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Trump’s Racist Tweets, and the Question of Who Belongs in America

July 17, 2019 | News | No Comments

On Sunday night I texted my twin brother, Chris, who lives in San Francisco, and asked him to excavate his memory about the bullying we’d experienced for being Asian while growing up. Our family moved around several times during our childhood: we spent elementary school in a Pittsburgh suburb; middle school was in upstate New York; high school was in Michigan. The schools we attended were almost exclusively white, and being Asian-American inevitably shaped our ability to navigate the social hierarchies that circumscribe the lives of all children. Some of the epithets we dredged up, in our texts: La Choy. Me Chinese, me play joke, me go pee-pee in your Coke. Ching chong. I remembered middle school as being the worst, but Chris thought that the teasing in elementary school was more pervasive. “We were more established in middle school,” he said. He pointed out that we’d managed to attach ourselves to a group of popular kids, and that had insulated us to some degree. But I still recalled ugly moments, including one when a friend—indisputably one of the cool kids—had to put a stop to the harassment. What Chris remembered—and it was what I remembered, as well—was the feeling of perennially being “on the outside looking in.” It’s a sense that persists for both of us today, at a constant low thrum.

On Sunday morning, President Trump suggested on Twitter that four congresswomen of color, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, should “go back” to the countries “from which they came.” The racist diatribe came in a string of tweets, separated by ellipses.

Many have already pointed out the fallacies in Trump’s tweets. Three of the women were born in this country; only Omar, who emigrated from Somalia, was not. Tlaib’s parents are Palestinian immigrants; Ocasio-Cortez’s parents are of Puerto-Rican descent. Pressley is black. They are all, of course, Americans. But it is worth pausing to recognize the racist shibboleths in Trump’s tweets, ones that have been used to justify other shameful moments in our history, from the Japanese internment, during the Second World War, to the Trump Administration’s Muslim ban.

As an editor, my normal instinct regarding Trump’s tweets has been not to engage, to avoid becoming an unwitting abettor of his attention economy. But Sunday’s tweets felt different to me. They were too dangerous to go unchallenged, the path from words to action too well trodden. There’s the assumed association with the countries of the congresswomen’s ancestry, a trope that has been used to question the loyalties of immigrants throughout American history. There’s the us-versus-them delineation in the language around “our government.” There’s the reproach to get out. On Sunday, I searched Nexis, a newspaper database, for variants of “go back to your country” and “murder” or “attack.” Some of what I found:

On February 22, 2017, Srinivas Kuchibhotla was having drinks after work with his best friend, Alok Madasani, at Austin Bar & Grill, in Olathe, Kansas. Kuchibhotla and Madasani both worked as engineers at Garmin, the G.P.S.-technology firm. Austin was a regular spot for them after work. A white man approached and demanded to know their immigration status. His name was Adam W. Purinton. He was fifty-one, a Navy veteran, and a regular at Austin. He continued to heckle the two friends and hurl ethnic slurs before other patrons intervened and escorted him from the premises. A short while later, he returned with a gun and opened fire, killing Kuchibhotla and wounding Madasani, as well as a bystander who chased after Purinton. Witnesses said that before Purinton started shooting, he yelled, at the men, “Get out of my country.”

In July, 2018, Rodolfo Rodriguez, a ninety-one-year-old resident of Willowbrook, a neighborhood south of downtown Los Angeles, was going for a walk when he passed a woman and a child on the sidewalk and suddenly found himself being beaten with a concrete brick. A witness said that she heard the woman, who was later identified as Laquisha Jones, shout, at Rodriguez, “Go back to your country. Go back to Mexico.”

In February, in Indianapolis, Mustafa Ayoubi, a thirty-three-year-old immigrant from Afghanistan, was shot to death by a man named Dustin Passarelli. Witnesses alleged that Passarelli yelled slurs about Islam and told Ayoubi, “Go back to your . . . country.” (Passarelli disputed the account.)

It was on the eve of Trump’s election, in October, 2016, when I experienced my own “go back to your country” moment. (I wrote about the incident in a column for the Times.) My family and I had just got out of church, and we were looking for a place to go for lunch. We were with some friends—all of us Asian-Americans—when a well-dressed white woman grew agitated at our group, because we were partially blocking the sidewalk. After she sidled past, she turned to yell at us, “Go back to China!” I was momentarily shocked, but then I abandoned my toddler in her stroller to confront the woman. As I was walking away, she screamed, “Go back to your fucking country.” To this day, I still think about what I hollered back: “I was born in this country!” As if that’s all I needed to prove.

The weariness that rose up inside me in the aftermath was, in large measure, for my two children. Even three generations removed from the immigrant experience, I wondered whether they’d ever feel a sense of belonging in this country. I happen to be currently reading Ocean Vuong’s extraordinary semi-autobiographical new novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” The story of the book’s narrator, Little Dog, closely aligns with that of Vuong, who was born in Vietnam, came to this country as an adolescent, and couldn’t speak English when he started school in Hartford. In Vuong’s novel, Little Dog experiences a harrowing incident on the school bus, when he finds his face suddenly shoved against the window by a jowly boy, who admonishes him to “speak English.” Slaps from the boy and others rain down on him before they get distracted and lose interest. “He was only nine but had mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers,” Vuong writes, of the aggressor. As Trump stokes the racial fears of the millions of white Americans who are uneasy about the demographic changes unfolding in this country, it is that dialect he is championing. And it is the lot of so many immigrants, children of immigrants, and people of color in this country to wonder whether we can ever truly belong here, and who gets to decide.

