunately with an odd number (hopefully, you'll manage to find some ability-increasing item or benefit in your adventure).

For this level's spells, let's grab Power Word: Stun and Demiplane is a good combo to immobilize a foe and send it to the Shadow Realm Mirror Dimension.

Level 19 - Wizard: We unlock the pinnacle of D&D arcane, the 9th-level spells... that is, unless your DM introduces High Magic, which is... whew, a league of its own.

Time Stop and Foresight give us those Time Stone abilities (for all you MCU degenerates. Yes, I know what I said, but Strange was given the Time Stone in his new run, so I did not lie!)

Level 20 - Wizard: Our capstone is Wizard 18, which gives us the Spell Mastery feature. We get to choose one 1st-level spell and one 2nd-level spell from our spellbook and make them our signature moves; we can now cast them at will, without expending a spell slot. Shield and Hold Person seems like a good choice here.

For our final spells of this build, we cannot go without Astral Projection, and let's get Imprisonment a chance.

---

And there we go! Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts. Let's see what we've created:

First of all, we're the epitome of Wizard, we're a great utility caster and a pretty good support, with Internet-like capability of finding information. We're don't have a lot of damage-dealing abilities, like Sypha did, but remember - Wizards also get spell by finding them in the world and copying them in their spellbook. This here is only what we get automatically. Go and roam the world in search for that Fireball!

We have AC of 14, but with Shield (and later making it pretty much permanent) it can get up to 19, and we have 130 Hit Points on average. Our speed is also a little better, with 40 feet of movement (plus flying thanks to the Fly spell).

Unfortunately, our Charisma and Wisdom are not great, so those saving throws might be difficult. Our Strength is also not the greatest, so we're pretty much forced to fight with magic.

---

And that is it! Next time, we return to SMITE for a few builds, as I absorbs information about Fire Emblem: Three Heroes. Also, the game devs just released a teaser for Morgana le Fay, and my first reaction was 'Hexblade Warlock'. Do you agree?

Anyway, hope you enjoyed it and your day is going great. I'll see you next time!

- Nerdy out!

[ezatluba]

Graves of nearly 600 cats and dogs in ancient Egypt may be world's oldest pet cemetery

Finds suggest Roman-era owners formed strong emotional bonds with their companion animals

26 Feb 2021

David Grimm

The cats and dogs lie as if asleep, in individual graves. Many wore collars or other adornments, and they had been cared for through injury and old age, like today's pets. But the last person to bury a beloved animal companion in this arid Egyptian land on the coast of the Red Sea did so nearly 2000 years ago.

The site, located in the early Roman port of Berenice, was found 10 years ago, but its purpose was mysterious. Now, a detailed excavation has unearthed the burials of nearly 600 cats and dogs, along with the strongest evidence yet that these animals were treasured pets. That would make the site the oldest known pet cemetery, the authors argue, suggesting the modern concept of pets wasn't alien to the ancient world.

"I've never encountered a cemetery like this," says Michael MacKinnon, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Winnipeg who has studied the role of animals across the bygone Mediterranean but was not involved with the new work. "The idea of pets as part of the family is hard to get at in antiquity, but I think they were [family] here."

Archaeozoologist Marta Osypinska and her colleagues at the Polish Academy of Sciences discovered the graveyard just outside the city walls, beneath a Roman trash dump, in 2011. The cemetery appears to have been used between the first and second centuries C.E., when Berenice was a bustling Roman port that traded ivory, fabrics, and other luxury goods from India, Arabia, and Europe.

In 2017, Osypinska's team reported unearthing the remains of about 100 animals—mostly cats—which appear to have been cared for like pets. But the exact nature of the site wasn't clear. Salima Ikram, an expert on ancient Egyptian animals at the American University in Cairo, said at the time that the bones might have been discarded rubbish.

Fieldwork being conducted at the Berenice pet cemetery

Osypinska and her colleagues have now excavated the remains of 585 animals from the site and analyzed the bones in detail. A veterinarian helped the team determine health, diet, and cause of death.

The animals appear to have been laid gently in well-prepared pits. Many were covered with textiles or pieces of pottery, "which formed a kind of sarcophagus," Osypinska says. More than 90% were cats, many wearing iron collars or necklaces threaded with glass and shells. One feline was placed on the wing of a large bird.

The team found no evidence of mummification, sacrifice, or other ritual practices seen at ancient animal burial places such as the Ashkelon site in Israel. At Berenice, most of the animals appear to have died from injury or disease. Some cats have fractured legs or other breaks that may have been caused by falls or from being kicked by a horse. Others died young, possibly from infectious diseases that spread rapidly in the cramped city.

The dogs, which make up only about 5% of the burials (the rest are monkeys), tended to be older when they died. Many had lost most of their teeth or suffered periodontal disease and joint degeneration.

"We have individuals who have very limited mobility," Osypinska says. Yet many lived long lives and their injuries healed. "Such animals had to be fed to survive," she says, "sometimes with special foods in the case of the almost-toothless animals."

A cat from Berenice was wearing a bronze collar.

The fact that humans took such good care of the animals, especially in a rough-and-tumble region where almost all resources had to be imported—and that they took such care in burying them, just as many modern owners do—suggests the people of Berenice had a strong emotional bond with their cats and dogs, the team concluded last month in World Archaeology. "They weren't doing it for the gods or for any utilitarian benefit," Osypinska says. Instead, she argues that the relationship between people and their pets was "surprisingly close" to the one we see today.

Ikram is convinced. "This is a cemetery," she says. "And it sheds an interesting light on the inhabitants of Berenice and their relationships with their animals."

Archaeologist Wim Van Neer is also on board. "I've never seen a cat with a collar" from so long ago, says Van Neer, of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, who has studied the relationship between people and animals in the ancient world, including at Berenice.

Still, he says it's possible the people of Berenice valued their cats and dogs for nonsentimental reasons. A seaport would have teemed with rats, he notes, making cats a prized working animal. And although a few of the pups at the site were small dogs akin to today's toy breeds—and thus likely had little utility except as lap dogs—larger canines could have guarded homes and consumed refuse. "I don't believe it was just a loving relationship."

Osypinska hopes the new work will convince other archaeologists that companion animals are worth study. "At first, some very experienced archaeologists discouraged me from this research," arguing the pets were irrelevant for understanding the lives of ancient peoples, she says. "I hope the results of our studies prove that it's worth it."

[newstfionline]

In Angolan Town, Land Mines Still Lurk ‘Behind Every Bush’

By Norimitsu Onishi, NY Times, April 26, 2017

CUITO CUANAVALE, Angola--Domingos Luis, a 20-year-old farmer, has lived his entire life in a hamlet surrounded by land mines, their lurking threat a constant presence. He remembers the old man who was killed after stepping on an explosive while tending his crops. Wild pigs and deer still set off mines in the nearby bush.

“I grew up with the fear that behind every bush there might be a mine,” he said.

When he was a boy, the village elders told him “where to go, where to move, how to move.” But sticking to the strict confines went against a child’s irrepressible desire to wander and explore.

