Monthly Archives: May 2022

Five Standout Films Coming To Cannes This Year [Trailers] – 2oceansvibe News

Posted: May 17, 2022 at 7:03 pm

[imagesource: Neon]

This years Cannes Film Festival has a few big names and sizeable studio efforts on show, like Elvis and Top Gun: Maverick.

But as usual, there are also some hidden gems worth excavating.

The Cannes lineup is particularly rich this year, due in part to a few festival regulars and also a number of rising stars.

Well be getting into a few of the more anticipated films, many of which dont even have an official trailer.

Brand spanking new and indie, just how we like it.

Lets dive in, with five films as listed by The Guardian:

Crimes of the Future

Cannes regularDavid Cronenbergreturns with his own long-gestating script, about a future world in which people have to adapt to transhumanism. Evolution accelerates, bodies sprout new organs and human identities are in a state of flux.

Sounds plausible:

The Natural History of Destruction

Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa returns to Cannes for a special screening of his new documentary, based on the book by WG Sebald about the horror of aerial bombardment during the second world war a subject with a special resonance today.

The festival website has more about this film.

Broker

Japanese auteurHirokazu Kore-edahas made his first Korean language film, with Korean star Song Kang-ho, an intense emotional drama, based on a real case, about the baby boxes in which people can leave unwanted newborns.

Thats particularly apt given whats happening across the pond in the US:

One Fine Morning

Transgressive passion is the foundation of this movie from Mia Hansen-Lve, withLa Seydouxas Sandra, a single mum with a young daughter, trying to find care for her elderly father, and embarking on an intense affair with an old friend.

You can find out more at IMDb.

Men

A frisson of League-of-Gentlemen unease in a creepy English country village where all the men (played by Rory Kinnear) have a weird resemblance to each other:Jessie Buckleystars in this scary movie from Alex Garland.

British and creepy is a potent combination:

The 2022 Cannes Film Festival starts today (May 17) and runs through to May 28.

[source:guardian]

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Cannes 2022: 10 movies to watch out for in this years festival – The Guardian

Posted: at 7:03 pm

Elvis

Baz Luhrmann brings his trademark truckload of spangly glamour and sugar-rush showbiz to the story of Elvis Presley with Austin Butler as the King and Tom Hanks as his manipulative manager, Colonel Tom Parker.

Ukrainian film-maker Sergei Loznitsa returns to Cannes for a special screening of his new documentary, based on the book by WG Sebald about the horror of aerial bombardment during the second world war a subject with a special resonance today.

Cannes regular David Cronenberg returns with his own long-gestating script, about a future world in which people have to adapt to transhumanism. Evolution accelerates, bodies sprout new organs and human identities are in a state of flux.

Michelle Williams is the regular leading player for film-maker Kelly Reichardt, and she returns as Lizzie, a sculptor whose life is about to be turned upside down by a new show. Other stars include Andr 3000, Judd Hirsch and Amanda Plummer.

European cinema icon Claire Denis brings a movie with a hint of Peter Weirs The Year of Living Dangerously and her own keynote theme of colonial agony: Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn star as a journalist and businessman in 1980s Nicaragua.

Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda has made his first Korean language film, with Korean star Song Kang-ho, an intense emotional drama, based on a real case, about the baby boxes in which people can leave unwanted newborns.

Transgressive passion is the foundation of this movie from Mia Hansen-Lve, with La Seydoux as Sandra, a single mum with a young daughter, trying to find care for her elderly father, and embarking on an intense affair with an old friend.

A frisson of League-of-Gentlemen unease in a creepy English country village where all the men (played by Rory Kinnear) have a weird resemblance to each other: Jessie Buckley stars in this scary movie from Alex Garland.

Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyska takes on the story of the British silent twins. Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance star as identical twins June and Jennifer Gibbons who spoke to no one but each other, wrote outsider art novels and were eventually sent to Broadmoor for arson and theft.

Virginie Efira stars in Alice Winocours drama as a woman caught up in a terrorist attack in a Paris bistro. Some months later, stricken with PTSD and amnesia, and plagued with fragmented memories, she makes a determined attempt to reconstruct her past.

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Cannes 2022: 10 movies to watch out for in this years festival - The Guardian

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On the Gnostic Ironies of Poets Nathaniel Mackey and Fanny Howe – Literary Hub

Posted: at 7:03 pm

The word Gnostic has long shadowed the careers of Nathaniel Mackey and Fanny Howe, two renowned elders of American poetry who each published an important new work last year. Mackeys three-volume box set Double Trio, the latest installment of the two intertwined serial poems that he has been writing for nearly forty years, and Howes memoirManimal Woe, a poignant prose-poetic elegy for her father, invite a closer look at this strange spiritual affinity.

