Robert Vinet
Traveller
An incredible achievement.
The 37-year-old open water marathon swimmer from Colorado completed the record-breaking feat at around 6.30am Tuesday morning, more than 54 hours after she set off from the British port of Dover.
It took her more than two days to swim the 130 miles across the busy English Channel four times.
Congratulations!
More videos » AFP, NBC, Euronews
More than 107 million passengers flew through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport last year, making it the busiest passenger airport in the world for the 21st year in a row.Atlanta also saw a 3.3% increase in passenger traffic, according to Airports Council International’s world traffic report, which was released on September 16.Globally, passenger traffic increased to 8.8 billion last year, a 6.4% increase, while air cargo shipments increased by 3.4%.
Sept 16
» Oil prices surge nearly 20% after attack on Saudi facilities – Reuters
» Oil prices trading at their highest levels since May – CNN
Sept 15
» Oil price spikes expected after drone attacks on Saudi facilities – Axios
Sept 14
The production shutdown amounts to a loss of about 5.7 million barrels a day, the kingdom’s national oil company said, roughly 5% of the world’s daily production of crude oil.
Officials said they hoped to restore production to its regular level of 9.8 million barrels a day by Monday. Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said lost production would be offset through supplies of oil already on hand.
» Read more from Summer Said, Jared Malsin, and Jessica Donati at the Wall Street Journal…
» US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo blamed Iran for attacks on a massive Saudi Aramco oil facility
Updated Sept 15
Video from the BBC »
Sept 13
With information from VOA: Thousands of people crowded shopping centers around Hong Kong, Thursday, September 12, for late-night flash mob-like displays of peaceful protest, belting out “Glory to Hong Kong”, a new protest song, in an act of resistance and support for the protestors in their months-long fight for democratic freedoms in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory.
The protesters have adopted the song, penned anonymously, as their anthem. The lyrics reflect protesters’ vow not to surrender despite a government concession to axe a proposed extradition law that sparked the summer of unrest.
“They are trapped. They are alone. They are desperate to come home,” David Pressman, the siblings’ New York-based attorney, told USA TODAY. “They are literally breaking down.”
The Lius are subject to a so-called “exit ban,” and they’re not they only ones.
Another American citizen, Huang Wan, says Chinese officials are using a “fake” legal case to prevent her from returning to the United States. An Australian resident, Yuan Xiaoliang, has been barred from leaving China for more than eight months, and her husband, an Australian citizen, has been arrested on suspicion of spying, according to Australia’s foreign minister.
The State Department has warned Americans about China’s growing use of exit bans – stating in a Jan. 3 travel advisory that Chinese authorities have sometimes used exit bans to keep Americans in China for years.
“China uses exit bans coercively,” the State Department cautioned, “to compel U.S. citizens to participate in Chinese government investigations, to lure individuals back to China from abroad, and to aid Chinese authorities in resolving civil disputes in favor of Chinese parties.”
» Read more about China’s ban in an article by Deirdre Shesgreen on USA TODAY…
‘A wart-covered picture of America by a joyless man,” wrote the photographer and critic Minor White. “A sad poem by a very sick person,” snorted Popular Photography.
The object of their scorn was The Americans, a collection of images of American life by the photographer Robert Frank, who died last week, aged 94.
It is difficult today to recognise how revolutionary was Frank’s work when it was first published 60 years ago. His style, his mode of observation, his subject matter have all become so ingrained in contemporary photography that one can gauge their impact only by the derision that rained down upon him from mainstream critics.
» Robert Frank, a true American revolutionary » Kenan Malik, The Guardian
If Robert Frank’s legacy rests mainly on The Americans, it is worth remembering how restless his creative imagination was, from the freeform anarchy of films like Pull My Daisy, an unruly evocation of the Beat aesthetic featuring Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, to the infamous Cocksucker Blues, his verite and decidedly downbeat take on life on the road with the Rolling Stones at their most glamorously debauched.
Frank’s singular vision did not sit well with Mick Jagger, who set out to suppress the film. “They sent lawyers, they sent planes, they sent the sheriff,” he told me, laughing, “It was out of proportion, like everything they did. It was comical really. I fled to Nova Scotia. I just wanted to be left alone.” In his absence, the Stones won a prohibitive court order that banned its screening unless Frank himself was present. Its infamy grew accordingly.
» Remembering Robert Frank, 1924-2019 » Jim Goldberg, Martin Parr, Thomas Hoepker, Matt Stuart » Hannah Abel-Hirsch and Marigold Warner, British Journal of Photography
» Robert Frank’s Legacy: Nine Photographers Reflect » Eli Reed, Justine Kurland, Alec Soth, Eugene Richards, Ruddy Roye, Nina Berman, Joseph Rodriguez, Elinor Carucci, Jim Goldberg » NY Times
» Robert Frank’s groundbreaking works » Deutsche Welle
» Robert Frank, 1924-2019: He Saw America Without Illusions » Mary Panzer, Wall Street Journal
Robert Frank was 94.
It was the perfect practical weapon, I could easily feel the surface of the unit to orient the flash forward in my hand, and there was a manual trigger button that my index finger naturally lined up with.
I would explain in advance to my date that if I squeezed her arm really hard, she should close her eyes until she saw the flash. (You could see the flash through closed eyelids.) But I also realized that she might not get the message in time, so I planned to immediately pull her to safety.
The idea was to incapacitate any aggressor(s) without physically harming them and, at the same time, not allowing them to get close enough to be a real threat. All I had to do was manually point my hand in the general direction of the (maybe) bad guy(s) and squeeze the button while remembering to close my eyes for half a second. No one being hit with an unexpected flash of this magnitude and having night adjusted vision was going to be able to see anything for at least thirty seconds. By then we were back in the bar or in the car and gone.
I only used it once on two guys that were approaching from near my car and calling out, “Hey dude, got a light?”
» Read more of this article by James Speed Hensinger at PetaPixel…
The first rule of self defence is to avoid the confrontation.
But if you must, if you have no other choice, this would be better and safer, in most circumstance. Plus it’s less lethal than firearm. The object should be to stop an attack. Not to kill anyone. It would be legal too, in most, if not every country in the world.
World Central Kitchen, which provides meals in areas hit by natural disasters, has been distributing food in the Carolinas, Florida and the Bahamas since Hurricane Dorian hit early last week. It announced its 100,000-meal landmark in a tweet on Monday evening with a photo of Andrés, who founded the organization in response to the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti.
The organization’s relief efforts are currently focused on the Bahamas, where the death toll from the hurricane currently stands at 50 and continues to rise. Dorian is the most powerful hurricane on record to hit that country.
“We are cooking for the people, and plan on ramping that up even more and more,” said Zomi Frankcom, the nonprofit’s relief administration manager, in a video she posted from the Grand Bahama International Airport in Freeport on Tuesday. Behind her, the airport appeared in bad shape — hangars were “ripped open like sardine cans,” as she put it. There were no other people in sight.
© 2019 Robert Vinet
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