Tag: City

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World News

Ukraine Information: Zelensky Visits a Metropolis Simply Miles From the Entrance, Underscoring Ukraine’s Features

Ukraine News: Zelensky Visits a City Just Miles From the Front, Underscoring Ukraine’s Gains

BELGOROD, Russia — Military trucks and armored personnel carriers spray-painted with the letter Z rumble through intersections, and groups of men in camouflage gear walk the streets shopping for military items like thermal underwear. Refugees are pouring out of areas in Ukraine recently lost to the enemy.

The sounds of nearby explosions have become a regular occurrence in Belgorod, 25 miles from the Ukrainian border, and concerned shopkeepers are calling the police and reporting imaginary bomb threats, a sign of paranoia beginning to spread. Residents are expressing concern about what’s to come next, with some even speculating that Ukrainian troops could make a move they’ve been avoiding for nearly seven months and enter Russian territory.

“It’s like they’re already here,” an ashen-faced woman told a vendor in the city’s central market after the sound of an explosion.

President Vladimir V. Putin has tried to keep life as normal as possible for most Russians as he wages his war in Ukraine and make hostilities a distant memory. But with Ukrainian forces now on the offensive, Belgorod residents feel war is on their doorstep.

“There are so many rumors, people are scared,” said Maksim, 21, a trader at the market.

He sold thermal underwear, camouflage jackets and other sporting goods that once belonged to hunters and fishermen but are now being bought up by soldiers and their families. Like most other residents interviewed for this article, he declined to give his full name for fear of retribution.

Tension prevailed at the market, a maze of stalls selling clothing, household goods and military equipment. Although the city of Belgorod is not under direct attack, Russia’s military air defenses intercept missiles in the distance. The sounds of explosions ring out, and in the Komsomolsky district, houses and property are hit with debris.

Recognition…Valerie Hopkins/The New York Times

On Monday, a college of teachers, a shopping mall and a bus station held evacuation drills as officials assured concerned civilians at the scene that the drills were planned in advance. The regional administration is evacuating towns and villages along the border as they come under Ukrainian fire. Denis, a local businessman, recently paid someone to dig a 10-foot-high bomb shelter in his backyard.

Many residents of the city fear that the risks to their safety are growing.

“We’re scared, and it’s especially hard when you work with children,” said Ekaterina, 21, a kindergarten teacher who said shrapnel fell on the school earlier this week. “The kids are running around yelling ‘rockets,’ but we tell them it’s just thunder.”

While most Belgorod residents support the government in Moscow and the war effort, some express frustration that the rest of Russia still lives as if it is not fighting an all-out war.

“How are they not ashamed!” exclaimed a middle-aged woman named Lyudmila from the Komsomosky district.

“In Moscow, they celebrate City Day, while here blood is spilled,” she said, referring to a city-wide celebration last week honoring the founding of the Russian capital that included fireworks and the ceremonial opening of a large Ferris wheel by Mr Putin . “Here everyone is worried about our soldiers, while there everyone is partying and drinking!”

Even those supporting the war effort have privately expressed frustration that the Kremlin insists on calling it a “special military operation” when they can see it is a full-blown war. Many are wondering if there will be a draft, and if so, how soon.

The refugees arriving from Ukraine also make the reality of the war clear.

Thousands of people have arrived from eastern Ukraine in recent months, particularly last week when Ukrainian troops retook areas in the northeast held by Russian soldiers. Some were worried about living under the control of the Ukrainian government in Kyiv, while others, particularly those who had acquired Russian passports or accepted jobs in the occupation administration, feared being treated as collaborators, according to activists who help them leave the country .

Recognition…Valerie Hopkins/The New York Times

“They tried to live their lives, work in hospitals, schools and shops, but this site understands this as cooperation with the occupiers,” said Yulia Nemchinova, who has been helping refugees in Belgorod. Ms Nemchinova, who holds pro-Russian views, left her native Kharkiv just across the border in 2014 after her husband had legal troubles with Ukrainian authorities.

But she also said many people felt shocked and effectively betrayed by a Russian army they saw as liberators, but which is now on the run in the face of a full-scale Ukrainian offensive.

“You were promised: Russia is here forever,” said Ms. Nemchinova.

As journalists and investigators uncover evidence of atrocities and human rights abuses committed by Russians during the occupation, those who recently fled to Belgorod say the retreating Russian army told them to leave because of possible retaliation.

In interviews in Belgorod, people who fled an area recently recaptured from Ukraine said they feared that when the Ukrainian army entered the local administration building, the soldiers would find the lists of people who received jobs or humanitarian aid from the Russian interim administration had accepted and were assigned penalties for collaboration. People were also afraid because Ukraine passed a law punishing cooperation with the occupation authorities with 10 to 15 years in prison.

A woman named Irina said her boyfriend, a former Ukrainian border guard, posted his personal information to a Telegram group that purported to name collaborators.

