April 13, 2024

Italian fashion designer Roberto Cavalli dies aged 83

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/italian-fashion-designer-roberto-cavalli-dies-aged-83-2024-04-12/



April 12 (Reuters) - Italian fashion designer Roberto Cavalli, known for his animal-print designs loved by showbusiness stars, has died at the age of 83, his company said. Cavalli, who founded his label in the early 1970s, had been ill for some time. He is survived by his six children and his partner Sandra Bergman Nilsson.

"The Roberto Cavalli company shares condolences with Mr. Cavalli's family, his legacy remains a constant source of inspiration," Sergio Azzolari, chief executive of Roberto Cavalli, said in a post on Instagram. The designer died on Friday at his home in Florence, Italian news agency ANSA reported.

Cavalli, who used bright colours and patchwork effects in his often revealing creations, was an extroverted art lover who wore tinted glasses and smoked a cigar. He expanded into real estate and often spent evenings in his popular "Just Cavalli Cafe," a nightclub in central Milan.

Giorgio Armani said he always had "enormous respect" for Cavalli even though his vision of fashion could not have been more different. "Roberto was a true artist, wild and wonderful in his use of prints, capable of transforming fantasy into seductive clothes," he posted on social media platform X.

snip

RIP

April 12, 2024

For all his bombast, Trump is plummeting - financially, legally and politically

He’s losing cash reserves and legal gambits, and his eponymous stock – DJT – took an embarrassing tumble this week

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/12/donald-trump-finance-stock-trial




Donald Trump is doing his best Wizard of Oz imitation. These days, Trump is not looking like the “winner” he needs voters to believe him to be. Like the title character in L Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s fantasy and the 1939 movie, there is less there than meets the eye. The 45th president’s lead in the polls evaporates while his cash stash shrinks. His upcoming felony fraud trial in Manhattan looms. For the record, he is zero for three in his bids to adjourn the trial, and lawyers are expensive. At the same time, the stock price of Trump Media & Technology Group – his eponymous meme stock, DJT – has plummeted this week. “DJT stock is down again,” announced Barron’s on Thursday. “Trump’s stake in Truth Social parent has taken a hit.” Elsewhere a headline blared: “Trump’s ‘DJT’ stock dives to lowest close since Ron DeSantis dropped out”. Reminder, Trump is a guy whose businesses are no stranger to bankruptcy or allegations of fraud. He leaves wreckage in his wake. The spirit of Trump University remains alive. Like life in Oz, so much in Trump World is illusory.

Meanwhile, Trump’s attempts to bond New York state’s $454m judgment have run into a legal roadblock. The purported bond posted to avoid enforcement pending appeal may be legally insufficient. Letitia James, the state’s attorney general, demands clarification. Whether the paperwork will be sustained will be decided at a court hearing later this month. If the court finds the bond to be insufficient or invalid, James may be able to immediately seek to collect what the state is owed. Financial humiliation set against the backdrop of the campaign is something that Trump can ill afford. For the record, he has already posted a $91m bond to stave off enforcement in the second E Jean Carroll defamation case. His assets are getting tied up, his liquidity ebbs. To him, image is almost everything. At the same time, abortion has re-emerged as a campaign issue, to the horror of the presumptive Republican nominee and his minions. The death of Roe v Wade cost the Republican party its “red wave” in the 2022 midterms. This time, it may lead to another Trump loss and Hakeem Jeffries of Queens wielding the speaker’s gavel in the US House of Representatives.

Hell hath no fury like suburban moms and their daughters. The last thing they need is a thrice-married libertine seventysomething with a penchant for adult film stars and Playboy models telling them how to raise their kids or meddling in their personal lives. When a guy who hawks Bibles for a side-hustle refuses to say whether any of his partners ever had an abortion, it’s time to roll your eyes and guard your wallet. “Such an interesting question,” he replied to Maureen Dowd in 2016, when asked about his days as a swinging single. “So what’s your next question?” For the moment anyway, the party faithful ignore Trump’s pleas to rectify the decision of Arizona’s highest court to allow the criminalization of all abortions except when the life of the mother is endangered. On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled Arizona legislature refused to revoke the 1864 law in the middle of this latest controversy. In case anyone forgot, once upon a time Trump himself had called for the criminalization of abortion. There had to be “some form of punishment” for women who have abortions, Trump said at a 2016 town hall.


