Latest news with #LesMisérables
Winnipeg Free Press
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
A grave task
To manage the world's most prestigious graveyard is no small undertaking. In a delightful dessert of words, Benoît Gallot is as lucid in his writing as he is in his affection for a gigantic gem — the 70 acres of beguiling cemetery called Père-Lachaise in the heart of Paris, where the dead are enveloped by life. It is vital, says Gallot, the cemetery's curator, to recognize that traditional cemeteries will become extinct if they continue to do nothing more than mirror death, and death alone, by presenting it in a sterile and barren setting emblematic of bereavement. The Secret Life of a Cemetery 'It took a 2011 decision by Paris City Council to change both my methods and my attitude. Goodbye pesticides, hello wild plants and animals,' Gallot writes. 'The cemetery I managed was no longer a place of death alone. Right before my eyes, it was becoming a haven of biodiversity for local plants, insects, birds, and even mammals. 'For years we turned away from cemeteries out of a fear of death. Now, the return of life may suddenly rescue them from the brink of extinction.' Gallot, obviously a romantic, explains: 'the beauty of Père-Lachaise lies in the fact you can easily get lost. What I love most about the cemetery isn't the celebrity graves but the bewitching sensation you can only truly experience when you're no longer sure of where you are. It will take your breath away and spark an irrepressible desire to come back, just so you can lose yourself in it all over again.' Père-Lachaise is a poignant marriage of 96,600 graves, over 200 years of history, the tombs of more notables than a history book, many of them blanketed with beautiful and bizarre tomb figures and an army of plants, flowers, wild animals, birds, insects and cats. They orchestrate a harmony of life over the dead. Père-Lachaise occupies about the same amount of land as The Vatican. Père-Lachaise's residents include the remains of 4,500 luminaries such as Oscar Wilde, Maria Callas, Marcel Proust, Frédéric Chopin, Jim Morrison and Édith Piaf as well as painters such as Amedeo Modigliani, Eugène Delacroix and Georges Seurat. It attracts 3 million visitors a year, the most in the world. Gallot became cemetery curator in 2018. As he puts it, 'I run an establishment where all the users are dead.' When Gallot was to be interviewed for the post, a colleague said: 'You're digging your own grave, man.' He and his family live on the grounds. The curator says the celebrity tombs are the main attraction for tourists. 'It wasn't until the second half of the 19th century that funerary art reached its golden age,' he says. 'Prominent families abandoned any semblance of sobriety, building grandiose monuments to show off their status and celebrate their success.' Gallot quotes Victor Hugo in Les Misérables: 'To be buried in Père-Lachaise is like having mahogany furniture. It is a sign of elegance.' (Hugo is not buried at Père-Lachaise.) A question Gallot has been asked more than once: 'Do you really keep Oscar Wilde's balls on your desk?' Jacques Brinon / Associated Press files French singer Édith Piaf is one of many notable personalities buried at the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. He explains that this question refers to Oscar Wilde's tomb, which featured a sphinx statue with stone genitals. When unveiled in 1912, it caused a public outcry and was covered with a tarpaulin. Allegedly two women removed the genitals. The only record of it is in a staff report in 1961 as follows: 'the testicles… have been damaged by an unknown person.' Ever since, says Gallot, countless articles have claimed that successive curators used Wilde's genitals as a paperweight. 'Naturally, when I began my new job, I searched every filing cabinet and combed through the paperwork my predecessor left me. Alas, I found nothing,' he says. One burial site, a vault, was recently repossessed by the city. When gravediggers opened the vault, it was stuffed with 20 square feet of dead birds. Gallot speculates someone forced the birds through a crack in the gravesite after performing a voodoo ritual. Gallot ponders what his own grave will look like. 'I think I'd like my tomb to be large enough to hold myself, my wife, and our children — if they so choose. It would resemble a little garden with a small shrub in the middle, where robins could come to nest. A bench would give loved ones or passersby a place to sit. On the headstone, beside a witty epitaph, a QR code would link to my Instagram account so that people could continue to 'like' me in death. An empty planter at the foot of my grave would collect rainwater to serve as a trough for foxes and a bath for birds. 'In short, I would like my grave to be a place full of life.' Barry Craig is a retired journalist.