“There’s no going back,” Irina, 18, said in an interview at a clothes bank where newly arrived refugees collected clothes and food. Her mother and sister stayed in their village, and she said she hoped the Russians would reoccupy it soon.

In Belgorod, a city of 400,000, fears of Ukrainians crossing the border would have been unthinkable a decade ago. For years, Russians in Belgorod regularly traveled the 50 miles to Kharkiv – Ukraine’s second largest city with a pre-war population of 2 million – to party, eat and shop. Many families are spread across the border.

“Belgorod was in total shock,” said Oleg Ksenov, 41, a restaurant owner who has spent the past few months evacuating people from battlefields in Ukraine and taking them to Russia. “We love Kharkiv.”

Recognition…Valerie Hopkins/The New York Times

Viktoriya, 50, who owns a cafe and bakery in the city, said that Kharkiv is a “megapolis” in the minds of all Belgorod residents.

“We had a joke: if you want to meet people from Belgorod, go to the Stargorod restaurant in Kharkiv at the weekend,” she said.

The relationship worked both ways. In the years after Russia instigated a separatist war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region, Ukraine enacted stricter laws on speaking Ukrainian rather than Russian in public. That prompted Russian speakers from Kharkiv to travel to Belgorod to watch films in Russian, said 44-year-old businessman Denis.

Now the two cities are effectively separated by a front line.

“It’s a tragedy of tectonic proportions,” he said. “It touches every person from Belgorod. Every family is connected to Ukraine.”

His aunt Larisa had just arrived over the weekend from Liman, a town in the Donetsk region occupied by the Russian army at the end of May. Since then it has had no electricity, gas or running water, and she said more than 80 percent of the housing stock has been destroyed.

In early May, a rocket—she didn’t know from which army, although she blamed Ukraine—hit her apartment building. Then, at the end of the month, the Russians came.

“I was so lucky to wait for her,” said Larisa, 74, in Surzhik, a dialect that’s a mix of Ukrainian and Russian.

Now their home is the scene of fierce front-line fighting. She said she had trouble walking and struggled to get down to the basement every time the air raid siren sounded.

Recognition…Valerie Hopkins/The New York Times

As the fighting drew closer, she said, she knew she had to get out because she no longer wanted and was afraid of being ruled by Kyiv.

Mr. Ksenov, who was born in Kharkiv but made Belgorod his home more than a decade ago, has devoted his time to helping civilians flee Ukraine to Russia. He worries about what will happen to the people from the border regions of both countries in the long term.

“This slaughter will eventually end,” he said of the war in an interview at his restaurant, whose windows are covered with plywood in case of a bomb attack.

“But who will we be? How will we look into each other’s eyes?”

Anastasia Trofimova contributed to the coverage.

Categories
Business

The UK’s new prime minister could possibly be about to shake up the Metropolis of London

Talks about deregulating Britain's financial sector are

People in the UK financial sector are wondering if the new PM will change the regulatory landscape.

Jeff J. Mitchell/Staff/Getty Images

As Liz Truss becomes Britain’s new prime minister on Tuesday, questions will be raised about her plans for Britain’s historic financial district – the City of London – as the country grapples with a deepening cost-of-living crisis and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

According to the Financial Times last month, the city’s regulators could be in for a big shake under Truss. It cited campaign insiders who said Truss will seek to review and possibly merge the three major London regulators – the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and the Payment Services Regulator (PSR).

She has also suggested reviewing the Bank of England’s mandate during her time as Prime Minister.

“Change for Change’s Sake”

The FCA regulates 50,000 firms in the UK to “ensure our financial markets are honest, competitive and fair”, according to its website. The PRA, meanwhile, oversees the work of around 1,500 financial institutions to “ensure the financial services and products we all rely on can be delivered in a safe and sound manner.”

Their responsibilities sound similar, but the various organizations were formed when it was decided that the Financial Services Authority, which regulated the city between 2001 and 2013, had several functions that could be better served by separate organisations.

According to Matthew Nunan, a partner at law firm Gibson Dunn and a former department head at the FCA, the original agency’s main objectives were good governance and financial soundness across the sector. He said the split in two is seen as a way to give these goals equal priority.

“The simple question that needs to be answered now is: What would the reunification of the PRA and FCA do?” Nunan wrote in an email to CNBC.

“If the answer is to reform the old Financial Services Authority, what was the question? Or is it simply change for the sake of change?”

Governments should always “challenge the status quo,” Nunan said, but argued that it was a question of whether doing so would actually better serve the “changing needs of a nation.”

“The problem here is that instead of articulating a problem and seeking evidence, the statements made seem to be proposing answers to questions that no one is asking,” he said.

Nunan also highlighted the difference between regulators and politicians, saying regulators are “never allowed” to make proposals in the way Truss has done.

