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Found: Handwritten notes with Einstein's thoughts on a good life

Source: atlasobscura.com

In 1922, Albert Einstein sat in a hotel room in Tokyo and wrote down two thoughts: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” and “a quiet and modest life brings more joy than a pursuit of success bound with constant unrest.”

He gave those two notes in lieu of a tip to a courier who had brought him a message, as the Japan Times reports.

It may have been that he didn’t have any change; it may have been that the courier had refused money. But Einstein had the idea that these small slips of paper might be worth much more than a handful of change one day.

When he had arrived in Tokyo, the scientist had been met by crowds of fans. He had been traveling around the world, giving a series of lectures, in America, in British Palestine, and in southeast Asia. He was in Asia when he received a telegram informing him he had won a Nobel Prize.

Read more: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/albert-einsteins-japan-notes-meaning-of-life

Einstein and friends enjoy sake in Tokyo in 1922.

President Macri's coalition 'ahead' in crucial Argentina mid-term election

Argentina's President Mauricio Macri's coalition looks to be on course to make significant gains in the country's congressional elections.

Partial results show his centre-right 'Let's Change' alliance leading in the capital Buenos Aires, and in 12 out of 23 provinces.

Over 33 million Argentines were eligible to vote, which saw a third of seats in the Senate contested, along with half of those in the lower house of Congress. More than 78% of registered voters took part.

Macri was elected by a narrow margin two years ago and won't have an outright majority. His coalition will gain at least 19 seats in the lower house, bringing its total to 105 out of 257, and reach 24 seats out of 72 in the Senate.

This election is being seen as a test of his ability to win re-election in 2019.

The most closely-watched race was in Buenos Aires Province, where the centre-left former President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, received 37% in her Senate bid. Although trailing Macri's former Education Minister Esteban Bullrich, who received 41%, second place was enough for the 64-year-old to win one of the province's three Senate seats, under Argentina's list system.

The nationwide Senate electoral map favored Macri's Let's Change, as just 3 of its 17 senators were at stake; the pro-Kirchner Front for Victory (FpV) and allies were contesting 20 of its 43 senators.

Doctored precinct summaries

Nationwide primaries held on August 14 were marred by irregularities, with evidence surfacing of doctored precinct summary pdf files showing zeroed-out counts for Kirchner's Citizen's Unity in a number of cases.

Former House Speaker Leopoldo Moreau, an ally of Mrs. Kirchner, explained that Citizen's Unity had opened its own tabulation center to corroborate official figures; but described today's polls as "proceeding normally thus far."

Santiago Maldonado

Today's elections were also overshadowed by the August 1 disappearance of 28 year-old artist and activist Santiago Maldonado, who was last seen during a Gendarmerie raid on an indigenous Mapuche protest camp in Patagonia.

Maldonado's body was found on October 17 nearly a mile upstream, prompting Mapuche spokesmen and his own family to assert that his body may have been planted there by government forces in an attempt to diffuse the controversy ahead of today's polls.

At: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-41717100

Mariano Rajoy has staged a 'coup d'etat' against democracy in Catalonia

​The Spanish government has suspended Catalonia’s self-rule, 78 years after Franco’s fascists did the same. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has decided he doesn’t like the democratically elected government of Catalonia and has announced he will replace its members with his own ministers.

He has also decided to prevent the Catalan parliament from choosing a new president, to validate all the legislative initiatives it may table in the future and to call for a snap Catalan election in the coming months. According to several high-ranking People’s Party officials, pro-independence parties could be banned in the run-up to the vote, or just after it.

Rajoy has also announced that his cabinet will have full control of the Catalan government’s finances (it already has it) and seize control of the Catalan public broadcasting service (TV, radio and news agency). This is how he plans to change the political will of Catalan citizens: by abusing the most basic democratic principles, the rule of law and the due respect for his fellow citizens.

Rajoy, the politician who irresponsibly started a Spain-wide campaign against the new agreement on Catalonia’s home rule 10 years ago, has now taken a step that no other Spanish politician dared to take in a democracy, not even during the worst times of the Basque violent conflict.

By suspending Catalonia’s home rule, the Spanish government, with the incredible support of the Socialist Party, has destroyed one of the basic consensuses that led to democracy in the late 1970s: the recovery of Catalonia’s self-rule. By doing so, Rajoy has staged a coup d’état against Catalonia’s institutions and against democracy in the whole of Spain.

It is more than evident that this is an escalation, without precedent, of tensions and will provoke hundreds of thousands of Catalan citizens to take to the streets to defend Catalonia’s home rule and institutions, as already happened yesterday.

At: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/catalonia-catalan-spain-independence-referendum-coup-against-democracy-a8013661.html
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Rajoy has gone as far as to threaten Catalonia's leadership with "the safe fate that befell Lluís Companys" - the 1930s pro-independence leader seized by the Nazis and executed by their close ally Franco.

