ASTEROID GODDESSES

Hi again Rad,

Great to have the opportunity to continue the asteroid Goddesses thread here.

There are three of the most recent charts published I would like to mention and thank you for your reference. The first is Robina Courtin, a Buddhist nun. This is a soul who truly embodies the practical wisdom of Jupiter in Virgo and I would encourage enveryone to check her short videos on exactly this subjects, every single one is a gift of wisdom. Here is a link to her YouTube and social media (her chart is on page 40 of the thread on the MB) https://www.youtube.com/@RobinaCourtinYouTube/shorts

https://www.instagram.com/robinacourtin/

The other is Camille Herron (MB page 41), ultrarunner champion and personally a soul that makes my soul smile with joy. She is indeed an Amazon example of our times and of course she has Amazon south node conjunct her mars south node and natal Uranus in Sag.

She has a very interesting talk where she blends personal strength with her feminine nature talking about the importance of menstrual health and having run an ultramarathon on day one of her period (and finishing it!)

Here is a link for those who wish to listen

https://womensrunningstories.com/camille-herron-menstrual-health-and-running-western-states-on-day-one-of-her-period

The other is of course Mahsa Amini. What more could be a chant of Lilith if not "Women, Life, Freedom"?

This courageous woman with Pluto new phase mars, nn Lilith balsamic to Pluto, in Sag. will forever be the face of women's resistance in Iran (and with the nn Lilith pluto mars she will be again here for the cause for sure) and with her sun virgo ruling the moon's north node venus and ceres, relative to a pisces Moon/Lilith, a true martyr for the cause. I feel she has been there through this trauma for time and time again with the Uranus south node conjunction in Aquarius, Neptune in Aquarius.

May Goddess bless her soul and all the souls of women and men who keep fighting their regime repression.

Helena

So are first post here will be the chart of Taylor Swift. Below is her chart with a recent article about her, and a link to wikipedia that has the full documentation of her life to date.

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Taylor Swift becomes first musician to claim entire Top 10 on Billboard Hot 100 Singer has surpassed Drake, who had held the previous record with nine of the top songs for a week last year Associated Press Taylor Swift scored a 10 out of 10 to become the first artist in history to claim the Top 10 slots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US, with tracks from her latest album, Midnights. Billboard reported on Monday that Swift has surpassed Drake, who had held the previous record with nine of the Top 10 songs for a week in September 2021. "10 out of 10 of the Hot 100??? On my 10th album??? I AM IN SHAMBLES," the 32-year-old pop star tweeted. The new album came out on 21 October with both a 13-track standard release and a deluxe version with seven bonus tracks. It has had one of the biggest album launches in nearly seven years. Billboard also reported that Swift now ties with Barbra Streisand for the female artist with the most No 1 albums. The No 1 spot on the Billboard chart belongs to Anti-Hero, whose lyrics "It's me/hi/I'm the problem/It's me" have quickly become a TikTok trend. The other Top 10 songs include Lavender Haze, Maroon, Snow on the Beach, Midnight Rain, Bejeweled and Question ... ? Swift has set a number of new records with Midnights: it had the biggest first week of sales of any album this year, almost doubling the numbers of the previous title-holder, Harry's House, the third solo album by Harry Styles. Midnights also had the highest first-week streams of the year: 72.5m, again beating Styles' figures of 53.9m. On the day of its release, Midnights broke global Spotify records for the most streams of a single album in one day. Swift has also overtaken Madonna to set a new all-time UK chart record for the fastest succession of nine UK No 1 albums of any female artist – although Madonna still has the record for the most UK No 1 albums of any solo female artist, with 12 overall. Swift is now second in that list, pushing Kylie Minogue into third place. But despite her success in the UK she won't be able to replicate her domination of the Billboard Hot 100: after 16 of the 17 songs on Ed Sheeran's 2017 album, ÷, charted in the Top 20, rules were introduced that mean that only the three most popular songs of any album are now eligible for the UK's singles chart. More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Swift ********

In the original thread we focused on the asteroids Lilith and Amazon which for her are listed below. But there are also other asteroids of course that correlate to the Goddess archetype such as Ceres for example. So please feel free to ask any questions you may have, or to comment on what you may see in any chart that we post going forwards from here. Her natal Lilith is 22 Sagittarius, N.Node 21 Sagittarius, S.Node 21 Gemini. Her natal Amazon is 5 Capricorn, N.Node 10 Taurus, and the S.Node 29 Scorpio. Goddess Bless, Rad

Here is the natal chart for Taylor which is based on her actual birth time.

HI All,

Here is the story of Charlene Richard who has been called the 'cajun saint'.

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The Miraculous Life and Afterlife of Charlene Richard

She died in 1959, at age 12. But for Catholics in her Louisiana community, that was just the beginning of her incredible story — and a decades-long fight to make her a saint.

By Nathaniel Rich

Dec. 20, 2022

NYT

It took 60 years but a postulator from the Vatican finally came to Richard, a lonesome patch of boggy farmland in southern Louisiana’s rice belt, last December. He arrived at St. Edward Roman Catholic Church, which stands at the closest thing the community has to a town center, cater-corner to Richard Elementary and opposite a pasture more than large enough for its dozen cows. He was greeted by the young parish priest, diocesan officials from Lafayette, a medical examiner, gravediggers, a pair of police officers and several siblings of the Richard family, whose sister he was there to see.

The postulator followed his hosts to the cemetery. Near the end of the first row, past plots of Thibodeaux and Babineux and LeJeunes, lies the raised tomb of Charlene Richard, who died of acute lymphocytic leukemia at age 12 in 1959. Each year as many as 10,000 people visit Charlene. They know her as the Little Cajun Saint, though the Roman Catholic Church has not yet recognized her as one. To accommodate the visitors, St. Edward sets out beside the grave, loosely arranged as if around a campfire, a pair of weather-beaten wooden prie-dieux, an iron garden bench and a tilting patio chair. Behind the tomb stands a discordant mailbox, painted over in black, on which is shakily written in chalk, donations removed daily. A long plastic container atop the tomb is the repository for handwritten prayers. Petitioners leave plastic flowers, votive candles and children’s toys: a Poppity Pop Turtle, a stuffed Elmo.

Everything was cleared for the exhumation. When the gravediggers lifted the eroded marble ledger, they found a simple wooden coffin, nearly covered by water. They hauled in an electric vacuum pump, but it wouldn’t turn on. After some tinkering, it finally hummed to life, spurting the grave water through a hose beyond the cemetery gate. Without great strain the men carried the coffin into the church. They removed the skeleton, laying it on an altar cloth for the medical examiner’s scrutiny. A rosary had been entwined around the finger bones. From the collarbones there hung a plastic sacred heart that, to the observers’ astonishment, had retained its coloration.

The medical examiner snipped off Charlene’s hair and handed a clump to her big brother. The postulator collected Charlene’s fingers for preparation as relics. He ordered the skeleton to be laid into a new steel coffin and returned to the vault, which was resealed with concrete.

The postulator made certain to attend to one final task. He folded the dampened altar cloth and, with great care, sealed it in a Ziploc bag. Before leaving town he would mail it to the president of the Charlene Richard Foundation, an invariably gracious, soft-spoken and patient (but not infinitely so) 68-year-old woman named Bonnie Broussard.

The emissary from Rome would never have come to Richard were it not for the ceaseless efforts of Broussard, who for more than three decades has dedicated her life to making Charlene Richard a saint. Why Broussard has pursued this laborious, expensive and thankless goal with such single-minded determination cannot be grasped from the basic biographical facts of her life. She never met Charlene, is not directly related to her and does not live in Richard. She is a devout believer, but that is unremarkable among the population of Acadiana, the French-speaking region of Louisiana that has one of the highest concentrations of Catholics in the United States.

If Broussard had to isolate a single quality that explains her intense commitment to Charlene Richard, it was her profound, lifelong desire to dedicate herself to a cause greater — nobler, grander, more permanent — than herself. What she could not have imagined, what she did not understand until just this past year, was that she was fighting for something even larger than a sainthood. She was fighting, in her dogged and self-effacing manner, for the soul of the church.

As Broussard approached 30, having yet to meet a partner, she began to suspect her calling in life was to become a nun. “I knew I could not be a single person in the world,” she says today. She was drawn to the local Carmelite monastery, a cloistered community practicing silence, fasting, manual labor and continual prayer. She had been making plans to join the order when her sister surprised her one Friday night by inviting a mechanic, the divorced father of an 11-year-old boy, to their grandmother’s house for gumbo and several rounds of the Cajun card game bourré. Within seven months they were married. “An instant family,” Broussard describes it. And the family instantly grew: They had three more children in the next five years.

During this period, she was dismissed from her job as a religious educator at the Diocese of Lafayette. Broussard had done nothing wrong. The diocese had. In 1985, it agreed to pay $4.2 million to victims of Gilbert Gauthe, a priest from Napoleonville who had admitted to molesting at least 37 children. This was the case that began the global scandal of sexual-abuse allegations against Catholic clergy, a crisis that has become the greatest threat to the church’s legitimacy since Julian the Apostate. After the Gauthe settlements, the diocese laid off much of its staff. Broussard was distraught, and furious. But she soon found a new teaching job at St. Genevieve Catholic Church in Lafayette, which was led by an exuberant, charismatic priest from Philadelphia named Joseph Brennan.

By the mid-1980s Brennan had become a celebrity in Catholic circles. He was a close friend and spiritual adviser to Mother Teresa, who opened a local chapter of her order in Lafayette and, in 1986, led a Mass at the sold-out Cajundome. (Mother Teresa made occasional incognito visits; Brennan would pick her up at the airport in New Orleans and chauffeur her into Lafayette under cover of night.) Brennan had also become a national expert during that decade’s satanic panic, leading workshops sanctioned by the diocese that advised how to detect cults, publishing a book on the subject called “The Kingdom of Darkness.” But locally Brennan was best known for having ministered to Charlene Richard on her deathbed.

Broussard had heard about Charlene since childhood. Despite the church’s reluctance to entertain the possibility of canonization, Charlene had served as Acadiana’s own guardian angel, as firmly entrenched in the cultural firmament as Meche’s King Cakes or the adventures of Bouki and Lapin. Notices regularly appeared in the classified pages expressing gratitude for prayers answered; schools chartered bus tours to her tomb; and prayer cards embossed with her sixth-grade yearbook photo were passed around on occasions of personal tragedy. But it was not until Brennan began telling Broussard about the final days of Charlene’s life that she began to grasp the force of the dead girl’s power.

Charlene Richard was born on Jan. 13, 1947, nearly seven years before Broussard and about 10 miles northwest of Lafayette, in Church Point. She was the second child of Mary Alice and Joseph Elvin Richard, two years younger than her brother John Dale. Eight siblings would follow, half of them after Charlene’s death. Mary Alice was a nurse’s aide for homebound patients; Joseph was a sharecropper and later a dragline operator for the state highway department. The Richard home had a pair of bedrooms, each of which held two large beds. The boys slept in one room, the parents and the girls in the other, the youngest child in a crib. They lacked electricity but kept the house clean and orderly. They drank from a wooden cistern and used two outhouses in the backyard. The children were forced to speak English in school, but they spoke French at home; Charlene’s father never learned English.

In Brennan’s 2009 “My Name Is Charlene,” one of a half dozen books published about the Little Cajun Saint, the priest emphasizes that her childhood was indistinguishable from that of any Cajun farm girl. The Richards attended Mass on Sunday and three other days a week. Sons were altar boys, daughters sang in the choir. The children attended Catholic school until Charlene was in second grade, when they moved three miles away to their grandparents’ property in Richard. (As is obvious to anyone in southern Louisiana, and few outside of it, “Richard” is pronounced “REE-shard.”) The community was named after Charlene’s ancestors who, with the Broussards, were among the first Acadian families to settle in Louisiana.

When the Richards were not in school, and often when they should have been in school, they worked the fields. They grew cotton, corn and sweet potatoes, raised hogs, cattle and sheep and fished for perch in the property’s cypress swamp. Joseph barbecued on a grill he jury-rigged by stretching chicken wire over the drum of a scavenged washing machine. In high summer, the children picked cotton until 2 in the afternoon, when a fluttering towel tied to the porch beam announced that it was time for prayer.

“It was a very simple life,” says Charlene’s older brother, John Dale, today. “We were at peace.”

Charlene was exuberant, loyal, generous. At 12 she stood five feet tall, not counting her bob of brown ringlets. Large dimples popped when she smiled. Girls were devoted to her and boys had crushes on her. She wrote musicals with John Dale, usually assigning him the role of “priest.” She rode horses, danced to Little Richard at sock hops and doted on babies. In fourth grade she won Richard Elementary’s Math Award; in sixth grade she was the captain of the basketball team, which lost only one game. Her mother told a reporter from The Morning Star, the diocesan newspaper, that Charlene “hated to lose.”

By 7, Charlene had memorized the rosary. She recited it nightly before an altar she assembled on her bedside table of a crucifix, an old Bible and a rose that she picked each morning. After a teacher lent her a picture book about St. Therese of Lisieux, “the Little Flower,” who died of tuberculosis at 24, Charlene declared that she wanted to be a saint. “If I pray like St. Therese,” she asked her grandmother, “will it happen?” In early 1959, when her grandmother recovered from gallbladder surgery, Charlene massaged ointment into the incision wounds. It was during the spring of that year that, while playing in the backyard, Charlene saw the lady in black.

The woman — or at least a figure “shaped like a woman,” as Charlene would tell her mother — stood before an oak tree. She was tall and wore a black bonnet that covered her face. Though her eyes were hidden, her stare burned.

“In the name of God,” Charlene screamed, “what do you want?”

The woman flew into the sky. Charlene sprinted back to the house and fell, shaking violently, into her grandmother’s arms.

Charlene had another vision the next evening. She was emptying laundry tubs in the backyard with John Dale. “I see her again,” she said, turning pale.

John Dale couldn’t see anything, but he believed his sister. “Many holy people have been visited by Satan in different forms,” he says, 60 years later. “Was it that? I have no idea.”

Around this time Charlene began to bruise easily and complain of a sore hip. The family doctor suspected growth pains. He prescribed radiation therapy. It didn’t help. Charlene bled from her rectum and suffered nosebleeds so severe that she passed out. After receiving the results of blood tests, the doctor handed Mrs. Richard a sealed envelope, addressed to a specialist at Lafayette’s Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. “He’s going to explain what needs to be done,” the doctor assured her. John Dale remembers driving in his grandfather’s pickup truck on dirt roads to the city, Charlene on her mother’s lap.

When the specialist finished reading the letter, he called for a chaplain. The priest on duty that day was a young Joseph Brennan, who had been ordained three months earlier. Once Brennan entered, the specialist explained that Charlene’s condition was terminal. “It was pure chance that I was the priest in the room when the news was told to Charlene’s parents,” Brennan writes in his book. “The shock was as expected when her parents were told, ‘Your 12-year-old girl has two weeks to live.’”

The Richards asked Brennan to tell their daughter. “I was numb,” he writes. “We never had training like this in the seminary. What was I going to say? As the elevator reached the fourth floor, I still had no answer, even though I was praying very fervently.”

Brennan met Charlene in Room 411 of Our Lady of Lourdes. “A beautiful lady is going to come to take you home,” he told her.

“When she does,” Charlene replied, “I’ll say, ‘Blessed Mother, Father Brennan says hello.’”

Charlene spent the next 13 days in unthinkable agony. When the pain grew acute, her eyes rolled back in her head but, Brennan writes, she never complained. During their meetings, Brennan introduced her to the Catholic doctrine of redemptive suffering: the yoking of one’s pain to the suffering of Jesus to help others.

There began an informal daily catechism between them. “OK, Father,” Charlene would ask, “who am I to suffer for today?” Brennan proposed a candidate, typically another patient, such as a terminally ill woman who refused to accept her fate. Charlene beseeched God to use her pain for healings.

“Without her witness, and her devotion,” Brennan said later, “her suffering would not have served any purpose.”

On the 12th day, Charlene kissed Brennan and told him that she would be praying for him in heaven.

On the 13th day, Aug. 11, 1959, she died. But as Bonnie Broussard likes to say, that’s just the day that Charlene Richard’s story began.

It was not easy, in 1959, to make a saint. A Cause for Canonization, as a formal candidacy is called, could not even be opened until 50 years after a candidate’s death. The growth of Charlene’s cult coincided, however, with a movement within the Vatican to reform the sainthood process. An Apostolic Constitution issued by Pope John Paul II in 1983 shortened the posthumous waiting period to five years. (John Paul II himself was made a saint in 2014.) The old juridical model, in which a proponent debated a “Devil’s Advocate” on the merits of a cause, was abandoned for a process that more closely resembles the preparation of a doctoral dissertation.

The making of a saint typically begins in the candidate’s diocese. Supporters begin a promotional campaign for an audience of one: their local bishop. They must persuade the bishop that a candidate is not merely virtuous, but heroically so. If successful, the bishop declares the candidate a “Servant of God,” officially opening a Cause for Canonization.

The cause is next taken up by a postulator, a supervisory figure licensed by the Vatican. The postulator acts in the deliberate manner of an appellate lawyer preparing a case for the Supreme Court. His client is not the church but the candidate’s petitioners, who are responsible for his fee and any expenses he incurs. The National Catholic Register has estimated that the cost of preparing a cause for papal review can run more than a quarter-million dollars.

The postulator reviews evidence, witness interviews and supposed miracles. (Catholics believe that a saint in heaven can intercede with God, improving the likelihood that a prayer will elicit a divine favor.) After years or decades, he presents an account of his investigation, the positio, to nine theologians who review the case. With their approval, it advances to the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of the Saints, where a body of cardinals and bishops decides whether to submit it to the pope.

Ultimately the pope makes one of four determinations. He can decline to act. He can decree the candidate a “venerable,” affirming a life of heroic virtue. Beyond venerable lies “blessed.” To earn that status, called beatification, it must be proved that the candidate has interceded in the granting of a miracle — an event, typically a healing, unexplainable by science. Beyond beatification lies sainthood.

For all the reams of evidence and historical research and liturgical debate, the saint-making process comes down to the authentication of miracles. A saint must have performed miracles. Two, to be exact.

Over the years Broussard had heard rumors of miracles credited to Charlene. Though Father Brennan did not, for decades, speak publicly about his encounters with Charlene, he did confide in a fellow novitiate, Floyd Calais. Father Calais dreamed of one day becoming a parish priest; two weeks after praying to Charlene, he received an appointment from the bishop to serve as a priest — at Charlene’s own church, St. Edward. Calais, now 96, still gets goosebumps telling the story.

Calais began traveling around Acadiana, telling Charlene’s story to solicit donations for a new church. After he raised the full amount in just two years, he began calling Charlene “my little money girl.” During his term at St. Edward, Calais claims he witnessed Charlene perform countless miracles, including for members of her family. Mary Alice, her mother, prayed to Charlene, asking for another daughter; she became pregnant with twin girls. A former schoolmate of Charlene’s named Lorita introduced Calais to a man she wanted to marry. Calais didn’t approve and prayed to Charlene. Two weeks later, the wedding was off. Six months later, Lorita was married — to John Dale, Charlene’s brother.

Thanks to Calais’s speaking tours, Charlene’s legend grew. In 1989, when Brennan and Calais organized a mass at St. Edward on the 30th anniversary of her death, an estimated 4,000 people came, surely the largest crowd ever to have gathered in Richard. Bonnie Broussard had planned to attend, but she woke up with morning sickness — she was pregnant with her third child — and gave her tickets to her mother. It was the last time she missed Charlene’s anniversary Mass.

The success of the Mass encouraged Steven Vincent, a prosperous oilman from the southern Acadian town of Gueydan, to commit himself to Charlene’s canonization. With his wife, Barbara, he founded the Friends of Charlene to publicize Charlene’s story, raise money and organize gatherings. But he needed an editor for what would become the group’s most critical function: a newsletter that published accounts of answered prayers. Over time, these collected testimonies would fill an archive that could be used to secure Charlene’s canonization — a library of miracles.

When asked by a church colleague to edit the newsletter, Broussard initially declined. She didn’t know the first thing about newsletters, and between her teaching obligations and raising three children under age 5 and a teenage stepson, she had no time. But she could not refuse a call to duty. Within a few weeks, she would conclude that it wasn’t her colleague who called her to Charlene but God.

Working from her kitchen table on a typewriter, Broussard found herself serving as a Miss Lonelyhearts for the cult of Charlene. A couple of dozen letters arrived a month — at first.

I have always had bladder trouble, developing an infection at least once a year. … In February of 1988, my husband and I traveled to Richard, La., to visit the tomb. … From that day on, I have not had any bladder infections. … I now can wear nylon pantyhose … and have a feeling of well being that I have not felt in a very long time.

A woman wrote in 1991 of traveling to Charlene’s tomb from Massachusetts after reading about her in American Airlines’ in-flight magazine; Charlene, she believed, cured her father’s prostate cancer. In the July 1992 newsletter, a correspondent credited Charlene for protecting her father from permanent lung damage after sustained asbestos exposure. In October 1992, Broussard published a letter from a Pine Bluff man who read about Charlene in the Arkansas Catholic:

My wife works at a poultry company in town and developed what the doctor called overused muscles. At that time we did not know what was wrong, because the company could not send her to a doctor and we were bound by an agreement to only use a company doctor. … I promised Charlene if she would help my wife by her prayers, I would write a letter to the Bishop … to speedily grant her sainthood. … there is only one explanation for her muscles to have healed. … Mary is still working, although we are praying for an easier job.

The accounts worked on Broussard. She began to reflect on her own past. In a 1992 editor’s note, she wrote about a health condition that sent her to the emergency room on her 38th birthday. “As I lay on the hospital bed waiting for the doctor to come and take care of me, I could not think of anyone else but MYSELF and MY PAIN. … Looking back on the event, I realized that God had given me the opportunity to experience intense physical suffering and pain just as Charlene must have felt. … Now I really know how special Charlene is and will be able to tell others about a lesson learned in humility and suffering.”

When Radio Shack transferred her sister’s husband, a store manager, to Texas that year, Broussard prayed daily to Charlene to send her sister home. On the eve of their move, Broussard’s brother-in-law was offered the chance to work in Lafayette. “That sealed the deal,” Broussard says. “Charlene was going to be my friend.”

Broussard grew convinced that sainthood was inevitable, though she didn’t know whether it would take decades or centuries. Steven Vincent, the oilman who founded Friends of Charlene, expected that they would not live to see it. Broussard was undeterred. She regularly drove to Richard, where Charlene’s immediate family, her childhood friends, Fathers Brennan and Calais and the local parishioners had become a second family to her. “If you’re an outsider in that community you know it,” Broussard says. “But over the years, I became one of them.” She had found, in the rice fields of Acadiana, her own cloistered community.

Broussard delivered every testimony she received to the diocese. A priest assured her that he would keep them in a special file, though he never failed to point out how each fell short of the church’s rigorous standards for authentication. Discouraged, Broussard stopped sharing the testimonies. But she didn’t dispose of them. She moved in with them. She stored the documents in a filing cabinet and later, when that filled up, in banker’s boxes that she stacked next to her boxes of stationery, prayer cards and prayer cloths. She installed the library of miracles inside her own bedroom, beside her bed.

The reforms of 1983 yielded an unprecedented bonanza of saint-making. During his pontificate, John Paul II recognized 1,338 beatifications and 482 canonizations, almost 15 times as many as the previous record-holder, Pius XII, who died in 1958, and more than the cumulative total of the five previous centuries combined. “We’re becoming a factory,” lamented a historical consultant to the Vatican, in “Making Saints,” Kenneth Woodward’s authoritative account of canonization in the Roman Catholic Church.

But the immoderation was the point. “In the hands of John Paul II,” Woodward writes, “the saint-making process has become a very powerful mechanism for advancing his message” — a message of a popular faith, accessible to all who believed. Saints were one of the most effective advertising tools the church had. They boosted recruitment, enabling the church to tailor its gospel to local populations and specific demographics. And the copyrighting of a saint’s name and likeness allowed the church to sell paraphernalia. Benedict maintained John Paul II’s pace, and Francis has outdone them both. In his first canonization ceremony he recognized 815 saints.

During this sainthood boom, the United States, which has the fourth-largest Catholic population of any nation, has been left out. No U.S. cause was opened before the late 19th century, and only one native-born citizen has been sainted: the Philadelphian heiress Katharine Drexel (1858-1955), canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2000. Three naturalized American citizens have been sainted, Saint Mother Teresa was an honorary citizen, and several “American” saints were born before 1776 or were foreign citizens living abroad, but this wider draw only emphasizes the scale of the underrepresentation. Canonization is, quite explicitly, a symbolic gesture, meant to draw attention to a heroic virtue, an act of martyrdom, a community. Symbolically speaking, American Catholics have been shafted.

Though there are currently more than 80 American candidates for sainthood, the Acadian community has a special claim to Roman sympathies. Its Catholic population descends from what Cajuns call “le grand dérangement”: the British Army’s expulsion of about 7,000 French Catholics from Nova Scotia in 1755 during the French and Indian War, tearing apart families and killing more than half the population. One of the largest bands of refugees arrived in Southwestern Louisiana in 1765, led by Bonnie’s ancestors, the brothers Joseph and Alexandre Broussard.

“Sainthood links the local church to the universal church,” says Kathleen Sprows Cummings, director of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, who wrote “A Saint of Our Own,” about the more than century-old campaign for a patron saint of the United States (leading contenders include St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and St. Kateri Tekakwitha, though each was born before the country’s founding). “The story of the Acadians is the story of how a persecuted minority was transplanted here and created a new culture. Charlene’s significance extends beyond the world of sainthood. It’s a profoundly American story.”

Since 1985, however, the Acadian story has endured a different great derangement. In May of that year Jason Berry published in The Times of Acadiana and The National Catholic Reporter his investigation into pedophilia charges against Gilbert Gauthe. Berry would later extend his reporting into a trilogy of books that tracked a series of pedophilia cases in the Diocese of Lafayette into the innermost sancta of the Vatican, revealing widespread patterns of abuse and corruption. According to data from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, more than 7,000 clerics have now been “credibly” or “not implausibly” accused of sexually abusing minors in the United States alone.

The evolution of Broussard’s relationship with the church corresponded to a broader shift that occurred in Acadiana during the 1990s, as the Gauthe case spurred dozens of other allegations within the region. Though Broussard grew disenchanted with the corruption of the clerical hierarchy, she did not consider abandoning her faith; instead she redirected her devotion to the angelic child who, she was certain, sat at the foot of God.