Mint
9 hours ago
- Politics
- Mint
How a once-resistant Trump decided to back Israel's attacks on Iran
WASHINGTON—The first act of 'Les Misérables" had just ended at the Kennedy Center Wednesday night when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) pulled President Trump aside for a quick conversation about Iran. Graham applauded the Trump administration's handling of the nuclear issue without people getting killed. 'Yeah, we're trying," Trump said about the sputtering negotiations with Tehran. 'But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do," he said. Graham took that remark to mean Trump was referring to the possibility of an Israeli strike on its longtime enemy. The encounter came midway through a week that would see Trump go from trying to head off an Israeli attack to backing its sudden campaign of airstrikes targeting Iran's nuclear facilities and senior military civilian leaders, an abrupt shift he executed after Israel spurned his appeal to delay its military operation. Trump said Friday that he had been aware of Israel's attack plans and argued that the punishing operation make a nuclear deal even more likely, though Iran said they were pulling out of a sixth round of talks scheduled for Sunday. 'They should have made a deal and they still can make a deal while they have something left—they still can," Trump told the Journal. Trump had seemed far less optimistic earlier in the week. On Sunday, he summoned his national security team to Camp David and told them during a discussion on the Middle East that he was increasingly pessimistic Tehran would agree to a deal, according to U.S. officials. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were due to speak the next day, and the president said he would tell the Israeli leader to delay any attacks until special envoy Steve Witkoff's diplomatic effort had run its course, U.S. officials recounted. In a letter to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in March, Trump had set a two-month time limit once talks got under way to reach a deal, a deadline that was due to expire this week. But Khamenei rejected a U.S. proposal to allow Iran to temporarily continue uranium enrichment in the country if it agreed to eventually halt its domestic centrifuge operation. Always in the background was Netanyahu's push to launch strikes against Iran's nuclear sites, a threat that loomed ever larger. In a call Monday with Netanyahu, Trump said he wanted to see diplomacy with Tehran play out a little longer, according to U.S. officials. But even Trump was losing faith in his strategy. Netanyahu raised his oft-expressed objection that Iran wouldn't make the deal Trump wanted and that Israel needed to keep preparing strikes, the officials added. Trump seemed to internalize the message. 'I'm getting more and more—less confident about it," he said of the prospects for a nuclear deal with Iran in a New York Post interview published Wednesday. 'They seem to be delaying, and I think that is a shame, but I'm less confident now than I would have been a couple of months ago." Netanyahu had been seeking to head off a U.S.-led negotiation with Iran over its nuclear program for years, arguing that only the destruction of its vast enrichment centrifuges and other facilities could guarantee Tehran wasn't secretly developing a bomb. The Israeli leader rejoiced when Trump in his first term tore up the 2015 nuclear deal brokered by then President Barack Obama, and he recoiled when Trump pushed for a tougher agreement during his second term in office. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in January that Israel was considering strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. The intelligence analysis concluded Israel would push Trump's new team to back the assault, viewing the incoming president as more likely to join an attack than former President Joe Biden. The Israelis, according to the assessment, believed the window for halting Tehran's pursuit of a nuclear weapon was closing. In a sign of mounting concern about an Israeli attack and Iranian response, the State Department on Wednesday ordered the departure of all nonessential personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and authorized the departure of nonessential personnel and family members from Bahrain and Kuwait. At the same time, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorized the voluntary departure of military dependents from across the Middle East. Army Gen. Erik Kurilla, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, canceled a congressional testimony scheduled for the next day and returned to Central Command's headquarters in Tampa. As anxiety grew in the Middle East and Washington, Trump was enjoying the performance of his favorite musical at the Kennedy Center, joined by Graham and other supporters. When Trump and Netanyahu spoke again on Thursday, the Israeli leader told Trump that it was the last day of his 60-day timeline for Iran to make a deal. Israel could wait no longer, Netanyahu said, according to officials familiar with the call. Israel had to defend itself and enforce the deadline Trump himself had set. Trump responded that the U.S. wouldn't stand in the way, according to administration officials, but emphasized that