#tf uk

[aviatrix-ash]

Heard we're Bluestreak appreciation posting again here.

He looked cute in this panel as he just took down a Seeker in the previous panels.

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Painting I: Alfred Sisley’s “Spring at Bougival” (circa 1873), in an exhibition at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn. // Painting II: Sisley’s “The Flood at Port Marly,” from 1872. Credit National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon Alfred Sisley: The Unheralded Impressionist by Jason Farago - February 02, 2017 - https://www.nytimes.com GREENWICH, Conn. — A reforming spirit swept through art history in the 1970s, when an academic discipline that once prized close looking above all else began to think about matters beyond form and symbolism. To truly see French painting of the late 19th century, historians averred, you had to understand their social history too — the urban reconstruction witnessed by the bourgeois Parisians in a painting by Gustave Caillebotte, or the health laws that regulated Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s prostitutes, or the class divisions expressed by the clothes of Georges Seurat’s Sunday parkgoers. It was a huge development in the history of art, but it had a side effect: Some significant painters, less socially engaged than Manet or Degas, ended up consigned to the B-team. Alfred Sisley (1839-1899) is one of those painters. He was included in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874; he showed with the leading Impressionist dealer Paul Durand-Ruel; and he maintained a close friendship with Monet even after leaving Paris for the suburbs. But Sisley’s near-exclusive focus on landscape has meant that he now appears, fairly or unfairly, largely in the shadow of the big boys who called modern art into being in the mid-1860s. A retrospective at the Bruce Museum here, the first Sisley show in the United States in more than two decades, offers a chance to focus on an artist who may not be in the first rank of French artists but who deserves greater attention. here is a dependability to Sisley’s painting. The 50-odd works here depict the Île-de-France region that surrounds Paris, as well as a few British sites, with delicate, divided brush marks and soft light effects rendered with daubs of gray and white. If his earlier paintings are a little tighter and his late ones a bit freer, there is nothing here like the wild, proto-Abstract Expressionist mark-making of Monet’s final years. Sisley was an atmosphere guy, and like almost all his colleagues, he painted en plein air, taking his canvas and palette to the banks of the Seine or to towns west of Paris. As for the figures, whether peasants in a landscape or pleasure-seekers in a boat, they are uniformly faceless, and sometimes depicted as just a few patches of flesh tones in acres of blue and green. Sisley was born in Paris to expatriate British parents; he lived in France almost his entire life. In his 20s he began painting landscapes in the forest of Fontainebleau, where an earlier generation of French artists — Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Charles Daubigny, and the other members of the Barbizon school — began to imbue landscape painting with greater subjectivity. An undistinguished early genre picture, from 1865-66, sees Sisley follow Corot’s example in depicting flowering trees as a curtain of specked pigment. Most of Sisley’s early work is gone. His house in the Paris suburbs was occupied by the Prussians during the Franco-Prussian War, and in a letter to a friend he said he lost everything he owned. As a Briton, Sisley didn’t fight, but we know he went to Paris, and he surely would have had contact with fellow artists, fighting for the doomed French Army. (The most famous art-world casualty was Sisley’s friend Frédéric Bazille — a retrospective of whom is at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and will open at the National Gallery of Art in Washington this April.) When the war ended, Sisley returned to Île-de-France, where he grew interested in depicting the suburbs with the sensitivity once reserved for the countryside. A painting of the port in Marly, flooded after the Seine burst its banks, unifies sky, water and a cafe into an allover undulation of pigment. Only rarely do his landscapes disclose the transformations that the Industrial Revolution was wreaking. On a trip to London, Sisley ventured out of town and visited Hampton Court, where he painted a newfangled bridge from below, its cast-iron struts framing a Thames of blue and white blotches. The palette in these postwar paintings is a uniform one of blue, gray, white and green. He becomes a bit more experimental with his colors in the 1880s, and brush strokes get slightly freer, as well: Trees are stippled with a perpendicular brush rather than merely smeared horizontally. I don’t want to overstate any break in style, though. As the Post Impressionists were preparing their emotional onslaught, Sisley stuck with what he knew, even if there was slightly more gesture in the riverside grasses and snowy skies he painted toward the end of his life. One of his final paintings, done on a beach in Wales during stormy weather in 1897, has sand of mauve breached by white waves, and almost recalls the chromatic experiments of Edvard Munch. This exhibition, curated by the Sisley scholar MaryAnne Stevens, plots Sisley’s art not only through time but through the Île-de-France region, which Sisley shuttled across as his interests changed and his money woes deepened. If your view of modern French painting inclines to only Paris and Provence, this show will introduce you to a new peri-urban geography of places physically on the cusp of the French capital but socially far removed. Argenteuil, Sèvres, Saint-Cloud, Villeneuve-la-Garenne: those suburbs Sisley painted are places that contemporary Parisians now see from the scratched windows of the R.E.R. express trains, and while some remain fancy bourgeois commuter towns, others are now ringed by tower blocks. Remembering that these towns are not eternally bucolic may help contemporary viewers find greater relevance in Sisley’s serene prospects. The landscape is never just the landscape; society is written across it too. -- Artist- Sisley - painting Meadow thursdayfile.com/Artist/AlfredSisley_016.html