His grandmother Diana Tchitumbo said she explained the dangers bluntly. “‘If you go there, you’ll be killed and never come back. Don’t go there again,’” she told him. “And if he did, I beat him.”

Fifteen years after the end of one of Africa’s longest wars, Angola remains one of the world’s most heavily mined countries. Swaths of Angola are still littered with land mines, some produced decades ago in countries that no longer exist.

Nowhere are there more mines than here in Cuito Cuanavale, a city in southeastern Angola that was one of the last great battlefields of the Cold War. As the United States and the Soviet Union faced off globally, their proxies laid tens of thousands of mines in Cuito Cuanavale, in an area of Angola then considered so remote and impoverished that it was known as the Land at the End of the World.

Today, as populations have swelled with Angola’s postwar economic recovery, communities now ring the city’s outskirts and villagers are living next to still-active minefields. But the unearthed land mines have stunted Cuito Cuanavale’s growth and impeded government plans to turn the battlefield into a Gettysburg-like tourist attraction.

While the city’s center has been cleared, villages press hard against minefields containing explosives set by Cubans, who supported the Angolan government. On the other side of the city, an 18-mile-long defensive strip, meticulously planted with mines by apartheid South Africa’s soldiers, who backed Angolan rebels, remains untouched.

“Angola has more different mine varieties than most mine-affected countries,” said Gerhard Zank, the country manager of the Halo Trust, a private British organization that clears land mines in Angola and other countries. Over the years, the organization’s deminers have found mines from at least 22 countries in Angola, including the former Soviet Union and East Germany, Mr. Zank said.

Immediately after gaining independence from Portugal in 1975, Angola slipped into a brutal civil war pitting two former liberation movements.

The civil war then became one of the most heated Cold War conflicts on the continent. The Eastern bloc backed the Angola government led by the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or the M.P.L.A., with Cuba sending in troops. The West supported the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or Unita, as the United States’ Cold War ally, apartheid South Africa, sent troops to Angola.

The Angolans and their respective allies clashed in Cuito Cuanavale in the late 1980s in one of the last century’s biggest battles in Africa.

Neither side scored a decisive victory. But in Angola and the rest of southern Africa, the battle--and not the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union--is regarded as the turning point that eventually led to the liberation of much of southern Africa and the end of apartheid in South Africa.

“If it wasn’t for this battle, I can surely say that Nelson Mandela would have died in prison and Namibia wouldn’t have achieved its independence,” said Brig. Jose Roque Oliveira, the department head of the government’s National Intersectoral Commission for Demining and Humanitarian Assistance.

Whatever the battle’s significance, it turned Cuito Cuanavale into what Mr. Zank calls the “most mined town in Africa.”

Of the 93,000 mines that the Halo Trust has cleared in Angola in the last two decades, more than a third of them were taken out of Cuito Cuanavale. Tens of thousands more are still believed left in the city.

Nationwide, about 32,000 acres of confirmed minefields need to be cleared, and 88,000 acres of suspected areas need to be verified as safe, according to the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor.

Angola was required to clear all such mines from its territory by 2018 under a global treaty banning antipersonnel land mines. But Angolan officials say they will be unable to complete the work before 2025.

At its current rate of demining, Angola won’t be free of land mines until “beyond the year 2040,” said Constance Arvis, the deputy chief of mission at the United States Embassy in Angola. The United States, which has been the biggest donor for demining efforts in Angola, has earmarked $4 million this year.

Decreases in international funding have also affected nongovernmental groups, forcing private demining organizations like Halo to slash their work force.

Officials at the government’s Commission for Demining said that funding was also a problem for the government. Because of a drop in the global price of oil, Angola’s main export, the government’s demining budget has been cut by 60 percent, they said. The Angolan government has focused its demining efforts exclusively on areas of public works, leaving other areas to foreign donors and private demining organizations.

Critics say that the government--which enjoyed an oil boom for most of the last decade--did not have to rely on outsiders to fund demining work. “They could have done much more themselves,” said Alcides Sakala, a senior official at Unita, now the main opposition political party.

Clearing one mine costs Halo more than $1,500, Mr. Zank said. It is painstaking work, requiring deminers to work on a small patch of ground for hours, moving slowly forward on their knees.

In Huambo, a province that Halo has almost finished clearing, three new hires were completing their training recently.

One of them, Lino Domingos, 27, lived in San Antonio, a neighborhood near the center of the city of Huambo that Diana, Princess of Wales, visited two decades ago to raise awareness of the dangers of antipersonnel land mines.

Mr. Domingos knew the painful toll that the mines were inflicting in his community. One of his older sisters was killed after stepping on a mine while walking to the family’s crops a couple of miles away. The next day, another sister was killed by a mine while looking for firewood.

“I was always afraid after that,” Mr. Domingos said. “When my mother would tell me to go with her to the crops, I’d refuse. I’d just stay home looking after my younger brothers.”

A decade later, after the area was demined, Mr. Domingos said he finally felt free.

“Now people can move from place to place without worrying,” he said.

[gigglesgigglinggiggles]

Drama

THIS IS LONG SO BE PREPARED FOR A WILD RIDE

Like any good Leo, I have tea, and this time way too much tea. I used to have a tumblr account known as ConfessorProfessor, which was my real life blog of crazy drama, no secrets. So I am gonna revive that style a little here.  My mother is an abusive narcissist and I left home at the tender age of 16. I absolutely despise her existence. I have been beaten, broken and damaged by this women, who like many mothers was supposed to love me, but in this case didn’t. She left me alone with my grandpa at one point of my life. He went to prison for pedophilia. Surprise real drama! Oh she also left her child to go to Japan for selfish and personal reasons, that will never make sense by the way. The first time on my grandpas money the second on secret money that no one knows where it came from. So fast forward from that incident and come to 2017 the year I got some money to go to Armeggedon which is the New Zealand form of comic con (except not as hyped up). I ask my mum for advice on saving on what little I was earning at the time. I wanted to save as much as I could, while learning how to deal with shopping urges. Why? because I use shopping as a stress reliever and self esteem booster. I shop to feel good a lot of the time. Anyway during this conversation multiple times I was offered money for the holiday, the first few times I said no, but then relented, it could hurt right? nope wrong. OH so WRONG I was. She tells me the only time I ever contact anyone is for money and that I am disowned because I unearthed a bunch of her lies and showed what I had found on my old tumblr. And who is but stalking it like an obsessed ex boyfriend from the movies? my mother of course. So I don’t talk to her, whatever emails she sends me or messages I read and delete. Fast forward to yesterday or rather the 12th of November 2019.

