Why the Murdoch media empire thrives despite a family feud
The all-famous Murdoch clan is engaged in a fierce battle over control of the family's media companies. Our correspondent explains why turmoil at the top has not deterred investors. After decades of fruitless research into Alzheimer's, there are finally some new drugs in the pipeline. And pop songs are getting shorter. Runtime: 18 min
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Economist
2 days ago
- Economist
Why the Murdoch media empire thrives despite a family feud
The all-famous Murdoch clan is engaged in a fierce battle over control of the family's media companies. Our correspondent explains why turmoil at the top has not deterred investors. After decades of fruitless research into Alzheimer's, there are finally some new drugs in the pipeline. And pop songs are getting shorter. Runtime: 18 min
NBC News
4 days ago
- NBC News
Harvard gets new legal backing from 5 Ivies and over 12,000 alumni
Twenty four universities, including five Ivy League schools, and more than 12,000 alumni took measures to back Harvard University in its legal battle against the Trump administration, which has threatened it with slashing billions of dollars in grants. Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania, along with several other schools, filed an amicus brief on Monday in support of the nation's oldest university, arguing that the funding freeze would impact more than just Harvard, due to the interconnectedness of scientific research, and would ultimately hinder American innovation and economic growth. Also on Monday, the group of 12,041 Harvard alumni filed a separate brief describing the withholding of funds as a 'reckless and unlawful' attempt to assert control over the school and other higher education institutions. 'The escalating campaign against Harvard threatens the very foundation of who we are as a nation,' the alumni said in the brief. 'We embrace our responsibility to stand up for our freedoms and values, to safeguard liberty and democracy, and to serve as bulwarks against these threats to the safety and well-being of all.' The amicus briefs aim to provide expertise or insight to the court, but the schools and individuals are not parties in the lawsuit itself. The filings come after Harvard in April rejected the government's list of 10 demands, including auditing viewpoints of the student body, a move that the administration says is aimed at addressing antisemitism on campus. After the government threatened to freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and $60 million 'in multi-year contract value,' Harvard hit back with a lawsuit. The brief filed by the universities included other prominent institutions like Georgetown, Johns Hopkins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The only Ivy League schools missing were Cornell and Columbia universities. The schools argued that the partnership between the government and academia has long led to critical advancements, from the The Human Genome Project to the Covid-19 vaccine. And that funding cuts to one school could endanger research at others. Harvard, MIT and Princeton, for example, have received funding from the National Institutes of Health for a project that could potentially yield tools to treat Alzheimer's disease. 'The work cannot continue at individual sites; MIT cannot use machine learning to uncover patterns, for example, without data from Princeton and Harvard,' the brief said. The universities said in the brief that the cuts would only cause more harm to the United States' ability to compete in science and academia. 'These cuts to research funding risk a future where the next pathbreaking innovation — whether it is a cure for cancer or Alzheimer's, a military technology, or the next Internet — is discovered beyond our shores, if at all,' the brief said. Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT, said in a letter to the school's community that it was critical to make a legal argument against the funding cuts. 'Although the value to the public of federally funded university research feels obvious to us at MIT, we felt compelled to make the case for its countless benefits to the court and, in effect, to the American people,' Kornbluth said. The Harvard alumni filed their brief in support of the school's motion for a summary judgement submitted last week. If granted, the summary judgment would allow the court to decide the case without a full trial. The alumni, which include comedian Conan O'Brien, author Margaret E. Atwood and Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., wrote in the brief that the administration's 'end goal is to narrow our freedoms to learn, teach, think, and act, and to claim for itself the right to dictate who may enjoy those freedoms.' The alumni also slammed the administration's concerns over antisemitism as rationale over the funding freeze. 'We unequivocally condemn antisemitism and every other form of discrimination and hate, which have no place at Harvard or anywhere else in our society,' the alumni said in its brief. 'Yet charges of antisemitism — particularly without due process and proper bases and findings by the Government — should not be used as a pretext for the illegal and unconstitutional punishment and takeover of an academic institution by the Government.' The government's demands on Harvard, the alumni said in the brief, 'have little or nothing to do with combating antisemitism' or any other form of discrimination on campus. 'Rather, its demands stifle the very engagement, teaching, and research that bring communities together, heighten our understanding of one another, and advance solutions that directly benefit us all,' the brief said. The show of legal support comes amid a monthslong back-and-forth between the administration and Harvard University. Most recently, the school sued the administration after Trump issued a proclamation last week denying visas for foreign students trying to come to the U.S. to attend the prestigious school.
