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☆ Frontline videos offer grim, close-up view of Kyiv's counteroffensive
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-11 | by ( Dan Peleschuk | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

REUTERS/Oleksandr Ratushniak /File PhotoKYIV, July 11 (Reuters) - Vivid helmet camera videos filmed by Ukrainian soldiers at the front line can give viewers a visceral feel of combat as Kyiv's counteroffensive finally unfolds, even though experts warn against drawing strong conclusions about how the war is going. The information vacuum has been partially filled by a steady stream of video filmed by soldiers themselves and often compiled, edited and released by their units. Later, an exhausted commander lets out an expletive at the camera after a Russian artillery strike on his unit's position. Reynolds added that the videos can also provide a feel for the artillery-scarred terrain Ukrainian troops are fighting on. 'SO YOU ALL KNOW THE PRICE'Troops releasing videos say that depicting the intensity of combat helps convey to the public their forces' commitment, bolstering support.

Persons: Oleksandr Ratushniak, Nick Reynolds, Reynolds, Oleh, Valerii Markus, we'll, Dan Peleschuk, Peter Graff Organizations: REUTERS, Separate Assault Brigade, Royal United Services Institute, Reuters, Troops, Mechanized Brigade, Thomson Locations: Ukraine, Neskuchne, Donetsk region, Ukrainian, Bakhmut, Russian, London, Crimea, Russia

☆ A Boy’s Life on the Front Lines
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-26 | by ( Lynsey Addario | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +6 min

A Boy’s Life on theFront Lines In a Ukrainian town, an 11-year-old navigates a childhood transformed by war. He lived with his mother, Lena, and his 23-year-old half sister, Angelina, in a borrowed one-story home about four miles from Russian positions to the east. “I remember how I used to have fun here with my friends,” Yegor said. Now only his father, Sasha, remained there, trapped behind Russian lines caring for the home and animals on the road out of Mariupol. But the war had forced Yegor into a sedentary life, almost always behind closed doors.

Persons: Lena, Angelina, Lena didn’t, Yegor, ” Yegor, ”, “, ’, ‘, ‘ Sonny, Sasha, squander, they’ll Organizations: Yegor Locations: Ukrainian, Donbas, Ukraine, stretchers, Kramatorsk, Chernivtsi

☆ Hundreds Dead, 9 Arrested, and Many Questions in Migrant Wreck
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-16 | by ( Jason Horowitz | Niki Kitsantonis | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

At the end of a long stretch of sandy beach, a weathered warehouse in the port of Kalamata held the survivors of one of the worst shipwrecks in Europe in a decade. Inside, dazed men from Syria, Egypt and Pakistan, all with numbered badges around their necks, languished on tightly packed corridors of thin mattresses. “I have two brothers,” said Odai Altalab, a 35-year-old Syrian who had rushed down from his home in Manchester, England. We need to know who is dead. Who is dead?”

Persons: “, ”, Odai Altalab, Mohammed Locations: Kalamata, Europe, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, Manchester, England

☆ Top seed Alcaraz hunts down Tsitsipas to set up Djokovic showdown
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-06 | by ( Karolos Grohmann | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

"This match is what everyone wanted to watch and it is going to be a really good match to play and to watch," Alcaraz said of Friday's semi-final. Alcaraz did not take long to put Tsitsipas under pressure, breaking him on his second service game. He wrapped up the first set, winning 12 of the last 14 points played, but he was equally relentless in the second to break Tsitsipas in the very first game to love. Tsitsipas launched a four-game comeback but Alcaraz ended it on his fifth match point. But it was pretty tough at the end of the match," Alcaraz said.

Persons: Carlos Alcaraz, Stefanos, Alcaraz, Novak Djokovic, Friday's, Tsitsipas, Karolos, Toby Davis Organizations: U.S, Serbian, Thomson Locations: Greece

☆ After Walking Offstage, a Concert Pianist Changes Her Tune
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-04 | by ( Corinna Da Fonseca-Wollheim | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

AUGUST BLUE, by Deborah LevyIn the work of Deborah Levy, certain elements recur in ever new arrangements: swimming, seafood, bees and silence; brokenness and recovery; the patriarchy. In Levy’s latest novel, “August Blue,” it is musical recomposition that becomes the overt, and sometimes overly self-conscious, metaphor for female revolt and reinvention. For a little over two minutes, she went off script, playing music that came to her unbidden, before walking offstage. At a flea market in Athens, this other woman snapped up two mechanical dancing horses that the pianist also wanted. While she chases what may be hallucinatory glimpses of the doppelgänger across Europe, she takes to wearing the trilby hat the mystery woman dropped at the market.