This is the start of drama. So my partner and I go to my Grandpas house. A lot of my stuff is still there at his. Yes the grandpa who is a convicted sex offender. I go over to get a picture of my cat who is 4 years younger than me, so you know 16-17 year old cat, she is pretty old and by the gods was she looking old (the last time I saw her was in June), I want to get a picture before she dies so I can get a clear photo for a tattoo artist. Was she there? No! Was my grandpa there? NO! Who answered the door? My birth giver. I ask where my cat is, and get a very blase “she’s passed away, she’s been dead since july” I am heart broken. No one called, no one text, no one emailed, nothing, not even my birthday email did I get a “you’re cat that you’ve had since childhood, is dead sorry”. I got silence.So I enter the house, the house that isn’t hers, and I can enter as I please because grandpa said I could. So I walk past her, a bit in shock but mostly just a lot of feelings. I go to see what I can take and how many trips I need to take for the stuff.  She starts off with an “ I will give you a minute to sort your stuff out yeah” I reply yeah. “do you want a coffee?” “No thank you.” and then the demon appears from within the silence. She keeps asking why I refuse to talk to her, when I will stop being childish. This woman is someone who has tried killing me, and she asks why I won’t talk to her, she tries to play the victim. The actual fucking nerve. I start getting stuff, but don’t respond or when I do I just say “it’s not my problem that’s yours.” because it isn’t my problem I don’t need to tell her why, she already knows. She doesn’t like the fact that she is the one in the wrong. So she decides to have a hissy fit and lie to me about the fact that the house is hers. It isn’t but I didn’t know that then so I am like well “where is grandpa?” her reply “ I don’t fucking know and I don’t care.” well that’s not good either. So I just grab what i can at this stage because she isn’t being nice and she doesn’t care so why should I? I just wanted my childhood toy and she decides to push me with her body into the wall telling me to “get out of my house!” again not her house. Did I forget to mention she is a 47 year old adult female who doesn’t have a job, refuses to get one and lives off my grandfather like a parasite? No well now I have. That is right! she has NO MONEY! so how can she own a house with no money? So she chucks my bunny at my partner and we start to leave, and at the top of the steps that go down to the car, I figure fuck it, I will yell back, and then we leave. I cry my cat, my baby Patches has been dead, didn’t even get to say goodbye, wasn’t there to hold her as she passed, and no one told me. I finally get a call back from grandpa after several attempts at calling and emailing, and I find out that my birth giver has beaten him and he doesn’t want to go back, because of her abuse. A medical report, police and social workers are evidence of this. As usual she isn’t getting punished for anything. And now my partner has to go over to get my stuff and I can’t go over without police because of her behavior. I am so fucking done with her shit. I hope she gets trespassed, and learns the hard way, that she is the fucking asshole and outcast, she is the one in the wrong, and she deserves all the shittiness that is thrown in her face!

[biofunmy]

How A Village In Ukraine Based On “Fiddler On The Roof” Got Dragged Into The Impeachment Inquiry

Christopher Miller for BuzzFeed News

An entrance to Anatevka Jewish Refugee Community

ANATEVKA, Ukraine — Less than 20 miles outside of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, there’s a little village inspired by Fiddler on the Roof that is playing an outsize role in the political scandal embroiling Washington, thanks to a cast of characters that includes the village’s honorary mayor.

And who’s he?

None other than Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was recently presented with an oversize ceremonial key to the village by its pro-Trump rabbi founder.

Anatevka, named after the village from the musical, was founded in 2014 by Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman, primarily as a refuge for Jewish families displaced by Russia’s five-year war against Ukraine in the country’s eastern Donbass region that has killed around 13,000 people.

The Anatevka project was also at the center of an aborted effort — brokered by Giuliani’s associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — to get the former mayor of New York to come to Ukraine in May for a meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, then the president-elect, whom he planned to push for investigations that would help President Donald Trump politically. Among the village’s funders are a former pro-Russian Ukrainian presidential candidate, a notorious Kazakh oligarch — and Fruman.

Fruman and Parnas stand accused of funneling money, much of it allegedly foreign, into Republican campaigns in the United States. The two men pleaded not guilty to four counts of campaign finance violations in a federal court in New York City on Wednesday and are now awaiting trial.

Meanwhile, another aspect of their alleged influence campaign has gone relatively unexamined.

For at least two years, Parnas and Fruman made donations to, and solicited financial support for, Jewish charitable causes as part of an international effort to build ties with influential politicians, according to interviews and records obtained by BuzzFeed News and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

In addition to contributions to the Anatevka project, financial documents show that Fruman and Parnas made a previously undisclosed donation of $25,000 to an affiliate of the National Council of Young Israel, a New York–based nonprofit run by Joseph Frager, who was formerly a fundraiser for the outgoing United States energy secretary, Rick Perry. The donation was given in the same month Parnas and Fruman traveled to Israel with NCYI and Republicans such as Mike Huckabee and Anthony Scaramucci.

The Giuliani associates’ financial support of both charitable causes appears to have bought them access to conservative figures in the US and Israel, as well as businesspeople in Ukraine. That access helped to bolster their back-channel campaign with Giuliani to try to dig up dirt on, and push conspiracy theories about, the Democratic presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden.

The payment to the Young Israel affiliate was from a bank account likely among those subpoenaed last week by the grand jury looking into the men’s trail of extravagant spending, as well as financial ties to figures including Giuliani, whose shadowy efforts in Ukraine Democrats are zeroing in on as they build a case for the impeachment of Trump.

When asked if Parnas and Fruman would comment about this article, their lawyer, John Dowd, said: “Don’t hold your breath.”

Angela Weiss / Getty Images

Rudy Giuliani lounges in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, his tie undone, alongside Parnas and Fruman.

Grinning widely as Parnas drapes an arm across his shoulder, Giuliani looks into a phone while someone records a video of them. He greets his friend Azman: “Moshe, how are ya, baby?”

The three men chuckle and each flash a thumbs-up before telling their rabbi friend, “We love you.”

The scene plays out in a now-viral video shot in 2018 that was published on the Facebook page for the Anatevka Jewish Refugee Community. In the video, which was unearthed this month by Jewish Insider, Giuliani and his associates discuss plans to soon visit Ukraine and Anatevka — “the best place in the world,” Fruman says.

The village of Anatevka, located just miles from the fictional setting of Fiddler on the Roof, is a dusty, fenced-in, and mostly treeless cluster of buildings. This week, work crews could be seen building two new structures. Residents who had relocated from the eastern war zone said that, despite the village’s lack of amenities, they were thankful for a peaceful place to live and a roof over their heads. As they spoke, a young girl rode by on a bicycle, an activity that one man said she wouldn’t have been able to safely do back in the east.

The site, which also contains the nearly 200-year-old grave of a prominent Hasidic rabbi, Mordechai Twersky, currently houses around 140 people. Its facilities include schools for children, according to the settlement’s administrator, Yoel Azman, who is the rabbi’s son.

The project has thus far cost somewhere between $6 million and $7 million, said the younger Azman, adding, “We’re constructing buildings every two or three months.”

He declined to discuss donations to the project, other than to point out plaques bearing donors’ names scattered around the complex. A tree sculpture adorned with those names in the center of the complex provided a fuller picture of Anatevka’s benefactors.

The list, mainly businesspeople from the former Soviet Union, included such controversial figures as Vadim Rabinovich, a Ukrainian oligarch, 2014 presidential candidate, and lawmaker who founded a pro-Russian party with a close friend of Vladimir Putin, and Alexander Mashkevich, a Kazakh Israeli mining billionaire whose company, Eurasian National Resources Corporation, is being investigated for corruption in the United Kingdom. ENRC has denied the allegations.

