When the Soviet Union still existed, Anatolii Harahatii made his career as a photographer in the small village of Savintsi in northeastern Ukraine. Snapshots of him as a younger, sharply dressed man appear on many surfaces in the cozy, one-story house he shares with Natalya, a former nurse and his wife of over 40 years. In photos from just a few years ago, he appeared happy and healthy, posing with Natalya and their two adult children.

As was the case for most Ukrainians, Anatolii’s life was forever upended on February 24 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of their country, and by early March troops had occupied Savinsti. Russia’s goal, which its government justified with an often head-spinning mix of falsehoods, was nothing less than to topple Ukraine’s democratically elected government and install a puppet regime in its place. As Ukrainian resistance proved to be more formidable than Putin had anticipated, Russian troops escalated their attacks on private citizens. Anatolii was one of them. 

Anatolii intensely followed the frightening and chaotic news of the early days of the war. Several months later, we sat in his kitchen, as he recalled seeing the news of grandmothers standing up to Russian armored columns, blocking their path as they tried to make their way through small villages across Ukraine.

“It was heroism,” Anatolii told me, referring to the Ukrainian civilians’ attempts to physically block Russian tanks with their bodies. When he awoke one morning, he decided to find the columns of tanks, which he filmed. He then posted the footage online.  At the end of May, Russian soldiers in masks, likely intelligence officers, arrested the 68-year-old pensioner. They considered his act of filming the tanks dangerous, likely due to the information it might provide to others in Ukraine, and believed he was in some way acting against the Russian authorities. 

Anatolii

Every other day, my WhatsApp bursts with messages from friends in Brazil and abroad expressing equal parts of excitement and apprehension as Sunday’s Brazilian presidential elections approach. On Wednesday, my best friend who lives in the country’s capital, Brasília, texted to say she was scared of wearing red clothes to go vote this weekend because red is the color associated with the Worker’s Party of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula, the current front-runner, has a real, if slim, chance to beat far-right incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro in the first round by getting more than 50 percent of valid votes. “The mood is terrible,” she wrote, later adding that in the last 48 hours, four instances of political violence had been recorded across the country. “It’s very sinister this fear of expressing yourself.”

My friend’s worries are justified. The upcoming presidential elections in my home country are the most fraught and hate-filled in recent memory. In July, one of the president’s followers fatally shot a local Worker’s Party treasurer at his Lula-themed birthday party. Even before the official kick-off of the campaign in August, pro-Lula protesters were bombarded with feces and urine. On September 7, the day Brazil commemorated 200 years of independence, in the midst of a political discussion, a Bolsonaro supporter killed a Lula supporter, stabbing him 70 times and attacking him with an axe. This month, a researcher with Datafolha, one of the main polling institutes in Brazil, was assaulted. In a Rio de Janeiro bar, a 19-year-old woman was struck in the head after a Bolsonaro fan threatened to hit her sister when she criticized the president. Almost 70 percent of Brazilians surveyed in a September poll said they fear being victims of politically motivated violence. 

“Online and offline hate speech and harassment and serious political violence have made many Brazilians afraid to express political opinions and exercise their political rights,” Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “Electoral and judicial authorities, police forces, and other authorities should do their utmost to protect freedom of speech and assembly, and ensure that Brazilians can vote safely.” Experts with the United Nations have also called for peaceful elections and condemned “continuing attacks against democratic institutions, the judiciary and the electoral system in Brazil.” 

“Online and offline hate speech and harassment and serious political violence have made many Brazilians afraid to express political opinions and exercise their political rights.”

This is not the first time political violence has been part of a Brazilian election. In 2018, Marielle Franco, a Black, gay, feminist Rio de Janeiro councilmember and human rights advocate was killed along with her driver after leaving a Black women’s empowerment event. She has become an international icon as a symbol of resistance and activism, but her murder remains unsolved. That same year, while on the campaign trail, Bolsonaro was stabbed by a mentally ill man. Since then, the country’s Superior Electoral Court, which oversees elections, has recorded a spike in violence against candidates. When my American coworkers recently asked me what I thought the outcome of this election would be, I matter-of-factly stated I believed Lula would win, if only he didn’t get murdered first. (The leading candidate’s security apparatus has been reinforced, and he’s been wearing a bulletproof vest at public events.) 

