RESULTS & PERSONAL BESTS via TFRRS Prior to Texas: Has personal bests in long jump of 6.59m 60m hurdles (8.56) and 100m hurdles (14.38).. 8th at 2022 U20 European Championships and 5th at 2023 U20 European Championships... Competed at the 2022 German National Championships in both heptathlon and long jump and the 2023 Indoor and Outdoor Championships... Personal: Daughter to Jochen and Johanna Eitel and sister to Manuel Started competing in track and field because her older siblings were competing.. Inspirations are both her brother Manuel and Sydney McLaughlin.. Chose Texas because to expand her experiences culturally and grow athletically.. Thanks for visiting The use of software that blocks ads hinders our ability to serve you the content you came here to enjoy We ask that you consider turning off your ad blocker so we can deliver you the best experience possible while you are here UH Assistant Professor of Biology & Biochemistry in Biochemistry from the University of Tübingen in 1986 and completed a Ph.D in Biology from the University of Heidelberg in 1990 Described by one German colleague as “a highly gifted researcher with achievements characterized by novelty and quality—a hallmark of his work,” Werner was an expert in the field of molecular neurobiology Richard Scheller’s group at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Stanford University analyzing the molecular basis of neuromuscular differentiation His work resulted in several first-author papers that appeared in top scientific journals joining the Max-Planck-Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen in 1994 supported by a prestigious Helmholtz-fellowship award from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Werner spent six years at the Max-Planck-Institute where he was immersed in a research environment focused on the developmental aspects of neurobiology and where he developed a new interest in molecular neuropathology After a year at the University of Bristol in England Werner joined the University of Houston in 2002 where he taught courses in Cell Biology and Developmental Neurobiology and carried out research on neural development and neuromuscular diseases Colleagues from the United States and abroad have lauded his research achievements A scientist capable of presenting complex material in a simple and clear form he is remembered by his students as a professor whose door was always open and who always treated students with kindness and respect Werner will be greatly missed by his UH colleagues and by all of those who had the pleasure of knowing him University of HoustonDepartment of Biology and BiochemistryScience & Research Building 23455 Cullen Blvd Bike Europe is a part of VMNmedia. The following rules apply to the use of this site: Terms of Use and Privacy / Cookie Statement | Privacy settings He is a  recognized expert on retail technology and is well versed in all things tech Dan’s “Retail Insights” technology column was recognized by the prestigious Eddie & Ozzie Awards He has been quoted and interviewed by a variety of publications and news sites including CNBC, and has served as a moderator and session host at numerous industry events.  Follow Dan on LinkedIn. France-based Decathlon is already live with the MishiPay mobile self-checkout solution in Decathlon Deutschland stores in Berlin with more locations being added every week.  Using the experience the retailer calls “Decathlon Deutschland Scan & Go,” customers scan and pay for items using their smartphone The MishiPay app automatically disables the RFID security tag to leave customers free to exit the store minimizing the need for contact with both humans and checkout devices Decathlon Deutschland had been seeking to develop a frictionless customer experience in recent years amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic and need for social distancing measures in stores “We are always looking for innovative ways to improve the in-store experience for our customers and we have found that they are really enjoying using the MishiPay app,” said Decathlon Deutschland leader of store digitalization the solution has clear customer benefits in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic; enabling shoppers to use their own device for the entire shopping journey instead of needing to touch store hardware and eliminating the need to wait at a checkout.” Decathlon has been testing out various mobile checkout options at different locations around the globe. In the Decathlon “experiential retail center” in the San Francisco suburb of Emeryville (one of its two U.S store associates perform mobile checkout at customer request using a mobile checkout station and an iPhone connected to the NewStore mobile store operations platform HAMBURG/PLOCHINGEN –  A consortium led by Funds advised by leading private equity firm BC Partners has reached an agreement to acquire CeramTec Group ("CeramTec") from its current owner Cinven The Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments) and Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (Ontario Teachers') both hold a stake in the Consortium CeramTec is the world's leading producer of technical ceramics and specialises in the development production and distribution of ceramic parts The acquisition is subject to anti-trust and foreign investment approvals With more than 100 years of experience in the development and manufacturing of ceramics CeramTec holds an unrivalled position in the production of advanced ceramics and their deployment in a wide range of applications Its advanced ceramics