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For Graciela Gómez Garcia, Ambassador of Mexico to Qatar, diplomacy is the art of building bridges to bring people together. Her experience tells her that the more one learns about other nations and cultures, the more one realises that all are but one humankind living in one planet. A senior career diplomat, Ambassador Graciela Gómez joined her duties in Qatar in August last year. She aspires to be one of the best female ambassadors for her country. Community spoke to the ambassador at length about her life, career and vision. Please tell us about your journey briefly. I was born in Mexico City and when I was 3, my family moved to Venezuela. I grew up there in a very diverse community surrounded by kids from different nationalities, cultures and religious backgrounds. From an early age, I dreamt of learning languages and travelling the world. In my first visit to New York, as a teenager, I visited the United Nations and was so inspired that I promised myself that one day I would be working there. At age 23, I joined the Mexican Foreign Service and since then I have had the honour to live and serve in five countries and on four continents. On a personal level, I have been married to my husband for 22 years and we have four children together. I love being a wife, mother and diplomat. My family is my inspiration to try to build a better world. How do you best define diplomacy? What are its basic tenets? For me, diplomacy is the art of building bridges to bring people together. My personal experience is that the more one learns about other nations and cultures, the more one realises that we are one humankind living on one planet that is our common home. Diplomacy is about nations working together for the common good and about solving our differences through dialogue and negotiation. A good diplomat has to be well informed about what is going on in the world and must develop excellent communication skills. Being a good listener is an art that one has to cultivate and in my experience, empathy is equally important. You cannot succeed in this career if you don’t care about people, as human beings are at the centre of our vocation. Finally, a diplomat has to be fully committed as this is a profession that takes over your whole life. What has been your most challenging career assignment? What are other highlights of your career? I have been privileged to have a career that has allowed me to explore the whole scope of diplomatic work: consular, multilateral and bilateral. All of my assignments have posed important challenges but have been equally rewarding. One of the highlights of my career was the first time I addressed a meeting of the United Nations in Vienna, and felt the unique responsibility of being the face and the voice of my country. My biggest challenge came on another occasion as I was heading the Mexican delegation at a regional conference in Costa Rica and I got informed that my grandmother had just passed away in Mexico. I was heartbroken but I had to comply with my schedule and attend various meetings before I could finally retire to my hotel room and cry. What is your take on Qatar-Mexico relations? How many expats from your country are living here and what professions are they in? On June 30, Qatar and Mexico celebrated the 45th anniversary of diplomatic relations. We have great achievements that make us proud but there is ample room to deepen our relationship and design our vision for the decades to come. I believe that talent is one of the best commodities that Mexico and Qatar can exchange. In addition to trade, I see plenty of opportunity for joint projects in areas such as agricultural production in arid zones, food security, and clean energy to name a few. We have nearly 600 Mexican nationals residing in Qatar. They are pilots, cabin crew, engineers, executives, entrepreneurs, business owners, football players, artists, hospitality and service workers, students, homemakers and professionals in different fields. They constitute a tightknit community and I am very proud of their achievements. Where does the bilateral trade currently stand and what are the potential areas for investment? In which areas Qatar can benefit from your country and vice versa? Bilateral trade has been growing steadily. In 2019, the value of our exchange reached US$ 134.7 million, an increase of 60% over the previous year, following on from a growth of 33% in 2018. We are committed to explore further opportunities in agro alimentary products particularly in those with more added value. In addition to investments in energy, we see potential in infrastructure, tourism, transportation, telecommunications and services. In order to achieve our vision we are encouraging closer contact and interaction between our business communities. What do you do in your leisure? What kind of books do you read, films you watch, and music you listen to? My favourite subjects are science and history. I love novels about historical events and international thrillers and I always appreciate a good recommendation to discover new authors. I truly enjoy watching historical films and I prefer movies over series as I inevitably end up watching too many episodes in one go. I am always listening to classical music as I find it ideal to think and write. In my free time, I have very eclectic tastes; I listen to a bit of everything and I love dancing to Latin music. As a hobby, I enjoy cooking as it is creative, relaxing and highly rewarding. How would you describe your experience of living in Qatar? What places do you venture out the most? My family and I arrived in Qatar late August 2019 and from the beginning we felt very welcomed. I found Qatari people to be very friendly and warm. The first six months I was very busy and then coronavirus happened, so sadly I haven’t really explored much of this beautiful country yet. In Doha, my favourite places are Katara Cultural Village and the Souq Waqif. I have become Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra’s biggest fan. Every week you can find me at the venues where it performs, whether it is the Opera House, the National Library or at the Qatar National Convention Centre. What piece of advice you will give to a budding diplomat? You have to love diplomacy, totally and unconditionally. Being a diplomat is a lifetime commitment. This career absorbs your private life and also that of your family. Your partner and your children’s lives will be determined by it. It brings immense satisfaction and provides you with unique opportunities but it also implies long periods far from home, friends and family. Personally, I never looked back and I cannot think of a bigger privilege than representing my country abroad. What is that one lesson in life that has always held you in good stead? One of my biggest lessons is to plan ahead and always be prepared for all kinds of scenarios. In diplomacy, you will constantly face circumstances that are full of uncertainty and whose outcome may be beyond your control. I am convinced that you will always be better equipped and more likely to succeed when you anticipate and design strategies for numerous situations. A corollary of this lesson is that it is always better to prevent a crisis than to manage one.  What are your future plans, especially after retirement? Professionally, I want to be the best leader for my team, and to keep learning from the people I admire the most. I want to be one of the best female ambassadors for my country, and to contribute to create better conditions for young women who want to be successful in diplomacy. At a personal level, I want to empower my children to pursue their dreams and to be happy with the paths they choose in life. When I retire, I see myself settling down with my husband in a small place by the seaside, dancing, writing and travelling the world. ‘Very proud of the way Qatar handled Covid-19 situation’ The coronavirus pandemic is probably the worst crisis that has afflicted humankind in the modern era. No country was prepared for its magnitude but I am very proud of the way Qatar authorities have handled the situation. They took containment measures early on, which allowed Qatar to delay the peak of infections. They also invested in intensive and targeted testing which resulted in early detection and effective treatment, and they introduced technology tools to trace contacts and prevent contagions. This strategy has been successful and explains that Qatar has one of the lowest mortality rates around the world. In the international co-operation arena, Qatar has assisted several countries, pledged generously to international organisations and I am very grateful because last month, Qatar announced a donation of $200,000 for medical equipment to support Mexico’s efforts against Covid-19. From the beginning of the crisis, the embassy has been translating into Spanish all the official directives to keep Mexican expatriates informed. We also published messages and videos calling our nationals to stay at home and now we are inviting them to keep the sanitary precautions in the reopening phase. The authorities did their part and we have to do ours. Together we will succeed against the virus.

Though there is a great degree of uncertainty in the world because of the coronavirus outbreak, people continue to show resilience and perseverance while trying to move on with their lives. Qatar has already established itself as a hub of artistic and cultural activities. While the novel coronavirus pandemic has put a halt on large gatherings and art events, both authorities and artists continue to find virtual and electronic platforms to showcase their creativity. ‘The Colours of Desert 2020 - 7th Edition’ is a series of annual exhibitions that highlights different aspects of Qatar through creative works. Its last six editions have earned immense appreciation for portraying different colours of life in Qatar. This year the annual exhibition of MAPS International, a Doha-based social art community, will go virtual in August due to the current Covid-19 pandemic situation. The exhibition will be organised via personalised virtual gallery in collaboration with Katara Cultural Village. The Exhibition will be based on the theme of ‘Qatar – Road to 2022.’ The registration for the artists is currently underway. Artists based in Qatar and the foreign participants of earlier Qatar International Art Festival exhibitions, also organised by MAPS International, can take part in the upcoming virtual exhibition. The eligible media include; painting, photography, mixed media, oil/chalk pastels, block/ink print, pottery/vessels, sculpture, digital art, collage, metal work, fibre/textile art, wood work, and contemporary craft. Lina al-Aali is the curator of the exhibition. She is an artist, author, certified trainer and former member of the Board of Directors of the Qatar Society of Fine Arts. Sharing her views on the upcoming exhibition with Community, she said: “Any exhibition is a chance for any artist to show their talents, especially with organiser like MAPS International. They are not only considering artists based in Qatar but also from aboard to strengthen the Qatari identity. The exhibition is also aligned with the concept of different colours of desert.” About the online exhibitions, Lina said: “The online exhibition is inviting those artists interested to contribute towards developing the content of these electronic exhibitions, which will be displayed after the completion of collection, arrangement and organisation of art pieces on the Katara website. These exhibitions include topics that explore the composition of the final art including, the story of the Qatari cuisine, eco-habitats and natural life. These exhibitions provide a platform for the exchange of creative ideas that can contribute to reducing the negative effects of the coronavirus pandemic.” Rashmi Agarwal, president of MAPS International, said: “There are different colours in a desert. The exhibition highlights the diversity of life and culture in Qatar. The artists show their love and loyalty towards Qatar. We are expecting over 75 artists from 25 different countries to take part in the exhibition. The theme for this exhibition is very important. The artists will creatively portray the journey of Qatar to 2022. No doubt, destination is very important but the journey to reach the destination is equally important.” Rashmi expressed her enthusiasm about the 7th edition of the exhibition by highlighting the significance of the digit seven in the universe and life. “Seven is the number of completeness and perfection – both physically and spiritually. It derives much of its meaning from being tied directly to God’s creation of all things. The number seven is much more prevalent in nature than most of us realise. There are seven colours in a rainbow; seven oceans; seven continents; seven vertebrae in the neck; seven layers of skin – two outer and five inner; ocean waves roll in sevens; sound has seven notes; there are seven directions; seven days in a week; the earth was created in seven days; a cube has seven dimensions; and so on.” Highlighting the support the community of artists gets from Katara, she said: “I am really thankful to Katara for their continuous support and encouragement. They have always been helpful and supportive through all our previous exhibitions. It would not have been possible without the collaboration of Katara.” 