For almost two millennia the Gnostics have suffered the reputation of teaching a dreary and dualistic religious doctrine in comparison with the hopeful, world-affirming beliefs of the early Christians with whom they vied for disciples on the southeastern fringes of the Roman Empire. First- and second-century Gnostic heresiarchs like Simon Magus, Valentinus, and Basilides notoriously proclaimed that the material universe is inherently evil, the flawed creation not of God but of a lesser deity who through pride, malice, or ineptitude fashioned the world into a prison for the human spirit.

Our only hope for salvation came not through gracethe true God, they believed, is infinitely remote from and utterly indifferent to the worldbut through secret teachings and initiation into gnosis, an intuitive and self-actualizing knowledge which penetrates and dispels the oppressive illusions of the world, thus liberating human spirits from the inert heaviness of matter.

Although the Gnostic sects had largely disappeared by the 4th century, the 20th-century philosophers Eric Voegelin and Hans Jonas argued that Gnostic strains endure in any number of modern philosophies, political ideologies, and works of art. Gnostic has since become a catchall for varying shades of existential suspicion and magical thinking. There is a recent trend among conservative Christian polemicists, for example, to attack as Gnostic everything they abhor about the modern worldfrom gender and critical race theories to Silicon Valley transhumanism. But even within the overwhelmingly secular and progressive milieu of contemporary American poetry, to be pegged a Gnostic is something of a liability.

We are living through a period of unquestionable political urgency, when poets increasingly dedicate their writing to collective projects of activism or allyship. Gnosticism, many suspect, is inherently individualistic, otherworldly, and apolitical, encouraging an apocalyptic detachment from the wars and commotions of history, in effect allegorizing them away as contingent symbols of a primordial flaw laced into the fabric of reality. Salvation, for the Gnostics, wasfromhistory, notinhistory. In stark contrast, most contemporary poets express their political agency in straightforwardly materialist terms, despite the hallowed precedent of the revolutionary William Blake, who availed the mythological imagination of the ancient sects, and the efforts of self-described New Gnostics, who seek to define a visionary and religiously attuned experimental poetry for our time.

Few readers familiar with either Nathaniel Mackey or Fanny Howe, however, would question their left-wing political bona fides. Longtime favorites of the indie poetry crowd, both Mackey, seventy-four, and Howe, eighty-one, have in recent years been recognized as among the most important authors of their generation, as evidenced by respectiveNew Yorkerprofiles and significant honors, including Mackeys National Book Award and Bollingen Prize, Howes Lenore Marshall and Griffin Prizes, and a Ruth Lilly Prize apiece.

Many new readers are therefore currently encountering inDouble TrioandManimal Woetwo distinct apotheoses of two vast catalogs (Mackey has published nearly twenty books and Howe close to fifty) of some of the most challenging and imaginative political poetry written since the 1970s, especially as it pertains to the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and the material conditions of Black life in America, preoccupations Mackey, Black, and Howe, white, share. Where Mackey and Howe diverge from the received wisdom is in their refusal to see Gnostic ambivalence and political commitment as mutually opposed. Collective political action, their new books suggest, must be shaped, guided, and channeled with a healthy sense of cosmic irony.

Double Triopresents the latest, and thus far the longest, episode in what Nathaniel Mackey calls his long song: the cross-cultural epic, comprising the two serial poems Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu (each the others understudy, as Mackey once put it) that he has been publishing incrementally since his 1985 debut,Eroding Witness.

Double Triois a pun. The title refers literally to the fact that each of the tomes three volumesTej Bet,Sos Notice, andNerve Churchcontains twice as many installments as each of its three antecedents,Splay Anthem(2006),Nod House(2011), andBlue Fasa(2016). But double trio also pays homage to the avant-garde saxophonist Glenn Spearmans group of the early nineties, which paired two jazz trios in free improvisations meant to elicit sui generis collaborations between instruments and bold new interchanges of musical ideas. Individually exploratory and centrifugal, each of the players nevertheless contributes to a vision (or, really, anaudition) of genuine collectivity, however transitory, however only partially enacted.

