The Good, the Bad, and the Embarrassing in America’s COVID-19 Response - Were Americans too unruly, or did elected officials expect too little of them? - link
Why Won’t Amnesty International Call Alexey Navalny a Prisoner of Conscience? - The Russian regime has used both its vast media infrastructure and its judicial system to vilify its opponents. - link
Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State - Survivors detail the scope of China’s campaign of persecution against ethnic and religious minorities. - link
When the Kids Started Getting Sick - After pressure from families, Pennsylvania has launched studies into whether fracking can be linked to local illnesses. - link
A Year in America’s First COVID Epicenter - Twelve months after Seattle suffered the first reported coronavirus death in the U.S., city leaders reflect on what has worked—and what remains agonizingly broken. - link
From Vox
One Good Thing: The brutal beauty of Veneno -
Daniela Santiago in Veneno. | Courtesy of HBO Max
I need everyone to watch Veneno, a stunning HBO Max series about storytelling and survival.
Sometimes, when we’re lucky, we get a TV show like Veneno — the kind of show that jolts you awake and makes you pay attention. The kind that makes you think about the countless ways we tell stories and all the possibilities we haven’t yet staked out. The kind that gives you the power to see the world differently and makes your senses tingle. The kind that makes you want to talk about it with anyone and everyone.
This kind of TV show, unfortunately, doesn’t come around often enough. And that’s why, I suppose, I’m writing about Veneno, an eight-episode, one-season HBO Max original series that I fully believe is the best television show of the last year.
Veneno, in practical use, is the Spanish word for venom. But it’s also the nickname of one Cristina Ortiz Rodríguez or “La Veneno,” a real-life, Spanish transgender singer and celebrity who rose to prominence in the mid-’90s after appearing on one of Spain’s popular late-night TV shows. Veneno is about her life, and all its joys and complications.
“Sultan, courtesan, Indian-like Pocahontas, but with a shark,” she tells a reporter when she’s asked to describe herself in the first episode (the show, which is in Spanish, is available to stream with English subtitles or English dubbing). “The shark … It’s between my legs. What else would the shark be?”
What Veneno makes clear is that at the time, sex work was one of the only acceptable professions for trans women. So on the margins of society, Cristina created her own life where she could be La Veneno and write the rules of her own existence. Within that existence, she can be whoever she wants to be — a sultan, a courtesan, Pocahontas — in ways that broader society would never accept (and maybe she didn’t always have the courage for).
Fantasy and beauty are redemptive; they are power.
Courtesy of HBO Max
Daniela Santiago in Veneno.
Veneno is very much about Cristina as it chronicles her childhood, the trauma she endured, how she learned to overcome said trauma, and how she built a persona and wielded a sense of lethality to survive. But the series also examines her effect on other people: what this uncontrollable woman meant to the queer community, particularly transgender men and women, who watched her fight so many of their own internal and external battles in the public eye.
That perspective materializes through the eyes of a teenage Valeria Vegas, a college student who seeks to learn what happened to the La Veneno she saw on television as a kid. She catches up with La Veneno, whose glamour and glitz have given way to older age and a purple bathrobe she wears in the daytime. Valeria is not fully out herself when she meets her hero, and the show explores their parallel journeys about finding acceptance and what we learn from our chosen families.
Through flashbacks and shifts to present day, the two relive La Veneno’s life: the regrets, the joys, the excitement, the nemeses, the embarrassments, the volatility, and maybe — finally — the peace, because Vegas wants to write La Veneno’s biography.
That biography —¡Digo! Ni puta ni santa. Las memorias de La Veneno (Not a Whore, Not a Saint: The Memories of La Veneno), which the real-life Vegas published in 2016 — serves as source material for the series. Vegas is credited as a writer on the show’s eight episodes and some of La Veneno’s real-life friends even play themselves.