Last month, dozens of protesters squared off against 50 police officers in riot gear at the Georgia Capitol and began to chant. “Tear down Gordon! Tear down Gordon!” The target of their ire was the regal figure of Confederate General John Brown Gordon, a former Georgia governor, senator and a white supremacist who is generally regarded as a state leader of the Ku Klux Klan in the years following the Civil War. The statue depicts Gordon in his Confederate uniform astride his horse, and has held a prominent spot on the statehouse lawn since its unveiling 113 years ago to a throng of white Atlantans and a band playing Dixie. Gordon remains, but Confederate statues across the Southeast are falling, including the court-ordered removal of a 112-year-old obelisk from the Decatur square June 12. Gone, too, is the contextual marker, placed just last year, that informed visitors the monument was erected to “glorify the ‘lost cause’ of the Confederacy.” Likewise, on June 30 Rockdale County removed a 1913 Confederate monument from the courthouse lawn in Conyers, and officials in Henry County officials voted July 7 to take down the memorial on McDonough square. While President Donald Trump and others have called the removals an attempt to erase American history, historians have long discounted Confederate memorials as accurate representations of the Civil War. Erected in most cases decades after the war ended, the monuments better illustrate how white southerners sought to rewrite history and impart noble motives to the dead, they say. “I’ve been studying history in some ways all my life. I’ve been doing it professionally for over 30 years, and I can’t say that I’ve ever learned much history at all from a monument,” said Kenneth Noe, Draughon Professor of Southern History at Auburn University. “Those aren’t the sources we use.” University of Alabama history professor Hilary Green was succinct. “Monuments do a very poor job in talking about history,” she said. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution spoke to five historians who specialise in Civil War and Southern history about calls to remove Confederate statues many consider a vestige of segregation and white supremacy. William Sturkey, a professor of Southern history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said white Southerners erected the monuments decades after the Civil War in a bloody campaign to reassert white supremacy and strip Blacks of newly earned freedoms. “People that make the argument that taking down monuments is erasing history truly have no idea how much history has been erased,” he said. “These activist organisations (who erected the monuments) sought to reshape history, reshape the meaning behind the Civil War, reshape what happened during Reconstruction, reshape the participation of African Americans in the history of this region and in our country. Those were the people who were actually erased.” More and more local leaders are reflecting that academic perspective as they confront controversies over memorials in their own communities. Last month, the Kennesaw City Council approved a resolution removing the Confederate battle flag from a war memorial on the city’s Main Street. Mayor Derek Easterling said the decision was met with overwhelming approval from local residents. He said addressing these monuments isn’t erasing history. “Removing a statue is not going to change how people feel,” he said. “It’s not going to change what happened.” But he said local leaders can take actions to address the message monuments send. In the case of Kennesaw, the council removed the Confederate battle flag, replacing it with the flag flown during the Civil War, an action designed to remove the most controversial element of the display. A historical reckoning Thomas Brown, a history professor at the University of South Carolina and scholar on the role of monuments in American culture, said the ground is shifting rapidly since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis refocused the nation’s attention on institutional racism. And popular opinion on the meaning and relevance of Confederate memorials has shifted too, he said. “The community that put up the John Gordon statue in 1907 is not the community that will debate its fate today,” he said. “I do think it could be a healthy discussion for Atlanta now.” Forty-four of Gordon’s living descendants are among those who have joined the discussion, noting in a letter to Republican Governor Brian Kemp that the “primary purpose of the statue was to celebrate and mythologise the white supremacists of the Confederacy.” The descendants want Kemp to remove it. Legally removing Confederate monuments in Georgia is difficult. A Senate bill Kemp signed last year forbids the removal of monuments, markers, plaques and place names dedicated to “historically significant military, religious, civil, civil rights, political, social, or cultural events or series of events” or to honor military service, including in the Confederate Army. And it stiffened penalties for anyone who vandalises a monument. Yet, elsewhere in the Deep South, authorities are moving ahead. Last month, the University of Alabama removed a plaque and memorial boulder placed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1914 on the campus quad. Alabama has a law protecting monuments as well, but the university found a loophole in the law that allowed the removal of the memorial boulder. Similarly, DeKalb County removed the Lost Cause obelisk after a judge declared it a public nuisance. DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond, who has written books about Georgia history, ordered the removal of the monument, but he dismisses the idea that history is being erased. “I’ve spent a major portion of my adult life and even earlier researching and writing about the American Civil War. For me, it was and remains the defining moment in the history of our nation,” he said. But he said the monuments that were erected after the end of Reconstruction were put there to romanticise the South’s role in the Civil War as a heroic struggle, rather than a fight to preserve slavery. “The Southerners fought valiantly, but they fought for the worst cause any people have ever fought for,” he said. “There has to be some reckoning with that fact.” ‘Lost cause ideology’ Karen Cox, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, said historians have been “slow on the uptake” in considering the fate of the more than 700 Confederate monuments spread across the South. “There really (hadn’t) been a lot of discussion among historians until the Charleston massacre,” she said, referring to the June 17, 2015, mass murder of nine African Americans in a Black church in Charleston by a white supremacist. Noe said he believes the opinion of historians has evolved over the past five years. “If you had asked me several years ago what do we do with the monuments, I would have said, ‘Interpret them.’ That’s what we historians do, right? We interpret the past,” he said. “That has largely been rejected, and it was rejected by both sides.” Some of the outrage following the attack in Charleston slayings focused on symbols like the Confederate battle flag, the carving at Stone Mountain and several high-profile Confederate memorials from Richmond to Birmingham to New Orleans. Cox, who has published books on the movement to erect the monuments, said most of them were erected between 1890 and World War I as whites in Southern states sought to reassert their political and social dominance following Reconstruction. Cox said the monuments do have a historical meaning, just not for the Civil War. “What it teaches us is about the history of the Jim Crow period,” she said. “What it’s about is the generation of people who put those monuments up, who attended the unveilings, etc. It’s about their desire to memorialise the Confederacy and Confederate principles — things like states rights, things like white supremacy.” She said white leaders sent a distinct message to the Black community by placing many of the statues in front of the courthouse where trials were held and citizens registered to vote. “These monuments only represent a particular version of history. It’s one that is crafted in Lost Cause ideology,” she said, referring to the idea that the South cause in the Civil War was noble and just. “It’s not history as much as it is myth-making.” “They certainly speak to the culture of the times,” added Noe. “But it was a culture in which one segment of the population dominated another.” Before the flood of Civil War monuments were erected, Americans did not have much of a history of building such memorials. “John Quincy Adams famously said, ‘Democracy has no monuments. It strikes no metals,’” Brown said. For example, Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the most universally admired of the Founding Fathers after George Washington, had no statue to his memory until the mid-1850s. “It was a cultural form that had been developed in monarchical and imperial orders.” First markers in the north The soul-shaking death count of the Civil War changed that. “So many people died,” Brown said. “They died far from home, away from their families, violently at a young age, and most importantly of all, their bodies didn’t come back.” To commemorate the lost, Brown said local leaders began erecting monuments — in the North. “It is death that puts the public monument on the national landscape,” he said. But the proliferation of monuments decades later in the South took a somewhat different tone. And it did not go unnoticed by the newly freed African Americans and their children, Green said. “From the very beginning African Americans were openly hostile to this landscape because it is occurring in the time with disenfranchisement. It also is occurring in a time with lynching. It’s also coming at a time where Jim Crow realities are becoming real and that moment of Reconstruction is closing,” she said. “They are seeing themselves being erased.” Sturkey, of UNC, said African Americans resisted the erection of monuments “from the jump.” He pointed to one instance in Chatham County, North Carolina, more than a century ago. “Their Confederate monument was defaced within 10 days of going up in the early 1900s,” he said. “It was an African American who climbed the Confederate monument and poured tar over its face to protest the erection of that particular monument.” Green said that historical unrest is important to consider. While diverse groups of white and black protesters are gathering around monuments in cities across the nation, there has always been protest by Blacks who saw them as symbols of lost freedoms. “People rejected these from the beginning. These were never uncontested, neutral sites, and it is showing today,” she said. But as monuments fall, exciting cheers or boos from various corners, Green believes this is only the start of the labour of knitting a new American identity. “Taking down monuments is easy. Putting up monuments is easy. But having those difficult conversations that undergird the activists that led to the toppling? That’s the hard part. That’s going to take more time,” she said. “This is the start, not the end, of the conversation.”  — The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Atlanta, Georgia)

Natalie Erika James’ atmospheric thriller Relic is a film about inevitable and universal horrors. Robyn Nevin, Emily Mortimer and Bella Heathcote star as three generations of adult women grappling with matriarch Edna’s (Nevin) encroaching Alzheimer’s. The film, which is available now on video on demand and in select theatres (after an exclusive week at drive-ins), explores themes of mental and physical decline, abandonment fears and the cyclical nature of caregiving. “Both as a mother and a daughter, I feel there’s a lot of guilt, confusion and regret that goes along with being a caregiver,” said Mortimer, who plays Edna’s daughter Kay. “You always feel like you’ve given so much but you never feel like you’ve given enough. And I think that’s really brilliantly expressed in the film as part of that process.” The movie, which debuted to critical acclaim at Sundance in January, marks the Australian writer and director’s feature debut. The Times caught up with Natalie Erika James in advance of the film’s digital release to discuss the nexus of the idea, its similarity to vanitas paintings and the unexpected ways life imitates art. What inspired you to write this story? It came from a really personal place. My grandmother, who lived in Japan, had Alzheimer’s and I had taken a trip to go see her. She’d suffered from Alzheimer’s for some time and it was quite a slow decline, but that particular trip was the first time she couldn’t remember who I was. And it really had a deep impact on me because it’s obviously heartbreaking when someone who’s only ever looked at you with love is looking at you like a stranger. I felt a lot of guilt and regret at not having gone to see her more often. She’d lived in this traditional Japanese house that was probably 100-150 years old. I spent most of my summers there and it used to really freak me out as a kid. Especially because there was a lot of clutter in the upstairs rooms. It was one of those houses with the sliding closet spaces that kind of feel like small rooms in themselves. So I think a combination of those things was really the starting point for the idea. What attracts you to the horror genre? Probably the primal elements and how it affects you on an adrenal level. As a preteen and teenager, I’d always loved Asian horror. I think the first film I saw without parental supervision but with a bunch of friends was The Others. And it terrified me so much, but there is such a thrill and joy in experiencing that with a group of people. It’s not dissimilar to being on a roller-coaster ride. I used to have a lot of nightmares as a kid as well. I had a lot of sleep paralysis too, so I was very used to seeing scary imagery. I’ve known I’ve wanted to be a director since I was 13 but I never really (planned for) horror specifically or genre movies. I was more drawn to very dark, psychological dramas. So when I went to film school that’s where I started but slowly over time the stories had more horror elements emerging in them. Horror is the perfect vehicle to talk about fear. There’s something inherently feminine about the concept of caregiving and the relationships between mothers and daughters in particular. What made those ideas ripe for the horror treatment? Caregiving often falls on women. For me, the three women came naturally because it was my mother’s mother (who had Alzheimer’s) so those three generations were already present in my life. But we did initially have (male characters). I think Kay had a husband way back in the first draft and there was a brother (character). But over the course of development we really stripped that back and decided to focus on just the three women. I kind of like to think of the film as a vanitas painting in that vanitas art really focuses on motifs of the brevity of life and the inevitability of death. In some ways you can interpret the film as watching a woman in each stage of her life and that’s backed up by the cyclical nature of ageing and having children and growing old, having to care for them and then having them care for you. So it felt aesthetically and analytically appropriate. The characters spend most of their time trapped in a house while a mysterious illness goes around. How does it feel to have inadvertently tapped into what’s going on globally with the pandemic?  (Laughs) Yeah, I never could have guessed. We end on such an emotional note and it really is about the importance of human connection that actually feels all the more resonant because of this time. In terms of isolation, there’s this element of being physically stuck. In a sense the characters are really tied to the house in their love for Edna. And for Edna, (the house) is representative of everything that she has had in her life, all the happy times and everything she has lost. You really acutely feel the elements of the house that have fallen into decline and how much it hints at happier times. So I think there’s a lot tied up in being isolated or trapped and stuck in that sense as well. While many films have had to skip theatrical releases altogether, this one is playing in select theatres and in drive-ins where IFC has had some success releasing another horror movie, The Wretched. How do you feel about the format and about the theatrical experience in general? I think there’s always something really nice about seeing a horror film in the darkness of the cinema. There’s something brilliant about the communal experience and having to go through it with a group of people. I think IFC has done a tremendous job with turning a completely unpredictable situation into this really wonderful opportunity and I’m thrilled that it’s being shown at drive-ins. Mostly because of the sheer novelty of it, I don’t think we have half as many drive-ins in Australia. The only downside is that we didn’t anticipate it would be shown at drive-ins so we didn’t do any sort of drive-in grade. So I hope that things are still visible because it’s a very dark film intentionally.                   — Los Angeles Times/TNS

The situation resulting from novel coronavirus pandemic has affected people across the world. There are however, some who have been doing everything in their power to help those less fortunate. The virus hit Qatar in a similar way as it has in other parts of the world. Qatar however, is different in many positive ways. The government has worked hard to check the outbreak and minimise its economic fallout.  Further, there have been numerous individuals who reached out to people who needed support of all kinds. British expatriate Carolyn Collins is one of the many philanthropists who have been making sure that those who have been rendered jobless get enough food supplies to sustain themselves during these difficult times. General Manager at Roots Hair & Beauty Salon, Carolyn moved to Qatar in January 2018 to manage her sister’s salon. “We have been closed since the March 18 and during this period I have been busy ensuring Roots continues to be fully active on the social media. We have been promoting our product delivery service and keeping in touch with our team, our client base and all the women we support in our local community. In my spare time, I have been able to do more exercise as well as self-development with Mindvalley [an education technology company founded in 2002].  I have also been listening to audio books and podcasts to benefit both the business and myself.” In April, Carolyn became a part of the initiative launched by several women living in the Pearl. “They were collecting food for employees who found themselves with no salary and food, and some who were rendered homeless after their companies shut down. When I saw a message on one of my WhatsApp groups asking for food donations, I thought this was a wonderful initiative and offered to put it on our Roots social media platforms. At Roots we have a ‘Giving Back’ initiative where we collect toys and clothes. I offered to donate these items with some food I had bought. “A friend, Shray Presenger, asked me if I would like to drop food items off to a couple of families in need and it broke my heart to meet these families. From an initial three families, I then got swamped by amazing people within our community who wanted to help. In four weeks, I had delivered to over 100 groups in need. Some of them were groups of up to 75 people. I was storing the food in my bedroom. The donations were coming in thick and fast but so were cries for help, so I moved all the donations to Roots. For the past three months, I have been receiving all the donations at the salon and preparing the food to go out and organise volunteer drivers to drop them off to those in need. Some of the drivers have their own groups. An amazing guy called Paul Okubasu who is a fitness instructor in Doha, is out nearly every night till all hours delivering. It has become extremely organised and runs like clockwork.” The volunteer has been all praise for the generosity she has received from her community. “I have now dealt with over 400 groups and I personally liaise with most of the families with babies. I got involved in the families. I also receive so many baby donations such as formula, nappies etc. every week. We also have a large group of men we support in the Industrial Area. I also send food to a friend that supports many families in Al Khor. We have given food to every nationality, but the ones who have largely received the donations are from the Philippines, Kenya and Uganda.” Carolyn calls the experience of distributing food very humbling. “The most rewarding part of this initiative has been the deliveries; to be able to meet the people and children receiving the food in person is just so humbling and a fantastic experience and one I will always remember. “It has also been so uplifting to see how a community can pull together, stand strong and help the less fortunate. The pandemic has hit every single one of us. Many have no money to feed themselves and some have no accommodation. There are many people who have no means to pay for a flight to go to their home country. “I feel incredibly grateful and privileged to have been able to meet so many amazing people. All of us will reflect on this pandemic in different ways during our lifetime; however, I can honestly say I will be looking at this time with true gratefulness and gratitude for so many different reasons.” 