Persons: Deborah Levy, Booker, “, Levy’s, unemployable Locations: British, Vienna, Athens, London, Paris, Sardinia, Greece, Europe

☆ Travel news: Best airlines, city break inspirations and ambitious bridges
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-03 | by ( Maureen O'Hare | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +4 min

CNN —In CNN Travel’s latest news roundup, we bring you the world’s best airlines for 2023, city break inspiration from Texas to Mongolia to Ecuador and why China might have overstretched itself by building a 15-mile, $6.7 billion bridge. Air New Zealand – which just topped a list of 2023’s best airlines – is on the case by asking all of its international departing travelers to hop on the scales as part of a passenger weight survey, the results of which are thankfully anonymous. Destination inspirationPop quiz: What was the world’s first capital city be listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site? And now that the country’s president has vowed to revitalize the city, the future’s looking bright, too. Here’s our roundup of 20 of the world’s best nude beaches.

Persons: CNN —, CNN Travel’s, Genghis, Kublai, it’s, Richard Linklater’s, Matthew McConaughey’s, San, Trevi Fountain, Venice, ”, Mount Everest’s Organizations: CNN, Air, Zealand, Federal Aviation Administration, Airbus, UNESCO, Developers, Pride Locations: Texas, Mongolia, Ecuador, China, United States, America, Rome, Athens, Quito, Inca, Karakorum, Austin , Texas, Bay Area, San Francisco, New York, Rwanda, Kigali, Dubai, Nantucket, Mount

☆ Read Your Way Through Los Angeles
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( Héctor Tobar | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Read Your Way Around the World is a series exploring the globe through books. Outsiders often think of Los Angeles as an anti-intellectual place, all Hollywood glitz and no substance, but writers have always been drawn to my hometown. In David L. Ulin’s “Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology,” I read about Simone de Beauvoir’s 1947 journey to L.A.’s Eastside, where she learned about the city’s anti-Mexican prejudice and admired Dia de los Muertos skulls. It’s no accident that two very different, canonical works of L.A. literature climax with riots, even though they were written more than a half century apart: Nathanael West’s 1939 novel “The Day of the Locust,” and Anna Deavere Smith’s play “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.”Is there a book, or a writer, who captures the essence of Los Angeles? With her iconic 1960s and ‘70s essays about Los Angeles and the West, in collections such as “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion helped invent New Journalism.

☆ The trans soccer team that’s making history
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-04 | by ( Hannah Ryan | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +12 min

On the rainy evening of March 31, 2023, he captained what he says is the first ever all trans masculine soccer team in Europe in a match. “I was quite nervous before the match,” Webber told CNN. They now also aim to make soccer a more inclusive sport and connect the trans community. “After the all trans feminine team played their game and once I’d played with the all-gender team, she took me aside and said she’d been thinking about what we could do next and asked if I’d be interested in captaining an all trans masc team,” Webber said. “One day, there’ll be hundreds of trans people playing football all over the country at all levels.”

☆ ‘Queens of the Qing Dynasty’ Review: Secret Soul Mates
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-04 | by ( Beatrice Loayza | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The pair make an odd couple, and yet their bond is intuitive, electric. The story kicks off in the aftermath of Star’s suicide attempt, the film’s tone at once bleakly clinical and deadpan absurd. Star, a neurodivergent foster kid with a sardonic sense of humor, clearly doesn’t register the gravity of her actions. Eyes glazed, she seems out of touch with her own body, and she’s not one for rules, like when she’s kicked out of an apartment for opening it to partiers. Walker, captivatingly raw, makes Star both charming and frustrating in her aloofness.

Four months later, 26-year-old Huang fled to Germany and decided to speak out in support of fellow demonstrators, some of whom remain in detention. "I feel like I need to speak up for Cao Zhixin and the other detained protesters... China has not commented officially on the protests, whether they triggered the end of the zero-COVID policy or subsequent detentions. He was then sat near the front of a police bus full of other detained protesters. "As long as one protester is still detained, the world cannot stop paying attention to the white paper movement."