The diocese, during this time, showed little interest in Charlene. Even the local clergy tended to dismiss the phenomenon, despite the efforts of Brennan and Calais, who continued to ferry parishioners to Charlene’s grave, use her story in fund-raising pleas and give interviews. “In my eyes and in the eyes of many, many people, Charlene Richard is already a saint,” Brennan told The Catholic Digest. “We’re just waiting for the church to catch up.” Calais still struggles to understand his peers’ disinterest. “There were priests who thought me and Father Brennan were crazy,” he says. These included, he said, his successor at St. Edward, the Rev. Stanley Begnaud, who has been labeled a “known pedophile” in church documents and is the subject of a lawsuit filed in 2020. (Begnaud died in 1985.)

With no foreseeable path to canonization, the Friends of Charlene held meetings less often, then not at all. “Nothing had happened for 10 years, and people just wondered whether anything ever would happen,” Broussard says. “That was the hardest time, just to keep it going.” By 1999, the only remaining founding member of the organization, the oilman Steven Vincent, told Broussard that he was leaving, too. He asked her to take over as president. She accepted without hesitation. “I felt that there was something here,” she says. People traveled to the annual Mass from all over the world to testify to miracles Charlene had performed from beyond the grave. “That’s what kept me going,” Broussard says. “All these people came for a reason.”

Broussard set about professionalizing the organization. After reading “Making Saints,” she came to understand the process better than any of the local clergy members, including, it would become clear, the bishop. She learned that it was not enough to answer letters and archive testimonials. Successful causes tended to be run like political campaigns, with an administrative office, a public relations arm and a reliable funding stream. This is why most saints were clergy: the orders to which they belonged had the resources necessary to elevate a cause to the Vatican. What Broussard lacked in money and clout, she tried to make up for in effort. She transformed the Friends of Charlene into a tax-exempt organization, established a website and a bulk-mailing operation, assumed the responsibility of planning the anniversary mass and organized a weekly knitting circle, led by a pair of retirees, Louise Giroir and Lydia Babineaux, who together would produce hundreds of thousands of prayer cloths. The work was its own reward — at least that’s what Broussard told herself.

Then, suddenly, in 2002, three blessings seemed to arrive in short succession, as if ordained. Michael Mouton, a Lafayette businessman nicknamed Big Mike, had a vision of Charlene Richard while undergoing open-heart surgery. A former programmer for Apollo 11, determined to raise money for an orphanage in Thailand, opened his Bible and a Charlene Richard prayer card fell out. And a local priest, Michael Jarrell, a native of Opelousas, was named bishop.

Big Mike had developed a successful business shipping radiography machines across the Gulf South. While under sedation, he saw Charlene standing at the foot of his bed, a beatific expression on her face. When he awoke, the operation a success, he vowed to dedicate his life to advancing Charlene’s cause. He told Broussard that he would devote his offices, administrative staff and $1 million of his personal fortune to the effort. “We’ll run it like a corporation,” he told her. If most causes were managed by religious orders, Charlene’s could be headquartered out of Performance Medical Group of Lafayette.

The NASA programmer, Reggie Bollich, did not know much about Charlene and had no idea how her prayer card had gotten into his Bible. But his wife, Dottie, had heard stories from her pastor at St. Genevieve, Father Brennan. It occurred to Bollich, as it had to Father Calais, that the Little Cajun Saint might be a prolific fund-raiser — his own little money girl. Within a year Bollich raised more than $45,000, including considerable donations from Big Mike, and the orphanage, Charlene Richard House, was built in a jungle clearing near Nongkhai.

With the opening of the orphanage, and the growing international attention it drew, Bishop Jarrell seemed persuaded that Charlene was ready for canonization. In 2007, Jarrell designated Msgr. Richard Greene, who 30 years earlier edited a major series of articles about Charlene Richard for The Morning Star, to gather information for the opening of a cause. At that year’s anniversary Mass, to the thrill of the assembled, Greene announced that he was going to begin the sainthood process. Broussard was euphoric. “I thought, this is it!” she says. The unimaginable appeared inevitable.

Greene held a series of round-table meetings with interested parties, among them Broussard, John Dale Richard, Reggie Bollich and Big Mike. Broussard recalls that Greene listened intently to their stories and took dutiful notes.

Someone asked how long it would take for the bishop to respond. Two or three weeks, Greene said. He’s a busy man.

What happens if he doesn’t approve the cause?

Then we’ll just go over his head, Big Mike interrupted.

Several petitioners gasped at the brazen display of hubris in the presence of a diocesan official.

“And that,” John Dale recalls, “was the end of that.”

They never met with Greene again. Bollich recalls that when the subject of sainthood later arose at a church ceremony, Jarrell said they could not treat it like a corporation — an obvious reference to Big Mike.

In 2012, in an interview with a local writer named Carolyn Thibodeaux for a self-published book titled “Saint Charlene Richard: Her Continuous Consecration to God,” Jarrell described the process as “kind of stalled”:

Thibodeaux: Is there anything we can do to help?

Bishop: No, I think that at this point, the ball is in my court. It’s not like you can just write a letter.

Thibodeaux: How exactly does the Canonization process work?

Bishop: I don’t know. But there are books on it.

Thibodeaux: Yes, I’ve read up on it on the internet.

Bishop: Then you probably know more about it than I do. I’m serious when I say I don’t know ... 

Thibodeaux: In writing my book, I already knew Charlene was special. I received so many healing stories. She is so deserving of the title, “Saint.”

Bishop: Well, I’m glad you judged that. If you were the Pope, it would be done.

Thibodeaux: Are you considering reviewing Msgr. Greene’s report?

Bishop: For what purpose, to help you with your book?

Thibodeaux records the bishop’s laughter.

“That was a big disappointment,” Broussard says of Jarrell’s inaction. “A major letdown for everyone. We kept waiting, thinking maybe, surely, he’ll take the next step — but he never did.”

Broussard nevertheless continued to prepare for a day when some future bishop might champion Charlene. She had learned from “Making Saints” that, as time passes, it becomes more difficult to gather the necessary evidence of a miracle: Witnesses die, memories weaken, documents are lost. It was not enough, she would explain to fellow devotees, to show that a prayer had been answered, even if a stunning reversal had occurred — a sudden recovery from a terminal illness, say, or the conversion of an unrepentant sinner. The Vatican’s bar was much higher and seemed to rise each year. The pope could not be embarrassed by modern science. As forensic technologies matured, so did the Vatican’s evidentiary standards.

Finalist miracles had to satisfy three primary criteria. They had to be rigorously documented. They had to be verified by objective experts. And they could not be explainable except by supernatural intervention. Father Brennan believed that the story of Tara Roy fulfilled all three.

Tara’s parents were parishioners at St. Genevieve. When Tara was diagnosed with Stage 3 colon cancer at age 21, in 1992, Brennan drove them to Charlene’s tomb. They returned every weekend, while Tara endured rounds of chemotherapy. Eleven months later, on the anniversary of Charlene’s death, Tara visited the tomb, emaciated and hopeless. She traced the engraving on the headstone and caressed Charlene’s portrait. “It seemed electricity ran from the tomb through her fingernails and into her entire body,” her father told the journalist Barbara Gutierrez. “She had been transformed before my eyes from a washed-out and despondent rag doll into a vibrant and energized young lady with color coursing through her cheeks.”

Three months later Tara was free of cancer. Her oncologist at Our Lady of Lourdes testified that her recovery was unexplainable by science.

Broussard was not convinced, however. “I thought it was a great story,” she says. “But I didn’t know if it could meet the standards of a miracle. She’d had surgery, after all. She’d had chemotherapy.”

The other miracle commonly asserted as proof of Charlene’s sainthood came from outside the diocese. In 1987 Jean Marcantel was diagnosed with a high-risk pregnancy, and arranged to give birth at a hospital in Lake Charles where she could be attended by a prominent obstetrician.

When the baby was born, the delivery room fell silent. “This is a mongoloid child,” the obstetrician said finally, using the jettisoned term for Down syndrome. He indicated the newborn’s prominent forehead, flat features, the ears set below the eye’s lateral canthus, the single crease across the palm of her hand.

The nurses moved the baby to a darkened isolation room. Jean was brought to the recovery room, where she was surrounded by other mothers and their healthy babies. She began to pray for the strength to raise a disabled child. She thought back to her own childhood in Richard, where she was friends with one of Charlene’s sisters. She did not believe in miracles, but after praying to the patron of lost causes and the patron of childbirth, she prayed to Charlene.

Jean awoke to the sight of her puzzled pediatrician. He told her that the baby showed no signs of Down syndrome. When her obstetrician was summoned, he burst into tears. Finally the child was brought in, her features transformed. Jean didn’t leave her daughter’s side for six weeks, fearful that her condition would reverse. Today that baby, Angelique, is a nun in Tanzania.

The Marcantels did not tell anyone what happened at the hospital except, belatedly, their priest. At his suggestion, Jean sent a confidential account to the diocese, stipulating that it should only be used if it helped Charlene’s cause. Broussard was not sure it would.

While Broussard culled her library of miracles, the cult of Charlene Richard continued to grow. Reggie Bollich, the NASA programmer, who in his retirement was ordained a deacon, helped to open Casa Charlene, a homeless shelter in the Colombian Andes, funded by Cajun parishioners. The Charlene Soup Kitchen in El Tigre, Venezuela, followed. Pilgrims, not all of them Catholic, began traveling to the St. Edward cemetery from Brazil, France, the Philippines, Australia. The canonization of Charlene Richard had become a global concern.

Still Broussard worried she wasn’t doing enough. She had kept the organization alive, preserved every testimony and mailed tens of thousands of prayer cloths, but Bishop Jarrell would not be moved. If she couldn’t convince him of Charlene’s cause, how would she convince a postulator, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints or the pope?

In 2016, after 14 years, Jarrell resigned. His successor, the Rev. J. Douglas Deshotel, was born in Basile, 20 miles west of Richard. Months after his consecration, Deshotel accepted an invitation to Charlene’s 2017 anniversary Mass — the first bishop to attend since 1989. These were promising signs, but Broussard was wary. Like so many of his predecessors, Deshotel was soon engulfed by the church’s scandals, as priests in the diocese were charged, arrested or convicted of serial sexual abuse of minors, possession of child pornography and the molestation of an altar boy. In 2019, after resisting calls from journalists for three years, Deshotel released the diocese’s list of known sex offenders (though withheld the names of accused nuns, religious-order priests and schoolteachers). Deshotel did not attend another anniversary Mass, and Broussard heard nothing from the diocese about the prospect of Charlene’s canonization. But at the 2019 Mass, Monsignor W. Curtis Mallet, the diocese’s vicar general, pulled Broussard aside in the sacristy of St. Edward, just before the ceremony began.

“I want to let you know that the bishop is considering opening Charlene’s cause,” he told Broussard. “But we have to move quickly.”

The bishop wanted to make the announcement soon, he said. If Broussard could produce a formal letter of petition, the bishop would designate Charlene a “servant of God”: The sainthood process would finally begin. Mallet warned her not to tell anybody.

Before she could respond, Broussard was called to the pulpit to give her introduction. As she gave her customary speech about Charlene’s exemplary suffering, she tried to disentangle the emotions that overwhelmed her. She realized what she felt most of all was not joy or relief. It was fear. She understood immediately that what had been, for decades, a work of private obsession, would be taken from her.

“For all this time,” she says today, “I’d been alone. I’d had the support of the community, but as far as the association, I was secretary, treasurer, president. I did everything myself, so that I could make sure that it was done right. But I knew once Charlene becomes a servant of God, she no longer belongs to the community. She becomes the property of the diocese. I would have to relinquish control. The church would be in charge, absolutely.”

At a ceremony at the diocese’s Immaculata Chapel on Nov. 17, 2021, in an unprecedented spree of canonical enterprise, Deshotel opened the causes for Charlene Richard and another candidate, August Pelafigue, an Arnaudville schoolteacher known as Nonco who embraced a life of rural poverty. (The cause of a third Cajun candidate, Ville Platte’s J. Verbis Lafleur, a World War II chaplain who gave his life to save fellow prisoners of war, was opened a few months later.) “Our culture needs a young saint,” Deshotel said. “Now more than ever.”

Broussard calls Charlene’s designation as servant of God the high point of her life, though even in the moment her elation was tempered by a profound sense of loss. “I knew it was coming to an end for me,” she says. “I had the satisfaction that I had done everything that I had been asked to do, just to keep it going. But I knew I would not be able to see it through.”

After the ceremony she turned over her entire archive. The diocese sealed it from public view. The postulator, Father Luis F. Escalante, directed Charlene’s siblings to sign over possession of their sister’s corpse to the church. In June, St. Edward’s Facebook page advised parishioners that Charlene’s tomb had come “under the protection and stewardship” of the diocese. Any item left on the tomb would be reviewed to determine whether it honored “the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.” Broussard was not invited to attend the exhumation of the corpse, nor were any community or family members, apart from immediate siblings.

After the exhumation, St. Edward’s young pastor, the Rev. Korey LaVergne, called Broussard into his office and told her not to tell anyone what had happened. “If anyone asks you why the grave looks like it does, it’s because we’re just doing improvements,” he told her. “It’s technically not a lie, because we are going to do improvements. But you cannot tell them about exhuming the body.”

One thing was plain: After decades of apathy, discouragement and belittlement, the Diocese of Lafayette had developed a very serious interest in Charlene Richard’s successful, and expeditious, canonization.

Bishop Deshotel confirmed as much. The Diocesan Chancery, a compound of four brick buildings arranged around a simple courtyard at the eastern fringe of Lafayette, was once a seminary where he attended high school (Gilbert Gauthe was his classmate). Deshotel’s wood-paneled second-floor office was his sophomore study hall. With its potted ficuses, leather couches and broad, tidy desk, it could stand for a judge’s private chambers or a senator’s regional headquarters.

The bishop has an amiable, unprepossessing manner, with a slight stoop and a twinkly smile. He served as a priest in Dallas for nearly four decades, long enough to lose his accent but not his Cajun sympathies; his closest friends are his old high school buddies from Lafayette. Deshotel is as circumspect about miracles as are most high church officials. “There are many kinds of miracles,” he said in an interview. “It’s not all spectacular physical healings. There are also miracles of a change of heart or a conversion.” He noted the miracle of accepting the human condition: of making peace with the implacable cruelty of suffering. What is more miraculous than reconciling oneself to the certainty of death?

“A person who starts looking into Charlene’s story might ask what inspired her to be able to do that,” he said. “They might think, Maybe I should look a little bit deeper into what faith is, and what was behind her being able to accept her illness.”

St. Charlene would help the church too, Deshotel acknowledged. A Cajun saint, particularly a lay saint, would “validate the rich faith of this Acadiana community.” More important, it would serve as “a catechetical tool for me and for the priests of our diocese.” Charlene would help the church “appeal to the youth in our diocese, who are called in all kind of directions by secular society.” Charlene would serve as an excellent recruitment tool, Deshotel maintained, especially for the young people of Acadiana.

With the young people of Acadiana, the church needed all the help it could get.

Several months ago Bonnie Broussard received bad news from Rome: The postulator had rejected the top two miracles from papal consideration. Tara Roy’s cancer cure was thrown out because, as Broussard had feared, the fact of her medical treatment meant that a scientific explanation could not be eliminated. Angelique Marcantel’s miracle was disqualified by a genetic test. The Tanzanian missionary had traveled by bus 18 hours to a clinic in Dar-Es-Salaam that analyzed her DNA. To the postulator’s disappointment, no extra chromosome was detected.

This finding did not surprise the Marcantels. Of course there wasn’t an extra chromosome — why would God, in His perfection, leave it behind? But they have taken it well. The Vatican’s validation “is not necessary for me,” Jean says. “It doesn’t change my belief.”

The postulator is pursuing a new tranche of miracles, among them a miraculous Covid cure and the case of Troy Hebert, a real estate broker in Lafayette whose childhood cancer was cured after he and his mother met a stranger at Charlene’s grave who they believed to be an angel. But discussions of forensic investigations only accentuate how far the ecclesiastical class had traveled from the true believers in the rice fields, who require no expert witness, no genetic test to prove Charlene is a saint. There is nothing the Vatican can do to strengthen their conviction, or weaken it.

“I’m a scientist,” says Bollich, the Apollo 11 programmer. “I’m always skeptical. I need facts. But you reach a point where factual becomes irrelevant. I believe that prayer can make a difference in whether a person lives or not. Does it happen often? No. But there are people who have been healed through prayer to Charlene. That we know. We’ve seen it.”

Father Calais found the whole process embarrassing. “The guy from Rome doesn’t know anything about Charlene Richard,” he says. “I was not impressed by him at all. I didn’t see any enthusiasm in him.”

As Jean Marcantel puts it: “It’s more important for the hierarchy of the church to have these proven miracles than for the people who experienced them. You know what they say: If you don’t believe, no proof is sufficient. If you do, no proof is necessary.” She laughed. “I wouldn’t want to be in Father Escalante’s shoes.”

Broussard herself has moved on. After turning over her life’s work to the diocese, she announced her resignation as president of the Charlene Richard Foundation. She has dedicated herself to caring for her young grandchildren. “I will always love Charlene and will do whatever I can do to help her cause,” she says. “But the fire for me has been put out.” Having spent decades battling indifference and dissuasion, waiting for the diocesan hierarchy to embrace the cause, she can’t bring herself to hang on as a junior functionary.

Besides, Broussard believes that she has already achieved her goal. Charlene won’t be forgotten. She is not yet a saint, not officially, but she has attracted a global cult that transcends not only Acadiana but Catholicism. She inspires faith, devotion and acts of healing so profound that they appear miraculous. What the Vatican wants, what the diocese desperately needs, Bonnie Broussard is powerless to give them. She gave them her papers, but she can’t give them that.

More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlene_Richard

Her natal Lilith is 27 Capricorn, N.Node 28 Sagittarius, S.Node 0.19 Gemini. Her natal Amazon is 5 Virgo, N.Node 3 Taurus, S.Node 5 Sagittarius.

Please feel free to comment or ask questions.

Goddess Bless, Rad

HI All,

Here is a story about Maria Alyokhina of the Pussy Riot. This is a noon chart.

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Interview: ‘We have a new Hitler in Russia’: Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina on Putin’s crimes and her years of resistance

The musician and activist has escaped her homeland – but its repression still torments her. She talks about being beaten and jailed, nuclear threats and the dangerous power of women

Zoe Williams

Guardian

When Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina left Russia in April this year, she went to Iceland, essentially a political refugee. She had been repeatedly arrested since early 2021, on specious charges – “violation of sanitary and epidemiological rules”, social media activity, attending a demonstration in support of the imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

She is no longer in Iceland, and speaks to me, as her fellow Pussy Riot member Nadya Tolokonnikova did earlier this year, from an unnamed location. But she resists any phrases that dramatise her situation – persecution, flight, exile, escape – preferring a hard-boiled statement of the facts. “I was arrested, many times – and not just arrests. I was under a travel ban, I had a red flag on the border for two years, I had to find a way to tour. The heads of the political Moscow police were quite often trying to go to my house, speak with my mother, catch me there.” She describes the trigger event for her departure: the news that she was about to be moved from house arrest to a prison.

So she hasn’t fled; she has found a way to go on tour, living in a van, raising money any which way, through spoken word, performance art, merchandise, NFTs. “I understand there was a big noise about my so-called escape, but I don’t have any plans for emigration. I just want to help Ukraine and that’s it.” She made €10,000 selling T-shirts and sent the money to a Ukrainian children’s hospital. Alyokhina and her girlfriend, Lucy Shtein, also from Pussy Riot, have made an NFT using the ankle tags from their house arrest, melted and turned into digital art: “They’re our trophies from the fight with the Russian government. We believe those fetters will be gone.”

The proceeds from that – whether you understand NFTs or not, they can raise vast amounts of money – will be split between Ukrainian charities and Russian political prisoners. “We cannot balance the nightmare which the Russian army and Vladimir Putin have created. But I believe, as Russians, we can do something good. As a human, and especially as an artist, it’s very important to raise up our solidarity with Ukraine and our call to stop this war.”

There is something instructive and depressing about the story of Pussy Riot and the world’s reaction. When they started in 2011, they were a loose collection of female artists, writers, activists and anarchists. Alyokhina was a student at the Institute of Journalism and Creative Writing in Moscow. As well as writing protest songs, the band wore neon balaclavas and taped their mouths closed. Alyokhina’s targets are wide-ranging – the oppression of women, the savage homophobia of the Russian state, the climate crisis, Putin’s kleptocracy – but boil down to one cause: anti-authoritarianism. To the global media, they were just fun, racy rebels.

In Russian activist circles, there are jokes about the west being ‘deeply concerned’: it means they are not going to do anything

So, when three of them, including Alyokhina, were arrested for hooliganism in 2012 and sentenced to two years in jail, it didn’t leave much of a mark on Putin’s reputation, even though human rights organisations such as Amnesty International designated them political prisoners. The protest was deadly serious: it was against Orthodox Church leaders’ support for Putin and the blind eye they were turning to his corruption and creeping totalitarianism. Yet the substance of that, and the harsh consequences it had, was ignored in the service of everyone playing nice at international summits.

Alyokhina rolls her eyes, as if to say that is not the half of it: “We were released on 23 December 2013. A month after our release, we made an action [demonstrated]: ‘Putin will teach you how to love the motherland.’ That was at Sochi, the Olympic Games, and that was the first time we were beaten physically. That was the first moment that I understood: Russia was already worse than when we were imprisoned.”

Two weeks later, Putin annexed Crimea – “the first point of no way back”, she says. “Especially shocking was the very weak reaction of the west. There were slight sanctions, but nations continued to deal with Russian businesses. Germany was selling weapons to Putin’s regime, evading the weapon embargo. A lot of capital from oligarchs went to Britain, especially to London. I spoke at the European parliament, in your parliament, in the US Senate. Everyone was ‘deeply concerned’, but nothing happened. In Russian activist circles, there are a lot of jokes about the west being deeply concerned: it means they are not going to do anything.”

If there had been the sanctions there are now after Crimea and the subsequent invasion of the Donbas, Alyokhina is certain that we would not be in this mess today. “We were calling for a full embargo in 2014 and again in 2015. We were doing street actions. I was arrested 100 times. I hear a lot of discussion in the west that it’s very hard and painful to stop buying oil and gas – well, you guys had eight years. In eight years, it would have been possible. In one month, it’s hard. Maybe politicians were afraid of their voters protesting that their houses were cold. Now Ukrainians don’t have houses at all.”

She lays out in brutal terms what this combination of inertia and self-interest has created. “Money from the west is the basis of our imprisonment, of our poisoning, of political murders and, now, of the war in Ukraine. I really want people to understand this and stop it.”

You can trace Putin’s growing sense of impunity through the totalitarian acts he got away with. And it does bear reflection: how did he manage it with so little censure? The marked, even absolute, absence of women in Russian political life has tended to pass without comment, as a historical or cultural quirk. “All this Russian criminal culture, which dates from the Soviet Union, is very misogynistic,” says Alyokhina. “There is no place for women at the decision-making table. No first ladies, no role for women. Even western journalists trying to write about Russian feminism – who do they name? Alexandra Kollontai. She was living in the 1920s.” Feminist anti-war resistance is stifled within Russia and unobserved outside it. “Propaganda is working like in the Third Reich,” Alyokhina says.

Most chillingly, the persecution of LGBTQ+ people has moved at speed, from intimidatory arrests – you can be prosecuted for holding a rainbow flag – to the creation of what the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta in 2017 referred to as “concentration camps” for gay men in Chechnya. “Russia was protesting all these years – there were streets, squares, full of people, beaten, arrested, imprisoned for five, six, seven years – and nobody cared because it was within her borders,” says Alyokhina. “It has always been this way.”

Even if the west has now woken up, or rather been awakened, have we fully grasped the seriousness of the situation? There is an overwhelming consensus about Putin – that he is a warmonger and tyrant – but still, Alyokhina feels, there remains a reluctance to take his utterances seriously. “He gave interviews 10 years ago and started to talk about his role models. One is Joseph Stalin. The biggest tyrant, who repressed, raped our people, killed our culture, killed all my favourite artists, some of them personally. This is a grave warning. If you listen carefully, you can understand where it will go.”

It’s very dangerous to totalitarianism if the women rise up. That’s another revolution

Commentators desperately cling to the hope that Putin is just one wild man, that around him are people who will eventually find the spine to overthrow him. Remarks were made recently by a representative of Rosneft, Russia’s largest state oil company. “You must have heard it,” Alyokhina says, with frustration, but no, I have not. “He promoted Adolf Hitler. He said that, of all the decisions in the west, the Anglo-Saxons are the most guilty people. The first nuclear bomb must be dropped on Great Britain. This is what we have, in our so-called news. They are speaking about nuclear bombs almost every day.”

The news that does percolate from inside Russia is that the state propaganda machine is extremely effective on the older generation, who take its news as truth, and that this has created irrevocable social and family rifts. Alyokhina describes one member of her collective whose father called her a Nazi for supporting Ukraine. “There are examples of parents reporting it to the police when their twentysomething children go on demonstrations. This is very Soviet Union, teaching people to call the police or the KGB if there is a political difference of opinion. Now, it’s again rising up.”

Alyokhina’s mother, a programmer who raised her alone (she didn’t meet her father until she was 21), isn’t like that at all. “My mum is amazing. She understands that we have a new Hitler in Russia.” The central propaganda line is “to provide the message that everything is complicated” for long enough that the war slips out of the western media “and then they will attack more”. But there is another strand to the state media’s message – that Putin is fighting nazism in Ukraine. This is “very hard for old people, whose parents fought the Nazis. There is almost no family in Russia who didn’t lose their relatives in the second world war. But my mother is very clear, and very sad, about what’s happening.”

‘I’m in a panic, I’m crying every day’ … Nadya Tolokonnikova at a concert in Tennessee earlier this month. Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova: ‘You cannot play nice with Putin. He is insane. He might open fire on his own people’.. Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/mar/08/pussy-riot-nadya-tolokonnikova-interview-putin-nfts-russian

She is absolutely trenchant on one point, which she returns to often and has said on stage, in interviews, online: Putin must be tried as a war criminal. “Without an international trial for Putin, it is just unfair to pretend that Russia can exist like before. There has to be an international judgment for this. Without the understanding that Putin is a terrorist and a criminal, it will just be more blood. More dead bodies. More raped women.”