the U.S. military wouldn't assist with any offensive operations. At the White House, Trump told reporters he wouldn't describe an attack as imminent, 'but it is something that could very well happen." While the U.S. and Iran were close to a deal, he claimed, Israeli strikes could 'blow it." Israel launched its operation as Trump was at a picnic Thursday evening on the White House grounds for members of Congress. He later joined Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Hegseth, and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and other senior officials in the Situation Room to monitor events. Israel had acted unilaterally and the U.S. played no role in the attack, Rubio said in a statement that acknowledged Israel notified Washington before the operation began. That was the only comment from the U.S. as the attack unfolded. Bombs struck and damaged a key Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz, and senior military leaders including Major Gen. Hossein Salami, commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, were killed. In all, Iran claimed that Israel's first attack killed 78 people and injured around 320 more in multiple waves of Israeli strikes. Netanyahu pledged that the operation would last for as long as necessary. Trump, who began the week resistant to an assault on Iran, quickly embraced it as a successful campaign that could boost his diplomatic effort. 'Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left," he posted on social media Friday, 'and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire." Write to Alexander Ward at Meridith McGraw at and Anat Peled at
Irish Examiner
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
America's first military parade in decades sees US marching into dark chapter of history
Today, Washington DC will wake up to its first military parade in decades. The US capitol will rumble with the sounds of armoured tanks, marching soldiers, and the roar of military aircraft. The parade, which is being held on US president Donald Trump's 79th birthday, is ostensibly to mark the 250th anniversary of the US Army. Sometimes a parade is just a parade and any resemblance to the proclivities of would-be despots living or deceased is, as they say in Hollywood, entirely unintentional. But it's difficult, given the events of the past week, not to see today's flex of military muscle as a metaphor for the authoritarian creep that threatens US democracy in ways large and small - and a warning to those who would defy it. On Wednesday night, Trump attended the opening night of Les Misérables at the Kennedy Centre, where he has also installed himself as cultural commander in chief, apparently oblivious to the irony of his fondness for a musical about the sans culottes struggle against authoritarians. People take photos with a tank parked on the National Mall in Washington during preparations for the upcoming military parade commemorating the Army's 250th anniversary. Photo: AP/Rod Lamkey, Jr. 'Viva Los Angeles!' a member of the audience shouted amid cheers and boos. Trump's executive order provides for the deployment of the US military across the US as he sees fit. His decision to invoke an obscure provision of a little-known law may provide a sufficient, albeit flimsy legal fig leaf to withstand California governor Gavin Newsom's legal challenge, paving the way for the deployment of the US military across the United States, even as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency ratchets up raids and detentions in a bid to meet its unfeasible 3,000 detentions a day quota. It was always going to be Los Angeles first. The state of California and America's second largest city have long been in Trump's crosshairs. No other state is home to as many immigrants, documented and undocumented. And no state is more innovative or more prosperous; it recently bypassed Japan to become the world's fourth largest economy. California has wrestled with inequality and unrest, racism and political extremes throughout its history, but for 150 years America's wealthiest and most populous state has doubled as the petri dish that fuelled almost every surge in America's economic fortunes. From Levi's jeans to Mickey Mouse, from the movie industry to the internet, from smartphones to electric cars to CAT scans, California has been synonymous with creativity and innovation. The US Capitol is seen through security fencing set up on the National Mall in Washington during preparations for the upcoming military parade commemorating the Army's 250th anniversary. Photo: AP/Rod Lamkey, Jr. It's where surgeons first removed an appendix through a mouth and a gallbladder through a bellybutton. Cheap immigrant labour has allowed its construction, agriculture and hospitality industries to flourish, while progressive policies laid the groundwork for investment in technology and green energy. Now it seems it may become the testing ground for Trump's strongman tactics. A combination of border proximity, liberal policies, and a labour market that relies on migrants both documented and undocumented has contributed to California's disproportionately high migrant population. Los Angeles county is home to 10 million people of whom almost four million live in Los Angeles