[1/6] Rescue workers try to rescue a 15-year-old girl trapped under the rubble, in the aftermath of a deadly earthquake in Kahramanmaras, Turkey February 10, 2023. The death toll exceeded 24,150 across southern Turkey and northwest Syria a day after Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said authorities should have reacted faster to Monday's huge earthquake. Earlier, the World Food Programme said it was running out of stocks in rebel-held northwest Syria as the state of war complicated relief efforts. A similarly powerful earthquake in northwest Turkey in 1999 killed more than 17,000 killed in 1999. In the Samandag district of Turkey, rescuers crouched under concrete slabs and whispered "Inshallah" - "God willing" - as they carefully reached into the rubble and plucked out a 10-day-old newborn.

☆ Newborn, toddlers survive days in rubble, bringing joy amid earthquake tragedy
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-10 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

His eyes wide open, Turkish baby Yagiz Ulas was wrapped in a shiny thermal blanket and carried to a field medical centre in Samandag, Hatay province, on Friday. Emergency workers also carried his mother, dazed and pale but conscious, on a stretcher, video images from Turkey's disaster agency showed. [1/3] A baby is rescued from the rubble in the aftermath of a deadly earthquake in Hatay Province, Turkey, February 8, 2023 in this screen grab obtained from a handout video. In freezing temperatures, they regularly called for silence as they listened for any sound of life from mangled concrete mounds. Like baby Yagiz, he was followed by his mother, on a stretcher, 103 hours after the earthquake struck.

☆ A Texas 'Dreamer' found out during an immigration meeting that his dad wasn't his biological father. Now he could be trapped in Mexico for a decade.
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-05 | by ( Erin Snodgrass | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +13 min

A DACA recipient is stuck in Mexico after traveling to Juárez for an immigration interview in August. For weeks leading up to the immigration interview in Juárez, he was plagued with premonitions of irrevocable consequences. It took more than two years, but in the summer of 2022, Avalos finally received word that his preliminary immigration interview in Juárez was set for August. "He found out a lot of truths at that interview," Martinez said. He sometimes speaks with his mother on the phone, though not about the revelations he learned during his immigration interview.

However, in the age of Apaches and laptops, everything I did in the course of two tours of duty was recorded and time-stamped,” Harry writes. The disagreement came at a planned reconciliatory tea at Kensington Palace in June 2018, Harry writes. According to the book, Kate told Meghan: “You talked about my hormones. We are not close enough for you to talk about my hormones!”According to Harry, Meghan recalled the conversation but was perplexed at Kate's reaction. Harry writes: "What I do remember with stunning clarity is that I did not cry.

☆ Prince Harry accuses William of physical attack in new book, report says
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-05 | by ( Marie Brockling | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +3 min

Prince Harry has accused his brother Prince William of physically attacking him during an argument over his marriage to Meghan, The Guardian reported Thursday. Representatives for Prince Harry and the publisher Penguin Random House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Kensington Palace, which represents Prince William, and Buckingham Palace, which represents King Charles, declined to comment on allegations made in the book. Harry reportedly says that he was scared of his brother, who was furious and following him around the house. Harry writes that he initially only spoke to a therapist about the alleged incident, according to the leak.

☆ Prince Harry says William knocked him to the floor in dispute - Guardian
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-05 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

Jan 4 (Reuters) - Britain's Prince Harry says in an upcoming book that his older brother and heir to the throne Prince William knocked him to the floor during a 2019 argument over Harry's wife Meghan, the Guardian reported on Wednesday. "He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor," Harry writes, according to the Guardian. Spokespeople for the palaces of King Charles and Prince William declined to comment on the report. According to the Guardian, the dispute with William arose over the royal family's displeasure with Meghan, Harry wrote. Harry says William called Meghan "difficult," "rude" and "abrasive," which he said sounded like "the press narrative" about Meghan.

☆ The not-quite-redemption of South Africa's infamous ultra-marathon cheats
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-30 | by ( Ryan Brown | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +35 min

"A runner can always recognize another runner," Eugene tells me. Ryan Brown for insiderIn those days, they didn't run for South Africa, but for QwaQwa – one of ten "homelands" established for Black South Africans. Tiny, non-contiguous territories – supposedly, the original territory of different Black South African ethnic groups – dotted across the country. It didn't turn out like that, but it didn't turn out like that for most Black South Africans either. As I sat speaking to Sergio, South Africa's president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was fighting for his political life after revelations that wads of cash, potentially ill-gotten, had been stolen from inside his sofa.

