(Reuters) – A magnitude 7.3 earthquake with a depth of 10 km struck Malango in Solomon islands on Tuesday, the United States Geological Survey said.

A tsunami warning was issued after the earthquake.

Mexico detained more than 16,000 migrants in a four-day span, including nearly 5,000 Venezuelans, the country’s National Institute of Migration (INM) said Monday.

The INM said 16,096 migrants from 46 countries were detained in 22 Mexican states between Nov. 17 and 20.

The majority of the migrants were from Central and South American countries, including 4,968 Venezuelans, 2,987 Guatemalans, 1,385 Nicaraguans, 1,311 Hondurans and 1,285 Ecuadorians.

The government agency said it increased services via migrant attention centers in several states including Aguascalientes, Chiapas, Durango, Hidalgo, Puebla, San Luis Potosi, Veracruz and Zacatecas due to an influx of migrants and they dangers they face including traffickers and increasingly cold temperatures.

U.S. President Joe Biden has struggled with record numbers of migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border during his presidency – including 187,000 Venezuelans just in fiscal year 2022.

U.S. authorities last month had announced a plan, agreed to with Mexico, to return some Venezuelan migrants who enter the U.S. illegally to Mexico. Earlier this month, however, a judge from the U.S. ruled unlawful the pandemic-era order known as Title 42, used to expel migrants to Mexico, complicating Biden’s strategy for deterring border crossings.

Since then, thousands of migrants have been found camping in poor conditions elsewhere in Mexico. In Oaxaca state, about 12,000 people, largely from Venezuela, were found sleeping on wooden crates, on sidewalks, and in residents’ houses and backyards.

Elon Musk is now tweeting explicit images of Trump as a monk tempted to have sex with with Twitter. It’s the kind of inappropriately offensive tweet that one might or might not consider reporting to Twitter, if not for the fact that it was posted by the owner of Twitter. And therein lies the conundrum.

Musk seems to be having the kind of mental breakdown where literally everything is funny to him. He keeps posting one increasingly unhinged tweet after another, including one in which he inserted his own face into a Brokeback Mountain meme. Each of these tweets is only serving to ensure Twitter’s lost advertisers won’t come back, drive down the value of Twitter and his own overall net worth, and reduce the selling price that he could get for Twitter if he does end up having to sell it in a fire sale to try to salvage some fraction of his own evaporating fortune. But Musk doesn’t seem to care, because everything is funny to this maniac, and so it doesn’t matter how much it harms him.

Lock out Twitter employees? That was a hoot. Promise to appoint a committee to decide whether Donald Trump will be back on the platform, only to then turn around and let it be decided by a bot-ridden Twitter poll? Hilarious. Bank on Trump coming back and making the platform more active, only for Trump to decide he doesn’t even want to come back? Musk is rolling in the aisles laughing, even as it all falls apart for him.

At the rate Elon Musk’s psyche is imploding, he might finish himself off before he can finish off Twitter. This is a guy who, in all seriousness, would likely be in psychiatric custody by now if his (rapidly dwindling) fortune weren’t providing him a (temporary) buffer from that fate.

This guy could well be entirely non-functional within weeks or days. What’s his next step, running up and down the streets and getting into arguments with fire hydrants? That’s not an attempt at making fun of whatever mental illness is causing him to unravel. It’s just that his online behavior (and financial behavior) is becoming so incoherently insane, it’s difficult to imagine that incoherently insane behavior in the real world won’t be his next step. Then what? Will a court appointed conservator end up taking Twitter away from him?

There’s really no precedent for this. Even when billionaire Howard Hughes famously suffered severe mental decline and his behavior became incoherently erratic, he still didn’t try to actively destroy his own fortune just for laughs. We’ll see where this goes. But if Musk is unraveling as quickly as his behavior suggests he is, we may find out where this is going sooner than one might have expected.

The post Completely unhinged appeared first on Palmer Report.

Colorado Springs officials on Monday identified the five shooting victims who died and the two heroes who prevented further bloodshed at the LGBTQ nightclub where a gunman opened fire on Saturday night.