Alyokhina starts rolling a cigarette, underscoring her nervous intensity. She lights up. The image recalls the smoke-hazed faces of resistance fighters since nazism began. She has never lost faith in resistance movements within Russia, especially from Russian women – “a great power, probably the biggest power in the country”. Totalitarianism – probably all of it, not just Putin’s – thrives on “this concept of women sitting at home, feeding the children and going to church. It’s very dangerous if the women rise up. That’s another revolution.”

Nor has she ever wavered in her belief that activism counts. “I really believe that each gesture, each word, each action is important. All these small impacts are the basis for building something different.” International fellowship is powerful, even when it is expressing itself in despair. “Sometimes, there is huge hope. For example, we were performing in Hamburg and there were two Ukrainian artists singing a hymn after us. We stood on the stage, hugging each other. For several seconds, everyone was crying. I was so shocked that this fellow feeling can exist after all this tragedy.”

I wonder, then, at the immense sadness of being exiled from your country, yet feeling its acts so keenly as your responsibility; of watching brutality unfold when you have warned of it for a decade and paid for those warnings time and again with your freedom.

“I will not talk about my sadness when, even today, there have been two bomb attacks against Ukraine,” she says. “Emotions are not important. We should continue, all of us, because it’s a war.”

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Pussy Riot song protests against war in Ukraine and calls for Putin to be prosecuted

The collective said Mama, Don’t Watch TV – a reference to the words of a captured Russian conscript soldier – rails against the Russian leader’s ‘bloodthirsty puppets’ and ‘war criminals’

Laura Snapes

Sat 24 Dec 2022 09.00 GMT

Pussy Riot have released a new song protesting against the war in Ukraine, Russian censorship and the west “sponsoring” the regime through buying oil and gas from Russia. They have also called for the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, to be tried at an international tribunal.

In a statement, they described Putin’s government as a “terrorist regime” and call him, his officials, generals and propagandists “war criminals”.

They called Мама, не смотри телевизор (Mama, Don’t Watch TV), which comes 10 months after Russia invaded Ukraine: “The music of our anger, indignation, disagreement, a reproachful desperate cry against Putin’s bloodthirsty puppets, led by a real cannibal monster, whose place is in the infinity of fierce hellish flames on the bones of the victims of this terrible war.”

The collective, in this instance represented by Maria Alyokhina, Olga Borisova, Diana Burkot and Taso Pletner, said the chorus is based on the words of a captured Russian conscript soldier who told his mother: “Mum, there are no Nazis here, don’t watch TV.”

“Russian propaganda daily poisons the hearts of people with hatred,” they wrote. “The law on foreign agents is used to silence opposition activists and journalists, to stop the activities of the last independent human rights organisations.”

Pussy Riot release song protesting against Putin’s war on Ukraine – video: https://youtu.be/W4IsdnlbOr8

They outlined the consequences for anyone who defies the regime. “Those who oppose Putin are imprisoned, poisoned with military poisons and killed,” they said, drawing attention to the “tradition of political poisoning” represented by Russia’s Lab X, a poison factory that helped silence the Soviets’ critics and that is believed to play a similar function today.

“Opposition figures of anti-government movements became victims of the ‘experiments’. Putin and the FSB are proud of this “tradition” and continue it: Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei Skripal, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Pyotr Verzilov, Alexei Navalny.”

The group said that the money the Kremlin receives from the international community conducting business with Russia is converted “into Ukrainian blood”.

They issued a three-point demand, calling for an embargo on the purchase of Russian oil and gas and the sale of weapons and police ammunition to Russia; the seizure of western bank accounts and property of Russian officials and oligarchs and personal sanctions against them; and an international tribunal to try Putin, employees of Russian state propaganda, army officers and everyone responsible for the genocide of the Ukrainian nation.

They asked the Russian people to ignore propaganda and not to participate in the war, take mobilisation notices or go to the military commissariat.

“Every action against this war is important,” they said.

Alyokhina is one of the three members of Pussy Riot who was sentenced to two years in jail for staging a performance inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in February 2012. She and Nadya Tolokonnikova were released in December 2013.

In July, Alyokhina told the Guardian: “We have a new Hitler in Russia.” She outlined how she had left the country in April disguised as a food courier, after repeated arrests. She went to Iceland, where she has been raising money for Ukrainian charities and Russian political prisoners, and staged an exhibition about Pussy Riot’s history, Velvet Revolution, at the Kling & Bang gallery.

She recently toured a Pussy Riot musical, Riot Days. In August, Tolokonnikova released an album as Pussy Riot called Matriarchy Now.

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Beaten, jailed, exiled and still taunting Putin: inside Pussy Riot’s filthy, furious show

‘A seven-year sentence isn’t enough – give us 18!’ …members of the collective are attacked by Cossack militia in Sochi, Russia, during the 2014 winter Olympics.

They fled Russia disguised as food couriers. Now a major exhibition is celebrating the collective’s punky protest art, from a urine-splattered portrait of Putin to the cathedral gig that landed them in prison

The first thing you see is a framed portrait of Vladimir Putin propped against a table. The Russian leader looks like a secular icon, like Lenin in his mausoleum, seemingly incapable of human expression. But this being a video installation, there is more. Standing on the table is figure in a long gown and orange balaclava, like Rasputin in women’s clothes, or a very unorthodox priest. The figure raises their skirts and a jet of urine spurts over the portrait.

Welcome to Reykjavík and to Velvet Terrorism, an exhibition tracing the decade-long history of Russian art collective Pussy Riot. “Is that you?” I ask Maria Alyokhina, AKA Masha, pointing at the masked urinator? The Pussy Riot co-founder has been showing me, over a video conferencing app, around the exhibition she and members of Icelandic art collective Kling & Bang (Dorothee Kirch, Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir and Ragnar Kjartansson) are installing. Kjartansson, who earlier this year helped Alyokhina flee Russia, holds the phone and gives me a view of Alyokhina at work. “It’s not me,” says Alyokhina, thin smile below intense eyes. “It’s a new member of Pussy Riot who joined earlier this year.” By way of context, she adds: “Putin’s Russia has no women in power. Putin surrounds himself with men. The women are to stay at home and accept their role, which is to be protected. I don’t want to be protected by him. I’d rather piss on him.” Kjartansson, unseen, chips in: “It’s such a great take down of the patriarchy. We were assembling a very slick exhibition, tracing the history of Pussy Riot in the past decade. Then Masha arrived and made it very rock’n’roll.”

‘The Orthodox religion is a hardened penis’ … Pussy Riot singer Maria Alyokhina at The Junction in Cambridge this month. Photograph: Chris Radburn/Reuters

Photos are stuck to the wall with coloured electrical tape. TV monitors howl footage of the various performances and beatings the collective have undergone, such as the time in 2014 when Alyokhina and other members were whipped and pepper-sprayed by Cossacks for protesting at the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The look of the show now has a punk sensibility fitting for a collective whose first songs, 2011’s Ubey Seksista (Kill the Sexist) and Osvobodi Bruschatku (Release the Cobblestones), sampled two late 70s British punk classics: the Cockney Rejects’ I’m Not a Fool and the Angelic Upstarts’ Police Oppression.

When I first meet Alyokhina, she is scribbling text on the gallery wall with what looks like a sharpie. She is writing, in English, an explanation of video footage showing Pussy Riot’s breakthrough performance in January 2012 in Moscow’s Red Square. That day they played a song called Putin Zassal (here rendered as Putin Pissed His Pants), which included the lines: “The Orthodox religion is a hardened penis / Coercing its subjects to accept conformity.”

The next exhibit documents what happened the following month inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Russia was then embroiled in the so-called “snow revolution” against electoral fraud. Alyokhina and four other women smuggled a guitar and amp into the cathedral, donned balaclavas and coloured tights, and performed their Punk Prayer, with lyrics including “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, chase Putin out”, and “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist”.

Alyokhina and other members of the collective were later jailed for inciting religious hatred after the prosecution – incredibly yet successfully – argued that feminism when proclaimed inside a church is heretical.

During Alyokhina’s 21-month incarceration in a penal colony in the Ural mountains, Putin’s ally and head of the Russian Orthodox church, Patriarch Kirill, explained what was expected of women in Putin’s Russia. “Man has his gaze turned outward – he must work, make money – and woman must be focused inwards, where her children are, where her home is. If this incredibly important function of women is destroyed then everything will be destroyed – the family and, if you wish, the motherland.” The message was clear: difficult women like Pussy Riot needed silencing to save the Russian motherland.

Alyokhina won’t be silenced, though she balks when I suggest that western artists aren’t as tough nor as political as she. This is a woman, after all, who while awaiting sentence released a single defiantly proclaiming: “Seven years isn’t enough – give us 18!” Later, while in jail, she organised impromptu uprisings and would go on to say: “This is what protest should be: desperate, sudden and joyous.”

This spring, after being arrested six times since last summer for protesting against Putin and suspecting another spell in jail was likely, Alyokhina, with girlfriend Lucy Shtein and other members of Pussy Riot, fled Russia disguised as food couriers. Shtein is now in Israel, while Alyokhina and other collective members are nomadic, and have spent much of their time since leaving Russia touring Europe to raise money to support Ukraine and sanctions on Russian oil and gas.

‘I miss my home’ … Alyokhina in Porto, Portugal, in June. Photograph: Estela Silva/EPA

Kjartansson calls me later and we speak alone. “I couldn’t say all I wanted about how great Masha is,” he says. “It’s like talking about Elvis in the presence of Elvis.” A longtime Pussy Riot fan, Kjartansson met Alyokhina last December at the grand opening of billionaire Leonid Mikhelson’s GES-2 art space in Moscow, which for a few months was hailed as a symbol of a new Russia.

Kjartansson’s recreation of the US soap Santa Barbara was the gallery’s inaugural attraction. It was a project inspired by the idea that Santa Barbara, the first US soap opera to be screened in Russia, had a powerful impact on post-Soviet culture. To that end, working with a professional film crew, he planned to stage, shoot and release about 100 episodes of the soap in Russian, on an insanely tight schedule of one episode a day performed in the gallery.

“But then the invasion of Ukraine started,” he explains, “and I didn’t want any part of what Russia was doing. So I withdrew.” He wasn’t alone. Teresa Iarocci Mavica quit as director of GES-2.

Kjartansson has since put his energies into this Pussy Riot exhibition. He wants to show the chutzpah of the collective in turning the power of the oppressors against them, making Putin’s thugs and lackeys part of their work. “Be it prison, novichok, whips, ankle tags or exile,” says the show’s publicity material, “Pussy Riot turn every violent action of the state into art material, shifting the power balance.”

I ask Alyokhina when she will go home. “A good question,” she smiles sadly. “I don’t know. I would like to be there. I miss my home. But not what Putin has done to it.”

• Velvet Terrorism runs until 15 January

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Her natal Lilith is 29 Leo, N.Node 23 Sagittarius, S.Node 19 Gemini. Her natal Amazon is 27 Virgo, N.Node 28 Taurus, S.Node 13 Scorpio.

Please feel free to comment or ask questions.

Goddess Bless, Rad

Hi All,

Here is the story of Madonna. The birth chart below reflects her actual time of birth.

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Madonna’s upcoming tour will defy society’s limits on female pop stars

Perspective by Robin Givhan

Senior critic-at-large |

January 17, 2023

Madonna's upcoming tour will mark 40 years of pop-culture greatness as it defies generations of stereotypes about gender and age. (Steve Sands)

Madonna has announced the North American and European dates of her concert tour, during which she will perform her most popular, era-defining songs. That’s 40 years worth of club dancing, provocative shape-shifting and sex-positive proselytizing. Madonna was one of the foundational female artists of the MTV dance pop genre, and this tour will be a testament to that legacy and a test of cultural boundaries. In “Madonna: The Celebration Tour,” the performer will be pushing against timeworn assumptions about gender and age at a moment when public dialogue can be very mean and very unforgiving on those very subjects. Godspeed, Madonna.

She announced her intentions on social media in a video that features a game of truth or dare — a reference to her 1991 film of the same name — with a clique of pals including Jack Black, Amy Schumer, Judd Apatow and Lil Wayne. The video is shot mostly in black and white and at times looks out of focus. Everyone appears a bit scruffy and like they’ve had a long night of loopy carousing. The effect is a video that is raw and self-consciously, gleefully transgressive, which is Madonna’s favorite kind of story to tell.

At the height of her fame and influence in the 1980s and ’90s, Madonna managed to offend pretty much everyone who considered themselves part of the establishment or who believed themselves to be charged with setting moral codes of conduct and defining social acceptability. She rankled the sensibilities of the Catholic church, Moral Majority and evangelicals. She made a career out of punching up at the powerful and the privileged. She stood on the side of outsiders. And for this — and her danceable beats and keen sense of aesthetics — she was beloved. She was especially vocal in speaking up for the LGBTQ community and celebrating elements of their culture, including ballroom and drag.

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBUpN99s1Hg

Most everything that made Madonna such a compelling cultural figure now has become a test, a challenge, a question. When she incorporated ballroom culture into her video for “Vogue,” she was applauded for shining a spotlight on this dance style created within the Black and Latin LGBTQ community. Now, there are conversations about cultural appropriation and whether she did enough to elevate the originators.

Harry Styles gets all the applause

As a performer, she was always moving forward, always latching on to the next thing simmering just outside the mainstream. She altered her look to mark each new chapter, and her audience applauded her. But the culture is less likely to applaud the looks of a 64-year-old woman unless she is perceived as somehow defying the march of time or aging gracefully — which is to say walking quietly into the sunset wearing expensive cashmere and sensible shoes.

And Madonna has not been quiet. She recently caused a kerfuffle on social media for making note of how, with her book “Sex” in 1992, she paved the way for performers such as Cardi B and Miley Cyrus to sing freely about their sexuality; she’s been taken to task for wearing the traditional attire of people from North Africa; she likes to craft social media videos of herself in extreme close-ups that make her look ghostly and imperfect rather than glamorous and flawless. She continues to provoke. Her admirers applaud her for maintaining the same edgy sense of indiscretion that she had in her 20s. She is also admonished for still having such audacity. Madonna hasn’t changed, and the culture is conflicted about that.

It will be quite something when Madonna takes the stage and all the familiar beats begin to play. Fans won’t be coming to see her stand behind a microphone and belt out a ballad. The performance, in all its sweaty and sexy athleticism, has always been the draw: the voguing, the bullet bras and, of course, the look. She was the club-hopping ragamuffin, the Marilyn Monroe doppelganger, the dark-haired heretic, the platinum sex goddess. Her look has always told her audience something about how she sees gender and sex at a particular moment. Her body has been a statement about the politics of sexuality.

What will that look like now in this seventh decade of her life? Surely, it can be wondrous and engaging and tantalizing. But it can be hard to convince popular culture of that. When the 50-something actresses returned to the “Sex and the City” revival with all the familiar outré costumes and melodramatic storylines, they were practically pilloried for having the nerve to have aged.

Society has been terribly begrudging of women as they get older. Each milestone brings new rules and limitations related to appearance. At 30, women are expected to be womanly rather than girlish. At 50, they are to aim for sophistication or elegance. After 65, there are no rules because women basically become just a head on an invisible body — exceptions are few.

Madonna is the MTV godmother bringing her personal playlist and bump-and-grind aesthetic back to the stadium crowds. There’s something exciting and unnerving about the prospect of this high-wattage video star returning to the stage with such bravado. Her brand of exhibitionist feminism put the female body directly in the spotlight, and that became fundamental to her public identity. As she goes back and performs her catalogue now, how will the music change? When she sings “Beauty’s where you find it” from “Vogue,” will it resonate differently?

One wants her to be as dynamic as she was decades ago. After all, there’s a good deal of nostalgia embedded in this tour. But the reality is that no performer can ever go backward. (Most probably don’t want to.) The excitement isn’t in a repeat performance of “Vogue” or “Like a Prayer.” The thrill is in the possibilities of what those songs can become.

The anticipation is not merely in hearing a fresh take on the old tunes. It’s also the exhilaration of this Madonna, still disruptive and full of swagger. Just by stepping onstage, she gives popular culture a new chapter in the female story.

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Madonna Will Never Go Gently

Why would we even want her to?

By Vanessa Friedman

Jan. 19, 2023, 9:13 a.m. ET

Madonna has once again infiltrated the pop culturesphere. The 64-year-old singer announced her 12th world tour — a spin across 40 cities and through four decades of hits entitled “Celebration” — via a five-minute black and white video that shows her hosting a dinner party with an assortment of famous friends that was as attention-demanding as you might expect.

She is resplendent in Heidi braids and Jocelyn Wildenstein face, body winched into a corset, shorts, fishnets and zip-up jacket as she and Jack Black, Lil Wayne, Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer, among other guests, play “Truth or Dare” (get it?), mime “Sex” (get it?), sing along to “La Isla Bonita,” and otherwise offer a brief referential whirl through one-time shocking Madonna moments before the big reveal.

To coincide with the news, Madonna is also on the cover of three different issues of “Vanity Fair” (Italian, Spanish, French), in the guise of the Virgin Mary, complete with black and white lace veils and a bleeding heart; inside the magazine she appears in a re-creation of “The Last Supper.”

And to coincide with all that, Piers Morgan, avatar of outrage, is predictably up in arms. How dare she presume to shove herself in our faces yet again, flaunting her body; her smutty jokes; her plastic surgery; her totally, incredibly, no-holds-barred age-inappropriate self?

Duh, because she always dared — that was her truth, more than the dancing, the OK singing, the documentaries, the ad campaigns channeling a sexy housewife for Dolce & Gabbana and a power C.E.O. for Versace. Why should it be any different just because she’s reached Social Security age?

Madonna was never going to go gently into that good night, even if she did have a brief phase living as English landed gentry (that was after her period as a hippie earth mother, as preserved on another cover of “Vanity Fair,” and her period of being Marilyn Monroe). She has always danced on the edge of absurdity and self-caricature, ever since she started actually dancing around the New York club scene in ripped lace petticoats, crosses and fingerless gloves with her belly sticking out. Even when she falls over, as she did at the Brit Awards in 2015, she does it with gusto and no apologies. We need someone to show us how. She’s not so much a train wreck as the train that wrecks the stasis of smothering politesse; the best woman for the job.

Just imagine what it may bring. Not much has been revealed except that Bob the Drag Queen of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” will be a special guest on all the dates, but if the theme is greatest hits, you have to expect that means not just the songs — “Like a Virgin,” “Vogue,” “Ray of Light,” etc. — but also the schtick. The cone bras. The simulated sex. The harems of sweaty ab-full young men. Maybe a surprise planned smooch with a guest star or two and some tongue. (Britney, where are you?) Perhaps a backstage film moment or two. Ascending from hell and descending from the heavens. Fashion-tastic costumes involving bondage, body-baring. Campy historicism and religion. The whole kit and kaboodle of Madonna-isms.

Her timing, as usual, is impeccable. Naked dressing is making a comeback, as worn not to please the eye of the (male) beholder but to advertise the empowerment of the woman inside the skin. So is the era of Indie Sleaze. Seventy has become the new 50. The president is 80. Maye Musk and other “mature” models are getting their cover tries. Mick Jagger is still prancing around in his fancy pants at 79. Madonna is practically middle-aged by comparison.

Besides, something happens when you stick to your guns long enough: You pass through the stages of being in and out and ascend to the status of national treasure. It happened to Queen Elizabeth II. It happened to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. After 40 years of pop culture presence, Madonna has become, Olivier Bouchara, head of editorial content for Vanity Fair France, said in a news release, “a figure as disturbing as she is sacred.” But the truth is, she really isn’t disturbing any more (real life is way too complicated for her to come anywhere close). She’s comfortingly herself.

At this point, we should just be appreciative. It’s probably not a coincidence most of her guests at the announcement party were comedians. It’s a hint (like the career Easter eggs) not to take any of it too seriously. Blowing raspberries at the world is fun. And cathartic. The show will probably be too. And that, as much as anything, is indeed worth celebrating.

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More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna

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Her natal Lilith is: 16 Libra N.Node 2 Sagittarius, S.Node 9 Cancer

Her natal Amazon is: 26 Leo, N.Node 11 Gemini, S.Node 5 Scorpio

Her natal Ceres is: 9 Virgo, N.Node 6 Cancer, S.Node 29 Scorpio

Here is a song by Madonna that is about God/ess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fzeNUqQbQ

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Please feel free to comment or ask questions.

Goddess Bless, Rad

Hi All,

Here is the story of Amna AlQubaisi. This is a noon chart.

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An exclusive interview with the first UAE female racing driver Amna Al Qubaisi

by Olivia Morris

October 13, 2021

Amna Al Qubaisi knows all about living her life in the fast lane. As the first Emirati female racing driver, Amna is here to inspire women to continue to pursue their dreams.

Can you talk us through your career so far?

I’m a Formula 3 driver working her way up to reach Formula 1. While I’m still only at the start of my career, I’ve claimed many achievements such as being the first female and Arab to win an FIA F4 race in 2019, the first female Arab to win the RMC in 2017, the GCC Drivers Programme, and The Dubai O Plate in 2019.

Where did your passion for racecar driving come from?

It comes from my father, Khaled Al Qubaisi, he was a racing driver himself and he started in 2019. I took inspiration when he would come home and invite drivers over for dinner and they would talk about racing and their favourite tracks so I wanted to take part and I started karting when I was 14.

How has your father inspired you and what advice has he given you for entering the sport?

He always taught me how to be calm and focused in this sport. At first, it was very hard for me to focus due to the fact I get distracted a lot.

There’s also a lot of physical aspects that go into racecar driving. Can you talk us

through this?

We have to work on our necks due to the strong G Force when turning in corners and work on our arms and abdomen as the car does not have any power steer available. And finally, our legs for the strong braking we have to input through our legs.

What does it feel like to have accomplished so much at such a young age?

It feels amazing but I know I can accomplish more. I have made many mistakes that prevented me from reaching my potential but it’s all part of the journey.

Women are definitely underrepresented in motorsports. How do you hope to change that?

I feel like due to the fact we don’t get the same advantages as our male competitors it’s pretty difficult to compete with that. So, I think we just need to spread awareness.

You’re a leader for women in this region. What do you hope others can take from your example?

I hope other women could take the fact that you should keep on persisting despite what other people say about you. I’ve come a long way and I can’t quit now when I put years of hard work in.

What do you hope for the future of women in the UAE?

I hope I get to see more women in a male-dominated field in general not just in sports and breaking that stereotype. We can and we will.

What have been the biggest challenges you’ve had to overcome, to date?

I’ve always had to deal with judgment and people criticizing me to this day. It’s still something new to others and I hope in time it will fade away.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, what are the key milestones?

For sure winning races and the biggest one was F4 in 2019. That was like putting a full stop to those that doubted me.

This is ‘The Renegade Issue’ – how would you define this?

I wouldn’t say it’s rebelling but more standing up for ourselves and be heard. We’ve come a long way and it’s time to become what we have always wanted to be.

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This 18-Year-Old Emirati Race Driver Is Going Where No Arab Woman Has Gone Before

by Shruti Thacker

At 18, most of us were applying for college or trying to get our first internship. But not Amna Al Qubaisi, who is at the forefront of breaking glass ceilings in the Arab world as the first female Emirati race car driver.

In 5 years’ time (when she is 23), she hopes to be participating in Formula 2. And that’s not the end goal. “Formula 1 is the main goal, but it’s not an easy journey — and I’m determined enough to reach that,” she tells me as we chat about the Formula E event that happened in Saudi Arabia last month.

Trained as a professional gymnast, Al Qubaisi took a detour from her chosen path while watching and cheering on her father, Le Mans racing driver Khaled Al Qubaisi, as he toured the world of motorsport. “When he spoke about racing and how he did different tracks around the world, meeting new drivers – that moment sparked [something in me] and I wanted to try a kart,” she reminisces. Shortly after, her father gave her a kart and started coaching her. There has been no looking back since then.

Al Qubaisi — who has already competed in Formula 4 in Europe and won the UAE’s senior Rotax Max Challenge karting series in 2017 — feels a sense calm behind the driving wheel. “Whenever I’m in a car, it’s my therapy. It keeps me focused. It’s like when you go to a therapist, that’s who I am when I drive. The car understands me,” she explains.

Speaking of Formula E at the Ad Diriyah ePrix in Saudi Arabia, Al Qubaisi feels immense pride. Joined by other female racing talent, the young Emirati driver (who is sponsored by Kaspersky Lab) took her place in the Envision Virgin Racing Team Formula E on the street circuit of Ad Diriyah in fully electric cars. While driving on the streets of Riyadh was momentous, she says it was seeing the locals and the energy that made the moment more special. The event had men and women attend the races and concerts in mixed groups, a first for the country. “Seeing so many of the locals watching the race on the stands [was] amazing. We can see how interested these people are in motorsport. That’s already a big step,” she comments.

With a competitive line-up of female drivers, the event proved to be revolutionary and shone a spotlight on the government’s commitment to women driving since the lifting of the ban on June 24, 2018. Al Qubaisi says the number of female racing drivers came as a pleasant surprise, but hopes to see more local faces on the track. “I’m glad to be the first — and hopefully I’m not the last. I have my sister [Hamda Al Qubaisi] following my footsteps. Hopefully in the future we see more Arabs involved in motorsports.”

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Amna and Hamda Al Qubaisi: Emirati sisters driving the family's motor racing legacy into a new era

Khaled Al Qubaisi explains how his daughters have impressed since taking their talents to Europe – and why Formula One is the ultimate goal

Mar 31, 2021

Khaled Al Qubaisi is one of the most accomplished and well respected figures in UAE motorsport, and now his daughters are set to carry the family legacy into the future.

Among his many motor racing achievements, Al Qubaisi, who has raced three times in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, has won the Dubai 24 Hour twice, in 2012 and 2013, and the Yas Marina 12-Hour Race, also in 2013,

His daughters, 21-year-old Amna and 19-year-old Hamda, are well on their way to emulating their father. Both sisters have graduated from Karting to Formula racing, and Al Qubaisi believes Amna and Hamda will become role models for a new generation of racing drivers.

"They have a bright future," Al Qubaisi, managing director of Abu Dhabi Motorsports, told The National. "Firstly, it is important to acknowledge that we have two great Emirati female drivers in Formula racing professionally and competing at this level.

“That is taking nothing away from them as racing drivers, but they are a great image booster to the UAE, the region and the Arab nations.

“They are not just female drivers but competitive female drivers. They have amazed the motor racing fraternity in Italy, as they were the only two female drivers among the 30-odd male drivers.