Gary Semel’s hands trembled in anticipation of the moment he had waited for four months. Finally, he could kneel down in front of Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World to propose to his girlfriend of two years, Tia Lovett, 50. They kissed, face mask to face mask, a love story in historic times, while a Disney photographer captured the moment. “I wanted to do it at Disney, and then it closed. I’ve been waiting very impatiently,” said Semel, 49, turning to his future wife. “I’m sorry that I took so long. I really wanted to do it here.” For the Jacksonville couple and many others, the return of Disney World on Saturday was a jubilant celebration. But the day brought only light crowds to the Magic Kingdom, which opened to the general public in tandem with Animal Kingdom. Epcot and Hollywood Studios will open tomorrow as Disney’s Orlando empire returns a month after Universal Orlando and SeaWorld. Not everything was magical. The resort’s revival is happening as the coronavirus pandemic surges. The state reported 10,360 new coronavirus cases Saturday, the third-highest daily increase, and 95 more deaths as Florida has become one of the nation’s major hot zones for the virus. When asked why Disney was opening now, executive Josh D’Amaro responded, “We are in a new normal right now, so what’s happening outside of the gates of Walt Disney World is our new world.” “We were one of the first theme parks to close, and we’ll be about the last to open,” he told CNN. “And we spent every minute of every day thinking about how to operate in this new normal that we’re in.” At the Magic Kingdom, all Disney employees wore face coverings, and workers with high contact with guests, such as ride operators, were equipped with clear face shields as well. Most visitors seemed to be obeying the required mask rule as well as markers meant to keep them 6 feet apart. Employees were observed enforcing the requirements. “We’re encouraged by our guests’ overwhelmingly positive feedback for our phased reopening and are grateful for their support of the new measures we’ve added,” Disney spokeswoman Andrea Finger said in a statement. Throughout most of the day, the most popular attractions posted 30-minute wait times or less, moving considerably faster than the sometimes hourslong lines of last year. A trip on Space Mountain had a 15-minute queue by afternoon. The biggest issues appeared to be early Saturday as the first guests arrived to face a long line for guest relations, apparently because of problems with electronic tickets. “This is not good,” said theme park journalist Carlye Wisel, depicting the moment on her social media account and calling it proof some things were working and others were not. For Disney and the other parks, coronavirus will be a long-term problem for the industry, warned Dennis Speigel, who runs Ohio-based International Theme Park Services. The virus ruined Orlando’s spring break. It’s already hitting the lucrative summer season, too, with no fireworks shot off for huge crowds on the Fourth of July or any day, for that matter, since mid-March at Disney. “I’m thinking based on where we are right now, reading the tea leaves, Halloween is a serious question,” Speigel said. “We’re going to be dealing with this (virus) this time next year, no question about it. This is with us for two years, easily.” For now, Disney loyalists can’t line up to get the best view of the daily Magic Kingdom parade. Guests can only see a lone float or a marching band spontaneously travel around the route as entertainment. Kids can’t hug Mickey Mouse or run up to Princess Elsa. “Disney World is a world very different than the one that closed back in March,” said Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “Going to Disney World for that experience in the past was so fundamentally defined by the very things that now have to be regulated.” For some people, this new theme park experience isn’t what they want when they plan a Disney World dream vacation, Thompson said. And for others, taking a selfie with a face mask on the Magic Kingdom’s Main Street will capture a historic moment in these strange times, Thompson said. It proves that you witnessed it. Bianca Jesus cried when she lined up to watch the fireworks and waved goodbye Mickey Mouse & the gang on March 15 as Disney World, which had never closed down for more than a day or so, went dark. She wasn’t alone in the outpouring of emotion. She vowed to come back on the first day back. Jesus, a tour guide who has lived off her savings during the pandemic, booked a Disney hotel room, even though she lives in Orlando, to guarantee advance reservation. Her spirits were so high Saturday, she said she didn’t mind wearing her mask on a hot day. She said she felt safe with Disney temperature screening visitors, the mask requirements and seeing employees enforcing the rules. Despite the changes from the pandemic, “it still felt like Disney,” Jesus said, after snapping selfies with Winnie-the-Pooh characters who posed on a restaurant porch, spread out from guests. “I’m so grateful to be here today.” Using its advance reservation system, Disney is limiting its crowds, but the company has not revealed how many people it will allow into the parks each day going forward. “We are taking a cautious and deliberate approach, which allows us to evaluate and adjust along the way, as the situation evolves,” Finger said. Some passholders seethed on social media that Disney still sold day-of tickets for $125 a pop on Saturday after they had invested $900 or more on their annual passes and still couldn’t get in. The limited supply of advance reservations distributed to passholders ran out by 7am, the day Disney issued them. For some, the frustrations are compounded that Disney mistakenly charged passholders on the monthly payment plan for four months in a row on July 3. Disney now faces two lawsuits over the situation. Magic Kingdom visitors who arrived before noon were treated to the wide-open spaces of Main Street and other lands of the theme park. Lack of crowd noise made the piped-in background music seem unusually apparent. The Dumbo ride was spinning, but only three cars were occupied. Visitors jockeyed along Main Street for pictures with a repainted Cinderella Castle as a background. It was harder to get a shot of the iconic building without other park goers in the scene, unlike previous lightly attended days where only annual passholders or Disney World employees could attend. Periodically, a booming announcement would courteously remind visitors to wash their hands frequently, keep their face coverings in place and maintain social distancing. Some restaurants and a smattering of stores were not open, perhaps a reflection of the low attendance cap. Most attractions were operating, but the park was absent some actor-driven experiences such as Story Time With Belle and some street entertainment. The Briar Patch, a store connected to the Splash Mountain ride, was closed. During an annual passholder preview, visitors had snapped up merchandise in the wake of the announcement that the attraction would eventually shed its Song of the South theme in favour of characters from The Princess and the Frog. Instead of an afternoon parade or up close character meetings, Disney has substituted appearances where Mickey Mouse, Goofy, assorted princesses and dancers glide down the streets waving at onlookers. “We love you, Tinker Bell!” yelled one woman as the Peter Pan sidekick passed near the castle. By midday a Florida standard had returned to Disney: the sudden thunderstorm. — The Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, Florida)/TNS

Debates over immigration and national identity dominate the political discourse in the Trump-era United States, but many Americans may be unaware that Australia has grappled with similar issues for decades. That’s about to change with the debut of Stateless, a Netflix series co-created by Cate Blanchett that dives into her home country’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. The drama is set during the mid-aughts, as wars in Iraq and Afghanistan sent thousands fleeing to other countries, including Australia, with the hopes of beginning a new life. The six-part series follows the unusual journey of Sofie (Yvonne Strahovski), an Australian flight attendant who gets involved in a cult, suffers a breakdown and mistakenly winds up in an immigration detention centre, where she claims to be a German tourist who overstayed her visa. At the centre — in a parched, economically depressed corner of South Australia — she is held along with hundreds of so-called UNCs (or unlawful noncitizens). These refugees include Ameer (Fayssal Bazzi), an Afghan man hoping to reunite with his family after a traumatic separation. Outfitted in a silver wig and sequins gowns, Blanchett has a small role as Pat, the singing-and-dancing wife of a charismatic cult leader played by Dominic West. As implausible as it may seem, Sofie’s story is partially inspired by the case of Cornelia Rau, a white Australian woman who was held in an onshore detention centre for several months and helped bring attention to the country’s severe immigration policies. Blanchett created the series with Tony Ayres and Elise McCredie. Though Stateless deals with subjects that remain deeply polarising in the US and Australia — and are explored in greater depth in an accompanying podcast called Post Play: Stateless — Blanchett insists the series is “not a piece of agitprop.” “It’s human drama. It’s not just delivering some political message. It’s asking more questions than it answers,” says the two-time Oscar winner, who was also an executive producer on this spring’s politically charged miniseries, Mrs. America. Blanchett and Ayres recently spoke via Zoom about the series and the difficult themes it explores. What made you want to get involved behind the scenes on this series? Is producing satisfying in a way that performing isn’t? Blanchett: The producers I truly admire are infinitely inventive. Some of them also happen to be performers or directors, as these skill sets are often interlinked. For me, it’s about balancing the pragmatic with the creative. Sometimes I am compelled to be involved in a project but know that to shoehorn myself artificially as an actor into that project would capsize or pervert the material. Then also knowing that if one is not in it, that certain financiers may not be willing to take a risk on the material. Some of the most fulfilling creative experiences I’ve had, the most fascinating conversations, have been in and around facilitating the work of others. It’s never been about what role I play, more the quality of the conversation. The idea for this series originated with a kitchen-table conversation back in 2013. Can you tell me about that? Blanchett: We were thinking about telling stories that were elephants in the room, so to speak — those stories that everybody needed to talk about. Drama is the most inclusive way to have those conversations. It’s the space for long-form empathetic examinations of quite complicated and confronting stories in any culture. Australia’s treatment of refugees over the last 20 years was one of those subjects that wasn’t being discussed. So we all wanted to find a way we could bring it back into the national conversation in a nonfear-based, inclusive way. Can you talk about the inspiration for this series and how you decided on setting it in the recent past — rather than the present day? Ayres: We decided that the best period to tell our story was looking at when Australia still had on-shore detention so that we could understand the current iteration. There were stories of Australian citizens that had been mistakenly put in detention, there were stories of people breaking out of detention, there were stories of Australian citizens who were standing up for refugees, and there were a lot of stories of trauma. Blanchett: It took a long time to find partners who were brave enough to look at the human drama behind the obviously political patina. For us, it was almost too hot and polarising and political to deal with what is still an ongoing situation in Australia and globally. So we decided to set it slightly back in time, almost as a prequel to offshore detention, when refugees were processed onshore so that we could reverse-engineer how we’ve got here. There’s so much about Australia that I am deeply proud of. So many of our cultural and scientific and athletic exports. But it’s been a great source of shame for me to hear the rhetoric around the building of the wall, the rhetoric around Brexit. The DNA of that is absolutely born inside of Australia. This has massive international relevance and resonance. We need to sort that out in our own country, but that language has absolutely been exported overseas. Why make Sofie one of the central characters? As a white Australian, she is not representative of the people who end up in detention. Blanchett: I had been inspired by my work as a goodwill ambassador for the (UN High Commission for Refugees) to shine a light on the human stories. Whenever I went on a mission with UNHCR, I would speak to mothers, to daughters, to sisters. The profound takeaway I had is that this could be me in different circumstances. That was something we carried into the DNA of the series. We wanted to find a window for people who hadn’t had interface with the refugee experience, to ask themselves, “What if it was my sister? What if it was me, what if it was my daughter who fell through the cracks as our character Sophie did in the mental health system, the judicial system and the immigration system and ended up by complete mistake inside one of these detention centres?” We felt like we could only create that through a middle-class, white Australian character. That was very deliberate. Ayres: The choice to enter the story with a white Australian woman was a form of Trojan horse. It was strategic: Who can we give to an audience that they can connect to? I think that Yvonne in particular is so extraordinarily empathetic in her performance. She brings us into the story, but then we hopefully will experience other people’s dramas within that, and the dramas of people who are not white. How did you develop the cult storyline and the character of Pat? Blanchett: I was happy to be involved as an actor in any way that would help the material, and Elise came up with the character where I got to sing and dance. The show is a lot about identity and what happens to the identity of citizens when they are separated from their humanity.  Cult Behavior 101 is you separate yourself from your family, from your past, and your future is reinvented. It’s all about being a new you, a better you, a you that is separate from anything that you did in the past. That was kind of a metaphor to what we saw happening in Australia. When Tony and Elise and I grew up, “Brand Australia” was built on multiculturalism (and) the welcoming embrace of refugees and asylum seekers. And we saw that atrophy and calcify and we use that metaphor of the cult to speak to that story. Ayres: For us, the idea of a cult where you are made all these promises of what you could be felt a little bit like the experience for the refugees — the promise of what Australia was, that you could escape the past, all of those things. It’s not a direct parallel, but those two stories resonated against each other for us. How conscious were you of trying to draw parallels between the situation in Australia and similar issues in the US and Europe? Blanchett: We’ve always been of the belief that if you make something deeply specific and true and accurate and well-researched, that it will have universal resonance. And that’s what we hoped the story would achieve. The only way to battle the pandemic is globally and yet we’re still labouring under this rhetoric of nation-building and how each country should deal with it in their own, individual way, but that’s not going to solve the problem. The global displacement crisis is not going to be solved by any one country, nor is climate change, nor is the pandemic. Ayres: In Australia, we compare how we’re dealing with the pandemic to the charts we’re seeing from America. That’s the problem — when it’s not a global issue.                   — Los Angeles Times/TNS