Perhaps fittingly, the larger-than-life adult Cristina is played by three outstanding actresses, each one covering a different time period in her life. Jedet Sánchez, Daniela Santiago, and Isabel Torres play three largely different roles (Santiago gets to embody La Veneno at her splashiest, right when she becomes a star), but each one imbues her with dignity and humanity. Torres, in particular, will take your breath away as an older Cristina, wistfully looking back at the life she lived but never letting it slip into unmitigated sentimentality.
In many ways, Veneno is already groundbreaking just by its existence because of the way it confronts an utter lack of representation in the status quo. Shows about the trans experience and primarily about trans characters are few and far between (trans actors play the trans people in Cristina’s story). We’re still at a point where cisgender actors are stumbling through apologies for considering and taking transgender roles in movies and on TV. Sex work is still a topic the media struggles to get right. That Veneno is a breakthrough for television is both a compliment and an ugly truth about the progress the medium still needs to make.
But the revelations in Veneno don’t stop at representation.
Thematically, Veneno has a lot in common with the recently released It’s a Sinand the earlier FX series Pose (the latter of which accounts for the bulk of trans representation on TV). Emotionally, I’d also compare it to director Pedro Almodovar’s movies. One of my friends said it was like Tim Burton’s Big Fish, if Big Fish was about Paris Is Burning and directed by Almodovar — a perfect description, provided you’re familiar with all those references.
And yet, Veneno is quite simply its own beautiful thing.
Creators Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo have found a way to tell a story that so specifically nails the complexities of queer identity and insecurity in a way that feels so familiar to people who have lived that experience. It’s evident in moments as slight as Valeria’s body language, which tightens when she’s around her family, contrasted with the way she unspools when she’s in Cristina’s apartment. But it’s also present in scenes that are weightier and more honest, like the ones that depict the destructive ways Cristina copes with grief.
Their magic is finding a way to portray these difficult emotions without compromising the depth of Cristina’s lived experience.
The series is never cruel to Cristina, but it doesn’t paint her as infallible either. Veneno realizes that Cristina, like all of us, are architects of our own lives. The way each of us sees the world is a result of how we discern between reality and fantasy.
For queer people especially, that fantasy becomes more important when faced with a reality that doesn’t have space for you. Perhaps, like Cristina, you embrace the strength of storytelling to become the courtesan, the sultan, or the shark and find your own power — to invent your own legends about having affairs with princes, to will yourself to believe in magic and happily ever afters, like living for eternity on a Grecian island.
Ambrossi and Calvo acknowledge Cristina’s fantasies as such, playing with magical realism one moment and flanking it with the starkness of reality the next. The disconnect between our actuality and our dreams is purposely harsh, and maybe even painful. But at no moment do they ever deny how important fantasy is to La Veneno’s existence, and how understanding it is vital to understanding our own.
Veneno is streaming HBO Max. For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.
Why Joe Biden’s pro-union message is so significant -
Demonstrators hold signs during a Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union protest near an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. | Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Some labor historians think Biden’s rhetoric on unionizing is stronger than FDR’s.
On Sunday, President Joe Biden did something not heard from a president of the United States in some time: He offered a full-throated endorsement of a worker’s right to collectively bargain.
The White House released a video statement of Biden referencing an ongoing vote in Alabama to decide whether Amazon workers at a Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse will unionize. The Bessemer workers are in the middle of a seven-week vote that began in early February and will end in late March. It’s the first time since 2014 that Amazon workers in America will decide whether or not they want representation from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
“Workers in Alabama — and all across America — are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace,” Biden said in the video. “It’s a vitally important choice — one that should be made without intimidation or threats by employers.”
Workers in Alabama – and all across America – are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace. It’s a vitally important choice – one that should be made without intimidation or threats by employers.
Biden’s words and their timing could have a big impact.
“It’s basically unprecedented in American history,” Erik Loomis, a history professor at the University of Rhode Island who studies labor rights, told Vox. “Even FDR did not really intervene at the moment of a union election with a direct statement for a particular set of workers.”
