Fernandez, Biden hold talks amid Argentina's economic strain

Source: Washington Post

President Alberto Fernández of Argentina used a White House meeting Wednesday to spotlight the economic strain his country faces as he looks for President Joe Biden to back Argentina’s effort to renegotiate with the International Monetary Fund on terms of $44 billion debt.

The United States has veto power in the IMF, so any sign of support from Biden to revise requirements to the debt agreement would be seen as a positive for Argentina while talks continue.

In comments to reporters at the start of their meeting, Fernández noted that Argentina’s economy has endured the “worst drought” in the country in more than 90 years.

He also noted the Russia’s war in Ukraine has caused rippling effects on his country’s economy and others.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/29/biden-argentina-alberto-fernandez-imf-debt-economy/b08be8cc-ce6e-11ed-8907-156f0390d081_story.html

Argentine President Alberto Fernández and U.S. President Joe Biden at the Oval Office this afternoon.

Biden lauded Fernández's stand on democracy, human rights, and against Russia's invasion of Ukraine - which has hit Argentina's already-stressed balance of payments hard.

Fernández thanked Biden for his donation of millions of Covid vaccine doses during the depths of the pandemic in 2021, and for Biden's support in Argentina's efforts to refinance a nearly $200 billion foreign debt inherited from the right-wing Mauricio Macri administration.

“I think we have an enormous opportunity to increase our economic interchange, our economic integration on everything from clean energy to critical minerals to technology to security,” Biden said.

Buenos Aires Herald returns after six-year hiatus

The Buenos Aires Herald, closely associated with Argentina’s British and American communities, as well as tourists, returned as an online daily after shutting down in 2017.

The English-language journal, founded in 1876, later earned internal renown for its coverage of the “disappeared” – people who were forcibly abducted, tortured and murdered by the state during Argentina's last dictatorship in the late 1970s – when much of the country’s media stayed silent.

The Herald, which - like most Argentine newspapers - had suffered steadily-declining circulation since the 1970s, was purchased by the owners of the country's largest business daily, Ámbito Financiero, in 2008 - and in 2015 by the Indalo Group, which owns Argentina's top-rated progressive cable news network, C5N.

The Indalo Group is currently pursuing litigation against members of the right-wing Mauricio Macri administration (2015-19) for political persecution, including alleged attempts to use pro-Macri courts to seize the group.

A key defendant in the case, Macri fixer Fabián “Pepín” Rodríguez Simón, has had an Interpol Red Notice issued against him in 2021 for avoiding subpoenas to testify. Rodríguez Simón, 64, is reportedly living in neighboring Uruguay - whose courts are still mulling his extradition.

The Herald's main competition in this new chapter will be the centrist Buenos Aires Times, owned by the Perfil Group.

At: https://buenosairesherald.com/op-ed/editorial/the-buenos-aires-herald-is-back

A sign of the times, a 2016 headline in the Buenos Aires Herald, Argentina's best-known English-language daily, presages its closure a year later.

Its owners revived the daily - long a favorite among Argentina's English-speaking community - this Friday.

The Herald earned international renown for helping expose Nazi activities in Argentina in the 1930s and '40s - and for raising awareness of the country's disappeared during the last dictatorship in the late 1970s.

It later earned the ire of Argentina's largely right-wing media for its criticism of former President Mauricio Macri, whose sharp utility rate hikes - and alleged use of allied courts against the Herald's owners - helped lead to its closure in 2017.

Right-Wing Radio Host Calls For Execution of Obama and Others if Trump's Indicted

Source: Mediaite

Pete Santilli, a right-wing radio host, advocated recently on his show for the execution of former President Barack Obama along with former Attorney General Eric Holder and former National Security Advisor Susan Rice if former President Donald Trump is indicted this week — as Trump has claimed he will be.

This comes after Trump’s post on Truth Social over the weekend where he alleged that he will be arrested Tuesday stemming from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation over a hush-money payment to adult star Stormy Daniels.

The video was posted by Right Wing Watch on Twitter Monday and shows Santilli raging for the military’s involvement so that the “criminals” can be held accountable.