John McCain finds a new voice and uses it against Trump

US Senator John McCain, the sometimes cantankerous, often charming, and eternally irrepressible Republican from Arizona, has never minced words.

But in the twilight of a long and storied career, as he fights a virulent form of brain cancer, the 81-year-old senator has found a new voice.

In twin speeches — one in July, where he issued a call to bipartisanship in the Senate, and another in Philadelphia this past week, where he railed against “half-baked, spurious nationalism” — McCain has taken on both his colleagues and President Trump.

In the process, his friends and fellow senators say, he has carved out a new role for himself on Capitol Hill: elder statesman and truth-teller.

“Even if John were not ill, with his experience and age, there is a part of you that I think begins to focus on your legacy,” said former Vice President Joe Biden, a close friend of McCain’s. But with cancer, Biden said, “he’s in the fight of his life, and he knows it.”

At: https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2017/10/21/twilight-career-mccain-becomes-unfettered-voice-against-trumpism/QQe46l3AGX2CJBh8WpKrdP/story.html

Noted Argentine actor Federico Luppi dies at 83.

Federico Luppi, a dignified Argentine actor well known for his complex performances died on Friday in Buenos Aires. He was 83.

The cause was complications of a subdural hematoma that developed after a fall at his home in April, said his wife, the actress Susana Hornos.

Luppi’s career, which began in the mid-1960s, included dozens of film and television roles, often in Argentine productions. Slim and stately with a shock of white hair, he endowed his characters with a sense of gravity.

Born in Ramallo, northwest of Buenos Aires, in 1934 to poor Italian immigrants, he studied architecture and worked in a slaughterhouse and a bank before he was able to support himself as an actor.

He was blacklisted from Argentine productions for some years after he was openly critical of the 1976-81 dictatorship of Gen. Jorge Videla.

He was also beset by a rocky personal life, including an acrimonious divorce to co-star Haydée Padilla in 1987, and a child support dispute over an illegitimate son born in Uruguay in 1999. Argentina's collapse in 2001 forced Luppi to emigrate to Spain; he returned in 2008.

Despite those difficulties, he remained a prolific actor, active in theater, television and film.

Luppi is best remembered in Argentina for two thrillers by the Argentine director Adolfo Aristarain: as a demolitions expert who stages an accident in order to expose an unscrupulous mining firm in “Time for Revenge” (1981); and as a contract killer who has tables turned on him in “Last Days of the Victim” (1982).

He also won acclaim for his role as a naive small-businessman in the tragedy “Sweet Money” (1982); as a political idealist who organized rural shepherds in “A Place in the World” (1992); and as a dying literature professor who tries to start a new life in “Common Ground” (2002).

Luppi later starred in three films by famed Mexican director Guillermo del Toro: as an antiques dealer turned into a vampire in “Cronos” (1993); as a leftist sympathizer who ran a haunted orphanage in Franco’s Spain in “The Devil’s Backbone” (2001); and the monarch of a fairy kingdom in “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006), which won three Academy Awards in 2007.

Writing in Spanish on Twitter, del Toro called him “our Olivier, our Day Lewis, our genius, my dear friend.”

At: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/obituaries/federico-luppi-83-actor-known-for-del-toro-films-dies.html

“When you've learned everything, then you die.” Federico Luppi, 1934-2017.

Brother identifies body of missing Argentine protester Santiago Maldonado

The brother of an Argentine protester whose disappearance prompted nationwide demonstrations said Friday that the family believes a body found in a river is that of activist Santiago Maldonado.

The family is now "convinced that the body is Santiago," his brother, Sergio Maldonado, told reporters outside a morgue in Buenos Aires where the autopsy was performed.

“We saw the body. We recognized Santiago’s tattoos so we are convinced it is Santiago,” he said.

The body was found Tuesday near the site of a protest on August 1, when Maldonado, 28, was last seen alive. Protesters were demanding the release of a jailed Mapuche indigenous leader and the return of lands belonging to Italian clothing company Benetton that are claimed by the Mapuche as their ancestral territory.

People at the protest said they saw police beat and detain Maldonado after he and others blocked a road in Patagonia.

Police never confirmed the arrest and denied wrongdoing. But some rights groups accused President Mauricio Macri's government of being part a cover-up.

His being located nearly a mile upstream from where he was last seen has led his family and rights groups to suspect his body may have been planted.

"It's very strange that the body was found where it was, when we have searched those same places and there was nothing," Sergio Maldonado pointed out. "We want to know the truth. "

The Maldonado case has overshadowed Sunday’s congressional election in a country where potential cases of abuse by security forces are particularly sensitive. It has also spurred mass protests and campaigns on social media demanding to know what happened to Maldonado.

At: http://newsok.com/article/feed/1467169

Santiago Maldonado

France grants extradition for Argentine Dirty War suspect Mario Sandoval

The Versailles Court of Appeal in France granted the extradition to Argentina of former police inspector Mario Sandoval, accused of crimes against humanity committed in the ESMA detention center during Argentina's 1976-83 dictatorship.