“Regulators are legally required to make evidence-based decisions about rule changes [and] require a cost-benefit analysis before they can be implemented… If that applies to regulators, why doesn’t it apply to politicians?” he asked.

“Light Touch Regulatory Regime”

The “fight” to deregulate the banking sector is like “turning back the clock to the pre-2008 global financial crash,” Fran Boait, director of campaign group Positive Money, told CNBC’s Squawk Box Europe last month.

Boait said there was a risk that the country would find itself in the same situation “or much worse”.

“Liz Truss’ proposal to merge the three key city watchdogs would risk restoring this light regulatory regime — the regime we had before the crash,” she said.

She also stressed that less than a decade has passed since the organizations were founded.

“It wasn’t long ago that we put in place a much larger regulatory regime because there was a consensus that the regime contained so many risks [that] Complexity in the financial sector needs to be properly regulated,” she said.

‘ambiguity’

Discussions of a review or merger of any of London’s regulators remain speculative as Truss has yet to issue any official statements on the matter.

This is leading to a “lack of clarity” about the future status of the three regulators, according to Hargreaves Lansdown analyst Susannah Streeter.

She said improving financial services for customers should be at the forefront of any regulatory discussion.

“Whether they stay as single entities or as a merged entity, it’s really important that the UK has dynamic regulators that make the most of the Brexit freedoms,” Streeter said in an email to CNBC.

Tackling fraud, creating more opportunities for investors to invest in IPOs and how information is shared with prospective investors should be on the agenda of any proposed changes to the current regulatory regime, she added.

Categories
Entertainment

Shakespeare or Bieber? This Canadian Metropolis Attracts Devotees of Each

Shakespeare or Bieber? This Canadian City Draws Devotees of Both

STRATFORD, Ontario – It’s a small town that practically screams “Shakespeare!”

Majestic white swans swim in the Avon River not far from Falstaff Street and Anne Hathaway Park, named after the playwright’s wife. Some residents live in Romeo Ward while young students attend Hamlet Primary School. And the school’s eponymous play is often performed as part of a renowned theater festival that draws legions of Shakespeare fans from around the world from April to October.

Steeped in references and reverence for the bard, Stratford, Ontario has counted on its association with Shakespeare for decades to reliably bring millions of tourist dollars to a city that would otherwise have little appeal to travelers.

“My dad always said we had a world-class theater housed in a farming community,” said Frank Herr, second-generation owner of a boat tour and rental business along the Avon River.

Then, about a dozen years ago, a new and usually much younger breed of culture enthusiast emerged on Stratford’s streets: Beliebers, or fans of local talent, pop star Justin Bieber.

Local residents don’t have much trouble telling the two types of visitors apart. A hint: look at what they are wearing.

“You have the Shakespeare books in your hands,” said Herr Herr of those who are here for the love of the theatre. “They’re just serious people.”

Beliebers, on the other hand, always have their smartphones handy to excitedly document the pop star’s otherwise boring sights: the location of his first date, the local radio station that first played his music, the diner where he was rumored to be eating.

Unlike Shakespeare – who never set foot in this town, named after his birthplace Stratford-upon-Avon, England – Mr. Bieber has real and deep connections: he grew up here and is familiar to many.

“I know Justin,” said Mr. Herr. “He used to skateboard on the cenotaph, and I used to kick him off the cenotaph,” he added, referring to a World War I memorial in the gardens next to Lake Victoria.

Diane Dale, Mr. Bieber’s maternal grandmother, and her husband Bruce lived a 10-minute drive from downtown Stratford, where the young singer, now 28, could often be found busking and collecting on the steps of the Avon Theater under her supervision up to $200 a day, she said in a recent interview.

Those moves became something of a pilgrimage for Mr. Bieber’s fans, particularly those vying to become “One Less Lonely Girl” during his teen-pop dreamboat era.

Another popular stop on the pilgrimage was Mrs. Dale’s front door. After fans rang her doorbell, she reassured them that her grandson wasn’t home, but that didn’t stop her from snapping selfies in front of the red-brick bungalow.

“Justin said if you don’t move, we won’t come see you anymore,” recalled Ms. Dale, a retired seamstress at a now-closed auto factory in town. In the meantime she has moved.

Stratford businesses that benefited from this second group of tourists began to speak of the “Bieber Effect,” a play on the “Bilbao Effect,” in reference to the Spanish city revitalized by a museum.

But one of the problems with pop fame is that it can be fickle. As fans have aged from their youthful infatuation with the musician, the “Bieber fever” has cooled and the number of pilgrims has dwindled.

The problems that have long plagued other Canadian cities, such as soaring home prices and drug addiction, are peeking more frequently through the picturesque veneer of Stratford, a city of about 33,000 surrounded by sprawling cornfields in southwestern Ontario’s farmland region.

But more than 400 years after his death, Shakespeare’s appeal is still fully intact.

The theater festival, which attracts over 500,000 visitors in a typical year and employs around 1,000 people, features Shakespearean classics, Broadway-style musicals and modern plays in its repertoire.