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Moment in Time Guy Fawkes is executed “January 31, 1606: It was a terrorist plot in the heart of London that laid bare tensions in a society divided over religious intolerance. And it played out more than 400 years ago, before "terrorism" was even a word. On this date in 1606, Guy Fawkes (a.k.a. Guido) and three of his 12 co-conspirators died for their role in the Gunpowder Plot, which the famous rhyme helps us remember had been derailed on the fifth of November. The aim of the Catholic militants had been to blow up the English Parliament, killing all the politicians, the Protestant King James and his heir. But authorities were tipped off and Fawkes was found in the cellar with the incriminating powder. The sentence for treason was to be drawn, hanged and quartered – a punishment even more gruesome than it sounds because the hanging was often brief enough that dismemberment could begin on living bodies. But Fawkes, weak from torture during his interrogation, feebly mounted the scaffold and jumped, breaking his neck. Beyond Bonfire Nights and Guy Fawkes masks, the reverberations of the whole affair were profound: The plight of the religious minority worsened as the wider group was blamed for the actions of a few fanatics.” – Joy Yokoyama ---------- Steven H MacDowall Join my Blog ‘The Thursday File’ every week. My next posting > February 01, 2018 > The Thursday File #710 - sign up today! > www.thursdayfile.com

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Catalan Separatists Want Independence. Who Else? By Milan Schreuer - December 17, 2017 - https://www.nytimes.com/ Part III: Scotland, United Kingdom Photo: In 2014, after a bitter campaign, Scots voted 55 percent to 45 percent to remain in the United Kingdom. - by Leon Neal Scotland joined with England to form Britain in 1707, and has had an active independence movement for decades. A Scottish Parliament was established in 1999 with limited power over matters such as health, education and the environment, and the pro-independence Scottish National Party now forms the government there. After winning a majority in the 2011 Scottish Parliament election, the party pressed for an independence referendum, with the consent of the British government. In 2014, after a bitter campaign, Scots voted 55 percent to 45 percent to remain in the United Kingdom. In the 2016 Brexit referendum, a majority of Scots voted to remain in the European Union, while Britain as a whole voted to leave. But the Scottish National Party has delayed pressing for a second referendum on independence. Next: Part IV: Flanders, Belgium -------------------------- Steven H MacDowall Join my Blog 'The Thursday File' every week. My next posting > December 21st > The Thursday File #704 - sign up today!