Biden has promised to be a friend to labor
Biden, who received the backing of several prominent labor unions during the campaign,came into office promising to be a pro-union president. This video is a huge boost not only for the Alabama unionization efforts, but for many more workers around the country who may be considering forming a union. If the Bessemer employees unionize, it could push a wave of organizing activity at other Amazon warehouses around the country.
What Biden said about workers’ right to form a union was important. But even more important is what he said about what employers cannot do when employees are deciding whether or not to unionize. Alabama is a right-to-work state, meaning employees don’t have to pay dues in a union — which makes it harder for unions to survive.
“There should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda,” Biden said in the video. “No supervisor should confront employees about their union preferences. It’s not up to me to decide whether anyone should join a union. But let me be even more clear: It’s not up to an employer to decide that either. The choice to join a union is up to the workers — full stop.”
Labor history expert Nelson Lichtenstein of the University of California, Santa Barbara tweeted about Biden’s video, “This is new, nothing like it before. Puts Obama to shame.”
As the Washington Post and other outlets have reported, Amazon has been actively discouraging the unionization push in Bessemer, putting anti-union flyers in warehouse bathroom stalls and texting employees telling them to vote against forming the union. Amazon didn’t return Vox’s request for comment on Biden’s statement.
The next four years of Biden’s administration could be a watershed moment for organized labor in the United States. The president’s early rhetoric and actions mark a big departure from his Republican predecessor President Donald Trump and from Democratic President Barack Obama, who Biden worked alongside as vice president.
“We never met with President Obama in the Oval Office in eight years,” North America’s Building Trades Unions President Sean McGarvey told Vox in a recent interview, noting he and other labor leaders met with Biden within the first 30 days of his presidency. “Never has the word ‘union’ flowed off a political leader’s tongue so easily as it has with President Biden.”
Coming off a year of the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting economic crisis could also give Biden an opportunity to make the case for increasing the number of unionized jobs, since unions helped protect people’s jobs during the coronavirus recession in 2020. As Vox’s Emily Stewart and Rani Molla wrote:
Even though the total number of jobs represented by a union went down by 444,000 in 2020, union jobs made up a larger share of total jobs, 12.1 percent, up half a percentage point from 2019. That’s because, thanks to union protections, people with union jobs were more likely than non-union workers to keep their jobs.
Of course, union leaders are still looking to see what concrete action Biden and his administration take on labor issues, including whether they’re able to successfully pass a pro-union bill, the PRO Act, or able to enforce existing labor laws to investigate corporations trying to discourage unionization of their workers.
Unions “go by what [presidents] do, not what they say,” McGarvey told Vox.
Why Biden’s words matter
On Monday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki clarified that Biden was not weighing in specifically on the Amazon union vote (the president did not mention Amazon by name in the video).
“We don’t comment on specific cases where it’s before the NLRB or could be before the NLRB, so we aren’t going to weigh in specifically on Amazon. But broadly he believes workers should have the right to organize; hence, he conveyed that in the video.” Still, Biden went out of his way to mention Alabama, where it’s hard to escape the news-making unionization effort in Bessemer.
Faiz Shakir, the co-founder of progressive media outlet More Perfect Union, told Vox that he had been in contact with White House chief of staff Ron Klain ahead of Biden releasing the video, encouraging the president to come out in favor of the Bessemer unionization push.
“It means a lot that Joe Biden did this,” Shakir told Vox. “They were from the jump appreciative of the idea.”
Labor historians and activists told Vox that the substance of Biden’s speech and the timing of it, in the middle of the Bessemer vote, are extremely significant. In a series of tweets, Lichtenstein compared Biden to President Franklin Roosevelt, under whose presidency unions flourished due to Roosevelt’s progressive New Deal policies and mass mobilization during WWII.