city. Around 3.5 million are first-generation immigrants and of these an estimated 800,000 to 950,000 are undocumented. Many live in 'mixed status' households where one or more family members may be legally working in the US while others are undocumented. They are concentrated in working-class neighbourhoods like Paramount, which along with a downtown clothing wholesaler, was the site of the initial ICE raids that triggered the protests that prompted Trump to deploy of US troops onto its streets. Protests and clashes Trump's decision to deploy the military marks the first time in 60 years that a US President federalised the National Guard without consulting, much less obtaining the consent, of its governor. The last time it happened Lyndon Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights activists against a virulently racist governor and police force. The city bears decades-old psychic scars from riots in the 1960s and the 1990s when mob violence and mayhem took a savage toll on the city and left an abiding mistrust of the Los Angeles Police Department, which has a long and undistinguished history of corruption and racism. Recently, however, community policing initiatives have led to significant drops in violent crime in some of Los Angeles's most dangerous neighbourhoods. Predictably, the protests against ICE led to clashes with the LAPD and re-inflamed tensions, with thugs setting fire to Waymo cars and providing the sort of made-for-FOX-News images that Trump seized upon to retrospectively justify his overreach. Trump's narrative LA was "trash", he said. Willing supplicants fanned out across pro-MAGA media outlets peddling the narrative that the military prevented an all-out conflagration, protecting ICE agents and federal buildings from marauding hordes of homegrown anarchists, leftists, and communists who are simultaneously seeking to destroy the US from within, whilst preventing the rounding up and deporting of an invasion of foreign terrorists, drug cartel members, murderers and child traffickers. It's a narrative that Trump has pushed to justify his trampling of the presidential norms that have thus far protected and nurtured the American experiment as it approaches its 250th anniversary. A protester holds a sign as Border Patrol personnel in riot gear and gas masks stand guard outside an industrial park in Paramount, California last Saturday. Photo: AP/Eric Thayer While previous presidents from both parties have dinged the guardrails of democracy in furtherance of their aims, none has attempted the sort of blatant transgressions of the past five months. His Department of Justice is a willing and eager accomplice, defending the absurdity of deploying more US troops to Los Angeles than is currently spread across Iraq and Syria to prevent a resurgence of ISIS – just hours after the LAPD police chief issued a press statement acknowledging the peaceful nature of the protests. Protests spread At the time of writing, protests had spread across the United States to other cities with significant migrant populations – Denver, St Louis, Chicago, San Antonio, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Philadelphia. Most are cities in blue states but protests also broke out in Nevada, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania – four of the six swing states that Biden won in 2020 and Trump claimed back in 2024, both candidates doing so with the narrowest of margins. Trump may not be particularly bothered by the political impact of his flirtation with authoritarianism in the 2026 midterms – or indeed the 2028 presidential election. Thus far, his presidency seems to be primarily an exercise in self-enrichment and retribution. But even Congressional Republicans who have drowned their political principles in a murky bath of expediency and denial are aware that, to paraphrase Elon Musk, Trump has 3.5 years left while the GOP presumably hopes to match and exceed Musk's prophesied expiry date of 40 years hence. The border crisis The current crisis has its roots in part at least in Joe Biden's reckless border policies. The Biden administration did little to curb or control the post-covid surge of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. When he and the Democrats finally acted, delivering a comprehensive bipartisan border reform bill in early 2024, it was deliberately tanked by Trump's Congressional lackeys, who knew a solution to America's decades-old border crisis would stall the engine that was powering his 2024 comeback campaign. Polls have shown so far that the public remains largely on Trump's side. A majority of Americans prefer the performative hyper kinetics of his immigration policies to the listlessness of the Biden era. But outside the far-right faction of the GOP, that support is contingent upon the belief that mass deportations will lead to increased prosperity for American citizens, to cheaper homes, lower crime rates, and better paying jobs. It's unclear to what degree and for how long America will remain willing to tolerate chaos and the suppression of individual rights if prices keep rising and Trump fails to deliver on his side of the economic Faustian pact that America has entered. Last week may be just the beginning of a dark new chapter in US history.