To become a band like that, to reconstrue individual identity and agency through ensemblic doubling and self-parsing, to collectively improvise a we, is the dream of the Gnostic sojourners who travel through Mackeys long song (Anuncio and Anuncia, Huff, Sophia, Itamar, Brother B and Sister C, Mr. and Mrs. P, Netsanet and Eleanoir, to name only a few) by boat, car, bus, train, airplane, and spaceship, passing through mapped localities (Los Angeles, Troy, Addis Ababa, Costa Brava) as well as allegorically limned regions unique to the Mackey mythos (Lone Coast, Low Forest, Crater, Dread Lakes, Lake Pred), on their way to an outmost destination they never quite reach, never more than a would-be band.

What prevents the migrating they from becoming an arrived-at we is Nub Mackeys word for that which prototypically dislocates, uncouples, decapitates. Nub is a Gnostic principle of severance endemic to being, but one that reveals itself in contingent historical incarnations, most recently in the United Slave States of Nub, the reassertion over the past decade of Americas old and new nature of violent deracination and exclusion.

This passage appears in a poem that alludes to the police murder of Eric Garner in 2014. Other poems inDouble Trio, written between the summer of 2012 and the summer of 2018, reference the murders of Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, and Alton Sterling, the mass shootings in Charleston, Dallas, Sutherland Springs, and Parkland, as well as the background noise of the troubled second term of the Obama administration, the 2016 presidential campaign, and the ascendancy of Donald Trump. Mackey mockingly portrays Trump as a kind of chthonic monster or archonone of the malevolent rulers of the planetary spheres in Gnostic cosmologywho lives beneath a field of comb-over haystacks and whom, like Scylla and Charybdis, the would-be band of black Odysseans must perilously navigate.

As these events sequentially unfold, the mood among Mackeys would-be band becomes increasingly nonplussed, angry, desperate, defiant, determined, resigned, hopefulunresolvedly all of these at once.

There is something undeniably fatalistic about Mackeys treatment of white supremacy and Black suffering. The unique tragedy of Eric Garners murder is, if not diminished, then certainly put in perspective by the ineluctability of historical recurrence. Black subjugation is extrapolated into something like a metaphysical constant. This is perhaps surprising, given that Mackey has written ambivalently in the past about a similar instinct in the Vietnam War poetry of Robert Duncan, the most unapologetically Gnostic writer of the 20th century, to cosmologize the American war machine, to treat such violence as part of the hidden order of things, and thus avoid taking a decisive moral position. Duncans poetic stance of oracular detachment famously cost him his friendship with Denise Levertov (a Roman Catholic convert, interestingly) who believed that the poet had a public responsibility to pursue concrete political measures against the war and used her own writing of the period to bear witness to American atrocities against the Vietnamese.

For Mackey, however, the question for the poet is not primarily between taking a stand and standing back. His characters act, they blow, even when they cant breathe. But just as the pleading final words of Eric Garner were repurposed into a powerful rallying cry for a new generation of civil-rights activism, Mackey suggests that the inescapable and, in some real sense, eternalfact of the violent severance of Black breath must be somehow dialectically incorporated into the sound of its perseverance.

This core conviction has shaped the mythopoetic and formal design of Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu from their inception. Mackey has discussed at length the importance to his project of the cosmogonic mythoi of the Dogon people of Mali, specifically their belief that doubleness, not individuality, is the true estate of human being. The human tendency to be born singular indicates an ontological prematurity. The Dogon song of the Andoumboulou, which recounts the story of humanitys originary loss of twinness, echoes Gnostic teaching. In funeral rites, the song is sung in a rasping, abraded, torn voice that, in Mackeys view, timbrally conveys the sense that we are born torn asunder from ourselves. The individual, in other words, is intrinsically dividual. The I is always already Nubbed.

In this way, Mackey turns on its head the conventional privileging and universalization of white over Black experience. It is actually the psychic uprootedness innate to diasporic identities, and not the self-assured Cartesian ego, that best characterizes the human lot. Mackeys critical writings have long protested the pressure historically imposed on Black writers to adopt a transparently and accessibly declamatory style, which a white literary establishment patronizingly presumes is necessary and sufficient for Black writers to tell their stories or, in todays parlance, speak their truth. He calls our attention to the possible duplicity whereby a poet might speak of political dispossession, but within an epistemological framework or model of lyric subjectivity that falsely presupposes self-possession.

Identity, for Mackey, is honestly expressible only as an Insofar-I: an I more subjunctive than securely subjective, one that acknowledges that self-presence is an illusion and that cognitive dissonance is the norm for one natally torn in half. In true Gnostic fashion, however, Mackey suggests that by accepting the truth of this we take the first step toward liberation.

