The names of late Korean artists Lee Jung-seob and Park Soo-keun have been dragged into a scandal after several of their paintings exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) were branded as fakes.

The show – titled “Korean Treasures from the Chester and Cameron Chang Collection” – ran for four months and ended on Sunday. Suspicion about the authenticity of some of the artworks, including two paintings apiece by Lee and Park, was apparently rife from the onset. Ceramics from the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910) were also exhibited.

Last week, LACMA held an official appraisal session at the museum, where four Korean art experts examined the suspected forgeries, South Korean national daily newspaper JoongAng reported Tuesday. They were Hong Sun-pyo, professor emeritus from Ewha University; Lee Dong-kook, director of the Gyeonggi Province Museum; Kim Sun-hee, former director of the Busan Museum of Art; and Tae Hyun-seon, curator at the Leeum Museum of Art.

The experts concluded that Lee’s A Bull and a Child and Crawling Children, and Park’s Waikiki and Three Women and Chile are counterfeits. The experts criticized LACMA’s due diligence process and also said the museum lacked an understanding of Korean art.

In a statement to ARTnews, the museum said, “LACMA has confidence in the scientific findings that our research has produced to date, and we are committed to continuing to conduct additional research on works in the Chester and Cameron Chang Collection. Further contextualization of these works and their art historical significance will appear in future LACMA publications, both online and in print. As is longstanding practice, the works in LACMA’s permanent collection are continuously studied as new discoveries are made and research progresses.”

Why can’t Kevin Keegan fly out to Germany to watch the Euros? I don’t know Kev, you tell us…

Marcus, Pete and Jim preview the last 8, where it’s BUSINESS time. Marcus is living in the past about Germany as we size up their clash with the Spaniards, while over in the England camp Gareth Southgate is finally learning from the past and trying a new formation with Ed Sheeran as sweeper.

Plus, Andy Carroll becomes a Streets of Rage character and Pete explains which fish he’d willingly eat off the floor in painstaking detail.

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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Despite insistence from the White House that President Biden has no plans to drop out of the general election after his disastrous debate performance last week, Republicans seem to be already running against Vice President Kamala Harris.

A new ad released on Wednesday by the National Republican Congressional Committee calls Harris Biden’s “enabler in chief” and “architect of the border crisis.” The ad, titled “Careful for what you wish for,” depicts Harris as conniving, as her remarks championing the president play against images of Biden stumbling on stairs and appearing to fall asleep. It ends with a demand—“This November: Vote Republican. Stop Kamala”—as ominous music plays in the background over footage of Democrats chanting “four more years!” at Biden’s State of the Union while Harris smiles and claps in the background.

The Trump War Room account on X, run by the campaign, also posted a four-minute long video featuring various clips of Harris repeating the phrase, “What can be, unburdened by what has been.” The apparent aim of the video was to try to cast the phrase in a conspiratorial light. “Here are four straight minutes of Kamala Harris being ‘unburdened,” the account wrote. Other prominent figures on the right also appeared confident that Harris would soon be replacing Biden. “They’re gonna put in Kamala,” conservative commentator Meghan McCain posted on X. Turning Point CEO Charlie Kirk, meanwhile, breathlessly posted what he claimed was a “scoop” that “leftist [get out the vote] groups…are lining up the switch to Kamala.”

By now, anyone who follows presidential politics has an opinion on what President Joe Biden should do following his debate meltdown that raised questions, concerns, and fears about his mental acuity. So far, a small number of Democrats have urged him to withdraw from the 2024 race. A larger number of pundits have done the same. Major funders are fretting. And the White House and his campaign have insisted Biden is up to the job and can carry on. On social media, his diehard supporters have raged against the commentariat and the apostate Democrats, asserting that Donald Trump, his lies and multiple liabilities, and the threat he poses to American democracy ought to be more the focus than Biden’s age.

No surprise, there’s no consensus in the Democratic world.

After speaking with numerous people within the Democratic cosmos, I have thoughts about this mess and possible steps forward. And I’m immodest enough to believe they might be worth sharing.

Let’s look at this as a decision tree. The first branch: What does Biden’s debate debacle mean? Many of his supporters and his own team have dismissed it as merely one bad night, with some pointing toward President Barack Obama’s disastrous first debate with Mitt Romney. But Obama’s poor performance was due to his lack of preparation and his arrogant decision to not approach Romney as a worthy adversary. It said nothing about his abilities or health.