Hey, Los Angeles, can we get some decent “wear the damn mask” PSAs going already? On Thursday, Governor Gavin Newsom announced that the state would finally be initiating a public awareness campaign and, while I applaud the “wear a mask, slow the spread” effort, this really is a time for the private sector to step in and step it up. I mean, here we are, the centre of the entertainment industry, six months into a global pandemic and we’re still confining ourselves to #wearamask on Twitter? Relying on Matthew McConaughey and Jason from freaking Friday the 13th to get the word out? I mean, I love McConaughey as much as the next person, but he’s one man! Living in Texas! Are we going to let Texas beat us at the PSA game? Or, God forbid, New York, where Governor Andrew Cuomo held a contest, the winner of which was called “We Love NY”? Yes, OK, Newsom did convince some of his gubernatorial predecessors to do a PSA with him when he first made wearing masks mandatory in California — and no doubt his new campaign will be even better, but come on. Are we really going leave it to the government to start a trend? Where are the VSCO girls? Where are the product-placement experts? Where are the ad agency creatives and the celebrities who are not Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson? We need to make facemasks hot. As in Hydroflask and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee hot, roller-skating redux hot, Sriracha everything and AirPods hot. And we need to do it right now. California infection rates are increasing, especially in LA County, in large part because some people refuse to wear masks. (Reopening the bars probably didn’t help either.) I’m not going to argue about this — studies have shown that wearing a face mask decreases the chance of infection. Period. Hence Newsom’s statewide requirement. Yet everywhere you go there are people breathing all over everything exactly as if we were not in the middle of a pandemic with California infection rates rising. Don’t give me politics. Don’t (and I never thought I would say this) blame the president. He has not been a great model in this, but are we all walking around in ill-fitting blue suits, overlong red ties and way too much makeup? No, we are not. If Donald Trump doesn’t value his life enough to wear a mask, that’s his own issue. A virus has no voting preference. A virus is just looking for a warm body to kill. Meanwhile, those of us who do wear masks see this and wonder, “How can this be? Why are so many people ignoring the obvious solution to this terrible problem?” I don’t know, how hard was it to wear a seat belt? Or to stop flicking lit cigarettes into the brush and leaving campfires burning in the forest? How hard was it to quit thinking it was OK to throw bags of trash out the car window? Hard enough to warrant some fairly serious and successful PSA campaigns. Smokey the Bear has been warning us that “Only you can prevent forest fires” since the 1940s, and the 1971 “Keep American Beautiful” “Crying Indian” commercial (though problematic in many other ways including the fact that the “Indian” was portrayed not by a Native American but an Italian American) kept many bags of trash in the car, and is still considered one of the best ads of all time. These and other campaigns, including Woodsy the Owl (“Give a hoot, don’t pollute!”) helped modify many types of harmful behaviour over the years — but it’s the “Crash Dummies” series that provides the best “wear a mask” model. The federal law requiring seat belts in all vehicles passed in 1968, but by 1985, only 21% of Americans were using them. Car seats? Forget about it — kids just rolled around in the back of station wagons half the time. Then, in an effort to decrease the number of car accident fatalities, the US Department of Transportation partnered with the Ad Council to produces a series of ads featuring two crash test dummies. Over the next six years, Vince and Larry tried to explain, and often vividly show, the need for buckling up. Each spot ended with the memorable tagline “You could learn a lot from a dummy” and, in conjunction with the passage of many state laws, helped almost quadruple the safety-belt compliance rate. Creators Jim Ferguson and Joel Machak also won an Addy award, a Cannes Film Festival Bronze Lion, two Clios and a place in the Smithsonian. In case any creatives out there need further enticement. Because that’s what we need right now — “You could learn a lot from a dummy” for face masks. Not a bunch of boring former governors telling us to do it because “Californians look out for each other.” A fun but firm campaign with a clever tagline. Something a bit more user-friendly than, say, “wear a mask, you moron,” to make it easier for those of us who already got the memo to admonish non-mask wearers. (Children love taglines and are often the most consistent, and irresistible, social enforcers, as any former litterbug or smoker knows.) In a recent interview with my colleague Nita Lelyveld, seismologist and local patron saint of science Lucy Jones said flattening the coronavirus curve comes down to “Don’t share your air.” That could work. How about “if you want to bask, wear a mask”? Or “Going someplace? Cover your face.” Go tentpole-wide with “All superheroes wear masks”. And get lots of celebrities involved — in the PSAs and daily life. Stephen Colbert and Ellen DeGeneres have issued daily reminders to wear a mask, but maybe they should wear one too. I know, I know, they don’t have to since they are filming from their home, but there is definitely a disconnect between what we are seeing on TV during their shows and what we are being told to do, so maybe they could give it a go, just for an episode or two — just to show that wearing a mask will not actually cause a person to suffocate or break out in hives, that it need not change your ability to communicate or go about your “normal” life. Especially since both The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and DeGeneres are selling their own branded masks. Maybe the next big reunion of an old television show could feature a face-covered ensemble. Imagine the Hamilton cast singing My Shot in black masks. I’m just spitballing here, but you get the idea. We need to make masks a habit — a must-have, like a pumpkin spice whatever. Attraction plus repetition equals retention, which is pretty much the mandate of every television, film, music and advertising executive in this town. So instead of wearing out your Twitter and Insta feeds, creative geniuses, put your skills to work for good and get a “Got Milk?” type campaign going — one so good it will work on every platform. Me, I’m already a convert. I’m actually a huge fan of masks. They hide so many trouble spots, really make your eyes pop and prevent men from telling you to smile because no-one can tell if you are smiling or not! There are so many styles and fabrics to choose from, and as for making a statement, well, a baseball cap or T-shirt has nothing on a face mask. I mean, it’s on your actual face. I’m surprised that more companies, including, ahem, the Los Angeles Times, aren’t following Colbert, Ellen and, of course, Disney, in leveraging this opportunity — many more people are going to see a logo on a face mask than on a key ring or a smartphone case; let’s make face masks the free tote bag of 2020! Because God knows we do not need another tote bag! As for politics, there is no better way to say “Make America Great Again” than on a mask. That you are actually wearing. Over your nose and mouth. Because if you really want to make America great again, you will need a few other Americans still capable of walking around to help.    — Los Angeles Times/TNS

The novel coronavirus pandemic and resultant lockdowns have been a test of people’s mental as well as physical strength. Experts want people to grow their immunity stronger to stave off the virus. Having a fun-filled physical activity to boost immunity and mental toughness is a rare blessing during the times of physical distancing. As many children seem to have been affected due to lockdowns, learning dance and music can prove really fruitful for them. Indian expatriate Rahul Gupta is a classical dance instructor. Since the closure of schools, he has been offering online training sessions to young children, teaching them traditional dance. The activity has not only made his students proficient in the dance but also kept them busy, active and healthy while staying at home. “As the pandemic has pressed on, people have found innovative ways to come together. One of them is classical dance. Dance transcends all barriers and boundaries. For this art, there is no race, religion, age or colour.  It is just the joy of rhythm. The joy melds diversities and has the power to bring people together in one voice,” said Rahul underlining the importance of classical dance. “Classical dance has always been used in various ways, be it prayer or celebration. It is amazing what the virtual world has done for us globally in making the world a smaller place. I feel as my part of contribution is a way of encouraging people to dance their blues away. The students, who enrol in our Bharatanatyam dance classes, do so for various reasons. Many want to make a career in dance, some want to tone their bodies, while others want to get rid of the inhibitions of social dancing and just have fun. But one quest binds every student and that is that dance frees the mind and soul. Physical activity, as in dance, cannot only promote chemical balance but also deepen the mind-body connection,” he added. The online dance classes also provide an opportunity for parents to get involved in classes and know how the teacher is interacting with students. It is refreshing for those parents, who are passionate about classical dance. Ten-year-old Shreysi Jaiswal is Grade-5 student at Rajagiri Public School Doha. Shreysi started showing interest in classical dance at a very early age. She has performed in various stages in school level and has taken part in many competitions. Shreysi said: “During lockdown when the whole world is sitting at home getting bored, online dance learning has helped me to lift the mood and lightens the spirit. It also builds up the immunity as it is a form of exercise and keeps the mind free from scepticism. I am really thankful to my teacher who made the idea of online classes and encouraged me to pursue my passion for the classical dance and music.” Aditi Satish is also 10 and student of Grade 5 at DPS Doha. She said: “The online dance sessions come as a great relief and opportunity to continue my dance training during Covid-19 lockdown around us. This online class is fun and enjoyable, just like my school days. It helps me to increase my exercise and activity levels and I can also make many friends around the world.” Nine-year-old T Yashaswini is in Grade-4 at DPS-Monarch International School. “I wish to extend my heartfelt appreciation for wonderful and highly engaging Baratanatyam online classes in this time of isolation. Physical activity affects mental and emotional health. By doing Bharatanataym, not only we get entertained but they also get educated. “Dance is my passion. I love to dance as it makes me happy and feel as if I am on cloud nine. I have been learning Bhartanatyam since Grade-2. It also helps us not only learn dance but also understand our mythology, culture and tradition. In this Covid-19 situation we were missing school. We however continue our favourite Bharatanatyam. It is like one positive thing happening during this lockdown.” Bharat Gupta is also 9. He said: “I love to do Bharatanatyam. I’m doing it almost from my kindergarten. During this lockdown times, the one thing that kept me occupied and happy is my Bharatanatyam.”

Your small choice of starting a kitchen herb garden or nurturing the gardening habit can lead you to joining the fight against global warming. The good news is that your balcony, backyard or kitchen garden can help control urban temperatures, mitigating the effects of extreme heat and cold due to climate change. Urban gardens also support our health by easing stress and providing an opportunity to do some physical exercise in today’s inactive lifestyle. Combining the idea of kitchen herb garden and environment with food and Ayurveda can bring wonders to your lifestyle and health.  With these easy to grow wonder herbs you can lead to a naturally healthy lifestyle and start your fight for climate change with your own Kitchen Garden, says Dr. Abhishek Gupta, NirogStreet. Stevia Planting and Care: Stevia plants do best in a rich, loamy soil — the same kind in which common kitchen or balcony garden-variety plants thrive. Stevia is a tender perennial that loves the warm sun. In frost-free zones you can enjoy growing stevia year-round, allowing it to grow into a small shrub. Stevia doesn’t like soggy soil, so make sure that it has good drainage. Uses: Stevia has strongly emerged as the safest and most natural answer to the risks associated with a sugar-addicted lifestyle. About 3 stevia leaves can replace 25 per cent of the sugar in one can of soda, uses at least 92 per cent less water than other natural sweeteners, its sweet compounds are 200-350 times sweeter than sucrose (table sugar), 30-80 percent less carbon than other natural sweeteners, uses 1/5th the land of cane sugar and adds a delicious sweet taste without adding calories. Peppermint Planting and Care: Peppermint is one of the easiest herbs to grow in kitchen garden and can be well maintained in containers as well. The best way to plant it is to cut a sprig from an existing mint plant or a mint seed and sow it in a pot preferably 12-16 inches wide. Spring is the ideal time for them to grow. Mint requires adequate sunlight and more water. Uses: Peppermint is an excellent deterrent for many kinds of pests including rodents, ants, and spiders. It is a calming and soothing herb that has been used for thousands of years to aid with upset stomach or indigestion. It is a good source of vitamin A, a fat-soluble vitamin that is critical for eye health and night vision. A potent source of antioxidants, its dynamic flavor allows mint leaves to accompany various great tasting recipes. Coriander Planting and Care: Grow Coriander by sowing seeds directly outdoors during spring and summer. It grows best in a well-drained, moist soil. The seeds can germinate within two or three weeks and quickly produce leafy growth. Plants should be spaced about 6 to 8 inches apart. Uses: This refreshing herb is extensively used around the world as a condiment, garnish, or decoration on culinary dishes. Coriander is also used for digestion problems including upset stomach, loss of appetite, nausea, diarrhea and intestinal gas. It is loaded with fiber, magnesium, manganese, protein, and iron. Parsley Planting and Care: For better germination, you can soak the seeds overnight. Plant seeds in individual pots indoors 10 to 12 weeks and then shift it to your kitchen or balcony garden. Plant the seeds in moist, rich soil about 6 to 8 inches apart. Water the seeds often while they germinate so that they don’t dry out. Throughout the summer, be sure to water the plants evenly. Uses: This popular green herb is a rich source of vitamins A, B, C and K and the minerals iron and potassium. It also helps to reduce water retention and bloating. Parsley contains high levels of a flavonoid called apigenin which can help in reducing the risk of various types of cancer. Basil Planting and Care: Plant seeds or transplants after all danger of frost has passed and soil is warm, Basil is easy to grow, but it only grows outdoors in the summer. Basil will grow best in a location that gets 6 to 8 hours of full sun daily, though it can perform well in partial sun, too. Soil should be moist but well-drained. Basil works great in containers, as these allow for better drainage. Uses: Basil is a wonderful herb with multiple uses in cooking, natural medicine, and more. It is used for stomach spasms, loss of appetite, intestinal gas, kidney conditions, head colds, and worm infections. It is also used to treat snake and insect bites. —IANS

