The US Department of Justice has charged political advisor and Russian television contributor Dimitri Simes and his wife, Anastasia Simes, with violating US sanctions through schemes involving art and antiques.

The two indictments against the couple were unsealed on September 5, according to a DOJ press release.

The first indictment accused the Simeses of laundering funds for the Russian state-funded network Channel One Russia, where Dimitri Simes hosts a popular news commentary show, for which they allegedly received over $1 million and various personal benefits including a personal car and driver, a stipend for an apartment in Moscow, and a personal team of ten employees from the station. Channel One Russia was sanctioned in May 2022.

The second indictment focuses on Anastasia’s role in purchasing and storing art and antiques, including a 19th-century painting by F.C. Welsch and a statue of the Greek goddess Minerva by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, for Russian oligarch and close friend of the newly appointed Prime Minister, Aleksandr Y. Udodov, who was sanctioned by the US government in February 2023. 

According to that indictment, the artworks and other antiques were acquired from American and European galleries and auction houses, then stored at the couple’s home in Virginia before finally being sent to Russia. However the FBI seized the couple’s collection during a four-day raid in August. Some of the items were family heirlooms, Dimitri said in an interview with the New York Times, which he said were irrelevant to the government concerns. 

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10 Great Middle Grade Reads for Hispanic Heritage Month

Hispanic Heritage Month, which occurs annually in the United States from September 15th to October 15th, is a month to celebrate and acknowledge the contributions of Latine and Hispanic Americans. First established as National Hispanic Heritage Week by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, it was expanded to a monthlong event by President Ronald Reagan in 1988. During the months of September and October communities around the United States host musical events, parades, museum exhibits, and educational opportunities to explore the impact Hispanic and Latine Americans have had in history and culture.

While it’s important to read books from a wide variety of authors all year long, events like Hispanic Heritage Month are an opportunity to highlight the authors from the cultures being celebrated and connect readers to books themed to the month. Below, you’ll find books specifically written for middle grade readers, though they can certainly be enjoyed by young adults and adults as well!

9 Twisted Science Fiction Novels About Time Travel

There’s something about election season here in the US that makes me want to escape to different worlds and different times. Sometimes, I feel hopeful, but oftentimes, I just need to check out and get lost in a science fiction book about time travel. What if we could go back in time and correct our mistakes? What if we could correct the larger horrors of humanity? What if we could leap forward and behold what’s to come? The theme is a classic one in science fiction that never fails to capture our imaginations.

Why Doctor Doom Is the Greatest Supervillain of All Time

At this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, Marvel Studios made the surprise announcement that the Fantastic Four villain Doctor Doom would be played by Robert Downey, Jr. This was an unexpected choice, to say the least, given that Downey is, uh, already pretty well known for playing a different MCU character. It was also controversial, not least because he’s got some pretty big boots (and a cloak and an iron mask) to fill.

I first tried AI the way many people did: I fell prey to a viral marketing trend. In late 2022, photo-editing app Lensa briefly broke the internet when users flooded social media with its uncanny AI-generated avatars. As my feeds overflowed with yassified portraits of friends in bootleg Marvel gear, I couldn’t help but think about my mother. What would Mom look like as an Avenger? I’d been making images of her in my art practice for more than 15 years, using every modality I could manage. AI seemed like a funny, if unexpected, next step.

My first reaction was simple amazement. The representational prowess of AI was shocking. But while the avatars in my feed were all GigaChads and Stacies in space, the renderings of my mom were remarkably more morose. The algorithm didn’t seem to know what to do with an androgynous barefaced older woman. The best it could manage were clichés of a cougar or a crone. I looked at my fierce friends and I looked at my mutated mom—all the normative visual tropes were there, but they were twisted, roughly hewn. Everything was so eerily familiar and yet so indescribably weird.

I suddenly thought, I’ve finally found the perfect tool.

Up until then, photography had been my primary medium, in large part for its dual ability to alienate a subject while also drawing it more into view. I had a little catchphrase: Taking a picture of trash is like crowning a prince. Conversely, making a postcard of a landscape can be a kind of dethroning, an unceremonious flattening. The mechanisms of this transformation have slowly revealed themselves to be one of my most important and bedeviling subjects (something I explore at length in my book Hello Chaos: a Love Story).

In photographing my mother, I had to confront the social conventions that underlie every aestheticized gesture. I crammed her into pitiless high heels and bound her breasts in forced masculinity. What voice did these visual conventions have, and how did they speak through the singular subject of my mother? How did my mom and my representations of her make these social and aesthetic expectations sing—or scream, or laugh, or cry? What assumptions do we draw upon to categorize what we see, and what are their political implications?

