November 4, 2023

Saturday, November 4, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Joe is always busy.

Women.

FACT SHEET: Release of the White House 2023 Women, Peace and Security Strategy and National Action Plan.

The Economy.

New York Times - U.S. employers added 150,000 jobs last month, falling short of forecasts.

Employers added 150,000 jobs in October on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department said on Friday.

The increase was slightly below what economists had forecast, but not too different from the sort of monthly jobs growth the U.S. economy was experiencing prepandemic.

The S&P 500 opened 0.4 percent higher and continued to rally, putting the index on course for its best week this year. The rally was broad based, showing optimism in the market following the jobs data. The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies that are more sensitive to the ebb and flow of the economy rose nearly 2.7 percent on Friday morning.

Guns. Lewiston.

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Kamala is always busy.

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Israel-Hamas War.

The President of Israel: This Is Not a Battle Just Between Israel and Hamas by Isaac Herzog.

I write these lines from Jerusalem, after spending time with the families of some of the 240 people kidnapped by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7. The hostages now held in Gaza include Jewish Israelis, Muslim Israelis and foreign citizens of different ethnicities.

In all my years of public life, the meetings with these families were the most difficult and fraught I’ve ever held. I’ve also spoken with families of some of the more than 1,400 of my people who were killed that day, many of them murdered in their living rooms and kitchens or dancing at a music festival. When I returned from one kibbutz devastated in the attack, I had to wash the blood off my shoes.

Tragedy is part of Israeli life, and I knew it would be part of my time as president. But none of us imagined a tragedy like this.

Against our will, we in Israel find ourselves at a tipping point for the Middle East and for the world and at the center of what is nothing less than an existential struggle.

This is not a battle between Jews and Muslims. And it is not just between Israel and Hamas. It is between those who adhere to norms of humanity and those practicing a barbarism that has no place in the modern world.

Just like ISIS and Al Qaeda, the Hamas terrorists who attacked Israeli homes and families had no qualms about burning babies. They tortured children, raped women and destroyed peace-loving communities. They were so proud of their deeds that they made sure to capture them on video and even broadcast them live. These videos will forever remain a stain on those Palestinians and their supporters who celebrated that day and a testament to the depravity of the terrorists and of the ideas that inspired them.

But almost as disturbing for me is the realization that many in the world, including in the West, are willing to rationalize these actions or even support them outright. In the capitals of Europe we’ve seen rallies supporting the total destruction of Israel “from the river to the sea.” Professors and students at American colleges make speeches and sign statements justifying terrorism, even glorifying it.

We’ve heard certain governments fail to denounce Hamas, instead condemning Israel’s response and even seeking to offer justification for Hamas’s atrocities. It would have been unthinkable to hear such moral confusion uttered after the Sept. 11 attacks or after bombings in London, Barcelona and Baghdad. When I spoke to a joint meeting of Congress this year, I said terrorism “contradicts humanity’s most basic principles of peace.” It turns out that not everyone agrees.

All of this shows that this collision of values is happening not just here in Israel but everywhere and that the terrorist ideology threatens all decent people, not only Jews.

History has taught us that foul ideologies often find the Jewish people first — but tend not to stop there. We find ourselves on the front lines of this battle, but all nations face this threat, and they must understand that they could be next.

Since Hamas forced this war on us, our military has been acting to permanently eliminate this unbearable threat and to enable the return of our hostages. This means fighting in the battlefield that Hamas has created in Gaza over many years — one in which terrorists hide behind and within the civilian population. This is a battlefield with terrorist tunnels under civilian streets, one in which civilian casualties are not avoided at all costs but rather encouraged by Hamas in order to draw global sympathy and blunt Israel’s response. Not only does Hamas store rockets under schools and homes; our intelligence and the confessions of captured terrorists show that the Hamas command center is hidden under Gaza’s central hospital.

The result of these sickening tactics is the civilian suffering we are all watching unfold. Many reports of the humanitarian difficulties in parts of Gaza are unverifiable, but there is real suffering, and it concerns us, too. These are our neighbors, and our full withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 was meant to give them free lives and open the door for peace. To our dismay, Hamas and its many Palestinian supporters chose otherwise.