For at least two years, Fruman has also been a public backer of the project. In late 2017, he set up a New York–based charity, American Friends of Anatevka, which, according to its financial records, took in just over $1,300 that year. Figures for 2018 are not yet publicly available.

In early 2018, Fruman also organized for a consignment of yellow American school buses to be sent to the village. The shipment was a debacle.

“None of them actually worked,” said David Milman, Rabbi Azman’s deputy. “But that’s not his fault. He bought some written-off buses, and they were transported to Ukraine. We spent a lot of time and money on customs clearing and, after that, we discovered they weren’t suitable for transporting small children.”

Christopher Miller for BuzzFeed News

A tree adorned with the names of donors stands on the grounds of Anatevka.

One of the bigger mishaps faced by Anatevka was the cancellation of the planned visit by Giuliani in May, which fell apart after Zelensky refused to take a meeting with him, and Giuliani faced public backlash over the trip.

The attention garnered by the trip was one of the first hints of what would become the impeachment scandal that has consumed the White House, revealing the links between Giuliani and a cast of characters in Ukraine.

Before canceling the trip, Giuliani told the New York Times he intended to give a paid speech to an unnamed Jewish group in Ukraine. In a Facebook post four days later, Azman revealed Giuliani had been invited to speak by both the Anatevka community and Fruman’s New York–based charity.

Instead of going to Ukraine, Giuliani and Parnas traveled to Paris the following week, where they met Nazar Kholodnytsky, the head of Ukraine’s Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, who was one of the sources for Giuliani’s back-channel Ukraine campaign. Azman also flew in to join them and presented the former mayor of New York with the symbolic key to Anatevka, a moment the rabbi posted about on Facebook.

“When Giuliani had to cancel his visit in May for political reasons, he called Rabbi Azman and told him he wanted to meet anyway,” Milman said. “He had already bought a good bottle of kosher cognac for the rabbi and wanted to present it to him.”

Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment about this article. Reached by phone, Azman refused to discuss potential payments to Giuliani and his relationship with him.

“I don’t want to be involved in [an] American political scandal. I work with refugees,” Azman said, referring to Anatevka. “It’s a really beautiful project, and now you want to involve it in dirty politics.”

Parnas and Fruman made use of Giuliani’s closeness to the project to attempt to direct money toward the New York charity, rather than toward the local fund for the Anatevka project. According to a Ukrainian businessperson who encountered Parnas and Fruman in Kyiv this year, the two men used Giuliani’s planned visit to Anatevka as a selling point to drum up contributions to the project from members of the country’s Jewish community.

The businessperson, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he found it strange that the two men were asking Ukrainian businesspeople to send money to the US-based nonprofit.

“How come I should give to an American charity?” the businessperson recalled replying to Parnas and Fruman, adding that he told them it would make more sense to donate directly to the Ukrainian charity.

Photos posted by Azman to Facebook show that his relationship with Giuliani goes back at least as far as January 2017, when the two of them were pictured together at Kyiv’s Brodsky Synagogue. The pictures also show Fruman as a speaker at a May 2018 event at Anatevka. Another image shared by Azman showed him, Giuliani, Parnas, and Fruman sitting with other men around a table at an undisclosed location on Nov. 2, 2018 as their Ukraine campaign geared up.

Azman declined to speak about his relationship with Fruman and Parnas, asking for a reporter to call back later to set up a time for an interview. A subsequent call went ignored. Another was answered by his press secretary, who said the rabbi would not be available for an interview. The next day, Milman said Azman would no longer be speaking to the media.

Parnas and Fruman were, by this point, earning a reputation as hustlers in Republican circles, jetting around the world, and pressing people from all walks of life for money while touting their connections to Giuliani and the Trump administration.

While they supported Anatevka in Ukraine, Parnas and Fruman also built political ties in the US via at least one five-figure donation to Chovevei Zion, an affiliate of the National Council of Young Israel, an Orthodox Jewish nonprofit.

Financial records show the men donated $25,000 to the organization on Aug. 21, 2018, from one of their companies, Global Energy Partners LLC. The company has a similar name to Global Energy Producers, a Delaware LLC set up by the men to pursue a deal selling American liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Ukraine.

A $325,000 donation made in 2018 in the name of Global Energy Producers to America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC, is one of several political contributions that US prosecutors allege in their indictment to have been made while Fruman and Parnas were concealing the true origin of the money.

Young Israel, an association of over 100 US Orthodox synagogues, has in recent years become a staunch supporter of Trump and the Israeli right, a partisan shift that caused some to split from the group. The association’s first vice president, New York gastroenterologist Joseph Frager, is a longtime supporter of conservative Republicans, including Energy Secretary Rick Perry and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.

Both Fruman and Parnas attended a trip organized by Frager to Israel in late July and early August 2018, which was attended by Huckabee and former Trump White House spokesperson Anthony Scaramucci. On the trip, Parnas and Fruman met David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel, and were pictured together with the son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the home of Israeli billionaire and conservative donor Simon Falic.

Also pictured on the Israel trip with Fruman, Parnas, and Huckabee was Anatevka’s Azman.

When asked about the 2018 trip, Scaramucci said he interacted with Parnas and Fruman “four or fives times maybe,” calling them “friendly.”

“Igor had difficulty with English. Lev spoke English fluently. And he was a talkative guy, a pleasant guy, didn’t think anything of him one way or the other,” he said, adding that there was one thing about the men that stood out. “They were name-dropping Rudy like a machine gunner.”

Scaramucci said he thought about Parnas and Fruman again this week — after the two men pleaded not guilty to the charges — and about the fact that they had dined and posed with Trump on several occasions.

“What you have to understand about Trump, despite the bombast and the big rallies, he’s a fairly reclusive guy. You know, like when he’s home, he wants to be alone, reading magazines and newspapers and watching TV. He’s not hosting like, you know, 200-person parties and stuff like that. It’s not his personality,” Scaramucci said. “So if you’re you’re having dinner with him in the White House residence, he knows who the hell you are.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Fruman and Parnas, and their LNG export company, Global Energy Producers, were handed Young Israel’s Chovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) award at a gala in New York in March this year, an event attended by Giuliani and Huckabee. Also in attendance were Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Tommy Hicks Jr., co-chair of the Republican National Committee and former head of America First Action — both of whom had received donations from Fruman and Parnas in 2018.

Josh Nass, owner of a New York–based public relations agency, recalled Parnas and Fruman standing out in the VIP room before the gala dinner. Nass said he approached the men, who introduced themselves as entrepreneurs in the gas business. Fruman stayed mostly quiet, while Parnas did the talking.

“Based on what [Parnas] was saying, it seemed like he was trying to sell me on the fact that he was a very important, influential person that has some very exciting business propositions,” Nass said.

Parnas, Nass continued, boasted of “incredibly vast” connections “in the pro-Trump apparatus, and they go all the way up to the senior-most echelons of the party.”

What the men seemed less interested in was the charity event itself. “They didn’t mention the organization [Young Israel] a single time to me. We may as well have been at the Trump International Hotel,” Nass said.

Nass said the conversation was cut short when Parnas got a phone call from Giuliani.

