League party leader Matteo Salvini participated in a rally in the Italian town of Maranello - known to be the headquarters of Ferrari - on Saturday, ahead of regional elections in Emilia-Romagna on January 26.
Wearing a Formula 1 Ferrari cap, Salvini said "to whoever thinks I'm a criminal: send me to trial and find a large court because millions of free women and men from this country will be with me, and we solve it once and for all And if I have to go to jail for defending an idea, I will go with my head held high."
Salvini also took the chance to repeat his support for Israel and his stance against laws protecting LGBTQ citizens.
Salvini was joined on stage by League presidential candidate for Emilia-Romagna, Lucia Bergonzoni. Bergonzoni took the chance to speak against Roma citizens.
Salvini and his party are aiming to win the regional election in the historically left-leaning Emilia-Romagna region and seeking to repeat the success they achieved in the Umbrian elections in 2019, when an alliance led by the League brought five decades of left-wing rule to an end.
"My story might have turned out very differently if I had been black," said the billionaire in a much anticipated speech.
TULSA, Okla. — Mike Bloomberg began his presidential campaign with an apology to African Americans — an acknowledgment of the racial inequities spurred by the controversial “stop and frisk” policing practice he oversaw as New York City mayor.
It was also a recognition of the political realities confronting a campaign for the Democratic nomination that hinges on a strong performance on Super Tuesday, when black voters will cast a majority of the primary vote in a handful of states.
Bloomberg has so far amassed a roster of surrogates that includes prominent black politicians, traveled to cities with large black populations like Oakland, Detroit and Cleveland to solicit input on policy, and unveiled proposals on issues central to many black communities, such as maternal mortality and incarcerated youth. Aides point to his work on education, gun control and job creation in addressing concerns he faces among black voters.
“I think he has challenges, but he has, I think, made a more-than-expected attempt to deal with the challenges,” Rev. Al Sharpton told POLITICO, noting endorsements like Columbia, S.C. Mayor Steve Benjamin and other black leaders who were early endorsers. “I don’t know how much it will work, but I can say he’s put more of an effort in it than I would have thought.”
Bloomberg flew here to attend Sunday services at Vernon Chapel AME Church before delivering the most sweeping and anticipated address of his young campaign: A plan to increase job opportunities and home ownership in black neighborhoods and invest $70 billion in struggling areas across the country.
His pitch, which takes its name from the Greenwood section of Tulsa known as “Black Wall Street” that was destroyed in the race massacre of 1921, was designed to tackle the systemic bias keeping many African Americans from advancement—as he put to parishioners at the church — “righting what I think are historic wrongs and creating opportunity and wealth in black communities.”
Bloomberg’s strategy of skipping the first four voting states — underwritten by his vast fortune — has given him a wide-open playing field in areas with large black populations to try to define himself to voters, many of whom have stuck with former Vice President Joe Biden. In the speech Sunday, the billionaire who made his fortune on New York’s Wall Street went even further to acknowledge his white privilege.
“As someone who has been very lucky in life, I often say my story would only have been possible in America — and I think that’s true,” Bloomberg said, as hundreds filled the Greenwood hall and spilled into an overflow room. “But I also know that my story might have turned out very differently if I had been black, and that more black Americans of my generation would have ended up with far more wealth, had they been white.”
“Instead,” he said, “they’ve had to struggle to overcome great odds, because their families started out further behind, and excluded from opportunities — in housing, in employment, education, and other areas.”
Bloomberg’s plan calls for one million new black homeowners and 100,000 new black-owned businesses in the next decade. Banks would need to update their credit-scoring requirements while he’d also create a Housing Fairness Commission funded with an initial $10 billion.
Organizationally, the event was a show of force for Bloomberg in a red state where Democratic activists and supporters said they’ve been starved to have in someone who could take on Donald Trump. Several prominent black political and business leaders were on hand from across the country, with Chicago heavyweight John Rogers Jr. introducing the former mayor and telling POLITICO that he’s made his endorsement: “I’m with him all the way,” Rogers said.