With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the festival returned to its roots, holding a limited number of outdoor shows under canopies, as it did for the first four seasons beginning in 1953. In 1957 the Festival Theater building was inaugurated with a summer production of Hamlet, starring Canadian actor Christopher Plummer in the title role.

In this year’s production, a woman, Amaka Umeh, plays the first black actress to play Hamlet at the festival.

While it’s unknown how popular Mr. Bieber will be four centuries from now, the appeal of someone who’s sold over 100 million digital singles in the United States alone doesn’t fade overnight.

And Stratford has taken steps to permanently commemorate his youth here.

Mr. Bieber’s grandparents had kept boxes of his belongings, including talent show sheet music and a drum set, which were paid for by the community in a crowdfunding effort – until a local museum offered them a chance to display the items.

“It changed the museum forever in so many ways,” said John Kastner, general manager of the Stratford Perth Museum.

After telling the local newspaper that the museum was opening an exhibition called Justin Bieber: Steps to Stardom in February 2018, Mr Kastner said he was inundated with calls from international media.

“We wanted to make a room, like a 10 by 10 room,” said Mr. Kastner. He called his curator. “I said, ‘We have a problem.'”

They canceled the agricultural show planned for the adjacent space, which proved helpful in accommodating the 18,000 visitors in the first year of the Bieber show, a huge increase in attendance from the 850 who visited the museum in 2013.

The Bieber show, which will be on at least until next year, has generated thousands of dollars in merchandise purchases, Mr. Kastner said, giving the modest museum a welcome financial cushion.

Mr. Bieber has also made a handful of visits, chalked his name on the guest board and donated some recent memorabilia, including his wedding invitation and reception menu, which featured a dish called “Grandma Diane’s Bolognese.”

But even before the Beliebers came to town, organized school visits brought young people to Stratford in busloads, with 50,000 to 100,000 students arriving each year from across the United States and Canada.

Barring the pandemic border closures, James Pakala and his wife Denise, both retired seminary librarians in St. Louis, have come to Stratford for about a week every year since the early 1990s. Thirty years earlier, Ms. Pakala traveled to Stratford with her high school English literature class from Ithaca, NY, and the trip has become a tradition ever since.

“I love Shakespeare and I love Molière too,” said Mr Pakala, 78, who was studying his program ahead of a recent production of Molière’s comedy The Miser outside the Festspielhaus.

Other guests enjoy the ease of getting around Stratford. Traffic is fairly light, there is ample parking and most major attractions are a short walk from each other, with lovely views of the rippling river and picturesque gardens.

“It’s easy to go to theaters here,” said Michael Walker, a retired banker from Newport Beach, California, who visits with friends every year. “It’s not like New York, where it’s arduous, and the quality of the theater here is better than Los Angeles or Chicago, in my opinion.”

The Here for Now Theatre, an independent non-profit that opened during the pandemic and plays to a maximum of 50 people, has a “symbiotic relationship” with the festival, said its artistic director Fiona Mongillo, who compared the scale of their activities to a Fiat for the Festival freight train.

“It’s an interesting moment for Stratford because I think it’s growing and changing in a really beautiful way,” Ms. Mongillo said, noting the increasing diversity as Canadians have moved from neighboring cities to a previous city, she added , “very, very white.”

Longtime residents of Stratford, like Madeleine McCormick, a retired corrections officer, said it can sometimes seem like residents’ concerns are being sidelined in favor of tourists.

Nonetheless, Ms McCormick acknowledged the assets of the vibrant community of artists and creative people that captivated her musician husband.

“It’s a strange place,” she said. “Because of the theatre, there will never be a place like that again.”

And Mr. Bieber.

Categories
Politics

Taliban Seize Key Afghan Metropolis as Biden Speeds Deployment

Taliban Seize Key Afghan City as Biden Speeds Deployment

As his army has all but collapsed and his government’s control shrinks, Mr. Ghani is facing pressure to step down. Yet in a recorded speech televised early Saturday afternoon, he promised only to “prevent further instability” and did not resign. With Taliban forces having captured Pul-i-Alam, a provincial capital only 40 miles from Kabul, Mr. Ghani said he had begun “extensive consultations at home and abroad” and that the results would soon be shared. He said remobilizing Afghanistan’s military forces was a priority.

Still, he has little apparent support at home, and thousands of his soldiers were surrendering. Mr. Ghani was not “worth fighting for,” Omar Zakhilwal, a former finance minister, tweeted on Friday.

With most of Afghanistan under the control of the Taliban, and with Kabul one of the last bastions held by government forces, many of the city’s residents expressed fatalism and fear at the prospect of their home falling into the hands of the militant group.

The Taliban seized Mazar-i-Sharif barely an hour after breaking through the front lines at the city’s edge. Soon after, government security forces and militias fled — including those led by the infamous warlords Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum and Atta Muhammad Noor — effectively handing control to the insurgents.