Frager said that he did not introduce Parnas and Fruman to Perry. “Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman met Mike Huckabee at a Republican event in June of 2018 before they came on the Israel trip,” he said. Huckabee did not respond to a request for comment.

The president of Young Israel, Farley Weiss, said Parnas and Fruman’s $25,000 donation was connected to their attendance on the 2018 Israel trip. “I don’t know [Parnas and Fruman], and if I met them it was very brief. Likely I was in a picture with them at the [March gala] dinner, but they did not give us a donation for that honor,” Weiss said.

The men were given an award at that event in exchange for bringing Giuliani, he said. ●

Sahred From Source link World News

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[how2to18]

TO MANY, Vivian Maier is known as the mysterious Chicago nanny who took photographs secretly — thousands and thousands of photographs, often left as undeveloped rolls of negatives, which she then boxed up and stored in lockers. She was perceived by the locals in her Rogers Park neighborhood as a cantankerous old bag lady who ate food out of cans. Nobody knew about her art. But in the months before she died on April 21, 2009, aged 83, her storage lockers went into arrears. The padlocks came off, and all her photos and old cameras, her stacks of newspapers, magazines, and other items, went up for blind auction. One buyer bought the whole lot, and put it up for sale again in four or five subsequent auctions, thus setting in motion the scattering of Maier’s work. Some buyers, curious about the photos they found, began posting them on the internet.

The discovery of Vivian Maier caused a sensation in the art world, and her story has captivated many. It is, after all, a tale of mystery and intrigue: a woman who works as a nanny, never marries, says almost nothing about her life and childhood, dies in obscurity, dwarfed by the belongings she hoarded, only to be unveiled as one of the boldest and most poetic street photographers of the 20th century. It is difficult not to be fascinated by the woman, who can be glimpsed in the various self-portraits she took throughout her life, casting her distinctive shadow on a pavement or a wall — the tall, austere figure with an angular face and a beguiling stare, always smartly dressed in 1950s-style skirt suits or overcoats regardless of what decade it actually was.

This is exactly the story Pamela Bannos, in the first full biography of Maier, sets out to discredit. Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife is intended as “a counterpoint, a counternarrative, and a corrective” to the narrative spun primarily by the buyers of Maier’s boxes at the auctions of August 2007, and in particular, former real estate agent John Maloof, who has done more than anyone else to make Maier visible. As one blogger put it in 2014, Maloof could be described as a man who “just found an old photo in storage, attached [his] name to it, claimed all rights and sold limited editions of that photo for thousands of dollars.” It is difficult to avoid Maloof when seeking out Maier’s photography. He has published three books of her photos and made a documentary, Finding Vivian Maier, released in 2014. When the productions are not in his name he has shown less enthusiasm however: he refused to collaborate when the BBC arrived in Chicago to make their own documentary on Maier for Alan Yentob’s Imagine series; when Bannos began working on this biography, Maloof set such high demands she found it impossible to work with him, thus denying her access to his collection.

Maloof is, undoubtedly, the archvillain in A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife, cultivating the image of the “mystery nanny photographer” and even admitting this was what kept him going. “If I knew all about her, I don’t think I’d be as interested,” he says. But he is also the figurehead of a deeper problem dogging all Maier scholarship: given that she was so secretive, and that her oeuvre has subsequently been so dispersed, can we ever build a true picture of the artist? To this, Bannos simply follows the photographs, tracing where Maier went and looking at what subjects drew her eye. Her approach is refreshing — a clear-eyed, empirical account that counters the willfully obscure, ego-driven yarns spun by the buyers. In this light, A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife is a work of real integrity in a field lacking such a genuine spirit of inquiry.

The biography proceeds by dual narratives, shifting between recounting and retracing Maier’s life, and the story of how her oeuvre was subsequently “discovered” following the auctions — Maier’s life, in other words, and the afterlife of her work, told in parallel. This jumping across time has its drawbacks for the flow of the biography. With the constant shifting from one epoch to another, we become less immersed in Maier’s life, and, perhaps as a by-product of this, Maier’s childhood in New York and France, her work as a nanny, the heyday of her photography in New York and Chicago throughout the ’50s and ’60s, and then her slow decline from the ’70s onward lack intensity. It is clear the nature of Maier’s photography evolved as the world around her changed, just as the cultural, social, and political atmosphere in the previous decades infused her work and likely influenced her behavior. But when Bannos describes this context, and offers some color and detail on the developments in art and photography, the shifts and controversies in society and politics, the prose can be clunky and dutiful — paragraphs are often tacked onto sections, as though to do the job of contextualization in a few lines, but evoked without much passion. A deftness of touch in knitting together biographical material with the historical situation is lacking.

One forgives Bannos, however, because she directs her energies on getting the counternarrative right, and this she manages admirably.

Maier’s choices to not share her history or her photography also seem vital to seeing her as a woman who did her best to control the way she was seen, as well as how she viewed and recorded her surroundings. Maier found men to be “uncouth” yet her legacy has been almost entirely in the hands of men — something we cannot ignore when considering how her life and work have been depicted.

The facts about Maier’s life unearthed by Bannos take us to New York first, where Maier was born, on February 1, 1926. Her mother, a Frenchwoman named Marie Jaussaud, had left the Champsaur Valley in the Alps in 1914, following in the footsteps of her own mother Eugénie, who had sailed to New York in 1901. Both worked as domestic servants. In New York, Marie met Charles Maier and had two children with him, Karl and Vivian. Their union was brief. In 1932, as the Depression hit its lowest point in the United States and work was scarce, Marie took her daughter back to France, where they stayed six years before returning to New York. There, Maier would begin to work as a nanny, earning enough to travel — first to her family’s home in France in 1950 and 1951, where her first known photographs were taken, and then in 1959, for a trip around the world, alone. Maier’s last employment was in 1996 in Chicago. Thirteen years later she died, in a city hospital. One of the children she had looked after as a nanny identified her body and organized her funeral. Maier herself never married, never had children, and was not known to have had any romantic relationships.

We cannot know for sure what influence Maier’s upbringing had on her photography, and Bannos resists speculating. It seems Maier both followed the path open to her, working as she did as a nanny, and at the same time made a conscious effort to break with her family and origins. She never spoke about her private life and she changed details on her birth certificate and other identification papers, suggesting she was doing her best to live a free life, as much as this was possible to her. “Her separation from her own family,” Bannos writes, “as she assumed an outsider’s role [as a nanny] among others stands out as a poignant reminder of her independence and self-determination.” None of this indicates a pathway to photography however, making her decision to devote her life and most of her money to the pursuit remarkable.

Maier’s oeuvre is thrilling to explore, but it remains disturbing to think how her privacy in life has been so compromised after her death. This also raises broader questions about orphaned art works and what drives artists to create in the first place. Asked by one acquaintance who glimpsed a few of her photos why she would not show her work to anyone, Maier apparently replied that if she had not kept her images secret, people would have stolen or misused them. Given the exposure of her work today, its proliferation online, in books, and in galleries, one wonders whether she would have been horrified by all the attention. She chose to remain unknown. We cannot even say if she self-identified as a photographer. Every house she lived in as a nanny she asked for a padlock on her bedroom door; whenever she went out alone to take her photographs she refused to say where she was going and got angry if asked; in her bookcases, she turned the spines of her books against the wall so the titles remained hidden. All these details suggest Maier wanted her anonymity to remain intact, and perhaps she never imagined she had anything other people might care to see.