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The Weekend - Whats Up Photo I: Portugal - A wildfire is reflected in a stream at Penela, Coimbra, on Sunday. Photo II: France - The National Assembly in Paris Photo III: UK - Emergency services workers inside the burned-out Grenfell Tower building on Sunday Photo IV: USA - Koepka posed for a picture with his girlfriend Jena Sims while holding the trophy -------------- Portugal - Raging forest fires kill at least 62 in Portugal PEDROGAO GRANDE, PORTUGAL—A raging forest fire in central Portugal killed at least 62 people as they desperately tried to flee, charring cars and trucks as it swept over roads. The disaster — the worst tragedy Portugal has experienced in decades — shook the nation, with the president declaring that the country’s pain “knows no end.” Almost 24 hours after the deaths Saturday night, fires were still churning across the forested hillsides of central Portugal. Police and firefighters were searching charred areas of the forest and isolated homes, looking for more bodies. A huge wall of thick smoke and bright red flames towered over the tops of trees in the forested Pedrogao Grande area, 150 kilometres northeast of Lisbon where a lightning strike was believed to have sparked the blaze Saturday. Investigators found a tree that was hit during a “dry thunderstorm,” the head of the national judicial police said. Dry thunderstorms are frequent when falling water evaporates before reaching the ground because of high temperatures. Portugal is prone to forest fires in the dry summer months and temperatures as high as 40 degrees Celsius hit the area in recent days. ----------- France - Macron's party wins clear parliamentary majority With nearly all votes counted, his La République en Marche, alongside its MoDem allies, won more than 300 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly. The record-low turnout, about 43 percent The winning margin is lower than some expected, with turnout down from 2012. The party was formed just over a year ago, and half of its candidates have little or no political experience. The result has swept aside all of the mainstream parties and gives the 39-year-old president a strong mandate in parliament to pursue his pro-EU, business-friendly reform plans. -------------- UK - London police say that the number of dead or missing in the high-rise apartment building fire is now 79. Police Commander Stuart Cundy gave the new figure during a statement outside Scotland Yard on Monday. The previous figure given was 58. "As of this morning, I'm afraid to say there are now 79 people that we believe are either dead or missing and I sadly have to presume are dead," he said. Cundy said the new number may change as the investigation continues. He said that the search and recovery operation in the 24-story Grenfell Tower continues, and it has been incredibly distressing for families. - Two British officials said Sunday that new exterior cladding used in a renovation of Grenfell Tower may have been banned under UK building regulations. - Up to 600 people lived in the 24-storey building although officials don't know exactly how many were in it when the fire broke out early Wednesday. Officials say they may never have a precise death toll or be able to identify all of the victims. - The public housing block was home to a wide variety of nationalities, including many originally from the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean. The mixture reflected London's stature as a magnet for people trying to make a fresh start. The first officially confirmed victim was a 23-year-old Syrian refugee whose grieving parents said he had come to Britain with ambitions to forge a new life. -------------- Sports USA Brooks Koepka captures 1st major title at U.S. Open American grabs control with 3 straight birdies on back 9 - With athleticism and power, and four straight putts over the back nine that allowed him to pull away, Koepka capped off his hardscrabble journey around the world and found stardom at home as the U.S. Open champion. He closed with a 5-under 67, only realizing after his par on the final hole that a birdie would have set yet another U.S. Open record in a week filled with them. Koepka finished at 16-under 272, matching the lowest score to par first set by Rory McIlroy six years ago at Congressional. Tied for the lead with six holes to play, Koepka holed an 8-foot par putt on the 13th hole that gave him confidence with his stroke and momentum to pour in birdies on the next three holes to turn the final hour into a celebration of another young star in golf. Notes - Brooks Koepka, USA, Current ranking: 5 - 1,534 points - 17 events - 1 win - USD $4,464,771. - This week alone, nine players reached at least 10 under and seven finished there. - The week ended with 31 players under par, breaking the U.S. Open record of 28 players at Medinah in 1990. There were 133 sub-par rounds, nine more than the previous record in that 1990 U.S. Open. -- Steven H MacDowall Why not take a moment and sign up to the Thursday File, my blog www.thursdayfile.com

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British police say attacker inspired by terrorism; 7 arrested in raids Death toll revised back to 4, although 7 are in critical condition The Associated Press - March 23, 2017 - http://www.cbc.ca Photo I: Time line with photos of how the attack on Wednesday unfolded // Photo II: Police officers and forensics investigators work on Westminster Bridge Thursday morning. - by Darren Staples // Photo III: from Nahlah Ayed Twitter feed. Updated: - Police raid 6 addresses, arrest 7 - U.K. PM Theresa May to speak at 6:30 a.m. ET - 4 killed, including attacker, and 40 others injured - Police believe attacker acted alone, was 'inspired by international terrorism' -- British police say they believe the attacker who killed three people including a police officer outside Parliament on Wednesday acted alone and was "inspired by international terrorism." About 40 people were also injured, some critically. Britain's Parliament this morning observed a minute of silence to mourn the victims. Prime Minister Theresa May will address Parliament at 6:30 a.m. ET. She earlier condemned the "sick and depraved terrorist attack." Flags at Parliament have been lowered to half-mast. Since the attack, police have raided six addresses, including in London and Birmingham, which have resulted in seven arrests in total. Mark Rowley, assistant commissioner with the Metropolitan Police, said that police are not ready to publicly identify the attacker and they are continuing to investigate "his motivation, his preparation and his associates." The raids come after the attacker drove an SUV into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge before crashing the vehicle into the gates of Parliament on Wednesday. He scaled the fences and later fatally stabbed a policeman before being gunned down by officers. The policeman has been identified as Keith Palmer, 48. Rowley said that 29 people required hospitalization and seven are in critical condition. Police were not to ready to publicly name the other two deceased until notification of next of kin, with at least one of the victims not from Britain. Those victims were identified as a woman in her 40s, and a man in his 50s. BBC reported that in addition to Britain, the injured included those from France, Romania and South Korea. While there is an increased police presence on Thursday, Rowley said there was no credible information of further threats. Parliament is scheduled to be in session later in the morning. -- Steven MacDowall Thursday File - http://www.thursdayfile.com