“This is a first down. It’s a good play. It wasn’t a touchdown, but he’s moved the ball down the field,” said Jarrod Loadholt, an Atlanta-based Democratic consultant. “Democrats writ large don’t speak meaningfully to economic opportunity when it comes to communities of color,” he added, contending that candidates tend to focus primarily on “safety net issues.”
But the degree to which stop and frisk has dominated negative assessments of Bloomberg has only magnified the issue as his Achilles heel in the Democratic primary. Mark Thompson, a veteran radio host and NAACP activist, dismissed Bloomberg’s recent attempts in recent weeks to move beyond the issue as an “utter misreading of the room,” given the party’s progressive streak.
“You can’t say ‘I’m sorry’ in 2020 when you haven't said ‘I’m sorry’ over the past decade,” Thompson said. That would split the Democratic coalition. Even progressive whites would not keep their progressive bonafides.”
Sharpton and others vociferously criticized his criminal justice record when he was mayor, including stop and frisk policing and his stance on five teenagers wrongly convicted of raping a woman in Central Park — now the subject of a documentary that underscores how the law enforcement system impacts young black and Latino men.
Former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg Flies to Israel, Dismissing Safety Fears
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has flown to the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, CBS reports, thumbing his nose at the safety concerns that grounded most Israel-bound flights from the U.S. earlier in the day.
Bloomberg said he was not trying “to prove anything,” but wanted to show that Israel was “safe, and a great place to visit.” The trip is also a gesture of support for the Jewish state during its current offensive against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. Speaking before boarding a flight at New York City’s JFK airport, Bloomberg said, “Israel has a right to defend its people, and they’re doing exactly what they should be doing.”
Earlier Tuesday, a Palestinian rocket landed just a mile from Ben Gurion Airport, situated 20 km (12 miles) from Tel Aviv’s city center, prompting the Federal Aviation Administration to place a 24-hour moratorium on flights by U.S. carriers to and from Israel. By that point, however, it was a mere formality: Delta Airlines United Airlines, and U.S. Airways, which collectively operate four flights from JFK and Newark Liberty International Airport each day, had already suspended their trips for the foreseeable future. Shortly before it was to touch down in Tel Aviv, a Delta flight from JFK carrying nearly 400 Israel-bound immigrants diverted to Paris, where it landed Tuesday evening.
The avowedly pro-Israel Bloomberg [Israel, a.k.a. the ethnostate Homeland of the Jewish People] will fly El Al, the country’s flagship carrier, which also operates four routes to and from the U.S. and has no plans to cancel these trips. The carrier has not commented on either the supposed safety risks or the U.S. response to them, but considering its close relationship with the Israeli government — it was state-owned until 2003, and owes much of its success to some subtle protectionism — one assumes it would echo the sentiments emphatically stressed on Tuesday by the administration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: flying to Israel is safe; not flying to Israel is to concede victory to the enemy.
Homo sapiens have been treading this planet for around 350,000 years now. With our primate hands and our primate brains, we have expanded our curiosity beyond Earth's blue skies, into the unimaginably vast reaches of space.
Our discoveries over the millennia have been incredible - we've peeled back the aeons and stared at the shreds of radiation left over from the birth of the Universe as we know it. We have formulae and theorems that mathematically describe just about everything in the physical realm. We know how the stars move overhead, and what's deep inside the belly of our planet.
But it's true, what they say: we stand on the shoulders of giants. Each time of discovery is better than the time that came before, because we have all those previous discoveries to build on.
Right now, in the 21st century, might very well be the best time yet for trying to understand the cosmos. That's partially because of the cumulative knowledge we've acquired so far. And partially due to the sheer luck that we humans are here in the Universe now, 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang.
Exoplanets
For centuries, astronomers hypothesised the existence of exoplanets - planets beyond the boundaries of our Solar System. But there was one problem: our instrumentation was not yet advanced enough to detect them.
That changed in January 1992. Astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan of Arecibo Observatory and Dale Frail of the NRAO whacked down one whale of a paper: they had detected what looked to be exoplanets, orbiting a pulsar 2,300 light-years away called PSR B1257 +12.
The discovery was confirmed later that year, and it was official: we'd found the very first exoplanets.