Another 17 people were wounded by gunfire in the rampage. Police said they had yet to determine a motive, but the city’s mayor and LGBTQ rights groups said the attack bore the hallmarks of a hate crime.

The suspected shooter, a 22-year-old man, remained under arrest at a hospital, presumably for injuries sustained when a decorated former Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran pummeled him in a successful effort to stop the assault at Club Q in Colorado’s second-largest city.

Club Q, one of the only places for LGBTQ people to gather in Colorado Springs, attracted a diverse crowd of queer people and straight allies. On Sunday, which was Transgender Day of Remembrance, the club was planning to mark the occasion with a “drag brunch” and a nighttime show “with a variety of gender identities and performance styles.”

Officials at a news conference declined to say what the suspect may have revealed about his motives, but they expected to file formal criminal charges later in the week once he is out of the hospital.

The suspect, Anderson Lee Aldrich, was known to law enforcement, having been arrested in June 2021 after his mother reported he threatened to detonate a bomb and harm her with multiple weapons, according to a news release from the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office.

Colorado Springs Police Chief Adrian Vasquez instead tried to focus Monday’s news conference on the victims. He identified the dead as Kelly Loving, Daniel Aston, Derrick Rump, Ashley Paugh and Raymond Green Vance.

“We strive to give the victims the dignity and respect that they deserve,” Vasquez said, providing the victims’ preferred pronouns.

Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers also paid tribute to the heroes who rushed the shooter: Richard Fierro and Thomas James.

Fierro is a U.S. Army veteran who did three tours of duty in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. Fierro rushed the shooter, pulled him to the ground, then grabbed the gunman’s pistol and hit him with it, his wife said by text.

“Rich injured both his hands, knees and ankle as he apprehended the shooter. He was covered in blood,” Jess Fierro said.

Fierro, who had gone to celebrate a birthday with his wife, their daughter and some friends, was unable to save his daughter’s boyfriend, Raymond Green Vance.

Vance, 22, had never been to the club before but was supportive of the LGBTQ community, his family said in a statement.

“He had just gotten a new job at a Colorado Springs FedEx distribution center, and was thrilled to have received his first paycheck,” the family statement said. “He couldn’t wait to save enough money to get his own apartment, but in the meantime he lived with his mother and younger brother who adored him.”

Others families of the deceased offered tributes as well.

Kelly Loving’s sister, Tiffany Loving, said simply, “My sister was a good person. She was loving and caring and sweet. Everyone loved her. Kelly was a wonderful person.”

Ashley Paugh’s husband, Kurt Paugh, described his wife as his high school sweetheart, an “amazing mother” of champion swimmer Ryleigh and someone who worked at a nonprofit that helps find homes for foster children.

“This included working with the LGBTQ community to find welcoming foster placements for children,” Paugh said.

Daniel Aston, 28, was a transgender man and bartender at the club who also performed in shows as a dancer, according to a Colorado Public Radio interview with his mother, Sabrina Aston.

“He was the happiest he had ever been,” Sabrina Aston said. “He was thriving and having fun and having friends. It’s just unbelievable. He had so much more life to give to us and to all to his friends and to himself.”

Derrick Rump was a Club Q bartender who was “what made Club Q,” Kayla Rene Cortes, a 26-year-old lesbian who has visited the bar for years, told the Washington Post.

“He was living his dream and he would have wanted everyone to do the same,” his mother, Julia Thames, told ABC News in a statement.

El Paso County District Attorney Michael Allen warned the investigation may be lengthy and declined to say what charges may be brought, but promised justice.

“The devastation this violent act has had in our community cannot be measured,” Allen said. “But we do know that we will respond to it in a strong way.”

Related Galleries:

The United States on Monday urged de-escalation of violence in Syria, U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in a statement, after tit-for-tat attacks by Turkey’s military and a Kurdish militia.

Price also said the United States continued to oppose “any uncoordinated military action in Iraq that violates Iraq’s sovereignty.”

SEOUL (Reuters) – Debate is brewing in South Korea over efforts to scrap a decades-old ban on North Korean media, as changing attitudes fuel renewed calls to review a national security law dating from the Cold War.

South Korea’s National Security Act blocks access to the North’s government websites and media, barring efforts at “praising, inciting or propagating” its activities.

