Latest news with #MaryMcCarthy
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
85-Year-Old Grandma Gets Airport Surprise From Great-Grandsons Before Dream Trip
Great Grandma Mary McCarthy was already excited for her 85th birthday trip to Ireland — then she got the surprise of a lifetime. While waiting for her flight with her daughter and granddaughter at Chicago's O'Hare airport, McCarthy spotted some familiar faces across the way: her two great grandsons, Finley and Wyatt, who surprised her all the way from Colorado. And her reaction was caught on a video. 'I looked out there and I said, 'That kid looks just like Finley!'' said McCarthy. Finley, 6, and Wyatt, 4, can be seen in the video running into their great grandma's arms while yelling, 'We surprised you!' The video of Grandma Mary and her unexpected travel buddies now has more than 700K views on TikTok, with people from around the world loving the surprise — and her reaction. 'I think that's why we knew we wanted to make it a surprise, because she has the best reactions,' said granddaughter Sarah Giannini, mother to Finley and Wyatt, who was the mastermind behind it all. 'We decided that when I landed with my family, I would go ahead and sit with my mom, grandma, and kind of chat, put her at ease a little bit,' said Giannini. 'Then I would text my husband to walk by, and we wanted to see how many times he could walk by with the boys without her noticing. So the video picks up right when I text him, and she saw him instantly.' In that instant, all the careful planning paid off, and Grandma Mary's reaction didn't disappoint. 'I'm surprised I didn't scream louder, but I knew I was in the airport,' said McCarthy. ''Well, you better tone it down,' I told myself.' Giannini says her boys were in on the surprise, and even came up with little white lies to throw grandma off the scent. 'I think you hear my youngest [in the video] kind of going, 'Hee, hee, we were so sneaky,' because they would purposely try to lay false trails,' said Giannini. With the surprise a huge success, the family set out on their Irish adventure. From dancing in pubs to exploring castles and listening to bagpipes, Grandma Mary did it all — even dabbling in falconry. 'I saw everybody do it, and I thought, 'Well, heck, I'm gonna do it too,' said McCarthy. Despite all the incredible experiences, both McCarthy and Giannini said the best part of the trip were the simple moments spent together. 'I don't get to see them that often, living a thousand miles apart,' said McCarthy. 'But we had a whole week together, and in the morning they'd come running [and say] good morning and give me a hug. It was so nice every day, every single day. I'm getting tears in my eyes thinking about it.' After this trip of a lifetime, Grandma Mary is already dreaming of their next adventure together. 'It was amazing. I'd love to go again,' said McCarthy. 'Drop of a hat — I'm ready. [It will] only take me 10 minutes to pack!' Giannini says they're planning their next reunion trip for Disney World. Until then, she says the viral video serves as a friendly reminder of how precious their time together is. 'I'm a lucky, lucky, lucky lady,' McCarthy added. This article was originally published on Solve the daily Crossword
Telegraph
23-06-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
Jewish doctors feel ‘intimidated and unsafe' at BMA conference
Jewish doctors feel 'intimidated and unsafe' at the British Medical Association's annual conference because one in 10 motions for debate relate to Israel, Palestine or Zionism. The three-day meeting is used to set out the doctor union's policies and priorities based on motions put forward by members, but 43 – about 10 per cent of the total – were about Israel, Gaza, Palestine, anti-Semitism or Zionism. Just five were concerned about other 'international relations'. The Jewish Medical Association (JMA) said members attending the conference 'feel intimidated, unsafe and excluded' and that it had 'felt it necessary to seek advice from' the Jewish support charity the Community Security Trust (CST) and BMA 'to ensure the safety and protect the wellbeing of Jewish representatives'. At the same time, a protest staged outside the conference venue in Liverpool used 'old shoes' to represent healthcare workers killed in Gaza - a visual statement synonymous with the shoes of Jewish people killed at concentration camps during the Holocaust - and considered anti-Semitic by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The BMA was last week accused of a 'cover-up' for dropping an investigation into its president, Mary McCarthy, for posts she made on X about the conflict in Gaza. Having initially decided there was a case for Dr McCarthy, a leading GP, to answer, after an independent review into a complaint by Labour Against Antisemitism, the BMA decided not to take it further because it had not been made by a member or employee of the union. All five motions prioritised for debate by the BMA's 'agenda committee' on Tuesday relate to Israel or Palestine. One simply asks members to agree that 'criticism of the actions of the state of Israel in Gaza is not per se anti-Semitic'. Others echo the sentiment that doctors should be able to criticise states and the Government's 'contravening international law' and that there should not be 'punitive measures' taken against doctors who partake in 'Palestine advocacy'. Another motion from one faction says it 'condemns in the strongest terms the systematic destruction of hospitals in Gaza and the killing of more than 1,000 healthcare workers since October 7, 2023, as grave violations of international law and an affront to medical neutrality'. The JMA said there were 'zero motions prioritised for discussion about any other international matters, not even those that one might expect to be of some interest to compassionate UK doctors, such as the famine in Sudan, war in Ukraine or the disastrous impact on public health of the new US administration's health policy and its withdrawal from the World Health Organisation'. It also raised concerns about a protest outside the conference from Health Workers 4 Palestine (HW4P), which it said had organised 'a visual protest against Israel's genocide and to show solidarity with the 1500+ health workers martyred over the past 20 months'. It said the protest was 'unrelated to the BMA' but 'inflammatory' because it had asked for 'old shoes to be brought' in a visual statement that is synonymous with the Holocaust. The JMA said: 'Many British people will be very aware that the piles of victims' shoes left behind at Nazi concentration camps became synonymous with a memorial of millions of Jews murdered in those camps during the Holocaust. 