Biden’s debate prompted the question: Was this an one-off (due to a cold, fatigue from grueling travel, or whatever) or an indication of a worrisome condition that could—or probably would—manifest itself again. If the latter, this meant his reelection bid—and the effort to prevent Trump from returning to the White House—was in great danger. One more public appearance like this one would likely end Biden’s campaign. And if such an event occurred after the convention, the Democrats would be dead ducks. Burdened with a candidate seen as in severe cognitive decline, the party could take a wallop that would include losing the Senate and failing to retake the House. The authoritarian-minded Trump would rule again, with a Republican-controlled Congress.

So here is the first decision. If you’re in the one-bad-night camp and still ridin’ with Biden, your calculating is done. You’re going to have to white-knuckle your way through the next four months.

If you believe the debate revealed a potentially existential threat for the Biden effort, then you move on to other branches on the decision tree. The next question is, if not Biden, whom?

Before proceeding, let’s note that under Democratic rules, there is no way for the party at this point to deny Biden its presidential nomination. He holds a majority of delegates to next month’s convention in Chicago, and they are pledged to vote for him. For anything else to happen, Biden would have to withdraw from the race. If he sticks with it, the rest of this what-iffing is irrelevant.

Two monkeys with wings defecate suspending a ballerina whose skull is split. Her tutu reveals thighs from the fifties, toned. Their hands are on her poor wounded head; she has no feet. One of the monkeys, the one on the left, has a badly defined jawline. The woman has a perforated abdomen.

Two cartoon Polish men high-five. Their legs and their heads are red, to accentuate the fact that their heads are like socks. Their eyes are like their mouths, almost smiling at their mischief. They betray a body pact.

Two bald women with upturned noses, alien eyes, and prominent oval breasts. The separation between torso and hip through a knee and high heels propping up either two gardeners watering or two amphibians. On either side, fetuses in placenta or ghosts with their fingers to their lips, and with ribbons, evidently red, around their necks.

In many ways, the end of Roe v Wade didn’t happen when the US Supreme Court issued its decision to overrule Roe in the Dobbs case in June 2022. Rather, it came nine months earlier, on September 1, 2021, when the Texas Heartbeat Act, also known as SB8, took effect. The law banned abortion after embryonic cardiac activity became detectable, around six weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for fetal abnormalities. The job of enforcement was outsourced to private citizens (also known as “bounty hunters”), thereby making the law much harder to challenge in court. Since then, as wave after wave of post-Dobbs abortion restrictions have been enacted in deep-red states, reproductive rights advocates and journalists have—rightly—focused their attention on the effects of those draconian laws on the health and autonomy of women.

The reports of harm to pregnant patients, however, though wrenching, have been anecdotal, which has limited their ability to move the most conservative hearts and minds. Then there is an additional factor: It’s not clear that many far-right lawmakers and courts actually care about the well-being of women.

But they do claim to care about babies, which is why a new study about SB8 and infant mortality is so important. A team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University has spent the two-and-a-half years since SB8 took effect crunching data on infant deaths in Texas and other states, then re-crunching it to confirm their results. They found that as women whose access to abortion was drastically curtailed by SB8 began to give birth in 2022, those infants were dying at much higher rates compared both to the period before the law took effect and to other states that didn’t have near-bans. 

The likeliest reason, according to Alison Gemmill, a lead author on the study, is that more women were forced to carry what are sometimes called “medically futile” pregnancies to term. These are pregnancies in which the fetus had catastrophic genetic and other anomalies incompatible with life outside the womb. Unsurprisingly, many of those newborns quickly died. The study’s measured academic language— “Restrictive abortion policies may have important unintended consequences in terms of trauma to families and medical cost”—barely hints at the depth of suffering imposed by SB8. 

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that former President Donald Trump has broad immunity from prosecution for crimes he allegedly committed while in office. The majority decision provoked furious dissent from the court’s three liberal justices. “The President is now a King above the law,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor, concluding, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

The decision is deeply at odds with public opinion. Surveys by researchers at Bright Line Watch earlier this year found that fewer than 30 percent of Americans— including about half of all Republicans— believed the court should extend broad immunity to Trump and future presidents. The immunity decision joins a string of other, less-publicized opinions this term that will contribute to the paralyzed state of the American government and loosen constraints on public corruption.

Taken as a whole, these opinions may have ripple effects on American democracy that go far beyond the immediate impact on federal regulations or Trump’s criminal trials. At a bare minimum, they suggest that the conservative justices have forgotten a basic first-year law school lesson: when citizens no longer believe they can resolve disputes through trusted institutions or depend on a rational legal system to hold officials accountable, they are much more inclined to take matters into their own hands. And unlike many Supreme Court oral arguments, this one isn’t just a hypothetical.

“What we have found is that support for political violence is highly correlated with deep distrust of democratic institutions.”

Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) on Tuesday became the first Democrat in office to call for President Biden to drop out of the general election in the wake of his disastrous debate performance last week.