Yahoo
19 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Benefits of Refusing
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. In the U.K., when people stop smoking, they say they 'gave it up,' Melissa Febos notes in her new book, The Dry Season. In the U.S., by contrast, it's more common to hear that they 'quit.' She observes that giving something up has a different connotation; to do so is 'to hand it over to some other, better keeper. To free one's hands for other holdings.' The phrasing matters: Giving up feels gentler, and also perhaps more generative. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic's books section: Fast times and mean girls The real message behind Les Misérables How one animal divided Europe Seven books for people figuring out their next move The Dry Season is a memoir about the year Febos spent voluntarily celibate, and this week, she wrote for The Atlantic about six books that celebrate refusal and abstinence. The titles she chose opened her eyes to 'all the other kinds of reneging I've experienced, and how many of them led to unforeseen delights,' she writes. In her own book, Febos uses a striking metaphor to explain why she took a break from sex, dating, and even flirtation. Whenever she had a partner, she writes, 'it made sense to keep the channel of one's heart narrowed the width of a single person, to peer through the keyhole at a single room rather than turn to face the world.' Febos realized that she wanted, instead, to widen her aperture, and found that removing something from her life opened her up to all the other things that had escaped her notice. In essence, her book argues, saying no to one thing allows you to say yes to something else. At a talk with the essayist and fellow memoirist Leslie Jamison earlier this week in New York, Febos said that her book is really about finding God, but she told the world that it was about sex because, she joked, it made for better marketing. Her description of discovering the sublime in daily things—such as the 'tang of fresh raspberries and the crispness of clean bedsheets,' as she writes in her recommendation list—moved me. It reminded me that spirituality can be less restrictive and more dynamic than I usually imagine it to be; that it can be found in smaller phenomena and stiller moments. My colleague Faith Hill, in her review of The Dry Season, came to much the same conclusion about the benefits of marshaling one's attention: 'Better to keep drawing it back, again and again, to the world around you: to the pinch in your shoe, to the buds in the trees, to the people—all the many, many people—who are right there beside you.' Febos's book made me wonder what narrow portals I'm looking through in my life, and what I might see if I turn away from them. What to Read When You're Ready to Say No By Melissa Febos Purposeful refusal, far from depriving us, can make way for unexpected bounty. Read the full article. , by Bae Suah The page-turning plot twists and thrills of a detective novel are often a very effective bulwark against boredom. The Korean writer Bae's novel offers those genre pleasures and more: It is, as Bae's longtime translator Deborah Smith explains in her note, a detective novel by way of a 'poetic fever dream.' Set over the course of one very hot summer night in Seoul, the book follows a woman named Ayami as she attempts to find a missing friend. As she searches, she bumps into Wolfi, a detective novelist visiting from Germany, and enlists him in her quest. Events take on a surreal quality, heightened by both an intense heat wave and the possibility that Ayami and Wolfi may have stumbled into another dimension. Summer's release from our usual timetables can quickly lead to seasonal doldrums. Untold Night and Day, set during the stretched hours of a sweaty, unceasing evening, shimmers at its edges, like midnight in July. — Rhian Sasseen From our list: Five books that will redirect your attention 📚 UnWorld, by Jayson Greene 📚 The Möbius Book, by Catherine Lacey 📚 The Sisters, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri What Trump Missed at the Kennedy Center By Megan Garber Little wonder that 'Do You Hear the People Sing?' [from Les Misérables] has become a protest song the world over, its words invoked as pleas for freedom. Crowds in Hong Kong, fighting for democracy, have sung it. So have crowds in the United States, fighting for the rights of unions. The story's tensions are the core tensions of politics too: the rights of the individual, colliding with the needs of the collective; the possibilities, and tragedies, that can come when human dignity is systematized. Les Mis, as a story, is pointedly specific—one country, one rebellion, one meaning of freedom. But Les Mis, as a broader phenomenon, is elastic. It is not one story but many, the product of endless interpretation and reiteration. With the novel, Hugo turned acts of history into a work of fiction. The musical turned the fiction into a show. And American politics, now, have turned the show into a piece of fan fic. Read the full article. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Explore all of our newsletters. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Donald and Melania Trump got boos, cheers at 'Les Mis' at Kennedy Center. See Trump approval ratings
President Donald Trump was met with mixed reactions on June 11 when he visited the Kennedy Center. The president and first lady Melania Trump attended "Les Misérables," an iconic Broadway musical about citizens rising up against their government. Trump never attended a Kennedy Center show during his first term, but he has waged a conservative takeover on the institution since returning to the White House earlier this year. As Trump appeared on the balcony, a cacophony of boos, cheers and claps broke out ahead of a "USA" chant, video posted on X (and in this story) shows. A mixed review is reflected in Trump's approval ratings, which remain historically low compared to other presidents at this point in their new administration, even though it has improved since his 100-day mark. Here is what to know: More: Does Musk still oppose the 'Big Beautiful Bill?' What we know after his apologetic post RealClearPolitics Poll Average shows the gap between Americans who approve of Trump's job and those who disapprove is largely leveling out after narrowing following his 100-day mark. Aggregated polls by the New York Times show a similar trend. As of Jan. 27, Trump received a +6.2 percentage point approval rating, but as of March 13, it flipped to slightly negative, the RealClearPolitics graphics shows, and widened over the following weeks until becoming the most negative on April 29 at -7.2 percentage points. His average approval rating margin as of June 12, according to RealClearPolitics, is -3.2 percentage points. The approval margin according to the New York Times aggregator on June 12 is -8 percentage points. A historical analysis by Gallup shows Trump's approval ratings in May in his first years in office − both as the 45th and 47th presidents − are lower than any other modern president at the same time in their administrations. Here is a closer look at some recent opinion polls on Trump's performance in office: Economist/YouGov poll: 52% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling his job compared to 43% who approve. (Poll conducted June 6-9; 1,533 U.S. adult citizens; margin of error: plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.) In light of the epic fight with Trump and Elon Musk, more Republicans were more likely to side with Trump over Musk at 74% to 6%, respectively. Half of Americans overall said they did not side with either. Quinnipiac University: 38% of respondents approve of Trump's job performance compared to 54% who disapprove. (Poll conducted June 5-9; 1,265 self-identified registered voters; margin of error: plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.) More respondents disapproved of the major tax and domestic policy legislation under consideration in the Senate at 53% to 27%, with 20% not providing an opinion, Quinnipiac found. Morning Consult: 47% of respondents approved of Trump's job performance compared to 51% who disapproved (Poll conducted Jun 6-8; 1,867 registered U.S. voters; margin of error: plus or minus 2 percentage points.) Trump's approval rating on immigration is matching his second-term low at 51% of voters approving of how he's handling the issue. The poll was conducted as Trump battles California over protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. Contributing: Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy, Zac Anderson, USA TODAY Kinsey Crowley is the Trump Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach her at kcrowley@ Follow her on X and TikTok @kinseycrowley or Bluesky at @ This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump approval rating after he and Melania got booed at Kennedy Center?
