In a shelter on Long Island, Nico has been forced to make a decision much too traumatic for any 14-year-old: return to Guatemala and risk death, or stay in the U.S. to pursue relief and potentially never see his parents again.
After crossing the border a few months ago he was separated from his father, who was then deported in mid-July. Nico, whose name has been changed because he is underage, is now left to make an impossible choice without any parental guidance.
When Alexander Holtzman, an attorney at the Safe Passage Project, talks to his client about his future, the 14-year-old looks at the ground while tears well in his eyes. After discovering his father had been deported, Nico drew stick figures of his parents and himself standing under rain clouds on opposite sides of the page, Holtzman said.
“I think the decision was hard for him to make,” said Holtzman. “He’s a 14-year-old kid trying to make a very adult decision about what his future will be … and trying to navigate a complex legal system that doesn’t have his or his father’s best interest at heart.”
Like Nico, most of the 559 children who are still separated from their parents ― the majority of whom have been deported ―will also be forced into this decision. They will need to choose between seeking safety in the U.S. or reuniting with their mother and fathers back home in potentially life-threatening situations.
Though many parents say Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers coerced them into signing deportation forms, the government has no plans to allow them back into America to seek due process. Lawyers and advocates are now scrambling to locate deported parents in Central America to ask if they want their children to stay in the U.S. or return home.
But because of inadequate government contact information, these parents have been extremely difficult to find. And so many children who expected to seek relief alongside their families will have to make a colossal decision about their future by themselves.
…While older kids might recognize the danger of returning home, younger ones often don’t fully understand or know the horrific details of why they fled. Lawyers say small children are so traumatized from the being forcibly separated from their mothers and fathers that all they can do is cry and ask to see their families again. “Maybe a teenager can tell you what happened [back home] and form an asylum claim,” said Amalie Silverstein, an immigration attorney at Catholic Charities. “[But] kids this small cannot.”
FBI agents in California and Washington, D.C., have investigated a series of cyberattacks over the past year that targeted a Democratic opponent of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). Rohrabacher is a 15-term incumbent who is widely seen as the most pro-Russia and pro-Putin member of Congress and is a staunch supporter of President Trump.
…The hacks on Keirstead began in August 2017 with a spear-phishing attempt — a fake email intended to deceive the recipient into typing in his or her password or other confidential information — sent to Keirstead’s work email address. The phishing attempt was successful — Keirstead thought it was a legitimate Microsoft Office message and entered his password before quickly realizing the message was fake and having his company take measures to secure their email system.
…In December, the cyberattacks on Keirstead took a different form: a sophisticated and sustained effort to hack into the campaign’s website and hosting service.Campaign officials detected repeated attempts to access the campaign’s website, Hansforca.com. Hackers or bots tried different username-password combinations in a rapid-fire sequence over a two-and-a-half-month period to get inside the campaign’s WordPress-hosted website. According to the campaign, there were also more than 130,000 so-called brute force attempts over a month-long period to gain administrator access to the campaign’s server via the cloud-server company that hosted the Keirstead campaign’s website.
…He [Quinn-Quesada, Keirstead’s campaign manager,] says the accounts he’s heard from fellow political operatives about cyberattacks and other suspicious online activity grow more common by the day. “The targets aren’t just high-profile statewide candidates or elected officials,” he says. “Individual congressional campaigns are being targeted on a regular basis.”
about 30 percent of Americans were eligible to vote but decided not to, a higher percentage than the portion of the country who voted for either Trump or his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Pew’s data shows that almost half of the nonvoters were nonwhite
two-thirds were under age 50.
More than half of those who didn’t vote earned less than $30,000 a year;
more than half of those who did vote were over age 50.
The single biggest predictor of whether or not people will vote, Burden says, is education level, which has direct and indirect effects on voting. “People are more likely to vote if they have information about the candidates and the process of voting, higher levels of income and education, find themselves living and working in networks of other people who vote,” he says. “Other people who are disadvantaged in those ways are much less likely.”
Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn aren’t in earshot they’ll never know right?