Bolsonaro himself has often incited hostility if not outright violence. A former army captain and a member of congress for 27 years, he was famous for his misogynistic and homophobic views. As president, he is notable for his disastrous handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and disregard for the Amazon and climate change. He has called for the Worker’s Party to be swept into the “trash bin of history” and talked about shooting the “petralhada,” a pejorative way of referring to those who vote for the left-leaning party. This authoritarian president, who received a full endorsement from former President Donald Trump, has loosened firearms laws, which has resulted in a three-digit surge in gun ownership registration and told his supporters to “prepare” for what is likely to be a negative outcome for the president. Before Independence Day rallies in September, Bolsonaro urged his supporters to “go to the streets one last time.” 

During the mid-1990s, trust and estate lawyer Jonathan Blattmachr had an innovative idea that would come to revolutionize the American trust industry. Blattmachr is a veteran of the wealth management field, cutting his teeth at the famous white shoe law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, wealth managers to the Rockefellers and other dynastically wealthy families.

Then based in New York, he knew about the success of offshore jurisdictions—places like the Cayman Islands and the Cook Islands allowed super-rich Americans to secretly stash their wealth overseas, hidden from creditors and the tax man. But many of his clients, he believed, would not “want to have their assets in a place they couldn’t find on a map.”

What if, Blattmachr thought, the offshore came onshore?

When Blattmachr proposed that New York allow onshore asset-protection trusts, “people thought I was absolutely out of my mind.” So he took his idea to Alaska instead.

With traditional trusts, you have the grantor (a.k.a. the client) who creates the trust and puts it in the care of a third-party trustee for the benefit of his beneficiaries—usually the grantor’s spouse or children. When offshore banking centers were first emerging, a major attraction was that they allowed grantors to create what’s known as an “asset protection” or “self-settled spendthrift” trust and house it offshore. Such trusts can be established for a very specific beneficiary: the grantor himself. (Most grantors are male.) By claiming he no longer owns the assets—in a way, they belong to the trust—he is able to avoid wealth-transfer taxes such as the estate tax, and dodge creditors, too. The intention is to put the grantor’s assets in an “ownership limbo,” which obfuscates his legal responsibilities. 

That’s what was going down offshore in the 1980s and 1990s. Blattmachr was riveted by the question: What if the United States hosted these trusts, too? You could have domestic asset protection trusts. He brought his idea to the trusts and estates law section of the New York State Bar Association, and was “unanimously shot down,” as Blattmachr told the trade publication Tax Notes in 2016. “People thought I was absolutely out of my mind.” See, some lawyers deemed the purpose of an asset protection trust—allowing people to insulate their money from creditors—a form of fraud.

A biopic of Emily Brontë and a romcom starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts

Thursday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on abortion bans was a predictable, three-hour medley of left- and right-wing talking points. Republicans accused Democrats of wanting abortion policies in line with those of North Korea and China; Democrats accused Republicans of promoting repressive policies that are comparable to how the Saudi and Iranian regimes treat women. The “fentanyl candy” hysteria made an appearance, as did an out-of-context Shakespeare quote about demanding a pound of flesh.

But one witness cut through the noise, rejecting the “binary yes or no” approach to discussing abortion and shedding light on the humanity of the people who choose to terminate their pregnancies. Kelsey Leigh, a Pittsburgh woman who now works at a reproductive health center, said that she was 20 weeks and six days into a desired pregnancy when she learned that her child had a severe fetal anomaly that she considered “not compatible with life.” At 22 weeks, she had an abortion. “I could not carry my son for four more months to give birth to him knowing that his life would only be filled with pain and suffering,” she said.

During the hearing, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) shared his own story of losing a child to justify his position that “I support life, from conception to natural death.” Higgins said that his daughter Daniela died after being born three months prematurely, but that her short life was still valuable. “Our daughter Daniela breathed life into us,” he said. “She touched every life that she gazed upon.”

Leigh responded that the two stories are not incompatible. “No one needs to be reminded of the sanctity of life,” she said. “We need to be reminded that this is a nuanced, complex decision that is never gonna be answered by a binary yes or no question or the amount of weeks that my ultrasound shows. We need to leave people alone to make these decisions for themselves and their families and the betterment of their communities.”