Here, Mackey riffs on the linguistic peculiarities of Rastafarian Dread Talk in order to reveal how the cosmological and historical severance of the I and I makes possible degrees of self-detachment, and thus both irony as well as ecstasy (literally displacement from ones proper place), that better enable us to see how we might recover the we. The I, for example, can imaginatively project its own double or whatsayer, who at once gainsays the I (so what?) and goads it on (what next?). The religious and political ramifications are what Mackey calls, after Duke Ellington, blutopic: a model of communal life that does not try to suppress the blue and bass notes, the nonsense and dissonance (or nonsonance in Mackeys idiolect) at the bottom of everything, but learns how to make of them the doubled instruments of ongoingness. Babble be our boon, Mackey writes, such were the dictates of seeming defeat, fugitivitys / rigor.

If Mackey has largely embraced his Gnostic reputation, Fanny Howe has sometimes demurred. A well-known convert to Roman Catholicism, Howe stated in a 2004 interview that although she had passed through a Gnostic stage, it soon felt evil to have that view of being. She objected to the way the Gnostics understood gnosis to be the privilege of an elect few, the rest of us pitiably wallowing in illusion. Her writing shows perhaps clearer fidelity to Franciscan incarnational theology and the preferential option for the poor. And yet, there is a seditious, heterodox streak to Howes Catholicism. Gnosticism continues to function in her writing as something of a check against the possible excesses of Christian eschatological hope.

The beatitudes famously promise heavenly restitution for the wretched of the earth, tempting many Christians throughout history to see worldly dispossession at most as a transitory injustice and even in some cases as an ordained stage in Gods plan. But Howe Gnostically refuses to justify the persistence of suffering as providence. Like Mackey, she is forced to interpret the historical recurrence of evil as cruelly fated; human beings are the unwitting playthings of what she calls, inManimal Woe, the mystery of repetition.

I wanted to know why, she explains in the books coda, when slavery formally ended, it went on, both internationally and especially in the American courts, as scapegoating. Racial segregation and voter suppression, hatred of the poor and red-baiting, warmongering and xenophobiaHowe sees the present-day reappearance of the malevolent forces that assailed and obsessed her youth, negatively shaping her dawning political conscience in the late 1950s, as evidence that

there is something built into our national system, self-destruction, that goes round and round; repetition without progress; evolution of disagreements. So it goes, stopping at the same stations, having the same scuffles with the same people, scratching down the same punishments and laws only to create a population of government-haters, money-makers, angry nationalists with power, and the rest wage-slaves.

She wonders whether this bad infinity is actually innate to law itself. Life is the enemy of the law, she writes. Law struggles to prevent something new from living.

This sentiment echoes the idiosyncratic Gnosticism of Marcion of Sinop, a 2nd-century Christian heretic about whom Howe wrote sympathetically in her remarkable 2003 essay collection, The Wedding Dress. Marcion saw an irreconcilable difference between the legalistic, jealous, and genocidal God depicted in the Old Testament and the transcendent God whom Jesus in the Gospels called Father. Marcion concluded, by way of an extreme interpretation of Saint Pauls theology, that Jesus came not to fulfill but overthrow the law. Christ was an emissary, he claimed, not of Yahweh, the Demiurge and taskmaster of this broken world, but of a God whom we have never known. The alien father of the Gnostics, Howe elaborates, may have left a little imprint here on earth, but he doesnt seem to care in the way the interfering God of the Torah did. Evil is powerful because it makes itself known very viscerally; it cares, the way the torturer cares. The true God, she reflects, would paradoxically express compassion through disinterestedness and absence, wanting us to know and bravely accept that we are abandoned in the world.

These same Marcionite instincts return inManimal Woewhen Howe attempts to come to terms with the life and legacy of her late father. Mark DeWolfe Howe was a blue-blooded descendent of Ancient Boston and mad slave-traders as well as a prominent Harvard legal scholar, civil-rights activist, and firm believer that US common law could be an effective instrument, in his own words, for advancing the personal freedoms and human dignities of the American people, even if he was fully conscious of its failure historically to live up to that promise.

Howe plumbs her fathers archives, excerpting his letters, legal opinions, and lectures, often at length, searching for wisdom that might avail us in our current political predicament, but also struggling with his core convictions. The 1967 Civil Rights Act takes on especial symbolic resonance in the book, having been passed in the same year that her father died suddenly and unexpectedly from a heart attack. Howes disillusionment with the failures of this specific law to ensure lasting justice for Black Americans is wrapped up emotionally with her acknowledgment that her father represented precisely the kind of privileged white liberal whose time has now passed and whose death created the painful conditions of Howes maturation and emancipation, the freedom to forge her own path. The Law seems to limit our abilities, Howe writes. This is at once a profoundly Gnostic discovery and, in the context of memorializing her father, an expression of grief.

