Day: September 6, 2023

The Kremlin is hoping that a second Trump presidency would see support for Kyiv dwindle, with the Ukrainian counteroffensive relying heavily on sustained Western backing.

Ex-FBI Agent Who Helped Initiate Trump-Russia Probe to Plead Guilty to Illegally Working for Russian Oligarch  National Review

Scholz Calls for Broad Pact to Slash Bureaucracy and Modernize …  http://hamodia.com

David Levithan is no stranger to banned books.

The author’s early-2000s novels about gay teens paved the way for queer representation in young adult literature, but also landed him on the American Library Association’s top annual list of books most often targeted for censorship — three times.

Now, his novel Two Boys Kissing is one of over 200 books, including Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, targeted for removal in Florida’s Escambia County school district. Nationwide, such attempts at book-banning reached a 21-year high in 2022, according to the ALA, with individuals demanding to censor more than 2,500 titles.

Those staggering numbers, and the content of censored books (the vast majority were written by or about marginalized communities), are not the only causes for concern. Before 2020, the ALA said, most requests to ban books came from individual parents who took issue with a specific title their child was reading. Now, most book challenges are part of broader demands to remove or restrict access to as many as 100 titles at once — a testament to the coordinated and repressive nature of the current surge in book bans.

Earlier this year, the free speech organization PEN America filed a lawsuit against Escambia County alongside publisher Penguin Random House, local parents, and several authors whose books had been banned. While his books have been targeted for years, he said today’s book bans constitute a new threat to free speech. “What was once individualized — a concerned parent lodging a challenge in a single community — has become systematic and politicized,” he told the Forward.

I talked to Levithan by email about his participation in the PEN lawsuit and the urgency of our current moment. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you decide to become involved as a plaintiff in the PEN lawsuit? 

I think it is important for the authors who are able to stand up for our readers and our books (in that order). If you want to fight back against political decisions being made to stifle freedom, you can make sure to vote for the right candidates and you can use the judicial system when you feel elected officials have bypassed the Constitution.

The Escambia County resident who filed an objection to Two Boys Kissing complained about the “bestiality,” “suicide,” and “victimization” in the novel. What do you think of those allegations? 

The word that comes to mind is ludicrous. My dictionary says bestiality is “savagely cruel or depraved behavior” or “sex between a human and an animal” — the behavior in the book is the antithesis of cruelty and depravity, and I say with complete certainty that no human has sex with an animal in its pages. The book has a strong anti-suicide message and the suicide attempt within it is unsuccessful. As for “victimization” — I don’t even know what to do with that. While most of the characters in the book have supportive families and friends, there’s one whose parents actively make his situation worse. That’s life. That’s what novels need to engage with. 

Since you published your first books, we’ve seen an explosion of queer young adult literature. How has your long tenure in this field shaped your outlook?

When I started, I knew we were at the beginning of a new body of literature that would need to grow exponentially and diversify greatly. And that’s exactly what’s happened, which is hugely gratifying. Even in moments like this, we have to be defined by our accomplishments, not by the backlash. If 40% of the 2500+ books being challenged have LGBTQIA+ characters, that means there are over a thousand books out there for LGBTQIA+ readers. That’s remarkable to me, and shows how hard it is to erase us.

Your books have been banned frequently. What feels different about this moment and the Escambia County case? 

Where there was once a respect for teachers’ and librarians’ expertise, there’s now a total disregard to established review processes. And many politicians have jumped into the fray, trying to use the erasure of our books as tools as a proxy to erase our identities and histories. What felt before like small fires popping up now feels like an existential forest fire trying to destroy intellectual freedom and its role in democracy. Which, frankly, is not a sentence I would have imagined typing 10 years ago.

Earlier this year, you compared Vladimir Putin’s book bans in Russia to those instituted by Ron DeSantis in Florida. How do you see right-wing groups and leaders learning from each other when it comes to censorship? 

The prevention of intellectual freedom leads to an authoritarian state. History has taught us that, over and over. I think it is a fundamental American right to choose what you get to read. If parents want to oversee what their children read, so be it — but they should not get to determine what other parents’ children get to read. Some right-wing groups have dusted off the old book-banning playbook. But the irony is — they wouldn’t want the government to tell them what they should read.