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The Challenge to Obamacare and a Legal Question: Does What Politicians Say Matter?

July 17, 2019 | News | No Comments

One striking aspect of the oral arguments, last week, in Texas v. United States, a case that threatens the Affordable Care Act, was the suggestion, from two of the three judges on a Fifth Circuit appeals panel, that what politicians say to or promise the public needn’t be taken seriously—indeed, that it hardly matters if they lie. The case, which I wrote about in this week’s magazine, was brought by states led by Republicans, and in effect argues that, when Congress passed President Trump’s 2017 tax bill, it was, unbeknownst to the public, actually invalidating the entire A.C.A. One roadblock to this argument is that this is not what Congress said it was doing. Instead, the law simply set the penalty for not securing health insurance—the “individual mandate”—to zero, and nothing more. But why should anyone believe them?

“How do we know that some members didn’t say, ‘Aha! This is the silver bullet that’s going to undo the A.C.A.’ or ‘Obamacare,’ if you prefer?” Judge Jennifer Elrod asked Samuel Siegel, an attorney defending the law on behalf of a group of twenty-one states, most of them blue. “ ‘So we’re going to vote for this just because we know it’s going to bring it to a halt, because we understand the tax issue’?” (The “tax issue” is the theory that, because Chief Justice John Roberts once argued that defining the financial penalty as a tax made that penalty constitutional, its absence was fatal to the whole law—an argument that lawyers might want to keep secret not out of tactical slyness but out of embarrassment, because it doesn’t make much sense.)

“That would be imputing to Congress the intent to create an unconstitutional law,” Siegel said, though it’s actually more convoluted than that. Indeed, the hypothesis is that members of Congress passed such a law just to be busted—to sabotage a law that they had failed to change legislatively. (At another point, Elrod asked whether Texas, one of the lead plaintiffs, might have been waiting to say, “ ‘Hah—caughtchya! You just did something unconstitutional!’ ”) When the penalty was repealed, Siegel noted, several legislators “specifically came forward and said, ‘We are not repealing the preëxisting conditions, we’re not repealing the subsidies’ ”—elements of the A.C.A. that are widely popular. If they did have a “silver bullet” plan, “that would mean they were misleading the American public and their constituents.” Senator Orrin Hatch, then the Republican chairman of the Finance Committee, was among those offering such reassurances in 2017.

“I’m not a fan of using quotes from elected officials, who say a lot of things for a lot of reasons,” Judge Kurt Engelhardt said. Engelhardt, whom Trump named to the court, came across as a silver-bullet kind of guy. An issue in the case is “severability”—how much of a large, multi-part law courts should invalidate if one element of it is found unconstitutional. The basic standard is that courts should be cautious and keep what they can. Engelhardt asked why it wouldn’t be easier to just throw out the whole thing and let Congress start over. “I mean, can’t they put together a sort of cafeteria-style package with all of these individual features that are so attractive . . .  They could vote on this tomorrow!” he said to Douglas Letter, a lawyer for the House of Representatives, who was also defending the bill. “Couldn’t they put them together and vote on them like that?” Engelhardt asked, snapping his fingers.

“And obviously the President would sign that, right? No, obviously not,” Letter replied, provoking laughter.

In the health-care case, the public reassurances from legislators simply reinforce the most obvious reading of the law, namely that Congress had decided that the mandate could go and the rest of the law could, functionally, survive without it. But an interesting phenomenon, in the jurisprudence of the Trump years, involves attempts by the Administration’s lawyers to get the courts to ignore a disjunction between what the President says in public and the legal justifications that his Administration offers for his actions. In the litigation over the various iterations of Trump’s travel ban, for example, lawyers for the Administration argued that judges should ignore what Trump said on the campaign trail about instituting “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” as well as his tweets disparaging Muslims. Instead, the judges should believe the lawyers’ claims that the ban was not targeted at any religious group and was not at all discriminatory: the ban was just a reflection of concerns about national security. It took a few tries, major revisions, and the inclusion of North Korea on a short list of proscribed countries for the Administration to come up with a limited ban that the Supreme Court, by a 5–4 vote, would accept.

Similarly, the Administration, in its attempts to add a citizenship question to the census, first claimed that the aim was to protect the voting rights of minorities—a rationale laughably at odds with the President’s warnings of an immigrant invasion. The question of how courts should interpret the meaning of legislative and executive actions has always been complicated; Trump’s tendency both to dissemble and to incite, both to deny his motives and to bray about them, all at high volume, can make it trickier still. In the census case, though, the President lost: the Supreme Court found that his Administration had not offered a good-faith explanation for adding the question. The ruling meant, practically, that the question would be omitted; the task of having to justify its actions in an honest manner was apparently too daunting for the Administration to accomplish in the time left before the forms had to be printed. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, wrote (citing an earlier decision), “We are ‘not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free.’ ” The Court wanted the Trump Administration to tell the truth about what it was doing. Or, at least, the Court didn’t want the President to force it to pretend to believe his more obvious lies.