In one of the most moving sections of the book, Howe composes a series of hypothetical letters in reply to her father, filling him in on the most significant events of her life since his passing. She shows herself to be conscious of the ways that the mystery of repetition has been at work in her own experiences and travails. She discerns fateful significance, for example, in the fact that she met and married the Black civil-rights activist Carl Senna just a year after her fathers death. Howe had three children with Senna before their divorce in the mid-seventies. She raised her mixed-race family, alone and impoverished, in sharply segregated Boston and its environs, finding community among other nomadic single mothers.

This is a period of her life that Howe has frequently written about, repeatedly combing her memories for clues about the deeper structures that have determined her life. Motherhood and childhood, Howe wrote inThe Wedding Dress, are distinct but overlapping existential horizons both characterized by bewilderment. Bewilderment is the natural condition of those left behind in the heros journey; mothers and children shadow the heros courage, discipline, conquest, and fame by sustaining positions of weakness, fluidity, concealment, and solitude; their paths are digressive and recursive, spiral rather than ascensional. Bewilderment circumnavigates, she writes, believing that at the center of errant and circular movement is the empty but ultimate referent.

InManimal Woe, Howe intimates that the nil point of the turning world is the vacancy left by the Fathers abscondment; the death of Mark De Wolfe Howe and the desertion of Carl Senna represent a lapse in paternal authority writ large. The Father is over and will never be saved, Howe insists. The Father is over like the Sabbath and the swamis. They noticed that laws are fears, and fears fade away. That law stays, the law of change. Again, for Howe this is an ecstatic, emancipatory discovery tinged with sorrow. How can you tell hysterical laughter from sobbing? Howe asks in the next breath, adding, That which is over is everywhere.

She retraces walks through Mount Auburn Cemetery, recalls lunches shared at Howard Johnsons, and imaginatively revives old conversations with her father about the incompatibility between liberty and equality, not as nostalgic and delusional exercises meant to resurrect what is irrecoverable, but as a Gnostic discipline of intuition and attention, watchful for patterns and predispositions in her own biography, in preparation for the next go-around. Premonition is the only way out of the trap of quantum history, Howe writes. To sense the face of yourself coming and to change your course before it does! What is finished must be repeatedly and creatively worked through to release a future into the air.

If this is a private spiritual discovery, it is also a political one. Even as repetition without progress has dulled us into the manimals we are today, pushing, bitching, lying, insinuating, measuring, bullying, and demanding pay for the labors of others, Howe suggests that just such a creative recapitulation, centripetally motored by an absence where the axis used to be, is needed to counteract it.

Recapitulation is backward thinking, like the composition of a poem or song. You look across a finished thing in order to understand it. You have to go over it again, but include your presence this time. You are now part of the thing you are going over. You cant ever escape this problem of being where you are as a negative presence.

When Howe subjects, through endless recapitulations, her own memories to this negative presence and Mackey harangues his own utterances with whatsay, they demonstrate a distinctively Gnostic restlessness, which the Christian theologian David Bentley Hart has recently described as a nagging apprehension that what we take to be real life or the real world is really only a kind of machine, altogether empty of spiritual life, devised to hold us captive and separate us from the truth.

Although such suspicions can so easily slide into paranoia and total despair, Hart insists that the Gnostics unyielding refusal to grant the history of this world a determinative or probative ultimacy proves enduringly wise. Neither Mackeys nor Howes poetry ever stops dreaming up possible political futures, but their thrumming bass notes of Gnostic disquiet remind us that we are prey to idols and illusions if we believe that history is anything other than a nightmare.

_______________________________________________________________

This essay was published in Issue 112 of Image under the title Gnostic Ironies: New Poetry by Nathaniel Mackey and Fanny Howe

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New Zealand’s Ardern tests positive for COVID-19

Posted: at 7:01 pm

STORY: New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has tested positive for COVID-19 and has moderate symptoms.

Thats according to a statement from her office on Saturday, which said Ardern began showing symptoms on Friday evening.

Her partner Clarke Gayford and their daughter both tested positive earlier in the week.

Ardern is now required to isolate until the morning of May 21, and will undertake what duties she can remotely.