“It’s something to be proud of as a country to have such great drivers to demonstrate the talent and success of Emirati females.”

Amna is in Formula-3 and a member of the champion Prema Team that won the Asian team championship by a wide margin when the event was held in Dubai and Abu Dhabi in February.

Hamda is also part of Prema Team and travelled to Italy three weeks ago for a rigid programme of testing and training where she was in the top five in the speed test. She will compete in the F4 Italian and German championship in April and May and will continue with her schooling in Italy until October.

“[Prima Team] won’t take anyone other than those with potential because they want to be the best team,” Al Qubaisi said. “Amna had the privilege of being selected for them. It’s not just about the money, because there are many drivers with big budgets who can pay to be in a top team.

“But teams choose drivers based on talent, personality, character, commitment, discipline and so many other things. So when they choose Amna and Hamda to be part of their team that is a big statement in itself."

Amna's prodigious racing career has involved breaking plenty of barriers. Having started karting in 2014 at the age of 14, she became the first female Arab to participate at the Rotax Max Challenge World Finals the following year.

In 2017, Amna won the UAE RMC Championship – the first Arab female to do so. As she progressed through the motor racing ranks, success followed her, including the 2018 Italian F4 Championship with Prema.

Hamda, meanwhile, has closely followed in her older sister's footsteps. Over two years racing in the UAE, she had six wins – one with a winning margin of nearly 11 seconds – and eight pole positions. In Europe, Hamda has managed three top 10s spots in her first season.

“This has been the most competitive seasons for both Hamda in F4 and Amna in F3," Al Qubaisi said. "They are very talented. I know someone who has been in motorsports for a long time and he tells me ‘your girls have the potential to reach F1 level’."

As for most aspiring racing drivers, Formula One is the ultimate goal for Amna and Hamda. “Otherwise, we won’t be wasting our time and energy,” Al Qubaisi said. “Of course, they still have a long way to go and a lot of support required to get them there.

“I think they have the talent. It’s just a matter of time and a combination of performances and results. They have been delivering it so far and have impressed in whatever was needed from them to take the next step.”

One possible avenue is the W-Series – the all-female championship, which offers winning drivers the chance to race in Formula 2, the traditional stepping stone to F1.

“In the W-series they will be racing alongside F1 drivers, providing them the exposure to compete,” Al Qubaisi said. “The winner of the race gets the opportunity to race in F2, so we are looking at this and talking to them.”

More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amna_Al_Qubaisi

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Her natal Lilith is 00/21 Taurus, N.Node 9 Capricorn, S.Node 29 Taruus.

Her natal Amazon is 2 Scorpio, N.Node 12 Taurus, S.Node 7 Sagittarius.

Her natal Ceres is 00/44 Libra, N.Node 2 Gemini, S.Node 11 Capricorn.

Please feel free to comment or ask questions.

Goddess Bless, Rad

Hi All,

Here is the story of a remarkable Dalit women named Jhalkari Bai. This is a noon chart.

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What We Know Of Jhalkari Bai, The Dalit Woman Commander Of Rani Laxmibai’s Army

We know of Rani Lakshmi Bai's bravery tales, but we are not aware of Jhalkari Bai, the Dalit woman who helped her throughout, and fought right next to her in the uprising of 1857.

Bhumika Agarwal

India Times

We know of Rani Lakshmi Bai’s bravery tales, but we are not aware of Jhalkari Bai, the Dalit woman who helped her throughout, and fought right next to her in the uprising of 1857.

The stories of our female warriors are rarely told. Can we think of any other female warriors other than Rani Laxmibai and Sultana Razia? Through the ages, women have shown great abilities, playing a crucial role in history. But we rarely hear about them. Isn’t it time we changed that?

Here is a name that is quite disguised in the pages of history. Commander of Rani Laxmibai’s Army, Jhalkari Bai. The attention that is paid to Kings and Queens is appropriate, but even majesty can show courage only when they have good support systems. Jhalkari Bai was that support system to the Queen.

Few people know that she is the woman who overcame every obstacle to save Rani Laxmi Bai and her son. Her uncanny similarity to Rani Laxmibai made it very easy for her to disguise herself as the queen and misguide the British army during the revolt of 1857.

What do we know about Jhalkari Bai?

Jhalakari Bai was born in Bundelkhand on 22 November 1830 to a poor Kori family (an oppressed Dalit group) Her mother was Jamunaabai and her father was Sadoba (E.K. Mulchand Koli), and lost her mother early in childhood, and was raised by her father as an only child. Because of the social conditions of the time, she did not have formal education, but was trained in horseback riding and firearms use.

Since childhood, she was bold and determined. She worked to support her family, supervised animals, as well as collected wood from forests. As Jhalakari once came into contact with a tiger in a jungle, she killed the animal with her ax. Her bravery and courage were outstanding.

Jhalkari Bai was married to a soldier in the Jhansi army, and that’s how she came to be, one day, among the women of the local village, who went to the fort of Jhansi to honor the Queen during Gauri Puja. Jhalkari Bai was an absolutely identical copy of the Rani, and this made the Rani notice her. When she came to know of the feats of Jhalkari Bai, the Rani was impressed and asked her to join the women’s Durga dal in the army. There, Jhalkaribai trained in guns, cannon firing, and other weapons, and later, became the commander of the Durga dal.

Night of the attack in the uprising of 1857

At the time of the rebellion of 1857, General Rose attacked Jhansi on 23 March 1858 with his huge army. Rani Laxmibai fought bravely with her 5000 soldiers. The Queen was waiting for help from Peshwa, but she was not able to make contact with them as Tatia Tope was already defeated.

Legend has it that when the British army came to the fort to attack the Rani, it seemed it may be difficult to save her. Jhalkari Bai (who resembled Rani Laxmi bai) took the position of queen. As the British army mistook Jhalkari Bai for the queen, the Rani was able to escape with her son (successor of the Jhansi kingdom).

She is now honored on Shahid Diwas (Martyr’s Day) by various Koli organizations.

Why is Jhalkari Bai not better known?

There is silence on Jhalkari Bai’s bravery which is intentional because she was from the Dalit community. Rani Laxmi Bai was born into a Brahmin family in Varanasi and married a Peshwa (Brahmin) king named Raja Gangadhar Rao of Jhansi. Tatya Tope, her ally, was also born in a Brahmin family, was similarly born to Ramachandra Pandurang Tope.

To keep the oppressed class as oppressed, history is told in a biased way, keeping them hidden from written records. This has motivated the Dalits in Bundelkhand and throughout UP, to retrieve and bring to light the heroism and sacrifices of Jhalkari Bai.

In India, the upper castes have ignored the many stories of Dalit resistance against colonial rulers and social injustices. Though these stories have survived mostly orally through generations of Dalits, history as we commonly know it has kept it hidden, due to history being written by dominant upper caste historians. There is also the additional layer of her being a woman.

Jhalkari Bai is played by television star Ankita Lokhande in her Bollywood debut in the Kangana Ranaut starrer biopic of Rani Laxmi Bai, Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi. She has been portrayed as brave and loyal, and the narrative speaks of how she sacrificed her life in the revolt.

More: https://satyaagrah.com/sanatan/veer-gaatha/715-jhalkaribai-the-indian-rebellion-of-1857-who-took-on-british-forces-disguised-as-laxmibai

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Jhalkaribai: The Indian Rebellion Of 1857 Who Took on British Forces Disguised as Laxmibai

A prominent fighter during the Rebellion of 1857, one woman driven by sheer fortitude and courage was able to strike fear in the hearts of the British army and leave behind a rich legacy for millions to emulate.

The history of India is full of rulers -- both men and women -- who combined bravery with a strategy to repulse attacks by foreign invaders down the ages. Members of royal families were known to have shown exemplary courage when the situation demanded.

But Jhalkari Bai's saga is a study in contrast. She was the 'double' of Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi, the legendary warrior who fought the invading British army in the first War of Independence. A little known figure in Indian history, Jhalkari Bai lives on in the folklore of the Bundelkhand region.

Jhalkaribai! While she remains in oblivion in the pages of History text books, she is revered as one of the bravest daughters of Bharat Mata from the Bahujan community. She was one of the commanders of /*Durga Dal*/, the women contingent of the *Jhansi army of Rani Laxmibai*. She was also an advisor to the queen. Laxmibai consulted her on

administrative and military affairs. Born and brought up in a humble background, she rose to power by sheer dint of her bravery and her love for the motherland.

Do you know it was because of the defence laid by Jhalkaribai against the British army that Rani Laxmibai could escape from Jhansi Fort? The British felt confused, as they thought she was the Rani of Jhansi. Such was the resemblance of Jhalkaribai with Laxmibai! Jhalkaribai purposefully misled the British army, leading from the front, giving a safe passage to the Rani of Jhansi.

Background of Jhalkaribai

Jhalkaribai was born to Jamuna Devi and Sadoba Singh, a Koli family in Bhojla village near Jhansi on 22 November 1830. The Kolis are a community with many subgroups; they inhabit the central and western mountain regions of India. Jhalkaribai was the only child of her parents. She lost her mother when she was very young. Coincidently her

lookalike Laxmibai also lost her mother when she was 4. Her father raised her as a single parent.

She was different from other girls of her community. Besides taking care of household chores, doing her duties of a lady of the household, Jhalkaribai was regularly involved in tending cattle and collecting firewood from the jungle. She was daring right from her childhood. She often went all alone with her axe to the jungle to collect firewood though she knew she might be attacked by wild animals.

Once she had an encounter with a leopard while herding her cattle. She killed the leopard with her herding stick! This feat of hers brought her fame in her neighborhood and beyond. On another occasion, she saved a village businessman from being looted by dacoits. She challenged a gang of dacoits who raided the house of the businessman and forced them to retreat. The villagers started revering her. The young and the old drew

inspiration from her.

When Jhalkaribai grew of marriageable age, the villagers started looking for a groom for her. They wanted her to get married to someone as courageous as her. And they found a suitable groom in Pooran Kori, who.was known to be brave and trained in the art of warfare. Soon after, Pooran Kori was inducted into the Jhansi army as a soldier. He became a well-known personality in the Jhansi army for his skills and exploits.

Jhalkaribai joined Jhansi Army "Durga Dal" of Laxmibai

On one occasion, Rani Laxmibai invited the women of the villages of Jhansi to attend Gauri (Goddess Shakti) puja at the Jhansi Fort.Jhalkaribai accompanied the other ladies to the fort. Laxmibai’s eyes fell on her; she was struck by Jhalkaribai’s uncanny resemblance with her. She learnt that she was the wife of Pooran Kori, one of the bravest

soldiers of her army. She also learnt about her childhood exploits, how she killed the leopard and her encounter with the dacoits. Laxmibai immediately inducted her into the women contingent of the Jhansi Army called Durga Dal. More women joined Durga Dal.

The Rani herself trained the women army. Jhalkaribai’s learning was fast. She soon became an expert in the art of warfare – horse riding, shooting, using of all weapons used in war, etc. By dint of her courage and her skills, she rose to the power of the Commander of Durga Dal.

Jhalkaribai was also a beauty with brains. Rani Laxmibai additionally appointed her as her advisor. The Rani started seeking her advice in administrative and military affairs and of creating strategies for defending Jhansi from possible attacks by the British and other enemy forces.

Lord Dalhousie

The British under Lord Dalhousie had rejected Damodar Rao’s claim to the throne of Jhansi, as he was adopted. They applied the Doctrine of Lapse and annexed Jhansi to their empire. Meanwhile, in the early months of 1857, rumor about cartridges containing pork or beef fat being supplied by British sparked unrest amongst soldiers and the common men alike. And the first rebellion started in Meerut on May 10, 1857. Indian sepoys with the help of local civilians killed 50 Britishers. This news spread like wild fire and many a son and daughter of Bharat Mata rose in revolt against the British across the country. The news reached Jhansi. Laxmibai revolted against the British and declared independence.

Meanwhile, a group of mutineers, who were supporters of a rival prince claiming the throne of Jhansi, attacked the fort. Rani Laxmibai foiled their attempt, defeating them. The rulers of Orchha and Datiya, both allies of the British, attacked Jhansi in August 1857. They wished to divide Jhansi amongst themselves. The Rani assembled her forces. She set up a foundry to cast cannons within the premises of the fort. Yes! She successfully defeated the invaders. Jhalkaribai and Durga Dal played an instrumental role in defeating the enemy forces.

Laxmibai ruled Jhansi peacefully from August 1857 to January 1858. Towards the third week of March 1858, the British forces, under Commander Hugh Rose, marched towards Jhansi. They ordered the Rani to surrender and threatened destruction of the fort and the town if she refused. The battle between Rani Laxmibai and the British forces began

on 24th March 1858 and continued for 10 days until April 2nd. Jhalkaribai played an active role in this battle. There were heavy casualties from both sides. At last British forces were able to penetrate the walls of the fort and into the fort and the palace. All

because one of the Rani’s commanders betrayed her, opening a well-protected gate of the fort to the British forces.

It was Jhalkaribai who advised Laxmibai to run away from the fort so that she could accumulate a force outside. The witty Jhalkaribai herself offered to defend the fort unto death by disguising herself as the Rani. Disguised as the queen, she galloped in her horse towards the enemy, taking command of the Jhansi army.

Jhalkaribai fought like a wounded tigress

Meanwhile, her husband Pooran Kori died while fighting the British. Jhalkaribai fought like a wounded tigress when she learnt about it, killing many British soldiers, until she was caught. With her adopted son Damodar Rao tied to her back, Laxmibai jumped down several feet from the fort and managed to escape.

The British Commander Hugh Rose and his men were overjoyed, as they felt they caught the Rani alive. Rose asked Jhalkaribai what should be done to her. She said, “Hang me!” Later, they learnt that she was Jhalkaribai, the lookalike of Laxmibai. She was hanged to death by the British. Though the actual date of the hanging is not in records, it was

probably April 1858, as she was caught on April 2nd.

According to Bundelkhand folklore, the British commander was so stunned by Jhalkaribai’s wit, courage, and sacrifice that he said if every Indian woman was like her, the British would be bound to leave India soon.

Jhalkaribai was a Bahujan. But didn’t she rise to power owing to her skills? Jhalkaribai struck fear in the hearts of the British army.Through her role in the 1857 War of Independence and for the freedom of Jhansi, through her valor and sacrifice, she has left behind a rich legacy for millions to emulate.

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Jhalkaribai

Jhalkaribai (22 November 1830 – 4 April 1858)[2] was a woman soldier who played an important role in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. She served in the women's army of Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi. She eventually rose to a position of a prominent advisor to the queen, Rani of Jhansi. At the height of the Siege of Jhansi, she disguised herself as the queen and fought on her behalf, on the front, allowing the queen to escape safely out of the fort.

Life

Jhalakaribai was born to Sadova Singh and Jamunadevi on 22 November 1830 in Bhojla village in a Koli family near Jhansi. In her youth, she is claimed to have stood her ground when attacked by a tiger and killed it with an axe. She reportedly once killed a leopard in the forest with a stick she used to herd cattle.[

After the death of her mother when she was very young, her father raised her. Consistent with the social conditions of the era, she lacked formal education, but was trained in horseback riding and the use of weaponry. Jhalkaribai bore an uncanny resemblance to Laxmibai and because of this she was inducted into the women's wing of the army.

Military service

In the queen's army, she quickly rose in the ranks and began commanding her own army. During the Rebellion of 1857, General Hugh Rose attacked Jhansi with a large army. The queen faced the army with 14,000 of her troops. She waited for relief from Peshwa Nana Sahib's army camping at Kalpi that did not come because Tantia Tope had already been defeated by General Rose. Meanwhile, Dulha Ju, in charge of one of the gates of the fort, had made a pact with the assailants and opened the doors of Jhansi for the British forces. When the British rushed the fort, Laxmibai, on advice of her courtier, escaped through Bhanderi gate with her son and attendants to Kalpi. Upon hearing of Laxmibai's escape, Jhalkaribai set out for General Rose's camp in disguise and declared herself to be the queen. This led to a confusion that continued for a whole day and gave the Rani's army renewed advantage.

In addition, she was a close confidante and advisor to the queen playing a key role in the analysis of the battle, alongside Laxmibai.

Legacy

The death anniversary of Jhalkaribai is celebrated as Shahid Diwas (Martyr Day) by various Koli organizations. The movement to establish Bundelkhand as a separate state has also used the legend of Jhalkaribai to create the Bundeli identity. The Government of India's Post and Telegraph department has issued a postal stamp depicting Jhalkaribai.

The Archaeological Survey of India is setting up a museum at Panch Mahal, a five-storey building located inside the Jhansi Fort in remembrance of Jhalkaribai.

She is referred to in the novel Jhansi ki Rani written in 1951 by B. L. Varma, who created a subplot in his novel about Jhalkaribai. He addressed Jhalkaribai as Koli and an extraordinary soldier in Laxmibai's army. Ram Chandra Heran Bundeli novel Maati, published in the same year, depicted her as "chivalrous and a valiant martyr". The first biography of Jhalkaribai was written in 1964 by Bhawani Shankar Visharad, with the help of Varma's novel and his research from the oral narratives of Kori communities living in the vicinity of Jhansi.

Writers narrating the story of Jhalkaribai. Efforts have been made to place Jhalkaribai at an equal footing of Laxmibai.[17] Since the 1990s, the story of Jhalkaribai has begun to model a fierce form of Koli womanhood, has acquired a political dimension, and her image is being reconstructed with the demands of social situation.

President Ramnath Kovind unveiled the statue of Jhalkari Bai at Guru Tegh Bahadur Complex in Bhopal on 10 November 2017.

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Her natal Amazon is 29 Cancer, N.Node 20 Taurus, S.Node 15 Sagittarius

Her natal Ceres is 17 Sagittarius, N.Node 2 Cancer, S.Node 15 Sagittarius

Her natal Lilith is 24 Gemini, N.Node 16 Sagittarius, S.Node 7 Caneer

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Please feel free to comment or ask questions.

Goddess Bless, Rad

Hi All,

Here is the story of Maria Pevchikh the right hand women to Alexie Navalny. This is a noon chart.

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Interview: ‘We do our work because we are angry’: Navalny’s right-hand woman Maria Pevchikh on taking on Putin

It’s two years since the arrest and imprisonment of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Here his deputy talks about continuing his fearless anti-corruption work – and why she won’t give up hope of his release

Carole Cadwalladr

Guardian

Sun 22 Jan 2023

Two years ago this week, the leader of the Russian opposition, Alexei Navalny, flew into Moscow knowing that he faced certain arrest and imprisonment. It was an extraordinary act of courage and leadership. He had only just recovered from an attempt on his life after collapsing on a plane poisoned with what was later found to be the nerve agent novichok. He was not meant to survive.

“There was no way he wouldn’t have gone back to Moscow,” the investigative journalist Maria Pevchikh tells me. “That wasn’t even on the table.” As the head of investigations for the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), the organisation founded by Navalny, Pevchikh worked alongside him for a decade and was with him in Siberia when he was poisoned.

“We prepared for it very well,” she says of Navalny’s absence. And then hesitates. “It’s just a very noticeable loss. We’re fully functioning, probably better than before. But we lost a lot of our spirit. We do our work because we’re angry.”

So much has changed since Navalny returned to Russia. He was arrested and he was imprisoned, sparking some of Russia’s biggest ever protests, with demonstrations across the country. Months later, the Anti-Corruption Foundation was labelled an “extremist organisation” and its staff had to leave the country overnight. Just over a month ago and after weeks of negotiation, I’d finally persuaded Pevchikh to give me a tour of their new home, a spacious, light-filled office in Vilnius, Lithuania. And although I’ve met her several times by this point, and we know various people in common, she has agreed to give the tour with extreme reluctance, and still eyes me with suspicion.

The office, with its recording studios, floating shelves and potted cactuses, looks like the kind of hip media startup you might find in Brooklyn or Shoreditch or LA, and in another life, Pevchikh might have been a high-powered media executive in one of those places. But in this one her boss is in a punishment cell in a jail outside Moscow and this is the headquarters of the Russian opposition. “We behave as if we were in Moscow. We are on Moscow time. We could be anywhere,” she insists, and her suspicion is grounded in an entirely rational understanding of the world in which she operates.

Navalny, the most influential Russian politician for a generation, is currently serving two separately imposed prison sentences – two and a half years for a parole violation and nine for fraud and contempt – in a maximum-security penal colony four hours east of Moscow. And he’s about to go on trial again, this time for creating an extremist organisation, and faces an additional 30 years in jail. A charismatic, funny, wise-cracking lawyer who has relentlessly lampooned Vladimir Putin, Navalny’s refusal to be afraid of the Russian leader was contagious, and for a moment in 2021 it felt like the country could be on the brink of change. But the invasion of Ukraine has changed everything. The latest photos of Navalny show him gaunt and emaciated. He’s currently in solitary confinement and being refused medical treatment for a fever and bad back. The outlook is almost unbearably bleak.

Navalny review – extraordinary documentary about the attempt to kill Putin’s rival

Read more

Last spring, Pevchikh had told me about the frenetic diplomatic efforts being made in London, Brussels and Washington on his behalf. “Every morning I wake up and think about what I can do to get him out,” she said. The foundation was lobbying for his release to be part of any negotiated settlement. But that seems an even more remote possibility now. Protest has been ruthlessly squashed across Russia and, in Ukraine, anger towards the Russian public and their perceived passivity has grown. Even Navalny himself, though he has condemned Putin’s war in Ukraine, has been accused of equivocating over whether Crimea should be returned to Ukraine. The efforts are ongoing, but when I ask Pevchikh about this again on the phone last week she says: “You can say that I refuse to discuss it. One day maybe I’ll write a book about it, but there’s too much at stake right now.”

One of the foundation’s main objectives at the moment is simply to keep Navalny in the news. Inside Russia, they’re doing so via a whole new slew of YouTube channels, bringing news of the war to the public via the one channel that’s still available to them. And in the west, they’re doing it via a documentary, Navalny, an independent feature released last year that’s been nominated for an Oscar and a Bafta. Awards season is in full swing and for months Pevchikh and Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, have been flying back and forth to America to talk and appear on panels and meet the great and the good. “I honestly don’t know where we would be without the documentary,” Pevchikh says. “It’s mentioned in every meeting I have with ministers or their staff. Everybody knows who he is because of it. And who I am.”

At the heart of the film is an indelible scene. A few months after Navalny’s poisoning, Bulgarian journalist Christo Grozev, the lead investigator for the international investigative collective Bellingcat, had come to the house in the Black Forest in Germany where Navalny was convalescing. He believed he had identified his poisoners. What’s more, he had their phone numbers. The film shows Grozev meeting Navalny and Pevchikh, and then the electrifying moment when Navalny – using the alias of a high-ranking aide in the FSB (Russian Federal Security Service) – speaks to one of his poisoners on the phone.

“I had no idea what was being said,” the film’s director, Daniel Roher, tells me, “because I don’t speak Russian. But then I clocked Maria’s expression and saw her jaw unhinge and she put her hand over her mouth and I thought ‘holy shit’. I knew something extraordinary was happening.”

Navalny had got an FSB agent to confess on camera and describe how he’d been part of the clean-up gang, sent in to remove any traces of novichok from Navalny’s clothes.

Navalny does not blink or miss a beat. He just piles on the pressure and insists on more details. “On which piece of cloth was your focus on? Which garment had the highest risk factor?” he asks. And the answer comes back: “The underpants.”

The FSB had tried to kill him with his own underpants.

This is a really innovative form of opposition politics… a political party created off the back of a media organisation

Anne Applebaum

Afterwards, he’s shown uploading a new film about the investigation to his social media channels, “Privyet!” he says. “Eto Navalny.” “Hi, it’s Navalny.” It’s his signature phrase. In Russia he is known for the blend of chutzpah, charm, forensic investigation and social media savviness that has fearlessly debunked the idea that Putin is a brilliant, all powerful mastermind who cannot be challenged, one mindblowing revelation at a time. The entire episode feels like a parable for the brutality and absurdity of Putin’s regime.

It was Bellingcat that brought the investigation to Navalny. But it was Pevchikh who checked it out and did the due diligence not just on the facts, but also on Grozev and the film-makers. What was your first impression of her, I ask Daniel Roher. “Scary,” he says. “Intimidating. Navalny was exactly like he was in the film, open and friendly. She was the gatekeeper.”

The last office Pevchikh takes me into at the foundation is where her investigations team works. It’s small, its tightly packed desks occupied by a handful of young men who look up with expressions suggesting a mixture of respect, fear and affection when we enter. Pevchikh’s expression is, as usual, unreadable. She is not someone you’d want to play poker with. On the wall is a poster of Navalny – “a birthday gift from the design team,” she says – bearing the words “Be Scared of Nothing”.

In Vilnius, I’d spent the evening before our interview observing Pevchikh and her team in action. In a grand 19th-century apartment, they were shooting a film for YouTube about a corrupt deputy finance minister, and there was no doubt that she was the boss in this a roomful of slightly dishevelled men, a rather fabulous boss with coiffed hair, perfectly applied red lipstick, red nails and an inscrutable expression.

In Navalny’s absence, she now co-presents the YouTube investigations with her colleague Georgy Alburov. The investigations unit is arguably the nerve centre of the organisation, which Navalny launched in 2011 to expose Putin’s ruling party as what he called “a party of crooks and liars”. Banned from forming a political party, it was a route, he hoped – still hopes – that would one day lead him to power in a free and open Russia.

Anne Applebaum, the American author and academic, has been on the foundation’s advisory board since it relaunched last year as an international group and she describes it as “a really innovative form of opposition politics”. “It was the first ground-up political organisation in Russia since the early 90s,” she tells me. “It’s always had these two things: a huge grassroots organisation and these investigations with this Hollywood-style storytelling.

“Navalny, from being an anti-corruption investigator/blogger, managed to create the biggest opposition organisation that was independent from the Kremlin. And he managed to do this by recruiting and training a lot of people. He was innovative in crowdfunding and he made a very important move from blogging to YouTube which made his anti-corruption content more and more readily available and in an entertaining form. It’s a political party created off the back of a media organisation.”

Before there were drones, we would fly a guy in a paraglider over these oligarchs’ houses to get footage

Maria Pevchikh

The YouTube investigations were groundbreaking. I didn’t know who Maria Pevchikh was before seeing the documentary but I’ve been a long-time fan of the work because, early on, Pevchikh and Navalny cracked something that no western news outlet has mastered: they made investigations into financial corruption exciting.