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10 reasons why central and Eastern Europe is having a moment

July 16, 2019 | News | No Comments

1. The revamped Hotel Excelsior in Dubrovnik, Croatia
Dubrovnik’s grand dame—the c. 1913 waterfront Hotel Excelsior—reopened in June 2017 following a seven-month renovation, in which interiors were modernised with reclaimed woods and understated earth-tone furnishings while the exterior was impeccably restored to its century old original form. (Over the years, the hotel has hosted the likes of Queen Elizabeth II, Elizabeth Taylor, and Princess Caroline of Monaco.) Don’t miss a daytime cocktail at Abakus Piano Bar and Terrace, which overlooks the Adriatic Sea and Dubrovnik’s majestic old city walls (easily recognisable from Game of Thrones).

2. Cruising the Lower Danube
The upper reaches of the Danube River, which begins in Germany and flows through 10 countries before ultimately spilling into the Black Sea, has long been one of the most popular river cruise routes in the world. Now, thanks to high demand from curious cruise-goers and ease in access to a host of Eastern European countries, the Lower Danube is opening up to tourism. To experience as much of the region as possible, consider a seven-day sailing on the Scenic Black Sea Explorer, which cruises between Bucharest, Romania, and Budapest, Hungary—stopping at off-the-beaten path port cities in Bulgaria, Serbia, and eastern Croatia along the way.

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3. The ice cream florets
Trending now in Budapest: flower art crafted from gelato that’s as tasty as it looks (and arguably the most photo-worthy ice cream you’ll see). At Gelarto Rosa, ice cream is scooped and sculpted into tiny rose petals, creating a single rose comprising up to three flavours of the house-made good stuff.

Image credit: Instagram.com/lubaleksandrova | Instagram.com/nicklin87

4. The party scene in Belgrade, Serbia, one of Europe’s nightlife capitals
Belgrade’s Studio-54 moment is happening in real time, with a nightlife scene that easily rivals Berlin and Ibiza. Hit up some of the 200-plus floating barges known assplavovi (or splav, for short) anchored along the Danube and Sava rivers—the party rages all night long.

Image credit: Instagram.com/belgradespots

5. The markets of Skopje, Macedonia
For those who are more than familiar with the bazaars of Istanbul and Marrakech, head to the colourful markets and Old Bazaar of Skopje, which reflect the myriad of Christian and Muslim cultures that call this city home. You’ll find vast blocks of cheese selling for pennies, jars of ajvar (a savory red pepper and eggplant spread) lining shop walls, and old-fashioned barbershops giving $1 hot shaves. Food vendors here are more likely to give you a free sample than hassle you to make a buck, so get here before everyone else does.

Image credit: Instagram.com/isakovski996

6. Sveti Stefan, Montenegro
A natural crossroads of mountain and sea, Montenegro’s seaboard combines medieval fortresses and Roman ruins with picturesque villages, pink-sand beaches, and sparkling blue water. Make a beeline for the most exquisite swathe of Montenegrin coastline, Sveti Stefan, and live like a modern-day royal at the former royal residence of Queen Marija Karadordevic, Villa Milocer at Aman Sveti Stefan resort. (Alternatively, head past the water’s edge and cross the bridge to stay on the resort’s namesake island, a stunning 50 rooms built in the existing houses of a 15th-century fishing village.) In either case, eat like a king or queen in the bona fide, lost-in-time fishing village, Pržno, due south of the greater Aman estate. Here, half-dozen waterfront restaurants serve daily catch for dinner—typically in the form of massive calamari rings, langoustines, mussels, and tuna. (You can even watch the fishing boats reeling in these fruits of the sea.) Book ahead at our favorite, no-frills seafood house, Restaurant Konoba Langust.

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7. Romania’s Corvin Castle
Transylvania gets its fair share of tourists in search of ‘Dracula’s Castle’, but the real gem of this region is lesser known—and infrequently visited—Castelul Corvinilor or Corvin Castle in Hunedoara. Foreboding and mystical, this c. 1446 Gothic fortress was built by regent-governor of the time John Hunyadi, and today stands at the surrealistic edge of fantasy and nightmare (feeding into all our medieval day dreams). Ogle at the exterior of double-thick impenetrable walls, a colossal drawbridge, and countless rectangular and circular towers used to keep watch and house prisoners. Inside, view the ceremonial marble-lined Diet Hall, a massive dungeon and torture chamber, and the remains of the ‘bear pit’, where human remains were fed to the castle’s resident bears.

Image credit: Instagram.com/kris_ulysses

8. Waterfalls in Bosnia-Herzegovina
The waterfall-stacked Skradinski buk section of Croatia’s Krka National Park is so popular that the country is limiting how many people can visit. Thankfully, neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina has plenty of gorgeous waterfalls, too, and often you’ll have these magnificent waterworks all to yourself. Visit the wide expanse of falls and emerald pools of Kravica waterfalls in the south, or venture to Una National Park in the country’s northwest reaches to witness the power and beauty of the country’s largest waterfalls, Štrbački buk.

Image credit: Instagram.com/tim.hasl

9. The rakia revolution in Belgrade
Much like [the] craft beer and artisanal gin and rum movements in the US, fruit brandy is getting an upgrade throughout Serbia. Rakia, the country’s national drink (and known all across Eastern Europe under different guises), is served in its best and purest form—double distilled and aged in an oak cask—at Rakia Bar in central Belgrade.