Read more: https://www.mediaite.com/politics/right-wing-radio-host-calls-for-execution-of-obama-and-others-if-trumps-indicted/

Fascist firing squad fan Pete Santilli

After brutal assault, Yanis Varoufakis urges progressives to focus on 'what really matters'

Recovering from a brutal assault that left him with a broken nose and cheekbone, leftist Greek lawmaker Yanis Varoufakis on Tuesday urged progressives "not get distracted" from the railway accident that killed 57 people last month or the neoliberal "privatize everything doctrine" he blames for the disaster.

Appearing on ANT1's Kallimera Ellada ('Good Morning, Greece') on Tuesday, Varoufakis — the parliamentary leader of the left-wing MeRA25 party and former finance minister in 2015 — said he needs to "thank the public hospital staff" because "they worked miracles" to treat his fractured cheekbone and nose, which was broken in six places during the Friday evening assault by a group of young men the lawmaker described earlier as "hired thugs."

"The oligarchic establishment is trying to exploit my injuries in the most hideous, Goebbels-like manner."

"I will recover," he said, brushing off more questions about the attack. "But those 57 from the train accident in Tempi won't, and their families' pain cannot be treated" — a reference to the February 28 collision of passenger and freight trains in Larissa.

At: https://www.commondreams.org/news/yanis-varoufakis

Former Greek Finance Minister and leftist leader Yanis Varoufakis speaks to the media in Athens on Tuesday.

He was brutally attacked three days earlier in an Athens restaurant by men he described as "hired thugs."

Varoufakis had earlier blamed rail privatization for a recent rail accident that cost 57 lives.

SVB collapse: Peter Thiel's role scrutinized as spark of bank run

Tech mogul and Republican campaign donor Peter Thiel is being accused of sparking the run on the bank that forced regulators to close down Silicon Valley Bank.

Journalists and critics have turned their focus on Thiel in the wake of SVB's collapse, accusing him of influencing businesses to withdraw their funding from the bank. His efforts are thought to be the first that eventually sparked the bank run, leading to California regulators intervening.

"To be clear, SVB did not properly hedge its risks against two threats, 1) concentration of influence by Peter Thiel, 2) rising interest rates," tweeted investigative journalist Dave Troy.

"That was mismanagement, but it still wasn't fraud, and they still have sufficient assets to meet nearly all of the bank's obligations."

At: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/business/svb-collapse-peter-thiel-silicon-valley-

Soft coup?

On Thursday night, Founders Fund - the venture capital fund co-founded by Peter Thiel - advised companies to pull money from the now-insolvent Silicon Valley Bank.

Popular but facing opposition, Pope Francis marks 10 years as pontiff

Pope Francis marks 10 years as head of the Catholic Church on Monday, hugely popular but facing internal dissent after a decade of reform, even if he has left basic doctrine intact.

When he appeared at the balcony of St Peter's Basilica on March 13, 2013, in his plain white papal robes, the newly elected Jorge Bergoglio immediately presented an image of a different kind of papacy.

The smiling, outspoken Jesuit was in sharp contrast to his reserved, intellectual predecessor Benedict XVI, who shocked the world by becoming the first pope since the Middle Ages to resign.

And Francis had a plan – to reform the governance of the Church plagued by inertia, clean up its murky finances and turn its focus outwards.

While he has not deviated from some staunch Catholic beliefs – he has called abortion murder and homosexuality a sin – he has shown a more compassionate and less dogmatic approach, including condemning the persecution of gay people.

"No more demonisation of homosexuality, debates on extramarital relations or the contraceptive pill... all that has been taken off the table," noted Italian Vaticanist Marco Politi.

Instead, the 86-year-old pontiff – who is seemingly never happier than when among his flock – has emphasised social justice, inter-religious dialogue, the environment and the rights of refugees.

At: https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/world/popular-but-facing-opposition-pope-francis-marks-10-years-as-pontiff.phtml

Pope Francis in an interview with Argentine publisher Jorge Fontevecchia on Friday.

On the eve of his 10th anniversary as Pontiff, Francis said that he's in good health, though he's been “thinking a lot” about his mortality and admitted that he misses “strolling around the streets” of Argentina’s capital - which he hinted that he might visit after elections this October.

