Here are 13 moments -- in honor of the number she wore for a generation -- on the field that defined Alex Morgan's decade and a half playing at the highest level.
Déa Kulumbegashvili's April is a bone-rattling drama about what it means to be a woman in the country of Georgia. The nation's laws permit pregnancy termination only up to 12 weeks — before some people even know they're expecting — and even then, rural stigma prevents many of them from accessing care. Kulumbegashvili places her protagonist Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) against this volatile backdrop, as an obstetrician who risks her career by driving to far-flung villages to help pregnant women in need of abortions.While the film's focus is the aspersions cast on Nina's character,...more it tells its story in oblique ways, with stunning confrontations of violence and bodily function that form a visceral fabric. The film presents life as an overlapping showreel of birth, death, pregnancy, abortion, and sex, all facets of female experience that Kulumbegashvili merges into a monstrous beast — not just narratively, but literally, through nightmarish imagery.All the while, April unfolds with the kind of unrelenting tension that takes it from understated drama to razor-wire thriller, a metamorphosis owed not to speeding up its images, but slowing down and lingering on them for jaw-dropping lengths of time. It's a film that induces revulsion, but at the same time, is too magnetic to divert your eyes away from.What is April about?The opening sounds and images of April are squirm-inducing, but immediately hypnotic. A humanoid figure wanders in a dark and empty void, naked and hunched-over — either like a fetus, or an old woman — as breathy whispers consume the soundscape. These gradually transform to sounds of laughter and children playing, as though this mysterious being were separated from some phantom family by only a thin layer of reality. Even before the movie presents its subject, it calls to mind images of abortion and of aging, woven together in some nightmare of anxious regret.Without warning, stray shots of rain and cautious observed natural landscapes yank us into a hospital room, as Kulumbegashvili captures a woman giving birth under harsh fluorescents — but this beautiful, bloody, painful miracle of life ends in death. The mother and her husband launch an inquiry against Nina as to why their baby died, placing the OBGYN under a spotlight of her own, and leaving looming doubts for the audience as to whether she was at fault.
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Nina, middle-aged and single, makes for an easy target by men looking to question her character — especially as she's long been the subject of rumors about illegal abortions. Her superiors at the hospital seem willing to look the other way, but only up to a point. Given the investigation, who better to throw under the bus than the aging spinster who already has a black mark against her?However, none of this stops Nina from continuing to to travel to rural villages on her own time to perform what she sees as her duty toward uneducated women whose lives would be ruined by unmarried pregnancy — thanks to threats from local men — even if they wanted to be mothers in the first place. She represents a choice, or at least an option, when these women have none, even if it puts her own choices at risk.April is dreamlike, but hauntingly realistic.Just as often as Kulumbegashvili's cuts to the aforementioned, formless creature, it presents lengthy scenes of Nina traveling to the countryside that offer space for viewers to ruminate — and to recover. The tension the m...
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Continue reading Why public EV chargers almost never work as fast as promised
Why public EV chargers almost never work as fast as promised originally appeared on Autoblog on Sat, 7 Sep 2024 11:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Buenos Aires claims actions by Venezuela’s government could be considered “crimes against humanity”
Argentina has called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue an arrest warrant for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and other officials, citing alleged human rights violations during a crackdown on post-election unrest.
The actions taken by Maduro’s government since the July 28 ballot could “constitute crimes against humanity,” the Argentinian Foreign Ministry claimed on Friday. The statement said a request to the ...morecourt will be submitted on Monday.
According to the National Electoral Council of Venezuela, Maduro won the July presidential election with 52% of the vote. The Western-backed opposition, however, has accused officials in Caracas of rigging the ballot, with rival candidate Edmundo Gonzalez claiming he in fact received 67%.
Protests swept the country after the results were announced. Maduro condemned the unrest as an attempted “coup against Venezuela,” and more than 2,000 demonstrators have since been arrested. Caracas also launched a criminal investigation into opposition figures Edmundo Gonzalez and Maria Corina Machado, after they called on the armed forces to drop their support for the president.
In the aftermath of the contested vote, many nations – including Russia and China – congratulated Maduro on his re-election. The US, along with the EU and several other countries including Argentina, have since refused to recognize Maduro as the legitimate president.