Image credit: Instagram.com/sonjaasta

10. Edgy art in Shkodër, Albania
Admittedly, Albania has a tumultuous and violent past. But instead of ignoring this dark chapter in history, the country’s second-largest city has developed inspiring, larger-than-life art installations from the very war artillery that once ravaged the country. Namely, thousands upon thousands of bona fide bombshells form the foundation of eye-catching pavilions and artsy lamp posts throughout the city centre.

Image credit: Instagram.com/paultheprotraveler

This story was first published by CNTraveler.com

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James Bond will have a female as the next 007 agent

July 16, 2019 | News | No Comments

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15th Jul 2019

While the much-delayed 25th James Bond film, Bond 25, is only set to hit our screens in April 2020, it has now been reported that current Bond Daniel Craig will enjoy a retirement of sorts in the storyline.

While Craig is still playing the titular role of James Bond, a new, and some may say improved, character takes the front as agent 007–31-year-old actress Lashana Lynch. Previously seen in Captain Marvel, Lynch makes an astonishing entrance as viewers see the newest 007 as a modern day female. “There is a pivotal scene at the start of the film where M says, ‘Come in 007’, and in walks Lashana who is black, beautiful and a woman,” a movie insider reports to the Daily Mail. “Bond is still Bond but he’s been replaced as 007 by this stunning woman.”

As the upcoming film begins with Bond retiring in Jamaica, the agent number 007 becomes open for Lynch’s taking. Craig’s Bond still makes a comeback in the film when spymaster M, played by Ralph Fiennes, calls Bond back to take on a new global catastrophe. 

Craig was originally cast as 007 agent Bond back in 2006. And while fans were shocked by the unlikely choice, Craig now ranks as one of the most loved Bond actors of all time, having played the character in the films Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall and Spectre. Bond 25 marks his fifth film in the decades-running franchise. 

Bond 25 is currently filming in Italy and the UK, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Scott Z. Burns and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. 

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A complete history of the most memorable royal wedding disasters

July 16, 2019 | News | No Comments

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For the hopeless romantics out there, royal weddings are magical occasions, filled with sweet, tender moments reaffirming that yes, love is real. It’s impossible not to sigh wistfully at the thought of princes and princesses exchanging heartfelt vows and promising to love one another for the rest of their natural lives.

Yes, there’s nothing more romantic than when a fairytale comes to life in the form of a royal wedding. Royal weddings, in all their pomp and ceremony, are the standard by which the romantic at heart set their dream nuptials.

For royals, nothing is off the wedding table, from custom wedding gowns to jewelled tiaras. Case in point: at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s 2018 wedding, the bride wore a custom Clare Waight Keller for Givenchy wedding gown, borrowed Queen Mary’s diamond bandeau tiara from The Queen, and had Grammy Award-winning singer, Elton John, perform at the reception. Talk about a fairytale wedding!

These kind of events don’t just happen overnight, though, months of planning go into royal weddings to make them into momentous history-making events. However, at the end of the day, royals and their wedding planners are only human, and despite the best-laid plans, things can and do go wrong, even to royals.

From a broken tiara to a bottle of perfume spilled all over the bride-to-be’s wedding gown, we chart the most memorable royal wedding day mishaps in history.

In 1947, the then Princess Elizabeth (see above) experienced a bridal nightmare when her diamond tiara snapped into two pieces as her hairdresser was securing it to her veil. The tiara, known as the Fringe Tiara, was loaned to Elizabeth by her mother, The Queen Mother, as her “something borrowed”. It had been commissioned in 1919, for Elizabeth’s grandmother, Queen Mary. The royals were prepared for something like this, though. A court jeweller was on standby and took the tiara via police escort to the royal jewellery house, Garrard to salvage the damage. The tiara was welded back together in time for the then Princess Elizabeth’s wedding. The only evidence of the mishap was the slight gap between the central diamond spike and the one on the right.

Lady Gabriella Windsor married financier Thomas Kingston in a gorgeous ceremony at St George’s Chapel in May of 2019. Her dress was designed by Italian fashion designer Luisa Beccaria, whom Gabriella is a huge fan of. According to , Gabriella broke tradition by working on the dress without her mother overseeing anything. Despite all her planning, there was a small hitch during her procession up the aisle. In her interview with , she recalled how her little bridesmaids kept wandering over her sheer tulle 20 foot veil, unaware it was actually causing her tiara to pull back. “I slowed down until they’d stepped off it, but then it happened again. Fortunately my hairdresser had pinned the tiara in place and it stood firm.”

On her wedding day, Princess Diana decided to wear her favourite scent down the aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral: Quelques Fleurs. Or rather, the perfume wore her. Barbara Daly, Diana’s wedding day make-up artist, revealed that the scent – which is the first ever true multi-floral blend, according to Houbigant Paris – spilled over the front of her gown as she was dabbing it on her wrists. According to , Daly advised Diana to hold her dress up as though she was avoiding to step on it to cover the stain. Luckily, her mishap was unnoticed by millions and to this day, only her stunning beauty is remembered.

There was a lot of secrecy surrounding Princess Diana’s wedding dress. Per , the now iconic wedding dress was actually kept in a safe overnight and was taken through a window on the morning of the wedding so the crowd gathered on the street wouldn’t catch a glimpse of it. However, despite all of this, onlookers gaped at the 25 foot train as much as the wrinkles on the gown as Diana stepped out of her carriage. reports that Elizabeth and David Emanuel, the designers of the gown, were “horrified” by the creasing on the dress. “We did know it would crease a bit but when I saw her arrive at St Paul’s and we saw the creasing I actually felt faint,” Elizabeth said.