The Guardian
05-06-2025
- The Guardian
‘People were repressed into silence': the Spanish artist creating a visual memory of fascism's horrors
The map of Paco Roca's mind, a landscape of memory and loss, unfolds across the walls of an exhibition hall in Madrid, inviting visitors to acquaint themselves with the bittersweet geographies that have shaped the work of one of Spain's best-known graphic artists. Roca, whose comics have explored such varied themes as Francoist reprisals, the exiled Spanish republicans who helped liberate Paris from the Nazis, family histories and the depredations of Alzheimer's, is the subject of a new show called Memory: An Emotional Journey Through the Comics of Paco Roca. Staged as part of a year-long programme of events to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Franco and Spain's subsequent return to democracy, the exhibition looks at how the 56-year-old artist has recovered, preserved and shared memories and testimonies. 'The idea was to make it all look like an encyclopaedia or a set of Victorian maps because, as the end of the day, it's an atlas – a collection of maps that chronicle the journey of creating a comic,' said Roca. 'There are three panels about memory: historical memory; memory and identity; and family memory. The maps try to show what's involved in the creation of any artistic work, whether it's a comic or a film or a novel.' Given the subject matter and Roca's own approach to trekking after the past, the peripatetic, cartographical and non-linear nature of the exhibition seemed only fitting. Its four murals, 19 annotated strips and dozens of sketches, photos and reference points – from lighthouses and hot-air balloons to Jules Verne, Gustave Doré and Hergé – form part of a meandering trail. 'The author never goes in a straight line from the initial idea to the final result, trying to do things as efficiently as possible,' he said. 'That's what AI might do. The author is after an emotional tour.' Although memory is the thread that runs through all Roca's work, some of his most famous journeys have led him into the still controversial realms of historical memory. His most recent book, The Abyss of Forgetting, co-written with the journalist Rodrigo Terrasa, is about a woman's struggle to find remains of her father, who was murdered after the Spanish civil war ended. 'Reconstructing the testimonies of people who couldn't talk about things when they were happening – for different reasons – is a creative and personal challenge,' he said. 'People were repressed into silence during the dictatorship and they couldn't talk about the tragedies in their lives for 40 years. And it's even complicated in democracy because as soon as somebody talks about something that happened, you get these voices saying: 'Come on! What do you want to remember all that for?'' Roca is also driven to use those testimonies to create a visual memory where none exist. 'Unlike what happened after the second world war in Europe, where there were visual records of the horror – the first thing the allies did after liberating the extermination camps was take photos of them and film them, so that only a handful of idiots can deny the horrors of fascism – there wasn't a visual memory in Spain,' he said. 'We don't have photos of the prisons and the executions and the repression and the mass graves. It can be really hard to draw because you often don't get a lot of detail from the testimonies because they're inherited memories, passed from parents to their children. But trying to contribute to the creation of this visual memory of that horror is really important to me. Hearing a testimony isn't the same as seeing it drawn.' Elsewhere in the exhibition, Roca reflects on how he has used his own family history to delve into Spain's past – and on how those stories have ended up becoming something more universal. 'The thing that really interested me about my family and its past is that they're totally normal people whose early lives were marked by the misery and the hunger of the postwar period,' he said. 'But the books I've written about them have been published in a lot of countries, and that makes you realise that they're not just everyday stories about Spain; they're also stories about grief and memory and nostalgia.' Questions about how memory shapes us recur in the section that examines recollection and identity. As well as looking at how age and disease 'can wipe both our memories and our identities', it features Marjane Satrapi, whose Woman, Life, Freedom – a collective work by 17 Iranian and international comic book artists, including Roca – showed how women have defended their identities amid the repression of the Iranian regime. Roca is well aware that sections of the Spanish right are unhappy with the notion of a year of celebrations to mark the end of the dictator. He also knows that some have accused Spain's socialist-led government – whose democratic memory ministry is organising the exhibition at the Instituto Cervantes – of playing politics with the past. But then political polarisation, he added, was hardly a problem unique to Spain. 'In Germany, you have parties that are questioning things that everyone had thought had been settled and you have these nationalist movements erupting in Europe and the US and you have [Javier] Milei attacking historical memory in Argentina,' said Roca. 'It's a bad time for society, but it allows authors to reflect on this and to find stories that had been consigned to oblivion.' And that, said the artist, was what it was all about: the odd individual trying to give the voices of the past a decent, if belated, hearing. It can sometimes be a lonely business – and solitude is another of the exhibition's themes. Roca pointed to a glass-topped cabinet that held an old pencil drawing of a boy in jeans and a T-shirt crouching over a desk. 'I found this sketch that my drawing teacher did of me in 1980,' he said. 'I'm still in that same position, alone and hunched over a piece of paper.'