“Biden’s attack on employer intimidation of workers seeking to join a union is something new for a president since [the 19]30s,” Lichtenstein tweeted, adding Biden’s Department of Justice and National Labor Relations Board need to follow through.
Loomis, the history professor, told Vox that there’s added significance because unions had far more political power back in the 1930s and 1940s than they currently do. In 1953, 35.7 percent of private-sector workers belonged to unions, according to a 2016 American Journal of Public Health article. By 2020, that number dropped to 6.3 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Public-sector workers in unions are over five times that number, around 34.8 percent.
In other words, private-sector unions had more political power back in the 1940s and 1950s, meaning that both Democrat and Republican presidents had to work with them and pay lip service if they wanted to win over union voters.
Certainly, organized labor is still a sought-after bloc within Democratic politics, but its relatively low numbers in the private sector show that Biden is responding to a push from the party’s base, rather than a demand from an individual union, Loomis argued.
“By Biden making this statement, he’s responding to an overall feeling in the Democratic party for economic justice,” Loomis said. “It’s even beyond the union, it’s simply that growing demand you’re seeing in the Democratic base for a raised minimum wage.”
But Shakir, who served as campaign manager for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 bid for president, says there are a lot of innate similarities between Biden and Sanders on labor issues.
“[Biden] campaigned as a pro-union candidate, and I remember many stops along the way in which he and Bernie were often aligned as they spoke to these AFL-CIO and Teamster gatherings,” Shakir told Vox. “There’s a lot of ideological camaraderie.”
How Biden’s best-laid plans for Iran and Saudi Arabia failed in his first month -
President Joe Biden makes an address on February 27. | Samuel Corum-Pool/Getty Images
President Biden hasn’t handled Iran and Saudi Arabia like candidate Biden planned.
President Joe Biden’s first month handling Iran and Saudi Arabia shows the new administration has succumbed to a classic problem: Initial plans and promises made during a campaign rarely survive once you’re actually governing.
As the Democratic candidate, Biden promised a swift return to the Iran nuclear deal. He then aimed to leverage that negotiation to curb other aspects of Tehran’s aggressive behavior — like its growing ballistic missile program — in follow-on chats.
And on the campaign trail, Biden called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state, vowing to make it “pay the price” for human rights violations, including the grisly 2018 murder of dissident, US resident, and columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
Though he released an unclassified intelligence report on Friday directly blaming Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the killing, Biden declined to punish the nation’s de facto ruler outright. Instead of authorizing sanctions, a travel ban, or an asset freeze, the president created the “Khashoggi ban,” which imposes visa restrictions on people who try to silence dissidents abroad. It’s unclear if that includes heads of state, however.
That action — combined with the end of US support for Saudi offensive operations in Yemen and a freeze on weapons sales — was meant to “recalibrate,” not “rupture” US-Saudi relations, Biden administration officials say. A major consideration was that MBS, as the crown prince is known, may soon officially run the country, so targeting him personally could doom future relations between Washington and Riyadh.
“Our relationship with Saudi Arabia is important,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price told reporters on Monday.
On these key foreign policy areas, President Biden therefore hasn’t governed like candidate Biden said he would. That’s invited some criticism of his first month in charge and concern that his choices could leave allies and activists dissatisfied.
“They are trying to thread the needle between competing interests,” said Seth Binder, an advocacy officer at the Project on Middle East Democracy. “Trying to please a broad array of interested parties is likely going to end up frustrating many of them.”
Biden’s situation is by no means new. Every president has offered a number of foreign policy plans while running for office only to back off them once they’re in charge. Former President Donald Trump, for example, promised to end America’s wars in the Middle East, but after four years, troops remained in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, partly over security concerns.
The new administration, then, is just the latest victim of circumstances not aligning with their initial views of events. Now, it has begun to alter its approach, and may need to do so further.
“This has been the education of Team Biden,” said Kirsten Fontenrose, who oversaw Gulf issues on Trump’s National Security Council. “Once you come in and everything’s new, you need to scramble a bit and adjust.”