The Football Ramble have managed to gain exclusive access to Mikel Arteta’s team talk for their trip to Man City on Sunday… “Live. Laugh. Love.”

Today, Marcus, Luke, Andy and Pete look ahead to the thigh rubber of the weekend and propose that Kevin De Bruyne and Martin Odegaard have an arm wrestle on the sidelines to entertain the crowd. Elsewhere, Anthony Gordon drives a VERY BIG car and Cagliari’s flamingo mascot takes pelters from their own fans.

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Join us at the London Palladium TONIGHT for 'Football Ramble: Time Tunnel', a journey through football history like no other. Expect loads of laughs, all your Ramble favourites, and absolutely everything on Pete's USB stick. Get your tickets at footballramblelive.com!

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Artists’ grant applications tend to be anodyne things because the point of them is often to appeal to an organization’s sensibilities, not to take a stand. But take a stand is what Elizabeth Catlett did in 1945 when she wrote of the “double handicap of race and sex” that Black women like herself faced. “Because of subtle American propaganda in the movies, radio and stage they have come to be generally regarded as good cooks, housemaids and nurses and little else,” Catlett wrote in her Rosenwald Fellowship plan in 1945.

“At this time when we are fighting an all out war against tyranny and oppression,” she continued, “it is extremely important that the picture of Negro women as participants in this fight, throughout the history of America, be sharply drawn.” She referred to the rape of Recy Taylor by six white men the year before; Taylor’s assailants were never indicted.

Catlett’s art rebuts an avalanche of racist, misogynistic images that she frequently encountered, offering pictures of strength, endurance, and proud femininity. Working in sculpture, painting, and printmaking, Catlett took styles associated with European modernism, then applied them to Black women, who were often demeaned or altogether ignored by white male artists abroad. The artist, who started out in the US before achieving fame in Mexico, would go on to produce works referring explicitly to a range of political subjects, from the imprisonment of Angela Davis to the stripping of rights from Indigenous Mexicans.

In doing so, she asked prescient questions, ones that have recently been taken up anew by generations of artists after her: What makes a good form of representation? And can images move people to action, raising political consciousness among the masses?

Now, for the first time in nearly 25 years, Catlett is the subject of a proper US retrospective, with some 150 of her works in multiple mediums brought together at the Brooklyn Museum. (After it closes in New York, the exhibition heads next to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which co-organized it, and then to the Art Institute of Chicago.) The exhibition makes a compelling case that Catlett, though hardly overlooked in the history of American modernism, deserves to be viewed as a transnational pioneer and one of the finest 20th-century artists. Below, a look at five essential works by Catlett, each of which appears in the Brooklyn show.

Could players really go on strike? And just how much will certain journalists at certain newspapers lose their nut if they do?

Night two of three in the first week of the Champions League was overshadowed by Rodri’s comments that a strike might soon be the only option. Marcus and Luke discuss that and remember the time that former Pompey man Jon Gittens called the ref a chicken nugget.

There’s also time to check in on Spurs, who narrowly escaped a massive upset in the Carabao Cup – but Luke thinks Big Ange will still be celebrating Christmas back in Melbourne…

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Join us at the London Palladium THIS FRIDAY for 'Football Ramble: Time Tunnel', a journey through football history like no other. Expect loads of laughs, all your Ramble favourites, and absolutely everything on Pete's USB stick. Get your last minute tickets at footballramblelive.com!

The Champions League is back and it was an emphatic night for Aston Villa on their return to Europe's top table. *Insert gag about it looking like men against boys*.

Elsewhere, Marcus, Luke, Vish and Pete dine on some tasty Carabao after Man United’s big win last night and Paul Mullin almost dined on Alex Cochrane in the “Hollywood” derby. Plus, Andy Carroll is set to spend the year drinking wine in the south of France and we couldn’t be happier for him.

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We're back on stage and tickets are out NOW! Join us at London Palladium on Friday September 20th 2024 for 'Football Ramble: Time Tunnel', a journey through football history like no other. Expect loads of laughs, all your Ramble favourites, and absolutely everything on Pete's USB stick. Get your tickets at footballramblelive.com!

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Real Madrid is intensifying its interest in William Saliba and plans to closely monitor him throughout the season.

The Frenchman is considered one of the best defenders in Europe, and Los Blancos are eager to bring him into their squad next season.

Arsenal will do everything possible to keep Saliba, but Madrid has already started tracking the defender’s performances.

According to a report from Defensa Central, a Madrid scout will attend the Gunners’ match against Tottenham this weekend.

Interestingly, Saliba isn’t the only North London defender on Madrid’s radar. The report also states that the scout will be watching Tottenham’s Cristian Romero, another defender on their shortlist.