Dr Victor  Tvircun is a teacher, historian, writer and researcher. A long-time diplomat, the Moldovan ambassador to Qatar sees diplomacy as the art of the possible, multiplied by experience, knowledge and intuition. In an interview with Community, Dr Victor shared his experience of being a diplomat and views of being a researcher and writer. Please tell us about your journey so far. It will soon be 30 years since I got affiliated to the diplomatic work. However, I did not immediately set foot on the diplomatic path. My career was developing in a completely different area. I was born in the city of Chisinau, capital of Moldova. Since school, I dreamt of becoming a historian. This dream came true in 1980 after graduating from the Faculty of History and Law of the Chisinau State University. In the same year, I began teaching. In January 1988, I defended my thesis, and received the title of assistant professor. Until the beginning of the 90s, I had worked at the Chisinau State Pedagogical Institute as the head of department. When Moldova gained independence and began developing state institutions, I was invited to join the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. From 1993 till present, my life has been connected to diplomacy. However, I did not part with scientific research. Throughout this time, I have published over 300 scientific works, including 24 books, and defended doctoral dissertations in pedagogy and history. All my successes and achievements would not have been possible without the main person in our family, my wife Lilia, who has always been there for me. No wonder it is always said that behind any successful man, stands a wise and unique woman. She has given me two wonderful children, my daughter Alexandra and son Anton. How do you best define diplomacy? What are its basic tenets? A wise person, speaking of diplomacy, gave it an excellent definition — calling it the art of the possible. I also share this view, however, would like to complete it. In my opinion, diplomacy is the art of the possible, multiplied by experience, knowledge and intuition. Like any other sphere of human activity, diplomacy is a living organism, which over the centuries has developed, improved, and modified. Modern diplomacy is significantly different from the diplomacy, say of the 16th or 18th centuries, and even the first half of the 20th century. The principles of mutual respect and equality of partners in diplomatic relations, regardless of size, military-political and economic status of their countries, came to the front line. In this regard, I recall the ancient Chinese wisdom — one grain of rice can tip the scales. There is a mandatory consideration for the partner’s mutual interests, since diplomacy is a two-way road. What has been your most challenging career assignment? It seems to me that in diplomatic work, there are no secondary matters, simple or complex tasks. Sometimes a task or an assignment seems part of the routine, trivial, but in practice it grows into a big problem. In this regard, an example is the incident that happened to me in March of 2003. As I was fortunate enough to present my credential letters, as a non-resident ambassador, to His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the Father Amir, and I had to fly to Riyadh to present my credentials to the king of Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, at the same time began the hostilities against the regime of Saddam Hussein. All movements were blocked, air communications were interrupted. The simple flight from Doha to Riyadh turned out to be a big problem. It took me five different airlines to reach the destination. But the mission was fulfilled. What are the other highlights of your career? The most difficult situations have been that related to solving the problems of the citizens of Moldova, returning them to their homeland, providing services and assistance in distress situations. What is your take on Qatar-Moldova relations? How many expats from your country are living here and what professions do they slot in? Bilateral relations are very friendly with a beautiful perspective. We hope that soon many bilateral projects that we signed in various fields such as investments, culture, medicine, and education will materialise. We are also awaiting other agreements to be signed in the fields of visa exemption, double taxation and agriculture, which will facilitate the scope of this solid future co-operation. The friendly and close relationship between our countries has manifested itself many times in the international arena, with Moldova supporting Qatar’s initiatives and candidature for elective bodies of international organisations. As a political and moral support for our friendly country, in August 2017, in Moldova was founded the Association of Moldova-Qatar called ‘Solidarity.’ At the same time, I want to mention that on May 26, 8.5 tonnes of medical assistance was provided by the Qatari brothers to Moldova, being the first ever humanitarian assistance by an Arab country to Moldova. The medical aid coming from His Highness Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, Amir of Qatar, was directly used to save lives of thousands of Moldovan people. To this day, according to official statistics of the Ministry of Interior, there are 162 Moldovan citizens residing in Qatar. Their professions vary from being engineers, professors, artists to hospitality industry workers. Also, a good part is proudly working for Qatar Airways. Few might know, but one expat that we are proud of is the chess master Victor Bologan, who is the head coach of the National Chess Team of Qatar. Where does the bilateral trade currently stand and what are the potential areas for investment? In which areas Qatar can benefit from your country and vice versa? Whilst having modest figures of bilateral trade, mainly consisting of exports of fresh fruits, organic meat and other agriculture produce, Qatar and Moldova have a huge potential to expand the bilateral trade. Allow me to say that with existent potential and favourable legislation based on financial incentives, free economic zones and other facilitations for investments, Moldova can be of great interest in attracting Qatari investments. There are tremendous opportunities in the agricultural sector along with construction and education sectors. Another strong sector for investments is the IT communications, where many foreign companies make use of educated and skilled labour force available in Moldova. Tourism is another sector where we believe Moldova has unique features; namely ecotourism and hunting, to offer to the Qatari people. Regarding ecotourism or rural tourism, this is an exceptional possibility to have the freshest eco-grown fruits, vegetables and juices in a relatively clean and untouched environment. Moldova also offers possibility for medical tourism through a variety of sanatoriums that have radon bath treatment type, perfectly suitable for cardiac and locomotor diseases. What piece of advice you will give to a budding diplomat? To love your homeland and respect the country and the people where you happen to work. It should be noted that the work of a diplomat is a constant work of self-education and self-improvement. There should be goodwill and friendliness in communication with the people, who will eventually play an important role in solving many problems as well as win over interlocutors and partners. There should be honesty and decency along with the maintenance of self-esteem. What do you do in your leisure? Based on my own experience as well as the example of many of my colleague diplomats, I can say with confidence that there is not that much free time for leisure activities. Reading and analysing information, corresponding with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other institutions of one’s own country and the country of residence occupy most of the time. The rest is dedicated to the study of culture, history, language and customs of the country and people where you work. How would you describe your experience of living in Qatar? Since my first visit in 2003, Qatar, its capital and people have become a part of my heart. I was fortunate to come to Doha many times in various positions. I was lucky to see the beautiful transformation of Doha. It gives me great pleasure to observe the care the municipality accords to increasing green areas, parks, ensuring cleanliness and attraction for its residents and guests. What is that one lesson in life that has always held you in good stead? It is being honest with people and God. Besides life and death, everything else is in your own hands. What are your future plans, especially after retirement? It has only been six months since I took the duties of the ambassador in Qatar. There is still a lot of time ahead to deepen and strengthen friendly ties between our countries. Envoy hails Qatar’s signal role in Covid-19 fight and helping WHO Coronavirus pandemic has become a serious phenomenon affecting all aspects of our usual life. I am certain that humanity will invest more in terms of prevention in order to achieve a stronger health security. Qatar has been dealing with the pandemic in a professional, humanistic and realistic manner by exemplary organisation of medical and administrative measures. Secondly, I would mention the unprecedented activity of providing humanitarian assistance to more than 20 countries of the world, including Moldova, and considerable financial support to international institutions in combating the pandemic such as the latest initiative to pledge 10$ million for WHO to step up global efforts against Covid-19. All the actions of Qatar, as a whole, show a high degree of responsibility of the wise leadership of His Highness Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, Amir of Qatar, and that of all relevant Qatari authorities towards the residents of this country and also towards the fate and future of the world and humanity.

Setting world records or achieving something extraordinary is a way for many people to challenge themselves and show just how far they can go to achieve something. In many cases, individuals take on physical challenges primarily for their overall well-being. Conquering the Mount Everest, the tallest peak in the world, is a sort of challenge that few dare to take on. It needs both mental strength and physical fitness. Ann Jangsell, president of the Swedish Association of Qatar, an expatriate community group, has conquered the tallest mountain while being at her home in Qatar. What started as just normal exercise to stave off the trauma of job loss and social isolation during the coronavirus pandemic has culminated into a record-setting achievement for Ann. The Swede started climbing up and down 10 stair-steps flight as a regular exercise. It led her to the idea of ‘Mount Everest Challenge’ that she has accomplished in the month of June. She climbed up and down 200 flights (each flight is equal to 10 stair-steps) every day to complete 6,000 steps in 30 days equalling the height of the Mount Everest. Talking to Community about her accomplishment, Ann said: “I haven’t heard anyone else in Qatar doing this challenge before, but a lot of people have contacted me for more information and how it works, from all over the world, not just in Qatar, thanks to my Instagram account and friends all over the globe. “The background of the challenge is an idea – ‘Fight For Every Heartbeat Stair Climb Challenge’ – that came up from the British Heart Foundation in 2017. It was meant to be a challenge for the staff in the various workplaces in the UK. A survey report showed that nearly two out of five adults in the UK did not achieve the recommended levels of physical activity to benefit their health. The challenge would help staff increase their activity levels, improving their mental and physical well-being by climbing the stairs, increasing staff’s morale, and team building. They could choose buildings like Big Ben in London, Sydney Opera House in Australia, Petronas Twin Tower in Malaysia etc. to conquer Mount Blanc in France, Mount Everest in Nepal, or Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.” Sharing how she prepared herself for the challenge and how she feels after completing it, Ann said: “I did not do much of preparations for the challenge. I just started climbing, at the beginning of the month my legs and knees was very soar but it went well after a couple of days. “I really like the idea of doing exercise that I can visualise as some kind of goal, more than coming into shape and losing kilos. So, it was truly optimal for me, who is so goal-orientated as a person. How amazing it is to have climbed Mount Everest in your own stairway? I feel very happy and proud of myself. I mean 200 flight up and 200 flights down, every day for 30 days, in total 6,000 flights up and 6,000 down. I feel like a true star to accomplish the challenge. It is like I have won a gold medal in the Olympics.” When asked what is next for her and will she continue challenging herself, the Swedish expatriate said: “The next challenge is to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. The challenge got started from 1st of July. It is going to be a 20 days challenge. The elevation of the mountain is 5,895 metres. Why I want to do it is to keep challenging myself and push further forward and upwards, coming into better shape and to feel proud of myself.” In response to a question about what she has actually achieved from the challenge and what positive she has got from it, Ann said: “I have been taught that I am stronger and tougher than I thought and that all and everything is possible if you really want it. My piece of advice to others is to invest in yourself, treat your body and heart well, do exercise for your body’s sake, so it can serve you for a long time. Be happy and kind and always try to be the best version of yourself.”

Hillary, Hulu’s four-part documentary about Hillary Clinton, came out of 2,000 hours of footage shot during her 2016 presidential campaign, 35 hours of fresh interviews with the subject herself and a bevy of archival material that filmmaker Nanette Burstein found while researching the project.    When Burstein had a version of the movie that was close to locked, she sent it to Clinton at her home in Chappaqua, NY, where she watched it in a single sitting. As you might expect, taking it all in, Clinton says, chuckling, was an “overwhelming experience.” “It’s daunting to watch your life unfold on the screen,” Clinton says. She’s on the phone, along with Burstein, in early June, as America continues to reel from the coronavirus pandemic and nationwide protests following the police killing of George Floyd. Clinton understands the despair that drives the protests and pervades the country in the wake of more than 120,000 (and counting) pandemic deaths and months of economic hardship. But she also sees signs for cautious optimism. “If you look at the young people who are the primary movers of the peaceful protests in response to Mr Floyd’s killing, I’m hopeful that this can break open not only some hearts but some structural impediments to equality and justice in a way that defies the distraction of the second-to-second demands of social media,” Clinton says. “And it may well be that a leader like [Donald] Trump, who depends upon distraction, has finally been brought down to earth because people are watching in real time what is happening and how inadequate his response has been to these historic moments.” Over the course of a quick 45 minutes, we discussed the news, the documentary and the ways the two intersect. Were there things in the documentary that surprised you? Maybe the footage of your daughter Chelsea putting herself between you and Bill, holding both your hands, “filling in the empty space,” as Bill puts it, that existed after he addressed the nation about his relationship with Monica Lewinski? That was one of those moments that I remembered but I hadn’t seen the footage for years until I saw the movie. Watching it again was pretty emotional. I had no idea Chelsea was going to do that. Nanette found things, like me being burned in effigy when I was working for healthcare, that I had forgotten about. And I have to say, I was struck again about how trying to get people universal healthcare could be whipped up into such a frenzy. That was kind of a moment. Burstein: I thought that clip was iconic of where our country is at right now, so divided. That’s what made me passionate as a filmmaker, understanding the antecedents to when partisan politics became so entrenched. The documentary ends on a positive tenor, noting the number of women elected to Congress in 2018 and with you saying that maybe your loss will be remembered as a turning point that lit the fuse. Rewatching it, the phrase “lit the fuse” hit me in a much different way. I can understand that. I’ve had people contact me about the documentary, and it’s interesting because people who watched it early had a different take than people who watched it recently. So much of what we’re seeing now, sadly, was known about Trump and the kind of people who were loyal to him. But it turned out to be even worse than what I thought it would be. Despite having my own front-row seat and being concerned about his character and behaviour, he has gone further and broken more norms and undermined our institutions more deeply than I thought would have been possible in such a short period of time. We see you in the movie at his inauguration, showing up, taking a deep breath and worrying that he wouldn’t rise to the occasion. What has been so surprising to me is how he can barely make an effort to rise to the occasion. I truly don’t think he can get out of his own way. Everything has to be all about him. If it’s about a terrible pandemic with an unprecedented virus, he tries to ignore it, tries to keep the attention on himself. Then when it becomes impossible to do that, he tries to seize the moment and turn it into a daily rally, like he loves to do. And then when it becomes impossible to ignore, he tries to change the subject; he tries to withdraw from the spotlight so he can come up with some other diversion and distraction for the body politic and the press. Then when we have a terrible killing like we did in Minneapolis, he makes some steps toward — in the very early hours after we all saw that horrific video — to look like he’s going to be empathetic, to look like he’s going to try to talk about this stripping bare of the continuing racism and inequities of law enforcement and the justice system. And then he pivots again because he’s not comfortable doing that. He doesn’t have even the minor amount of empathy to fake it, to look like he is concerned, and he reverts to the belligerence and the threat-making and the photo-opping, all the tried-and-true tactics that feed his need for control and dominance and attention. You tweeted about his recent photo op, when troops used tear gas to clear protesters so Trump could walk to St. John’s Church and hold up a Bible, calling it a “horrifying use of presidential power.” What was that like to watch? It was beyond my comprehension. We have never seen anything like this. He is without shame. It is a mystery why anybody with a beating heart and a working mind still supports him. You mentioned the inauguration. I’d been to every inauguration since 1993, and I had a really hard time going to that one, but I thought, “OK. The moment might very well transform him, and the awesome responsibility of the office as well.” And yet I heard him get up and give that speech that was the absolute opposite of anything that could have brought the country together. Politics should be about addition, about finding common ground. No, he was speaking to his outraged base. And in the movie, I say, I was sitting next to George W Bush — who has now spoken out twice, trying to provide some ballast in this time we’re going through, which I appreciate, despite my political disagreements with him — and he just turned to me and said, “That was some weird [stuff].” And every single day has been a surprise, an unpleasant surprise, about how there seems to be no bottom to this man and his presidency. Hillary documents the media’s gender bias in your presidential campaigns. How do you think the women running for president this year were treated? It was a very mixed picture. On the one hand, we had more women running, which was a big positive because then you could see that women, just like men, had different styles, different approaches, different platforms. And yet at the same time, there were still some of the same tropes and attitudes being expressed about women becoming president and what kind of person could beat Donald Trump and all of the usual questioning. It was a step forward, but not as big a step as I wish it had been. Watching those clips in the movie, men screaming, “Iron my shirt,” or John Edwards saying, “I’m not sure about that coat” during a debate, made me crazy. Did you ever come close to snapping? We all have that choice. You can escalate or you can try to take a deep breath and deal with it thoughtfully. I believe strongly in what I think is right. And I am willing to stand up for it. But I’m not interested in engaging in some kind of verbal confrontation for the sake of delivering a flashpoint. What’s fascinating to me is the thoughtful, deliberate response or the careful thinking before you speak is somehow viewed as less authentic than the blowing up. And we’ve seen the result of that now, sadly, for 3 1/2 years, someone who doesn’t have the discipline, someone who doesn’t care what he says because he came from reality TV. He was a bankrupt businessman who got a second wind because he could scream at people, “You’re fired.”                        — Los Angeles Times/TNS