Even as Hamas fires hundreds of rockets at our cities and as our soldiers fall in battle, we’re making an effort to give early warning to civilians with leaflets and phone calls, to move them out of the main battle zones and to enable humanitarian aid through Gaza’s border with Egypt. Hundreds of aid trucks are now arriving, with more expected each day.

But anyone who thinks the cynical exploitation of civilian suffering will tie our hands and save Hamas this time is wrong. For us and for the Palestinians, the suffering will end only with the removal of Hamas. Anyone trying to tie our hands is, intentionally or not, undermining not only Israel’s defense but also any hope for a world where these atrocities cannot happen.

In the months and years before the Hamas massacre, we began to see signs of the emergence of a better Middle East, from the Persian Gulf to North Africa — one inspired by progress and partnership, one in which Israel could finally feel at home among our neighbors. Will this be the world that emerges from this crisis? Or will it be the world desired by the murderous fundamentalists of Hamas?

These questions will be key among the strategic issues on the agenda in our discussions with Secretary of State Antony Blinken during his visit to the region beginning Friday — as they were during the visit to Israel of President Biden a few weeks ago.

Much is at stake at this moment, not just the future of Israel. On Oct. 7 we were all jolted awake and presented with a shocking challenge to our hopes and morals. How we meet this challenge will shape our future. (Op-Ed, New York Times).

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in Israel, asking for “Humanitarian pauses.”

After talks with Netanyahu, Blinken said a temporary halt was needed to boost aid deliveries and help win the release of the hostages Hamas took during its brutal incursion nearly a month ago.

But Netanyahu said he told Blinken that Israel was “going with full steam ahead,” unless hostages are released.

U.S. officials say they are not seeking a cease-fire but short pauses in specific areas to allow aid deliveries or other humanitarian activity, after which Israeli operations would resume. Netanyahu has not publicly addressed the idea and has instead repeatedly ruled out a cease-fire.

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15 years ago today, Obama accepted that he won the election.

What a day that was.

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From Congressman Jamie Raskin to George Santos.

Santos wrote thank you notes to all the Congress people who voted not to expel him. Congressman Raskin wrote back.

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Trump cases.

New York’s Attorney General Letitia James comments on Eric Trump’s testimony at the Trump fraud case.

Touch 👇 to watch.

Appeals Court Temporarily Frees Trump From Gag Order in Election Case.

The gag order, which was put in place last month by Judge Tanya S. Chutkan in Federal District Court in Washington, has now been frozen, reinstated and frozen again.

A three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Washington lifted the order for at least two weeks, freeing the former president to say what he wants about prosecutors and witnesses.

An appeals court in Washington on Friday paused the gag order imposed on former President Donald J. Trump in the federal case accusing him of seeking to overturn the 2020 election, temporarily freeing him to go back to attacking the prosecutors and witnesses involved in the proceeding.

In a brief order, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said the pause of about two weeks was needed to give it “sufficient opportunity” to decide whether to enact a longer freeze as the court considered the separate — and more important — issue of whether the gag order had been correctly imposed in the first place.

The panel’s ruling came in response to an emergency request to lift the order pending appeal that Mr. Trump’s lawyers filed on Thursday night. While the judges — all three of whom were appointed by Democrats — paused the gag order until at least Nov. 20 to permit additional papers to be filed, they wrote in their decision on Friday that the brief stay “should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits” of Mr. Trump’s broader motion for a more sustained pause.

The gag order, which was put in place last month by Judge Tanya S. Chutkan in Federal District Court in Washington, has now been frozen, reinstated and frozen again. The protracted battle, with its back-and-forth filings and multiple reversals, has pitted two visions of Mr. Trump against each other. (New York Times).

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Some people make the world more beautiful.

Renowned glass artist and the making of a giant church window featured in new film.

VALLE DE BRAVO, Mexico (AP) — It’s as if Narcissus Quagliata is painting with light.

He sprinkles the crushed, colorful glass onto a template of his own design before baking the powder-coated pane at nearly 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit for almost an entire day. Once cooled, a translucent, stained-glass image emerges.

“The light, with the glass, moves you to the core,” said Quagliata, an 81-year-old master of his craft, on a recent day at his studio in Valle de Bravo, near Mexico City. “It’s profound.”