The neighbours are still technically at war since an armistice put an end to fighting in the 1950-1953 Korean War, rather than a peace treaty.

“Article 7 forces people to harbour hostility toward the North as it suppresses anyone’s freedom to review North Korean materials,” said Jang Kyung-wook of Minbyun, a collective of human rights lawyers, referring to a key provision of the law.

Jang has defended some of those charged under the law, adopted in 1948 to target communism and last revised in 1991, but which was used to jail thousands of activists and defectors and even execute some during the South’s military dictatorships.

Violations of the law can be punished with jail for up to seven years, although enforcement has eased recently.

However, more than 45% of South Koreans support scrapping Article 7, with about 40% opposed, a survey by pollster STI showed in April 2021, before the Constitutional Court began reviewing petitions against it this year.

The U.N. Human Rights Committee has also repeatedly recommended repeal of the provision on free speech grounds.

In a report in July, the Unification Ministry, which is charged with handling ties with the North, told President Yoon Suk-yeol that gradually opening access to its media would foster mutual understanding on both sides.

The proposal has rekindled debate about whether South Korea, with its democratic system, economic dominance and cultural influence, driven by K-pop and global hits such as boy band BTS and the television show “Squid Game”, must still worry about North Korean propaganda.

‘COMMIE IN CHRISTIAN’S SKIN’

Despite the relaxed approach to enforcement, many progressive activists say the authorities still use the law to pursue them, stoking security fears for political purposes.

Jung Dae-il, a missionary who studied the ideology of North Korean founder, Kim Il-sung at a Christian think tank, published his memoir in the South, was arrested this month on charges of breaching the law after police raided his home in July.

“They labelled me a commie in a Christian’s skin, raising issue with more than 10 years of my work,” Jung told a rally in Seoul, the capital, after his release on Nov. 9.

Police did not respond to requests for comment.

Data from prosecutors shows 41 people were indicted in 2021 from among 250 accused of violating the law, down from 2013’s corresponding figures of 197 indicted from among 289 accused.

Opaque terms used in Article 7, such as “praise” and “incitement”, had allowed arbitrary interpretations, the the Constitutional Court said before its first public hearing on the law in September.

This had allowed iron-fisted regimes to abuse the provisions to silence dissenters and political foes, it added.

In a statement to the court before the hearing, the national rights watchdog had called the clauses vague, disproportionate and damaging to fundamental rights.

Most activities banned by the law are no longer considered a “clear and present danger” to South Korea, the watchdog said, citing “insurmountable military and economic differences and people’s awareness of democracy”.

Still the justice ministry has protested against plans to revoke Article 7.

“Evil consequences from the spread of pro-enemy expressions can only be healed at the expense of massive national damage and division,” it said in a statement, adding that the issue could not be left to “the ideological free market”.

Also joining the debate are many scholars and journalists, who have gained access to the contentious material through virtual private networks or proxy servers, who say such a move would benefit people’s right to know.

North Korean films, songs and other content are already widely available on YouTube and elsewhere, they added.

Opponents said Pyongyang’s propaganda machine could nurture more pro-North forces in the South, where a partisan divide is growing as a standoff over the North’s development of nuclear weapons stretches out.

“The North will likely produce television shows and publications specifically designed to sow more division in the South,” said defector Kim Tae-san, a former North Korean ambassador to the Czech Republic.

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Hello loyal readers. This just in from the folks at Substack HQ:

Congratulations!
You’re a Substack Bestseller

Well I’ll be!

“SpyTalk by Jeff Stein,” the email said, “is a Substack Bestseller with hundreds of paid subscribers.”

Of course, I get that this is a marketing trick. No better way to blow their own horn than to blow mine. And “hundreds” seems like a pretty low bar, considering so many truly big hitters here, like my friend Bill Bishop, the awesome proprietor of the all-things-China newsletter Sinocism, who recruited me here, and many, many others even better known whose circulation dwarfs ours. Still…

But there’s a crucial correction to be made, too: SpyTalk is not just “by Jeff Stein.” No, it could not have succeeded to the extent it has without the steady, important contributions of our contributors, folks like (in alphabetical order):

*Jonathan Broder, a former CQ foreign news editor, Newsweek writer and foreign correspondent for the A.P. and Chicago Tribune in the Middle East

*Matthew Brazil, a former US government officer in Beijing and co-author of the authoritative, Chinese Communist Intelligence.