One of the upsides of staying at home during lockdown is not only having the time to do more of the things you love but exploring new hobbies, too. And whether you are a seasoned grower or are just starting out, the Qur’anic Botanic Garden (QBG) has a series of tips and tricks for naturally enhancing gardens using easily available household products. Mohamed Hassona, a horticulture expert, QBG, says: “Keen gardeners already know the delights of growing and eating your own fruit and vegetables, while others devote hours to cultivating beautiful flowers and plants. So, to help grow a love of gardening, we have a number of great ideas to share with the community.  “For example, making your own fertiliser at home from simple household ingredients that rival expensive shop-bought ones, which will boost your growing power and are perfectly safe to use.” One such ingredient is yeast, which can assist with growth and safely supports a plant’s vital processes and metabolism by providing important nutrients, especially nitrogen.  A yeast solution can easily be prepared by simply adding five grams of ready-made yeast to one litre of water, then adding a small teaspoon of sugar and continuously stirring for three minutes. After ensuring that all ingredients are completely dissolved, the solution should be stored in a warm place for two hours, after which it is ready for use. The canopy can be watered three times a week using a manual sprayer, preferably when a plant is thirsty and the soil is not saturated, since it will have a higher capacity to absorb the solution. Similar to yeast, pesticides that can protect your plants and contribute to their growth can be prepared at home using easily accessible household ingredients, which all contain antibacterial substances that inhibit microbial activity.  In a home blender, add a sliced onion, five cloves of peeled garlic, a spoon of red chilli pepper powder, and a tablespoon of cinnamon powder and blend for approximately two minutes – until the mixture has the texture of soft dough. Then add one litre of warm water, and blend again for another three minutes until the mixture has absorbed all the water. Following this, filter the impurities from the mixture and store the solution in the fridge. When ready to use, add a pint of water and two ml of dishwashing liquid to 100 ml of the concentrated solution. Shake the bottle well, and spray your plants every three to five days. Ensure that it is kept out of the reach of children.  “And to grow your own plants and flowers, you can easily propagate plants through air layering,” says Hassona. “The process works on shrubs, climbing plants, and even trees.”  First, select a strong piece of stem, and use a knife to remove a five centimetre ring from the outer layer of the stem. Then, take a plastic bag – either transparent or dark – and open it at both ends, so that you can pass the whole stem through the bag. This will serve as a soil container. One end can then be sealed with adhesive tape and filled with soil from the garden.  Following this, water the soil and tightly seal its top side with adhesive tape. If the bag is large, bind the middle section to help the soil stick and generate roots quickly. The bag shouldn’t need watering again, but if it does, add water from the top, without loosening the tie. The new stem can be separated from the mother stem using a sharp knife after white roots begin to emerge from the bag, an indication of a new plant. You can then cut the stem directly underneath the bag, while keeping the roots attached to the soil. Plant the new stem in the garden. “And this is just the beginning,” says Hassona. “There is nothing more satisfying than growing your own garden and seeing – or eating – the fruits of your labour.”  For more gardening ideas, follow QBG: Instagram: Quranic_Botanic_Garde Facebook: Qur’anic Botanic Garden Twitter: @QuranicGarden 

The coronavirus pandemic has been pushing people to learn how to stay positive during uncertain times. Experts have been coming up with novel and new suggestions for people to maintain a positive attitude during these challenging conditions. A time-tested method of reigning in negativity and inculcating positivity has been to indulge in social welfare work and extend a helping hand to others in the hour of need. This is what Martha Anyait, a Ugandan expatriate has been doing since the outbreak of the pandemic in Qatar. A flight attendant by profession, Martha is not only an active community worker but also a motivational speaker. She also cherishes her role as an empowerment expert and a life coach. “I am passionate about empowering people using any and all means within my reach such as social events, social media, podcasts, charity activities and more. Motivation reminds us to believe in our inner strengths to achieve our dreams by maintaining a positive self-image and attitude regardless of what we are going through in life.” When asked how she has been coping with lockdown and spending her time at home, Martha said: “I have been coping up really well because I try to maintain and stay close to my routine. I not only stick to my normal routine; I keep myself active and less likely to spiral. It will be easier to readjust again when it’s time to get back to work.” The motivational speaker has also started doing something different and special while being at home. “I also decided to do something special during these days. For example, I began learning a new language –Spanish, improving on my cooking and baking skills, maintaining my exercise routine and sleeping routine, reading, online learning and I also spend time recording my motivational videos to keep my social media followers inspired. I also spend time with my friends on zoom— praying, sharing our experiences and encouraging each other during this crisis.” When asked what would be her piece of advice as a motivational speaker for people on how they can stay positive during these uncertain times, she said: “My message is that everyone will occasionally feel negative thoughts during these uncertain times. Some people will feel like quitting and ignoring everything or even try to escape from the truth but yes you may allow yourself to take a break while hiding from the problem but this is just temporary, learn to face your challenges and train yourself to reflect on your life during this time. Start giving more of yourself to life. “While we all wonder what is going to happen next and as we face this unique crisis, it is essential to face our own fears and push through them. How we handle our fears will determine where we go with the rest of our lives. So let’s break that shell of fear because it breeds anger, hate, frustration and defeat. Instead gain strength, confidence, and courage. Begin asking yourself how I got through my last horrific experience that means if I got through that, I can get through this too and I can take the next thing that comes along.” Regarding her social work and welfare activities that she has been taking part in order to support her community in Qatar, Martha said: “As a community advocate, I volunteer as the secretary of the Uganda Community in Qatar (UGACOQ) where I serve the community with dedication and contribute to its growth. I have supported the community in various ways. For example, I am an administrator, a PR person, a champion of women empowerment. I have been organising social events, charity drives including our recent campaign of distributing food items that was given to the Uganda community in Qatar with the help from the Ministry of Administrative Development, Labour and Social affairs, Qatar Charity and various other stakeholders. “My life theme is that all people should live to see their God-given abilities fulfilled and this zeal drives my aspirations to be an agent of positive living in a world that is growing bitter day by day.”  IG: @martha_anyait Facebook: Martha Anyait Inspiration YouTube: Martha Anyait Inspiration