Likewise, Kari Lake – a Republican Senate candidate in Arizona, Trump acolyte and frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago – had demanded that her state enact an abortion regime that copied Texas’s draconian law. Not any more. Live by Dobbs, die by Dobbs. Arizona is the new ground zero of this election. This is what states’ rights looks like. Having feasted on Hunter Biden’s depredations, it is once again time for the Republican party to stare into the mirror and cringe. Trump is more Caligula and Commodus than Cyrus, the biblical paradigm of a virtuous heathen king. For all of Joe Biden’s missteps and mistakes, his candidacy is demonstrating unexpected vitality. Then again, he is running against a defeated former president who lost the popular vote in 2016 to Hillary Clinton and again four years later. Trump’s lead is now a matter of fractions. According to Real Clear Politics, he is now ahead by a microscopic two-10ths of 1%. Indeed, Reuters’s latest poll shows the 46th president with a four-point lead up from a single percentage point a month ago. Said differently, Trump’s campaign is in retrograde. Joe Biden is in the hunt and Donald Trump is looking like the old man behind the curtain. Substitute Stormy Daniels for Dorothy and the only things missing from this tableau are Toto, the little dog, ruby slippers and Kansas.

snip

April 12, 2024

Minimalhouse/ Microhouse Mix [Travelling without Moving #2]

April 12, 2024

Tim Kaine: Biden knows Netanyahu 'played' him in early months of Gaza war

Senator and leading foreign policy voice in Democratic party tells the Guardian Biden has come to realise the limits of his influence

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/11/tim-kaine-interview-biden-israel-netanyahu

Senator Tim Kaine, a former vice-presidential nominee and leading foreign policy voice in the Democratic party, has said Joe Biden now understands that Benjamin Netanyahu “played” him during the early months of the war in Gaza but “that ain’t going to happen any more”. In an interview with the Guardian on Tuesday, Kaine accused the prime minister of making Israel “dramatically less safe” and hurting its longstanding relationship with the US, and said the US president had come to realise the limits of his influence.

The Democratic senator for Virginia is best known nationally as Hillary Clinton’s running mate in the 2016 presidential election, a race they lost to Republicans Donald Trump and Mike Pence. The Biden ally is a member of the Senate foreign relations and armed services committees. Kaine has repeatedly reiterated his backing for Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas following the terrorist attack six months ago that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 250 people hostage. But he has joined other Democrats in expressing growing consternation over a hardline military response that has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza health ministry, and spurred a looming famine.

Biden embraced Netanyahu early in the conflict but had little to show for it as Israel continued to rain bombs on Gaza, causing mass displacement, threats of famine and disease and, last week, the deaths of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers. Protesters have condemned Biden for miscalculating the extent of his sway over Netanyahu. Kaine reflected: “I do believe he felt like that relationship and the true compassion that he had for Israel over his career would lead him to be listened to by the Israeli leadership. I think he is enormously frustrated that he’s been trying to give advice, not like a foe would give it – ‘I think this is better for you if you listen to me. I’m not just saying this is better for me; I’m saying this will be better for you.’”

snip

The senator, who last December raised concerns over the Biden administration’s decision to transfer weapons to Israel without congressional oversight, added: “I think President Biden has turned the corner and realised he’s not going to be able, through the force of the relationship, to convince Benjamin Netanyahu to be anything other than who he is.” Biden has become increasingly critical as the war drags on and the civilian death toll mounts, including thousands of children. In an interview recorded last week and broadcast on Tuesday on Univision, the president said of Netanyahu: “I think what he’s doing is a mistake. I don’t agree with his approach.”

snip

April 11, 2024

The Adverts - Gary Gilmore's Eyes [1977] [magnums extended mix]

Label: Anchor (2) – ANC 1043
Format: Vinyl, 7", 45 RPM, Single
Country: UK
Released: 12 Aug 1977
Genre: Rock
Style: New Wave, Punk

April 11, 2024

Antitax Nation: How clever marketing duped America into shoveling more tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations.

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2024-04-05-antitax-nation-graetz-review/





When Ronald Reagan accepted the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, he presented himself as a tax magician. “We are taxing ourselves into economic exhaustion and stagnation,” he said before making a tantalizing promise. He would slash income tax rates by 30 percent over three years. Government revenue would miraculously increase, because lowered taxes would foster massive new investment, creating more jobs at higher pay. Libertarian economists Milton Friedman and Arthur Laffer vigorously championed Reagan’s claims, but even many conservatives scoffed. Herbert Stein, President Nixon’s chief economic adviser, remarked that the likelihood that tax cuts increase revenue was about the same as finding “there is human life on Mars.” George H.W. Bush called it “voodoo economics.”

