Latest news with #Feri
Daily Mirror
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Commuter 'wants to throw up' after spotting what woman is wearing on feet
A woman has sparked a debate after sharing a video of a stranger's shoes - saying they're 'not acceptable on public transport' and they're going to make her 'throw up' Everyone has their own unique sense of style - but some people just don't understand their 'vibe'. But one commuter believes a woman went too far with street fashion when she wore toe shoes on the tube when travelling around London. Pairing the outfit with blue wash jeans, she innocently sat cross-legged on her seat unknowingly 'offending' those around her with her choice in footwear. In a TikTok video, Feri, who is known as @feriliketheboat on social media, shared a clip of the stranger's shoes while saying: "No, this is not acceptable on public transport. Oh my God, they're your toes. Oh, I'm going to throw up. No, get them off." She later came to learn the shoes are from Vibram Five Fingers UK, who design and create shoes for barefoot running enthusiasts. A statement on their website reads: "Vibram FiveFingers were designed and created by the barefoot running enthusiast Robert Fliri and Marco Bramani the CEO and proprietor of Vibram worldwide in 2006. "This unique style of footwear immediately became popular with those who wanted the barefoot minimalist experience as well as protection and grip, without compromising sensory ground feedback. "The release of the best selling book ''Born to Run' by Christopher Macdougall in 2009 catapulted Vibram FiveFingers into the running world 's consciousness. "The book describes the ultra-race between the Tarahumara tribe of Mexican Indians and the elite of the western world's runners, the most famous of which was 'Barefoot' Ted Macdonald who famously competed in Vibram FiveFingers. "Since then Vibram FiveFingers has extended their appeal beyond the running world. There are different styles of Vibram FiveFingers for every activity: training, martial arts, weight lifting, hiking, water sports and much more – just select the pair for you." Even though the footwear was off-putting to the commuter, others didn't see anything wrong with it. They urged the TikToker to let people wear what they want. Commenting on the TikTok video, one user said: "Barefoot shoes are awesome, really good for strengthening your feet and super comfortable. As a runner I wear mine a lot, not that brand though." Another user added: "But I bet you wear flip flops." A third user said: "Funny how people have been brainwashed to think these are bad icky. They are one of the best shoes to support your natural foot position. Look at how these shoes we've designed are changing the structure of feet over time." One more user added: "How is this worse than flipflops?" Another user added: "Why everyone so judgy? The world is a better place if everyone is different and individual rather than all the same." A final user said: "These a barefoot shoes and are meant to be healthy for your feet. Though there are other barefoot shoes that are not toe shoes like Saguaro and Hobibear, Frodo Barefoot and many others."
The Star
22-07-2025
- Politics
- The Star
Calls grow for Indonesian President Prabowo to end deputy ministers' dual roles
JAKARTA: Pressure is mounting on President Prabowo Subianto's administration to remove more than two dozen deputy ministers from their roles as commissioners of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) after the Constitutional Court maintained its position that cabinet members can not hold dual appointments. Out of the 56 deputy ministers in Prabowo's Cabinet, the largest since the Reformasi Era, at least 30 are currently serving in concurrent roles as SOE commissioners. The latest appointment came earlier this month when Second Deputy Higher Education, Science and Technology Minister Stella Christie was named commissioner at Pertamina Hulu Energi, the upstream subsidiary of state-owned oil and gas giant Pertamina. Amid mounting concerns that the practice could threaten good governance and undermine anti-corruption efforts, Juhaidy Rizaldy, executive director of Indonesia Law and Democracy Studies (ILDES), filed a legal challenge with the Constitutional Court. He petitioned the Court to explicitly interpret Article 23 of the 2008 State Ministry Law, which prohibits ministers from serving as SOE commissioners, as also applying to deputy ministers. Juhaidy argued that the Court had already addressed this issue in its 2020 ruling on a 2019 judicial review, where it stated in the judicial opinion that deputy ministers should likewise be subject to the ban on dual office-holding. The Court ultimately dismissed Juhaidy's petition as inadmissible, citing the loss of his legal standing following his death on June 22. However, it reaffirmed that its 2020 ruling had 'explicitly prohibited deputy ministers from holding dual positions', a prohibition the government has yet to enforce. Constitutional law expert Feri Amsari of Andalas University said the latest ruling reinforces the Court's earlier position: that deputy ministers are held to the same standard of accountability as ministers and are therefore barred from holding overlapping roles. 