Back in 2011, Kate Middleton’s wedding ring was a little too small. During the ceremony, as Prince William tried to slip the ring on his bride’s finger, it took some time as the ring was not moving past her knuckle. Kate had the wedding ring made a size smaller so the ring wouldn’t slip off as she had the same issue with the engagement ring.

Lady Charlotte Wellesley married Alejandro Santo Domingo in a ceremony in Spain in 2016, wearing a long-sleeve, off-the-shoulder ball gown designed by Emilia Wickstead. The cathedral veil she wore over her head, adorned in a Swiss dot pattern, flew up as the wind blew, but Charlotte just laughed it off. The wind, apparently, does not seem to care whether you’re a royal or not.

Princess Diana’s incredibly extravagant wedding dress almost didn’t fit in the glass carriage she had to travel in. The legend states her gown was so voluminous she only just fit inside the ceremonial coach, a necessity the designers had forgotten to account for.

Due to controversy surrounding Princess Beatrix marrying Claus von Amsberg back in 1966 (due to his German nationality), a large amount of protests took place nearby the ceremony. As the pair said their vows together in Amsterdam, security had to navigate smoke bombs outside.

During the four-hour wedding service of King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola which took place at the Royal Palace in Brussels in 1960, the bride was fasting for the Eucharist prior to the nuptial. This caused the bride to almost faint during the ceremony.

Guest stood in the sunshine in 1978, to wait for the beautiful bride Princess Caroline, the princess of Monaco, to arrive in the arm of father. Wearing a Marc Bohan for Christian Dior gown with a floral headpiece and veil, the bride looked the perfect picture of a relaxed royal bride. Unfortunately, prior to her wedding day, her dress design was leaked. The house of Dior couldn’t have the princess walk out in a gown that had already been seen, so days before the maison hastily made changes to the gown.

There was quite a commotion when the then Princess Elizabeth realised her pearls were not with her moments before the wedding, instead, they were around the corner at St James’s Palace. A courtier was displaced on foot to get them. As well, the bridal bouquet could not be located, eventually it was found in a cupboard!

The tiara Princess Diana wore on her head on her wedding day caused her some grief. The tiara, known as the Spencer tiara, was a Spencer family piece that was elaborately styled with flowers and diamonds in silver settings. Despite its beauty, Diana’s brother, Earl Charles Spencer, recalls the weight of the tiara gave Princess Diana a “cracking headache.”

The beautiful Queen of Spain, Sofía, accidentally tripped over on her wedding day in 1962. As the bride was so excited to tie the knot, she tripped over her Jean Desses gown. The gown, designed by the Parisian designer with silver and white lamé and covered in a tulle and antique lace, had a five-metre train, so there was no surprise that the bride took a small stumble.

All wedding days come with nerves, but for this royal bride, the nerves really got the best of her. During the civil ceremony which was held at the Empire Salon of the Palace in 1959, the bride burst into tears due to her heightened emotions. In the middle of the ceremony the groom’s grandmother, the Dowager Queen Elizabeth, had to step forward and comfort the bride to calm her down and make her feel at ease, right in the middle of the nuptials.

During the couple’s vows, Princess Diana said the wrong name! Instead of saying ‘Charles Philip’, she got the order wrong and instead said “Philip Charles.’

Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, (and not pictured above) experienced one of the most horrifying scenarios on the morning of her wedding. Her wedding dress was a magnificent white and silver dress with white diamonds. It also didn’t fit. Her dress was apparently made before her arrival in France and her dressmakers had to estimate her measurements. Legend has it that her bodice was too tight and could not be properly cinched. So, it was left open with a gap, revealing the lace she had on underneath.Click Here: watford fc shirt

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9 of the best beauty products to take on your next holiday

July 16, 2019 | News | No Comments

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Given the main objective of a holiday is to relax, unwind, and press pause on the demands of everyday life, its little wonder that the worlds of escapism and skincare are intersecting. Nowadays, the new norm is to turn on the out-of-office and turn up to a far-flung wellness retreat to recharge the mental, spiritual and physical batteries. And that starts at the departure gate. Can you even recall a time before your cabin baggage was stocked full of sheet masks to ease the moisture-sapping effects of hours spent in the air? Here, our airside favourites.

Aman Desert Dew Face Mist, $84

Just as Aman properties reimagined the typical hotel experience with its unrivalled attention to detail and understated luxury, their skincare feels similarly focused. We love the Desert Dew Face Mist for its around-the-clock hydration.

Summer Fridays Jet Lag Mask, $73

It has a loyal following for good reason, this nourishing mask is loaded with vitamins and antioxidants to deliver a nice zing to lacklustre skin.

Chanel Les Eaux de Chanel Travel Set, $300

A liberal spritz of a pocket-sized Chanel scent is enough to perk up even the weariest traveller.

Lancome Renergie Multi-Lift Ultra Mask 5-Pack, $120

If you didn’t apply a sheet mask, did you even travel? This one comes loaded with gravity-defying firming ingredients which persist long after the 20-minute ritual.