The feud has sparked a war of words – with Maduro calling the Argentinian president “monster face” after Javier Milei branded Maduro a dictator and told him to “get out.” Venezuela ordered the closure of Argentina’s diplomatic mission after the election and recalled its own staff from Buenos Aires.
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Arrest warrant issued for Western-backed Maduro rival
Weighing on the feud, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova rebuked Miley for his apparent reluctance to address issues in his own country.
“Looks like Argentina has no problems of its own, and President Milei has already put all his campaign promises into practice?” she quipped.
Argentina, Latin America’s third largest economy, is in the grip of a severe economic crisis after decades of mounting debt and financial mismanagement. An estimated 55% of Argentina’s population lives below the poverty line, according to the socio-economic watchdog Social Debt Observatory of the Catholic University of Argentina. The figures show that 49.5% were living in poverty when President Milei was sworn into office in December 2023. Argentina’s inflation is one of the highest in the world, exceeding 260% over the last 12 months. The government has devalued the peso by more than 50% as part of the Milei’s “shock therapy” reforms aimed at stabilizing the economy....
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Continue reading America's EV charging network is growing but not fast enough
America's EV charging network is growing but not fast enough originally appeared on Autoblog on Sat, 7 Sep 2024 07:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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FRANKFURT: Firefighters and aircraft on Saturday (Sep 7) ramped up efforts to tackle a massive forest fire in the mountains of central Germany that has reportedly forced the evacuation of hundreds of people. Several blazes began in the Harz Mountains on Friday, and by the evening had joined together to for
So, you've built yourself a fancy gaming PC. You sifted through all the specs, stressed over snagging your dream graphics card, and painstakingly obsessed over what kind of cooling system you'll use. Congrats! You did it.OK, now that we've celebrated your triumphs, it's time to get real. In truth, you're really only getting started, because now you have to worry about all of your peripherals: Monitors, mice, gaming headsets, and more. Even if you already have all those things, until you've got yourself an elite gaming keyboard, your setup just ain't all that. Sorry, I don't make the rules!
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Luckily, you've got yourself a lifelong gaming hobbyist here to help you pick one out. Trust me, it can get super complicated without some guidance (compared to building a gaming rig, this will be a cinch, champ). Over the past month, I went hands-on with the best gaming keyboards so that you could spend less time researching and more time gaming. We'll get into my top picks below, but let's go over a few things first.What are the most important specs?At a glance, the specs you'll want to pay most attention to while shopping for a gaming keyboard are:Size/layoutSwitchesBacklight/RGB lightingConnectivityCustomizationScroll to our "How we tested" section for more detail on our testing process in each of these categories.
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What size gaming keyboard is best?The size (or layout) of the gaming keyboard you choose comes down to your preference. For me, Tenkeyless (or TKL) is best, because without arrow keys, I just don't know what to do with myself. Every time I need to move my cursor while typing, I just kind of freeze. Super normal stuff. That might not be you, though. Maybe you're able to adapt all the way down to 60% — arrow keys and number pads be damned!Here are the main types of gaming keyboards you can expect to see while shopping:Full-size: As big as it gets. A full-size keyboard will have somewhere between 104 and 108 keys, including arrow keys, a number pad, and maybe even some dedicated macro keys. I personally don't think this size keyboard is necessary unless you often find yourself crunching numbers in Excel sheets.96%: Ditches some of the extra macro and navigation keys but maintains the number pad.Tenkeyless, or TKL: Gets rid of the 10-key number pad (thus, ten-key-less) but keeps the arrow, function, and navigation keys. This is my personal favorite.75%: Similar to a TKL but sacrifices a few of the navigation keys.70%: This is the same layout as the 75%, but it doesn't have any function keys.65%: You'll find various configurations for these compact keyboards — some have arrow keys, function keys, or a mixture of both.60%: As compact as it gets. Also referred to as "mini" keyboards, a 60% layout chops off any extra keys. They can be super portable and great for remote gaming.What gaming keyboard should I get in 2024?Time for the picks! Let's take a look and get you the gaming keyboard of your dreams....