“Navalny’s idea was that investigating corruption was a way of shifting the narrative, that it would open up opportunities,” says Pevchikh. “Investigative journalism in Russia was dead at that point. We tried something new with each one. Before there were drones, for example, we would fly a guy in a paraglider over these oligarchs’ houses to get footage.”

Navalny made it look easy: he was a master storyteller with the laconic informality of a late-night US chatshow host. “He was actually so, so bad when we started,” says Pevchikh, affectionately. “He was like, ‘You want me to talk to the camera?’ He was embarrassing. And then he just trained himself, he studied. That’s the way his personality works. He’s good at learning new stuff.” Above all, he was entertaining. He relentlessly, simply and endlessly took the piss. His refusal to take Putin seriously is at least part of the reason he’s now in a maximum-security prison.

The work now carries on without him. Within hours of Navalny’s arrest, Pevchikh and her team released Putin’s Palace, their most ambitious investigation to date, a feature-length film about Putin’s secret Black Sea super-mansion. An astonishing piece of work that used satellites, drones and 3D software to render the mansion’s jaw-droppingly grotesque interiors, which included a pole-dancing bar, it has now been viewed by 125 million people.

“We kept it real, but we tried to make it ugly,” she says. “A year later, actual photographs from the palace were leaked and they were so much worse than even we’d imagined.” Much of what they do, she says, is “trying to find those moments and just squeeze everything out of it to show how ridiculous he is.”

In her view, Putin is “a frat boy”. What do you mean? “He’s just quite basic. Putin is not some great thinker and strategist. He’s not exceptionally intelligent. His interests are very shallow. He just likes expensive things.”

That’s why she believes that, despite the hopelessness of the current situation, there is still hope. “I stopped trying to analyse video recordings of him. It’s pointless. He’s not subject to any logic or rational thinking. He does whatever is convenient to him on the day that he does it. And there could be a day where it’s convenient for him to release Alexei. And we just need to not miss that day.”

Navalny had just emerged on to the national stage when Maria Pevchikh met him in 2011. She was still in her early 20s. She’d grown up in Moscow and, she says, her grandfather instilled in her a hatred of the FSB. Otherwise, her family was not political; her mother worked for Nissan and her father managed a chain of hotels. Aged 15, Maria won a place to study sociology at Moscow State University.

That’s so young, I observe, but she bats away the comment. “It was completely fine. I was 15. But my mental age was 45 and I started to suspect something was wrong because our department was the most corrupt department in the most corrupt institution that ever existed in Russia. It was insane. Everyone was taking bribes. It was like $200 to pass an exam. And it actually ended up in the first student protests since for ever.”

She decided to leave because she wanted “an actual university education” and moved to London and the London School of Economics. It was when she returned to Moscow that she saw an advert on Navalny’s blog. “He said he was looking for a lawyer to study procurement contracts for him so, being quite arrogant I guess, I just sent him a note saying, ‘I don’t have anything you need but here’s my résumé anyway.’ I was, like, 22, and he got back to me five minutes later with a joke saying that I had the perfect résumé of an MI6 spy.”

She began as a volunteer, researching bits and pieces for him. He’d started investigating state-run firms through a form of shareholder activism and one of her first tasks was researching the UK land registry for him to find details of oligarchs’ property transactions. She still spends a lot of time in London, has a flat in the city and a group of friends from university. Does Britain’s role in facilitating Russian kleptocracy make you angry, I ask. “It does make me angry… What’s happening in Ukraine, you know, mass rapes, mass killings, and all of that, it’s like with any illness, if you don’t treat it at the early stage, this is how it develops… Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night from nightmares that Putin withdraws the troops from Ukraine, and some of the sanctions have been lifted and he gets away with it. That just cannot be allowed to happen.”

Navalny preaches an Obama-esque message of hope. And Pevchikh echoes it. “In Russia, there’s this very common way of thinking that nothing can change. But I’m convinced that we can change things.”

It’s partly, she says, because she’s old enough to have known a different Russia. “I grew up in the 90s. I had that glimpse of freedom. It was a different society. There was a band called t.A.T.u that represented Russia at Eurovision with two girls pretending to be lesbians. And everyone loved it. There was no homophobia like there is now. Nothing prevents Russia from being prosperous and rich and happy. I don’t think we have a corruption gene.”

Odessa Rae, the producer of Navalny, describes Pevchikh as “a fighter” and recalls seeing her go “toe to toe in challenging [Navalny]”. And at the moment, she’s focused on getting Navalny out of jail. But in the future? “Oh,” says Rae, “I think there’s no doubt that if Navalny ever formed a government, she’d be attorney general or the head of some ministry.”

Navalny’s poisoning was a defining moment, for the foundation and for Pevchikh. She had been in the Siberian city of Tomsk with Navalny when he was poisoned, and there’s another scene in the film in which she goes into his room and puts objects in bags in case they’re needed as evidence. It’s later revealed that there were traces of novichok on one of them.

“I remember standing,” she says now. “We had to wait before they opened the room for us. I remember when they did, I was standing at the doorway thinking: I could go home now. I could fly to London. And this would be perfectly fine. No, I will have no trouble. Everything will be OK. And I’ll be out of this nightmare. Or if I go in? That will be the end of my life as it is now.”

She went through the door.

Vera Krichevskaya, the co-founder of the Dozhd, or TV Rain, which was the last independent TV station in Russia until it too was forced into exile, has known Navalny for years. She describes his courage as “historic”. But his absence has created a black hole. “The Russian opposition doesn’t have anyone. It’s empty. There’s just darkness and emptiness.”

But his colleagues remain “true believers”, she says. “I don’t know how they do it but they believe change is possible. They have an expression, ‘Beautiful Future Russia’. Recently that has sounded like a joke. For most of us in exile, it’s getting darker every day but they refuse to believe that. They are true optimists.”

Is it journalism, I ask her, the YouTube investigations? Or activism? “It’s politics. Navalny is a politician. They all are. They just found this niche and this really specific language to make these investigations accessible to a very wide audience.”

According to Krichevskaya, Pevchikh has the same steel as Navalny. “Sometimes I think she is not human because she doesn’t have fear. I saw her many times in Europe, walking alone. I understand her power, her influence, how they hate her. That story she just did about the deputy defence minister? In her place, I would live in a bunker after that story.”

Navalny’s main message, the one that’s on the poster in Pevchikh’s office, is “Be scared of nothing”. It didn’t come naturally to her, she says. “At first I would behave more courageously than I actually felt. But then with time you absorb it.”

On the phone a couple of weeks ago, Pevchikh tells me about a new Bellingcat discovery and suddenly it feels like the risks she’s taken have become all too real: Christo Grozev had found evidence that the FSB poisoning team had also visited her hotel in Tomsk. “And their theory is that they were going to set me up. Navalny was meant to die on the plane. And then I’d have been arrested. What freaks me out is that I know it would have worked. Even if Bellingcat proved it wasn’t me, it would have always existed as a conspiracy theory. Even my colleagues would have wondered.”

Pevchikh rarely shows emotion but now I can hear it in her voice. If Bellingcat’s theory is correct, she would be trapped not just in a Russian prison but in a lie. “Be scared of nothing” seems about as implausible as a “beautiful future Russia”, but if Navalny’s model really is to instruct by example, he seems to have succeeded.

Navalny is available to stream on various platforms. Here are some links to the various trailers for it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81AAlzoKNPU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GjDUQYpwFQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzhcm0fbfDo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJW2CfeWmFU

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Maria Pevchikh: The young investigator uncovering 'the hidden world of Vladimir Putin'

By Eric Campbell and Matt Henry

Posted Mon 15 Feb 2021 at 8:31pm

Maria Pevchikh knew she would have to act fast to uncover the truth about who poisoned her boss, Russia's main opposition politician, Alexei Navalny.

The 33-year-old has built a career out of penetrating Kremlin disinformation to expose high-level corruption and criminality.

So on the morning of August 20 last year, she rolled the dice on a high-stakes gambit.

Ms Pevchikh was having breakfast in a Siberian hotel with other members of Navalny's inner circle when they received an alarming text message — he was unconscious after falling gravely ill on a flight to Moscow.

Navalny's plane had been forced to divert and make an emergency landing in Omsk after he collapsed on the cabin floor, screaming in agony.

Ms Pevchikh and her colleagues immediately suspected foul play.

"We live in Russia, we know how it works," she told Foreign Correspondent. "We straight away suspected that this is a poisoning, because what else?"

Proving it would be much harder.

Hours earlier, Navalny had checked out of the Xander Hotel in Tomsk to catch his flight, but his room had not yet been cleaned.

Suspecting that clues to his sudden illness could still be there, Ms Pevchikh and her colleagues set about persuading hotel staff to let them in.

To their surprise, it took only a few minutes to gain access to room 239. Donning masks and rubber gloves, they quickly gathered up anything they could take away — rubbish, towels, water bottles.

"I don't even know what we were hoping for back in the moment, we just knew for sure that if that is poisoning, no-one is going to investigate it," she says.

"We just went, OK, we'll grab what we see and then we'll deal with it later."

It was one of the water bottles Ms Pevchikh took from a bedside table that eventually solved the riddle.

It was bagged up along with the other items and whisked out of Russia to a German military lab, where traces of the chemical nerve agent Novichok were detected on its surface.

The obvious conclusion was that Navalny had Novichok on his fingers when he touched the bottle.

"When he left [the hotel] at 6:00am and had that last sip from that water bottle, he already was poisoned in that minute," Ms Pevchikh said. "It was a very clear timestamp."

The discovery of Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent developed by the KGB, also seemed to confirm who was behind the attempt on Navalny's life.

"It's pretty much just [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's signature on this crime," she said. "It's very obvious that no-one apart from the state has access to these sorts of things."

History's 'biggest bribe'

Uncovering the secrets of Mr Putin and Russia's cadre of powerful oligarchs has become a full-time occupation for Ms Pevchikh.

The London-based former finance professional leads the investigations unit in Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, a non-profit political organisation known in Russia as the FBK.

Educated at the London School of Economics, Ms Pevchikh is not a journalist by background.

But with a small staff of investigators and camera operators, she probes the obscene wealth and murky financial dealings of the Kremlin-connected elite, producing video investigations fronted by Navalny that have a habit of going global.

In a 2019 scoop, the FBK team claimed the head of the Kremlin-run VTB Bank, Andrey Kostin, had used state funds to provide his girlfriend with a private jet and yacht for her extravagant European holidays.

Another investigation that year claimed then Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev had similarly lavished a private jet on his wife.

But this was small fry compared with her latest bombshell investigation, resulting in a 113-minute YouTube expose titled Putin's Palace: History of World's Largest Bribe, revealing a vast estate allegedly built for Mr Putin at a cost of nearly $US1.5 billion.

"The place is so expensive that it is probably the biggest bribe ever given in the history of bribing," Ms Pevchikh said.

Putin's Palace untangles an intricate web of shell companies, bank transactions and Putin allies involved in the decade-long construction of a "new Versailles".

"We managed to figure out the system that he'd built to be able to steal money from the state," said Ms Pevchikh of her team's work.

"The main message of our investigation is that Putin is probably the richest person in the world and he uses a network — a very sophisticated network — of his old friends to hide all of this."

According to detailed models FBK investigators pieced together from building plans, drone video and photos taken by construction workers, the sprawling complex houses an underground hockey stadium, casino, ice rink, vineyard, "aqua disco" and a windowless hookah lounge with a pole-dancing stage.

Perhaps the most eye-popping details relate to what's inside — luxurious furnishings allegedly including couches worth tens of thousands of dollars each and $US850 toilet brushes.

"[Mr Putin] likes to present himself as this very modest man who only cares about Russia," said Ms Pevchikh.

"Whereas, in fact, he turns out to be this luxury-obsessed man who is spending ridiculous amounts of money on ridiculous pieces of furniture and decor."

Mr Putin has denied any connection to the property, but that hasn't stopped the video spreading like wildfire.

In a matter of weeks, Putin's Palace has been viewed over 110 million times on Navalny's YouTube channel, with one poll estimating a quarter of the Russian population had watched the video.

The FBK's videos have become a potent political weapon for Navalny, transforming him from anti-corruption crusader to Mr Putin's most high-profile political nemesis.

Part of their appeal is that they deploy mockery, memes and satire calibrated to do maximum political damage to Russia's powerful elites.

Navalny's social media prowess has long enabled him to bypass a state media wholly co-opted by the Kremlin to speak directly over YouTube and social media platforms, particularly to young Russians.

"It's a fight for people's hearts and minds," Russian writer and commentator, Arkady Ostrovsky, told Foreign Correspondent.

"I think the internet is what enabled Navalny to break into politics and rise to the top. Without his media machine, none of this would have happened."

'The most unbelievable day in my career'

The extraordinary reach of the Putin's Palace investigation was no doubt fuelled by the timing of its release.

On January 17, after months of rehabilitation in a German hospital, Navalny flew back to Russia where he was immediately detained by police at a Moscow airport.

Alexei Navalny surrounded by reporters on a plane.

Two days later, Ms Pevchikh's team released Putin's Palace.

As mass protests erupted in hundreds of towns and cities across Russia, some demonstrators could be seen taking to the streets brandishing golden toilet brushes as a token of their anti-Putin rage.

"I hope it's damaging to Putin," said Ms Pevchikh.

"We just uncovered the hidden world of Vladimir Putin. We showed what he really cares about; how he sees himself personally."

The Kremlin and its proxies didn't delay in taking their revenge. One of FBK's cameramen, Pavel Zelensky, was swept up in raids targeting Navalny insiders.

Navalny's press secretary Kira Yarmysh was also detained, as was FBK lawyer Lubyev Sobol, who was grabbed off a public street and dragged away in front of the cameras.

A video of police entering the home of Navalny's personal doctor, Anastasia Vasilyeva, went viral after she coolly played Beethoven on the piano during the confrontation.

"You can applaud if you wish," she said defiantly, before demanding a lawyer be present before she would sign anything.

Hours later she was taken into custody and has since been placed under two months' house arrest.

Although safe for now in her home in London, Ms Pevchikh also knows what it's like to be a target for state harassment.

In November, Russian state TV insinuated she was "connected with foreign intelligence services", labelling her "like one of the James Bond girls in a spy movie" for her role in smuggling the tainted Novichok bottle out of Russia.

She was even smeared with suggestions she was behind Navalny's poisoning.

According to a joint investigation by Bellingcat and The Insider, an agent from the toxins team of the Russian security service, the FSB, trailed Ms Pevchikh to Siberia in August on an advance trip the week before Navalny was poisoned.

But sparring with Russia's intelligence services comes with the territory for those in Navalny's inner circle.

Back in December, Ms Pevchikh was at Navalny's side when he prank-called the FSB agents behind his poisoning in a bid to extract an unlikely confession.

These were the men identified in the Bellingcat/The Insider investigation — which the FBK also contributed to — as the "kill team" who followed team Navalny to Siberia.

'Putin's Angels' aren't the only Russian patriot group on the rise

Four Corners investigates the international network of patriots determined to remind Australia that Vladimir Putin's Russia is a force to be reckoned with.

"We were just calling number after number. It was about 4:00am, everyone was sleeping. The plan was just to catch them off-guard," said Ms Pevchikh.

Initially, the ploy didn't work. The agents refused to talk. But when Navalny changed tack and posed as a superior officer demanding a debrief about the Novichok operation, the team suddenly struck gold.

Ms Pevchikh watched on in stunned disbelief as one of the agents bought into the ruse, revealing details of how the solution of lethal nerve agent was applied to the inner seams of Navalny's underwear.

What followed, she said, was an hour-long conversation in which "a member of a kill-team confesses to the person who they tried to kill".

"That was the most unbelievable day in my career. He's the guy who's doing the clean-up, so he would go to places where Alexei went afterwards and just clean up," she said.

"He even specified, you know, the area of the underwear where it was applied and how he was cleaning and washing the seams of [Navalny's] underpants afterwards."

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Her natal Lilith is 18 Cancer, N.Node 2 Sagittarius, S.Node 9 Cancer.

Her natal Amazon is 29 Leo, N.Node 10 Gemini, S.Node 5 Scorpio.

Her natal Ceres is 21 Sagittarius, N.Node 6 Cancer, and the S.Node 29 Scorpio.

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Please feel free to comment or ask questions.

Goddess Bless, Rad

Hi All,

Here is the story of Jesse Combs the fastest car driver on Earth. This is a noon chart.

"THIS IS WHY I WAS BORN' .. Jesse Combs

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Jessica Combs[1] (July 27, 1980 – August 27, 2019)[2] was an American professional racer, television personality, and metal fabricator. She set a women's land speed class record (four wheels) in 2013 and broke her own record in 2016. She was known as "the fastest woman on four wheels".

She co-hosted the Spike TV show Xtreme 4x4 for more than 90 episodes from 2005 to 2009.[4] Other television shows on which she appeared include Overhaulin', Mythbusters, The List: 1001 Car Things To Do Before You Die, All Girls Garage,[5] and Science Channel's How to Build... Everything in 2016.

Combs died after crashing a jet-powered high-speed race car at the Alvord Desert in southeastern Oregon while attempting to beat her four-wheel land speed record.[7][8] She was posthumously awarded the female land-speed world record by Guinness World Records in June 2020.

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'Fastest Woman on Earth' Proves Jessi Combs Was Not Like Most of Us

Csaba Csere reviews a new HBOMax documentary, out October 20, about the land-speed racer who died in 2019 trying to break a 512-mph record.

BY CSABA CSEREPUBLISHED:

OCT 17, 2022

Combs died in August 2019 in Oregon while trying to break a 512-mph record as a driver with the North American Eagle team. The movie, titled The Fastest Woman on Earth, is the result of a seven-year filmmaking project.

It should surprise no one that drivers striving to set land speed records aren't ordinary people. Nor are they necessarily successful and accomplished racing drivers, which is why names like Andretti, Earnhardt, and Schumacher aren't in the speed record books. Instead, they tend to be thrill-seeking daredevils who enjoy the limelight and eschew conventional life. This new HBOmax documentary, The Fastest Woman on Earth, clearly illustrates that such people come in all genders.

Jessi Combs was a gifted car fabricator with a powerful affinity for both cars and motorcycles. She parlayed these talents and passions into a number of successful off-road race drives and a career as TV personality with a long list of shows to her credit—Overhaulin', Mythbusters, The List: 1001 Car Things to Do before You Die, All Girls Garage, Full Throttle TV, Xtreme 4x4.

In the process she connected with Ed Shadle and his San Diego-based team that had created the North American Eagle—essentially a 60-year-old Lockheed F-104 jet fighter shorn of its wings and fitted with wheels—to try to take the 763-mph land speed record from the British Thrust SSC team. Created in 1998, the team made slow but steady progress and set its intermediate goal as taking the unofficial 512-mph women's land speed record set in 1976 (the women's record is unofficial because the FIA, which tabulates speed records, understands that a car's performance is unrelated to the sex of its driver). With her automotive background, on-camera skills, strong following, and daredevil nature, Combs had found her next quest.

Land speed record cars are two to four times as fast as Indy, NASCAR, or Formula 1 cars. And the rules are wide open. So long as the car rolls on wheels, pretty much anything goes. Yet despite the fact that the cars are so much faster and their designs so much more original, the budgets of the teams fielding these earth-bound rockets are a small fraction of what is spent by a professional racing team in a major series. Speed-record teams are often barely more than amateur organizations—almost LeMons racers (as in the very amateur racing series) to the 10th power.

For Combs, being involved in such an effort, as well as maintaining her TV appearances and high social media profile, clearly required an extreme commitment. Combs acknowledges as much, concluding that having a more normal life and a family seem unlikely for someone with her ambitions, especially as a woman in what is largely a man's world.

In one of the movie's most interesting sections, Combs seeks out the existing women's speed record holder, Kitty O'Neil, who was a former stuntwoman in Hollywood and had her record ambitions cut short for various unfair reasons. The connection between the two women, who are clearly cut from similar cloth, is fascinating and touching.

I would have liked more technical explanation about the North American Eagle and the details of the various runs, but then I'm an engineering nerd. But watching the speeds increase during the years spent running at the Alvord Desert in southeastern Oregon gives you an idea of what a long and painstaking process it is to achieve a record. Especially when your ambitions are delayed when weather conditions render the desert surface unsuitable in some years. Combs eventually does achieve her goal—and pays the ultimate price.

The movie goes live on HBOmax on October 20 and is well worth watching for anyone interested in land speed record racing, breaking gender stereotypes, or unconventional life choices. Most of us will marvel at all that Combs accomplished, while also being grateful for our more sedate lives.

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RACING TO HER DEATH Jessi Combs’ final ride captured in chilling footage showing ‘fastest woman on four wheels’ seconds before she was killed in jet car speed record crash

Mark Hodge

The Sun

HAUNTING footage shows jet-car racer Jessi Combs’ final moments while attempting to smash the female land speed record. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ5Xy_GHipM

The former Mythbusters host had competed for the North American Eagle Supersonic Speed Challenger team, which she joined in 2013.

Cops are now probing what caused her 56ft-long, 52,000-horsepower “jet car” – dubbed the North American Eagle Supersonic Speed Challenger - to crash.

The New York Post reported that investigators are trying to recover laptops from the vehicle — so they could find out what went wrong.

“They’re waiting for the team to recover the [engine and systems] information stored on the inboard computers,” said Lt. Brian Needham of the Harney County Sheriff’s Office.

He said “there was a fire involved” but was unable to say whether Combs’ car hit something to cause the blaze.

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'DID EVERYTHING WE COULD TO SAVE HER'

Jessi's partner Terry Madden confirmed her death on August 28 in a heartbreaking Instagram post.

He wrote: "Unfortunately we lost her yesterday in a horrific accident, I was the first one there and trust me we did everything humanly possible to save her!!

"I have never loved or been loved by anyone as much as this amazing woman she was truly my unicorn and I enjoyed every single minute that I had with her.

"She was the most amazing spirit that I have ever or will ever know.

"I'm not okay but she is right here keeping me going. I made her a promise that if this didn't go well that I would make sure and do good with it."

South Dakota-born Jessi had always dreamed of being a racing car driver.

After graduating from WyoTech in Wyoming with a degree in Custom Automotive Fabrication, she explored careers in television.

She hosted automotive shows, including Xtreme 4x4, Overhaulin', Truck U, and Two Guys Garage.

Combs had also appeared as a host and builder on Discovery Channel's Mythbusters.

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The Untold Truth About Jessi Combs Death

By Dylan Goldstein June 11, 2022

Whether you know her from her internationally-recognized career on TV, or for her prowess behind the wheel, the truth is that Jessi Combs was extremely skillful in doing what she loved the most.

Besides her career in the car building world, Jessi’s successful career in the entertainment industry and race driving led her to become one of the most famous stars in the automotive world. However, her title of “the fastest woman on four wheels” was ultimately a high price to pay for making her biggest dream come true.

So how did Jessi Combs die? Did it happen on the track or somewhere else? What happened to her family and loved ones, and how many records did she break? Keep with us to know more about Jessi and her impressive life!

How Did She Die?

Unfortunately, Jessi Combs was killed in a car crash on 27 August 2019 at 39 years old. At the time of her death, she was in Oregon’s Alvord Desert attempting to break the women’s land speed record set in 1976.

As reported by the Associated Press, the official cause of death was ‘blunt force trauma to the head’, which she supposedly suffered right before the car was engulfed by fire.

According to witnesses, Jessi’s jet-powered car named the North American Eagle Project, fell to the desert’s lake bed after failing to stop. These types of failures were supposedly prevented by several safety measures included in the car’s design, but as an investigation led by The North American Race Team and Harney County Sheriff’s Office determined, a failure ‘most likely caused from striking an object on the desert’ led to the front wheel assembly to collapse while the four-wheeled vehicle ran at 550 miles per hour.

Resulting from this unfortunate incident, the North American Eagle Project was abandoned in the following months. However, despite her unfortunate and tragic end, it’s important to remember Jessi as someone who pursued her passions with everything she had.

Was Her Record Registered?

Jessi Combs actually became the world’s fastest female racer on that fateful day in August 2019. Jessi had already broken a world record in 2013, but the record set by Kitty O’Neil in 1976 of 512.71 mph was her biggest goal for several years, but mechanical problems had prevented her from achieving it other times when she’d tried.

Regardless of the unfortunate way in which it was achieved, in June 2020 the World Guinness Record updated its database with Jessi’s name as the new titleholder of the female land speed record, for reaching an average speed of 522.783 mph during her last runs in the Alvord Desert.

On her way to breaking this record, she had even become close with O’Neal, who gave Jessi her blessing some time before dying in 2018. As well, Jessi’s association with The North American Eagle Project since 2013 was key in achieving said goal: ‘Jessi was one of the most innovative, energizing, and gifted figures in modern racing’, written on their Facebook page.

Posted by North American Eagle on Thursday, March 24, 2016

As affirmed by her boyfriend and team-mate Terry Madden: ‘no record could ever be worth her not being here, but it was a goal that she really wanted’.

What Records Did She Break?

In 2013 Jessi Combs broke the first record of her career when she became the fastest woman on four wheels in October that year. The previous record had been set by Lee Breedlove, who in 1965 reached a speed of 308.506 mph while driving the Spirit of America Sonic, surpassed by Jessi with 398.954 mph on average.

Jessi’s 2013 feat wasn’t only impressive by general standards, but also her own. As she admitted in an interview with Off Road Xtreme in 2014, the fastest speed she had ever reached before that was 211 mph a couple of years prior, while driving a Ferrari: ‘I ended up running the Ferrari off the end of the runway, and nobody was really happy about it’.

"U.S. driver Jessi Combs killed in bid to break land-speed record U.S. driver… Combs was one of the rare dreamers with the bravery to turn those possibilities into reality, and she left this earth driving faster than any other woman in history.” https://t.co/Eg1MTOcLXh pic.twitter.com/1z8hQl5jtC

— Tammy Bruce (@HeyTammyBruce) August 28, 2019

Although breaking Breedlove’s 48-year-old record should have been enough for anyone, it was only the start for Jessi, on her way to breaking Kitty O’Neal’s record. During the following years she tried to achieve that feat several times, even breaking her own 2013’s record in 2016 by running at 477.59 mph, which was surely enough to ensure her legendary status in the race world.

Who Was Jessi?