Lano Face Base The Aussie Flyer Leave-On Recovery Mask, $26

For best results, apply this no-rinse mask to sleep-deprived skin just before touch down.

Dior Capture Youth Glow Booster Illuminating Serum, $162

Loaded with vitamin C for brightening, slather on this serum within minutes of landing for a complexion that defies jetlag.

Chanel La Crème Main hand cream, $87

Where to start? The ultra-hydrating formula means it’s an in-air essential, while the chic packaging means you’ll be looking for any excuse to whip it out of your carry-on.

Aesop Departure, $65

Ultra-chic packaging aside, these in-flight essentials are everything you need for a fresh-faced arrival.

The Travelista Jetset Antioxidant Boost, $82

With vitamin B3, C and hyaluronic acid, this lightweight formulation protects against environmental stressors like air-conditioning and UV rays.

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Greta Thunberg and 7 other young activists on how we can tackle the climate crisis

July 16, 2019 | News | No Comments

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16th Jul 2019

When Greta Thunberg began her school strike for the climate last August, the then 15-year-old could not have dreamed of the global impact she would have. The Swedish teenager has inspired 1.6 million young people in over 100 countries around the world to join in her demand for urgent action on the climate crisis. Thunberg and her peers have achieved what the adults before them could not: bringing the issue to the forefront of people’s minds. 

But there is still a lot of work to be done, and it is young activists around the world who are continuing to lead the charge. In fact, Thunberg – whose speeches have been turned into a book, No One is Too Small to Make a Difference – is now planning to take a sabbatical year off school to concentrate on campaigning. “Once you fully understand the climate crisis, you can’t un-understand it; you have to do something,” she tells Vogue. 

Spurred on by Thunberg, young campaigners are calling for adults to join in a mass global climate strike on 20 September, in a bid to force politicians and business leaders to act immediately. In the meantime, Fridays For Future strikes are continuing to take place every week and there’s a Youth Climate Action camp taking place in Germany in August – an indication of just how organised the youth movement is.

As well as taking part in coordinated action, a new generation has been inspired to look at specific issues relating to the climate crisis that are important to them. Here, Thunberg and seven other activists around the world, from Mexico to Uganda, share the reasons they are campaigning and the vital steps we can all take now to tackle the climate crisis.

Greta Thunberg on making your voice heard

Thunberg, 16, from Stockholm, Sweden, began the school strike for climate movement – known as Fridays For Future – in August 2018. She has met with politicians around the world, and spoke at the UN Climate Change Conference last December. 

“Making your voice heard is what makes a difference; that is what’s going to save us. Yes, we need a system change, but we can’t have a system change without strong pressure from a large group of individuals. That is what needs to happen: an awakening among people. 

“I’m trying to influence people so together we can put pressure on those in power. It is especially important for young people to make our voices heard. We can’t vote, [but] we can influence people who can. And that is what we’re trying to do, among other things.

“[The school strikes] has told me that when enough people – especially young people – organise themselves and get together, we are unstoppable. Many think it’s too late to get involved. But what they don’t realise [is] how few people are actually fighting for this. If you start now, then you are one of the pioneers. It is never too late.” 

Isra Hirsi on ensuring the climate movement is inclusive

Hirsi, 16, from Minneapolis, US, co-founded the US Youth Climate Strike earlier this year, after initially getting involved in her school’s “green team”. She is particularly interested in climate justice, after seeing how global warming is affecting non-white communities around the world. 

“People [are already] dying and suffering today because of the climate crisis, in countries like Bangladesh and Mozambique which are suffering from cyclones, hurricanes and drought. My parents are from Somalia, [which] in the past few years has suffered extreme droughts. When [those affected] are black and brown, people don’t really talk about [it].  

“The people in these front-line communities know their communities and the solutions the most; allowing them to lead this movement is crucial. I feel it is important for me as a black woman to use the platform I have to talk about this. People of colour have voices and they deserve to be heard.” 

Nakabuye Hilda Flavia on tackling plastic pollution 

Flavia, 22, from Kampala, Uganda, is one of the leaders of Fridays for Future Uganda, which has been organising school strikes in the east African country since January. The student also carries out plastic clean-ups every week with other volunteers. 

“Plastic pollution is one of the biggest challenges we face. It takes 400-plus years to decompose, [and] is a threat to lives both on land and in water. Africa has many freshwater lakes and if plastic goes into the lakes, it has a really big impact [contaminating the water supply]. During my clean-ups, I find dead fish suffocated by plastic. 

“[Although] Uganda has declared a plastic ban, it has not implemented it; we still have plastic everywhere. I would like the government to implement it. Recycling doesn’t bring the issue to an end, [but] there should be globalised efforts to help countries that cannot recycle a lot of plastic by themselves. I also urge [people] to join plastic clean-ups and to reduce their [plastic] footprint. Take personal responsibility.”  

Image credit: Getty Images

Asheer Kandhari on stopping deforestation  

Kandhari, 15, from Delhi, India, is one of the coordinators of the school strikes in India, and also a member of #DelhiTreesSOS, a campaign group calling for the government to stop deforestation in the capital. 

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“Last year, the pollution in Delhi was higher than it’s ever been. One of the main reasons was deforestation on a large scale. A year ago the government ordered the cutting of more than 16,000 trees [in south Delhi]. We climbed the trees and hugged them so the contractors could not cut them down. I think it was one of the most effective things we’ve done yet.