'Although the Court deemed the latest petition inadmissible due to the petitioner's passing, the substance remains identical to the [2020 ruling]. Therefore, it carries the same legal weight,' Feri said on Monday. Echoing Feri, Bivitri Susanti of the Jentera School of Law said on Monday that the Court has already made it abundantly clear that deputy ministers are constitutionally barred from holding dual roles. Although this standard is articulated in the Court's judicial opinion rather than the ruling's final clause, Bivitri stressed that such opinions are legally binding, and that disregarding them would erode fundamental principles of good governance. 'The Court has recognized that holding dual positions is unconstitutional because it undermines the principle of good governance,' she said. 'It means that deputy ministers should be assessed based on their performance in public office, not on their roles in SOE boards'. Constitutional law expert Yance Arizona of Gadjah Mada University (UGM) said the government is clearly violating both the State Ministry Law and the Constitutional Court's rulings, given that 30 deputy ministers are concurrently serving as SOE commissioners. He urged the Prabowo administration to rectify the situation, warning that their appointments could otherwise be challenged in the State Administrative Court (PTUN) for breaching good governance principles. 'The government must either remove them from their commissioner roles or from their positions as deputy ministers. Alternatively, those serving in dual roles should take responsibility and voluntarily step down from one of the posts,' Yance said. Presidential Communications Office (PCO) chief Hasan Nasbi previously defended the dual roles held by deputy ministers, asserting that the Constitutional Court's ruling does not explicitly prohibit such concurrent appointments. He argued last month that while the Court's opinion may imply a restriction, the formal decision only applies to ministers, not their deputies. Hasan was unavailable for comment when contacted by The Jakarta Post on Monday (July 21). While the Court has reaffirmed its stance against dual positions, momentum around enforcing the ruling appears to have slowed amid broader debates over its recent handling of the election law. Growing concerns over the weak implementation of the Constitutional Court decisions come as talks to revise the Constitutional Court Law resurface. These talks were reignited following the Court's ruling to separate national and local elections, a decision which has faced opposition from political parties in the national legislature. - The Jakarta Post/ANN
New York Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Nahid Rachlin, Novelist Who Explored the Iranian Psyche, Dies at 85
Nahid Rachlin, an Iranian-born writer who defied her parents' expectations of an arranged marriage, instead winning a scholarship to study in the United States in the 1950s and becoming one of the first Iranians to write a novel in English, died on April 30 in Manhattan. She was 85. Her daughter, Leila Rachlin, said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was a stroke. Ms. Rachlin's debut novel, 'Foreigner,' published to critical acclaim the year before the Iranian revolution of 1979, depicts the slow transformation of a 32-year-old Iranian biologist named Feri from a woman living a comfortable but unsatisfying suburban life with her American husband to an ill-at-ease visitor in Iran to an indistinguishable local after she abandons her job and her spouse and resigns herself to wearing the veil. 'There is a subtle shift in 'Foreigner' that is fascinating to watch,' Anne Tyler, who won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, wrote in a review for The New York Times in 1979, 'a nearly imperceptible alteration of vision as Feri begins to lose her westernized viewpoint.' 'What is apparent to Feri at the start — the misery and backwardness of Iranian life — becomes less apparent,' Ms. Tyler continued. 'Is it that America is stable, orderly, peaceful, while Iran is turbulent and irrational? Or is it that America is merely sterile while Iran is passionate and openhearted?' The critic Albert Joseph Guerard called 'Foreigner' 'as spare as Camus's 'The Stranger' and with some of its enigmatic force.' In a 1990 lecture, the Trinidadian writer V.S. Naipaul, who received the Nobel Prize in 2001, noted that 'Foreigner,' 'in its subdued, unpolitical way, foreshadowed the hysteria that was to come' for Iran — the popular uprisings that forced out the repressive Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who was backed by the United States, and ushered in a theocratic republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Ms. Rachlin grew up steeped in those contradictions. In her hometown, Ahvaz, Iran, the local cinema featured American films even as the mosque across the street 'warned against sinful pleasures,' she wrote in a memoir, 'Persian Girls' (2006). Her own home 'was chaotic, filled with a clashing and confusing mixture of traditional Iranian/Muslim customs and values, and Western ones,' she wrote. 