Since then, the field has exploded; to date, over 4,000 exoplanets have been confirmed in the Milky Way galaxy, with over 5,000 more candidates. (We've yet to detect extragalactic exoplanets, but that's probably only a matter of time.)
Those planets include gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn; ice planets like Neptune and Uranus; and rocky planets, like Earth, Mars, Mercury and Venus. And there are pecularities, too. The most common type of exoplanet, for instance, is the mini-Neptune, which we don't have here in the Solar System. Nor do we have hot Jupiters, gas giants orbiting perilously close to their stars.
These discoveries have greatly advanced our understanding of planetary systems, while deepening the mystery of Earth's seemingly unique properties that gave rise to and supported life for billions of years.
But we're only going to learn more. Thanks to ever-evolving techniques, astronomers are finding new exoplanets all the time. With the new generation of instruments - including TESS, which launched last year, CHEOPS due to launch in December 2019, and PLATO scheduled for a 2026 launch - we're right in the thick of the age of exoplanet discovery.
The Moon covers the Sun
You ever look at a solar eclipse and marvel that, while the Sun is huge and the Moon is tiny, somehow the Moon is just the right size to neatly cover the Sun? You should, because it's pretty incredible.
It has to do with the relative size and distances of the two bodies. The Sun's diameter is around 400 times bigger than the Moon's diameter. And the distance from Earth to the Sun happens to be around 400 times farther than the distance from Earth to the Moon.
That means that the Sun and the Moon appear to be around the same size in the sky - but not always. The Moon's orbit around Earth is elliptical, which means sometimes it's a little closer and sometimes it's farther away; its distance can vary up to 50,000 kilometres in a single orbit.
So, there are two types of solar eclipse where the Moon completely crosses the Sun - the total eclipse, when the Moon is closer to Earth, appearing a little larger, and therefore completely blocking the Sun's light; and the more common annular eclipse, where a ring of Sun is visible around the edge of the Moon.
That's not just an amazing spectacle - because the Moon neatly obscures the brightness of the Sun's disc, it allows us to see structures in the Sun's corona we can't see normally, teaching us about the dynamics of stars.
Why are we lucky? Well, the Moon isn't going to stay where it is. It's actually moving away from Earth at a rate of around 3.82 centimetres (1.5 inches) a year. Another 600 million years and it'll appear too small for total eclipses.
We've seen a black hole
It was 1783 when English polymath John Michell first proposed the theoretical existence of a mass from which not even light could achieve escape velocity. The idea of the existence of black holes didn't catch on for over a century. Even up until relatively recently, these mysterious objects were regarded as possibly only theoretical.
In 1978, French mathematician Jean-Pierre Luminet mathematically simulated, based on general relativity, what a black hole should look like. That was the first time the world had seen a real visual representation of these ultradense, to use Michell's term, 'dark stars'. There were other simulations over the years, of increasing sophistication.
But, finally, last year, the culmination of a massively ambitious project came to fruition. The Event Horizon Telescope, a global collaboration that took years of work, had finally produced the first direct image of a supermassive black hole, in the centre of a galaxy called M87, 55 million light-years away.
And wouldn't you know it? Luminet's simulation was correct. As were Einstein's general relativity predictions, made over a century ago. It looks pretty fuzzy, but you can clearly make out relativistic beaming, whereby the light coming towards us is brighter than the light moving away. This means the material is orbiting the black hole.
There is still a lot left to learn, but this is it. Black holes exist, and we can see them. This project was extremely difficult to accomplish, but now the nut's been cracked, and we know how to get the kernel.
The next project for the team is a film of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy. We can't freaking wait to see it.
Saturn's rings
Our Solar System is around 4.5 billion years old, and it didn't always look the way it does now. In fact, some of the changes we can see with our very own eyes. According to Cassini data, Saturn's rings are raining into the planet at an astonishingly fast rate.
"We estimate that this 'ring rain' drains an amount of water products that could fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool from Saturn's rings in half an hour," said planetary scientist James O'Donoghue of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center last year.
"From this alone, the entire ring system will be gone in 300 million years, but add to this the Cassini-spacecraft measured ring-material detected falling into Saturn's equator, and the rings have less than 100 million years to live."