The extradition is pursuant to an international arrest warrant issued in 2012 by Argentine Federal Judge Sergio Torres.

Sandoval was charged with the kidnapping and the disappearance of Hernán Abriata, a 24 year-old architecture student detained at his home in Buenos Aires by Sandoval at the height of the Dirty War in 1976. He was last seen in the clandestine detention center which at the time functioned beneath the Navy Mechanical School (ESMA).

Around 5,000 detainees were tortured and killed at ESMA, the largest of some 300 detention centers during the Dirty War.

"This is another step after five years of waiting and 41 years after Abriata's disappearance," said Carlos Loza, a member of the Association of Former Disappeared Detainees and a former cellmate of Abriata's during their ESMA ordeal.

Sandoval, 64, left Argentina shortly after democracy returned in 1983 and settled in France, where he obtained citizenship in 1997.

Unlike most Dirty War fugitives, Sandoval had a relatively high-profile life in exile, obtaining degrees in public safety and economic intelligence, teaching at the Universities of La Sorbonne Nouvelle and Marne-la-Vallé, and working as a consultant to several French companies as well as for Colombian paramilitaries.

At: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.infonews.com%2Fnota%2F311093%2Fcausa-esma-francia-concedio-la-extradicion

Dirty War fugitive Mario Sandoval during his French exile, and Hernán Abriata shortly before his 1976 murder.

Information cannot be silenced: 40 journalists sign open letter against Macri for press reprisals

A group of 40 well-known journalists in Argentina and elsewhere have signed an open letter denouncing the administration of President Mauricio Macri for "retaliation" and "pressures to silence voices."

The letter refers specifically to alleged threats made against the center-left Buenos Aires news daily Página/12, and its senior investigative journalist, Horacio Verbitsky, for information published on August 27 detailing over $132 million in "whitewashed" offshore accounts owned by at least close associates of the president - including his brother, Gianfranco Macri.

Those involved took advantage of a tax amnesty law, passed by Congress at Macri's urging in July 2016, which drops all tax evasion charges or potential charges in exchange for a 10% payment. The law was amended by decree that November - in violation of Argentine constitutional law - to allow family and close associates of the administration to take advantage of the offer.

The ensuing scandal - as well as six cases against Macri that range from influence trafficking to money laundering - has become a headache for his center-right "Let's Change" coalition heading into legislative elections this Sunday.

The open letter, titled 'Information cannot be silenced', also comes weeks after news anchor Roberto Navarro, to whose top-rated evening news program Verbitsky was a frequent contributor, was fired on September 19 amid what executives later admitted was pressure from the government to force his removal.

Some 38 Argentine signatories were joined by French journalist Patrick de Saint-Exupéry and Robert Cox, a British journalist who edited the recently defunct Buenos Aires Herald from 1959 until his reporting on massive human rights abuses in the 1970s forced him to leave Argentina in 1979.

The open letter reads as follows:

In recent weeks various media have reported on the decision of the national government to carry out retaliatory actions for the information published by the journalist Horacio Verbitsky in Página/12 regarding money laundering carried out by associates and relatives of President Mauricio Macri.

This information, citing sources, was not denied.

As journalists, we note our deep concern at the attack on freedom of expression that a decision of this kind would imply. We believe that there should be no retaliation for disseminating information and that every democratic system must guarantee plurality.

We are convinced that the pressures to silence voices produce irreparable damage to our democratic life.

Argentine lawyer Delia Ferreira Rubio elected chair of Transparency International

Delia Matilde Ferreira Rubio was elected chair of Transparency International, the global anti-corruption movement, at its Annual Membership Meeting in Berlin.

Rueben Lifuka was elected as vice-chair, along with seven new board members. All will serve a three-year term.

“Globalisation and technology have changed the nature of corruption. It is the role of Transparency International to face up to this changed world. Our work will be guided by our strong principles of transparency, integrity and accountability. We shall walk the talk and in this I will lead,” said Ferreira Rubio.

Ferreira Rubio is from Argentina and was the former president of Transparency International’s Argentine chapter, Poder Ciudadano. She has served as chief adviser for lawmakers at Argentina's Congress and has advised the Constitutional Committee of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

During her tenure at Poder Ciudadano, she was critical of then-Buenos Aires mayor (now President) Mauricio Macri for eroding transparency in municipal contracts and for ignoring freedom of information laws that allow access to all public contract records.

Born in Córdoba, Ferreira Rubio, 61, has a PhD in law from Madrid’s Complutense University and is the author of numerous publications on democratic culture and parliamentary ethics. She served on the international board of Transparency International from 2008 to 2014.

At: https://www.transparency.org/news/pressrelease/delia_matilde_ferreira_rubio_elected_chair_of_transparency_international

Delia Ferreira Rubio