In the late 1990s, Mazar-i-Sharif was the site of pitched battles between the Taliban and northern militia groups that managed to push back the hard-line insurgents before the group took over the city in 1998. The victory followed infighting and defections among the militias and culminated with the Taliban’s massacre of hundreds of militia fighters who had surrendered.

During the current Taliban military campaign, Mazar’s defense was almost completely reliant on the reincarnations of some of those very same militias that have all but failed to hold their territory elsewhere in the north. Some are led by Mr. Dostum, a former Afghan vice president who has survived the past 40 years of war by cutting deals and switching sides.

Others were behind Mr. Noor, a longtime power broker and warlord in Balkh Province who fought the Soviets in the 1980s and the Taliban in the 1990s. During the civil war, he was a commander in Jamiat-i-Islami, an Islamist party in the country’s north, and he was a leading figure in the Northern Alliance that supported the American invasion in 2001. Shortly afterward, he became Balkh’s governor, deeply entrenched as the singular authority in the province. He refused to leave his position after Mr. Ghani fired him in 2017.

Helene Cooper reported from Washington, and Christina Goldbaum from Kabul, Afghanistan. Lara Jakes contributed reporting from Washington, and Najim Rahim and Sharif Hassan from Kabul. Adam Nossiter also contributed reporting.

Categories
Entertainment

‘Can I Really Sing?’ Meet New York Metropolis Ballet’s Songbird

‘Can I Actually Sing?’ Meet New York City Ballet’s Songbird

Before the pandemic, Clara Miller had a secret that she kept from her dance world at the New York City Ballet. Well the caretakers knew.

After dance performances, she went to empty studios to rehearse. But she didn’t dance. Armed with her voice and a piano, she wrote and sang songs – sometimes, she remembered, she didn’t raise her voice above a whisper.

Cover songs were also part of her repertoire. Once she used a rehearsal piano on the stage of the David H. Koch Theater and sang “Dancing in the Dark” in front of an empty house. “It felt like I was playing for an audience of ghosts,” she said in a recent Zoom interview.

She often made videos of herself performing; she didn’t know how to write down her compositions. But one question remained: “I would listen and say, ‘Does my brain only hear my voice?'” She said. “‘Or am I really bad and just don’t hear it? Can I actually sing? ‘”

“It was like my hidden, secret little passion,” she added, “that I didn’t want to share with anyone until I figured it out.”

She found out. She can sing.

Miller, 25 and a member of City Ballet since 2015, specializes in a mixture of indie folk and indie rock, with a voice – pleading, ethereal, elated – that hovers in a space of vulnerability. It feels exposed and tender, but there is also an underlying trust: she knows she is giving out secrets. “Oath”, their debut EP, was released this month. On Friday she will perform at Bitter End. (She has recorded and appears under the nickname Clanklin, but will begin to use her full name.)

Her songs don’t ignore the trauma she experienced, especially her difficult relationship with her father growing up – it’s better now – but they also deal with lighter subjects, like an unrequited crush.

She calls Phoebe Bridgers her queen – “Women save music,” she said – but she also loves Lucy Dacus, who founded the Boygenius group with Bridgers and Julien Baker, Fiona Apple, Samia and Soccer Mommy. “And I’m always a fan of Stevie Nicks,” Miller said with big and serious blue eyes. “I have her photo on my bathroom wall. She is everything. “

Miller recently released a video of the first track, “Graveyard,” which was filmed in Green-Wood Cemetery by Devin Alberda, a member of the City Ballet. Miller calls Alberda – who has also explored another type of art as a photographer – her mentor. (Wendy Whelan, the company’s assistant artistic director, republished the video, calling Miller “City Ballet’s own songbird.”)

Miller and Alberda became close friends during the pandemic. “She writes these songs for herself,” he said, “and we’re lucky enough to hear her and see her transform through them.”

Alberda added that he was impressed with “the empathy, tenderness and emotional maturity she can bring to her approach to life – she has gone through more physical trauma than almost anyone I know. I don’t know anyone who has had their backs opened twice. “

Miller had two spinal surgeries – vertebral body tethering – to correct idiopathic scoliosis. The second occurred in October 2020; She knew the pandemic would give her ample recovery time. (The cover of their EP shows an x-ray of her spine.) In 2016, tethers were used to straighten her spine. But instead of giving her body enough time to acclimate, she returned to dancing too quickly.

The tethers broke, “and my spine got curved again,” she said. “So they went in and fixed the tethers from the first operation and then they put on a whole different set of tethers and I was like, OK, I have to come back slowly.”

She released her first single “Old Car” from her hospital bed, where she had to stay for 10 days. “Songwriting was the only opportunity I had and I really appreciate that,” Miller said. “If I can’t dance, I have to express myself somehow, otherwise I will feel sick.”

