US diplomatic retreat deepens with Covid-19 crisis

The Covid-19 epidemic saw the rapid and almost unprecedented erasure of the United States on the international scene in a matter of months. Dedicated since the election of Donald Trump to a transactional vision of international relations, their institutions paralyzed by a deep political divide, the Americans had revived for a few years with their old isolationist tendencies. This trend suddenly accelerated and accentuated with the coronavirus health crisis. The glaring absence of the United States from all attempts to coordinate a global response to the greatest contemporary pandemic already appears to be a turning point of historic magnitude [ . . . ]

Source: US diplomatic retreat deepens with Covid-19 crisis

French screen legend Michel Piccoli, who starred in ‘Belle de jour’, dies at 94

Michel Piccoli, one of the most original and versatile French actors of the last half century, has died aged 94, his family said Monday.

He died “in the arms of his wife Ludivine and his children Inord and Missia after a stroke”, the family told AFP.

Piccoli starred in a string of classics that redefined world cinema, from Luis Buñuel’s “Belle de Jour” and “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” to a typically memorable turn opposite Brigitte Bardot in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Le Mépris” (“Contempt”) in 1963.

A masterful performer with a wickedly malicious edge, he managed to carve out a hugely prolific career as both an art house icon and a kind of French Cary Grant.

Like Grant and other Hollywood all-rounders Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper, Piccoli was able to adapt himself to virtually any kind of material without altering his essential everyman screen persona.

With his bald forehead, vast eyebrows and sly grin, he hopped easily from seducer to cop to gangster to pope (2011’s “Habemus Papam” by Nanni Moretti), with a predilection in the 1970s and 1980s for ambiguous and cynical roles.

Actor and activist

Yet despite his omnipresence, with Buñuel alone casting him in six of his films, Piccoli never won a French Oscar – the César – despite being nominated four times including for Louis Malle’s “Milou in May” and Jacques Rivette’s “La Belle Noiseuse” in 1991.

He did, however, win best actor at the Cannes film festival in 1980 for playing a tortured Italian judge in Marco Bellocchio’s “A Leap in the Dark” and the following year shared best actor at Berlin for “Une étrange affaire”.

Piccoli was a life-long left-winger who counted the philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre among his friends, but that did not stop him raging against repression in the old Eastern Bloc and supporting the Polish trade union, Solidarity.

One of his best known films outside France was Marco Ferreri’s 1973 “La Grande Bouffe” (Blow-Out), in which a group of male friends shut themselves up in a house with prostitutes and try to eat themselves to death.

“I do not put on an act… I slip away behind my characters. To be an actor, you have to be flexible,” Piccoli said.

Source: French screen legend Michel Piccoli, who starred in ‘Belle de jour’, dies at 94

“Must hear” Interview: We are only at the beginning of this crisis

Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, photo courtesy University of Minnesota

In the midst of a pandemic, governors around the country have been reopening local economies and causing concern for many health experts, including members of the White House coronavirus task force who testified before a Senate committee this week. 

Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota has long warned about the risk of pandemics. He calls the effort to reopen a “hodgepodge,” though he believes remaining locked down while we wait for a vaccine is not an option. First and foremost, he laments a lack of national leadership, frank talk about the tradeoffs ahead, and a clear direction in the fight against COVID-19.