To say Jessi Combs was a race driver would ignore all the impressive feats she achieved in her life. A native from South Dakota, Jessi’s appreciation for cars and speed started in her early childhood, a hobby only rivaled by her passion for sports and creating everything from photography and leather crafting to steel building. Nonetheless, Jessi’s most impressive talent was her high resilience and relentless will to make things by herself: ‘I will try everything at least twice. I wouldn’t want to be jaded by the first attempt’, as her website reads.

Though she was granted a scholarship to study design, Jessi pursued a career in snowboarding in Colorado instead. However, dedicating her life to sports proved to be more demanding than she expected, so she chose to move to Wyoming to pursue a degree in Custom Automotive Fabrication at WyoTech, graduating in 2004.

It may seem a little crazy to walk directly into the line of fire… those who are willing, are those who achieve great things. .

People say I’m crazy. I say thank you

.#fastestwomanonearth #almost #fasterthanfast #jetcar #afterburner #landpsee… https://t.co/IrnCQQWMGJ pic.twitter.com/A5NZ6Luq0u

— Jessi Combs (@TheJessiCombs) August 24, 2019

Her time in WyoTech learning everything from upholstery and fabrication turned in her favor, as her first job upon graduation was building a car from the ground-up to be exhibited and later auctioned at that year’s Specialty Equipment Marketing Association’s (SEMA) show. Not only did that job gain her recognition in the automotive world, but also made clear that pursuing a career in the car field was the right choice.

Career On TV

Although the entertainment world might not be the preferred field for people in the automotive field, Jessi’s charisma and endless talent landed her a first job on TV in the popular series “Overhaulin’” as a guest fabricator. Not long afterwards, she became host of “Xtreme 4×4”, which showed in depth the process of building four-wheeled vehicles, and keeping them on the road.

Watch: https://youtu.be/lp1lfmdiSP4

In 2008, Jessi left the show suddenly due to health reasons, but her career on TV had only just started. The following year she joined the cast of “MythBusters” as Kari Byron’s replacement for one season, later landing her most recognized job on TV by returning to “Overhaulin’” as a main host.

She left the latter show after only a year, to become “All Girls Garage”s host and main builder. Though she appeared briefly in “1001 Car Things to Do Before You Die”, in 2013 she took a break from TV to focus on her racing career. In 2016 she returned as a metal builder and car driver for “How to Build… Everything”.

Unbeknownst to many, Jessi had a brief career as an actress, as Catherine Lewis in the movie “Breathless Betrayal”, and in the film “Interviewing Monsters and Bigfoot”, premiered a couple of months after her death.

Accident

In 2007 Jessi Combs suffered a severe accident while on set of “Xtreme 4×4”. As it happens, Jessie often took part in the many repair and mechanical projects featured in the show, but a huge piece of machinery fell and ‘folded’ her in two, as her website reads.

Jessi was lucky enough not to lose her life in such a terrible way, but the fracture to her spinal L3 was close leaving her in a wheelchair. Jessi overcame that unfortunate time of her life by getting seven drawers on her spine in surgery, being confined to a hospital bed for months while undergoing a long recovery process, but ended up leaving the show ‘in pursuit of other opportunities’.

While Jessi didn’t often talk about the accident and apparently recovered well to live normally, she described her spine situation as a ‘L1-L4 Vertebrae fusion’: ‘I have more good days then bad days, tho’ it doesn’t seem to slow me down in achieving my goals’, as she wrote on her website.

Race Driving Career

Although Jessi Combs left her goal of becoming a professional race driver aside for years, the dream was never forgotten. Growing-up, Jessi trained several in driving styles, including performance and stunt driving, which merged well with her knowledge in mechanics and fabrication she acquired later in life.

Despite being in the field for several years, it wasn’t until 2011 that Jessi gained her first big result by reaching second spot in The Baja 1000, followed by getting the spot at the Ultra 4 Stampede in 2014, not long after taking an indefinite break from TV to focus on driving. That same year she scored several top racing spots, including becoming a national champion of the Ultra 4 Stampede, and Ultra 4 King of the Hammers in the Spec Class, a feat she successfully repeated in the following years in the event’s other categories.

Jessi Combs is about to iron(wo)man the Baja 1000! You can support her and even get your name on the truck! Only 20…

Posted by Race-Dezert on Tuesday, November 7, 2017

In 2015, Jessi won her first international race championship at the Rallye Aicha des Gazelles, followed by other North American titles. In 2018 she was placed second in the Gambler 500 Mini Moto Enduro, ending an accomplished but career cut-short in the race world.

How Much Was Her Car Worth?

Knowing how prolific her career behind the wheel was, it’s unsurprising for people to wonder how much Jessi Combs’ record-breaking car was worth. However, while the real cost of the North American Eagle Project is unknown, she drove other jealousy-inducing vehicles worth quite a lot.

For starters, the Ferrari 458 Italia she drove before breaking her first speed record is nowadays worth over $200,000, but its price is fairly surpassed by the 2017 Bugatti Chiron, a car she drove in a 2018 feature in “Jay Leno’s Garage” valued at $2.9 million. According to Leno, the Bugatti is able to go from ‘zero to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds and reach a top speed of 261 mph’, fairly winning the title of the fastest mph road car in the world.

Although most people aren’t skilled enough to drive such a great and expensive machine, it was unsurprisingly a piece of cake for Jessi.

Educational Efforts

In 2013, Jessi Combs was named spokesperson for WyoTech, in a joint effort to spread the love and passion for car fabrication and education in general. Jessi held public events all around the US, representing WyoTech as one of its most honorable graduates: ‘she’s an outstanding example of what dedication and perseverance can achieve’, as the institute stated.

Becoming a spokesperson wasn’t Jessi’s only effort to inspire others, as in the following years she co-founded Real Deal Revolution, with the designer and custom car painter Theresa Contreras. Their organization’s goal was to inspire and support women in pursuing automotive-related areas, including wielding, steel fabrication and racing, on top of breaking stereotypes for women in a male-dominated industry.

Despite Jessi’s death in 2019, Real Deal Revolution’s mission continued on afterwards. The organization is still active and run by Theresa, who never fails to spread her and Jessi’s once shared dream and passion.

Tributes & Legacy

After her death, Jessi was featured in the movie “Interviewing Monsters and Bigfoot”, directed by Thomas Smugala. Although Jessi’s role was brief, Smugala dedicated the film to her: ‘she was the kindest and [most] uplifting person in the world. She was fierce. She was giving. She was loyal. She will be missed by all’, he told Fox News.

Despite dying very young, Jessi Combs’ accomplishments were undoubtedly impressive and greatly inspiring. That’s why her legacy still lives on to this day, and thanks to the creation of The Jessi Combs Foundation, inaugurated in September 2019 at the Los Angeles’ Petersen Automotive Museum, where the exhibition

“Jessi Combs: Life at Full Speed” was held. During this event, a variety of Jessi’s belongings were exhibited, including some of her cars and memorabilia.

Posted by Petersen Automotive Museum on Wednesday, September 18, 2019

However, more than just a tribute for Jessi, the organization’s mission is to inspire people in all walks of life by her life’s story, on top of encouraging women to follow their dream path in life. Thanks to the Jessi Combs Foundation’s scholarships, to date dozens of women have been granted annual financial support in careers related to automotive or industrial fields considered male-dominated: ‘the program is a platform for driving change within the cultural fabric of the trades industry; creating pathways for more women to enter, thrive, and succeed’, as the website states, definitely making Jessi’s philosophy more relevant than ever.

Links to THE FASTEST WOMEN ON EARTH

Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVFxLjdUY9w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij1Xg2CIXtI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hje_ld17bgQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ5Xy_GHipM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9r_mJBLKzo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3J646EBxe0

Uncut interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0i5WBnM3ZI

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Her natal Lilith is 24 Libra, N.Node 4 Sagittarius, S.Node 4 Cancer

Her natal is Ceres 25 Gemini, N.Node 2 Cancer, S.Node 1 Sagittarius

Her natal is Amazon 1 Caner, N.Node 8 Gemini, S.Node 4 Scorpio

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Please feel free to comment or ask questions.

Goddess Bless, Rad

HI All,

Here is the story of Elly Schlein. this is a noon chart.

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Italy's left picks 'anti-Meloni' politician Elly Schlein to lead the party

By Andrea Carlo

Euro News

Italy's centre-left Democratic Party (PD) has selected Elly Schlein as its new leader. The 37-year-old MP has emerged as a breakout start in Italian politics, and will hope her elevation to party leader will bring a ray of hope for the beleaguered centre-left, which suffered a devastating defeat in the September general elections, which saw Brothers of Italy's Giorgia Meloni and her right-wing alliance sweep into power with a landslide victory.

Italian-American Schlein was born in Switzerland and holds triple nationalisty. She is young and openly bisexual, a feminist and impassioned pro-European who posits herself as a "real" leftist -- one who appeals to society's most disenfranchised, rather than the "elites" the modern-day left is often accused of courting.

Media outlets have described Schlein as the "anti-Giorgia Meloni", and compared her to US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is also renowned for her socially progressive platform.

So who is Elly Schlein? Will she be able to revive Italy's moribund centre-left? And how do Italians perceive her?

Italy's AOC: Schlein's political platform

Elly Schlein's political position is perhaps best encapsulated by the way in which she announced her leadership bid last year.

Speaking at a club in Rome’s suburbs -- outside of its "limited traffic zone," a metaphor often used to depict the urban elite -- she announced a "progressive, environmentalist and feminist" campaign to offer an "alternative" to Italy’s new far-right government. All the while, her supporters sang "Bella Ciao" - Italy’s anti-fascist Resistance anthem.

Schlein, who belongs to the PD’s more socialist wing, aims to present a fresh and unifying vision for the left and the country.

As a party whose roots lie in a fusion between the Communist and Christian Democratic factions of Italy's past, the PD is often perceived as suffering from an identity crisis, floundering through a divide between a more centrist, economically liberal wing and leftist one.

The party's past leaders, especially Matteo Renzi, have often been accused of eschewing the PD’s leftist roots, and indeed her leading opponent in the primaries, Stefano Bonaccini, occupies a politically centrist ground, despite having formerly been a Communist Party member.

Schlein, for instance, supports a minimum wage — a proposal which the Democratic Party has endorsed but failed to push through while in government. She speaks about a Green New Deal and bringing the party back to the trade unions and city outskirts, all of which have drawn comparisons to the platform of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Schlein's reputation for being a gutsy conviction politician breaking through the ranks of Italy's stuffy political establishment has also led commentators to see her as the left's answer to fresh-faced PM Giorgia Meloni, whose own meteoric rise from the margins of Italian politics was attributed to her charismatic persona and mass appeal.

While Schlein resists the anti-Meloni label, she has certainly not pulled the punches on Italy’s new — and first female — premier.

"Not all female leaderships are feminist leaderships," she said in December. "Politically, we’re poles apart."

Schlein is often compared to US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her platform advocating social justiceMarco Vasini/Copyright 2022 The AP. All rights reserved.

A diverse background

Italy's political class has garnered a reputation for homogeneity -- throughout the decades, its members have been overwhelmingly male and advanced in age.

Schlein’s background stands in obvious contrast, not only for her gender and youth but for her heritage as well.

Born in Switzerland, the leftist politician hails from an ethnically diverse family. Schlein's father is a Jewish American political scientist, her mother an Italian law professor, and she consequently holds triple Swiss-Italian-US citizenship.

If elected as head of the Democratic Party, Schlein would become both the first woman and openly LGBTQ person to lead the centre-left bloc.

Schlein makes no secret of how her background makes her something of an outlier in Italian politics.

Back in 2020, she came out as bisexual on a popular television show, announcing that she had a girlfriend.

"I have loved many men, I have loved many women. At the moment I'm [in a relationship] with a woman, and I'm happy," the MP told TV presenter Daria Bignardi, to rapturous applause from the audience.

From campaigning for Obama to battling Salvini: Schlein's political journey

As a triple citizenship holder, it comes as little surprise that Schlein's career would be as international as her background.

Following the completion of a law degree from the University of Bologna, the leftist politician started her career 7,000 km from home by working on Barack Obama’s campaign trails in 2008 and 2012.

After cutting her political teeth across the Atlantic, Schlein became an impassioned youth activist for the Democratic Party and was elected as a member of the European Parliament in 2014.

Come the following year, and increasingly opposed to the labour reforms of the then-PM and party leader, Renzi, she ultimately parted ways with the PD and joined a splinter party, Possible (Possibile).

In 2020, Elly Schlein was elected on a centre-left ticket in Emilia-Romagna, a historically communist region that risked succumbing to Matteo Salvini’s anti-immigrant, populist Northern League in the regional elections. She emerged as the single most successful candidate in the region’s history, becoming regional vice-president — the current President, Bonaccini, is her opponent in next year’s primaries — and effectively halted a supposedly "unbeatable" far-right wave.

On how she managed to beat Salvini? "By asking the right questions," she quipped.

A new hope for the left? Or the same old?

The media buzz surrounding Elly Schlein is such that the young candidate is already being heralded the new protagonist of Italy's left. But when one scratches beneath the surface, is she as popular as she is made out to be?

At one point in the leadership campaign, Schlein was 18 points behind her main opponent, but remained a popular choice among PD's leftist youth, many of whom are pinning their hopes on her to revive the party and its values.

"A regeneration of the party is necessary," one PD member, Laura Leuzzi, told Euronews. "I think [Schlein] can bring about this renewal and I always try to support leftist female leadership that pays attention to younger generations."

For many Italian leftists, who, like Schlein, had ditched the PD as a result of its increasingly centrist positions over the past decade — especially following Matteo Renzi’s leadership of the party — the aspiring candidate remains a welcome potential change.

Among these is Giacomo, 29, who left the party after disagreeing with its political line.

He told Euronews he would vote for her in the primaries. "

"Unlike what her detractors say, she brings forward many more ideas than people give her credit for."

"As an MEP, for instance, she tried to reform the Dublin Convention on asylum seekers, while the PD was attacking the legal rights of migrants," he noted.

But other young leftists are less impressed.

Among these is Agostino Biondo, a 30-year-old Rome-based warehouseman and youth activist for the PD. Despite being on the party’s leftist wing, he is not convinced that Schlein's policies are sufficiently socialist.

"[Saying you’re a leftist] is not enough," he told Euronews. "What does it mean to be a leftist?"

"Being in favour of a minimum salary is not leftist enough… you need to be in favour of the nationalisation of the means of production at least, and even that isn’t enough."

Over the past years, the PD has suffered from stagnancy and is seen as having abandoned the working class, leaving members like Biondo sceptical that she can bring about any major changes.

"The PD needs to intercept workers, the unemployed, people who probably don’t even know who Elly Schlein is," he said.

"Yes, she talks about wanting to venture outside of the city centre, but so have other PD candidates in the past… The problem is, how are you going to go about doing it?

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Elly Schlein Has Been Dubbed ‘Italy’s AOC.’ Here’s What She Thinks of Her Country’s High-Stakes Election

September 23, 2022

If the polls are to be trusted, then Italy will soon be led by its first-ever female Prime Minister. But those on the left such as Elly Schlein won’t be celebrating. Known as the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of Italy, the 37-year-old socialist and rising political star began her career in 2014 representing Italy at the European Parliament before returning home to help defeat the far-right in Emilia-Romagna, a wealthy northern province where she has served as Vice President since 2020. These days, Schlein is contesting Italy’s Sept. 25 election as an independent candidate for parliament on the Democratic Party’s Progressive Italy list, and has spent the past several weeks campaigning up and down the country in a bid to once again thwart the far-right.

That task hasn’t been easy, though. Compared to the parties on the Italian right—which have already agreed on a shared platform that they plan to enact should they receive enough votes to form a government—Italy’s left-wing parties are divided, disjointed, and trailing in the polls. Even if they did manage to win a higher percentage of votes than the right, they wouldn’t necessarily be able to form a governing coalition. Although Schlein is willing to discuss what a potential government led by Giorgia Meloni—the leader of Brothers of Italy, a far-right party with neo-fascist roots—could mean for the country, she insists that the left still has everything to play for. “The fight is still open,” she says, “and we are fighting until the very, very last day.”

TIME caught up with Schlein in the run-up to the final week of campaigning to discuss what’s at stake for Italy in this election, why the left is so fractured, and what a Meloni-led Italy would mean for the country, Europe, and the West.

You have an unusual background compared to most other Italian politicians: You hold dual Italian and American citizenship, but you were born and raised in Switzerland. So how did you get involved in Italian politics?

In my family, politics was always around. My parents, with such different backgrounds, are still very engaged. They have never done politics directly, but we discussed it at home. I started being more and more interested in politics when I was first at school, then at university in Bologna. I was in the student movements and I went to the U.S. to campaign as a volunteer for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012. It was a rather new way of campaigning; it was the start of social media. And it was also a lesson for me because I saw very different people working together for a coherent vision of the future of the country. This method of grassroots campaigning is something that I tried to also apply here in Italy.

You’ve sparred against the far-right before. What was that experience like?

Two-and-a-half years ago, when I came back from the European Parliament, I was asked together with other people to build a new movement with a left, green, and feminist perspective for the elections in Emilia-Romagna. It was a regional election, but it had a national impact. [The far-right leader Matteo] Salvini was very strong in the country. He had more than 30% in the polls and was very competitive. We were at risk of seeing the right-wing winning in Emilia-Romagna, which is historically considered a stronghold—roccaforte, as we say in Italian—for the center-left. So I decided to run and we managed to win a very difficult election.

The Italian left appears to be more fractured today. Why is that?

Our opponents are very good at getting together, even if they do not share the same ideas and vision. You can see the contradictions every day between Giorgia Meloni, Matteo Salvini, and Silvio Berlusconi. But when it comes to elections, they stick together. And, usually, the left doesn’t manage to stick together.

I’ve always said we need to do two things: The bigger parties like the Democratic Party and the Five Star Movement have to try to be more coherent and clearer on the key issues—jobs, migration, climate—to appeal to more voters, especially the younger generation. At the same time, we have too many small parties on the left. I sometimes joke in Italian that on the left we have more parties than voters. We have to overcome the contradictions of the bigger parties and also the fragmentation of the smaller parties.

I would have loved an even broader coalition. But still, if you look at the polls, the Democratic Party and its allies are the only strong alternative to the coalition of Meloni, Berlusconi, and Salvini. So we are running to win this election and have the numbers to form a government.

What is it about Meloni that is so attractive to voters? Is the fact that her party was the sole opposition against the last unity government fueling her rise?

She has been in opposition for the past 10 years, so she was never blamed for difficulties during these times. [Meloni, however, served as the youth minister in Berlusconi’s government from 2008 to 2011.] She took dangerous positions on the pandemic because she was always against the COVID-19 green pass and all the restrictions. The lockdown itself was not an easy choice for any of us. But at some point, we have to listen to science and to people who are more competent than us politicians, and make difficult choices for the common good.

The right-wing is very good at naming the problems, but they never propose a solution that actually redistributes power, wealth, and knowledge. They stop there. Voters can sometimes relate to them because they talk about the concrete problems that people are facing. But the solutions that the right-wing propose is going in the opposite direction. One concrete example: They are campaigning for a flat tax on income. But if you lower taxes for the rich in a country with a whole set of problems, it means less money and public services for poor people.

What would a Meloni-led government mean for Italy?

If you look at her party’s international allies, you already see what kind of policies they are taking in their countries. Viktor Orbán has said that races should not be mixed. He has also passed laws against the LGBTI community and has canceled the right to seek asylum in his country. Another ally of Giorgia Meloni is the Law and Justice Party in Poland and they are undermining the independence of the country’s judges and are having a difficult discussion already with the European Union on the rule of law. The European Parliament voted on a resolution to condemn the attempts to violate the rule of law in Hungary and you know who voted against that resolution? Salvini’s Northern League party and Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party. How can it be clearer than that?

How important is it that Meloni could soon become Italy’s first female leader?

Not all women leaders help other women. There’s a difference between women leadership and feminist leadership. A woman Prime Minister who doesn’t defend the rights of all women—starting from the right to choose—is useless to other women. [Meloni is against abortion, though she insists she would not ban it. Regions under her party’s control have seen abortion rights curtailed.

What impact will a far-right government in Rome have on the E.U.?

Salvini is one of the few Italian leaders who is questioning the sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Salvini is constantly attacking not the invasion of Ukraine, but the sanctions that the invasion made necessary. Italy must not become a grimaldello, a way to undermine the European Union’s coherence in this fight for democracy.

If a Meloni government does come to pass, what are the lessons you think the Italian left ought to learn from this election?

We will have to work very hard every day to regain people’s trust. In the last 10 years, my generation and younger ones have had a difficult relationship with politics. Too many people think that politicians are all the same; too many people think that politics has stopped being a way to improve their lives. And that’s true. Trust is not something that is easy to rebuild in 20 days of an electoral campaign. We are trying, and we are trying with the most progressive platform that Italy’s Democratic Party has ever presented.

I think we can regain credibility. And we can do this by opening the political class up to the younger generation, to women, because we are strongly underrepresented. But today, we are the best and strongest alternative to the far-right, which is looking to the past instead of the future.

One last question: You’re often likened to U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. What do you make of the comparison?

I follow her and, obviously, I’m flattered by the comparison. But I think we operate in two very different political contexts and have two very different backgrounds. What is true is that there are similarities on the fights we face and on our approach—what we call an intersectional approach. What does that mean? We need to unite our fights for social justice, gender equality against patriarchy, and climate justice. We face the same challenges as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—but also Rashida Tlaib, the other wonderful congresswomen who are working with her, and Bernie Sanders.

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The Woman Shaking Up Italian Politics (No, Not the New Prime Minister)

Daughter of Italian and Jewish American parents, Elly Schlein wants to remake the center-left opposition to Giorgia Meloni, if only her party can survive it.

By Jason Horowitz

NY

March 4, 2023,

ROME — Growing up in Switzerland, Elly Schlein felt a little lost.

“I was the black sheep. Because my brother and sister seemed to be more sure of what they would do,” the politician recalled. She watched Italian neorealist cinema and American comedies, played Philip Glass on the piano, pet her dwarf bunny named after Freddie Mercury, listened to the Cranberries and ultimately got involved in her school’s politics. “It took a lot more time for me to find my way,” she said.

Last weekend, Ms. Schlein, 37, found her way into the center of the debate about the future of the European left when she stunned the liberal establishment and reordered Italy’s political landscape by winning a primary election to become the first woman to lead the country’s center-left Democratic Party. She is promising, she said in her new office headquarters on Wednesday, to “change deeply” a party in the midst of an identity crisis.

It is hard to embody change in Italy more than Ms. Schlein.

A woman in a relationship with a woman, she is the daughter of a Jewish American father; granddaughter of an Italian antifascist partisan; proud native of Lugano, Switzerland; former volunteer for Barack Obama; collaborator on an award-winning documentary about Albanian refugees; fan of “Naked Gun” movies; shredder of Green Day chords on her electric guitar; and fervent progressive eager to make common international cause with “A.O.C.,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York.

With her election, Ms. Schlein has catapulted Italy, which long seemed a Country for Old Men, into markedly different territory. A female opposition leader now is pitted against the first female prime minister, the right-wing nationalist Giorgia Meloni.

“It’s a different scenario now,” said Ms. Schlein, who had the professorial air of her professor parents as she leafed through newspapers. “And an interesting one, because I’ve always said that we don’t need just a female leadership. We need a feminist leadership.”

The two women could hardly be more different. Ms. Meloni, who called Ms. Schlein to congratulate her, was raised by a single mother in a working-class neighborhood of Rome, was a youth activist in post-Fascist parties and came to prominence on an anti-migrant, Italy-first platform. Her battle cry: “I’m Giorgia, I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m a Christian!”

Ms. Schlein — who has Italian, Swiss and American passports — said she didn’t understand how being “a woman, a mother and a Christian helps Italians to pay their bills.” She added: “I am a woman. I love another woman. I am not a mother, but I am not less of a woman for this.”

She argued that Ms. Meloni represented an ideology that viewed women merely for their reproductive and child-rearing roles. Ms. Meloni has “never described herself as an antifascist,” Ms. Schlein said, arguing that she instead threw red meat to her base with “inhuman” and “illegal” policies making it harder to save migrants at sea.

Such liberal red meat is likely to sate the base of progressives and young voters that Ms. Schlein brought into the Democratic Party fold in last Sunday’s primary. But it did little for the left in the election Ms. Meloni won easily in September. Ms. Schlein’s party now has about half the support of Ms. Meloni’s.

Moderate critics within Ms. Schlein’s own deeply divided party fear that she will fold its big tent by forfeiting the political center, driving the party to the far left, gutting it of its reputation for sober competence, and blending it with — or feeding it to — the reinvigorated, populist Five Star Movement.

But Ms. Schlein is not convinced that denizens of an Italian middle even exist. “Where are they today?” she asked in her perfect English, noting that “when somebody had tried to represent them with new political options, it never went really well.” Instead, she saw the way forward as making “clear who we want to represent” — struggling Italians.

She said she would spread “environmentalist and feminist” solutions to endemic Italian problems such as female unemployment and inequality in “clearly a patriarchal country.” She would make amends for “the mistakes made in the past,” especially during the leadership of former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, which led her to quit the Democratic Party nearly a decade ago.

She would reintroduce labor protections, tax the rich, reconnect with trade unions, invest in a greener economy and push for gay and immigrant rights. This week, she visited the site of a deadly shipwreck of migrants in Calabria and effectively interrogated Ms. Meloni’s interior minister for appearing to blame the victims.

“Rights, civil rights and social rights, for us are strictly interconnected,” she said in the interview, adding, “The left lost in the moment it became shy on these issues.”

One major change on her agenda is to put her party in a position to win elections by making alliances with partners who agreed on critical progressive issues, such as the support of a universal income.

“Five Star, of course,” she said. “They have a lot of support.”

But Giuseppe Conte, the leader of Five Star, which has demonstrated a strong illiberal streak over recent years, was the prime minister who signed off on the crackdown of migrant rescue ships at sea. He has emerged as Italy’s main opponent to Ms. Meloni’s vow to keep sending weapons to Ukraine.

Five Star’s position on Ukraine, Ms. Schlein said, “I don’t agree on.” She described her party as wholly supportive of Ukraine against the “criminal invasion” by Russia and noted it had voted to send arms over the next year, because “it’s necessary now.”

Supporters of Ukraine, however, worry about Ms. Schlein’s ongoing commitment because of her talk of being a “pacifist” and what some consider her naïve argument that Europe somehow needed to convince China to force Russia to end the war.