are used across a number of different industries The company's portfolio comprises well over 10,000 different products parts and components made of technical ceramics as well as a large number of ceramic materials With production plants and subsidiaries across Europe CeramTec enjoys a truly global presence as a manufacturer and supplier CeramTec generated revenues of €538 million The company employs more than 3,400 people worldwide said: "We believe CeramTec has great potential to achieve profitable and sustainable growth and we look forward to working closely with the company's management team and its employees." commented on the transaction: "We are delighted to welcome the BC Partners led consortium as our new owners we have invested substantially in our operations and our people We have doubled our ceramic implant capacity in Marktredwitz; we have simplified the organizational set-up; and we have created a leading platform in piezo ceramics with the UK acquisition we have started our journey from a German centric technology leader towards a true global market leader We are looking forward to continuing on this journey together with our new owners." "We are pleased to be backing this transaction alongside BC Partners Ontario Teachers' and CeramTec management," said Guthrie Stewart Senior Vice President and Global Head of Private Investments "This is a perfect example of our strategy to invest in global leaders in order to support their management team and create long-term value alongside world-class private equity investors such as BC Partners." "Strong relationships are key to our investment strategy and we are very pleased to be working again with BC Partners and PSP Investments We appreciate this opportunity to invest in a diversified company with an accomplished management team We consider Germany to be a very attractive market and a place where we would like to continue investing," said Jo Taylor PWC provided financial and tax due diligence as well as structuring advice Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer were the consortium's legal advisors supplies its customers with premium quality ceramic products from around the globe The products are used in many different applications today The company's success is rooted in the formula: Continued development of new innovative materials with a strong commitment to quality a focus on customer-specific systems solutions and dialog-based application consulting services that cover the entire product life cycle CeramTec GmbH is one of the largest international manufacturers of ceramics for technically demanding applications The Group employs more than 3,400 people across 20 facilities worldwide CeramTec generated revenues of €538 million and adjusted EBITDA of €196 million Further details on CeramTec are available at: https://www.ceramtec.com/ bcp@perfect-game.de Andrew Honnor / Charlotte Balbirnie / Alex Jones media@investpsp.com Email: Pav_Jordan@otpp.com You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser or activate Google Chrome Frame to improve your experience Subscribe online and gain access to the entire archive Joshua Craze Published in Issue 46 : Agitation I was standing outside the smoking lounge at Bole Addis Ababa’s principal international airport inhaling a cigarette as I stared at the images on my phone My friends were sending me photos of a sit-in beginning right outside the Republican Palace in Khartoum and these scenes were as unimaginable as Bernie supporters suddenly pitching up on Biden’s lawn According to my friends it was a fake protest set up by the military to stir up unrest and prepare the groundwork for a coup I would arrive in Khartoum and be able to see for myself even if visiting demonstrations was not exactly part of my job description I had worked as a conflict researcher in the Horn of Africa I would do my research during the dry season when waterlogged roads harden and the fighting begins and the Swiss organization’s money was running out and see if anyone would fund the Swiss’s research in Sudan I would also contact some South Sudanese rebel groups that were seeking succor across the border and find out what they were planning I had a week to get some good information and avoid attracting too much attention from Sudan’s intelligence service None of this held much interest when compared to the protests The images on my phone showed white tents offering free medical services and young people joyously milling together in scenes that evoked the demonstrations of 2019 when months of protests against the reign of Omar al-Bashir culminated in a sit-in just outside the headquarters of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) I had watched those protests unfold from afar I thought that real politics was collective struggle but over the past decade I’d begun to fear the era of mass movements had come to an end I briefed diplomats and wrote angry missives for the United Nations and Swiss NGOs about brutal government military campaigns in South Sudan I became convinced that the diplomats who were the primary audience for my reports were deeply uninterested in changing their positions they had backed a predatory government intent on pillaging South Sudan while the country descended into a low-intensity conflict I struggled to know how to position myself—neither ethnic militias nor diplomats are my constituency—and felt expectant about my trip to Sudan If South Sudan was a land of ethnic violence and indifferent diplomats was a country of political parties and street protests—protests so effective they