Biden hoped for a smooth reentry into the Iran deal. He didn’t get that.
In a July 2019 speech, Biden was clear about what he wanted to achieve with Iran once he became president.
“If Tehran returns to compliance with the deal, I would rejoin the agreement and work with our allies to strengthen and extend it, while more effectively pushing back against Iran’s other destabilizing activities,” he told a crowd at City University in New York. Those activities, among other things, included its missile program and support for proxies and terrorist groups.
In office, Biden’s team continued holding that line: For the US to reenter the agreement, Iran needed to first come back into compliance with the pact’s limitations on its nuclear development. Simply put, Tehran would have to reduce its levels of uranium enrichment to the limits specified in the Iran deal before America would lift any sanctions on the country.
Iran, however, showed less willingness to engage in talks. Tehran said the US had to lift sanctions before it would discuss America’s reentry into the pact. And likely in an effort to increase pressure on the US, Iran-aligned proxies fired rockets at anti-ISIS coalition forces outside Erbil, Iraq — killing a Filipino contractor and injuring US troops — and near the US Embassy in Baghdad.
After days of “considering” sitting down with the US in an EU-brokered negotiation, Iran on Sunday rejected that plan. The “time isn’t ripe for the proposed informal meeting,” tweeted Saeed Khatibzadeh, the spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry.
Considering US/E3 positions & actions, time isn’t ripe for the proposed informal meeting.
Remember: Trump failed to meet because of his ill-advised ‘Max Failure’. With sanctions in place, same still applies. Censuring is NOT diplomacy. It doesn’t work with Iran.#CommitActMeet
This is surely not how Biden’s team thought the process would go. “Iran, which should be the beneficiary of his policy, is kicking Biden in the face,” said Fontenrose, who’s now at the Atlantic Council.
While most experts believe Washington and Tehran will eventually get back into the deal, what the new administration has learned is that its best-laid plans need retooling.
“The clear strategy that Biden presented during the campaign has not quite translated into this first month,” said Kaleigh Thomas, an Iran expert at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, DC. “We’ve lost the opportunity for a refresh the Biden team was looking to leverage.”
Candidate Biden promised to punish top Saudi leaders. He didn’t punish MBS.
In a November 2019 Democratic debate, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked then-candidate Biden if he would reprimand senior Saudi leaders over the Khashoggi murder. His response was unequivocal.
“Yes,” he said. “Khashoggi was, in fact, murdered and dismembered, and I believe on the order of the crown prince. And I would make it very clear we were not going to, in fact, sell more weapons to them. We were going to, in fact, make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are. There is very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia.”
But on Friday, Biden didn’t follow through on his promise. MBS escaped direct punishment, even though the intelligence report the administration released directly implicated him as the orchestrator behind Khashoggi’s murder.
The president and his team seem content with what they’ve already done to “recalibrate” the US-Saudi relationship, including curbing MBS’s access to Biden — he must now interact with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, his direct counterpart — and freezing billions in weapons sales to the country. Further, the “Khashoggi ban” could deter foreign leaders from attacking dissidents abroad.
Some say the administration’s actions will still be read as a severe reprimand for leaders in Riyadh. “Saudi Arabia is being normalized inside the US,” instead of being seen as a country that won’t be reprimanded for its internal politics save for religious education issues, said Yasmine Farouk, an expert on Riyadh at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Following the release of the report, and Biden’s policy changes, Farouk said, “That’s going to become the norm from now on, and that’s big when it comes to Saudi Arabia.”
If the administration targeted MBS — the king’s son and likely future king of Saudi Arabia — the US would put all that at risk. That’s just not something Biden’s team wanted to do.
“We believe there [are] more effective ways to make sure this doesn’t happen again and to also be able to leave room to work with the Saudis on areas where there is mutual agreement — where there is national interests for the United States,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. “That is what diplomacy looks like.”