Asked by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) why abortion bans are dangerous for families like hers, Leigh had some harsh words for the representatives who used their time to describe the stages of fetal development. “It’s demeaning and it’s insulting to insinuate that that’s what I need to hear to know that my son, and that his life, mattered,” she said. “The rhetoric and the sensationalization create stigma and shame, and it’s wrong. And it’s really difficult to sit here and to hear that, and then not actually be looked in the eye and be asked about my experience.”

When the Queen of Tuvalu died, I remembered.

My parents were pleased that at ten years old I liked Mark Twain. And then they discovered that, as with Cleo the Talking Dog five years earlier, I would not move on from The Prince and the Pauper. I wasn’t interested in any other non-school book. I’d seen the film of Twain’s novel and Errol Flynn had the right to sit in my presence every week when I reread my favorite parts. Tom Sawyer? Any luckily orphaned boy princes? No? Then no thanks.

My mother had purchased from a door-to-door salesman in 1958 our 1957 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia. We never owned another set. My knowledge of the world came from our ever more out-of-date encyclopedia. My science is still very Sputnik-era. I let the twenty-four taped, dogged volumes go with much regret in 2009 after my parents died. As I was tiring of Twain’s lookalike boys and their protector, Miles Hendon, I found in the encyclopedia a black-and-white illustration of a painting of two princes in dark clothes. They had light long hair and looked scared. Princes were unlucky. I lived in Indianapolis, Indiana. I longed to be unlucky. The two brothers were in a place with a dark staircase called the Tower of London. And, yes, the L volume of our encyclopedia set had so much on London, headed by a drawing of really old London dominated by “S. Pauwls Church.” I studied the narrow houses packed around it. My father couldn’t tell me for sure what “eel ships” were, but they were the largest vessels on the river in the drawing. So that’s where my nursery rhyme jumble of “all fall down” came from.

(When did I come across the drawing that had the Globe Theatre marked in it and London Bridge full of houses over the “Thames fluuius”? Much later, when Shakespeare’s history plays were still way over my head.)

Dotun, Andy and David Cartlidge are here with a state of play after the final international break before the World Cup. We wonder if Germany might prove entertaining rather than efficient come Qatar and whether the problems plaguing France have knocked them off their prime perch. 

There’s also time for a Barcelona injury update and a question even devoted fans are starting to ask: do Portugal need to move on from Cristiano Ronaldo?

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This past weekend, activists, economists, politicians, and members of the public packed a room at the California Science Center in Los Angeles to talk about reparations. Members of the California Reparations Task Force, a first-of-its-kind group, gathered for their tenth meeting to grapple with some of the difficult questions they have yet to answer about what California owes to descendants of slavery.

At the top of everyone’s mind was how to begin to calculate the amount the state should owe for the harms it has committed. The Task Force has to decide how much California should owe eligible Black residents not just for its involvement in slavery, but also for all the lingering trauma that has followed and the impacts it has had on every facet of society.

Though California’s 1849 state constitution was meant to be anti-slavery, the state was complicit in upholding the institution. There are no exact counts, but one Gold-Rush-era source estimates that in 1852, there were 1,500 enslaved African Americans living in in the state. The same year, California passed a state fugitive slave law, which not only criminalized formerly enslaved people who had escaped to the state from across state lines, but also people who had escaped there before California had even officially become a state. 

To study these harms and try to understand how they could possibly be remedied, the Reparations Task Force was created in September 2020, with the passing of AB 3121. The Task Force has two main objectives: 1) To “study the institution of slavery and its lingering negative effects on living African Americans…and on society”; and 2) to make recommendations for “compensation, rehabilitation, and restitution for African Americans.” In other words, it’s time for the government to pay up.

The Task Force issued its first report in June, with a final report due by July 2023. The interim report includes preliminary recommendations, ranging from a proposal to repeal policies that contribute to housing segregation to calls for free healthcare programs and the elimination of discriminatory policing. The interim report also recommends that the state should implement a reparations program to address its racial wealth gap (which one 2016 estimate put at around $350,000 in Los Angeles), though the Task Force has yet to decide the size of that payment.

The chilling power of controversial documentary-horror Häxan, 100 years on