Over the last five decades, Quagliata has created these stained-glass artworks for sacred spaces, private homes and public exhibitions, using a fusible glass technique he considers his most precious legacy.

The scope of Quagliata’s invention can be seen in “Holy Frit,” a documentary recently released in U.S. In the film, the Italian artist serves as a mentor-like figure for Tim Carey, a young American colleague who found himself facing the greatest challenge of his artistic career.

In 2015, Carey was appointed lead artist for a colossal project, a stained-glass window more than 90 feet long and nearly 40 feet high for a new church building in Leawood, Kansas. By 2017, “The Resurrection Window” would become the focal point in Resurrection’s sanctuary – the home base for the largest United Methodist congregation in the U.S.

“My hope is the window acts like a sacrament, as a visible means of grace through which God communicates and says: I’m here,” Hamilton said in “Holy Frit.”

But first Carey needed to figure out how he and his team would pull off the 161-panel window, with each panel measuring 4 feet by 5 feet, in a few years’ time.

Carey created 76 sketches before getting the pastor’s approval. What he kept silent, though, was a technical dilemma: he had no idea how to mix more than one color in a panel, as his sketch proposed. So, he called the maestro.

“Narcissus is like the Steven Spielberg of stained glass,” Carey said in “Holy Frit.”

Before Quagliata perfected his fusing technique, stained-glass panels primarily were separate pieces held together by lead strips. A few artists tried to merge colors with extreme heat, but most failed.

It’s simple chemistry, Quagliata said. Each color possesses minerals which determine its cooling temperature, so even if blue and red could fuse inside an oven, the glass would break up in the end.

“Fusible glass means you can create an image with glass and no lead,” Quagliata said. “You can use 80 colors and it won’t break”.

Though he had spent the last four decades mastering his craft, “The Resurrection Window” made Quagliata nervous. He had never before depicted 90 human figures in fusible glass.

The power of light and glass struck him in the 1960s, soon after he left Rome to become an artist in the United States. Walking through the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, 19-year-old Quagliata saw works by painter Marc Chagall and was hit with a powerful dose of inspiration.

Before long he moved to California, where the surge of the Arts and Crafts Movement convinced him to let go of his dreams of becoming a traditional painter like Picasso and embrace painting through stained-glass instead.

“I kept thinking: What I would do with red glass, with blue glass?” Quagliata said.

In “The Resurrection Window,” Christ’s skin is yellow. Light-red patches frame the nose. Bright layers of purple, pink and green coat his eyes. The design was Carey’s, but the subtle fusion of colors was Quagliata’s work.

Members of the congregation wept on the day the panel was hung in the church.

“Fusing glass is spontaneous,” Quagliata said. “It awakens a genuine feeling that is rare in religious painting.”

In the glassworks and watercolors that he keeps in the studio where he has lived since the early 2000s, no religious motifs can be seen. A masculine figure in red portrays a prisoner, while a blue profile depicts what could have been a Greek sculpture sunk by the Romans in the sea.

“My career is defined by three things: the first one is the light; another one is the love for the human figure – very beautiful or very distorted – and finally the approach towards something social.”

“The Resurrection Window” took a while to complete, but The Dome of Light, in Taiwan, which holds a special place in his heart, took even longer. The stained-glass piece is made of 1,152 panels, distributed along 30 meters (98 feet) in diameter, and it took Quagliata and his 20 assistants five years of hard work.

“When I came back, I was depressed for months,” Quagliata said. “It was like winning the Olympics and coming back to perform in a local race.”

What took him out of his sadness was answering a question: When was I the happiest as an artist? And it became clear. He was young and could barely pay his studio’s rent, but he was energetic and the faith he put in his glassworks was enough to devote his life to them.

“I told myself, instead of thinking about the past, think about what you want in the future and do it as adventurously and passionately as you did when you were young,” Quagliata said.

And so, he learned how to teach remotely. He faced his fears of technology and – coached by his daughter, an experimental video artist — he started crafting a digital masterclass.

He also remodeled his studio and says he hopes to take in students from abroad.

“I’m more than 80 now, so I don’t like to travel anymore,” Quagliata said. “But if I’m healthy, instead of going out to the world to teach, I’d love the world to come to me.” (Associated Press).

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I am taking tomorrow off. See you on Monday.

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