But she said she feels a personal connection to Ukraine. Her grandfather was from Ukraine, she said, and after he emigrated to the United States, eventually settling in Elizabeth, N.J., his family back home was almost certainly wiped out in the Holocaust. Her Italian grandfather, who eventually became a Socialist lawmaker, refused to wear the “black shirts of the Fascists” during his graduation and “was an antifascist lawyer” who, she said, would “defend Jews in trials.”

That family history has made her keenly sensitive to “what nationalism has brought to the European continent,” she said, adding, with a reference to the Russian president, “This war is a nationalist war from Putin.”

Ms. Schlein was herself not raised Jewish, though she called herself “particularly proud” of her Jewish ancestry. In a friendly interview during the campaign, she told an Italian website that her last name and pronounced nose, what she considers her defining physical feature, attracted odious anti-Semitic attacks. But, she noted, the nose was not Jewish, but “typically Etruscan.”

The Colosseum lit up in the colors of the Ukrainian flag, in Rome, in February. Ms. Schlein described her party as wholly supportive of Ukraine against the “criminal invasion” by Russia. The Colosseum lit up in the colors of the Ukrainian flag, in Rome, in February. Ms. Schlein described her party as wholly supportive of Ukraine against the “criminal invasion” by Russia.

Asked about that comment, Ms. Schlein’s verbosity stalled. “I wouldn’t go back to that,” she said. “No, thanks.” When pressed on what an Etruscan nose looked like, she threw her hands up and acknowledged, “They don’t even exist!”

The point, she said, was that she learned that being a “woman,” and “an L.G.B.T.Q.I.+ person” and “very proudly the daughter of a Jewish father” made her a prime target “from the extreme right or also from my extreme left sometimes.” Ms. Schlein declined in the interview to discuss her family or her partner in further detail.

Ms. Schlein said addressing such injustices drew her into politics. A star pupil in her Lugano high school, she said, she wanted to take her talents to Italy, “because I’ve always felt that this country, the country of my mother, has strong potential that only needs to be freed.”

She went to art school in Bologna. Then she dropped film for law and went from campus politics to the real thing — making powerful friends, gaining fluency in social media and doing stints in the European and Italian Parliaments along the way. When she quit the Democratic Party to protest the loss of its liberal way, she supported a movement to “occupy” the party.

Now she occupies the leadership headquarters near the Spanish Steps, and after a short walk toward Ms. Meloni’s palace, Ms. Schlein, the progressive no one saw coming, entertained taking that place over, too.

“Well,” she said. “We’ll see.”

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Biography

1985

Childhood

Elena Schlein, Elly, was born in Lugano (Switzerland) to an Italian mother and an American father.

A European heritage: her maternal grandfather, Agostino Viviani, was a lawyer from Siena and fervent antifascist; her paternal grandfather, Harry Schlein, came from an Eastern European family that experienced the tragedies of the 20th century and emigrated to the United States.

Elly has one older brother and a sister: they live in different European countries. Having played the piano from the age of 5, she was 15 when she secretly bought an electric guitar.

2004

High School

Elly receives her high school diploma from Lugano High School. On this occasion, she is awarded the Mariani prize for the student with the best exam results. She then decides to move to Italy, her mother’s home country, to attend Bologna University. She first enrolls in an arts, music and film production degree, and, after one year, she decides to study law.

2008

volunteer for Obama

With the unfolding battle between Barack Obama and John McCain in the presidential election in the US, Elly wants to take part in this historical moment and decides to fly to Chicago to volunteer for Obama’s campaign. As she describes in her blog, this experience has been absolutely life-changing for her and influential. This is when her passion for communication and politics germinates as well as her natural inclination to build grassroots campaigns, door-to-door, collectively. She will then be back in Chicago in 2012 to train new volunteers for Obama’s re-election campaign.

2011

University

Elly graduates with honors and writes a thesis on criminalization, the issue of overrepresentation of migrants in prisons and the rights of aliens in constitutional jurisprudence. During her university years, she continues to be politically active in the student political life and student unions, being involved in communication, graphics as well as organizing several events. She is twice elected student representative to the Law Department Board. Later, she forms the association “Progrè” with lifelong friends. For Progrè she shoots several inquest videos on issues concerning prisons and she organizes a festival on the prejudices involved in discussions about immigration.

2012

“Anija-La Nave”

Elly has always been interested and involved in filmmaking and cinematography: she writes film reviews for several newspapers and blogs. She has also attends the International Film Festival in Locarno since 2003. Elly works on the documentary “Anija-La Nave” (Luce Institute – Cinecittà) by Roland Seijko. This documentary tells about the mass escape of thousands of people from Albania to Italy on board of vessels and ships. This film won the David di Donatello Award 2013 for best documentary film. The same year Elly shoots an inquest video with Pippo Civati on the issue of unclaimed Italian funds in Switzerland.

2013

#OccupayPD

In April, during the election of the President of the Italian Republic, when 101 turncoats completely destroyed Romano Prodi’s nomination, Elly and many others of the national mobilization give rise to “OccupyPD” against multi-party coalitions, organizing this network at a national level.

2013

102 ideas to change

In June, Elly launches the “102 ideas for change” initiative, an event in favour of making party members and voters participate in the decisions of the Democratic Party. On this occasion, 102 petitions are presented, calling for a political renewal of the centre-left party. Thereafter, the youth of OccupyPD hand out to Romano Prodi their “We are more than 101” T-shirts.

2013

Supporting Civati

Elly tours Italy with 70 stops in just a few months, alongside Pippo Civati and Civati supporters in his campaign for the leadership of the Democratic Party. She is full of enthusiasm: she really wants to reform the party to change her country.

She is later elected to the party’s national Assembly and national Board.

2014

#slowfoot

Elly Schlein is a candidate in the European elections: this is a new challenge, an uphill path which, she knows, needs to involve and engage citizens through collective mobilization, taking it step by step. She wants to be around people. The campaign #slowfoot was Elly’s very own way to imagine a sustainable future with others, and to listen to and reflect upon the needs of the people, the constituency and those who will come after us. It was her own way to look up on the epochal challenges we face today. That is to say: you write it Schlein, you read it European.

2014

The European Parliament

On 25 May 2014, Elly is elected as MEP for the European Parliament with 54 802 votes. Later, she becomes a member of the Committee on Development (DEVE), the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) and the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM). She is also the Vice President of the European Parliament Delegation to the Committee SAPC EU-Albania and Co-President of the Intergroup on Integrity, Transparency, Corruption and Organized crime (ITCO). She mostly works on issues that were at the heart of her electoral campaign: rights, immigration, fiscal justice, ecological conversion, fight against corruption and mafia.

2015

the break with the Democratic Party

On 6 May 2015, after the approval of the “Italicum”, education and school reforms, the Jobs Act, and due to irremediable fractures between Elly’s political views and the policies taken by Renzi’s government, she decides to leave the Democratic Party together with Pippo Civati and many other friends and companions. On 21 June 2015, they launch “Possibile” which, in April 2016, officially becomes a new political party.

2017

Mep Awards 2017

Elly wins the Mep Awards 2017 for the Deputy of the Year on Development issues, thanks to her commitment to the Development Commission (DEVE) first as Speaker of the Parliament on combating tax evasion and avoidance in developing countries, then on the new Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 (SDGs) and on the link between migration and development.

2018

the reform of the Dublin Regulation

In 2016 Elly was appointed rapporteur for the Socialist and Democratic Group on the reform of the Dublin Regulation, the rule that establishes which Member State is responsible for each asylum application submitted in the EU.

After two years and 22 meetings of long and delicate negotiations, in which he presented a system of 145 amendments aimed at canceling the hypocritical criterion of the first country of access and ensuring an equitable sharing of responsibilities among all European countries, in November 2017 a historic vote by a large majority of the European Parliament approves a revolutionary reform proposal: the cancellation of the criterion of the first country of entry to replace it with an automatic and permanent relocation mechanism, which on the one hand enhances the significant ties of asylum seekers and on the other hand, it obliges all European states to do their part on reception. The European Parliament is waiting to negotiate it with the Council, and insists with the European governments that they do not miss this historic opportunity.

2020

The regional elections

In the regional elections of January 2020 she leads the Emilia-Romagna Courageous list and is elected in the regional legislative assembly. Thanks to the result of the list and the over 22,000 preferences, you receive the post of Vice President and Councilor for the fight against inequalities and ecological transition.

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More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elly_Schlein

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Her natal Lilith is 17 Sagittarius, N.Node 5 Capricorn, S.Node 9 Gemini

Her natal Ceres is 14 Gemini, N.Node 10 Gemini, S.Node 7 Capricorn

Her natal Amazon is 21 Aries, N.Node 20 Taurus, S.Node 26 Scorpio

Please feel free to comment of ask questions.

Goddess Bless, Rad

HI All,

Here is the story of Kae Tempest. This is a noon chart.

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Kae Tempest: Drama Graphic novels and Illustration Poetry

Kae Tempest is a playwright, poet, novelist and spoken word artist. They began performing when they left school at the age of 16. As a teenager was support act to various key cultural figures including Benjamin Zephaniah and Billy Bragg. Kae has since emerged as one of the U.K.’s most recognised performance artists, drawing large crowds at Glastonbury and Leeds Festivals. Their influences range from Wu-Tang Clan, to modernist poetry, to Tracey Emin. Tempest was visiting fellow at University College London in 2015. Neil McCormick has described them as ‘Britain’s most acclaimed young performance poet, Tempest can dazzle with scansion and flow, cadence and rhymes, but crucially employs their verbal skills in the service of big ideas – about poverty, identity, consumerism – and strong emotions.’

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Interview: The best summer of my life’ – Kae Tempest takes Sophocles on a gender odyssey

Kate Wyver

Guardian

The writer has turned a Greek tragedy about a marooned soldier into an all-women play for the Covid era. They reveal how its creation mirrored their own journey.

‘These stories can be intimidating for so many reasons,” Kae Tempest says of the classical Greek tragedies. “But more than that, they are galvanising. They give you something that was important thousands of years ago that lands you more fully in the now. They have this roaring effect, where we’ve brought the past with us.”

Tempest, who uses they/them pronouns, is a revelatory writer and performer, seamlessly blending the ancient and the new. Much of their work is steeped in the history and magic of Greek myths, from the Ted Hughes award-winning Brand New Ancients, which places the gods alongside us modern mortals, to the hypnotic, flesh-filled poetry collection Hold Your Own, based on the story of gender-switching prophet Tiresias.

Now Paradise, the Mercury-nominated writer’s adaptation of the Sophocles tragedy Philoctetes, is about to open at the Olivier, the largest stage at the National Theatre in London. We speak on the last day of rehearsals, Tempest sitting in the Olivier foyer with director Ian Rickson and actor Lesley Sharp, all exhausted, exhilarated and relieved to have made it this far.

First performed in 409BC, Sophocles’ drama, one of his lesser-performed plays, focuses on three soldiers. Philoctetes – the only soldier brave enough to step forward and light Heracles’s funeral pyre, winning the hero’s bow as a reward – has spent 10 years on an island, abandoned by Odysseus on the way to Troy. When Odysseus needs Philoctetes again in order to fight, he returns to the island with young soldier Neoptolemus, and attempts to trick the older man into leaving the island with them. The original involves godly intervention, acceptance of fate, and an overriding devotion to triumph and battle-fuelled glory.

Following largely the same structure, but questioning the morals, meanings and ending of Sophocles’ original, Tempest sets this adaptation in a non-time, where weapons from the gods sit alongside references to flatscreen TVs. “When you do these plays,” Rickson says, “they allow you to unpack what heroism is. Concepts that Sophocles was fascinated by – dignity, honour, exile, trust – are as important now as 3,000 years ago. It’s the stuff of life.”

It was Rickson who introduced Tempest to the story of Philoctetes. A mentor to the writer for several years, he invited them to a reading performed by ex-servicemen. “There was a resonance to their reading,” Tempest says. “It was like watching a conversation between soldiers 3,000 years apart.” Rickson – who directed Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, which returns to the West End in 2022 – adds: “When you give an old play to a writer, you never know what it will do to them. But you want them to take it and run. Reading Kae’s poetry, and being a superfan of Brand New Ancients, I felt a synergy with what Sophocles was doing. I really felt he would enjoy Kae taking it on.”

Our lonely, wounded hero Philoctetes is played by Sharp, best known for police drama Scott & Bailey, the National’s A Taste of Honey, and perhaps the scariest episode of Doctor Who ever, Midnight. Sharp did not wait for the part to be offered to her. “You either say: ‘Well, I’ll keep my fingers crossed and hope it might come my way’ – or you declare your love and interest. I’ve always sat back and kept my fingers crossed.” But after an early workshop for Paradise, in which she felt something “elemental”, she made her wishes clear. “I just felt something had happened,” she says. “I was a better actor for having engaged in that work. I sent Ian an email: ‘If this ever gets to a place where it’s going to be put on and you decide to cast the men as women, please could I throw my hat in the ring?’”

The role – which she describes as a “damaged, defiant, old, smelly, naughty, lost, lost, lost soul” – was hers. “It feels like one of those moments that don’t come along very often in an artistic life,” Sharp says. “The role is extraordinary. And usually, a man gets to do it.”

Tempest adds: “As a writer, you get so much wrong. At first, there were men playing men. They were incredible, the guys that came to read these parts. But I took a step back and just thought, ‘Hang on a minute, I’ve gone against my own belief systems. I’ve just made a play where the men are doing the acting and the women are just sitting around.’” When Sharp read as Philoctetes, Tempest says, the performance of masculinity, embedded in the text, became clearer – and the role came alive. The cast is now entirely made up of women, with Odysseus played by Anastasia Hille and Neoptolemus by Gloria Obianyo.

These questions of casting took place in parallel with something larger. “My own journey of my own gender was happening,” Tempest says. In August 2020, they announced that they were non-binary, changing their name. At the same time, they were “trying to grapple with what [the play] was trying to say about gender, which is often the way”. In The Bricks That Built the Houses, their 2016 novel navigating harsh corners of London life, one of the protagonists, Harry, was originally written as male. “It took me two drafts before I got up the guts to say: ‘No, this character’s female, or presents as female.’ Quite often in my work, the first draft is what I’m not yet brave enough to negate.”

For Paradise, Tempest always knew the members of the chorus were going to be female, as opposed to Sophocles’ male sailors. “There is life that is usually ignored in these grand old stories,” they say, “that had to be persisting, surviving, not just on the peripheries of the drama, but central to it.”

The things I’m learning about what actors are capable of doing – it’s just blowing my mind

In their first non-fiction book, On Connection, published during the pandemic, Tempest writes: “Empathy is remembering that everybody has a story.” Paradise’s chorus is a testament to that. The women speak in verse, the words weaving between them as the soldiers argue. Cynical and watchful, curious and cruel, they defy cliche and fate. They have agency. “Each of those characters,” Tempest says, “has as much of a hero’s quest as Phil.”

Tempest has been loving rehearsals. “The feeling in the room is like nothing I’ve ever experienced,” they say. “It’s the best summer of my life. The things I’m learning about what actors are capable of doing, and how they approach text, it’s just blowing my mind.”

The foyer we are talking in is almost empty, the night before it is due to fill up with the first non-socially-distanced audiences. Like most shows this year and in 2020, Paradise was hit with delays owing to Covid. Opening night should have been last summer. Their collective feeling is one of relief and gratitude to be back, to be working, to be here.

“I felt very moved by seeing all of the staff who’ve kept it ticking over while it’s been asleep,” Sharp says, looking around. “I feel like [the building] is very glad to have life coming back into it,” Rickson agrees. “The delays were upsetting,” he says, “but they allowed the work to mature, because it’s a mountain to climb. You have to step back, look at it and say: ‘OK, that’s a good route. Let’s go down again and think about it.’

The pandemic has influenced the text, admits Tempest. “I didn’t go back to the draft and say, ‘I’d better make it about Covid.’ But I trust that the guts of the text will be full with what we’re all going through. In a really obvious way, it’s about a soldier isolated in a cave who is given this opportunity to leave his isolation. So, of course, that has all the resonances of what we’ve all been through. There’s a lot about survival, wounds, recovery, victimhood, vengeance – and before Covid those words had different resonances.

“But the beautiful thing about performed language is that it can reverberate with whatever’s happening in the moment. The text holds it.” The writer pauses, then adds: “It’s heavy magic when you get in a room and speak these old stories.”

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Kate Tempest

Production Studio Notion

August 1, 2019

As Britain’s premiere poet slash MC, Kate Tempest, releases her third album — The Book of Traps and Lessons — we talk making connections, broken social structures, and the end of the world for Notion 84!

“It’s okay. We’re dead, we’re gonna die,” proclaims Britain’s resident polymath MC, spoken word artist, poet, playwright and novelist Kate Tempest, with a laugh that acknowledges the bombastic nature of her sincere statement. “These systems can not continue. It’s a mad thing to talk about in a magazine!”

Tempest isn’t wrong, on both counts — it is a mad thing to talk about in a magazine and we are gonna die. We’re in at the deep end, discussing themes that run through Tempest’s third album, The Book of Traps and Lessons. This, it turns out, is what you sign up for when you sit down for a chinwag with Tempest — the South East London raised, Brit award and two time Mercury Prize nominee, recipient of the once in a decade title of Next Generation Poet, and winner of the Ted Hughes Award for her poetry work.

To record The Book of Traps and Lessons, Tempest and her band rigorously rehearsed the album, committing it to their body memories. In September 2017 they decamped to Shangri La, the legendary recording studios owned by Def Jam founder and producer Rick Ruben. Ruben had caught Tempest performing on Charlie Rose and tracked her down, eventually taking on production duties for the album. At Shangri La, they laid down single takes of themselves performing all 45 minutes of the album in its entirety, three times a day, for three days straight until they recorded the definitive version you hear.

“It was mad. I’m just fucking standing there with this beautiful mic, in this beautiful studio, in this beautiful place,” says Tempest of the album recording sessions. “As you start you’re like ‘okay I’m gonna start in a minute and then when I start it’s 45 minutes before I stop, so I need to be in this right now’.” But Tempest is no stranger to this kind of endurance performance, having toured her 75-minute narrative poem, Brand New Ancients (though it’s demanding and often violent content would push her to her limit).

“There’s something interesting that happens when all the words are said at the same time,” Tempest muses, “they have all this relevance to each other. Something that happens in the second song, suddenly it’s holding hands with something that happens eight songs later — there’s these links that happen between words that would never happen if you stopped and recorded these tracks separately, so it gives this feeling of mad communication happening between the lyrics.”

Tempest has been working on the album for years, even before her second album, Let Them Eat Chaos, the demos for which came out of sessions for The Book of Traps and Lessons. Tempest is always making two or three things at any one time, currently juggling releasing the album with a play she’s writing. “These things, they just occupy different space, they keep me energised” Tempest explains, “When you’ve got all of this going on, then it would exhaust you if you didn’t have your other outlets, your other things to switch focus.”

Anyone that’s heard her first two albums, Everybody Down and Let Them Eat Chaos, or seen one of her numerous plays or read her book, The Bricks That Built the Houses, will know that Tempest’s work demands to be heard. It’s not the kind of thing you put on in the background while you’re hoovering the house. It requires your attention, for you to submerge yourself in its language and its narratives — it’s basically a bloody good book with beats.

“IT IS ONE THING TO NOTICE DAMAGING BEHAVIOURS THAT HAPPEN IN YOUR SOCIETY, IN THE WIDER HYPER INDIVIDUALISTIC INDUSTRIALISED CAPITALIST SYSTEM THAT WE ALL LIVE IN AND HAVE DONE SINCE ENLIGHTENMENT AND INDUSTRIALISATION, BUT IT’S ANOTHER THING TO NOTICE THOSE BEHAVIOURS IN YOURSELF.”

In the process of making Traps and Lessons, encouraged by Ruben, all the things that Tempest was previously comfortable using in her creativity were stripped away or broken down to just the essentials — including rap technique, structure, flow, as well as narrative devices she’d become accustomed to, like third-person perspectives. Tempest describes the result as a more open and intimate album than its predecessors, explaining that its title references a journey in which the speaker of the poems becomes aware of damaging patterns in their behaviour — or ‘traps’ — that they want to break free from.

“They realise they’re caught in these traps in their life, in their relationships, in their addictions, that they want to break. So the first half of the album is these ‘traps’, ending with “All Humans Too Late”, which is the middle and at the point where you’d turn the vinyl if it was on vinyl. Then you move into the second half of the album, which is the ‘lessons’, it’s when the speaker of these poems is able to actually put into action some of the things that they’ve been thinking about, some of the realisations they’ve had about their behaviours and things start to change throughout the book of lessons which is the second part.”

Within the intimate framework of the record, there appears to be two overarching and intertwined perspectives — one that speaks of intimacy, tenderness and love, another that hints at climate catastrophe, broken political systems, serving a bleak assessment of humanity and the end of the world (at least as we know it). Tempest’s voice itself flows between the two, switching between confessional tales and battle ready rhymes; as it embodies the crippling world, buckling under the weight of humanity. The language Tempest chooses is just as volatile, “vomiting memories” and “fangs and destruction, suction and froth and dysfunction”.

“A person is both in the world and in their own life at the same time,” says tempest. “One of the things that the album seems to be holding, is that it is one thing to notice damaging behaviours that happen in your society, in the wider hyper individualistic industrialised capitalist system, that we all live in and have done since enlightenment and industrialisation, but it’s another thing to notice those behaviours in yourself, in your own relationships.”

For Tempest relationships are the “front line” in this battle, a place where you can’t hide anything, where you come face-to-face with how you’re coping and how your experiences are manifesting in your behaviour. In short, a self-awareness on a level that allows you to be able to zone in and say: ‘this is what I’ve just done and this is everything around me that has influenced this moment’.

Talk turns to Tempests own relationships and “Firesmoker”, the tender expression of queer love and first single to be lifted from Traps and Lessons. “I wanted that to be the lead single because it’s just a beautiful articulation of queer love,” says Tempest. “It’s a powerful thing to stand up and make these proclamations about sexuality to women. So often those depictions of two women together are controlled, and directed, and written by heterosexual men — this idea of what two women together is, what it means, what you see when you see that in popular culture.”

“It took me a long time to be able to stand with my own queerness and where I sit on the gender spectrum. That journey, for me, has been a challenging journey… To be able to just articulate something beautiful and positive about this experience and to be able to just stand on stage and just be in my presence, and in my body, and the fact that I’m even there at all — that’s powerful for somebody in the audience going through their own journey with their sexuality or gender. I feel that.”

“THE FIRST STEP TO REALLY BEING ABLE TO MAKE A CHANGE WITHIN YOUR OWN PATTERNS IS AWARENESS”

“I do love it whenever I meet people who have got a kick out of my work for that reason, it really gets me. It’s like recalibration, like right I’m on the path, it’s working. I have this little check-in with all the people I’ve been throughout my life and that little kid who could have done with seeing the same thing.”

Baring in mind the overarching themes of identifying and unlearning negative behavioural patterns to live healthier lives and in turn create healthier societal systems — change is another hot topic that runs throughout The Book of Traps and Lessons. Changing these behaviours, both personal and bigger picture, is arguably one of the world’s biggest challenges. An inability to come to any consensus on change is what’s fueling inaction and division in everything from Brexit to climate catastrophe. Tempest says that bigger change must be built on a foundation of personal responsibility — then together we might be able to break the wheel.

“The system that we live in, one of the things it does is that it creates factionism, violence, it creates a desire amongst rootless people who are nothing but agents of consumption — this is what we are useful for and this is the role we’ve been given, this is literally what we are for within our system. It creates a desire for a kind of chauvinist male leader to give us some kind of violent solution. Stalin and Hitler have been written out of the Western progressive capitalist story as if they were these freak occurrences, but actually this is the conclusion of this system, it creates this, and it continues to create it, and it has never stopped creating it; and the myth that the West tells itself about its own progress is a convenient myth that allows this system to spread further and further afield.”

Tempest references the work of Pankaj Mishra and his book The Age of Anger, in which Mishra explains that we have forgotten the violence that happened at the dawn of capitalism and took root in industrialisation. Mishra traces these systems — which are dehumanising, exploitative systems that uproot communities and give people no agency beyond a role to play in a consuming machine — back to their roots.

“I think it’s worth saying that the solution to Brexit or anything else, is to realise that this is nothing new. This is what happens under the system we live in and the first step towards making a huge change is cognisense, being like, this is what’s happening in my behaviour, in your day to day relationships for example, this is what I’m doing, this is what’s happening. The first step to really being able to make a change within your own patterns is awareness and that takes education and careful thought.”

“If I am addicted, if I’m an alcoholic —which I have been for a long time — if I’m not aware of it, then I’m not ever going to decide to not have a drink. That might be a strange parallel to make but this system, another thing it does, it encourages numbness in us. It’s a requirement of the system — in order to function you must be numb. Creativity, poetry, literature, music, that’s one thing it can do, it can reconnect — for me anyway. When I’m at my numbest, often it’s creativity, someone else’s artistry, that brings me back and reconnects me, that’s why I might cry when I’m watching someone sing because I’m suddenly a human being again, I have my vitality back.”

Tempest says that the second requirement for change is reconnection, explaining that as a maker of artwork, connection is something that she is consciously trying to do on a day-to-day basis.

“I love to connect, I love to be in front of people telling the poems. I have to keep sight of that, as you get on a touring cycle there’s this mechanical process that happens behind touring that logistically you have to get from this place to the next, and be there at this time, and set up — it’s an industry like anything else. You have this opportunity to stand in a space with people and speak language and make a connection. As knackering as it does get, it’s beautiful, I feel so lucky.”

On The Book of Traps and Lessons, Tempest might have made room to be more openly personal than ever before, but she is still throwing punches at the system and unafraid to be vulnerable and to ask the big questions, even if she doesn’t have all the answers and it’s as much of a mystery to her as the rest of us.

“It’s really important to remember that this is one phase of the planet, we happen to be living and born into a time that was this phase,” says Tempest. “That’s what I’m saying on the album: we’re dead.”

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Play It Forward: Kae Tempest Watches The World Vibrate

August 17, 2020

NPR

Transcript

Spoken word poet and musician Kae Tempest thinks that the act of paying extreme attention allows one to be more empathetic to others and to create art that resonates beyond the present moment.

In this week's Play It Forward, where artists tell us about their music and the musicians who inspire them, we hear from the British spoken word poet and musician Kae Tempest. In last week's segment, Indigo Girls' Amy Ray and Emily Saliers talked about Tempest's ability to capture small human moments in large meditations about life and the resonant way they think about love. Ray called them "a true poet," like one of the literary greats.