Those on the upper rungs of the income ladder made out well from the Reagan Revolution. They enjoyed significant tax savings in 1981 and 1986 as the top rate was slashed from 70 to 28 percent, a reduction twice as big as what Reagan promised. But the magic didn’t work: Under Reagan, economic growth ran slightly below, not above, the postwar average. Ballooning annual deficits more than doubled the federal debt in eight years. And Reagan didn’t shrink the federal government relative to the economy, as promised: The share of our economy paid in federal taxes was the same when Reagan assumed office and when he left.

Why, then, do such proposals continue to flourish? In his eloquent and absorbing new book The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America, Michael J. Graetz argues that “the modern antitax movement is the most overlooked social and political movement” of the past half-century. This movement once existed on the fringes, as we see with conservative criticism of the Reagan plan. But Graetz writes that it has grown “into a powerful force that transformed American politics and undermined the nation’s financial strength.” Graetz is not the first to explore antitax political culture, as old a concept in America as Fries’s Rebellion, a 1799 Pennsylvania revolt against a new federal levy on enslaved people and land. Dorothy A. Brown’s trenchant 2021 study The Whiteness of Wealth shows how our tax system “impoverishes Black Americans.”



Then there’s sociologist Isaac William Martin’s eye-opening 2013 book Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent, which focused on semi-con man J.A. Arnold, who 111 years ago created antitax clubs, often led by bankers, that stirred resentment of the newly imposed federal income tax. Beginning in the 1940s, Martin showed, antitax ideology moved into mainstream conservatism after Robert Dresser, a Harvard-educated lawyer and New England textile heir, deftly blended anti-communist, anti-union, and racist appeals into tax policy. Graetz tells the next chapter in this story, tracing how modern charlatans duped the middle and upper-middle class into helping the rich shed the burden of taxes, while hurting themselves in the process. It’s primarily a tale of ideological marketing—selling the sizzle so smartly that few notice the overcooked meat is rotten.

snip

April 11, 2024

Reform Groups Home In on Lack of Corporate Prosecutions at DOJ

https://prospect.org/justice/2024-04-09-reform-groups-lack-of-corporate-prosecutions-doj/



The Antitrust Division of the Justice Department has demonstrated by its actions a determination to hold corporations accountable. Its antitrust cases against Google and Apple, active investigations into Ticketmaster and UnitedHealth, crackdowns on meatpackers and realtors, and successful merger challenges in airlines and publishing testify to this open combat against corporate power. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the rest of the Justice Department, as a recent report from Public Citizen on corporate criminal prosecutions shows. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, in 2023 DOJ prosecuted 113 corporations, up from 99 in 2022 and just 90 in 2021, which was the lowest number in a quarter-century. Even the 2023 figures are still sharply lower than any year of George W. Bush administration, and lower than two of the four years of the Trump administration. And for broader context, the 113 prosecutions last year equal about 37 percent of the 304 prosecutions waged in 2000.

Moreover, 76 percent of the corporations DOJ prosecuted in 2023 had 50 or fewer employees. Large corporations are far less represented among the array of prosecuted companies, regardless of their culpability for corporate crime. This has drawn the attention of five accountability-minded organizations, which today asked for a greater commitment to corporate criminal enforcement in a letter to President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland obtained by the Prospect. Following what has now become a mantra amid progressives in D.C.—“personnel is policy”—the groups focused on vacancies in the top levels of DOJ leadership, which they say would be better served with appointees “who can be counted on to aggressively protect the public interest.”

Chief among the concerns for the Revolving Door Project, the American Economic Liberties Project, Demand Progress Education Fund, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and the People’s Parity Project are the two top deputies to Garland at main Justice. One of them, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, is a familiar antagonist to reformers, especially since she announced a “safe harbor” policy whereby companies engaged in mergers and acquisitions can volunteer information about wrongdoing at the target company and eliminate their liability. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has explained, this policy constitutes a double whammy of encouraging mergers and neglecting to prosecute corporate crime. Monaco has a well-documented history as a partner at corporate defense firm O’Melveny & Myers, where she represented Apple, and a principal at WestExec Advisors, where clients included Google and other large corporations.