“I was really scared to play a murderer,” says Amanda Peet. But the 48-year-old actress came to embrace the psychological gymnastics required to take on one of the toughest roles of her career: Betty Broderick, the suburban housewife convicted of the 1989 murders of her ex-husband and his new wife. “I was really scared to play someone who did that to their children’s father and to their children,” she adds, with the tone of someone still grappling with it. “And behaved in a way that is morally repellent. Yes, that definitely scared me.” The fear resulted in a layered performance that fans and critics have called the best of Peet’s career. Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story, which also stars Christian Slater as Betty’s ex-husband Daniel Broderick, follows the seemingly ideal romance and marriage of the San Diego couple and their combative split, which preceded the brutal double murder that gripped national headlines. (The anthology series, whose first season was based on a Los Angeles Times podcast, is produced in association with Los Angeles Times Studios.) Once again helmed by Alexandra Cunningham, the second season joins other recent dramas, such as Little Fires Everywhere and Mrs. America, in offering a complicated portrait of a woman whose identity is defined by her role as a wife and mother as well as societal expectations. The portrayal of Betty Broderick allowed Peet to confront and sink into the complexity of that archetype and find depth in a woman who had been reduced to tabloid fodder. “From outside the situation, she was a murderer to me,” Peet says. “Once I was on the inside, she was a person in dire straits who had all her eggs in one basket, had no psycho-therapeutic resources, and had the rug pulled out from under her in the most fundamental, visceral way.” Curled up in a pillow-filled nook inside her Los Angeles home, which she shares with her husband, Game of Thrones writer David Benioff, and their three children, Peet has her hand outstretched, holding her phone at a distance to participate in our video interview. She’s back in town after a recent trip to New York to visit her mom, who lives with Parkinson’s disease, on her 79th birthday. (“The airport did remind me of a zombie movie,” she says.) The role had Peet thinking a lot about her mom, Penny, and the social mores she had to navigate as a woman who grew up in the 1950s and was starting a family in the 1970s while balancing a career. But it also had Peet reflecting on her own points of connection to Broderick. “I’m a very jealous person,” she says. “I certainly care about airs, what people think … not all the time, but I can relate. I’m not, like, immune to that. I can understand the feeling of wanting to keep up with the Joneses, wanting to appear to be just flawlessly sane when things inside are not … the discrepancy between the way things appear and the way things are.” And then there’s the matter of watching your partner rise to success. Dan developed a lucrative career as a medical malpractice attorney in San Diego, while Betty tended to their home and their four children. Betty, as the show tells it, began to feel insecure about their marriage as his professional life took off. Peet’s husband, along with his writing partner D.B. Weiss, have been in high demand due to the meteoric success of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Peet is well acquainted with bouts of insecurity and wondering how one partner’s success might impact a marriage. “It definitely crossed my mind at certain points when he’d been away on location for many months and Game of Thrones was taking off in a way that none of us could have possibly imagined,” Peet says. “But we’re pretty good communicators, and I’m the daughter of a shrink. And so we had a lot of advantages that, obviously, (Betty and Dan) didn’t have. And also, I think we’re both big fans of dance with the gal that brought you here.” To prepare for the role, Peet opted not to review footage or read stories related to the case. She also didn’t read Bella Stumbo’s 1993 book Until the Twelfth of Never: The Deadly Divorce of Dan & Betty Broderick, which serves as the primary source material for the series. Instead, she chose to let the scripts inform her. One of her first questions before shooting was whether she was going to be made to look like Betty. “Once Alexandra said, ‘I’m not interested in you doing an imitation of Betty Broderick. This is not what this is about. I just want you to try to capture this person’s psyche,’ then I felt very liberated,” Peet says. “I tried really hard not to look at footage of Betty because I didn’t want to be disappointed or, I don’t know, be misled by seeing some tiny clip when really I had to try to create a more whole picture.” After Peet was cast, Cunningham e-mailed one of their mutual friends, actor David Duchovny. Cunningham says the actor, unaware of the premise of the series, suggested the writer-producer find ways to tap into Peet’s comedic side. “I actually did not realise the extent to which that was going to blow the character outward in so many ways,” Cunningham says, “because Betty was a very funny person. Even in super inappropriate times and, especially after she was in custody, she was still trying to make jokes and trying to make people laugh because it was so important for her that everyone like her. For Amanda, the humour and the rage were right next to each other all the time. And the intelligence. I just would watch her on set with my mouth open.” For Peet, who has appeared in films such as The Whole Nine Yards and Igby Goes Down and in TV shows like HBO’s Togetherness and IFC’s Brockmire, Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story put the spotlight directly on her. And she worked hard to earn its keep there. “My entire life was Betty Broderick,” Peet says. “It was definitely all-encompassing. Not like in a Daniel Day-Lewis way — God bless him. I didn’t come home and make everyone call me Betty.” But, as in most projects Peet takes on, she did have questions. She would often make the short trek to the home of her best friend, Sarah Paulson, and run scenes out loud with Paulson and her partner, Holland Taylor, to get their input and guidance on the emotional beats of her character. (Paulson points out that Peet returns the favour as a sounding board when she needs it.) “It’s just a testament to her dedication that she would have worked an insane day and then still come over afterwards to run the lines or we would get on FaceTime and parse things out,” says Paulson, whose nickname for Peet is Bird. “She certainly didn’t need me for any of this, but I think it’s part of Amanda’s way of moving through the world, in general. It’s like — and I’m not trying to infantilise her — but it’s like being a kid at the park and you keep turning around to make sure that the person is still standing there and then you do the big, brave, bold thing because you know the people you trust are watching.” Cunningham jokes that the questions would usually reach her only if Peet had already asked Benioff and Paulson, and their answers were not in agreement. “She always was like, ‘I don’t want to bother you,’” Cunningham says. “And I’m like, ‘You’re the only person that I want to bother me.’ But, so, she would say, ‘I asked David and he said X and I asked Paulson and she said Y. What do you think?’ … When I would see her name on the phone it would give me joy because we’re going to discuss what we’re doing together. And she’s gonna maybe give me insight into something, and I’m gonna help her. It really was like a dream that I never wanted to stop having. I think it comes from the writer in her.” Peet wrote while a student at Columbia University, where she studied American history, but it wasn’t until she turned 40 and experienced Hollywood’s inhospitable attitude toward women of a certain age that she began to take writing more seriously. “I hadn’t reached a certain echelon in my industry,” she says. “There were other 40-year-old women who were getting the type of writing that I wanted to be getting, and I just wasn’t on those lists. Maybe it sounds lame for me to complain because it’s fun to just be employed as an actor.” Peet made her debut as a playwright in 2013 with The Commons of Pensacola, a Bernie Madoff-inspired off-Broadway play that starred Sarah Jessica Parker and Blythe Danner. In 2018, she premiered her second play, Our Very Own Carlin McCullough, at the Geffen Playhouse. Both productions received solid reviews from critics. “I feel a lot of regret about it,” she says of not writing seriously sooner. “And when my children show little bits of interest in becoming actresses, I always say, ‘You’ll have to write that! You have to be like Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Write your own material. Don’t wait by the phone. … I guess I feel like if I had been serious about it earlier, I could have been better by now. I also feel like I wouldn’t have done some of the lousy stuff that I did because I would have realised that there were other resources at my disposal. I didn’t have to play that wife role or that role in the unnameable movie that I won’t name. I could have been writing instead of doing that. I think there was a period of time in my 20s where I was definitely chasing the hype instead of doing my work.” Her writing will next be seen on Netflix. She’ll make her debut as a TV series writer and showrunner with the upcoming six-episode dramedy The Chair, about the head of a university’s English department. The series, which will star Sandra Oh and Jay Duplass, counts Benioff and fellow Game of Thrones creator Weiss as executive producers as part of their blockbuster $200 million overall deal with the streamer. (Peet co-wrote the pilot with Annie Julia Wyman.) It’s unclear when production will begin on the series. “It’s lampooning academia and dealing with overprivileged, desperate people and making fun of them but also digging out the heart and the comedy and the soul of what it means to be alive and trying to figure out how to do your life,” says Duplass, who reunites with Peet after their work on Togetherness. “Amanda is an incredible writer. She’s just so funny and so sharp and very, very … rigorous. To be in Amanda’s hands and to know how rigorous she is and how hard she’s working on it and to see these scripts go through drafts because she’s dogged, is awesome.” Despite her dedication to the page, Peet is convinced there’s one story she would have mishandled as a writer: Betty Broderick’s. “I don’t think I would have been able to do it. The time period and the story. Also to write a real person. I couldn’t do it. I don’t mind saying that. It’s too hard.” — Los Angeles Times/TNS

“I believe in change. I believe that for an artist to grow, for him to be able to introduce new ideas and design concepts, he must continuously adapt to change. I also have a fascination for recycling old and used materials and transforming them into something fresh and new.”  Qatari artist Mohammed al-Atiq’s artistic traits are painting and collage on fabric with different sizes and dimensions. He uses different techniques. The artist uses abandoned ores such as locks, hair clips, nails, threads, fabric, used matchsticks, papers etc. He tries hard to use what he called “the little” to change its concept from its concrete status to the visual concept which would embed intellectual connotations. Atiq is seeking to realise the aesthetic basics which would build bridges between him and the audience through the creation of a visual balance between the elements of the work of art which are the colours, the shapes and materials to serve his ideas. Community recently had an e-mail interview with the experienced and talented artist. Please share your journey thus far with us briefly. I was born in 1966 in Qatar. I have served as chairman of Qatar Fine Arts Society (2006-2012), graphic designer with Qatar TV in 1986, General Coordinator with Symposium Al Diar 2008-Qatar, and General Coordinator of the Al Asmakh International Art Symposium (2013-2014 and again 2015-2017). I have also won many prizes including: The arbitration award in the first Biennial, Dhaka 2003; the arbitration award in the first Biennial, Dhaka 2008; second prize in the competition of National Heritage and the Environment in the Eyes of the Fine Artists 1998; jury prize competition Heritage and Environment of Country in the Eyes of Fine Artists 1999; first prize in the competition festival time the first day Sea to the Gulf Cooperation Council Jeddah; and first prize bronze statue in the second exhibition for the youth of the Gulf Cooperation Council. How and when did you develop interest in art? My passion for art began in childhood when I was impressed by the surrounding nature. I was inspired by the components of traditional heritage and folklore features. I tended to use those details collected in memory in my artworks through my very own style, to form my own aesthetic basics. What kind of work and mediums do you use for your creative pieces? Tell us about some of the exhibitions you have attended as an artist so far. My work can be described as a visual board that highlights the uniqueness of the little things which could be — from my own point of view — rebuild, reinstalled and reorganised. I try through creativity and authenticity to pass beyond the visionary to comprehension so I could use simple elements, ordinary tools and even cheap material to create a distinguished artwork by finding alternative concept of time and place as well as building unusual connection between the work and the audience. I have successfully managed to travel to a globally artistic space through presenting binaries of opposition like black-white which is an example of the whole components. Tell us about your participation in the recent art project carried out by the Unesco. I received an invitation from the Mediterranean Organization (MIDOS) in co-operation with Unesco to attend an exhibition of creativity through the idea of the mask, which has become a distinctive emblem during Covid-19 pandemic, and as a matter of support to everyone who protected, guided and watched over our comfort by offering something simple to those of our feelings. The exhibition highlighted the artistic works covering the shape of the solid mask with beautiful shapes and colours; recording, documenting and sharing the world artists’ views. The pandemic is affecting everyone and I hope Allah will soon put an end to the ailment, allowing the world to return to contentment and peace. With all your experience how do you best describe art?  I believe in change. I believe that for an artist to grow, for him to be able to introduce new ideas and design concepts, he must continuously adapt to change. I also have a fascination for recycling old and used materials and transforming them into something fresh and new. There is always something unique and meaningful with anything, in everything around us. We just have to strive harder to see them. As you know, art has its own place in the world. It is a kind of destination of every country and reflects the culture of every society and its history. I had the experience of artistic residence in New York, and it was a unique experience, under the patronage of Qatar Museums, with a personal exhibition planned for the end of this year. How have you been spending your time at home? Do you think having free time and being at home helps people increase their creativity? It is not a strange thing for an artist to be at home. But the pandemic has created an opportunity for artistic minds to create more. They have time to discover new art technologies or get enrolled in new art schools. How do you see the works of young artists? What advice will you share with them? Young people should be aware and weary of the banal and cheap art that can be seen more often than not. They should focus on the art of an intellectual nature more because it presents new philosophies and helps in keeping pace with evolving thoughts on the art scene. What are your plans for your artworks? I had to postpone many due to the pandemic and resultant lockdown. I will have a personal exhibition sponsored by Fire Station and a group participation sponsored by Al Markhiya Gallery soon. 

A pair of self-described serial entrepreneurs, best-known for flying a KFC chicken sandwich into space and living two years sealed inside a biosphere, are attempting to start a new human spaceflight company that instead of launching rockets will lift civilian passengers into the sky tethered to a high-performance balloon. Space Perspective, introduced during a video news conference last Thursday, aims to carry a capsule of eight passengers at a time, dangling from a 650-foot-tall balloon 100,000 feet above Earth. The balloon and capsule will gently ascend for about two hours at 12mph, floating along for another two hours as passengers enjoy refreshments and a view of the Earth below, and then descend back down at 12mph and splash down in either the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean. The company will base its operations at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch and Landing Facility on Merritt Island and launch from there. It also will potentially launch from Cecil Spaceport in Jacksonville. Manufacturing facilities may later be based in Florida. The goal is to make the flights as accessible and affordable to as many people as possible, one day possibly hosting weddings or corporate retreats. Co-founders Jane Poynter and Taber MacCallum, who are married, said they anticipate prices to be around $125,000 for a single ticket. “That’s really what this is all about: Everybody should be able to see the Earth from space,” Poynter said. “We want them to really be able to experience what astronauts talk about, seeing the Earth in space in that inky blackness of the cosmos, looking down at the curvature of the Earth.” But passenger flights are still at least a year away. Hoping to perform its first test flight in early 2021, Space Perspective joins the ranks of burgeoning companies working to create an industry that can send paying passengers to the edges of space, generally thought to begin about 50 miles off Earth’s surface. Space Perspective’s balloon will reach about 20 miles. SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin have been among the most high-profile companies to set their sights on flying regular people to space. Poynter and Taber have successfully developed and test-driven other balloon crafts, at another company they founded in 2012 called World View Enterprises. That endeavour drew a lot of publicity when it hoisted Google executive Alan Eustace for the highest-altitude free-fall jump and when it flew a KFC chicken sandwich into the sky. Since Poynter and MacCallum left World View, the company has focused on flying payloads instead of people. “The balloon technology and putting people into space via a balloon has been done before so it’s clearly a proven technology. What has not been done, which I think is the challenge that they’re hoping to address, is the ability to do so at a sufficiently affordable and reliable and regular enough cadence,” said Dale Ketcham, vice president of government and external relations for Space Florida, the aerospace economic development agency of Florida. Passengers will need very little training before taking a ride with Space Perspective, MacCallum said. During the flight, the interior of the capsule will be pressurised and temperature and humidity will be controlled. Onboard there will be a pilot, paired with another down on Earth who can also control the craft. A new balloon, which will be filled with hydrogen as helium has become more scarce, will be used for each flight and materials from it upcycled. The capsule will be able to be reused on multiple missions. Renderings of the spacecraft, to be named Spaceship Neptune, depict a large capsule with a circle of seats facing out to a row of windows. Poynter and MacCallum said a bar, bathroom and an unobstructed windowed dome at the top of the capsule will be integrated into the design. It will also have room to fly research payloads and experiments that Poynter said will study climate change, the atmosphere and the origins of life in the universe. The company has signed a Space Act Agreement with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which will provide access to test facilities, technical support during launches and weather data to plot the balloon’s ascent and splashdown. The balloon vehicle will be regulated as a spacecraft by the FAA. Base Ventures CEO Kirby Harris, Space Perspective’s lead investor, will serve as a board member for the new company, and Nasa astronaut Jeff Hoffman will serve as senior technical adviser. Poynter and MacCallum plan to be on one of the first test rides. The self-taught researchers over the years have cultivated a somewhat eccentric reputation in the space fandom. One of their most successful undertakings was at Paragon Space Development Corp., a company they founded in 1993 that designed a spacesuit life-support system funded by a $1.4 million grant from Nasa in 2010 as part of the Commercial Crew Program that at the time was trying to foster public-private partnerships to develop new technologies. Neither of Nasa’s commercial crew partners, Boeing nor SpaceX, has used the spacesuit system, however, Nasa said. At Paragon, they later started pursuing another objective, to become the first humans to fly past Mars, but without funding from Congress or a suitable spacecraft, they eventually abandoned the plan. But Poynter and MacCallum’s celebrity originates from the two years and 20 minutes they spent living inside Biosphere II, a steel and glass, terrarium-like research facility that sprawled three acres of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. Part of a crew of eight men and women, Poynter and MacCallum studied the survivability of the space colony simulation, farming crops and raising animals, to evaluate if one day humans could live in similar self-sustained colonies on other planets. The experiment, hoped to be a blueprint for colonising Mars and predicted by physicist Carl Hodges to potentially be “the most significant scientific project of all time,” was widely considered a failure, marred by the crew’s inability to create a liveable environment that prompted intervention from those on the outside running the experiment. But Poynter said it served as the beginning for her and her husband’s journey to send people into space. “We’ve been working on this concept for a long time,” Poynter said. “It goes all the way back to our days at Biosphere II.” —The Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, Florida)/TNS