had brought down Bashir that I would find the sort of collective politics I could recognize as my own he had been Sudan’s ruler for thirty years having taken power in a coup in 1989 while still an army brigadier Bashir captured a state racked by a civil war that pitted the country’s margins against its urban centers which have long dominated Sudanese politics Successive colonial regimes had installed themselves in Khartoum and extracted resources and labor from the country’s peripheries the postcolonial government continued the same pattern of domination One civil war (1955–72) led to a decade of southern regional government during which Sudan’s inability to service its debt nearly bankrupted the country and led the state to withdraw from the peripheries dependent on personal relationships and backroom deals ceaselessly maneuvering at the top of an unstable coalition of Islamists most of it extracted from the south of the country—the hotbed of the civil war Oil enabled Bashir to cut a deal with Sudan’s cities He would provide cheap commodities and subsidies if they tolerated dictatorship and repression in the peripheries in revolt against their marginalization by the country’s elite he encouraged these forces to loot and pillage effectively franchising the state’s monopoly of violence Surely it’s possible to say two things at the same time— to dwell in the uncertainty The lower courts may ultimately prove a central site of protest in our time I will hang out with basically anyone for as long as I can — what else to do with myself If they even see his name on the plaque by the door I felt a physical closeness with her—the last I will ever have It’ll be interesting to watch where we all turn to beg for impressions n+1 is a print and digital magazine of literature We also post new online-only work several times each week and publish books expanding on the interests of the magazine Terms & Conditions | Privacy Policy Thomas de Monchaux San Bernardino City Hall is a long and skinny building It is six stories tall and constitutes 14,279 square feet of civic office and support space an architect then working for the studio of Victor Gruen alongside Norma Merrick Sklarek the first Black female licensed architect in New York and California who would later work on the design of the American embassy in Tokyo and the Mall of America outside Minneapolis The entirety of San Bernardino City Hall is clad in brown-black reflective glass and elevated on big cylindrical columns: you process past the columns and into one of the narrow ends The entrance is marked by big three-dimensional sans serif letters that seem to float in midair The glass skin turns and also wraps the underside This is an act of architectural rhetoric that tells you that the building is not what it actually is — seven steel-reinforced ferroconcrete slabs lifted on a point grid of steel columns stuffed with ducts and machines to keep it cool — but something more like solid crystal The resemblance is enhanced by the chamfered corners and other lapidary incisions and deflections the sensation is of embarking on a convenient spaceship A little more than a decade after Pelli and Sklarek designed San Bernardino City Hall Pelli redesigned the Museum of Modern Art in New York City He was at that moment perhaps the most lauded architect in America the landmark office skyscraper for London’s Canary Wharf redevelopment that provided office space for banks profiting from England’s rapid deregulation of financial services Pelli had relinquished his cultural stature of a decade earlier but had gained influential patrons — as captured in an iconic photograph of him and Margaret Thatcher surveying a model of Canary Wharf he in a dark suit with his chin lowered and head tilted in a courtier’s posture of deference she upright with a long Hermès-ish scarf and signature smile San Bernardino City Hall now looks like nothing Or rather it looks like everything else — the third building on the left in some exurban office park unspectacular behind rows of cars and bushes Out there in the Inland Empire of Southern California was the fulfillment of a Weimar fantasy dated back forty years to the interwar modernism of Central Europe particularly to the Bauhaus school and the work of its last director Mies drew linear and curvilinear glass towers in charcoal that were unbuildable with the technology of the time With their ostensible transparency or mere shimmer these buildings were meant to address the squalor and terror of the decade that preceded them — even more so than the white walls also then popular among the avant-garde “The new era is a fact,” Mies said in a speech in 1930 irrespective of our ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Yet it is neither better nor worse than any other era Mies emigrated to America in 1937 and was successfully patronized by Philip Johnson who in his burgeoning interest in Nazism had visited Germany a decade earlier and had occasion to first meet the older man In 1954 — with the American patron and operator playacting as protégé and designer — the two collaborated on Manhattan’s Seagram Building a skyscraper at the corner of Park Avenue and East 52nd Street Technology had somewhat caught up by then: the glass curtain wall was tinted an amber bronze — anecdote has it that the color was chosen in deference to the liquor company’s brown products the tower appeared to be in the process of being lifted away from the ground on columns as would San Bernardino City Hall a decade and a half later Seagram is a building that was once specific and