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Marmite Survives After ‘Brexit’ Spurs Tesco-Unilever Price Dispute By Kimiko De Freytas-Tamura - October 13, 2016 LONDON — Months after Britain voted to leave the European Union, the first tangible victim of that decision has emerged and, like the 28-nation bloc itself, it is something that has divided the country for years: Marmite, a sludgy and odd-tasting breakfast spread. Since the June referendum, many who voted for withdrawal from the European Union, a process known as Brexit, have brushed off concerns that a recession was possible or that car manufacturers and banks based in the country might leave. They have even celebrated the pound’s recent fall to a 31-year low, arguing that a weaker currency is good for exporters. But they probably never thought it would come to this. Fears that Marmite and other British classics, like the PG Tips brand of tea, might disappear from store shelves had gripped Britons after reports that the supermarket chain Tesco and the owner of those brands, the British-Dutch consumer goods company Unilever, were locked in a price dispute over who should bear the cost of the weakening pound. Marmite was briefly unavailable in Tesco’s online market, and store supplies dwindled. The pound has fallen drastically against other major currencies since the vote to leave the bloc, and as worries have increased that Britain would opt for a “hard Brexit” — shorthand for a strict break with the European Union — which could limit its tariff-free access to the region’s single market for goods and services. But after the markets closed on Thursday, Tesco reassured the public that the crisis had been averted. In a statement, Tesco said, “We’re pleased this situation has been resolved to our satisfaction.” In reality, consumers will most likely have to dig deeper into their pocketbooks. Graeme Pitkethly, Unilever’s chief financial officer, said during an earnings call on Thursday that “prices should start to increase to cover the cost of imported goods due to weaker sterling.” Still, the concerns over the beloved consumer goods led to a political uproar. “Who would have thought that the first casualty of a hard Brexit would be the nation’s supplies of Marmite?” asked Pete Wishart, a member of Parliament for the Scottish National Party, which campaigned to remain in the European Union. On Twitter, Britons wryly noted that store shelves were emptied of Marmite jars, and one used jar was put up for sale on eBay for 100,000 pounds, or about $122,000. News bulletins on the BBC led with the possible Marmite shortage. “This is a concrete case of Brexit affecting people’s lives,” said Pinar Hosafci, a senior food analyst at Euromonitor International. “Talk of Brexit had been more political, financial and a bit abstract” before, she added. “This touches their lives.” Among the affected brands is Colman’s Mustard, which, like Marmite, is produced in Britain. Analysts noted that although Marmite and some of the other affected brands were made in Britain, Unilever published its company results in euros, meaning that those products were still affected by a weaker pound. Imported household goods like Dove soap and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream are also under the Unilever umbrella. In 2011, Tesco refused to stock Branston Pickle after another supplier, Premier Foods, tried to pass on cost increases. Analysts have predicted that food prices will start to rise across the board in the coming months as supermarkets struggle to absorb the extra cost of imported goods, which are more expensive when a currency weakens. Stores have already stopped promotions and discounts on their products, Ms. Hosafci said. But “price increases will start happening in the next four to five months, when they will need to renew their stocks.” “Eventually, they’ll need to increase prices,” she added. “Otherwise, their businesses will no longer be profitable.” -- Photo I: A taxi at Unilever’s Marmite factory. Britons feared for the toast-topper during a price dispute. - by Darren Staples // Photo II: bottle of Marmite // Photo III: Marmite Mug / -- Note I: Marmite is the brand name for two similar food spreads: the original British version, since 2000 a Unilever product; and a modified version produced in New Zealand by Sanitarium Health Food Company and distributed in Australia and the Pacific. Marmite is made from yeast extract, a by-product of beer brewing. Other similar products include the Australian Vegemite, the Swiss Cenovis and the German Vitam-R. The British version of the product is a sticky, dark brown food paste with a distinctive, powerful flavour, which is extremely salty. This distinctive taste is reflected in the British company's marketing slogan: "Love it or hate it." The product's name has entered British English as a metaphor for something that is an acquired taste or tends to polarise opinions. A version with a different flavour has been manufactured in New Zealand since 1919. This is the only product sold as Marmite in Australasia and the Pacific, whereas elsewhere in the world the British version predominates. The image on the front of the British jar shows a "marmite", a French term for a large, covered earthenware or metal cooking pot. British Marmite was originally supplied in earthenware pots, but since the 1920s has been sold in glass jars shaped like the French cooking pot. -- Steven H MacDowall Sign up to my blog at www.thursdayfile.com Next one is published October 20, 2016

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Theresa May Born: October 01, 1956 (age 59), Eastbourne, England, UK May has been married to Philip May, an investment banker currently employed by Capital International, since September 06, 1980 Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: Assumed office on July 13 2016 Leader of the Conservative Party: Assumed office on July 11 2016 She campaigned to remain in the European Union The former home secretary, 59, becomes the UK's second female prime minister in the wake of David Cameron's resignation after the EU referendum. She had previously served in the Home Office for more than six years. -- She is the only child of Zaidee Mary (née Barnes; 1928–1982) and Hubert Brasier (1917–1981). Her father was a Church of England clergyman who was chaplain of an Eastbourne hospital. He later took up the position of Vicar of Wheatley, a few miles east of Oxford. -- Steven H MacDowall Sign up to my blog at www.thursdayfile.com Next one goes out July 14, 2016