As a musician, she is basically self-taught. As a high school student, she took piano lessons at the City Ballet-affiliated School of American Ballet, but taught herself to play guitar – she called it her first 18th birthday gift, Stevie – along with the ukulele, banjo, and the drums .

Learning covers served one purpose: it taught them how to perform. (“Oath” shows her take on Bob Dylan’s “One Too Many Mornings”.)

“It’s like learning a ballet variation and looking at old tapes of ballet dancers and trying to copy some of their artistic moments,” she said. “I just played the songs I loved on the piano. And occasionally a caretaker would come in and I was just about to buckle up and I got so shy. “

When the pandemic broke out, Miller was working from her loft on the Upper West Side, where guitars hang from a brick wall and drums sit on the side. In the early days, she had an inverted sleep cycle, going to bed at 8:00 a.m. and waking up at 4:00 p.m. It was the first time in her life that she didn’t have a strict schedule.

“I started playing the drums at 11pm,” she said, “and my poor neighbor came to my door and said, ‘Please stop.’ So I had to stop. “

What she has really tested in the last year and a half are her limits – both in terms of her dancing and musical self as well as her physical and mental health. Her relationships with several Juilliard alumni – friends who played a role in her musical development – helped. (Along with Steven Robertson, who shares the show with her at Bitter End, some of these friends, the “quarantine crew,” as she calls them, will be performing with her.)

After a period of depression, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and started taking medication, which made a real difference. “I had so much more access to my artistic voice because I was more stable,” she said. “And then writing just blossomed and when I wrote all of my EPs, that was from January to March.”

But Miller, who has regular sessions with her physical therapist and takes classes at City Ballet, has no plans to stop dancing, which she called her deepest love. “To me, dancing means becoming one with the music, just like making music,” she said. “For me, it’s all about the music.”

Before the pandemic, she found she danced more freely; she didn’t hold back. “Now I am rediscovering the same lesson with music,” she said. “Even the release of my album was a huge, huge public demonstration that I was nervous about – it’s a very illuminating thing. But at the end of the day my whole thing is, I never want to do anything out of fear. Just let it out. “

Busking, mainly in the Times Square subway station and Washington Square Park, was an important teacher. “The first time I played in Times Square, I was sweating all over my body like I was trembling,” Miller said. “I just thought, okay, you have to do this. And the people were so supportive. They took photos and videos and were just so cute. It helped me overcome stage fright. “

As a young dancer, she danced for years – modestly, as she emphasized – for a tiny audience and in competitions on concrete, where, as she laughed, “everything was kind of nonsense”.

Similarly, street musicians are about paying their dues. “I like the feeling of being humiliated and getting back to my roots,” she said. “It was definitely a test of my courage and my ability not to mumble. Sometimes I sing so softly. I mean, now I’m bringing a microphone because I just have to or people wouldn’t hear me. Yes, the microphone is necessary. “

Categories
World News

Taliban Take Second Afghan Metropolis in Two Days

Taliban Take Second Afghan City in Two Days

KABUL, Afghanistan – Another provincial capital, the second in two days, nearly fell in Afghanistan on Saturday, officials said, this one in the north of the country, where a Taliban offensive has encircled several cities since international forces began in May, to retire.

The capital Sheberghan in Jowzjan Province collapsed less than 24 hours after the Taliban took over a provincial capital in southwest Afghanistan.

“The whole city has collapsed,” said the deputy governor of Jowzjan, Abdul Qader Malia. “Nothing is left.” On Saturday afternoon, government troops were still controlling the airport and army headquarters outside Sheberghan.

However, much of the province bordering Turkmenistan is now under the control of the Taliban.

The Taliban’s victories – and the defeats of the Afghan government – come despite continued American air support and are the result of an insurgent strategy that has overwhelmed and exhausted the Afghan government forces.

Sheberghan’s fall comes after the Taliban captured around 200 of the 400 or so districts in Afghanistan in the past few months – often without firing a shot. They penetrate deep into the north of the country, even though the region has a reputation for being an anti-Taliban stronghold and relatively safe.

The insurgent offensive has turned into a brutal urban struggle as Taliban fighters advanced into cities like Sheberghan and Kunduz in the north, Kandahar and Lashkar Gah in the south, and Herat in the west, and tens of thousands of civilians amid a desperate struggle for control. Hundreds were killed or wounded and many more were displaced.

On Friday, government forces in Sheberghan reportedly repelled the Taliban incursion after insurgents entered the city and attempted to raid government buildings such as the police headquarters and the prison. The number of civilian victims is unclear.

“The situation in the city is so scary,” said Matin Raufi, a Sheberghan resident. “We don’t know what’s going to happen.”

The Taliban returned on Saturday and penetrated deep into the city, despite desperate attempts by security forces to defend what was still theirs.

“The government troops have withdrawn to the army brigade and the airport, the two places that are still under their control, to regroup and plan counter-attacks against the Taliban,” said Mohammad Karim Jawzjani, member of parliament from Jowzjan.