is now generic In 1957 it stood out from its masonry-clad neighbors; now surrounded by its glassy imitators and successors it’s an unintentionally unassuming background building save for an atypical care with small details and the palpable erudition of its stealth-neoclassical proportions San Bernardino resembles the spaceship that alights at the end of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind If you were filming a television show set in a futuristic landscape I cannot think of another point in history in which the built environment of fifty to a hundred years ago could be used to signify the future Surely the word retrofuturistic should be far less legible to us than it seems to be you could also use San Bernardino City Hall for another kind of period piece — a Spielbergian or sub-Spielbergian movie about tween-age ennui and subsequent adventure out there in the sprawl the kind of story that involves space travel or time travel or both In this scenario the building would serve as one of the squat glassy boxes that revolve past you glimpsed from within your friend’s mom’s station wagon on the freeway or whose parking lot provides a venue for skateboarding or sex in the back seat a building like San Bernardino would indicate boringness and the prim corporate efficiency of an establishment indifferent to your particular happiness Turning the pages of the manual—A in a circle The Editors Uncertainty remains the war’s dominant quality the Ukrainian defense proved unexpectedly formidable culminating in the fall 2022 counteroffensive which succeeded far beyond most observers’ expectations both sides can at best claim to have broken even The ongoing violence — and the sense of grinding stasis — is increasingly at odds with the rhetoric we hear from the overcaffeinated pundit cheerleaders who preside over the discourse as if emphasizing the stakes of the war would magically win it We believe Ukraine will prevail for the same reason we believe socialism will prevail: because the alternative is barbaric But that emphatic belief must coexist with the recognition of this war’s tragic indeterminacy and activists whose certainty about uncertainty is key to their methodology and their outlook In an Atlantic story on this summer’s counteroffensive and Volodymyr Zelensky’s charismatic leadership Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg wrote that “this is a war over a fundamental definition of not just democracy but civilization  The civilization that Ukraine defends has been profoundly shaped by American ideas not just about democracy and the rule of law.” The authors concluded their article this way: Central Asians are waiting for the counteroffensive and others around the world whose dictatorships are propped up by the Russians — they are all waiting for the counteroffensive too Ukraine gets a chance to alter geopolitics for a generation essentialist style that carries the sickening aftertaste of Iraq war enthusiasm (in part because its biggest practitioners were Iraq war enthusiasts) Much has changed in two decades — for one thing the US lost that war — but pro-war frenzy and triumphalism on the part of the most influential US media elites has not The essentialist style conceives of nations in sweeping and geopolitical conflicts in plainly teleological ones In its pernicious vacuity it owes a great deal to the political scientist Samuel Huntington author of Clash of Civilizations and the intellectual guru of American interventionism in the early 21st century George Scialabba noted that Huntington’s book American Politics “nicely illustrates the theological function of the policy-oriented intelligentsia.”) As a method the essentialist style is both under- and oversensitive to events so obsessed with conflict at the level of civilizations that it transforms every incident into proof of concept The short interregnum provided by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny-adjacent challenge to Putin earlier this year condensed the entire hermeneutic of Western commentary into thirty-six riveting hours: “Russia Slides into Civil War,” “The Coup Is Over but Putin Is in Trouble,” “Putin Is Caught in His Own Trap,” “The Mutiny Could Be a Gift to Putin,” “The Power of a Failed Revolt,” “Yesterday’s Putin Is Gone,” “Putin’s Beast That Would Now Devour Him,” “Prigozhin’s Mutiny against Putin’s Reign of Lies,” “Wagner Uprising Is Reckoning for Putin’s Rule,” “Putin Looked into the Abyss Saturday — and Blinked.” The race to interpret the grand significance of each and every moment leaves very little room for subtlety If the patron saints of the Iraq war were Huntington and Bernard Lewis whose commitment to Islamophobia in the guise of cultural diagnosis has been instrumental to the US imperialist worldview in its 21st-century incarnation the war in Ukraine has Yale’s Timothy Snyder As Sophie Pinkham argued in the Nation in 2018 Snyder has always been an idiosyncratic historian his books on state violence and World War II full of both straightforward errors and contortions in service of strange theses But in the Trump era Snyder became “unwilling to make the slightest effort to imagine that Russia might have any strategic concerns that go beyond its plot against freedom,” Pinkham wrote Snyder is driven simultaneously by the need to essentialize and the need to analogize: the small nations of Eastern Europe have always been distinct and free and Russia has always been despotic and evil Russia is Nazi Germany and Putin is Hitler and 2022 is 1938 who is also evil (and had no influence on Hitler) (that