"You can read something that [they] wrote before what's going on right now and it applies to what's going on right now. It's like, are you a [prophet]?" Ray wondered. "I find that I have catharsis when I listen to [them] and read [their] words. I hear hope in them: The willingness for [them] to be so vulnerable makes me hopeful and the willingness for [them] to love humanity through the darkness makes me hopeful."

Tempest is humbled by the praise.

"I feel like they said some extremely beautiful things and I feel honored that people are paying such close attention to my work," they say. "I felt like what they were saying about the hope and the vulnerability — the willingness to feel vulnerable being a sign of hope — it's just a beautiful, perceptive thing to notice. What I can say? I feel lucky."

NPR's Ari Shapiro spoke to Kae Tempest about reigning in the desire to despair, the art of paying attention and the uplifting power of Lianne La Havas' voice. Listen in the audio player above, and read on for highlights of the interview. Editor's Note: NPR recorded these interviews when the artist went by the name "Kate Tempest" and used she/her pronouns. Since then, they've put out a statement saying they will use the name "Kae" and them/they pronouns. NPR has been given permission to air the interview as it was recorded.

Interview Highlights

On loving humanity through the darkness

I think it's hard work: It's a process and it's a practice. It demands a willingness to defeat the parts of you that want to go first to despair or want to go first to hurt or distrust, to actually try and override that. It's a mark of my privilege that I'm in a position that I can do that so it's definitely important that I acknowledge that, but at the same time, it's something that I live by. That's why so much of my work is about it, because so much of my life is about trying to find that balance.

On practicing empathy for other people

Empathy is about hearing other people's stories before telling your own.

Kae Tempest

It's about looking again. It's basically allowing yourself — or in fact, demanding —that you notice and feel and tune into the idea that every single person is existing at as ferocious a frequency as you are. Empathy is about hearing other people's stories before telling your own and just having an awareness of that at all times. For me personally, the practice is to look again. It's about a reanimation of a kind of a veiled existence. It's about trying to reanimate, take the veil back, look again; it's about noticing, particular attention. And as soon as I pay attention to anything ... it suddenly becomes something that's extremely beautiful and it's full of life and has a lot to teach me.

On being described as a "prophetess" by Amy Ray

For writers, we pay extreme attention — this is what I'm saying about this decision to pay particular attention. And when you do that, what you access is the present but what it looks like and reads like is prescience. It looks like you're talking about the future, but actually you're just paying attention to the present, and it happens all the time when you read novels or you listen to lyrics by people that are afflicted with the burden of being somebody who notices in such sharp frequencies what's going on. Then you explain it and you get it out of you and it seems like you're talking about future but you're not; you're just describing the moment.

On the melodic brilliance of Lianne La Havas

There is something that happens when I hear her sing, which is so uplifting. I feel like the way that she selects melody and the way that she embodies those melodies — her guitar playing, the placement of the breath in the lines that she sings — I just find it extremely uplifting and healing. She's one of these people that have put all this effort into making it appear effortless so that we can just be met with this wash of pure melodic brilliance. I just want to celebrate her because I've got so much out of her melodies.

I was lucky enough to be at the Albert Hall when she did a gig in London. And she did a cover version just with the guitar singing Aretha Franklin's "Say A Little Prayer." I mean, that's a challenging song to cover, right? But it was such a beautiful moment. I just hear somebody enjoying the beauty of music; like what a beautiful gift it is to have music and to play music and give music to others. I'd like to say thank you for making me feel less alone in the world and for putting your heart into everything you sing, and I'd like to say thanks for all your music.

Kate Tempest announces they are non-binary, changes name to Kae

Performance poet, writer and musician said they had previously ‘tried to be what I thought others wanted me to be so as not to risk rejection’

Ben Beaumont-Thomas

Guardian

The musician and poet formerly named Kate Tempest has changed their name to Kae Tempest, and announced they are non-binary.

In the announcement on Instagram, Tempest said they were changing the pronouns they use, from she and her to they and them. Their new name is pronounced like the letter K. They wrote:

I’ve been struggling to accept myself as I am for a long time. I have tried to be what I thought others wanted me to be so as not to risk rejection. This hiding from myself has led to all kinds of difficulties in my life. And this is a first step towards knowing and respecting myself better. I’ve loved Kate. But I am beginning a process and I hope you’ll come with me … [Kae is] an old English word that means jay bird. Jays are associated with communication, curiosity, adaptation to new situations and COURAGE which is the name of the game at the moment. It can also mean jackdaw which is the bird that symbolises death and rebirth. Ovid said the jackdaw brought the rain. Which I love. It has its roots in the Latin word for rejoice, be glad and take pleasure. And I hope to live more that way each day … This is a time of great reckoning. Privately, locally, globally. For me, the question is no longer ‘when will this change’ but ‘how far am I willing to go to meet the changes and bring them about in myself.’ I want to live with integrity. And this is a step towards that. Sending LOVE always.

In an interview with Notion in August 2019, they discussed their queer identity: “It took me a long time to be able to stand with my own queerness and where I sit on the gender spectrum. That journey, for me, has been a challenging journey … to be able to just stand on stage and just be in my presence, and in my body, and the fact that I’m even there at all — that’s powerful for somebody in the audience going through their own journey with their sexuality or gender.”

They described the song Firesmoke, nominated for best contemporary song at this year’s Ivor Novello songwriting awards, as “a beautiful articulation of queer love … It’s a powerful thing to stand up and make these proclamations about sexuality to women.”

Tempest released their debut album in 2011, and has become an acclaimed musical artist creating performance poetry – partly informed by rap and hip-hop – alongside a wide variety of writing.

They are the joint top nominee at the Ivor Novellos this year, with another nomination for album of the year, for The Book of Traps and Lessons. It is their fourth album, with two previous releases each nominated for the Mercury prize. They have also written a novel, 2016’s The Bricks That Built the Houses, plus three plays and five poetry collections.

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Links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_auc2Z67OM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFyEFTaIJ7A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSVyyykaEOo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRULtXn6W0s

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Her natal Lilith is 19 Pisces, N.Node 23 Sagittarius, S.Node 13 Gemini

Her natal Ceres is 1 Sagittarius, N.Node 15 Gemini, S.Node 22 Sagittarius,

Her natal Amazon is 6 Leo, N.Node 8 Taurus, S.Node 00/53 Sagittarius

Please feel free to comment or ask questions.

Goddess Bless, Rad

Hi All,

Here is the birth chart for Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. This is a noon chart.

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Who Is Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Belarus’s Unlikely Opposition Leader?

Ms. Tikhanovskaya spent her summers in rural Ireland, as a “Chernobyl child” sent to the country for respite. Her host family remembers her as a compassionate leader, even as a youngster.

By Megan Specia

Aug. 13, 2020

When Svyeta, then age 12, arrived in rural Ireland from Belarus in the mid-1990s, it was her strong grasp of English and her kindness that stood out.

One of thousands of children brought to Ireland by charities in the years after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in northern Ukraine, she used her language skills to help interpret for others in the program.

“She was a very compassionate kid,” said Henry Deane, who along with his wife, Marian, hosted her at their home in the central Irish town of Roscrea. “She would hold their hands at the dentist and interpret and, really, comfort them.”

It would be decades before the girl they call Svyeta, now known as Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, became the main opposition candidate in last Sunday’s disputed presidential election in Belarus. Ms. Tikhanovskaya, 37, on Sunday fled the country for Lithuania under what her associates said was pressure from the Belarusian authorities.

The country’s president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, claimed a landslide victory in a ballot that was widely denounced as fraudulent. Mr. Lukashenko, who has clung to power amid violent protests denouncing the election, had faced a surprising challenge from Ms. Tikhanovskaya, who became his fiercest rival. In recent days, widespread protests met with violence against demonstrators and mass detentions.

Ms. Tikhanovskaya was an unlikely presidential contender from the outset. Having never been in politics before, she was a stay-at-home mother who took up the candidacy when more established opposition figures, including her husband Sergei Tikhanovsky, a blogger, were jailed or forced into exile ahead of the vote.

Ms. Tikhanovskaya, who before the election had given up a teaching career to care for her two children, was thrust into the spotlight as she vowed to continue her husband’s campaign. She found support from voters looking for an alternative to Mr. Lukashenko, as she called for change after years of economic stagnation and repressive rule.

Anna Krasulina, Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s press secretary, said that she had been compelled to take up the candidacy in her husband’s stead.

“It was a very interesting moment, and people immediately began to gather around her,” Ms. Krasulina said.

Ms. Tikhanovskaya has been largely out of contact since arriving in Lithuania this week. Those who know her say they are most worried for the safety of a woman whom they saw rise from difficult beginnings to become a strong leader.

For more than a decade, Ms. Tikhanovskaya spent her summers living with the Deanes, who said she became like one of their own children. Her ability to speak honestly about the trials her country faced signaled her leadership early on, the Deanes said.

“She wouldn’t go along with the crowd,” Ms. Deane said. “She didn’t run down her country, but she didn’t hide anything about it.”

The family hosted a number of other children at their home over the years, but grew particularly close to Ms. Tikhanovskaya, who returned summer after summer and later found casual work in the area to raise money for college.

“She was like our child then,” Ms. Deane said. Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s last visit to Ireland was around 10 years ago but they have stayed in regular contact, with Mr. Deane visiting her in Belarus.

Ms. Tikhanovskaya grew up in Mikashevichi, a town south of Minsk, the capital, where she excelled in school. Her hometown was near the Chernobyl fallout zone and many locals were relocated to the south, although it is unclear if Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s family was among them.

Life in Mikashevichi was difficult, and the Deanes described an impoverished upbringing for Ms. Tikhanovskaya, despite her having a supportive and loving family.

Her time in Ireland allowed her to further her English skills and earn money for school. She later went on to study teaching at Mozyr State Pedagogical University in Belarus, but she eventually left work to devote herself to her two children, a son, now 10, and a daughter, now 5.

The elder child was born nearly deaf, and much of Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s attention went to her son’s care, Ms. Deane said. She moved her family from Minsk to the southeastern city of Gomel so he could receive special care and was eventually able to afford a cochlear implant that vastly improved his hearing.

Ms. Krasulina, the press secretary, said that Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s fight for her child’s health and her stubbornness in ensuring he received the best care possible had remained part of her identity during the campaign.

“She remained herself in the sense that her system of values was ​​completely preserved,” she said.

The Deanes last spoke with Ms. Tikhanovskaya at the end of April, as her campaign for the election geared up. They feared that the government would portray any overseas calls to her as potential interference, but they continued to communicate with her by text message and email.

“All you can do is just send encouragement and support to her, because we don’t want to put her in any danger,” Mr. Deane said.

After Ms. Tikhanovskaya cast her ballot on Sunday, she disappeared for several hours, before it was reported that she had arrived in Lithuania. On Tuesday, Ms. Tikhanovskaya posted a video explaining why she left Belarus in the early hours of Sunday morning amid antigovernment protests, and in it mentioned her concern for her children’s well-being.

Video: 1:14‘I Made a Very Difficult Decision,’ Belarus Challenger Says

Watch: https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/100000007283284/belarus-elections.html?action=click&gtype=vhs&version=vhs-heading&module=vhs&region=title-area&cview=true&t=6

Another video, apparently scripted and recorded under duress before Ms Tikhanovskaya left Belarus, emerged in which she urged her fellow countrymen to end their protests and accept Mr. Lukashenko’s re-election.

Ms. Deane said she struggled to watch the clips, and said she was glad to hear that Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s children — who were sent out of the country before the election for their safety — had been reunited with their mother. The Deanes have been unable to reach her by phone since the election.

Many viewed Ms. Tikhanovskaya as a political lightweight during the campaign, but also saw her as providing a necessary, positive persona for the opposition. She had the ability to work with others and unite feuding factions, while being seen as nonthreatening for Mr. Lukashenko, who never took her seriously and so never had her arrested.

Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian writer and Nobel laureate, said in an interview with Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe on Wednesday that Ms. Tikhanovskaya “was and remains a symbol of change” who “did what she could.” But, Ms. Alexievich added, it was now time for more experienced figures to take over the opposition effort.

As Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s bid for office gained momentum, Belarusian news outlets compared her to Joan of Arc, an analogy Mr. Deane also drew.

Mrs. Deane said that Mr. Lukashenko vastly underestimated Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s skill as a politician and the strength of the support she drew ahead of the election. At one of her campaign rallies last month, thousands of supporters poured onto the streets of Minsk.

“A stupid little girl, he called her,” Ms. Deane said. “Well, that stupid little girl, she’s had thousands and thousands of people at her rallies, and the support for her has been amazing.”

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How a Belarusian Teacher and Stay-at-Home Mom Came to Lead a National Revolt

By Vivienne Walt

February 25, 2021 1:31 PM EST

On a hot summer day last August, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya was pacing up and down her empty apartment in Minsk, the capital of Belarus in Central Europe, her life—and her country—in turmoil. With her husband in jail, she had sent her two small children out of the country, to safety, and she now faced a stark choice, bluntly handed to her by the nation’s hard-line security forces: flee into exile herself, or face arrest. “I had a couple of hours, but I could not pack anything, because I was so overstressed,” she recalls. “It was a shock. I was not prepared for this.”

Indeed, it is hard to imagine how Tikhanovskaya could have prepared for the jolting transformation of her life. Within the space of a few months, she emerged from obscurity to become the leader of Belarus’ biggest revolt in decades, determined to bring down President Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled the former Soviet republic with an iron hand for more than 26 years as what many call Europe’s last dictator—thanks largely to the backing of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Until last year, Tikhanovskaya, now 38, was a full-time mother, planning to pick up her earlier career as an English teacher. Then last May, the government arrested her husband, Sergei Tikhanovsky, thwarting his run for President in August elections, in opposition to Lukashenko.

With no political experience, Tikhanovskaya jumped in to replace Sergei as a candidate, campaigning alongside the wife of another jailed activist and the female campaign manager of a third. In Lukashenko’s mind, the three women—who were barely adults when Lukashenko came to power in 1994—barely seemed like a threat. But Tikhanovskaya, a soft-spoken neophyte appointed as leader by the group, exhorted the crowds to oust Belarus’ strongman in the August vote. Her presence was electrifying. Thousands of women thronged to hear her, clutching flowers and draped in the opposition colors of red and white.

When Lukashenko declared he had won—claiming more than 80% of votes—people poured into the streets in outraged fury. Tikhanovskaya had reason to believe her own vote was around 75%. The estimate was based partly on voters who photographed and uploaded their ballots to a platform built by activists, in anticipation of election fraud.

Lukashenko responded by dispatching heavily armed security forces who beat protesters with truncheons and rifle butts, and hauled them into miserable, jam-packed prisons. Amid the upheaval in August, Tikhanovskaya slipped across the border into Lithuania, where she now lives in exile with her children, ages 10 and 5, plotting the downfall of her nemesis, Lukashenko. She spoke to TIME in December, during a visit to Brussels.

Lukashenko has likened his beleaguered presidency to the last days of the Soviet Union before its collapse in 1991. His foes are tools of foreign governments, plotting a “blitzkrieg coup,” he told his supporters on Feb. 11: “We must endure no matter the cost.” The cost has been severe. Outraged by Lukashenko’s actions, the European Union is preparing its fourth round of economic sanctions against his officials. More than six months of protests have left Belarus’ economy on its knees, and even a $1.5 billion bailout from Russian President Vladimir Putin last September has not succeeded in stabilizing the country.

On Monday, Lukashenko met Putin again in Sochi, Russia, to ask him for another $3 billion, according to Russia’s Kommersant newspaper—a loan that could open the way for Putin to have a far greater hold over Belarus. Opposition leaders predict that could further ignite protests, as people see their country increasingly in the pocket of Russia—perhaps one reason Lukashenko has denied asking Putin for financial help. “People don’t want to give up independence to save Lukashenko’s ass,” says Franak Viacorka, a Belarusian journalist and adviser to Tikhanovskaya. Yet the country’s ruler now badly needs Putin’s help. “Lukashenko is cornered,” he says. “He doesn’t have a choice.”

Protests have simmered down in recent months, but activists say they plan to return with full force in the spring, despite the mass arrests. Tikhanovskaya estimates about 33,000 people have been detained since August, in a country of just 9.5 million. More than 900 face criminal charges, some of which carry 15-year prison sentences, according to Viacorka. “People are being tortured, in violence and chaos,” Tikhanovskaya says. “It is so scary, you cannot even imagine.”

At the risk of arrest, demonstrators send photos and videos of beatings, and details about where to demonstrate, to Nexta, a channel set up on the encrypted platform Telegram. “It is very dangerous for them to send this information,” says Stsiapan Putsila, 22, Nexta’s founder, who is based in Warsaw. “But their will to share the information is more significant.”

Tikhanovskaya says the past months have left her feeling drained, as she attempts to piece together, among the dozens of activists who have fled Belarus in recent months, a political force capable of collapsing a decades-old government. Called the Coordination Council, it now acts as a kind of government in waiting, with Tikhanovskaya as its leader. “We have been sleeping for 26 years,” she says. “We thought after every election, there would be a rise of people, but it was brutally cracked down on.” This time, however, she sees a profound shift. “People have started to feel that we are a nation,” she says. “They started to feel proud of this fact.”

Yet the task of knitting together a political opposition from outside the country is daunting. Sighing deeply, she says, “I feel so emotionally exhausted.”

Months on, she is still anguished by the choice she made that August day, as she paced her empty apartment in Minsk. She says she has been unable to quell the thought that security police might have tricked her into believing she was about to be jailed, simply in order to force her into exile. “Sometimes I doubt I made the correct decision,” she says.

If the Belarus leader believed banishing Tikhanovskaya would end her threat to his rule, he was wrong. From her headquarters in Vilnius, Tikhanovskaya and other activists have spent months plotting how to force Lukashenko out of power, and to seek help from Western officials. After finding her voice as a candidate in her home country, Tikhanovskaya says she has had to learn from scratch, on the fly, how to become a politician capable of negotiating with international leaders from exile. “It is so difficult to understand and realize that on your decisions, so much depends,” she says.

One key strategy, forged in regular talks with U.S. and E.U. officials, is to push for far tougher economic sanctions on Lukashenko and his government than those the bloc has so far approved. A separate effort is under way in Washington. After Tikhanovskaya consulted with U.S. State Department officials, Congress passed sweeping legislation in late November, saying that it would not recognize Lukashenko’s government, and backing Tikhanovskaya instead. U.S. Treasury officials say they intend listing the global assets of Lukashenko and his aides—a possible prelude to sanctions.

Forcing out Lukashenko will take even tougher action, however, given Putin’s billions in aid. Some hope that as Lukashenko becomes increasingly hated at home, Putin might pull back. “Lukashenko is totally dependent on Putin’s support, but how long Putin will stay with that support, nobody knows,” says Andrius Kubilius, a former Prime Minister of Lithuania, who heads a group of E.U. lawmakers supporting Tikhanovskaya. “When Putin stands beside Lukashenko, his popularity at home goes down.”

Lukashenko is already isolated. Since pushing Tikhanovskaya abroad, the embattled President has largely holed up in his capital trying to stamp out the protests. All the while, Tikhanovskaya has zipped across Europe, meeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and other leaders. In Brussels in December, she and other Belarus activists were feted in the European Parliament, where they were awarded the E.U.’s human-rights honor, the Sakharov Prize. Standing at the podium in the vast Parliament chamber, Tikhanovskaya told lawmakers that a “wall of fear held us back for almost three decades.” That wall has now disappeared, she told them. “Everything has changed. We are bound to win.”

Her words brought loud applause from the E.U. politicians. “She is like Lech Walesa,” says Robert Biedron, a Polish member of the European Parliament, referring to the former Polish President, who led the country’s anti-communist revolution in 1989 and won the Nobel Peace Prize. “I know the role Walesa played for Polish society,” Biedron says. “And Svetlana is playing that same role in Belarus.”

And yet, despite her fast rise as a leader, Tikhanovskaya says she does not envision herself as the next Belarus President. She is painfully aware that her husband—the original presidential rival to Lukashenko—sits in a solitary cell in a Belarus jail, while she commands the attention of world leaders.

Tikhanovskaya says she is focused on ousting Lukashenko. Decisions about her own political future, she says, will come later. Should Lukashenko face trial? That question has two answers, she says. “As a person I cannot forgive his crimes,” she says. “But for the future of Belarus, he can leave for Russia, or wherever, or stay in his house.” Tikhanovskaya knows that decision would likely face strong criticism back home, after months of protests. “But if you have to think globally, sometimes you have to take such decisions,” she says, already sounding—after half a year in politics—like a seasoned leader.

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Belarus: Women as the face of protest

Rayna Breuer

08/09/2021

Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko once had many women among his supporters. But now, they are some of his most uncompromising opponents.

One year ago, on August 9, 2020, Alexander Lukashenko declared himself the winner of Belarus' presidential elections. Massive nationwide protests ensued, which were followed by a seemingly unending wave of arrests, torture and intimidation of the participants.

"I had the feeling that they would soon come for me as well," says Anna Koval, who, along with other helpers, collected food, toiletries and clothing for people in detention.

"We joke among ourselves that we suffer from bus phobia — a specifically Belarusian anxiety disorder," she says. "We mean the small buses carrying unknown people who can stop you on the street at any time and force you into the vehicles. They don't tell you who they are or why they are taking you away. Even people who aren't at all politically active can have it happen to them."

The personal story of Anna Koval, who felt compelled to leave her native country four months ago, and that of many other women in Belarus is told by the author Alice Bota in her new book "Die Frauen von Belarus" ("The Women of Belarus"), which has just been published by the Berlin Verlag.

"There is something noble about people overcoming their fears and taking up an unequal struggle even though they have so very much to lose. And when they stay peaceful despite experiencing so much violence," writes Bota, a journalist.

It is women like these who have realized their own strength and challenged Lukashenko. They have been a crucial factor in the resistance to a regime that does not accord women any place in politics.

Women on the move

For decades, Lukashenko seemed to many like a father figure, the protector of the nation. Women were among his main supporters and voted for him in droves at presidential elections.

"For women, social guarantees were important, and the regime ensured that social guarantees were upheld. Women were particularly vulnerable and relied on the state to help them, if they had no male partner, with child allowances, maternity leave and child care," Bota told DW.

But then the worm suddenly turned, she said, describing how women were horrified at seeing their own children being manhandled on the streets — something they could not forgive Lukashenko for.

"Although families in socialist countries had a matriarchal structure, with women keeping families together, working, looking after children and perhaps caring for grandma as well, the system was and still is dominated by men," Bota said. "Women are assigned a special role; they are revered but at the same time kept in their places." But now, she said, women have overcome their reticence and become visible — and are surprised at their own power.

Three women against Lukashenko

And Lukashenko had not expected resistance of this kind from women. Maria Kolesnikova, a musician and feminist; Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a homemaker, former teacher and mother; and Veronika Tsepkalo, an IT manager and also a mother, have become three of the main Belarusian opposition figures. They are the new face — a female face — of the country's revolution.

Arm in arm, the three women traveled the length and breadth of the country, spoke to journalists and demonstrated strength and resolution through their words and gestures in front of crowds of people. Veronika Tsepkalo's special symbol was the victory sign, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya used the fist and Maria Kolesnikova the heart.

At the start, Lukashenko did not take the women seriously. He called them "girls" who "could make rissoles" but not talk about politics. This contemptuous attitude toward women and his humiliating words in public were his biggest mistakes — they turned him from being the protector of the nation to a hated opponent.

These three women actually never wanted to become involved in politics. But circumstances have forced them to do so. They took up the political cause after Tskihanouskaya and Tsepkalo's husbands were both stopped from running in the elections, as was Viktar Babaryka, whose campaign was managed by Kolesnikova. They managed to frighten Lukashenko, who reacted all the more harshly. While Tskihanouskaya and Tsepkalo succeeded in fleeing abroad, Kolesnikova is in pre-trial detention and faces a potential 12-year prison sentence.

Civil society on the march

Lukashenko has been in power since 1994. Two years after taking office, he had the constitution changed by referendum to give himself virtually boundless powers. He introduced state symbols strongly redolent of the Soviet era. Belarusian traditions and even the Belarusian language are frowned upon.

Although the protests were long in coming, discontent has been building up for a long time among Belarusian citizens, Bota said. "The cynicism of the state in the coronavirus crisis, Lukashenko's comments and the mockery of the dead have all led to society rediscovering itself. A civil society has arisen. Many people underestimated how great the discontent was," she said. "These three women were catalysts. Perhaps the protests would have taken place anyway, but they created such a strong contrast to the contemptuous rhetoric used by the regime by speaking about love and respect."

The struggle continues

A year after the protests, the regime has made no concessions at all to civil society. On the contrary, intimidation and torture are still the order of the day. The struggle on the streets and the women's revolution are not over.

"At the moment, a total cleansing of dissidents is happening," says Marina Vorobei, a journalist from Belarus and the founder of freeunion.online, an online platform that aids people to organize themselves in public associations and initiatives.

"It is not just those who took part in the protests, but simply everyone who can be regarded as a member of civil society, like NGOs," Vorobei says. "Since the start of July, more than 50 NGOs in Belarus have been searched." According to her, on July 14 alone, a day described as a "Black Wednesday" for Belarusian NGOs, searches were carried out at at least 18 public organizations.

She said that the Belarusian NGO sector had never seen such a huge wave of arrests, searches and confiscations.

It would seem that the protests in Belarus are moving from the streets to the online sphere, where activists can operate with more protection. At any rate, they are not considering giving up the fight, as both Anna Koval and Marina Vorobei agree.

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Svetlana Tikhanovskaya: from 'Chernobyl child' in Ireland to political limelight

Host Henry Deane remembers Belarus’s opposition leader arriving in Roscrea at the age of 12

Katherine Butler

Tue 11 Aug 2020 05.00 BST

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the woman who has been catapulted into political stardom in Belarus by her push to dislodge the man often referred to as Europe’s last dictator, may be an accidental challenger, standing in Sunday’s presidential election only because her opposition activist husband Sergei was arrested.

But a hint of the strength and resilience that has made her a courageous if unlikely opponent who has refused to accept Alexander Lukashenko’s claim to victory in a poll marred by vote-rigging may have been present at age of 12, when she arrived to spend a summer in rural Ireland.

Tikhanovskaya was one of the “Chernobyl children”, whose health was either directly or indirectly affected by the radioactive fallout of the 1986 nuclear disaster in neighbouring Ukraine and whom Irish families hosted for respite and recuperation.