But she is dead, she left no will and made no apparent attempt to determine the fate of her photographs. Should we honor what we think the artist might have wanted? Maier’s oeuvre joins the other art collections, discovered by strangers, in an age of freewheeling circulation of images on the internet. In many ways, Maier and the various ways she has been understood, from the “mystery nanny” to the “street photographer,” is a construction and reflection of our time and much less of her own. This is what makes Bannos’s biography so welcome. For the most part she lets Maier emerge simply from what she did — her travels, her photos, her actions. Only in her closing remarks does Bannos give us the swiftest brush strokes of a portrait, which is worth remembering for it is one of the most lucid and accurate summations of Maier’s work to date.

Vivian Maier was a fiercely independent woman who lived the life of a photographer while also working as a nanny. She had a difficult personality, she was a hoarder, and she sought anonymity. These qualities may ultimately have little to do with her photography, but together they form a picture of a woman who chose to remain unknown.

There are two mysteries around Maier that are neither disrespectful nor irrelevant to pursue. The first is practical. Why did Maier stop taking photographs so abruptly in the ’80s? She would live another three decades. Did she stop? We cannot be sure. All we know is that almost all her known prints were packed up by the end of the ’60s, also around the time she stopped developing her black-and-white film — “a choice that today contributes to multiple readings of her intentions,” Bannos writes. For the next 40 years, Maier carried all her material with her in boxes, alarming new employers, some of whom would give over their garages and attics to store her belongings. Maier’s downward spiral began in the mid-’70s, by which point the subjects of her photographs had changed — the vivid, moving portraits of people started to disappear and were replaced by trash on the street, countless newspapers, fresh piles off the press or single copies torn and discarded. This was an evolution, but was it announcing an imminent end? Or have we simply not discovered all the work from later decades?

The second mystery is more essential, and unknowable. Why did Maier take photos and live the life of a photographer if she did not want to show her work or ever have it seen? It is moving to imagine her working so privately, without any apparent desire for recognition or visibility. What drives an artist to create, detached from any thought about reception or market, or apparently any desire to communicate through the art? If Maier was not interested in any of this, it is admirable — and also odd. The attempt to communicate an idea, an experience, or an emotion drives much artistic creativity, even if that artist has little interest in her potential audience. With Maier however, we must consider the possibility that she was not interested in communicating anything to anyone.

Another possibility is Maier feared the reception she would get because of the nature of her photographic process, which often involved prowling and stalking strangers. But if she simply lacked faith in the interests and motivations of others, should they get their hands on her photographs, this leaves us to wonder: If Maier had such little faith in other people, and no intent to have her work seen, why did she not do more to safeguard her oeuvre? By boxing it up in storage lockers, and then not paying the rent, she was leaving it to the wolves. She could have avoided all this by destroying it, and ensured absolute privacy and obscurity to the end. Given what we now know about Maier, this final abandon she showed with her oeuvre is baffling. Perhaps the idea of destroying it was, understandably, unbearable, or perhaps some part of her did want the world to see it eventually. And perhaps, ultimately, she was just too tired, in the end, to deal with all that.

¤

Emilie Bickerton is the author of A Short History of Cahiers du Cinema (Verso) and the screenwriter of the film Amnesia, which was released in 2015.

The post A Light on Vivian Maier appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[eurekamagdoteu-blog]

So: Just Who Are The DUP?

A Young Arlene Foster.Photo by The Belfast Telegraph.

Lindsay Heenan

British politics is not what it used to be. A once stable and often monotonous political system has been shaken to its core in recent years, with resignations, referendums and leadership elections rendering the United Kingdom a fractured state in flux. For students of political science, Britain has rarely been as exciting; yet for Brits themselves, politics has rarely been so worrying.

 With little doubt, the shock decision of the British electorate to leave the EU was the biggest accelerant in this new era of British politics. Described by many as a plunge into the dark, the referendum result unearthed a number of questions that didn’t immediately demand answers before June 23rd 2016 - including the time of the next General Election. Despite denying the need to call a General Election upon her ascension to Number 10, Theresa May’s 2017 U-turn brought Britain back to the polls earlier this year, in order to secure the mandate that her naysayers said she lacked. Predicted a colossal majority over Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, May actually managed to lose 13 seats in the Commons, a fact that left her with a variety of unpleasant decisions to make. Who’d of thought that Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party would become the kingmakers of the commons amongst all this uncertainty? 

 As a Northern Irish citizen, I can absolutely acknowledge the lack of understanding around the DUP, or further still, what the situation in Northern Ireland actually is. My aim however, is to try and make sense of who the DUP are, what they stand for, and what Theresa May’s new reality means for the UK as a whole, as well as Northern Ireland itself. 

 Just Who Are the DUP?

 If I’m being honest with myself, I’m not even sure where to begin with this. But let’s try it out. The Democratic Unionist Party was founded by Reverend Ian Paisley at the height of ‘The Troubles’ in 1971. The firebrand preacher established the party on the principle of staunch allegiance to the United Kingdom - totally abhorrent of any sort of Dublin influence in Northern Irish affairs. This was perhaps best demonstrated by Paisley’s charisma-fuelled ‘Never’ speech in protest of Margaret Thatcher’s signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement - a video I thoroughly recommend finding on YouTube. 

 Since its inception, the DUP has always offered a somewhat more radical form of ‘unionism’ in Northern Ireland. In 1998, they refused to enter the new Northern Irish government established by the Good Friday Agreement, on the grounds that they would not share power with Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA. This move would skyrocket their support among those who could not yet bear the thought of convicted murderers, who despite having not served full sentences, were being elected to public office. Ironically, when they became the largest party in the country in 2006, Paisley and the DUP would change their views on this matter, and indeed entered into government with the ‘bloodthirsty monsters’ (Paisley) of Sinn Fein. Paisley himself would serve as First Minister alongside IRA top gun (perhaps ‘top bomb’ would be more appropriate) Martin McGuinness. Paisley dramatically softened his stance on Irish Nationalism and Catholicism during this time, but it would not be enough for the DUP’s ‘modernisers’, who ousted him from the party in 2008. 

 What Do They Believe? 

 To get a grip with what the DUP stand for today, it’s important to clear up the misconceptions spread by British tabloids that no doubt clogged our Facebook feeds in the days following the General Election. The reality of the DUP is that, as far as Northern Ireland goes, they really are not that shocking of a phenomenon. Outside of our London bubble, there are without doubt areas of the UK which some may refer to as, well, a little more rustic. There is perhaps no area a better example of this than Northern Ireland - we did go through a thirty-year civil war after all. 