For Fontenrose, who was in the Trump White House during the Khashoggi affair, Biden ended up essentially where the former president did. “There’s literally no difference in their approach,” she told me, save for Biden avoiding the kind of crude comments Trump made about the issue. “This is just as much a get out of jail free card as MBS got from Trump.”
This is not to say Biden’s policy is identical to his predecessor’s or that it won’t change in the future. It’s only been a month, after all.
But what recent events have shown is that the president’s policies for Iran and Saudi Arabia haven’t gone as planned or as promised, which means we can all expect a change in the administration’s approaches in the days to come.
Sign up for The Weeds newsletter. Every Friday, you’ll get an explainer of a big policy story from the week, a look at important research that recently came out, and answers to reader questions — to guide you through the first 100 days of President Joe Biden’s administration.
From The Hindu: Sports
Punjab CM urges BCCI to include Mohali cricket stadium for IPL - Delhi, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Chennai have been shortlisted as potential venues but the BCCI is yet to take a final call on the matter
ICC ‘Player of the Month’: Ashwin, Root, Mayers in contention among men - Seasoned India off-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin along with England captain Joe Root and West Indies’ new batting sensation Kyle Mayers were on Tuesday
Mandhana slips 2 places to 6th among batters; Goswami still at 5th among bowlers in ODI rankings - Besides Goswami, Poonam Yadav, Shikha Pandey and Deepti Sharma are the other Indian bowlers in the top-10.
Chris Gayle targets T20 World Cup defence with Windies on comeback - Gayle has kept himself busy in T20 leagues across the world
Australia right behind England ahead of final India Test - England’s hopes of playing the WTC final were crushed with their 10-wicket defeat inside two days in an extraordinary third test in Ahmedabad.
From The Hindu: National News
India tells Pakistan to stop state-sponsored cross-border terrorism - India also slammed Pakistan for deliberately misusing the Council for its malicious propaganda against the country
Kerala Tourism bid to woo domestic holidayers - Increased focus on social media to improve footfall
CBI raids places in UP, MP in coal pilferage case - The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Tuesday conducted search operations at several places in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh in connection
Gold smuggling: Swapna’s bail plea to be heard today - Special Court had earlier granted bail for 12 accused and the HC had ratified it
Kangana Ranaut moves SC seeking transfer of cases from Mumbai to Shimla - Kangana Ranaut and her sister said they apprehend if trial in these cases are conducted in Mumbai, there would be a “material threat” to their life and property
From BBC: Europe
Covid: France approves AstraZeneca vaccine for over-65s - Older French patients can now get the jab, which had been initially limited to those aged under 65.
Covid: What’s the problem with the EU vaccine rollout? - The coronavirus vaccine is being rolled out across the EU but there have been delays.
Poland activists acquitted over LGBT Virgin Mary - Three women, who faced up to two years in jail, were found not guilty of offending religious feelings.
Volvo Cars to go fully electric by 2030 - The Swedish firm is to phase out all models with internal combustion engines over the next few years.
Angelina Jolie sells Winston Churchill painting for record £7m - The Tower Of The Koutoubia Mosque, owned by the actress, is sold to an unidentified buyer.
From Ars Technica
Biden administration puts a price on carbon - The results of his first environment executive orders are coming in. - link
Trump’s is one of 15,000 Gab accounts that just got hacked - GabLeaks includes 70,000 messages in more than 19,000 chats by over 15,000 users. - link
Why N95 masks are still hard to get, even though production is up - Both supply and demand are up—but they aren’t lining up in the right places. - link
“We knew T-Mobile couldn’t be trusted,” union says after 5,000 job cuts - T-Mobile claimed Sprint merger would create thousands of jobs “from day one.” - link
Minisforum U850—solid hardware and easy upgrades in a little box - This mini-PC is VESA mountable, easy to work on, and attractively priced. - link
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Courtesy of HBO Max