She will not be in parliament for the government's emissions reduction plan on Monday and the budget on Thursday.

Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson will address the media in her place on Monday.

In the statement, Ardern said she was gutted to miss what she called the governments milestone week.

But added that "isolating with COVID-19 is a very kiwi experience this year and my family is no different."

ARDERN: "Today represents a significant milestone in our recovery plan."

On Wednesday, Ardern announced New Zealand would fully reopen its international borders on August 1.

The country's had some of the strictest COVID measures throughout the pandemic and one of lowest death rates in the world.

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New Zealand's Ardern tests positive for COVID-19

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New Zealand shooting survivor says violence achieved nothing – NPR

Posted: at 7:01 pm

Al Noor mosque shooting survivor Temel Atacocugu points to the scar of a bullet wound in his arm during an interview at his home, Feb. 25, 2020, in Christchurch, New Zealand. Mark Baker/AP hide caption

Al Noor mosque shooting survivor Temel Atacocugu points to the scar of a bullet wound in his arm during an interview at his home, Feb. 25, 2020, in Christchurch, New Zealand.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand If the Buffalo supermarket shooter had learned anything from the massacre in New Zealand that apparently inspired him, it should have been that the violence didn't achieve any of the gunman's aims, a survivor said Tuesday.

Temel Atacocugu was shot nine times when a white supremacist opened fire during Friday prayers at two mosques in Christchurch three years ago, killing 51 worshippers and severely injuring dozens more.

Atacocugu continues to recover from the gunshot wounds in his mouth, left arm and both legs.

One of the stated aims of the Christchurch gunman was to sow discord between racial and ethnic groups, eventually forcing nonwhite people to leave. But if anything, the opposite happened as Muslims and non-Muslims embraced each other in a shared and enduring grief.

Atacocugu said the news about the shooting in Buffalo, New York, and its connections to the Christchurch massacre was scary, triggering flashbacks for him.

"Violence does not solve the problem. They should see that. People, including the extremists, should see that violence does not fix anything," he said. "Peace will fix it. They have to learn to talk with people around them, too."

Atacocugu said he was heartbroken for the families of the Buffalo victims and wished governments around the world would do more to stop extremism.

"They went to do their shopping and they had no idea what's going to happen," he said. "They were just thinking to buy their food, maybe they're feeding their young kids at home."

The 18-year-old gunman accused of killing 10 Black people in the Buffalo attack had watched a copy of the livestream video the New Zealand mosque shooter had taken, according to a document attributed to him.

People wait outside the Al Noor mosque following a mass shooting March 15, 2019, in central Christchurch, New Zealand. Mark Baker/AP hide caption

People wait outside the Al Noor mosque following a mass shooting March 15, 2019, in central Christchurch, New Zealand.

In a 180-page diatribe, Payton Gendron said he subscribed to the same racist "great replacement" theory that the New Zealand gunman Brenton Tarrant wrote about in a similar 74-page screed.

And like Tarrant, Gendron allegedly painted slogans on his gun and used a helmet-mounted camera to livestream his attack on the internet.

Gendron, who surrendered inside the supermarket, has pleaded not guilty and was jailed under a suicide watch.

After eventually pleading guilty, Tarrant, an Australian citizen, in 2020 became the first person in New Zealand to be sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, the toughest sentence available.

The Christchurch attack was livestreamed for 17 minutes and viewed by hundreds of thousands of people on Facebook before it was taken down. The video and Tarrant's screed were quickly banned in New Zealand but can still be found in dark corners of the internet.

Since Christchurch, social platforms have learned to remove videos of extremist shootings faster. The Buffalo shooter allegedly livestreamed the attack to the gaming platform Twitch, which is owned by Amazon. Twitch said it removed the video in less than two minutes.

The Christchurch attacks also prompted the New Zealand government within weeks to pass new laws banning the deadliest types of semi-automatic weapons. Police paid owners to hand over their guns and destroyed more than 50,000 of them.

"We saw in New Zealand the gun control thing," said Muti Bari, another survivor from the Christchurch attacks. "We saw some measures taken by the government immediately after. We are still waiting to see what the U.S.A. government does. But unfortunately, we haven't seen anything like that."

Bari, who hid in a bathroom at the Linwood mosque as the shooter killed people just feet away, said he tries not to think about that day too much but is reminded when he meets his friends, including one family that lost both a father and a son.

He said the easy access to guns in the U.S. coupled with constitutionally protected free speech and the seeming prevalence of hate speech was a potent mix that the U.S. government needed to consider more seriously.