 A proudly Christian party, in what remains a strongly Christian country, the DUP uphold the views of the Protestant tradition in Northern Ireland - and are popular for doing so. Their support mostly stems from rural church-goers and working class Protestants in larger towns and cities like Belfast and Derry. The former sympathise with their hardline stance on issues like gay marriage and abortion (which both remain illegal in Northern Ireland), while the latter see them as the only party protecting their right to fly Union Jacks from every lamppost available, and march on the roads as much as possible during Northern Ireland’s 10 annual sunny days. With Sinn Fein’s support growing among Catholics in Northern Ireland, it would be political suicide for the DUP to alienate either of these core support groups. Thus, their stance on key issues only hardens. The party remains as firm today on many issues as it did during the Paisley years. They reject calls by people in the North to have a referendum on the border. They do not agree with the legalisation of gay marriage, abortion, or recreational drugs. They deny notions of Darwinist evolution and climate change. While this may seem like a shocking set of beliefs outside of my country’s borders, a high percentage of the population have a keen fondness for the DUP’s offerings. 

 The party’s stance on gay marriage and abortion have undoubtedly resulted in them getting plastered with homophobic and sexist labels - which to me feels overzealous. It would be wrong to label the whole support base of the party as homophobes and misogynists on account of their religious beliefs on social issues. But this does not mean the DUP are not deserving of these labels. The leadership continues to stand behind members of the party who have clear homophobic and sexist, not to mention racist, Islamophobic, and sectarian, beliefs. Here are some standouts: 

 ‘There can be no viler act, apart from homosexuality and sodomy, than sexually abusing innocent children’ - Iris Robinson, former MP, on child sex abuse

‘Would I trust them to go down to the shops for me, yes I would’ - Peter Robinson, former First Minister, on distrust of Muslims

 ‘I don’t care about CO2 emissions, to be quite truthful’ - Sammy Wilson, MP, on climate change 

 ‘Her most important job will remain that of a wife, a mother, a daughter’ - Edwin Poots, MLA, on Arlene Foster becoming First Minister

 ‘Save Ulster from sodomy!’ - Ian Paisley’s slogan during protests against legalising homosexuality

 Clearly, then not a very forward thinking party. These people are certainly part of the DUP’s old guard- but the fact that the party continues to give these individuals power and air-time speaks volumes. 

So What Does Confidence & Supply Mean For Us?

 So what will the deal between May’s Conservatives and Foster’s DUP mean going forward? For Northern Ireland, this really has the potential for good things. An injection of £1 billion to one of the poorest regions of the UK is all the more valuable considering we are currently lacking a government, and looks to be lacking one for the foreseeable future. Despite opposition from many in England, Scotland and Wales, Northern Ireland is the region in most desperate need of investment to education and infrastructure. Though I have much distaste for the DUP, I’m excited for the prospects this deal brings for Northern Ireland, both economically and politically - perhaps this forgotten province shall finally gain some politically clout. For the UK as a whole, the deal will actually do very little. A ‘Confidence & Supply’ deal looks almost nothing like the Conservative’s coalition formed with the Liberal Democrats in 2010. The DUP’s ability to shape policy going forward will be highly limited, with May’s main concern in shaking their hands being the passage of budgets and the avoidance of Motions of No Confidence. Despite unrest even among Tory ranks of the DUP’s record on LGBT rights, it’s unlikely that we’ll see any sort of homophobic legislation rolled out UK-wide. 

 A general election nobody predicted left us with a result that similar numbers foresaw. The DUP became the kingmakers in May’s government’s most desperate times, giving the six counties of Ulster levels of media attention last seen when bomb-strapped cars lined the streets of Belfast. In the end, Northern Ireland remains a poisoned chalice - it is in neither the interest of the United Kingdom, nor of the Republic of Ireland, to control this region. An economic liability and a desperately divided state, the future is uncertain for Northern Ireland - the present however, looks rather promising.

[newstfionline]

Why A Man Declared Innocent Can’t Get Out Of Prison

Deborah Bradley Hagerty, NPR, December 6, 2017

Just past 10 p.m. on a summer night, attorney Cheryl Wattley is standing near a quiet street in West Dallas, reconstructing an old crime.

It’s a moonless night. One street light and one porch light from a nearby house illumine the scene, nearly identical conditions to the night 30 years ago, when a young man was left to die on the street not too far from here.

Wattley points toward a man standing under the street light, a private investigator named Daryl Parker, as he positions himself in the alley 40 feet away.

“Can you identify him?” she asks.

I squint. It’s nearly impossible to see anything.

“You see a silhouette of a man,” Wattley says. “You can’t even see his face.”

On the night of the killing, witnesses said they could see more than a silhouette. They identified Benjamine Spencer and another man running away from the scene. Their testimony helped send them to prison.

But was Spencer guilty? He maintains his innocence. A trial judge even declared Spencer innocent and concluded the evidence that put him behind bars was falling apart. That was 10 years ago. A higher court ruled that was not enough to warrant a new trial. And Spencer remains in a maximum security prison.

This is how he got there.

On March 22, 1987, 33-year-old Jeffrey Young, the acting president of a clothing manufacturing company called FWI, was robbed as he was leaving his office around 9:30 p.m. in a warehouse district of Dallas. Police say two attackers robbed and beat him. They stuffed him in his BMW, drove over the Trinity River to West Dallas, dumped his body on the street, abandoned his car in the alley and fled.

Police got lucky: Three witnesses said they knew the two men from the neighborhood. They identified Spencer and Robert Mitchell as the men who abandoned the car.

“These are not eyewitnesses who were strangers--strangers who all of the sudden had to pick somebody out of a lineup,” says Faith Johnson, the current district attorney in Dallas County. “These people knew Spencer.”

Four days after the crime, police arrested Spencer. He was 22 years old, newly married, and expecting his first child. He’d had brushes with the law. He’d spent a few days in jail for driving on a suspended license. He’d received six years of probation for driving a car stolen by a friend.

He thought his arrest was a simple mistake, soon to be rectified.

Spencer had an alibi. He and a young woman told police they hung out from around 7:30 p.m. to past midnight the night of the killing. There was no physical evidence connecting him to the crime--no fingerprints, no murder weapon, and no Seiko watch, wedding ring, briefcase or portable TV--items that were taken in the robbery.

He thought he’d be out in a few days. But in October 1987, Spencer was tried for murder. The jury convicted him and sentenced him to 35 years in prison, based on testimony of the three key witnesses and a jailhouse informant.

Then Spencer caught a break. The state’s star witness had lied on the stand about whether she received a reward for her information. Spencer was granted a new trial. The state offered him a plea deal: He’d be out in less than 5 years. Spencer’s attorney thought he should accept.

“He was saying, ‘If you take it to trial, they’re going to try to give you a life sentence, and they’re likely to get it,’” Spencer recalls. “And I’m like, ‘I’m not going to plead guilty to something I didn’t do.’”

In the second trial, the state prosecuted him for aggravated robbery and asked for life. The star witness was 42-year-old Gladys Oliver, whose house overlooked the alleyway.

“There’s no question that Gladys Oliver’s testimony convicted Ben Spencer,” said former prosecutor Andy Beach.

He recalls Oliver sitting in a wheelchair in court, eye level with the jury, as she described Spencer getting out of the car and speeding away.