we are aware of) Snyder has continued to distort Russia into a cartoon of itself At a recent lunch with the Financial Times in Vienna and there’s almost no social mobility or possibility of change in most Russians’ lives so foreign policy has to compensate and provide the raw material — the scenography — for governance But the Russian soul didn’t invade Ukraine together with his military and the better part of the Russian political and business elite Putin is a conspiracist with a terrifying amount of latitude to pursue his objectives and to punish and kill those he decides are standing in his way such as the people of Ukraine and the brave Russian critics of the war In the second chapter of his novel Flaubert’s Parrot Julian Barnes presents three chronologies of the life of the great novelist The first is a traditional highlights reel of literary and personal accomplishments the kind of thing one would find in an Everyman’s Library edition of Madame Bovary with one instance of despair and disappointment after another (1850: “In Egypt Much of his hair falls out; he grows stout”) The third is a collection of quotations from Flaubert’s letters — the novelist in his own pained All three accounts seem complete enough on their own (the career but Barnes’s juxtaposition shows how truth lies in the synchrony What would a synchronous account of the war in Ukraine look like Derluguian’s Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus about the fall of the USSR and the emergence of nationalist violence in the North Caucasus points to one possible approach — or to the possibility of multiple approaches in place of one mind-numbing story of good and evil Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer seems to be having a moment: we’ve heard from numerous friends and comrades reading and rereading it this year is a radical intellectual and aspiring revolutionary from Kabardino-Balkaria whose idiosyncratic uniquely post-Soviet trajectory stands in for larger fractures and continuities in the region was his subject defeated by an emergent capitalist patronage regime composed of people who had been in power since the Brezhnev era while the neighboring republic of Chechnya erupted into ethnic conflict and open war with the Russian state Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer features many great anecdotes like Derluguian’s discovery that “the headquarters of the Islamic battalion are now located at Rosa Luxemburg Street But no one — except grad students — reads a two-decade-old work of historical sociology for the details What is most impressive and resonant about Derluguian is his methodological approach to the real political and military complexities and contingencies that “civilizations” are composed of when trying to identify the historical moments and institutional locations in which human agency might liberate itself from structural constraints to shape the course of history this becomes more likely in moments of historical transition when structural constraints are overloaded complete chaos would deny human agency the structural basis for exercising its plans or might undo that agency itself The two sides of the equation are surely relational let me add that the impression we gain may depend on our instruments the more important do acts of human will appear Derluguian doesn’t write much about Ukraine — he is admirably entrenched in Kabardino-Balkaria and Chechnya — but his methodology is seductive and his emphasis on “relative situations” especially bracing at a moment when so much of the mainstream commentary on the war opts for platitudes and moralism A synchronous account of the war in Ukraine with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its intervention in eastern Ukraine It would take in Ukraine’s tumultuous post-Soviet transition Bush pressed for NATO expansion in Ukraine and Georgia — and also NATO’s earlier absorption of the Visegrád Group and intervention in Yugoslavia is a place for Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia and along with it the Georgian Civil War of the early 1990s and the bloody history of ethnic cleansing and revanchism on all sides that precipitated the Russian military presence in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to begin with As it described the awful shock of the first few days the synchronous account would (in Derluguian’s terms) increase its magnification and focus on the extraordinary resilience and ingenuity of Ukraine’s soldiers and volunteers and civilians compelled to reorient their lives in order to defend their country And this spontaneous and determined self-organization working uneasily in tandem with the state and the military would not be characterized as unique to the front in 2022 but traced back to the streets of Kyiv — and Donetsk — in 2014 we would inevitably extend our gaze to the devastated cities and villages left behind by retreating Russian forces and to the lives of those still under occupation in Mariupol and the Donbas An accounting of the wildly successful summer Ukrainian counteroffensive would take in the economic dimension of the war for both countries the complex entanglement of the world economy in both aid and sanctions and their rippling effects on markets across the globe The emphasis on paradox would continue: on one hand the violent stalemate of the winter and the spring as Ukraine and Russia sparred over villages and city blocks; on the other which has already cost nearly half as much as the entire Marshall Plan Prigozhin’s march through Rostov-on-Don and Voronezh in