The Christchurch attack has also inspired other white supremacist shootings, including a shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, that left 23 people dead.

Atacocugu, the survivor who was shot nine times, this year retraced the route the gunman drove from Dunedin to Christchurch on the morning of the attacks.

Despite his lingering injuries, Atacocugu walked and biked for two weeks along the entire 360-kilometer (224-mile) route. He wanted to bless the route, spread peace and change a journey that began with hate.

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New Zealand shooting survivor says violence achieved nothing - NPR

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New Zealand banks predict 20% drop in house prices over next year – The Guardian

Posted: at 7:01 pm

New Zealands house prices are on track to drop by up to 20% in the next year the biggest drop since the 1970s two of the biggest banks have predicted, which would take prices back to where they were just over a year ago.

For years, the country has been plagued by a runaway housing market. The cities of Wellington and Auckland have some of the least affordable property markets in the world, and homeownership rates have been falling since the early 1990s across all age brackets, but especially for people in their 20s and 30s.

Now, New Zealand is in the midst of some of the largest drops and slowdowns since the aftermath of the global financial crisis. The number of houses sold in April was down 30% from the month prior, according to the Real Estate Institute and, according to Westpac, prices fell by 1.1% in April now down 5% from their peaks in November.

Price drops and supply increases will be welcome news for prospective buyers, but recent first homebuyers who spent up large now to own an asset that is less valuable, and increasing interest rates due to inflation, could make paying off a hefty mortgage more challenging, as a cost of living crisis also bites.

Two of the countrys largest banks, Westpac and ASB, have now both sounded the alarm about dramatic drops in house prices over the next year, with ASB economists citing the three big housing nasties as the reason behind the receding prices: tighter credit conditions, higher mortgage rates and increased supply of new housing.

However, the bulk of the house price impact from the mortgage rate surge is yet to come. About 60% of all mortgages rates will be reset over the coming 12 months, ASB said.

Interest rates could nearly double for some households, ASB economists said, but it does not expect the change to lead to widespread mortgage distress or forced sales. But the rate shock will siphon a bunch of extra disposable income out of Kiwis wallets this year, hitting discretionary retail spending hard.

Westpacs acting chief economist, Michael Gordon, told news website Stuff that while 20% sounded like a big drop, it would put prices back only on par with where they were at the start of 2021. Median house prices rose 31% in the year to July 2021.

That illustrates the ferocity of the rise in house prices during what turned out to be a brief period of super-low interest rates, he said.

Gordon added that increasing incomes and a rise in household savings would take the edge off a downturn. The slowdown were forecasting looks more likely to be a soft landing, rather than a crash.

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New Zealand to help pay for cleaner cars to reduce emissions – The Associated Press

Posted: at 7:01 pm

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) New Zealands government said Monday it will help pay for lower-income families to scrap their old gas guzzlers and replace them with cleaner hybrid or electric cars as part of a sweeping plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The government said it plans to spend 569 million New Zealand dollars ($357 million) on the trial program as part of a larger plan that includes subsidies for businesses to reduce emissions, a switch to an entirely green bus fleet by 2035 and curbside food-waste collection for most homes by the end of the decade.

This is a landmark day in our transition to a low emissions future, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said in a statement. Weve all seen the recent reports on sea level rise and its impact right here in New Zealand. We cannot leave the issue of climate change until its too late to fix.

The plan represents a step toward the pledges the nation made under the 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change and New Zealands stated goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Ardern, who was scheduled to launch the plan but cancelled after testing positive for COVID-19 late last week, said every community and sector had a role to play and that reducing reliance on fossil fuels would help shield households from volatile price hikes.

The plan also sets a target of reducing total car travel by 20% over the next 13 years by offering better transportation options in cities as well as improved options for cyclists and walkers.

The programs will be paid for from a 4.5 billion New Zealand dollar ($2.8 billion) climate emergency response fund. Officials said that over time, money collected from polluters would pay for the programs rather than taxes from households.

But the plan remained short on some details, including for the gas guzzler replacement plan which the government said would be finalized over the coming months.

And some critics said it continued to give an easy ride to the nations huge agriculture industry, which creates about half of the nations total greenhouse gas emissions but is also vital to the economy as the nations biggest export earner.

Some of the policies announced, like the cash-for-clunkers system, are proven to be dogs and have been tried and failed overseas, said David Seymour, leader of the libertarian ACT Party.

Seymour said consumers should be able to choose how they reduce emissions through the market-based emissions trading scheme.