What do you hope that this lawsuit can accomplish?

I would like this lawsuit to signal to school boards and politicians that they can’t violate the Constitution, and that their desire to censor cannot prevail over the expertise of their teachers, librarians and all the children they are responsible for.

The post What the Jewish author behind one of America’s most banned books has to say about censorship today appeared first on The Forward.

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, a two-year-old institution in the heart of Los Angeles, has announced plans for its first permanent exhibit, Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital, which will open on May 19, 2024 — during Jewish American Heritage Month.

The announcement, made in an exclusive to the Forward, comes after the museum confronted serious criticism upon its opening — including from the Forward — for overlooking the significant role of Jews in creating the American film industry. 

The Museum’s initial, temporary exhibits focused largely on the works of Asian, Black and Latinx filmmakers, as well as the making of Citizen Kane and The Wizard of Oz.

Those temporary exhibits omitted mention of the contributions of the original major studios’ Jewish founders: William Fox (Fox Films); Adolph Zukor (Paramount); Harry, Albert and Jack Warner (Warner Bros.); Carl Laemmle (Universal); Louis B. Mayer (Metro Goldwyn Mayer); Harry Cohn (Columbia) and David Sarnoff (Radio-Keith-Orpheum). (Mayer was mentioned in The Wizard of Oz exhibit, in a revisitation of allegations that he exploited the film’s young star, Judy Garland.)

In Hollywood’s first decades, these Jewish men developed moving pictures into America’s most popular form of entertainment — and a multi-million dollar global industry.

As Rolling Stone reported in January 2022, after major museum donors — including film and television producer Haim Saban, who with his wife, Cheryl, donated $50 million to the museum — protested the lack of Jewish representation, alongside Academy members and community stakeholders, museum staff concluded that the foundational story of Hollywood’s Jewish pioneers deserved a permanent installation.

 

Curator Dara Jaffe and Jacqueline Stewart, director and president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Photo by Owen Kolasinski/©Academy Museum Foundation

“We never had any desire to exclude or not represent the Jewish founders,” Bill Kramer, the museum’s former director and president, told the Forward in January 2022, when the museum first shared its intention to craft an exhibit focused on Hollywood’s Jewish pioneers. “We long planned on having a temporary exhibit highlighting them but are now going to make it permanent.” 

“Within my family, there are a lot of variations of the Jewish immigrant story” Dara Jaffe, the curator in charge of the Hollywoodland exhibition, said in a recent interview at Fanny’s, the Academy Museum’s inhouse restaurant named for Jewish comedian Fanny Brice. “Most of my great-grandparents came over in the wave of Eastern European immigrants escaping the pogroms at the turn of the 20th century. As I read about the Jewish founders of Hollywood, I can’t help but see my great-grandparents in their stories.”

Hollywoodland, which is still in development, will involve a multimedia element, including a short-form documentary about the immigrant backstories of Hollywood’s pioneering Jewish studio heads, and an immersive projection map highlighting how the film industry shaped Los Angeles between 1902, when the first theater dedicated to playing motion pictures opened, and 1929, when the first Academy Awards ceremony took place. These installations will help build the exhibit’s dual narrative of how the Jewish founders’ Hollywood “dream factories” became synonymous with Los Angeles. 

“We want people to be engrossed in the nuanced story of Hollywood’s Jewish immigrant founders — how their lives and careers were defined by their Jewish identities,” Jaffe said. 

“We are committed to telling the truth,” Jacqueline Stewart, the museum’s new president and director, said in an interview. “And it’s true that Hollywood’s founders were Jewish businessmen who saw their studios as a way to elevate cinema and to make a name for themselves in an environment that was profoundly antisemitic.”

“I think the exhibition’s narratives of how political and religious oppression and exile move people around the world will resonate with visitors of many different immigrant backgrounds,” she added.

The post A museum snubbed Hollywood’s Jewish founders. Its next exhibit hopes to make amends appeared first on The Forward.

U.S. economic growth was modest amid a cooling labor market and slowing inflation pressures in July and August, a Federal Reserve report published on Wednesday showed, buttressing expectations that the central bank was either done, or close to being done, with interest rate increases.