Over the past few weeks, the killing of George Floyd by police sparked nationwide protests against state violence toward black people. With the demonstrations on countless streets and the conversations taking place in countless homes, bookstores are now experiencing a surge of interest in books about black history, racism and social justice. Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, Ibram X Kendi’s How To Be an Antiracist and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow all turned up on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. It’s cause for hope, among those who believe that reading can make us better and stronger. With thanks to The Seattle Times readers who sent us dozens of suggestions, here’s a shortlist of titles — nonfiction and fiction — for those wanting to learn more about how we got to where we are, and how we can do better. Nonfiction There is no list of nonfiction books that could ever encompass the breadth and complexity of African American history and the underpinnings of systemic racial injustice. But in an effort to ground this moment in history, humanity and connection to place, here are a few books for deeper exploration. My People are Rising: Memoir of a Black Panther Party Captain by Aaron Dixon Dixon, who led the Seattle Black Panther Party starting in 1968 through the late 1970s, wrote his memoir to chronicle his years leading the Seattle chapter during the height of the Black Power movement in the US. The book is a good reminder for Seattleites that racial injustice is not a problem just in other places, but that it has long been part of our social and political fabric — then and now. Former King County Councilmember Larry Gossett writes in praise at the front of the book, Dixon “presents a visual picture of the courage, commitment, and sometimes shocking brutality of life as a Panther activist.” Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X Kendi Kendi might be best known for How To Be an Antiracist, but before he wrote that bestselling book, he wrote Stamped From the Beginning, which takes readers through the history of racist ideas through five “tour guides,” including WEB Du Bois and William Lloyd Garrison. He writes, “Antiracists have long argued that racial discrimination was stamped from the beginning of America, which explains why racial disparities have existed and persisted.” When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele In this book, Khan-Cullors writes of growing up in Los Angeles and experiencing the persecution of black people by law enforcement, and particularly her brother’s experience in jail. After Trayvon Martin’s killer went free in 2013, these experiences led Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi to co-found Black Lives Matter to fight for accountability for injustices against black people. There was plenty of pushback, with a 2016 petition to label the movement a “terrorist organisation” getting more than 140,000 signatures. Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, said the book “reveals what inspired Patrisse’s visionary and courageous activism and forces us to face the consequence of the choices our nation made when we criminalised a generation.” The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870 Through the Civil Rights Era by Quintard Taylor Published in 1994, this book by Taylor, a University of Washington history professor emeritus and founder of BlackPast.org, remains a must-read for those who want to understand Seattle’s history. Taylor documents the evolution of Seattle’s black community in the Central District from the 1870s to the early 1990s, examining the impacts of migration, redlining, white flight, racial covenants and the movement for racial justice. The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by Jesmyn Ward National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward compiled this collection of essays and poems about race by contemporary writers including Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Edwidge Danticat, Kevin Young, Claudia Rankine and Honoree Jeffers. The Fire This Time was conceived as a modern response to James Baldwin’s powerful 1963 essay collection The Fire Next Time (in our list below of must-read books on racial justice) and explores the “untidiness” of race in the US. — N. I. Fiction Reading fiction won’t give you a specific list of steps to take to fight social injustice — but it will do something just as important: It places us inside someone’s head and someone’s imagination, letting us begin the work of understanding and empathising. Here are five books by black American authors (and yes, I’ve left out many of the greats; this is just the tiniest of starts), new and old, that immerse us in black lives. If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin Baldwin’s fifth novel, published in 1974, has as its heart a topic that resonates all too strongly today: the criminal justice system’s long record of unjust incarceration of black men. Fonny and Tish, a young black couple, are in love and expecting a child in early 1970s Harlem, but their idyll is interrupted when Fonny is falsely accused of raping a white woman and sent to jail. A wrenching love story narrated by Tish, this novel eloquently reminds us of the weight social injustice places on families. Bonus: the beautiful 2018 film version of the book, directed by Barry Jenkins. The Turner House by Angela Flournoy This 2015 novel places the reader at the centre of a large black family in Detroit, moving us from the father’s early years in the city in the 1940s to the Turner family’s financial struggles in 2008. The 13 Turner children span a generation — the oldest born during World War II, the youngest just months after the 1967 Detroit race riots — and the book is an immersive examination of the complexities of sibling relationships, the housing crisis’ impact on inner-city families like the Turners, and how a house becomes the story of its inhabitants. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston Maybe you read this and were dazzled by it, like I did and was, back in college; maybe you’re due, like I am, to read it again. Published in 1937 (and out of print for decades before being reissued in the 1970s), it’s the story of Janie, a black woman who maintains her fierce independence throughout three marriages. A key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston wrote many novels, stories, essays and poems, including two long-posthumous books: the nonfiction work Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’ (published in 2018) and the short story collection Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, published earlier this year. An American Marriage by Tayari Jones More than four decades after If Beale Street Could Talk comes Jones’ 2018 bestseller; reading the two back to back would be an eloquent demonstration of how short a distance we’ve come. An American Marriage also examines the effect of unjust incarceration on a family; here, the burden is carried by an Atlanta couple: he behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit; she waiting at home, and drawn to a longtime friend who offers solace. It’s both an up-to-the-minute contemporary drama, and a timeless, poignant love triangle. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead Whitehead’s 2016 novel, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, is every bit as devastating and brilliant as you expect it to be; after finishing it recently, I found I needed time to process, to sit with the searing, simple beauty of his words. The story of a young enslaved woman who escapes via a secret (and nonmetaphorical) series of trains and stations, it’s painful, necessary reading, reminding us of our country’s horrific legacy — one that’s too easy for some of us to forget. — M. M. 15 other titles And here are 15 more suggestions you probably have already heard of; many of them current bestsellers, all of them powerful and relevant to this moment. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People To Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo How To Be an Antiracist by Ibram X Kendi Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More by Janet Mock So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor by Layla F Saad Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson Native Son by Richard Wright For even more suggestions, see the Schomburg Center Black Liberation Reading List from the New York Public Library.                     —The Seattle Times/TNS

The virus is winning. That much is certain more than six months into a shape-shifting pandemic that’s killed 450,000 people worldwide, is gaining ground globally and has disrupted lives from Wuhan to Sao Paulo. While promising, fast-moving vaccine projects are underway in China, Europe and the US, only the most optimistic expect an effective shot to be ready for global distribution this year. If, as most experts believe, an effective vaccine won’t be ready until well into 2021, we’ll all be co-existing with the coronavirus for the next year or longer without a magic bullet. And this next phase of the crisis may require us to reset our expectations and awareness and change our behaviour, according to public-health professionals. In their view, success isn’t defined as returning to life as it was in 2019. Rather, it’s about buying time and summoning the staying power and policy flexibility to limit the destructive capacity of an expanding pandemic, which may result in global deaths of more than one million according to one estimate, until there are medical tools to effectively treat and immunise against the virus. “People are fatigued. They mistakenly feel that things were going away,” said Cameron Wolfe, an infectious-disease doctor and associate professor of medicine at Duke University. “We’re going to have to figure out a way to live with this.” Complicating matters, the perceived threat varies from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, let alone country to country. Much depends on the severity of local outbreaks and the effectiveness of testing, contact tracing, social distancing, hospital systems and public-health messaging that is free of political shading. Leaders such as US President Donald Trump, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson or Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro have seen their poll numbers crumble at least in part because of high infection rates and deaths from Covid-19, the disease spawned by the virus.  In many instances, messages from the top have seemed to conflict with the advice of experts, or drowned out the guidance of government agencies. That has created confusion and mistrust and invited people to view public-health information through a partisan lens. Not all the news is grim. In the first half of the year, governments worldwide resorted to emergency measures like forced business closures, stay-at-home rules and bans on large gatherings. The moves slowed infection, saved lives and gave leaders time to stockpile medical equipment and supplies. Yet that progress came at the cost of economic contraction, soaring unemployment and trillions of dollars in fiscal and monetary stimulus measures. Governments are likely to be reluctant to resort to wholesale lockdowns again in anything short of a catastrophe. Instead, the biggest economies seem intent on reopening, even if the pace varies. That, in turn, means more social mobility and more opportunities for the virus to spread. Already, scientists who track virus trends are seeing signs that re-opening is leading to a spike in cases. “I understand there is a perception of the need to balance on these economic considerations,” said Ada Adimora, an epidemiologist and professor of medicine in infectious diseases at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. “But to the extent that we open up society and have people going to restaurants — you can’t wear a mask while you eat — you are not really working to control the threat of the virus.” The ability to co-exist with Sars-CoV-2, as the virus is known, will increasingly ride on how individuals assess risks and make decisions. “No activity will be without the risk of coronavirus,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore. “It’s just how much risk people think is worth assuming.” Trouble is, the virus is stealthy. Countries like China and South Korea that contained their local outbreaks have seen secondary flare-ups. Beijing this week closed its school system and limited international flights after a new outbreak spread to neighbouring provinces. In Germany, which has kept its death toll below that of other large European countries, new clusters of infection emerged in a slaughterhouse and a Berlin apartment block. In the US, the pandemic has made inroads into Sun Belt states like Florida, Texas and Arizona after hard-won gains taming it in New York. Latin America, spared early on, is now getting walloped. Brazil, home to densely populated urban centres and rural areas with weak healthcare systems, has become a new epicentre. The resurgence in cases in China and the US shows what can happen when regions start to lift restrictions, according to Seth Berkley, chief executive officer of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. The non-profit is part of a global effort to deploy coronavirus vaccines equitably. “Clearly it isn’t over anywhere,” Berkley said in an interview. “We need to have some humility in how we manage this thing going forward. Obviously if we were to just throw open the gates and try to go completely back to normal, we would see continued spread of the virus.” While the virus ebbs and flows regionally, it’s on the march at the global level, where there are 8.3 million confirmed cases and the pace is accelerating. At the start of May, the daily tally of new confirmed cases was running at about 88,000; now it’s 176,000, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Some experts say the global death toll will top 1 million. “We’ll go well over a million,” said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California. “I wouldn’t be surprised by 2022 if we go into a couple million or more, knowing that there are so many people out there who are vulnerable.” Reopening campaigns in the US have prompted the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to increase its US death-toll forecast for the start of October by 18% to 200,000. As of June 16, Covid-19 has resulted in 117,000 lost American lives. “I’m not sure how you prepare for something of this magnitude and severity,” said Carissa Etienne, director of the Pan American Health Organization. “It’s almost difficult to conceptualise.” A reprieve from the pandemic that Trump and other experts had hoped would come with the arrival of warmer weather hasn’t yet materialised and may not ever, according to Davidson Hamer, a professor of global health and medicine at the Boston University School of Public Health and School of Medicine. If people feel a false sense of security, they’re less likely to wear masks and avoid large gatherings. “The real worrisome time will be this fall, when we are reopening universities and returning to work, with more people inside and cooler temperatures,” Hamer said. “It’s the perfect storm for a resurgence of disease.” The high number of asymptomatic infections is having a huge impact, according to Topol. “This is the worst pandemic in 100 years,” he said. “1918 didn’t have 30% of people who were infected who didn’t know it. It’s the stealth infection thing that adds to the mix.” Drug developers are racing to find effective treatments and a vaccine. This week, University of Oxford researchers reported that a low-cost, widely used anti-inflammatory drug called dexamethasone improved survival in Covid-19 patients, the first treatment to show life-saving promise months into the pandemic. US officials and scientists have launched an accelerated programme that aims to have a vaccine to prevent Covid-19 by the first half of 2021, but White House health adviser Anthony Fauci has cautioned that it could take longer. Promising candidates include shots being developed by biotechnology company Moderna Inc; several Chinese programmes; and a partnership of the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca Plc projecting a vaccine as early as September. The World Health Organization hopes there will be about 2 billion doses of a handful of effective vaccines available by the end of next year, chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said at a briefing this week. But that’s enough for less than one-third of the world’s population. Future vaccines that do arrive on the scene may not provide long-term immunity. If Sars-CoV-2 is like other coronaviruses, including some that cause the common cold, individuals may need annual booster shots to ward off subtle changes, Fauci said in a recent interview. Without a vaccine in place, countries are doing the best they can to contain the virus with contact tracing and targeted quarantines. Testing is crucial, and many countries still haven’t ramped up their capability sufficiently to identify outbreaks when they’re still small enough to bottle up, said David Heymann, professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who led the WHO’s response to severe acute respiratory syndrome in 2003. “It’s all trial and error but if you know the epidemiology and where transmission is occurring you can do a more tailored response,” he said. As the pandemic rolls into the summer, this much is clear. The virus will not “fade away” even without a vaccine, as Trump predicted this week. “This was never something that would be containable or would disappear,” said Adalja at Johns Hopkins. “It spreads too efficiently between humans. That’s all it needs to do.” — Bloomberg News