“Deforestation is one of the major factors affecting the climate crisis right now. [Trees are a] natural resource, they take in the carbon dioxide [being emitted]. Pollution is significantly increased; it’s already causing so much harm. It’s not only the humans [affected]; animals are losing their homes. We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction caused by humans.” 

Natalia Naranjo on moving to renewable energy 

Naranjo, 19, from Mexico City, Mexico, is a member of environmental group Nosotros por la Selva, as well as setting up her own local action group which organises litter pick-ups. She is studying sustainable development engineering at university. 

“President [López Obrador] in Mexico recently said he wanted another coal-powered plant for electricity. We don’t need that; you have to invest in sustainable energy. I would like the government, and corporations and big industries, to take action [on this].

“Coal is the most polluting way of creating energy. You can use nature instead – the sun, the wind, or water. We want every house to have solar panels, every hospital [to be powered by] wind energy. As part of my university course, we’re learning about new technologies. We have to create new solutions [to tackle the climate crisis].” 

Anna Taylor on the importance of education 

Taylor, 18, from London, UK, co-founded the UK Student Climate Network, after being inspired by the school strikes taking place in other countries. The group is demanding for education reform, along with a green new deal for Britain. 

“Education is extremely important, because [that’s] what allows people to see the real need for action. [One of our] demands is [for the government] to reform the national curriculum, so it addresses the ecological crisis as an educational priority. It should be something that’s taught in every subject; it is the greatest threat facing our future. 

“What the climate strikes are doing is actually educating kids. Other children are seeing their friends going and they’re starting to read about climate change. The [wider] public are also being educated because of the strikes.” 

India Logan-Riley on protecting indigenous communities

Logan-Riley, 25, from Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, is part of Te Ara Whatu, an indigenous youth climate group. She was part of the first indigenous youth delegation to attend the 2017 UN climate change conference.

“For me, climate change is an outcome of colonisation, which has removed indigenous communities’ ability to defend the land and the water. We know that within my lifetime, we will be forced to move inland because our land will be eroded by the sea. We have also seen seasonal droughts, which have become much more severe. We’re starting to see wildfires, too. There’s a very real threat of losing our land, our home.

“It’s really important that the wider climate movement aligns itself with the aspirations of indigenous communities [and] amplifies the solutions that we advocate for. [We have to] address climate change in a way that leaves no one behind.”

Marinel Ubaldo on lobbying governments

Ubaldo, 22, from Tacloban City, Philippines, is Plan International’s youth ambassador for climate change. She was among those who submitted a petition to the Human Rights Commission in the Philippines, demanding for an investigation into the actions of fossil fuel companies.

“It’s important to lobby governments; they need to act now – it’s an emergency. I want them to make laws [to tackle climate change] and own the problem. Governments can get big businesses to follow environmental guidelines, they can implement laws to stop rubbish being burned. They have the resources to [create a] big impact. 

“It’s important to get the involvement of local governments, too. The Tacloban City council submitted a letter to the [Philippines’] Human Rights Commission in May in support of the petition we filed [to investigate whether 47 fossil fuel companies have violated human rights due to their role in climate change]. 

“Protesting is one way of getting attention from the politicians. Writing letters is another way. Invite them to your events to make them realise [the work] you’re doing.”

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Democratic Congresswomen Urge Trump to Go Back to Russia

July 16, 2019 | News | No Comments

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Four Democratic congresswomen issued a brief statement on Monday urging President Donald Trump to go back to Russia and improve the dire conditions of that country.

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In the tersely worded statement, the four lawmakers—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York; Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota; Ayanna Pressley, of Massachusetts; and Rashida Tlaib, of Michigan—indicated that Russia was “broken and crime-infested” and required Trump’s immediate attention.

The statement went on to suggest that, once Trump had fixed the problems plaguing Russia, he could return to the United States and “show us how.”

In a tweet, Trump mocked the congresswomen, contrasting them with the “real revolutionaries” honored over the weekend on Bastille Day. “In 1789, these brave people stormed Louis XVI’s airports,” he wrote.

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Tom Steyer, the Democrats’ Billionaire for the People?

July 16, 2019 | News | No Comments

“Citizen Kane” offers us only a glimpse or two of Charles Foster Kane’s ill-fated run for governor of New York. The most memorable is the boisterous speech that Kane, by this point a famous and well-connected newspaper publisher with an ego as large as his fortune, delivers to his supporters outlining the vaguely populist themes of his campaign. “The working man and the slum child know they can expect my best efforts in their interests,” he bellows. “The decent, ordinary citizens know that I’ll do everything in my power to protect the underprivileged, the underpaid, and the underfed!”

After Kane’s loss, he’s confronted by an old friend, who drunkenly assesses the contradictions of his public career and his self-image as a champion of the working class. “You used to write an awful lot about the working man,” he sneers. “He’s turning into something called organized labor. You’re not going to like that one little bit when you find out it means that your working man expects something as his right, not as your gift.”

Today, a century after the progressive movement that inspired Kane and real-world patricians, class and inequality are once again at the center of American politics. Two of the leading candidates for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have pushed inequality to the center of the Party’s political discourse, levelling indictments at the millionaires and billionaires who have absorbed much of the gains that the economy has made over the past few decades and particularly post-recession. The chief villain of this narrative is now Donald Trump—the self-proclaimed populist billionaire President who got to the White House with the help of a press that both burnished and indulged his reputation as a savvy businessman worth hearing out and taking seriously. Much of the free publicity his campaign was granted can be tallied among the many complimentary perks that the wealthy are habitually offered in this country.