☆ She gave birth, twice, in prison. We were there to witness the reunion with her kids.
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-24 | by ( Jamie Roth | Alan Chin | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +15 min

As she left prison, still wearing her prison-issue sweatsuit, the photographer Alan Chin raced to catch the reunion at the San Antonio airport. Alan Chin for InsiderWhat made this reunion even more poignant was that Kelly had been let out once before. Alan Chin for InsiderThere is no reliable count of the number of babies born behind bars each year. Alan Chin for InsiderWhen Kelly returned to prison after her year out, Rick tried to stay in close touch. Alan Chin for Insider"It was just us: me and my kids, and him.

But since mid-May, when rates futures markets began to bet outright that the Fed would cut rates in the second half of next year, markets have stabilized. Rates futures have raised the 2023 implied fed funds terminal rate by 400 bps to around 5% and the Fed has raised its 'dot plot' forecasts, in a broadly lockstep move. But since mid-May the implied 2023 terminal rate has been brought forward to the first half of the year, and rate cuts have been priced into the second half. Yet policymakers' 2023 economic growth forecast has slumped to 0.5% - it was 2.25% in March - and they now see unemployment topping 4.5%. Powell's comments are pushing Wall Street lower on Thursday, but interest rate markets largely have dismissed them and continue to price in more than 50 bps of rate cuts next year.

☆ Pablo Escobar was gunned down 29 years ago today — here are 3 theories about who took the Medellin kingpin's life
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-02 | by ( Christopher Woody | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +10 min

By 1993, Colombian authorities, the US government, and rival criminals were all after Pablo Escobar. "Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar," or People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar — known as Los Pepes — was made up of rival drug traffickers, paramilitaries, and others scorned by the Medellín cartel boss. His son, Juan Pablo Escobar Henao, who has changed his name to Sebastián Marroquín, has insisted that his father took his own life on that Medellín rooftop. "I have no doubt" that Pablo Escobar planned his own death, Marroquín said in a 2014 interview. The question of who killed Pablo Escobar is likely to go unresolved, probably by design.

In an interview at her home Monday afternoon, Jessica Fierro described her husband's heroic efforts to prevent greater tragedy. Richard Fierro, 45, an Army veteran who completed four tours between Iraq and Afghanistan, yelled for someone to call the police, she said. Jessica Fierro said her two best friends were shot and her daughter broke her knee as she ran for cover. Richard Fierro earned his MBA from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs last year. Deon J. Hampton reported from Colorado Springs, Janelle Griffith and Melissa Chan reported from New York.

The jury in Kevin Spacey's sexual abuse trial found that the Oscar-winning actor is not liable for battery against “Star Trek: Discovery star” Anthony Rapp. Rapp alleged that Spacey climbed on top of him at a party in New York City in 1986, when Rapp was 14 and Spacey was 26. “I didn’t ask for him to do that,” he told jurors, referring to Spacey’s alleged sexual advance. Rapp alleged that sometime after that evening, Spacey invited him to a party at his apartment. Rapp testified that he did not recognize anyone at the party, so he went into a bedroom to watch television.

Rapp, watching Spacey accept his prize, threw a pencil at the screen, he testified this week. Spacey’s lawyers have tried to convince the jury of six men and six women that Rapp fabricated his claim in large part because he was bitterly envious of their client's success. Rapp, they contend, desperately wanted Spacey’s career: the hit films, the plum roles, the two Oscars. But through the first five days of the trial in downtown Manhattan, Rapp’s alleged jealousy has been a recurring and striking theme. “I wanted my career.”Warrington Parker, a San Francisco trial attorney, and Danny Cevallos, an NBC News legal analyst, both described the jealousy argument as a high-risk bet for Spacey’s lawyers.

It is true that an increasing number of central banks are intervening in the currency market to sell dollars, and the nominal value of their FX reserves and U.S. Treasury holdings has declined. "Official holdings are falling, but not because central banks are selling. Central banks bought into that downturn but it is unclear whether that continued through August and September, when the BofA Treasuries index lost another 6% and central banks' FX intervention picked up pace. China and Japan, the world's biggest holders of FX reserves, have released September reserves data but neither give a breakdown of currency or asset composition. The nominal value of China's FX reserves stood at $3.029 trillion in September, the lowest since March 2017.

Whacked further by a soaring dollar, indices of overseas sovereign bonds in dollar terms are down almost 24% - even worse than then S&P500's (.SPX) 19% year-to-date reversal. Far from portfolio buffers, these sorts of moves make bonds meat and drink for hedge funds. And even though equity prices have fallen and cheapened on many models, their relative value versus bonds has not. It trimmed expected equity returns by a quarter point. Reuters poll-U.S. treasury yield outlookRobeco Chart on Asset Allocation HistoryThe opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters.

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