Sheberghan is the hometown of Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum, a notorious warlord and former Afghan vice president who survived the last 40 years of war by cutting back and changing sides. It was long expected that Marshal Dostum would muster the same Uzbek militias that fought in the country’s civil war in the 1990s and helped overthrow the Taliban after the 2001 US invasion to serve as a bulwark against the group’s recent boom .

The Sheberghan case is evidence that, despite the resurgence of these militias – which the Afghan government advocates as a complement to its troops – these militias are currently unreliable when it comes to fighting the Taliban.

Marshal Dostum returned to Afghanistan in the past few days after weeks in Turkey – where he is resident and has close ties – to recover from health problems. The aging warlord has left much of his frontline duties to his son Yar Mohammad Dostum, who leads the fight against the Taliban on social media.

On Saturday, Marshal Dostum met with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in the capital, Kabul, where Marshal Dostum pledged his continued support to the government’s security forces, according to a palace statement.

The warlord’s militias are only part of a kaleidoscope of armed groups that are regaining importance as American forces aim to complete their retreat by the end of August and the Afghan government tries to hold onto territory. The return of the militia is a terrifying throwback to the 1990s, when an ethnically charged civil war helped create the Taliban after the same armed groups brutalized civilians.

The fall of Sheberghan means the Taliban can now move their troops elsewhere, most likely to other besieged cities in the north. The same situation is playing out in southwest Afghanistan, where the insurgents captured Zaranj, the capital of Nimruz province, on Friday.

“Sheberghan and Zaranj can hardly be called cities given their small size, and although these are propaganda victories, the Taliban are still fighting to take the larger cities like Herat and Kandahar,” said Ibraheem Bahiss, an adviser to the International Crisis Group and a independent research analyst. “In these places they encounter considerable resistance and make sacrifices.”

Zaranj, known for its poor governance, lawlessness and illegal economy, will no doubt serve as the starting point for future Taliban operations in the west and south. This is especially true of the capital of neighboring Helmand Province, Lashkar Gah, which is dangerously close to collapse. Fierce fighting in recent days has left parts of the city to rubble and civilians killed.

This leaves the Afghan government few options in both provinces: counterattack and try to recapture the lost territory or relocate troops to another location to defend other besieged cities.

American air support, which is slated to last until the end of the month – or longer if the Pentagon gets permission to continue – is being launched from outside the country, meaning there are insufficient resources to defend every Afghan city attacked .

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Entertainment

Amar Ramasar, Metropolis Ballet Dancer, To Retire After Texting Scandal

Amar Ramasar, City Ballet Dancer, To Retire After Texting Scandal

A star dancer with the New York City Ballet, who has come under fire for sharing vulgar text and sexually explicit photos, plans to leave the company next year.

Dancer Amar Ramasar will retire in May after a 20-year career with City Ballet, according to an announcement for the 2021-22 season the company released this month.

Ramasar has been under intense scrutiny since 2018 when he and two other male dancers were accused of sending inappropriate texts and photos from fellow City Ballet dancers.

The scandal rocked the ballet company and became a high-profile test of the #MeToo movement. One dancer accused the company of tolerating a “brotherly atmosphere”.

In 2018 the City Ballet released Ramasar. Months later, he was reinstated after an arbitrator ruled the company had exceeded.

City Ballet confirmed Ramasar’s resignation but made no further details, only saying that his farewell performance would be on Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.

In a statement, a Ramasar spokeswoman said he will be 40 years old this year and ready to retire.

“Amar has had a fine career with the New York City Ballet,” said spokeswoman Kimberly Giannelli. She said he was looking for other career opportunities.

Ramasar has previously said that he has learned from past mistakes. He has argued that he was only sharing pictures of his own consensual sexual activity.

Ramasar, a solo dancer, was also successful on Broadway, appearing in productions of “West Side Story” and “Carousel”.

But the SMS scandal continued to tarnish his career. Critics protested his performances and demanded his dismissal.

Other City Ballet dancers have also accused Ramasar of inappropriate behavior. Soloist Georgina Pazcoguin writes in her new memoir that Ramasar often greeted her by touching her breasts. Ramasar denies the allegations.

City Ballet has grappled with a number of scandals in recent years, including allegations of sexual harassment and physical and verbal abuse by its former ballet master Peter Martins. (Martins has denied the allegations.)

The pandemic has also challenged the company, which has resulted in the cancellation of the winter and spring seasons.

City Ballet will return to the stage on September 21st with a program of Balanchine’s “Serenade”.

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Entertainment

Metropolis Plans Central Park Live performance for the Vaccinated: LL Cool J, Santana and Extra

City Plans Central Park Concert for the Vaccinated: LL Cool J, Santana and More

LL Cool J, Elvis Costello, Andrea Bocelli, Carlos Santana and the New York Philharmonic, along with Bruce Springsteen and other artists, will be at the starry Central Park concert next month, which the city plans to announce its comeback from the pandemic, Mayor Bill announced de Blasio on Tuesday.