This week, Tom Steyer—who is not only a billionaire but one of the largest political donors in the country, having spent an estimated hundred and twenty-three million dollars on last year’s midterms—joined Sanders and Warren in the progressive lane of the Democratic primaries. Both candidates greeted his entrance coldly. “I like Tom personally,” Sanders said in an MSNBC interview, “but I do have to say—as somebody who, in this campaign, has received two million campaign contributions, averaging, I believe, nineteen dollars a person—I am a bit tired of seeing billionaires trying to buy political power.” Warren tweeted, “The Democratic primary should not be decided by billionaires, whether they’re funding Super PACs or funding themselves. The strongest Democratic nominee in the general will have a coalition that’s powered by a grassroots movement.”

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To his credit, Steyer has already built a movement of sorts. His campaign to impeach Trump, publicized in ubiquitous social-media and cable-news ads, claims to have collected 8.2 million e-mail addresses. His nonprofit and political-action committee, NextGen America, registered about a quarter million young voters for the midterms last year and helped rally activists behind environmental campaigns like the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline and the effort to extend California’s cap-and-trade program. In his campaign-launch video, however, Steyer focusses on an all-encompassing fight against inequality. “We have a society that’s very unequal,” he says to the camera, “and it’s really important for people to understand that this society is connected. If this is a banana republic with a few very, very rich people and everybody else living in misery, that’s a failure.”

Sanders and Warren rail against the upper class as a whole—both individual millionaires and billionaires and the corporate world for unbalancing politics and the economy. In Steyer’s narrative, the villains are not the wealthy as a class but a malevolent set of corporations that have bought a disproportionate share of influence within our political system. “If you give them the unlimited ability to participate in politics, it will skew everything, because they only care about profits,” he says in the launch video. “I think eighty-two thousand people died last year of drug overdoses. If you think about the drug companies, the banks screwing people on their mortgages—it’s thousands of people doing what they’re paid to do. Almost every single major intractable problem, at the back of it you see a big-money interest for whom stopping progress, stopping justice, is really important to their bottom line.”

Steyer himself is a big-money interest, of course. But his campaign seems to hinge on the argument that his own wealth has bought him both political independence and courage. “I’m an outsider,” he said in a CBS interview, on Thursday. “I’ve been doing this—successfully beating the oil companies, the tobacco companies, closing tax loopholes—from the outside for ten years. I don’t believe that this failed government is going to be reformed from the inside.” This is part of the case Trump made for his own candidacy in 2016—that only he, an outsider with the privilege to jump into the political system—could drain Washington’s swamp. “Remember, I am self-funding my campaign, the only one in either party,” he tweeted in January of 2016. “I'm not controlled by lobbyists or special interests-only the U.S.A.!”

On the whole, the experience of the Trump Presidency does not inspire much confidence that wealth is a political insulator or purifier of motives. For starters, Trump only self-financed a small portion of his campaign, and ultimately took in millions from donors large and small, while also benefitting from contributions made by mega-donors like Robert Mercer and Sheldon Adelson to Trump-supporting super PACs. Trump’s wealth has not prevented his Administration from developing shady ties to some of those big donors and other special interests; his extensive business holdings, including his hotels, have, in fact, facilitated bribery in plain sight. And his populist rhetoric has been belied by a policy agenda, including a tax-cut package in 2017, that has been well in keeping with the inequality-exacerbating orthodoxy of conservative economics.

All of this has reinforced the sense that the wealthy embrace many of the policies that they do not only because some are beholden to or own this or that particular company but because the wealthy, as a class, share certain common interests. This is the locus of the distrust toward the rich that has built within the Democratic Party post-recession, the underlying suspicion behind the rise of millennial socialism and its superstars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. One of her chief policy advisers, Dan Riffle, uses the Twitter handle “Every Billionaire Is A Policy Failure.” When the New York Times asked the 2020 candidates whether anyone could truly deserve to have a billion dollars, Beto O’Rourke and Kirsten Gillibrand said no. (Sanders and Warren, a bit more cautiously, emphasized the need for the wealthy to pay their “fair share” in taxes. “My guess is when you have that, you’re not going to have too many billionaires left,” Sanders said.) As of last year, according to Gallup, a majority of Democrats do not believe that America benefits from having a class of rich people. These are the currents Steyer will be swimming against. Buying name recognition with ad dollars won’t necessarily bring him buy-in from progressives.

By odd coincidence, Steyer announced his candidacy the day that Ross Perot, a wealthy populist of a different stripe, died. A consensus has emerged among political historians and journalists that Perot’s outsider campaigns likely did not tip the outcomes of the 1992 and 1996 Presidential campaigns. But he did, through his fortune and reputation, help promote a particular set of ideas, particularly a rough-hewn brand of free-trade skepticism that survives to this day. Steyer might similarly influence discourse during the primary—but any wealthy politician advances, too, in their own person, another set of ideas. Steyer’s candidacy and career rest on an argument that the benevolent rich can truly be relied upon as the benefactors of the working class. Fewer and fewer Democrats agree.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES