Kansas City Comets sign two players and other news – The Blue Testament

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The Kansas City Comets announced two signings Thursday. Nine-year veteran Lucas Rodriguez and first-time-pro Hector Moy Solorio Villalpando both signed two-year deals prior to the Major Arena Soccer League 2019-20 season.

Rodriguez has played all of his indoor seasons with the Comets, missing only one season since Kansas City returned in 2010 when he was playing outdoor in the NASL.

I would love to be able to finish my indoor career at only one club. I think theres a lot of value in that. Im a loyal person, said Rodriguez via press release. Im just excited to continue to play and represent the city at the highest level and do everything we can to put Kansas Citys name out there where it belongs.

Rodriguez routinely scores in double digits for goals, knocking in 13 for the last two seasons and is a key creator for the Comets. The veteran is often the focus of restarts and can play the sixth attacker role as well.

As one of the top 30 players in this league we look for Lucas to continue to be a playmaker, control the midfield and finish his opportunities, said Brian Budzinski, Comets managing partner via press release. Lucas is one of those players that makes others around him better with his vision and technique in tight spaces.

This will be Solorio Villalpandos first season as a pro after playing NCAA DI at Niagara University, with Kaw Valley FC in USL League Two and in the Sporting Kansas City Academy.

While this is his first professional experience, Solorio Villalpando is no stranger to Silverstein Eye Centers Arena. He was a regular at games while he was growing up and cheering the team on from the supporter section.

Going out and competing, I have high expectations for myself. This is a great opportunity to keep playing soccer, to keep playing the sport I love. Im ready to go and compete. I know I can play. Im just excited to just go out and do the best I can every day, every training session, every game, Solorio Villalpando said in the press release.

There had been some worry amongst fans up until recently when the Ownership and management was restructured that the Midwests most successful indoor team may not return. Those fears were laid to rest with that announcement and since then Brian Budzinski and his staff have been busy making sure they were ready for the next few seasons

The Comets have reached three-year agreements to continue playing home games at the Silverstein Eye Centers Arena and to train at the KC Soccer Dome. Additionally, they have a one-year lease for an office in Hy-Vee Arena.

The Comets are conducting open tryouts this weekend at the Kansas City Soccer Dome. On Saturday (2-4 PM) and Sunday (12-2 PM) talent will be evaluated by veteran players and coaches for the potential to play for the Comets. More info can be found here.

The Comets have not yet named a new head coach after it was announced that indoor soccer legend Kim Roentved would not be returning to lead the team. It has been indicated that an announcement naming the new head coach was not be too far off.

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Kansas City Comets sign two players and other news - The Blue Testament

Baertschi, Goldobin tearing up the AHL, leading Canucks’ farm club to record start – The Province

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Canucks fans were downright apoplectic when Sven Baertschi and Nikolay Goldobin hit the waiver wire last month. The two wingers were among the final training camp cuts as Vancouver set its opening-day roster, a decision that angered many in Vancouver who believed the club had enough depth for three dedicated scoring lines.

Baertschi and Goldobin werent happy either.

It was a tough pill to swallow, Baertschi said this weekend after leading the Comets to a 7-1 victory over the Rochester Americans for the Comets fifth consecutive win, and third consecutive rout. But, I knew I was coming to a great place. So, it was something I was looking forward to. For me, it was coming here making a statement that I belong in the NHL. That was my goal. So far, I think it is going well.

It certainly is. While some Canucks fans remain sore about the demotions, there is likely little anger among the Comets fanbase, where Baertschi and Goldobin wasted little time making their case for a quick return to the NHL by leading Utica to an impressive 5-0 record out of the gate. Its the clubs best start in franchise history.

Its clear that the injection of skill up-front has been the secret to Uticas early success. The Comets havent just prevailed in every game theyve played theyve done so decisively, winning each of their last three contests by a margin of four goals or more. Uticas 29 goals for are tops in the league.

Three of Uticas forwards now occupy the top 10 for AHL scoring: as usual, Reid Boucher is up there. The scoring machine leads all AHLers with 10 points, including a mind-boggling 8 goals in just five games. But Goldobin and Baertschi arent far behind, with nine and eight points, respectively, in just four games apiece after missing the season opener.

In the Comets second showing of the season, a 4-3 overtime victory over the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, the pair made all the difference. Goldobin picked up an assist on the clubs second goal yet another tally by Boucher and Baertschi took over in the final minutes of regulation, setting up captain Carter Bancks game-tying tally with under three minutes remaining before assisting on Lukas Jaseks overtime winner.

Three days later, Goldobin and Baertschi contributed four assists to Uticas third straight win in their home opener, and this weekend, they combined for 10 points in consecutive routs as Utica outscored their opponents by 14 goals.

At times, the pair has made AHL defenders look silly. Goldobin, for instance, dropped jaws during a two-on-one in the home opener by deking his defender straight into the goalmouth before feeding The Big Fella, Zack Macewen, for a tap-in. That highlight-reel goal can be seen at 1:50 of the package below.

On Saturday, the wingers connected on Uticas sixth goal of the game, practically walking the puck into the opposition net after a won faceoff. They look pretty unstoppable here.

On Monday, Goldobin was singled out for praise when he was named the CCM/AHL Player of the Week, on the strength of a three-game run that saw the winger put up back-to-back three-assist games, eight points and a plus-7 rating.

Provided this doesnt pave the way for a trade, as both players have certainly upped their value of late, one wonders when the Canucks brass will decide the duo is too good for this league. Injuries are coming, and as spots open up on the big club, Vancouver suddenly finds themselves with plenty of depth to patch over the inevitable holes. Baertschi and Goldobin make up two-thirds of an NHL scoring line, and with pivot Adam Gaudette sitting in the press box, its clear the Canucks have a readymade trio simply lying in wait.

Still, nobody in Utica will mind if its a long wait. Loaded with NHL-calibre players, the Comets suddenly look like the team to beat perhaps because nobody has managed it since Baertschi and Goldobin arrived.

Both natural playmakers, the pair are also making life easy for some of the Canucks other developing prospects, like Kole Lind, who is off to a hot start on Baertschis line. Lind, who managed just 17 points in 51 games in his rookie season, already has 7 points in 5 games to start this year, and while one could chalk some of this up to progress, its clear that the shifty young winger is thriving alongside talented linemates. Thats a good sign for his future.

But enough about the future. Lets live in the moment, where the Comets are hotter than ever and for now, at least, boast one of the deepest forward groups in the league.

Utica returns to the ice Friday, Oct. 25 when they battle the Binghamton Devils for a chance to move to 6-0. Provided Baertschi and Goldobin remain with the club, we like their chances.

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Theater review: A provocative clash of wills in Renegade’s ‘The Meeting’ – Duluth News Tribune

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What if two iconic figures in the civil rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had a chance to sit down together to discuss their differing philosophies, beloved families and uncertain futures?

That is the fascinating premise of Renegade Theaters production of Jeff Stetsons one-act play, The Meeting, directed by Daniel Oyinloye. Thought provoking, intelligent and witty, the performance, while decidedly political, also afforded the actors a chance to open a window into the anguished souls of these two visionaries.

In real life, King and Malcolm X met just once. On March 26, 1964, on Capitol Hill, both were attending a Senate debate on the Civil Rights Act. A photographer snapped a now-tragic picture of the two both later victims of assassination who would never meet again. Set in a Harlem hotel room on Valentines Day 1965, the play opens with a discussion between Malcolm X (Julian Williams) and his bodyguard Rashad (Gabriel Mayfield) as they wait for King (Carl Crawford) to arrive.Rashad gives his boss militant arguments on why he shouldnt be meeting with King at all. Though he is only onstage for a brief time, Mayfield effectively provides both comic moments and the angry face of the charged atmosphere of Malcolm Xs by any means necessary movement.When Dr. King arrives, the two men warily greet each other with Still the dreamer and Still the revolutionary. The battle lines are drawn, contrasting Kings peaceful non-violence, the only road to freedom approach to the movement and the racial powder keg that Malcolm X once wrote could erupt in an uncontrollable explosion.For some of the conversation, Williams is a little more low-key than might be expected as the firebrand activist, yet, on the whole, he carries his own, even with the gravitas and understated power that Crawford brings to his role as Dr. King. Though Malcolm X was actually three years older than Dr. King, Williams looks (and is) considerably younger than Crawford. Williams is believable, however, in showing how tired and conflicted Malcolm X was at this time (just a week before he would be assassinated).While giving a few glimpses into the lofty oratory that King was famous for, here he is more of a listener, who still finds the right moments to challenge his philosophical foil. Crawford captures the essence of a man who is ready to die for his beliefs and tragically did not make it to the mountaintop as he predicted. The two mens solid performances breathe life into what could have been hollow portrayals from a history book and instead reveal their shared pain, passion and fatalism.Over 50 years later, the central tragedy brought to the forefront by this play is that the grand future that both men envisioned of a time when all people would be equal has not come to pass.Kings line echoing through the theater as the lights dimmed left the audience with the evenings central message. Just imagine what we could have accomplished if we joined hands in the same direction.If You GoWhat: The Meeting one-act play and post-show discussion (Act II)Where: Zeitgeist TeatroWhen: Oct. 18-20 and 24-26. Evenings at 7:30 and matinee (Oct. 20) at 2 p.m.Tickets: $20 for adults, $16 for students and seniors at 218-336-1412 or zeitgeistarts.com

Sheryl Jensen is a former teacher, magazine editor and director. She reviews theater for the News Tribune.

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Theater review: A provocative clash of wills in Renegade's 'The Meeting' - Duluth News Tribune

Daryl Morey, Hong Kong, and the Limits of Sports Activism – The UCSD Guardian Online

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It began as these things often do on Twitter. Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey tweeted a picture Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong on Oct. 4. What started as a pro-democracy tweet by an executive most NBA fans couldnt pick out of a lineup quickly turned into a firestorm at the intersection of sports and politics. In doing so, the fans have provided the current generation of superstars a battleground for protest in which theres real cash at stake and the ramifications will affect all future political speech coming from the sports world.

Activism is nothing new in sports, but the current generation of superstars have avenues to express themselves that were inaccessible to those before them. But that trend has been coupled with a rapid monetization of players public personas. There is no better example of this than LeBron Jamess recent attempt to trademark Taco Tuesday. Combined with the NBAs rise globally, it was only a matter of time before politics and finance came into conflict.

Which brings us back, of course, to Daryl Morey. Within days, the Rockets joined Winnie the Pooh and Tiananmen Square among the casualties of the Great Firewall of China; China Central Television and Tencent Holdings Limited stopped airing Rockets games, and the Chinese government asked the NBA to fire Morey. When the league refused, every Chinese sponsor terminated their deals, and the TV ban extended to all games. While that ban has now ended, the Rockets remain off the air.

As for the NBA ecosystem, the responses have been mixed. Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr and star player Stephen Curry gave noncommittal statements, despite being on the forefront of the leagues political zeitgeist. Rockets star James Harden even apologized for Moreys comments. But the most inexplicable comments came from the greatest current NBA player, James, who criticized Morey as uneducated on the issue and for being selfish by risking league interests.

It might be too far to call players hypocritical, as some have, for being vehemently anti-Trump James famously called the president U bum in a 2017 tweet and yet remaining silent about China. After all, one can sense players discomfort when asked about a foreign protest movement theyre likely uninformed about. But it delegitimizes future NBA activism most of it being positive if players submit to such a clear attack on the league.

As for James, Fox Newss Laura Ingraham was wrong to say he should just shut up and dribble last February. But that wouldve been preferable to Jamess comments, who condemned Morey, while those in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and across China face draconian human rights violations daily speak louder than LeBron ever could.

Its futile to ask billion-dollar corporations to worry about anything other than their bottom lines, even the NBA. But the players face a responsibility today that they will often face again, and appeasement can only defer it. Maybe its unfair to make this comparison, but since James was willing to monetize shut up and dribble into a documentary of that name about the history of sports activism, its one hes welcomed. Muhammad Ali gave up the prime of his career to protest the draft. Colin Kaepernick lost his career protesting police brutality. Tommie Smith and John Carlos were expelled from the 1968 Olympics for protesting racial injustice. To James, it seems Space Jam 2 was more important. But to the rest of the league, we can only ask: What are you willing to lose?

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Joker Is a Thinly Veiled (and Thin) Take on ’80s NYC – Hyperallergic

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Joaquin Phoenix in Joker (all images courtesy Warner Bros.)

The vicious circle of duty-bound readers and conversation-chasing editors which has attended the avalanche-like rollout of Todd Phillipss Joker is symptomatic of a culture starved for zeitgeist cinema. The thinkpiece-industrial complex has already descended on this skimpy, mostly just fine movie and picked its bones clean; only for a public so surfeited with superheroes that Christopher Nolan seems like the vanguard of thematic and aesthetic ambition would Joker be received as a challenging, appointment-viewing surfacing of toxic white male misery. I cant believe we signed over a whole season of The Discourse to a filmmaker who still thinks theres something inherently hilarious about little people.

Joker is an origin myth, a grim and pseudo-religious And that little boy grew up to be story like Batman Begins, showing how one of lifes shat-upon becomes a supervillain and a galvanizing figure for a mass movement of antisocial violence. It wants to be and the industry, critics, and fans, in ways alternately breathless and begrudging, have taken it seriously as a reckoning with the extremes of abjection, with the psychic trauma and social rejection that could lead someone to a nihilistic howl of laughter. But its far too derivative, far too wedded to its juvenile mythology, and finally far too tentative to deserve discussion on such terms.

That abjection at least takes an ideal form in Joaquin Phoenix as sad clown Arthur Fleck. Arthur who, like John Wayne Gacy, paints his mouth with sharp north-pointing corners has a medical condition that causes him to break out into uncontrollable laughter when upset. Phoenix lost an unhealthy amount of weight for the role; his ribs all but poke through a loose-skinned torso, which he holds at unnatural angles so that he seems permanently contorted, a full-body rictus. He looks even more down and out than the films circa-1981 Gotham City, where black garbage bags pile up on the sidewalk as a sanitation strike drags on.

Arthur lives with his invalid mother (Frances Conroy), who writes plaintive and unanswered letters to her onetime employer, the condescending kajillionaire Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen); his fantasy father figure is late-night talk show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro, superb as a smugly anodyne monoculture avatar). Arthurs obsession with Murray and the transformative promise of fame shouts out to De Niros own stanning of Jerry Lewis in The King of Comedy, while his diary-of-a-madman journaling (in a childish scrawl: I just hope my death makes more cents than my life) and subsequent vigilantism echo De Niro in Taxi Driver. In these Martin Scorsese films, the pathology of De Niros characters merged with the pathology of New York City, and the world. Joker tries to merge the pathology of Phoenix with the pathology of the earlier films.

Phillips began his career by making a scuzzy G.G. Allin documentary and founding the New York Underground Film Festival before graduating to frat pack comedies. Here he gestures to seriousness with a constant dirgeful cello score by Hildur Gunadttir, but emits major dirtbag vibes when imagining the depravity of Jokers milieu. He utilizes un-PC standup routines at the nightclubs Arthur visits, and invokes frequent trolling music cues (Send in the Clowns for its literalness, Frank Sinatras Thats Life for the triumphant tone, Rock and Roll Part 2 by imprisoned child molester Gary Glitter), which complement the fart-trombone irony of the clown prince of crime himself.

This is all pretty weak tea, but Joker largely entertains moment-to-moment, thanks to a star who captures the characters mesmerizing pulp energy. With his stumbling-in-a-fog voice, Phoenix seems to speak, like he moves, through enormous, invisible resistance. Its disturbing when he catches a gust of verbal eloquence or physical momentum. (Hes also a great physical comedian who can bring himself up short in a snap.) In a cheap suit and clown makeup, dancing erratically down one of the Bronxs step streets, he seems borne along on a swift current of destructive impulses.

Those Bronx step stairs are in Highbridge, just west of Grand Concourse, the boulevard of dreams modeled after the Champs-lyse and the pride of an area that was a prosperous Jewish and Italian suburb in the first half of the 20th century, before every white family save apparently the Flecks fled the citys death spiral. The film makes heavy use of prewar apartment buildings way uptown, abandoned Brooklyn subway stations with their cracked and stained mosaic tile, and rundown Deco exteriors in Newark and Jersey City. Despite the Se7en-esque color grading, Phillilps has a feel for architecture which suggests aspiration, decrepitude, and millions of hidden lives, and harmonizes with Arthurs grand delusions.

But there are elements of the character that are beyond even Phoenixs abilities to sell. During Arthurs climactic appearance on Murray Franklins couch, which is meant to synchronize his torment with the roiling anger of a city left to rot by contemptuous elites, Phoenix resorts to trying on different swishy voices in an effort to inject some organic disturbance into his summing up of the movies thesis. Pre-release, the fear was that Jokers portrait of a pathetic, lonely man who finds his voice in violence might goad copycat lashings-out. In fact, the film channels Arthurs rage toward a series of One-Percenters, like Wayne and Franklin, who are personally mean to him. In Arthurs relationship with his mother if not with his neighbor crush, an incredibly perfunctory role for Zazie Beetz Joker at least attempts to acknowledge that a beta male like Arthur might transfer his self-hatred onto women. At any rate, its closer to being authentically fucked up about gender than it is about race, with which it barely engages.

Gotham is a mirror for received notions about urban America, and Joker, with its graffiti and news reports about super rats overrunning the sidewalks, evokes the lurid high-water mark of the white flight era, when tall tales of wanton lawlessness rebranded New York as Fear City for skittish out-of-towners. Implicit in most coverage of crime in New York in the 70s and 80s was the idea that the urban population was a problem that had to be controlled. Arthurs first kill comes in response to subway harassment, in an obvious echo of Bernard Goetz opening fire on four young black would-be muggers on a 2 train in 1984. Here, though, the menace comes in the form of three slick-haired banker douchebros. Arthur, as an anonymous clown-painted avenger, becomes a figure of notoriety. His rampage, like Goetzs, is splashed across the covers of Gotham tabloids, which are as alarmist and crime-obsessed as New Yorks. He then becomes the totem of a clown-masked Occupy-esque protest movement.

The idea that the random murder of upper-middle-class white men on public transit in 1980s NYC would galvanize a populist movement against white elites is ahistorical and flatly ludicrous. I dont want or need a serious consideration of white grievance from a movie about the clown who fights Batman, but given the position Joker has assumed in our national conversation, its disingenuous and pandering for Phillips to root through a grab bag of resentments and pick out only the least problematic, like hes trying to find the last candy in the bag that isnt licorice. The rebellion Joker inspires appears, behind the clown masks, to skew white and male. This is flammable material, but late in Joker, it takes the form of a subway car packed with rowdy dudes in near-identical pop culture costumes, headed downtown to commit wanton property damage. All I could think was that the entire rusting machinery of mainstream American cinema was churning and churning to get us invested in a movie about SantaCon.

Joker is in theaters now.

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Joker Is a Thinly Veiled (and Thin) Take on '80s NYC - Hyperallergic

Size Matters: A Conversation on Storefront for Art and Architecture’s History with Founder Kyong Park – Archinect

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Arlene Schloss reading to a crowd as a part of Performance A-Z, 1982. Image courtesy Storefront for Art and Architecture.

For art and architectural venues, growth is a commonly accepted measure of success. As the story usually goes, an upstart museum or gallery begins life small and then, with enough reputation and investment capital, gets a larger and larger space; with expansion and higher ticket sales comes the ability to support ever-larger shows that reach a broader public. But for New York CitysStorefront for Art and Architecture, however, a small, irregularly-shaped 868-square-foot space provides a physical constraint that has long been a key part of its ability to showcase relevant, vital exhibitions.

In an extended interview with Kyong Park, Storefront founder and director between 1982 and 1998, we take a look at the origins of The Storefront for Art and Architecture.

Located just north of Manhattans Little Italy and Chinatown neighborhoods, Storefront is a small, wedge-shaped exhibition space located across the street from a wedge-shaped park. Since its beginnings, it has always been a storefront with street frontage at ground level. With this key distinction embedded in the name itself, Storefronts mission has been kept consistent and has allowed it to represent an international and local community with a curatorial reach much larger the gallerys modest size. Like retail storefronts in the e-commerce age, which serve both to display products and physically represent the massive behind-the-scenes machinations that power global consumption patterns, Storefront is better seen as a physical manifestation of a much larger dispersed community of architects and artists both in New York and the world more generally. For a scene with no real local place to convene outside of school events and public lectures, Storefront represents an independent living room for the community to come and hang out in real life, in one place. Today when discourse increasingly is carried out online and via decentralized platforms, the existence of such a dedicated exhibition space is even more crucial for concentrated acts of community intervention and response.

The history of Storefront stretches back almost 40 years to 1982, when it was founded by Kyong Park at 51 Prince Street, across the street from where the McNally Jackson bookstore is today. Organized with artists Arlene Schloss and R. L. Seltman, its introduction to the community included 26 consecutive evening performances every day from local artists as part of a show called Performance A-Z. Artist Shirin Neshat joined in 1983 as co-director, contributing to many exhibitions throughout the next ten years (catch her massive exhibition at the Broad in Los Angeles, I Will Greet the Sun Again from October 2019 to February 2020.)

The early years in the 1980s saw many solo exhibitions of then-rising, now-famous architects and artists such as Neil Denari, James Wines SITE, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Lebbeus Woods, and Dan Graham. But the exhibits that really gave Storefront its identity were the community-focused exhibitions which addressed problems currently in the zeitgeist, such as anexpos on homelessness, ashow on queer space, apublic housing exhibitthat doubled as a movement to save Adam Purples Garden of Eden on the Lower East Side from demolition.

These early efforts also showcased proposals of Eric Owen Moss, Alison Smithson, Morphosis, Zvi Hecker, Lebbeus Woods, Neil Denari, and Diller + Scofidio. This focus carries through the more recent era. In the wake of Occupy Wall Street, for example, Storefront organized a series of events, including a public call for ideas to meet and discuss how to move forward following the Great Recession of 2008 and the resulting global realization that capitalism is inherently unable to create a better world.

Today theyre often hosting panel discussions, tours, book launches, talks, original exhibitions, events, and more. To see a full schedule of upcoming events, make sure to check theirwebsitefor more information. Since Park's tenure, Storefront has been led by a number of leading architectural curators and thinkers, namely Sarah Herda, Joseph Grima, and most recently Eva Franch i Gilabert. Jos Esparza Chong Cuyis the current direct of Storefront, sinceEva Franch left to lead the AA in 2018.

I first visited Storefront for Art and Architecture for the first time in 2014. At the time, Marc Fornes / THEVERYMANY and Jana Winderen had an installation in the gallery called Situation Room. It was a perfect introduction to what I feel Storefront promotes spatially, because from the outside you could see pink Fornes metaballs poking out of the open facade panels and upon entering it became an experiential exploration of the neon pink form and ambient soundscapes surrounding you. As sensually striking as it was, it lacked the political and contextual discourse that some of the early shows had such as Homelessness at Home in 1985 or Adams House in Paradise in 1984. Despite this, it did demonstrate to me the power of an exhibition space that refuses to be a typical blank white box- something thats been consistent at Storefront even before the current home was renovated by Steven Holl and Vito Acconci in 1993. I wondered if being a foil to the ubiquitous empty white space was how it was conceived from the beginning, and if you could talk about the origins of Storefront and the types of shows you wanted to put on that you felt were absent from the art and architecture discourse at the time.

Well, you know, it was 1982, almost 40 years ago. The world changes a lot in half a century. Performance A-Z was actually organized by my partner, Robert L. Seltman, an artist who I started Storefront with. It was really he who actually conceived of it and organized the performances. I knew some other people in the show myself, but it was his brainchild.

The reason why I want to mention that it was a different time is because I think that may have just as much to do with the making of Storefront as anything that I have done.

New York at that time was really coming out of rock bottom. Almost all American cities underwent economic decline and depopulation. New York was not immune to it. It almost went bankrupt in 1974. Really nobody wanted to be there unless they had to. Its a bit of an exaggeration, but It was also a place where people would escape to from other places, drawing eccentric people that didn't really fit anywhere in the country.

I say country because at that time New York was really national. It didn't draw many people from outside of the US as it does now. It was a reversal of Kurt Russells Escape From New York, where instead of escaping from a maximum security prison, people who needed a fresh start or to leave their home town would move to New York. It was a kind of collection of chaos and anarchy. There were all these vacant storefronts on the lower part of Manhattan that were comparable to loft spaces today because they were large spaces that artists could turn into a studio.

The first Storefront opened at 51 Prince Street. It was about 350 square feet. I paid 250 dollars a month for it back then and by the early to mid-2000s, a while after we had moved to the current spot on Kenmare, it was already up to five or six thousand dollars a month being rented to a Tibetan boutique store. A lot of artists moved into these spaces, obviously living there illegally, and some of them started turning them into shops and self-run galleries here and there; in Little Italy there were several of them.

There was a sense of community there, and so, with some friends like Robert L. Seltman and Arlene Schloss, we decided to introduce the gallery to the city through a series of 26 performances by different artists. Certainly, at that time, neither myself nor the people in this community paid any mind to becoming wealthy and famous as many do today. It was more about making art, being part of our community, having a place to meet. It was a social-cultural space as much as, you know, an aesthetic-cultural space.

After surviving for two years, we became a legitimate 501(c)(3) and then started getting money from New York State Council of the Arts. Soon, people beyond our local area south of 14th Street started to pay attention and it became more serious: with a broader audience, Storefront became more legitimate and started to build a more solid, successful programming history.

It started very naturally from the socioeconomic conditions of New York City at the time and more than anything else I must say that I had no idea about what I would do when I came to New York at the end of the summer of 79. I had no intention to open a gallery. It wasn't something that I had in mind explicitly to do, so I credit the city itself, the community, and the culture as the true founders of Storefront.

What was the architecture scene like this around the time? Rem Koolhaass Delirious New York came out in 1977, describing New York in the '70s as an anarchic, unscripted place without any prescriptive theory. This might have been true to a visitor, but the reality is that people had been there for a long time producing culture, imagining futures, writing about the city, etc.

Well, I didn't really hang out with architects; I hung around with artists. At the beginning of Storefront, architecture in New York was very provincial. Not even national-provincial, just New York City, by itself.

At the time, people basically made theoretical stuff: paper architecture, drawing architecture, imaginary architecture, mainly headed by the New York Five: John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, and Richard Meier. They ran the show and some of them had institutions- Hejduk led Cooper Union, Eisenman at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, and so on. Their work was highly recognized throughout the country and probably beyond, but its prevalence showed that there was not a lot of work for young people, so for those like me, there was more of a drift toward art.

I wanted to hear about your conception of the first shows like the Gowanus Canal and Adams House in Paradise. I was wondering how the early curation direction was conceived and if it was a part of any 10-20 year plan for Storefront.

I have always had a very political radical interest. The shows you mentioned were projects that I initiated from Storefront. I have to give a great deal of credit to Glenn Weiss for Adam's House in Paradise. He was spearheading that project as well as Homeless at Home. Also, he was quite involved in that as well and other projects like DMZ, Project Atlas, Before Whitney, and After Tilted Arc. For these, we set up the concept and then invited people to propose an alternative critical discourse about re-examining status quos or current conditions. We wanted to attack the mainstream.

The solo exhibitions by artists and architects were to promote the cross-disciplinary relationship between art and architecture. We constructed a community where artists found interest in architecture and architects found interested in art. This has always been a reflection of myself, actually. I think that kind of crossover really was the key ingredient to pulling together a community that was unique and very committed.

[Eventually], The solo exhibitions switched from artists to architects, with almost half of them not from New York, or the United States, really. I think that Storefront had an interesting dialogue between something small and something large. We were quite small but we had large ambitions. We recognized that we didn't have to be big in order to do big thingsI remember some newspaper articles saying "Small Storefront Puts Museums to Shame" or something like thatWe challenged that notion of scale, almost ridiculing some of the big institutions for being very small-minded. I like this antagonistic role that I play.

Thats interesting to see that a stance on growth was always integral to how you saw Storefront. As you know, many institutions are built on a model of expansion where you acquire more work, see an increase in foot traffic and subsequently in ticket sales, which in turn then allows larger exhibitions, and so on. Infinite growth.

Thats the modern/American culture. The growth-forever model was criticized in the 70s by the Club of Rome reports which suggested in its place a more sustainable economic model rather than an annual growth in GDP. That idea of growth you speak of is a very modern, American belief where you build, grow, buy assets, and become a multinational conglomerate, continuing to buy more subsidiary companies and so on.

Did you pay attention to the Oslo Architecture Triennale this year?

No, I dont follow architecture very much.

The curation was about degrowth, promoting alternate models that push back against the idea that the continuous growth intrinsic to capitalism is a good thing, and that eternal growth is natural. The curators said the same thing, that GDP is a really poor measure of progress because it only measures a few myopic statistics.

[GDP is] a political tool just as much as an economic indicator. There are a lot of challenges regarding the legitimacy/accuracy of GDP as a statistical measurement, just as much as there are around SAT or the No Child Left Behind policies. Its not surprising to hear that about the Oslo Triennale. Architects have been enjoying one of the greatest building booms in the history of human civilization, nobodys really complaining about it. That may be coming to an end sooner than we think because we simply cant make billionaires anymore. Its not sustainable.

Storefronts existence all this time, to me, represents a challenge to the dogma around growth. It has always been small and has successfully stayed small; I wanted to hear how this was maintained. Did you havea plan for expansion once it moved?

No. I know we didn't have any plans except for the annual goals to go out and to get funding for the next year. During my time, I kept it small. Financially, its now much more substantial than it was during my time. Since I left, it became much more organized with a lot more funding. I dont know what the annual budget now is, but mine was, at its largest, maybe $250,000 a year. There was really no ambition to make it into a museum of any type or to make it larger. I felt that we were doing well enough and within our means. Maybe they could expand today but things are much more expensive now.

Just down the street is the New Museum, which moved to its SANAA building in the mid-2000s and is now slated to have an addition designed by OMA New York. For a while now, it has been oriented towards growth, accepting large donations, and building up an increasing collection. Its workers just unionized to increase previously unlivable wages that had driven up turnover. Since it was founded not too long before Storefront, just down the street on Bowery, it makes me wonder if you ever tracked yourself in relation to its continuous expansion and acquisitions.

Small is good. I didnt really pay much attention to the New Museum. It was already quite big in my time. It was a space in the corner of Broadway and Houston which was not a small space.

Its not just about size, its about the ambition of people in relation to power. The ultimate aim for people with fame is power, thats why people go to New York. Just as much as the growth-forever economic model, people are driven by fame and fortune which makes a nice recipe for bigness.

There was a great article in The Guardian that came out earlier this year by their architecture critic Oliver Wainwright about the state of real estate investment and speculation in NYC embodied in the super-tall pencil skyscrapers.

I mean they gotta put money somewhere right. Cash in the bank doesnt do as well, as Thomas Piketty told us in Capital in the 21st Century. I think they just dont have enough places to put the money. Their price tag is not because of the market or the construction costs or fees. Theyre inflated in order to put money away.

I heard someone say once that the art market is one of the last safe spaces for money laundering.

I would turn and go the opposite direction, it was one of the first money laundering tools and has proven to be a very dependable one historically.

Thats my concern once architecture reaches a certain scale. It is inevitably tied in obligation to foreign investments. And in growth, more generally, comes a concession to those forces that require more capital to reinvest, more financial obligation if you dont want to stay small. You stepped down from directing Storefront in 1997 and went to Detroit. Could you talk about why you decided to leave?

That was a year or so after Giuliani became the mayor and when the city started to become what it is today: gentrified, Americanized. In the early 1990s, things started to change and chain stores moved in. I remember the first one was Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Before this, like I was saying before, New York was a bunch of misfits that didnt belong anywhere else. And then with gentrification you started to get outside Americans coming in to find jobs. Gentrification really used art and culture as an appetizer to convince people to come back to the city, after white flight and suburbanization in the 1950s. I really didnt want to be a part of that. I started Storefront as an independent voice but now the city was beginning to use its presence as part of its political economy; we were only useful to them for the economic and political purposes that attracted outside investment to reterritorialize the inner city. I didnt like it. So in the mid-1990s, I started to go to Detroit because I was doing projects like Detroit is Everywhere and working with Cranbrook Academy of Art. I started meeting very interesting people, totally disconnected from society, extreme urban pioneers. They were off the grid, not just infrastructure, but socially and culturally. They were just on their own. I got very interested in their work and I felt that maybe I could be more useful in Detroit than I would be in New York. Even though I had started Storefront, I had come to realize that as independent as it could be, it could no longer be as experimental as it once was. I saw in Detroit a place to be experimental again.

I think that explains the reason why I started, what I did, and why I left. I think the problem is larger now than I ever imagined. Its the whole world. The way I think about the future is not very optimistic. I think were about to enter a historical moment where our comfort, our expectations, and ideas no longer matter because we are not trying to determine our future anymore. History is the ultimate determinant and we cant do anything about it, its become more of a destiny.

In the face of all this, what do you think the role of small scale art curation would be? Can we only react?

I think we have to start small again, to challenge big agendas, big companies, big institutions, including politicians. We have to find small groups of people that create challenges to authority.

Continued here:

Size Matters: A Conversation on Storefront for Art and Architecture's History with Founder Kyong Park - Archinect

The Feminist History of Fat Liberation – Ms. Magazine

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Susie Orbach said it best back in 1978: Fat is a feminist issue. Fat is also a queer issue, and a racialized issue, and an issue of classbecause fatness is inseparable from all other intersections of identity.

But rarely do we hear conversations about fat liberation, even in todays feminist spaces. Instead, most folks are intent on positioning body positivity as our savior from the diet industrial complexerasing, in the process, the revolutionary power of the long-standing feminist movement to fight fatphobia.

Fat liberations roots are in the 1960s, when the emergent Fat Acceptance Movement aimed to celebrate fat bodies and remove stigma from fatness in a long-term and meaningful way.

It is no coincidence that fat acceptance organizing, second-wave feminist organizing and queer organizing came into the social justice mainstream around the same time, because fatphobia impacts fat people from every identity group. You can be fat and black, fat and heterosexual, fat and differently abled, fat and trans.

In fact, unpacking the work of The Fat Underground makes it clear that fat acceptance came out of queer and feminist organizing.

The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, or NAAFA, was founded by Bill Fabrey and Llewelyn Louderback in 1969; both men were tired of their wives being ostracized because of their weight. Louderback had already made strides into fat liberation through the publication of an article in 1968 which encouraged people to take a stand against weight loss, and later continued to make inroads with his 1970 book Fat Power: Whatever You Weigh is Right. Although much of NAAFAs activism was tepid at best, they did hold a Fat -In, or a sit-in meant to combat fatphobia, in which fat people gathered in Central Park, ate ice cream and burned pictures of Twiggy. NAAFA attempted to address fatphobia in schools, places of business and in media.

But by the early 1970s, Judy Freespirit and Sarah Fishman, two of the more political members of NAAFA, grew weary of the mild mannered-ness, especially as they were involved in the more rage-filled activism seen in concurrent feminist and lesbian organizing. Their radical, empowered, intellectual fringe group provided respite, but it had a lofty goal: to upend the medical industry by calling attention to its fatphobia. To do this, the women spoke at conferences and rallies, got involved with local feminist organizations and disseminated information about fatphobia to the public.

Working in tandem with these newly minted ideals, The Fat Underground unequivocally meant business. By pouring through medical journals, the members found statistics and studies which proved the rampant fatphobia in medicine. When singer Cass Elliot died, they took to the stage at the 1974 Los Angeles Womens Day March and pointed a finger at the medical community for essentially murdering Elliot via fatphobia.

Following this incident, The Fat Underground saw an increase in membershipbut soon after, members, both old and new, dropped out for various reasons. By 1983, the organization had disbanded.

Although their organizing efforts were seemingly cut short due to circumstance, The Fat Undergrounds research, organizing and revelatory politics more than paved the way for present day fat liberation activism. An archived video shows viewers the kinds of radical and progressive conversations that were being had by the group, which provided the foundation for todays Health At Every Size movement along with language and ideas to combat fatphobia in the medical industry.

In the 1980s and 1990s, fat liberation slowly became a more relevant part of the academy and the legal world. Lawsuits that made workplace discrimination illegal on the basis of weight were fought and won. In 1994, activist Marilyn Wann published the foundational zine Fat!So? Since then, multiple books, both for academic purposes and for-pleasure, have been published, allowing fat liberation to become part of the cultural zeitgeist and the fabric of academia through the fields of Womens Studies, African American studies, Psychology, Literature, History, Sociology, Queer Studies and American Studies.

Yet today, fat liberation has become entwined with body positivitymostly as a result of lazy organizing, the prioritization of bodies that benefit from thin privilege and individual feminists resistant to challenging their own discomfort. As Evette Dionne suggests, body positivity was initially one factor of fat liberation. But today, it has eclipsed the initial radicality of the movement and erased the very people it is meant to help.

It isnt the body positivity is wrong, or not feministit is radical, after all, to love yourself in a world that benefits from your self-hatred, particularly if youre a woman or femme, and especially if you occupy various other marginalized identities. But much like any other political movement, fat liberation began as a push back against the oppression of a marginalized group. It was a movement that gained traction because of fat people, predominantly women, organizing and mobilizing against fatphobia.