June 2023 the initial success of which surprised everyone would open up to an assessment of the strength of Russian institutions and Putin’s responsibility for the war: at once ultimate and constrained by history and geopolitics To be anything other than starkly opposed to a war supported by the US government feels an anti-essentialist account of the war in Ukraine would have to situate the conflict in the longue durée of Russian imperialism a depressing constant amid several centuries of internal upheaval (“The genetic code of imperial states does not change so easily,” Derluguian wrote in 2001.) This is not to say that Putinism or Russian imperialism is transhistorical to the point of useless transcendence or that it is unmodified by the actions of the people it subjects and the other empires with whom it competes — namely In this sense both the October Revolution and the modern Ukrainian nation-state shifted and sometimes fundamentally transformed from within itself subject to the pressure of imperial competition on the world stage A truly anti-essentialist history of the war in Ukraine might therefore begin as easily in 1917 as in 2022 But to properly consider the war’s structural causes is not to strip it of its visceral And so our imagined account of the war would with a tentative assessment of the summer and fall counteroffensive; with Russia’s reconstitution of its economy a largely successful “sanctions-proofing” effort that only seems to entrench the battle lines economic and literal; with the dramatic reshuffling of Ukrainian military command; and with the ominous horizon of the 2024 US presidential election an event with obvious and unspeakable implications for the war And it would end where it began: with awful uncertainty about what comes next The letter forcefully denounced Russia’s “war of aggression” and acknowledged Ukraine as an “independent and democratic state” engaged in a “legitimate struggle.” It approached the issue of negotiations sensitively it provoked uproar across the blob and was retracted Here was a significant assertion immediately foreclosed by disorganization A rare certainty: however the violence ends the US left will have played only a marginal role the bar is low: Biden and Congress have also dutifully supplied Ukraine with internationally banned cluster munitions that will certainly kill its own citizens But this strange new position cannot serve as a license for blanket support and neoconservatives who have learned nothing about the folly of American intervention in their long careers of unquestioned support for it Even the coalition’s less unseemly members take for granted that any future without the American imperium at the head of the so-called rules-based international order is a future that must be avoided at all costs And still this is a war that we can only hope Russia will lose Is the left’s lack of impact on foreign policy merely a question of powerlessness which has offered immense clarity for so long reached a point of diminishing returns in an emergent multipolar world Few figures are more emblematic of this dilemma than Noam Chomsky whose insistence that the war be understood first and foremost as US blowback has provoked intense denunciation on the Ukrainian left Abstractly contextualizing regional Russian imperialism within global American imperialism is cold comfort for the Ukrainians being bombed can we on the left afford to do without such abstraction It’s true that no one on the left is being asked to serve as deputy national security adviser Many of the war’s strongest advocates in government and in the media have their eyes on war with China as do some of its nominal Republican opponents in Congress (The Pentagon has proposed a 10 percent cut to Green Beret troops in favor of “large conventional ground forces needed in a potential fight in Asia.”) And Republicans don’t want to stop there: during the recent debates everyone onstage enthusiastically supported bombing Mexico — a position that sounds like a joke until one realizes that the journey from joke to policy is a short one Perhaps Republicans will keep losing elections And then there are the places and people the US doesn’t care about One of the catastrophic effects of the war in Ukraine is its contribution to destabilization and right-wing entrenchment across the former Soviet Union Putin-vassal Aleksandr Lukashenko continues to viciously suppress even the mildest expressions of dissent The NATO- and EU-member Baltic states have recommitted with gusto to forcing their sizable Russian minorities to choose between cultural assimilation and expulsion from public life the influx of Russian and Ukrainian refugees has supercharged a cost-of-living crisis that is making the government’s geopolitical balancing act increasingly likely to tip over into chaos Maybe the starkest effect is in Nagorno-Karabakh supported by Turkey and Israel and helped along by complete inaction on the part of Russian peacekeepers has forced the exodus of practically the entire local Armenian population oil-rich Azerbaijan has hardly received a slap on the wrist Zelensky himself has come out in support of Azerbaijani dictator Aliyev affirming the two countries’ shared commitment to “sovereignty and [the] territorial integrity of states.” for the country’s multiethnic social fabric: contrary to Putin’s hopes and expectations Russian-speaking Ukrainians have overwhelmingly rallied to their country’s defense accelerated the expunging of Russian and Surzhyk language from the Ukrainian public sphere The invasion has also provided