The mayor said that concert-goers would need to show a vaccination card.

“We want this to be a concert for the people,” said Mr. de Blasio at a video press conference, announcing additional headliners – and the name – of the We Love NYC: The Homecoming Concert, which will take place on August 21st take place on the Great Lawn. “But I would also like to make it clear: it has to be a safe concert. It has to be a concert that will help us advance our recovery. “

“So if you want to go to this concert, you must have a vaccination card,” he added.

The line-up includes artists and music icons from a range of eras, genres, and styles, including the Killers; Earth, wind; Wyclef Jean; Barry Manilow and the previously announced cast including Paul Simon, Jennifer Hudson and Patti Smith.

While 80 percent of the tickets are free, proof of vaccination is required to participate. (Adequate accommodation would be provided for those unable to be vaccinated because of a disability, the city said in a press release.) Masks will be optional due to the vaccination requirement and the fact that it takes place outdoors.

Free tickets will be released to the public in batches from Monday at 10 a.m. on nyc.gov/HomecomingWeek. Others will be available for purchase on Monday.

Gates will open at 3 p.m. on August 21 for the concert produced in partnership with Live Nation, and the show will start at 5 p.m. CNN will also broadcast the event live worldwide, including on CNN en Español.

The venerable music producer Clive Davis, a native of Brooklyn, has been working on the concert since May. He had lived in New York for most of his life, he said at the press conference, but he had never seen anything like the events of the past year and a half.

“As a born, raised, and true New Yorker, I know exactly how resilient we are and how New York keeps coming back,” said Mr. Davis. “And yes, ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be back. And I really can’t think of a more fitting way to celebrate this than an unforgettable concert in one of the most extraordinary places in the world: the Great Lawn at Central Park. “

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World News

N.Y.C. to Require Metropolis Staff to Be Vaccinated by Mid-September

N.Y.C. to Require City Workers to Be Vaccinated by Mid-September

Attempts to get Americans vaccinated accelerated on Monday when the most populous state and largest city in the United States announced it would require its employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus or have frequent testing.

All New York City urban workers, including police officers and teachers, as well as all state and local public and private health workers in California, must be vaccinated or tested at least weekly.

The Department of Veterans Affairs also became the first federal agency to order some of its employees vaccinated on Monday.

The mandates are the most dramatic response yet to the sluggish pace of vaccination across the country given the highly contagious Delta variant ripping through communities with low vaccination rates and one by federal health officials as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

According to federal data, only 49 percent of people in the United States are fully vaccinated.

Misinformation and skepticism have haunted the launch of the vaccine, and in recent weeks coronavirus infections and hospital admissions have risen, with the number of new cases per day quadrupling in the past month.

Yet all three indicators are well below last winter’s devastating winter peaks, and vaccines have proven to be very effective protection against the coronavirus. Cities, private employers and other institutions are increasingly turning to mandates to ensure that more people are vaccinated.

Hospitals and health systems like New York-Presbyterian and Trinity Health have announced vaccination mandates and in some cases sparked union protests. The National Football League announced that it would punish teams with players who fail to be vaccinated. Delta Air Lines requires that new employees be vaccinated, but not current employees. And last week, a federal judge ruled that Indiana University could require vaccinations for students and staff.

New York City will require its approximately 340,000 urban workers to be vaccinated against the coronavirus or undergo weekly tests until schools reopen in mid-September, Mayor Bill de Blasio said.

The new California requirement, which will apply to approximately 246,000 state workers and many more healthcare workers, will be implemented by Aug. 23, Governor Gavin Newsom said.

At the VA, one of the largest federal employers and the largest integrated health system in the country, government officials said 115,000 frontline health workers will have to get vaccinated over the next two months. “I’m doing this because it’s the best way to protect our veterans, period,” said Denis McDonough, the veterans affairs secretary, in a telephone interview on Monday.

Eliza Shapiro, Dan Levin and Shawn Hubler contributed to the coverage.

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Health

NYC to require vaccinations or weekly Covid exams for metropolis well being care, hospital staff: Sources

NYC to require vaccinations or weekly Covid tests for city health care, hospital workers: Sources

Bill de Blasio, Mayor of New York.

Jeenah moon | Reuters

New York City will require all employees in city health facilities and hospitals to be vaccinated or have weekly Covid tests, with positivity rates continuing to rise as the Delta variant spreads, City Hall officials told NBC New York.

Mayor Bill de Blasio will release details on the request Wednesday morning, including those that go with it, sources said. The plan targets the unvaccinated third of all healthcare and hospital workers in the city.

“It’s about the safety of a health system,” said Bill Neidhardt, the mayor’s press officer.

This is a developing story. Please check again for updates.