But less well known is the number three member of the Justice Department leadership, Benjamin Mizer. He is currently serving as acting associate attorney general, after Vanita Gupta stepped down in February. Mizer was Gupta’s principal deputy, and therefore automatically stepped into the role. But while this transition was announced at a press event February 1, there was little fanfare associated with Mizer’s ascension. Perhaps that’s because of Mizer’s stint at BigLaw giant Jones Day, and the litany of corporate clients he represented. That includes serving as lead attorney for Walmart in a case defending the company from charges of facilitating the opioid epidemic among members of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. In that case, Walmart tried to force the tribe to release private data like names and birthdates for every one of its citizens. “Mizer’s resume is yet another example of a profile that has repeatedly failed to protect the American people from the most rapacious and amoral corporations,” the letter reads. “We lack confidence that Mizer should be trusted to advance the administration’s commitment to ensuring that the law applies to everyone, no matter how wealthy or connected.”

snip

April 11, 2024

Privatization Warning: A VA advisory panel issues a red alert on outsourcing.

https://prospect.org/health/2024-04-11-privatization-warning-veterans-affairs/



When the Department of Defense (DOD) or U.S. intelligence agencies face a crisis, they often assemble a task force to conduct a review and recommend solutions. In response to cost overruns on care for nine million patients of the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) recently convened such a high-level “Red Team.” The panel of six health care leaders includes former VHA undersecretaries for health, ex-DOD officials with military health experience, and prominent health care system executives. The group conferred with VA leaders in Washington, collected relevant budget data, and pored over reams of peer-reviewed studies. It then issued a 24-page executive roundtable report entitled “The Urgent Need to Address VHA Community Care Spending and Access Strategies” (emphasis added). Although the report was released to top VA leaders in late March, it has not yet been publicly released. The Prospect’s repeated requests for the report itself or information about it were ignored.

Rarely has a group of inside-the-Beltway experts gotten to the point so quickly or sounded the alarm so clearly. In the report, obtained by the Prospect before its public release, the group unanimously concluded: “The increasing number of Veterans referred to community providers … threaten to materially erode the VA’s direct care system.” Without a course correction, they said, mass closures of VA clinics or certain services could ensue, “eliminating choice for the millions of Veterans who prefer to use the VHA direct care system for all or part of their healthcare needs.” This call for immediate action is noteworthy because of the stature of the team’s members. Red Team chair Kenneth W. Kizer is a Navy veteran and nationally known leader in health care quality and hospital management, who led the transformation of the modern VHA under Bill Clinton. (Kizer declined the Prospect’s request for comment on the report until it was publicly released.)

Dr. Jonathan Perlin served in the same role under George W. Bush, before joining HCA Healthcare as a top administrator, and now leads the Joint Commission, which certifies and accredits private- and public-sector hospitals. Other members include Debra Friesen, a former senior executive at Kaiser Permanente; Dana Safran, CEO and president of the National Quality Forum; Kavita Patel from the Brookings Institution; Karen Guice, a former DOD official in charge of health affairs; and retired Maj. Gen. Elder Granger, who helped manage TRICARE, a private insurance program for active-duty personnel and their families who don’t use the military health care system. The authors don’t question the need for sending some veterans to private doctors or hospitals, “when needed services are not readily available in the VA’s direct care system.” But their report pinpoints all the obvious flaws, weaknesses, waste, and inefficiencies built into large-scale outsourcing, which began under Obama, exploded under Trump, and now continues on Biden’s inattentive watch.

Higher Costs, Less Quality

The cost of reimbursing the 1.7 million private-sector providers enrolled in the five-year-old Veterans Community Care Program (VCCP), which facilitates patient outsourcing, has “dramatically increased, rising from $14.8 billion in FY 2018 to $28.5 billion in FY 2023,” the report states. Referrals outside the VHA are rising by 15 to 20 percent per year and now involve more than 40 percent of all patients, who are getting at least some care in the private sector. One major source of out-of-control costs is privatized emergency room services, which now represent 30 percent of VCCP spending. When a patient or family member clicks on the website of any VA Medical Center in the country and searches for “emergency care,” they are directed to non-VHA hospital emergency rooms, despite studies like one in The British Medical Journal (BMJ) and another published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which found that veterans treated in private ERs were twice as likely to die in the first 28 days after admission than if they had been admitted to the VHA.

snip

April 11, 2024

The Final Act on Government Surveillance

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-04-10-final-act-government-surveillance/



A preliminary floor vote on a House rule to expand government surveillance powers, favored by leadership in both parties, failed to pass on an initial vote this afternoon. The rule was defeated by a sizable margin, 228-193, with ten members not voting. Nineteen Republicans crossed their own Speaker, voting against the rule and preventing it from coming to the floor. The fight involves whether to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) had plotted a strategy to oversee the most dramatic expansion of government surveillance powers since the original Patriot Act.