A jury convicted Spencer a second time, with a sentence of life. Robert Mitchell was convicted a few days later in a separate trial. He, too, maintained his innocence. He died after he was paroled in 2001.

With his verdict, Spencer embarked on a 30-year journey to unearth proof of his innocence. His story illustrates how difficult that can be.

“There’s probably not a day that goes by that I don’t at least think of Ben,” says Jim McCloskey, founder of Centurion Ministries, a group that re-investigates cases of prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted.

Spencer wrote Centurion in 1989. They were unable to take his case for more than a decade. When they finally met, McCloskey says, “I walked away thinking: We can’t leave this man behind.”

That was 17 years ago. Centurion interviewed more than 100 people, built a case, and then they asked a trial judge for a hearing.

“We thought we had a good shot,” McCloskey recalls.

Texas is one of a handful of states that can grant a new trial based on “actual innocence,” not just constitutional problems in the original trial. The petition landed in the chambers of Rick Magnis, a newly elected criminal court judge in Dallas.

“I was wary at first,” Magnis says in an interview.

The vast majority of exonerations are based on DNA evidence, which was not presented here. But as he read, he became intrigued.

“It started to become persuasive as I looked more and more at the evidence,” Magnis says.

In July 2007, he opened an evidentiary hearing. The state’s star witness, Gladys Oliver, held firm. But others backtracked.

Spencer’s team also presented evidence that they claimed implicated another man, Michael Hubbard. Hubbard was called to testify, but took the fifth.

Finally, they called a forensic visual scientist, who testified it would be impossible for the witnesses to identify Spencer. Under those conditions, you would have to be no more than 25 feet away to discern a face; the closest eyewitness was 93 feet away.

At best, the expert said, the witnesses could have seen a silhouette. The state’s expert agreed.

“When you have two [experts] that say none of these three witnesses could have seen what they said they saw,” Magnis said, “I felt that was very, very compelling.”

So did Alan Ledbetter, the foreman of the second jury. Centurion investigators talked to him in the course of their search for new evidence. The more he listened and researched, the more his doubts grew about Spencer’s culpability.

“We worked with what we had, but we were very wrong,” he says, as he grows emotional. “So there’s an element of guilt, and grief, that I carry for whatever role I may have played in robbing so much of his life from him.”

Judge Magnis issued his recommendation that Spencer be granted a new trial to the Court of Criminal Appeals, on the grounds of “actual innocence.”

Spencer was elated. “I was very hopeful. I thought that this is it. I’m going home.”

But days turned into weeks, months into years, with no word from the Court of Criminal Appeals, the only court with the authority to grant a new trial.

In 2011, he received the grim news. The appellate court denied Spencer a new trial. Judge Lawrence Meyers wrote the unanimous opinion. If this evidence had been presented at the original trial, he explained, it might have created reasonable doubt. But the evidence did not outright clear Spencer.

In an interview with Meyers, he said, “The problem was, there just wasn’t newly discovered evidence. That’s what really hurt Mr. Spencer the most.”

To win a new trial, Spencer would have to find unassailable proof that he’s innocent--DNA that’s never been tested, for example, or security camera video that’s never been seen. It’s an incredibly high standard. In fact, Texas judges call it a Herculean burden.

Meyers acknowledges that the bar is so high that innocent people are surely in prison with no recourse. So where does that leave Benjamine Spencer?

Meyers sighs. “Oh, I don’t know. Mr. Spencer has been in jail for a long time. Mr. Spencer may be eligible for parole.”

Theoretically, Spencer could ask for another new hearing. But his attorney, Cheryl Wattley, says his team threw everything they had into the first hearing. They’d have to start from scratch.

“Ironically, that’s the catch-22,” she says. “We need new evidence. We need the proverbial breakthrough.”

Thirty years after the crime, it’s nearly impossible find new evidence.

Gladys Oliver, the one who testified confidently about what she saw, refused to talk about the case.

A second witness is dead. And a third has now back-peddled. That witness testified that he got a clear view of Spencer in the alley. In an interview, he now gives it a 30 percent chance it was Spencer. He says he felt pressured by police to name him.

Another neighbor who was never called at trial says the man ran right in front of her. She’s said in an interview that she’s “1,000 percent sure” the man was not Spencer.

Even the jailhouse informant, Danny Edwards, has recanted. Edwards had testified that in 1987, Spencer and he briefly shared a jail cell, and that Spencer had said he killed Jeffrey Young. Did Spencer actually say that?

“Naw, he didn’t say that,” Edwards said in an interview. “He said they was accusing him of doing it. He didn’t even know the guy. He ain’t even been over there. In fact, he had proof that he wasn’t over there that day.”

Edwards claimed in court that he did not receive a benefit for his testimony. But state records show he was facing up to 25 years in prison in a separate aggravated robbery case before he talked to lead detective Jesus “Jessie” Briseno. After he gave police his statement about Spencer, the records show his charges were reduced and he walked out of prison in 15 months.

So, if Spencer didn’t kill Young, as his some of his accusers now say, who did? Could it have been Michael Hubbard? One of his friends, Kelvin Johnson, recalls that, a few days after the crime, Hubbard mentioned Young’s attack and killing.

“These were his exact words: “The white man who they found dead over in West Dallas? I did that, man.” Johnson said. “Ben’s in prison for something he didn’t do.”

Johnson was torn because of his friendship with Hubbard, but gave a statement to police about his friend’s confession 30 years ago. But he never signed his affidavit, and police didn’t believe him.

Johnson eventually testified to all that before Judge Magnis, who found him to be credible.

Hubbard, who’s now serving life for a brutal robbery and assault, declined an interview.

Why would investigators believe a jailhouse informant, and disregard the alibi witnesses and others who said the perpetrator was not Benjamine Spencer?

Private investigator Daryl Parker believes it was a classic case of “tunnel vision.” That’s when police are so driven to solve the crime, they focus on the initial suspect, to the exclusion of other potential leads.

“And then they start making the evidence fit their theory,” Parker says, “instead of making their theory fit the evidence.”

Detective Jesus Briseno shrugs when he was told that two of his four witnesses have more or less recanted. “It’s their conscience, not mine,” he says.

And they had a solid suspect already: Benjamine Spencer.

At the maximum security prison, Spencer looks professorial in his wire-rimmed glasses, his hair flecked with gray. He is tall and lanky and still handsome. But he seems a little defeated.

“I’m just at a point where, I’m still hopeful, but at the same time, it’s like I’m stuck in a system.”

Spencer comes up for parole in February. He’s been denied every time in the past, despite a near perfect record.

Jeffrey Young’s family opposes his parole. They point out that not one, but two juries convicted him. A story like this re-opens old wounds, and they declined to talk about Spencer’s case.

Even without parole, Spencer may have one last hope. It turns out that the crime laboratory in Dallas may have kept fingernail clippings from Jeffrey Young’s right hand. There is a chance that Young scratched his killer and captured his DNA beneath his nails.

If the DNA hasn’t degraded, it may point to another person, or to Benjamine Spencer. We asked District Attorney Faith Johnson if she would agree to the testing.

“Absolutely,” she says, “because we don’t want any innocent person to be in prison.”