Fat people were at the center of the theory, actions and radicalism of early fat liberation. Today, however, the faces of body positivity, or #bopo, that we see on social media are too often thin, conventionally attractive, white women. By and large, body positivity has lost the edge and radical politicization that fat liberation possesses.

Activist Jes Baker speaks to this when she discusses what she calls Lisa Frank BoPo; a feel good, stay hydrated, thank your body, and do your sun salutations sort of thing. Bakers call for progress urges activists to get more political and angry. Id like to take it even further.

While turning the heat up on our respective politics will be useful for both individuals and the world at large, its Lisa Frank-ly not enough. What we need to actually engage with is fat liberationan intersectional mode of thought which challenges and subverts the various ways fatphobia manifests in both day to day life and big picture oppression.

Fat liberation stems from queer unrest and rebellion. Its message differs from body positivity; it is more radical, more political, maintains fatness at the center of its narrative and goals and focuses on the ways fat people are mistreated by the system.

This does not mean there is no room for those #bopo champions: Engaging in fat liberation is the same as engaging in any political movement; if youre not directly impacted by the oppression youre combatting, you just have to stay in your lane and be keyed in enough to know when its appropriate to step up and when to step back.

Make it your business to be a resource. Educate yourself so you can take on the emotional labor of confronting fatphobia in day to day life. If your politics arent radical, revisit the cornerstones on which they are built. Investigate whether or not they rest on pillars of white supremacy, capitalism, classism, sexism, fatphobia, transphobia, homophobia or ableism.

In honor of The Fat Underground, let this be a call to action for all of us to do better in our fight for every body.

On the next page: Fat Liberation Resource Guide!

Read the original here:

The Feminist History of Fat Liberation - Ms. Magazine

The WFP won. That’s why it could go extinct. – City & State

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On a balmy night in September, Maurice Mitchell, the new national director of the Working Families Party, introduced a leading presidential contender to thousands of her delirious supporters. Repeat after me: People power! People power! Mitchell shouted to crowd thronging Washington Square Park. In the past few months, the Working Families Party had a deliberative process that included state chapters, members and supporters. I couldnt be prouder to say this morning we announced our support for (U.S.) Sen. Elizabeth Warren for the Democratic nomination!

Mitchell stepped back from the podium, his lips closed with satisfaction, as the crowd began to roar. For Warren, who entered the race as an underdog to household names like former Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the rally was an affirmation of her place in the top tier of the presidential field.

For the WFP, it was something like an apotheosis: a once-fledgling political party, launched at a nadir for progressive politics, had arrived on the national stage, backing a lefty candidate who may go all the way. Mitchells blue and white WFP sticker, pasted over his heart, was visible for everyone to see.

But all was not well, because nothing is ever so simple with the most prominent and powerful third party in New Yorks history. The WFPs decision to endorse Warren had enraged backers of Sanders, who was the partys choice in 2016, when the self-described socialist launched an insurgent campaign against Hillary Clinton that captivated millions. Jacobin, a magazine that serves as the house organ for socialists and their preferred candidates, declared the WFP had written itself out of history. Leftists canceled their monthly donations to the party. WFP staffers were harassed online, enduring threats that were racist and sexist in nature.

Anger festered among Sanders supporters as the WFP refused to say how exactly Warren won the internal vote. Half of the votes came from just 56 delegates on the national committee, while the other half were drawn from an estimated 10,000 dues-paying members and progressive activists. Some of the delegates lead large community organizations that belong to the party, like New York Communities for Change. These leaders largely preferred Warren.

The fallout threatened to destabilize coalitions the WFP has forged and maintained over its 21-year existence. For all its boasts of increasing its national power the WFP now organizes in 18 states, including Wisconsin, Colorado and Connecticut, plus Washington, D.C. it is chiefly a New York force.

In the past year and a half, the WFP has played a pivotal role in flipping the New York state Senate to Democratic control and nearly elected a democratic socialist, Tiffany Cabn, as Queens district attorney. The policy victories in Albany have been significant: new voting laws, drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants, stronger rent regulations and a far-reaching plan to combat climate change.

The WFP has effectively moved New York politics to the left and given a real voice to progressives, said Karthik Ganapathy, a progressive consultant who has worked for Sanders and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. They gave progressives an alternative vehicle to make their voices heard outside of the traditional Democratic Party machine that runs New York.

Yet the WFP inhabits a precarious moment. Its mortal enemy, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, is alleged to be behind an ongoing effort to end fusion voting in New York, which could severely undercut the party. Many powerful labor unions, once its lucrative backbone, left the party last year under pressure from the governor. And the leftist movements they helped build have arguably overtaken the party. Groups like the Democratic Socialists of America and Justice Democrats with their lodestar, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represent a new vanguard of the left: more radical, unapologetic and disdainful of the Democratic Party.

Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders dramatically reshaped the landscape of New York and national politics. When Ocasio-Cortez won, you saw the apex of that reconfiguration. Bob Master, a WFP founder

The WFP, in many ways, could become a victim of its own success. Before the lefts ascent over the past few years, they were the uber-progressives. The governor views them as enough of a player to try to end them. If a state commission set up to allow the public financing of political campaigns manages to kill fusion voting, the lifeblood of New Yorks third parties, the WFP would hobble on having already won the war.

Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders dramatically reshaped the landscape of New York and national politics. When Ocasio-Cortez won, you saw the apex of that reconfiguration, said Bob Master, a prominent labor leader and a founder of the WFP. All of a sudden, you have a new set of actors who are independent of institutional foundations. And these actors are doing things that even a couple of years ago seemed unimaginable.

The leftward movement of New York politics represents exactly what the WFP sought to accomplish when it was founded in 1998. At the time, Rudy Giuliani was in his second term as mayor of New York City. George Pataki, another Republican, was the governor of New York, and Republicans had an ironclad grip on the state Senate. Conservative Republicans had taken control of Congress and passed a welfare reform bill that slashed benefits and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton, who had declared the era of big government is over.

The WFP, a brainchild of Dan Cantor, Joel Rogers and labor leaders such as Master, had its origins in something called the New Party, a third party founded in the early 1990s to be a home for progressive Democrats and organized labor frustrated with the Democrats rightward drift. The New Party had national ambitions: to bring fusion voting to every state in America, so left-leaning third parties could cross-endorse Democrats and by threatening to withhold that endorsement drive them left.

Through legal challenges (most states bar fusion voting), the New Party hoped to eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court and have laws preventing fusion voting ruled unconstitutional, but it lost at the Supreme Court in 1997, effectively killing the party.

In 1998, to gain party status in New York, the WFP needed to secure 50,000 votes in a gubernatorial election. Their only option was to back the Democratic candidate, Peter Vallone Sr., a conservative Democrat who, as speaker of the New York City Council, had worked closely with Giuliani. It would be the first of several seemingly contradictory alliances the WFP would forge to protect its livelihood.

Labor didnt really have as much clout in the Democratic Party at the time as it should have had, said Sal Albanese, a former Democratic member of the City Council who ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 1997, 2013 and 2017. Along with Master, Albanese pushed for the idea of a third party that would center the concerns of private and public sector labor unions, building around an agenda of raising wages for workers and combating government spending cutbacks. The party would also include influential community organizations committed to liberal causes, like ACORN. We put a ground operation together, urging people to vote on the WFP line, Albanese said.

On election night, Vallone lost to Pataki and it appeared the WFP would not garner 50,000 votes. Master stood up to give a concession speech at a Lower East Side pizzeria. In the audience was a young political operative named Bill de Blasio, who would hitch his political fortunes to the WFP in the coming years.

The votes continued to roll in late into the night and the WFP narrowly cleared the threshold, securing its place on the ballot for the first time. As a political party, it would have a ballot line to lend to Democrats and gain the ability to spend much more aggressively on its endorsed candidates.

The victory had even greater symbolic value. For decades, New York had been home to important progressive third parties, fueled largely by organized labor. In the 1930s, the American Labor Party was New York Citys social justice conscience, battling with Tammany Hall to help elect Fiorello La Guardia as mayor. At its peak, the party enjoyed a neighborhood presence to rival the Democrats, with thriving political clubs across the city.

The collapse of the American Labor Party during the anti-Communist 1940s and 1950s gave way to another WFP predecessor: the Liberal Party. Founded by labor leaders to be an anti-Communist alternative for the left, the Liberal Party was influential in the 1960s and 1970s, helping to elect important figures like New York City Mayor John Lindsay. It also controversially contributed to some conservative Republican victories including Ronald Reagan for president and Alfonse DAmato for U.S. Senate in 1980 by endorsing its own candidates for those offices instead of the Democratic nominees.

By the 1990s, the Liberal Party had cemented its move rightward, backing Giuliani for mayor and morphing into a corruption-plagued patronage mill. Its transformation created an opening for the WFP.

You cant have a fight between the left and Democrats with Republicans in control, said Bill Lipton, the WFPs New York state director and one of its longest-tenured staffers. We formed this institution to challenge that.

The party changed New York by electing more Democrats who cared about raising the minimum wage, beefing up tenant protections and creating a fairer criminal justice system. The effort began in earnest in 2001, when the WFP successfully backed a small number of New York City Council members in Democratic primaries, including James Sanders Jr. in Queens. It was not a major player in that years mayoral race billionaire Michael Bloomberg would pull off the upset over Mark Green and de Blasio himself was elected to the City Council. But the groundwork was being laid for a legislative takeover.

Unlike other third parties, the WFP would mostly influence elections by supporting progressive-minded Democrats in primaries. In the general election, winning candidates appeared on the ballot line for a handful of extra votes.

(They say) you cant have a fight between the left and Democrats with Republicans in control. We formed this institution to challenge that. Bill Lipton, WFP state director

Each cycle, more WFP-friendly Democrats joined the City Council. There was the future speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, and the future state attorney general, Letitia James, who were elected in the next couple elections. James was unique for the circumstances of her win: one of the rare candidates to triumph exclusively on the WFP line in a one-of-a-kind special election to replace a slain City Council member.

In 2009, the wave crested much higher: the WFP-backed insurgents Jumaane Williams, Jimmy Van Bramer and Daniel Dromm won Democratic primaries and arrived in the City Council, along with Brad Lander, another close ally, and Deborah Rose. De Blasio, a top-priority candidate for the WFP, was the new public advocate. John Liu, another the WFP-endorsed Democrat, was elected city comptroller, becoming New Yorks first Asian American elected citywide.

Beyond the five boroughs, the victories were piling up. In 2004, the WFP threw its full weight behind Democrat David Soares, who unseated the more conservative Albany County district attorney in a primary. Soares ran on reforming New Yorks draconian Rockefeller drug laws, which brought steep, mandatory prison sentences for people convicted of drug crimes. Not long after Soares win, state lawmakersvoted to significantly soften the laws.

The dramatic Soares victory mattered for another reason, one that hangs over the WFP today as the state Public Campaign Financing Commission threatens to tie the end of fusion voting to creating a system of publicly financed campaigns. Until now, the party has been allowed to spend virtually unlimited amounts of cash on favored candidates, in full coordination with the candidates campaigns. A 2006 state Supreme Court case upheld the WFPs lavish spending on behalf of Soares, striking down limitations the state Board of Elections had placed on party expenditures during primaries. The WFPs cash reserves, fed at that time by unions, could be put to full use.

Meanwhile, the WFP would make the sort of alliances it hopes history will forget. Andrea Stewart-Cousins, now the state Senate majority leader, was not a WFP candidate when she first ran for the Senate in 2004, losing by just 18 votes. The WFP endorsed her Republican opponent, Nicholas Spano. Spano was more labor-friendly than the typical Republican; when Stewart-Cousins ran again in 2006, the WFP stayed neutral, rather than back her outright.

Though the WFP would work enthusiastically to retake control of the state Senate in 2008, playing decisive roles in electing Democrats on Long Island and in the North Country, the liberal third party would triangulate too. Labor unions needing favors from the Republican-controlled state Senate would back the GOP over Democrats, and the WFP, loathe to alienate its labor allies, would do the same in certain cases.

They were supportive of Joe Bruno when he was the Republican (state Senate) majority leader for many years, said a labor leader who worked with the WFP at the time and requested anonymity to speak frankly. They refused to support Democratic candidates in marginal districts.

By the 10-year anniversary of its founding, the formula for the WFPs success was quite clear: unite influential labor unions with party activists, undergirding it all with a highly effective canvassing operation. This for-profit operation would have a formal name, Data and Field Services, and endorsed candidates would pay for its services. In 2009, one of City & States predecessor publications, City Hall, published an investigative series about the WFPs relationship with Data and Field Services, prompting federal and local investigations. After the 2009 cycle, Randy Mastro, a Republican attorney, filed a lawsuit alleging the WFP was circumventing campaign finance laws by offering its services to endorsed candidates at illegally reduced rates. The U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York launched a probe as well, though no charges were filed.

Enough damage was done. In 2011, the WFP reached a settlement with Mastro, paying $100,000 to cover his legal fees and agreeing to shut down Data and Field Services. Its prized outside canvassing arm was no more.

The WFP, through necessity and savvy, has reinvented itself several times over, morphing internally as its faade has remained largely unchanged from its founding days. In the 2000s, it was the party of organized labor, with a for-profit canvassing arm attached.

In 2010, Andrew Cuomo was elected governor, forever altering the partys trajectory. In New York City politics, all would be well. The 2013 cycle was triumphant: de Blasio was elected mayor, James became public advocate and the City Council chose Mark-Viverito as its speaker.

The City Council, more conservative in the Bloomberg years, went into full progressive bloom. A new law guaranteeing paid sick days to city workers, a long-standing priority for the WFP, was passed within weeks of de Blasio taking office, after Bloomberg and his allies had bottled it up for a decade.

There were wrinkles, however, that hinted at trouble ahead. De Blasios victory in the Democratic mayoral primary was not a product of the WFPs foresight, because the partys labor affiliates could not agree on a candidate to endorse, forcing the party to remain neutral. Those close to Mark-Viverito credited 1199SEIU, the all-powerful health care workers union, with twisting arms on the City Council to elect her, not the WFP.

And then there was Cuomo. The governor, a centrist in the New Democrat mold, called for capping property tax increases, expanding charter schools and accepted bipartisan rule that would keep Republicans in power.

The states heavyweight unions, such as 1199SEIU, warmed to Cuomo or at least learned to properly fear him.

The WFP 2.0. was born in 2014, when progressive activists backed Fordham University law professor Zephyr Teachouts primary campaign against Cuomo. The partys labor union affiliates sided with Cuomo, while the partys grassroots members argued for Teachout. In the end, to guarantee 50,000 votes in the general election, the WFP endorsed Cuomo.

A deal was struck with the help of de Blasio, who enjoyed a closer relationship with Cuomo at the time: The WFP would endorse Cuomo if the governor agreed to back a host of liberal priorities, including raising the minimum wage and campaigning for Democratic state Senate candidates. In the end, Republicans kept control of the Senate that fall, riding a national wave. Cuomo hardly helped the Democrats at all. He resented having to bargain with WFP at all, which he dismissed as a fringe party.

Cuomos office did not return requests for comment about his history with WFP.

I understand their need to be transactional for survivals sake, but that also calls into question the foundation of their validity. state Sen. John Liu, former WFP candidate

The Teachout dilemma, for the first time, would also throw the WFPs transactional nature into the public eye. That fall as part of a deal that ultimately fell apart to reunite state Senate Democrats with a breakaway faction of Democrats, the Independent Democratic Conference the WFPwithdrew its support from two Democrats running against IDC members.

I have been turned off by how transactional they have been not just in my case but in many other instances as well, said Liu, one of the candidates who lost the WFPs backing in 2014 and lost the primary. I understand their need to be transactional for survivals sake, but that also calls into question the foundation of their validity.

In 2018, the WFP finally spurned Cuomo during the Democratic gubernatorial primary and selected Cynthia Nixon as its nominee, even though the WFP eventually switched back to Cuomo after he won the Democratic nomination. Under pressure from Cuomo, labor unions began abandoning the WFP. The unions had been a consistent source of cash and ground troops. Without them, the WFP would have to hunt for new sources of revenue.

What is the WFP? On one hand, thats an easy question to answer: a progressive political party that, these days, only cross-endorses Democrats. But the WFP doesnt organize political clubs, like the old American Labor Party, and doesnt encourage too many of its supporters to register as members of the party, lest they sacrifice clout in Democratic primaries. Some major unions have remained in the party, including the New York State Nurses Association and New York State United Teachers.

Their power today derives from how they serve as a nerve center for the professional left. The WFP itself cant deploy 100 people to knock on doors, but member organizations like Make the Road New York, Citizen Action of New York and New York Communities for Change can.

Activist energy no longer exclusively resides within the WFP. Even though its rank-and-file membership may outnumber the Democratic Socialists of Americas, the more than 5,500 members of the democratic socialist organizations New York City branch are far more willing to volunteer for favored candidates.

Grassroots organizations, including the Indivisible chapters, True Blue NY and No IDC NY, arose to furiously challenge the Republican Partys grip on the state Senate. They set their sights on the eight Independent Democratic Conference members who had formed a power-sharing agreement with the GOP, confronting them at raucous town halls and alerting formerly apolitical neighbors to their existence.

Though the WFP had been a critic of the IDC and Cuomo, it was the new grassroots organizations that initially led the effort to oust the IDC. Activists involved credit the WFP with lending direction to the anti-IDC movement, which was led by people unfamiliar with the labyrinthine nature of New York politics. They would host meetings with various grassroots leaders very early on, said Susan Kang, a founder of No IDC NY. Most of us who jumped in early were new to state politics. We didnt have the institutional knowledge. We didnt know who the key people to speak to were.

The WFP pulled lists of registered Democrats so the freshly formed organizations could start calling voters long before the primary. On behalf of the IDC challengers, the party paid for staff, digital ad campaigns and rebranded the IDC members as Trump Democrats.

The WFP evolved, in essence, into thepro bono political consultant of a movement that could exist independent of the party.

There was one notable missed opportunity: A 28-year-old former Bernie Sanders organizer was running against the Queens Democratic Party boss, Joseph Crowley.

In 2018, the WFP 2.0. hit a new peak. Six out of the eight anti-IDC candidates won their races. Left-wing novice Julia Salazar, aided by the WFP and DSA, unseated Democratic state Sen. Martin Malav Dilan, who was perceived by some as too close to the real estate industry. Though the insurgents they supported for governor and lieutenant governor, Cynthia Nixon and Jumaane Williams, were unsuccessful, their campaigns won plaudits from the grassroots left, the very people the WFP now relied on most, and Williams came surprisingly close to upsetting Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul.

There was, however, one notable missed opportunity for the party: A 28-year-old former Bernie Sanders organizer was running for Congress against the Queens Democratic Party boss, Joseph Crowley. DSA, Our Revolution and Justice Democrats had formed a coalition that was generating buzz. The candidates visage was popping up everywhere from widely distributed campaign literature to national news outlets.

But the WFPs leadership was wary of endorsing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom they hardly knew. Crowley may have been a moderate who supported the Iraq War, but he had close relationships with organized labor and was on track to someday become speaker of the House. In a year of warfare against Cuomo and the IDC, the WFP didnt believe picking a fight with Crowley was worth their time.

Crowley took the WFP endorsement and went down with it. As Ocasio-Cortezs celebrity grew, the WFP was stuck with Crowley on its ballot line, lacking legal options to kick him off.

This year may be remembered as another pivot point for the WFP. Again, they played grizzled political consultant and benefactor to another movement that began without them, endorsing Tiffany Cabn, a young public defender and DSA member, for Queens district attorney. When the campaign was struggling to raise cash, the WFP hired a veteran campaign manager and paid for other field organizers. The major labor unions backed the front-runner, Queens Borough President Melinda Katz. After a monthslong recount and court battle, Katz won by a mere 55 votes.

To the democratic socialists who knocked doors daily for Cabn, the WFP was the trusted elder statesman of the resurgent left. When a new public financing commission, with Cuomos tacit blessing, began to consider whether to ban fusion voting in New York, the DSA which would be entirely unimpacted released a statement in support of keeping fusion voting.

With or without fusion voting, the WFP has left a permanent mark on the political firmament. It has now existed longer than the American Labor Party, its legacy secure. You could see it as a successful extension of the strategies around since the big growth of unions in the 1930s, said Joshua Freeman, a professor of labor history at the CUNY Graduate Center.

If Warren is elected the next president, the WFP would have its first White House ally, which could yield all kinds of clout and spoils. But there are those on the left, dedicated to Sanders democratic socialism, who will long remember the day the WFP broke with them.

Its unclear what the WFP can do for a Warren campaign that has already raised a lot of money and spent heavily on building its field operation in early primary states. Even WFP-friendly activists have quietly questioned the wisdom of wading so early into a contest between two candidates beloved by the left, as well as the partys muddled defense of the decision to endorse Warren in the days after the announcement. Kang, the anti-IDC activist who helped convince the DSA to back Cynthia Nixon for governor a year ago, canceled her monthly donation to the WFP, redirecting it to the Sanders campaign instead.

In 2020, the liberal grassroots organizations of New York are plotting primary challenges to members of the Assembly deemed insufficiently progressive. Whether the WFP wants to partake in that battle, threatening its relationship with the Assembly speaker, remains to be seen.

The WFP 3.0., with its new national renown, may be its strongest iteration yet or the version that loses the zeitgeist altogether.

Correction: This article originally neglected to include Joel Rogers as a WFP co-founder.

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The WFP won. That's why it could go extinct. - City & State

Presenting the winners: Vogue Women Of The Year 2019 – VOGUE India

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Now in its third edition, Vogue Women Of The Year awards has become synonymous with glamour, excellence and remarkable success. Weve raised the bar up another notch for 2019, bringing together the most inspiring names from all over the world to tip our hats to their unparalleled talent, and the countless hours they spent perfecting their crafts. From the countrys most successful sportswomen to business leaders, designers, supermodels, Bollywood celebrities and more, meet the winners of Vogue Women Of The Year 2019.

Viral YouTube star Lilly Singh is systematically dismantling the all-white world of suits that anchored late-night television. As the NBC newcomer and first Indian-origin female host on broadcast television in America, she has opened the doors for many others who look like her, and brought some much-needed diversity to our TV screens.

In 2007, Kunal Nayyars big break came when he starred as part of an oddball cast of geeks who charmed viewers in The Big Bang Theorywhich went on to become the longest-running multi-camera series in television history. While Nayyars Raj Koothrappali was a bit of a dorky clown, his intrinsic role in the group and the ability to keep it real set him apart. In 2015, the actor even penned a book titled Yes, My Accent Is Real to talk about how he wasnt just another Apu in America. After 12 years of relentless work and phenomenal success, he announced to the world his plan to take a break from social media.

At just 25 years old, Canadian model Winnie Harlow has already changed the face of fashion. Since she was discovered by Tyra Banks on the 21st series of Americas Next Top Model in 2014competing under her real name, Chantelle Brown-Youngshes been central in the move towards a more diverse and inclusive fashion industry. Harlow may not have won the competition, but she didnt need to. Shes fronted campaigns for the likes of Diesel and MAC Cosmetics, a regular on the catwalk and fashions front rows and appeared on dozens of magazine covers, all the while raising awareness about her skin condition, vitiligo (which causes patches of pigmentation loss).

It wouldnt be an exaggeration to say that Huda Kattan is currently the beauty worlds brightest star. She has close to 40 million Instagram followers, clocked 150 million YouTube views and owns a beauty brand with an estimated value of US$1.2 billion. When Kattan started out as a beauty blogger back in 2010, white influencers were the norm, a few African-American names were in the mix, but brown women were totally missing. Kattan has gone on to popularise her own Arabian style of makeup (which resonates strongly with brown women) all over the worlda near-miraculous phenomenon, as traditionally beauty ideals are passed from West to East, not the other way around.

Our Style Icon of the Year considers style an accessory to life, not the principal driver. A believer in fashion thats believable (but not basic), Anushka Sharmas is a covetable wardrobe youd want to replicate. Shes routinely spotted in a range of athleisure staples and casual wear, and white sneakers are more likely to show up than over-the-knee patent leather boots. Sometimes we push ourselves to wear extremely uncomfortable clothes. There are clothes meant for a specific reasonthey look beautiful on screen but theyre not the most amazing clothes to wear. In my own space I want to be comfortable in what Im wearing and, most importantly, it has to reflect me, she reveals.

As a child, Alia Bhatt would dance for her grandparents every Sunday. Her game of choice with her best friend was actress-actress. Left to play, shed conjure an imaginary audience to dance and act for. At 26, this prodigiously talented actor seems to have achieved everything. Gully Boy is on its way to the Oscars, her father is directing her in Sadak 2, and her upcoming feature, Brahmastra is frantically awaited. No wonder she has been crowned our Performer Of The Year this time around.

With her brand new venture into the world of beauty, Katrina Kaif might have just cracked the code to being an unpredictable enigma and yet coming as close to her fans as a superstar can at the same time. Her makeup brand, Kay by Katrina is an unapologetic, honest ode to beauty, and has been two and a half years in the making to speak Kaifs language. I want it to portray my philosophy. It definitely does not say, Look like me. I want you to have fun with my makeup and let it enhance the favourite parts of you, she says.