In a lengthy statement, Doggett said Biden “should make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw” in order to reduce the likelihood of a second Trump term.

“Instead of reassuring voters [at the debate],” Doggett said, “the President failed to effectively defend his many accomplishments and expose Trump’s lies.”

“Our overriding consideration must be who has the best hope of saving our democracy from an authoritarian takeover by a criminal and his gang,” he continued. “Too much is at stake to risk a Trump victory—too great a risk to assume that what could not be turned around in a year, what was not turned around in the debate, can be turned around now. President Biden saved democracy by delivering us from Trump in 2020. He must not deliver us to Trump in 2024.”

I took the day off work to cook. Dad wore my apron and made the charoset and complained about how long it took to cut that many apples. Mom told me the soup tasted like nothing and made me go to Key Food to buy Better Than Bouillon. They were visiting New York to see my new apartment for the first time. Mom had always been in charge of preparing this meal when I was growing up, but for the first time, the tables were turned: I was hosting and we were eating at my house. She was older and more disabled now, which meant she could no longer use her hands to chop carrots and celery and fresh dill. So instead, she sat on a cane chair at the kitchen table she had just bought me from West Elm, tossing directions my way like a ringmaster.

Everyone said Passover would be weird this year. How could it not be? Tens of thousands of people were being systematically starved in Gaza at the hands of Israel. Our government was helping, weaponizing American Jews in its effort. It felt wrong to celebrate by eating ourselves silly.

I kept thinking about that one line—“Next year in Jerusalem.” It’s a line Jews have been reciting for thousands of years, way before the Nakba and the establishment of the state of Israel. But when I was growing up, I associated it with the directive that camp counselors and youth group educators had given me: to connect myself with Israel; to visit the country, “the homeland”; and to move there, should I be so inclined. This was a suggestion I now felt affirmatively opposed to, and resented having ever been taught. I didn’t want to think about propaganda at the dinner table. Whoever read this line aloud, I felt, would be encouraging the rest of us to contribute to a tragedy of displacement and violence.

By sundown, I was drinking my second cup of wine and Dad was studying THE NEW AMERICAN HAGGADAH so he could lead the seder in an abbreviated way for my friends, most of whom had gone to Catholic high schools and Jesuit colleges. Waiting around hungrily and impatiently until they arrived, Luke punctuated the silence by telling my parents the story about the time he enunciated the ch in l’chaim in front of an entire courtroom.

“Be there in 5-10,” Tim texted the group chat. “Princess Jake demanded an uber.” Tim had sourced a 6.6-pound cut of brisket from his workplace, a meat distributor specializing in biodiversity and humanely raised animals. Jake had cooked it with carrots and spices, using the skills he had been honing at his workplace: a restaurant in Greenpoint where the prix fixe menu started at $195 without the wine pairing. Zach came with the shmura matzah—“artisanal,” he called it. Eleni came with the wine. Tim arrived wearing a vest right out of Fiddler on the Roof. We call it his Jewish outfit. We all sat down at my new, big, rectangular table, me at the head and my parents at the other end. The dining area had two big windows, and the light was nice and yellow as the sun started to set. This was the first time my parents would meet these friends, some of my closest, and I was eager for everyone to drink their wine and settle in, for any awkwardness to melt away.

Last December, UNICEF reported that two and a half months into Israel’s offensive in Gaza, at least a thousand children lost one or both of their legs. As more Palestinians become disabled, their risks expand. A United Nations committee warned in May of “the disproportionate impacts on people with disabilities due to the destruction of hospitals, the cut-off of essential services, restrictions, [and] non-existing access to humanitarian assistance” amid the war waged in response to Hamas’s attack on October 7th.

One organization that is trying to help disabled Palestinians in Gaza is Humanity & Inclusion, an international Nobel Peace Prize-winning humanitarian group, which has operated in Palestine—both in Gaza and the West Bank—for nearly three decades. Since October, H&I has provided mobility devices to newly disabled Palestinians.

Their work has been treacherous—multiple H&I staff members have been killed and their office in Gaza City has been destroyed. In mid-June, H&I says the Israeli Defense Forces bulldozed their warehouse in Rafah, where medical supplies and mattresses had previously been stored. (In response to a request for comment on the destruction of H&I’s warehouse, a spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces did not deny the warehouse’s destruction, but said the IDF “follows international law.”) The Israeli army has also prohibited many medical devices from entering Gaza, claiming that these are “dual-use items”—that crutches or hearing aid batteries, for example, could have a military use. 

Mother Jones spoke to Noor Bimbashi, an advocacy officer for Humanity & Inclusion based in the West Bank about the challenges that disabled people in Gaza face, the impact of aid restrictions, and how those in the West Bank experience violence, too.