Then about a week into their journey like
Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying
Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst
Legolas:
~*~earlier~*~
Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits
Merry: Frodo what’d he say
Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish
i mean, honestly it’s amazing the Elves had as many languages and dialects as they did, considering Galadriel (for example) is over seven thousand years old.
english would probably have changed less since Chaucer’s time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.
they’ve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max.
frodo’s books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isn’t likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragorn’s foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolas’ father was born.
so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we can’t really tell because there weren’t years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.
plus a lot of Bilbo’s materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didn’t establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isn’t the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.
so Frodo might sound hilariously formal for conversational use (though considering how most Elves use Westron he’s probably safe there) and kind of old-fashioned, but he’s not in any danger of being incomprehensible, because elves live on such a ridiculous timescale.
to over-analyse this awesome and hilarious post even more, legolas’ grandfather
was from linguistically stubborn Doriath and their family is actually from a
somewhat different, higher-status ethnic background than their subjects.
so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his
upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his
Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice
from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really
obscure colloquial Avari dialect when he’s being casual. or both!
considering legolas’ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.
…it’s
also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though
with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didn’t learn as a kid.
which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and they’re just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.
this is elvish dialects and tolkien, okay. there’s a lot of canon material! he actually initially developed the history of middle-earth specifically to ground the linguistic development of the various Elvish languages!
Legolas: Alas, verily would I have dispatched thine enemy posthaste, but y’all’d’ve pitched a feckin’ fit.
Aragorn: *eyelid twitching*
Frodo: *frantically scribbling* Hang on which language are you even speaking right now
Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?
Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?
Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbits’ weird dialect this whole time: That’s what it sounds like to me.
Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.
Sam, a mere working-class country boy: Honestly y’all could be talkin Dwarvish half the time for all I know.
Pippin, entering Gondor and speaking to the castle steward: hey yo my man
Boromir, from beyond the grave: j e s u s
Literally canon
TIL Tumblr can out-language-geek Tolkein and honestly that’s why I love this site so much.
More than 20 former crew members, editors and contestants from the show have told the Associated Press that Trump was repeatedly demeaning and vulgar to women. Bill Pruitt, who said he helped produce the first two seasons of The Apprentice, stoked speculation about the show’s archive when he tweeted on Oct. 8: “I assure you: When it comes to the #trumptapes there are far worse. #justhebeginning.”
Fred Wertheimer, of the Democracy 21 watchdog group, said the committee, as a nonprofit, can’t legally convert any of the funds to personal use… “It’s not a piggybank,” he said.
… But Kerrigan, who is running for Congress from Massachusetts, said it’s “shocking” that Trump’s team is not disclosing more information about how they are spending the record amount they collected for relatively modest celebrations. Trump attended three official balls, for instance, compared to Obama’s 10.“It is alarming that you would potentially have at least $50 million left over and no sense of how it was spent,” he said.
… But the mandatory tax return it filed with the Internal Revenue Service revealed heavy spending on administrative and logistical expenses associated with planning and executing several days’ worth of events for donors and supporters around Mr. Trump’s inaugural ceremonies.
… The 116-page filing indicates that the majority of the funds — more than $57 million — went to four event-planning companies.The company that received the biggest payment — $26 million — was WIS Media Partners of Marina del Rey, Calif. Records show that the firm was created in December 2016, about six weeks before the inauguration, and its founder, according to a person familiar with the firm, was Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a longtime friend of Mrs. Trump’s. Otherwise there is very little information available about the company.
Ms. Winston Wolkoff’s firm also paid the team used by Mark Burnett, the creator of “The Apprentice,” whose involvement in the inaugural festivities was requested by Mr. Trump.
No can do, Burnett says. “Despite reports to the contrary, Mark Burnett does not have the ability nor the right to release footage or other material from The Apprentice,” he said in a statement emailed to USA TODAY.
That’s because MGM Television and Digital Group owns Burnett’s production company, he said in the statement, although he left out that he is president of MGM.
A Pennsylvania museum has solved the mystery of a Renaissance portrait in an investigation that spans hundreds of years, layers of paint and the murdered daughter of an Italian duke.
Among the works featured in the Carnegie Museum’s exhibit Faked, Forgotten, Found is a portrait of Isabella de’Medici, the spirited favorite daughter of Cosimo de’Medici, the first Grand Duke of Florence, whose face hadn’t seen the light of day in almost 200 years.