“Most Districts reported price growth slowed overall,” the Fed said in its latest “Beige Book” summary of surveys and interviews conducted across its 12 districts through Aug. 28. It added that “nearly all districts indicated businesses renewed their previously unfulfilled expectations that wage growth will slow broadly in the near term.”

The U.S. central bank is widely expected to leave its benchmark overnight interest rate in the current 5.25%-5.50% range at the end of its Sept. 19-20 policy meeting, while leaving open the door to a final quarter-percentage-point hike before the end of the year.

Financial markets are pricing about even odds that the Fed’s rate-hike campaign, begun 18 months ago, is over.

Fed officials are, however, keeping their options open. They believe that the 5.25 percentage points of rate hikes delivered since March 2022 are slowing the economy, capping job growth and most importantly slowing inflation, which soared to a 40-year high last year.

Data since the last Fed rate hike six weeks ago has tended to support that view, with the economy adding an average of 150,000 jobs per month over the last three months, down sharply from the prior three months. Inflation, as gauged by the Fed’s preferred measure, was 3.3% in July, down from 7% last summer.

That’s why even a hawkish policymaker like Fed Governor Christopher Waller was able to say that the central bank has time to take in new data before it decides whether it has to raise rates again, or can hold them at current levels.

Earlier on Wednesday, Boston Fed President Susan Collins also said the central bank has the space to be patient, while acknowledging that inflation pressures, though easing, still remain too high.

Collins, however, added that she did not believe a “significant slowdown is required” to get inflation down and “price stability is achievable with an orderly slowdown and only a modest unemployment rate increase – ideally preserving some of the favorable labor supply dynamics.”

Still, prices continue to rise faster than the Fed’s 2% goal, employers are adding many more than the monthly 100,000 jobs needed to meet population growth, and economic output appears to be far outpacing the less-than-2% annual growth rate Fed officials say is sustainable in the long run.

Many of the Fed’s 12 regional banks found that amid decelerating price pressures, the ebbing was most notable in goods-centric parts of the economy, according to the latest Beige Book report.

The report also flagged some fraying around the edges of the consumer sector, noting that a rising number of households had exhausted savings built up during the coronavirus pandemic and were turning more to borrowing. At the same time, the report found evidence more households were struggling to manage debt.

The New York Fed district said migrants were putting strains on the local safety net. The report said “housing affordability, homelessness, and food insecurity continued to challenge communities” in the San Francisco Fed district, adding that “temporary housing shelters and food banks saw increased demand in recent weeks, especially from older adults.”

The report noted that housing remains an issue and that the supply for single-family homes “remained constrained.” Home building was picking up, the Fed said, but building affordable properties is being strained by high financing costs and rising insurance premiums.

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Moderna (MRNA.O) and rival Pfizer (PFE.N) on Wednesday said their updated COVID-19 vaccines generated strong responses in testing against the highly mutated BA.2.86 subvariant of the coronavirus that has raised fears of a resurgence of infections.

Moderna said its shot generated an 8.7-fold increase in neutralizing antibodies against BA.2.86 compared with an untreated natural antibody response in clinical trials in humans. The variant is currently being tracked by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“We think this is news people will want to hear as they prepare to go out and get their fall boosters,” Moderna head of infectious diseases Jacqueline Miller said in an interview, adding that the data should also help reassure regulators.

Pfizer said its updated vaccine with partner BioNTech (22UAy.DE) elicited a strong antibody response against BA.2.86 in a preclinical study in mice.

Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech and relative newcomer to the COVID vaccine market Novavax (NVAX.O) have created versions of their shots aimed at the XBB.1.5 subvariant, the dominant variant through most of 2023. Those are expected to be rolled out this autumn.

Moderna shares were down 1.6% and Pfizer shares were off nearly 3% in afternoon trading.

TD Cowen analyst Tyler Van Buren said Wednesday’s news was unlikely to raise the share price because people already assume the mRNA vaccines will continue to be effective against new COVID variants as they crop up. Both the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech shots are based on mRNA technology.