While he criticized “gender ideology,” he emphasized that “the exaggerated, rootless right wing is very dangerous, it worries me.”

Uruguayan-born Rafael Vinoly, New York's prolific and polarizing architect, dies at 78

Rafael Viñoly cut more or less the perfect figure of the New York City architect — serious-minded but amiable with an indulgent smile that could give way to a cool, impassive stare.

He may have been born in Montevideo, Uruguay, and spent the earliest years of his career in Argentina (he graduated from the University of Buenos Aires in 1968); but his assumption of the role as a New York designer appears to have been total.

“A relatively small, rocky island,” he once called Manhattan, “with this urban experiment, which is so unique and irreproducible.”

What Viñoly — who died on Thursday of an aneurysm at the age of 78 — left scattered across that island and its adjacent territories is pretty astonishing.

Since emigrating to the U.S. in the late 1970s, the designer’s eponymous firm completed no less than a dozen major projects in all five boroughs: from courthouses in the Bronx (two of them) to a performance venue in Manhattan (the interiors for Jazz at Lincoln Center) and academic buildings in Harlem, Brooklyn, and beyond.

But Viñoly did not, it often seemed, make much effort to duck the clothesline of public opinion.

Infamously, both his 20 Fenchurch Street tower in London from 2014 (known, not quite affectionately, as the Walkie Talkie) and his Vdara resort complex in Las Vegas from 2009, were discovered on completion to have a magnifying glass–like effect — reflecting sunlight with sufficient intensity to zap the odd parked car.

At: https://www.curbed.com/2023/03/rafael-vinoly-obituary-architect-new-york-city-432-park.html

Renowned Uruguayan-American architect Rafael Viñoly, 1944-2023, at the Carrasco International Airport terminal (2009) he designed for his native Montevideo.

From modest office, apartment and public buildings in Buenos Aires, Viñoly went on to design a prolific number of landmark, post-modern high-rises in Manhattan and elsewhere - including two "super-talls": 432 Park Avenue and 125 Greenwich Street.

Happy 100th Birthday to the iconic Wes Montgomery (1923-1968)

Gone much too soon - but not forgotten.

The Hollywood sign at 100: how a hillside ad became an enduring monument

The Hollywood sign, originally constructed as an advertisement for a local real estate development, turns 100 this year, and like any star, it’s been primping and preening in advance of its big day.

It’s received multiple highly publicized makeovers, and its PR team (yes, it has a PR team) has been readying for major coverage, with centennial events planned and a fundraiser launched to build more amenities for tourists.

The familiar letters loom over a dreamy city – yet they remain surprisingly hard to reach.

But it’s easy to understand why, despite all the barriers, tourists from around the world continue to flock as close to the letters as possible.

“In a city that doesn’t have a center, it feels like a real place to go,” Jesse Holcomb, one of the sign’s PR reps, said.

At: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/04/the-hollywood-sign-at-100-how-a-hillside-ad-became-an-enduring-monument

Visitors cavort in front of the Hollywood sign, in Los Angeles' Griffith Park.

Originally erected as a real-estate promotional sign ("Hollywoodland" ), the iconic landmark was rebuilt in 1978 - and at 100 remains a symbol of both a city and its beloved film industry.

Wayne Shorter: Legendary jazz saxophonist dies at 89

One of the greatest jazz saxophonists, Wayne Shorter, has died in Los Angeles at the age of 89.

A well-known figure on the jazz circuit in the late 1950s, Shorter is credited with shaping much of 20th Century jazz music.

The 12-time Grammy award winner played alongside several greats - including Miles Davis, Carlos Santana and Herbie Hancock.

Wayne Shorter was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933, and initially played the clarinet at age 15. Soon after he moved on to tenor and soprano on saxophone and studied music at university before spending two years in the US Army.

Among the dozen Grammy awards he won, Shorter received a Lifetime Achievement award in 2015.

At: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64830949

Legendary jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter, 1933-2023.

Tributes that poured in from social media shared a common sentiment: gone, but not forgotten.