Their research also suggested that the rings are young, only around 100 million years old, which means they would have formed during the Cretaceous. That's a matter of debate, but still pretty crazy to think about. In cosmic timescales, it's barely the blink of an eye.
Planetary scientists also think Jupiter once had thick, lush, Saturn-style rings that have since clumped together into the Galilean moons. Now it just has a few thin trace rings left, like the ghosts of rings.
We don't know how planetary rings form, but being here on Earth in this time, when multiple stages of ring lifespans are still in the Solar System, is an incredible coincidence that is helping us to slowly unravel their secrets.
Gravitational wave astronomy
In his theory of general relativity published in 1915, Albert Einstein predicted that massive events would send light-speed waves rippling through the fabric of spacetime, like the ripples that spread across the surface of a pond when you drop a rock in (but in three dimensions).
At that time, our technology was not yet at a level that could detect these minuscule disturbances… but, fast forward 100 years and on 14 September 2015 humanity made its first detection of gravitational waves from two colliding black holes - not only proving the existence of gravitational waves, but of black holes.
That first discovery kicked off an entire new field of gravitational wave astronomy. Since then, many more black hole collisions have been detected, and one spectacular collision between two neutron stars.
And there's more on the wishlist. Astronomers think that earlier this year they detected the collision of a neutron star and a black hole for the first time, which could tell us all sorts of things, such as confirming the existence of neutron star and black hole binary systems, and the rotation and axial tilt of both bodies - which can tell us how they formed.
Astronomers are also avidly hunting for what is called a "mass-gap" event, where one or both of the colliding bodies is in between the upper mass limit of neutron stars (2.5 times the mass of the Sun) and the lower limit of black holes (5 times the mass of the Sun).
We have never found a body in this mass gap, so the jury is still out on whether they'd be big neutron stars or teeny tiny black holes.
As you can see, we're only just starting to unravel the mysteries gravitational wave astronomy can reveal.
Onward and upward
The future looks even brighter. We're in the process of falling into a vast gravity well of knowledge. The next generations of space- and ground-based instruments are so much more powerful than their predecessors, from the space-based gravitational wave observatory LISA, Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, CHEOPS, WFIRST and ATHENA, to ground-based observatories to such as the Giant Magellan Telescope and the Square Kilometre Array.
We're stepping up our Solar System exploration, too. We're sending more probes and sample return missions to asteroids. NASA is sending a probe to Europa to look for signs of life. Humans are going to return to the Moon.
And genuine plans are underway to send humans to Mars.
At this point in our time in this Universe, we are like a diver poised on a precipice, or a bird about to fly - raised high by an entire ladder of giants. Space is out there, and it's huge, and it's full of potential and discovery. It's an absolute, awe-inspiring wonder, and we are honoured to experience it.
The writer and director made comments during an interview where he also said he “better not be a man”.
Talking to the Independent, Gilliam said: “Yeah, I said #MeToo is a witch hunt - I really feel there were a lot of people, decent people, or mildly irritating people, who were getting hammered. That’s wrong. I don’t like mob mentality.
“I understand that men have had more power longer, but I’m tired, as a white male, of being blamed for everything that is wrong with the world - I didn’t do it!
“I’m talking about being a man accused of all the wrong in the world because I’m white-skinned. So I better not be a man. I better not be white. OK, since I don’t find men sexually attractive, I’ve got to be a lesbian. What else can I be? I like girls. These are just logical steps.”
It is not the first time Gilliam, known for films such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas starring Johnny Depp and 12 Monkeys starring Brad Pitt, has made controversial comments.
Speaking at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, in 2018 Gilliam said: “You know I no longer want to be a white male and be blamed for everything; I tell the world I am a BLGT, Black Lesbian in Transition and my name is Loretta.
“Comedy is not assembled – a boy, a girl, white, black, a dog… I want to be trans-species. Transgender is not enough.”
Gilliam is currently promoting latest movie The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which is loosely based on the seventeenth century novel written by Miguel de Cervantes.
The film, which stars Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce, is released in the UK this month.