*John Dinges, a former NPR News managing editor, Godfrey Lowell Cabot Professor of Journalism Emeritus at Columbia University, and author of The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terror to Three Continents.

*Peter Eisner, the much praised investigative author and former senior editor at New York Newsday and The Washington Post. 

*James Grady, prolific author of spy and crime dramas, starting with the iconic Six Days of the Condor (shortened by three days for the hit 1975 movie, still a perennial favorite).

*Maria Hartwig, professor of Psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Director & Co-Founder, Project Aletheia. She is an internationally recognized expert on deception, counter-deception, and interviewing and interrogation strategy.

*Gail Helt, a former CIA analyst on East Asia who now directs the security and intelligence studies program at King University in Bristol, Tennessee.

*Filip Kovacevic, a leading expert on the history of Russian intelligence at the University of San Francisco.

*Olga Lautman, analyst and researcher focused on Kremlin, organized crime, intelligence and Eastern Europe, and senior fellow at The Center for European Policy Analysis. Co-Host of Kremlin File podcast.

*Elaine Monaghan, former Reuters correspondent in London, Moscow, Kyiv, Minsk, Kosovo and Ireland, and Washington columnist for The Times. Co-author of On The Brink, the memoir of CIA officer Tyler Drumheller.

*Jefferson Morley, a former Washingtin Post editor and reporter and the author, most recently, of Scorpion’s Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate.

*Patricia Ravalgi, former staffer at the House Intelligence Committee, the FBI and the U.S. Central Command.

*Gus Russo, a nine-time author (including two books on the Kennedy assassination), documentarian, and musician. His latest book is his first fiction, Gaia.

*Elaine Shannon, the veteran national security correspondent for Time and Newsweek. Latest book: Hunting LeRoux (HarperCollins/Michael Mann Books)

and finally….

*C. Tatum, the pen name of a writer who observed efforts to evacuate Americans and Afghans from Kabul.

It took a village (sorry!) to take SpyTalk from zero on our launch date, Aug. 31, 2000, to where we are today. We certainly couldn’t have done it without the support of paying subscribers, who, like donors to their local NPR station, could read for free but think we’re doing something worth supporting with their wallets.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, all. Help keep us going.

Allbest, Jeff

When the first production of “Fiddler on the Roof” was in rehearsals, Jerome Robbins told Zero Mostel to stop kissing the set’s mezuzahs. It was too weird, too Old World, too … Jewish. Mostel, the show’s first Tevye, responded by crossing himself.

Point taken.

Mostel won the battle, and the gesture has lived on in countless performances — even one at Brigham Young University.

This anecdote, oft-repeated in documentaries and interviews, encapsulates a core tension behind the development of “Fiddler on the Roof”: how to keep the material authentic without alienating a largely non-Jewish audience. As “Wonder of Wonders” author Alisa Solomon found, clues to this anxiety can be found in production notes, with lyricist Sheldon Harnick, composer Jerry Bock and director-choreographer Robbins fretting over a certain schmaltzy “Second Avenue” quality.

In “Fidler Afn Dakh,” the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s Yiddish-language production, directed by Joel Grey, now in its third run and venue at New World Stages, the actors all reach for the mezuzah. It’s really a pantomime. Beowulf Boritt’s set of crinkled paper panels — suggesting the vellum of holy books rumpled by travel or pogrom — is decidedly minimal. The impression is one of transience, that a custom performed upon entering and leaving a home has more permanence than physical walls. In the end, this turns out to be true.

The mezuzah-kissing tells us we’re in a kosher hoyz; the Yiddish, as delivered by returning Lortel Award-winner Steven Skybell and company, particularizes what was designed to be universal. And yet, the tension remains. The soaring production, brimming with life and as unmissable as before, wrestles with two dueling traditions: the broad appeal of the original show and the specificity of an ethno-language that was once the lingua franca of most of the Jewish world, but is now spoken by only around 1 million people.