New Zealand to help pay for cleaner cars to reduce emissions - The Associated Press

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Alarmed by Solomon Islands-China pact, New Zealand finds its voice on security – WION

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New Zealand has long been seen as the moderate, even absent,voiceonChinain the "Five Eyes" western alliance, so much so thatitscommitment to the group was questioned just 12 months ago.

The recent signing of asecuritypactbetweenChinaand nearbySolomonIslandsappears to have changed that.

New Zealand's tone on bothsecurityand Beijing's growing presence in the South Pacific has toughened, a shift analysts say reflects concerns the agreement will give Beijing a strategic foothold and potentially a military presence in the Pacific that could destabilise Western influence.

Also read |Australia-Solomon Islands meet, discussions include China deal

"It's a real challenge to New Zealand's sense of where the Pacific is heading," said Robert Ayson, Professor of Strategic Studies at Victoria University of Wellington.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described thepactas "gravely concerning" and called onSolomonIslandsto discuss it within the PacificIslandsForum.

"What is really changing around us is the level of assertiveness and aggression we see in the region," Ardern said later at a United States-New Zealand Business Summit.

New Zealand has previously often shied away from such criticisms, which analysts put down to the country's heavy trade reliance and close economic relationship withChina.

BothChinaand theSolomonIslandshave said the newpactwill not undermine peace in the region. Details of the final agreement have not been released but Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said the agreement called forChinato help theSolomonIslandsmaintain social order and cope with natural disasters, and did not pose a risk to the United States.

Watch |The Pacific power struggle: US officials land in Solomon Island

Soft power

But statements by Ardern and Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta were a clear signal they shared U.S. and Australian concerns about Chinesesecurityengagement in the Pacific, said Anna Powles from the Centre for Defence andSecurityStudies at Massey University.

"It also sent a signal to the Pacific that New Zealand supported regional collectivesecurityinitiatives, and to third parties, specificallyChina, that regional crises in the Pacific would be managed by the region," she said.

While small and with limited military capabilities, New Zealand's soft power in the Pacific is arguably stronger thanitsallies. It has a large Pacifika population and strong family, business, sporting and cultural ties along with territories in the region.

New Zealand seesitself as a Pacific country and wants stability and prosperity foritsneighbours, and needs a free and open Indo-Pacific to protect trade and telecommunication connections.

David Vaeafe, programme manager at non-governmental organisation Pacific Cooperation Foundation, said the relationship with the Pacific was not all about money but about listening and understanding what the region needs.

"New Zealand's foreign policy towards the Pacific is slowly evolving and engaging from being 'you shouldn't do this' to consulting and being part of that process," he said.

Also read |Senior White House official Kurt Campbell visits Solomon Islands after it signed security pact with China

Five Eyes Criticisms

A year ago, there were questions over Wellington's commitment to the Five Eyes alliance with Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States, after Mahuta said Wellington was uncomfortable with expanding the role of the group.

There had been criticism after New Zealand opted not to sign joint statements from other Five Eyes members, including one on Hong Kong and another on the origins of COVID-19.

White House Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbelltold a business summit earlier this month that New Zealand's underestimation ofsecurityrisks in the past appeared unlikely to be an issue.

"I think there is an understanding that the challenges that are presenting themselves on the global stage are not so distant - they're closer and they have direct implications," he said.

Already New Zealand and Japan have announced plans to increasesecurityties and other moves are afoot.

Mahuta visited Fiji at the end of March and signed an agreement that among things will facilitate information on sharedsecuritychallenges.

Also read |Security deal with China won't affect peace, says Solomon Islands prime minister

At the start of the month, a partly New Zealand-backed tuna processing plant for theSolomonIslandsthat is set to create more than 5,500 jobs was announced.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has quietly shuffled more money into Pacific development cooperation budget for 2021-2024, according to changes made onitswebsite. The fund has been increased since December by nearlyNZ$120 million ($75 million) to $1.55 billion.

New Zealand's budget on Thursday will likely give further detail on Pacific spending with New Zealand's defence minister previously highlighting the region as a priority.

"New Zealand is quite strongly aligned to the United States and Australia," VUW's Ayson said. "That doesn't mean we always see eye-to-eye and it doesn't mean the we're as closely aligned as Australia, but New Zealand'ssecurityalliance is quite strong."

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Alarmed by Solomon Islands-China pact, New Zealand finds its voice on security - WION

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FIRST READING: Why the world hates Canada for its dairy policy – National Post

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Despite everything, an election held tomorrow would yield same results as last two

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