Acting was not part of the game plan for Taapsee Pannu. She had an engineering degree and was preparing for the Common Admission Test (CAT) to apply to business schools. So when did she decide to actually become an actor? She says it was after she completed her debut film, a Tamil feature called Aadukalam (2011). Cut to 2019, Pannu is a well-known face in the Hindi film industry, with blockbusters like Pink and Badla to her credit. Her formula for success? Being slow but steady, and accepting your own reality.

Ananya Panday may be just one film old right now, but she has already made a lasting impression in the Hindi film industry. After a prestigious debut in Karan Johars Student Of The Year 2 (the first SOTY launched the careers of the likes of Alia Bhatt, Varun Dhawan and Sidharth Malhotra) earlier this year, the 20-year-old actor is now gearing up for her upcoming feature, Pati Patni Our Woh, where she will share screen space with Kartik Aaryan and Bhumi Pednekar. Panday has been ticking off everything that sums up a stars listshe had signed on as Lakms youngest brand ambassador even before SOTY 2 released, made her runway debut at Lakm Fashion Week winter/festive 2019 for Arpita Mehta and Anushree Reddys show, and has now become a regular on best dressed lists. Today, her bag of endorsements also includes denim brand Only and Gillette Venus.

In Ranveer Singh, we have a leading man who takes his work seriously but not himself. Quixotic, intense, angsty and the class clown all rolled into onehere is a man who makes the movies more fun than they have been in a long time. Over the years, he has combined a hyperbolic goofball public persona with a versatile body of workincluding Zoya Akhtars Gully Boy, Indias official entry to the Oscars this year, and Kabir Khans upcoming 83, which will see him playing the countrys first cricket World Cup-winning captain, Kapil Dev.

Growing up as the son of Mammootty, superstar of the Malayalam film world, Dulquer Salmaan had a vantage point on fame and cinema that few do. But he didnt really want to act. He was always in awe of his father, so he felt that acting was that one thing he couldnt do. My biggest fear was Id be a humongous failure son of my dad, and that I would lose it all, he says. Today, Salmaan has some 30 acting awards to his name, and is a consistent name in listicles for the best-dressed and the influential. Clearly he was wrong.

To call Zoya Akhtar unstoppable would be an understatement. Her latest film, Gully Boy, was recently announced as Indias official entry to the Oscars for 2019, and she also produced her first web series, Made In Heaven, for Prime Video earlier this year. Considering her wide range of as a filmmakerher earlier work includes the likes of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011) and Dil Dhadakne Do (2015)its not surprising that shes considered as a fine storyteller and observer of subcultures by critics and audiences alike.

Anyone who grew up in the 90s can attest to the all-pervasive message of Benettons ad campaigns: joy, colour, celebration, acceptance, love. Taking the brands ideals of multiculturalism, diversity and inclusivity forward is its new artistic director, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, who has been designing clothes since 1968. The long-time champion of diversity believes that fashion has a responsibility, and that you can say important things with creativityfashion but with a cause.

She was the Vogue India Fashion Fund winner in 2014, the Woolmark International Prize Winner in 2018, and this year at the Vogue Women Of The Year Awards, shes Designer Of The Year. Ruchika Sachdeva has carved a space for herself in Indias fashion landscape in less than a decade since she founded her label, Bodice, in 2011, dedicated to impeccable construction, menswear tailoring traditions and Indian crafts. Her collections may look deceptively simple, but actually boast of rich, complex textures, a detailed analysis and research of handlooms, and an overarching message of thoughtful design.

An international debut in 2016 at Louis Vuitton catapulted Pooja Mors continental career shift, where part of the perks include being shot by the best photographers in business (Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel and the late Peter Lindbergh), a stream of global campaigns and a platform for championing causes. Almost 16 seasons, 68 runways and 76 looks later, Mor has made the worlds runways her stage.

Garima Arora has had quite the year. She became the first female Indian chef to receive a Michelin star for her restaurant Gaa in Bangkok in 2018, and was also awarded Asias Best Female Chef 2019 at the Worlds 50 Best Restaurants awards. Last month in Mumbai, the 33-year-old chef launched Food Forward India (FFI), a culinary initiative that brings together people at the forefront of the Indian food industry to re-examine, re-evaluate and reintroduce Indian cuisine to the world. The cub pharma reporter-turned-chef, who worked with Gordon Ramsay, Ren Redzepi and Gaggan Anand before opening her restaurant, is applying her journalistic curiosity and chefs laurels to be the change she wants to see.

In 2013, Heena Sidhu received a phone call that would change her lifeshe got an opportunity to compete at the World Cup in Munich, Germany. The 30-year-old pistol shooter went on to beat the then world champion with a record score of 203.8, and became the first Indian pistol shooter to win gold at the World Cup. The following year, news emerged that she has made history as the first Indian shooter to hold the World No. 1 title.

Apart from record-breaking firsts on the track, Dutee Chand is also Indias first openly lesbian athlete. The professional sprinter announced that she was in a same-sex relationship earlier this year, and earned high praise from many quarters, including talk show host Ellen DeGeneres. Just over a month ago, Chand clinched the gold medal in 100 metres at the World University Games in Naples, making her the first-ever Indian woman track and field athlete to do so, clocking 11.32 seconds. Next up on her list? My ultimate aim is to bring home the gold medal for India in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, she reveals.

From setting up the 10-acre-large arts village Kaladham in the JSW township in Vijayanagar to starting Art India, the countrys leading magazine for contemporary art, Sangita Jindal is a patron whose engagement with art goes far beyond the act of acquiring. A champion of Indian art for more than a quarter of a century, as the chairperson of JSW Foundation, the non-profit arm of JSW (a colossal steel and energy conglomerate run by husband Sajjan), Sangita proactively promotes heritage as well as contemporary art.

It could be refusing to sit on a segregated bus seat, pledging to donate half of their wealth to charity or skipping school to protest. For social entrepreneur Neera Nundy, it was a coming together of her desire to lead and prove herself. As the co-founder of Dasra (an organisation that catalyses Indias strategic philanthropy movement), she has an ambitious goal to transform a billion lives with dignity and equity. Shes a role model of leadership today, proving that it takes vision, a real understanding of ones skills and a lot of hard work to truly make a difference.

A 30-year-old with an annual turnover of over Rs 300 crores, Foodhall founder Avni Biyani has captured the zeitgeist with a food chain that brings trending, premier foods to our pantries. From a starter team of 70 people, Foodhall has now expanded to over 800 employees in the gourmet food space as Biyani gears to open her 10th store in Delhi. The stock, too, has swelled almost double-fold in the eight years since the brand launched in 2011. From introducing India to 2,000 foreign items, they now boast an international stock of over 7,000 items. Biyani is unstoppable. With an app underway, she plans to kick off her digital expansion soon too.

There were no case studies, no reference points, no guidelines when Falguni Nayar decided to sell something as tactile as makeup and skincare products online. She noticed how her friends in the States were dependent on shopping on Amazon. She noticed the paucity of a good beauty sale experience in India and combined the two to launch Nykaa in 2012. Today, her empire is worth more than 750 million dollars. She could not define the Vogue Business Person Of The Year award betterrevolutionising the beauty industry via technology, product curation and catalogue and influencing a vast majority of the country.

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Presenting the winners: Vogue Women Of The Year 2019 - VOGUE India

Google says ‘quantum supremacy’ achieved in new age super computer – Fox Business

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FOX Businesss Hillary Vaughn on Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Ivanka Trump teaming up to create more IT jobs.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) Google says it has achieved a breakthrough in quantum computing research.

It says an experimental quantum processor has completed a calculation in just a few minutes that would take a traditional supercomputer thousands of years.

The results of its study appear in the scientific journal Nature. Google says it has achieved quantum supremacy, which means the quantum computer did something a conventional computer could never do.

"For those of us working in science and technology, its the hello world moment weve been waiting forthe most meaningful milestone to date in the quest to make quantum computing a reality," Google CEOSundar Pichai wrote in a blog post announcing the breakthrough."But we have a long way to go between todays lab experiments and tomorrows practical applications; it will be many years before we can implement a broader set of real-world applications," he continued.

Competitor IBM is disputing that Google achieved the benchmark, saying Google underestimated the conventional supercomputer.

Quantum computing is an advanced computing technology that is still at a relatively early stage of development.

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Google says 'quantum supremacy' achieved in new age super computer - Fox Business

Milwaukee School of Engineering Supercomputer to Support AI Education and Research – Campus Technology

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High-Performance Computing

A new supercomputer at the Milwaukee School of Engineering will serve both research and instruction in artificial intelligence and deep learning for the university's computer science program. MSOE partnered with Microway to build the custom cluster, an NVIDIA DGX POD-based machine designed to support modern AI development. The DGX POD reference architecture is based on NVIDIA's DGX SATURN V AI supercomputer used for internal research and development for autonomous vehicles, robotics, graphics and more.

Technical specs include:

MSOE students will be able to access the supercomputer via web browser and "start a DGX-1 or NVIDIA T4 GPU deep learning session with the click of a button" with no need to understand command line interfaces and workload managers, according to a news announcement. "Unlike many university programs in which students' access to supercomputers is usually limited to graduate students in computer labs, this configuration gives undergraduate students at MSOE supercomputer access in the classroom, enabling training of the next AI workforce."

About the Author

About the author: Rhea Kelly is executive editor for Campus Technology. She can be reached at rkelly@1105media.com.

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Milwaukee School of Engineering Supercomputer to Support AI Education and Research - Campus Technology

New Cray Supercomputer Brings Advanced AI Capabilities to the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart – Yahoo Finance

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German HPC Center Prepares for the Exascale Era; Responds to Growing Demand for Converged Solutions Combining AI and HPC

SEATTLE, Oct. 24, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Global supercomputer leader Cray, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company (HPE), today announced that the High-Performance Computing Center of the University of Stuttgart (HLRS) in Germany has selected a new Cray CS-Storm GPU-accelerated supercomputer to advance its computing infrastructure in response to user demand for processing-intensive applications like machine learning and deep learning. The new Cray system is tailored for artificial intelligence (AI) and includes the Cray Urika-CS AI and Analytics suite, enabling HLRS to accelerate AI workloads, arm users to address complex computing problems and process more data with higher accuracy of AI models in engineering, automotive, energy, and environmental industries and academia.

As we extend our service portfolio with AI, we require an infrastructure that can support the convergence of traditional high-performance computing applications and AI workloads to better support our users and customers, said Prof. Dr. Michael Resch, director at HRLS. Weve found success working with our current Cray Urika-GX system for data analytics, and we are now at a point where AI and deep learning have become even more important as a set of methods and workflows for the HPC community. Our researchers will use the new CS-Storm system to power AI applications to achieve much faster results and gain new insights into traditional types of simulation results.

Supercomputer users at HLRS are increasingly asking for access to systems containing AI acceleration capabilities. With the GPU-accelerated CS-Storm system and Urika-CS AI and Analytics suite, which leverages popular machine intelligence frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch, HLRS can provide machine learning and deep learning services to its leading teaching and training programs, global partners and R&D. The Urika-CS AI and Analytics suite includes Crays Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) and Cray Programming Environment Deep Learning Plugin, arming system users with the full potential of deep learning and advancing the services HLRS offers to its users interested in data analytics, machine learning and related fields.

The future will be driven by the convergence of modeling and simulation with AI and analytics and were honored to be working with HLRS to further their AI initiatives by providing advanced computing technology for the Centers engineering and HPC training and research endeavors, said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO at Cray, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. HLRS has the opportunity to apply AI to improve and scale data analysis for the benefit of its core research areas, such as looking at trends in industrial HPC usage, creating models of car collisions, and visualizing black holes. The Cray CS-Storm combined with the unique Cray-CS AI and Analytics suite will allow HLRS to better tackle converged AI and simulation workloads in the exascale era.

In addition to the Cray CS-Storm architecture and Cray-CS AI and Analytics suite, the system will feature NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs and Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

The convergence of AI and scientific computing has accelerated the pace of scientific progress and is helping solve the world's most challenging problems, said Paresh Kharya, Director of Product Management and Marketing at NVIDIA. Our work with Cray and HLRS on their new GPU-accelerated system will result in a modern HPC infrastructure that addresses the demands of the Centers research community to combine simulation with the power of AI to advance science, find cures for disease, and develop new forms of energy.

The system is scheduled for delivery to HLRS in November 2019.