'None of us prayed, followed the hijab, or fasted.' But her parents insisted on arranged marriages for their children and reserved higher education for their sons. Ms. Rachlin's second novel, 'Married to a Stranger' (1983), explored post-revolutionary Iran. Reviewing it in The Times, Barbara Thompson said it depicted, 'better than most factual accounts, what was happening in Iran that made the Ayatollah's theocracy possible.' Nahid Bozorgmehri was born on June 6, 1939, in Ahvaz, the seventh of 10 children of Mohtaram (Nourowzian) and Manoochehr Bozorgmehri. Her father was a prominent lawyer and judge. Three of her siblings died in childhood. At 6 months, Nahid was given by her mother to her Aunt Maryam, her mother's widowed sister, who longed for a child after years of infertility. But when Nahid was 9 — the age at which girls in Iran could legally marry — her father, most likely concerned that her more traditional aunt would follow that custom, retrieved her. (Perhaps he understood the consequences, having married Nahid's mother when she was 9 years old and he was 34.) The separation devastated Nahid. Feeling 'kidnapped,' Ms. Rachlin wrote in a 2002 essay for The New York Times Magazine, she had a strained relationship with her birth mother and would never call her Mother. Over time, she grew close to her older sister Pari, who fought their father over her pursuit of acting and her resistance to arranged marriage — battles she lost. Determined to avoid such a fate, Nahid implored her father to send her to America to attend college, like her brothers. She enlisted her brother Parviz to persuade him: She was first in her high school class, and her writing showed promise. Her father adamantly refused. But as political tensions escalated — both Nahid's outspoken feminist teacher and the bookseller who sometimes slipped her banned literature had disappeared — her father, who had resigned his judgeship after interference from the government, feared a servant or neighbor might tattle about Nahid's stories and her 'white jacket' books to the Savak, the shah's notorious secret police. When Parviz found her a women's college near St. Louis, where he was studying medicine, their father allowed Nahid to apply, hoping his headstrong daughter would cause less trouble abroad — though not without stipulating that she return home after graduation to marry. While attending Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Mo., on a full scholarship, Nahid discovered that though she had escaped the 'prison' of her home, as she wrote in her memoir, she felt utterly isolated in America. 'Late at night I turned to my writing, my long-lasting friend,' she wrote. She had quickly developed fluency in English — though she had taken only hasty lessons in Iran before her departure — and had begun writing in her adopted tongue about the difficulty of feeling neither Iranian nor American. 'Writing in English,' she said, 'gave me a freedom I didn't feel writing in Farsi.' She majored in psychology and, after graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1961, resolved not to return to Iran. She curtly informed her father in a letter; he would not speak to her for 12 years. With only $755, she took a Greyhound bus to New York City, where she picked up odd jobs — babysitting, waitressing — and, to maintain her student visa, enrolled at the New School, where she met Howie Rachlin. They married in 1964. Their daughter, Leila, was born in 1965. In addition to her, Ms. Rachlin's survivors include a grandson. Mr. Rachlin died in 2021. After a few years in Cambridge, Mass., where Mr. Rachlin studied for a psychology Ph.D. at Harvard, and then in Stony Brook, N.Y., where he taught, they moved to Stanford, Calif., in the mid-1970s. There, on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, she worked on 'Foreigner.' Her novel would never find a home in Iran. Censors blocked its publication in Farsi, arguing that Ms. Rachlin's descriptions of dirty streets and hole-in-the-wall hotels suggested a failure of the shah's modernization plans. Her literary agent, Cole Hildebrand, said as far as he knows, none of her books were ever translated into Farsi. In 1981, Ms. Rachlin received devastating news: Her sister Pari had died after a fall down a flight of stairs. For decades, Ms. Rachlin could not bear to write about the tragedy; she did not turn to the subject until her memoir, in 2006. 'Yes, dearest Pari,' the last line of that work reads, 'it is to bring you back to life that I write this book.' Ms. Rachlin's other works, all of which explore Iranian social and political life, include two short-story collections, 'Veils' (1992) and 'A Way Home' (2018), and three novels, 'The Heart's Desire' (1995), 'Jumping Over Fire' (2006) and 'Mirage' (2024). Her last novel, 'Given Away,' which will be published next year, is the story of an Iranian child bride. It draws from the life of her birth mother, who gave birth to her first child at 14. The mother-daughter connection featured prominently in Ms. Rachlin's work, and in her life. She dreamed of living near her Aunt Maryam, whom she always called Mother, but Maryam felt that life in America would be too jarring and preferred to stay in Iran. With her own daughter, however, Ms. Rachlin found the tight mother-daughter bond that had always eluded her. 'Even in our rare disagreements,' Leila Rachlin wrote in an email, 'she would gently reassure me afterward, 'We're still best friends, right?''