carte blanche for the banning of communist and socialist parties and the increased repression of organizers and dissidents The future of Ukraine is located in an unsettled zone On the table are a neoliberal reconstruction of the Brussels or shock therapy varieties a more promising crisis-born tradition of social self-organization and a fragile culture of ethnolinguistic pluralism the Ukrainian left — underground and otherwise — is as divided in its postwar imaginary as its counterparts abroad.) Russia’s own fate may be even more dire A true collapse of the Russian state seems unthinkable is a near future of isolation and retrenchment but one can find a more obvious example in the puppet states of Donetsk and Luhansk As the sociologist Jeremy Morris has noted these “people’s republics” resemble nothing so much as miniature evacuated of any trace of civil society by external warfare and internal repression without even the pretense of rule of law that made life in Moscow or Saint Petersburg more akin to Western Europe than not Putin’s largely successful sanctions-proofing of the economy — expropriating fleeing Western businesses and handing off their assets to longtime cronies and rappers (Busta Rhymes collaborator Timati recently became the public face of Stars Coffee the former Russian franchise of Starbucks) and betting the house on dramatically increased military spending — indicates that Russia can maintain its siege posture for the foreseeable future even after its troops leave the Ukrainian battlefields Such detail is superfluous in the American essentialist style Applebaum reveals the recklessness of her position: “Given the growing popularity of the word restraint we must consider how that concept might not only prolong the war but lead to a nuclear catastrophe.” This is obscene The very real risk of nuclear escalation — and the total war that civilizational conflict demands — cannot be reduced to contorted paradoxes Putin indicated that he sees the nuclear question differently we may revoke ratification,” he said of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty There’s no reason to think that restraint has led him to this reevaluation Putin’s option has a clear precedent: Russia could “mirror the stand taken by the US,” which signed the treaty but never ratified it Applebaum might call this “whataboutism,” a term invoked to deflect substantive and trollish assessments in equal measure That the US has never ratified the treaty is an outrage — and exactly the kind of issue where the left can intervene we can look back to the major efforts of the past (like the 1980s antinuclear movement which transcended borders and existing political coalitions) and like the letter from the Congressional Progressive Caucus As Stephen Wertheim wrote recently in the Guardian in the first few months of the war “officials spoke of dealing Russia a ‘strategic failure’ rather than a total territorial defeat and envisioned the conflict ending in a negotiated settlement official rhetoric has escalated and domestic support has eroded.” Despite the left’s relative powerlessness insistence on geopolitical restraint and diplomacy seems like a bare minimum The hope for an end to the horrific violence for the defeat of authoritarians around the world — these aspirations should not be in contradiction Whether they are or not is the ultimate uncertainty The recent delegation led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Brazil, Chile, and Colombia — an encouraging sign of life and engagement—was conceived in response to the absence of left solidarity between North and South Americans. An internationalist revival along these lines is exciting, and sorely needed, but the road ahead is long. ↩ Cultural considerations wax as political hopes wane The hype cycle replaces aesthetic judgment with something closer to speculative investment in securities We have an elite with a “study abroad” worldview Or a sign of Biden’s deeper estrangement from the world he has made Territory: Germany, Netherlands, Singapore, USA What's New in Payments provides banks, card issuers, merchants, payment service providers and technology suppliers with in-depth information on the emerging technologies revolutionizing the global payments market. Find out more Get NFCW's top headlines by email every Wednesday Sign up or find out more Decathlon is rolling out mobile self-checkout across its store network in Germany The France-based retailer is already live with the MishiPay mobile self-checkout solution in Decathlon Deutschland stores in Berlin with more locations being added every week and we have found that they are really enjoying using the MishiPay app and eliminating the need to wait at a checkout.” – Decathlon Deutschland leader of store digitalization Contact us: info@rli.uk.com Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker The Sacred Heart Seminary recently hosted two contingents from French and German schools as part of the ongoing multilateral partnership between the Sacred Heart Seminary conducted under the aegis of the Lifelong Learning Programme Comenius programme The project entailed many activities related to the Gozitan and Maltese cultural and gastronomic heritage as well as a theatre activity entitled Food for Thought Participants were able to prepare local food participate in a walk along the southern cliffs of Gozo with several stops where edible plants and fruit were evident and a visit to Xwejni salt pans A drama project related to healthy eating was also put up please register for free or log in to your account.