About Cray Inc.Cray, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, combines computation and creativity so visionaries can keep asking questions that challenge the limits of possibility. Drawing on more than 45 years of experience, Cray develops the worlds most advanced supercomputers, pushing the boundaries of performance, efficiency and scalability. Cray continues to innovate today at the convergence of data and discovery, offering a comprehensive portfolio of supercomputers, high-performance storage, data analytics and artificial intelligence solutions. Go to http://www.cray.com for more information.

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CRAY and Urika are registered trademarks of Cray Inc. in the United States and other countries, and CS-Storm is a trademark of Cray Inc. Other product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.

Cray Media:Diana Brodskiy415/306-6199pr@cray.com

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New Cray Supercomputer Brings Advanced AI Capabilities to the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart - Yahoo Finance

AMD CPUs Will Power UKs Next-Generation ARCHER2 Supercomputer – The Next Platform

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AMD has picked up yet another big supercomputer win with the selection of its second-generation Epyc processors, aka Rome, as the compute engine for the ARCHER2 system to be installed at the University of Edinburgh next year. The UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) announced the selection earlier this week, along with additional details on the makeup of system hardware.

According to the announcement, when ARCHER2 is up and running in 2020, it will deliver a peak performance of around 28 petaflops, more than 10 times that of the UKs current ARCHER supercomputer housed at EPCC, the University of Edinburghs supercomputing center. ARCHER, which stands for Advanced Research Computing High End Resource, has filled the role of the UK National Supercomputing Service since it came online in 2013.

The now six-year-old ARCHER is a Cray XC30 machine comprised of 4,920 dual-socket nodes, powered by 12-core, 2.7 GHz Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon E5 v2 processors vintage, yielding a total of 118,080 cores and rated at a peak theoretical performance of 2.55 petaflops across all those nodes. Most of the nodes are outfitted with 64 GB of memory, with a handful of large-memory nodes equipped with 128 GB, yielding a total capacity of 307.5 TB. Crays Aries XC interconnect, as the system name implies, is employed to lash together the nodes.

The upcoming ARCHER2 will also be a Cray (now owned by Hewlett Packard Enterprise) machine, in this case based on the companys Shasta platform. It will consist of 5,848 nodes laced together with the 100 Gb/sec Slingshot HPC variant of Ethernet, which is based on Crays homegrown Rosetta switch ASIC and deployed in a 3D dragonfly topology.

Although thats only about a thousand more nodes than its predecessor, each ARCHER2 node will be equipped with two AMD Rome 64-core CPUs running at 2.25 GHz, for a grand total of 748,544 cores. It looks like ARCHER2 is not using the new Epyc 7H12 HPC variant of the Rome chip, which was launched in September, in fact, which has clocks spinning at 2.6 GHz but a turbo boost speed that is lower at 3.3 GHz; this chip requires direct liquid cooling on the socket because it is revving at 280 watts, which cannot be moved quickly off the CPU by fans blowing air in the server chassis.

Even though the ARCHER2 machine will only have about six times the core count, each of those Rome cores is nearly twice as powerful as the Ivy Bridge ones in ARCHER from a peak double precision flops perspective. Thats actually pretty remarkable when you consider that the nominal clock frequency on these particular Rome chips is 450 MHz slower than that of the Xeon E5 v2 counterparts in ARCHER. Having 5.3X the number of cores helps, and really, it is the only benefit we are getting out of Moores Law. The vector units in the Rome chips are 256-bits wide, while the AVX units in the Ivy Bridge Xeons are 128 bits wide, so this also accounts for some of the performance increase.

ARCHER2s total system memory is 1.57 PB, which is more than five times larger than that of ARCHER, but given the 10X peak performance discrepancy, the second-generation machine will have to manage with about half the number of bytes per double-precision flop. Fortunately, those bytes are moving at lot faster now, thanks to the eight-memory-controller design of the Epyc processors. The system also has a 1.1 PB all-flash Lustre burst buffer front ending a 14.5 PB Lustre parallel disk file system to keep the data moving steadily into and out of the system. All of this will be crammed into 23 Shasta cabinets, which have water cooling in the racks.

In fact, as we reported in August in our deep dive on the Rome architecture, these processors can deliver up to 410 GB/sec of memory bandwidth if all the DIMM slots are populated. That works out to about 45 percent more bandwidth than what can be achieved with Intels six-channel Cascade Lake Xeon SP, a processor that can deliver a comparable number of flops.

The reason we are dwelling of this particular metric is that when we spoke with EPCC center director Mark Parsons in March, he specifically referenced memory bandwidth as an important criteria for the selection of the CPU that would be powering ARCHER2, telling us that the better the balance between memory bandwidth and flops, the more attractive the processor is.

Of course, none of these peak numbers matter much to users, who are more interested in real-world application performance. In that regard, ARCHER2 is expected to provide over 11X the application throughput as ARCHER, on average, based on five of the most heavily used codes at EPCC. Specifically, their evaluation, presumably based on early hardware, revealed the following application speedups compared to the 2.5 petaflops ARCHER:

As the announcement pointed out, that level of performance puts ARCHER2 in the upper echelons of CPU-only supercomputers. (Currently, the top CPU-powered system is the 38.7 petaflops Frontera system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.) It should be noted that ARCHER2 will, however, include a collaboration platform with four compute nodes containing a total of 16 AMD GPUs, so technically its not a pure CPU machine.

ARCHER2 will be installed in the same machine room at EPCC as ARCHER, so when they swap machines, there will be a period without HPC service. The plan is to pull the plug on ARCHER on February 18, 2020 and have ARCHER2 up and running on May 6. Subsequent to that, the new system will undergo a 30-day stress test, during which access may be limited.

This is all good news for AMD, of course, which has been capturing HPC business at a breakneck pace over the last several months. Thats largely been due to the attractive performance (and likely price-performance) offered by the Rome silicon compared to what Intel is currently offering.

Some recent notable AMD wins include a 24-petaflop supercomputer named Hawk, which is headed to the High-Performance Computing Center of the University of Stuttgart (HLRS) later this year, as well as a 7.5-petaflops system at the IT Center for Science, CSC, in Finland. Add to that a couple of large Rome-powered academic systems, including a 5.9-petaflops machine for the national Norwegian e-infrastructure provider Uninett Sigma2 and another system of the same size to be deployed at Indiana University. The US Department of Defense has jumped on the AMD bandwagon as well, with a trio of Rome-based supercomputers for the Air Force and Army.

All of these systems are expected to roll out in 2019 and 2020. And until Intel is able to counter the Rome juggernaut with its upcoming 10 nanometer Ice Lake Xeon processors in 2020, we fully expect to see AMD continue to rack up HPC wins at the expense of its larger competitor.

The ARCHER2 contract was worth 79 million, which translates to about $102 million at current exchange rates. The original ARCHER system cost 43 million, which converted to about $70 million at the time. So the ARCHER2 machine will cost about 1.46X and delivers 11X the peak theoretical performance over an eight year span of time. First of all, that is a very long time to wait to do an upgrade for an HPC center, so clearly EPCC was waiting for a chance to get a really big jump in price/performance, and by the way, at 28 petaflops, that is considerably higher than the 20 petaflops to 25 petaflops that EPCC was expecting back in March when the requisition was announced.

That original ARCHER system cost around $27,450 per peak teraflops back in 2012, which was on par with all-CPU systems but considerably more expensive than the emerging accelerated systems, on a cost per teraflops basis, of the time. (We did an analysis of the cost of the highest end, upper echelon supercomputers over time back in April 2018.) The ARCHER2 system is coming in at around $3,642 per teraflops, which is a huge improvement of 7.5X in bang for the buck, but the US Department of Energy is going to pay another order of magnitude lower something on the order of $335 per teraflops for the Frontier accelerated system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the El Capitan accelerated system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory when they are accepted in around 2022 and 2023. Both have AMD CPUs and Frontier will also use AMD GPUs for compute; El Capitan has not yet decided on its GPU. The current Summit and Sierra systems at those very same labs, which mix IBM Power9 processors with Nvidia Tesla V100 GPU accelerators, cost a little more than $1,000 per teraflops.

Our point is, all-CPU systems are necessary, particularly for labs with diverse workloads, and they come at a premium compared to labs that use accelerators and have ported their codes to them.

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AMD CPUs Will Power UKs Next-Generation ARCHER2 Supercomputer - The Next Platform

Surprising Discovery Made When Supercomputer Simulations Explore Magnetic Reconnection – SciTechDaily

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Collision of two magnetized plasma plumes showing Biermann battery-mediated reconnection. Credit: Jackson Matteucci and Will Fox

Magnetic reconnection, a process in which magnetic field lines tear and come back together, releasing large amounts of kinetic energy, occurs throughout the universe. The process gives rise to auroras, solar flares and geomagnetic storms that can disrupt cell phone service and electric grids on Earth. A major challenge in the study of magnetic reconnection, however, is bridging the gap between these large-scale astrophysical scenarios and small-scale experiments that can be done in a lab.

Researchers have now overcome this barrier through a combination of clever experiments and cutting-edge simulations. In doing so, they have uncovered a previously unknown role for a universal process called the Biermann battery effect, which turns out to impact magnetic reconnection in unexpected ways.

The Biermann battery effect, a possible seed for the magnetic fields pervading our universe, generates an electric current that produces these fields. The surprise findings, made through computer simulations, show the effect can play a significant role in the reconnection occurring when the Earths magnetosphere interacts with astrophysical plasmas. The effect first generates magnetic field lines, but then reverses roles and cuts them like scissors slicing a rubber band. The sliced fields then reconnect away from the original reconnection point.

The simulations modeled the results of experiments in China that studied high-energy-density plasmasmatter under extreme states of pressure. The experiments used lasers to blast a pair of plasma bubbles from a solid metal target. Simulations of the three-dimensional plasma (see image at the top of the page) traced the expansion of the bubbles and the magnetic fields that the Biermann effect created, tracking the collision of the fields to produce magnetic reconnection. Researchers performed these simulations on the Titan supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energys Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The results provide a new platform for replicating the reconnection observed in astrophysical plasmas in the laboratory, said Jackson Matteucci, a graduate student in the Plasma Physics program at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory who led the research.

By bridging the traditional gap between laboratory experiments and astrophysical processes, these results open a new chapter in efforts to understand the universe.

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Funding provided in part by the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship Program.

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3-D magnetic reconnection in laser-driven plasmas: novel modeling provides insight into laboratory and astrophysical current sheets9:30 AM-12:30 PM, Thursday, October 24, 2019Room: Floridian Ballroom CD

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Surprising Discovery Made When Supercomputer Simulations Explore Magnetic Reconnection - SciTechDaily

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies had a very bad day – TechCrunch

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The price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies tanked today, continuing a months-long slide that has seen the value of the digital currency slide by more than $2,000 from highs of above $10,000 earlier in the year.

Investors are still speculating about the cause of the crash, but hopeful cryptocurrency bulls before today had hoped that $8,000 would be the new floor for Bitcoin.

No longer. Today the price of Bitcoin dropped to $7,448.75, down from around $8,000 earlier in the day.

Investors arent sure whats behind the crash, but Bitcoins commentariat pointed to two likely culprits.

One was the underwhelming performance of Facebooks chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in testimony before Congress on the Libra cryptocurrency that his company is leading the charge to create.

However, an underwhelming performance from Zuckerberg and the potential fate of Libra, which cryptocurrency purists have scoffed at anyway, may be less concerning for the Bitcoin crowd than developments happening in Googles quantum computing research labs around the world.

Earlier today, Google declared quantum dominance, indicating that it had solved a problem using quantum computing that a supercomputer would have taken years to solve. Thats great news for theoretical physicists and quantum computing aficionados, but less good for investors whove put their faith (and billions of dollars) into a system of record whose value depends on its inability to be cracked by computing power.

When news of Googles achievement first began trickling out in late September (thanks to reporting by the Financial Times), Bitcoin experts dismissed the notion that it would cause problems for the cryptocurrency.

We still dont even know if its possible to scale quantum computers; quite possible that adding qbits will have an exponential cost, wrote early Bitcoin developer Peter Todd, on Twitter.

The comments, flagged by CoinTelegraph, seem to indicate that the economic cost of cracking Bitcoins cryptography is far beyond the means of even Alphabets multibillion-dollar budgets.

Still, it has been a dark few months for cryptocurrencies after steadily surging throughout the year. The real test, of course, of the viability of Bitcoin and the other cryptographically secured transaction mechanisms floating around the tech world these days is whether anyone will build viable products on their open architectures.

Aside from a few flash-in-the-pan fads, the jury is very much still out on what the verdict will be.