“This was not an anticipated catalyst that people were waiting for,” he said, adding that Moderna continues to be a favorite target of Wall Street short sellers who bet that shares will fall.

The CDC has previously indicated that BA.2.86 may be more capable of causing infection in people who previously had COVID or were vaccinated with previous shots. The Omicron offshoot carries more than 35 mutations in key portions of the virus compared with XBB.1.5, the target of the updated shots.

Moderna said it had shared the new finding on its vaccine with regulators and submitted it for peer review publication. The retooled shot has yet to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, but is expected to be available later this month or in early October.

Last month, Moderna and Pfizer each said their new vaccines appeared to be effective against another new subvariant of concern dubbed EG.5 in initial testing.

European regulators have since backed the Pfizer/BioNTech shot, with Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency approving the vaccine on Tuesday, but have yet to make any announcements on Moderna’s updated vaccine.

BA.2.86 has now been detected in Switzerland and South Africa as well as Israel, Denmark, the U.S. and Britain according to a WHO official.

While it is important to monitor the variant, several experts told Reuters it is unlikely to cause a wave of severe disease and death because of immune defenses built up worldwide from mass vaccination and prior infection.

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By Ivan Lyubysh-Kirdey

KYIV, Sept 6 (Reuters) – Ukraine has made important progress in its counteroffensive against Russia’s invasion, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday during a visit overshadowed by a Russian attack that killed at least 17 people.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy condemned the attack, which hit a crowded market in the city of Kostiantynivka, close to the battlefield. He said a child was among the dead, and officials said at least 32 people were hurt.

“This Russian evil must be defeated as soon as possible,” Zelenskiy said, describing it as a deliberate attack on a “peaceful city”. Aides posted video footage showing an explosion after what sounded like a missile approaching, and people scurrying for cover or falling to the ground.

Russia did not immediately comment on the attack, and has denied deliberately targeting civilians.

Blinken, the first top U.S. official to visit Kyiv since the counteroffensive began in early June, announced a new package of U.S. wartime assistance worth more than $1 billion, including support for Ukraine’s air defences.

“In the ongoing counteroffensive, progress has accelerated in the past few weeks. This new assistance will help sustain it and build further momentum,” Blinken told reporters at a news conference with Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.

Blinken earlier described the progress as important and “very, very encouraging”.

U.S. media reports have cited unidentified U.S. officials as saying the Ukrainian counteroffensive has been too slow and hindered by poor tactics – criticism that angered Ukrainian officials and prompted Kuleba to tell critics to “shut up”.

Ukraine has retaken more than a dozen villages and small settlements in its offensive. But its push into Russian-held territory has been slowed by minefields and trenches.

U.S. officials have not publicly criticised Ukraine’s military tactics, and last week said they had seen progress in the southeast.

The new U.S. aid would include HIMARS missile launch systems, Javelin antitank weapons, Abrams tanks and other weapons systems, White House press secretary Larine Jean-Pierre said. The Pentagon said it would also send depleted uranium ammunition.

Asked about Blink en’s visit, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peso said Moscow believed Washington planned to continue funding Ukraine’s military “to wage this war to the last Ukrainian”.

He said U.S. aid to Kyiv would not affect the course of what he called Russia’s special military operation.

Blinken’s visit coincided with parliament approving the appointment of Rust Umerov as defence minister following the dismissal of Oleksii Reznikov. Officials did not say whether Blinken would meet Umerov.

During his train ride to Kyiv, Blinken also held talks with Danish Prime Minister Mettle Fredericks, who was visiting the same day.

Blinken thanked Fredericks for Denmark’s donation of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine and its leadership of a coalition of nations to train Ukrainian pilots, a State Department spokesperson said.

Denmark and the Netherlands announced last month they would supply more than 60 U.S.-made F-16s as soon as pilots are trained to fly them – the first countries to offer the jets.

The U.S. government has provided more than $43 billion in weaponry and other military aid to Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February 2022.

Several Republican presidential hopefuls have questioned U.S. aid, fuelling concerns over whether Washington will maintain its support for Ukraine once the U.S. 2024 election campaign intensifies.

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Putin, Mohammed bin Salman talk over phone, are satisfied about oil supply cuts: Kremlin  WION