Isabella Medici’s strong nose, steely stare and high forehead plucked of hair, as was the fashion in 1570, was hidden beneath layers of paint applied by a Victorian artist to render the work more saleable to a 19th century buyer.
The result was a pretty, bland face with rosy cheeks and gently smiling lips that Louise Lippincott, curator of fine arts at the museum, thought was a possible fake.
Before deciding to deaccession the work, Lippincott brought the painting, which was purportedly of Eleanor of Toledo, a famed beauty and the mother of Isabella de’Medici, to the Pittsburgh museum’s conservator Ellen Baxter to confirm her suspicions.
Baxter was immediately intrigued. The woman’s clothing was spot-on, with its high lace collar and richly patterned bodice, but her face was all wrong, ‘like a Victorian cookie tin box lid,’ Baxter told Carnegie Magazine.
After finding the stamp of Francis Needham on the back of the work, Baxter did some research and found that Needham worked in National Portrait Gallery in London in the mid-1800s transferring paintings from wood panels to canvas mounts.
Paintings on canvas usually have large cracks, but the ones on the Eleanor of Toledo portrait were much smaller than would be expected.
Baxter devised a theory that the work had been transferred from a wood panel onto canvas and then repainted so that the woman’s face was more pleasing to the Victorian art-buyer, some 300 years after it had been painted.
Christ men have been Photoshopping women to make us more “pleasing” since for-fucking-ever.
Also, Isabella de’Medici is nice looking, but also has that look in her eye of all Medicis: “I haven’t yet decided whether I’m going to kick your ass, buy you and everything you own, or have sex with you. Perhaps all three.”
It’s interesting the way the repaint has photoshop!Isabella affecting a slightly dreamy, docile gaze into the middle distance; she’s dewy-faced and unthreateningly soft. But in the original, she’s looking you right in the eye. She takes the male gaze and throws it right back at you. That’s a face that says go on, tell me I’d be so pretty if only I had a little repaint, I dare you. I’ll fuck you up.
They also made her hand smaller and I can’t tell if that’s an urn or scepter in her hand but considering it was painted out I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a symbol of power.
Oh, it’s a symbol of power alright. She’s a Medici, daughter of Cosimo I de Medici, First Grand Duke of Tuscany. The Medicis were the most powerful political family in Florence for almost forever. In Florence, the lines between politics, crime, warfare, and the Church were very blurry. They even managed, on four separate occasions, to get one of their own family members elected Pope, usually by very underhanded dealing with the cardinals. They had their fingers in every pie in Italy from 13th through 17th century.
In the case of Isabella, in order to secure an alliance with the Orsini family of Rome, she was married to Paolo Giordano I Orsini when she was 16. Contrary to popular belief, people in Renaissance Europe weren’t all that into child brides, this was just about the politics, so she stayed at her father’s household in Florence until she was of appropriate age. And then she just sort of… never left. Her new husband had zero concept of money, and her dad actually kinda hated him even though he was the one who arranged the marriage in the first place. So Isabella and her 50,000 scudi dowry (at a time when the average Italian earned somewhere between 10 and 40 scudi a year)stayed in Florence. Because she never went to Rome to live with her husband, she enjoyed enormous freedom and power back in Florence. After her mother died, she basically stepped into the role of First Lady of Florence, and was considered one of the keenest political minds in Europe. She ruled what she wanted, bought what she wanted, and fucked who she wanted, with no one really able to tell her no.
She was eventually assassinated by her husband while she was on holiday at one of her family’s country villas, probably because she was fucking her husband’s cousin, Troilo Orsini. Well, she had an “accident” while bathing, and Paolo Orsini said she must have drowned, but the coroner said she was strangled, and several servants swore they saw him do it. He might also have done it on the orders of Isabella’s brother, Francesco Medici, since he was trying to consolidate his power as the next Grand Duke, and by all accounts she was definitely in his way because of her political savvy.
So yeah. She was a boss, and that’s what makes it even more offensive that this Victorian sap tried to make her into this passive, skinny, doe-eyed wimp.
Hearseeno 