The opening number, “Traditsye,” plays out as you remember, with Shraga Friedman’s translation skewing more colloquial (tallis-katan, not “little prayer shawl”). But the underlying primer on shtetl society feels odd when delivered in this vernacular. Surely, Yiddish speakers know all this. Who is Tevye addressing? Landsmen or the broader world? If the latter, why would he expect to be understood? Perhaps he knows he’s flanked by Russian and English supertitles.

In an early draft of the Broadway show, “Tradition” was “We’ve Never Missed a Sabbath Yet,” and followed Golde’s harried preparation for Shabbat. 

The creators ultimately eschewed this lived-in family scene for a community-wide crash course in traditional Jewish life. As Bock said, the new number “helped us get on the road to other people outside of the Jewish people being able to appreciate what our story was about.”

So what happens when “Tradition” becomes “Traditsye,” and we see what the song spells out demonstrated in subtler ways?

Jennifer Babiak (Golde), Steven Skybell (Tevye), Jodi Snyder (Fruma-Sore) and company in “Fiddler on the Roof” in Yiddish. Photo by Jeremy Daniel

Tevye’s muddled midrash is now strewn with erroneous attributions to Rashi. Jennifer Babiak’s Golde puh-puh-puhs the evil eye. (There’s a lot of superstitious spitting going on.) Tevye’s biddy-bums become a natural niggun in “Ven ikh bi a Rothschild” (“If I Were a Rich Man” — the new title is cribbed from a Sholem Aleichem story that doesn’t feature Tevye). 

You’ll hear, and read, such translation-resistant idioms as “like cupping can help a corpse” and the intuitive-in-context “Loy mitn alef” (as in “You want to marry this penniless socialist? Loy mitn alef. Absolutely not.”)

Choreographer Staś Kmieć has introduced new physical vocabulary to Robbins’ iconic staging by making use of traditional folk dances. Hodl’s solo “Far From the Home I Love,” when rendered as “Vayt fun Mayn Liber Heym” and sung by the wonderful Stephanie Lynn Mason, sounds like a wistful folk song Moyshe Beregovsky may have recorded on his journeys through Jewish villages.

The overall effect is a production that draws out the Yiddishkeit already bubbling beneath the surface, informed by Sholem Aleichem’s oeuvre and the collective historical memory of Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, Jerome Robbins and Joseph Stein, who wrote the book — and, of course, Mostel’s own indelible stamp.

The story of “Fiddler” is circular, and by the end, Skybell’s Tevye hitches his cart (his kingdom for a non-lame horse), lugging his belongings around the stage, three daughters lighter, but laden with a new ancestral trauma. An edict has expelled the whole community from Anatevka. They walk with their loads in a circle, mirroring the movements of the jubilant beginning — or, if you like, modern residents of Ukraine.

The wisdom of the original creative team, in centering the theme of tradition writ large, proves to be tamper-proof for almost any culture, even in its restoration to the mamaloshen. As Solomon noted of the translation, the text reaches a kind of apotheosis of scholar Jeffrey Shandler’s theory of “post-vernacular Yiddish,” in which the use of Yiddish words, with all their associations, take on a greater meaning than the words themselves for a non-Yiddish-speaking audience.

Why would Tevye tell us, in Yiddish, the things a Yiddish speaker would already know? Because at the beginning and the end, he is not merely the dairyman of legend. He is an ambassador from a past upended by the constants of Jewish life: disruption and reinvention guided by custom.

Of course he speaks in Yiddish, revels in and laments the passing of the old ways in Yiddish, dances and sings and petitions God in Yiddish. Yiddish — if not all Yiddishkeit — was a gutting cultural loss for countless Jewish families, the production makes clear, as others can’t. It’s a loss that goes beyond the duties of the mamas, papas, daughters and sons, and one that is also inseparable from how they lived.

A central joy of Yiddish “Fiddler,” which deserves a chance to travel to all corners of the diaspora (the pandemic canceled a planned international tour), is how it serves as a revival. From the old tradition, a new one emerges — from something even older.

The post Yiddish ‘Fiddler’ returns, a stirring reminder of Jewish loss and revival appeared first on The Forward.