'According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, the use of such symbolism undermines memorial of the Holocaust and by definition is antisemitic. 'Therefore we expect this protest to be moved from its proximity to the ARM so that Jewish members of the ARM do not have to suffer further offence, exclusion and harassment.' A BMA spokesperson said: 'We are totally clear that antisemitism is completely unacceptable. There is no place for it in the BMA, NHS, or wider society and we condemn antisemitism in the strongest possible terms, as we do with all discrimination based on race, religion, sexuality, gender or disability. 'The BMA's annual representative meeting is an inclusive space, where wellbeing of members and staff is our priority and we've put in place a number of measures and sources of support to ensure this. We are also confident that we are complying with all of our obligations under the Equality Act and our own EDI policies. 'The BMA has a long and proud history of advocating for human rights and access to healthcare around the world, and motions submitted to this year's conference reflect the grave concerns doctors in the UK have about the Gaza conflict and the impact on civilians and healthcare. 'As with previous annual representative meetings, organisations and groups external to the BMA will choose to demonstrate outside the venue. They are entitled to do this, but we recognise that member and staff safety remains paramount. Regarding a demonstration outside this year's ARM, we have received some concerns from members and staff, have updated our security teams and are liaising with the police to request that all protests are managed safely.'
New York Times
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Father and Daughter Caught in the No Man's Land of Migration
In 1971, decades after her exile from Europe, the German-born political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote to her friend, the novelist Mary McCarthy: 'One can't say how life is, how chance or fate deals with people, except by telling the tale.' The generative power of storytelling inspires Madeleine Thien's deeply humane novel 'The Book of Records.' In an aching, dreamlike narrative that overlaps distant centuries and geographies to chart cycles of authoritarianism and loss, Thien uncovers glimmers of community among disparate individuals. The bittersweet novel opens on the banks of the Sea, an abandoned military outpost turned 'no man's land' where 'people who needed to disappear, or who had no other nation, began to take refuge' centuries ago. For most people, including 7-year-old Lina and her father, Wui, 'the Sea was just one stop on the way to a better place.' Its location is uncertain, a site of imagination and conjecture: Though Lina and Wui believe they're on the South China Sea, other inhabitants say it's the Atlantic, or the Baltic. They've left behind their home — and Lina's mother, brother and aunt — in Foshan, China, without explanation beyond Wui's desire to flee 'an empire in ruins,' he says, 'a hall of mirrors in which good people could betray themselves and never know it.' But Lina's loneliness and confusion clash with her father's brave front. For them, this is no temporary way station, Wui suffering from an illness that makes the Sea a final destination. Adrift, Lina seeks solace in a rare commodity: books. The only three her father hastily packed (taken from a 90-volume series for children called 'The Great Lives of Voyagers') chronicle the lives of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the poet Du Fu and Arendt herself. For Lina, 'these blue-covered books were a net that would suspend us outside the present,' Wui embellishing his reading with episodes not in the text. As she grows, she realizes his trick, that he 'made things up and thereby slowed time down, ensuring that no matter how long our journey lasted, we'd never run out of history, no matter how true or inaccurate it was.' When they're not reading, the two find kinship with three neighbors whose ethereal and unlikely presences raise the question of whether they exist at all. Inexplicably, each shares uncanny similarities with the three historical figures in Lina's books, and together they expand upon her simple children's stories to weave absorbing, evocative tales about the nonfictional 'voyagers.' These spellbinding historical passages serve as a ballast to Lina and Wui's uncertain existence. Although Thien could have written a purely historical novel, she gracefully folds these mostly true stories into an ambitious family saga, like accordion pleats. With her imagined worlds, incandescent prose and malleable sense of time and history, Thien strikes worthy comparisons to Italo Calvino, Walter Benjamin, Gaston Bachelard and Ali Smith's seasonal quartet. This staggering novel blurs the line between fact and fiction to underscore the importance of storytelling itself, as a practice of endurance, and resistance. Years pass and Lina is fixed in place as the sole caretaker of her still-ailing father, watching ships filled with refugees come and go without any sign of her family. Trapped in a 'world of encircled beginnings,' Lina latches onto these philosophical conversations and stories as her education, as the only movement she knows. When a middle section discloses the truth behind Wui's flight from home, 'The Book of Records' then toggles in time to reconcile the brutality of betrayal with the forgiveness inherent in unconditional love. Try to read without weeping profusely.