With many Republican members voting down the rule this afternoon, the path ahead to passing FISA just got a lot harder. Leadership will have to reconvene with the relevant committees to chart out a new road map. Speaker Johnson tried to load up the rule by attaching two controversial, unrelated resolutions that were added at the last minute. One denounced the Biden administration’s immigration policies and the other condemned “efforts to impose one-sided pressure on Israel with respect to Gaza.” These resolutions were likely included to try to make it more challenging for Republicans and pro-Israel Democrats to vote no, despite objections they might harbor about FISA. But the gambit did not work. “The Speaker’s thumb just broke the scale,” said Sean Vitka, policy director of Demand Progress.

Danger still lies ahead, and the stakes remain pretty high. Intelligence agencies are currently able to tap a backdoor search database of Americans’ communications without a warrant, under the guise of queries regarding a foreign threat. And under what’s known as the data broker loophole, the government can also compel certain types of companies to hand over data collected on Americans. In each instance, the House Intelligence Committee is now pushing for broader legal criteria authorizing this surveillance. Reform advocates have referred to the Intel Committee’s amendments as “Patriot Act 2.0.” One Intel Committee amendment would expand the already broad definition of foreign intelligence in FISA to specifically include any information about international trafficking, sale, and production of narcotics driving “overdose deaths,” which could cover any drug under the Controlled Substances Act.



Another amendment targets immigrants traveling to the U.S. by allowing intelligence agencies to run backdoor searches on these groups without providing any rationale, which is the only restriction on these powers when applied to Americans. “As if the base text wasn’t bad enough, these amendments would all significantly expand Section 702. In particular, the weaponization of a post-9/11 warrantless surveillance authority to search for immigrants traveling to the U.S.—with no suspicion of wrongdoing whatsoever—is deeply offensive and should be radioactive,” Chris Baumohl, law fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), told the Prospect. House Intelligence Committee leaders are pushing for even more drastic changes by dropping key qualifications on which types of businesses are subject to Section 702 information requests. The government could now compel companies as far-reaching as office buildings, landlords, and even the backbone of the internet such as data centers, according to FISA Court amicus lawyer Marc Zwillinger. Access to data centers would constitute a massive expansion of “upstream” government surveillance, Zwillinger suggested.

snip

April 11, 2024

Fletcher Crane Architects completes pale brick home overlooking Richmond Park, London

https://www.dezeen.com/2024/04/05/fletcher-crane-architects-kingston-villa-london/















UK studio Fletcher Crane Architects has completed Kingston Villa in Richmond, London, offering a contemporary "evolution" of the area's typical suburban architecture in pale brick and metal. Tasked with turning a dilapidated bungalow on the edge of Richmond Park into a new family home, the Surrey-based studio drew on its neighbouring buildings to create a simple, gabled form.













"This new family villa bordering Richmond Park seeks to evolve the historic villa typology and inject character and quality into a typical suburban streetscape architecture," explained Fletcher Crane Architects. "The resultant detached home has been inspired by the varying historic features within the quality built environment; friezes, bays, entrance porticos and construction methodology – represented into an architecture of its day," it continued.













Facing the street, Kingston Villa is fronted by a metal canopy that shelters its entrance. This sits beneath a gable end that has been finished in pale textured brickwork. The entrance route leads past two smaller lounge and study spaces into a living, dining and kitchen space, centred around a double-height seating area and fireplace overlooked by a metal and timber stair. In these living and circulation areas, the internal finishes mirror those of the outside, with exposed brickwork, tiled floors and dark wooden carpentry bringing a "heavy, yet quiet" quality to the spaces.











At the rear of the home, full-height windows look out towards the park, finished with alternating deep-set and projecting metal reveals that subtly animate the facade. On the ground floor, sliding glass doors provide access to a sunken paved patio that steps up to the garden beyond. "Bold white brickwork is contrasted by bronzed window frames, metalwork panels and arboreal planting," explained the studio. "The architecture is heavy, yet quiet with a focus on emphasising the fabulous location and aspect with panoramic views of the park," it added.

snip