That uncertainty affects more than just Bitcoin, and, indeed, the rest of the market also tumbled, as Coindesk pricing charts indicate.

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Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies had a very bad day - TechCrunch

Google claims to have developed a quantum computer which is BILLIONS of times faster than our most advanced – The Sun

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GOOGLE says it has developed a quantum computer billions of times faster than any other technology.

The US giant claims it took 200 seconds to carry out a task that would have taken a supercomputer around 10,000 years.

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Experts called it a "phenomenally significant" breakthrough.

In conventional computers, a unit of information or bit can have a value of 0 or 1.

But quantum bits can be both 0 and 1, allowing multiple computations at once.

University College London expert Dr Ciarn Gilligan-Lee said: It is the first baby step on a long journey where we can fully harness the power of quantum mechanics that will eclipse anything our current laptops or even supercomputers can do.

"It is a huge technological and scientific milestone."

Quantum computing promises to revolutionise the way PCs crunch data.

They could perform important work like designing super-materials, speeding up package deliveries and creating new drugs for deadly diseases at high speed.

Scientists have spent decades trying to achieve "quantum supremacy", a landmark that Google now claims to have conquered.

The phrase basically means the moment at which aquantum computer is able to do something that a classical computer can't.

The search giant worked for more than a decade to produce its own quantum computing chip, called Sycamore.

"Our machine performed the target computation in 200 seconds," Google researchers saidin a blog post about the work.

"From measurements in our experiment we determined that it would take the world's fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to produce a similar output."

Google carried out its research at a lab in Santa Barbara, California.

The findings were published in the journal Nature.

Dr Luke Fleet, a senior editor at Nature, said quantum machines are still years, if not decades away.

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He said: This breakthrough result marks the dawn of a new type of computing.it allows you to compute things faster not just a little, but lot faster!

This is transformative as people will be able to compute things that they previously thought impossible.

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Google claims to have developed a quantum computer which is BILLIONS of times faster than our most advanced - The Sun

Liberty Health Sciences Announces Opening Of 19th Florida Dispensary In Pensacola; Second Panhandle Location – Yahoo Finance

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TORONTO , Oct. 24, 2019 /CNW/ - Liberty Health Sciences Inc. (LHS.CN) (OTCQX: LHSIF) http://www.libertyhealthsciences.com("Liberty" or the "Company"), a provider of high quality cannabis, announced today thatit will open its 19th and largest Florida dispensary in Pensacola , subject to approval from the Florida Department of Health.

LHS Logo (CNW Group/Liberty Health Sciences Inc.)

Located at 7152 North Davis Highway Pensacola, FL. , the new dispensary will be open Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. , Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. , and Sunday, 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. The new6,434 square foot store includes a spacious retail and reception area, along with two private consultation rooms and a large waiting room. As with all of Liberty's dispensaries, locally inspired wall-art will be featured throughout the store on a rotating basis.

"We are excited to deliver on our continuing commitment to improve the quality of our patients' lives by providing access to our premium cannabis products right here in the beautiful and historic heart of Pensacola ," said Victor Mancebo , Interim Chief Executive Officer of Liberty . "Our patients in the panhandle will now have two locations in the most western region in the Florida Panhandle . Our new dispensary sits in one of the busiest corridors in Pensacola , where our patients can enjoy the accessibility and convenience of this beautiful location."

Liberty continues to steadily expand its operations throughout Florida and plans to open five additional dispensaries in November, subject to Florida Department of Health approval. The Company prides itself on providing customers safe, consistent products from discreet capsules and transdermal patches to premium flower products and pods. Liberty's dispensary teams are specially trained to answer questions about the various products it sells and how to best use them to meet their specific needs.

Liberty currently operates 18 dispensaries across Florida in the following locations:

Dania Beach

Port St. Lucie

Miami

Summerfield

Palm Harbor

Orange Park

St. Petersburg

Gainesville

Tampa (Hyde Park)

Cape Coral

Winter Haven

Boca Raton

Merritt Island

Bonita Springs

Tallahassee

Panama City

North Miami

Tampa (Tetra)

Patients may place an order online at http://www.libertyhealthsciences.com for in-store pick-up or free delivery. Liberty also offers patients free delivery statewide.

About Liberty Health Sciences Inc. Liberty is the cannabis provider committed to providing a trusted, high quality cannabis experience based on our genuine care for all cannabis users and a focus on operational excellence from seed to sale. Liberty's measured approach to expansion opportunities is focused on maximizing returns to shareholders, while keeping consumers' well-being at the forefront of what we do. For more information, please visit: http://www.libertyhealthsciences.com.

CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS: This press release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Any statements that are contained in this news release that are not statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are often identified by terms such as "may", "should", "anticipate", "expect", "believe", "plan", "intend" or the negative of these terms and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements in this news release include, but are not limited to, expectations related to the Company's production capabilities, expectations concerning the receipt of all necessary approvals from the Florida Department of Health, expectations concerning the opening of new dispensaries and the expansion of its greenhouse space, and the Company's future expansion and growth strategies. Forward-looking statements necessarily involve known and unknown risks, including, without limitation, risks associated with general economic conditions; adverse industry events; marketing costs; loss of markets; future legislative and regulatory developments involving medical marijuana; inability to access sufficient capital from internal and external sources, and/or inability to access sufficient capital on favorable terms; the medical marijuana industry in the United States generally, income tax and regulatory matters; the ability of Liberty to implement its business strategies; competition; crop failure; currency and interest rate fluctuations and other risks. Readers are cautioned that the foregoing list is not exhaustive. Readers are further cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements as there can be no assurance that the plans, intentions or expectations upon which they are placed will occur. Such information, although considered reasonable by management at the time of preparation, may prove to be incorrect and actual results may differ materially from those anticipated. Forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement.

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Liberty Health Sciences Announces Opening Of 19th Florida Dispensary In Pensacola; Second Panhandle Location - Yahoo Finance

Liberty adds UConn to 2020 football schedule, moves UVa game to 2023 – Lynchburg News and Advance

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Liberty tweaked its 2020 football schedule by adding a program shifting to independent status and moving a date with an in-state program to a later season.

The Flames will play the University of Connecticut on Oct. 31, 2020, at Rentschler Field in East Hartford, Connecticut as part of the Huskies independent schedule.

The Hartford Courant released nine of the Huskies 12 games for the 2020 season Thursday morning.

UConn announced over the summer it is moving all of its sports, except football, from the American Athletic Conference to the Big East Conference. UConn will join Liberty, Notre Dame, BYU, Army, UMass and New Mexico State as independent programs in the Football Bowl Subdivision.

As FBS independents, we certainly try to cooperate with one another in scheduling, Liberty athletic director Ian McCaw said in a phone interview Thursday morning. He cited Army, BYU and UMass as examples of independent programs moving around games to accommodate the Flames move to college footballs top tier in 2018.

We wanted to help Connecticut.

The Flames original 2020 schedule featured Oct. 31 as an open week. Liberty opted to move its scheduled Nov. 7 game at Virginia to Oct. 14, 2023.

The Nov. 7 weekend will serve as an open week for Liberty in 2020.

That schedule shuffling allowed UConn to play at Virginia next season.

McCaw confirmed the 2020 matchup with the Huskies is the first in a home-and-home series, with UConn playing at Williams Stadium on Nov. 11, 2023.

McCaw added Liberty and UConn envision playing frequently in the future and the programs are in discussions to continue the series beyond 2023.

The addition of UVa and UConn to the 2023 schedule gives Liberty 10 opponents for that season.

UVa is the second Power 5 opponent on the schedule. The Flames will play at South Carolina on Nov. 4, 2023, and receive a $1.5 million guarantee for the trip to Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia, South Carolina.

Libertys 2023 slate features five games in September (Bowling Green, at Coastal Carolina, at Buffalo, Eastern Michigan and at Miami (Ohio)), two in October (Old Dominion and at Virginia) and four in November (at South Carolina, UConn, UMass and at New Mexico State).

Were very close to announcing our 2023 schedule, McCaw said. Its a very attractive schedule. Were putting putting the finishing touches on that.

Damien Sordelett covers Liberty University athletics and local golf for The News & Advance. Reach him at (434) 385-5550.

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Liberty adds UConn to 2020 football schedule, moves UVa game to 2023 - Lynchburg News and Advance

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not in US Constitution – Call Newspapers

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Letters to the Editor

I hesitate to cast aspersions upon conservative intelligence or erudition, however, I must take exception to Jean Flanagans Sept. 12 letter: Letter outlines conservative beliefs, such as life, liberty.

As we learned in grammar school, the reference to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which is based on Lockean philosophy, is enshrined not in the U.S. Constitution but rather in the Declaration of Independence.

Perhaps Ms. Flanagan has been deluded by the renowned Fox News history scholars like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, or this may just be another example of Republican revisionist history.

I was also surprised by our presidents lack of conservative intelligence a few months ago when he decided to release a highly classified U.S. spy satellite photo taken over Iran.

Thanks to his display of childish pique, his tyrannical buddies who govern Russia, China, North Korea and our many other adversaries now know the trajectory of this super-secret satellite and can take evasive actions to thwart it.

Once again Trump had undermined our own intelligence and military services and helped those who would destroy us.

I guess thats why he donates his presidential salary; somebody else is going to be paying him substantially in the future.

Had anyone else released this photo, they would be in Leavenworth Prison.

Ed OlsenAffton

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Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not in US Constitution - Call Newspapers

British government notes ‘deterioration’ of religious liberty in several countries – Crux: Covering all things Catholic

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LEICESTER, United Kingdom Religious freedom has deteriorated in several countries during the first half of 2019, according to a statement published Oct. 22 by the British Foreign Office.

The relatively short statement was a follow up to the 2018 Human Rights and Democracy Report published by the British government in June. The statement gave an updated assessment of the 30 priority countries in which the Foreign Office had noted particular concern about human rights issues, and felt the UK can make a real difference.

The 30 human rights priority countries are: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Burundi, Central African Republic, China, Colombia, North Korea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Libya, Maldives, Myanmar, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Yemen and Zimbabwe.

Although the report encompassed the entirety of human rights concerns, it particularly pointed out instances of religious persecution, harassment, and discrimination in several countries.

The statement said the overall human rights situation in Pakistan continues to deteriorate, with religious minorities suffering in particular.

The situation for religious minorities continues to be very challenging and deeply concerning, with widespread intolerance, violence, and discrimination, including against Christians, Ahmadis, Hindus, and Shias, the report says.

There have been some positive developments, notably the Supreme Courts January judgement upholding the acquittal of Asia Bibi of blasphemy. This was a welcome positive step, as was the issuing of thousands of visas to Indian Sikhs, allowing them to make the sacred pilgrimage journey to Pakistan following the opening of the India/Pakistan Kartarpur Corridor at the end of last year, it continued.

The statement noted that in Sudan, while restrictions on Christian school opening days were dropped in January, there are ongoing challenges to Freedom of Religion or Belief, including public order and guardianship laws, which have a disproportionate effect on Christian women.

The Foreign Office also expressed concern about growing restrictions on freedom of religion or belief in China, including reports that authorities are tightening control over how certain religions are practiced.

It also said there was no improvement in the dire human rights situation in North Korea, which is at the top of Open Doors annual ranking of the 50 countries where Christians experience extreme persecution and top of the Global Slavery Index, noting the regime continues to exercise total control over freedom of expression and Freedom of Religion or Belief.

The statement also highlighted restrictions on religious freedom in Russia, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Libya.

However, the Foreign Office noted improvement in a few countries.

Freedom of Religion or Belief in Bahrain is legally protected in society. Although there is more to be done, EU Special Envoy Jan Figel earlier this year observed that religions are not just tolerated but readily accepted by Bahraini society, the report says.

It also said modest progress is continuing to be made on religious freedom in Egypt, pointing out President Abdel Fattah Sisi inaugurated the largest cathedral in the Middle East on Jan. 6, and the continued progress on licensing church buildings under Egypts Church Building Law.

The British government has stepped up its engagement on the issue of international liberty, and 2018 saw the creation of the post of Prime Ministers Special Envoy on Freedom of Religion or Belief.

In December, the Foreign Office announced it would sponsor a report on Christian persecution around the world, which was published this summer.

Follow Charles Collins on Twitter: @CharlesinRome

Crux is dedicated to smart, wired and independent reporting on the Vatican and worldwide Catholic Church. That kind of reporting doesnt come cheap, and we need your support. You can help Crux by giving a small amount monthly, or with a onetime gift. Please remember, Crux is a for-profit organization, so contributions are not tax-deductible.

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British government notes 'deterioration' of religious liberty in several countries - Crux: Covering all things Catholic